Behan, Brendan (1923-1964) playwright, memoirist

Brendan Behan was born in a tenement house in Dublin. Later, when he was famous, he often portrayed himself as a child of the slums, but this was not the case. Both his parents were educated and well-read. His father, Stephan Behan, was a housepainter who once studied for the priesthood, while his mother Kathleen came from a middle- class family. Behan’s father was also a republican who was arrested and imprisoned at the end of the Irish civil war, and Behan’s maternal uncle, Peadar Kearney, wrote the Irish national anthem. His upbringing was thus steeped in Irish history, politics, and literature.

At 13, Behan joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In 1940, while carrying a bag of explosives, he was arrested in Liverpool and sentenced to three years in juvenile detention in Suffolk. After two years he was released and deported back to Ireland, where, in 1942, he was arrested again for firing at a police detective during an IRA parade. This time he was sentenced to 14 years. During his time in prison, he started to write short stories. Early in his incarceration, the novelist Sean O’Faolain, who was then editor of The Bell, published an account of Behan’s youthful imprisonment. A general amnesty provided Behan with his release from prison in 1946. In 1950 he returned to Dublin, where his talent drew attention in literary circles.

The Quare Fellow (1954) was his first successful play. It was well received when it was first performed in 1954, and the 1956 London production made him famous. The Quare Fellow is a grim, yet comic, drama about the effects an imminent prison hanging has on warders and inmates alike. The condemned prisoner, the “quare fellow” of the title, is never seen on stage, but his presence is everywhere in the prison. More than just a protest against capital punishment, the play, a blending of comedy, tragedy, and naturalistic language, is a portrait of the human spirit enduring under intolerable pressures. Behan’s sympathy with and portrayal of people outcast and marginalized by society would be present in all his best work.

In the play, a prison official reminds one of the warders that the condemned prisoners get a Christian death with benefit of cleric and sacraments. The warder, Regan, responds, “But that’s not our reason for hanging them, sir. We can’t advertise ‘Commit a murder and die a happy death,’ sir. We’ll have them all at it. They take religion very seriously in this country.”

When The Quare Fellow opened in London, the drama critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in the Observer that “in Brendan Behan’s tremendous new play, language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless, and spoiling for a fight. . . . With superb dramatic tact the tragedy is concealed beneath layer upon layer of rough comedy. . . . I left the theatre overwhelmed.”

Behan’s next play, The Hostage (1958), was first written in Gaelic and then translated by the author. It is the story of an English soldier kidnapped and held in a Dublin brothel by the IRA. Also an enormous success, The Hostage continued Behan’s exploration of the wounded lives of the down-and-out. He also extended his sympathy to include victims from both sides of the conflict. One of the women the hostage has befriended says over his slain body, “It wasn’t the Belfast Jail or the Six Counties that was troubling you, but your lost youth and your crippled leg. He died in a strange land, and at home he had no one. I’ll never forget you, Leslie, till the end of time.”

Borstal Boy (1958), Behan’s memoir ofhis prison days, was a best seller in England and America; it demonstrated Behan’s exceptional lyrical power and his largeness of spirit. His later work did not equal these early successes. In fact, his later memoirs, like Brendan Behan’s New York (1964) and Brendan Behan’s Island (1962), were transcribed from recordings. Though he often said when he was a struggling writer that he was ripe for success, a wild lifestyle led to alcoholism, diabetes, and an early death in Dublin. An IRA guard of honor accompanied his coffin at his funeral.

Critic Declan Kiberd has observed, “To the very end, Behan’s fear was that his own formal wildness might be domesticated and misinterpreted,” and that Behan’s best work is “an organized project of resistance by those in the modern world who stand defeated but not destroyed.”

Works about Brendan Behan:
- Arthurs, Peter. With Brendan Behan. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.
- Brannigan, John. Brendan Behan: Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002.
- Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.
- Wallace, Martin. Famous Irish Writers. Belfast: Appletree Press, 1999.