Reading Brendan Behan: Penetrating essays on the Dubliner’s writing

Reading Brendan Behan

Author: John McCourt

ISBN-13: 9781782053378

Publisher: Cork University Press

Guideline Price: €39

In July 1956 Myles na gCopaleen (aka Brian O’Nolan, or Flann O’Brien) wrote one of his satirical Irish Times columns, this one entitled “Behanism” and dedicated to his friend Brendan Behan. In the column, Myles asks, “is he a human Behan at all[?]”.

Sixty-three years on, and we are still grappling with this question – with Behan’s infamy, the cult of personality which makes it almost impossible to look at his work without seeing him. IRA man, drunk, media celebrity, bohemian: Behan’s life was so big that it overshadows his art. Behan plays with these personas and stereotypes in his work, not just in the autobiographical Borstal Boy, but elsewhere too. In The Hostage, Behan inserts himself into the always-topical dialogue of the play:

SOLDIER. Brendan Behan, he's too anti-British.
OFFICER. Too anti-Irish, you mean. Bejasus, wait till we get him back home. We'll give him what-for for making fun of the Movement.
SOLDIER [TO AUDIENCE]. He doesn't mind coming over here and taking your money.
PAT. He'd sell his country for a pint.

This playful, jarring interaction with the English audience precedes complete pandemonium onstage, in which all the characters argue at once. The introduction of the author presupposes chaos, and this little moment perfectly illustrates the chaotic presence of Behan’s big personality in critical studies of his work.

Reading Brendan Behan, a new collection of essays edited by John McCourt, promises to look “beyond the author’s all-too-well-known personality” and instead at “what ultimately matters – the writing.” As the first critical volume on Behan in nearly 20 years, it shoulders a heavy burden of marking out the field of Behan studies for the years to come. McCourt’s excellent introduction does this successfully, bringing together a range of critical perspectives and setting the scene for further work. But, as is the danger with such an enterprise, this work of scene-setting often continues into the essays themselves, which, despite a wide range of promising perspectives – modernism, queer theory, translation studies, archival research – tend towards summary and introduction.

Maria DiBattista, for example, writes on three “Lessons of Detention” learned by Brendan in Borstal Boy. The first – “a new knowledge of what the body is, what it can suffer and what it alone knows” – would have made a fantastic essay on its own. References to “bodily abjection” are skated over, evoking ideas but not committing to them. If DiBattista had allowed herself to linger on these ideas, on Brendan’s constant references to the horror of the “heavy smell of human excrement”, of his anxiety surrounding chamber pots and regimented bowel movements, and on the fear of being caught masturbating, the essay could have shifted from surface level summary to an incisive analysis of the body in confinement, the body confronting the abject.

Biographical readings

There is an argument to be made that, considering the rather barren state of the field of Behan studies, this volume is introductory out of necessity. A more pressing concern is the persistent focus on biographical readings; the volume returns again and again to the big personality it claims to look beyond. It is difficult to find an essay which does not connect Behan’s work to his life, and indeed, Paul Fagan’s essay on Brendan Behan’s appearances in Myles na gCopaleen’s columns barely refers to Behan’s own writing at all. Fagan’s essay is a fascinating read, and allows for an insightful critique of male friendship and public performance, but it certainly does not follow the rubric of the volume.

Despite these methodological reservations, there are a number of really penetrating essays. Michael G Cronin’s “Eros and Liberation” interrogates the meeting points between Irish republican prison writing and homoerotic prison writing in Borstal Boy. Through a number of close readings, he characterises homoeroticism in the novel “less as a distinctive current of sexual desire than as one component on an elastic continuum of bodily needs, affects and potentialities”, and lays the groundwork for a new wave of queer readings of Behan’s work. Moreover, Michael Pierse’s closing essay on Richard’s Cork Leg is a compelling analysis of earlier drafts of the play which argues that the image of the graveyard becomes a nexus for discussions of capitalism and the body. His skilful interweaving of rigorous archival research and theoretical adventurousness will surely become a model for future studies of the recently acquired Behan archives at Princeton.

Ultimately, in diverging from its own goals, Reading Brendan Behan itself becomes a collaborative, living and breathing study of the entanglement of author and text. By remaining firmly under the shadow of Behan’s “rollicking personality”, as Augustine Martin deemed it, the book becomes at once a critical study and a commentary on the limits of its methodology. As such, Reading Brendan Behan opens up the possibility of a new kind of critical method, one not dissimilar to the entrance of the author in The Hostage, which is self-aware, and works with, not against, its own limitations, reckoning with the spectre of Brendan Behan’s reputation, and the “human Behan” under the gossip and clamour.