Behan / Brannigan A Bit of a Writer

Brendan Behan's Complete Collected Short Prose
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-84351-882-2
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 567 Seiten

Brendan Behan wrote over one hundred articles for Irish newspapers between 1951 and 1956 as he rose to international fame, with most of them written in a weekly column in the Irish Press. The articles reveal a serious writer capable of great comic set pieces and amusing yarns as well as thoughtful reflections on cultural and historical issues. They reflect his passion for working-class Dublin life and the history and folklore of the city, as well as his travels in Ireland and Europe. This edition gathers all the articles and essays that Behan published in newspapers from 1951 to his death in 1964. Selections of Behan's articles have been published since his death (Hold Your Hour and Have Another, 1965; After the Wake, 1981; The Dubbalin Man, 1997). However, there has been no complete edition of Behan's prose, and no edition has provided a detailed biographical and literary introduction, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading. This volume is intended for publication during the centenary celebrations of Behan's birth in 2023, with his birthday being 9 February.

Born on 9 February 1923, Brendan Behan was raised at 13 Russell Street in Dublin's north inner city. He became one of Ireland's best-known writers and talkers. Behan moved between Dublin, Kerry and Connemara and spent time in Paris, writing in both Irish and English. He wrote articles for The Irish Press and two radio plays for Radio Éireann. 'The Quare Fellow', Behan's first play, was produced in 1954 in Dublin. 'The Hostage' met with great success internationally following Joan Littlewood's production in London in 1958. Borstal Boy, Behan's autobiographical novel, was published the same year and became an immediate best seller. Suffering from diabetes, compounded by years of heavy drinking, he died on 20 March 1964.   Professor John Brannigan is Head of English at UCD and is the author of book-length studies of the writings of Brendan Behan and Pat Barker as well as investigations of critical race theory in Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (2009). He was editor of the international journal Irish University Review from 2010 to 2016.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Behan, Brendan

Brannigan, John

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Before Brendan Behan became famous internationally as a playwright and bohemian reveller, he wrote a weekly newspaper column in Dublin for The Irish Press. Between 1953 and 1956 he produced over one hundred articles. Some were recollections of his childhood in Northside Dublin, some were inventive comic fictions, some told the stories of his travels and musings around Ireland and Europe. He had begun to write these articles on an occasional basis in 1951, but they became a regular feature in late 1953 when the new editor, Jim McGuinness, commissioned him to write a weekly column. McGuinness had known Behan in the 1940s – both men were interned in the Curragh military camp as IRA activists during the Second World War. When he became editor of The Irish Press, McGuinness set out to bring more writers to the newspaper for feature articles and columns. It is evidence of the impact that Behan had already had as a young writer that McGuinness chose to ask him alongside more established writers such as Lennox Robinson and Francis MacManus. By this time, Behan had published a handful of short stories in English, and some poems in Irish, as well as a serialized novel, The Scarperer, which was published under a pseudonym, ‘Emmet Street’, in The Irish Times. He had also written radio plays and presented radio broadcasts for Raidió Éireann. In 1954 his first major play, The Quare Fellow, had its premiere in Dublin’s Pike Theatre; by 1956 the play had made him an international star. The columns published in The Irish Press were written in the period in which Behan achieved his first success, and in which he was at his most confident and conscientious as a writer.

‘Brendan wrote his newspaper articles with ease,’ wrote his wife, Beatrice, ‘rarely missing a deadline.’ He was paid five pounds a week and given free rein to write about whatever he chose. He rose early, and would write until it was time to bring Beatrice breakfast in bed. It was a routine not completely without interruptions, for he would occasionally go off on drinking binges, but he usually found ways of making the deadline. Donal Foley, who worked in the London office of The Irish Press, recalled how Behan turned up at the office one day to ask for an advance of twenty pounds. The editor allowed Foley to give Behan the money on condition that he first received four articles. Four hours later Behan returned with four articles amounting to seven thousand words, and was paid the money. Behan’s column, Foley writes, was ‘the best of its kind to appear anywhere at that time’, and the four articles, hastily written as they were, lived up to expectations.

In later years, wracked with illness, Behan seemed to resent the fact that Dubliners were slow to recognize his talents. His most significant achievements in literature found success and recognition elsewhere. The Quare Fellow was rejected by the Abbey Theatre and performed only in the Pike, a small experimental theatre, before it became an international success after its West End production in London in 1956. The Hostage first found expression in an Irish-language version, An Giall, performed in the modest setting of Damer Hall in Dublin, but then likewise became a West End and Broadway success in 1958. Borstal Boy, his autobiographical novel, was banned in Ireland as soon it was published in the same year. Lionized by theatre audiences in England, America and Europe, and courted by journalists and broadcasters wherever he went, Behan felt shunned by his peers in Ireland. In an interview with Eamonn Andrews, broadcast on RTÉ in 1960, Behan’s resentment was palpable: ‘The Irish are not my audience; they are my raw material,’ he professed. When Andrews asked if he would like the Irish to be his audience, Behan replied, ‘No, I don’t care. I don’t care.’

Behan did care. In the articles gathered here, it is clear that he cared deeply about Dublin and Dubliners. He cherished the stories, songs and sayings of the people who surrounded him in his childhood and youth. There is a prevailing sense of nostalgia for the receding generations and communities of the early twentieth century – the rebels of 1916, the veterans of the Boer War and the First World War, and the oul’ ones whose sharp wit and quick tongues deflated the pomposity of both the rebels and the veterans. There is also a lively sense of community with contemporary Dubliners – Behan has much to say about changes in the city, and responds to his correspondents in his column. Behan attempted to produce in his column a sense of Dublin as a ‘knowable community’, a place that abounded with jovial rivalries between distinct areas (‘Monto’ and the ‘Coombe’; the Northside and the Southside), but ultimately a city in which it was impossible to get lost. In his comic sketches, and the characters he invented for them – Mrs Brennan, Maria Concepta, Crippen – he conjured up the distinctive dialectal style and conversational rhythms of Dublin speech, and a strong sense of identity and outlook. ‘The Dubliner is the victim of his own prejudices,’ writes Behan, but in these articles he satirizes those prejudices tirelessly, writing that he had been ‘conditioned all the days of my life to the belief that people from the three other provinces, Cork, the North and the Country, could build nests in your ear, mind mice at a crossroads, and generally stand where thousands fell’.

It is, then, as a ‘jackeen’, a Dubliner seen as if from outside, that Behan also takes his readers on a tour around Ireland – to Wicklow and Wexford, to Kerry, Connemara and the Aran Islands, to Belfast and Donaghadee. These outings are no mere travelogues or tour guides. He is rarely interested in the ‘sights’; instead, Behan displays the same warm curiosity and interest in people and their stories wherever he goes. The same is true of his adventures across the sea to France, and particularly to Paris, a place dear to his heart since the late 1940s. ‘Everyone admires Paris for the artists,’ he wrote, ‘but I equally loved Paris for the barricades.’ In truth, literature and politics are intertwined and inseparable sources of interest for Behan. The pieces abound in allusions to writers and artists, and perhaps even more so to the architects and activists of Irish republicanism. We find in them stories of Brendan Behan passing himself off as George Orwell, and stories about Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey. The pantheon of Irish heroes, from Brian Boru to Patrick Pearse, is never far from his thoughts. Yet perhaps Behan’s greatest gift is to give no more significance or weight to the stories of these famous figures than to the stories of his family and neighbours. Behan was a folk writer, in the best tradition of folk tales and folk songs, a collector and teller of stories.

LIFE AND WORK

Brendan Behan was born on 9 February 1923, just six months after his parents, Stephen Behan and Kathleen Kearney, had got married. Stephen was a house-painter by trade, a passionate reader of literature, and a republican and trade union activist. At the time of Behan’s birth, his father was imprisoned in Kilmainham Jail for opposing the treaty with Britain signed by the new Irish Free State. Brendan Behan would follow his father’s literary and political interests closely, and for a time also followed his father into the house-painting trade. Kathleen had been married previously to Jack Furlong, a Belfast republican who died of influenza in 1918, with whom she had two sons. A committed republican herself, Kathleen had worked in domestic service for Maud Gonne MacBride, and knew many of the most significant political and cultural figures of the Irish revolutionary period, including W.B. Yeats and Michael Collins. She had a deep knowledge and wide repertoire of Irish folk songs, with which she entertained her children. Her brother Peadar Kearney wrote the Irish national anthem, among many other songs. Her brother-in-law was the actor and theatre manager P.J. Bourke. The Behan family, which included Brendan’s two half-brothers, Rory and Seán Furlong, and later three brothers, Seamus, Brian and Dominic, and a sister, Carmel, lived in tenement rooms in 14 Russell Street in Dublin.

Russell Street, in the shadow of the national Gaelic sports stadium, Croke Park, beside the Royal Canal and adjoining the North Circular Road, is the scene of many pieces here. The street contained a row of Georgian houses, once the home of middle-class families, which had long become tenement houses with rooms rented out, and whole families living in one room. Behan describes these houses often, with families living cheek by jowl, doors always open, children running errands for bed-bound elders, with nowhere and no time for peace and quiet. The characters, the stories and the songs from this upbringing were the sources of his art. Almost all the men that Behan knew as a child had been to war, to prison, or both. The women learned how to survive and endure. Behan attended St Vincent’s Boys’ School on North William Street just a few streets from his home, run by Catholic nuns, the French Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. He also joined the Fianna, the youth wing of the IRA, at the age of eight, and his first publication – at the age of thirteen – was in the organization’s newspaper, Fianna Éireann. As a child he was deeply aware of the deeds of Irish nationalists but even more of their words. He recalled being able to recite the famous speech from the dock by Robert Emmet from the age of six.

Behan’s education continued at the Christian Brothers’ school, St Canice’s, on the North Circular Road,...