After the Wake

‘You see immediately what a master of his craft Brendan was.’

Ulick O’Connor,
Sunday Independent

‘[Behan] had an incredible literary gift, demonstrated impeccably in
After the Wake
. The book, with a superb introduction by Peter Fallon … [charts] the political, social and cultural history of Irish life through the eyes of one of her most talented but troubled sons.’

Book Me blog

This book was my idea, but I had help along the way. Beatrice Behan was always enthusiastic, helpful and courteous; she made our collaboration a pleasure for me. Colbert Kearney wrote an excellent book. Rory Furlong, Edward Mikhail and Christopher Logue answered my letters and my questions.

I had help too from the staffs of the National Library in Dublin and the Periodicals Department of the British Museum and from Nóra de Brún and the staff of the library of University College, Cork.

Michael O'Brien was the good publisher; he trusted his instincts. Jean Barry typed the manuscript. Alison helped at the British Museum and Loudon first took me to The White Horse.

Brendan Behan was born, in Dublin in 1923, into an Irish Republican family and he soon found the household’s politics to be his own. In 1940 he began almost two years’ detention in Borstal in England for ‘complicity in acts of terrorism’. When he was arrested, he made this statement: ‘My name is Brendan Behan. I came over here to fight for the Irish Workers’ and Small Farmers’ Republic, for a full and free life, for my fellow countrymen, North and South, and for the removal of the baneful influence of British Imperialism from Irish affairs. God save Ireland.’ He was sixteen years old.

Two years later, he began five years of his prison sentence for shooting at a detective during an I.R.A. commemorative ceremony in Dublin. Many thought him lucky to escape hanging for this act. Instead he was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude and released under a general amnesty. In 1947 he was arrested again, this time in Manchester, ‘having helped in the escape of an I.R.A. prisoner,’ and he was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment.

Behan seems to have appreciated his terms of confinement – he considered them his ‘university’ – and from the first of them he gleaned the material for his best-selling autobiography,
Borstal
Boy
, and
from the second and third, material for plays and stories and even the language itself for the poems and the play he wrote in Irish. Detained in the Curragh, he studied the Irish language and literature under Seán Ó Briain and Máirtín Ó Cadhain and began to conceive of the possibility of rebuilding a native Irish culture. The play,
An
Giall,
was later transformed into
The
Hostage.

Perhaps there was something predictable about the course of events of his early life. One of the titles considered for his memoir of Borstal, ‘Bridewell Revisited,’ has about it an air of inevitability as well as of wit. The excellence of his writing could not have been foretold. But Behan had two exceptional gifts – as writer and as showman. Tragically his prowess for one would ultimately destroy the talent he’d begun to question for the other.

Writing in Irish afforded a way for Behan to realise his literary and political aspirations. In 1946 he published his first poem in
Comhar
;
he had published juvenilia in
The
Wolfe
Tone
Weekly,
The
United
Irishman,
Fianna:
The
Voice
of
Young
Ireland
and other radical journals. This poem,
Filleadh
Mhic
Eachaidh,
a eulogy for Seán McCaughey, an I.R.A. officer who died on hunger-strike in Portlaoise, was later incorporated into
An
Giall.

In the next few years he published other poems in
Comhar,
Envoy
and
Feasta,
and he was the youngest contributor to Seán Ó Tuama’s
Nuabhéarsaíocht
(1950).

By the early 1950 s he was writing in English again and he published short prose pieces in various magazines in Paris. In
My
Life
with
Brendan,
his widow Beatrice recalls, ‘Brendan had talked to me at
great length about Paris. Like James Joyce he had spent penniless years there, and he had written pornography to survive …’ A detective story,
The
Scarperer,
by ‘Emmet Street’ was serialised in
The
Irish
Times
in 1953. In 1955 he married Beatrice Salkeld.

Nineteen fifty-four was the turning point in Behan’s career. It was the year in which
The
Quare
Fellow
was first produced by the Pike Theatre in Dublin. Two years later this play was accepted by the Theatre Royal in London. In 1958
The
Hostage
was first produced and
Borstal
Boy
was published. Brendan Behan had quickly become an international celebrity, the darling of critics and the popular media. The limelight proved too much a distraction from the completion of further serious work. Plays and prose were left unfinished, ideas and promises unfulfilled.

After
the
Wake
is a book of uncollected and unpublished short prose pieces. It includes work of acknowledged excellence, ‘The Confirmation Suit’ and ‘A Woman of No Standing’; of sombre detail, ‘The Execution’; and of lively autobiography, ‘I Become a Borstal Boy’ The unpublished pieces – and they include a short story called ‘The Last of Mrs Murphy’ and the opening section, all that exists, of an unfinished novel, ‘The Catacombs’ – are infused with compassion, wit and perceptive comment. The eponymous story, ‘After the Wake,’ is arguably the author’s finest It displays a degree of feeling that is honestly, humanely and courageously reported.

The selection contains all the hallmarks of the author’s talent – an ability to bring characters to life quickly and unforgettably, a sharp ear for dialogue and dialect, and a natural vocation for story-telling.
His pervasive themes are rampant – the obsession with nuances of class and social structures, the inclination towards insurrection and rebellion, and the over-riding sense of moral justice. Grim situations are relieved by clemency and humour. Above all, the delicacy and holiness of human tenderness and sympathy is depicted vividly against usually unsympathetic backdrops.

The first of these stories, ‘The Last of Mrs Murphy,’ was submitted to Radio Éireann from the Behan home-place in Crumlin in the early ’50s. The script was marked for the attention of Francis MacManus or Mervyn Wall, and Mr. Wall thinks it was broadcast as part of a series of talks Brendan Behan gave around that time. It is very much a ‘Dublin’ story, the characters are easily recognisable as fictional neighbours of those in ‘The Confirmation Suit’. It is a story about fellowship with a surprising and spirited twist.

‘I Become a Borstal Boy,’ prototype of
Borstal
Boy,
was accepted by Seán Ó Faoláin for publication in
The
Bell
in June, 1942, sixteen years before the appearance of the extended – and altered – memoir. It tells of events after the author’s first arrest and shows a conflict of emotions between the narrator’s personal responses and the expected stance of one cast in his position for the ‘Cause’.

This conflict is highlighted in ‘The Execution’ which has only been published before in a limited edition (Liffey Press, Dublin, 1978) and which I have transcribed from the author’s manuscript. In his handwriting all the b’s are capital B’s, there are commas around almost every phrase, and almost every sentence is a separate paragraph. I have made
certain modifications. ‘The Execution’ owes much to Frank O’Connor’s story, ‘Guests of the Nation,’ though it is shorter and less polished. The implication of the job in hand, its human seriousness, is conveyed in one sentence: ‘I never liked him much before but I felt sorry for him and sorrier for his people.’ The final act exposes man’s confusion in political deed and fervour.

‘A Woman of No Standing’ was published in
Envoy
in Dublin in 1950 and seven years later as ‘That Woman’ in a fashion magazine,
Creation.
The woman in question does not appear until the final paragraphs and, even then, she does not speak. Nonetheless she is the most memorable character in the story. Here Behan anticipates the success of
The
Quare
Fellow
whose central figure never appears on stage and who is also talked about and judged by others.

‘The Confirmation Suit’ is widely known. It was first published in
The
Standard
in 1953 and was, with ‘A Woman of No Standing,’ featured in
Brendan
Behan’s
Island,
a compilation of sketches and transcripts of recordings made, it seems, to honour a publishing contract. The most important aspect of this story is tone. Behan was able to
write
stories as a master would
tell
them. This one is both moving and funny, even if some of the jokes are dated – for instance, the woman who took a bath each year
whether
she
was
dirty
or
not.
Perhaps these jokes were less familiar thirty years ago. Isn’t Shakespeare the man who uses all the clichés?

‘After the Wake’ was published in
Points
in Paris in 1950. Could this be the ‘pornography’ to which Behan referred? Could his epithet be part of a shyness
or self-protection from subject matter which was still taboo thirty years ago? Whatever, the story treats delicately the intimacies of marriage and friendship. It is a mature and honest study of grief and solace.

The fourteen articles included here under the title, ‘The Same Again, Please,’ were first published in
The
Irish
Press
for which Behan wrote a regular column between February 1954 and April 1956. Five of them were included in
Hold
Your
Hour
and
Have
Another.

Occasionally these articles are literary – they mention Tolstoy, Raftery, Forrest Reid and the background of
The
Playboy
of
the
Western
World,
but more often they ramble on about travels in Ireland and trips to the ‘Continong’, about Partition, Nationalism, the state of the Irish language and about Nelson’s Pillar, who’ll win the Derby, the time of the first ‘talkie,’ and Genockey’s motor-car.

They’re laced with songs and puns and jokes, with old Dublin sayings (‘Isn’t the day very changeable: you wouldn’t know what to pawn’), and with tall tales. They feature characters he’s used before, the cast of Jimmy-the-Sports’ and the Markets’ bar (Mrs. Brennan, Crippen and Maria Concepta), as well as members of his own family.

‘See now, what I brought you,’ he boasts in one. The comic situations, the quick, good-natured dialogue, might have found their place easily, in one of his plays.

Sometimes these articles stop and start in mid-air. In one he writes simply and suddenly, ‘A change is as good as a rest,’ and then he begins another story. Another ends, out of the blue, ‘To cause a diversion, I asked them what they were having.’ In another he asides, ‘I was reared a pet, God love me.’ Certainly.

‘The Catacombs’ has never been published before. Like most of these pieces it is uneven and unfinished, and like them it is animated and engaging. It is filled with memorable characters – Uncle Hymie, Stinking Fish and the author himself, for this time there is no attempt to disguise the identity of the chief protagonist. ‘You’re welcome, Brendan Behan,’ says Mrs Bolívar. This fragment has the stamp of autobiography more than of fiction, and in it nothing is sacred. It begins, ‘There was a party to celebrate Deirdre’s return from her abortion in Bristol,’ and it proceeds to mock all that is sacred in Irish society, religion, politics and ethics. It stops and starts and digresses and is held together ultimately only by the presence and personality of the author.

That author wrote, reflecting on the plaque outside the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, ‘However, the Chelsea Hotel respects him (Dylan Thomas) as a great artist, and I would hope that Mr. Bard, the proprietor, and his son Stanley, who has a beautiful baby daughter, would leave some space on their plaque for myself. I am not humble enough to say that I do not deserve one (sic), but I hope it does not come too soon, because of all the names on the plaque, as far as I know, James T. Farrell is the only one that’s alive and kicking very much.’

By this time, Dublin’s darling boy had become the whole world’s roaring fellow. His death, at the age of 41, was a terrible waste as the last years of his life had been.
After the
Wake
is part of an attempt to revert the spotlight from the exhibitionism and tragedy of those years to Brendan Behan’s enduring literary achievement. It is also a delightful windfall.

Peter Fallon, Loughcrew, Winter 1980