Inventing Ireland (70 page)

The play, along with the autobiographical
Borstal Boy,
entitles Behan to high praise as an exponent of
prison literature. These texts take their place in a tradition which also includes John Mitchel's
Jail Journal,
Wilde's
De Profundis
and
"Ballad of Reading Gaol", and
Peadar O'Donnell's
The Gates Flew Open.
But they also subvert this predecessor genre, in the sense that they remain iconoclastic about nationalist pieties: the teenage Behan, masturbating in his lonely cell in an English borstal, asks himself witheringly if great men like de Valera were driven in similar circumstances to do this too.
¹⁷
Even rebellion must be rebelled against, if it is to become liberation. Indeed, Behan's understanding of prison literature is so wide, so ecumenical, that there is a valuable sense in which his example reminds us that many other classic Irish texts, from the cellular musings of
Malone Dies
to the babbling voices of
Cré na Cille
should also be considered prison writing, as an organized project of resistance by those in the modern world who stand defeated but not destroyed.

Like other
republican prisoners before and since, Behan was branded a common criminal – or as he joked, an ODC, "ordinary decent criminal" – in the eyes of the law: but he had no final objection to that, recognizing that to give some privileged prisoners political status was as absurd as to declare some literary texts above and beyond political influence.
¹⁸
In the snobbish jockeying for the three P's – pay, promotion, pension – among the warders, he depicted not only the careerism of the new administrative élites, but also the way in which the
state apparatus "may be not only the stake, but the site, of the class struggle".
¹⁹
Though his prisoners were sometimes clever at exploiting this division among the warders, he showed that ultimately they succumbed to such thinking themselves. Being in his origins a socialist as well as a republican, he framed a devastating critique of the entire state system which had emerged, in keeping with that later outlined by
Herbert Marcuse:

The robber
and the murderer leave the head that can punish them intact and thus give punishment its chance; but rebellion "attacks punishment itself" and thereby not just disparate portions of the existing order, but this order itself.
²⁰

When Behan was returning to Ireland after release from his jail-sentence in England for bombing activities, a friendly official waved him through customs in
Irish with the words "It must be great to be free, Brendan". His laconic reply was "It must". ("Caithfidh sé go bhfuil sé go hiontach bheith saor? Caithfidh".)
²¹

Despite the major success of
The Quare Fellow
on its transfer to the London stage, Behan wrote his next play in Irish as
An Giall
(
The Hostage). "Irish is more direct than English, more bitter", he explained to bemused British journalists, "it's a muscular, fine thing, the most expressive language in Europe".
²²
He had little to gain in terms of commercial success from such a venture, but there were other motivations. In the words of his nephew "no amount of foreign applause could satisfy this facet of his personality: he could no more forget his earlier hopes than he could cut himself off completely from the IRA. He had always wanted, among other things, to serve Ireland and now, as something of a world figure, he was in a strong position to do so".
²³

An Giall
was a quiet success in Dublin and the inevitable call to rewrite the play in English for
Joan Littlewood's
Stratford experimental theatre in London soon followed. What happened next is hotly debated: but the majority view is that Behan never really rewrote his own play, instead ceding it to Littlewood's company, which teased it into a shape calculated to appeal to Princess Margaret and the fashionable,
avant-garde
first-night audience. A spare and simple tragedy thus became something very different,
The Hostage,
a variety-show play complete with topical, newsy references to Prime Minister
Macmillan, risky homosexuality and the film-star
Jayne Mansfield. Only on the opening night, amid the thunderous applause, did Behan's brother Brian detect that something might be wrong: "I looked at him closely.
He looked suddenly as if he knew he had been taken for a ride, that he had been adopted as a broth of a boy, that they had played a three-card-trick on him".
²⁴

Many additional characters appeared in
The Hostage,
straight from the scandal-sheets of
News of the World
and
The Sunday People,
but they added little, other than a boozy bravado, to the play itself. Much of the wordplay in
An Giall
proved untranslatable. Great fun was had in it with the double meaning of the word
conradh,
signifying both the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and the League (i.e., Gaelic League):

KATE: Cad a chuir as a mheabhair é?

PAT: Ó, an Conradh.

KATE: Cén Conradh? Conradh na Gaeilge? Yerra, chuirfeadh an dream sin duine ar bith as a mheabhar.
²⁵

This is a layered exchange in Irish, for through the words of Kate,
Behan mocks that very organization whose members would provide much of the audience for
An Giall
This effect was all but lost in the London production, though the technique of "insulting the audience" is discernible in
The Hostage
as well. In the following passage, Meg (who has just sung a rebel song) remarks on Behan's notorious fondness for appearing suddenly in his own plays, like other absurdist playwrights, with a song or a story:

MEG: The author should have sung mat one.

PAT: That is, if the thing has an author.

SOLDIER: Brendan Behan, he's too anti-British.

IRA OFFICER: Too anti-Irish, you mean. Bejasus, wait till we get him back home. We'll give him what-for, for making fun of me movement.

SOLDIER: (to audience) He doesn't mind coming over here and taking your money.

PAT: He'd sell his country for a pint.
²⁶

That exchange, in which Behan displays much self-knowledge, gets the balance of his play about right, poised as it is between healthy insolence towards the theatrical audience and servile deference to British expectations.

Too often, however, complex characterization in
An Giall
declines into mere caricature in
The Hostage:
in the latter, for instance, the IRA men are cruel to the captured British soldier Leslie, whereas in the former they give him cigarettes to calm his nerves. In
An Giall
they
grow so fond of Leslie that they hide him in a cupboard during a police raid, and he dies there of suffocation through no fault but sheer bad luck: in
The Hostage,
though the circumstances of his death remain somewhat blurred, the unspoken assumption of the average British audience will be that he was a victim of the IRA.
²⁷
The real complexity of the Irish attitude to the English – which is to suspect them
en masse,
but to warm to them as individuals – is lost.

In a subsequent article, Behan denied that mere had been any betrayal of the original text in London: indeed, he suggested that if mere had been any betrayal, it had happened in Dublin:

I saw the rehearsal of
An Giall
and while I admire the producer
Frank Dermody tremendously, his idea of a play is not my idea of a play. He's of the school of Abbey Theatre naturalism, of which I'm not a pupil. Joan Littlewood, I found, suited my requirements exactly. She has the same views on the theatre that I have, which is that the music hall is the thing to aim at, in order to amuse people, and any time they get bored divert them with a song or a dance.
²⁸

If
O'Casey had turned a music-hall variety-show into a play, complete with comic duos, tear-jerking routines and periodic songs, Behan seemed intent on reversing that process, stripping down a play to something like a music-hall variety-show, where even members of the audience might get hauled into the act:

I've always thought that
T. S. Eliot wasn't far wrong when he said that the main problem of the dramatist
today
was
to
keep his audience amused; and that while they were laughing their heads off, you could be up to any bloody thing behind their backs – and it was what you were doing behind their bloody backs that made your play great.
²⁹

Just as the vaudeville knockabout was borrowed from O'Casey, so also were many of the underlying themes – his critique of narrow-gauge nationalism, his recording of the decay of republican ideals, and his attempt to provide a perspective on the sufferings of the Dublin poor as being, in essence, no different from that of an unemployed cockney youth driven by economic pressure into the ranks of the British Army. However, Behan goes much further than O'Casey in
The Hostage,
where he delights in stripping off the coverings of his play to reveal its raw, constituent parts, offering it more as process than as product. He itemizes the songs, gags, climaxes and anticlimaxes that might make up
a serviceable drama, but refuses to bolt them all finally together in a coherent plot. It has become
de rigueur
to stage it in a set that is only half-built, a house that has the look of incompleteness about it, a building as unvarnished and unfinished as the state itself.
Behan wants audiences to note the workings of his contraption: hence that passage already quoted, in which the exchanges between characters sound suspiciously like the reviews in the next morning's papers, as the play discusses itself, its
author, and its attitude.

In a scene such as that, Behan beat the critics to the punch, disarming them in advance by incorporating ail possible critiques into the play. This is a favourite device of Irish absurdists, to be found also in a novel like
At Swim-Two-Birds,
in which Flann O'Brien renders not just a text but the critical apparatus by which it is to be judged ("A satisfactory novel is a self-evident sham . . ."), or in
John Banville's
Doctor Copernicus,
which proclaims itself a machine that deconstructs itself. Such manoeuvres can be viewed in two ways: as attempts to assert the proud self-sufficiency of the text (arguably the case for O'Brien and Banville) or to cope with a fear of public misinterpretation (certainly the case for Behan). Behan's self-consciousness as an artist was the result of his self-doubt, a feeling shared with many artists who had been driven to the edge of society as a result of specialization. From Bohemia, such figures thumbed noses at a bourgeoisie often too philistine even to notice their gestures of revolt: and that nose-thumbing often took the form of wilful obscurity, a cult of obscenity, or outrageous personal behaviour (Behan specialized in the latter two categories). When all this failed to attract attention, such artists often thumbed noses at themselves and one another, in works which turned neurosis into a form of perverse heroism and which were filled with knowing references to other works, other writers.

Hence Behan's clever-clever reference to the play's producer, Joan Littlewood. Hence, too, his rehash of the famous joke from the Cyclops chapter of
Ulysses
:

SOLDIER: What actually is a race, sir?

MONSEWER: A race occurs when a lot of people live in one place for a long period of time.

SOLDIER: I reckon our old sergeant-major must be a race; he's been stuck in that same depot for about forty years.
³⁰

The Hostage
is filled with echoes of previous works, not just of
An Giall.
The plot, insofar as it exists, is a dramatization of
Frank O'Connor's
famous short story "Guests of the Nation", and the many references to O'Casey have been noted. All this should be seen less as the result of
Behan's failure to think up new jokes or an adequate plot of his own, than as part of his offence of his audience. With the increasing specialization of art in the mid-twentieth century came an increasingly specialized audience, which revelled in in-jokes, which enjoyed spotting back-references to Joyce and others, and which loved above all to be attacked, so that it could give further evidence not just of learning but of its own tolerance. The constant breaking of the dramatic illusion by Behan, onstage and off, may be seen as part of the attempt to induce a critical, rather than too easily sympathetic, attitude in the viewers. Behan's reported "anger" with Joan Littlewood may have been as theatrical as anything enacted on the stage.

The tide
The Hostage
seems to refer to the captured Leslie, but may really indicate the older Irish onstage, all of whom seem to be hostages to a calcified past. In the case of Monsewer, the oldest, the obsession is quite ridiculous: the rabid Anglophobia of a nationalist who prefers to be called "Monsewer" than to be reminded of his origins as a British public-schoolboy. When he spoke Irish to bus-conductors, we are gravely informed, he had to bring an interpreter with him, so that the man would know where to let him off. (Presumably, his British dialect of Irish was incomprehensible.) Behan here endorses
Kavanagh's view of the
revival as a plot by disaffected public-schoolboys; and, like Brian O'Nolan, he mocks the aristocratic pretensions of the nationalists, especially their cult of the kilt. This element disgusted the socialist in Behan. So his satire on de Valera is crudely predictable: when told that the Taoiseach can speak seven languages, Pat remarks that it's a pity that English and Irish are not among them, so "we'd know what he was saying at odd times".
³¹

In castigating de Valera for his aloof image, Pat is speaking for all those disappointed radicals of the
republican movement, who were told that "Labour must wait", that the social question was secondary to the national question. For Behan, this was the moment when "liberation" was missed. He has Pat recall, with mingled pride and frustration, the time when the agricultural labourers of Kerry took over five thousand acres of land from Lord Tralee. The puritanical IRA officer of the 1950s knows nothing of this radical strand in the earlier history of his movement, so Pat has to explain how the IRA leadership forbade the seizure of Lord Tralee's land, sending a message to the effect that "the social question could be settled when we'd won a thirty-two county republic". "Quite right too" says the IRA officer: but Pat responds with
a more pragmatic line. "The Kerrymen said they weren't greedy, they didn't want the whole thirty-two counties, their own five thousand acres would do 'em for a start". Pat, being less interested in social questions than in social answers, stayed with the farm labourers in their cooperative, and was court-martialled: "Sentenced to death in my absence – so I said, right, you can shoot me in my absence".
³²
As a disillusioned ex-IRA man, Pat in all this speaks for Behan.