At times since then he has been seen at high tide, wild and hirsute as a seal, vigorously hunting fish in the company of that community with whom he had decided to stay. I have often heard the neighbours say it would be a good idea to hunt down O'Sanasa, because by then he would have grown into a tasty trout-fish and might have a winter's oil in him. I do not think, of course, that anyone has had the courage to chase him.
Chonnacthas ar bharra taoide corr-uair ó shin é, féachaint mhongach air ar nós na rón féin, agus é ag soláthar iasc go rabach i gcóluadar na muintire ar ghlac sé lóistín leo. Is minic a chuala-sa na cóursain a rá gur mhaith an bheart an Sánasach do sheilg, mar go mbeadh sé fán tráth sin fásta 'na bhreac bhlasta agus go mbeadh solus geimhrí ann. Ní dói liom, áfach, go raibh sé de mhisneach ag éinne dul sa tóir air.26
In this chapter on Sitric O'Sanasa, O'Nolan takes with myopic literalism some of the racist metaphors prevalent among the Victorian English and among the ascendancy in Ireland. Such metaphors had gained a particular currency in the 1860s, when Fenian outrages antagonized the British populace and theories of evolution disturbed the traditional folk mind. "Just as Darwinism appeared to lay bare the ugly realities of the struggle for survival, so Fenianism appeared to reveal the elemental beast in the Irish character".27 Those respectable folk who resented having their bodies compared to those of black troglodytes could now make their own comparisons. It was scarcely surprising that they should have found closer resemblances between the apes and those races whom they feared or exploited, the Irish and the Negroes.
This is the burden of tragic knowledge in An Béal Bocht. O'Coonassa's demand to know if the Gaels are in fact human is also the question put by O'Nolan, a writer who was as agitated as any Victorian by what he called "the incompatibility of the flesh and the spirit". Benjamin Disraeli once remarked that the Victorian English wanted to be angels, but feared that they might be apes. That same neurotic dichotomy lies behind O'Nolan's blackest humours, with one crucial difference. He inverts the priorities of the Victorians, yearning not for the sanctity of the angelic but for the bliss of the primitive. He said that "imbedded in the flesh (and by no means in the spirit) is this disastrous faculty of reason. It has ruined many a man, the same reason". His elaboration of that idea went as follows:
To sensible, thoughtful people, the thought of life, as life goes, must be something of a nightmare. It begins to look as if we humans were right until we developed consciousness with its two children, Memory and Imagination. If man was not "blessed" with consciousness or cursed with Memory, he could not look back And if he were not "blessed" or cursed with Imagination, he would think nothing about the future.28
In An Béal Bocht, O'Nolan has taken the insulting metaphors surrounding the stage Irishman and explained that they are literally true, not just of the Irish but of the "awful human condition".29 Behind the comical conventions, he has discerned the truth which neither the English caricaturists nor their Irish victims could face. In attacking these conventions with their own evasions, he has also provided his own deeply comic answer. Though that answer inverts that of the Victorian theorists, it arises from an equally agonized awareness of the contesting forces of spirit and flesh in humankind. An Béal Bocht may be one of the first parodies in modern Irish, but it is also one of the last Victorian melodramas.
Many other assumptions concerning the Irish in the nineteenth century receive mocking treatment in An Béal Bocht. The idea that the race was inherently lazy and incapable of being taught anything gained wide support, as did the conviction that "Irish Celts could no more change their temperaments than they could change the colours of their eyes".30 Among the Irish in England, crime was believed to be inevitable and newspapers were studded with reports of the fighting Irish. In 1861, for example, though only one quarter of the population of Liverpool was Irish-born, the Irish accounted for over half the defendants appearing in city courts on charges of assault, drunkenness and breach of the peace.31 By the later 1880s, almost one half of all Irish news items reported in The Times of London concerned political and agrarian crime, giving further credence to the idea that crime was endemic in the land. Needless to add, many native Irishmen were themselves convinced that this was indeed the truth.
The inevitable outcome of these policies is enacted in the classrooms of Corcha Dorcha, where every child is told that it is his destiny to be guilty of misdeeds, to be beaten and forced to answer to the name "Jams O'Donnell". The concept of the Irishman as an irredeemable and unchangeable idiot is itself not far removed from Aristotle's classic definition of comedy: "the comic character is static and goes on revealing itself". That sense of predestined failure communicated itself to many impressionable Irish people and was, no doubt, heightened by what O'Nolan called "the sense of doom that is the heritage of the Irish Catholic".32 Those older characters in An Béal Bocht such as Bonaparte's mother or the Old Grey Fellow repeatedly tell the lad that he must play in fireside ashes and accept the grinding poverty and inevitable sense of failure. They are the unwitting accomplices of a tradition which deprived the Irish of identity. It is fitting, therefore, that when Bonaparte comes face to face with his father in the final chapter, he should be on his way to the same jail in which the father has already served a sentence of twenty-nine years – the exact span of the sentence on which he now embarks, in keeping with the inexorable logic of idiotic predestination which has propelled the book. It is even more brutally appropriate that he should have been sentenced after a trial in English, which he could not understand, for a crime which he did not commit. He is the peasant equivalent of Kafka's nameless citizen, a Joseph K. of the western world.
He who could not distinguish his first-born son from an outhouse pig now fails to identify his own father, until the broken old jailbird hoarsely mutters that his name is "Jams O'Donnell". At this point, only, does Bonaparte see the truth: that his identity is that of the thieving, drunken, vagrant that was once his father and will soon be his son. Like every other character in the novel, his features are never described, for, like the stage Irishman, he is more caricature than character, relying for his effect more on props than on the self-constructed personality. How could Myles na gCopaleen – who had just recovered his identity after more than a century of frustration – describe such a man? For Bonaparte, like all his stage-Irish predecessors, has no face.
The final paradox in this story of Mylesian identities lies in the fate of Brian O'Nolan. Having put an end to the role of Myles na gCopaleen as perpetual victim of English ridicule, the author himself became the ultimate victim of his newly-acquired persona. So successful was the column conducted thrice-weekly by Myles na Gopaleen in The Irish Times that it lasted for over twenty-five years, "on a level of wit, invention and intellectual virtuosity without parallel".33 The cost was massive. Throughout the period, O'Nolan produced no works to equal the brilliance of his three early and major novels, At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, and An Béal Bocht. More than one of his friends asked a difficult question: "had Myles na gCopaleen never existed, would the genius of Flann O'Brien have flowered in other unpredictable masterpieces?"34 The answer must be a tentative "yes", with the caveat that the persona to blame was not Myles na gCopaleen but Myles na Gopaleen. For he was the fatal clown, the licensed jester, who lurked within O'Nolan, whom he roundly despised but whom he could never fully suppress. He offered his author the quick success and easy laughs which hold a deadly attraction for the Irish artist who knows he should express, but fears he may have to exploit, his material.
If O'Nolan succumbed early to that temptation to placate his newspaper audience, he did not do so before he had written three comic masterpieces. That is the measure of the immense talent wasted in the service of R. M. Smyllie. It was a common temptation in the period, identified by Patrick Kavanagh as the call to play the fool, to be another "gas bloody man", to enact in public the role of writer rather than to confront in private the anguish of real writing. In the case of Brian O'Nolan,
the wonder was that he had endured as an artist for so long, for according to R. N. Cooke, he had already donned, with only some pangs of conscience, the jester's mask even before he graduated from university. Cooke's assessment of the brilliant student debater is a fitting epitaph of the real achievement and actual waste of one of Ireland's major writers: "Unfortunately, his fame as a funny-man was such that he was typed as a debater. The Society expected it from him and he seldom disappointed . . ."35 But his real potential, as thinker and as artist, may have never been suspected, and was surely not realized.
Twenty-Nine
The Empire Writes Back – Brendan Behan
Brendan Behan first saw his father through prison-bars. Not long after his birth in 1923, the infant was taken to the jail in which Stephen Behan, even then a veteran republican, was held as a consequence of the Civil War.1 Two decades later, the son himself would be in prison as a republican prisoner.2 It was said that, in all political debates among detainees at the Curragh Camp, there were three factions – those who were pro-Hitler, those who were against him, and Brendan Behan.3 The effect of prison on most of the republicans, including Máirtín Ó Cadhain, was to redouble their political fervour: the effect on Behan, however, was to leave him with an abiding distrust of all commitments. His plays are O'Caseyesque in their sharp critique of idealism, so sharp that they come perilously close to downright nihilism. Ultimately, they owe more to the absurdist theatre of Ionesco, Genet and Beckett than to their forerunners in the Irish dramatic movement.
This was, of course, the real reason why The Quare Fellow was rejected by the Abbey and by each of the larger Dublin theatres. Eventually, it was accepted by Alan Simpson for the miniature Pike Theatre, whose maximum capacity was fifty-five seats. On the opening night, Behan announced to the audience: "I didn't write this play: the lags wrote it".4 Apart from first-night critics, that audience was composed mainly of ex-convicts, many of whom felt that they were "inside" again, such was the claustrophobic experience in the Pike. Using a method of lighting derived from ballet (overhead and lateral, but no frontal light), Simpson achieved a "three-dimensional emphasis on the actors, which made the stage look bigger than it really was".5 This helped to bring out one of the play's themes: the attempt by prisoners to create in words a sense of spaciousness and open possibility denied them in their daily routines. That this attempt was also made by each warder was part of Behan's exposure of the corrupting effects on the human spirit of prison life.
Some of the actors in the cash-poor company played warder and prisoner alike, which further served to emphasize Behan's conviction that, under such stressful conditions, the opposite might easily become the double. Neither the warders nor the prisoners (with just one exception on each side) question the wisdom of the authorities who sentence one killer to death and reprieve another: they accept that the logic of such authorities is absurd and incapable of explaining itself, as incapable as the sponsors of a very similar order in Waiting for Godot where one boy is punished and another spared, but no reasons are given. Only Warder Regan, the Christian humanist, questions the right of the state to take life: and his lonely position is endorsed among the prisoners solely by a young lad from the Gaeltacht. The others all conspire in a euphemistic language – slang among the prisoners, officialese among the warders – to deflect the enormity of what is about to happen among them, an execution by hanging, planned for the following morning, of the Quare Fellow. He is variously "your man" or "the condemned man", but he is never named and, like Godot, he never appears. In the manner of Beckett's tramps, the prison inhabitants fill the unnerving time of waiting with nervous jokes, verbal routines, and hysterical laughter.
The only moral distinction offered by the play is made at the level of language, in a contrast between those who use words to describe hanging for what it is and those who use them to occlude the facts. On this matter, most of the prisoners are honest, resorting to bitter parodies of the cosy officialese which appears in the newspapers. But the warders are similarly divided between those who evade and confront the event. If the elderly lag Dunlavin is frequently drunk on methylated spirits, the prison visitor Holy Healey is endlessly drunk on alcohol. If Dunlavin refers somewhat casually to "topping", Healey is even more occlusive in talking to Warder Regan of their "sad duty". Regan, who believes that the whole show should be put on in a football stadium for the public which pays for it, asks very savagely "What, neck breaking and throttling, sir?" Healey tries to rationalize his sense of guilt by reminding the warder that the condemned man at least dies a Christian death with the benefit of the sacraments: but Regan responds with a further parody of the official jargon:
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.6
In fact, it is Regan alone in this play who takes religion seriously: the others, Holy Healey included, do not. Healey refuses to help Dunlavin secure accommodation after his imminent release on the grounds that he is currently visiting the prison as an official of the Department of Justice; and he makes a clear distinction between this and his charitable work for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, urging Dunlavin to call on him in the Society's office upon his release. In such an exchange, one can hear echoes of Behan the crusading socialist, mocking all who would separate notions of charity from notions of justice, in the mode of Aneurin Bevan who said that "private charity is no substitute for organized justice".
The ultimate indictment of the prison system in the play lies in the fact that conditions outside are so much harsher for the old lag Dunlavin that he is actually better off inside.7 This is Behan's none-too-covert critique not just of the British penal system, which so offended Wilde and Synge, but, even more scathingly, of the so-called Irish Free State which blithely persisted with this British model. Dunlavin is old enough to remember the British régime and he recalls how, for want of real cigarettes, he used to smoke its mattress coir in paper rolled from prison Bibles:
I smoked my way half-way through the book of Genesis and three inches of my mattress. When the Free State came in we were afraid of our life they were going to change the mattresses for feather beds ... But sure, thanks to God, the Free State didn't change anything more than the badges in the warders' caps.8
Three decades after the foundation of the state, Behan's assessment of its progress was as bleak as that to be produced by Rushdie after thirty years of Indian "independence". His analysis of the decay of republican ideals linked him to those socialists who had warned that a nationalist élite might paint the post-boxes green and hoist a tricolour over Dublin Castle, but that it would all mean nothing unless there was a change in the structure of society. That decay is most bitterly exemplified in the clandestine meetings which Prisoner C and the idealistic young warder Crimmin, bom from the Kerry Gaeltacht, are forced to resort to if they are to enjoy conversations in the Irish language. Such an ironic use of Irish as a sort of secret, outlaw language in one of the Free State's official institutions is mordant indeed.
Behan himself had begun his literary career writing modernist lyrics in Irish during his time in jail for the republican cause, an exercise which allowed him to fulfil his artistic impulses while carrying on his father's struggle against British imperialism.9 He was arguably the first poet to introduce the Imagist techniques of Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle to Irish, crossing them with those of the haiku:
Uaigneas
Blas sméara dubh'
tréis báisteach
ar bharr an tsléibhe.
I dtost an phriosúin
feadail fhuar na traenach. Cogar gáire beirt leannán don aonarán.
The blackberries' taste
after rainfall
on the hilltop.
In the silence of the prison
the train's cold whistle.
The whisper of laughing lovers
to the lonely.
Ó Cadhain adjudged Behan and Ó Ríordáin the two best p
oets in modern Irish:10 and the former must have felt real pangs of guilt at having reverted to English for the sake of international acclaim in his later writings, mainly novels and plays. It is significant that, at the climactic moment of The Quare Fellow, a minor character comes forward with a statement in Irish, as if this were the language of some not-fully-closed-off recess of Behan's mind. Just before the Quare Fellow is hanged, Prisoner C sings the haunting Gaelic song Is é Fáth mo Bhuartha, whose first line says "It is the cause of my sorrow, that I have not permission for a visit".
Like others before him, Behan clearly felt, as a result of sojourns there, that the Blasket islands offered something akin to an ideal society which combined social equality with Gaelic cultural values. These values did not include a belief in judicial execution, as Synge had found decades earlier in the story of how islanders had sheltered a murderer in flight from the law. The Aran islanders' philosophy was straightforward: a killer with any human feeling would obviously experience such dreadful remorse for his deed that it could make no sense to add to his burdens the pain and humiliation of physical confinement. He was so punished by his action that he scarcely needed to be punished for it: solitary confinement was hardly necessary to induce such a one to look into his soul, but it would cut him off from those fellow-humans to whom he must ultimately return from his lonely knowledge.11 Behan's rather caustic brand of Gaelic idealism is manifest in the remark of the Prison Governor in The Quart Fellow about the fact that the Free State had to import an English hangman to perform the distasteful duty:
Inventing Ireland Page 63
