We advertised for a native hangman during the Economic War. Must be fluent Irish speaker. Cailíochtaí de réir Meamram a Seacht (Qualifications in accord with memorandum number seven). There were no suitable applicants.12
Whenever he espoused Gaelic ideals, Behan was at pains to fuse them with socialist principles. He reserved great contempt for those profiteers who used the native language in their bid for academic success, financial affluence and social respectability – that is to say, for the conservative wing of the nationalist movement. He knew that the dream of such people was not a free, Gaelic Ireland which would cherish its children equally, but simply to replace their former British overlords and to take over their privileges. He spoke often and with jocular scorn of the silver and gold rings worn in lapels by officially-accredited Irish-speakers as "erseholes". Prisoner D is a tell-tale example of this type in the play. He is incensed by the young prisoner from the Gaeltacht, who had developed a close friendship with Warder Regan. The young islander recalls for the other prisoners Regan's diatribes against capital punishment and against the vice of wealthy judges, and his contention that the prisoners were simply doing penance for the sins of the wealthy and powerful. "As a ratepayer", Prisoner D will stand for no more libellous remarks on the judiciary, for "property must have security". Regan, he alleges, must be an atheist if he disbelieves in capital punishment and should therefore be dismissed from the public service. "I shall take it up with the Minister when I get out of here", says Prisoner D: "I went to school with his cousin".13
By now, it is clear in the play that this man is a corrupt government hack who has sailed too close to the wind: so it is no surprise to learn that "he's in for embezzlement; there were two suicides and a by-election over him". He can boast of his grandfather's role in the Land War, while at the same time prating that his youngest nephew has just gone to Sandhurst, the British military academy. He has the requisite Gold Medal in Irish from school, but is quite flummoxed by the natural conversational Irish of a native speaker like Prisoner C: and so he turns savagely on the youth, reprimanding him for his secret meetings with the young Irish-speaking warder. "How can mere be proper discipline between warder and prisoner with that kind of familiarity?" Prisoner C replies in a moving speech, which suggests more powerfully than any other, that both he and his warder-friend are enduring a similar punishment, exile from their own civilization:
He does be only giving me the news from home and who's gone to America or England; he's not long up here and neither am I ... the two of us do be each as lonely as the other.14
It is no accident that alone among the prisoners, it is this young islander who has developed a real friendship and intimacy with the Quare Fellow.
The absurdism of the prisoners' world leads them to rate a man who killed his wife cleanly with the blow of a silver-topped cane above the Quare Fellow, who apparently used a meat-cleaver to chop his brother to bits. Even more spooky, however, is the fact that such thinking seems to be shared by the authorities, who spare Silver-Top but execute the Quare Fellow. To the warders, he has no more identity than he has to most of the prisoners: even his bureaucratic identity within the crazy system is expendable, as he is changed from E779 to E777, because a seven is easier to carve on stone than a nine. There can be no clear relation between cause and effect in such a world, nor any clear plot-line of development. It has sometimes been complained that The Quare Fellow lacks an adequate climax,15 since the execution happens offstage ... but this, of course, is exactly Behan's point: that capital punishment continues only because it is so successfully hidden from the public. If there is anticlimax in the ending, it is surely as deliberate as the off-key endings of O'Casey, which served to emphasize the randomness of the fate which overtakes the poor. If the authorities show no deference to the bureaucratic identity of Prisoner E779 in death, the prisoners are even less respectful, fighting for possession of the dead man's letters in hopes of selling them to Sunday scandal-sheets.
This late moment of the play is a grotesque reminder of the soldiers who cast lots for the garments of the dead Jesus: it reinforces the Christian parallel between the Quare Fellow and Regan drawn all through the play, proving that they arc doing penance for the sins of the mighty: but it also provides a fitting final image of life as an absurd game of chance, just as O'Casey had done in The Plough and the Stars, where the card-game on the coffin-top and the tossing of coins epitomized the appalling arbitrariness of the destiny in store for all on stage. Such a commentary is linked here by Behan to his satire on the anarchic forces of laissez-faire capitalism: for it is the establishment embezzler Prisoner D who initiates the sordid squabble for letters. Prisoner B and the young Blasket islander refuse to take any part in this plunder, and the embezzler quickly appropriates their share with the words "We can act like businessmen". To Prisoner A Behan leaves the last word on this, when he has him ask "What's a crook, only a businessman without a shop?"16 In such a world, where punishment is as random and unaccountable as everything else, the prisoners may be forgiven for finally turning the hanging into a sporting farce, complete with bets, gambling and commentary: for each in his heart must realize that he may well be the next to face the chop.
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.
Inventing Ireland Page 64
