Brendan Behan

Brendan Behan (1923–1964) was born into a fiercely republican Dublin family and became the most vivid, self-destructive, and outrageously talented Irish writer of the mid-twentieth century. An IRA volunteer arrested at sixteen, imprisoned in both England and Ireland, he transmuted the experience of incarceration into literature of extraordinary vitality: Borstal Boy (1958) is one of the great prison memoirs, and The Quare Fellow (1954) transformed the Dublin stage. He drank himself to death at forty-one, becoming in the process a public figure whose drunken television appearances and barroom exploits threatened to eclipse the work itself.

Life and Career

Behan grew up in the inner-city Dublin tenements — his father was a house painter and IRA man, his mother came from a republican family (her brother Peadar Kearney wrote the Irish national anthem). He was steeped in Dublin working-class culture: ballads, stories, Irish language, and militant republicanism.

At sixteen, he was sent to England on a solo IRA bombing mission, was arrested in Liverpool with a suitcase full of explosives, and sentenced to three years in Borstal (a juvenile detention centre). In 1942, back in Dublin, he was sentenced to fourteen years for the attempted murder of two detectives at an IRA commemoration; he served four years before a general amnesty. These imprisonments were the making of him as a writer.

The Quare Fellow (1954), a play about a prison on the night before a hanging, was staged by Joan Littlewood at Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in 1956 — a production that brought Behan international attention. Littlewood also directed The Hostage (1958), an anarchic, music-hall-inflected play about an English soldier held captive in a Dublin brothel.

Borstal Boy (1958) is his masterpiece: an account of his arrest, trial, and imprisonment in England that is at once a political memoir, a coming-of-age story, and a celebration of human warmth and resilience. It was banned in Ireland and in Australia.

His later years were consumed by alcoholism. His final books — Brendan Behan’s Island (1962) and Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965) — were dictated into a tape recorder because he could no longer write. He died in March 1964 in Dublin. At his funeral, an IRA honour guard fired a volley over his coffin.

Major Works and Themes

Behan’s great gift was voice — a demotic, exuberant, bilingual voice that could move from bawdy comedy to lyricism to political rage in a single paragraph. His writing is saturated with Dublin speech, with songs, with the comedy of survival. His characters — prisoners, prostitutes, IRA men, landladies — are drawn with immense affection and zero sentimentality.

His subject is imprisonment in every sense: political imprisonment, class imprisonment, the imprisonment of ideology, the prison of addiction.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Behan was adored as a personality and underestimated as a writer. The drinking, the television appearances, the legendary wit (“I’m a drinker with a writing problem”) created a public figure that overshadowed the work. Borstal Boy and The Quare Fellow deserve to be ranked alongside the best Irish writing of the century.

Key Works

• The Quare Fellow (1954)
• Borstal Boy (1958)
• The Hostage (1958)
• Brendan Behan’s Island (1962)

Collecting Behan

Borstal Boy (1958, Hutchinson, London) is the most collected Behan title. First editions in dust jacket bring $200–$600.

The Quare Fellow (1956, Methuen) first edition: $100–$400. The Hostage (1958, Methuen): $100–$300.

Behan signed irregularly — his signature became increasingly erratic as alcoholism progressed — and signed copies have a poignant appeal. Inscribed copies from the period of literary celebrity (1956–1962) are uncommon.

The Irish-language works — particularly An Giall, the original Irish version of The Hostage — are seldom encountered and highly valued by collectors of Irish-language literature.