DBrendan Behan has well deserved a reputation as the “bad boy of Irish literature”, which is also spread by the blurb of this Wagenbach jewelery book: as a teenager he joined the IRA, but ended up in prison before he could do anything worse. He later processed his experiences in an English reform school into his novel “Borstal Boy” (1958); that of a lengthy detention in Dublin for involvement in the attempted murder of an Irish policeman, during which time he also learned Gaelic, inspired various other works.
Anecdotes about Behan’s alcohol abuse and rowdy behavior are numerous – among the more curious is a 1950 letter from the lighthouse keeper at St John’s Point in Northern Ireland to the relevant authorities in Dublin. Behan, who was supposed to be painting the lighthouse in question, is reviled as careless, dirty and disrespectful, including having ruined a wall and being “the worst example” of a person the keeper had met in thirty years of service.
Literary explosives
The dissolute life did not diminish Behan’s literary ambitions: in Paris in 1948, where he worked as a journalist, among other things, he really wanted to get to know Samuel Beckett, which he did. A Behan biographer reports that Beckett later bailed Behan on several occasions. In the years that remained before his untimely death, Behan made the leap from jail and pub factotum to internationally acclaimed author.
Brendan Behan. “Woman without rank and name”.
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Image: Wagenbach
As far as German editions of his works are concerned, however, Behan has become quiet over the past few decades. In 2019, Curt Meyer-Clason’s translation of “Borstal Boy” was reissued by KiWi. Known primarily as a playwright (also in Germany in the 1960s), he has fallen into oblivion, especially as a prose author. This can be outrageous in view of the present collection: In an impressive translation by Hans-Christian Oeser, it shows Behan’s mixture of drasticism and lyricism, humor and hard-boiled sound, which not only deals with explosives, but often seems explosive: “The Brits had two Irish, but not the right ones, arrested and hung.”
A novel has remained a fragment
At one point, Behan jumps into the perspective of a little boy (“On my fifth birthday, Mrs. Murphy said we had to go to Jock Jimmy and have a lift”), and though said old woman, in whose “vestibule” it was caricatured in the words of a Nurse smells “definitely of whiskey” and has a bad tongue, it’s heartbreaking when you realize that she’s about to start what will probably be her last move, to the hospice. Another time, Behan describes a cancer patient’s wake, and in the cover story a priest says, “It’s not when you die that matters, it’s how you die.”
Inspired by Norman Mailer’s view that Behan knew “that he carried death within him,” Hans-Christian Oeser surmises in his afterword: “Perhaps the incessant talking and singing that Behan was known and famous for was always a part of it.” Addressing and singing against death.” Behan deals with this particularly drastically in the story “The Execution”, which, as Oeser also notes, is reminiscent of Brecht’s “Measurement”. With the utmost laconicism and a harrowing ending, she describes how IRA members murder a comrade who betrayed them. Masterful as the short prose is, it is unfortunate that Behan was unable to complete a novel entitled The Catacombs, reproduced here in fragmentary form.
Brendan Behan: “Woman without rank and name”. From the English and Irish, with an afterword by Hans-Christian Oeser. Wagenbach Verlag, Berlin 2023. 144 p., hardcover, €22.