The Geography of the Imagination: Brendan Behan's The Scarperer

Abstract

The Geography of the Imagination: Brendan Behan’s The Scarperer Thomas O’Grady Reasonably enough, critics have tended to dismiss Brendan Behan’s novel The Scarperer for what it is – a potboiler, a project undertaken quite literally to light a flame on the gas cooker. Having harboured literary ambitions since the 1940s, Behan returned to Dublin in 1950 after a two-year sojourn in Paris with promising publications to his credit – a handful of poems written in Irish, a mildly homoerotic short story printed in the avant-garde magazine Points, a few pieces of freelance journalism – and, according to biographer Ulick O’Connor, with the discipline to harness those ambitions: [In Paris] Brendan formed habits of regular writing hours and became aware of the need for re-writing. He worked at writing – as a craft and not as a means of occupying himself when he wasn’t housepainting or drinking. When he settled back in Dublin in 1950 he was no longer just an entertaining talker who intended to be a writer: he was a writer who liked to talk a lot.1 Before he rose to fame in the later 1950s with his plays The Quare Fellow (1954) and The Hostage (1958) and his best-selling memoir-esque narrative Borstal Boy (1958) – and then to notoriety thanks to his personal life and his larger-than-life personality – Behan lived provisionally in Dublin, sometimes practising the family trade of house-painting, but mostly just taking his chances where he found them. Originally published serially, and pseudonymously, in The Irish Times in 1953, The Scarperer represents Behan’s first extended attempt to earn a living wage as a writer. According to Rae Jeffs, the publicity officer for London’s Hutchinson publishing house, which produced an edition of the novel in 1966, Behan admitted authorship of the long-forgotten narrative just in passing, in 1962. In an Afterword to the American edition published by Doubleday in 1964, shortly after Behan’s death, Jeffs recounts how Behan mentioned The Scarperer only in the course of testifying, from personal experience, about the challenge of writing ‘a crime story’. He then went on Studies • volume 109 • number 436 424 to explain to her why he had written The Scarperer under a nom de plume: ‘By 1953, I was quite well-known as a poet and a writer, and unfortunatelytheDublinintelligentsiahadseenpiecesofpornography that I’d written for French magazines when I was in France – in English, of course. This didn’t exactly endear me to them, so being short of the readies [i.e., cash], I decided to write under a phoney name’. He also explained: ‘I wrote it under the phoney name Emmet Street, which was the name of the street opposite the one I was reared in [Russell Street] in North Dublin’.2 Aside from representing Behan’s capacity to apply himself to an extended project, The Scarperer also represents, despite its inherent deficiencies as ‘literature’, the nature of his emerging talent as a writer – specifically his ability to sketch memorably colourful characters and his sense (mostly intuitive) of how to construct a sustained narrative. More significantly, it also represents his recognition of the crucial relationship between and among characters, action and place. With three distinctive settings – inner-city Dublin (including the interior of Mountjoy Prison), an unnamed island off the west coast of Ireland (readily recognisable as Inis Oírr, the smallest of the Aran Islands), and Paris – The Scarperer is very much a place-centred novel. By itself, the importance of place in the narrative does not excuse the novel’s shortcomings – caricature-like characters, a contrived (albeit clever) plot, a deus ex machina climax, and a too-neatly unknotted dénouement; but a readerly alertness to how Behan’s awareness of place affected the action of the novel might help to redeem The Scarperer, if not as a work of enduring literature then at least as an illuminating element in his overall oeuvre. Dear dirty Dublin According to Joseph Brady’s 2014 study Dublin, 1930–1950: The Emergence of the Modern City, Dublin at mid-century was evolving and growing, even as the rest of the country was declining in both vigour and...