Quare Fellow Research Articles

“The most cooperative of writers”: Brendan Behan’s Collaboration with Carolyn Swift on The Quare Fellow

“The most cooperative of writers”: Brendan Behan’s Collaboration with Carolyn Swift on The Quare Fellow

A Study on The Quare Fellow: Postcolonial Crisis of Nation and Difficulties of Writer

A Study on The Quare Fellow: Postcolonial Crisis of Nation and Difficulties of Writer

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

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...

Quare Memory in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy

This essay adapts David Cregan's concept of ‘queer memory’ – a form of memory defined ‘by exclusion rather than inclusion’ – to the author of The Quare Fellow, analysing narrative gaps in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy in order to better understand its construction of cultural memory. Situating Borstal Boy within a growing canon of Irish writing on coercive confinement, the essay contends that draft versions act as an important component of textual memory, as can be seen by the more explicit portrayal of queer sexuality in Behan's drafts. Both in its transgressive portrayal of queer masculinity, and in the ‘quare’ narrative strategies used to incorporate this material into the published text, Borstal Boy presents an author whose ‘quareness’ is a key part of his literary aesthetic.

Hairy Apes and Quare Fellows: The Legacy of Eugene O'Neill in the Work of Brendan Behan

Abstract Brendan Behan (1923–64) was part of a Dublin theater community that grew up with the plays of Eugene O'Neill on its doorstep, and the impact was significant. As John P. Harrington notes, when the Dublin Drama League produced O'Neill's Emperor Jones in 1927, Denis Johnston described it as “the first true invasion of the modern into the national theatre [of Ireland].” By immersing himself into Dublin's modernist theater culture during his early years, Behan fed his interest in the avant-garde, which resulted in The Quare Fellow, a play that has some remarkable thematic and formal similarities to O'Neill's The Hairy Ape. Each writer emerged from fringe theater, and each turned to European expressionism to challenge issues around social justice and equality. This article surveys O'Neill's significance in the Dublin of Behan's youth, considers the sociopolitical affinities between the writers, and analyzes the theatrical aesthetics of each in their respective plays The Hairy Ape and The Quare Fellow.

Losing Ireland, Inventing America: O'Neill and After

Abstract O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night has had a palpable influence on subsequent Irish plays by artists as different as Tom Murphy (A Whistle in the Dark) and Brian Friel (Faith Healer). Its obsession with fog and foghorns is a leitmotif through Behan's The Quare Fellow. But the prevailing metaphor of a fog people, doomed to stammer a broken poetry ever since they lost their lives in the Unconscious of the underwater world and were cast up gasping on land, has also powerfully inspired Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's poetic sequence The Fifty-Minute Mermaid. In a similar way, the depiction of a property-hungry, frustrated paterfamilias in the Moran of McGahern's Amongst Women is hugely indebted to the figure of James Tyrone. The various phases of Irish history, Anglo-Irish and mere Irish, are condensed into the story of the Tyrone family—and the influence of the famous play extends across all literary genres of recent Irish writing, not drama alone.

Introduction: A Bit of a Writer

‘The boss on the painting job says to me one morning: “Behan, I believe you are a bit of a writer’”. So begins Brendan Behan’s first article for the Irish Press newspaper in 1951, and it catches Behan at an important moment in his transition from house-painter and Republican rebel to the internationally acclaimed writer he became in 1956 when The Quare Fellow was produced in London. By 1951, Behan had published stories in The Bell and Sindbad Vail’s Points magazine in Paris, a handful of Gaelic verse in an important anthology of new Irish writers, Nuabhearsaiocht, and he had written some play drafts which were rejected by the Abbey. The suggestion that he is ‘a bit of a writer’ stirs him to remember, and to quote at length from, a review of Points magazine which had just been published in the Hudson Review, in which his story, ‘After the Wake’, was singled out for praise:

Saint Behan

This essay examines Brendan Behan's evolution as a dramatist, linking him to the tradition of O'Casey's urban theatre, particularly Juno and the Paycock, and emphasising his closeness to the experimental drama of his near contemporary, Samuel Beckett. It details how subversively Behan used both music and the Gaelic language in sexualizing the story of The Quare Fellow, how he censors such radical departures in An Giall, and how The Hostage in its wild exuberance restores Behan to the status of a most dangerously liberated dramatist. Finally it looks at the influence of Behan on his most significant follower, the openly queer English playwright, Joe Orton.

Language Usage and Social Categorisation in Brendan Behan’s Play The Quare Fellow

The language of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow (1954), a play set in an Irish prison, is examined stylistically. This is done under the headings of naming, usage of Hiberno-English, of prison jargon, and of Gaelic. These show evidence of categorisation under the conventional class structure of upper, middle, and lower. However, there are more complex divisions present through language. These are: prisoners’ pecking-order according to crime, prisoners using more Hiberno-English and also prison jargon than the authority figures, one warder who uses language patterns similar to the prisoners, and the use of Gaelic by two characters, one a warder and the other a prisoner, who along with the warder above, represent the moral core of the play. Keywords: Brendan Behan; The Quare Fellow; stylistics; class structure.

Annotations for Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow

Whenever I teach Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow (1956), I spend a substantial—and unnecessary—deal of time explaining slang terms, expletives, historical names, and items of popular culture to my...

The Quare Fellow (review)

The Quare Fellow (review)

Brendan Behan's Lament for Gaelic Ireland: The Quare Fellow

Criticism of Brendan Behan's masterpiece The Quare Fellow has generally viewed it as an anti-capital punishment drama and often tended to neglect its critique of lingering imperial remnants in postindependence Ireland. 1 While on one level The Quare Fellow (1956)is a ribald polemic against capital punishment, on a more subversive level, it is also an insider's exposé of the collision between residual British imperialism and the vanishing world of Gaelic Ireland in an urban Dublin jail. This drama was influenced by earlier executions Behan witnessed, especially that of Bernard Kirwan in 1943, and largely written to the moment; Ireland and Britain were then embroiled in an acrimonious public debate over capital punishment. Alan Simpson has pointed out the contemporary relevance of the play's critique of this practice: "The impact of The Quare Fellow in 1954 was greatly sharpened by the fact that judicial hanging was still practised by the governments of both Britain and Ireland." 2 But Behan's drama has a twofold aim: in addition to being a protest against capital punishment, it is also a skillfully rendered lament for the rapidly disappearing Gaeltacht areas of Ireland—particularly the Blasket Islands (Na Blascaodaí) off the Dingle Peninsula—which Behan had come to know and love. This reading of Behan's drama also delineates a tentative outline of an anticolonial Irish drama and assesses the place of The Quare Fellow in this dramatic tradition.

"The Storyteller": Narrative Authority and Cultural Nationalism in Brendan Behan's Short Fiction

"The Storyteller": Narrative Authority and Cultural Nationalism in Brendan Behan's Short Fiction }ohn Brannigan More renowned for his plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, and his fictional autobiography, Borstal Boy, Brendan Behan's earliest publications were short stories. The argument of this essay is that Behan's stories reflect the thematic concerns and stylistic tendencies of nationalist short story writing, but that increasingly the stories become stories about storytelling , about the formal exercise of narrative authority. Read in this way, as considerations of the power and performance of narrative, Behan's stories reveal themselves to be more than thinly masked autobiographical sketches, but also multi-layered reflexive narratives, more interested in style than plot. Before he abandoned the short story form, Behan used the form to reflect on the persuasive and, more specifically, seductive power of storytelling, and thus began to consider the properties which rendered narrative such a potent tool of political and cultural nationalism. "The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale" (Benjamin 87). Walter Benjamin argues that the figure of the storyteller embodies the social rituals of legitimation and conferral, drawing authority from his capacity to relate stories to others, while simultaneously passing on the power of narrative to his listeners. JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 31.3 (Fall 2001): 283-298. Copyright © 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 284 JNT Accordingly, as Ross Chambers has pointed out, the storyteller cedes his authority even as he exercises it, for in the act of disclosing his narrative "secret" or germ, he ceases to possess and control its dissemination (Story 50-1). The storyteller is, thus, in classic Barthesian terms, the author of his own disappearance, which Benjamin acknowledges in the conclusion to his essay when he writes that the storyteller "is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story" (107). The basis both for the social significance of the storyteller and of his dissolution in the act of telling is the infinite iterability of the story. "Storytelling ," Benjamin writes, "is always the art of repeating stories" (90). As such, it is at once both conservative and transitory, evoking the notion of a tradition in which stories are authorized and reproduced, and of their momentary value and consumption, usually for the purposes either of entertainment or education. For Benjamin, storytelling was an artisan craft of direct communication, in which the teller fashioned the "raw material of experience" into something "solid, useful" (107). In contrast to the totalizing speculation of the novel, stories were the vehicles of a kind of folk wisdom, and storytellers were akin to "teachers and sages," with "counsel " to offer the many (107). The authority of the storyteller is thus derived from the form itself, conferred upon the storyteller by his listeners in anticipation of a useful or gratifying narrative of experience or wisdom, the narrative itself in turn extending the compass of the listeners' own repertoire of stories. The act of storytelling which Benjamin describes acquired considerable symbolic significance in the Irish revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in both oral and written forms. It served as a model form of continuity and authority in which nationalist myths of tradition and legitimacy were both mirrored and disseminated. In the nationalist imagination of the late nineteenth century, storytelling figured both the intimacy of the national community and the endurance of dissident popular cultural forms. The movement to preserve, collect, revise, and popularize Irish folk tales in written form led in turn to the emergence of storytelling as a powerful trope of authority and conferral in literary nationalism . The recurrent nationalist motifs of popular folk tales, which functioned to delineate and define distinguishing characteristics of Irish culture, found a new form in the development of the Irish short story form. The Storyteller 285 Benjamin argues that the short story is a reductive manifestation of the oral story form, "which no longer permits that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which...

Plays of Impasse. Contemporary Drama Set in Confining Institutions by Carol Rosen

Reviews 187 and generalizes too much here. For one thing, not all these interpretations go so far as to claim that Lear asserts the dignity of man. Many would agree that man is decentered in this drama and that to see an affirmation in Cordelia’s death is an unwarranted mystification. Dollimore makes a good case for Lear being about power, property, and inheritance although I believe it is not so prominent a theme as he makes it out to be. He offers some shrewd observations on minor points. He finely observes, for instance, how absurd it is for Gloucester to say to Lear at the hovel, “What, hath your Grace no better company” (III.iv.142)—referring to Edgar and the Fool—and how these words betray Gloucester’s class consciousness. But his analysis of this scene as a whole and of Lear’s behavior in it is quite inadequate and lacks in dramatic empathy. It is true that the abstractions in Lear’s “prayer” to the “houseless poverty” point to his inexperience with want and misery; but the prayer comes just a little after Lear has urged the Fool to enter the hovel first, a gesture in contrast to Gloucester’s callous absurdity. For a moment, Lear acts, even if he does not think, concretely about poverty and transcends his class-conscious royalty. But, of course, for Dollimore to have admitted the possibility of Lear’s reaching for a transcendence of this kind would have interfered with his radical thesis and argued for Shakespeare’s at least tentative exploration of the human essence which Dollimore sees broken beyond recovery. And to have admitted it would have meant to admit the power of human feelings besides that of material forces. When Dollimore says that “Lear in the end clings more tenaciously than ever to the only values he knows” [that is, power and authority], one is too painfully reminded that the Lear we see on the stage clings in the end to Cordelia with the momentary illusion that she may be alive. Whether he dies with this illusion in mind or not, his feelings and ours are strong and excruciating. Dollimore does not deal well with feelings; vide his wholly inadequate treatment of Antony and Cleopatra. I have called this a provocative book. It is not likely to leave readers indifferent, just as it has not left this reader indifferent. In this lies its merit, and the heavy ideology and the overstatements may even contribute something to this particular merit. For being the most challenging recent book about tragedy, Dollimore’s wins the prize. ROLF SOELLNER Ohio State University Carol Rosen. Plays of Impasse. Contemporary Drama Set in Confining Institutions. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Pp. 325. $24.00. A thematic analysis integrating both drama and theater considerations, Plays of Impasse excels by nearly any criterion ever devised for measuring excellence in critical studies: introducing new material, demonstrating a persuasive and novel thématique, and, as a result, disturbing received ideas. 188 Comparative Drama In the first instance, Rosen’s principal thesis, i.e., the substantive congruity among contemporary plays set in confining institutions like hos­ pitals, asylums, prisons, and barracks, allows her to focus on plays which have been recognized as serious but which, for the most part, have not achieved contemporary canon status. To wit: Pinter’s The Hothouse, Nichols’s The National Health, Kopit’s Wings, Weiss’s Marat/Sade, Diirrenmatt ’s The Physicists, Storey’s Home, Brown’s The Brig, Behan’s The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, Genet’s Deathwatch, Wesker’s Chips With Everything, and Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Streamers. This means that even though this is a book intended for academic readers (upper-division students through specialists), few readers will have had an opportunity to have read all of these plays, let alone to have seen all of them, and so her genial reading which incorpor­ ates discussions of productions is truly informative. In the second instance, Rosen uses throughout the institutional taxo­ nomy of Erving Goffman for “total” institutions and adopts his premise that all such institutions of controlled social environment, regardless of purpose...

The Major Works of Brendan Behan by Peter René Gerdes (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 213 Gald6s (great as a novelist, but unimpressive as a playwright) in contrast to only a skimpy treatment of such major theatrical figures as Strindberg, Brecht and O'Neill (only 30 pages for the three together). Unconvincing is the word for the comparison Cortina makes between Edward "Ned" Sheldon's The Boss (presented in Detroit in 1911) and Gald6s' drama, La loea de la easa (Madrid, 1892). Cortina recognises that Sheldon followed closely the structure, plot and characters of the Spanish play. He acknowledges that "la sospecha de plagio puede surgir, debido al extremo paralelismo" and goes on to prove this "extreme parallel"; however, his conclusion is somewhat contradictory: on one hand he contends that it is difficult or impossible to prove that "The Boss es un arreglo 0 adaptaci6n de la obra escrita por Gald6s"; on the other hand he says that Perez Gald6s deserves most of the credit for writing the original. Although lacking in cohesion and planning, Cortina's book does not fail to be of general interest and illustrative. Especially interesting to Spanish readers is Chapter 3: the role of some major directors and theatre companies in the development of the American stage. The artistic life of Orson Welles is also skilfully highlighted. The result is a book which, in spite of the aforesaid faults, is a readable, informed introduction to some aspects of modern theatre. ERMINIO G. NEGLIA University of Toronto THE MAJOR WORKS OF BRENDAN BEHAN, by Peter Rene Gerdes. Bern: Herbert Lang; FrankfurtlM: Peter Lang, 1973.264 pp. Discussions of the merits of Behan's work are characterized by two major weaknesses. They tend to get bogged down on the fascinating but somewhat irrelevant question of Behan's personality, and they are usually uninformed on Behan's work in Irish and its relationship with his work in English. In his discussion of Behan's major works, Gerdes ignores the temptation to explore the controversial question of Behan's place in the long tradition which stretches back to Shakespeare's Captain Macmorris, and demonstrates his awareness of the importance of the hidden Behan, who was a sensitive Gaelic essayist, poet and playwright. The purpose of the study is "to give a critical evaluation of Behan's achievements as an artist" (p. 9), and "to counterbalance the image of the showman, which is such a handicap to objective judgement" (p. 10). To this end, Gerdes discusses the strengths and weaknesses of three plays: The Quare Fellow, An Giall and The Hostage, and Behan's contribution to Irish prison literature, Borstal Boy. The treatment of the Irish play on which The Hostage is based as a work of independent existence and merit is sound. Its existence is usually ignored or glossed over. Equally sound is the refusal to make a case for such works as Confessions ofan Irish Rebel, which were tape-recorded under doubtful circumstances . Gerdes argues that An Giall is the culmination of Behan's artistic achievement , and laments the fact that its intrinsic merits have not become known 214 BOOK REVIEWS outside of Ireland. By comparing the texts of An Giall and The Hostage, he demonstrates that the attribution of The Hostage solely to Behan is a misuse of his name and a barrier to a valid assessment of his total achievement, because the current text of the play is the product of a committee headed by Joan Littlewood of which Behan was simply a member and frequently absent at that. It is unlikely, however, that the validity of this argument will be widely accepted until an English translation ofAn Giall is available. Unfortunately, Gerdes tends to undermine parts of his argument by using weak or false evidence. He concludes his discussion of the contents of Borstal Boy with the exaggerated claim that: "Criticism so far has neglected to recognize the three main subjects that occupied Behan's mind during his imprisonment: politics , religion, and literature" (p. 123). To support the claim, he quotes part of the blurb on the Corgi Book Edition. He states that the epitome of Behan's wit and humour is to be found in the interrogation of Leslie by Monsewer in The Hostage, and as an...

Theater in London

THEATER IN LONDON THERE IS ONE MARVELOUS THING about the theater in London-the most expensive seat in the house is cheaper than the cheapest seat in a New York theater. In many theaters a gallery seat costs only the equi~ valent of 35 cents. There, unfortunately, the list of good things about the London theater ends. The West-end theaters produce for the most part trashy commercial vehicles, revues, and musicals-in short, pretty much the same thing as may be seen at any time in the Broadway theaters. But the New York theatergoer is never starved for good plays. There is always the off-Broadway theater with anywhere from ten to twenty little theaters presenting good drama-plays by promising new authors, avant-garde experimental theater, classics, and revivals of worthwhile failures which deserved a better fate. London has practically no counterpart to the off-Broadway theater. Only the Royal Court, the Theatre Royal, The Tower, and the Unity can compare with New York's live-wire theaters; and of these the latter two are non-professional. The Royal Court theater, which is well off the theatrical track in Chelsea, and the Theatre Royal, which is far out in East London, are both partially subsidized by the Arts Council. Both have done much to introduce new British authors to the public. The Theatre Royal was the first to produce Brendan Behan, now enjoying some success offBroadway with The Quare Fellow, and Shelagh Delany, whose A Taste of Honey is soon to receive a West-end production. The Royal Court holds a series of "Productions without Decor" and readings for its members and has so far introduced such promising new dramatists as N. F. Simpson, Donald Howarth, Arnold Wesker, Michael Hastings, John Arden, Ann Jellicoe, and Errol John. Its regular productions, open to the public, usually run fow' weeks and then transfer to a West-end theater if the reception warrants such a move; it rarely does. During my stay in London the Royal Court put on two plays. The first, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl by Errol John, is an excellently conceived play about a man's ruthless attempt to wrench himself out of his stifling environment, in this case Trinidad. The cast, headed by the American actor Earl Hyman, was by far the best I saw in London. The other production was The Long and the Short and the TaU by Willis Hall, a story about a doomed patrol of British soldiers in the Malayan jungle during the last war. This play was saved by its racy dialogue and by the excellent acting of an all-male cast. What little plot it has is trite and revolves around the reactions of the various members of the patrol to a Japanese prisoner whom they capture. I kept hoping that the Japanese prisoner would not take out pictures 47 48 MODERN DRAMA May of his wife and children (including one baby too young to be photographed but indicated by tenderly cradling anns), but he did. The Theatre Royal bowed to the almost mandatory English theatrical custom of doing a seasonal play at Christmas and did a wonderfully lively adaptation of A Christmas Carol while I was there. For me the high point of the production was the device used to close the first act. Scrooge steps out and glowers at the audience: "\Vhat are you laughing at? Well, stop it. Bah! (yells backstage) And ring down the curtain!" Christmas plays are a peculiarly British custom. Nowhere else is the hybrid creature known as pantomime to be found, fortunately. The pantomimes, based on the old fairy tale stories, vary from year to year as new gags are thought of and new topical jokes inserted, but there is one Christmas play which never changes. Where the Rainbow Ends was first produced forty-eight years ago and has remained popular at the Christmas season ever since. Not a word of the original script has ever been changed, and the purity of the text is jealously guarded by the heirs of the authors. So remarkably bad and so peculiarly English is this script that it deserves a few words of description. The first...