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in 1172 decided that any Irishmen that refused to acknowledge the King
of England as his ruler was excommunicated," recapitulating in inex–
haustible detail the protracted history of injustice and persecution that
the Irish suffered at the hands of the British, and always locating the
center of horror in the distant past. "Didn't they condemn the men of
'forty-eight and tell the people to give up their crops and die
df
the
hunger in the ditches at home, with the grass-juice running green from
the dead mouth of a mother clutching a live infant...
!"
The profuse,
effortless flow of rhetoric cannot for long conceal the hollowness, in–
flation and remoteness of what was being communicated. At sixteen,
Behan was a stripling version of "the citizen" in the Cyclops episode of
Ulysses
-
strident, inbred, obsessed, ignorant. Yet
Borstal Boy,
Behan's
autobiography of his adolescent years, is about the un-making of a fa–
natic, and is in the classical tradition of the education of a young man.
That education begins when Behan is remanded to prison to await
trial, and it is an education in paradox and toward an awareness of
irony. After he makes a speech defying the authorities of the prison, he
is taken back to his cell and beaten - slapped in the face and punched
in the body. He expected this and even a bit worse; but he did not expect
that two minutes after the jailers had left, in would come the prison
librarian to lend him some books, one of which was
Under the Green–
wood Tree .
The jail itself was a typical Victorian bastille, with no toilets
or running water in the cells; but Behan was able to have the
Daily
Herald
delivered to him every day to read "while I leant over my
dinner." There was brutality to spare in the prison; but he discovered
that the prisoners themselves were capable of much worse than the
guards. The antediluvian rules of the prison made conversation almost
impossible; but there were apparently an unlimited number of Victorian
novels to read. And when he was finally sent to a Borstal (a boys' re–
formatory), Behan was given the first pair of pajamas he had in his life.
Bit by bit, as he went on reading and observing, and as he got
to know the other boys in the young prisoners' section of the prison,
his allegiances began to shift.
I was a bit ashamed in a way that I was worried over going to p .s.
[penal servitude] for fourteen years or to Borstal for three and ashamed,
too; because it was not really the length of the sentence that worried
me--for I had always believed that if a fellow went into the I.R.A. at
all he should be prepared to throw the handle after the hatchet, die
dog or shite the license-but that I'd sooner be with Charlie and Ginger
and Browny in Borstal than with my own comrades and countrymen
any place else.
It
seemed a bit disloyal to me, that I should prefer to
be with boys from English cities than with my own countrymen. . . .
