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more time in jail, and it is common to hear him compared to Jean
Genet. On the evidence of
Borstal Boy
it seems to me that this com–
parison is largely mistaken. Behan does not conceive of his having been
either an I.R.A. member or Borstal inmate as a revolt against society;
he has no
mystique
about crime and no theory about the unique moral
status of criminal society. Above all, he seems to have virtually no im–
pulse to construe his experience as essentially symbolic of modern life,
or assert that his individual fate comprehends a judgment of civilization.
He does not, I would suggest, because in a quite real sense he was
not raised in the twentieth century. He comes from a working-class
family-as a youth he was apprenticed to the house-painting trade–
but one which was both musically and literarily accomplished. His most
memorable boyhood adventures were to deliver milk to Joyce's sister
and to pass by the homes of Yeats, O'Casey and Sheridan on his way
to school. "My mother worked in Maud Gonne's house on St. Stephen's
Green and my uncle was in the I.R.B. with Yeats, and many is the
winter's evening I spent after tea, telling ... stories I'd heard from
my father and mother and uncles about Yeats, Stephens and his lovely
red-haired wife, and Maud Gonne, and A.E." But even this, atypical
as it may be, does not sufficiently account for the striking absence of
modern feelings-of exacerbation, inversion, alienation and self-deni–
gration-from Behan's writing. On the other hand, his involvement
with Irish nationalist culture, begun at so precocious an age, does, I
think, come closer to the matter of his experience. To begin with, Ire–
land itself, depressed and debilitated, isolated and self-isolating, has re–
mained curiously inaccessible to many of those events and movements
that characterize our age; and the passions and beliefs of so many Irish–
men, including Behan, are bound up either in an obsession with England
in its historic role as an oppressor or in some extreme commitment to
Ireland's quasi-mythical past. To be sure, this condition of separation
from the central movement of the European mind did not prevent some
Irishmen from being among the greatest writers of our era, writers in–
deed who defined its very character; but the case of Behan indicates
that it may work in another way too. At the age of sixteen Behan was
not only possessed by an eccentric nationalist
mythology-cum-history,
by
attitudes that had only the most marginal relation to the general Euro–
pean life, but the very tissue of his sensibility seems to have been com–
posed of the language, the phrases and accents of a long-lost time–
and it is just here, I think, that a large measure of his paradoxical vi–
tality is to be found.
In prison, Behan whiles away the time singing songs to himself:
