BOOKS
In boyhood's bloom and lTnanhood's pride,
Foredoomed
by
alien laws,
Some on the scaffold proudly died,
For Holy Ireland's cause;
And brothers say, Shall we, to.day,
Unmoved by cowards stand,
While traitors shame and foes defame,
The Felons of our Land.
...
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Anyone who has ever read Ebenezer Elliott's
Corn-Law Rhymes
or some
of the Chartist hymns will recognize this kind of verse. Its pathos and
force arise out of a connection with the nineteenth century and its tra–
dition of working-class life, and with the language that still informed
that life, but no longer does ,or can. Behan also sings songs which are
connected with the Irish "literary" folk tradition, and also have a re–
lation to the language of
Marmion,
of "The Burial of Sir John Moore
at Corunna," and of "The Private of the Buffs." It is a language that
was generally debased and lost to literature ; but such a language, if it
is taken seriously by a boy or young man, can become a kind of armor
against modern life and may even
be
turned into an instrument for
dealing with it. So it seems to have been for Behan. In the degree that
his mind was penetrated with the fantasies in these heroic rhymes and
accents (and he knows hundreds of such songs and poems) , in that
degree was he able to humanize his experience, to deal with the English-–
men about him, even the prison officials, as something more than the
tools of imperialist, ideological tyranny, in time to discard ideology itself.
Nor
is
this a connection with the past that deforms Behan's sensi–
tivity to the present. On the contrary, his intense aliveness to speech
is his largest resource as a writer, and
Borstal Boy
is without question
one of the most impressive and convincing renderings of the language
of the British lower-classes--and therefore of their life and culture–
ever written. Behan is truly on the inside of this society; he registers
every inflection of class and regional dialect and discerns the shades
of feeling each accent conveys. The conversations in dormitories and
lavatories that he records express, as nothing else I have recently read
by an English writer does, the life of the depressed classes and the
wretchedness of it. A close analogy to what Behan has achieved in this
regard are those remarkable scenes in James Jones's
From Here to
Eternity,
in which the entire range of aspirations, desires and disap–
pointments of American working-class boys in the 'thirties were poign–
antly revealed. Behan is mQre fortunate, and more of a piece, than
Jones, however, for the energy and intelligence of the language in those
