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PART I S AN R EV IEW
scenes informs the rest of his prose, as it never does in J ones.
As it so often happens, this extraordinary virtue also contains Be–
han's signal weakness and the principal threat to his talent. His gift
of language is so lavish and fluent that it allows him to buy things
too easily, to remain too close to the surfaces of experience. One finally
feels that he has not allowed his experience to impose upon or violate
his style; nothing in the book resists his rhetoric, makes it stumble, or
forces it into a realization that it
is
but rhetoric. Because Behan's style
seems to take him wherever he wants to go, he has never had to stop
and grope about in those regions of existence where all language is
inadequate. What I am suggesting is that he uses his language as an
evasion; somehow one feels that there ought to be more disturbance,
more exasperation and resentment, more uncertainty and awareness of
insoluble contradiction than get expressed here. In fact, Behan uses style
in the way that less gifted people use ideologies- to deny those depths
of misery, perversity and confusion without access to which no style
can ever transcend itself.
Borstal Boy
is that kind of triumph of articu–
lateness which intimates a failure of inwardness.
In short, Behan comes out of it all smelling too much like a rose.
Like Dylan Thomas, to whom he has also been compared, Behan
is a man enchanted by the sound of his own voice, and the image of
himself that he offers at the end of the book is of a sweet, wise, decent
and disinterested tough customer. I n our time the image of an innocence
which has managed to preserve itself is almost irresistibly attractive, and
no one knows this better than Behan himself. Yet if he is to go on as
a writer, he will, like his great countryman, have someday to lie down
"In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." H ere he has not, and as
a result,
Borstal Boy)
for all its brilliance, is a work of guileful innocence.
I t is, I should say, an excellent book to give to a very young man.
Coming Exhibitions:
Walter Murch
Forrest Bess
William Congdon
Jesse Reichek
Betty Parsons Gallery
- 15 East 57 Street,
N. Y.
Steven Marcus
Elaine de Kooning
April 7 - 25
Grace Hartigan
Apr. 28 - May 30
TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY
24 E. 67 St. {corner Madison}
N.Y.C.
