There are artists whose public performance is so flamboyant … that their contemporaries, repelled or dazzled by the man, have failed to measure his artistic quality. This has been the fate of Brendan Behan…. That Behan's writings have some virtue is allowed—but of what kind is it? For in all assessments I have read of writing in English in the past decade, while significance is bestowed on many a dullard whose productions are deemed, by the critical investigator, to conform to the "trend" or "pattern" he discerns, the name of Behan somehow gets forgotten. This surprises me, for of all the writers of my generation, including myself, the only one who I am certain will be read a century from now, is he.

Or rather, this does not surprise me; for the reasons that make the unwary undervalue his achievement are so evident. Chief of these is that he's an Irish writer…. [We] seem to believe a benevolent magic makes it so easy for Irishmen to be fine writers, that this gift of nature deprives them of true merit. (p. 53)

I exaggerate, of course; but wish to suggest this patronizing attitude to Irish writing, largely unconscious and totally detestable, has as its basis—even in the most enlightened English minds—a political motivation…. It strikes me as significant, for example, that while dozens of Irish writers (including, of course, Brendan Behan) have found in [our centuries' old war with Ireland] the chief material of their creations, not one English writer, so far as I know, has tackled it on the scale that it deserves….

Having failed in this task of self-assessment—as much in our national thinking as more particularly in our writing—we have fallen back, in both these areas of consciousness, on the negative device of patronage and denigration. The Irish … remain worthy and slightly comical….

[Borstal Boy] describes Behan's arrest, imprisonments and final liberation (that is, expulsion) when, at the age of sixteen during World War II he attempted, as a volunteer of the IRA, to set off a bomb in Liverpool. (p. 54)

The whole attitude of the Irish patriot to England—motives we can understand well enough, it seems, in Indians or Africans, but not yet, even today, in Irishmen—is the chief theme of Borstal Boy. Yet though I do not think Behan could be described as a "forgiving" person, his amazing triumph, as a man and an autobiographer, is to have given the English at every possible point—and even in the most appalling circumstances—their human due. He is the best, the only real patriot—a man whose love for his country never denies the love others have for theirs, or fails to respect this love. And the portraits of English fellow prisoners, screws, and coppers is unfailingly sympathetic, whenever sympathy seems possible at all. Also, the English temperament, even when its manifestations most repel him (and make his life a misery) is entirely understood by an intelligent imagination. I am not sure how long after his first imprisonment Behan wrote Borstal Boy, but even supposing a maturer Behan bestows on his younger self a greater wisdom than he then possessed, there can be no doubt the Irish boy he was did win, by his humanity, an astonishing moral victory over his captors. This was possible because he is so clear-headed about himself: indeed in many ways, the most satirical portrait in the book is the one the writer draws of the young Brendan.

The language of Borstal Boy dispels another illusion about "Irish writing". The hackneyed convention is that the Irish are beguiling chatterboxes; and of course, Behan knows very well this is expected of a "Paddy", and turns on the blarney at times to amuse his captors (and divert their ire) or, more usually, to trick them and take the mickey. But the overall style of the book, though eloquent and passionate, is trim and lucid. Short scenes, portrait vignettes, swift emotional developments, are conveyed with admirable economy. (pp. 55-6)

I call Behan a poetic writer (and can offer no higher praise) not only because of his frequent quotations of Irish folk and political verses (the reverse of intrusive, and always heightening the dramatic or emotional effect), nor even because some of these verses are written by himself, but in the truer sense that his prose and poetry are almost the same thing; and that his prose, even in passages of factual description, is sustained by a vision which interprets fact imaginatively in evocative speech. This is never "poetic" in a lush purely verbal sense—and in fact, the more one reads Behan the more one is persuaded this rhetoritician has a classic sense of harmonious order, an almost severe self-discipline. Drama, though charged with feeling, is conveyed nearly with austerity. (pp. 56-7)

If I have hitherto left out the comedy—for which Behan, the 'roaring boy', is most renowned—it is because, although this is hilarious (the cliché 'makes you laugh out loud' is unavoidable), I see Behan as a tragic artist. I do not think it has been generally noticed that in his three published works a tragic death is the key event on which the whole drama turns. It may seem absurd to suggest one can miss this in The Quare Fellow which is, after all, about a hanging. But we never see this, nor even its victim, and the first impression left by the play of sardonic humour and abounding life is so overwhelming, that one almost forgets these arise from the fact of the man in the condemned cell. (p. 57)

Considered as a study of prison life [Borstal Boy] is … outstanding…. Behan spares us nothing of the degradation prisons force on everyone inside them (on the screws even more than on the prisoners), yet his demonstration of how the instinct for life survives this test is beautifully conveyed without personal rancour. The sexual aspect is treated with humanity and tact: the inevitable homosexual element is introduced without undue mockery or morbid preoccupation, and the animal lives of the prisoners given a dignity snatched from every official effort to destroy it. The finest achievement is to have evoked love men have for each other without any of that nervous scruple with which a heterosexual writer—in dread of being thought by his readers to be otherwise—usually confronts this theme—or fails to do so. (p. 58)

In The Quare Fellow Behan confronted a theme of daunting difficulty. An exclusively male cast, a principal character who is never seen, a setting of unrelieved gloom. From these unpromising materials (or, of course, being the artist he is, because of them) Behan has made a drama that is funny, humane, and a profound affirmation of the life that everything in the prison is trying to destroy.

The play opens with a song (and closes with a variant of it)…. Behan has been criticized for his addiction to incidental songs in his plays—in my view quite mistakenly…. I cannot account for this objection … if only because all theatre is in one sense illusion, and everything depends on the conviction with which the artist uses any theatrical device. In The Quare Fellow Behan introduces song sparingly, with great tact and dramatic effect. From the outset, the very fact that an invisible prisoner is singing, and that the first character we see, a warder, stops him, establishes at once his central theme which is the conflict of life and joy with cruelty and death, and the triumph of life despite judicial murder…. (pp. 58-9)

As we meet the prisoners and warders we are made aware that the forthcoming execution of the 'quare fellow' is a shared obsession: the warders, the active party in the matter, being far more disturbed by it than the inmates. Snobberies, resentments and frustrations of the prisoners are conveyed with comic irony, reminding us that a jail population differs from that outside in no essential respect whatever. The first Act ends with an attempted suicide by a reprieved prisoner; and the dramatic effect of this, by bringing us so close to death so early, and by contrasting its 'voluntary' nature in this instance with the irrevocable killing that must come, reinforces the gathering sensation of impending horror.

The central 'character' of the second Act is the grave the prisoners are digging for tomorrow's victim: a riveting theatrical device, since the condemned man, though still unseen, becomes even more visible to the audience's imagination; and a device saved from the merely macabre by the intensity of feeling with which Behan invests this gruesome emblem, and by the speed and point of the sardonic dialogue he gives to the prisoners and warders who surround it…. The one character we are drawn to is the young Gaelic-speaking warder Crimmin, who is as yet an innocent. It was a bold and characteristic device of Behan's to put the only really likeable man in the play among the oppressors, and he brings this off without a trace of sentiment or artifice. (pp. 59-60)

Considered as a drama that soars from initial apparent grand guignol to authentic lyric tragedy, the play is beyond praise. Viewed as a demonstration that any alternative to judicial murder must be better—and, as forcefully, that prisons defeat their own supposed ends of humiliation or redemption—it will carry conviction to anyone capable of being convinced. Yet so fine is it as a play that, just as Greek tragedy haunts us still despite the moral mainsprings of the drama being quite different from our own, so I am sure The Quare Fellow, in whatever kind of social order that may replace our own, will never lose its human relevance. (p. 60)

Despite its fateful ending, [The Hostage] is the gayest of Brendan Behan's works and the most overtly political. The Irish resentments of England, and their human sympathies for an Englishman, are beautifully conveyed by a houseful of comicals all sharply individual, not stereotypes. And for Behan, a man who has sacrificed so much for his political ideas, and who holds them so absolutely, it is brave not to hesitate to mock the sterile elements in Irish nationalism that he finds repellent. I think the fact is Behan is much more than an Irish nationalist merely—though he certainly is that: he is a revolutionary humanist, and his heroes belong to one nation of the socially oppressed in every country….

There remain two key elements in Behan's writing I must refer to, since I am sure of their importance, though with diffidence because of ignorance. The first is that he is an accomplished writer in Gaelic; and as I believe any writer who possesses two mother tongues is able to effect happy transmutations from the one speech to the other, this gift may help to account for the rich flexibility of his English prose…. The other element is the saturation of Behan's thought and speech by the spiritual inheritance of the Roman Catholic Church into which he was baptized. It is hard to tell from Behan's writings—which praise and castigate the Church with equal vehemence—how far he is what is known as a 'believer'. But that he has a religious instinct in the profoundest sense there can be no doubt; nor that his familiarity with Roman Catholic history, ritual and doctrine have contributed to his style and artistic temperament. (p. 61)