Brendan Behan: A Late Modernist Writer Engagé in Postwar Paris

65 BRENDAN BEHAN: A LATE MODERNIST WRITER ENGAGÉ IN POSTWAR PARIS Deirdre McMahon DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2024.67.5 Abstract: Building on findings presented in the radio documentary Brendan Behan in Paris (RTÉ, 2019) about Behan’s time spent in the city during the late 1940s and early 1950s, this article explores the relationships that Behan forged in Paris, including with Albert Camus and the literary magazine publisher Sindbad Vail, who would become the first to publish Behan’s work internationally. It further explores the significance of the timing of Behan’s arrival into postwar Paris, and his affinity with the philosophical ideas that were circulating there at the time. The article illustrates how Behan’s literary engagement with the city and its intellectuals in the postwar period is both anticipated and reflected in his work, including the vigorous debate between Sartre and Camus on the meaning of freedom, justice, and the nature of violence and revolution. Through this we see Behan as a writer immersed in and familiar with the dominant trends in European, and especially French, writing. Keywords: Brendan Behan, Sindbad Vail, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Points, Shakespeare and Company, “After the Wake,” Merlin, postwar Paris Send “the Maupassant in the French because I’m learning it now,”1 wrote a twentyyear-old Brendan Behan from Arbour Hill prison in 1943 to his cousin, Séamus de Búrca. Of course, Behan was already familiar with the French writer from childhood, introduced to him, along with many others, by his father, Stephen. Throughout his work, Behan demonstrates his familiarity and engagement with the dominant trends in European, and especially French, writing. It was an interest that was nurtured in his family home, that he would advance while in prison, and would immerse himself in following his arrival in Paris in 1948. Not leaving aside 1 E.H. Mikhail, ed., The Letters of Brendan Behan (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 24. Deirdre McMahon 66 its revolutionary history, Paris for Behan was the city of Rabelais, Zola, and the above-mentioned Maupassant, whom his father had read to him as a child, and of the writers he would read as an adult: Villon, Flaubert, Proust, Genet, Colette, Sagan, Sartre, and Camus. Paris was where Joyce found his publisher in Sylvia Beach, where Oscar Wilde had died, and where Samuel Beckett now lived. PostWorld War II Paris for Behan was also where publishers, writers, artists, and jazz musicians gathered and enjoyed the intellectual freedom that the city offered. This article explores the significance of Behan’s literary engagement with Paris and its intellectuals at a time when the city was coming back to life after the devastation of World War II and reinstating itself as the centre for intellectual thought and artistic expression. The article discusses the relationships that Behan forged there, including with Albert Camus and Sindbad Vail, the literary magazine publisher who was at the heart of the late modernist project. It further illustrates Behan’s affinity with the philosophical ideas that were circulating there at the time, including the vigorous debate between Sartre and Camus on the meaning of freedom, justice, and the nature of violence and revolution, and how these ideas are both anticipated and reflected in his work. In Behan’s considerable artistic contribution to this debate, we see how as a late modernist and writer engagé he recovers the “socialist orientations” of modernism that John Brannigan has identified in his work.2 Behan arrived into Paris from an Ireland that was newly independent and disappointing to him in its failure to live up to the egalitarian vision of its revolutionaries. He had left behind a Republican movement beset with divisions and had been imprisoned for his Republican activity. During his captivity, he had become disillusioned by an impossible political idealism. Transitioning from a revolutionary to a literary career, the role of art in politics would be central to his interests: “Everyone admires the Paris of the artists,” he said. “I love the Paris of the barricades. I love Delacroix, who, I think, represents perfectly these two Parises.”3 Behan was determined to get to the writer’s city where just such topics were being discussed. From 1948, he spent long periods of time there. He honed his craft as a writer, found a publisher, and pursued the themes in his work that interested him, themes which he could explore more easily in the freedom of Paris 2 John Brannigan, “Bohemian Behan: Late Modernism, Sexual Politics, and the ‘Great Awakening’ of Brendan Behan,” in Reading Brendan Behan, ed. John McCourt (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019), 47. 3 Brendan Behan, “The Only Thing I Blame Paris for,” L’Express, 9 April 1959, 36. Reproduced in translation in Brendan Behan: Interviews and Recollections, vol. 1, ed. E.H. Mikhail (Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982), 125-27. Brendan Behan: A Late Modernist Writer Engagé 67 than at home. Behan was respected as a writer in Paris, and that recognition inspired his confidence and creativity. In prison, Behan had continued to write in Irish and English and develop his interest in European writing. Just months after his 1943 letter asking for French literature to be sent to him, he was transferred to the Curragh Camp where he joined fellow Republican prisoner Máirtín Ó Cadhain, one of Ireland’s most innovative and important writers, and someone who would come to regard Behan “as one of the few important poets in the contemporary Irish language,”4 placing him alongside Seán Ó Ríordáin in his review of Nuabhéarsaíocht 1939-1949 (1950),5 Seán Ó Tuama’s seminal anthology of modern poetry in Irish, to which Behan was the youngest contributor. Besides mastering Russian while at the Curragh, Ó Cadhain was honing his French and would tutor Behan in language and literature. Along with Eliot and Pound, Ó Cadhain’s reading at the time included Villon, Rabelais, Racine, Flaubert, and Maritain, as well as the Russian writers Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Gorky.6 His modernist masterpiece Cré na Cille would be published just a few years later in 1949. Behan was also tutored and mentored in jail by the Kerry schoolmaster Seán Ó Briain. Ó Briain became one of Behan’s closest friends and it was to him that he dedicated his modernist poem “Jackeen ag Caoineadh na mBlascaod” (1948). Significantly, Ó Briain introduced Behan to Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán Oíche, and Behan’s early interest in a literature of resistance and subversion can be traced back to Merriman’s epic. Already a skilled Irish speaker from his schooldays,7 Behan committed the poem to memory and translated it into English. Ó Briain tutored Behan and the other prisoners in the poems of Dáithí Ó Bruadair, Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, and Pádraigín Haicéad.8 A direct link can be made between the style of these poets and Behan’s modernist poetry. Behan adopted the accentual verse of the major seventeenth-century Gaelic poets, such as Haicéad, Ó Bruadair, and Ó Rathaille, and the style of Ó Súilleabháin 4 Declan Kiberd, “Introduction,” in Brendan Behan: Poems and a Play in Irish, ed. Proinsias Ní Dhorchaí (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1981), 9. 5 See Máirtín Ó Cadhain, As an nGéibheann (Dublin: Sáirséal agus Dill, 1973), 201. 6 Cathal Ó Háinle, “Aitheasc Luan na Tríonóide 2002: Máirtín Ó Cadhain,” Trinity Monday Memorial Discourses 1895-2022, 5, https://www.tcd.ie/Secretary/FellowsScholars/discourses/. 7 As discussed in the present volume by Brian Ó Conchubhair, as well as noted through anecdote in Michael O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan: A Life (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1997), 24, and evidenced in Behan’s ability to conceal jokes at the nuns’ expense in the school essay he wrote in Irish aged nine for his friend Teresa Byrne – see Mikhail, ed., The Letters of Brendan Behan, 4. 8 Interview by the author with Austin Ó Briain, 2017. Deirdre McMahon 68 and Merriman of the eighteenth century, and combined such characteristics with thoroughly modern themes, including the philosophy of existentialism. If his predecessors blended the conventions of bardic poetry and accentual verse as a response to their contemporary social and political upheavals,9 so too did Behan adopt traditional modes for contemporary concerns. Characteristic of his work, the “consonantal correspondence,” “vowel assonance,” and alliteration bind “together for the ear the sense of the words [and] the verbal unity of the poem.”10 In the poem that he dedicated to Ó Briain, “Jackeen ag Caoineadh na mBlascaod,” Behan captures the isolation that would lead to the 1950s evacuation of the Blasket Island inhabitants in this way: “Séideadh na gaoithe ag luascadh go bog leathdhoras, / ‘San teallach fuar fliuch, gan teine, gan teas, gan cosaint.” (“And the wind soughing, softly a half-door swinging / By cold wet hearths, their fires forever extinguished.”)11 He repeats the process in his satirical take on existentialism in “L’Existentialisme” in 1952: “A fhir faire, tá ag siúl falla – / foirgnimh falaimh” (“Watchman, walking the wall – / of an empty hall.”)12 While Behan was clearly drawing on the Irish literary tradition, in “L’Existentialisme” he was now combining it with contemporary trends in European writing that he was experiencing in Paris. The period between 1948 and 1952 is an incredibly productive one for Behan, and it is no coincidence that this corresponds to the years when his engagement with Paris was at its height. Three of his poems are set in Paris: “Buíochas le Joyce” (1949),13 “Oscar Wilde” (1949),14 and the above-mentioned “L’Existentialisme” (1952). Two of his short stories were published there, namely “After the Wake” (1950) and “Bridewell Revisited” (1951). Behan’s work of this period became increasingly experimental. In The Quare Fellow, which he had started in 1946, we see him develop the play’s expressionism; and in Borstal Boy, which he got down to writing in earnest in Paris, we see Proustian aesthetics emerge in the complex pattern of association that Behan establishes to create solidarity amongst the borstal boys. The 1942 version of his prison experience, “I Become a Borstal Boy,” 9 Seán Ó Tuama, ed., An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (Portlaoise: The Dolmen Press, 1981), xix. 10 Ulick O’Connor, Brendan Behan (London: Abacus, 1970), 130. 11 Brendan Behan, “Jackeen ag Caoineadh na mBlascaod,” Comhar 7, no. 10 (October 1948): 10. Translation by Valentin Iremonger, included by Behan in Brendan Behan’s Island: An Irish Sketch-book (London: Hutchinson, 1962), 70. 12 Brendan Behan, “L’Existentialisme,” Comhar 11, no. 3 (March 1952): 8. Translation by Colbert Kearney in The Writings of Brendan Behan (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977), 60. 13 Brendan Behan, “Buíochas le Joyce,” Comhar 8, no. 8 (August 1949): 14. 14 Brendan Behan, “Do Sheán O Súilleabháin” [later entitled “Oscar Wilde”], Comhar 8, no. 8 (August 1949): 14. Brendan Behan: A Late Modernist Writer Engagé 69 is a considerably more conventional account and a distance aesthetically from the autobiographical novel that would eventually be published in 1958. In his early writing we see him develop many of the devices and themes that would become so much part of his later work. For example, the device of the unseen character with whom we sympathise in his short story “A Woman of No Standing” (1950) would become central to The Quare Fellow. The title character of each work has no voice and either makes no appearance, as in The Quare Fellow, or an appearance only at the close of the story, as in “A Woman of No Standing,” yet each are vehemently judged by the other characters.15 Much has been speculated about Behan’s activities in Paris, and much of the myth was created by Behan himself. He claimed that he wrote pornography while there, saying “hunger makes pornographers of us all.”16 Certainly, like many in postwar Paris, he was mostly very poor during his early days in the city, living on his wits, and foraging for food along the Paris streets: “if you go along windowsills in Paris, you’re always sure to find something. People have a habit of leaving odd pieces of food up on the place.”17 The experience often left him feeling worn out, especially when attempting to write. The manuscript that he refers to here is Borstal Boy: “The principal difficulty in writing a book is getting someplace to write it if you haven’t got any money. I didn’t have any dough. I’d no place to go [...]. I lost the bloody manuscript of it lots of times. So weary, just looking for a place to sleep, I forgot the goddamn thing.”18 Behan did work as a house painter at this 15 Brendan Behan, “A Woman of No Standing,” Envoy: A Review of Literature & Art 3, no. 9 (August 1950): 30-32; Brendan Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” in The Complete Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1978). Besides other work, Behan also commenced his articles for The Irish Press in 1951, making indirect reference to “After the Wake” and Points in the very first article. These are collected for the first time in their entirety in John Brannigan’s A Bit of a Writer: Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2023). 16 Mikhail, ed., The Letters of Brendan Behan, 114. 17 Sylvère Lotringer interview with Brendan Behan, Dublin, 1961, Sylvère Lotringer Papers and Semiotext(e) Archive, Series X1 Audio, MSS.221/repositories/3/ resources/1762, Box 85, Media ID 221.0211 and 221.0212, reel 221.0212t1, 36:58-37:11, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Library (hereafter cited as Lotringer interview, 221.0212t1 or 221.0212t2 as appropriate to denote reels). Interview extracts used in this article are reproduced with kind permission by Semiotext(e). Extracts from the audio interview were broadcast for the first time in the radio documentary Brendan Behan in Paris, prods. Deirdre McMahon and Tim Desmond (RTÉ Documentary on One, 2019), https://www.rte.ie/radio/doconone/1071608-brendan-behan-in-paris. Lotringer published the interview as “The Thin Man: An Interview with Brendan Behan” in the Field Day Review 1 (2005): 3-27. 18 Lotringer interview, 221.0212t2, 07:48-08:08, audio. See also McMahon and Desmond, Brendan Behan in Paris. Deirdre McMahon 70 time and joined the section bâtiment of the union – the Confédération Générale du Travail. Given how little he was earning overall, it must have been tempting to join the daily queue of hungry writers who waited outside the apartment of Maurice Girodas, who was publishing erotic literature under his Olympia Press Traveller’s Companion series. The publisher certainly paid well: “between ten and thirty thousand francs at a time.”19 Enormous sums for the time, and, undoubtedly, too much for a writer to resist during this period of widespread poverty. John Calder paints the picture of the daily routine: “A line would gather outside Girodias’s door every morning, waiting for the publisher.”20 However, no pornography by Behan has ever emerged. There has been speculation that Behan was referring to his short story “After the Wake,” a tale of homoerotic seduction. However, this literary masterpiece can in no way be described as pornography. What Behan did do in Paris was find himself a publisher. Sindbad Vail and Points Magazine Following in a long tradition of writers who sought inspiration and patronage in Paris, Behan took his early work to the French capital – to the epicentre of postwar modernist thought, and to the publisher Sindbad Vail, who was about to launch his literary magazine Points. As the son of Peggy Guggenheim, Vail was steeped in modernism, and given Behan’s literary interests at the time, that would have been important. Vail was part of an artistic, literary circle in Paris that included the esteemed editor of Horizon magazine, Cyril Connolly. His father was the writer and artist Laurence Vail. When Sindbad Vail launched his late modernist magazine in 1949, he and Connolly would trade tips on new writing, with Connolly sending writers from Horizon to Vail to be published in France and vice versa. Behan had sent early work to Connolly, and it is not hard to imagine that his name came up for discussion. When Vail presented the idea for his literary magazine to an assembled group that included his wife, Jacqueline Ventadour, Cyril Connolly, Connolly’s former wife – the art critic Jean Connolly (now Vail’s stepmother21) –, and Laurence Vail, he received much encouragement from the Horizon editor, including promotion of Points through his magazine.22 Points was the first postwar literary magazine in France to offer the opportunity of publication to young writers in English as well as French. The American 19 John Calder, The Garden of Eros: The Story of the Paris Expatriates and the Post-War Literary Scene (London: Calder Publications, 2013), 67. 20 Calder, The Garden of Eros, 67. 21 Following her separation from Cyril Connolly in 1939, Jean Connolly married Laurence Vail in 1946. 22 Interview by the author with Jacqueline Hélion, 2016. Brendan Behan: A Late Modernist Writer Engagé 71 novelist Iris Owens23 remarked that the magazine “was one of the first signs of French culture picking up after the war.”24 Of course, the new bilingual Transition Forty-Eight magazine had launched in 1948 under the editorship of George Duthuit – a reincarnation of the influential, pre-war transition/Transition founded by Maria and Eugene Jolas.25 However, Duthuit’s idea was to bring the best new French writing in translation to an anglophone readership.26 Contributors included Sartre, Eugene Jolas, and Georges Bataille. Points was different. Vail’s aim was to “publish French and English young writers who had not been published before.”27 Jacqueline Hélion (née Ventadour), who was married to Vail at the time, and involved in his literary enterprise, recalls that this, of course, “was not quite the case for Brendan, but then he [Vail] did make exceptions.” Vail immediately recognised the genius of Behan’s writing. “He was very impressed by Brendan,” recalls Hélion, “his writing was wonderful. So vivid and [...] strong.” Hélion recalls that when her husband advertised in the international and French press, “manuscripts came pouring in from everywhere.”28 Behan sought out Vail and not long after one of his most important works, “After the Wake,” appeared in Points 8 in 1950. It was quite a coup for Vail to secure “After the Wake” for his magazine. Behan did not present the story in Ireland because of its theme of homosexuality, which was, of course, then criminalised in Ireland, and would not be decriminalised until 1993. Had it not been for Sindbad Vail, it can be said with confidence that one of Behan’s finest prose works may have been lost to literature, especially given the many scripts that Behan lost along the way.29 By publishing the story, Vail preserved it. As is covered in some detail in the radio documentary Brendan Behan 23 Pseudonym “Harriet Daimler.” 24 Mary Dearborn, Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of Modernism (London: Virago Press, 2005), 330-31. 25 The literary journal was originally titled using the lowercase transition but changed to Transition from issue 21 on. See David A. Hatch, “Beckett in Transition: Three Dialogues, Little Magazines, and Post-War Parisian Aesthetic Debate,” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 15 (2005): 55 n1. 26 Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: De Capo Press, 1999), 394. 27 Jacqueline Hélion in McMahon and Desmond, Brendan Behan in Paris. Further quotations are from the same documentary. 28 Jacqueline Hélion in McMahon and Desmond, Brendan Behan in Paris, and interview with Hélion, 2016. 29 For example, as discussed here, Behan recalls losing his Borstal Boy manuscript in Paris. Beatrice Behan recalls the manuscript for An Giall being left in Ibiza, fortunately later to be found. See Beatrice Behan with Des Hickey and Gus Smith, My Life with Brendan (London: Leslie Frewin Publishers, 1974), 117, 124. Deirdre McMahon 72 in Paris, a later, edited version of “After the Wake” appeared in the Points Short Story Anthology in 1955. Here, the concluding lines which explicitly describe one man getting into bed with another have been removed, along with other important imagery. Behan had created a powerful tableau in the 1950 original which neatly unites the story’s opening and concluding lines. This original version culminates with the male narrator imagining the watchful eye of his friend’s deceased wife as he “slip[s] down beside”30 him in the marital bed. We are told that the wife has cotton wool “protruding from her nostrils” (56) evoking a ghoulish and cartoonlike image of steam as she fumes from her coffin in the next room. Her mouth is “half-closed” (56) and, therefore, half open, possibly in surprise, and her teeth are “bared” (56). Behan had opened his story by envisioning her response had she known about her husband and his friend: “she’d feel angry, not so much jealous as disgusted, certainly surprised” (52). We are now given the physical manifestation of that reaction as the story concludes. Even if the outcome of the campaign of seduction at the heart of the story may be obvious to the reader in the 1955 version, the effect of the edit is to disrupt an otherwise meticulously crafted story, and thereby deny a full appreciation of Behan’s structure and narrative control. By 1955 Behan was becoming a well-known writer and enjoying the success of The Quare Fellow. No doubt he had to consider the potential backlash in this conservative era to his representation of a gay relationship now that the story was to be given wider circulation in book form. The only reproduction of the unedited, original version of “After the Wake” from Points 8 is by Denis Cotter, who published the story in limited edition in Ireland in 1978 in his collection Brendan Behan: Poems and Stories.31 That came fourteen years after Behan’s death and remains the only publicly available record of the original story in Ireland today. For Behan, Points magazine offered a much-needed outlet for his work and introduced his writing to an international readership. Being published in Points provided an important context for Behan. As Brannigan notes, not only was he now placing his work alongside other late modernist writers, such as David Gascoyne and Alexander Trocchi; as Peggy Guggenheim’s son, Vail had a direct 30 Brendan Behan, “After the Wake,” in Points: The Magazine of Young Writers 8 (December 1950 – January 1951): 56. Further references to this edition are included in the text in parentheses. 31 Denis Cotter, ed., Brendan Behan: Poems and Stories, design by Frank Miller (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 1978). The 1955 edited version is published in Peter Fallon’s After the Wake (1981), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume IV: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, eds. Angela Bourke et al. (2002), and Sinéad Gleeson’s The Art of the Glimpse (2020). The full collection of Points magazine is available on microfilm from the Bibliothèque national de France. Brendan Behan: A Late Modernist Writer Engagé 73 connection for Behan to that great generation of modernist artists and writers.32 Being published by Vail in Points “established Behan’s own sense of what he could achieve as a writer. It established a kind of literary credibility for his work.”33 That affirmation was repeated in 1951 when Vail published Behan’s short story “Bridewell Revisited,” the story that would largely become the opening pages of Borstal Boy. Behan had in fact tried to get “Bridewell Revisited” published in Ireland, but it was refused by The Bell. In the face of this rejection, he turned, once again, to Vail. Behan was not the only Irish writer to approach Vail when work had been refused in Ireland. Of Irish censorship Vail would later comment: “We are lucky that their bigotry is our fortune.”34 When Iain Hamilton of Hutchinson Publishers read the same opening pages in 1957, he said he knew he had “the beginning of something extraordinary.”35 Vail readily accepted “Bridewell Revisited” and the story was published in Points 11-12 in the winter of 1951. “I think there’s a key turn in Behan’s work around 1950, ’51,” says Brannigan, “and it’s all to do with Points magazine.”36 Hélion describes Vail as a “pioneer,” a spirit he shared with his mother. The influential editors and writers of the literary magazine Merlin (1952-1956) all had early work published in Points. Founding editors Jane Lougee and Alexander Trocchi, Richard Seaver, Patrick Bowles, Christopher Logue, and Austryn Wainhouse all featured alongside writers such as David Gascoyne and Herbert Gold, with the latter two sharing Points 8 with Behan in 1950. Of course, Merlin writers Richard Seaver and Patrick Bowles would come to translate Beckett’s work. Behan’s work of this time displays a new confidence, and it would become increasingly experimental. It was during this period that he explored the imagist form and Japanese haiku, as seen in his poem “Uaigneas” (1950).37 He would never again write so explicitly in his published work about homosexuality as he did in “After the Wake.” When it came to the prospect of the story’s wider, international circulation, he changed the ending. That decision came later, once he was back in Ireland. In the preceding period of freedom in Paris, a clear turning point in his 32 John Brannigan in McMahon and Desmond, Brendan Behan in Paris. 33 Interview by the author with John Brannigan, 2019. 34 “Notes by the Editor,” Points 13 (Spring 1952), 5. Vail made the comment when he published “Asylum for the Blind” by Domhnall O’Conaill, who had been unable to publish his short story in Ireland. 35 Iain Hamilton, “Among the Irish,” Encounter 23 (October 1964): 36-37. An extract is also published in Brendan Behan: Interviews and Recollections, vol. 1, ed. E.H. Mikhail, 88-90. 36 Interview with Brannigan, 2019. 37 Brendan Behan, “Uaigneas / Loneliness,” Envoy: A Review of Literature & Art 1, no. 2 (January 1950): 24. Deirdre McMahon 80 into his engagement with Paris and its intellectuals, Behan’s contributions to social change were those of a writer engagé. The jostling positions of Sartre and Camus would both ignite and help to resolve the many questions and concerns that Behan can be seen to interrogate in his work of this period. “The Execution” If The Quare Fellow (as well as The Hostage) reflects the Paris debates, “The Execution” (c. 1942-1946)72 anticipates them, concerned as it is with structural and systemic violence. Indeed, “The Execution” sees Behan combine an assiduous attention to form with a political standpoint. The story tells of a group of IRA men who have been tasked with carrying out the execution of a young IRA Volunteer, Ellis. Under interrogation during his first arrest, Ellis has revealed the location of an arms dump. His executioners do not have the stomach for the act, but nevertheless carry out their orders. While “The Execution” presents the violent actions of the group as a product of a governing history and ideology,73 Behan pushes against the notion of such authority at every opportunity in the story by challenging the brutal act through an expressed humanity and empathy with the victim, and, in so doing, undermines the system that demands his execution.74 The story is carefully laid out in five distinct sections, which are each underlined by Behan in the original manuscript.75 The visceral effects of the story anticipate the expressionism which Behan would explore more thoroughly in The Quare Fellow, while his economical use of words to achieve maximum effect also anticipates his work produced in 1950, such as “After the Wake” and the minimalist poem “Uaigneas.” Each section of the story is made up of a series of short paragraphs, and each creates a terminal caesura-like effect in its concluding line to emphasise a theme. The first echoes the overarching voice of officialdom, and here it is reminiscent of Joyce in its evocation of a voice and idiom that is external to the text: “[...] we couldn’t let people give away dumps on us or there’d soon be no respect for the 72 The original manuscript of “The Execution” is held by Special Collections, Q-1, Boole Library, University College Cork, and is undated. 73 See John Brannigan, Brendan Behan: Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), 55. 74 See also Kearney: “To a great extent, the young lad dies not because anybody desires his death but because the system demands it.” The Writings of Brendan Behan, 29. 75 These sections are highlighted in Denis Cotter’s 1978 publication of “The Execution,” along with punctuation as set out by Behan, in Brendan Behan: Poems and Stories. Brendan Behan: A Late Modernist Writer Engagé 81 Army.”76 That Ellis’s confinement by the group is governed by the system, is left in no doubt. Of the victim we are told: “The poor devil wouldn’t have run if we’d let him.” (7) His role as an IRA Volunteer is steeped in history, and his killing will be a disgrace to his family: “[...] my old man being a ’16 man an’ all.” (7) The conclusion to the second section of the story sees Behan’s typical use of plain language to deny any euphemism for what is about to take place. Language such as “[l]etting him have it,” “plugging him,” “[k]nocking him off,” is undercut by the last line: “We were going to kill him.” (8-9) This device would become familiar in Behan’s work – such as when Holy Healey in The Quare Fellow attempts to pass off hanging as a “sad duty” which prompts the concise retort from Regan: “Neck breaking and throttling, sir?”77 Such denial of euphemism is also a feature of Camus’s work. The conclusion to the third section of “The Execution” denies any attempt to attach religious values to the act of killing. As Ellis and the group who are about to shoot him kneel to pray, the narrator remarks: “I tried to pray for his soul. I couldn’t. It seemed awful to think of souls just then.” (9) The penultimate section ends with death: the life of Ellis is “Finished.” (10) The preceding lines have set the scene into slow motion: “As if in a dream I saw Connie eject the empty shells. Kit was picking them off the ground from his Auto.” (10) The scene is then paused, the action halted, once again through Behan’s use of separate scenes. The finale imparts a stark image that eerily expresses humanity encased within a brutal image of the horror that has just occurred: cold, hard earth is shovelled on top of a body that is “quite warm” (10) as the narrator tells us: “I moved a big stone off my shovel – it might smash in his face.” (10) The system in this case has won out, Ellis has received his “death sentence” (9). Yet the sympathy invoked from the reader is compelling, and as in Behan’s later expressionist drama, the effect visceral. Behan’s questioning of systemic violence in “The Execution” is manifest also in the characters of the story being defined by the guns they hold as if they have been consumed by the system: “You can sometimes judge a fellow by his taste in skits.” (8) Ted Boyle observes that Behan’s employment of the absurd in his work is a way to show “that man is ridiculous when he allows himself to be controlled by a system.”78 This would become most pronounced later in The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, where arbitrary decisions are made around life and death. It is, after all, only the impending death of one youth, the Catholic “boy in the Belfast Jail”79 76 Brendan Behan, “The Execution,” in Cotter, Brendan Behan: Poems and Stories, 7. Further references to the story are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text. 77 Behan, “The Quare Fellow,” 67. 78 Ted Boyle, Brendan Behan (New York: Twayne, 1969), 89. 79 Brendan Behan, “The Hostage,” in The Complete Plays, 162. Deirdre McMahon 82 in The Hostage, that will determine the death of another, the English soldier, Leslie Williams; in The Quare Fellow, the middle-class character “Silver-top”80 is reprieved for no apparent reason, while the eponymous quare fellow, a rural butcher, is hanged. This decision goes unchallenged and there is no accountability for it. “We detest arbitrary judgement,”81 wrote Camus in 1944 – and a similar notion of absurdity appears in “The Execution” where the system is the governing factor. Each work exposes a meaningless and absurd world for its marginalised characters. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Behan would strike up a relationship with Camus, who defined the human condition as essentially absurd in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus82 and who was now embroiled in a very public intellectual debate on justice and the nature and limitations of violence. Conclusion Writing in the wake of World War II, Behan’s concerns for social and political justice were precisely those that had preoccupied him on the streets of SaintGermain-des-Prés in the company of Camus. The postwar intellectual debates are both anticipated and reflected in his work. Behan returned to Paris in the late 1950s as a celebrated writer. His plays garnered the highest accolades and awards there and attracted involvement in translation, production, direction, music, and performance by such important artists as Boris Vian, Jean-Louis Barrault, Madeleine Renaud, Georges Wilson, Mikis Theodorakis, Arletty, and Simone Signoret.83 In 1969, the stage adaptation of Borstal Boy by Frank McMahon was presented as part of the Théâtre des Nations Festival at The Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, this time representing Ireland rather than Great Britain (which The Hostage had done at the festival in 1959). The play would go on to win the 1970 Tony Award on Broadway, the first Tony Award for an Irish drama. Returning to Behan’s early days in Paris, the recognition that he received as a writer there, combined with the intellectual freedom that he experienced, stimulated the creativity that would lead to his later major works. Paris made perfect sense for Behan. It was here that he was able to develop the themes in his work that interested him and to immerse himself in the philosophical discourse of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the dominant 80 Behan, “The Hostage,” 42. 81 Albert Camus, “October 25, 1944,” in Lévi-Valensi, Camus at Combat, 90. 82 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Penguin, 2005), 1-26. 83 As presented by Virginie Roche-Tiengo during the “Brendan Behan at 100: Legacy and New Directions” conference held at Charles University, Prague in 2023. On Mikis Theodorakis, see An Buachaill Gealgháireach, written and presented by Theo Dorgan, directed by Alan Gilsenan, and produced by Kathryn Baird and Sheila Friel (TG4, 2022). Brendan Behan: A Late Modernist Writer Engagé 83 trends in European writing. Just as he did when he requested the “the Maupassant in French” all those years before, Behan knew exactly the direction he wished to take his work in when he went to Paris in 1948. 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