“A splendid figure of revolting womanhood”: The Women of Brendan Behan’s Short Fiction

86 “A SPLENDID FIGURE OF REVOLTING WOMANHOOD”: THE WOMEN OF BRENDAN BEHAN’S SHORT FICTION Nathalie Lamprecht DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2024.67.6 Abstract: Following Patricia Coughlan’s prompt to question representations of women in the writing of male authors, this article sets out to analyse the representations of women in the work of Brendan Behan, more specifically his short fiction. As a workingclass writer, the issue of the portrayal of his own neighbourhood and community quickly emerged as a central concern for Behan. As Michael Pierse has argued, within the oppressed group of the Dublin working class, it was women who were most at odds with the status-quo, suffering double marginalisation through both gender and class. When looking at Behan’s depictions of women in his short stories, no straightforward conclusions may be drawn. Behan can hardly be classified as a feminist writer, but he treats most of his female characters with similar empathy as he does his male characters, allowing them the capacity to be anything from self-denying saints to “screwy bitches.” Some of his stories are written in homage to the women who raised him, others seem to criticise a society that victimises them. Keywords: Brendan Behan, working-class literature, short stories, literary representations of women, feminism Introduction In her 1991 essay “‘Bog queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney,” Patrica Coughlan writes: “I have chosen to discuss the work of male poets, believing strongly that both ‘gynocritics’ – the ‘naming,’ recovery and revaluing of women’s writing – and the persistent demystifying of representations of women in men’s work must continue in “A splendid figure of revolting womanhood” 87 tandem.”1 Acknowledging the vital importance of this attitude, this article sets out to analyse the representations of women in the work of Brendan Behan, more specifically his short fiction. Two of Behan’s most well-known and critically renowned works, the play The Quare Fellow (1956) and the autobiographical novel Borstal Boy (1958), are marked by a distinct absence of female characters due to their homosocial prison settings.2 While both are inspired by the time the author himself spent in prison between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, for most of the rest of his life, women played a significant role in both his personal and professional development. Starting from early childhood, Behan was surrounded by strong women. In his writing, it is mainly his paternal grandmother Christina English who emerges as a formative figure. In adulthood, the two most important people in Behan’s life were his wife Beatrice3 and his editor Rae Jeffs, author of Brendan Behan: Man and Showman (1966), and creator of the ‘talk books,’ Brendan Behan’s Island (1962), Brendan Behan’s New York (1964), and Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965), as well as of the collection Hold Your Hour and Have Another (1963) which included original illustrations by Beatrice Behan. Behan never shied away from working with women in a professional capacity, as his longstanding relationship with Rae Jeffs shows. However, even before she took over the management of his career, Behan’s closest collaborators were women. His first play, The Quare Fellow, for instance, was significantly edited by Carolyn Swift of the Pike Theatre.4 His English language adaptation of An Giall, The Hostage (1958) 1 Patricia Coughlan, “‘Bog queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney,” in Seamus Heaney: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Michael Allen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) 185. Essay originally published in Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairns, eds., Gender in Irish Writing (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1991), 41-60. 2 Behan’s second canonical play, The Hostage (1958), does feature several female characters, a detailed discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article, albeit merited. 3 An accomplished artist herself, Beatrice Behan devoted much of their time together to taking care of Brendan, supporting his career, and trying to cope with his alcoholism. Her experiences were published in My Life with Brendan Behan (1973). The importance of Beatrice’s understanding and support cannot be measured in words. In 2023, Behan’s centenary year, author Pat McCabe’s installation The Holy Hour: Requiem for Brendan Behan at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) honoured her by including her image as a central part of the exhibition’s artwork. As in life, in an altar piece created by Lucy Smyth, Beatrice is right by Brendan’s side. On his other side, Charlie Millwall stands in for Behan’s work, but also as a reminder of the author’s bisexuality. 4 See also James Little’s contribution in the present volume. Nathalie Lamprecht 88 was produced with the help of English theatre maker Joan Littlewood. Without these women, the Brendan Behan we know today would not exist.5 In Behan’s writing, too, there are quite a few significant female characters, as it turns out. In The Hostage, for example, women, some of them prostitutes, play a crucial role in uncovering the hypocrisy of their countrymen. As Michael Pierse notes: “like that of the Shakespearean ‘fool,’ their jest carries some of Behan’s most insightful observations.”6 Behan’s only crime novel, The Scarperer (1966), also has several important female characters, ranging from the abused police informer Nancy Hand, over a diverse cast of pub goers, to the two ladies who bring about the downfall of the central criminal syndicate, Aunt Jeannie and her niece Nancy. Aunt Jeannie, as John Brannigan indicates, is a caricature of bourgeois Dublin who is nestled comfortably in southside suburbs, busy with compassion for animals or perhaps even charity for the poor, educated in private schools unchanged by independence, and content with an Irish government which has done nothing to amend the deep social inequities inherited from British rule.7 Indeed, portrayed as deliberately obtuse, Aunt Jeannie sets out to uncover a case of animal cruelty, bringing about the solution of the central mystery purely by accident.8 Despite her role in solving a murderous criminal plot, she is one of Behan’s more unlikable characters, due to her narrow point of view, nostalgia for colonial times, and class position. She stands in stark contrast to the central female characters of stories such as “The Last of Mrs. Murphy” and “The Confirmation Suit,” who tend to be quick-witted, firmly placed in working-class settings, and focused on survival, rather than Aunt Jeannie’s bourgeois pastimes. It can thus be surmised that women take a variety of roles within Behan’s oeuvre, sometimes appearing as the otherwise unspoken heroes of the working class, sometimes as their direct opposites. They are neither idealised nor disparaged, but rather 5 Despite this, in popular imagination Behan exists in a world without women, a perpetually drunken pub character moving from one homosocial environment to another. On a walking tour through Dublin in 2022, the present author witnessed the tour guide quipping that no women would go near men like Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan. As shown above, this could not be further from the truth. 6 Michael Pierse, “‘A dance for all the outcasts’: Class and Postcolonialism in Brendan Behan’s An Giall and The Hostage,” Irish University Review 44, no. 1 (2014): 106. 7 John Brannigan, “‘For the readies’: Brendan Behan, Crime Fiction, and the Dublin Underworld,” Éire-Ireland 49, no. 1&2 (2014): 102. 8 Brendan Behan, The Scarperer (London: Arena Books, 1987), 124-50. “A splendid figure of revolting womanhood” 89 portrayed with all the complexity deserving of a group of people who often remain unrepresented. While an in-depth analysis of Behan’s fictional women would surely be fruitful, for reasons of space this article will focus mainly on four of his short stories gathered in Peter Fallon’s collection After the Wake (1981). It sets out to explore Behan’s representations of women in order to shine a light on whether the extraordinary insight and empathy with which he approaches his male characters stretches to his female characters as well. Women and the Working Class As a working-class writer, the issue of the portrayal of his own neighbourhood and community quickly emerged as a central concern for Behan. After independence, the state’s vision of itself quickly led to attempts at erasing the history and culture of all communities that did not comply with the idealised image of Ireland perpetuated in both the literary revival and the revolutionary period. The urban working class was one of the targets of this unifying mission of state ideology. As Pierse has pointed out, within the oppressed group of the Dublin working class, it was women who were most at odds with the status-quo, suffering double marginalisation through both gender and class.9 Moreover, he argues, [w]hile it is by now axiomatic to observe what Eavan Boland terms the “disproportionate silence of women” generally in Irish literature, the disproportionate silence surrounding working-class women is barely discussed in critical inquiry. […] An obvious explanation for this particular imbalance is the lack of writing from working-class women themselves, due, in no small part, to the general conditions that the class system imposes on their lives. (114) Therefore, instead of reading first-hand accounts of Dublin’s working-class women, scholarship must largely resort to the portrayals of these women in the writings of their male counterparts in order to be able to draw some conclusions about their stories. This necessarily leads to a sometimes-skewed image of their lives, as shown through a male perspective. Behan’s image of working-class womanhood, for instance, is one that is practical, boisterous, and often drunk. Behan’s women may struggle with alcoholism, a lack 9 Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin after O’Casey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 115. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. Nathalie Lamprecht 90 of money and resources, as well as the hypocrisy of their society, but they do not face some of the harsher realities that real mid-century Irish working-class women often did. As Pierse points out, “the state’s tolerance for domestic violence” and the fact that “[w]orking-class women were also more likely to be entirely reliant on a husband’s income” (116) meant that if their husbands were abusive, they rarely had the option to leave. Indeed, he argues: “The twin despotisms of social and domestic abuse, as enabled by church doctrine and androcentric statutory control, made life a living hell for many working-class women.” (116) This is not the Dublin working class that Behan describes in his short stories, though. Domestic violence is not a topic mentioned in them, nor are there any women scarred by the impossibility of separating from a spouse, abusive or not. It may be argued that Behan avoids the theme of domestic violence for fear of censorship, but this is not a compelling argument due to the controversial nature of some of his other stories. It is more likely that he cast aside certain issues in favour of a somewhat idealised image of working-class womanhood, inspired by his own upbringing. The image he consequently creates is an urban archetype put in contrast with the rural ideal prevalent at the time. Coughlan argues that Irish ideology tends to an idealisation of rural life. This is often centred on female icons of ideal domesticity, especially mother-figures, who are associated with unmediated naturalness. […] It is also necessary to bear in mind the way ideology has effectively denied women the freedom to develop a fully self-conscious ego and therefore to participate in civil society by allocating them a fixed position within the domestic sphere, and by the celebration of domestic virtues as constitutive of femininity.10 Behan’s urban rulers of the house are very different from this “ideal of domesticity,” and they are not afraid to make that known. Defining the way Sean O’Casey writes about women, Pierse notes that “[t]he role of women in workingclass life as a nurturing and heroic force is strong in O’Casey, to be sure. […] [W]omen often represent humanity at its best […]. Yet O’Casey, overall, depicts women in varied and often conflicting forms.” (58) It may be argued that Behan does so, too. Like O’Casey, he depicts women in ways that go “beyond a stereotypically maternal, nurturing role” (59). Refusing to cook, lacking empathy for those outside the community, and generally not the demure, submissive, and pious mother figures that were seen as the norm in their time, they are flawed, yet willing to do anything for those they love. They stand in for the entire community 10 Coughlan, “Bog queens,” 187. “A splendid figure of revolting womanhood” 91 in much the same way as the “female icons” (Coughlan’s phrase) of much of modern Irish writing do for rural Ireland, but they do so in a way that shows both the pretty and the ugly sides of that community. “The Last of Mrs. Murphy” and “The Confirmation Suit” The first two stories to be discussed here, “The Last of Mrs. Murphy” (1981)11 and “The Confirmation Suit” (1953), are most directly concerned with the working class. What is remarkable about them, in the context of this article, is that they are almost exclusively populated by women. Indeed, seeing as these may be said to be the most autobiographical out of all of Behan’s short stories, it comes as no surprise that their protagonists are closely modelled on those most influential to his childhood self, namely his grandmother Christina and her motley crew of gossip and alcohol providers. As Colbert Kearney outlines, “With his Granny English and her cronies there was no fanaticism or idealism other than in pursuit of a good time and lively company; even her name, English, seemed to mock the patriotism of the rest of his family.”12 Accordingly, these stories focus on childhood and community, introducing fictionalised versions of the formative characters of a young Behan’s life, most of whom happen to be women. “The Last of Mrs. Murphy” reveals a preoccupation with gender within its first few sentences: Over Mrs. Murphy’s bed hung a picture of a person wearing a red jacket and a white head. When I was small I thought it was a picture of herself, but she laughed one day and said no, that it was Pope Leo. Whether this was a man or a woman I was not sure, for his red cloak was like Mrs. Murphy’s and so was his white head.13 Blurring gender lines, while also poking fun at his community’s (and his own) devout Catholicism, Behan here perhaps already hints at the importance of figures like Mrs. Murphy and their standing within the community due to their advanced age. Certainly, to the young narrator, Mrs. Murphy is much more real and 11 “The Last of Mrs. Murphy” was, according to Peter Fallon, written in the early 1950s and remained unpublished until his 1981 collection. See Peter Fallon, “Introduction,” in After the Wake, ed. Peter Fallon (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2023), 11-12. 12 Colbert Kearney, The Writings of Brendan Behan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 11. 13 Brendan Behan, “The Last of Mrs. Murphy,” in After the Wake, ed. Peter Fallon (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2023), 16. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. Nathalie Lamprecht 92 important than Pope Leo. With his mother presumably occupied either with work or younger siblings, the narrator spends a great amount of time with Mrs. Murphy, who looks after him, but also, as time progresses, needs his support: “I walked in front for her to lean on my head, slow and in time with her.” (19) Consequently, when she dotes on a new baby in the house, the narrator is upset at having to share the attentions of the elderly lady. However, here as elsewhere in the story, a certain lack of compassion in its central characters is revealed: “cheeks and eyes all full of tears – [I] ran through the hall and out into the street. My mother only laughed and said it didn’t mean that Mrs. Murphy fancied the baby more than she did me.” (19-20) The child, at five years old, struggles to understand his mother’s reaction, instead devoting his attention to Mrs. Murphy’s cat, Minnie or, as the narrator calls her, Minnie Murphy, “who, if she was vicious enough to scrawb you if she thought she’d get away with it, didn’t make you feel such a fool.” (20) Here, already, we see an image of Dublin’s working-class women emerge which shows them to be of a no-nonsense disposition, not overly empathetic, nor emotional. While the story conveys overall a certain nostalgia, Mrs. Murphy herself can hardly be described as sentimental. When, during a discussion of her age, the Great Famine is brought up, she quips: “We were respectable people round this street and didn’t go in for famines.” (18) Her attitude towards those lingering on the past is one of cool disinterest, as seen in her interaction with Jimmy the Sports: Jimmy the Sports ground his teeth and looked as if he might cry. “God forgive, and you an old woman. My poor mother fell from her own dead mother’s arms outside Loughrea workhouse.” Mrs. Murphy took a pinch of snuff. “Well, we all have our troubles. If it’s not an ear, it’s an elbow. What about the gargle?” (18) As caregivers the story’s female characters are further shown to be divorced from the image of the ideal woman/mother perpetuated to this day in the Irish constitution: 1° In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. “A splendid figure of revolting womanhood” 93 2° The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.14 The constitutionally defined “life within the home” likely includes care duties, both regarding children and elderly relatives. Instead of portraying self-sacrificing mothers, who take on these duties without complaint, Behan writes a scene in which the young narrator overhears some women talking about wasting money on life-insurance policies for elderly relatives who refuse to die, depicting a rather reluctant version of those taking on the role of caretaker. Furthermore, Mrs. Murphy is shown to frequently share her snuff and the occasional drink with the boy: “‘An orange or something would be better for the child,’ said Jimmy the Sports. / ‘The drop of gargle will do him good,’ said Mrs. Murphy, ‘it’s only a little birthday celebration.’” (18) Overall, rather than stop at home to cook and take care of their children or grandchildren, the women in this story are most frequently depicted outside of the home, drinking with friends, defying the idea of “domestic virtues as constitutive of femininity.”15 It is thus all the more significant that once Mrs. Murphy has been declared sick, the other women of the community, more specifically the narrator’s grandmother Christina and her friends Long Byrne and Lizzie MacCann, rally together to take care of her. First, they prepare everything for her journey to the “Refuge of the Dying” (20), which may be assumed to be a nursing home, ordering cabs and holding “a kind of wake” (21) for her on the way there. Then, finally outside the Refuge, they are all worried about her fate: “‘We’ll never see her again now, till we come up to collect her in the box,’ said Long Byrne. / ‘For God’s sake, wisht up out of that, you,’ said my granny, ‘people’s not bad enough.’ She fumbled with her handkerchief.” (21) So far, the women of “The Last of Mrs. Murphy” have been able to hide their emotions, but here, taking leave of their friend, they struggle to contain them any longer. In addition to being worried that they will not see Mrs. Murphy alive again, they are wary of the institution they are leaving her at: “It’s not the kind of place I’d like to leave a neighbour or a neighbour’s child.” (21) Writing about different working-class authors’ depictions of women, Pierse has 14 “Constitution of Ireland: Article 41.2.” Irish Statute Book, last modified January 2020, accessed 26 May 2024, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/cons/en/html. A March 2024 referendum aimed and failed to modify this language. Low voter participation, a rushed process, unclear language, and a general dissent on the proposed changes were partly responsible for this outcome. 15 Coughlan, “Bog queens,” 187. Nathalie Lamprecht 94 pointed out that “the institutions of the state are particularly dismissive towards working-class women, who have little social power” (251), explaining the intrinsic distrust the women have of the Refuge. This distrust is soon confirmed to be justified, as a nurse emerges from the building, complaining about the intoxicated state of Mrs. Murphy, before throwing the other women out due to their making drunken jokes about the situation. In contrast to the other women, this nurse is sober, lacks a sense of humour and speaks in what can only be assumed to be an approximation of a south Dublin accent: “Whars in charge of the peeshent?” (22) She is thus, despite her gender, in opposition to the close-knit group of workingclass women surrounding Mrs. Murphy. Finally, the eponymous character emerges from the Refuge and returns home with the rest of the group, where, over some drinks, it is decided that Long Byrne and Lizzie MacCann will take care of her, with the narrator’s grandmother contributing financially. This story depicts women as the backbone, the heart and soul of the working-class community Behan grew up in. Although sometimes mean and often drunk, they care for each other and for each other’s children, they stick together in the face of common enemies, they are willing to sacrifice when necessary and always ready to give to others. Yet, some of them prefer to give financial aid rather than care, and all of them are empowered to make decisions without involving the men of their respective families. In many ways, these women show the strength and power of working-class womanhood depicted through the admiring eyes of a child narrator. In “The Confirmation Suit,” a similar community of women emerges. As Fallon notes in his introduction to After the Wake, the characters in these two stories are unmistakably “fictional neighbours.”16 The narrator of “The Confirmation Suit” is once again a young boy, this time preparing for his confirmation. Presently, it becomes clear that in this community, it is the women who make the financial decisions: “Twenty-two and sixpence for tweed, I’d expect a share in the shop for that. I’ve a good mind to let him go in jersey and pants for that.”17 In the narrator’s family, in particular, it is even hinted that a woman is the one who will be most likely to possess the funds for his confirmation suit: “I wasn’t so worried about this. My old fellow was a tradesman, and made money most of the time. Besides, my grandmother, who lived at the top of the next house, was a lady of capernosity 16 Peter Fallon, “Introduction,” in After the Wake, ed. Peter Fallon (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2023), 12. 17 Brendan Behan, “The Confirmation Suit,” in After the Wake, ed. Peter Fallon (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2023), 36-37. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. “A splendid figure of revolting womanhood” 101 partner who, in the words of the priest, “is only – what she is.”23 The fact that the representative of the Catholic church shies away from calling her his ‘mistress’ may be due to a sense of piety, but it may also be in recognition of the fact that this word does not quite fit the situation at hand. After all, as is soon revealed, this woman has been working to support the man for years and has been diligently visiting him at the sanatorium, bringing him chicken soup. This his wife and his daughter take as an affront, regardless of the fact that the latter acknowledges: “we’re away from him since I was five” (54). Throughout the story, the ironic tone of the narrator indicates a certain criticism of the situation, juxtaposing a declaration that Ria, the dying man’s wife, “was the kindest woman in Ireland” (54), with her relief at his death bringing him no more “than a few short years of harmonious torture in purgatory” (54). The narrator is, however, also characterised by a lust for sensation: We had a few prayers that night, but she never turned up, and I was sorry, because to tell the truth, I was curious to see her. […] I had some idea of a big car (owned by a new and tolerant admirer) sweeping into the cortège from some side street or another, or else a cab that’d slide in, a woman in rich mourning heavily veiled in its corner. (55) To the narrator’s astonishment, the woman who eventually attends the funeral, hidden behind a tree, is “a poor middle-aged woman, bent in haggard prayer,” instead of being, as expected, “dolled up to the nines – paint and powder and a fur coat” (56). The fact that the narrator’s expectations vary so drastically from reality is due to the way everyone else involved, Ria, her daughter, and her priest, had characterised the woman, who was “out scrubbing halls for me dear departed this last four years – since he took bad” (56), as “a walking occasion of sin” (53). Behan, instead, turns her into a martyr, a woman willing to bear the judgement of her entire community for love. She stands in stark contrast to the other two women, and the priest, who all value the supposed sanctity of marriage, and by extension their own reputations, over the life of the man. Behan thus exposes the hypocrisy of mid-century Catholic Ireland, which would rather see a man die alone than allow his marriage to be dissolved. However, the story also leaves some details 23 Brendan Behan, “A Woman of No Standing,” in After the Wake, ed. Peter Fallon (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2023), 53. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. Nathalie Lamprecht 102 unexplained. Pierse notes the difficulty of leaving a violent or unhappy marriage, indicating that without sufficient funds and the right contacts, annulments, the only legal and Church-sanctioned way of ending a marriage at the time, were out of the question (124). Indeed, in a country several decades away from legalising divorce, even separations were frowned upon, not to mention the lack of legal obligation to pay child or spousal support during such a separation. The fact that Ria has apparently separated from the man years prior to the action of the story and is yet seamlessly integrated into her community is thus noteworthy. It may be assumed that she has her own money, which allows her to sustain herself and her daughter, as well as a very good reason to have left her husband (while even domestic violence would often not be seen as sufficient). However, it could also be that the narrator, not being privy to the entire story, is unaware of the reasons for Ria’s perhaps perfectly justified negative inclination towards her husband. While her callousness towards him may be questioned by the narrator, she is yet never judged for having separated from him in the first place. Similarly, the “woman of no standing” is pitied, rather than demonised by the narrator as soon as her true situation is revealed to him. It becomes clear that it is society at large that by hindering women’s right to free choice is responsible for the overall unhappy situation of the story’s characters. On the one hand, this story thus functions as open critique of religious oppression, on the other, it is a lesson not to judge a situation from the outside, with incomplete information. Conclusion When looking at Behan’s depictions of women in his short stories, no straightforward conclusions can be drawn. Behan can hardly be classified as a feminist writer, but he treats most of his female characters with similar empathy as he does his male ones, allowing them the capacity to be anything from self-denying saints to “screwy bitches.”24 He writes some of his stories in homage to the women who raised him, and some to critique a society that victimised them, yet rarely pointing outright towards women’s issues. Rather, in his attempt to bring to life the various facets of the Dublin working class, he happened to portray several interesting female characters, because women – both those boisterous, drunken, and surprisingly caring, as well as those demure, oppressed, and self-sacrificing – were a vital part of the community he was raised in and valued highly throughout his life. Pierse 24 Brendan Behan, “The Catacombs,” in After the Wake, ed. Peter Fallon (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2023), 57. The actual quote is “the screwy old bitch” and refers to another great and little researched female character of Behan’s, María Bolívar. “A splendid figure of revolting womanhood” 103 has written extensively about the preoccupation many male working-class writers share with the plight of working-class women. Yet, the women of Brendan Behan’s short stories are not the eternally suffering abused women of the texts he studies. Instead, Behan’s stories stand as testimony of the strength, resilience, and gumption of Dublin working-class women; they tell of women who break the rules, who earn their living, who take care of children and the elderly, albeit reluctantly; they tell the tale of women who never get married as well as those that regret doing so. Behan’s women are decision makers, refusers of household chores, and victims of patriarchal systems. What emerges is thus a varied, colourful, and perhaps accidentally woman-heavy image of the Dublin working class. A larger-scale study of both the women who influenced Behan’s life and work and the female characters he wrote inspired by them might allow further conclusions about the frank and uncritical approach Behan seems to have to women who fall outside of the norm; this may open up new avenues of inquiry into Behan’s small but impressive oeuvre. BIBLIOGRAPHY Behan, Brendan. “After the Wake.” In After the Wake, edited by Peter Fallon, 46-52. Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2023. Behan, Brendan. “The Catacombs.” In After the Wake, edited by Peter Fallon, 57-97. Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2023. Behan, Brendan. “The Confirmation Suit.” In After the Wake, edited by Peter Fallon, 36-45. Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2023. Behan, Brendan. “The Last of Mrs. Murphy.” In After the Wake, edited by Peter Fallon, 16-23. Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2023. Behan, Brendan. The Scarperer (1966). London: Arena Books, 1987. Behan, Brendan. “A Woman of No Standing.” In After the Wake, edited by Peter Fallon, 53-56. 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