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Brendan Behan's Island: An Irish Sketch-book
The late Brendan Behan captured the essence of Ireland in this compilation of Dublin talk, reminiscence, comment, verse and anecdote. The text is complemented by Paul Hogarth's drawings.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1962
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About the author
Brendan Behan
74 books155 followersEarly association with the Irish republican army and experiences in prison influenced works, including
The Quare Fellow
, the play of 1954, and the autobiographical
Borstal Boy
in 1958 of Brendan Francis Behan, writer.
Brendan Francis Behan composed poetry, short stories, and novels in English. He also volunteered.
A mother in the inner city of Dublin bore Brendan Francis Behan into an educated class family. Christine English, his grandmother, owned a number of properties in the area and the house on Russell street near Mountjoy square. Peadar Kearney, his uncle and author of song and the national anthem, also lived in the area. Stephen Behan, his father, acted in the war of independence, painted houses, and read classic literature to the children at bedtime from such sources as Émile Zola, John Galsworthy, and Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant; Kathleen Behan, his mother, took them on literary tours of the city. From father, interest of Behan in literature came; his mother originated his political ideas. She politically acted in all her life and personally befriended Michael Collins. Brendan Behan lamented "The Laughing Boy" at the age of thirteen to Collins. His mother gave the affectionate nickname, the title, to Collins. Kathleen published "Mother of all the Behans," a collaboration with Brian Behan, another son, in 1984.
Peadar Kearney, uncle of Brendan Francis Behan, composed Amhrán na bhFiann , the national anthem. People best knew "The Patriot Game," the song of Dominic Behan, his also renowned brother; Brian Behan, another sibling, a prominent radical political activist, spoke in public, acted, and authored. Brendan and Brian shared not the same views, especially when the question of politics or nationalism arose. Brendan on his deathbed presumably in jest asked Cathal Goulding, then the chief of staff, to "have that bastard Brian shot—we've had all sorts in our family, but never a traitor!"
From a drinking session, Brendan Francis Behan at the age of eight years in 1931 returned home on one day with his granny and a crony, Ulick O'Connor recounts. A passerby remarked, "Oh, my! Isn't it terrible ma'am to see such a beautiful child deformed?" "How dare you", said his granny. "He's not deformed, he's just drunk!"
Brendan Francis Behan left school at 13 years of age to follow in footsteps of his father as a house painter.
Brendan Francis Behan composed poetry, short stories, and novels in English. He also volunteered.
A mother in the inner city of Dublin bore Brendan Francis Behan into an educated class family. Christine English, his grandmother, owned a number of properties in the area and the house on Russell street near Mountjoy square. Peadar Kearney, his uncle and author of song and the national anthem, also lived in the area. Stephen Behan, his father, acted in the war of independence, painted houses, and read classic literature to the children at bedtime from such sources as Émile Zola, John Galsworthy, and Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant; Kathleen Behan, his mother, took them on literary tours of the city. From father, interest of Behan in literature came; his mother originated his political ideas. She politically acted in all her life and personally befriended Michael Collins. Brendan Behan lamented "The Laughing Boy" at the age of thirteen to Collins. His mother gave the affectionate nickname, the title, to Collins. Kathleen published "Mother of all the Behans," a collaboration with Brian Behan, another son, in 1984.
Peadar Kearney, uncle of Brendan Francis Behan, composed Amhrán na bhFiann , the national anthem. People best knew "The Patriot Game," the song of Dominic Behan, his also renowned brother; Brian Behan, another sibling, a prominent radical political activist, spoke in public, acted, and authored. Brendan and Brian shared not the same views, especially when the question of politics or nationalism arose. Brendan on his deathbed presumably in jest asked Cathal Goulding, then the chief of staff, to "have that bastard Brian shot—we've had all sorts in our family, but never a traitor!"
From a drinking session, Brendan Francis Behan at the age of eight years in 1931 returned home on one day with his granny and a crony, Ulick O'Connor recounts. A passerby remarked, "Oh, my! Isn't it terrible ma'am to see such a beautiful child deformed?" "How dare you", said his granny. "He's not deformed, he's just drunk!"
Brendan Francis Behan left school at 13 years of age to follow in footsteps of his father as a house painter.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 24, 2023
In this slim read, Behan offers his thoughts on the places and people of Ireland with some stories, poems, and wit thrown in for good measure. I would say not to think of this as a book, but rather as a long conversation with the great writer himself taking place by the fireside of some Irish pub. Often rambling and told with its fair share of fibs and tall tales (Behan himself admits he is a seasoned liar!), this work is an entertaining read that can only be described as good craic!
Read
June 26, 2008This is priceless Behan. Conversations with extremly old irishmen and women, ramblings about his and their younger days, prison, poverty, murdering british soldiers, --All beautifuly illustrated in pencil and ink by the man himself.
(I acctually have the hardback, which isn't listed here.)
(I acctually have the hardback, which isn't listed here.)
Read
August 17, 2010Behan telling anecdotes to a tape recorder, which were then typed up & edited by an editor. 'tis himself in his final days.
May 15, 2019
The wonderful thing about having lots of books is that every now and again you stumble across a book you’ve never read, forgotten you had, and can’t even remember where you originally got the thing.
The book I stumbled across was a first edition of the American printing (Bernard Geiss Associates, distributed by Random House) of Brendan Behan’s wild, undisciplined, very personal, frequently very funny tour of his beloved native Ireland. I use the word “tour” loosely; think of stumbling from pub to pub, with occasional bouts of sobriety to lure you on to a new pub, a new conversation, or a quasi-legal—I’m being charitable—escapade. The book is entitled Brendan Behan’s Island: An Irish Sketch Book, a title that must have amused him to come up with, because the book is profusely illustrated with marvelous sketches by the artist Paul Hogarth, member of the Royal Academy, OBE, and a distant descendant of the famed late-Jacobean-early Georgian artist and engraver William Hogarth.
Brendan Behan is largely forgotten today outside of Ireland, primarily because he is best known for two wildly original plays (The Quare Fellow and The Hostage) which were very well received when they were first produced. Both plays were, in fact, good enough to have multiple productions, starting in Dublin, then migrating to London and thence on to New York. Sadly, the qualities that made them so original and unique back during Behan’s lifetime (1923-1964) have made them dated today in ways that Sean O’Casey’s plays (The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, and others) and J. M. Synge’s (Riders to the Sea, The Playboy of the Western World) seem to have avoided. O’Casey’s plays and Synge’s are both revived fairly regularly in repertory, summer stock and college (The Irish Repertory Theater is currently doing the three O’Casey plays mentioned above in New York), but I’ve never seen or even heard of a production of either of Behan’s plays. That’s a shame because, as Stanislavski said, we don’t go to the theater to see what the playwright has written; we got to the theater to see what the playwright has not written. My imagination is pretty good, and God knows I’m used to reading scripts, but I would love to see Behan’s words come alive on the tongues of some good actors.
Both of Behan’s plays are hard and unsentimental looks at the inevitable effects of violence and war. But those hard, unsentimental looks are portrayed against a counter point of comedy that ranges from clever verbal pyrotechnics to slapstick. Both plays are very funny, irreverent, and include an unusual—for their time—and completely unique style of breaking the fourth wall. In The Hostage, the wild assortment of disparate characters (gays, transvestites, whores, hard-bitten IRA soldiers, a naïve young farm girl, the equally naïve young British hostage, and one or two who are just plain crazy) all periodically stop the action to perform song and dance routines. In The Quare Fellow, double-tough convicts waiting for an unseen fellow convict to be executed (the quare fellow, “quare” being an Irish corruption of “queer,” which was the slang term given to any prisoner sentenced to death) trade very funny insults with each other and their guards, and two of them do a Samba at one point. (I know, I know, but trust me, it works.)
Behan’s closest living dramatic relative today is probably Martin McDonagh, author of some wickedly wacky and darkly funny plays, and—less fortunately—the author and director of the movie, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which I emphatically detested (http://readjamesonparker.com/archives...) in part because it didn’t work as a coherent and believable artistic whole, and in part because I’ve had all I can take of intellectually and morally superior elites sneering at smelly deplorables in fly-over country, and I especially don’t like it when that particular elite isn’t even an American.
Brendan Behan’s Island is the antithesis of that hoity-toity attitude. Behan was from a tough, brawling, alcoholic, working-class, republican (think IRA revolutionary) family, albeit an educated one, and he clearly both liked and respected the impoverished laborers, farmers, fishermen, racetrack touts, scruffy artists and writers, fellow revolutionaries, and ne’er-do-wells he knew and wrote about. In fact, The Quare Fellow, set entirely in a prison, shows Behan liked and respected most of the convicts with whom he spent too many years of his too short life (a result of his own IRA activities). His father was a house-painter and he was born in the Mountjoy area of Dublin, and to give you an idea of what that area was like, I’ll quote, in its entirety, J.M. Synge’s poem, The Curse, subtitled, To a sister of an enemy of the author’s who disapproved of “The Playboy” [of the Western World]:
Lord, confound this surly sister,
Blight her brow with blotch and blister,
Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver,
In her guts a galling give her.
Let her live to earn her dinners
In Mountjoy with seedy sinners:
Lord, this judgement quickly bring,
And I’m your servant, J.M. Synge.
Synge didn’t want her to live in Mountjoy because it was classy and elegant, hence what is possibly the most perfect response to a critic ever penned, though Behan himself came close with his famous aphorism:
“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.”
And that quote gives you a small taste of what his book is like: funny, pugnacious, irreverent, and frequently rambling haphazardly from thought to thought. One gets the impression Mr. Behan’s pub visits frequently interrupted his intended itinerary, or possibly just erased it from the hard drive altogether.
He starts in Dublin, proceeds logically to Killarney, in County Kerry, then County Cork (birthplace of one half of my own ancestors), on to Galway and what he calls “The Bleak West,” and then up to “The Black North,” only the journey is frequently interrupted with asides in the forms of poems, songs, reminiscences of IRA heroes and activities, a full-length one-act play, and more anecdotes than you could shake a whiskey at.
Much of Behan’s writing involves considerable use of Irish patois, slang, and local vernacular—hell, some of it’s written in Irish—so it takes a little patience to figure out what certain terms and phrases mean, but the journey is well worth the effort. I’ll give you a taste of Behan’s writing and his penchant for anecdotes as a small appetizer of what you can expect in the unlikely event you’re ever able to lay your hands on a copy of Brendan Behan’s Island, an Irish Sketch-Book:
“As I said, it’s a very affluent city, Cork, with a good reputation for work, and it was there that Henry Ford in 1920 established their first European factory. Some time thereabouts the Cork Brigade of the IRA were conducting some operations against the British that necessitated the use of motor transport—lorries—which the Brigade didn’t have. Fords, of course, had plenty, so a few of the IRA went down and held up the staff and the manager and demanded some lorries in the name of the Irish Republic.
“The manager of the works, being a very clever and quick-thinking man, announced, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘you can’t have any in the name of the Irish Republic because these works,’ he said, ‘are the property of a citizen of the United States of America with which the Irish Republic is not at war.’
“But the commanding officer of the IRA was what the times demanded of him, a quicker-thinking man, and he turned away and wrote something on a piece of paper. He turned back to the manager and, ‘Here,’ he said, ‘read that.’
“And the manager read out: ‘In the name of the Irish Republic, I solemnly do as from this moment declare war on the United States of America.’
“‘Now,’ says the commanding officer, ‘hand over them bloody lorries quick.’”
The book I stumbled across was a first edition of the American printing (Bernard Geiss Associates, distributed by Random House) of Brendan Behan’s wild, undisciplined, very personal, frequently very funny tour of his beloved native Ireland. I use the word “tour” loosely; think of stumbling from pub to pub, with occasional bouts of sobriety to lure you on to a new pub, a new conversation, or a quasi-legal—I’m being charitable—escapade. The book is entitled Brendan Behan’s Island: An Irish Sketch Book, a title that must have amused him to come up with, because the book is profusely illustrated with marvelous sketches by the artist Paul Hogarth, member of the Royal Academy, OBE, and a distant descendant of the famed late-Jacobean-early Georgian artist and engraver William Hogarth.
Brendan Behan is largely forgotten today outside of Ireland, primarily because he is best known for two wildly original plays (The Quare Fellow and The Hostage) which were very well received when they were first produced. Both plays were, in fact, good enough to have multiple productions, starting in Dublin, then migrating to London and thence on to New York. Sadly, the qualities that made them so original and unique back during Behan’s lifetime (1923-1964) have made them dated today in ways that Sean O’Casey’s plays (The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, and others) and J. M. Synge’s (Riders to the Sea, The Playboy of the Western World) seem to have avoided. O’Casey’s plays and Synge’s are both revived fairly regularly in repertory, summer stock and college (The Irish Repertory Theater is currently doing the three O’Casey plays mentioned above in New York), but I’ve never seen or even heard of a production of either of Behan’s plays. That’s a shame because, as Stanislavski said, we don’t go to the theater to see what the playwright has written; we got to the theater to see what the playwright has not written. My imagination is pretty good, and God knows I’m used to reading scripts, but I would love to see Behan’s words come alive on the tongues of some good actors.
Both of Behan’s plays are hard and unsentimental looks at the inevitable effects of violence and war. But those hard, unsentimental looks are portrayed against a counter point of comedy that ranges from clever verbal pyrotechnics to slapstick. Both plays are very funny, irreverent, and include an unusual—for their time—and completely unique style of breaking the fourth wall. In The Hostage, the wild assortment of disparate characters (gays, transvestites, whores, hard-bitten IRA soldiers, a naïve young farm girl, the equally naïve young British hostage, and one or two who are just plain crazy) all periodically stop the action to perform song and dance routines. In The Quare Fellow, double-tough convicts waiting for an unseen fellow convict to be executed (the quare fellow, “quare” being an Irish corruption of “queer,” which was the slang term given to any prisoner sentenced to death) trade very funny insults with each other and their guards, and two of them do a Samba at one point. (I know, I know, but trust me, it works.)
Behan’s closest living dramatic relative today is probably Martin McDonagh, author of some wickedly wacky and darkly funny plays, and—less fortunately—the author and director of the movie, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which I emphatically detested (http://readjamesonparker.com/archives...) in part because it didn’t work as a coherent and believable artistic whole, and in part because I’ve had all I can take of intellectually and morally superior elites sneering at smelly deplorables in fly-over country, and I especially don’t like it when that particular elite isn’t even an American.
Brendan Behan’s Island is the antithesis of that hoity-toity attitude. Behan was from a tough, brawling, alcoholic, working-class, republican (think IRA revolutionary) family, albeit an educated one, and he clearly both liked and respected the impoverished laborers, farmers, fishermen, racetrack touts, scruffy artists and writers, fellow revolutionaries, and ne’er-do-wells he knew and wrote about. In fact, The Quare Fellow, set entirely in a prison, shows Behan liked and respected most of the convicts with whom he spent too many years of his too short life (a result of his own IRA activities). His father was a house-painter and he was born in the Mountjoy area of Dublin, and to give you an idea of what that area was like, I’ll quote, in its entirety, J.M. Synge’s poem, The Curse, subtitled, To a sister of an enemy of the author’s who disapproved of “The Playboy” [of the Western World]:
Lord, confound this surly sister,
Blight her brow with blotch and blister,
Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver,
In her guts a galling give her.
Let her live to earn her dinners
In Mountjoy with seedy sinners:
Lord, this judgement quickly bring,
And I’m your servant, J.M. Synge.
Synge didn’t want her to live in Mountjoy because it was classy and elegant, hence what is possibly the most perfect response to a critic ever penned, though Behan himself came close with his famous aphorism:
“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.”
And that quote gives you a small taste of what his book is like: funny, pugnacious, irreverent, and frequently rambling haphazardly from thought to thought. One gets the impression Mr. Behan’s pub visits frequently interrupted his intended itinerary, or possibly just erased it from the hard drive altogether.
He starts in Dublin, proceeds logically to Killarney, in County Kerry, then County Cork (birthplace of one half of my own ancestors), on to Galway and what he calls “The Bleak West,” and then up to “The Black North,” only the journey is frequently interrupted with asides in the forms of poems, songs, reminiscences of IRA heroes and activities, a full-length one-act play, and more anecdotes than you could shake a whiskey at.
Much of Behan’s writing involves considerable use of Irish patois, slang, and local vernacular—hell, some of it’s written in Irish—so it takes a little patience to figure out what certain terms and phrases mean, but the journey is well worth the effort. I’ll give you a taste of Behan’s writing and his penchant for anecdotes as a small appetizer of what you can expect in the unlikely event you’re ever able to lay your hands on a copy of Brendan Behan’s Island, an Irish Sketch-Book:
“As I said, it’s a very affluent city, Cork, with a good reputation for work, and it was there that Henry Ford in 1920 established their first European factory. Some time thereabouts the Cork Brigade of the IRA were conducting some operations against the British that necessitated the use of motor transport—lorries—which the Brigade didn’t have. Fords, of course, had plenty, so a few of the IRA went down and held up the staff and the manager and demanded some lorries in the name of the Irish Republic.
“The manager of the works, being a very clever and quick-thinking man, announced, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘you can’t have any in the name of the Irish Republic because these works,’ he said, ‘are the property of a citizen of the United States of America with which the Irish Republic is not at war.’
“But the commanding officer of the IRA was what the times demanded of him, a quicker-thinking man, and he turned away and wrote something on a piece of paper. He turned back to the manager and, ‘Here,’ he said, ‘read that.’
“And the manager read out: ‘In the name of the Irish Republic, I solemnly do as from this moment declare war on the United States of America.’
“‘Now,’ says the commanding officer, ‘hand over them bloody lorries quick.’”
October 9, 2014
One of the great comic masterpieces of the last sixty years.
November 24, 2017
Behan's personality, rife with humor, irony, and understatement, is on full display in this lively little book, which takes the reader on a most idiosyncratic tour of the Emerald Isle. The tour begins in Dublin and proceeds clockwise around the regions of Ireland, and while there are a few facts and figures, the main purpose of the book seems to be as a vehicle for Behan to tell stories about his homeland--some recollected, some concocted--and to communicate something of his view of what makes Ireland and the Irish unique in the world. One of the few repeated themes is Behan's contention that there are fewer differences among the Irish, even if one is comparing an Orangeman in Belfast to a Catholic in Cork, than among many of the regions of England, so that if difference is an argument for partition, England should be carved into bits far more so than its smaller neighbor to the west. Behan was of course a notorious and unrepentant drunk, and some of that peeks above the page here and there, but more than anything he was a brilliant writer and sardonic wit, and that is what makes this volume an enjoyable and worthwhile read.
April 24, 2023
This book is a gritty and interesting the chapters are random but every chapter is a different and unique but with the same setting of ireland of course. The people Brendan speaks about are these three dimensional people he’s met throughout his life. There is a great chapter that is a whole folktale of Irish tradition and it’s all put on perfectly and beautifully.
April 13, 2020
Filled with humor, tales of quirky folks, and a bit of commentary of Ireland at the author's time, in Brendan Behan's Island, the author's voice and personality shine throughout this engaging book. Both Behan's character sketches and Hogarth's drawings are quite engaging. An enjoyable read.
January 22, 2021
I enjoyed every story, ever character. I laughed through the Callathumpians who must have wine on Sunday, his grandparents and the story of the donkey - a wonderful book that I am delighted is in my personal library.
January 9, 2022
One of my favourite books!
Behan is at his best but the drawings by Paul Hogarth are sublime .....I wonder what Behan thought of them.
Behan is at his best but the drawings by Paul Hogarth are sublime .....I wonder what Behan thought of them.
July 1, 2023
Thoroughly enjoyed. Behan was an interesting character and I enjoyed the many snippets of Irish history throughout. Anyone interested in 20th century Ireland and its history would enjoy.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews