Borstal Boy

Borstal Boy is an autobiographical development novel by Irish writer Brendan Behan from 1958. It describes the time that Behan spent as a young, idealistic IRA activist in British juvenile prisons and the Hollesley Bay Borstal reformatory . The first-person narrator gradually changes his view of the English and the world, especially due to his love affair with his fellow English prisoner Charlie. Initially banned in Ireland , the work is now considered a modern classic of Irish literature and has been translated into numerous languages. The German translation by Curt Meyer-Clason appeared in 1963.

action

In the novel, Behan deals with the time he spent in British juvenile prisons in the 1940s. The reason for his detention were planned bomb attacks against the British military - ostensibly on behalf of the Irish Republican Army . The book begins with Behan's arrest. His first stop is the Walton Gaol , a regular prison, followed by a short stay in the Feltham Boys' Prison . Most of the novel is devoted to the time in Hollesley Bay Borstal, a reformatory for young people. It was then the first open institution of its kind and was located in rural Suffolk . In addition to inmates and guards, Behan also describes nature, work in agriculture and the landscape. He lets a variety of different characters appear. Charlie, a sailor in the Royal Navy and petty criminal from a London suburb, occupies a special position. Behan has a close friendship with him and at times also has a love affair.

Style and content

The novel chronologically describes the events during Behan's detention and gives the impression of being the transcription of an oral story. It should not appear like an originally written work, but rather as the unvarnished story of a young man.

Borstal Boy is characterized by the use of numerous variants of English as spoken in the British lower class as well as in different regions and classes. Behan was able to show that the Catholic-Irish and Protestant-English workers had more in common with each other than with their respective upper classes. He also often uses song texts and poems and lets his characters speak Cockney Rhyming slang , for example .

Throughout his life, Brehan was a political person with distinctive opinions and shares them freely in Borstal Boy. For example, the young Behan, who has spent all his youth in the Irish Republican milieu, takes for granted that all Irish support the fight against the British and that all English are his enemies. In the asylum, however, he gets to know so many different characters that this clear dividing line is blurred. He is treated particularly harshly by an Irish guard, while some Englishmen become friends in the institution. In his close relationship with Charlie from London, the Dubliner Behan realizes how similar their memories of the urban working-class neighborhoods of their childhood are and that they see the English aristocracy as their common enemy. Behan also turns against the attempts of an English socialist who wants to convince him to break with his friends, since he is a real worker, but they are only thieves and idlers. Behan can do little to counteract this intellectually, but nevertheless refuses to make the break.

Last but not least, the novel describes Behan's conflict with the Catholic Church. At the beginning the young prisoner assumes that the Catholic Church supports the Irish wholeheartedly and is thus an ally. But in prison, the church soon shows itself to be in league with the Protestant guards who Behan and the other prisoners face. He was beaten up several times by Protestant guards on the orders of the Catholic priest.

Origin and publication history

Brendan Behan, 1960

Behan worked on his novel for a good 15 years, parts of which appeared in various Irish, British and French magazines until 1956. However, the reconstruction of its origin was made more difficult by some contradicting statements by Behan, his contemporaries and biographers. He published his first article about his imprisonment in England in April 1942 under the title I Become a Borstal Boy in The Bell magazine . At this time Behan was again imprisoned, first in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison , later in Arbor Hill , where he had plenty of time to write. In 1942 he first mentioned the intention to write a novel; it was to carry the title The Green Invasion and deal with the IRA terror campaign of the years 1939-1940. However, it cannot be said whether this planned novel should be autobiographical.

After he was released from prison in 1945, he stayed in Paris for long periods of time and published some short stories in the bilingual literary magazine Points, which is published here . In May 1951 Behan mentioned in a letter to Sindbad Vail, the editor of the paper, that he was writing a novel entitled Borstal Boy and sent him a few pages of his manuscript. An excerpt in which Behan describes his arrest appeared in the winter issue of 1951 under the title Bridewell Revisited (alluding to Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited ); Behan later adopted the text of this article almost word for word for the opening scenes of Borstal Boy . Feeling too distracted by the long nights in the Dublin bohemian , he retired to the country in the summer of 1952 to concentrate fully on the manuscript. In October 1952 he wrote to Vail that he had already put 50,000 words on paper, but also complained that he was getting in the way of working on his first drama for the Abbey Theater. He was also less and less under control of his drunkenness and therefore had to go to a longer hospital stay around 1955. It was not until 1956 that he published two more excerpts from his manuscript. A Christmas Day in Walton Jail , published in the summer issue of Irish Writing magazine , he later took over literally for the Christmas episode of Borstal Boy . In December 1956, an article in the British The New Statesman and Nation followed , which in turn was entitled Bridewell Revisited . The discussion described here by the young Borstal prisoners about their “matrons” was revised by Behan for the book version.

Behan gave a late version of the manuscript to the poet Valentin Iremonger , who at the time was the first secretary of the Irish Embassy in London. He advised Behan to finish the work at all costs and recommended it to Ian Hamilton of the London publishing house Hutchinson . Since Behan was banned from entering Great Britain, Hutchinson went to Dublin to meet in the summer of 1957. He was very impressed by the drafts Behan submitted to him and, according to Behan's biographer Ulick O'Connor, immediately signed a contract and paid him a generous advance of £ 350. According to Peter René Gerdes, however, a contract was only signed after Hamilton returned to London and the manuscript showed Timothy O'Keeffe, who was so enthusiastic that he was reminded of none other than Gogol and Dostoevsky.

O'Connor and Gerdes contradict each other on another point. According to O'Connor and Behan's friend John Murdoch, Behan had previously sold the rights for a serial print to two London papers, both to the Sunday Dispatch and to The People ; that it appeared in both papers at the same time was not noticed at first, since the Sunday Dispatch only included it in its Irish edition. When asked to do so, the publisher of The People contradicted Gerdes to this representation; in fact, his paper acquired the rights from Hutchinson, not from Behan. Gerdes could not find a print in the Sunday Dispatch anywhere in the archives; From October 1958, The People was demonstrably printing excerpts from Borstal Boy in five issues .

According to his wife Beatrice, Behan ultimately burned the manuscript of the Borstal Boy.

censorship

In Ireland the book was banned immediately. The state censorship agency gave no reasons for its decision; It is likely, however, that Behan's frank portrayal of homosexuality was the decisive factor in the decision, but his far-reaching criticism of the Catholic Church may also have played a role. Behan composed a humorous song for the occasion:

" My name is Brendan Behan, I'm the latest of the banned,
although we're small in numbers we're the best banned in the land,
we're read at wakes an weddin's and in every parish hall,
and under library counters sure you'll have no trouble at all. "

In fact, the sales ban was not rigorously enforced. When it was repealed in 1970, the Catholic Herald wrote that the book was already on sale in many stores. The book has also been banned in Australia and New Zealand.

Autobiographical references

Behan himself was an active member of the Irish Republican Army. He was arrested in Liverpool in 1939 at the age of 17 in possession of explosives intended to carry out attacks on British shipyards. After a few months in custody, he was sentenced in 1940 to youth imprisonment in a reformatory called Borstal in Great Britain . In the book, the author describes himself as a loyal fighter on behalf of the IRA. In fact, Behan had tried to implement his plans without the consent of the underground organization and against the will of his family. In addition, the first-person narrator of the book leaves the reformatory as a purified person, while the real Behan carried out a bomb attack in Ireland after his release and only decided to live as an author after another, several years imprisonment. Behan described these and subsequent events in the work Confessions of an Irish Rebel .

Adaptations

After Borstal Boy, there was both a musical that won a Tony Award in 1967 and a feature film in 2002. The film only writes in the credits that it is "inspired" by the novel and makes generous changes to the plot. In this way he shortens the internal arguments about Behan's sexuality to a love triangle between Behan, Charlie and the director's daughter. The film also plays down the political references. If the book is praised for the liveliness and color of its very different characters, almost all reviews hold the film against the fact that the characters are clichéd and predictable.

literature

expenditure

• Borstal Boy . Hutchinson, London 1958. (English first edition)
• Borstal Boy . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1959. (American first edition)
• Borstal Boy . German by Curt Meyer-Clason . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Berlin and Cologne 1963. (German first edition)
• Several reprints, most recently in 1996, ISBN 3462025449 (paperback edition)

Secondary literature

• MC Andersen: Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy: The Homecoming . In: English Academy Review 8, 1991, pp. 47-59.
• John Brannigan: Brendan Behan: Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer . Four Courts Press, Dublin 2002, ISBN 1851826696 .
• Richard Brown: Borstal Boy: Structure and Meaning . In: Colby Library Quarterly 21: 4, 1985, pp. 188-197.
• Etaf A. Elbanna: The Autobiography of an Irish Rebel: Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy . In: Mary Massoud (Ed.): Literary Inter-relations: Ireland, Egypt, and the Far East . Gerrards Cross, Smythe, 1996, ISBN 0-86140-377-0 (=  Irish Literary Studies 47)
• Peter René Gerdes: The Major Works of Brendan Behan . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3261008768 (also Diss. University of Basel)
• Patrick Colm Hogan: Brendan Behan on the Politics of Identity: Nation, Culture, Class, and Human Empathy in Borstal Boy . In: Colby Library Quarterly 35: 3, 1999, pp. 154-172.
• Werner Huber: Autobiography and Stereotypy: Some Remarks on Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy . In: Wolfgang Zach, Heinz Kosok: Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World: 3 National Images and Stereotypes . Günther Narr Verlag, Tübingen 1987, ISBN 3-87808-683-0 , pp. 197–206 (=  Studies in English and Comparative Literature  3)
• Colbert Kearney: "Borstal Boy": A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Prisoner . In: Ariel 7: 2, 1976, pp. 47-62.
• Steven Marcus: Tom Brown in Quod . In: Partisan Review 26: 2, 1959, pp. 335-344.
• Ulick O'Connor: Brendan Behan . Hamish Hamilton, London 1970. Several reprints, most recently: Abacus, London 2000, ISBN 0349105146 .
• Corey Phelps: Borstal Revisited . In: EH Mikhail (ed.): The Art of Brendan Behan . Vision Books, London 1979, ISBN 0854782249 , pp. 91-108.
• Bernice Closet: Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy as Ironic Pastoral . In: Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 18: 2, 1992, pp. 68-74.
• Bernice Cabinet: Telling it like it is (and isn't): Recreating the Self in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy (PDF; 389 kB) . In: Brno Studies in English 37: 2, 2011, pp. 173-184.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Misha Berson, 'Borstal Boy' glosses over rough edges of an Irish rebel-turned-writer , The Seattle Times April 12, 2002
2. ^ ^{A b c} Frank Norman: Bad Boys and Blarney: A Prison Masterpiece , The Glasgow Herald, October 23, 1958
3. ↑ ^{a b} Kearney, p. 50
4. ↑ Kearney, p. 47
5. ↑ Kearney, p. 49
6. ^ Kearney, p. 57
7. ↑ Ulick O'Connor: Brendan Behan , p. 150.
8. ↑ Ulick O'Connor: Brendan Behan , pp. 150-155.
9. ^ Peter René Gerdes: The Major Works of Brendan Behan , p. 101.
10. ↑ Ulick O'Connor: Brendan Behan , p. 155, p. 200.
11. ^ Peter René Gerdes: The Major Works of Brendan Behan , p. 103.
12. ↑ Ulick O'Connor: Brendan Behan , p. 155, p. 201.
13. ↑ Peter René Gerdes: The Major Works of Brendan Behan , p. 103, p. 106 (note 12).
14. ^ Peter René Gerdes: The Major Works of Brendan Behan , p. 104, p. 107 (note 21).
15. ↑ Behan ban removed ( Memento of the original dated November 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Report in The Catholic Herald, February 27, 1970, p. 3.  
16. ↑ Kearney, p. 48
17. ↑ Michael Wilmington: Borstal Boy , Chicago Tribune March 22, 2002