He spent most of the next three years in borstal 1 in Suffolk, where he seems to have made many friends among both warders and inmates, and to have read a great deal in the library.
#The hostage brendan behan full#
In 1939, when he was sixteen, Behan was arrested in a Liverpool hotel with a suitcase full of dynamite intended for use in blowing up a battleship.
As a child, Behan was a member of the Fianna Éireann, an IRA-affiliated youth organization, and in the 1930s worked as an IRA messenger. Behan was raised in a very Republican family - his uncle, Peadar Kearney, was the author of the Irish National Anthem. When Brendan Behan was born in Dublin in 1923, his housepainter father was in prison for his participation in the Irish War of Independence. The lovely thin paper with a bit of mattress stuffing in it, if you could get a match, was as good a smoke as I ever tasted. The Borstal Boy The Bible was a consolation to a fellow alone in the old cell.
In spite of the poverty of his childhood, the alcoholism that killed him at the age of 41, and his tendency to play up to the stereotypical foreign image of the drunken, sociable Irishman, Behan contributed greatly to his country's literary heritage, and to our understanding of the human condition. But his earthy, satirical writing is marked, not by political rant or social bitterness, but by an acute commentary on the lives of common people. He was also known for his drinking and, to some, unsavoury political background - he spent several years in various British penal institutions for IRA activities. Brendan Behan, the Irish poet and playwright, was known for his sharp wit and skill as a raconteur.
0 kommentar(er)
