Dublin … Paris … Behan … Joyce

Late in his novel The Scarperer, Brendan Behan introduces a pair of characters—an Anglo-Irish dowager and her niece Nancy, a student in Paris—who essentially leverage the deus ex machina ending that he needed to escape his entertaining but intrinsically flawed narrative. In the process, Behan incidentally takes a page out of the writings of two of his fellow men-of-letters of so-called Bohemian Dublin of the 1940s and ’50s. Poet Patrick Kavanagh and multi-monikered Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien each cast a skeptical and sardonic eye on the Joyce industry that emerged in the wake of the Second World War, in part as a byproduct of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (also known as the G.I. Bill) through which the U.S. Government financed education for American veterans of the War. “Who killed James Joyce?” Kavanagh asked (and answered) in a poem he wrote for the special Joyce-centered issue of Envoy published in 1951: “I, said the commentator,/I killed James Joyce/For my graduation.” Kavanagh then goes on to identify students from Harvard and Yale as particular culprits, along with one who “got a scholarship/To Trinity College.”¹ O’Nolan/O’Brien struck a similar note in the same issue of Envoy: “Perhaps the true fascination of Joyce lies in his secretiveness, his ambiguity (his polyguity, perhaps?), his leg-pulling, his dishonesties, his technical skill, his attraction for Americans.”² O’Nolan also referenced the Joyce industry frequently, and superciliously, while writing under the nom de plume Myles na Gopaleen in “Cruiskeen Lawn,” his column published in The Irish Times between 1940 and 1966.

The jab Behan throws at Joyce and Joyceans in The Scarperer is a bit less direct. In a scene set in Paris, he first gives a winking nod toward Marcel Proust, having the aunt wonder aloud why the city should remind her of her childhood centered around Alexandra College, an exclusive Church of Ireland–affiliated girls boarding school in the south Dublin suburb of Milltown: “But yet I get a distinct, sweetly melancholy, remembrance of things past. The statues, the trees, and the Bois do so remind me of … I. …”³ The niece responds with an obvious pastiche (hers, not just Behan’s) of Joyce’s tracking of the viceregal cavalcade across Dublin from Phoenix Park to the Mirus Bazaar in the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses:

Phoenix Park in the days of good King Edward and the Lord Lieutenant’s carriage and outriders going past the Gough Monument at a spanking pace. Pappa raises his grey bowler and Mamma tells little Emily to wave and Nancy lifts the baby from the perambulator, to see the nice mans and ladies and the lovely horsies. The lower orders rush from the playing fields of the Fifteen Acres to remove their caps and shout lustily, but with devotion: “Long life to your honour.” And the dignified figure in the carriage leans forward and graciously bows as the carriage bowls along.

(131)

When asked by her aunt how she could describe in such exact detail a scenario from long before her time, Nancy replies: “I sit beside two Americans at the Foyer des Etudiants. They’re doing a thesis on James Joyce. By the way, Aunt Jeannie, you wouldn’t happen to know the price of pigs’ cheeks in June, nineteen four, would you?” (131).

Evidently, Behan knew his Joyce well enough not only to parody “Wandering Rocks” but also to borrow its panoptical point of view for the denouement of The Scarperer, as he ties up the narrative loose ends in the final chapter with a series of vignettes clearly intended to be absorbed nebeneinander—simultaneously—by the reader:

In a religious hostel off the rue du Bac were some travellers just arrived from Lourdes and on their way home to Ireland.

In Mountjoy a boy turned over, half waking, and thought of the six months he had to do.

At three in the afternoon, Lugs, Eddie Collins, and Jerry Synnott were brought to an office, where they were met by four Irish detectives...