Brendan Behan by Ted E. Boyle (review)

BOOK REVIEW BRENDAN BEHAN, by Ted E. Boyle. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1969. 150 pp. $4.50. There can be no doubt that a thorough analysis of Brendan Behan's life and work is very much needed. Mr. Boyle's book leaves the need unsatisfied. This brief study of Behan is divided into three parts: a short' account of his life, a section on "relevant" theories of comedy, and a close reading of Behan's work. The first part of the book is informative and well-written, though some more research on the specific causes and genesis of Behan's alcoholism might have been in order. It is with the second part of the book that Mr. Boyle goes off the deep end. Although the author comes to the correct conclusion at the end of the book -to wit, that Behan was neither a great nor a flawless writer-he persists throughout the book in puffing up his assignment so as to make it appear that Behan was a for more important writer than he actually was. This is a common enough disease of critics who feel that their own stature is only a reflection of the magnitude of their subjects. Mr. Boyle thus tries desperately to build a mountain while ignoring the perfection of the mole hill. In the second part of the book Mr. Boyle has decided to show the links between some theories of comedy and Behan's own writing. He purports to do this by quoting a series of disconnected snippets from such diverse sources as Aristotle, Cicero, Donatus, Giraldi, Groucho Marx, Ben Jonson, George Meredith, Henri Bergson, and George Santayana. Mr. Boyle goes through some extraordinary and totally unconvincing mental contortions in order to show that these disparate theories all apply specifically to Behan's practice of comedy. Indeed, some of them are so far-fetched that one would suppose the author were trying to show off his erudition were it not for the fact that all of the quotes are cribbed from various standard anthologies. Another one of Mr. Boyle's irritating little devices for puffing Behan up is a tendency to manufacture targets at which to take pot-shots. Thus we are informed that those who see Behan merely as a drunken funny man are not sensitive. Since nobody but a newspaper reviewer or a retarded ultramontane seminarian would see Behan as only a drunken funny man, it becomes difficult to understand whom, besides these straw men, Mr. Boyle is accusing of insensitivity. Occasionally Mr. Boyle takes on a real target and can find nothing more effective to do than to fire blanks off to its side, as when he asserts that Behan has wrongly been called a primitive because he was influenced by his father, thus neatly confining primitivism to orphans. In a further desperate attempt to confer an importance on Behan that he simply did not have, Mr. Boyle asserts that he belongs to the theater of the absurd movement and that his answer to the world, like that of Camus, Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, and Sartre, is laughter! This is so obviously muddle-headed that criticism becomes supererogatory. One can only sigh and turn the page, except that that brings us to Mr. Boyle's textual analyses. These are detailed step-by-step accounts of each of Behan's book and plays. That this sort of mental sludge is published under the name of scholarship is discouraging. We can only hope that Behan will eventually get the book that he deserves. 252 GEORGE E. WELLWARTH State University of New York Binghamton ...