Brendan by Ulick O'Connor (review)

1972· BOOK REVIEWS 485 that "Brecht was relatively safe and free in his exile" (p. 155) is open (except possibly for his period in the United States) to the most serious doubt. One has serious reservations also about flat statements on the sufferings of the coolies of Mukden that extend, so we are assured, even up to the present day. (p. 216) These points of questionable political judgment and/or understanding are as disturbing in their own way as the following errors of fact. It is not true that the comedian Valentin advised Brecht to use whiteface for his actors in Drums of the Night. The advice was given for the staging of the Brecht-Feuchtwanger adaptation of Marlowe's Edward II. Brecht's mythical experiences of performing operations in a military hospital in Augsburg (long since disproved by Dieter Schmidt) are again cited with more satisfaction than knowledge. There is too much evidence now available on the early, largely non-political Brecht, a Brecht enjoying the services of a family maid and his father's several secretaries, for us to be able to accept without qualification the statement: "Brecht's political sympathies had always lain with the oppressed, the poor, the exploited." (p. 32) To pass from a consideration of specific strong and weak points of Mr. Wulbern's book, I would say of the book as a whole that it is a modest but worthy extension of our critical understanding of these two playwrights. It does not, however, either exhaust the topic of the interrelationship of the French and the German dramatists or render obsolete the excellent earlier work of Reinhold Grimm, Ruby Cohn, Martin Esslin, Rosette Lamont, and Agnes Hufner in this seminal but difficult topic area. JOHN FUEGI .University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee BRENDAN~ by Ulick O'Connor. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 328 pp.$6.95. The publication of books about Brendan Behan does not spring from his reputati ()n ·as a writer, but shows the public is turning him into a tragic drunk, like . Dylan Thomas, and an amusing voluble Irishman, like St John Gogarty. Actually th~re is little that is picturesque about Behan's story. We already have three bio- . graphical accounts: The World of Brendan Behan~ edited by Sean McCann (New York, 1966), numerous reminiscences which build a convincing picture; Dominic Behan's My Brother Brendan (London, 1965), which tells us more about Dominic himself than about his brother; and Rae Jeffe's devoted account of the last years, Brendan Behan: Man and Showman (London, 1966). O'Connor's full, popular biography, with very few notes, will hopefully be the last. Behan's writing is limited to two worthwhile plays, the memorable autobiography Borstal Boy, various fragments, and scrappy tape-recorded work. O'Connor adds to this some Gaelic poetry Behan wrote in his twenties, which he translates, and the early short story, "The Confirmation Suit" (in Brendan Behan's Island). which he compares with Maupassant. O'Connor usefully describes the deletions from The Quare Fellow made by Joan Littlewood for her London production, which he contends weaken the play. He gives more space to The Hostage, showing how Littlewood's version was inferior to the original Gaelic text, An Giall. He concludes: "An Giall had its roots in Ballyferriter, the Blaskets and the Atlantic; The Hostage in a commercial entertainment world Brendan had no real contact with. It was, in a sense, a betrayal not only of the I.R.A. whom he guyed in the play but of the instinct which led him to write the first version, the composition 486 MODERN DRAMA February of the artist for a human predicament he could personally identify with." Clearly we need a full account of Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop. Behan wrote little in the six years he lived after completing The Hostage: O'Connor describes the unpublished, incomplete Richard's Cork Leg, mostly irreverent jokes fired off at random. He does not attempt much criticism; rather, he gives facts and quotes texts and reviews. The atmosphere is often rich as O'Connor guides us through the various phases-years of jail, Paris in the late forties with such acquaintances...