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Brendan Behan: A Life Hardcover – October 10, 2000

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Michael O'Sullivan (Author)
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3.6 out of 5 stars 8 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 354 pages
  • Publisher: Roberts Rinehart (October 10, 2000)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1568331878
  • ISBN-13: 978-1568331874
  • Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 1.3 x 9.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,411,892 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsChronicles a talented writer's near-legendary life
By Midwest Book Review on April 28, 2001
Format: Hardcover
Brendan Behan: A Life chronicles a talented writer's near-legendary life and illustrates why Behan became one of Ireland's most celebrated artists. Compiled from a wide variety of sources which included prison documents, interviews with family and friends, editors and contemporaries, biographer Michael O'Sullivan was able to present a lucid and vivid introduction to the complex personal world of a genuine literary genius. Brendan Behan: A Life is a "must" for those who appreciate the contributions, influence and work of this unusual and gifted literary figure of modern Irish literature.
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4.0 out of 5 starsBrendan Behan, a (tortured) Life
By Byrne Hourihane on April 13, 2009
Format: Hardcover
Pointedly brief, O'Sullivan's title for this latest biography of Brendan Behan speaks volumes about the bad boy of recent Irish letters. Not quite life tragic, yet certainly not life triumphant, O'Sullivan lets the reader plod through and decide what it was. Who would, after all, pay for worldwide literary claim and fame by spending half of their adult existence in prison?

To begin, O'Sullivan lays the blame for Behan's crippling alcoholism at the feet of his grandmother, a family matriarch who doted on Brendan and had him swilling pints of Guinness by age six. Using a curious theory of child rearing, Granny English believed that early imbibing actually prevented alcohol dependency in later life. Kethleen Behan, Brendan's mother, resented her mother's influence on the family but was inexplicably powerless to halt it.

In the background stood Brendan's father Stephen, a peripheral player for the fledgling Irish Republican Army in the Dublin of the 1920s. If nothing else Behan's father instilled in him a love of literature and a hatred of the British and their Free State cronies, a hatred which was monumentally critical in shaping Brendan's later life.

By age sixteen Brendan Behan was a young man of obvious intelligence and writing ability, yet also a young man likened by his IRA counterparts to a loaded pistol with the safety off. O'Sullivan lays bare Behan's misplaced republican idealism, idealism that saw him land in one of Britain's Borstal Correctional Institutes after docking in Liverpool with a suitcase of explosives and not a satisfactory account for them.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsA Dubliner on the lefthand path
By Sean O Nuallain on January 19, 2015
Format: Hardcover
There are several ways into BB's tragic, short and under-achieving life and it is to O'Sullivan's credit that this book opens all of them for us. The first is perhaps new; it is Hamilton's view of him as marked by god, born under a bad sign, Thomas Merton, endowed with a similar literary talent and addictive personality, chose the Trappist order as a way to preserve his talent. It is noticeable that Behan is most at home in contexts paradoxical for such a stage Dub; the Gaeltacht; Paris; and Garech Browne's gracious mansion in Wicklow. Ike Merton, Behan wrote substantial work only while incarcerated and switched to the tape recorder after only a few years of “freedom”

A second, related issue is the roll-call of tragedy from Behan's “dead as doornails” generation; his friend O Riada dead also in his early 40's; O Nuallain, mid-50's; Kavanagh mid 60's. Move forward a generation and Gallagher and Lynott continue the tradition; Dublin is a most dangerous place for an artist.

A third route is the absolutisms he grew up with; a 32 county Ireland both free and Gaelic. His devotion to the Irish language is a powerful theme here in this book In the early 1990's, Dan Ryan, OC of the IRA in West Clare, was laid to rest. His family refused permission for the gun-volley send-off. Behan received one; there is no reason to doubt that he remained an IRA member all his life.

This despite the “love” of the English which, one guesses, was rather forced on him in the Borstals. It is horrible to watch the subsequent tragedy unfold, and it is to the credit of O'Sullivan that one does not doubt from halfway through that nothing but ill will ensue from “notoriety” which has a darker valence in the English which Behan mastered in the footsteps of his cultured father
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4.0 out of 5 starsBrendan Behan Warts and All
By R. J. Marsella on February 21, 2013
Format: Hardcover
Few writers could have had as rough a start as Behan and yet he seemed to draw on his early experiences as fuel for the writing that made him famous. This well researched biography details Behan's early life as a failed IRA operative who ends up in Borstal at 16. After release his attempted shooting of Police officers has him on the run and ultimately locked up again. His drinking is shown to be rooted in early influences of his family and his confused sexuality is also examined. He is ultimately a tragic figure and none of his flaws are overlooked here. Few figures are more representative of the debilitating ravages of excessive drink than Behan.
Behan had remarkable success as a playwright and author and his works are as intrinsically Irish as any of the many great authors Ireland has produced. Reading this biography was valuable in enhancing my appreciation for his work and inspired me to go back and reread his own words. This is really a fine biography that gives a true perspective into Behan as a human being not just as a writer.
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