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Details
The literary and personal archive of Brendan Behan (1923-1964).
Autograph manuscripts and typescripts for plays (including The Landlady, The Quare Fellow, The Hostage, The Catacombs, and Richard’s Cork Leg), autobiographical accounts (including Borstal Boy and Confessions of an Irish Rebel), short stories and articles (chiefly on political themes), comprising 10 autograph manuscript drafts for single works, and c.131 pages of fragmentary autograph and typed notes and drafts, 4 autograph notebooks, and approximately 35 typescripts (around half with autograph annotations); also approximately 14 letters and notes from Behan, with 11 pieces of his received correspondence, including a telegram from Tennessee Williams; and further ephemera, including pen sketches; c.1943-1963. In English and Gaelic, approximately 85 pieces, c.1,500 pages in total. Provenance: by descent.
The pre-eminent archive of one of Ireland’s seminal 20th-century writers, which brings together his most important literary and autobiographical works, and covers the vast majority of his writing career, including the important prison years. The collection also preserves a significant proportion of the small number of surviving letters sent by the writer, alongside evocative ephemera. Behan holdings in public collections are scant and scattered: the present papers comprise almost all of his surviving work.
Brendan Behan’s death from alcohol-induced illness at the age of 41 brought a premature end to a meteoric career, which, despite a relatively small oeuvre, had brought worldwide recognition – his dramatic works, including The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, opened to rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, while Borstal Boy, the first of the autobiographical works presenting his extraordinary life story, received universal acclaim when it was published in 1958. Yet leading the most public of private lives took its toll on this self-proclaimed ‘drinker with a writing problem’. The man ranked by Kenneth Tynan as a potential successor to Sean O’Casey, and one of the most important chroniclers of the mid-century Irish experience, left behind a body of plays, short stories and autobiographical accounts that, at their best, are full of what his biographer Michael O’Sullivan describes as a ‘life-celebrating ebullience and fury’ that still resonates today.
The papers collected here span the vast majority of Behan’s career as a writer, which began uncommonly early. As an enthusiastic member of Fianna Éireann, the junior branch of the IRA, he was writing for their newsletters from an early age, ardent love-letters to the republican cause, often inspired by his personal hero, Wolfe Tone. Much of his later adolescence and early adulthood was spent in English or Irish institutions, initially borstals and then prisons, first for travelling to Liverpool, aged just 16, on a solo bomb-planting mission born of his frustration at the IRA’s refusal to deploy him, and then for shooting at a policeman during a 1942 demonstration, when he was sentenced to 14 years (of which he eventually served four).
As the present archive demonstrates, his incarcerations in no way put a stop to his writing, and this second period of imprisonment marks a crucial transition in Behan’s life between his tearaway youth and his adulthood as a writer of stature. The substantial body of manuscripts from this period which survive in the present archive and which have hitherto been unknown to scholars comprise a major discovery: these include a copybook containing what appears to be the earliest preparatory draft for Borstal Boy, written in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, in 1948.
The major achievements of the following 16 years before Behan’s premature death are marked by a series of substantial literary drafts, comprising either preliminary notes and drafts or completed manuscripts of The Quare Fellow (the only autograph manuscript for this work to survive in any collection), An Giall [The Hostage], Borstal Boy, and Confessions of an Irish Rebel, as well as his first play, The Landlady. In the context of Behan’s chaotic writing methods and his notoriously destructive treatment of his manuscripts, the survival of such substantial literary drafts is remarkable. The three manuscripts for Borstal Boy which are offered here (two substantial annotated typescripts in addition to the Mountjoy Prison draft) deserve particular notice – Behan would later insist that his editors destroy any manuscript copies of the unedited version of his autobiography, and Beatrice Behan recalled scooping sheaves of rejected drafts for the work out of the fire into which he had tipped them. Until now, the only known manuscript for Borstal Boy had been the 12-page draft which survives at the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
In addition to these more developed drafts, the unpublished notebooks and unsorted drafts offer significant insight into Behan’s creative method, and the typed material in the present archive, including many embryonic typed fragments of works which were subsequently abandoned, is of particular interest: typing appears to have been, for Brendan, a direct extension of the creative thought process. These are complemented by manuscripts and typescripts for articles and essays, together with a group of evocative ephemera.
The slender collections of Behan’s work that exist in public institutions worldwide are in the main limited to secondary holdings relating to the staging of his plays, and no institution holds more than ten items emanating directly from his hand. The approximately 1,500 pages of the papers now offered for sale undoubtedly represent the pre-eminent archive of Brendan Behan’s life and work, apparently comprising everything that passed into the possession of his widow, Beatrice, and barely touched since his death.
For a full listing of the archive, please contact the Books Department.
Autograph manuscripts and typescripts for plays (including The Landlady, The Quare Fellow, The Hostage, The Catacombs, and Richard’s Cork Leg), autobiographical accounts (including Borstal Boy and Confessions of an Irish Rebel), short stories and articles (chiefly on political themes), comprising 10 autograph manuscript drafts for single works, and c.131 pages of fragmentary autograph and typed notes and drafts, 4 autograph notebooks, and approximately 35 typescripts (around half with autograph annotations); also approximately 14 letters and notes from Behan, with 11 pieces of his received correspondence, including a telegram from Tennessee Williams; and further ephemera, including pen sketches; c.1943-1963. In English and Gaelic, approximately 85 pieces, c.1,500 pages in total. Provenance: by descent.
The pre-eminent archive of one of Ireland’s seminal 20th-century writers, which brings together his most important literary and autobiographical works, and covers the vast majority of his writing career, including the important prison years. The collection also preserves a significant proportion of the small number of surviving letters sent by the writer, alongside evocative ephemera. Behan holdings in public collections are scant and scattered: the present papers comprise almost all of his surviving work.
Brendan Behan’s death from alcohol-induced illness at the age of 41 brought a premature end to a meteoric career, which, despite a relatively small oeuvre, had brought worldwide recognition – his dramatic works, including The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, opened to rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, while Borstal Boy, the first of the autobiographical works presenting his extraordinary life story, received universal acclaim when it was published in 1958. Yet leading the most public of private lives took its toll on this self-proclaimed ‘drinker with a writing problem’. The man ranked by Kenneth Tynan as a potential successor to Sean O’Casey, and one of the most important chroniclers of the mid-century Irish experience, left behind a body of plays, short stories and autobiographical accounts that, at their best, are full of what his biographer Michael O’Sullivan describes as a ‘life-celebrating ebullience and fury’ that still resonates today.
The papers collected here span the vast majority of Behan’s career as a writer, which began uncommonly early. As an enthusiastic member of Fianna Éireann, the junior branch of the IRA, he was writing for their newsletters from an early age, ardent love-letters to the republican cause, often inspired by his personal hero, Wolfe Tone. Much of his later adolescence and early adulthood was spent in English or Irish institutions, initially borstals and then prisons, first for travelling to Liverpool, aged just 16, on a solo bomb-planting mission born of his frustration at the IRA’s refusal to deploy him, and then for shooting at a policeman during a 1942 demonstration, when he was sentenced to 14 years (of which he eventually served four).
As the present archive demonstrates, his incarcerations in no way put a stop to his writing, and this second period of imprisonment marks a crucial transition in Behan’s life between his tearaway youth and his adulthood as a writer of stature. The substantial body of manuscripts from this period which survive in the present archive and which have hitherto been unknown to scholars comprise a major discovery: these include a copybook containing what appears to be the earliest preparatory draft for Borstal Boy, written in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, in 1948.
The major achievements of the following 16 years before Behan’s premature death are marked by a series of substantial literary drafts, comprising either preliminary notes and drafts or completed manuscripts of The Quare Fellow (the only autograph manuscript for this work to survive in any collection), An Giall [The Hostage], Borstal Boy, and Confessions of an Irish Rebel, as well as his first play, The Landlady. In the context of Behan’s chaotic writing methods and his notoriously destructive treatment of his manuscripts, the survival of such substantial literary drafts is remarkable. The three manuscripts for Borstal Boy which are offered here (two substantial annotated typescripts in addition to the Mountjoy Prison draft) deserve particular notice – Behan would later insist that his editors destroy any manuscript copies of the unedited version of his autobiography, and Beatrice Behan recalled scooping sheaves of rejected drafts for the work out of the fire into which he had tipped them. Until now, the only known manuscript for Borstal Boy had been the 12-page draft which survives at the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
In addition to these more developed drafts, the unpublished notebooks and unsorted drafts offer significant insight into Behan’s creative method, and the typed material in the present archive, including many embryonic typed fragments of works which were subsequently abandoned, is of particular interest: typing appears to have been, for Brendan, a direct extension of the creative thought process. These are complemented by manuscripts and typescripts for articles and essays, together with a group of evocative ephemera.
The slender collections of Behan’s work that exist in public institutions worldwide are in the main limited to secondary holdings relating to the staging of his plays, and no institution holds more than ten items emanating directly from his hand. The approximately 1,500 pages of the papers now offered for sale undoubtedly represent the pre-eminent archive of Brendan Behan’s life and work, apparently comprising everything that passed into the possession of his widow, Beatrice, and barely touched since his death.
For a full listing of the archive, please contact the Books Department.
Brought to you by
Emily Pilling