Word: behan
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BORSTAL BOY (372 pp.)-Brendan Behan-Knopf...
...latest addition to the Eton-Harrow-Rugby tradition deals with Borstal,*an equally exclusive institution reserved for young English criminals. Brendan Behan, a Borstal Old Boy, has written about his three years in Borstal tie and short, school-uniform pants ("like a bleedin' boy scout"). The second published work (1958) by an author known in the U.S. chiefly for his play, The Quare Fellow (TIME, Dec. 8), Borstal Boy is a rousing reform-school saga...
...name is Brendan Behan...
...Quare Fellow is Irish prison slang for a condemned man. Around the imminent hanging of such a man, who himself never appears on stage, Irish Playwright Brendan Behan, sometime I.R.A. man and jailbird (see SHOW BUSINESS), has set down a clearly on-the-spot account. As in that memoir of another Irish Prisoner-Playwright, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Quare Fellow records the atmosphere, the emotions, the tensions of convicts and gaolers as execution nears. But, in Behan's play, as atmospheric pressure mounts, the need for outlets intensifies. Voices are raised, and fists; a half-brutal, half...
...condemned man has not saved his cigarette butts, betting their Sunday bacon on whether the quare fellow will hang, greedily rushing the guard carrying the quare fellow's last dinner, fighting in the quare fellow's grave over his salable last letters. As a large-scale muralist, Behan lacks concentration and power; as a thumbnail etcher, he is at his vividest first-rate...