Word: borstal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Where Borstal Boy ended, Confessions begins: the teen-age I.R.A. demolitions expert, discharged from British reform school and launched on the short, sputtering, sodden, prison-checkered career that led down a hill to fame and death. It reads like a drunk shouting in a pub, happy as only such a man can be, and only half-remembering, not entirely clear in his mind what he wants to say. But the infectious Behan rhythm is unmistakable, and so is the Behan tongue. Mountjoy Prison, Strangeways Jail, bouts on the Left Bank, a party for a colleen celebrating her abortion, pimping...
Brendan Behan lost his battle with "the gargle," the two quarts of Irish whisky, chased by floods of Guinness stout, that he drank every day he was able. Some said it was a sad, wasted life, over at 41, but the Borstal Boy never said it. He was never that far gone that he couldn't knock out the stray book or play-the best of them, such as The Hostage and The Scarperer, being very good indeed, and the worst of them throbbing, at least, with that high, rollicking rebel spirit that made Behan different from other skins...
...Behan Borstal...
Died. Brendan Francis Behan, 41, professional Irish tosspot and boyo terrible, semiprofessional writer of wit and distinction, a pudgy, rumpled, onetime juvenile terrorist for the I.R.A. who staggered into the limelight in 1958 with his scabrous reform-school memoir, Borstal Boy, two brilliantly nihilistic plays of Dublin low jinks, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, but despite faint, repeated vows to stay "off the gargle" subsequently squandered his fireworks in binges from Los Angeles to London; of diabetes, jaundice and acute alcoholism; in Dublin...
...Ragman's Daughter is a finely machined narrative that illustrates the virtues and defects of Sillitoe's work. A young spiv describes his lovely nasty life in the golden months when he is headed for Borstal (reform school) but has not yet arrived there. Love intrudes, in the form of the nubile daughter of the local ragman (U.S. "junk dealer"), a rich man who drives a Jaguar and provides his daughter with a chestnut filly, which she rides about the slum. She and our hero fall to stealing things-just for kicks in her case. Their shared criminality...