Thanks Be To Joyce: Brendan Behan à Paris

Abstract

Late in his novel The Scarperer, Brendan Behan introduces a pair of characters — an Anglo-Irish dowager and her niece, Nancy, a student in Paris — who essentially leverage the deus ex machina ending that he needed to escape his entertaining but intrinsically flawed narrative. In the process, Behan incidentally takes a page out of the writings of two of his fellow men-of-letters of so-called Bohemian Dublin of the 1940s and ‘50s. Poet Patrick Kavanagh and multi-monikered Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien each cast a skeptical and sardonic eye on the Joyce industry that emerged in the wake of the Second World War, in part, as a byproduct of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (also known as the G.I. Bill) through which the U.S. Government financed education for American veterans of the War. ‘Who killed James Joyce?’ Kavanagh asked (and answered) in a poem he wrote for the special Joyce-centered issue of Envoy published in 1951: ‘I, said the commentator, / I killed James Joyce / For my graduation.’ Kavanagh then goes on to identify students from Harvard and Yale as particular culprits, along with one who ‘got a scholarship / To Trinity College.’¹ O’Nolan/O’Brien struck a similar note in the same issue of Envoy: ‘Perhaps the true fascination of Joyce lies in his secretiveness, his ambiguity (his polyguity, perhaps?), his leg-pulling, his dishonesties, his technical skill, his attraction for Americans.’²