The Thumb in the Stew

CONFESSIONS OF AN IRISH REBEL by Brendan Behan. 245 pages. Bernard Geis. $4.95.

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. He was indeed a fine doorful of a man, as a friend said of him once, and the sight of him there in it, showing a grin that was all the more devilish for lacking teeth, was ever enough to warm the kindred heart.

Downhill to Fame. Confessions of an Irish Rebel is one of Behan's worst books, but it is the last of him there is, the last there'll ever be. In 1957, knowing his wild ways, his British publisher assigned a publicity manager to keep him sober long enough to write. Dogging her charge across two continents, locking up the gargle every day till 3 p.m., Mrs. Rae Jeffs got three books out of him before he died. One was Brendan Behan's New York, published in 1964, a love song to that city; one was Brendan Behan's Island--the Ould Sod, what else? And the third was this. In prying this one out of Behan, Mrs. Jeffs didn't have the half of a time. He talked it all into a tape recorder, she blushing the while, and when the gargle put him under before he could read what he had done, Mrs. Jeffs saw it through into print with minimal editing.

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 in Harry's New York Bar in Paris, painting lighthouses, doping greyhounds, springing an I.R.A. mate from a British nick--all of this is mixed together every which way like an Irish stew. The stirrer has his thumb in the pot; it improves the taste.

A Writer's Duty. "My father would read to us," he says, remembering a literary childhood, "for the four nights of the week when he didn't have enough money for beer." A woman magistrate, trying Behan for something or other, "had a face like Harris tweed." He shows no stomach for the lot of the ' workingman: "Someone that does j things that are dirty, boring, dangerous or all three." He knows a writer's duty: "To let his Fatherland down, otherwise he is no writer. In the name of Jesus, how the hell can a writer attack anyone else's Fatherland if he doesn't attack his own?"

"Look, Beatrice," he says in the end to the girl he would marry, "you know, I'm really respectable." Says she: "I don't care whether you're respectable or not. I just happen to like you." It is a fair way to take Brendan Behan and the only way to take his last book.

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