Monday, Jul. 29, 1957

Jig on the Trap

THE QUARE FELLOW (86 pp.)--Brendan Behan--Grove Press (clothbound $2.75; paperbound $1.25).

REFLECTIONS ON HANGING (231 pp.)--Arthur Koestler--Macmillan ($4.50).

There are those to whom the scaffold is a pulpit and those to whom it is the stage for a ghoulish Punch-and-Judy show. One of the pulpiteers is Britain's ex-Hungarian, ex-Communist Arthur Koestler, whose brilliant contribution to the campaign for the abolition of hanging in Britain has been published in the U.S. To Koestler (who languished for months under sentence of death in a Franco prison), hanging is no joke. To Dublin's Brendan Behan it can be.

In The Quare Fellow, a Manhattan-bound three-act play that won critical applause in London last year, Irish Puppeteer Behan performs a farcical jig on the trap in the Hanging and Flogging wing of a prison remarkably like Dublin's Mountjoy Prison. His "Quare Fellow," who never appears in the play, is one of two men waiting for the public hangman to come from Britain to execute them for murder. One, whom the prisoners call "Silver-top," had beaten his wife to death with a walking stick. The Quare Fellow had killed his brother and, using his skill as a butcher, drained the brother's blood into a crock. Silvertop is reprieved (and thereupon tries to hang himself in his cell), but the Quare Fellow is doomed.

Birdlime in a Dell. It sounds like dismal stuff, but from the first lines of this play the Irish language contrasts with modern stage English as a cage of songbirds contrasts with a yardful of hens, and the reader is quickly caught in a Grand McGuignol of fatalist humor. Like Koestler, rumpled, mountainous Author Behan, 34, knows prison bars from the inside; he was sentenced in his teens to an English reformatory for dropping I.R.A. explosives into London mailboxes, has spent in all eight years in prison for assorted violence on behalf of Irish freedom. His dialogue flourishes with a knowledgeability of prison slang--a cell is a "flowery dell" and time is "birdlime"--and makes engaging capital of the peculiar snobbery of the penitentiary in which the long-termers, or lags, have social precedence over the young or first-term offenders.

There are comic scenes that approach the .best in Sean O'Casey, as when a shrewd old lag with a game leg solicits a massage from a warder in order to get drunk on rubbing alcohol. "Which leg is it?" asks the warder. "To be on the safe side," says Convict Dunlavin, "you'd have to do two of them. It's only the mercy of God I'm not a centipede, sir ... Ah, that's massive, sir. 'Tis you that has the healing hand." The warder turns, and Dunlavin sneaks a great swig from the alcohol bottle. "That's it, sir, thorough does it ... May God reward you, sir, you must be the seventh son of the seventh son of one of the Lees from Limerick on your mother's side maybe. [Drinks again.') Ah, that's the cure for the cold of the wind and the world's neglectment."

Dig for Snout. Beneath the farcical, Playwright Behan's point is as serious as that of Polemicist Koestler, and even before the action builds to its sickening offstage climax with the drop of the trap and "the screeches and roars of them" in the rest of the prison, it is apparent that playwright and polemicist agree. The prisoners laugh at their keepers, at themselves, even at the Quare Fellow's predicament. In this way, Brendan Behan laughs at the society that thinks that by taking men's lives, it improves itself. At the grave, which they have eagerly dug for the customary reward of some snout (tobacco), four prisoners perform a final act reminiscent of the division of spoils on Calvary long ago. It is the prison custom not to send on the condemned man's last letters, but to bury them with him. As they are dropped in the grave, the prisoners grab for them. "Give us them bloody letters," says one. "They're worth money to one of the Sunday papers."

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