Free Algren at Sea by Nelson Algren Page A

driving wind and slating rain, with fog coming in from the sea and mist coming up through the floor, it was sunny enough in The Floating Ballroom withal, and the sun shone even more brightly at news that local parties had thrown a sleeper across the rails of the train to Belfast and derailed it that same afternoon of slating rain. Every time the I.R.A. tosses a sleeper across the rails in hope that whoever gets his back broken may be from Belfast, The Ancient Nation is that much closer to unification, I gathered, looking at my Guinness a bit closer.
    â€œYou don’t necessarily achieve a goal by stepping directly toward it,” Mr. Montague sensed my doubts. “Look at the Algerians.”
    I hadn’t realized until that moment that the F.L.N. was going about matters indirectly. Yet I had gotten wind of an address made in French by Behan, appropriately enough on the Rue des Martyrs, demanding that the F.L.N. begin to emulate the I.R.A. Meaning, I take it, that they should give more thought to the possibilities of dramatizing their revolution for the European stage. Less people get hurt onstage than in street fighting.
    â€œWe’ve been banjaxed,” was how Montague put it.
    â€œFughed,” Behan explained, “from a height.”
    Run over by the British economy like a truck over a biscuit tin.
    For the Irish dissipate their violence. They make war like the American Indian, like schoolboys, blowing up monuments that no longer stand for anything and then going home; as though unable to sustain a hostility. They upset everyone with their skirmishes, while the English keep a general goodwill on their side by the control they exert over their own violence. The fact is that the English are a much more violent tribe than the Irish, but the Irish have all the bad manners.
    â€œI can tell a Protestant half a mile off by his walk,” Montague disposed of all issues in one.

    â€œO death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling,” I hummed, “O grave where is thy victory?”
    â€œIf that tie is el-ectrified,” Montague accused me, “when is it going to light up?”
    â€œI’m told the Irish are a vanishing race,” I replied, “but I don’t see anyone here leaving.”
    â€œShe has one son dead and the other vanished”—Mrs. Behan nodded toward Aunt Maggie —“vanished.”
    The great Irish trick is to take care to hate most that which is farthest; so as not to be obliged to do anyone harm. Had the wise old warning, “Hit him again, he’s Irish,” not been invented before Brendan Behan was born, it would have been needed at that moment. Where most men have a chin Behan has a challenge attached to a face constructed deliberately for provoking blows. Thus it deploys defiance while concealing pity. And hence his intellectual belief in the class struggle is modified by his emotional conviction that the only class is Mankind.
    Not so many people get hurt that way either.
    â€œI was nearer to them,” he tells of the English inmates of Borstal who, like himself, had come from working-class homes, “than they would ever let Ken be. I had the same rearing as most of them, Dublin, Liverpool, Glasgow, London. All our mothers had done the pawn-pledging on Monday, releasing on Saturday. We all knew the chip shop and the picture house and the fourpenny rush of a Saturday afternoon, and the summer swimming in the canal and being chased along the railway by the cops.
    â€œBut Ken they would never accept. In a way, as the middle class and upperclass in England spend so much money and energy in maintaining the difference between themselves and the working class, Ken was only getting what his people had paid for, for he was more of a foreigner than I, and it’s a lonely thing to be a stranger in a strange land.”
    For some reason unclear to myself, I launched into a long discourse on the career of