Brendan Behan Remembered [Terence Winch]

There’s a picture of Brendan Behan standing outside the Dublin Zoo with a bemused look on his face and a large snake curled around his neck.  The photo reveals much about Brendan, who died 55 years ago today, on March 20, 1964, at the age of forty-one. He was a comedian who liked to shock people and who wasn’t afraid to take chances.  He was an unstoppable ham who would do nearly anything to entertain his audience.  His life, or legend, nearly overshadowed his work in its claim on public attention.  His fans were sometimes more interested in the snake around his neck than in his writing.

He was a man of many talents, with the charm and magnetism of a movie star.  An accomplished singer who knew hundreds, maybe thousands, of songs, Brendan came from a musical background—his father played the fiddle, his uncle wrote the Irish National Anthem, his brother Dominic wrote “The Patriot Game,” one of the best-loved Irish songs to come out of Ireland’s struggles.  Brendan himself composed many songs, some of which are part of his plays and one which he claimed was written with a threatening pistol at his head.  He was fluent in the Irish language and wrote the first version of The Hostage (an Giall) as Gaeilge.  He had lived in France, spoke good French, and claimed to have written pornography in Paris. He was precocious writer, turning out reasonably good verse as early as age nine.  He first started drinking when he was a boy, so his two major activities in later life—drinking and writing—were off to an early start.

As he grew older and more famous, his taste for “the gargle” took greater hold of him.  In his late twenties and early thirties, when he was turning out the work on which his reputation would ultimately rest, he was capable of long periods of hard work without any intake of alcohol.  But as he conquered the public with his brilliant memoir Borstal Boy and his two best plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, he lost the stamina to keep on producing work of the same stature.   His public demanded the famous tough-talking funny Irish writer, and Brendan hated to disappoint a ready audience. It wasn’t, of course, all the public’s fault.  Brendan loved pub life, good times, music, talk.  He was certainly aware of how he was ruining himself and his future as a writer, but that awareness was no match for his thirst.  

As a boy and young man he was a political extremist, having taken part in a 1939-40 IRA bombing campaign (one with numerous parallels to the later IRA bombings that were part of the Troubles in Northern Ireland) in Britain, where he was arrested in Liverpool at the age of sixteen and sentenced to three years in borstal (something like reform school). Although he had abandoned active participation in the IRA by the time he was an established writer, the same wild and rebellious spirit that landed him in borstal—and in an Irish prison for his part in a shoot-out between the Irish police and the IRA less than a year after his release from borstal—also landed him in numerous bars on both sides of the Atlantic, wherein he challenged his health rather than the established order.  It was in the pubs that he played Brendan Behan, the famous ex-con with a big mouth and great talent. 

Ultimately, the booze got the best of him.  Friends, family, doctors, editors—many of the people in his life—tried to help him control his need for drink.  But he wasn’t up to the task.  There was a public hungry for the character Brendan Behan had created, and he wanted to come through for his fans.  His drinking, though it was bringing him closer to an early death with every passing day, was also a central element of his public act.  Towards the end he was in and out of hospitals frequently. His wife Beatrice, or some friend perhaps, would discover him unconscious in his hotel room in a diabetic coma and rush him to a hospital.  He amazed medical people with his powers of recovery and disheartened those who loved him with his many drunken escapades and self-destructive compulsions.  Much of his talent was destroyed along with his liver, so that at the end he was almost a parody of himself, trying desperately to live up to his reputation as legendary raconteur and tireless literary comedian.

His life was full of contradictions.  He hated and feared death and didn’t even like the subject brought up in his presence.  Yet he destroyed himself at an age when he should have been just reaching the peak of his powers as an artist.  He was known throughout the world as a brawling macho Irishman, yet he was also bisexual and wrote at least one early story, unearthed by Ulick O’Connor in his fine biography of Brendan, which can clearly be categorized as gay.  Even Borstal Boy includes many touching scenes (no pun intended) among the imprisoned boys that are obviously sexual in nature.  Brendan apparently worried about what a public revelation of his sexual complexities would do to his image, but such an expose never occurred in his lifetime.

Brendan’s last books were all spoken into a tape recorder and later put together with the help of his devoted editor, Rae Jeffs.  He had lost the ability to sit down at a typewriter and work at his craft.  In the end, Brendan was in the hospital, dying of alcoholism, when he got hold of some drink through a misguided visitor.  That apparently finished him off.  There were to be no more miraculous recoveries. 

Borstal Boy was Brendan’s masterpiece, the book in which, as they say, he found his voice. In the making over a period of many years, it displays all Brendan’s talents as a story-teller and humorist.  A moving account of his life from his arrest in Liverpool to his release from borstal and return to Ireland, the book is put together with exacting skill and literary vitality. Borstal Boy is in the tradition of portraits of the artist as a young man and rivals Joyce’s more highly regarded Portrait.  If Brendan had gone on to write something approaching the brilliance of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, Borstal Boy would perhaps have a higher rank in literary history than it now enjoys. 

The best-known of his plays, which are both performed from time to time, are The Quare Fellow and the Hostage. They are first-rate works that clearly demonstrate Brendan’s gift for dialogue and his ability to create authentic human drama.  The rest of his output—more plays, two “travel” books, a novel, and a follow-up to Borstal Boy are second-rate only in comparison to Borstal Boy and the two major plays. 

When I was a high school kid in the 1960s, my two favorite writers were James Baldwin and Brendan Behan. I couldn’t get enough of their work. I was thrilled when Brendan released two LPs back in those days. In fact, I pretty much memorized Brendan Behan Sings Irish Folksongs and Ballads, so much so that I can  still instantly summon up his voice in my mind any time night or day. (Photo below: Visiting Brendan at his permanent residence in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, Oct. 2016; photo by Dominick Murray.)

Comments

[Cathy Strodel]

Thanks for this. Going to get a copy of Borstal Boy today!

[Indran Amirthanayagam]

Brilliant Terence. You bring Brendan Behan back roaring. Interesting to recall the similarities with another great raconteur who fell early to booze, Dylan Thomas.

[Dan / Blood And]

It's always heartbreaking to read about someone who lived with such vitality but couldn't control a dark impulse (to drink excessively) and ended up destroying him or herself. This is a fine tribute, thanks for posting it. One of the songs he sang -- from The Hostage -- was "Don't Muck About With The Moon." Indeed. We should not (muck about)! I'd love to find a copy of that record.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Dan. You can find the LP on Ebay, I think.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Indran. Yes---Brendan & Dylan led parallel lives for sure. I sometimes have to think for a moment as to whether it was Beatrice Behan or Caitlin Thomas who wrote Leftover Life to Kill.

[Terence Winch]

I hope I didn't over-hype it for you, Cathy.

[richie piggott]

Excellent Terence...your piece also brings back happy memories of reading Anthony Cronin's "Dead as Doornails". A must read for those who have not!

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Richie. I've never gotten around to Dead as Doornails, but always meant to. Maybe now I will.

[Dominick]

Excellent Terence. I, too, am grateful for your posts. Borstal Boy is one of the first books I remember reading, and you've reminded me of that delight. Thanks man.

[Terence Winch]

I'm grateful to you for guiding me through the labyrinth of Glasnevin to Behan's grave & for taking that photo.

[lally]

brilliant as always terence, though you have the year of his death wrong, it was 1964, I know because I was in the military at the time and used the excuse of one of my favorite writer's death to go on a drunken binge that lasted a few days, but thankfully later that same year I was led to a solution for my uncontrollable drinking so didn't suffer the same fate...

[Noel Fahey]

Lovely piece, Terry, that captures the triumphs, contradictions and tragedy of BB's life. The one thing I would add to your picture is some more on the extraordinary role of his long-suffering supportive wife, the unlikely Beatrice ffrench-Salkeld.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-beatrice-behan-1498024.html

https://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/925-brendan-behan/317467-brendan-behan-the-writer-the-rebel-and-the-rollicking-boy/

[Noel Fahey]

P.S. I heartily concur with someone else's mention of Cronin'sDead as Doornails and also his Life of Riley.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Noel. I have her book here, and read it long ago. She definitely had much to contend with.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for catching that error. Mistakes were made!

[Howard Bass]

Thanks, Terry. I read Borstal Boy when I was in high school, when I was also addicted to Dylan Thomas, and this post spurs me to read it again sometime soon. I saw a terrific staging of The Hostage at a theater in Ashland, Oregon, some decades back. My friend Bo was a musician for the show, and he and his fellow players would periodically rise up on some kind of elevator from below the stage level, play a tune or two, and then get lowered back down below the stage--in itself that was amusing, and my memory tells me that the play itself was stirring and heartbreaking.

[The Best American Poetry]

Terence: Which Behan play was it that Frank O'Hara thinks of buying in "The Day Lady Died"? DL

[Terence Winch]

DL: No, I don't know. Will you tell us? But I'm very happy you reminded me of Brendan's appearance in this great O'Hara poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWiB2bmDa4I

[Terence Winch]

I wish a local theater company would do a production of one of his plays. I remember seeing a play about Behan in New York in the late '60s---it amazed me how much the actor playing him looked and sounded like the man himself. Spooky. Can't remember the name of either the play or the actor.

[Jennifer O’Riordan]

Go raibh maith agat as seo, a Terence.
Scríofa go hálainn. Suimiúil mar is gnách. Ag foghlaim uait i gcónaí.
Treise leat.

[Terence Winch]

Go raibh maith agat, banríon na Gaeilge. I have learned a lot from you chomh maith.

[Susan Francis Campbell]

Wonderful piece, as always. I think I'll read Borstal Boy again. xo

[Terence Winch]

Thank you, Ms. Campbell.

[Micahel O'Keefe]

Well done Terrence.

[Gerald Fleming]

What a wonderful essay, Terence Winch.