A QUARE FELLOW
From the Broadway stage to the life of a bowsie, our writer examines the duality of Brendan Behan ahead of his centenary
WHEN it came to summing up Brendan Behan, no one did it better than Brendan himself. ‘I’m a drinker with writing problems,’ he once said, and it was true.
At the start of his career, which rose like a firework to a dazzling apogee before bursting into pieces that quickly fizzled out, he was best known as a poet and playwright who conquered the West End and Broadway alike.
By the time of his death, at just 41, he was more infamous for his extra-curricular exploits, almost all of which involved alcohol and other excesses. New York audiences lived in hope they would be among those to see him heckle the actors in his own play, The Hostage. On one occasion, he is alleged to have roared from the stalls, ‘that’s not what I wrote!’, before realising he was in the wrong theatre, and actually at a play by Noël Coward.
Dubliners love a ‘character’ – usually the codeword for a roaring drunk – and most of a certain age have a Behan story to tell. Whether truth or myth is often difficult to ascertain, but Brendan Behan never needed any help in being outrageous, and outrageously funny.
This coming Thursday marks the centenary of his birth, the start of a life that took him from incarcerated, juvenile, would-be IRA bomber to being lionised by everyone from Bob Dylan to Tennessee Williams to US president John F Kennedy (the invitation to JFK’s inauguration, not taken up, was addressed simply to: Brendan Behan, Dublin, Ireland).
Behan’s mother, Kathleen Kearney, was an ardent republican, and the sister of Peadar Kearney, who wrote the words of The Soldier’s Song, to music by Patrick Heeney. Translated into Irish in the Thirties by Liam Ó Rinn, it became the national anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann.
Kathleen and her husband Jack Furlong had two sons, the second born six months after she Jack died in the 1918 flu pandemic. Four years later, she married again, to house painter Stephen Behan, who fought on the anti-Treaty side and was imprisoned for two years after the Civil War ended; his first sight of Brendan was from the prison window, as Kathleen held their son up for him on the street outside. Four more children followed, Séamus, Brian, Dominic, and Carmel.
The family lived on Russell Street, in Dublin’s north inner city, before moving to a council house in Kimmage in 1937, a place where Brendan’s uncle claimed the natives ‘ate their young’. As a semi-rural area at the time, it was likely the genesis of Brendan’s later assertion that ‘since I was a child, I’ve had a pathological hatred of country people’.
On his mother’s side of the family, he was inculcated from an early age in the republican tradition. His father’s influence was literary, exposing the children to works by the likes of Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola and John Galsworthy.
Kathleen had been a friend of Michael Collins and, at just 13, Brendan wrote a song, The Laughing Boy, after his mother’s nickname for Collins. Later incorporated into The Hostage, it bizarrely became a key song in the Greek revolutionary movement after a translated version of the play was staged there.
His formal education ended at 13, when he left school to follow in both grandfather’s footsteps as a house painter, though he proved a poor one. Many years later, the lighthouse keeper in St John’s Point in Co. Down wrote that Behan was frequently absent, careless with his use of paint, fond of using ‘filthy’ language, and ‘not amenable to any law or order’.
Brendan joined Fianna Éireann, the boy scout wing of the AntiTreaty IRA, and also started writing. In 1931, he was the youngest person ever to have a poem printed in the Irish Press. At 16, he joined the IRA and embarked on an unsanctioned solo mission to bomb Liverpool docks. He was under surveillance, and soon arrested in a boarding house, as he later wrote in his autobiography, Borstal Boy.
‘Friday, in the evening, the landlady shouted up the stairs: “Oh God, oh Jesus, oh Sacred Heart, Boy, there’s two gentlemen here to see you.” I knew by the screeches of her that the gentlemen were not calling to inquire after my health, or to see if I’d had a good trip. I grabbed my suitcase, containing Pot[assium] Chlor[ide], Sulp[huric] Ac[id], gelignite, detonators, electrical and ignition, and the rest of my Sinn Féin conjurer’s outfit, and carried it to the window. Then the gentlemen arrived. A young one, with a blond Herrenvolk head and a BBC accent shouted: “I say, grab him the bestud.”’ Brendan was sentenced to three years in Hollesley Bay borstal in Suffolk, where he very likely had his first homosexual experience. Over the course of his life, he would have affairs with partners of both sexes.
Released in 1941, he returned to the Ireland of the Emergency, as the period of the Second World War was known here, but he was not free for long. Arrested and found guilty of the attempted murder of two members of the Garda Síochána, he was sentenced to 14 years in the Curragh Camp, but released in a general amnesty in 1946. At the age of 23, he turned his back on paramilitary activity, though he remained friendly with chief of staff Cathal Goulding.
He was, however, pithy on the subject. ‘If you fight for the liberty and unity of a small country, you’re an anarchist,’ he said, ‘but if you go bombing for a great power, you’re a patriot. It all depends on the size of the country in question.’
After returning to work as a painter, he moved to Paris in the early Fifties, where he is alleged to have made a living writing pornography. Back in Dublin, he fell in with a literary crowd that drank in McDaid’s just off Grafton Street, including JP Donleavy, Anthony Cronin and Patrick Kavanagh, though he later fell out with the latter. In 1954, Behan’s play The Quare Fellow was staged at the experimental Pike Theatre. A chronicle of prison life up to the execution of the prisoner of the title, who is never seen, it ran for six months and transferred to the Theatre Royal Stratford East, and later the West End, after being picked up by theatrical legend Joan Greenwood.
During this time, Behan was interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge on the BBC, and was clearly drunk. Far from putting potential audiences off, it made Behan an instant star, but also led to him thinking he would always get away with it.
In 1958, his play in Irish, An Giall, debuted. It tells the story of a British soldier being held captive in a Dublin brothel in anticipation of a prisoner exchange with an IRA man facing execution in Belfast.
In collaboration with Greenwood, the English translation, The Hostage, became a theatrical sensation on both sides of the Atlantic (many see more of Greenwood in the adaptation than they do of Behan). By the time The Hostage
‘During his life he had affairs with partners of both sexes’
transferred to Broadway, Behan’s fame preceded him, and he was met on arrival at New York’s Idlewild Airport (now JFK) by a phalanx of news cameras. The play was a galvanising moment. Norman Mailer, by then a major literary figure, summed up its impact.
‘New York was dead in those days,’ he later told Behan’s biographer, Ulick O’Connor. ‘It was the end of the Eisenhower regime, a puritan period. Brendan’s Hostage broke the ice. It made the beatnik movement – Kerouac, Ginsberg, myself and others – respectable uptown. Before Brendan, we were in exile down in the [Greenwich] Village. The Hostage was adored because of its outrageousness and its obscenity, and because of Brendan’s captivating humour and personality. He was an ice-breaker, and the times needed an ice-breaker.’
Brendan had married Beatrice ffrench-Salkeld, a horticultural illustrator and the daughter of artist Cecil, in 1955, whereupon they were dubbed ‘the ffrench Behans’ by Dublin wags.
The marriage was a happy one, for the most part, though Brendan continued to have affairs, especially in a New York that seemed to him so much freer than the cloying Dublin of the moribund postEmergency years. The couple had only one child, Blánaid, born in 1963, shortly before Brendan’s death. Beatrice later had a son, Paudge, by Cathal Goulding.
The New York-based Irish writer Dave Hannigan wrote an entire book about Brendan’s time there, Behan In The USA – The Rise And Fall Of The Most Famous Irishman In New York. Before he left Dublin, his friend Desmond Mackey told him: Brendan – you’re f***ed’, and it proved prophetically accurate.
Bob Dylan chased him across New York just to say hello, while Steve McQueen trawled Hollywood trying to find him to beat him up. In Los Angeles, he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in a restaurant. The owner of the establishment put up bail and invited him back the next night, as the star attraction.
While in the States, he also fathered a son in a one-night stand with fellow Dubliner Valerie DanbySmith, who later married Dr Gregory Hemingway, whose father was another literary hellraiser, Ernest Hemingway.
Though Behan almost always received good notices, he held critics in contempt, saying: ‘They are like eunuchs in a harem. They know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.’
He also knew how important the wider world was to his bottom line, noting that ‘the number of people who buy books in Ireland would not keep me in drink for the duration of the Sunday opening time’.
He was well aware too that the hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie of his native city was fundamentally shallow. ‘Dublin is a city where there’s familiarity without friendship, loneliness without solitude,’ he said.
In terms of his literary output, he said it was the first duty of a writer to let his country down. Those in power saw it differently. In 1960, Taoiseach Seán Lemass attacked Irish journalists, playwrights and novelists for sustaining ‘anti-Irish propaganda’ through representations of ‘the stage Irishman’ in their work. ‘Even the BBC television service rarely, if ever, presents a play about Ireland without characters moving around in clouds of alcoholic vapour,’ Lemass noted.
Behan’s appearance in a two-part CBS television documentary on Ireland, broadcast in January 1961, was criticised by a Department of Foreign Affairs official as ‘a rambling and incoherent interview’ that reflected Ireland in very poor light.
And, in truth, Brendan Behan was falling apart, neglectful of his diabetes and going on ever more spectacular drinking sessions. ‘New York is my Lourdes,’ he said in 1961. ‘I go there for spiritual
‘I took up writing because it’s easier than house-painting’
replenishment.’ In fact, the 18 months he spent there up to 1963, took a heavy toll on his kidneys and his liver – and his talent. With his literary peak behind him, at such a young age, he morphed in to a caricature of himself and one that increasingly became a sad caricature. One by one, the doors of the literary salons were closed to him, followed by the doors of less salubrious saloons.
‘I only drink on two occasions,’ he said, ‘when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.’ It finally caught up with him. On 20 March 1964, he collapsed in the Harbour Lights bar on Dublin’s Echlin Street, and was transferred to the Meath Hospital in the Liberties, where he died. Popular legend has it that a pal sneaked in a bottle of whiskey to speed him on his way. He received a full IRA guard of honour at his funeral, which was said to be the biggest in Dublin since those of Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Collins.
He was, for a time, the most famous Irishman in the Englishspeaking world, even when his own speech was rambling and slurred. Over the years, his literary reputation has been reassessed, and whole new audiences are enjoying the ribald wit that made his name. As for why he turned to literature in the first place, the best explanation, as always, comes from Behan himself. ‘I took up writing,’ he said, ‘because it’s easier than house painting.’