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He is regarded as one of the greatest Irish writers of all time, penning novels, short stories, poems and plays.
Now, as we approach the centenary of his birth this week, Ireland is marking Brendan Behan’s 100th birthday.
RTE is celebrating the larger-thanlife literary legend with a series of programmes on The Borstal Boy, spanning radio, television and online.
Here, historian DONAL FALLON remembers the colourful genius that was Behan , who became an international celebrity with works inclduing Borstal Boy and The Quare Fellow.
Despite once famously calling himself “a drinker with a writing problem” his legacy endures, a century on.
BRENDAN Behan, born a century ago on February 9, 1923, lived a short life.
His death at 41 was a sad ending to a career that had produced moments of real brilliance, infuriating many who felt that perhaps the best was yet to come.
Joan Littlewood, the theatre director who had brought his work to huge audiences in Britain, remembered just how she felt on hearing Behan was gone: “I was so angry with Brendan for dying that I felt like kicking that coffin.”
Borstal Boy, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage have stood the test of time as great works of literature, but Behan exists on other levels too.
Like a working-class Oscar Wilde, he is instantly quotable, recalled for insisting: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity, except your own obituary.”
Of the Irish people, Behan would insist: “the Irish are not my audience; they are my raw material”.
CENSORSHIP
There was much truth in that one – much of Behan’s output didn’t make it past the Censorship of Publications Board.
There is no denying Behan was strongly shaped by his parents.
He first viewed his father, imprisoned IRA man Stephen Behan, through the bars of Kilmainham Gaol.
The Civil War was still raging, and both of Behan’s parents were firmly Antitreaty. An uncle, Peadar Kearney, had taken the other side in the conflict before growing disillusioned with the new state.
Peadar wrote The Soldier’s Song, better known to us today as Amhran na bhfiann.
A song that had been sung with gusto on the barricades during the Rising, it went on to become our national anthem.
Behan’s mother Kathleen raised her children on a diet of nationalist songs, the classics of literature and a deep love of the city in which they lived.
Before his teenage years, Behan joined the republican boy scout movement, Na Fianna Eireann. By 16, he was a member of the IRA.
For his involvement in a disastrous bombing campaign of Britain, during which he was arrested in Liverpool in possession of explosives, he was sentenced to imprisonment in the grim Walton Gaol, later transferring to Borstal detention in Hollesley Bay.
For a young Behan, Borstal was an awakening. He discovered common ground with working-class English teens, and the
Borstal governor, Cyril Alfred Joyce, recognised the potential brilliance of the young Irish inmate.
Joyce remembered: “His extraordinary sharp and quick wit and the colourful choice of words in his ordinary speech. In ways, he was so refreshing, so out of the ordinary.”
The experiences of Borstal are well captured in Borstal Boy, Behan’s autobiographical account of those days, but it was published much later in 1958. Before that there were periods in
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the Curragh internment camp ng The Emergency, as the Irish stened the Second World War. mprisonment allowed Behan to hone kills as a writer and a wit. ean O’briain, locked up in “the Joy” Behan, remembered: “We made fun plenty of it, and it was during those s that Behan’s true character made f evident.” om behind bars he would send nuscripts and articles to editors and n to the Abbey Theatre – but few e yet willing to take a chance on him. When the break did come in 1954, it
the tiny little Pike Theatre that ned the door for Behan. ocated down Herbert Lane, the Pike could only sit an audience of 55. Tickets for Behan’s The Quare Fellow, which tells the story of a condemned prisoner in Mountjoy, were like gold dust.
One reviewer noted: “Not only was the theatre crowded but the tiny stage held nearly thirty players.”
When the English theatre director Joan Littlewood put The Quare Fellow on the stage of her Theatre Workshop in London, a star was born.
Behan’s plays grabbed not only the attention of the British public but, in time, the Americans too.
In the United States, New York City fell in love with Brendan and he fell in love with it.
On the Chelsea Hotel today, immorand talised in song by Leonard Cohen, a plaque honours Brendan with his observation on the United States: “America – the man who hates you hates the human race.”
There was adoration from young poets like Allen Ginsberg. A star-struck Bob Dylan, just 20 years old, tried to chase Behan down to shake his hand.
Coming from a country where television hadn’t yet made its impact felt, Behan embraced the opportunities TV brought in Britain and America to win new audiences and win them over with wit. Sadly, with stardom, Behan’s drinking intensified. His talent, in the words of one friend, “drowned in a whiskey glass”.
Diagnosed diabetic at the height of his popularity, Behan struggled to keep it together, his wife Beatrice and publicist and friend Rae Jeff ’s both trying to steer the ship.
Later interviews from the 1960s reveal a sad figure. The tragedy of his final years, in the words of biographer Colbert Kearney, “was all the more appalling for being so public”. He collapsed in a Dublin pub in March 1964.
He died of complications of diabetes and alcohol in the Meath Hospital.
Fittingly for a republican, Behan was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
As his funeral procession made its way through the streets, Joan Littlewood remembered an old man shouting: “May he never get there.”
It was just the kind of tribute Behan would have appreciated most.
Donal Fallon is author of Three Castles Burning: A History of Dublin in Twelve Streets (New Island Books).
He features on Nationwide’s programme on Behan’s life, work and legacy tomorrow on RTE One at 7pm.
For the full series of programming on Behan, see www.rte.ie/culture/brendanbehan/