Brendan Behan Remembered [Terence Winch]

 

[Note: this post first appeared on the Best American Poetry blog on 20 March 2019. It is slightly revised and updated here.]

There’s a photo of Brendan Behan standing outside the Dublin Zoo with an enigmatic look on his face and a large snake curled around his neck.  The image reveals much about Brendan, who died 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, almost outstretched 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-destructiveness.  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 probably 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 plays 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 BrendanBehan 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.

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I used to imagine when I was a teenager that I might encounter Brendan at some Irish event or other in New York, but I never did. In 2016, however, I managed┄with the help of my friend Dominick Murray, who took the photo below---to find his grave among the 1.5 million buried in Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery.  

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Selected Comments on the original 2019 post:

Thanks for this. Going to get a copy of Borstal Boy today!
    Posted by: Cathy Strodel | March 20, 2019 at 06:24 PM

Brilliant Terence. You bring Brendan Behan back roaring. Interesting to recall the similarities with another great raconteur who fell early to booze, Dylan Thomas.
    Posted by: Indran Amirthanayagam | March 20, 2019 at 06:26 PM

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.
    Posted by: Dan / Blood And | March 20, 2019 at 06:32 PM

Thanks, Dan. You can find the LP on Ebay, I think.
    Posted by: Terence Winch | March 20, 2019 at 07:08 PM

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.    Posted by: Terence Winch | March 20, 2019 at 07:12 PM

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!
    Posted by: richie piggott | March 20, 2019 at 07:16 PM

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.
    Posted by: Dominick | March 20, 2019 at 10:03 PM

brilliant as always terence. I was in the military at the time behan died 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...        Posted by: [michael] lally | March 20, 2019 at 11:30 PM

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/

Posted by: Noel Fahey | March 21, 2019 at 01:03 AM

P.S. I heartily concur with someone else's mention of Cronin's Dead as Doornails and also his Life of Riley.
    Posted by: Noel Fahey | March 21, 2019 at 01:08 AM

Thanks, Noel. I have her book here, and read it long ago. She definitely had much to contend with.    Posted by: Terence Winch | March 21, 2019 at 10:21 AM

Thanks, Terence. 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.
    Posted by: Howard Bass | March 21, 2019 at 01:36 PM

Terence: Which Behan play was it that Frank O'Hara thinks of buying in "The Day Lady Died"? DL                Posted by: David Lehman | March 21, 2019 at 03:08 PM

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
    Posted by: Terence Winch | March 21, 2019 at 03:55 PM

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

    Posted by: Jennifer O’Riordan | March 21, 2019 at 04:25 PM

Go raibh maith agat, banríon na Gaeilge. I have learned a lot from you chomh maith.
    Posted by: Terence Winch | March 21, 2019 at 05:30 PM

Wonderful piece, as always. I think I'll read Borstal Boy again. xo
    Posted by: Susan Francis Campbell | March 24, 2019 at 01:45 PM

Well done, Terence.
    Posted by: Micahel O'Keefe | March 24, 2019 at 08:23 PM

What a wonderful essay, Terence Winch.
    Posted by: Gerald Fleming | March 25, 2019 at 12:42 AM

Here is a different take on Borstal Boy from Terence Hegarty, songwriter, poet, and longtime friend of mine who grew up in Dublin: “I can't agree about Borstal Boy. I reread it a few years ago, this time aloud because I wanted a loved one to appreciate how good it was, but both my listener and myself were getting restless long before I was finished. I came away feeling it's an important book because it manifests the English approach to reform school education, which at that time was probably the most enlightened in the world. (This was probably not Behan's intent.) As a bildungsroman it struck me as cliché-ridden and not too memorable. I found long passages quite dull.

I will always love Behan for his two great plays. I am also fond of his novel The Scarperer (you will remember I read bits of that for your Behan program on WGTB in the early 70s). I will also always remember the occasions when I saw his wife dragging him home through the Dublin streets during my childhood years. These incidents, I think, helped me, at an early age, to understand that drunkenness and bad behavior are not necessarily markers of depravity (as my Catholic teachers told me); that such things can coexist with excellence; that his wife's courage in these public displays showed that human caring (let us say, love) overcomes everything.”

This is a deftly decluttered and piercing appreciation of Brendan Behan by Terence Winch. It certainly ranks among Terence's best postings on his BAP blog, which is saying a lot. It also raises an obvious question: why not a nonfiction book collecting your longer BAP blog postings with any other essays and lengthy impressions you've written on writers, Terence? Think about it. Here's my own addendum to the BRENDAN BEHAN SINGS IRISH FOLKSONGS AND BALLADS LP containing "The Old Triangle" or, as it is sometimes written, "The Auld Triangle." The rendition below features the late Luke Kelly singing it with the Dubliners. (In my essay for a CD collection of the Dubliners, I likened them to the Rolling Stones vis-a-vis the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem whom I likened to the Beatles. Let the brickbats fly.) Luke Kelly attributed the song to Brendan Behan, who, in turn, attributed it to his brother, Dominic, who, in turn, may have hinted that someone else composed or, at least, inspired it. Whatever its provenance, the song was featured in Brendan Behan’s play THE QUARE FELLOW in 1954. It still hits home. Click on this or paste it in your browser to hear:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1vpdsEb_30

Great job, Terence!
    Posted by: Earle R. Hitchner III | April 01, 2019 at 05:54 PM

Thank you, Dr. Earle. I loved Luke Kelly's (and Ronnie Drew's) singing. I heard, and met, The Dubliners twice in Dublin in 1966, thanks to my Dub cousins, and I was thrilled to the core. They were idols of mine. Have fun in Amsterdam!
    Posted by: Terence Winch | April 01, 2019 at 07:26 PM

Since the name of Dominic Behan, Brendan's brother, pops up in Terence's impressive blog post, I thought I'd add this curio for the Irish traditional music fans reading this blog post: Dominic Behan co-produced and wrote four songs--"Paddy on the Road," "Strike Weapon," "Avondale," and "Belfast Brigade"--for Christy Moore's debut album in 1969. The title of his 12-song album, "Paddy on the Road," came from Dominic's song. Three years later, Christy would follow up with "Prosperous," an album featuring all five founding members of what would become the highly influential quartet Planxty: Christy Moore, Andy Irvine, Liam O'Flynn, and Donal Lunny. Keeping in the literary vein, I also point out that the lyrics of Christy Moore’s popular song “Lisdoonvarna” is included in “The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry,” a 1,120-page hardback published in 2010. As Christy said when learning of his song’s inclusion, “What a buzz.”

Click on this to see and hear Christy Moore sing his song “Lisdoonvarna,” interspersed with some additional, improvised lyrics and a snippet of the song “I’ll Tell Me Ma.” To use his words: “What a buzz.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SVo9W4QM5A

    Posted by: Earle R. Hitchner III | April 20, 2019 at 02:49 PM

Whoops. Planxty began not as a quintet but as a quartet, which is obvious from the four names mentioned. Mea culpa.
    Posted by: Earle R. Hitchner III | April 20, 2019 at 03:01 PM

Thanks, Earle. Clearly and somewhat understandably, Dominic Behan was overshadowed by his brother Brendan. But there's no denying his significant contribution to Irish music. I sold most of my LPs years ago, but kept a few treasured discs, including Dominic's 1957 Riverside recording, Easter Monday, 1916: Songs of the I.R.A., which I memorized as a kid. But I didn't know of his four songs for Christie Moore's first album, so thanks for that information.

    Posted by: Terence Winch | April 20, 2019 at 03:19 PM

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