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.)
from ther archive; first posted March 21, 2019