Brendan Behan
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 | This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. |
Brendan Francis Behan | |
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 Brendan Behan with Jackie Gleason | |
| Born | February 9, 1923 Dublin |
| Died | March 20, 1964 Meath Hospital, Dublin |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Period | 1942–1964 |
| Genre | Irish poet, novelist, playwright |
| Subject | Irish Republican struggle, often autobiographical |
Brendan Francis Behan (Irish: Breandán Ó Beacháin) (February 9, 1923 - March 20, 1964) was an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English. He was also a committed Irish Republican and an erstwhile member of the Irish Republican Army.
Behan was one of the most successful Irish dramatists of the 20th century.
Biography
Early life
Brendan was born in the inner city of Dublin on February 9, 1923 into an educated working class family. He resided in a house owned by his granny English, who owned a number of properties in the area. His father Stephen Behan, a house painter who had been active in the Irish War of Independence, read classic literature to the children at bedtime from diverse sources such as Zola, Galsworthy and Maupassant; while his mother Kathleen took them on literary tours of the city. If Brendan's interest in literature came from his father, then his political prejudices were injected by his mother. Brendan said: "Only a deaf mute could be reared by my mother and be unable to catalogue England's misdemeanours from Africa backwards." She remained politically active all her life, and was a personal friend of the famed Irish republican Michael Collins. Brendan wrote a lament to Collins: "The Laughing Boy," at the age of thirteen. The title was derived from the affectionate name Mrs Behan gave Collins. She published her acclaimed autobiography "Mother of All The Behans," a collaboration with her son Brian, in 1984. Behan's uncle Peadar Kearney wrote the Irish national anthem A Soldier's Song. His brother, Dominic Behan, was also a renowned songwriter most famous for the rebel song The Patriot Game, while another sibling, Brian Behan, was a prominent radical political activist and public speaker, actor, author and playwright.
He developed his taste for drink from his granny English, and knew what it was like to be inebriated well before his teens. His biographer Ulick O'Connor recalls one day, at the age of eight, he was returning home with his granny and a crony from a drinking session. A passer-by remarked: "Oh, my! Isn't it terrible ma'am to see such a beautiful child deformed?" "How dare you," said his granny, "he's not deformed, he's just drunk!"
At the age of thirteen, Behan left school to follow his father's footsteps in the house painting business.
Republican activities
In 1937, the family moved to a new local authority housing scheme in Crumlin. Here, Behan became a member of Fianna Éireann, the youth organization of the IRA and published his first poems and prose in the organization's magazine Fianna: the Voice of Young Ireland. He was also the youngest contributor to be published in the `Irish Press` when a poem of his entitled: "Reply of Young Boy to Pro-English verses" was published in 1931.
At the age of sixteen, (in 1939), he joined the IRA and embarked on an unauthorised solo mission to England to blow up Liverpool docks. There he was arrested in possession of explosives. He was sentenced to three years in a reform school (or Borstal in British English) (see his autobiography "Borstal Boy") and did not return to Ireland until 1941.
In 1942, during the timeframe leading to the IRA's Northern Campaign Behan was tried for the attempted murder of two detectives in Dublin while at a commemoration ceremony for Wolfe Tone - the father of Irish Republicanism. Sentenced to fourteen years in prison he was incarcerated in Mountjoy Prison and the Curragh. These experiences were relayed in "Confessions of an Irish Rebel".
Released under a general amnesty for Republicans in 1946, his "military" career was over by the age of twenty-three. Aside from a short prison sentence that he received in 1947 for his part in trying to break a fellow republican out from a Manchester jail, he effectively left the IRA, though he remained great friends with the future Chief-Of-Staff Cathal Goulding.
Behan the writer
Behan's prison experiences were central to his future writing career. In Mountjoy he wrote his first play, The Landlady, and also began to write short stories and other prose. Some of this work was published in The Bell, the leading Irish literary magazine of the time. He also learned Irish in prison and, after his release in 1946, he spent some time in the Gaeltacht areas of Galway and Kerry, where he started writing poetry in Irish. He left Ireland and all its perceived social pressures to live in Paris in the early 1950s. There he felt he could lose himself and release the artist within. Although he still drank heavily, he managed to earn a living, ostensibly by writing pornography. By the time he returned to Ireland he had become a writer who drank a lot, rather than a drinker who talked about what he was going to write. He had also developed the knowledge that, in order to succeed, he would have to discipline himself. Throughout the majority of his writing career he would rise at seven in the morning and work until 12 noon-when the pubs opened. He began to write for various newspapers such as The Irish Times and radio, where a play entitled "The Leaving Party" was broadcast. Additionally, he cultivated a reputation as carouser-in-chief and swayed shoulder-to-shoulder with other literati of the day: Brian O'Nolan, Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, J. P. Donleavy. For reasons unknown he had a major fall-out with Kavanagh, who reportedly at the mere mention of Behan's name would visibly shudder. He referred to him as "evil incarnate". Amid all the merry-making, however, Behan sensed that he hadn't written anything of significance, and feared the boozer would eclipse the writer. Nearly five years after his return his literary niche had yet to be carved.
That changed, however, in 1954 with the play "The Quare Fellow" (Irish slang for "condemned man")-his major breakthrough at last. Originally called "The Twisting of Another Rope" and influenced by his time spent in jail, it chronicles the vicissitudes of prison life leading up to the execution of "the quare fellow"-a character who is never seen. The prison dialogue is vivid, and laced with satire, but reveals to the reader the human detritus that surrounds capital punishment. It was produced in the Pike Theatre in Dublin. The play ran for six months. In May 1956, The Quare Fellow opened in the Theatre Royal Stratford East, in a production by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. Subsequently it transferred to the West End theatre. Behan generated immense publicity for "The Quare Fellow" when appearing drunk on the Malcolm Muggeridge TV show. The English, unaccustomed to drunken authors, took him to their hearts . A fellow guest on the show the American actor Jackie Gleason reportedly said about the incident: "It wasn't an act of God but an act of Guinness!". Behan and Gleason went on to forge a friendship. Brendan loved the story of how, walking along the street in London, shortly after this episode, a Cockney approached him and exclaimed that he understood every word he had said-drunk or not-but hadn't a clue what "that bugger Muggeridge was on about!" While addled, Brendan would clamber on stage and recite the play's signature song "The Auld Triangle". The transfer of the play to Broadway provided Behan with international recognition.
In 1957, his Irish language play, An Giall (The Hostage) opened in the Damer Theatre. It remains one of the most damning indictments of the IRA ever presented on stage. Reminiscent of Frank O'Connor's "Guests of The Nation" it portrays the capture of a British soldier who is being held in exchange for the release of an imprisoned IRA volunteer. The hostage falls in love with an Irish girl, Teresa. Their innocent world of love is incongruous among their surroundings-the play was set in a brothel. The soldier feels until the end that he won't be executed and will survive to marry Teresa. Tragically he dies, revealing to the reader the human cost of war-a universal suffering. One of Brendan's former comrades referred to him as "a chancer".
His autobiographical novel Borstal Boy followed in 1958, and remains forever his masterpiece. A vivid memoir of his time in Hollesley Bay Borstal, Suffolk, England, from its pages an original voice in Irish literature boomed out. The language is both acerbic and delicate; the portrayal of inmates and "screws" cerebral. For a republican, though, it isn't a vitriolic attack on Britain-it delineates Brendan's move away from violence. In one account an inmate strives to entice Brendan in chanting political slogans with him. Brendan curses and damns him in his mind hoping he would cease his rantings-hardly the sign of a troublesome prisoner. By the end the idealistic boy rebel emerges as a realistic young man who recognises the truth: violence, especially political violence, is futile. Kenneth Tynan, the 1950s literary critic said: "While other writers horde words like misers, Behan sends them out on a spree, ribald, flushed and spoiling for a fight." He was now established as one of the leading Irish writers of his generation.
As his fame grew, so too did his alcohol consumption. Brendan saw that it paid him to be drunk, as the public wanted the witty, iconoclastic, genial "froth of a boy". And he gave it to them in abundance. He staggered through the drunken hoops held out to him exclaiming: "There's no bad publicity except an obituary."
His health suffered terribly, with diabetic comas and seizures occurring with frightening regularity. Towards the end he became the caricature of the drunken Irishman. The public who once extended their arms now closed ranks against him; publicans flung him from their premises; and former friends tired of his anecdotes and stories, finding him a bore.
Although Brendan cried out that he was a writer, inside he knew his fears had materialised — he was unable to generate another classic. His last two books, "Brendan Behan's Ireland" and "Brendan Behan's New York", published in 1961 and 1962 respectively, were talk books and cannot be compared to his former works — they were littered with pretentiousness and sycophancy, something which he wouldn't have tolerated earlier: "As Norman Mailer said to me. ....." Arthur Miller came up to me. .." "One day with Groucho Marx. ..."
Amid the chaos, he married Beatrice Salkeld (the daughter of painter Cecil Salkeld) in 1955. They had a daughter, Blanaid, born in 1963. Love, however, wasn't enough to haul him back from his alcoholic abyss.
By early March 1964, the end was in sight. Collapsing at the Harbour Lights bar, he was transferred to Meath Hospital, and never re-surfaced. On March 20, the bawdy, boisterous boy who clung to the whiskey bottle never did make it home.
Anecdotes
Brendan's life is swamped in stories and anecdotes-both true and fictional. For those who criticised his drinking he exclaimed: "Where I came from, to get enough to eat was an achievement. To get enough to get drunk was a victory."
To accusations that the IRA court-martialled him: "Yes, I was court-martialled in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence. So I said 'go ahead and shoot me. ..in my absence!'"
Another occasion saw him enter a priest's house, badly shaking with alcohol withdrawal and gasping for a "cure". The priest provided him with a little whiskey in a glass, exhorting that providing him with it was like "tapping a nail into your coffin". Behan reportedly looked at the meagre amount and said: "You wouldn't mind giving the nail another tap would you father?"
Behan was perhaps the most famous Irish writer of his time, and was once hired to write an advertising slogan for Guinness. As part of his payment for this, the company offered him half a dozen kegs of their stout. After a month the company asked Behan what he had come up with; Behan had already managed to drink all of the beer they had given him and produced the slogan Guinness Makes You Drunk. Erroneously, he is also sometimes credited with "Guinness is Good for You", which was actually written by Dorothy L. Sayers.
Decline and death
Behan found fame difficult to deal with. He had long been a heavy drinker (describing himself, on one occasion, as "a drinker with a writing problem" and claiming "I only drink on two occasions-when I'm thirsty and when I'm not") and developed diabetes in the early 1960s. This combination resulted in a series of notoriously drunken public appearances, on both stage and television. His last two works: "Brendan Behan's Ireland" and "Brendan Behan's New York" were tape-recorded, a device which Brendan hated, preferring to write or type his words. Bad health though dictated different. He died, aged 41, in the Meath Hospital, Dublin, and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. He received a Republican funeral.
Pop Culture References
- He was mentioned in the Preacher comics by Garth Ennis when the vampire Cassidy claimed to have known him in the 50's. Ennis also created a Behan analogue in Hellblazer.
- Behan's work has been a significant influence in the writings of Shane MacGowan, and he is the subject of "Streams Of Whiskey", a song by the Pogues: "Last night as I slept, I dreamt I met with Behan, I shook him by the hand, and we passed the time of day / when questioned on his views, on the crux of life's philosophy, he had but these few clear and simple words to say: I am going, I am going, any which way the wind may be blowing, I am going, I am going, where streams of whiskey are flowing".
- Behan is also mentioned in the Pogues song Thousands are Sailing (written by Philip Chevron) with reference to the experience of Irish immigrants in New York: "And in Brendan Behan's footsteps, I danced up and down the street".
- Behan is also mentioned in the song All Things considered by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones .
- In the Thin Lizzy song Black Rose in the lyric "Ah sure, Brendan where have you Behan?" In The Mountain Goats song Commandante, he is mentioned with the lyric, "I'm gonna drink more whiskey than Brendan Behan."
- In Thinking Voyager II Type Things, Bob Geldof sings, "So rise up Brendan Behan / And like a drunken Lazarus / Let's traipse the high bronze of the evening sky / Like craic-crazed kings."
- Shortly after Behan's death a young student, Fred Geis, wrote the song Lament for Brendan Behan and passed it on to the Clancy Brothers, who sang it on their album Recorded Live in Ireland! the same year. This song, which calls "bold Brendan" Ireland's "sweet angry singer," was later covered by the Australian trio The Doug Anthony All Stars, better known as a comedy band, in an album entitled Blue during the mid-eighties.
- Paul Kelly penned the song Laughing Boy about Behan on his first album, Post (1985).
- Brendan Behan is also mentioned in the Damien Dempsey song Jar Song, which includes the lyrics, "Brendan Behan was a friend of mine / He loved the bars and he drink cheap wine / Get outta his mind with a lad and lass / He'd ride them both and then go to mass[1]".
- The Belfast songwriter, Seamus Robinson, wrote Brendan, which was released by The Freemen in 1976.
- Behan's prisoner song The Auld Triangle, from his play The Quare Fella (this term being prison slang for a prisoner condemned to be hanged), has been recorded by groups including The Dubliners, the Pogues and the Dropkick Murphys.
- In Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, is a beloved neighborhood pub named in his honor.
Works
Plays
- The Quare Fellow (1954)
- An Giall (1958), The Hostage (1958)
- Behan wrote the play in Irish, and translated it to English
- Richard's Cork Leg (1972)
- Moving Out (one act play, commissioned for radio)
- A Garden Party (one act play, commissioned for radio)
- The Big House (1957, one act play, commissioned for radio)
Books
- Borstal Boy (1958)
- Brendan Behan's Island (1962)
- Hold Your Hour and Have Another (1963)
- Brendan Behan's New York (1964)
- Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965)
Songs
Biographies
- My Brother Brendan by Dominic Behan
- Brendan Behan by Ulick O'Connor
- The Brothers Behan by Brian Behan
- With Brendan Behan by Peter Arthurs
External links
