The Quare Fellow

Brendan Behan, the bad boy of modern Irish letters, was good copy. Journalists like myself fed off him, fed him drinks and then fed him to our editors. At our (and his) worst, we led him around like a trained bear, into the pubs that were killing him and onto transatlantic TV talk shows where, on cue, he performed as the outrageous drunken “paddy” who could write his fool head off in private and in public make a fall-down sloppy buffoon of himself. At the peak of his popularity, in the early 1960s, he gave audiences a caricature of an Irishman, free with his sex and curses, and a prodigy with the English language. Like the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, he lived down to our expectations everywhere except at the writing table.

Brendan Behan was a serious literary craftsman on a near-equal footing with his contemporary (and mentor) Samuel Beckett. In his best-known plays, “The Quare Fellow” and “The Hostage”--both originally written in Gaelic--he was an Irish Brecht in his inventive use of music, song and irony. He wrote one of the finest of all prison memoirs, the touching and forceful “Borstal Boy,” now a film by Peter Sheridan. His wickedly funny crime novel, “The Scarperer,” is as good as anything by Frank or Malachy McCourt. And his short stories, collected in “Hold Your Hour and Have Another” and “After the Wake,” are first rate.

As an IRA terrorist, Behan had blown up things and tried to kill people. The son of a politically conscious Dublin house painter, he was an IRA message carrier by 9. At 13 he was arrested on a sabotage mission, attempting to blow up a battleship in Liverpool harbor, and sentenced to three years in Borstal, an English reform school, the period covered in Sheridan’s film. Later, he was sent to an adult prison, the notorious Mountjoy, and served another jail term for helping an IRA prisoner to escape. What great copy!

In 1962 my editor, David Astor, publisher of the liberal Sunday newspaper the Observer, sent me to Ireland on a double mission: to cajole Behan into entering detox in England (to be paid for by Astor), or, if that failed, to catch for posterity his dying words. The week I spent with him in Dublin, at his Ballsbridge home and making the lethal rounds at Jury’s, Bailey’s, the Dolphin, Davy Burns--up and down the bars of Pearl Street--was brutally alcoholic, phantasmagoric and, for me, unforgettable. Everyone, including Behan, knew he was dying--of diabetes and liver and life itself--and some were impatient that he was taking such a God almighty long time at it. He wasn’t 40 yet.

Huge, sprawling, disheveled, a large cigarette burn squarely in the back of his new Irish-export tweed suit, his white shirt streaked with dirt and spotted with faded bloodstains down the front, the tops of his suspendered trousers reaching almost to the barrel-like chest, his yellowish drink-splotched face showing several days’ growth of rough reddened beard, he looked the very stereotype of burned-out roaring boy from the heart of working-class Dublin. Wherever we went in Dublin, him wheezing and coughing and spitting blood into a handkerchief, he seemed to know everybody. Old school friends, booze-up pals, IRA comrades, hangers-on, admirers and ex-lovers surrounded him on every street, in every pub, feeding him whiskey, bits of sly gossip, slyer malice, thumps on the back and ... always--always--more Jameson’s whiskey.

Once, when I suggested to him that perhaps his friends were easing his passage to the grave prematurely, he turned his sad behemoth’s shattered gaze on me and said, “It’s obvious you’re not Irish despite your name. All this”--he waved his hand at the pub mob around us waiting for him to crumple or fight or do something wicked--”it’s a form of mercy, don’t you see?”

Then the surprises came.

As the drink seeped into him, and I thought he’d probably die in my arms, he became something more than a self-destructive clown. Death staring him in the face didn’t exactly sober him. What could? (I actually attended, in his Ballsbridge bedroom, Behan’s wake for himself where he sadly greeted the mourners filing in to pay their respects.) But, temporarily relieved of the duty of playing a “local character,” of dying so publicly, he revealed a gentler, more vulnerable man who had “gone beyond,” into a melancholy, meditative place.

He was, I believe, first and foremost a political poet. But now, near the end, he was transcending his own history. At the core of his large and difficult heart, he’d gone from being a man of war, reprisal and revenge to being a man of peace and reconciliation and no quick answers. I’ve rarely seen this except in veteran combat soldiers--or political operatives--who evolve into something like conscientious objection to violence.

As we sat in the shade of a leafy tree on a bench opposite Mountjoy prison, to which he’d been sent for attempting to murder two Dublin detectives, he mused, “You wouldn’t think to look at me I’d been a gunman. Hard to believe it myself.” He belched. “I don’t know. As I grow older I like parliaments, democratic parliaments, more than ‘clean up.’ You know what I mean by ‘clean up’?” He used his big paw--a house painter’s hand--as a token knife to cut his throat. Earlier we’d run into his old IRA commanding officer, now an insurance executive, who had reminisced how disinclined to military discipline Behan always had been. Behan gave a little laugh. “Left and right in the IRA, they didn’t get along. If we’d won against the English, you’d have seen a bloody civil war after that.”

Behan’s prophetic musing outside Mountjoy long predated the IRA internal quarrels pitting factions against split-offs in a dizzying and continuing bath of blood.

Catholicism--rebellious, critical and in the end forbearing--was incredibly important to Behan. He had been raised in a family culture of revolutionary piety. (His grandmother displayed pictures of the bishop of Dublin and Karl Marx on her wall.) In our pub trawls, he kept going back to his religion.

“I suppose,” he said, “I’m still a Catholic of a sort. Not when I’m feeling all right, but when I think it’s closing down [for me].” In the hospital the previous month, he had let a priest anoint him when he thought he was on the point of death. “I think the younger clergy like me. A nun asked to have her picture taken with me alongside. So I don’t think I’ve been excommunicated. Yet.”

Behan was a man in conflict: with his violent past, his religion, his sexuality. While he remained devoted to his IRA comrades, who clustered around him like magpies, buying or cadging drinks on our rounds, he reassuring them in every way he knew that he wasn’t getting above himself, he was still one of them, I think they sensed that he was traveling a wholly different road.

His primary loyalty then was to himself as a writer, even if that conflicted with everything, including a bred-in-the-bone Catholic nationalism he had gone to jail for. “The principal responsibility of the writer,” he insisted, “is to let his own country down with a great big and beautiful bang.” He loved Ireland unsentimentally. “Oh, a very rich, very ancient culture. And no damn health scheme.”

Perhaps he was less an Irishman than a Dubliner. He couldn’t live in Dublin, and he couldn’t live without it. It may be a literary town, but it’s also packed to the slate roofs with active, poisonous envy and malice, bilious star worship all mixed up with spite, for anyone with writing talent. Perhaps in this way it’s not so very different from London and New York, where Behan was lionized and patronized simultaneously. One old IRA pal, leaning against a bar at Davy Jones’, scrutinized the large, flubby, grizzled, blustery, immensely sad and funny man almost collapsed on the floor and said, “Look at him. He always has to come back to us, doesn’t he? He’ll never get away, you know, because we made him what he is.”

I last saw Behan in a bed at Central Middlesex hospital in London. Despite the efforts of David Astor, his friends and his great play producer, Joan Littlewood, a constant visitor at his bedside, he wasn’t to last much longer. He was 41 when he died in 1964. He’s buried, at home, in Dublin’s Glasvenin cemetery.

Before we separated, he to Killarney, me back to London, he raised his glass in what he wryly called his last message to the world:

Health and life to you,

Land without rent to you,

The woman of your desire you,

A child every year to you--

Married or single

A stout heart, a wet gob

And may the hair on your bollocks grow as long as the

Beard on a goat.