St Patrick’s Day is tomorrow and I was thinking about Brendan Behan, the Irish novelist, playwright, and raconteur. In the late 60’s and early 70’s he had an influence on my friends and me.
Behan was born in Dublin in 1923 to an educated working-class family. Behan's uncle, Peadar Kearney, wrote the Irish national anthem, "Amhrán na bhFiann." His brother, Dominic Behan, was also a renowned songwriter best known for the song, "The Patriot Game;" another sibling, Brian Behan, was a prominent radical political activist and public speaker, actor, author, and playwright.
While still in his teens, Behan joined the IRA and when 16, he was found in possession of explosives and arrested. Behan was sentenced to three years in Borstal, a type of youth prison in England. In 1942, Brendan was tried for the attempted murder of two detectives in Dublin while at a commemoration ceremony for Wolfe Tone, the father of Irish Republicanism. This time, he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison, but was released after four years under a general amnesty in 1946.
This ended his IRA career, and he next threw himself into his house-painting, writing, and of course drinking, which he had always been serious about. After writing the plays The Quare Fellow (1954), An Giall (1958), The Hostage (1958) and the books Borstal Boy (1958), Brendan Behan's Island (1962), Hold Your Hour and Have Another (1963), Brendan achieved a modicum of fame and money. In 1960, he visited New York and immediately become a media darling, the embodiment of the stereotypical Irish drunken writer, a role that he was all too willing to play. When asked what he would most like to see in Spain, he replied, "Franco's funeral." When asked what he thought of Canada, he said it would be all right when it was finished. But when asked, he said, “New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment…a place where you're least likely to be bitten by a wild goat.”
Some of Behan’s other memorable quotes are:
“If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.”
“It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.”
“An author's first duty is to let down his country.”
“I never turned to drink. It seemed to turn to me.”
“I'd rather be dead than think about death.”
“Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.”
“The English always have their wars in someone else's country.”
“There's no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.”
“When I came back to Dublin I was court marshaled in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.”
My friends and I loved reading about Bren’s drinking exploits, conveniently ignoring the downsides which were chronicled in his brother Dominic’s biography, My Brother Brendan. Suffering terribly, with diabetic comas and seizures, Brendan followed alcohol to its logical end, dying in 1964 at the age of 41. So on St Paddy’s Day, Brendan, here’s one for you. Éirinn go Brách!
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