BBC Radio 4
16 March 2024
By Eoin Dillon
When Brendan Behan is being discussed as a writer, very often it is mentioned early on that he was also a house-painter, and it is left at that as though a sense of incongruity is warranted but not to be pursued any further. Trades are an underappreciated feature of everyday life, present in every built structure and supremely visible in those that aspire to some aesthetic effect: state and municipal buildings, monuments to wealth such as business headquarters and their satellites, but above all in places of religious expression. Churches, for good or bad, were the incubator of the popular imagination, and Dublin’s Catholic churches eschewed puritanical suppression of the visual, giving the child’s mind the freedom to roam over all the possibilities and impossibilities of life, human and animal; all creation was there. And all those representations were achieved by the painstaking application and skill of the artisan.
Brendan Behan served his time—at least before incarceration intervened—in the formal discipline of acquiring a trade, measured out in years and grades; you learned how to do it. He also served his time as a writer—at school, which may have been less rudimentary than is usually said. He was recognised early on as precociously bright, and read Speranza, mother of Oscar Wilde and nationalist antiquarian publicist and poet. He learned Church Latin and perhaps, via the Mass, a sense of the theatrical.
On the face of it, Brendan Behan and Evelyn Waugh are polar opposites: one very English and aspiring to upward social mobility, the other very Dublin and marked indelibly by his origins. Both were Catholics. Both were consummate craftsmen: talented men who learned the trade of writing. Both were travellers, both served in an army, both drank, both had a strong homoerotic side, later suppressed in the case of Waugh. Both were very good reporters. Both were very funny. Behan gently mocked Waugh with a mention in the song ‘The Captains and the Kings’ and he called an early short story ‘Bridewell Revisited’, which suggests respect being paid. It forms the basis of the opening pages of Borstal Boy, and in borstal Behan acquired another facet of his education—exposure to a well-stocked library. Behan acquired much of his cultural stock from home life; it was further burnished in more formal ways. Waugh was a great describer of Church and chapels; Behan knew them every bit as intimately, having painted the Church of England chapel in his borstal with self-evident care and pride—a job well done.
A decidedly sober Megan Nolan starts her documentary on Behan with the story of his drunken appearance on BBC television with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1956. It made Behan instantly famous in Britain and laid the basis for his drinking reputation thereafter. But her programme covers the middle years of the 1950s, when Behan was still working hard, and leaves out the later years when drinking had taken over almost completely and Behan could be dismissed as a garrulous bore and an enfant terrible gone beyond his best-by date. Being boring is not, as is sometimes implied, the exclusive prerogative of the drinker. After the age of 60, Muggeridge, a groper who found religion, would preface nearly every answer to any question—on British nuclear deterrence, public transport, the present state of the Church of England—with a disquisition in his high reedy voice on his impending mortality: ‘I’m dying, dying …’. He lived to be 87.
Nolan touches on Behan’s further intellectual development when she turns to his time in Paris. Deirdre McMahon, who made a radio documentary on that subject, speculates that he may have been influenced by the Psychomachian clash between Sartre and Camus that echoed in the heart of literary and artistic creation in the city at that time; if so, there isn’t much evidence of it. Behan, it seems to me, is much more interested in the lived lives of ordinary people than in abstract political theorisation of armed struggle and national liberation, political exploitation and national and social degradation. So far as I know, he never addressed the war in Algeria but rather remained a conventional Francophile. You could read a favourite Behan song, ‘An Coolin’, as an instance of imperial subjectification, the imposition of ‘appropriate’ modes of existence and lifestyle, or as a love song in Irish that allowed Behan to express a tenderness in a private language he otherwise often kept to himself.
Another perhaps unexpected twinning of Behan might be with Lionel Bart, writer of two very successful musicals, Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be and Oliver, as well as numerous hit singles for the likes of Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard. Bart—London Jewish, gay, communist—was nurtured, as was Behan, by the incomparable Joan Littlewood in Stratford East in London; both destroyed everything with drink, though Bart survived with much-impaired health. Bart was gay. Behan is more ambiguous. In an interesting aside in a detective novel, the German professor of law Bernhard Schlink has a character describe being gay as about ‘becoming’. In borstal, I think it could be said, Behan was becoming gay; to put it crudely, and to adapt a phrase of Behan’s, he’d get up on the back of a Drimnagh bus, whichever way it was going. Love was a different matter. One of the most beautiful scenes in Borstal Boy is when Behan describes a small group of young men breaking free to go swimming illicitly in the North Sea. It is possible to make an over- or exclusively sexualised reading of that piece; it can also be read as a simple evocation of the exuberance of being joyously unrestrained in a medium that Behan loved—water.
Behan’s great achievement was to be simultaneously remarkably honest and remarkably ambiguous, and that tension perhaps both made and destroyed him.
Eoin Dillon is an independent scholar.