Book Review: Brendan Behan's short prose provides insight to what was... and could have been

September 12 will mark the 20th anniversary of Johnny Cash’s death. A star-spangled icon, his place in American culture, or at least what may be or was a passing version of it, remains secure. It seems reasonable to wonder if Cash’s often maudlin romanticism, his doom-laden introversion — he was the man in black in far more ways than one — and raw, frontier piety, his capacity for substance-fuelled implosions would not stymie his career in this age of Beyonce mega optimism, high energy, and perfect skin. 

Like Glen Campbell, another superstar once enslaved by addictive stimulants, Cash found Jesus at the end of a long, very rocky road and lived long enough to enjoy a very productive later career. Near enough contemporaries of Brendan Behan and from similar enough backgrounds and blessed or burdened — you choose — with an enormous talent Cash and Campbell slayed their dragons or at least held them on a very strong chain and went on to bequeath legacies far richer and more textured than anything they offered in the first half of their careers.

So, if Brendan Behan had managed to slay or even chain his dragons occasionally and lived to be more than a stripling dead at 41 what might his late, mature, and maybe mellower career have produced? This collection, often laugh-out-loud anarchy on a page, of over 100 weekly newspaper pieces written for The Irish Press between 1951 and 1956 confirms that his collapse into abject alcoholism quenched one of the very great Irish voices of his time. 

When, on March 20, 1964, he collapsed in the Harbour Lights Bar in Dublin’s Echlin Street his race was run, there would be no later career, no Lazarus masterworks like Cash’s four American Recordings. And what a terrible loss to Ireland and the world of letters that remains. What a warning parable about precious gifts.

This collection raises niggling what-if questions with nearly every entry but there is one over-riding one. Ireland of the 1950s, when these pieces were published by the uber-conservative and nationalistic Irish Press, is routinely presented as a monochrome theocracy drained through emigration and stunted at every turn by ignorance or petty-mindedness laced with bigotry. 

Today, those years are often held up as a kind of mirror so we can feel enriched and occasionally a little too smug about contemporary secularism and grudging tolerance. The Valley of the Squinting Windows has become The Valley of Flowing Pharma Gold and all that entails. What fun Behan would have had with that neo-colonisation and the sycophancy underpinning that change. 

That he had such fun writing these pieces for a mass newspaper publication (when that quaint idea still held water) must question the received-wisdom idea of repression and crozier swinging, especially as Archbishop John Charles McQuaid was then in peak ayatollah mode.

There is, as far as I know, no contemporary newspaper or online Irish writer as fluent, as stir-it-up anarchic, as powerful, or as sharp as The Roaring Boy was over these brief few years. No-one comes even close to using humour to fillet pretension and hubris as well as he did. There is a vibrancy, a razor-sharp relevance to these pieces missing from today’s public discourse. 

After all, it is impossible to imagine one of today’s celebrity columnists foregoing the lucrative blandishments of one of the glitzy-but-tawdry style magazines and use their column to tell their family that they had married. During these years, unknown to either family before the event, Behan married Beatrice Ffrench-Salkeld in February, 1955. Both families, chalk and cheese hardly described the contrast, were displeased. They only learnt of the marriage when Behan, announcing a trip to France, told his readers that he would be accompanied by his wife.

One of the most obvious gifts of this collection is Behan’s mastery of describing the disparate voices in public house conversations. His skill with the pun — in Irish and English — the timing of his interjections, his capacity to give his sentences a steady pulse animates these pieces in a way that few of today’s Irish writers can, certainly not in newspaper writing. 

He is so good at it that his work is as much a part of our oral tradition as it is of our literary tradition. Donal Ryan in The Queen of Dirt Island and Kevin Barry in The Night Boat to Tangier come close but, as Behan harrumphs in one of the pieces; to paraphrase “that’s the kind of writing for books with hard covers” but very few others capture the mercury of the spoken word as completely.

Because his gift of perception, his instinct for the core of a situation, which enriches these 1,200 or so word pieces, he must have been self-aware enough to realise he was surrendering his independence and, ultimately squandering his great talent as so many of his compatriots unable to manage alcohol did and do but maybe not to the extent of previous generations. 

One of myriad stories telling of his endless debauch is set in an airport in Canada. 

On arrival, an immigration official asks Behan why he has come to Canada. “I was in a bar in Dublin, and I saw a beer mat that said 'Drink Canada Dry' … well, here I am.” It would be funny if it was not an early draft of a suicide note. My grandfather, long dead and a Dublin city centre guard during Behan’s very public decline told of seeing him standing almost bereft in doorways waiting for a pub to open. Dishevelled and often incontinent, his clothes soiled, he offered a pathetic contrast with these magnificent time-capsule pieces.

Behan was a committed republican and a communist and spent more than a sixth of his very short life — seven years — in either British or Irish jails. 

A playwright, an autobiographer, and a reliable newspaper columnist his comet burned all too brightly and flew far too short an arc. 

It is, in this his centenary year, hard to understand why he is so poorly represented in our school curriculums as he offers invaluable insights on so many of the powerful forces in humanity’s journey, a sobering parable of how even a great talent can drown in fun-cum-tragedy and foolishness and, still pertinent today, the complexity of the relationships between all communities on this island. 

By reminding us of these wonderful vignettes, editor John Brannigan has served Behan’s legacy and his readers very well. What a pity the writer did not get the kind of attention that would have, like Cash and Campbell, offered a kind of living redemption and the glorious later career we can only imagine.