Early life

Behan was born in the inner city of Dublin at Holles Street Hospital on 9 February 1923 into an educated working-class family. He lived in a house on Russell Street near Mountjoy Square owned by his grandmother, Christine English, who owned a number of properties in the area. Brendan’s father Stephen Behan, a house painter who had been active in the Irish War of Indepence, read classic literature to the children at bedtime from sources including Zola, Galsworthy, and Maupassant,his mother, Kathleen, took them on literary tours of the city. If Behan’s interest in literature came from his father, his political beliefs came from his mother. She remained politically active all her life and was a personal friend of the Irish republican Michael Collins. Brendan Behan wrote a lament to Collins, “The Laughing Boy”, at the age of thirteen. The title was from the affectionate nickname Mrs. Behan gave to Collins. Kathleen published her autobiography, “Mother of All The Behans”, a collaboration with her son Brian, in 1984.

Behan’s uncle Peadar Kearney wrote the Irish national anthem “The Soldier’s Song”. 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.

A biographer, Ulick O’Connor, recounts that one day, at age eight, Brendan 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!”

Behan left school at 13 to follow in his father’s footsteps as a house painter.

IRA activities

In 1937, the Behan family moved to a new local council housing scheme in Crumlin. Behan became a member of Fianna Eireann, the youth organisation of the Anti-Treaty IRA. He published his first poems and prose in the organisation’s magazine, Fianna: the Voice of Young Ireland. In 1931 he also became the youngest contributor to be published in the Irish Press with his poem “Reply of Young Boy to Pro-English verses”.

At 16, Behan joined the IRA and embarked on an unauthorised solo mission to England to set off a bomb at the Liverpool docks. He was arrested by British law enforcement and found in possession of explosives. As Behan was only 16 at the time of his arrest, British prosecutors tried to convince him to testify against his IRA superiors and offered in return to relocate him under a new name to Canada or another faraway colony of the British Empire.

Refusing to be turned, Behan was sentenced to three years in a borstal (Hollesley Bay, once under the care of Cyril Joyce) and did not return to Ireland until 1941. He wrote about the experience in the memoir Borstal Boy.

In 1942, during the wartime state of emergency declared by Irish Taoiseach Eamonn De Valera, Behan was arrested by the Garda Siochana and put on trial for conspiracy to murder and the attempted murder of two Garda Detectives, which the IRA had planned for during a Dublin commemoration ceremony for Theobald Wolfe Tone. Behan was found guilty and sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment. He was first incarcerated in Mountjoy Prision in Dublin and then interned both with other IRA men and with Allied and German airmen at the Curragh Camp in County Kildare. Those experiences were related in Behan’s memoir Confessions of an Irish Rebel. Released under a general amnsety for IRA prisoners and internees in 1946, Behan’s IRA career was largely over by the age of 23. Aside from a short prison sentence in 1947 for trying to break an imprisoned IRA man out of an English prison in Manchester, Behan effectively left the organisation but remained friends with several IRA members.

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. It was a literary magazine called Envoy. (A Review of Literature and Art), founded by John Ryan, that first published Behan’s short stories and his first poem. Some of his early work was also 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, supposedly by writing pornography. By the time he returned to Ireland, he had become a writer who drank too much, rather than a drinker who talked about what he was going to write. He had also developed the knowledge that to succeed, he would have to discipline himself. Throughout the rest of his writing career, he would rise at seven in the morning and work until noon, when the pubs opened. He began to write for various newspapers, such as The Irish Times, and also for radio, which broadcast a play of his entitled “The Leaving Party”. Additionally, he cultivated a reputation as carouser-in-chief and swayed shoulder-to-shoulder with other literati of the day he had known through Envoy and who used the pub McDaid’s as their base: Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Swift, Anthony Cronin, John Dordan, JP Donleavy and artist Desmond MacNamara  whose bust of Behan is on display at the National Writers Museum. For unknown reasons, Behan had a major falling-out with Kavanagh, who reportedly would visibly shudder at the mention of Behan’s name and who referred to him as “evil incarnate”.

Behan’s fortunes changed in 1954, with the appearance of his play The Quare Fellow, 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. 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. Behan generated immense publicity for The Quare Fellow as a result of a drunken appearance on the Malcolm Muggeridge TV show. The English, relatively unaccustomed to public drunkenness in authors, took him to their hearts. A fellow guest on the show, Irish-American actor Jackie Gleeson, 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. Behan 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 had not 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. Rumours still abound that Littlewood contributed much of the text of The Quare Fellow and led to the saying, “Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood, Brendan Behan wrote under Littlewood”. Littlewood remained a supporter, visiting him in Dublin in 1960.

In 1957, his Irish-language play An Giall  (The Hostage) opened in the Damer Theatre, Dublin. Reminiscent of Frank O’Connor’s Guests of the Nation, it portrays the detention in a teeming Dublin house in the late 1950s of a British conscript soldier, seized by the IRA as a hostage pending the scheduled execution in Northern Ireland of an imprisoned IRA volunteer. The hostage falls in love with an Irish convent girl, Teresa, working as a maid in the house. Their innocent world of love is incongruous among their surroundings since the house also serves as a brothel. In the end, the hostage dies accidentally during a bungled police raid, revealing the human cost of war, a universal suffering. The subsequent English-language version The Hostage (1958), reflecting Behan’s own translation from the Irish but also much influenced by Joan Littlewood during a troubled collaboration with Behan, is a bawdy, slapstick play that adds a number of flamboyantly gay characters and bears only a limited resemblance to the original version.

( Seamus at Brendan Behan funeral, Glasnevin Cemetery March 23rd 1964 )

His autobiographical novel Borstal Boy followed in 1958. In the vivid memoir of his time in St Andrews House, Hollesley Bay Colony Borstal, near Woodbridge, Suffolk, England. (The site of St Andrews House is now a Category D men’s prison and Young Offenders Institution). An original voice in Irish literature boomed out from its pages. The language is both acerbic and delicate, the portrayal of inmates and “screws” cerebral. For a Republican, though, it is not a vitriolic attack on Britain; it delineates Behan’s move away from violence. In one account, an inmate strives to entice Behan into chanting political slogans with him. Behan curses and damns him in his mind, hoping that 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. The 1950s literary critic Kenneth Tynan said: “While other writers hoard 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.

In very militant Irish republicanism, Irishmen who served in the British Army during World War 1 are traditionally considered to have been traitors. Also, Behan is known to have always had a deeply troubled relationship with the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. Even so, Behan is also known to have deeply admired Father William Doyle, a Dublin-born priest of the Society of Jesus, who served as military chaplin to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers as they fought in the trenches of the Western Front. Father Doyle was ultimately killed in action while running to the aid of wounded soldiers from his Regiment during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. Behan expressed his affection for Father Doyle in the memoir Borstal Boy. Also, Alfred O”Rahilly’s 1920 biography of the fallen chaplain is known to have been one of Behan’s favorite books.

Behan learned to speak the Irish language at the home of the Nolan family in the Connemara Gaeltacht during the late 1940’s. Drs. Sinéad and Maureen Nolan (daughters of the house) never heard a disrespectful word or a hint of profanity from him during that time. He was much loved and revered by their devoutly Roman Catholic parents, who recognized Behan’s genius for language long before he became famous. The Nolans saw his theatrics for what they were: a device to conceal an exquisitely sensitive nature.

Decline and death

Behan found fame difficult. 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 1950s but this was not diagnosed until 1956. As his fame grew, so too did his alcohol addiction. This combination resulted in a series of famously drunken public appearances, on both stage and television. Behan’s favourite drink (a lethal combination for an alcoholic diabetic) was champagne and sherry.

Behan saw that it paid to be drunk; the public wanted the witty, iconoclastic, genial “broth of a boy”, and he gave that to them in abundance, once exclaiming: “There’s no bad publicity except an obituary.” His health suffered terribly, with diabetic comas and seizures occurring regularly. The public who once extended their arms now closed ranks against him; publicans flung him from their premises. His books, Brendan Behan’s Island, Brendan Behan’s New York and Confessions of an Irish Rebel, published in 1962 and 1964, were dictated into a tape recorder because he was no longer able to write or type for long enough to be able to finish them.

Behan had married Beatrice Salkeld (daughter of the painter Cecil Salkeld) in 1955. A daughter, Blanaid, was born in 1963. Love, however, was not enough to bring Behan back from his alcoholic abyss. By early March 1964, the end was in sight. Collapsing at the Harbour Lights bar, he was transferred to the Meath Hospital in central Dublin, where he died, aged 41.

Behan had a one-night stand in 1961 with Valerie Danby-Smith, who was Ernest Hemingway’s personal assistant and later married his son, Dr. Gregory Hemingway. Nine months later, Valerie gave birth to a son she named Brendan. Brendan Behan died two years later, having never met his son.