The naked truth about Brendan Behan

LAST week, the door to the room that Brendan Behan stayed in at the famously bohemian Chelsea Hotel on New York’s Westside was sold at auction for €6,000.

The owner of the hotel had taken Brendan in when he had become an unwelcome guest elsewhere.

He sobered up for a while, but gradually drifted back on to the booze and was suffering with chronic diabetes when he died in Dublin on March 20, 1964. Brendan Behan was a consummate Jackeen and one of our finest playwrights, poets and authors. He is credited as the writer of ‘The Auld Triangle’, a song that was written for his first play in English, The Quare Fella. In the past 50 years, wherever Irish people gather, this song will inevitably surface before the night is over.

Behan died at the very early age of 41, and it was alcohol that eventually killed him. He left behind him a reputation as a notorious drinker, entertaining and bawdy, and with a withering line in personal insults.

The first time I saw Brendan Behan, in the flesh, so to speak, I was about 12 and there was an abundance of flesh on view. Brendan emerged from the water at Seapoint, having enjoyed his dip in the briny and there he was standing, buck naked, drying himself with a towel no bigger than a tea cloth.

The next time I saw him he was walking down Baggot Street in his pyjamas, which he was wont to do. All and sundry greeted him as though he was the Lord Mayor, though a few were scared of what he might say.

There was a nature column in the Evening Press at the time, written by J. Ashton Freeman and illustrated by his wife Stella Gore.

Stella was walking down Grafton Street one day when she saw Brendan approaching and did her best to hide herself in the crowd. Alas, Brendan spotted her. ‘Hey Stella,’ he roared. ‘How’s yer blue tits?’

Brendan’s most famous book, Borstal Boy, was an account of his time in borstal, where he was sent after being caught trying to smuggle gelignite into England for an unauthorised mission for the IRA.

Brendan was from a very staunch Republican family and his father Stephen was one of Michael Collins’ handpicked squad who assassinated seven British spies on the morning of Bloody Sunday.

His mother Kathleen was a fabulous character who collected songs which she sang in raucous style.

I enjoyed many nights in her company in the Embankment in Tallaght.

She was also funny, and one of her favourite sayings was, ‘Jaysus come down off that cross and let me up there for a minute’s peace!’

Brendan’s first play, An Giall, was written in Gaelic and had its first peformance in the Damer Hall on Stephen’s Green.

My Dad played the part of ‘Monsieur’ in the play, and the opening night was probably the last time I saw Brendan in person.

An Giall was translated into English as The Hostage, and was bowdlerised by producer Joan Littlewood.

It became a sensation in Britain and New York, and thus began Brendan’s love affair with The Big Apple. H E is quoted as saying, ‘New York, my new land. The man who hates New York, hates life’. But it was back in Dublin on a cold, chilly winter’s night that I was privileged to witness a moment of drama that might have been concocted by Brendan himself.

Having finished a concert for the inmates, a group of ballad singers were crossing the quadrangle of Mountjoy Jail, when, unbidden, Ronnie Drew broke into ‘The Auld Triangle’. ‘A hungry feeling came o’er me stealin...’, he sang.

The words rang out crystal clear and when he finished the song, with their tin cups the incarcerated prisoners banged on windows and bars, the jail equivalent of a standing ovation.