Blanking Success

To a certain breed of Irishman, the one important motto to remember is: If you can't join 'em, lick 'em. No one among the current crop of Irish has more outrageous fun living to this maxim than a richly vocabularied ex-terrorist and convict named Brendan Behan. His autobiography, Borstal Boy, ran through its first edition two weeks after publication, a current play called The Hostage had London critics wondering if another Sean O'Casey had popped up from no where, and another play, The Quare Fellow, after a rousing run in London, introduced Behan to Manhattan last week (see THEATER).

The night Quare Fellow had its off-Broadway opening, Playwright Behan, a tousled, Falstaffian figure of a man, celebrated by heading out on a glorious binge in Dublin. Behan (rhymes with seein') is the descendant of a distinguished line of eccentrics, rebels and house painters; his father is the relatively sedate president of the National Society of House and Ship Painters, but his grandfather was a member of a group of terrorists called "The Invincibles," and his grandmother was so busy with other things that she fed her family an unvarying diet of "brawn* and stout."

Brendan himself cannot remember getting squiffed earlier than the age of six. "Meself and me grandmother turned up at the Hospice for the Dying with an auld man we were trying to get in. It's probably the first time in history that the hospice has thrown out three people for being drunk--a granny, a boy of six and a prospective client."

Turns with the Screws. The boy of six had discovered his avocation, but it was not until he was twice that age that he stumbled onto his double-barreled calling: terrorism on behalf of the I.R.A., and books and plays springing from what he observed during the resultant jail sentences. His first turn with the screws (i.e., prison guards) came in 1939, when the 16-year-old was assigned to help blow up the battleship King George V in Liverpool harbor. "I was due to start work the day after I was arrested," he recalls. Terrorist Behan pulled a three-year sentence, since then has spent nearly eight years on and off in gaol and prison, unwillingly soaking up the petty grievances and triumphs, the cadenced vulgarity and bare-nerved wit of his fellow prisoners. Behan sold his first pieces ("dirty stories, mostly") to Left Bank reviews in the late 1940s, completed The Quare Fellow in 1954, waited two years for a London theater to take a chance on mounting it.

Behan's thunderous and immediate success was on the scale of another bedeviled elf, the late Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. But unlike Thomas, who wanted both porter and her daughter, Playwright Behan has stuck to the porter; and while it goes to his head with staggering frequency, nothing else has. His complete curtain speech in London, after he had watched Quare Fellow's opening in the company of two playgoers from Scotland Yard, was a classic: "I've been under guard here. I need a drink badly. Please forgive me." Two years ago, invited to appear on a BBC-TV interview, he went on camera paralyzed to the point of petrification. When the BBC blamed the hot weather, Behan roared to questioning reporters: "I was drunk." Explained his wife of 3 1/2 years, Painter Beatrice Salkeld: "They shut him up in a room before the broadcast, but were stupid enough to leave a bottle of whisky in the room too."

The Vagabond Liver. On the auld sod of Dublin, Behan makes even less attempt at apology. "I'm addicted to drink," he announces calmly. "In the part of Dublin I come from it's no disgrace to get drunk. It's an achievement." Followed by a horde of slum urchins begging sixpence ("Their standard of living has gone up with mine; they used to be content with pennies"), his florid, stocky figure heads out for the boozer before n a.m. He "gargles" whisky and porter the rest of the day, while heaving beguiling blarney to friends and freeloaders: "Do you know I'm a shareholder in the Daily Worker? But I can't afford to write for it--I write for Vogue instead." At times he is melancholy about the passing of the years: "I am 35 and I do want to die."

For all his attachment to the spigot, Brendan turns it off during his writing bouts. Not that it is easy to stick to work, now that the vagabond liver has money and fame. Brendan has started a novel about Dublin, but, he says, "I can't get on with it with all this blanking success." Meanwhile, since his Borstal Boy was banned as "obscene" by the Irish government, he strides about bellowing (to the tune of MacNamara's Band):

Oh me name is Brendan Behan, I'm the

latest of the banned,

Although we're small in numbers, we're

the best banned in the land;

We're read at wakes and weddins, and

in every parish hall,

And under libr'y counters, sure you'll

have no throuble at all.

* Pig's cheek, boiled to the crumbling point and then pressed into a mold until it looks like red marble.

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