Comment: The quare fellow Behan goes to Gotham

OVER the years, there have been many odes to the city that never sleeps.

Deserving of a place among them is a characteristically wry yet affectionate tribute from Brendan Behan: “New York is my Lourdes, I go there for spiritual replenishment.”

Of course, Behan found plenty of another kind of replenishment in the city, the alcoholic kind for which he became famous, overshadowing the work which had brought him critical acclaim and recognition.

The Dublin playwright, who died 50 years ago this month, took New York by storm on his first visit to America in 1960. He was feted by Manhattan’s finest on his arrival, greeted by an adoring media and courted by the biggest names in American arts, from Arthur Miller to Norman Mailer. His play The Hostage was a huge hit on Broadway and he was paid $3,000 a week to host a jazz cabaret evening, sharing the stage with Nina Simone.

In his book, Behan in the USA, Dave Hannigan looks in detail at a previously little-known chapter of the writer’s life, and the material he uncovered was a revelation.

“You hear about someone being ‘big in America’, it’s always exaggerated, but when I started researching the Behan visit, I realised, this guy really was enormous here,” says Hannigan, a Corkman based in New York.

“There was a media scrum at Idlewild airport when he arrived and he did 50 interviews in his first two weeks in New York. He was a genuine celebrity.”

But Behan was struggling with the creative gift that had been the springboard for that fame and it would transpire, his best work was already behind him.

“The book starts at September 1960 and he was basically done as a writer at that point. He was working on a play from when he arrived in America, called Richard’s Cork Leg, which he never finished. All the books that come out after that period is him speaking into a microphone and somebody typing it up later. They were basically milking him as a writer. His two great plays [The Quare Fellow and The Hostage] are done and Borstal Boy is finished. He’s on a slide into oblivion.”

There’s a strong sense of the sadness of this downward spiral in the book despite the entertainment value of the Behan adventures in New York.

“There were sparks, incredible witticisms and off-the-cuff stuff he would come out with under pressure. But the story of the book is sad, a guy exploding into fame and fortune and his talent drowns as the drinking intensifies and he’s dogged by ill-health,” says Hannigan.

“In the beginning, there was enormous regard for his talent. Literary giants like Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, James Thurber, they all respected him and thought he was a serious player. But then they realised how troubled he was and pulled back from him.”

Behan’s sojourns in New York can be seen as the last thrashing of an extinguished talent, the self-destructive swan song of a man who knows he has no more to say. This would be to deny the essential humanity of the writer — his generosity of spirit and practical decency doesn’t receive the same attention as the binge drinking, and little wonder. He actually spent the first 54 days of his visit sober. When he fell off the wagon, it was done with a certain panache. Following an argument with his wife Beatrice, he went to a restaurant where he ate a large plate of spaghetti and downed seven or eight bottles of champagne, with Beatrice on her knees begging him to stop.

Allen Ginsberg had an encounter with Behan that showed the other side of the Dubliner. The Beat poet told of how Behan treated him and his partner to a meal: “The thing I remember most vividly is towards the end of the meal, I went downstairs to the men’s room and he got up from the table and followed me. He stopped me in the hall outside the toilet and asked me, ‘Have you got any ammunition?’ ‘Ammunition?’ ‘Money.’ I said, ‘No’. He took out a wad of bills and gave me $80. He had no reason to do that except he was open-hearted and I guess he was making money on his play.”

Generous and flush: that was Behan’s luck and his curse, all at once.

* Behan in the USA, Ballpoint Press, €14.99, is in shops now.