Posted on 11/04/2002 6:53:22 AM PST by Orual
(Filed: 04/11/2002)
Brian Behan, the Irish author and playwright who died on Saturday aged 75, was never as celebrated as his brother Brendan, yet possessed a fair measure of the family's literary talent, and a full share of its irreverence and conviviality.
In his younger days he was heavily involved in radical politics. He would often talk of having met Josef Stalin and Mao Tse Tung.
His outstanding literary success was Mother of All the Behans (1984), an autobiography he ghosted on behalf of his parent. Adapted by Peter Sheridan into a one-woman show, it ran in New York, as well as picking up awards in Brighton, Edinburgh and Canada. His novel Kathleen (1988) was also based on his mother's life.
The older Brian Behan became, the more he delighted in being outrageous, especially about his own family. Thus in 1997, when there was debate about Brendan Behan's sexuality, Brian swiftly came forward with physiological detail.
"My brother had a strained foreskin," he volunteered, "and had to have an operation in America. After it, in my view, he was unequipped for sex." And before America? "Brendan did say once that if it was a choice between Michelangelo's David and Whistler's Mother - well, there'd be no contest."
Brian Behan was born in Dublin on November 10 1926, the third brother in the family, after Brendan and Seamus; Dominic came after, and there was also a sister, Carmel, as well as two step-brothers.
Brian's father was interned as a Republican during the Irish Civil War, while his mother Kathleen had acted as a courier for the rebel leaders Padraig Pearse and James Connolly during the Easter Rising of 1916.
Growing up in a slum on Russell Street in north Dublin, Brian was soon in trouble. In his autobiography With Breast Expanded (1964) he explained that his delinquencies were not due to a bad home background nor to any psychological disturbance. It was just that he wanted money for gambling.
In 1937 a children's court judge ordered that Brian should attend Artane Industrial School, run by the Christian Brothers. The Brothers, as Brian recalled 60 years later, were obsessed with sex.
Two boys accused of improper intimacy were tied around a vaulting horse by the drill master and flogged. Their heads were shaved and their necks adorned with a placard: "I am impure, do not speak to me."
Behan claimed that the Christian Brothers scarred him for life.
On leaving school he served in the Irish Army Construction Corps. Later, with employment thin on the ground in Dublin, he came to London, finding work as a bricklayer, carpenter, hod carrier and docker.
He became a trade union firebrand, fighting for the introduction of safety measures and better conditions. In 1950 he organised a go-slow at the Festival of Britain site, an agitation that led to his serving a spell in Brixton Prison. And in 1959 he was incarcerated in Wandsworth Prison after a demonstration at the South Bank.
Soon after arriving in London Behan joined the British Communist Party, and in the early 1950s undertook a tour of Eastern Europe, Russia and China. But he was not impressed by the lavish lifestyle of Communist leaders, and in 1956, after the brutal Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, left the Party.
Subsequently he was involved in various radical movements, becoming secretary of the Socialist Labour League before being expelled for "deviationism" by the dictatorial Gerry Healy. Behan later recalled Healy as "bald, with the little sore eyes of a newborn pig".
At the end of the 1960s, Behan entered Sussex University as a mature student, graduating with a degree in History and English at the age of 48. He subsequently completed a teacher training course.
During the 1970s he lived on a houseboat (actually a converted torpedo boat) at Shoreham, where he threw many an excellent party. In 1970, though, five shots were fired at the boat from a .22 rifle; fortunately they missed Behan, though one of them lodged in a grapefruit.
Behan thought this attack might have been motivated by a letter he had written to the Times, criticising both the Communist Party and the Conservatives' Industrial Relations Bill.
In 1972 Behan featured in a swearing match at the British Museum, in celebration of the republication of Lars Porsena, Robert Graves's book on swearing. "Brian will lick them all," opined the Irish publisher Timothy O'Keeffe. "I've only known two men curse better than Brian: the poet George Barker, and Brendan."
In the 1980s Behan became a lecturer in media studies at the London College of Printing, a post he held until 1990. But after the publication of his novel, Time To Go, in 1979, he devoted himself increasingly to writing.
His plays included The Begrudgers, performed at the Dublin Festival Fringe; Brother of All the Behans, Barking Sheep and Hallelujah I'm a Bum, all staged at Brighton, where Behan went to live in 1990; and Boots for the Fearless, at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, 1990. He collaborated with Aubrey Dillon-Malone to produce a memoir of Brendan, The Brothers Behan (1998).
At Brighton Behan took up nude bathing, not entirely to the satisfaction of the locals. "A middle-aged lady suddenly appeared out of the mist and told me I was a disgrace to humanity and would be frightening women and children," he recounted in 1998. "I told her I would go with her to the police station as I was, and she backed off after that."
On another occasion passers-by took his dip during a storm for a suicide bid and called the emergency services.
Brian Behan married first, in 1951 Celia Johnson; they had three daughters. "Women drain you of your vital fluids, see," he remarked after his divorce in 1975. "Men are suffering flak on an unprecedented scale; they need a divorced man like me to counsel them." So he went to work on The Male Liberation Handbook.
He married secondly the artist and sculptor Sally Hill; they had a daughter and a son.
With that background, I'm surprised he didn't move over here to become heavily involved in Democrat politics.
Too busy in his new job...
I am endlessly fascinated by the difference in perception from one side of the pond to the other. A person may be seen as colorfully eccentric, yet ultimately harmless over there, whereas here, they would simply be Democrats...
From last week's Telegraph.
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