Quote of the Day (Brendan Behan, on the Irish and Cynicism)

“It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.”—Irish man of letters Brendan Behan (1923-1964) quoted in Brendan Behan, Interviews and Recollections (1982), edited by E. H. Mikhail (1982)

Quote of the Day (Malcolm Muggeridge, on Interviewing Brendan Behan)

“My TV interview with [the playwright] Brendan Behan is to me a memorable one, because he was drunk and did not utter throughout it one single comprehensible word. For Behan the experience was decisive. The papers next day were full of him and, Miss [Joan] Littlewood told me, several West End [theatre] managements, hitherto uninterested in his play, telephoned offering to put it on. So Behan learnt, and he was quick to learn - there was a crafty, calculating side to him - that one drunken, speechless television appearance brought more of the things he wanted, like money and notoriety and a neon glory about his head, than any number of hours with a pen in his hand."—Malcolm Muggeridge, Observer, July 26, 1970

English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge interviewed Brendan Behan for the BBC program Panorama on this date in 1956. Behan (1923-1964) was supposed to be talking about his play The Quare Fellow, which had become something of a cause celebre after its opening in Stratford because of material considered a potential turnoff to the British public of the time (e.g., Irish political prisoners, one gay character).

This should have been an ideal forum for promoting his work. In fact, this is what it turned out to be, for the playwright’s short-term gain but long-term ruin.

Well before he even got to the studio, Behan had started imbibing at a club. When friends' attempts to induce him to beg out of the interview on account of illness proved unavailing, he then made his way to the BBC‘s “green room,” where efforts by Muggeridge and others to sober him up were likewise ineffectual.

According to Bill Peschel’s Writers Gone Wild: The Feuds, Frolics, and Follies of Literature's Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts, and Misanthropes, the suits at The Beeb considered canceling right then and there, but Muggeridge’s plea to let it continue was granted--save for one condition: If Behan referred on-air to a certain part of female anatomy, it was all over.

Well, that didn’t happen, but much else did.

Behan started the interview but kicking off his shoes, and things came quickly unglued from there. Producers probably wished he had been completely inaudible, because his first words were that he needed to take a leak. A resourceful worker had taken the precaution off-camera of propping the playwright up--otherwise, Behan would have quietly slid to the floor.

Behan’s response to Muggeridge’s first question--mumbling--led the interviewer to paraphrase (or, if you will, improvise) an answer on the spot. Several bizarre and embarrassing minutes ensued, with Muggeridge bringing the proceedings to a merciful close by successfully prevailing on the inebriated Behan to sing a song from the play.

As Muggeridge noted in the quote above, several London theaters--five, to be exact--phoned about producing The Quare Fellow. As the journalist noted, the impact of all this on Behan was not salutary.

In December, I passed by New York’s famous Hotel Chelsea, where all kinds of the illuminati--Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Thomas Wolfe, and James Schuyler, among many others--have passed through over the years. It was Behan’s fate to re-enact there the fate of Dylan Thomas, who had a somewhat more substantial body of work than Behan but met a similar alcohol-fueled end in that spot.

Eight years after the BBC interview that made Behan a TV celebrity, Arthur Miller found him at the Chelsea, where he was being encouraged “to drink and perform his cute Irish act with his salivating brogue which Americans adore."

The sad thing about Behan is that far, far more has been written about him than he managed to write himself. Great talent brought low by substance abuse is wrenching indeed to watch.

This Day in Literary History

February 9, 1923 – Brendan Behan—IRA soldier, prisoner of Britain, playwright, novelist, poet, media star—was born on this date in Dublin.

Imprisoned for IRA activity as a teenager, he came out with the experiences that formed the basis of his acclaimed autobiographical novel, The Borstal Boy. In the 1950s his play The Quare Fellow prompted critic Kenneth Tynan to observe, “It seems to be Ireland’s function every twenty years or so to provide a playwright who will kick English drama from the past into the present."

Behan’s outrageous comments (e.g., "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves") made him a natural for the talk-show circuit. Eventually, however, drink and diabetes got the better of him. He died only one month after the birth of his daughter, leaving an all-too-small literary output for someone of his outsized wit and talent.

Even to the end, he couldn’t resist a one-liner. I first heard about his dying quip in a book called, appropriately enough, Last Words: Variations on a Theme in Cultural History, by Karl Guthke.

As he lay dying, Behan was nursed by a nun. Grateful for easing his agony, the self-described “daylight atheist” summoned the best words of thanks he could think of under the circumstances: “Ah, bless you, Sister, may all your sons be bishops.”

Truth or legend? I don’t know. But, as my friend Sherwood noted many years ago, about a high school bacchanal featuring a couple of buddies involving epic amounts of wine and women: “No matter what you may have heard—no matter how improbable, even impossible, it might sound—at least 80 percent of it is true.” Behan’s life was outrageous enough to produce that 80 percent, and maybe more.