TravelVoice Journal - Brendan Behan's New York

It was the Irish playwright's favourite city. To mark St Patrick's Day his niece, Rosemary Behan, revisits his old haunts. ">

Brendan Behan's New York - St Patrick's Day

by Rosemary Behan

It was the Irish playwright's favourite city. To mark St Patrick's Day his niece, Rosemary Behan, revisits his old haunts.

New York has been violently aware, since 2 September, of the arrival of a bawdy, iconoclastic, ex-Irish revolutionary, ballad-singing, jig-dancing, stocky, rumpled, wild-haired, thirty-seven-year-old Dublin playwright named Brendan Behan. Met by reporters when he arrived at the airport, converged upon at his Algonquin Hotel suite, pursued in Third Avenue bars and followed on his rambles along the streets of New York, Mr Behan hasn't stopped talking since he stepped off the plane.

Thus The New York Times reported the beginning of Brendan Behan's love affair with the city in 1960. When asked what he would most like to see in Spain he had replied Franco's funeral. When asked what he thought of Canada he said it would be all right when it was finished. But he said New York was the greatest city in the world. It was "the place where you are least likely to get a bite from a wild sheep".

When he arrived at Idlewild airport (now JFK), Brendan was at the height of his fame. The Hostage, his play about a British soldier held captive in a Dublin flophouse, had been running in the West End for over a year and Borstal Boy, his autobiography, had just been published. News of his alcohol-fuelled scrapes had spread throughout the world. Now The Hostage was opening on Broadway, and the press pack scented a story. They got one: Brendan sat down in front of them and drank milk.

He had been on the wagon for five months and was determined to stay there. But if he was sober he wasn't sedate. Asked for his view of the presidential candidates, he praised John F Kennedy, saying that his ancestors came from a part of Ireland where the apples grew alongside the road but the people were so honest they never touched them. When Kennedy won the election, he invited Brendan to his inauguration.

Forty years later, strolling down Broadway, I was amazed at how warmly the city remembers my uncle. Passing a tacky restaurant called The Playwright's Tavern, I glanced in the window. The menu was offering "Brendan Behan soup". "Come in, don't be a stranger," the man on the door told me, and indeed I felt I wasn't. I was struck by the aptness of a line from a Pogues song: "In Brendan Behan's footsteps I walked up and down the street". Just inside the door was a vast photograph of Brendan. The eyes of the uncle I never met followed me eerily around the room.

Brendan died in 1964, 12 years before I was born, so I'm a disappointment to those who expect personal reminiscences. But I feel that I know him - not only from his books and plays but from a host of family stories. If his public image is that of a writer and a boozer, his family and close friends remember him as a rare presence ("God-branded", in the words of his publisher, Iain Hamilton) who could smell a phoney a mile off.

He was raised in a poor and staunchly Republican household. "Burn all things British - except their coal," my grandmother urged her children. Hardly surprising, then, that he ended up in borstal at 16 for being caught in Liverpool with bomb-making equipment. More surprising is that he managed to make the leap from borstal to Broadway and, along the way, warmed to the British.

The Cort Theatre, where The Hostage played to packed audiences for three months, was dark during my stay and the Eugene O'Neill, where The Quare Fellow also played, was showing The Full Monty. But at the Irish Repertory Theatre - devoted to bringing classic and contemporary Irish and Irish-American works to the stage - I caught a performance of The Hostage. It was true to the spirit of Joan Littlewood's original production, even if the American accents grated slightly.

The theatre attracts Irish-Americans "seeking to discover or rediscover their roots", and receives large grants from the city's Department of Cultural Affairs. New York, perhaps more than any American city, is proud of its Irish population and strives to preserve "Irish-American culture".

After the New York Irish fought in the American War of Independence they gained the same rights as American citizens, and were no longer thought of as strangers. They rose famously quickly in politics and policing, though today they are just as likely to be in business, banking or the media.

As late as the 1950s, however, Irish writers had yet to make their mark. I reflected on Norman Mailer's view of the opening of The Hostage: "New York was dead in those days. Brendan Behan's Hostage broke the ice . . . It made the beatnik movement - Kerouac, Ginsberg, myself and others - respectable up-town."

At his home on the Upper West Side, the writer Malachy McCourt told me how Brendan turned Manhattan into a small village, meeting friends on the streets at all hours of the day and night. "I used to see him in the mornings in Midtown. At that time he wasn't drinking, so we would visit the coffee shops. Once it was about 10.30 in the morning and I said: 'You look like you need some fruit juice.' He said, 'By God I do.' "

But only two months after his arrival in the city, Brendan was back on the bottle, gatecrashing his own play after seven bottles of Champagne, singing to the audience and lecturing the actors. Malachy, who owned a string of bars at the time - he named one The Bells of Hell after a line from The Hostage - says Brendan's so-called friends were partly to blame. "There were always these sycophants around him. They would boast, 'I got drunk with Brendan Behan'. I thought that was a stupid thing to say. Why couldn't they just say they met Brendan Behan?"

In those days he wasn't hard to find. His haunts included the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly had his last drink; Chumley's, the snug revolutionary speakeasy where he met Hemingway; and P J Clarke's on Third Avenue. In Brendan Behan's New York, a memoir he dictated months before his death, P J Clarke's appears in a Paul Hogarth drawing as an imposing four-storey Edwardian building. Now the bar, on the ground floor, sits forlornly on its own, the upper three floors having been lopped off in the 1980s to make way for an office block. I don't think Brendan would have approved, though he would be pleased that a photograph of himself with Kevin McGlory, an Irish-American film star, still hangs on the wall.

The Algonquin Hotel, too, has had a facelift since the 1960s, when Brendan sat at its famed Round Table with Thornton Wilder, James Thurber and Norman Mailer. But the oak-panelled lounge has preserved its comfortable, 1930s atmosphere and is worth a few minutes of any visitor's time.

Mary Bodne, the owner in my uncle's day, had died a few months before I arrived, but Mike Lyons, 57, a bellman for 39 years, could bear witness to two different Brendans: the one who hosted teas in the lobby and the one who had to be helped to his bed. In the latter days, "he was very funny and very loud. I remember him coming in at four in the morning with an entourage. Often I would just see a bunch of guys carrying him up the stairs. We didn't mind." Though he was refused entry to the Algonquin after returning from a bender in Toronto, Brendan remembers the hotel in his memoir as an "excellent institution".

He was less kind to Judge James J Comerford, who banned him from the 1963 St Patrick's Day parade for being a "drunken disgrace". Brendan told the American press that he had a new theory about what happened to the snakes when St Patrick drove them out of Ireland: "They all swam to America and became New York judges." He was then invited to the New Jersey parade and received the key to the city.

Not that he was wholly approving of the celebrations. He thought the parade "a very jolly occasion", but he berated Irish societies for being "so fond of running round the place doing all sorts of things on Saint Patrick's Day that are certainly not done in Dublin, Belfast, Cork or Limerick."

Though he loved the energy of 1960s New York, he understood the fears of Irish immigrants who had arrived earlier, who had adjusted to the New World only to see it swept away by an even newer one, their tenements flattened to make way for skyscrapers. He would talk over these developments with them in McSorley's Old Ale House in what is now the East Village. The bar, he noted, "has been there for about a hundred years and is worth a visit from anybody of any sort, size, shape or creed . . .

"The conversation in the saloon is great on New York, which of course these old men do not appreciate now, for they remember the time when the buildings were half the size. They certainly do not appreciate the Time-Life building, nor for the matter of that, the Empire State Building."

Opened in 1854, McSorley's claims to be the oldest bar in the city. Through boom and bust, peace and war, it has provided a refuge and a link with home for generations of Irish immigrants. These days it seems to cater for well-dressed couples by day and students by night.

I turned up on a cold Sunday morning. Sunlight streamed through the windows, mingling with cigarette smoke and settling on the sawdust-covered floor. Matt Mahon, the portly, kind-looking manager, looked up from under his flat cap to greet me and serve the only drink the bar offers - its own ale.

McSorley's Old Ale House: It is, said Behan 'worth a visit from anybody of any sort, size, shape or creed'

Looking around, I saw among the hundreds of bits and pieces on the walls a framed dust jacket of Brendan Behan's New York, a charcoal drawing of Brendan and a poster advertising Borstal Boy.

Matt himself had never met Brendan, but among his regulars were several who had bumped into him in the 1960s, when they were students up the street at New York University. Terence Moran, now professor of culture and communication, had even introduced Brendan's books into the curriculum. "His writing had an iconoclastic effect," he told me. "We were trying to expand the view of what literature was. Borstal Boy showed someone with no educational background succeeding in the world of letters. It was invigorating."

Terence met Brendan several times. "I remember once he wasn't drinking. He was in at the bar and his wife was standing outside [women were not admitted until the 1970s]. A friend of mine went over and said, 'Mr Behan, I don't want to disturb you, but I just want to say how much I admire your work. I think you're a genius and I just want to buy you an ale.' So Brendan took the ale and poured it on the floor without saying anything. I think he wanted to make a dramatic gesture for his wife, who was at the door."

New York may have made Brendan an international star, but it also facilitated his destruction - as his wife, Beatrice, had predicted. She had begged Joan Littlewood not to take The Hostage to the city. When Brendan's roistering went too far even for the Algonquin, he had trouble finding another place to stay. Stanley Bard, who gave him a home at the Chelsea Hotel, recalls that he was "really on a drinking binge that was non-stop. He was very verbal. No one else would take him."

At the Chelsea, in a room on the ninth floor, between alcoholic comas and seizures in 1963, Brendan dictated Confessions of an Irish Rebel. Stanley took me up to the room, which, apart from being half the size of what it had been, still had bare wooden floors and sparse furniture. The view over the street from the wrought-iron balcony was dreary. It felt like a dead person's room, as if it had been uninhabited for 40 years.

When I arrived in New York, driving over the Manhattan bridge at night with the skyline lit up, the magic my uncle saw in it seemed undimmed. Even during daylight hours, the city's man-made canyons, looming over Central Park and Broadway, are breathtaking. But outside the central areas there is a dirtiness and decay that is more suggestive of the Third World than a 21st-century Western city. Greenwich Village seemed to me to have none of the intellectual vibrancy people noted in the 1960s, when great writers were scraping a living there (Brendan famously stuffed $80 into the pocket of an impoverished Allan Ginsberg).

I wasn't overly impressed with the Chelsea, either. The hotel, a seedy red-brick Victorian building of more than 100 rooms, trades on its past, on a guest list of literati that included Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller and William Burroughs. It wouldn't be my choice as a base in New York. It has too little of the promise that Brendan loved about the United States and which he summed up in a sentence preserved in a plaque at the front door: "To America, my new-found land: the man that hates you hates the human race."

But there is no doubt that he felt at home at the Chelsea. In a disorganised office, filled with piles of books and papers spread across several desks, Stanley told me: "Brendan would come in just as you did now and stand right there where you are standing. I would be on the phone to my wife and he would grab the phone off me and start singing to her."

By his own standards, though, he was reasonably well-behaved. "We are interested in helping the artist and he respected that," said Stanley. "He never abused the hotel or anyone in the hotel."

None the less, Stanley was pleased when Beatrice came over in 1963. "She calmed him down, but she still relied on me to help her. He was here for eight months then." The pair of them made friends with the composer George Kleinsinger, who rented an apartment on the top floor. They would sing as Kleinsinger played his grand piano amid a menagerie of plants and caged birds.

It was at the Chelsea that Brendan told Beatrice he had been having an affair. In My Life with Brendan Behan, Beatrice names the woman simply as Barbara, and describes her as "one of the immature stagestruck people who surrounded Brendan". There were rumours that she was pregnant. Beatrice reminded Brendan that she was pregnant too, and she was the one he owed loyalty to. She was the one who had nursed him during drunken bouts for the better part of 10 years.

He tried to pursuade her to settle in the US, but they finally sailed back to Dublin in December 1963. Four months later he was dead, proving that the cold master death doesn't care which town you live in.

Rosemary Behan
March 2002

Oh Savannah

Trevor Sinclair
June 2003

By Trevor Sinclair

My oh so patient partner and I arrived in Savannah after an extremely tedious drive from Atlanta. Trucks, eighteen-wheelers, trucks, trucks and more trucks. If I�d known more I would have flown. With ticket prices under $50 it�s gotta be worth it. The drive along the Interstate is very lush green and somewhat pretty, but it�s not as though there�s anywhere to stop, apart from finding the most wonderful fresh fruit in the small town of Dudley�somewhere off the freeway past Macon.

Brendan Behan's New York - St Patrick's Day

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