It is time to get drunk!/ So that you may not be martyred/ slaves of Time,/ get drunk, get drunk,/ and never pause for rest!/ With wine, poetry, or virtue,/ as you may choose!
— from “Get Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire
Brendan Behan’s saddest choice in life was that he tried so desperately to pursue all three of Baudelaire’s options. Virtue and poetry were warming, kind friends that em-braced him and nurtured him in the creation of rough and revealing plays and stories.
And alcohol killed him, another martyr to the role of drink in Irish mythology.
Conjure up the image of a man who had completely wrecked himself by the time he died in 1964 at 41, his liver gone, his teeth rotted and his diabetes running rampant. His poor face, in his youth the countenance of a renaissance cherub, had mutated into a brutal cartoon of the classic Irish stage drunk.
If you didn’t know who he was and saw him in a bar, you would immediately conclude this was another one of those florid, potato-faced street bums. Maybe he would sing an old rebel song. There would be spit and drool and gums showing, with an occasional walrus-like tooth sticking out.
People close to him would be very uncomfortable.
Behan was not a character for those who want their art tied up in neat, predictable packages. He was a blessed man, most certainly, fascinating when sober, dangerous when drunk and just plain unpredictable when he was moving from one state to the other.
He won his entree into the world of letters by telling so well the powerful stories he collected during his tumultuous, brief life. But it was not a comfortable place for a man with little formal education, a terrorist’s background that would keep the devil himself awake at night, and hardly any polish at all.
An actor’s work of art
It was a great pleasure to see him rise from the dead and walk on stage at Mercury Theater on Southport just as St. Patrick’s Day approached, with all of that wretched green beer and those swilling, stumbling, puking amateurs preparing to hit the streets for their annual alcoholic ramble.
“Brendan Behan: Confessions of an Irish Rebel,” which runs through March, is a powerful reminder of the danger of romanticizing alcoholism, or of thinking of it as a quaint character trait, part of being creative and Irish. The man’s brilliance is apparent in this play, but it stands right beside the pathology that wrecked his life.
Shay Duffin has been playing Behan in this show, which he also wrote, for 24 years. If you are sensitive about witnessing the story of a genius in deep decline, it is one of the scariest one-man plays you will ever see.
Duffin, 54, takes the character from complete sobriety when he first steps on stage into a deeper and deeper drunkenness that is profoundly disturbing, particularly in the last 10 minutes or so of the play.
Duffin’s Behan is big and loud and profane, as comfortably funny as anyone could ever be, but always with a shadow standing just behind him. This is the play to go see if you want to watch language dancing. It immediately brings to life the old Irish saying that Irish writers are just people who failed at talking. Behan clearly managed both.
There is actor’s art at work here too. Duffin is no potato-face. In fact, in profile it is not hard to imagine him in a toga playing Julius Caesar. But he has the big features and the sense of swagger essential to the Behan characterization.
Those shoes he wears in the play, the brown wing-tips, were Behan’s, a gift to Duffin from his widow. Duffin was born and raised in the same Dublin slum as Behan. Like Behan, he quit school early and pursued a trade, furniture reupholstering, before he began his career as a folk singer and actor.
He was just a young boy when he first saw the writer in a pub, way drunk and holding forth to a small audience. He remembers watching him stumble his way to the door and down the street in the dark, a figure disappearing in the distance, but occasionally illuminated by the light from windows of other pubs.
You come away from “Brendan Behan” with a clear understanding of the price this particular Irishman paid for his love of drink. At the end, the lights fade on a drooling, hopeless man, lost in a crashing sea of Guinness and dark, sad memories.
The characterization is so convincing that Duffin has to return to the stage afterward just to let everyone know he is OK, that he is not drunk beyond reason even though he has been guzzling Guinness, three pints per show on average. (By March 20, the 34th anniversary of Behan’s death, he will have had 16,725 pints on stage.)
“I only drink at work,” he says, opting for tea at Cullen’s Bar during a long, rambling afternoon conversation. He can and will talk for hours about Behan and his life and how playing such a powerful character for so long brings him close to the troubled author’s ghost.
Sometimes, late at night, he wishes he could have made this character stop drinking himself to death. The body of work he left, Duffin argues, will be recognized a century from now. But what might Behan have done had he lived to ripe old age?
Why didn’t he just stop?
Duffin has thought a lot about alcohol over the past 24 years.
His own on-stage adrenalin keeps him from becoming completely pussed, as the Irish say, during performances. But he tested himself after a show one night and blew way into the danger zone on a barside Breathalyzer. He said he certainly didn’t feel drunk, but you could probably wring pure alcohol out of the sweaty old shirt he was wearing.
Does he think alcohol was central to Behan’s creative process?
Behan was certainly alcoholic and was certainly creative, but any connection between the two was coincidental, the actor and writer said.
What if Behan had never put pen to paper?
“He would have been an alcoholic house painter who died young,” he said. “You can’t write well when you are drunk. Even Behan knew that. He was sober when he wrote.”
Duffin was shocked after a recent performance when a woman in the audience, full of sincerity and good intention, asked, “He had a wife and a child. Why didn’t he just stop drinking?”
“The man was a sponge,” Duffin replied. “He was sick.”
Duffin recalls the reaction years ago when he announced he would be working on a play to bring Behan’s complicated persona to the stage.
“What do you want to do a play about that drunk for?” was the general reaction almost everywhere.
It wasn’t about Behan the drunk, he said. It was about Behan the artist. The play was a big hit in Ireland and later in the United States and Europe.
The challenge of the play has been to convey the man’s wit and beauty while staying true to the sad realities of his life. Duffin has been hitting the mark for 24 years now. He could probably recite the play in his sleep, but it is a tribute to his dedication and his respect for Behan that he can still make it feel so alive.
Behan started drinking as a child in the Dublin slums. His mother would send him to the bar to pick up a huge pitcher of Guinness, Duffin said. He would drink a big portion of it on the way home, then substitute water to refill the jug.
He had what modern therapists would describe as a most complicated adolescence.
He was very well educated early in life by nuns and Christian Brothers, which gave him the ammunition he would need later when it came time to put pen to paper. But by the time he was 14 he was already leading a double life. On the surface, he was going to trade school to pursue a job he deeply hated, house painting. He spent his long Sunday afternoons on his other career, studying bombmaking for the Irish Republican Army.
He was first arrested in Liverpool in 1939 when his landlady, checking his baggage, found what amounted to an IRA chemistry set and turned him in. He was sentenced to three years in reform school, saved from hanging for treason only because he was just 16.
He was expelled and deported to Ireland in 1941. Less than a year later, during a commemoration of the Irish Easter Rising of 1916, he was arrested for shooting at a policeman in Dublin. He was sentenced to 14 years.
Even as he was on his way to prison, his first story, “I Become a Borstal Boy” was published. His troubles with the law continued after he was released in a general amnesty in 1946. He was in prison two more times in the following two years.
Then he went to Paris to become a pimp for the whores who worked Harry’s American Bar.
In the wake of this apprenticeship, he became a newspaperman.
From genius to clown
And his literary career started to take off. “The Quare Fellow,” his masterpiece, opened in Dublin in 1954 and rapidly moved on stage around the world. The play was a powerful protest against capital punishment.
The rest of the story involves many bad decisions, more jail time, some writing just for money, some great art and a shift onto the celebrity circuit, where he seemed to be playing the wild Irish rover in extremis.
Toward the end of his life, he would attend his own plays on Broadway, sitting in the audience, frequently in a drunken rage. “That’s not what I wrote!” he shouted in an obscenity-laced tirade. It got so bad that the police would not allow him into the theaters.
Of course no one witnessing any of this would have seen inside of Behan. The soul of an altar boy lived down in there someplace, swirling around in a soup of Guinness, passionate Irish nationalism, more misbehavior than most people can manage in a long lifetime and, always, fear.
By the time Behan died, he had mutated from Irish genius to public clown by last call. But don’t make the mistake of thinking about him in terms of circus. Opera is where this story belongs.
The cause of death: cirrhosis of the liver.
In the wake of his death, critics from all over the world sat down to try to assess what it was about him that had been so great, and so troubling at the same time.
Kenneth Allsop, the English writer and broadcaster, wrote a brief essay for the London Daily Mail the day after Behan died.
“There were two reasons why he was compelled to drown his troubled heart,” Allsop wrote. “He was Irish as one of his own gamey stage characters, and success and celebrity forced him to stay permanently in the glad rags of the roaring boy, the terror of pale suburbanites, the toss-pot who always tossed his pot farther than anyone else.”
He said he was with Behan in New York a year before his death when Allsop learned why there was so much darkness around the heart of the man. He said Behan told him one of the IRA squads he worked with had planted a bomb in Liverpool that killed a young woman and her baby. He said Behan told him only a lunatic would boast about taking a life.
“He was, indeed, a gentle and amiable man,” he wrote. “More than the loss of the books he never wrote, I shall feel that henceforth, there will always be an empty chair at the feast.”
Was that story true?
Behan may have said it. He may even have believed it. He may indeed have done it. People spend their lives wrestling with what happens to them as young men fighting wars, where the flames of passion seem to singe reason and morality beyond recognition.
There is not enough Guinness in the world to chase demons away forever.
