The perils of paddywhackery ☘️
Or, Brendan Behan as the Stage Irishman
Irish St. Patrick’s Day is to American St. Patrick’s Day as being Irish is to being Stage Irish. In Ireland, it’s a minor religious holiday. Here, it’s green beer and plastic bowler hats.
When Irish eyes are rolling, it’s likely due to the over-the-top, Darby O’Gill and the Little People Irishness designed for export only. Leprechauning, the purposeful injection of these stereotypes into culture, persists because it readily generates pots of gold for those who do it well.
The life of Brendan Behan (1923-1964) was a short descent from Irish to Stage Irish: He began as a national hero, ended in the hard depths of paddywhackery, and is now canonized as one of the Great Irish Writers.
Behan followed his father into the Irish Republican Army, spent formative time in prison for attempting to bomb the ports of Liverpool as part of the IRA’s terrorist campaign, became fluent in Irish language and culture, painted houses, then “took up writing because it’s easier than house painting.” He made his name with the 1954 play The Quare Fellow, based on his prison time. When it opened in London two years later, Kenneth Tynan raved:
The English hoard words like misers, the Irish spend them like sailors; and in Brendan Behan’s tremendous new play language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless and spoiling for a fight.
The resulting publicity led Behan to plausibly be the first person to appear drunk on television, and his career careened forward (most notably with the prison novel Borstal Boy) and downward from there. He told the Daily Mail in 1956 that he averaged 14 pints of stout or two bottles of whisky a day. For a while, that worked. He was a “drinker with a writing problem,” he wrote, and as years went on he managed to solve that problem with more drinking.
His preferred medium became pub banter, and for a time that meant his words found a wide audience in tellings and retellings.
“The first duty of a writer is to let his country down,” he said, though he was hampered in doing that because “the number of people who buy books in Ireland would not keep me in drink for the duration of the Sunday opening time.”
He remained a revolutionary at heart, arguing that “if you fight for the liberty and unity of a small country, you’re an anarchist: but if you go bombing for a great power, you’re a patriot. It all depends on the size of the country in question.”
His Stage Irishness was in full effect by 1961, when his behaviour got him banned from marching in New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, even though he insisted that “I’m off the drink for Lent — and for breadth, too!”
And of course, a true Stage Irishman needed a dirty limerick, though his was more clever than most. He introduced it as his way of explaining the difference between poetry and prose:
“There was a young man named Rollocks, who worked for Ferrier Pollocks. As he walked on the Strand. With his girl by the hand. The tide came up to his knees. Now that’s prose. If the tide had been in, it would have been poetry.”
International fame and gigalitres of whiskey diluted him from character to caricature until he died in 1964 at the age of 41. Though he quipped that “there’s no bad publicity but an obituary,” his early demise propelled him to quasi-sainthood in his homeland, where he’s appeared on a stamp and is constantly being reassessed by academics. His classics were reissued while his later books, which were slurred into a tape recorder, have been largely forgotten.
Is there a moral in his life, beyond try not to drown yourself in Guinness? As one of his contemporaries said, he was “basically a shy person and quiet when sober. When he took a few drinks to break the ice he was the most wonderful company in the world. When he took one over the eight he became violent and unpleasant.” So, quit when you’re wonderful.
When he was asked if one of his plays had a message, he had an incredulous response at the ready: “Message? Message? What the hell do you think I am, a bloody postman?”
Quick quips; lightning
“Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?”
Elizabeth Bowen
“I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the same.”
Iris Murdoch
“An Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination.”
George Bernard Shaw
That’s the 37th issue of Get Wit Quick, your weekly pint-sized provocation. Darby O’Gill and the Little People is indeed on Disney+, with the warning that it “may contain outdated cultural descriptions.” Here’s a terrific writeup of Behan’s time in Toronto, where he performed with Nina Simone and (in his words) attempted to Drink Canada Dry. Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting keeps me in drink. No one actually kisses the Blarney Stone, especially these days, but you’re welcome to tap the 💚 below.