Brendan Behan

Irish poet, playwright, novelist, freelance journalist, house painter, singer, celestial boozer, and rebel Brendan Behan (1923-1964) acquired a writer’s discipline in Paris, a city indifferent to his Irish reputation but interested in his literary achievement and as Seamus Heaney, he resumed digging with his pen into the kaleidoscopic pattern of his past. In the Latin Quarter, from 1948 onwards, between the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, “The twin cathedrals of existentialism” as Behan called them, he was surrounded by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian and Albert Camus. He also met Sindbad Vail, who was the editor of an avant-garde magazine called Points, to which Brendan made contributions in English. Behan’s short story After the Wake was published in Points magazine in 1950 and the short story Bridewell Revisited published in 1951 became the opening pages of Borstal Boy (1958). 

To get more insight into Behan’s life in Paris and the important role played by Sindbad Vail in the development of Behan’s career, listen to Deirdre McMahon’s award-winning RTÉ Radio One Documentary "Brendan Behan in Paris":

The Poet Walking with Irish Ghosts in Paris

From a very early age, Brendan Behan was introduced to the works of French writers like Zola and Maupassant as well as the writings of Irishmen who had lived in France like Wolfe Tone by his father, Stephen Behan (1891-1967), an educated working-class republican soldier and house painter. Hence for Brendan Behan, Paris was haunted by Irish artists, poets, playwrights, revolutionaries, priests, and singers whose steps he followed. Wolfe Tone, John O’Leary, James Stephens, and many others spent a lot of their lives in Paris. In Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965), Behan evoked Paris and the ghosts of Irishmen and sought out places of Irish interest. In the rue des Irlandais he found the Irish College, today Le Centre Culturel Irlandais where in the eighteenth-century young Irish seminarians had studied.

Behan lives on in music in 2023. Macdara Yeates, a singer of traditional Irish folk music with historian Donal Fallon, organised a musical event celebrating the centenary of Brendan Behan's birth at Dublin's Liberty Hall.

What Behan discovered in Paris was another way to give a voice to the disempowered. Brendan Behan’s poetry written in Irish comprises in total thirteen short lyrics published mainly in the Irish Literary magazine Comhar between 1946 and 1952. This limited but paramount contribution to modern poetry in Irish has been acknowledged in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) and The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006).

James Joyce

In Paris, Behan also wrote a poem about James Joyce in Irish, translated “Gratitude to Joyce”. Because like him James Joyce roamed the streets of “dear Dirty Dublin” and “the City of Light”, Paris. In his poem, Behan sees the ghost of Joyce in Paris in the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, but the ghost also sees him and is led to praise him. Behan is walking with Joyce’s ghost, not silenced, or daunted by him, but defiant asking to be treated as a peer. The Irish ghosts of Behan hence weigh, think, intensify, and condense themselves within a Parisian historical and cultural circle. Both James Joyce and Brendan Behan fought against Irish censorship and found a haven in Paris. For James Joyce, it was thanks to Sylvia Beach (who published Ulysses in 1922) and her Shakespeare and Co. bookshop (opened in 1921 at 12 rue de l’Odéon, 75006 Paris) and for Brendan Behan, it was Sindbad Vail and later George Whitman’s new 1964 Shakespeare and Co. bookshop (37 rue de la Bûcherie, 75005 Paris)

The Singer and Freelance Journalist

Returning to Dublin in 1950, Brendan Behan wrote short stories and scripts for Radio Telefis Éireann and sang on an ongoing programme, Ballad Maker’s Saturday Night. 

Listen to the documentary directed and presented by Anthony Cronin, featuring the voice and songs of Brendan Behan and conversations on his life, times, and writings with among others Joan Littlewood, Rae Jeffs, Beatrice Behan and Cathal Goulding:

Between 1951 and 1956, Brendan Behan wrote over one hundred articles for Irish newspapers with most of them written in a weekly column in the Irish Press, edited together for the first time in 2023 by John Brannigan.

The Quare Fellow

The Quare Fellow opened at the small Pike Theatre, Dublin, in 1954 and was an instant success in Ireland. Then in November 1958, The Quare Fellow opened in New York at the ‘Circle in the Square’ while Boris Vian and Jacqueline Sundstrom’s French translation of the Quare Fellow as Le Client du Matin was produced in April 1959 at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris and directed by Georges Wilson.

An Giall/ The Hostage (1958)

In 1958, Behan’s play in Irish An Giall opened at Dublin’s Damer Theatre. The Hostage, Behan’s English translation of the play was extremely successful worldwide following Joan Littlewood’s production in London in 1958. It received the Obie Award in 1958, the Paris Théâtre des Nations Festival Award in 1959, Tony Award nomination for best play in 1961, and the French Critics' Award in 1962. In April 1959, Brendan Behan with his wife Beatrice travelled back to Paris for the four-day Théâtre des Nations Festival where The Hostage had been selected to represent not Ireland but Great Britain. At the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre, a crowd of 1,250 people attended the play. It was translated by Elisabeth Janvier as Deux Otages.

For Jean-Louis Barrault, co-director with Madeleine Renaud of the Odéon Theatre, (called Théâtre de France in the 60s), the second work by Brendan Behan presented in Paris in 1962 alongside works by Claudel, Shakespeare, Kafka, Molière and Aeschylus, had the exceptional quality of treating a very human subject with anarchic casualness. It was directed by Georges Wilson with Arletty playing Meg.