Behan was bizarrely anticipating his rock-star fate. Even though it was his ‘Irish’ stereotype that probably fitted in with ‘English’ prejudice and American expectation: ‘The English hoard words like misers,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan in his review of Behan’s The Quare Fellow in The Observer; ‘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. It is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness.’15 Shaped in such ‘national’ terms, it is precious wonder that Behan’s death as a result of diabetes and alcoholism was viewed almost as a semi-state funeral. But in a curious way, too, one of the leading roles offered to the Irish writer of the time as a ‘character’ was buried with him; few serious writers since Behan would follow in his footsteps.
Behan had been memorialised before his death, however, in J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955). Behan and the Catacombs16 feature in this richly cruel comedy of manners set in drink-besotted 1950s Dublin, as the reek and customs of the period are relentlessly exposed in Donleavy’s unstoppable saga of the life of Sebastian Dangerfield and his student days at Trinity College. This is how Behan turns up at one of the gatherings of the time:
There was suddenly a crash at the door, the centre boards giving way and a huge head came through singing.
Mary Maloney’s beautiful arse
Is a sweet apple of sin.
Give me Mary’s beautiful arse
And a full bottle of gin.
A man, his hair congealed by stout and human grease, a red chest blazing from his black coat, stumpy fists rotating around his rocky skull, plunged into the room of tortured souls with a flood of song.17
As with Borstal Boy and Behan’s plays, Donleavy’s prose catches the absurdly mischievous, mocking, feckless playing with reality as his main characters brazen their way through the life of the capital. It is a novel seeping with a Dublin that has long since disappeared.
It is interesting, therefore, to consider how, in looking back at his own experience of living in 1950s Dublin, John McGahern interprets the scene in the posthumously published collection of his autobiographical essays, Love of the World: Essays (2009).18 In speaking of his own generation of young aspiring writers, born in the provincial 1930s (the three Toms come to mind – Murphy, Kilroy, Mac Intyre) and who by the fifties were based in Dublin, McGahern is unambiguous: ‘The two living writers who meant most to us were Samuel Beckett and Patrick Kavanagh.’ These two ‘living writers’ were hugely influential, as McGahern recounts:
They belonged to no establishment, and some of their best work was appearing in the little magazines that could be found at the Eblana Bookshop on Grafton Street. Beckett was in Paris. The large, hatted figure of Kavanagh was an inescapable sight around Grafton Street, his hands often clasped behind his back, muttering hoarsely to himself as he passed. Both, through their work, were living, exciting presences in the city.19
Patrick Kavanagh would become a significant figure in McGahern’s own fiction, as we shall see, while Beckett’s influence on another writer who emerged out of the 1950s, Brian Friel, is important to note here. Brian Friel’s early drama, such as Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), has Beckettian undertones in the play’s view of language and memory – such as the father’s inability to recall details that matter to the departing (emigrating) son, the 25-year-old Gar. Friel’s play also embraces the increasing allure of American popular culture: ‘I’ll come home when I make my first million,’ Gar protests, ‘driving a Cadillac and smoking cigars and taking movie films’,20 as well as conveying the sense of ‘having to’ leave Ireland because of its claustrophobic provincialism.21 As Gar puts it, picking up terms he has heard earlier from his drunken old schoolmaster:
All this bloody yap about father and son and all this sentimental rubbish about ‘homeland’ and ‘birthplace’ – yap! Bloody yap! Impermanence – anonymity – that’s what I’m looking for; a vast restless place that doesn’t give a damn about the past. To hell with Ballybeg, that’s what I say!22
In his short story, ‘High Ground’, set in the 1950s but published in 1982 and collected in High Ground (1985), John McGahern puts in the mouths of his timber workers a complex web of self-recognition and ironic delusion as they sup their pints with another alcoholic old schoolmaster after hours in Ryan’s Pub. The young Moran (a literary brother to Gar in Philadelphia) pauses outside by the church, having gone to the well for spring water, the pressure of having been offered his old teacher’s job pressing upon his mind and he overhears the pub conversation:
‘Ye were toppers, now. Ye were all toppers,’ the Master said diplomatically.
‘One thing sure is that you made a great job of us, Master. You were a powerful teacher. I remember to this day everything you told us about the Orinoco River.’
‘It was no trouble. Ye had the brains. There are people in this part of the country digging ditches who could have been engineers or doctors or judges or philosophers had they been given the opportunity. But the opportunity was lacking …’ The Master spoke again with great authority.23
Patrick Kavanagh could well have been one of those voices. Indeed, in some of his poems he seems to be deliberately improvising the innocent circumspection similar to these characters’ knowledge, intimacy and understanding.
After years of hard dedication to his craft, that would produce one of the mid-century Irish ‘classics’ in The Great Hunger (1942), and having fought against what he saw as the establishment in Dublin (and elsewhere), Kavanagh’s health, like Behan’s before him, gave out. But out of his illness – lung cancer and the complications of an unsteady lifestyle based around the pub – Kavanagh’s rebirth took place in the mid-1950s, as he was to remake his writing life by the Grand Canal:
So it was that on the banks of the Grand Canal between Baggot and Leeson Street bridges in the warm summer of 1955, I lay and watched the green waters of the canal. […] I was born in or about nineteen fifty-five, the place of my birth being the banks of the Grand Canal.24
Come Dance with Kitty Stobling,25 which was finally published in 1960 after Kavanagh’s arduous search for a publisher, is addressed to his muse and contains a great lyrical lightness of touch, surrounded by some scars of struggle, as health and moral freedom are restored. It is a great book, as important in its way as, say, W.B. Yeats’s magnificent volume of 1928, The Tower. Come Dance with Kitty Stobling is a hymn to rebirth but it is also a remarkable poetic testament to the resilience of the imagination and the ability of Kavanagh to transcend the demeaning, niggardly and cramped atmosphere that had contaminated so much of the Irish literary scene by the 1950s.
As the Northern Irish, London-based poet Louis MacNiece remarked of the Dublin of a decade and a half beforehand, in 1939 just as the Second World War is declared:
I was alone with the catastrophe, spent Saturday drinking in a bar with the Dublin literati; they hardly mentioned the war but debated the correct versions of Dublin street songs. Sunday morning the hotel man woke me (I was sleeping late and sodden), said, ‘England has declared war’.26
Kavanagh’s Kitty Stobling takes on what remains of this ‘literary world’ post-war in ‘The Paddiad; or, The Devil as a Patron of Irish Letters’, while caustically pointing his finger at those who promote its fading glories outside the country. This is the prefacing note to the poem:
This satire is based on the sad notion with which my youth was infected that Ireland was a spiritual entity. I had a good deal to do with putting an end to this foolishness, for as soon as I found out I reported
