The Brendan Voyage

The Brendan voyage On the 100th anniversary of Brendan Behan’s birth, Aubrey Malone plots the highs and lows of one of the 20th century's most celebrated and infuriating Irish literary sons

Brendan Behan would have been 100 years of age this year if he lived. A lovable eccentric, he once said he taught his cat to give an IRA salute by standing on its hind legs. Another day he said, ‘I bought the Bailey bar by accident, I only went to the auction to buy an electric toaster.’ He claimed to have a bath once a year ‘whether I need it or not.’ Food was often kept in his bathtub, anything from a chicken to a sheep’s head. Asked how often he washed his socks he said, ‘I throw them at the ceiling. If they don’t stick onto it they’re good for another day or two.’ After throwing his clothes on the floor one night he was asked why he didn’t put them on a hanger he said, ‘I hung them on the floor where they can’t fall off.’ His mother, Kathleen, had to leave a rooming-house when she was pregnant with him due to lack of funds. He boasted, ‘I’m the only writer who was evicted before he was born.’

It was his granny, the so-called Empress of Russell Street, who first inducted him into the diverse joys of Guinness. He was hardly out of short pants before he was lowering substantial quantities of it. His writing career had hardly begun before he became synonymised with it.

He loved the excitement of Russell Street. The community life there gave him the spiration for much of his writing. Afterwards he moved to Crumlin. The vast sprawl bored him to tears. ‘I feel like a culchie,’ he said. He professed not to like this breed. Meeting one in a pub once he told him to get lost. ‘Come back when you’re born in Dublin,’ he hissed.

His first drink was said to be at a funeral with his granny. She often used to ask him to go into pubs for her for jugs of beer. By all reports the young Brendan would drink half of them and top the rest up with water. Amazingly she never seemed to notice.

One day when he was stumbling up the street as a result of sloshing back a few half-jars, a man said to her, ‘That’s a beautiful boy you have there. It’s a pity

he’s handicapped.’ She grew indignant at the remark, replying, ‘How dare you call him handicapped – he’s drunk.’ It was almost like a badge of honour for her - and subsequently for him.

He was a fighter before he became a writer. His family was republican. He became a member of the IRA as a boy. He claimed to have been sent to England on a bombing mission some years later. ‘I brought gelignite with me,’ he said, ‘I preferred it to dynamite. Dynamite isn’t safe.’

He ended up in prison after firing a shot at a detective at a funeral. It provided a conducive environment for his writing – and his wit. ‘Are we getting food with our meals today?’ he asked a jailer once. He said he lost his faith in prison doctors when he heard of one who prescribed two aspirins for a man with a broken leg.

Life on the ‘outside’ wasn’t much better. He was a painter by trade but he didn’t particularly enjoy it. His ideal day, he said, would be ‘Work from 1 to 2, with an hour off for lunch.’

Success came in England first, largely due to the help of the legendary theatrical figure, Joan Littlewood. ‘If Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood,’ he was alleged to have said, ‘I wrote under Joan Littlewood.’

How did he get to England? ‘My granny had an umbrella with powerful ribs. We were flying over London. I asked the pilot to let me out. He slides the door open. I open the brolly and out I went.’

Fame turned into notoriety after he became ‘leader of the banned.’ When his play The Hostage was censored he said, ‘I’ve set up my own Censorship Board and I hereby censor all censors.’

The sometime painter became a sensation. His father Stephen remarked, ‘Last year he was wearing my cast-offs. Now I’m wearing his.’

He wasn’t interested in money. ‘He’d give you the shirt off his back,’ a colleague said, ‘and then tell you what horse to put it on.’ He comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. Asked if he’d become bourgeois since becoming famous he replied, ‘Not yet, but I’m saving up for it.’

Too many people had pretensions to left wing causes. A lot of them, he said, wouldn’t know the difference between communism and rheumatism. Asked why he lived in the posh area of Anglesea Road after he got married he replied, ‘to annoy the neighbours.’

He thought his talent lay in his hyperactivity and resisted any attempt to diminish this even if it prolonged his life. He had a kind of fighting in him, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that would not let him sleep.

Such anger rose to the surface when he was drinking. So did his inimitable sense of fun. Nobody knew which would come to the fore on a given night. It made socialising with him like living over the San Andreas fault. At the end of the day – or night - the only person he really damaged was himself.

He admitted he was neurotic but added significantly, ‘My neuroses are the nails and harness which give me a living. If I was cured of them I’d probably have to go back to house-painting.’ It was a high price to pay for a good book or a good play but one he paid time and again with interest.

He once said he wasn’t proud of his alcohol intake but he wasn’t ashamed of it either. Asked why he drank so much, he replied, ‘Because I like the stuff.’ Elsewhere he said, ‘I drink to forget but I can’t remember what.’ Another familiar witticism was, ‘l drink only twice a day: when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.’ Another reason Behan said he drank was because orange juice was too expensive. More seriously, he claimed he only got into alcohol in a big way after the money from his plays started to pour in. He meant it started him on spirits. Before that all he could afford was stout. If he continued drinking Guinness alone he might have lived a lot longer, even with his diabetes.

The fact that he gave up the day job after he began writing full time meant he wasn’t working off his hangovers with the activity. When he had his first experience of literary success he organised a ritual burning of his paints and overalls in his house in Crumlin. It was meant to be a

Brendan Behan in full literary flow. Photograph by Robert Messenger

Brendan Behan wrote a number of revealing travel books, including Brendan Behan’s Ireland and Brendan Behan’s New York, superbly illustrated by Paul Hogarth

celebratory but maybe this was the day death put in its first brushstrokes.

When his literary career took off he became the toast of London and later New York. The Irish, he said, may have been his raw material but they weren’t necessarily his audience. He became friendly with writers like Norman Mailer, actors like Jackie Gleason. He even met Montgomery Clift. Hollywood he described as ‘a quagmire crawling with Judas Iscariots.’

A court banned him from attending the St. Patrick Day parade in New York in 1961 because of his obstreperous behaviour in a bar. Miffed at the decision he said, ‘I now know what the snakes did after St Patrick banished them from Ireland. They swam over to America and became judges.’

He had a tongue, it was said, ‘like a plateful of mortal sins.’ He said to a colleague once, ‘I hear someone died. It wouldn’t be yourself by any chance, would it?’ He claimed he once tried to be a policeman but was rejected when it was discovered his parents weren't married. ‘I never knew a situation so bad,’ he maintained, ‘that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.’ ‘It’s not true. It just seems that way.’ All of these quips were thinly-veiled attempts to shift attention from the seriousness of his problem. His personality changed with drink. He was entertaining without it but doubly so when he’d imbibed. His friends goaded him on to greater indulgences.

It’s a pity more of them didn’t stay around longer to pull him out of the gutter when that became his destination at the end of another Rabelaisian night. ‘I ruined my health, he lamented, ‘by drinking to everyone else’s.’

He was never able to cope with success. In time it became a poisoned chalice, a different kind of prison than the one with bars. He was too ‘real’ to enjoy it. Sometimes he joined the people queueing for his plays and sang songs for them, passing a hat around afterwards for ‘donations.’

People said drink destroyed his career but Behan rarely wrote under the influence. The only other times he was sober was when he was in prison. Outside those confines he let it work its magic on him.

‘I didn’t turn to drink,’ he once said, ‘It turned to me.’ As well as liver weakness he had diabetes. Health-wise, each drop he raised to his lips was like a fan to a flame but he couldn’t resist it in the heady atmospheres of the pubs that were the kernel of Ireland’s social life. ‘I ruined my health’ he said, ‘drinking to other people’s.’

Fair weather friends deserted him when he started to become difficult. Those who loved him tried any ploy they knew to get him to stop. Parasites who enjoyed watching him make a fool of himself egged him on to further indulgences, further mad exhibitions of paddywhackery and (occasionally) inspirational drama.

Beatrice, his wife, frequently pleaded with him to have himself dried out in hospital. He refused, feeling he would come out of any hospital a vegetable. ‘You want me to be a suburbanite,’ he said, ‘Into the office at nine in the morning and walk the dog along Sandymount Strand after tea.’

In his last years he was steeping rough, drinking quietly in pubs where he once held court in front of dozens of people, getting short surges of the old magic but mainly just going through the motions of a life that seemed to be crawling towards its close. ‘Such a waste of genius,’ Anthony Butler wrote, ‘all gone now with the windy belch of ten thousand pints of stout.’

Blanaid Behan Walker at the statue of her father on the Royal Canal at Drumcondra

Most of his old friends, or those who called themselves his friends, had departed by now. The ones that remained were locked between pity and fear for the former mirth-maker who was now in the horrors of a disease he’d given himself over to as if it were his destiny.

His liver was shot to pieces by now. He girded his loins for a few last surges into the old stomping grounds as he attempted to recreate the glory of his prime. The laughter was hollow, however, as his well of inspiration had dried up. He went to bed sick and he woke up sick. The most he could hope for was to meet his maker with dignity. ‘I’m only staying alive,’ he told people, ‘to save funeral expenses.’

He died in March 1964. ‘He couldn’t hold his liquor at all at that point,’ his brother Brian told me when I collaborated with him on a book about Brendan, ‘and I mean that literally. The glass would fall from his hands.’

At this time he was living separately from Beatrice. Even when he stayed overnight with her he slept on the sofa instead of in her bed, leaving her to cry herself to sleep. She’d had a child by him by now, a daughter called Blanaid, but he couldn’t appreciate it. Ironically, the man who’d had such a soft spot for children all his life was immune to the charms of his own baby.

‘He was dying and he knew it’ Brian said, ‘The last time I drank with him his legs were swinging under him like a rag doll. The furniture was gone from the loft. He was just marking time until the end.’

‘You made a big mistake in marrying me,’ he said to Beatrice shortly before he passed away but that wasn’t the way she saw it. She loved him, warts and all. He was buried in Glasnevin cemetery. (Not Kiltiernan which he once described as ‘the healthiest graveyard in Ireland’ because it was near the sea. ‘People are dying to get into it,’ he remarked.)

His disaster may be seen as selfimposed but if alcoholism is a disease, and it is, we should grant him some succour. Before it robbed him of his talent, he wrote a handful of classic books and plays that capture not only the street gaiety of profoundly simple souls like himself but also the march of a nation towards the terrible beauty of self-definition.

Waterford Research finds Quality of Life can be improved for Alzheimer’s Patients

After twenty years of research into the role of nutrition for eye health, the team at Nutrition Research Centre Ireland (NRCI) has discovered an exciting link between nutrition for the eye and nutrition for the brain.

With an ageing population, it is estimated that around 150,000 adults in Ireland will experience symptoms of dementia by 2045. While there are many different types of dementia, defined as a deterioration in memory, thinking and behaviour, Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form.

Alzheimer’s Lifestyle Risk Factors

There is currently no cure for Alzheimer’s disease; therefore, more focus is put on preventative strategies to slow the progression and reduce the severity of disease. Several lifestyle risk factors have already been identified for dementia, such as low physical and mental activity levels, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption and being overweight. However, it is thought that around a third of Alzheimer’s cases could be avoided if lifestyle changes are implemented.

Mediterranean Diet and the Ageing Brain

There is a growing pool of evidence showing that nutrition is important for optimising cognition and reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. This makes a good place to start when thinking about reducing the risk of dementia and optimising cognition.

A Mediterranean diet is best known for its high intake of plant foods, olive oil and fish, alongside lower consumption of dairy products, alcohol, and saturated fats. There is already a lot of evidence showcasing the positive health impacts of a Mediterranean diet. Additionally, there is a large consensus that sticking to a Mediterranean-style diet is associated with better cognitive performance, slower rates of cognitive decline, better brain structure and function in later life, and a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

NRCI scientists have analysed the Mediterranean diet and have identified the key nutritional parts of the diet, namely carotenoids and omega-3 fatty acids that may be beneficial for brain health.

Supplementing with Carotenoids and Omega-3 Fatty Acids

Prof John Nolan and his team at South East Technological University, Waterford has played a crucial role in understanding more about the direct influences of targeted nutrition on eye health, as well as, cognition and brain health. Using evidence-based science, the team has identified that a nutritional supplement formulation (containing carotenoids and omega-3 fatty acids) can benefit certain elements of cognition in healthy, mildly cognitively impaired individuals, and patients suffering with Alzheimer’s disease.

A number of carotenoids (nutrients that come from plants) have been identified in brain tissue. Research by the NRCI has shown that patients with Alzheimer’s disease are deficient in the carotenoids - lutein, zeaxanthin and meso-zeaxanthin.

The brain needs a lot of oxygen to fuel itself, using a fifth of the body’s total oxygen intake. As a result, a lot of unstable molecules known as free radicals are produced. This leads to oxidative stress where body cells and tissue can be damaged because of consistent exposure to these unstable molecules.

Due to their chemical composition, carotenoids primarily act as antioxidants, mopping up the unstable molecules that cause damage to the body. Omega-3 fatty acids on the other hand are primarily involved in the control and resolution of inflammation. Given that oxidative damage and inflammation are known factors in the development of Alzheimer’s disease in the brain, it is likely that carotenoids and omega-3 fatty acids can play an important role in slowing down the mechanisms associated with cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease.

Slower disease progression

Given the reported positive effects of omega-3 fatty acids and carotenoids, the team at NRCI explored in several trials whether supplementation with these nutrients supported brain health.

Findings from the most recent NRCI project, The Memory Investigation with Nutrition for Dementia (re-MIND) trial, have reported slower rates of disease progression, as well as, improvements in quality of life for the patients with mild-moderate stage Alzheimer’s disease on the active intervention. Carers of patients taking the carotenoid, fish oil and vitamin E formulation, also reported improvements in memory, mood, and in the ability to carry out day-today activities such as getting dressed independently or making a cup of tea.

This innovative study was published on 25 October in the esteemed Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. The Editor-inChief, Professor George Perry, noted “The Re-MIND study adds strong clinical evidence to the growing body of data supporting a key role for nutrition in reducing the incidence and slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease with supplements.”