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BRENDAN BEHAN.
The craziest of the writers and a real character around the bars of Dublin. I remember him well too. He and the other Behan brothers, Jimmy and Dominick, used to drink in The Bailey Pub. Not the pastiche we see today but the original, owned by my friend John Ryan (who saved the door of Joyce’s famous Eccles Street house and installed it in the Bailey). I actually helped him stand upright just outside the Pen Corner off Dame Street and guided him into the Banker pub then I legged it as he started roaring. His widow Beatrice, a gentle, warm, and superbly read woman was a good friend of mine too when I was a young artist. Beatrice held lovely literary parties in her house on Adelaide road and had the place full of left-wing radicals so I fitted right in.
I liked Jimmy Behan. He once shared a podium two seats away from Chairman Mao himself at a gathering in one of those vast halls for the Chinese Communist Party. The joke in Dublin was: ‘Who’s that up on the podium with Jimmy Behan?’