Drink became the arbiter of authenticity; a counter-cultural shelter, a public house for private lives, with its holy hours, after hours, Sunday closings and other licensing controls creating a lifestyle all its own, and lasting mythologies: Such and such is a terrible man. (Footage of a drunken Flann O’Brien being interviewed one Bloomsday bears the marks of an embittered and caustic self-parody that is itself tragic-comic.) Alcoholism, an affliction of the fifties, was as much a feature of the time as the polio epidemic of 1956 or the political collapse some years earlier of Noel Browne’s Mother & Child Scheme in 1951.
Brendan Behan’s success in the fifties – indeed the 1950s was very much his decade, with The Quare Fellow (1956), Borstal Boy (1958) and The Hostage (1958) – was based upon an ebullient verbal art that seemed to challenge the official sentiments of the time – in Ireland but also in Britain and the United States. As his Borstal Boy hit the note of 1950s’ break-through, shared in novels of the period, or in a play such as Look Back in Anger (1956) by John Osborne, Borstal Boy turned the tide on English complacency and through the sheer energetic verve of his language, Behan manages to sound like a Beat poet in full flow – one minute irreverent, aggressive, the next meditative and accepting, while mocking conventional wisdom in an almost Wildean play of grievance and entitlement:
Jesus, if they’d only let me sit there and sew away, I could be looking down at the canvas and watching my stitches and seeing them four to an inch, and passing the time myself by thinking about Ireland and forgetting even where I was, and, Jesus, wasn’t that little enough to ask? What harm would I be doing them? If any of them was in Mountjoy, say, and I was there with a crowd of Dublin fellows, I wouldn’t mess them about, honest to Jesus Christ I wouldn’t, no matter what they were in for. And that James, that was a proper white-livered whore’s melt.14
If the fifties were Behan’s, as a one-time militant republican, jailed in England at age sixteen in the late 1930s, he came to understand England and condemn much of what was hypocritical in the Irish. His death in 1964 in his early forties makes its own telling point about the traps that were on offer in the unfolding decade of television and mass-produced popular magazines.
For, like Dylan Thomas, who had died as a result of alcoholism before Behan in 1953, and Elvis Presley, who died after him, Behan had become that most modern phenomenon: a celebrity. In the infamous live interview with Malcom Muggeridge on the BBC’s Panorama television programme in 1956, cursing and swearing and obviously the worse for drink, and in his brawling, binge-fuelled lifestyle, 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