Behan's prison experiences were central to his writing career. In Mountjoy, he wrote his first play,
The Rent Woman, act one of which was recently discovered in the archives of the National Library of Ireland, along with acts 2 and 3 of an Irish language version of the play,
An bhean ciosa the Irish for Rent Woman. After his release in 1946, he spent some time in the
Gaeltacht areas of counties
Galway and
Kerry, where he started writing poetry in Irish. During this period he was employed by the
Commissioners of Irish Lights, where the lighthouse keeper of
Saint John's Point, County Down, recommending his dismissal, described him as "the worst specimen" he had met in 30 years of service, adding that he showed "careless indifference" and "no respect for property". He left Ireland and all its perceived social pressures to live in Paris in the early 1950s. There, he felt he could lose himself and release the artist within. Although he still drank heavily, he managed to earn a living, supposedly by writing pornography. He returned to Dublin and began to write seriously, and to be published in serious papers such as
The Irish Times, for which he wrote In 1953, drawing on his extensive knowledge of criminal activity in Dublin and Paris, he wrote a serial that was later published as
The Scarperer. Throughout the rest of his writing career, he would rise at seven in the morning and work until noon, when the pubs opened. He began to write for radio, and his play
The Leaving Party was broadcast. Literary Ireland in the 1950s was a place where people drank. Behan cultivated a reputation as carouser-in-chief and swayed shoulder-to-shoulder with other literati of the day who used the pub McDaid's as their base:
Flann O'Brien,
Patrick Kavanagh,
Patrick Swift,
Anthony Cronin,
John Jordan,
J. P. Donleavy and artist
Desmond MacNamara whose bust of Behan is on display at the National Writers Museum. Behan fell out with the spiky Kavanagh, who reportedly would visibly shudder at the mention of Behan's name and who referred to him as "evil incarnate". Behan's fortunes changed in 1954, with the appearance of his play
The Quare Fellow. Originally called
The Twisting of Another Rope and influenced by his time spent in jail, it chronicles the vicissitudes of prison life leading up to the execution of "the quare fellow", a character who is never seen. The prison dialogue is vivid and laced with satire but reveals to the reader the human detritus that surrounds capital punishment. Produced in the
Pike Theatre, in Dublin, the play ran for six months. In May 1956,
The Quare Fellow opened in the
Theatre Royal Stratford East, in a production by
Joan Littlewood's
Theatre Workshop. Subsequently, it transferred to the West End. Behan generated immense publicity for
The Quare Fellow as a result of a drunken appearance on the
Malcolm Muggeridge TV show. The English, relatively unaccustomed to public drunkenness in authors, took him to their hearts. A fellow guest on the show, Irish-American actor
Jackie Gleason, reportedly said about the incident: "It wasn't an act of God, but an act of Guinness!" Behan and Gleason went on to forge a friendship. Behan loved the story of how, walking along the street in London shortly after this episode, a
Cockney approached him and exclaimed that he understood every word he had said—drunk or not—but had not a clue what "that bugger Muggeridge was on about!" While addled, Behan would clamber on stage and recite the play's signature song, "The Auld Triangle". The transfer of the play to Broadway provided Behan with international recognition. Rumours still abound that Littlewood contributed much of the text of
The Quare Fellow and led to the saying, "
Dylan Thomas wrote
Under Milk Wood, Brendan Behan wrote under Littlewood". Littlewood remained a supporter, visiting him in Dublin in 1960. In 1958, his Irish-language play
An Giall (
The Hostage) opened in the Damer Theatre, Dublin. Reminiscent of Frank O'Connor's
Guests of the Nation, it portrays the detention in a teeming Dublin house in the late 1950s of a British
conscript soldier, seized by the IRA as a
hostage pending the scheduled execution in Northern Ireland of an imprisoned IRA volunteer. The hostage falls in love with an Irish
convent girl, Teresa, working as a maid in the house. Their innocent world of love is incongruous among their surroundings since the house also serves as a
brothel. In the end, the hostage dies accidentally during a bungled police raid, revealing the human cost of war, a universal suffering. The subsequent English-language version
The Hostage (1958), reflecting Behan's own translation from the Irish but also much influenced by Joan Littlewood during a troubled collaboration with Behan, is a bawdy, slapstick play that adds a number of flamboyantly gay characters and bears only a limited resemblance to the original version. His autobiographical novel
Borstal Boy followed in 1958. In the vivid
memoir of his time in St Andrews House, Hollesley Bay Colony Borstal, near Woodbridge, Suffolk, England. (The site of St Andrews House is now a Category D men's prison and Young Offenders Institution). An original voice in Irish literature boomed out from its pages. The language is both acerbic and delicate, the portrayal of inmates and "screws" cerebral. For a Republican, though, it is not a vitriolic attack on Britain; it delineates Behan's move away from violence. In one account, an inmate strives to entice Behan into chanting political slogans with him. Behan curses and damns him in his mind, hoping that he would cease his rantings-hardly the sign of a troublesome prisoner. By the end, the idealistic boy rebel emerges as a realistic young man, who recognises the truth: violence, especially political violence, is futile. The 1950s literary critic
Kenneth Tynan said: "If the English hoard words like misers... Behan sends them out on a spree, ribald, flushed, and spoiling for a fight." He was now established as one of the leading Irish writers of his generation. Behan revered the memory of Father
William Doyle, a Dublin
priest of the
Society of Jesus, who served as
military chaplain to the
Royal Dublin Fusiliers as they fought in the trenches of the
Western Front. Father Doyle was
killed in action while running to the aid of wounded soldiers from his regiment during the
Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. Behan expressed his affection for Father Doyle's memory in the memoir
Borstal Boy.
Alfred O'Rahilly's 1920 biography of the fallen chaplain was one of Behan's favourite books. ==Personal life==