During the early years of his marriage, Brendan tried his best to harness his demons. He was very proud of Beatrice and her extraordinary capacity, at least at the beginning, for quiet amusement at his antics, even when they were sometimes excessive. There is a lovely picture of him crushing his great animal head against her pale face, and his imitation of her, brush in hand before her easel, was one of his new party tricks, in addition to 'The Old Woman of the Roads', 'The Trial of Oscar Wilde', and Toulouse Lautrec, for which he would wear his shoes backwards on bent knees. If the daughter had arrived earlier, I am convinced that Brendan would have lived, because he loved children as much or more than he desired young men. I have a favourite image of him festooned with children at Blackrock Baths, performing elaborate bellyflops for their delight. And whenever my wife Madeleine's pretty little niece came to stay with us, Brendan would fire bags of bon-bons through the window, "pour la petite".
By eerie coincidence, my first marriage was also childless, and I recall a sadly hilarious exchange with Brendan cross-examining the novelist Benedict Kiely, in genuine puzzlement, as to how he had managed to have so many children, while Ben mumbled some vague consolation. It was as if he truly believed that he might be doing something wrong in the love department. For, despite the casual exchanges that sometimes prevailed in Dublin's bohemia, we actually knew very little about sex in those days. And certainly almost nothing about problems like infertility, which even doctors discussed in hushed tones.
In my experience, in a childless marriage there is a tendency to revert to former habits, because the anchor that children provide is missing. It was the tension between Brendan and Beatrice in this area that began to tear at the heart of their marriage, as it had begun to trouble my own, albeit less seriously, perhaps because my French wife could speak more candidly about sexual matters than most Irish people at that time.
Brendan dropped in on us most nights for a last drink - "a wee, wee sup", he would implore in stage-Irish tones, holding up the glass like a chalice - before heading home. One night, he had either drained the bottle earlier, or found it empty. He took this as an insult, angry words were exchanged, and I threw him out, or rather up our basement flight, not an easy task on a wet night, and with a sullen, drunken Brendan on my hands.
But club football and my mother's pub had given me some basic bouncer skills, and I rammed his sodden, 13-stone bulk up the steps, his oaths fouling the air. As a last salute, he turned to kick me in the face, but I caught his heel and toppled him into the street. I feared we might consider our friendship at an end, but he never mentioned the matter again; if you put manners on him, he respected you. And although he had a street-fighter's repertoire of dirty tricks, he was by that time usually too befuddled to use it.
Flann O'Brien's obituary declares of Brendan: "There has been no Irishman quite like him ...He exuded good nature ... (and was) the sole proprietor of the biggest heart that has beaten in Ireland in the last 40 years." Truly, his generosity was as outsize as his burly physique. You could hardly buy a drink, or even a meal , without him seizing the bill, or throwing a wad as thick as a cattle - dealer's on the table. And if he had drunk all your whiskey on his homeward halt the night before, he would usually call round with more, plus flowers and sweets, the next morning. I did not like the hangers - on that began to gather round him, taking all he could give but often reviling him behind his back. They would encourage him to perform, to make sense of himself, and at such times I would often slip away. I only once asked him for real money.
As most young marrieds do, I had come up against a financial problem of a fairly conventional kind, but one which required a large, immediate loan, preferably without the strict conditions that a bank would impose. I braced myself to face Brendan, because I feared that money might soil our relationship, which had never been parasitical. So I stammered my request at the lunch hour one day, but I need not have worried; it was met with instant sympathy. He did not have a sum like that handy at the moment but he would have it in a day or two, and yes, the wives were to be kept out of it. In due course, he summoned me out of Bord Failte to the Beehive, and the money was pressed into my hand. He could not resist a moment of curiosity, perhaps in an effort to glamorise the tactful and undramatic exchange. "For a cautious fukken Ulsterman you seem to have got yourself into a sizeable spot of trouble. No one could be up to you culchies. Tell me ... "He himself began to stammer, and to laugh mischievously. "Did you get a g g-goat into t-t-trouble?"
Nothing would do Brendan but to think that I was keeping a mistress, paying for an abortion, or buying rifles to liberate my native Tyrone (the 1950s@ campaign was still on). I managed to concoct an unlikely explanation, to gratify his appetite for myth; he could face quotidian fact6 but preferred a richly-coloured story.
The anticlimax came when I returned the money a few months later; he had never mentioned it again, but I had made it clear that I considered it a loan. It was a cold winter evening, after work, when I handed him the payment. He fell into a gloomy silence, seeming almost hurt. I anxiously asked if I and been too slow, or upset him in any way.
"You have," he growled. "For now I'll go and fukken spend it. At least I felt I was doing some good with you, whatever it was. But trust a fukken Northerner. You can't recognise a present when you get one. At least I hope the girl is out of trouble." Then he grinned. "Maybe she'll have the sense to get shut of you."
One truly riotous exchange has never ceased to amuse me, as an example of Brendan at his wicked best. Tom Parkinson, the Yeats scholar and poet, was staying with us, writing reports on Ireland for The Nation, which involved journeys North, since the 1950s' IRA campaign was then at its peak. I can testify that Brendan, despite his Republican background, knew little about it. In fact, he was quite upset when Parkinson and I were roughly questioned by the RUC in Newry, which was very tense at that time and under curfew; the bus station had been burned down the very night we arrived.
Parkinson was around six feet, seven inches, a grumpy scholarly skyscraper, extremely conspicuous in a vigilant border town amongst the medium-sized natives. In order to survey Parkinson, the RUC inspector had to tilt his head dangerously back and clutch at his cap to prevent it falling off, which somewhat weakened his intimidating stance.
As well as the IRA campaign, Parkinson was interested in the Fethard-on-Sea controversy, during which Donal Barrington spoke out against the local boycott of Protestants, describing it as one of the most divisive incidents since the Civil War, "an unjust and terrible thing". As Donal, a future judge, had been a university classmate of mine, I asked him to dinner, so that our American friend could see that real liberals still existed in Ireland. We also had my wife's niece staying with us, the pretty little girl from Paris whom Brendan adored, but Brigitte was safely tucked up in bed, and conversation had begun to warm up to the main subject of Church and State in Ireland, when there came a knock at the door.
Madeleine and I exchanged apprehensive glances; it was too early for Brendan.
"Good God!" exclaimed my wife as she hurried to answer, "it looks like a priest!"
And almost as though on cue, a shy but determined young man entered, announcing that he was our local curate, on his parish rounds.
"I've heard of you," he said nervously, when Barrington was introduced, putting a damper on the occasion. The serious conversation had only just been kindling, but it nearly guttered out now, with Parkinson glowering at the clergyman, Barrington looking embarrassed, and Madeleine trying to be a gracious hostess, offering drink, which was duly refused since, he explained, he was local head of the Pioneers (what Brendan mockingly called "The Sacred Thirst").
Meanwhile, I searched desperately for harmless topics, and thought I had found one. Lately we had received many calls from the Legion of Mary, seemingly fascinated by our bohemian way of life and determined that God should be a part of it. I broached the matter lightly with Father Lee, but he took it seriously, like a man gripping a solitary oar on an uncertain sea.
"Oh, I must speak to the girls in that case; we can't have them upsetting people. Even if it is a good cause. They are very good people, you know."
"Ah, don't worry, Father, I have worked out a way of dealing with them. I tell them that there's a man up the street who needs their help more than I do: Mr Behan at Number 15. And that they should try to induct him into the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association."
"Oh, Mr Behan , the famous playwright, "the priest breathed. "I've been looking forward to meeting him. He's one of my parishioners too. Westland Row is quite a big parish, you know."
WE all fell silent, contemplating his pious innocence in welcoming such a confrontation, when God decided that it should happen for all our benefit. Suddenly, a second and more bulky body came clattering down teh steps, and a fist banged at our door. Once more, Madeleine went to open, mumbling, "Jesus, it's Brendan!" Behan barged past her, breathing heavily, with a kind of mock-heroic fire.
"I heard you," he accused. 'Jesus, it is Brendan!' You're becoming as foul-tongued as the rest of us fuckers." He wagged his finger at her. "Don't forget you have a child living with you, so you must give good example".
Then he slowly took in the situation; the table with teh remains of te abandoned dinner party, Parkinson like a kind of seated Eiffel Tower, to whom he nodded, and Barrington whom he had heard of, but could not immediately place. There was no Brigette, so he dropped a bag of sweets on the table, and was turning to go, when he saw the priest, sitting tensely behind him, on the edge of the chair, smiling anxiously.
Brendan looked at him with genuine and growing disbelief. He clearly had never associated our home with clerical interference. Finally he went cautiously over, as though to pole him with his toe to find out if he was real.
"In the name of God, Father, what holy water font did you spring out of?"
The young priest dealt manfully with Brendan's incredulity, taking the "bull" by the horns, so to speak.
"You must be Behan," he said . "I have been very much looking forward to calling on you. You are in my parish, you know, and of course I have heard of your work."
Silence, while Brendan's brow swelled with disbelief, and we all waited.
"You will not call," he said decisively. "I need your lot for three things; birth, marriage and death, and I have two of them over. THE druids have too much power in this country as it is".
Then the penny dropped, and he turned to Barrington, saying:
"You agree, don't you? I liked your speak about that filthy, anti-Christian boycott." "You're not a druid freak, are you?"
"They only did one of those three things for me," said Tom, whose father had been head old the longshoremen's union in San Franciso.
The embarrassment had thickened, as we waited for Brendan's next salvo. Heh had become dimly aware that he might have gone too far, but his way of making up for it was, if anything, worse. He swayed us all disapprovingly through lidded, half-drunken eyes.
"Not that you liberal fuckers have the right to judge priests, anyway. You're nearly as good as the craw-thumping yourselves. As for the fukken French" - turning to my wife - "everyone knows about them. Even the few poor priests they have left are sex mechanics. You'd never hear the class of thing about Irish priests that you hear about French. They may wear long skirts, but they still chase the judies."
Then he focused again on the young priest, in case he might have relaxed a little. "In the name of God, Father, how do you do it?"
The question was rhetorical, and the priest fielded it as best he could, even managing to tell a slightly risque story himself, about a reformed streetwalker in his former parish. He began, however, by apologising in advance in case he offended the "tender ears of Mrs Montague".
"Tender ears," cried Brendan incredulously. "Do you know who you're talking to? Sure, French girls study naked men in school. She could give you a course on sex education. Paris is a bit bigger than Westland Row, you know."
Parkinson chuckled, but none of us knew what to do about the situation: the young priest was now scarlet, while Brendan remained triumphantly on course, dominating a hushed, partly amused, partly dismayed, and wholly captive audience. Brendan rocked back and forwards, before he attacked again, this time to bring down the curtain. Once more, it was couched as an apology to the priest, but Brendan's commiseration could be more scornful than his dismissal.
"It's all right, this anti-clerical lark, blasting the poor druids for everything. But no matter what Parkinson thinks, or any of our so-called, liberal writers say, there's a lot to be said for the Irish clergy. The Irish priest, the flower of the f***ing flock, the apple of God's eye, toiling under the hot sun to save the soul of the black heathen. As a matter of fact, do you know, Father?" - he paused rhetorically, to better focus in on his target, who shifted, smiling uneasily.
"As a matter of fact, statistically speaking, there have been more Irish nuns and priests eaten by cannibals in foreign parts than any other variety."
Even Brendan couldn't surpass that one. The priest took his leave hurriedly, but the dinner party was past recovery. Parkinson and Barrington moved into the night, talking in low voices, and I recalled a window where we could knock for a drink after closing time. We offered to bring Madeleine, but she had had enough Irishry for one evening.
Brendan and I made our way to the Beehive, and, as the pints were being creamed off, he ventured a sort of apology: "Did I ruin your evening, John?"
"No," I said resignedly, "but, as usual, you drastically changed the script."
The young Brendan was a comely, curly-headed lad with small feet and hands; the prematurely aged Behan was a sagging gladiator. Or a sad, stricken bull, dying publicly on its feet. There are accounts by Aidan Higgins in The Balcony of Europe and by Cronin in Dead as Doornails of Brendan in his last stages; shame on them, they lack both generosity and compassion, although perhaps both writers had feared and faced the same fate for themselves.
For alcoholism has been the fall of many writers, the strict loneliness of the craft compensated for by the easy communion of the pub, bar or cafe. Parkinson grimly remarked in The Nation, in 1957, that he hoped no one would invite Brendan to America to emulate Dylan Thomas. There was even a physical resemblance, though Thomas kept a haunting sense of what he was losing. Hemingway is surprisingly a closer comparison, the early war wounds wearing down his bloated body and wearied mind until the association mania of the alcoholic swamped the discipline. Even the later, exhausted Joyce of Finnegans Wake may not be exempt. As for Berryman's days in Dublin, chanting his Dream Songs in the pub ...
With the help of David Astor, the editor of the Observer, we tried to lure Brendan into a clinic, but treatment for alcoholism was then in its infancy, and Brendan had a horror of being institutionalised.
But I should not leave Brendan on a sour note; he shone like a good deed in the murky world of mid-20th century Dublin. He told me once about being briefly locked in the BBC by producers anxious to get a sober performance from him. Bored and restless, he searched for some distraction, and came upon a cache of old-fashioned, official, rejection slips. Mischievously, he filled them out and addressed them to nearly every Irish writer he knew.
So Patrick Kavanagh was thanked for his long poem, The Bog-Trotter's Funeral, which "failed to get off the ground." Messers (sic) O'Connor and O'Faolain, "c/o the Bell Magazine" were thanked "for your story about an old people's home in Cork, but regrettably it is too gloomily provincial". Benedict Kiely was thanked " for submitting your 'Tale of Tyrone', which unfortunately we found a shade long-winded".
Whether it happened or not, it was a playful notion, and typical of Brendan in his prime. When he died, another of the most touching obituaries was by his fellow Dubliner, the writer and critic John Jordan, who quoted Shakespeare: "Boy, bristle thy courage up, for Falstaff he is dead."
The friendly little bull, dazzled and confused by the glare of publicity, the roar of the crowd, found that the amphitheatre he craved had become a killing ring.