Brendan Behan

Harry's Bar, rue Daunou

Brendan Behan’s (Dublin, 1923-1964) Paris adventures stretch over several stays of varying length, the first one in 1948. Unfortunately, his Paris sojourns are relatively badly documented – with many of the accounts unable or unwilling to go beyond presenting Behan as a boozing anarchist intent on self-destruction. And some of the material is of questionable veracity. Did he actually make friends with Albert Camus, as Ulick O’Connor writes? And what are we to make of Behan’s own claims that he was a pimp at Harry’s Bar “procuring French girls for rich Americans on commission”? (True, years later, when on a trip to Montreal, he introduced himself as “un ancient maquereau de Paris”.) What seems more certain is that he spent seven months as a house painter in the French capital. He arrived in Paris in August 1948 after having spent a month in prison in Dublin for assaulting a policeman. Unable to settle back in Ireland and barred from setting foot in the U.K. after his Borstal experience, Paris seemed the nearest alternative. But did he really paint a sign for a café in the Latin Quarter that read ‘The best fucking bar in Paris’ ?

While in Paris, aside from claiming to having written pornography for a living, Behan tried to offload a number of poems on Sinbad Vail, son of Peggy Guggenheim and editor of a literary magazine called Points. Vail described Behan thus: “(he) drifted all over Paris and in the end, I fear, he bored everybody who wanted to help him…(He) was awfully boring and abusive, insulting his friends, smashing their furniture and destroying pictures on the walls. In the end, most of us thought he was just a bloody, drunken show-off Irishman, the sort that is caricatured, and I think now he must have wallowed in it.”

He had lodgings in the rue des Feuillantines (5th arrondissement), when he had to be bailed out of prison by Samuel Beckett after a night of being drunk and disorderly. Behan possibly found inspiration in Paris, though one cannot know whether he was sober when he wrote the following piece of doggerel, called 'Thanks to James Joyce' (translated from the Irish by Ulick O’Connor):

A later trip through France, including Paris, was undertaken in the company of Anthony Cronin. Behan had only £40 in his pocket – money he had received for the film rights to one of his short stories - but since it was a Marian year, the two of them hoped to get down to Rome by living on their wits and claiming they were “deux Irlandaises en perinage à Rome” (sic.). They made it as far as Briançon, in the French Alps, before Behan turned back for Paris. While there, he went to the Irish Embassy for repatriation money, which he swiftly drunk, and slept at the Hôtel d’Alsace in the rue des Beaux-Arts (6th arrondissement, where Oscar Wilde died) because of its “reputation at being liberal with its credit”.

Behan was back in Paris on a number of occasions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. On one of his last visits to the French capital, he made it out to Orly to grab an Air France flight back to Dublin. But by the time the airplane took off, Behan had had the “odd jar”. No sooner did the aircraft gain height than it was caught in a storm and crossed a patch of severe turbulence. Behan panicked, went mad, and wouldn’t sit strapped in his seat. Unable to control the Irishman, the pilot decided to bring the ‘plane back to Orly, where Behan was detained by the airport police. The following day, the French press reported that an Irish author had been borne off the ‘plane, displaying virulent anti-French feelings and hollering “I’m not ready to die for France” – a version of events that Behan later tried to correct, claiming that what he had said was “I’m not ready to die for Air France.”

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