The real Behan
Dan Farson's laborious and rather sloppy account of Brendan Behan on TV last Sun- day. came closest to the man when his wife. Beatrice. was talking. She speaks a clear and beautiful and unrancorous truth and she had the good and the bad days with Brendan. She Was not off-key. The terrible news-film ex- cerpts of his last. months were the truth in their way, but. not being the whole truth. were in other ways a distortion. Journalists. cameramen, interviewers were so convinced by the Behan myth—of the wild Irish boyo drinking himself picturesquely to death after the previous fashion of Dylan Thomas, the wild Welshman—that they sought him out when drunk, and if he wasn't drunk when they found him, they made him drunk soon after. It was a journalist who smuggled a bottle of brandy into him in hospital at the very end of the terminal stage of his sickness.
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