Behan could on occasion exhibit great discipline, such as that required for his mastering of the Irish language, and indeed French. Those who wag the finger at him do so from the somewhat pious middle class world of print. Their retrospective wish for Behan, it would seem, is that he should have crossed over and settled down to fashioning a ‘well-wrought urn’, which could then be solemnly added to the canon. This, I think, is to misunderstand what he was about.
If Behan didn’t write his Dublin book, its raw materials are present in his plays and in Borstal Boy but perhaps even more so in his performative life and dazzling improvisations (who would not have liked to witness his version of Maud Gonne at the microphone) and also in his shorter prose, mostly newspaper columns, which the inestimable Lilliput Press has now published in a volume entitled A Bit of a Writer, edited by John Brannigan.
