Brendan Behan, drinker with a writing problem

I used to say that Dublin is like a beautiful young woman. I could never afford her. Prices being what they are, I booked into a hotel on the North Wall, in what used to be the rougher part of the harbour. The place is a new build extension of an old pub. It holds all the promises of overpaid disappointment.

Dublin was never just a city to me. I never fell in love with her concrete sinews and tarmac tendons, at rush hour contracting into a spastic convulsion of carbonconbustingengined cars. I never pined for her aorta that is the Liffey, beset with shiny new dentures, each of them looking just too straight, too white, too shiny – just half a mouthful though, alternated with tired craggy teeth of bricks and mortar hinting at a lifetime of too much smoke and societal rot; as if an exasperated and disillusioned periodontist abandoned his job halfway through, leaving a mouth only capable of uttering slurred half-truths, a Dorian Grayish gab speaking with a forked tongue.

Dublin was never just a city to me. I never longed for her liver cirrhosis and lung cancer riddled Victorian public houses rubbing shoulders with the gluten free oak milk foamed barista bars of nose jobs and breast enhancements. Dublin’s a work in progress to one, a lost case to the other. One man’s hell, another man’s heaven. One woman’s sanctuary, another’s whorehouse. Lasciata ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. Céad Míle Fáilte. You should never call Dublin beautiful, but rather impressive.

I start reading A bit of a writer – Brendan Behan’s collected short prose. I never knew about Behan, hailed as a giant of literature in Ireland an beyond, who frequented the likes of Joyce and Beckett and who considered himself a drinker with a writing problem. Behan spent his youth on the North Wall.

‘Sure the young crowd is no use for a decent heave. God be with the days you’d see the D(ublin) M(etropolitan) P(olice) being bet from one end of the quay to the other. With their own batons of a Saturday Night. But now it’s like a graveyard. The young crowd is no good for anything except dancing and the pictures. (…) There were a few English people and country people in the street. They were popular enough, but in a row someone might tell them to go back to where they came from. The country was the country to us, and it started where the tram tracks stopped. Religion didn’t enter into it. Indeed, when my father came out of jail after the Troubles, a Protestant man got him his first job and said: ‘Come down in the morning with me. This place is overrun with bogmen and English, and we have to look after our own.’ (…) When we talked about the rest of Ireland, we never divided it North or South. It was all the country, inside and around. In ways the bog was enchanted land. When we weren’t jeering it, we were very respectful about it.-- 1951

Dublin was never just a city to me. Dublin’s a stage. Her buildings and streets merely props to set the scene. Her uptown boardwalks littered with improvised cardboard beds, vomit and broken carglass shards: testament to so many of last night's plays. Stories lived, ofttimes told, retold and exaggerated, but never written down, let alone published.

Dublin was never just a city to me. She’s a stage; waiting for you to play your part – both as a spectator and a performer. To enter the play, you just interact and connect with the other protagonists. They know the play, they’ll act the part.

You can discern the silhouettes of yesteryear’s characters in the artificial backlight beaming off the newbuilds. They move amongst us, mere audience to their drama, these demiurges of a netherworld; not of our universe, although hoovering within its confines. The lines on their faces speak of past battles, past defeats, past victories. Their souls leaning into the wind, soaked in rain, stout and judgement. Scheming the next scheme to get out of the previous one.

They seem anathema to the slick treepiecesuited boys and girls, rushing to and fro their executive job at Salesforce, Hubspot or PWC on the North Wall. Their faces slick, bland and superfluous, hiding any scar suffered at the hands of life behind their Armani, Boss or Louis Vuitton. The only hint of life the runout mascara -- war paint seen on a Saturday night on Harcourt Street, when these angelic Jezebels revert back to their banshee form, cursing the white horsed poxy eejit for having shattered the happily ever after. The North Wall, Dublin’s Middle Earth, housing a cast of Orcs and Elves of Irish extraction, pitiful carbon copies of Joyce’s Dubliners.