THERE ARE various good likenesses of Brendan Behan, including a fine pencil drawing by Patrick Collins and the well known painting - hardly more than a sketch but immediate and vivid - by John Ryan, showing Behan singing The Ould Triangle. Characteristically, he holds a pint in his hand and is standing erect, with his head back and his mouth open wide; he is short and stocky in build - "butty" or "blocky" in the Dublin vernacular.
It is less well known that Behan was painted by Thomas Nisbet, RHA, in one of his favourite Dublin watering holes, McDaid's pub, sometime in 1952 (or more likely, according to sound academic practice, Nisbet sketched him there and finished the picture in his studio). Behan was shown sitting at a table, with (almost inevitably) a pint of stout and an MS in front of him. The painting was exhibited at the RHA's annual exhibition that year and was sold for £50, a good price at the time. It was not entitled Portrait of Brendan Behan, or even Portrait of a Writer; instead Nisbet simply called it The Short Story.
Behan's name would not have meant much to the general public then, and certainly not much to the civil servants, businessmen and upper bourgeoisie likely to frequent the RHA exhibition, whose opening night was a social event. He had a limited reputation around town as a talented but erratic journalist, known for his bohemian and sometimes rowdy behaviour, and with an active republican past. The column he wrote for the Irish Press in the early and middle 1950s was widely and deservedly read for its "Dubbalin" humour and superb ear for dialogue - especially since Myles na Gopaleen's unique column in this paper was already beginning to show some signs of battle fatigue. Otherwise, Behan had published relatively little except a few short stories and scattered articles, plus some poems in mostly forgotten, fringe newspapers and magazines.
THE MS (or more accurately, typescript) which Nisbet painted into the picture was presented to him by Behan and it was duly preserved and comes up for auction at De Vere Art Auctions in Dublin at 6pm today. It is a short story called Christmas Eve in the Graveyard, subtitled A Short Story by Mick the Miller. It runs to slightly less than eight pages and roughly 2,000 words, widely spaced and rather badly typed - presumably by Behan himself. A few changes and corrections have been inked in by hand but a trained sub editor would still have been kept busy putting in missing apostrophes and adding punctuation here and there, plus a few other minor matters.
The story is hardly a story as such, merely one of Behan's typical racy. garrulous Dublin pub conversations or sketches - in this case, a family group commiserating with a working class widow after the funeral of her exsoldier husband, from whom she had been long separated. In the climate of the early 1950s, it was probably not easily publishable because of its almost burlesque treatment of popular religion and its frank depiction of the sexual amorality not uncommon among the city poor. Behan knew the world he had come from.
Tom Nisbet, now in his eighties, does not know exactly who bought the picture from the RHA exhibition but thinks it was "someone in Kerry". Curiously, it does not appear to have surfaced since. But, we have a good idea as to what it looked like, since the artist produced a black and white postcard reproduction which was marketed commercially. One of these will go on sale in the auction on March 12th; other copies must surely have survived somewhere.
Within a few years of the McDaid's encounter, Behan's life had changed greatly, with the international success of The Quare Fellow and his discovery by the British and American media. From then on he was a public performer, willingly or unwillingly; always "news" for the tabloids, constantly hounded by the press or TV for quotable quotes and often followed by a tail of hangers on in the streets. The publication and success of Borstal Boy, hawked around in manuscript for years (though a fragment had appeared in the Bell magazine), set the seal on his new found reputation and today it ranks as a classic, going through edition after edition.
His last books (Behan died in 1964, a few weeks past his 41st birthday) were not written or typed by him, merely mouthed into a tape recorder for English publishers, and in any case his "irregular" way of life meant that surviving manuscripts or type scripts of his works from any period are rare. The estimated price for the MS of Christmas Eve in The Graveyard is anything from £1,000 to £3,000.
