Closing Time
From TIM PAT COOGAN
DI RIAN rr titL fact that Dubliners will no longer see the .11 tubby figure of Brendan Behan, head canted slightly to one side, feet twinkling along as though they belonged to a man who would have been a star scrum-half bad they not been bound at birth toddling off to some piece of audacity' or another, is just beginning to percolate through the city's consciousness.
There is a general consciousness of a gap that won't be filled easily if at all. A city that prides itself on being full of literary figures suddenly., finds that it isn't, wasn't and won't be until Cram or some other Celtic Gods send along another talented creature, earmarked for suc- cess--and destruction.
There aren't any major literary figures really, there was only Brendan Behan, more famous for himself, his sayings and his doings than for his work. He was the arch-enemy of conformity. ; But ironically his death is one of this century's' great arguments for conforming. Of conform- ing to normal standards of drinking, of behaviour; of work habits, of creating enough order in one's life to allow one to stay alive happily ;irtd creatively.
As his fame grew, so did disaster tighten its hold on him. At first it was great to see how he stayed natural and unassuming. But then, as he refused to make even the simplest adjustments, to acknowledge that he was now a recognised artist, it became ominously obvious that there was such a thing as being too natural.
Always on stage, always headline-making, sur-.i, rounded often by dubious Dublin hangers-on, life to Brendan Behan, basically one of the--, most sensitive and perceptive men of our time, :f increasingly became a four-letter word. He re- treated further and further into the mist, of(11, alcohol.
How many people in Dublin are saddened by their own memories of what they said and felt about his antics, and fittingly his funeral was gigantic and the stories tinged with regret. ri Especially the last one—that just as he was re- covering from the final illness someone smuggled him in a bottle of spirits. It must have been the Irish in him.
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