Abstract
We had only a few shillings and it was a serious matter whether to buy a Sunday newspaper or not. Eventually we decided to buy a Sunday Times and as we sat over two pints and the divided paper we discovered that George Orwell was dead. ‘Listen to this, Brendan’, I said, and I read him the closing passage of Cyril Connolly’s famous obituary: ‘But the gardens of the west are closed, and there is no place now for the writer to wander.…’ A look of intense fury came over Brendan’s face. ‘Arrah sweet and holy Jasus, would you mind telling me what fucking gardens of the west did you and I ever wander in?’ he asked.
Extracted from Dead as Doornails: A Chronicle of Life (Dublin: Dolmen Press; London: Calder and Boyars, 1976) pp. 27–61. Editor’s title.
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Notes
When Behan was released from Strangeways Prison in July 1947, a party was given for him. ‘The party was held in the Catacombs, a flat in the basement of a large Georgian house in a Georgian square in Dublin. It was rented by a tall, willowy Englishman called Cecil, a very kindly person in his own way and a great favourite of my father and mother. The lady who owned the Catacombs was a painter and she let the flat to Cecil rent-free, apparently because he posed for her pictures’ — Brendan Behan, Confessions of an Irish Rebel (London: Hutchinson, 1965) P. 137.
Peadar Kearney [O Cearnaigh] (1883–1942), Irish poet, songster, and patriot. See Seamus de Burca, The Soldier’s Song: The Story of Peadar Kearney (Dublin: P. J. Bourke, 1957)
Peadar Kearney, My Dear Eva: Letters from Ballykinlar Internment Camp 1921, ed. Seamus de Burca (Dublin: P. J. Bourke, 1976).
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© 1982 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Cronin, A. (1982). To France with Brendan Behan. In: Mikhail, E.H. (eds) Brendan Behan. Interviews and Recollections. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06013-9_11
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