Introduction: A Bit of a Writer

Abstract

‘The boss on the painting job says to me one morning: “Behan, I believe you are a bit of a writer’”. So begins Brendan Behan’s first article for the Irish Press newspaper in 1951, and it catches Behan at an important moment in his transition from house-painter and Republican rebel to the internationally acclaimed writer he became in 1956 when The Quare Fellow was produced in London. By 1951, Behan had published stories in The Bell and Sindbad Vail’s Points magazine in Paris, a handful of Gaelic verse in an important anthology of new Irish writers, Nuabhearsaiocht, and he had written some play drafts which were rejected by the Abbey. The suggestion that he is ‘a bit of a writer’ stirs him to remember, and to quote at length from, a review of Points magazine which had just been published in the Hudson Review, in which his story, ‘After the Wake’, was singled out for praise: