He tried.
Rare on sale images of Brendan Behan getting arrested and saying his prayers in a Toronto jail in March 1961.
Via The Torontoist:
Behan barrelled into Toronto on Sunday, March 19, 1961, in an unhappy mood. Days earlier, in New York City, he’d been publicly humiliated when he was barred from participating in the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade over organisers’ fears he’d be an embarrassing nuisance….
…Although Behan and his wife Beatrice were welcomed by the mayor—who awarded Behan a pair of gold cufflinks and playfully warned him to behave himself—it didn’t take long for the city’s pro-British contingent to make them feel unwelcome.. “We knew, of course,” Beatrice recorded in her memoirs, My Life with Brendan (Nash Publishing, 1973), “that there was a strong Orange feeling in the city and that an Irish Republican like Brendan, despite a reputation as a dramatist, wasn’t welcome….”
Historicist: One Drink Too Many, and a Thousand Not Enough (Torontoist)
Thanks Sibling of Daedalus
He was also on telly over there, and refused to give in to the grins of his baiting co-guests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZdG3Zm-DKU
thats brilliant. id never heard him talk before
Enjoyed that. His reactions to the imperialistic statements are classic.
It’s great isn’t it? His keenness even while drunk make his diabetes seem even more tragic. Plenty of functioning genius alcholics out there, but in the context of his illness, fatal.
My reply went on top, weirdly. This was to both the other replies.
Keenness?
He could have blown them out of the water, ‘crept he was a slurring, drunken mess.
Even in those days pissed Irishmen abroad who thought they were funny weren’t.
Wow! The smug indoctrinated beliefs of the English representative are toe curling.
‘Pro-British’ contingent or not, he sounds like an obnoxious, tiresome boor.