This last was etched into his mind; at the same time, an intensity yet scarcity of information made the enigma of this drinking saint still greater, until one day, many years later, he discovered Behan camouflaged behind the character of the garrulous Barney Boyle at a bar in Christine Falls, a novel written by John Banville under his pseudonym Benjamin Black. Still surprised by this discovery, he devoted himself to spying on the environment of this Boyle, Behan’s counterpart: an atmosphere of fog, coal fires, whiskey vapors, and stale cigarette smoke. And he began to think that each day he found himself ever closer to the authentic Behan. He wasn’t wrong. A few weeks ago, he went into a bookshop, and as if it had been there waiting for him his whole life, he suddenly came across the Spanish edition of Brendan Behan’s New York. The first thing he regretted was not having published it himself. And he regretted it more when he discovered that Behan’s book was a wonderful monologue about the city of New York, which he considered “the greatest city on the face of God’s earth.” To Behan, nothing compared to the electric city of New York, the center of the universe. The rest was silence, glaring darkness. After having been in New York, everything else was awful. And so London, for instance, must seem to a Londoner returning from New York like “a wide flat pie of redbrick suburbs with the West End stuck in the middle like a currant.”
Brendan Behan’s New York, the book he wrote at the end of his life, turned out to be a tour of the infinite genius of a city’s human landscape, a city with a lucky star. What’s more, Behan’s New York confirmed that this city and happiness were the same thing. Behan wrote his book in the Chelsea Hotel, when he was already a total alcoholic, at the start of the sixties. They were days of great parties, where people were always dancing the recently invented twist and the Madison, but also days of incipient revolutions. Some years earlier, the Welshman Dylan Thomas had turned up at the Chelsea Hotel on the night of November 3, 1953, announcing he’d drunk eighteen straight whiskeys and thought this was probably a record (he died six days later).
Ten years later, as if he were the very same “drunken boat” from Rimbaud’s poem, “hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether,” the Irishman Behan turned up at that hotel too in as inebriated a state as the Welshman had been; he was assisted by Stanley Bard, the owner of the Chelsea, who put him and his wife up, even though he knew that the writer, who was always drunk, had been thrown out of every other hotel. The great Stanley Bard knew that if there was one place where Behan might start writing again it was the Chelsea. And so it was. The hotel on 23rd Street, which had always been considered a place conducive to creativity, turned out to be crucial to Behan, whose book was composed on the same floor where Dylan Thomas had lived.
The book speaks of the euphoria induced in Behan by this energetic city in which, as evening fell — probably the eve of his own life — it always became clear to him that in the end the only important thing to do is “to get something to eat and something to drink and someone to love you.” In terms of the book’s style, it could be summarized as follows: to write and to forget. The two verbs sound like an echo of the well-known relationship between drinking and forgetting. Behan himself used to say that he had decided this: “I will have forgotten this book long before you have paid your money for it.”
Although he was Irish, Behan was never an administrator, perhaps the exception to Vilém Vok’s rule that New York belongs to the Jews, is administered by the Irish, and enjoyed by the Negroes. Because the last thing Brendan Behan wanted was to have to administer anything in his beloved city. Maybe this is why the style in Brendan Behan’s New York is made up of opinions that are shots with no intention of reaching beyond that shot itself, of deliberately furtive volleys, judgments about, all the humans he had within his reach: blacks, the Scottish, waiters, homosexuals, Jews, taxi drivers, beggars, beatniks, bankers, Latinos, Chinese, and of course, the Irish, who went around the entire city in family clans keeping an eye on each other and creating their own culture; it’s as if this were just a ballad about their rainy native land.
Throughout New York, at no point does Behan forget the inspiration of his literary masters. “Shakespeare said pretty well everything, and what he left out, James Joyce put in.” For example, Behan’s way of approaching each of New York’s bars recalls Joyce’s Ulysses when the day is drawing to a close and the people and scenery around Stephen start to disappear from his sight, perhaps because the drinks he’s consumed over lunch and the intellectual excitement of the conversation in the library — actually trivial and stultifying — are gradually making them sometimes clearer or sometimes more blurred. In the same way, the bars of early sixties New York gradually appear in Behan’s book, with transparent or hazy alternative names according to the level of his private enthusiasm. And the names, like some fascinating and disquieting litany, fall one after the other, inexorable, Irish, legendary: McSorley’s Old Ale House, Ma O’Brien’s, Oasis, Costello’s, Kearney’s, Four Seasons, and the Metropole on Broadway, where the twist was born.
An essential and secular litany. Riba thinks that remembering Behan’s book has been a good way to continue preparing for his trip to Dublin, to move further away each day from the interior space that’s holding him hostage, and so slowly approach wider horizons. He devoured Behan’s book on the train from Lyon back to Barcelona, imagining many times that he was reading it at a table by the iron door of the amazing Oakland Bar, the one on the corner of Hicks and Atlantic from When You Wound Brooklyn, the beautiful novel by his young friend Nietzky.
And he remembers too that in the last few minutes of reading this book of Behan’s, as evening fell, still imagining himself to be in the Oakland, he even thought he shared with the author this dark, unrepeatable moment, this moment, somewhere between Joycean and elegiac, when Behan’s daydreams gradually absorb the world around him. Daylight fades and the impressions of the day are gathered together in a harmony of urban sounds and a touching blend of feelings and dying light that reaches the very doors of the Chelsea Hotel, where they never turn out the lights.
Without New York he would be nothing. Like eau de vie, he needs the happiness he feels whenever he remembers that this city is out there, waiting for him. Right now, thinking about the Chelsea Hotel and Behan has made him slowly sink into a state of happy New York melancholy, a sort of strange nostalgia for something unlived. Thinking about the Chelsea Hotel and Behan is a way of feeling closer to the magic and warmth of New York and to certain moments from an unlived past and to everything that, for reasons that usually escape him, brings a happiness as mysterious as it is necessary to his continued existence.
When it gets dark we all need someone. That’s just as true as that when dawn breaks, we always need to remember that we still have some goal in life. New York fulfills all the requirements for being a real driving force for staying in the world. The most agreeable and also the strangest memory of this city he’s visited twice — and where he thinks he should go and live soon — that night in the Brooklyn house of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster. He turned up there in the company of young Nietzky. He’ll always remember this night out, among many other things because he hasn’t had an evening out since; he’s banned himself from going out at night, to not feel too tempted by alcohol and to preserve his health. For the Austers he made an exception that he’s not repeated. Now he remembers perfectly how on that day when he made that great exception, at around six o’clock in the evening, he and Nietzky left the bar of the Morgan Museum, on Madison Avenue, and walked slowly all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge, which they crossed on foot over the course of an unforgettable half hour. While crossing it, he was able to confirm what some friends in Barcelona had told him, that feeling the city from the bridge during the time it takes to cross it on foot is an intense experience.