The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  I’ve stopped in to see Christy a few times on his home ground of Kimmage in Dublin. The neighborhood is solidly working class. He lives with his sister Ann and her family in the same stuccoed row house built by the city government (so-called Corporation Housing) in which he was raised, where he has always lived. The cramped living room with its linoleum floor and mismatching flimsy furniture, along with the zinc-counter kitchen behind it, provide the setting for many of the dramatic encounters in Down All the Days. The pubs depicted in the novel are nearby, too, and seeing that Christy has never been one to refuse a pint of dark, foamy Guinness Stout, then before long he’ll have you down to one of his two local bars. You’ll be sipping late into the evening as men in work clothes shout his name in greeting through the thick smoke, and it seems that seldom does one fellow or another get up to head to the men’s room without on his way stopping and leaning over Christy in his wheelchair to tell him “a good one” he heard on the job the other day. Songs, loud and forcefully off-key, break out in the various nooks and corners of the smoky, packed premises, and by closing time Christy is bellowing away with the rest of the impromptu Irish tenors. After the pubs shut at eleven it’s back to the house in Kimmage for long hours of conversation and poems read aloud over more stout and fish and chips bought at the corner shop.

  Framed by a tuft of curly hair and a full beard, the very blue eyes seem to be the key to the genius of the man who could produce a book as thoroughly startling as Down All the Days, the verve of its energetic, lushly poetic prose of ten compared to that of Dylan Thomas—they are eyes that literally sparkle in the living room’s low lamplight when he admits he certainly never expected his book to do as well as it did, and eyes that are determined, almost hard, when he tells you there is no room for partition in Ireland and in his heart he will always be an Irish Republican, like his bricklayer father before him and his brothers now, ready to fight for the complete abolition of the border that currently slices the island in two.

  He has visited the United States three times. The first trip was after the publication of his first book, My Left Foot, a slim autobiography released sixteen years ago. It’s an apprentice document that Christy in a way likes to forget and doesn’t advise anyone reading; nevertheless, though long out of print, it will soon be reissued in a new paperback edition. He has close friends in Stamford, Connecticut, where he is a certified honorary member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, he laughs, and on a promotional tour for his book last summer he spent most of his spare time in New England, which he loves and which will figure considerably into his next novel, to be titled A Shadow on Summer.

  He speaks of the fine seaside towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts and the spectacle of autumn foliage in the New England hills. He says Boston is his favorite American city and, in his opinion, very much like Dublin, with its narrow streets, formal parks, and abundance of “beautiful” dirty redbrick architecture. Of course, he couldn’t live in any place else but Ireland, not permanently, anyway, but he adds that he often thinks about setting up a part-time residence somewhere in New England, maybe to begin putting down on canvas some of that handsomeness of the countryside. Another idea that has been bouncing around in his mind lately, a dream of his, actually, is to cross the United States for a camping tour by motor trailer. He has never seen the American West and he’s convinced that taking to the road à la Steinbeck in Travels with Charley would be the only way to do it right.

  He does maintain many strong opinions on his own country. He holds that the trouble in the Northern Ireland stems from a serious and longstanding economic split rather than a religious one—the old story where one class keeps another down not just for status but for exploitation and moneymaking, too. The present British-allied Stormont government there represents the Protestants, who often are the landowners and business proprietors, while the average Catholic is inevitably the working man. He worries that the American people don’t take seriously enough the “grave situation” that does exist in Northern Ireland today and they still think that the fighting in Derry and along the infamous Falls and Shankill Roads in Belfast represents but a few brawling Irish rebels stirring up a street melee here and there with some stolen ammunition. He says that maybe because Americans are used to larger scale and exorbitantly expensive foreign wars, like the current conflict in Vietnam, they can’t find it easy to either sympathize with or understand the kind of turbulence now starting to wrack the North.

  And he believes that the Catholic Church that embraces most of the population in the rest of Ireland is, surprisingly, undergoing change, which he’s sure can only turn out for the better. He sees the old-school clergy, bent on enforcing the discipline of harsh denial, gradually being replaced by a new breed of younger priests, prepared to discuss in the open the problems of a contemporary society, including contraception—it has long been a taboo topic in his country, where the sale of all birth-control devices is strictly banned by national law. According to Christy: “The Catholic Church is finally, and I mean finally, admitting that it has to make concessions to the members of a younger generation.” He says the Church must do so or it will lose them completely, go out of business altogether. Another longstanding problem that concerns him is that the most gifted of its younger people continue to emigrate from the country to pursue careers elsewhere, England, usually, where several of the Brown siblings themselves (there were a full thirteen kids in his family, all packed into that row-house flat) are living now.

  On the whole he harbors a strong fondness for Americans. He confesses to having been a fervid, even close to fanatical, admirer of both Jack and Bobby Kennedy, and he sees Ted sadly as a “man drained of spirit,” one who will probably be rendered somewhat lost as time goes by because of all the tragedy that has befallen the family.

  Christy is sharply critical, however, of one American custom—drinking at home rather than in a bar or pub: “Americans don’t go out for a few jars.” He says they do most of that drinking at home alone, or if with friends, there’s the formality of inviting them over for cocktails, and even then there’s always dinner afterward. “Dinner, now that’s a waste of an awful lot of important drinking time,” Christy is quick to point out.

  Understandably, with his feistiness he has emerged as a character of sorts in Ireland. Primed with stout and Irish whiskey, he repeatedly and emphatically used one of his dearer four-letter words on the air during an Irish network live talk show, making what he likes to think of as “television history,” for Ireland, anyway; after that he was banned entirely from the local air waves for a while. He says that aware of this, David Frost called him aside when he, Christy, showed for a New York City taping of Frost’s talk show last summer along with his burly younger brother Sean (employed at the Jameson Whiskey plant in Dublin), who accompanied him to the U.S.; Frost sternly told Christy to please try to keep all obscene language in check. Worse, in the course of the taping, ever-serious, schoolteacherish Frost leaned forward in his chair and overearnestly asked him if he believed in God, which isn’t the type of question Christy thinks should ever be posed on television: “I thought he was going to ask me next about how my sex life was going.” Which Christy almost wishes he had, because, he says, he would have been happy to announce that at that particular time it was going quite well: “Better than David Frost’s, I bet.”

  He notes, really smiling now: “I have no formal education and maybe that’s why I can write.” His late mother—a figure much like the selfless, brave mother character in Down All the Days, the heroine of the novel—argued that Christy not be institutionalized when he was a child, as social workers urged be done; she chose to take care of him herself, even if it was a very heavy added burden for her. The schooling he did acquire was largely what he styled for himself— the handicapped boy at home devouring paperback after paperback in a determined effort to read through the entire gamut of great world literature, which, like his ultimate literary hero Thomas Wolfe before him, he actually set out to tr
y to do. He explains that his gruff and often violently drunk father maybe saw it as a good babysitting device, slipping Christy about ten shillings a week out of his meager salary to buy enough books to keep himself occupied. Christy says he could usually get two five-shilling editions with the money, and that was quite enough, he emphasizes—two books a week, week after week.

  Probably more than enough, I’d say, considering the writer he turned out to be as he worked away on that Smith Corona and his lofty stature in the literary world at the moment.

  1971, FROM THE PROVIDENCE SUNDAY JOURNAL

  Postscript:

  Christy Brown died in 1981.

  As explained earlier in these pages, much material from Down All the Days provided the basis of the acclaimed 1989 film about him starring Daniel Day Lewis, which borrowed the title of the earlier autobiography that he advised here that nobody should read, My Left Foot. A straightforward and admittedly rather casual newspaper feature piece like this certainly doesn’t fully get at the complexity of this spirited man who didn’t let his many sadnesses defeat him, who loved literature and especially the utter musical beauty of words themselves as fervently as probably anybody I’ve ever encountered. And it doesn’t get at the experience for me as a hopeful, albeit constantly cold, twenty-three-year-old wannabe writer living for the better part of a year in an absurdly cheap seven-dollar-a-week bed-sitter in dank Dublin, sans central heat (the place did come with a pink hot water bottle to warm the sagging bed, the plump landlady carefully demonstrating to me how to pour the steaming kettle to fill it, as if it were a complicated lab experiment); I was doing some journalism and, more importantly to me, trying to get a start on my own fiction. I valued the relationship with Brown that developed after I initially interviewed him for the newspaper piece, our long and excited conversations about books. My subsequent visits to the Kimmage row house inevitably ended up at night in our happy inebriation in a local pub along with his sister and her husband and a brother or two, with ever-generous Christy never letting anybody else pay for anything, and then all of us back to the row house again afterward for more good talk and, yes, booze, as described. But before the going to the pub, at the house with him in the late afternoon, I became almost a de facto secretary on occasion, helping him come up with responses to fan mail and making note of novels he wanted me to buy for him at the big Eason’s book and stationery store on O’Connell Street when I was downtown. Along the lines of the essay in this collection on Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, “The Other Life of Any Book,” and my talk there of endlessly pressing that novel on people, I remember that when I got Brown a copy of it at Eason’s, he read it, loved it, and told me: “This is the book that F. Scott Fitzgerald was always trying to write with Tender Is the Night but failed to do.” Hauntingly perceptive, all right, because I later learned that Lowry himself was nothing short of obsessed with Tender Is the Night, which did endlessly thwart Fitzgerald during its troubled composition, Fitzgerald never satisfied with that tale of Dick Diver’s downward spiral and personal unraveling. Lowry even spent a large chunk of his own time in the 1950s working on an intriguing, if not very accurate, film adaptation of Tender is the Night that was never produced. I should note that while some of Brown’s observations on his homeland here might seem a given today, he was very prescient in things he said, predicting without hesitation the full-fledged mess that the renewed Protestant-Catholic strife, which was beginning to rapidly escalate at the time of my acquaintance with him, 1971, would degenerate into in the coming years; he was equally insightful about how the Irish Catholic Church, which more or less had the nation in a psychological hammer lock back then, had to start loosening up if it expected to survive. (To give you a sense of the prevailing atmosphere: Not only were condoms still strictly illegal and black-market fare, but I once got stuck on a poky train winding forever through the green-on-green mountains and heading toward Yeats’s hometown of Sligo in the West of Ireland with a wacky priest who railed against what he saw as the filth in Catcher in the Rye; he was shocked by my liking the novel and asked how could I ever consider any book “decent” if it contained within its pages even a single mention of a character who was a prostitute?)

  Christy Brown was married and living in Somerset in the UK at the time of his death at the age of forty-nine.

  TWO SHORT MOVIES AND

  A TRANSCENDENT TRAILER:

  WITH N. WEST

  IN HOLLYWOOD

  Lately I have been feeling even more discouraged than usual. The ancient bugaboo—‘Why write novels?’—is always before my mind.

  —NATHANAEL WEST, FROM A 1940 LETTER AND JUST

  BEFORE HIS DEATH AT AGE THIRTY-SEVEN IN

  AN AUTOMOBILE CRASH

  1. Working

  I’m in L.A. for a week or so, now that my semester of teaching back in Austin is over. It’s late May.

  Set up at a motel downtown, I’m by myself and working on revising some rough sequences in a long fiction manuscript of my own here.

  2. As Good a Place as Any

  I figured that L.A. was as good a place as any to get away from everything (real sadness over the past few months involving the serious illness of a friend in Austin, which I won’t go into, and then the always crazy crunch at the end of a semester—grading looming stacks of short stories from students in my creative writing classes, along with a couple of unexpected faculty skirmishes, the petty, departmental-politics kind of stuff I usually manage to sidestep and the only truly bad part of a teaching job, where those students are by and large wonderful), yes, get away and concentrate on the manuscript.

  I’ve already gone up to Hollywood on this trip. I walked around one afternoon, tracking down the actual settings of scenes in Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, heading there after I finished more work in the morning on the manuscript at the motel—a cheap but comfortable spot in Chinatown—then I ended the day with a drink on Hollywood Boulevard. This particular afternoon I plan to do the same.

  3. On the Boulevard, a Short Movie

  It’s only about twenty minutes, one change involved, on the hissing train of the L.A. Metro.

  And, three o’clock on a warm weekday, I’m soon stepping out of the car in the empty Hollywood station. There’s the dry smell of maybe dust and electricity, like vacuum cleaner innards, that could be any subway platform anywhere, though the station here is definitely not a standard one.

  Clean to the point of gleaming, as is just about everything in the new L.A. Metro system, the station is actually somewhat over the top, with almost a forest of repeated support pillars that are made to look like palm trees—concrete trunks sprouting gold and green ceramic fronds—and the vaulted ceiling showing a pattern of empty movie reels; the red floor of the expanse spreads like a lake, it’s so freshly polished, and a wavy inlay through it mimics (what else?) the Yellow Brick Road. It takes two escalators, long ones, to proceed through the two levels of the station—which is to say, to go from far, far underground and then fully into the glaring sunlight again.

  On the second escalator, I ride the continually folding steps, no passengers except for me, and eventually do see a blue swatch of sky above. I suppose I tell myself what I’ve told myself before: granting it is over the top, this gaudy, absurd station with its bright stainless-steel escalators slowly bringing you closer and closer is a perfect way to be, well, delivered smack into the acknowledged heart of the place, Hollywood and Vine.

  Not paying any attention to the gathering of touts for guided tours and the few straggling and confused tourists in front of the station, I head for 1817 Ivar Street. I was there when in Hollywood a couple of days earlier, but I want to get a better look at it now, having reread some pages in my old, well-worn New Directions copy of The Day of the Locust in the motel the night before and decided that the apartment house on Ivar, called Pa-Va-Sed and mentioned by West’s biographers, most likely did provide the model for the apartment house where many of the cast of down-and-out characters
in the novel live, called San Bernardino Arms.

  Ivar isn’t far down the Boulevard, a cross street intersecting with that supposed Walk of Fame.

  My progress is slowed some with the gradually increasing number of tourists—always thickest by Grauman’s Chinese Theatre much farther on—who are repeatedly stopping to look down. (For me, happening to notice one of those endlessly continuing bronze plaques set in red and black terrazzo on the sidewalk is never a matter being struck by the name of a real star, somebody you expect, Jack Lemon, let’s say, but the whole weirder exchange of seeing and thinking about a personage you haven’t thought about in years, somebody rather inconsequential in the bigger scheme of things—may-be Arthur Treacher, a name often associated with a fish and chips chain, or Forrest Tucker, a name usually only associated with—almost worse than fish and chips—the 1960s TV sitcom about a bunch of loopy cavalrymen in the Old West, F Troop). I turn at an old yellow brick office building, now a Scientology museum. Unlike the Boulevard, Ivar is all but deserted in the mid-afternoon sun that is genuinely hot now, and wearing black Levi’s and an open-collared dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the basic black-and-white nylon Reeboks I swear by and have repeatedly purchased for years, nicely bouncy under my feet, I’m glad I gunked up with sun block before setting out. I can see the low blond hills beyond Ivar—the distant HOLLYWOOD sign a faded and near ghostly white, the letters a bit lumpily angled like uneven teeth—and, steeply rising, the narrow open street gives way after a couple of blocks to welcome shade from big, spreading-limbed trees along the sidewalk on either side, the lovely jacarandas wispy with their dangling purple spring blossoms right now and certainly no shortage of the more than ubiquitous L.A. eucalyptus; everything is suddenly quite residential.