‘Down All the Days:’ Christy’s masterpiece

When you can’t do things, when you have to sit, day after day, like a potted plant, you could become angry and bitter and life-hating.

Or, you could utilize the only two abilities you have that everyone else does — your eyes and ears — to observe what others are doing, to take the whole world in as it passes before you, processing it in your seething, active brain. You could become a contemplative (that’s a personality type. It’s what I am, too, by the way.)

But it’s doubtful you could have done what Christy Brown did in “Down All the Days,” as well as a number of other startlingly amazing pieces of literature that he wrote in his short life of 49 years.

You see, Christy Brown was a working-class Irishman, born in 1932 in Dublin to a bricklayer named Patrick Brown and his wife Bridget. Nothing especially exciting there, is there? But wait — Christy was born with a severe form of cerebral palsy. Throughout his life, he could not walk, or eat, or drink, or do anything else, without considerable help. His limbs shook constantly; his speech was slurred and limited, hard to understand except by his family. He was, as people said in those days, “a cripple.” He sat in a wooden, box-like carrier on wheels which his father had built for him, most of the time, especially when his many brothers took him with them in their boyish gallivanting about the streets and docks of Dublin.

There was something about Christy that no one suspected until he was nearly an adult, though. He had a brilliant, retentive, analytical mind which could remember and process everything it saw and heard, including people’s words, what they looked like, the feel of a room full of people, scents, sounds — it was all processed and stored. To use a modern term, his memory was never “almost full.” It seemed to have a limitless capacity.

Somehow, at some time during his childhood, Christy Brown learned to read — possibly assisted by one of his older siblings (he was one of 22 children born to the Browns; only 13 lived to maturity).  And then, at some time after that, the fact that he could control his left foot (the only part of his body over which he had voluntary command) led him to teach himself to write, on a notebook laying on the floor, using the toes of that foot to hold and manipulate the pencil.

And the result of that — the fictionalized version of his own life — is “Down All the Days.” Christ wrote other things, such as the more autobiographical “My Left Foot,” of which a movie version starring Daniel Day-Lewis was made. But the novel is a stunning achievement, even if he’d never written anything else.

Think James Joyce, who lived in an earlier period, and created the “stream of consciousness” technique, the “inner dialogue” in which the leading character’s most secret thoughts are revealed to us.

Except you couldn’t say that Christy is the leading character of his novel. There is no single person who fits that description. You have his father, a hard-working and hard-drinking Irish plebeian with an explosive temper, who has been known to beat his wife at home and who seems to go out of his way to be argumentative and confrontational (but then, he’s Irish). He is a harsh father to his children, especially the boys, ever ready to administer the belt to their posteriors whenever he feels they need it — which is often. But touch one of his children, as an outsider, and he is on you like a mountain lion.

Then there is his mother — mild-mannered, but sensible and practical, and not afraid to stand up to her Paddy when she knows he’s wrong. The contrast between her and some of her female friends is striking, as she seems always in control of herself.

The most colorful of those friends is Red Magso Rattigan, recently widowed when the story begins, a mountainous, hard-drinking woman with huge breasts who alternates between weeping copiously over her dead husband, and angrily berating his memory. Her musings and ravings when she, Bridget and Oul Essie, a skinny, toothless crone, are together at Magso’s house, are a highlight of the book. Oddly, outsiders twice address Red Magso by different last names than Rattigan, for no apparent reason, unless it is Christy’s attempt to make his characters sound more like Irish “types.”

In one of those conversations concerning the recent loss of her husband, Essie tells her intoxicated friend Red Magso, “I wouldn’t be sitting back here like a queen bee drowning in honey, for you’re not past doing it again, I tell yeh. I do see the way that oul fella from up the street looks in at you when he passes … Speak of the divil!”

‘Who — him?!’  shrieked Magso, looking out of the window and scowling at a tall, droop-shouldered elderly man who politely lifted his hat to her but hurried on when he saw her storm-wrecked face framed ominously in the window-square like an angry red moon. ‘Oul go-by-the-wall and tickle-the-bricks! Oul empty fork!’ she yelled after him as he loped hastily away up the street. ” ‘Wait now till I shake me tits after him!’ she cried exuberantly, straining out of the window and fumbling at the one remaining button that barely held the blouse shut over her huge wobbling breasts.”

But true to the “stream of consciousness” heart of the book, its pages begin with internal musings of the boy in the wooden cart who can only watch and listen.

“… He could never go to sleep very easily, and would lie awake in the night while the others snored and snored, thinking of many things, things he felt rather than saw, for there was not much to see from between the four rough wooden sides of the old boxcar, and there was not much to be seen from the front window either, except other houses facing, and buses, and cars, and the kids running and playing out in the streets.”

The book is episodic — which some reviewers always count as a “minus.” But these episodes move the story along at a natural pace. The Brown family lives their hectic, disorderly lives, with “Da” coming home drunk frequently, berating “Ma,” shouting at his children, etc. Lil, the eldest, marries a young man named Doyle — in England, where she had gone to find work — and later returns with their first baby. Later they have twin boys — who both die at nine months old, of gastro-enteritis.

Jem (James) and Tony, the two oldest boys, get their union cards courtesy of their father, to become bricklayers, but then duck out and instead join the Irish Army (World War II is in its first year). Da is furious with the two for letting him down before his mates, and openly ridicules their military pretensions.

Christy — who is never referred to by name in the book, but only as “he,” “him,” or “the lad” — locked in his own mind, struggles with early sexual feelings he doesn’t understand. “He awoke in the middle of the night, hot with terror from a well-known nightmare, being smothered by someone, or some thing, huge, moist, and hairy; opening his eyes in the dead greyness, he could still see, horrified, the vague outlines of the terrible form before his eyes, in the room with him; as he stared, it faded slowly, into the familiar outlines of the bed in the far corner … ”

And the story reaches its climax when Da, coming home loaded one night, bearing several beers and some whiskey, goes through his own stream of consciousness — about his hard work on the streets, the children who seem to just keep coming, his own unquenchable lust which is the reason for their arrival, what his wife has gone through all those years … The denouement follows shortly, changing the Brown family forever.

In the spirit of the writing style founded by James Joyce, Christy Brown’s novel sometimes meanders, lapses into spoken poetry (pretty good poetry, too), and takes a mystic turn. It’s not your average boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl in the end story. But it’s very fascinating and very Irish.

Christy Brown has an edge on all his contemporaries who ever wrote novels. Not one of them did his work with his left foot.

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And here’s a little personal epilogue: Even though I’ve had no physical disability like Christy Brown’s, I’ve always felt “on the margins” of whatever was going on, most of the time. Like the kid staring longingly through the window of the candy store, I was always on the edge of the action, always wishing I could be in the middle of things, but unable, for whatever reason, to get there. Unseen, seemingly, although I knew I wasn’t; not really. I’ve joked before that I’d worn my “cloak of invisibility” on a given day because I felt everyone was ignoring me. I once missed a high school class reunion because of that feeling of “aloneness” having closed in on me at a cocktail get-together the night before, leaving me very depressed.

It’s amazing how that kind of feeling — call it a “complex” if you want — when it starts in your childhood, can make you a “contemplative” person; that is, one who watches the world go by and absorbs what he/she sees and hears, and analyzes it. I suppose under the right — or rather, “wrong” — circumstances, a person like that could grow up, resenting what he feels is lack of recognition and appreciation by his fellow humans, and finally go berserk and commit some horrible crime. I was more lucky; my writing talent enabled me to express myself, and gain people’s attention, by putting pen to paper.

I’m glad that I was born with that gift. I’d like to think that some other people are glad, too.