WORLD LIT—
MY EARLY CLASSES
1. JAMAICA, 1976
2. CAMEROON, 1979
3. IRELAND, 1971
1. JAMAICA, 1976: HOW FAR THE POET’S WRIT RUNS
The actor Sir Alec Guinness once said jokingly that he struck from his travel list any country in which his friend Graham Greene had set a novel. In Guinness’s opinion, Greene’s nose for political discord was keen and if trouble already hadn’t erupted there, it would soon enough. The Quiet American by Greene is probably the best proof of the theory. In the novel, Greene fathomed and foretold, with his examination of one personal case, the tragedy of American involvement in Vietnam a decade before most future protesters even realized it was happening.
During a trip to Jamaica in January, I kept thinking of Guinness’s observation on Greene. The week before I left, I had finished reading V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas and submitted a review to a newspaper in Vermont where I live. I was preoccupied with plans for my own coming trip. So the logical way to start the review was to say that the book held special interest for me because I was about to visit a country which appeared very similar to the lush, unnamed Caribbean island that is the setting for Guerrillas. I didn’t know then the full implications of the statement.
V. S. Naipaul is Trinidadian. According to some reviewers, the story of the novel, in which a young woman is raped and viciously murdered, can be traced to the killing in 1972 of a British woman who became involved with a local pimp turned black activist in Trinidad. But, in a way, the fictional territory could just as well be Jamaica, the other large independent Caribbean island that is still part of the Commonwealth. Naipaul does make an effort to disclaim Trinidad’s being the setting by having the characters talk about having left Trinidad to settle on the novel’s island. In fact, the novel’s island shares much with Jamaica. A major industry is bauxite mining, as in Jamaica; cricket is the great pastime (the avidly followed West Indies test matches with Australia were going on last month); Kingston-born reggae rock music blares on street corners, again as in Jamaica.
One purpose of my visit, besides escaping the northern New England deep freeze and also doing some research for fiction, was to stop by at Kingston recording studios to gather background material for an article on reggae. A cab ride to one studio took me through the heart of the quarter of hungry children, open sewage, and corrugated tin shacks that is the West Kingston slum of Trench Town. I remembered detailed descriptions of such areas in Naipaul’s novel. I myself was staying at a guesthouse in admittedly posh Liguanea at the foot of the Blue Mountains. It is a locale not unlike the Ridge in Guerrillas, with its neat British-style bungalows and its location above the congested city center.
In Naipaul’s novel, a member of a slum neighborhood gang is shot, and deadly rioting begins. Two politically liberal white visitors—Roche from South Africa and Jane from London, the woman eventually murdered by the novel’s black-power leader and head of a failing commune, Jimmy Ahmed—watch the slum burn from their vantage point of the Ridge. A few days after I landed in Kingston, these were the headlines on the front page of the Kingston Daily Gleaner: “Man Shot Dead, Four Persons Wounded, Hundreds Flee Homes...Fires Rage in Rema Area. Firemen Retreat Under Attack by Armed Gangs. Blockades Hold Up Police, Soldiers Entering the Area.” The trouble started with confrontations between local youth gangs. They were said to be politically at odds as radical supporters of either the rival People’s National Party (the majority party) or the Jamaica Labour Party. But before long, the police and army seemed their common enemy. In related violence, a constable on duty at the United States Embassy was shot. A BBC broadcaster says in Naipaul’s novel, “.the disturbances were sparked off by radical youth groups protesting against unemployment and what they see as continued foreign domination of the economy.. ”
I took the train up to Montego to spend the last several days of my stay in the resort town on the beautiful northern coast. I bought the Gleaner every morning to read the reports from the other end of the island. The headlines kept tabs on the deaths of policemen and gunmen. There were photographs of some people fleeing amid the rubble and other people looting. In Guerrillas, Roche tells Jane, “Yes. One day there’s going to be an accident. I hope it doesn’t get to that. It’s so odd. When you’re out in the country, the old estates, and you see country people walking to church or rocking in their hammocks or drinking in their little bars, you don’t think it’s that kind of a country.... People would be frightened if they know how easily it comes.”
In Jamaica, I got that feeling of “how easily it comes”—in this case, how a developing country could find itself suddenly on the brink of outright fighting and confused civil war. Or, as another of Naipaul’s characters says when he brings up the possibility of such fighting leading to assassinations, “It’s going to be South America for a couple of generations.”
The uprising in Guerrillas ends when soldiers without uniforms, dropped from U.S.-marked helicopters, brutally quell it to protect foreign investment in the bauxite mines. The trouble in Kingston that began in January ended—at least for a while—without outside intervention.
Shelley was a dreamer indeed to call poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” However, that doesn’t mean that we should continue to ignore some of the best minds of any generation—the poets, playwrights, and novelists—when their fictions offer some of the best political analysis of the times. Naipaul shows in Guerrillas that he understands enough about the roots of Caribbean volatility to create a fictional explosion essentially identical to an actual one that happened several months after the book appeared. I suppose one could hope (and it seems a farfetched hope) that the real legislators—maybe local Caribbean leaders, bauxite industry representatives, and even American State Department people—would avail themselves to Naipaul’s knowledge. His novel, finally pessimistic, offers no solutions, but he wisely probes where the uneasiness lies, socially and economically.
I can’t help but believe that our painful involvement in Vietnam might have had a different character and a different outcome if more of those supposedly best and brightest administration members of the time had taken to heart Graham Greene’s convincing story of how one idealistic, concerned young American in Vietnam in the 1950s went sadly wrong in his concern.
1976, FROM THE NATION
2. CAMEROON, 1979: BUMA KOR & CO.
I received a formal invitation.
It came to me because a poet friend in Yaoundé had mentioned to Buma Kor that there was an American in the Cameroonian capital researching African literature and interviewing writers (I’d already conducted several such tape-recorded sessions). The card was the variety of summons that could cost a bit of money here—printing rates are high in this African country and there are heavy taxes on paper imports.
On the occasion of the inaugural opening of the
BILINGUAL BOOKSHOP
The Management and Staff of
BUMA KOR & CO.
cordially invite the presence of________
to their premises at Mvog-Ada, behind the Dispensary
to witness the official
Cutting of the Symbolic Ribbon
at 3 p.m. on Saturday 13th July, 1979
R.S.V.P.
Next to it was the same invitation in French. The bilingualism was important. The United Republic of Cameroon in Central Africa was formed from French and British territories, a rare such union on the continent. True, the Francophone section is larger and the French language predominates. But the first article of the nation’s constitution proclaims French and English as the two official tongues (there are just too many tribal languages for any of them to be official) and all secondary school students study both. Buma Kor’s shop would be the first totally bilingual outlet for books in Yaoundé. Established by the French, the inland capital is cut out of the mountain jungles, a sprawling city of tin-roofed houses and a central cluster of stately buildings left over from the colonial regime, plus a few new high-rises for hotels, government ministries, and banks.
I arrived early that Saturday afternoon, to give myself plenty of time to find my way around Mvog-Ada. It turned out to be a noisy neighborhood on a hill peppered with bars and record shops. Chickens pecked at mounded garbage heaps; people stood on corners and waited for the sputtering Toyota ramassage (group pick-up) taxis, the way everybody always seemed to be waiting for taxis in Yaoundé. The day itself was one of the absolutely brightest sunshine, with a gusty breeze kicking up the dust and rattling the clumps of banana palms growing everywhere.
Buma Kor & Co. was in a freshly whitewashed building at an intersection of streets that combined patches of asphalt and rutted red dirt in just about equal part. A yellow satin ribbon as wide as your hand flapped across one open side of the airy shop. At the front of the other open side, a table had been set up and a woman was arranging bottles and hors d’oeuvres on the white tablecloth. Some guests were already browsing among the shelves within, waiting for the ceremonies to begin. I entered from the side sans the ribbon and joined them.
I was soon shaking hands with Buma Kor, a smiling, goateed young man in a rather too big suit of French cut. He told me he was a native of Bamenda in the English-speaking part of the country. He explained that besides selling books he would publish titles under a Buma Kor imprint—in fact, there were already three books to its credit. The publishing house would operate out of the bookshop premises and it, too, would be fully bilingual. Personable and energetic, Buma Kor struck me as a natural businessman. He is also a poet himself and—according to information I received later—a former preacher. What better credentials for heading a successful publishing venture?
Looking around on my own, I saw that Buma Kor had stocked a good selection of books in French, including the literary series put out by CLE, a well-known Cameroonian publisher of the works of Central Africa’s poets and novelists. The offerings in English were more spotty: two or three Shakespeare plays in paperback, some novels in the Heinemann African Writers Series, and a large rack of decidedly racy fare, several books here by a certain Rosie Dixon— typical was Confessions of a Baby-Sitter, a garter-belted blond teenage beauty toting a feather duster shown on the cover, ready for sport—that attracted more than their fair share of pre-ceremony browsers. In the small textbook section, the Effective English series offered by Evans Publishers, of London and Lagos, Nigeria, caught my eye. The uniform jacket design had the expected photos of African students engaging in various scholarly pursuits, at desks or in the lab—and also, high above all the rest, a long and sleek Mercedes automobile. Were the Evans people offering this contemporary African power symbol as an incentive for high schoolers? Which is to say, if you study hard, you, too, can become a high-living businessman or politico, reminding everyone with a flashy car that you are unquestionably a cut above the common crowd? (Note the placement of the Mercedes at the very top of the cover.) The thought somewhat saddened me. Buma Kor’s shop also stocked a supply of tennis and ping-pong balls.
My friend arrived, the polite and unassuming Cameroonian poet Ernest Alima. He pointed out some of the notables. The man in the blue suit was the Chancellor of the University, and the man in the gray suit was the Minister of Post and Telecommunications. Also on hand were the Minister of State for Territorial Administration and the Minister of Culture and Information, the latter accompanied by an entourage of his deputies. A skeptic might have concluded that with all the current government emphasis on promoting bilingualism and with complete adherence to that doctrine a top priority of the powerful (or “strong-arm,” to some) Cameroonian president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, the bigwigs maybe considered this a good place to be seen. But I like to think that these government types, and the professors and writers, came simply to wish the very best of luck to Buma Kor as he started out in the book business in their city—they came to tell him that they were behind him in his sales and publishing pursuits, that they felt his work would help the developing country develop something besides the usual cash crops and even military meddling for export.
The guests assembled in the street, before the front steps, where a microphone and speakers had been set up. The sound system didn’t work. The huge speakers of the record shop across the way were working exceptionally well, however, and I feared the ceremonies would be hopelessly competing with tambour drums and pinging electric guitars, the African pop singers melodically wailing. But suddenly there was silence—the record shop proprietor obviously deduced from the look of the clientele that a big event was going on.
The dedication speech was given by the Assistant Director of the Regional Book Promotion Center of Africa, an organization funded by several Sub-Saharan African countries. (Actually, Buma Kor works for the center, and, as he told me, he would be tending to his duties as head of Buma Kor & Co. mostly during the evenings.) The man spoke in French and couldn’t be heard too well even without the music. Beside him, waiting patiently, was a pretty little girl of ten or so dressed up in a red frock, her hair intricately braided. She held a pair of long scissors on a white porcelain plate.
The speaker emphasized that Buma Kor was certainly well qualified, though he prudently cautioned that one shouldn’t expect success too soon. Then he quoted the slogan Buma Kor was using for his publishing house, “Our Literature Is Not Dead” (an observation originally applied specifically to the literature of Anglophone Cameroon, where there are understandable worries of being overshadowed by the larger Francophone side, as Buma Kor had earlier explained to me). The little girl in red handed over the scissors, the satiny yellow band dropped gracefully in two, and Buma Kor announced, smiling, “We can now enter, and look, and”—he hesitated, smiling wider—“buy.” Laughter and cheers of approval.
I guess I decided then that, yes, Buma Kor & Co. was definitely going to make it.
How like a cocktail party for literati anywhere were the goings-on afterward. There was refreshment. The champagne went first and fast, then the good golden Harp lager brewed at the local Guinness plant, then the not-so-good Cameroonian brand beer, then the Fanta orange soda, then the not-so-good Cameroonian brand orange soda. The breeze had at last died down, replaced by a welcome stillness; the guests sipped and chatted in the equatorial sunlight so bright and strong you could almost touch it. A young novelist, whose first book had recently come out under the CLE imprint, complained to me that the publisher had not given him a second look at the proofs. No, he said, he couldn’t really explain what his novel was about, as I felt amiss for even asking—a novelist should never be able to flatly explain what a novel is about. A university prof who had joined us spotted a lovely actress from the national theater group, and he politely—yet rapidly—excused himself, to try to intercept her and chat her up. A noisy, heavyset man in sunglasses, a floor-length powder-blue boubou, and an embroidered skullcap came up to me and made sure I knew that he was the Director of the Regional Book Promotion Center. In an authoritative baritone, he informed me that he would have delivered the dedication speech himself and not delegated it to his assistant if it hadn’t been for another very important engagement, which meant his arriving late. A scruffy guy lugging a suitcase-sized “portable” radio/ tape player wandered over from where he must have been browsing in the record shop across the street and, with the graceful cheek of any determined crasher, tried to talk his way into a free drink. He had no luck, having to settle for a purchased beer at the open-air La Pirogue bar next door.
That evening and all day Sunday, the national radio (Cameroon has no TV yet) broadcast news of the opening. When the national daily newspaper came out on Monday, it carried a couple of stories with photos. In a small country like Cameroon even the launch of a bookshop rated headlines, and there was no denying this particular event represented a true cultural milestone for this wonderful emerging nation, in Buma Kor & Co.’s mission of bilingualism, if nothing else.
As for me, an appreciative visitor from very far away, I couldn’t remember when I had spent a more thoroughly delightful afternoon.
1980, FROM WORLDVIEW MAGAZINE
3. IRELAND, 1971: ABOUT CHRISTY BROWN
Christy Brown’s novel of the bittersweet life of a boy growing up in the Dublin backstreets in the early 1940s, Down All the Days, not only was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, but has been labeled by many critics as a surely lasting piece of literature. And everyone knows that lately the two seldom go hand in hand.
Christy is an accomplished painter as well, and this summer he’ll take a bundle of his oils, most of them depicting the striking natural beauty of the rugged West of Ireland, on a tour of European exhibitions.
Not resting on his laurels, Christy is already well into a second novel. It’s set in America, and hopefully it will become the middle installment in a projected trilogy, of which he has mapped out the entirety in his head. And don’t forget the volume of poems scheduled for publication this spring or the play he is hard at work on that was commissioned by the national Abbey Theatre of Dublin, which is certainly the highest honor that can be paid to any playwright in Ireland, a country of master playwrights.
Oh, yes, there’s probably something else that should be added here to this success story, though Christy doesn’t particularly like to have critics harping on it all the time—he has suffered since birth from cerebral palsy. It has left him with the full use of only one limb, his left foot, with which he both typewrites all his manuscripts with the toes—using an old electric Smith Corona, the bulky, well-worn beige contraption set on the floor—and holds his artist’s brushes. He has never had a day of formal education in his thirty-eight years, but get to know him a bit and you’ll learn that his reading background challenges that of the best literature professors anywhere.
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 try 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.