MY EXPERIENCES AT the Clinic and the effects it had upon me made my mind full of ideas. It almost seemed as though a curtain had been lifted from before my eyes, as though I had at last found the key to something that had puzzled and tormented me for a long, long time.
I wanted desperately to say something, not merely to my family, not merely to my friends, but rather to everyone, to the world as a whole. There was something in me, some inner urge to speak, and I wanted to get it out of me, to communicate it to others and make them understand it. I felt I had found something, something I had been looking for ever since I began to think and feel about myself. It had taken years to find, but now I was positive that I had discovered it at last, and suddenly I wanted to fling it to the four winds and let it go round the world, bearing its message into everyone’s heart.
It wasn’t just something about myself, but about all who had a life similar to my own, a life bounded and shut in on all sides by the high walls of a narrow, suppressed life. I felt that I had at last found a way of scaling those walls and breaking loose from the shadow of them, a way of taking my place in the sun and of playing my part in the world along with the able-bodied.
But—how could I express what I wanted to say, what I wanted everyone to know? My hands were of no use to me at all; they were still twisted and unruly, still powerless to grasp or hold anything. Nor could my lips utter the thoughts which were whirling round in my mind like swarms of impatient bees, because I still wasn’t able to speak any sort of intelligible language outside the family circle, so that in general I was still tongue-tied, still doomed to a brooding silence.
What about my faithful old friend, my left foot? The foot that had served me so well and which had been my only weapon against despair and defeat through all those years? Could I not use that now?
No! That was impossible. I couldn’t go back on my promise to Mrs. Collis. I’d think myself a traitor if I did. I had made a resolution and I was determined to keep to it.
Yet it wasn’t just any irritating sense of loyalty that kept me from using my left foot. That in itself, I’m afraid would not have been strong enough to help me resist the temptation. It was because I knew that if I started to use my foot again I would be standing in the way of my own recovery and making my chances of leading an active, if not a normal, life very much slimmer indeed. I had tied up my left foot and put it away, and I wasn’t going to recall it to service now. It would be a sign of surrender anyway, and I wasn’t prepared to wave the white flag yet.
It seemed I had reached a dead-end; everywhere I turned the way was blocked. I felt the way anyone would feel with their hands and feet tied and a gag in their mouth.
Then suddenly I had an idea, an inspiration. I was sitting in the kitchen one afternoon thinking how I could find a way of putting down all I wanted to say on to paper when I noticed one of my brothers sitting over a copy book at the table with a pen in his hand, writing something into it. This was Eamonn, just twelve years of age at the time, and he was doing his homework—an English composition, which I could see, by the scowl on his face, he wasn’t enjoying very much. The idea of him sitting there writing and yet not knowing what to write about, and me sitting there by the window, my brain teeming with ideas and yet not able to hold a pen in my hand, almost made me want to jump up from the chair and run amok!
Instead I leaned forward and asked him what he was doing.
“Trying to write a composition for school,” answered Eamonn with a sigh. “I’ll get biffed if I don’t do it right.”
I saw my chance. I told him I’d help him—on condition that he’d do something for me in return.
“Sure I will,” he said confidently. “What do you want me to do?”
“Write for me,” I told him briefly.
His face fell. “But I can’t even do my own writing!” he protested, “I wouldn’t know what to say!”
“Fool,” I replied. “You’ll just hold the pen and I’ll tell you what to put down.”
My brother was very doubtful about this idea; it sounded too complicated to him and he felt there was something ‘fishy’ at the back of it. But at the same time he wanted to get that composition right, so in the end he agreed to my condition and I did his homework for him.
When we were done we went out to my study at the back of the house, got a nine-penny jotter out of the drawer, sat down at the table and looked at each other.
“What d’ye want me to write down for you?” asked my brother innocently, the pen poised in his hand.
I looked out the window at the branches of the trees waving against the bright spring sky, thought a bit, then turned back to look at my young brother’s inquiring face.
“My life-story,” I told him.
Poor Eamonn let his pen clatter down on the table.
“Your … what?” he asked.
I told him again, and this time he was quite silent.
In the end I got him to agree to write for me for ‘an indefinite period’. We started that very afternoon, without any sort of preparation whatever.
I was eighteen when I began that first attempt to write my autobiography. It was a ponderous piece of work, a veritable forest of seven- and eight-syllabled words. My only reading up to this had been Dickens, and in my inexperience I imagined it my duty to try and imitate his style of writing—with the result that the English I used was fifty years out of date! I used words and phrases that would have tied up anybody’s tongue in a matter of seconds. So long were the words that I had to spell them letter by letter, before my brother could write them down on to the page. I am still wondering why neither of us had a nervous breakdown during the writing of that tremendous first attempt. It must have amounted to tens of thousands of words before I become discouraged. It dragged on and on sluggishly like a stream of molten lead. My poor brother often got writer’s cramp. He had written almost four hundred pages of manuscript before I saw that if I went on like this the book would go on for ever.
Its title typified the whole. I called it ‘The Reminiscences of a Mental Defective’! I meant that to be a nice piece of irony, a sort of punch on the nose for the doctors who had doubted my sanity at the age of five.
The language, if impossible, was gorgeous. For instance, instead of calling myself a cripple and leaving it at that, I spoke of myself as being an ‘unfortunate item of mortality’, and again as a ‘heavenly miscarriage’. I was also very fond of changing a straightforward word into an obscure one by putting ‘ism’ at the end of it: instead of saying ‘defeat’ I said ‘defeatism’, and likewise I was also adept at using completely abstract words to express my essentially simple ideas, words like ‘inconceivability’ when I wanted to describe a thing that couldn’t happen, ‘incongruous’ for something that didn’t fit, and I used the word ‘materialistic’ very often when what I really had in mind was something thoughtless and gay, so that, in my twisted conception of things at that time, I could have said my brother Peter was a materialist because he preferred going to dances and parties than reading Dickens!
The other day I pulled out part of this famous manuscript.
In the first chapter I gave a description of my home-life: “… I was brought up amid an environment of working-class doctrination and morality. As the world knows, the pursuit of literary … knowledge is not widely practised by this class of the human race. … Intellectualism is not a characteristic of this breed. …”
Anyone’s guess is as good as mine as to the meaning of that last sentence!
On page thirty-two I was still on the subject of the working class, “While admitting that class and social differentiation is necessary for the harmonious development of mankind, I also consider that such segregation should be confined within the realms of moderation, thus preventing unnecessary prejudice and superfluous social friction.…”
And that was well before I even had an idea of what the word ‘social’ meant!
All this, of course, didn’t mean that I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but the trouble was that I didn’t know how to say it. I hadn’t as yet found a way of expressing my thoughts clearly and putting them into intelligible form. Indeed then, I seemed to be quite determined never to make a simple statement if I could turn it into a complex one. I seldom expressed one individual thought in a single sentence. I required three or four sentences before being satisfied that I’d really expressed my meaning, and sometimes I would use up a whole paragraph to express a single thought. I could never resist digressing—or, as my father would say, ‘beating about the bush’.
The passage that I now quote shows clearly the effect Dickens had on me, because it is so typically Dickensian that it might almost have come from between the covers of any one of his books.
“… It is when we are released from the turbulence and feverish activity of day that we fall, without conscious effort or mental volition, into a reverie mingled with regrets and mellow joys.… All the happy and tearful scenes of the forgotten past crowd before our inner eye. … We re-live again the trials and pleasures we have been through … we recall all our little vanities and pretences. … We exclaim to ourselves: ‘This wasn’t me! I was never as reckless as that, surely!’ … Yet the past never lies; it is irrevocable … would that it were not so! What an abundance of saints and angels there would be then! …”
I was eighteen when I perpetrated that!
The pages of manuscript just kept piling up, stack upon stack. I went on dictating and my brother went on taking it down till we both reached the stage when I spoke and he wrote mechanically, without exactly knowing what we were doing. We were just going round in circles. I still had a vague idea that I was supposed to be writing my life-story, but I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I kept talking and Eamonn kept writing and the copy books kept filling up day by day. It was just a forest of words, with no clear path through it.
I knew there was something wrong somewhere, for before I’d begin dictating, my thoughts would be clear enough, but the moment I began trying to dictate them they’d all go haywire, they’d all become twisted and go scattering around in my mind like fallen leaves blown to and fro by the wind. I found it hard to catch and hold on to them. I became mad at my own stupidity.
I called myself a fool; I called my poor brother a fool. In fact, I called everyone in the house a fool—because I couldn’t write as well as I wanted to! The longer the ‘book’ dragged on the more irritable I became. If anything got in my way I’d just lift my foot and kick it violently. I’d get so annoyed that sometimes I wanted to burn the whole thing and put it out of my sight, but I hadn’t the heart to do away with it. I had by this time spent nearly two years at it and I couldn’t bear to admit, even to myself, that all that work had been in vain, that I had failed. I was too stubborn to give in and throw it all into the fire. I knew, I felt that I could write a good book, if only—if only. …
That was it! If only I had someone to advise me, to show me how to write clearly and constructively with no gaps between or holes in the middle! Someone who would know what he was talking about, who would put me on to the right path. I needed a guiding hand; I needed someone not only with brains but with a heart as well.
But where could I find this somebody, this fairy godfather? Not in Kimmage, anyway! This was a house of bricklayers only. My brothers knew nothing about writing, and I knew nothing about laying bricks, so that was that.
I thought and thought, but I could think of no one. It looked as though I was entirely on my own. It seemed as if I’d have to carry on by myself as best I could, torturously trying to express myself and only getting more and more lost as I went on.
Then one day, as I was sitting moodily by the window in a bad temper, too disgusted with myself even to dictate any more, a name suddenly flashed across my mind, so suddenly that I almost fell off the chair: “Collis!” I heard myself saying out loud, “Collis!” Without waiting to think, I yelled for Eamonn, made him get a postcard from the drawer and sent it to Dr. Collis immediately. I was very abrupt—I just wrote this little message:
‘Dear Dr. Collis. I’m trying to write a book. If you don’t mind, please come and help me. Christy Brown.’
It was only after the card had been posted that I began to think about what I had done. I hadn’t seen the doctor for over a year, not since I had come back from London. I didn’t know much about him, except that he was the founder of the Clinic and chief of the Cerebral Palsy Association of Ireland. I had liked him from the moment I saw him. I hadn’t felt any embarrassment or awkwardness in his presence the first time I met him, and that was unusual, because even with people I knew quite well I always felt out of place. Sometimes I felt the same way even with my family.
But, after all, he was only a doctor, wasn’t he? He might be the nicest man in the world, but what good was that if he couldn’t help me to write? Apart from being a nice man, who was he?
It was only later that I found out that he was not just Dr. Collis—but Robert Collis, the author, too, the man who had written the famous play, Marrowbone Lane, The Silver Fleece, his own autobiography, along with other plays and books.
The next day I was in my little study at the rear of the house, sitting by the fire reading old Dickens, when the door opened suddenly and Dr. Collis marched in, carrying a large bundle of books under one arm and a brief case in the other. He dumped the books on the bed, put the case on the floor and turned round.
“Hello,” he said, coming over and sitting down on the chair at the opposite side of the table. “I got your S.O.S. this morning. So you’re writing a book. Well, let’s see it.”
I had the manuscript stored away in an old leather case under the bed. He got down on his knees, pulled it out, took out the manuscript, brought it over to the table, put on his glasses and began reading.
As he read the first page I saw him raise his eyebrows. He read the second and the third, and each time his eyebrows went higher. Then he threw down the copy on the table and looked up at me.
“What the hell!” he said and stopped.
He looked at me keenly to see if I could take criticism and understand. I forced myself to keep a poker face. He smiled.
“Yes, it’s awful—” he said, “the language you use may have been popular in the reign of Queen Victoria, but…”
My heart sank within me as I heard this. It looked hopeless. It seemed that I would never do what I now wanted to do more than anything else—write my life-story. It seemed I was back to where I always had been, wanting to do things and not knowing how. My dreams were too big to come true. How could I ever write a book—I, who had been shut up all my life behind the four walls of my home and who had never as much as seen the inside of a schoolroom? I was mad even to think of such an idea.
This passed through my mind as Robert Collis sat before me turning over the pages of that awful manuscript. Sometimes he grunted to himself. I sat with my head bowed.
Suddenly he stopped and sat upright in the chair. I looked up in surprise. His face was smiling with approval.
“Good!” he exclaimed excitedly slapping the table with his hand. “You have written one sentence here that stands out like a rose among a lot of weeds, one shining little gem thrown in amongst stones. It shows me that you could write if you knew how. That’s what I wanted to find out.”
Then he got up and had a look at the few books I had on the shelves. He shook his head.
“To write good modern English one has to read modern English, Christy. Dickens is all very well, but. … Literary taste, like all other tastes, changes.”
Then he showed me the books he had brought me, and spread them all out on the table. There was a book of L. A. G. Strong’s short stories, two books by Seàn O’Faolain, some books of his literary brothers, John Stewart and Maurice Collis and six volumes of a collection of famous literature from all over the world.
“These will show you how good English should be written,” he said.
He told me that if I wanted to be a writer I must learn to write. That writing was as difficult an art as painting, and to master it one had to practise it and cultivate a style of one’s own bit by bit. He told me that, no matter how difficult I found it, I had one good thing in my favour—I wanted to write, I had the inclination, and that was as important as having a style, which I could develop as I went on. To do a thing really well, one had to like doing it. A good style was pretty useless if there was nothing behind it. Writing like that was like a taste without the food.
He then sat down and took up the manuscript, looking at it again thoughtfully. He was silent for some time. I could hear the fire crackling, the clock ticking loudly on the mantelshelf and the faint sound of voices coming from the kitchen across the yard. At last he spoke.
“Christy,” he said, leaning forward with his elbows resting on the table, “all this—” pointing to the bundle of copies, “hasn’t been in vain. It may be unreadable, but it hasn’t been a waste. If it has done nothing else, it has given you lots of practice at thinking out ideas. If you still want to write your story—?” He paused and looked at me questioningly. I nodded my head vigorously. I wanted to write that story above everything else.
“Right, then,” he went on, “If so, you must begin the whole thing again!” Now he began to talk, to teach me. I realised later that he was a teacher and had many students. “There are two first principles attached to writing any sort of story,” he said, “first, you must have a story to tell, and, secondly, you must tell it in such a way that the person reading it can live in it himself. Now let me give you some concrete points: Whenever you can, use a short word rather than a long one. You have painted pictures with a brush, try and do the same thing with a pen. Practise it. Just describe the room here: your queer chair, the picture on the smudged wall there, the broken mirror, the books—that coloured photograph.…”
I listened as I had never listened before that evening and many following while he taught me how to write. I never forgot one thing he said.
At last he came over to me and shook hands. I knew then that I was about to start on the toughest job I had ever taken on, but with this man behind me I knew that I would see it done one day.… I knew it in his handshake.