Paul Bura - Poet, Broadcaster, Writer

PAUL: 1977. Should I write to him, should I write to Christy Brown enclosing the slim volume of poems via his publishers? The collection of poems was called THE COMING OF THE GIANTS and was my first collection in Hardback by a London publisher. I don’t know why I sent the poems, except perhaps that I, in a foolish floundering gesture, wanted to somehow give back to Christy Brown something of what he had given to me. I had read his autobiography MY LEFT FOOT (Later made into a film) and his brilliant new novel: DOWN ALL THE DAYS. His first collection of poems simply stunned me: they rolled around my tongue like honey, not wishing me to swallow…just yet; they left me with a feeling of admiration for this Spastic, as his condition was known in those days, as indeed it was known in the special schools I attended, I being a polio victim. Later on the condition was known as Cerebral Palsy. Soon the word Spastic was deemed derogatory, or politically incorrect.

Christy Brown had an IQ of 145, which left me way down the scale, and typed everything with his left foot: this being the only limb that he could control, but with a dexterity that enabled him to paint as well as write; his speech, though, was a little more difficult for him.

As I’ve already said: I really didn’t know why I sent it, but I’mvery glad that I did. I wrote to him on the 1st June 1977.

DEAR CHRISTY BROWN:
I enclose a copy of my book of poems THE COMING OF THE GIANTS, which I hope very much that you enjoy. I really don’t know why I’m sending them, except to say how much I enjoyed reading MY LEFT FOOT and your novel DOWN ALL THE DAYS, which I thought was brilliant…and your first collection of poems; a true poet if ever there was one.
Other than that I don’t really know what to say…except perhaps:
Thank you.
LOVE AND LIGHT.
Paul Bura.

PAUL: As with communications of this kind I really didn’t expect to hear from him, but hell was I wrong? On the 4th July1977 I received this letter:

CHRISTY

Dear Paul Bura. Thank you for sending me your poems. I quite agree with you about how difficult it is to know what to say when writing to someone for the first time; one wants to avoid clichés like the plague, yet at the same time it’s so hard to say anything original and to resist the stereotype response. I can only say how genuinely delighted I was to get such an unexpected gift, and that apart altogether from the poetry itself, which I hasten to add I also enjoyed immensely, so full of light and whimsy and deep feeling, idiosyncratic and buoyant about life and people and the great and good ability to poke fun at yourself when you feel you need it. You know pain like an old friend and, like friendship, have learned to accept it and find meaning in it beyond the surface reality. Your encounter with The Drunk on the Train had a kind of melancholy hilarity about it that moved me deeply so that I said out loud: I know how you felt, mate! One can’t help being a poet – it’s like being afflicted with a terminal disease but I hope you’ll go on displaying such splendid symptoms for a very long time to come. It’s a mad thing to be doing with one’s life, and we were never in greater need of such madness. Wish I could return the gift in like measure, but you’ll have to wait until around Christmas, when my latest volume of poems comes out; I thought it would be sometime this summer or autumn, but publishers are a law unto themselves, so it is now Christmas. The collection is called: OF SNAILS AND SKYLARKS, and reflects in part my new rustic reincarnation since coming to live in this most beautiful part of the world with my equally lovely wife Mary with our little menagerie of animal friends in our eyrie overlooking the Atlantic – which sounds impossibly idealistic I know, but gorgeously true. At present I’m embroiled in another novel, my forth, which really has me in its fiendish grip, though hopefully that grip will be considerably loosened by the time the year is out. When all this is not going on life is, so I’m really never idle. Plenty of repose, yes, but no idleness. I’m beginning to sound moralistic, so I’d better shut up while you still think I’m a nice bloke. Thanks again, Paul, for the treasure of your poems, and best wishes and love from Mary and myself. Light to you too.
CHRISTY BROWN.

PAUL

DEAR CHRISTY:
I’m about to ask a favour when our friendship - if I may be so bold - has just dragged itself off the ground. My volume of poems THE COMING OF THE GIANTS, which you said so many kind things, is going into a 2nd Edition (1000 copies, which in poetry terms deems it a best seller, though not by your standards, of course). Thing is, may I quote from your letter on the dust cover? I realise this is an awful cheek, and I would understand if you were to say ‘no’. (“Christ,” you cry, “he’s got a bloody nerve!”)

How are you and Mary? More to the point: how’s the new novel faring. Well I hope? Or perhaps I shouldn’t ask?

DEAR PAUL:
Here, with profuse apologies for the delay in answering yours of 27th Jan 1978, is the promised copy of the new volume of doggerel…

PAUL: (The promised collection of poems titled: OF SNAILS AND SKYLARKS; not only that but he’d signed it!)

Let me say at once that you can most certainly use whatever quotation of mine that you wish for the forthcoming re-edition of your poems, if you really think it will do any good. I only hope it’s not too late as you didn’t say exactly when the 2nd edition is due to be released. The complimentary 6 copies from the publishers were eaten up before I knew where I was, and I ordered some more, which of course were ages in arriving, hence the reason for the long hiatus in between letters. I feel quite guilty about it, but feel sure you’ll understand and pardon since we’ve both trod that well-known thoroughfare that’s paved with good intentions…
Am on the last lap of the new novel as well as my last gasp and should be through sometime next month. After which will come another nose-grinding bout of extensive editing, rewriting, alterations etc., which will probably take up another month or so before my editor arrives to go into close conclave with me to hammer out the ultimate manuscript; we hope to have an autumn publication. I don’t want to think of writing another novel or indeed another anything for years and years –say at least 6 months- and am looking forward with utmost sensual anticipation to just sitting on my arse all day going happily blind staring at the sea, doing childish, simple crosswords, watching horse racing on TV and doing sundry other profound and contemplative things, my typewriter hooded and silent and all but forgotten on its bench. Famous last words. Ah well, I can dream, can’t I?
Hope life is suitably abusing you these days and that you’re bashing away at our madman’s trade as violently as ever. Mary sends her best regards, which is an echo from Parnassus one ignores at one’s peril, I assure you. Best of luck with everything and stay punch-drunk.
CHRISTY BROWN.

PAUL

DEAR CHRISTY:
How are you (not forgetting Mary, of course)? Well, at last I’ve received the 2nd edition of GIANTS, which I enclose. I plucked out, using my word scalpel, from the main body of your comments, what I consider to be the most useful. I could have extracted more but that would have been nearing the regions of “bigheadedness”. I thank you for letting me use them in the first place.
Have you had your poems recorded? If not I’d like very much to send you a cassette of my rendering of your work to see what you think. If you like what you hear, I propose that my partner: Bernard Shaw does a proper studio recording. Bernard is a friend of the Irish actress - oh what IS her name?- who worked recently in MACBETH, and does a bloody good ‘Red Magso’ from your novel DOWN ALL THE DAYS, apart from good readings of your poetry. Anyway, Bernard thinks that he can talk her into joining me on the project. And the Arts Council could be persuaded into giving us a grant. Fingers crossed.
My love to your good wife, Mary, who I trust is looking after your needs, carnal and otherwise.

I was delighted to get the 2nd edition of GIANTS and thank you very much for the copy. As to what I’ll actually do with It with the two copies…well, next time a poor humble dim-witted sycophantic millionaire comes to pay his homage I’ll present him with one and maybe after that you’ll be ‘made’ for life and can give up altogether the ugly plebeian habit of work…!
About your enquiry as to your recording some of my stuff in your best dulcet Dylanish tones- personally you can go ahead and record the whole damn lot as far as I’m concerned. Yes, there have been some tapes and recordings made before now, radio broadcasts and so on, as well as various stage readings and dramatisations and so forth, but I’m under no contractual commitments to anyone so you wont be hauled before the courts if you really think it’s worth your while making a record or tape or whatever. (The name of your partner, Bernard Shaw, sounds auspicious, if not suspicious; is it really his name, or an alias to impress?) The witch in MACBETH whose name you so ungallantly failed to remember is my dear friend Anna Manahan, actress of no small repute, who has indeed done Red Magso with great gusto, and I’m sure she’d be delighted to join you on cassette or record with the poetry and pros bits. Apart from anything else I’d love to hear what you actually sound like outside of your frenetic bits of letters.
The new novel continues to twist my guts most painfully but I do believe I’ve got the fucking thing under control now and turning it like a mad runaway horse in the direction I wanted it to go all along and hope to finish in Feb. or March ’79, after which I’ll no doubt expire and make my quietus with or without the aid of a bare bodkin. Mary’s still living with me, a miracle in itself, and not only that but is as beautiful as ever; maybe some people do thrive on adversity. She sends her love, which makes me instantly jealous, though surely one loony scribe is enough for any girl?
The best of luck with the Arts Council – you’ll need it, if our indigenious shower of blinkered morons is anything to go by.
Merry Christmas and all that and give my regards to the Muse. I hardly ever meet her now. Fickle Jade. Incandescently, CHRISTY.

PAUL.

DEAR CHRISTY:
Enclosed is the cassette of your joyous poems. I’m shitting bricks here sitting on the other side of the Irish Sea hoping above hope that you and Mary (is she a blond, by the way?) like what you hear. If you don’t then that’s okay. I tell a lie, it’s NOT okay. But your work reads itself and was a joy to work with.
LOVE N’ LIGHT
PAUL.

DEAR PAUL: 6th February 1979.
Sorry for the long delay in communicating my joyous transports upon listening to you immortalising on tape –GREEN, NOT RED- my few paltry rhymes, which silence was due entirely to the fact that I’ve more or less imposed upon myself a sort of Trappist-Monk seclusion from the rude outer world in order to grapple with the sterner stuff of this fucking novel and get it over and done with by March/April before it wrests the last vestiges of precarious sanity from me. I was really delighted with your vocalisations and we both spent a highly enjoyable if not entirely argument-free hour listening to them over the necessary few jars –necessary, that is, to my flagging powers of sensibility and perception, not to in any way augment the magnificence of your delivery and interpretation. As to my reference to argument –merely a personal quirk, as we find it sharpens the pleasure of the mood and moment, and anyway we recoil in horror from all the usual forms of blanc-mange-?- mutual agreement (that phrase above sounds like a canine disease). Apart altogether from the scintillating incandescence of the subject-matter –modesty was always one of my more endearing attributes, as you may have noted- your voice played upon the verses like a well-tuned instrument, teasing out meanings and nuances that of course had escaped me, who’s merely the author after all and therefore in a vastly subordinate position to everyone else. In other words: I LOVED IT, and so did Mary- who, by the way, in answer to your question in your last letter, is not only blonde, which would be akin to saying that Helen of Troy was merely a female Trojan, but the most beautiful and quintessential blonde living in the world at this time, so put that in your metaphorical pipe and smoke it.
How did the second proposed recording session go – or didn’t? How was my friend Anna Manahan? It’s been too long since we last saw or heard of her, but she always seem to have a special affinity for my stuff, and makes a fair stab at Red Magso in “Down All The Days”. I remember she did a sparkling Molly Bloom sometime ago on the Dublin stage and later in New York. Whoops, that’s it! Do send a word winging across the duck pond and tell us how blows the wind.
Yours Spluttering Feebly. CHRISTY.
PS. Irish television are planning a documentary about my life for screening later in the year and they might want to use your voice speaking a few verses – I don’t know yet, but will keep you posted!

DEAR CHRISTY:
T’was a rainy day in old London Town when we first entered the recording studio. Anna was late arriving as she’d been up all night drinking Irish-Whiskey (what else?) with Cyril Cussack but still managed a faultless performance of RED MAGSO (the consummate professional). In-between ‘takes’ of my renderings, she dozed until it was her turn to read your stuff. The resultant recording is now offered up for your approval (and Mary’s). I’m stuffing my fingers in my ears afraid, yet waiting for you both to roar across the Irish Sea: Bloody crap! I think I’ll creep away and smoke a joint or two; it’ll dull the pain of my anguish.

(I was doing nothing in particular in my cottage in Broomfield, Herne Bay, in Kent when the phone rang. I answered it.
          “Aw umm da were dat ooo, all”
          “I’m sorry, can you repeat that, I didn’t quite get it.”
          “Aw umm do were dat ooo, all, id Kisty”
          The penny dropped.
          “Christy? Is that you? How ARE you, mate?”
          This was followed by even more incoherent mumbling.
          “I-I’m so sorry, Christy, but [I was embarrassed now because I didn’t understand what the hell he was saying] I’m having trouble…Just then the phone was taken out of his (hand/foot) and a woman came on the line. “Paul,” she said, “It’s Mary, his wife, so sorry but Christy is pissed out of his mind on ‘scrumpy’ and even I don’t understand him!”
          We engaged in a bit of chit-chat and all the time Christy was mumbling in the background. “Look, Paul, I’ve got to go, its Christy…”
“I understand,” I said, “I really do.” And with a cheery goodbye she hung up.
          Incoherent speech - until you get used to it - is very much an aspect of cerebral palsy sufferers. According to Anna Manahan the actress, after a while Christy’s speech was quite understandable.)

DEAR CHRISTY: 23rd August 1979
Lazarus calling, Lazarus calling! Are you still receiving me out there in darkest Kent? Despite my brilliant imitation of having departed this life and shaken off this more than mortal coil, I’m still comparatively alive and extant and overwhelmed by your incredible patience and tolerance in keeping faith with me in my tomb-like silence of recent months. It was in part due to the Irish malaise of “industrial action” –which means of course inaction—and to the unremitting rigours of novel writing- which, the Gods be praised, has at last been consummated, at least as far as the solid stuff goes. Yes, I finished that damned albatross off on Tuesday evening last after three and a half fucking years of hard labour and I’m still reeling from the shock of having done so. It hasn’t sunk in yet. Now comes the only slightly less arduous task of editing and rewriting here and there, with which my blessed and indispensable Mab will help me, my best critic at the end of the day. It should finally burst upon the world next Spring with I hope a bang rather than a whimper, but for now I’m taking a week’s sabbatical here at home and catching up with an Everest of correspondence.
A word about the tape: it duly arrived, we duly listened to it and were duly impressed, nay delighted with the overall results. You were superb, making Dylan Thomas growl in his grave with envy; our dear Anna M. did her valiant best as Cathleen ni Houlihan complete with Yeatsian whine –will she ever stop being Bessie Burgess or Molly fucking Bloom and just be herself, which is a very good self at its best? Never mind, maybe her very ‘Irishness’ will go down big if ever we get going commercially, especially if we get a foothold in the States. I particularly didn’t much care for her interpretation of LINES OF LEAVING; I’d much prefer yourself reading that one. Don’t for Christ’s sake say a word of this to herself as I love her dearly and wouldn’t want to hurt her for the world. So all in all a definite thumbs (or toes) up for a job well done and here’s hoping the gallant little ship can be launched as it so richly deserves to be. May God and Mammon smile on our efforts.
No time for more just now –thank God says you- so take care, take heart and be easy with the hemlock. It can have harmful effects I’m told. CHRISTY.

PAUL:

DEAR CHRISTY:
Phew!! Thank God for that. You seemed to like the album okay. Well Anna and I did our best. Oh and don’t worry, I’ll not breathe a word to Anna. I’m sending a copy to the Arts Council. Fingers crossed. I seem to be forever asking you favours. My latest slim volume of verse titled: THE SPACE BETWEEN THE SYLLABLES is due out in time for Christmas (so the publishers say). I’m hoping on bended knee (not that I can kneel) that you might put your critics hat on and give me a quote or three. A copy of the proofs of said volume enclosed. Hope to God you like it, if not I’ll make do with the persons I have…all fellow poets.
So glad that you’re wrestling successfully with the latest book and have got it in a headlock, but then, as I know you a little better, I wouldn’t have expected anything else!
Tell me: is MAB (as in MAB COTTAGE, where you live in County Kerry) the name for MARY?
Give her my love, as indeed I give it to you.
LOVE N’ LIGHT.
PAUL.

CHRISTY

Congrats! That’s terrific about the poems coming out for Santa Claus. We read the proofs –forgive the papal ‘we’ but since the Man himself is here among us at the moment it’s infectious- and though they were great. No bullshit. A tremendous advance on THE COMING OF THE GIANTS if that doesn’t sound too patronising, and let’s hope that’s what they’ll give you: a tremendous advance on the book publication, though that’s like falling off Blackpool pier in the middle of the Sahara!
Sorry about the delay in answering back –my poor Ma always said I was a proper little bugger at answering back- but we’ve been away on some business in Dublin and only got home at the weekend.
Did I tell you Abbey are putting on the stage play of DOWN ALL THE DAYS in November? Can’t remember if I did or not, but anyway they are. Wish you could be there for the first night and the resultant orgy –dark doing in the Green Room and all that. I see our friend Anna Manahan is coming over about then to act in something or other, so maybe she’ll come along and shiver with me in the wings. Yes, you dumb bastard, MAB is Mary, my pet name for her, but she’d murder me or divorce me or both if I explained how it came about. Anyway there was Queen Mab, remember, of beauteous legend, deliverer of dreams, and that’s the version we like to hand out.
Thanks for sending us the poems, mate –and if there’s any left by the time you’ve satisfied your ravenous horde of relatives and friends and other assorted fans we’d greatly appreciate a signed copy if you still have strength enough to lift the pen. And I hope the enclosed bit of comment about your latest masterpiece THE SPACE BETWEEN THE SYLLABLES will suit the job. Condense at will and select what you think best of course – if any.
Misbehave yourself,
Light n’ Bitter, Christy.

PAUL: this was the last letter that I received from him. He died soon after. A few years later I received a phone call, it was from Mary, Christy’s ‘QUEEN MAB,’ the Bringer of Dreams, his beloved wife, who he had always spoken of with such love and affection. She still missed her Christy. She had had the occasional fling but nothing ever came of it, she said that she was always measuring them up against her Christy – a hard act to follow. Nobody ever came remotely near. She had gone back to nursing, she said. I said, you can phone or write to me anytime. But that was the last I heard from her.

Richard Harris was reciting some of his poetry on the Parkinson Show and he read out a poem simply called CHRISTY BROWN. I leave you in Richard’s very capable verse…and voice.

(Grams: of the late Richard Harris reciting the poem. Sig’ tune of lone Celtic flute played over poem)

Christy Brown
Came to town (Richard Harris sings this stanza to the tune
Riding on a wheelchair of “Bobby Shafto”)

Back strapped
To wheel
And chair
Free wheeling down all his days
Into the
Byways in our heads
Visions
Bursting from his pen
Ink in blood
Left foot in rapture
Riding
Through fleet street pulp
Past
Paper stand and paste
Ploughing stairs to heaven
Riding on
On
On his chariot wheels
Conquering heroes in space
In the time allotted for his spin

Reared in masses
His childhood playpen on concrete slabs turned
Into flowing fountains
In his fountain pen toes
Ceasing to suffer
In the kennel of his bark
Spends
Dark years with his ears
Tied to his mother’s tongue

“Where are you, Mother?”
“Here
here
I’m here, Christy
Growing flowers in your yard
Sending fruit to the market place
In your soul
Patiently bending my breasts
To feed the hunger in your mind

Dear bended lady
Drawing in midnight whispers
The elements of verse
Vocalizing grammar
Building his armoury for battle
Filling his long sleepless limping nights
With the music of her challenge
And
Built a birth
As bright as Christmas

In his schoolroom
Slum
That buried some
Crippled most
The toast from her womb
Grew legs in her words
And walked
Long distance to the corners of the globe
Striding beyond Gethsemane
Passing the avenue of sorrows
Out of Golgotha
Into resurrection

Streets in palms
Carpeting
His Sunday visit
Rode bareback
The donkey of the apocalypse
Over bridges
Where crippled waters
Stood still
In the lame shores of our crying
Rode
Heaven high
Over tears and pity
Through the attending city
Where skeletons
His high in the cupboards of our complacency
Rode on
On
On the laughter in his sighs
Everlasting in song
Storming our ears in wonder
Making his face
Shine upon us
And
Throwing from the seaweeds
Of his wisdom
Iodine to heal the wounds of a waiting world

SUNDAY VISIT
(For his father)
We finally found him
curled up in the chair like a many-wrinkled shell
staring blindly out at nothing
among a gathering of imbecilic fossils
his one good eye fastening fiercely onto life
the hair still sturdy though silver under the old cloth cap.

We finally found him
through all that terrible labyrinth of grey concrete cells
quietly rounding out his days
alone in a morass of moronic camaraderie
his doomed cellmates snoozing and snoring all around
and he with his one good eye defying the shadows.

The tears came then
not soft, but real
the tears of a real man broken by life
groping wildly with gnarled fingers at the straws of life
in that awful room of no life
and the television set blaring forth its banalities
drowning whatever words of comfort our futile tongues could offer.

I had no words for him
no words to span the heartbreak of years
when Samson-like he had stood between us and chaos
bringing to us the small rare trinkets of his love.
I had for him only whiskey
the old bitter gift
the poor tribute of one poorer in spirit
than that jaded near-blind half deaf soul reclining so tamely
in a wicker chair
in a ward of fearful paralysing resignation
a ward full of already dead people
sleeping as the television blared.

Yet the hand that gripped mine spelled out love
and the raw lovely courage of that old landscaped face
put my feeble pity to shame.

P A U L B U R A

The Letters of Christy Brown, Novelist and Poet. Author of "My Left Foot"

CHRISTY

PAUL

PAUL

CHRISTY