Write and left

Published On October 6th, 1972

THE TIMES WE LIVED IN:IT WAS A joyous day: the wedding, at Kildare Street registry office in Dublin, of the writer Christy Brown. "The groom," reads the caption, "who overcame severe physical handicap by learning to write and paint with his left foot, signed the register in the same manner." The 40-year-old Brown, author of My Left Footand Down All the Dayswas a celebrity. Crowds of well-wishers and friends greeted his arrival at the registry office with his 27-year-old bride, Mary Carr; among the guests at the wedding reception were the film producer Kevin McClory; actors Richard Harris, Niall Toibin and Anna Manahan, and Charles Haughey, TD.

The caption concludes with the information that “the honeymoon will be spent at a villa in the Bahamas loaned by Mr McClory, and the couple will live in the groom’s recently-built house in Rathcoole, Co Dublin”.

Nowadays most people know Christy Brown through the 1989 film of My Left Foot which stars Daniel Day-Lewis. It portrays Brown’s early life as the 10th of 22 children born to a Dublin bricklayer, and his struggle to express himself as a poet, novelist and painter despite severe physical disability due to cerebral palsy. The film ends with Brown sharing a bottle of champagne with his nurse, Mary Carr – and a final caption tells the audience that they married in 1972, leaving the viewer with a distinct impression of “happy ever after”.

Real life was, as ever, to prove somewhat more complex. An authorised biography published in 2007 claimed that the marriage alienated Brown from his family and that Carr, who was an alcoholic, neglected the writer during their nine years of married life. “I felt sad when I found these things out, because he was a genius,” the book’s author, Georgina Hambleton, said. “He is comparable to Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan and if he had been in a positive relationship with someone who fostered that intellect, he would have produced even better books.”

Christy Brown died in 1981, and Mary Carr in 2006.

Arminta Wallace

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Photograph By Pat Langan