An Eloquent Way With Words : Young Irish Author Christopher Nolan Breaks Out of His Silent World With Style

He is a large young man with a strong, healthy-looking face, this “chair-clad boy” as he has called himself. And though he cannot shake hands without help, and cannot say hello, he appropriates a visitor’s eyes with a commanding, beckoning stare in the sitting room of the suburban home he shares with his parents and older sister.

Since January, Christopher Nolan, 22, brain damaged at birth and unable to speak or use his limbs, has become a celebrated author. He is used to receiving the press and long suffering toward it. That he has actually managed to write a book at all--given the huge practical difficulties he has in writing--would in itself be newsworthy. But that is not the reason that television crews have been traipsing through his house, photographers have made him pose for color portraits in magazines and the family has had to change its telephone number to stop reporters calling at all hours.

It is the quality of the book that Nolan has written that is the reason for all the fuss. On Jan. 19, his thinly fictionalized version of his own life, “Under the Eye of the Clock,” was given the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Britain’s biggest literary prize. It also became a best seller in Britain and will be published in the United States this month by St. Martin’s Press.

Proclaimed Major Author

The force and originality with which Nolan speaks in his book have some critics proclaiming him a major author in the great Irish tradition of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Nolan himself is wary of comparisons and not very interested in questions about influences on his work. He approaches writing as though it were his lifeline, and, as a critic has pointed out, that is what it is: his only escape, except in dreams, from his condition. At the moment, interviews are preventing him from getting on with his work.

But he makes every effort to make a visitor feel relaxed in his comfortable living room. “He worries for the stranger. He wants to put you at your ease,” his mother says. Nolan suffers from cerebral palsy and spasms go through his body, causing him to move in unexpected ways. But aside from his disability, he is in excellent health: his hearing is acute; his eyesight is excellent.

His wheelchair is placed near the door, facing the hearth. Congratulatory greeting cards, maybe a hundred of them, are arranged on the mantle and every available surface.

This morning his conversation will be in his own language of eye signals and nods. He tries to speak words, but can only make sounds. His mother, Bernadette Nolan, 52, an energetic dark-haired woman sitting near him on a green sofa, will help interpret. His father, a psychiatric nurse, is at work.

The word yes, which is perhaps the first eye signal the stranger learns to understand, is a swift darting movement of his eyes toward the ceiling. But this language that he has invented is capable of considerable nuance, complexity and humor. The greatest moment of Christopher Nolan’s life--aside from the award ceremonies he has subsequently attended--occurred on Aug. 20, 1977. That day a therapist discovered that through the use of a muscle-relaxing drug he could gain sufficient control of his neck to type by nodding his head with a pointer called a “unicorn stick” attached to his forehead. But his head still had to be supported by human hands, a function that his mother now fills.

Typing is still a tremendous effort. A word can take 10 minutes; a page 12 hours. If Nolan is excited or agitated about writing an important passage, this increases the spasms and makes typing doubly difficult.

Yet the sweat--he literally perspires--and frustration are unquestionably worthwhile. Before the typing breakthrough, the prison of silence he lived in was much worse than his physical limitations. He describes in his book, speaking of himself in the third person, how it felt to have gained the freedom to express himself: “His own mother cradled his head but he mentally gadded here and there in fields of swishing grass and pursed wildness. His mind was darting under beech copper-mulled, along streams calling out his name, he hised (kicked out) and frolicked but his mother called it spasms.”

Nolan turns and nods toward the door, looking at the keyhole. He repeats the action. “He is saying that he had felt locked in before he learned to type,” his mother says. “Isn’t that right, Christy?” His eyes dart up to say yes.

Nolan is not the first severely disabled author to speak to the world in eloquent terms. Seventeen years ago, another similarly disabled Irishman published a novel that described his life in the Dublin slums. Christy Brown’s “Down All the Days” was widely praised for its literary qualities and made its author a celebrity. Brown died six years ago, coincidentally on Nolan’s 16th birthday. They never met.

By the time he was a teen-ager, Nolan was already known as a respected poet. He had won a prize in a competition for disabled authors and the announcement, made in a charity magazine, was noticed by a British journalist, Marjorie Wallace, who traveled to Dublin to meet Nolan and his family and returned with sheaves of his poetry. She wrote an article that attracted the attention of computer experts who wanted to help facilitate his typing through the use of computers.

The poems were eventually published in a volume called “Dam Burst of Dreams” (Ohio University Press), a title that Nolan felt described what happened when he became able to type.

Besides his personal need to communicate, Nolan believes he has a mission in writing. He stares up at the chandelier and then looks down at his wheelchair, which means, in his language, that he wants to shed light on the disabled. He is vehemently anti-abortion, and wants to do whatever he can to improve conditions for disabled people who are less fortunate than himself.

“Under the Eye of the Clock” has undeniably done that. It tells the story of Nolan’s education from the age of 12 to 17 at a Dublin school, and is a passionate plea for allowing the severely disabled to be educated at schools for the able-bodied.

In the book, there is a marked lack of coyness toward his condition. Nolan does not refer to the character that represents him, Joseph Meehan, as disabled. He calls him “crippled.” Bernadette Nolan explains that her son feels that is the correct word to describe his condition. “He feels there really is no other word,” she says.

Nolan’s book does not shirk the weights of despair and discouragement that he has suffered, most particularly over his reception by those who are afraid of his predicament. Perhaps the book’s most marked quality is its sense of an individual voice, a voice that shows a character who is self-mocking, wild to participate in life, aware of his whimsical intelligence and largely unembarrassed about the exigencies of his condition that force him into unavoidable child-like dependency on his family for his physical needs.

“Why is society so afraid of the crippled child?” he has written. Nolan suffered agonies of worry before going to school that the other children would not believe he had normal intelligence; that they would assume he was not interested in the sort of mischief all schoolboys get up to. But it is one of the triumphs of the book that Nolan risked their misunderstanding and found that, for the most part, they accepted him. He made many friends at school.

Family Support Vital

Nolan freely acknowledges the part his family has played in helping to support his talent. “My folk are grand when it comes to helping a fellow in a fix,” he has written. He has emphasized how important it was that his family treated him, in every way possible, as a normal child. Family outings in the Irish countryside--Nolan is appreciative of scenery--are rapturously described in “Under the Eye of the Clock,” but the book holds back from sentiment. Indeed Nolan has resisted offers by producers who want to turn the book into a film.

Bernadette Nolan wheels her son into his study, a narrow room facing the street. The room is unheated because Nolan hasn’t used it for quite a while. He has been too busy with publicity.

He nods toward the bookcase, indicating he wants his mother to take down a book. The volume she retrieves is a book of poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Taking it back into the heated sitting room, Mrs. Nolan asks her son what poem he wants. “Oh your favorite poem, is it?” And Nolan indicates yes. She turns to “Pied Beauty,” a famous short poem by Hopkins, and begins to read it. This brings up her son’s essay on Hopkins, which he wrote during his year at Trinity College in Dublin. (He decided continuing at university, which would have taken him six years, was too much of a burden on his family, and unnecessary to his plans to be a writer.) She goes to retrieve it from his papers.

The first two sentences of the essay are startling in their denseness and original approach: utterly Nolanesque. Acknowledging this reaction, he manages one brilliantly lucid, slightly sly smile. It is the most dazzling moment of the interview.

Nolan has had to endure the inevitable cynicism of those who believe it is a bit too good to be true that someone in his condition could be a gifted writer. In “Under the Eye of the Clock,” he has dealt with these attacks straight on: one such incident forms the dramatic climax of the book.

An American reporter--the Nolans will not give his name--visited the family several years ago and accepted their hospitality. He published a story that stated that Christopher Nolan had a ghost writer. “It was much harder on him than we could ever have imagined,” Bernadette Nolan says. “He was so young when it happened. But he has got over it now.” Christopher indicates by glancing upward that he has.

Once press attention tapers off, Nolan hopes to take a holiday. He would like to go to Malta. He then will tackle his next major work: a novel that will be solely a work of his imagination and nothing to do with his own life. He thinks it will be set in ancient Dublin. “He’s going into old Dublin with his friends or his dad, trying to soak up atmosphere,” his mother says.

“When he’s writing, you have no idea how quiet everything has to be,” Bernadette Nolan says. “I look forward to Christy’s next book, but I dread the months and months of quietness and late nights catching up on work that has been left.

“After he’s finished work, he’ll come into the sitting room to relax and watch one of his favorite shows,” she says.

And he has other pleasures too. He loves cigars and there is a tall brass-plated ashtray in the living room that is his.

His sister, Yvonne, comes into the room. Her manner toward her brother is offhand. “I’m not easy on him. If anything, I’m hard on him. Christy could quite easily live without me,” she says. “There would be a lot less arguments that way.” Her brother’s eyes dart up. He has written about the fun and the fights they have had together.

“When people have said he has an almost supernatural skill because he’s disabled, it makes Christy sick to his stomach to hear it,” Yvonne says. “People say our communication with him is almost psychic, when it’s through pure gutsy hard work that he has taught us his language. And what goes down on the paper coming from Christy, that’s more gutsy hard work.”

And her brother’s eyes, silently, eloquently, look up.