One conspicuous example of good versus evil in today’s culture comes from Harry Potter. Harry enters Hogwarts as a nervous child. Trials and tribulations thwart but season young Potter, preparing him to do battle with the evil wizard Voldemort.
Real life, whatever that is, tends to favor a less melodramatic narrative arc than that of a predestined wizard-child marching along well-defined lines of good and evil … unless we agree that real life means zealous news anchors and the latest acts of senseless violence.
In those cases, melodrama pervades.
Of course, many people now exist somewhere between the realms of fantasy and unfounded speculation via the blogosphere or Twitterverse.
Picture Potter, for instance, minus the wand and the lightning-bolt scar. Maybe he grows up the elder brother to two sisters, playing the “man of the house” while his heedless mother indulges her appetite for Guinness and opportunistic men. Picture Potter’s father serving in the army of a foreign country (let’s say America), while sending little, if anything, back home to his family. And lastly, picture Potter a scalawag of a child, bent on skipping school to explore the banks of the river Liffey.
So went the very real life of six-year-old Danny Ellis, the boy at the gate, in 1950s Dublin, Ireland.
Fast forward to 2014. Real-life author Ellis, married and a stepfather for roughly the last 20 years, has contentedly booked regular gigs and taught himself to play an array of instruments in the hills over Asheville, North Carolina. With these instruments, he wrote songs that became the masterpiece album 800 Voices.
Satisfied with musical expression, Ellis soon realized that he had still left young Danny shivering by the gate of Artane Orphanage, waiting for a mother who would never come. Refusing to abandon Danny any longer, Ellis penned a memoir and gave voice to his past.
Ellis cut his storytelling teeth as a musician and songwriter, packaging yarns in three minutes or less. We feel the influence: the memoir reads like a series of lyrical vignettes. Wit that only the Irish seem to possess—crass yet poignant—dances on every page, mainly because Ellis frames the narrative of his younger self with jaunts into the present.
“I’m always up for a little downward mobility,” Ellis quips—his humor an obvious yet endearing coping mechanism in a memoir bringing Dickens’ Oliver Twist to life in the mid-20th century.
One may find the intrusion of an elder Ellis to be a somewhat forced literary device. But without the context of a life after his formative years at the Artane Industrial School, the memoir would risk estranging the faint of heart. After all, Ellis inhabits Danny down to the “potato sack heavy” boots and chaffing uniforms assigned to lads unfortunate enough to enter one of the worst orphanages Ireland ever offered its abandoned youth.
The brutal Christian Brothers run Artane with leather straps rather than iron fists. After young Danny transitions from his dysfunctional family in Dublin to the rigor behind Artane’s walls, a lashing or the threat of being dragged to the “boot room” appears at almost every mention of the Mackerel, the Maggot, or the Whistler—lads’ handles for a few of the fearsome Brothers tasked with guiding the young fellahs along the straight and narrow.
With the shocking contemporary revelations about sexual and physical abuses at Ireland’s orphanages in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Ellis could have penned a scathing tell-all. He might have vilified the supposedly Christian institution of Artane with social media re-posts and talk-show appearances.
Refreshingly, he veers from self-righteous condemnation of the Brothers’ evils by delving into the survival camaraderie of the likes of Rasher, Danny’s first friend at the school. Rasher literally runs into Danny’s life. He must keep up or be swallowed by the amoebic nature of orphanage existence … or by his delusions of being reunited with his mother, sisters and even his father.
The two friends race around in playground kickball and poker games, through tussles and courtyard interrogations. Rasher teaches Danny everything: which whistle means what; how to snatch your share of grub in the dining hall; counting cards (the Brothers approve of poker, as they believe it bolsters the boys’ mathematical abilities.)
Rasher also fuels the allure of being a member of the Artane School Boys’ Band. “Everyone wants to be in the band,” says Rasher. “Dano, it’s an easy life.” It’s a serious statement in a place where your best friend could use you as a punching bag come recess.
Band life ultimately becomes anything but easy for Danny, since he must remain in the good graces of the band director, Brother Joseph “Joe Boy” O’Connor. To do so, Danny must learn to read music. In his chorus class, he mastered scales through the use of Do-Re-Mi, but O’Connor will not stand for such “Sound of Music” stuff in his realm.
Danny must also avoid a bully, Fatser McBride, who pesters him for no good reason. Once Danny hauls off on Fatser, O’Connor exiles Danny from the band. The heartbreak truly sinks in during scenes of Danny longing for the feel and sound of his trombone while skinning potatoes in Artane’s kitchen. Sure, being abandoned by one’s mother tears a heart something awful, but to have found a way out of the pits through his own volition … only to throw it away on a schoolyard grudge … tortures Danny.
Fortunately, Brother O’Driscoll (who runs the kitchen) catches Danny midway through playing “The Irish Washerwoman” one night. For Danny, O’Driscoll represents the “the paradox present in so many of the brothers of Artane … on the one hand, he was cruel and callous … and on the other, he was a deeply pious man, capable of real empathy and kindness.”
Taken aback by Danny’s raw talent, O’Driscoll vouches for his reinstatement into the band. Once accepted, Danny improves and rises in the ranks. He even travels to play shows outside of Artane. During such trips, he rooms with sponsor families that feed him, clothe him, and offer him bus fare. Understandably, glimpses of a stable family life remind Danny of his abandonment and abuse—the only stabilities he has ever known.
One particular band excursion takes him across the Atlantic to New York, where his father has been living. Their reunion proves sobering for Danny; his embittered father reveals the truth about his ma, even if Danny suspected it all along. “Yer ma didn’t have TB when she put you in Artane … She got rid of yez all and caught the first boat to England to be with some shitehawk that meant more to her than either of us.”
What little hope Danny has of love and family through his father dissipates in the spell of Guinness that surrounds his old man. So, young Danny retreats again to his trombone lessons and the wilderness of Artane.
The Boy at the Gate proves most compelling when conveying the power of friendship under intolerable circumstances, as well as the saving grace of a purposeful life. Some editing of the book’s first third might have sped up the pacing, but no amount of summary could communicate how a mother’s love for her children proves no match for her own sense of abandonment.
The final third of the book covers the next five to six years rather quickly, yet Ellis manages to gently usher the reader out the door rather than shove him. Also, this final section introduces new characters, who play into an ending that Hollywood could easily conjure … though never pull off as sincerely as Ellis does.
Probably because it actually happened to him. You know—real life.
Too often in today’s media, people speculate motive and stir up controversy under the guise of condemning villainous acts. Throughout The Boy at the Gate, though, Ellis explores the villain within us all.
Through one Brother Columbus, Danny discovers that the Brothers, though often tyrants, share many traits with the boys in their care. Sneaking into the chapel to thaw out his hands on the radiator on a winter’s eve, Danny happens upon Columbus in the throes of a desperate prayer to the Almighty. Columbus spots Danny, but spares the strap. With tears and raised voice, he demonstrates to Danny how one should properly beseech God, “Oh, Dearest Father, King of Heaven and earth, I’m so lost in this cruel world. I can find no rest here any more. I’m tired and weary and oh, so lonely.”
Also, an adult Ellis, faced with his wife’s research on sexual abuse claims against a long-dead Brother O’Connor, defends in the 800 Voices album Joe Boy’s presence: “His arrival in my life changed everything.”
Can evil really draw out the good in people? The Boy at the Gate reminds us that all humans embody Potter and Voldemort. Sometimes one wins out over the other … or eventually succumbs. From the well of Ellis’s heart spills a chorus of 800 orphaned voices, which funnel into the singular story of any lost person clawing a way back home.
Readers will be relieved to discover that Ellis’s memoir and his album lack pontifical statements such as the last few that I have made.
Joseph J. Schwartzburt is a writer and literary performer based in Savannah. His arts and culture pieces appear regularly in the Savannah Morning News’ “DO Magazine.” Witness the literary jollies offered up by him and his friends at Seersucker Live’s quarterly reading series, and peruse Seersuckerlive.com for information on the next event, “Episode 11: The Jig Episode.” A recent recipient of the Wilkes-Etruscan Prize (judged by poet William Heyen), Joseph is currently putting the finishing touches, again, on a first novel.