In the Dark Room

by Brian Dillon

  Praise for In the Dark Room

  ‘In the Dark Room moves beyond the specificity of recollected grief to explore the history of attempts to understand memory, from De Quincey to Proust and Bachelard. Like Van Veen in Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor, Dillon delights in the texture of time, “in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds”. The personal blends effortlessly with the universal to form a deeply evocative meditation on loss and the passage of time.’

  — P. D. Smith, Guardian

  ‘It is the deeply emotive nature of his “journey into memory” that presents Dillon with such a formidable task. Yet he not only succeeds in translating his personal experience into a book of immense, disturbingly lucid insight, but in doing so has written a meditation on the nature of memory that, in many places, could compare to the most open-hearted writings of Roland Barthes. It is an amazing achievement in terms of prose style alone.’

  — Michael Bracewell, Daily Telegraph

  ‘There are plenty of memoirs of unhappy childhoods on our shelves. Few of them, though, have the intelligence or rigour of this first book by critic Brian Dillon, which is less a personal narrative than an anguished monument to the idea of memory itself. … Of all the cultural heavyweights he calls as witness (such as Barthes, Benjamin and Sebald), none fits Dillon’s book better than Rachel Whiteread. His home was as filled with silence, sulky, embarrassed and pained, as was her “House” with miraculously solidified space. In the Dark Room is an equally impressive achievement.’

  — Jonathan Gibbs, Independent

  IN THE DARK ROOM

  BRIAN DILLON

  To Pod and Ned, from Bid

  ‘Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor monuments.’

  — Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia

  ‘This is the time. And this is the record of the time.’

  — Laurie Anderson, ‘From the Air’

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  FOREWORD

  HOUSE

  THINGS

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  BODIES

  PLACES

  CODA

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  FOREWORD

  In the Dark Room, originally published in 2005, is a meditation on mourning and an excavation of memory. It was also Brian Dillon’s first book, and we might see it as the prelude to his subsequent essays on photography and hypochondria, artists and ruins, essayists and what he calls ‘essayism’. How, Dillon asks, does memory – that ‘refined and slow-drying medium which covers everything’ – adhere to ashtrays and snow globes, stairwells and hallways? The answer is explored through the catastrophe of his family life.

  When he was fifteen, Dillon’s mother died of a rare autoimmune disorder and five years later his father suffered a fatal heart attack. ‘The double bulwark’ of his parents’ deaths creates what Dillon describes as ‘a storehouse of memories all the more alluring for being glimpsed through the thick portal of mourning’. The world he returns to in these pages is ‘submerged’, settled in a ‘strange submarine resting place’, as though the objects and images contained here ‘could not survive in the corrosive air of a clear recollection’. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke observed how ‘it is in the nature of grief to keep its object perpetually in its eye … to repeat all the circumstances that attend to it’. Dillon attends, with unflinching intensity, to the objects and circumstances of his grief, the ferocity of his intellect holding in check the seductions of elegy.

  The book begins in 1993 with Dillon, aged twenty-four, leaving for the last time the semi-detached in Dublin where he and his brothers were born. The house is now empty, and ‘no house could be more comprehensively stocked with the detritus of the past than the empty house’. Many of Dillon’s memories are of last times: the last family holiday, his last look at his mother’s face, his last look at his father’s body, the last argument he had with his brothers. Hypochondria, from which he suffered, is equally focused on finality. ‘Nothing of the everyday,’ Dillon explains of the gain from his condition, ‘can match the exhilaration of rebirth that seizes one when the imagined disorder fails to become real’. For that brief moment, he is not living in end time.

  To guide him through the valley of shades, Dillon is accompanied by Roland Barthes, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Baudelaire, John Berger, Gaston Bachelard, Henri Bergson, and Walter Benjamin. His mind is cultivated in the soil of the twentieth century but seeded in British Romanticism – at least in Borges’s understanding of Romanticism as ‘a feeling of loss’. Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu are the acknowledged precursors to In the Dark Room, but it is as a late Romantic that I read Brian Dillon. The high austerity of his project, the concern with ruins and the growth of his own mind, the return to childhood, the intimations of mortality all recall Wordsworth, who was also orphaned before he reached adulthood, whose writing was also born of loss. In The Prelude Wordsworth described himself as ‘conscious of myself / And of some other being’ and this double consciousness is what Dillon also attends to in these pages, where he is both narrator and subject, patient and doctor, adult and child (the older Dillon has no sympathy for his younger version). He is moreover – and this is the most striking aspect of his prose – vigilantly present as a seeing eye and curiously absent as an ego. Dillon, who notices everything, is alert to his own disappearance: looking at photographs of himself, taken before the death of his mother, he sees in his form a solidity that has since vanished; he has ‘evanesced’ through grief, to the point where he would now, he fears, fail to even register on film. But if Dillon is continually disappearing, he reappears in the bodies of his parents. In a photograph of his father aged seven, Dillon sees, ‘as if hovering below the surface’, his own unborn face. In appearance he is his father’s double, his living shade. After his mother’s death, Dillon’s skin began to stiffen, bristle and burn in a mirroring of her own horrific symptoms. Bodies, he notes, remember in their own way.

  Dillon describes memory as ‘a sort of space, in which are piled up … all manner of essential or useless objects’. He places these objects – pipes, pens, Bibles, churches and corner cabinets – in five chapters called ‘House’, ‘Things’, ‘Photographs’, ‘Bodies’ and ‘Places’. Dillon’s titles, like labels on boxes to be stored in the attic, describe his method: he accumulates, and then categorizes, chaos. He also freely associates, allowing one thing to lead him to another. In ‘House’ Dillon recalls Thomas De Quincey’s description, in Confessions of an English Opium Eater, of the auditory effect of the Whispering Gallery beneath the dome at St Paul’s Cathedral: ‘a word or question uttered at one end … in the gentlest of whispers, is reverberated at the other in peals of thunder’. For De Quincey, and also for Dillon, the progress of the whisper is a metaphor for memory: what at the start of a life seems of little impact speaks by the end ‘in volleying thunders’. In ‘Places’ Dillon turns to George Eliot’s description, in Middlemarch, of Dorothea Brooke’s honeymoon in Rome, where she wanders alone through St Peter’s. What ‘accosted’ him in the passage, Dillon recalls, ‘is Eliot’s insistence on the way in which the interior of the church persists in Dorothea’s imagination’, and he now returns to the vast, Victorian monument in which the funerals of his parents took place. As a child he had once fainted here during family mass, and the church is as frightening as the hospital in which his mother is treated. Like one of Piranesi’s prisons, the church became ‘a void into which I used to feel I might fall: I would gaze, in distracted moments, at its upper reaches, and wonder what it woul
d be like to drift towards the distant ceiling and hang there, looking down on the congregation below.’ This suspended position, high in the vaults and looking down, is where Dillon can often be found. It is only when he confronts the consolations of Catholicism that his tone – always taut, occasionally tense – turns to rancorous anger. His father’s funeral ‘had exposed our ancient family secret: our affinity with this monstrous architecture, this unbearable weight of solid silence and droning piety, these poisonous clouds of incense and candle smoke’.

  The dark room, where photographic negatives are developed into images, is Dillon’s central metaphor for memory. But the darkness he inhabits is occasionally illuminated by a lighthouse beam. In one such instance it is early morning; he is in bed, his mother is in hospital and his father, having just come off the telephone, is standing in the doorway speaking to him. ‘And the phrase which joins the feeble light from the doorway to the shaft of sunlight from behind the curtains at the other corner of the room is “She doesn’t have long.”’ Dillon has many devastating sentences, but this is the one I cannot forget, that wounds me like the punctum of a photograph. He continues:

  To wake in the night and find that the light from the opening above my bedroom door was once again stretched across the ceiling was in later years my greatest nocturnal fear. Like the lamp of a lighthouse which no longer turns but is stuck in a single, cyclopean beam of panic, it signalled a danger which would instantly be confirmed by a hushed voice or a footfall on the landing.

  Dillon’s prose also stores memories, and contained in this scene is the footfall of another. When, in To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsey dies and the holiday house is abandoned, ‘certain airs … ventured indoors … Some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even.’ De Quincey too, Dillon notes, associated death with light coming through a bedroom window, and he also mapped his grief onto the architectural spaces of the childhood home.

  Wordsworth, De Quincey’s mentor, might have called Dillon’s ‘cyclopean beam of panic’ a ‘spot of time’, one of those moments of imaginative convergence – like a naked pool, or a woman with a basket on her head – that penetrates the mind. The spot of time that contains the death of Dillon’s mother anticipates another spot of time, in the section called ‘Waiting Room’. Once again lying on his bed, Dillon is now told by his brother, standing at the door, that their father has died: ‘My father is dead. No, my mother is dead (I know because I was here: I lay here, in this room, on this bed, the morning after she died). But my father is dead too.’ The reality of his loss is figured in the emptiness of the hall at the bottom of the stairs: ‘For the briefest moment, that space might have contained anything at all; the possibility of a grotesque mistake, of a violent or lingering death, or time turning away from the course to which I am trying to accommodate myself.’ Hovering below the surface of these lines is the memory of the young Wordsworth in The Prelude, also waiting, also with his brothers, for the horses that will carry him from school to the home in which his father will also soon die.

  It is De Quincey who gave us the metaphor of the human brain as a palimpsest, onto which ‘everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen … softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.’ In Dillon’s hands, De Quincey’s image converges, like the light from the doorway and the light from behind the curtains, with that of the Whispering Gallery. ‘Not only’, Dillon writes, ‘do the events of the past remain carved into the mind, but it is precisely the tiniest and faintest marks that will one day make their presence felt, magnified to monstrous, grotesque legibility’. It is the slow surfacing of these marks that Dillon makes visible in this extraordinary book, which itself remains carved in the mind.

  Frances Wilson, London, 2017

  IN THE DARK ROOM

  HOUSE

  ‘It is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time.’

  — Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Melancholy Angel’

  ¶ View by appointment

  The house in question stands at the western end of an almost semicircular road that curves off a wider suburban thoroughfare. Approached from that end, the house remains invisible until one has rounded a long, thickly hedged garden on the left; even then it would not be the first one you noticed, opposite you, in a row of architecturally identical, semi-detached homes. Your eye might be drawn instead by the pristine paintwork of a house a few doors to the right (one of the few to have retained the original look of a 1930s semi); by the newly concreted garden of the house next door; or by the abutting house on the left, with its comic grid of mock-Tudor window frames. The house we are approaching refuses to accost the eye in any way; indeed, it seems to have retreated from the street, to have settled itself a little further back in space and time.

  Perhaps one’s gaze doesn’t settle swiftly on this house because the colour of its pebble-dashed exterior is oddly indeterminate. It is certainly a kind of grey, but a grey so lifeless it barely registers on the retina; it might have been chosen to make the house fade into the clouds above, or to seem a blunt outcrop of the pavement below. The owners of the house could tell you that, when painted a decade ago, it had looked almost tasteful, but the colour (if it is a colour) has faded with shocking rapidity. The structure itself looks as though it has been subject to an alarming erosion, here and there kept at bay by repairs and additions that appear only to have accelerated the decay, to have burdened the house with a weight of optimism it can no longer bear. Atop the wall of the small front garden, a fresh concrete pediment caps a structure that is visibly crumbling on to the pavement outside. By the low iron gate, the slightest pressure on the right-hand pillar will cause it to rock back and forth with a worrying crunch. The pebble-dash is dropping off in chunks, the window sills spalling, the green paint on the front door peeling away to reveal several previous generations of the same green. If you were to risk a knock at the door – if, that is, you had taken the ‘For Sale’ sign outside as an invitation, and not a warning that something was distinctly amiss here – the mottled chrome handle would doubtless come off in your hand, and if you reached for the doorbell, the resulting toneless rasp would be enough to dispel any thoughts of domestic harmony within. In sum, it’s a house that might have been abandoned long ago, or given up, as a concrete franchise on hope, by its inhabitants, left to eke out its last days along with their dwindling prospects. But behind its elderly net curtains (of a colour now indistinguishable from that of the house itself), something is moving: ending and beginning. The house is being transformed, so that before long its interior, which is still full of the stuff of several lives, will start to resemble its sorry exterior, and speak only of what it once was: how it was made out of hopes, plans and dreams that have absconded, leaving their grey shadows behind.

  Soon the house will stand empty for the first time in a quarter of a century. Whereas it took years for the façade to reach its current state of decay, the abandonment of the house will have been effected within the space of a week. I am its last tenant. (There will be others, as there have been before; but they are not part of this story, and I can barely credit their existence.) The house will seem to me to rebel against this far too rapid domestic escape act. It has already embarked on a stealthy revenge for the violence inflicted on it in recent days. As if its unfamiliarly echoing rooms have somehow discerned the intensity of hurried shame with which their curators have cleared them of furniture and effects, the house begins to restock itself with ghostly mementoes. Until a few hours ago, the variously sturdy or dishevelled objects that occupied this space had seemed to persist only as temporary reminders of a job to be done and a deadline to be met. But their spectral replacements are already alive with uninvited significance. This house, so swiftly cleansed of all tangible history, suddenly insists on reminding me that something has
happened here. The place looks – so I imagine, in a brief fancy I would like to pass off with a wry detachment I can’t quite muster – like the scene of a crime. From the corners of my vision, certain blanknesses obtrude: pallid voids lately hidden by ageing furniture and gloomily familiar pictures (these gaps now dustily outlined like improbably proportioned or oddly articulated corpses). Here lurks the evidence of something recently deceased. The absent bodies seem to want to speak, to tell of their long history and rapid demise. But as my gaze falls exhaustedly on patches of strangely vivid carpet and sharply patterned wallpaper, I would rather not listen, and so continue my distracted survey.

  It is the autumn of 1993, and I am standing in the sitting room of the house in which I grew up and which, within the hour, I will leave for the last time. I am aching and fuddled from lack of sleep, having spent the previous night frantically trying to dispose of the last solid remnants of a shared life that disintegrated long ago, leaving behind something less than a family and something more than I currently care to acknowledge. My two younger brothers left earlier in the morning. Their departure was a relief: we had argued long into the night about how much of this glum inheritance to leave behind, how much to dump in the skip which has sat in the street outside for several days, and how much to take with us or disperse among the various relatives who have already spirited away some of the most precious things: the few valuable items of furniture, wedding presents, cracked suitcases full of photographs and papers. If I did not come to blows with Paul, the elder of my brothers, it is only because Kevin, the younger, shouted himself hoarse trying to keep us apart, to stop us descending even further into the storm of recrimination and regret that has overtaken us in recent days. Paul moved out months ago, finally defeated by the wearying routine of almost daily verbal and sometimes physical violence into which our lives have drifted since our father’s sudden death two years earlier.