In the Dark Room

by Brian Dillon

  One does not need to have acquired such a mad profusion of things as the fictional Charles Foster Kane to be moved by the final image of Welles’s film: his deceased hero’s treasured plaything ravaged in the furnace of his vast, hubristic home, the varnish on the sled boiling away to reveal, for a second, the beloved name. Nor need we live our lives on quite so melodramatic a scale in order to recognize the secret affinity between the things of our childhoods and their later avatars. Every life is rich with these hidden correspondences between things, submerged collusions between one time and another which are fully expressed only at the moment when one concentrates hard on the object, weighing its presence against other, lost but still imaginable, things. Whole industries exist to convince us of the essential serenity and comfort of such an instant: the warm glow of a memory lovingly caressed. But there is something terrible, too, about the way a dumb artifact can lead us back to the past, if only because its very existence is at odds with the passing of the bodies to which it might once have attached itself, or with which it once shared the space of daily life. That stark contrast makes us fixate too on the objects themselves, as if we can never quite escape the blank obtrusion of dead things into a space, that of personal memory, which we would rather imagine as altogether more fluid and ambiguous.

  I have occasionally revolted against the tyranny of the memento, and am sometimes surprised that anything at all has survived my periodic fury at the mere existence of the things around me. The consequent purges have ensured that my stock of childish mementoes (that is, of things I actually owned, as opposed to those objects I have inherited) is pitifully meagre. I can count with certainty only two things. The first is a tiny yellow teddy bear: tissue-stuffed, one-eyed since the Saturday afternoon in the mid-1970s when my father bought it for my brother Paul, who quickly plucked out its right eye and abandoned it. Sewn up and restored to life (which means, in the society of toys, that it was given a name), it survived for years as the diminutive steerer of several cardboard-box buses and trucks, before resting in a bedside locker where, miraculously, it escaped all subsequent redundancy drives. The second object is a decrepit volume of fairy stories by Enid Blyton: an uncharacteristically gruesome collection of moral tales wherein a succession of hapless and gothically illustrated characters are forced to atone for such sins as talking too much and wishing for an endless supply of porridge (the influence of the traditionally ruthless Germanic fairy tale seems to have briefly overtaken the author, but I knew I was safe at least from either of these latter temptations). On the title page, I have inscribed thickly my name and address, followed by the announcement of a generous reward should the book be found and returned to its owner.

  I still cannot quite believe that this is the sum total of my hoard, but neither a mental tally of possible hiding places, nor a thorough search through ancient boxes containing numerous relics of later years, will reveal any other object predating the first of several adolescent purges. I remember the excitement of these bouts of destruction, my sense that all of ‘that’ was at last at an end. In the course of a decade or so, I disposed of toys; books; diaries; drawings; a tiny set of wooden rosary beads given to me on the occasion of my First Communion; a prayer book of the same vintage which contained, I imagined, a photograph of the actual, terrifying moment of transubstantiation (until I realized, years later, as I looked at it for the last time, that the strange fleshly remnant reflected in a chalice was in fact a priest’s knuckle); half a dozen penknives of various sizes and degrees of keenness; bits of plastic jewellery spat out by chewing-gum machines (one of which reminded me for months, secretly, of the pale, red-haired daughter of a family who holidayed next door to us three years in a row); a small golden ring into the empty socket of which I had inserted the hand-drawn emblem of my elusive hero, the Scarlet Pimpernel; an alarmingly illuminated toy machine gun which, its twin barrels sparking and wheezing, was, disappointingly, not at all the rugged ‘riddler’ I longed for one Christmas; a pair of toy binoculars given to me by my paternal grandfather, which, once I had tired of spying on imagined enemies at the bottom of the garden, I had reversed and trained on my room, turning everything I owned into a faraway land, just about to vanish over the horizon.

  In an essay on ‘The Philosophy of Toys’, Charles Baudelaire distinguishes two childish attitudes to playthings: reverence and iconoclasm. There are children for whom the toy is a sort of diminutive deity, a household god to be tended and worshipped, treated with a respect that precludes even touch. The poet warns: ‘I would be quick to be on my guard against these men-children.’ And there are those who cannot tolerate the toy’s mystery, who desire immediately, in a frenzy of curiosity, to discover the ‘soul’ of the thing: ‘It is on the more or less swift invasion of this desire that depends the life of a toy. I do not find it in me to blame this infantile mania; it is a first metaphysical tendency.’ Perhaps a corresponding typology distinguishes our attitudes to the things of our childhoods once we have begun to think of ourselves as adults. There are individuals who, as the view recedes, institute a kind of private curatorial programme, reminding themselves regularly of the once innocent (now forced, though still pleasurable) import of a particular object. But there are also those of us who see in the collection only an intolerable exigency, a demand for a continuity that is unbearable. I was always ready to plunge the souls of things into perdition.

  I must have recognized this tendency in myself at an early age. It was the source, I remember, of some considerable guilt in my teenage years, when I would curse my twelve-year-old self for having recklessly got rid of numerous comic books, notebooks, toy soldiers and a once beloved volume that recounted the adventures, on a stolen motorbike, of mischievous twin penguins, Pen and Gwen. Despite these regrets, I gave in, time and again, to the same impulse to start over, to rid myself of all material ties to the past. When the time came to vacate the family home, I recall, I felt the oppressive air of a whole house full of objects that could not fail, as they were torn from their dusty nooks, to remind me of years which (for years) I had been doing my best to forget. I had now to struggle with my natural urge to bin the lot. I was forced to choose, and in choosing I would ensure that the little I took with me would comprise a new stock of mementoes, their power enhanced by their rarity. There were objects which I was determined would have no place in my new, forgetful life. A large silver crucifix had stood on the dressing table in my bedroom for several years, inherited (morbidly, I now reflected) from an old man with whom my father’s father had shared a nursing-home room in the last months of his life, and placed there by my mother. I had immediately loathed the weight it added to my already fretful relationship with the pious objects around me. I turned on it now with a determined spite, waiting until I was alone in the house before unscrewing its heavy base and dismembering the Christ figure. Had I been able, I think I would have torn the sturdy metal of the cross itself to pieces, all the while aware of the essential idiocy of the gesture, but at least assured that this useless reminder of a faith which had saved nobody could no longer follow me on my flight from the house.

  Fortunately, a few objects escaped my tearful fury at being reminded of what exactly I was leaving behind. These things are all, I realize, comparatively small: I have hung on to nothing which I could not hold in my hand, cram into a suitcase or neglect on a shelf in plain and unthinking view of my daily life. I cannot pretend that they bear the memorial significance of Charles Foster Kane’s fractured ornament, but they are, in some sense, all I have left. In their silent persistence, they call up other objects, other times and places; they attest to the workings of a memory which seems unable to leave them alone, which is forever settling once more on their surfaces. As in those opening moments of Citizen Kane, the path through these ghostly things is lit by a fragment of glass.

  ¶ Vitrine

  I have just placed on my desk a small glass ashtray that belonged to my father. Already, I have had to remind myself not to use it: just now, searchin
g for the proper words to describe its transparent presence, I slipped, without thinking, a dark hyphen of ash between two radiating prisms of light at its edge, and it occurred to me that of all the objects I still possess from my family home, I have treated this one with the least care. I have never stopped using it, referring to it always as ‘my dad’s ashtray’, as if that title contained no more of the residue of exhausted time than do any of the other private names we give to the everyday objects which surround us. And yet, each time it resurfaces from a cupboard, or newly washed and gleaming, I am a little surprised: first that it has survived for so long without damage, and, more unsettlingly, that it looks so unlike the mental picture of it, in its original home, that I have retained from childhood. The distance between these two objects – one resounding solidly on the desk as I put it back in its place, the other muted by memory – has not altered over the years. It looks no more or less like itself now than it did on the day I took it from the place it had occupied throughout my childhood.

  What knowledge can an object preserve? The smooth interior of this thing, which is now a dim reflection of the room in which I am trying to recall its previous life, was once almost invisible to me. It inhabited the right-hand side (my father’s side) of my parents’ dressing table, where it had all but vanished beneath several of my father’s pipes, a selection of workaday bowls and stems from which he would choose one to begin the ritual of cleaning, filling and lighting that so fascinated me. Directly below was a drawer which, as I was occasionally privileged to discover, held other, more elaborate examples. There nestled a bright yellow pipe that appeared to be made of polished bamboo; a short, greyish-white pipe that had a rustic look about it; and a massive, curving and pendulous pipe that I never saw my father smoke, but which I imagined would transform him, uncannily, into the double of the hawk-nosed detective whose image I failed to capture, as I held this pipe to my lips, in the large mirror in the middle of the dressing table.

  Both the surface of the table and the drawer below were crammed with a pipe-smoker’s paraphernalia: big flat yellow boxes of Swan Vestas, a spider’s nest of pipe-cleaners, tobacco tins at various stages of use. I remember the particular pleasure of opening for the first time a large, white-labelled tin and releasing, from beneath a crackling concertina of paper, the fresh, plump smell of new tobacco. The flattened disc would give way slowly under my fingers, freeing itself into cool brown tendrils. These my father would transfer to a bowl lately scraped clean by the blackened blade of a tiny cream-handled knife. The essence of my image of my father clung to this end of the dressing table: a quality captured in the contrast between the hard brown sheen of its top and the mutability of the substances it held. The whole ensemble of objects seemed both intimate and distant, never more so than on the occasion when, as part of my homework, I wrote an essay entitled ‘The Day I Smoked My Father’s Pipe’. I cannot recall whether this oddly specific, intimate and even transgressive topic was set by a teacher or was my own choice.

  The glass ashtray marked the centre of the universe of things which orbited my image of my father. As the years went by, the space around it cleared and the precise spot became more visible. My father smoked less, and eventually gave up completely. The confusion of pipes and pipe-cleaners vanished from the dressing table. When he died, the ashtray was still in its place, now filled with dust rather than ash. I think it may have been in the months following his death – a long summer during which the room where he had slept alone for five years remained undisturbed – that I first paid any close attention to it, and noticed for the first time its true shape.

  The object which I had always thought of as a transparent circle was in fact composed of several abutting curves (eight, to be precise; I have just counted them). The interior, I discovered, was completely smooth. The complex explosion of facets which I had imagined on the inside actually fractured the exterior surface, forming a network of diminishing diamonds which pointed to a single, round, lens-like dot at the centre. I vividly recall picking it up one afternoon as I lingered in my parents’ room, clearing the dust away and being shocked that an object so familiar to me could suddenly appear so alien. I think it was also at that moment that I first properly discerned that it was identical to another ashtray that had had a more nomadic existence in our household. That one sat often on the kitchen table, tucked to the side of a radio, from which point, on a Sunday afternoon, my father’s hand would leave his pipe and pour into a small transparent brown coffee cup a black inch of his Guinness, which I was thrilled to share. The ashtray might then migrate to the sitting room, where a cloud of blue smoke would materialize above my father’s head (a fog into which, over the years, I gradually grew). I recalled all of this on that dusty afternoon, and remembered too that I had recently reached for this other ashtray on the morning my father died, relieved to be able to admit I smoked as neighbours and relatives gathered in our bereft house.

  It seems to me that this was the instant at which the ashtray stopped being a mere thing and became a memento. It began to suggest a world from which I had recently departed. This was also the moment when it somehow ceased to be itself and started to look and feel unfamiliar, the source of a confusion which perhaps explains why I have kept it near me all these years. It appears to say: the world you think you remember is not as it seems. The recto surface of memory is shadowed, like the glass itself, by its infinitely more complex verso. One side is smooth and reflective, the other jaggedly tactile, composing a nexus of memory images made up of the infinitely detailed patterning of things: a physical realm still sharp and clear beneath the compacted surface of ordinary recollection. The visible landscape of the memento, silted over with nostalgia, conceals the ancient and surprising geology of the object itself.

  ¶ Breviary

  I have stared long enough at my father’s ashtray for it to have disappeared again. It falls back, buried, this time, not beneath the chaos of other objects, but under a pile of memories which cling to it like ancient ash. I have to remind myself of its real weight and shape. I place it, in my imagination, back in its proper home, hearing the sound of glass on wood: a sound that resounds both here and now on the desk in front of me and in a distant recess of my memory. If I were to pick it up and place it carefully down again on the dressing table, it would reflect once more the dark surface, the large brown-spotted mirror and the profusion of my mother’s things, inches away in the middle of the space that my parents shared. But to which time does it belong? It is the only object to have survived the desecration of that space and to have remained in my possession. Of course, other objects have absconded elsewhere. I remember a squat jewellery box encrusted with shells. I loved the sound of its lid as it caught a thin lip of wood and felt, for a second, as if it wouldn’t close again, before sliding, with a whisper and a tiny pop, back into place. The box was reluctantly related to a decidedly less refined object which sat for years in the sitting room downstairs: a squat wine bottle clumsily decorated, by an aunt of my mother’s, with much larger shells and exhibited, I assume, out of a loyalty that precluded aesthetic judgement. The jewellery box was part of a far more delicate arrangement, which included a silver brooch my mother often wore, and which was never condemned to the darkness of the box but always displayed on the shallow glass shelf below the dressing-table mirror. It is already clearly visible in one of the earliest photographs I possess of my mother as an adult.

  On top of my mother’s bedside table was a modest collection of books, one of which I still own. When I recall that spot in the room, the small black-bound Bible sits always on top of the pile. It may be that I have fantasized its place at the peak of her little library: the book, before she died, had already acquired a significance which I could hardly bear. The thing itself is unexceptional: encased in fake leather, the rounded corners of which have worn so that they curl, greying, towards the pages whose gilt edges have almost faded away. On those edges corresponding to the New Testament, the gold has been replaced by a
pale brown, elongated smudge. I remember how much I resented the presence of this Bible. As my mother’s illness worsened, it seemed ever more insistent, a reminder of her increasingly desperate search for some comforting words to assuage her mounting fear. In the last few years of her life, her customary piety had taken a more urgent form. She had joined a local prayer group at our parish church: an offshoot of the Charismatic Movement in which the Catholic Church had seen some hope of reversing the trickle of worshippers away from regular attendance.