In the Dark Room

by Brian Dillon

  I assume, too, that he must at that moment have recalled his own time at the same university, the documentary evidence of which was spreading before me on the carpet a quarter of a century later. I had found, it turned out, my father’s carefully filed notes from his days as a student. I can recall nothing of what was written on the hundreds of pages I pulled from the box that day. I don’t think I spent much time reading their contents at all. Instead, I was transfixed by the image of my father that they brought to mind. I saw him, soberly suited and exhausted after a day’s work (he must still, at that time, have held a minor position in what was then the Department of Post and Telegraphs), summoning the energy for an evening’s lectures or solitary study. And I had a sense, suddenly, of the contingency of my own existence. Although I knew (and still know) only the barest details of his life at that time, I had to assume that my father’s educational ambitions had as their goal his subsequent promotion in the civil service, and thus the possibility, not long after, of marriage. On his sedulous study, the remnants of which were piled around me, had depended the very possibility of my subsequent being.

  At the bottom of the box, tucked to one side so that it had bent under the weight of the folders and loose papers above, was a small black notebook. The hard, shiny fabric of its spine had split, and crackled as I lifted and opened the book. The edges of the pages had obviously once been deep blue but had faded. I flicked quickly through the pages, from back to front: the notebook was empty but for a few leaves on which I recognized both my father’s careful handwriting and the impress of his fountain pen. His hand, I noted, had put that instrument to a considerably defter use than I had so far managed, the thick nib here producing a surprisingly delicate script. Each of the ten or so pages on which my father’s pristine blue letters were inscribed contained an outline of the life and works of a great Irish writer, from Jonathan Swift to James Joyce. On the last of these pages was a heading for Samuel Beckett, above an otherwise blank page. Why did Beckett deserve an entry but no comment? Perhaps my father simply had nothing to say about a writer whose works had conspicuously not made it, then or since, on to the shelves of his library. Or maybe (and the thought lifted my spirits) this was my father’s devious little private joke at the expense of Beckett’s love of silence and voids.

  The notebook, with its broken spine, creaking cover and curious gilded legend – ‘the Alwych Book with the all weather cover’ – seemed an odd little memorial to my father’s fastidious habits and dry sense of humour. It still pains me that, although I put it carefully aside that afternoon, I lost it somewhere in the intervening years. But it began to have a productive, faintly sentimental, afterlife when I discovered, a year later, that a single Dublin stationer still stocked these peculiar notebooks. I have since found a sort of comfort in the thought that all the identical books I have purchased since (I’m writing these words in one) amount, as they pile up on my desk at the rate of four or five a year, to a belated completion of my father’s unfinished annotations. The Alwych notebook, it turns out, has been in production for the best part of the last century. Its current manufacturers, the Glasgow firm of John Reid, have proved sadly unclear, in response to my eccentric enquiries, about its exact provenance, but having recently uncovered an ancient receipt, are sure that it dates back at least to the mid-1920s. In its present incarnation, it seems miraculously unaltered. Its vaunted ‘all weather cover’ makes only the most cursory effort at a faux-leather appearance; one has the sense, instead, of handling something vaguely related to such mid-century materials as Bakelite, or the fragile heft of early vinyl records. The pale yellow pages, their dark blue edging fading pleasingly after only a few weeks’ use, still tend to separate quickly from the glued spine, but are held in place, as forty years ago, by strong stitching. The whole thing rapidly takes on a scuffed, aged appearance, while remaining gratifyingly intact. It is the sort of object you imagine academics or scientists of half a century ago slipping out of their tweed pockets: a svelte amalgam of venerable tradition and quietly utilitarian design.

  Despite its resonance as an object of pure nostalgia – a thing which, in the brief period I had it in my possession, was both the subject and the source of certain memories of my father – it seems also to suggest that a part of my father’s life remained unfinished, unfulfilled. It will always be linked in my mind to a few scraps of paper discovered around the same time. I had long known that my father, as a young man, had had poetic ambitions. Indeed, as he occasionally reminded us, he had achieved some minor success: a poem of his had been published. Though I have no idea of the publication, I am sure that on at least one occasion he produced a tiny shred of newsprint as evidence. I recall nothing of the poem itself; if it ever really existed, it is now lost. I still possess, however, a small piece of paper, cut from a larger page, on which my father’s name appears below some thirteen typewritten lines, entitled ‘Newquay June 1969’; and I have the vaguest memory of my father recounting to me the tragedy that befell nine passengers of a boat which capsized in Galway Bay one summer.

  On Sunday, 29 June 1969, the Red Bank, a 25-foot oyster boat, was taking parties of locals and holidaymakers out into the bay when, on its fifth trip, it overturned 200 yards from the pier head at Newquay. Newspaper reports published in the days following the accident are at first confused about the number of people lost, but they agree that most were children. In the end, they confirm that nine were drowned. The boat, it seems, was authorized to carry only a crew of three, but on this summer afternoon about forty passengers had been crammed on to its deck. One of the survivors, Sally Gaynor, aged thirteen, had seen her eight-year-old brother drown: ‘The girls ran to one side of the boat and it overturned. I managed to swim from under it. I held on to a propellor and other people were holding on to me. I saw my brother Jimmy but there was nothing I could do and I knew he could not swim. I could not bear to watch him. I screamed and turned my head.’

  My father’s poem is undated. I have no way of knowing when he composed his response to this terrible event. But reading it now, it seems less an adequate tribute to those drowned children than an excessively pious formulation of his own poetic persona. I cannot quite believe that the author of this fragment, whose first child had been born only seven weeks before the disaster, could in all seriousness begin a poem with the words ‘Do not grieve for them who died young upon a Summer’s eve’. Nor that he really means it when he concludes in his final lines that ‘in His wisdom / A far gentler hand than ours / Reached out and made a garland of these nine fresh flowers’. It is not only the mawkishness of the metaphor that appals me; I simply cannot accept the content of that couplet, with its simplistic appeal to theological consolation. So allergic am I to the sentiment of the poem that I wonder now whether my father had already discerned in this, his first published verse (if this indeed is the one), a conventional stricture, a hampering strain of dogma, that put an end to his ambitions as a poet. Of all the objects of his that I have inherited, this is the one with which I would like to accost him still, to ask: what sort of man wrote these lines; what dream, later submerged in family life, work and illness, came clumsily to life here? What exactly was he thinking? And more: what did he feel as he put his name to this poem which, though it seems to me to display a sensibility which has quite missed the true horror of its occasion, must nonetheless have had for him some emotional significance, enough for him to have hidden the folded typescript away all those years? I wonder now whether this scrap of paper might not have been for my father the reminder of an unrealized dream, a memento from a life not lived. Or rather, of a career cut short by my own arrival that summer: a season which itself now exists only as a series of snapshots.

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ‘Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance, on account of their scars.’

  — Chris Marker, La Jetée

  ‘When will they invent a machine to know who I am?’

  — Jacques Henri Lar
tigue

  ¶ Archive

  In the winter of 1997, without, initially, giving much thought to the significance of what I was doing, I began spending my nights poring over a selection of photographs from the family hoard. For some months, I had been huddled deep inside the folds of a depression that had lately made it almost impossible for me to engage by day with the postgraduate research I had left Dublin to complete at a provincial university in the south of England. In truth, I had made scarcely any headway with my work since arriving two years earlier. My ill-concealed lack of productivity was beginning to tell against me in every respect: academic, financial and personal. I felt myself constantly in flight from all those who might notice some sign of the new vacuousness of my being, the dull ache at the centre of my chest that denoted my absconded hopes, plans and talents. As deadlines passed and the promised doctoral thesis failed to materialize time and again, I cast about desperately for some prop to shore up my slowly spalling sense of self, but succeeded only in adding to the confusion of a mind long past hope of being cleared by its own efforts. By this time, my second winter away from home, I had made a comprehensively tangled mess out of all ties to the world around me. During the summer of that year, there were days when – having lain awake most of the night, adrift between the vicious reality of my situation and my increasingly fantastic notions of how best to end my torment – I could hardly raise myself from my bed before mid-afternoon. Once up, I was a frantic wreck before the awful challenge of the day, quickly debilitated again by the panic that overtook me when faced with the simplest decision. Eventually, I was persuaded (it was already autumn, and I realized that I had no memory of the sun shining at all that summer) to drag myself, emaciated and, so I am told, actually grey in the face, to a doctor.

  In the weeks that followed, my fogged brain began to respond slowly to the drugs I had immediately been prescribed. The deeper roots of my disarray would continue, for many months, to leach hope and energy from my life. But I was at least lucid enough to appreciate how far I had wandered from myself. And I had regained sufficient physical and mental function to begin to reflect on what had led me astray. Any doubts I might previously have had about the wisdom of a pharmacological cure for emotional torment were quickly dispersed: I could feel the disease as a palpably organic entity, a parasite. (Depression, wrote the glum Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran, is as much physical as mental: left unchecked, it would attack even the fingernails.) The long-term effects of my breakdown – the word, I came to realize, should be understood in a literal, mechanical, sense – would take years to resolve. I do not think it was only as a result of a therapist’s inevitable broaching of my family history, nor of the certainty that I had always had of my one day emulating my mother’s plunge into depression, that I found myself mulling over the artifacts of my past. While I could not bring myself to face the demands of my unwritten thesis, I began an eccentric communion with the few photographs I had taken from our family home some years earlier. I entrusted something of myself, of my future, to them each night as I closed the door of a cramped bedroom and sat down at a tiny desk to peruse my archive once more. I realized that I had never really looked at them with anything other than a distant, even embarrassed, sense that the world they depicted was no longer a part of me. Now, however, they seemed to have accosted me from the tattered box file where they had lain since my leaving the house. The process of their rediscovery had begun during the terrible summer just gone. One night, as I wrestled with my hopelessness and rage, I had suddenly, quite unaware of what I was doing, ripped a photograph of my parents from the wall of my bedroom and thrown myself on the bed, holding it tightly to my sobbing chest. I remember gradually realizing the absurdity of the gesture, and how I was utterly unable to communicate to the one person there (the lover whose life had contracted around my sapping and cruel presence) why my misery had taken such a melodramatic turn.

  Each night, for perhaps an initial week or two, I would take the photographs out and place them one by one on the desk in front of me, until the whole collection had been divided among a few unruly piles. Each comprised photographs of a particular subject: myself, my parents individually or together, my family, various relatives, a few unknown persons. On those occasions, I would simply stare at the images in a sort of stupor, unsure what had motivated these long hours of desultory handling. Before long, however, another impulse took over: I began to write about the photographs. I had to overcome a distinct embarrassment. I told myself that the furtive marks I was about to make in the pages of a large softbound notebook were entirely unrelated to the halting words I spoke weekly to my therapist. Whatever I imagined I was doing with these photographs, it was not, I insisted, therapeutic. It was of another order entirely: some belated reckoning that might turn out to be unbearable, to undo all the therapist’s good work (I could never decide if she was an angel or an idiot; but her unnerving silences seemed to have freed something in me, even if I didn’t yet believe in it). I resolved to describe what I saw in these photographs, rather than indulge in any excessive reminiscence or conjecture about their significance. What I wanted, I think, was at last to recall simply what I saw there, no longer to feel so detached from the scant remains of my own past. I had long been fascinated by – and now re-read obsessively – the pages of Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’s melancholy reflection on photography and death, which treat of certain photographs of his mother uncovered after her death. I had already half mythologized my own collection according to the details of Barthes’s troubled engagement with the image of his mother. He writes: ‘according to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her hands. I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether.’ Now, I thought, I would test my own photographs against the misery that kept me confined to my room. Perhaps I would recognize something there; and if I didn’t, I would at least discover the consolation of expressing my failure.

  I began nightly to write a few lines (in my exhausted state, I could manage no more) about a particular photograph. Over a period of some weeks, I completed eleven fragments: each one numbered and appended with a brief statement of (so far as I could discern) when, where and by whom the snapshot was taken. I recall now that it was only, each time, by a prolonged act of concentration that I could begin to piece together precisely what I was looking at. Certainly, the bare essentials of each scene were usually clear to me: it was the details that seemed completely foreign. I sometimes spent hours simply sitting and staring, before certain spaces, objects or textures became recognizable, and I started to fit them to the abstract image I had in my head of each occasion or era made visible there.

  The first photograph that I tried to describe was taken when I was about seven: it shows my brothers and me sitting rather nervously in a row in the gym of our primary school. At the end of a day’s photographing of individual pupils, we had been brought specially from our respective classes to sit for this picture of what might well have been the only trio of brothers in the school at that time. There is, really, nothing else of note about the photograph, and in my short written account of it I have remarked only that I recall being even more uncomfortable in front of the camera than I look. Here I am again, according to the second passage in the notebook, perched on a deckchair in the back garden: an insignificant image but for the barely visible fraying of the fabric of the chair around its metal frame. Years later, somebody (it may well have been me) would fall straight through the torn seat. And again: proudly straddling a brand-new bicycle, aged seven; or a small blur on a rug five years earlier; or squinting towards my father at the height of a summer’s holiday in Kerry; or glumly edging from the frame, aged thirteen, on the occasion of my brother’s confirmation.

  Those paragraphs comprise only my first broaching of a territory from which I retreated before long. Which is not to say that the other photogra
phs – of the world my parents inhabited before my birth – did not intrigue me: I gazed at them for hours, became obsessed with certain scenes depicted there, but they never made it into my written record of the collection. I seem to have avoided looking at photographs of my parents without me, as if I was not yet willing to accept that the collection as a whole was the evidence of their disappearance. Why was I unable to write about the photographs of my parents in the same way? I am quite prepared to believe that my depression was a function of an incomplete process of mourning (if the truth be told, a process not even begun: mourning, surely, requires some voicing of one’s grief, and this was exactly what I could not begin to attempt). But if so, my solitary scribblings didn’t get me much further along the route to a complete reckoning with my loss; instead, I became entranced by the details and the surfaces of these other images. I may not have been able to write about them, but it was these photographs of a world in which I was not yet present that appeared then (and seem now) to contain the most telling memories of all.