by Brian Dillon
Nor can I identify the three women and one man who flank my father in the sunshine one day in 1946 (this is one of the few photos in my collection with an inscribed date). My father is quite handsome, almost pretty, though less at ease than his anonymous friends. I can relate almost nothing of his life at this point. I know that he left school four years earlier to work as a messenger boy for the post office. I know that in the intervening years of the ‘Emergency’ he trained as a member of the civil defence force, and stopped one morning on his way to work to watch two fighter planes, considerably adrift from their planned courses, chasing each other in the sky above the city. I have an idea, derived from some admonishing lecture delivered when I was a child not much given to ‘making my own entertainment’, that his life was an endless round of tennis and card games. And although this photograph tells me that he might have had more on his mind, I can’t help suspecting that one of these five will find herself, any minute now, on the sidelines as the other four take up their rackets.
The most intriguing set of images among the photos of my father is the half dozen or so taken some time in the late 1940s or early 1950s on a journey round France. I had known for years, before discovering these, that he and a friend (the only friend I ever knew my father to have had: he turned up at our house once, after my mother died, and he himself died a week before my father) had spent some time there. I recall my father telling me that everywhere he went, he still saw evidence of the war, and that at some point in the journey he had, alarmingly, driven a car (my father never learned to drive, though I also recall – and may have imagined – another story that has him driving from Dublin to Cork, quite illegally, on some official civil service business).
Clearly, my father’s friend (known only as Slevin) had an eye for a picture. He photographed his travelling companion looking extraordinarily dashing against a selection of exotic backdrops. There he is in shirtsleeves on a street somewhere in the south, cigarette dangling from his fingers, framed by palm trees, the windows of the building behind him shuttered against the heat. He exhibits, to my surprise, a repertoire of matinée-idol poses that I’d never have guessed he could deploy. So iconic does he look – brooding against the balustrade of what I take to be a Parisian bridge, looming as a stark silhouette in the doorway of a Crédit Lyonnais, square-jawed and just out of focus as his boat pulls into, or away from, a nameless harbour – that, forty years later, a friend and I would attempt, ineptly, to replicate the faded elegance of those photographs. But no matter how louchely I tried to light a Gauloise while slouching by the entrance to a Métro station, I could never capture the unaccountable presence which my father exhibits here. Neither, it seems, could he. In subsequent snapshots, he appears already middle-aged; his former reticence before the camera has got the better of him again. Photographed at a ballroom table ten years later (a glittering stave of musical notation plays on the wall above his head), his efforts to look casual haven’t quite come off. Lounging back in his chair, he succeeds only in separating himself from the rest of the group.
¶ The stock
A family photograph is supposed to recall us to a presence with which we are already familiar. But its effect is often to make a well-known physiognomy appear suddenly alien. At certain junctures in À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust reminds us that the photograph can as effectively distance us from the remembered face as recall it for us. When the narrator’s grandmother is about to die, she becomes, he tells us, like a photograph of herself:
the process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes then adhere to it, coincide with it.
Photography, and the proximity of death, tear the face from its home and memory and set it adrift in time, where we find that we have failed to recognize the faces we know best.
Here is my mother, sitting on her mother’s knee; beside them are her father and elder brother. The photograph finds the young family in front of a whitewashed wall. To the right of the group – a peculiar insertion into the frame, this – is a sash window, one pane of which has been broken, adding a jagged rectangle of black to the pale background. It is also a clue to the precise spot where the family has been invited to pose. I surmise that the window belongs to a former farmhouse that had now been given over to livestock: to the photographer’s right is the new house, which was itself superseded: my grandparents left it for a bungalow a few miles away. In the photograph, they are seated; only one leg of each chair is visible, so that they almost appear to float unsupported before the pallid, stained backdrop. The image has clearly been produced by a professional (it is, in fact, a postcard). The chairs have been brought out into the sun; everybody squints slightly. If I’ve guessed the location correctly, it is morning (the old house faced east, the new one south). The family is dressed for the occasion and posed with just the proper combination of formality and ease. The father’s dark three-piece suit dominates the whole field of the photograph; his son grimaces and holds one chubby hand to his face. The mother is less distinct. Her hair has been caught by the breeze and she is further blurred by a fading (or overexposed) area to the left of the frame that renders her faintly spectral beside her husband. Her coat is shapeless, and her polka-dot dress almost indistinguishable from that of her daughter, who sits on her lap, mirroring her brother’s sullen gesture.
About my grandmother, I remember almost nothing. There are only two images of her that I can bring into focus. The first sees me playing on the gravel outside her house. A sandpit had been filled by the door: a photograph shows me, aged about four, standing proprietorially in front of it, clutching a bucket and a large stick that has taken over from a tiny spade which lies on the ground beside me. I had expanded the scope of my excavations and begun to dig on the path down to the road. What I remember is simply my grandmother telling me to stop, and directing me back to the sand. After she died (I was five), I’d recall this moment with a terrible, secret shame each summer. The other tiny fragment of her that I recall has me sitting in her living room: my grandmother is offering to fill the egg-cup in front of me with whiskey.
This photograph of my mother’s family has always seemed to me to be confusingly doubled. On the one hand, it might almost be a study in a certain sociological moment: ‘Ireland in the 1930s’; or, more generally, ‘prewar farm life’ (in which case its national character would disappear: this could be anywhere, any time in the first fifty years of the twentieth century). A good deal of what I read here is merely cultural: it has strictly nothing to do with what I remember of these individuals, and rather too much to say about their circumstances, about the obvious care with which they have prepared for this unusual morning when (perhaps for the first time since my mother was born) the family was to be photographed. It might equally be an illustration of how such people comported themselves before a visiting photographer in the days before it was usual for a family like this to own a camera.
The photograph is both a historical artifact and a reminder of something I’ve never actually known. My grandparents appear here like those images of past fashions of which Baudelaire wrote that ‘the living substance gave suppleness to what appears too stiff to us’. These figures inhabit their clothes, and the space around them, with a strange intimacy. All the markers of chronological distance are at the same time those of lived, tactile experience. It is this which gives such a photograph its specific power to thrust me into a temporal conundrum: what appears here as the very texture of the subjects’ lives is also what leaves me staring at them from a debilitating distance. And yet, I can transcend those details and grasp nothing less than the essence of my memory of my grandparents. The photograph rehearses with uncanny accuracy the clarity of the
images of them I recall. My grandfather’s suit is almost unchanged – but for the upward sweep of a lapel and his double-breasted waistcoat – from the suit I remember him as always wearing. His huge mottled hands and shock of white hair (here subdued for the occasion) hover, in my memory, just above their photographic doubles. My grandmother requires a greater degree of concentration, but still she seems as if she might step into either of the two moments I remember her as inhabiting.
In short, the photograph is like one of those images that appear in biographies, accompanying the narrative of the subject’s prehistory but never quite matching up with it. And at the centre of this particular photograph sits a fascinating blank: a hole in the surface of the image to which I am able to give a name but which I cannot look at without feeling myself alienated from the whole picture. It is the figure of my mother, whose face is quite unlike that of the being I knew. Everything in this frame is in some (even if tentative) way readable and recuperable in terms of my own experience, except, appallingly, my mother. So unfamiliar is this infant that I have sometimes been convinced that it cannot be her. I have tried to imagine a circumstance in which she would not appear, in which the unknown face that looks at me is in fact that of one of her sisters (the boy, by contrast, is totally familiar: my uncle’s expression is unmistakably that of several generations of the family). But brute chronology is against me: as the second child and first daughter, it can only be my mother who gazes out of this photograph with a look that undoes all my efforts at recollection, at making this image coincide with the facts I know.
When I first discovered it (after both my parents were dead), this photograph of my mother came as something of a shock. While I was able to find in it so many reminders of a specific history – a history that was both mine and something more abstract, more ‘historical’ – my mother seemed to be entirely absent. She was reduced to a photographic archetype: the infant dandled on her mother’s knee. I could find nothing of her there, and therefore nothing of myself. And this absence, this feeling that she was manifestly present but just out of reach, was distinctly painful.
¶ Studio
I put aside this first instance of my own photographic history and began to concentrate on an image of my father. He is aged about seven: the occasion is his First Communion, and he is photographed in a studio, looking so like me over forty years later that, having misplaced my own Communion photos, I can still picture them hovering just below the surface of this one, identical in almost every detail. I found this photograph not long after my father died, and although I’d been reminded all my life of my resemblance to him, I was still shocked to discover the extent of the similarity between our seven-year-old selves. In fact, I half suspected that I’d been dressed, in the early summer of 1976, precisely to replicate this photograph. Certainly, no other child I knew had suffered the bizarre indignity of a tailor-made, short-trousered, three-piece suit, and as I looked at my father’s costume – only a handkerchief and the barely visible clip of a pen in his top pocket distinguished his get-up from my own – I felt as if he’d perpetrated a bitter practical joke across the decades.
On the reverse of the print, a date has been stamped in purple ink – ‘23 May’ – but the year is illegible. My dating of this image is thus imprecise, though I have always imagined that the year is 1935. But as my father was born in November of 1928, this would place the photograph – assuming that he was seven years old at the time of his First Communion – somewhere in 1936. And so, by this simple belated recalculation, my father’s image begins to edge a little closer to the earliest photograph of my mother. The studio photograph, pictured, as the reverse of the image informs me, ‘by the Owl Studio’ (the first and last letters of the studio’s name are the eyes of a pair of birds in profile: eyes almost as wide as those of my father on the other side). A vaguely defined backdrop hovers behind the young boy: an odd combination of two looming trompe-l’oeil trees or bushes and a black-and-white-squared tiled floor receding into the distance. The scene abuts awkwardly and unconvincingly an intricately patterned carpet on which stands a small table with a glass vase full of flowers. My father’s hand grips the leading corner of the table, his arm held stiffly in his suit; from his short trousers his legs descend in pale socks and highly polished shoes. The white rosette in his lapel is overexposed and glares out from his dark jacket like a puff of white ectoplasm in a spiritualist photograph of half a century earlier. He holds his head awkwardly above a collar which looks stiff and too new. His hair has been plastered to one side (which recalls my father’s insistence on painfully scraping my hair into the same style for my Communion photo). Palely glaring towards the photographer with a look that is half terror, half curiosity, he is a little startled light bulb of nervous energy above the gloomy stricture of his garb.
The image is a mass of antique detail. It fixes its subject rigorously within the constraints of the past. The scene is so rigid in its arrangement that there appears at first to be little of my father there at all. It seems an image stalled at the level of the formal pose, and therefore susceptible to no imaginative investment beyond the rigours of a certain sort of knowledge. And that knowledge is scant. I can connect this diminutive figure only with a scattering of clichés: the formal occasion of a studio portrait, the demands of the photographer (hinted at by the rigidity of the gesture that connects my father to the edge of the table) and of the parents who hover outside the frame. I picture a familiar strictness in his father’s demeanour, but cannot see my grandmother at all. The only biographical fact to which I can attach the photograph at first comes from my knowing that not long after it was taken, my father would awake one morning to find himself paralysed from the waist down. He will spend months immobilized, before whatever undiagnosed catastrophe has befallen him will finally lift and he will be able to walk again. In the meantime, he will have been trundled about the streets in a wheelbarrow (or so the rather picturesque story he told had it).
All of this seems to situate my father in a distant, almost legendary past. It is as if photography itself were to blame for his paralysis, as if he has been scrubbed, starched and pressed flat by the weight of formality. And yet this is also the photographic instant at which I have imagined that my father comes alive in my memory. In the long course of my struggle to connect the images with myself, I became neurotically convinced of their fragility. I decided to photocopy those I thought most significant. The copies would ensure that the iconic originals remained untarnished by my melancholically regular handling. This photograph of my father proved, however, impossible to copy accurately. Beneath the photocopier’s light, the image almost vanished. The studio sank into nothingness; my father’s suit became an oblong void, only slightly more black than the surrounding gloom. Out of the darkness, a few details glinted like bright satellites orbiting the dead world of my father’s presence at the centre. A few specks of pure white still insisted: the edges of the flowers, a single sock, the pallid insignia of the handkerchief, the rosette and a pristine collar. His hand still clung, as if severed, to the now obscured edge of the table. For all its newly darkened strangeness, this was the moment when I could say for the first time that the face which hovered above these few details was recognizably that of my father. What had appeared in the actual photograph to be the unknowable face of a young boy gazing at the camera six decades earlier became, in the photocopy, an expression I knew, half-quizzical, half-proud.
¶ The unique being
In my father’s Communion photograph there is a fragility about him that is quite absent from the other photographs of him I possess. There, he controls his own image successfully; here, he has not quite managed to appear wholly confident, or pious, or pleased with himself. It is a face with which I felt I could identify. The photograph’s resemblance to those of my own First Communion was only the most obvious connection: really, I identified with my father’s inability here to become properly part of the surrounding formal scenography. I was convinced that this
quality in the image could not be explained by his age. It was not only that my father was a child here, but that he revealed, inadvertently, a tenderness that I felt I recognized and at the same time could not conjure out of my own repertoire of memory-images. Such, at least, was my imagined connection with the image as I set it aside and turned to another.
In a photograph of my mother aged, it seemed, about eighteen, another sort of exception presented itself: here, my mother looked more assured, more at ease, than I had ever seen her. A group of seven young women stands in bright sunlight in front of a sturdy greenhouse. The occasion is not difficult to ascertain: one of them holds a book, and two others clutch rolls of paper; they have just, I am certain, received their Leaving Certificates. The scene is the exterior of a school in north Kerry half a century ago. They are wearing, on this perfect summer day, a variety of dresses which place them earlier, as if they are modestly sporting the fashions of the previous decade. But they do not look dated; they have dressed up for the occasion and they all face the camera proudly, squinting slightly into the sunlight. Most of them look slightly awkward. They seem, in the way that the youth of the past often do, to be much older than their late teens; a few already look almost maternal. My mother stands at the back, the tallest of the group, her body turned slightly at an angle so that I notice first the elegance of her jacket and the way she faces the photographer with a poise which her classmates, for all their eager address to the camera, seem to lack.