In the Dark Room

by Brian Dillon

I must have put this treasured object aside a few years later, seduced away by a procession of fat-nibbed fountain pens and a little embarrassed to be seen at school sporting such a feminine object (even if I had told myself that the drab green was a more acceptably masculine colour). It was only after both my parents were gone that I took it out again. In the five years between their deaths, I think I might now and then have glimpsed both pens hidden away in drawers and corners, reminders of that December afternoon when I had felt for the first time, returning from our shopping trip, that my mother and I had a new and adult affinity. But this was the kind of thought which, in those years, I would quickly stifle: my mother’s belongings stuck around in our household, as quiet and undisturbed as the memory of her to which none of us ever gave a voice. The same silence persisted after my father died. Although his name never interrupted the uneasy truce between the three of us, we found ourselves surrounded by things that insisted on being handled, that made of our daily lives an unspoken conversation with the recent past. My own private response to this gulf between the material endurance of things and the silence that surrounded them was to appropriate, without much thought, certain objects. And so began a brief period, a few years, in which I seem to have gone out of my way to lose as many of my parents’ possessions as possible.

  I cannot now recall what became of my mother’s blue pen. I can only hope that it was spirited away by one of her sisters, who might have recognized in it something of the essence of her. I remember that the green pen was now the one that I identified with her, and carried with me always as a student, along with my father’s strapless watch and a gold pen presented to him on some professional occasion. In turn, I managed to lose both pens and break the watch (I can see it now, flying from my hand and landing at the bottom of a college staircase). I remember too my complete despair, standing on a rainy street, ransacking my pockets for the green pen, cursing my foolish urge to keep it about me like a magical talisman whose powers I did not, while I possessed it, yet comprehend.

  Only one object remains to me from the chain of interconnected artifacts that I am now recalling. A dusky blue fountain pen with gold detailing and nib: it was hidden, until my father’s death, at the back of the top shelf of the wardrobe in my bedroom. I remember, as a child, sometimes happening upon it as I rummaged about there, dragging out an ancient camera, still in its tattered box (I would train its dusty viewfinder on my room before replacing it guiltily). In that darkness, too, was an old vanity case. Its zip yielded reluctantly to reveal a still-gleaming array of mysterious objects: an old-fashioned shaving kit with elaborate, but bladeless, razor; two pristine chrome talc holders; a stiff and unused clothes brush. But it was the pen which I found most compelling, and wholly resistant to my imagination. I could never work out how it functioned. I knew there must be some connection between the tarnished gold of the nib, with its minutely inscribed legend – ‘Schaeffer’s 33, Made in USA, 14K’ – and the svelte rectangle of gold set into its barrel. If I hooked a fingernail under one end, into an oval indentation, the lever would give slightly. But I could never bring myself to pull it back all the way, a movement which might have revealed its purpose. Instead, the pen stayed in an imaginative vacuum: I never asked my father about it, and I wonder now whether he had forgotten about it as it lay snugly and dustily concealed. Eventually, I forgot it too.

  After my father died, I dug out his fountain pen and started to use it. Quite why I did so I am unable to say, but it might have had something to do with a sense that the life my brothers and I shared with the remains of our family home was coming to an end, and the pen seemed to connect to a version of my father I found freshly comforting (though I had never seen him use this pen). I quickly discovered that the rubber reservoir into which the pen sucked ink through its nib had perished, and the paltry drop which it was possible to attract was only enough to keep writing for a line or so: about twelve words. It now seems quite bizarre to me that I carried on using it for months in this fashion, refilling it every few minutes. After a few months of this I had the pen repaired, but the fully functioning object quickly lost its allure, and it now sits on my desk as a reminder of a time when its failing machinery was a sort of encouragement, a suggestion that a fresh start to everything was only minutes and inches away, at the tips of my fingers.

  ¶ Enigma

  In the corner of our sitting room stood a tall cabinet of dark wood and alarmingly thin and delicately engraved panes – the subject, I seem to recall, of many stern warnings from my mother as I approached. The cabinet contained two bone-china dinner sets: one somewhat garishly edged with gold leaves, the other more elegantly decorated with a subtler and more colourful flora. It was the second set, accompanied by a tentative tinkling, which I was now and then privileged to remove from its glittering home and lay out for a special occasion. For the most part, the contents of the cabinet lay just out of reach, their glassed-in proximity secured by a tiny key which resided in a small pewter vase on the polished surface above. This plane was more accessible, but still a realm from which I was excluded by the preciousness of the objects it supported. A huge crystal vase was flanked by its diminutive siblings. Where the central, gigantic mass ascended to a gaping height, its smaller relations were characterized in my mind by the way their faceted roundness seemed to invite a cool handling. In fact, the flattened prisms which punctuated their surfaces reminded me of nothing so much as the pineapple-shaped hand grenades lobbed, to devastating effect, in the pages of the WWII comic books to which I was addicted. In a rare destructive fantasy, I imagined seizing one of these glassy bomblets and hurling it in the direction of some imagined enemy at the opposite corner of the room.

  The contents of this cabinet are now dispersed, safe from my vividly recalled urge to trash the whole delicate armoury. Only one object has survived the slow-motion explosion by which the rest were sent careering into the possession of other family members, an object which had always seemed to inhabit a tactile universe a little closer to my own. ‘The blue thing’: this is the quite inadequate name by which I used to know a heavy glass bowl that sits on my desk as I write. It had occupied a place just in front of the more precious and transparent glass artifacts. It seemed, even then, to partake of another aesthetic entirely from the gaudy ornaments that surrounded it. Its simple, solid heft felt (and still feels) so much more modern. About three inches high and of a thickness and weight that sits as impressively in my hands now as it did many years ago, its most mysterious attribute was the wide expanse of its rim. The solidity of this thing was only a prelude to the wonder I felt on taking the bowl from its place on the cabinet and gazing down on its surface. For the endlessly alluring sight that greeted me was this: seen from above, the radius of blue which enclosed the darkness at the centre of the bowl held within it a layer of pure gold. This gilt substratum was, and remains, a mystery to me. I turned, as I do now, the glass in my hands, trying to discern where in its depths this vision might reside. It is not there, and my first thought – that it is just the reflection of my own puzzled face – is dispelled as I edge away from the bowl, having placed it on a dark background only to find that the phenomenon persists.

  Where some objects connect quite clearly in my memory with real events and circumstances, others recall only themselves. At first, the blue bowl seems one of these: I can link it only to my own past contemplation of it, my state of wonder at its enigmatic colouring. But this is a clue to its real function in my memory. For many years, I have been unable to look at its mutable blue without calling to mind another instance of the same (but of course it is not the same) colour. The image it brings to mind is undated, a fugitive impression from childhood which has stayed with me for I know not what reason. It is the image of a blue enamel saucepan held by my mother in the kitchen of my grandfather’s house one summer. The memory amounts to no more than that: a flash of blue at the end of my mother’s arm. That blue, which corresponds to no colour I have seen since – and I have looked for it, o
ver the years, everywhere: on the surfaces of things, in the depths of fabric, in a succession of real blue skies and filmed or painted ones – is perfectly visible to me now, and quite incommunicable. It fits no chronology; instead, it simply persists. But the image is not, for all its obscurity, devoid of meaning. It brings with it, as it fades into view in front of the bowl – a cinematographer’s match-cut between two rhyming cylinders of blue – a sense of calm, of a chromatic unity of times. The colour seems to have settled into its proper place, to have found its moment, secure in its niche in my memory for precisely the reason it is so mysterious: it is not part of a story.

  If that blue recalls anything now, it is, oddly, another colour entirely: the red interior of my mother’s sewing box. Here is Walter Benjamin in 1938, in A Berlin Childhood around 1900, contemplating the dark interior of his own mother’s sewing box:

  I began to question whether the box was really meant for sewing in the first place. That the spools of thread and yarn within it tormented me by their shady allure only strengthened my doubt. What attracted me about those spools was their hollow core; originally, this was intended for an axle which, on being rotated, would wind up the thread on the spool. Now, however, this cavity was covered on both sides by a black label which bore, embossed in gold, the name and number of the firm. Too great was the temptation to press my fingertips against the centre of the tag; too intimate, the satisfaction when it tore and I dipped into the hole beneath.

  Benjamin remembers intimacy, depth: a hollow which promises the dark, vaguely erotic pleasure of probing, then penetrating, its contents. The sewing box is an image of concealment and revelation. I remember the mystery of threads and fabrics, of slipping my fingers between tattered pattern books to discover ancient remnants, buttons and needles. But what I recall most clearly is the sight of the box lying open, the plush red (which may have been silk) attached to the inside of its wicker lid thrust back, slightly askew where one hinge had begun to give way. I remember the box as something open and alive with activity, moments, to borrow Benjamin’s words, ‘when the sewing things ruled over me with inexorable power’ as I submitted to the fittings and alterations which would stretch an afternoon into an agony of stillness, boredom and frustration. I do not remember my mother’s increasing discomfort in later years, as her hands stiffened and she found herself unable to thread a needle or to force it, with the hardened but raw tip of her finger, through the fabric. I remember only that the sewing box was opened less frequently, that its contents, which once saw a succession of new, bright objects pass through it on the way to becoming garments or mendings, now rarely altered, so that already, long before she died, it seemed a thing from another time, a memory of childhood while I was still a child.

  ¶ Library

  I have around me, scattered on shelves, in chaotic piles, lost in ostensibly temporary storage, about half of the one thousand or so books which my father owned. His library is both an ever-present reminder and a solid embodiment of the ways in which I have tried to give a pattern to his memory. There was a time, I remember, when I endeavoured to keep my father’s books together, to maintain the integrity of a collection that had been such a vivid presence in my childhood. But my heart was never in the task of keeping all his years of reading unified on my own bookshelves; the books are now so completely integrated with my own that I sometimes forget whether a given volume is his or my own.

  The novelist Georges Perec, in an essay with the playfully prim title ‘Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books’, begins his reflection on his own library by remarking: ‘every library answers a twofold need, which is often also a twofold obsession: that of conserving certain objects (books) and that of organizing them in certain ways’. Looking at my father’s books, dispersed among my own, I notice that I have belatedly inherited his principle of organization; or rather, have abandoned, as he did in our book-strewn home, any pretence at an order other than that imposed by day-to-day reading habits and the space available. There was a time in my life, not long after my father died, when I subjected both our libraries to a rigorously alphabetical arrangement. Numerous relocations, countless packings and unpackings, have put paid to that project and I realize that I have lately begun to reproduce exactly the unruliness of my father’s library: a chaos in which, like him, I insist that I can find my way, that I remember (of course, it is a lie) where each and every volume is. Perec elaborates:

  Books are not dispersed but assembled. Just as we put all the pots of jam into a jam cupboard, so we put all our books into the same place, or into several same places. Even though we want to keep them, we might pile our books away in trunks, put them in the cellar or the attic, or in the bottoms of wardrobes, but we generally prefer them to be visible.

  Even when hidden away, books are simply awaiting their proper home in a fantasized library, where one day they will converse with one another calmly.

  My father’s books were divided between my parents’ bedroom and a built-in, floor-to-ceiling bookcase which I think my mother eventually convinced him to install in the dining room. Her hope was, I suppose, to rid the bedroom finally of the astonishing profusion of volumes stacked in ragged piles about one side of the room. She almost got her way. Even after most of his books had been tucked away downstairs, my father still contrived to have much of his collection tottering by his bedside, from which position the whole edifice would occasionally come tumbling down as he tried to pluck a book from the middle of the pile. My mother despaired, I think, less of the inexorable accumulation (though she would sometimes scandalize my father with the barbarous notion that he ought to ‘get rid’ of these stray books) than of his unfathomable urge to keep a good hundred or so perched perilously within reach at all times.

  This tower of books was a source of endless wonder to me: an image of my father’s incomparable knowledge. But it was merely an intriguing adjunct to the greater part of his library, which loomed over me in the shape of the bookcase whose upper, glass-guarded, shelves held the most precious and unattainable objects. I can still recall the precise placing of certain books: the slightly buckled slip-cover of a two-volume paperback edition of War and Peace took pride of place at the top left, the sturdy capital letter at the start of a parade of subordinate Russians, giving way, towards the other end of the shelf, to equally forbidding, if less weighty, Victoriana: Trollope, Eliot, the tattered green leather of a deluxe Oliver Twist, the only book I recall my father reading aloud to me (for years, I remembered little of it beyond the bumptious comic alliteration of the beadle). The rest of this upper stratum was punctuated by titles whose oddity fed my image of my father the reader. The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, with its curious transparent dust jacket, was especially opaque to me, though somehow, I thought, related to Aldous Huxley’s Lotus Eaters a few shelves below (I had no idea what was denoted by ‘lotus’ or ‘opium’ nor what the effects of ingestion might be). A little further down, the glass doors stopped above two open shelves on which stood a selection of Penguins: the bruised orangery of Lawrence, Waugh, Ford Madox Ford, Hemingway. These, while more accessible, held little interest. Only much later would I explore their interiors, and recognize there, in the last years of my father’s life, the record of an aspect of him that was also a barely articulated point of contact between us.

  ¶ Documents

  In the summer of 1990, a couple of months after my father died, I finally found the courage to go through some boxes of his belongings which my brother Kevin had discovered tucked beneath the foot of his own bed. This cache of old documents seemed, to a mind not yet ready to tackle the more exacting task of examining the contents of my father’s room, to exist at some consoling remove from my immediate memory of him. The first box I opened that afternoon had, I thought, an almost historical interest, rather than an emotional one. The box was packed with papers: some loose, others neatly inserted into plain brown card folders or held together in flimsy reams by archaic brass paperclips of the ki
nd with a thick round top and two thin wings which splayed to keep the leaves in place. As I began to pull bunches of these papers from their hiding place, I realized that I had happened upon the archive of a period in my father’s life about which I knew next to nothing. I knew this much: that in the mid-1960s he had graduated from University College Dublin with a degree in Economics and Politics, and that in the first year of his course he had also studied English and Philosophy, the same subjects in which I was about to begin my third year of study. In fact, I’d already inherited some tangible remains of my father’s studies: from the bookcase downstairs, I had plucked numerous volumes for my own use, and been occasionally surprised to discover that my father’s intellectual ambitions had once been rather more current, even radical, than his later literary tastes suggested. I remember how impressed I was to unearth at the back of a lower shelf a copy of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, and how I began (without ever discussing such things with my father) to piece together an image of him that was quite at odds with his taste for Trollope (whose works I deprecated without reading a single page) and his loftily dismissive reaction to my interest in the volumes of existentialist philosophy and Marxist political theory which he had left untouched for decades.

  I have no doubt that my father felt some pride at my modest academic successes, but his reaction never got beyond the wry (and to me quite dismaying) suggestion that I might do well to restrict my reading to what he called ‘the classics’ before embarking on such esoteric studies. Only once did he ever comment directly on my own academic efforts. A few months before he died, I had been elated to have an essay returned (the topic, I think, was The Tempest) not only with an astonishingly high grade but with a tutor’s comments which suggested that my father’s warning at the start of my university career – to the effect that my hitherto dismal academic record might not augur well for a degree involving, as he put it, ‘a lot of research’ – could be challenged at last. He read my essay in silence. His curt response – only years later did it occur to me that its asperity hid a certain pleasure and surprise – was to note that my prose style was excessively ‘Johnsonian’. I must have rehearsed that scene in my mind dozens of times since (such, in a way, is the orphan’s tedious fate), as if stuck for ever in a moment of mute adolescent rage at having my ambitions reduced to a middle-aged quip. No doubt, of course, he was correct.