The Past (10 page)

THE MONTHS AFTER the Communion breakfast are hardly memorable. The irises in the jam jars wither and before Sister Paul throws them out you filch one for your copybook, where it smudges the ink. The tree changes from green to golden and then finally empties itself and you wonder whether this is what is meant by the age of reason after all—a sense of absence. Then driver Jack comes and stands in the doorway with tears in his eyes and his cap in his hand and you see on the instant that this is one event that will distinguish this time
for you. You wonder what he is going to say. Something that will have the import of your father's words over the heather in the yellow chair. You look to Sister Paul for permission to rise from your seat but she anticipates the news from Jack's cap and his tears. She ushers you instead from the room, past Jack into a parlour you have never seen before, where there are oak chairs with slender ankles, green walls and a brown, glinting piano. You wait for Jack there, and his eyes and cap.

Soon after that you were taken from the school. Your education became sporadic. You would run on the Abbey stage now and then, in minor children's parts. Your mother, at the time of Jack's news, was appearing in a St John Devlin comedy, which broke all box-office records for a week. And it was in the Green Room of that theatre, the Abbey, that the photograph was taken of you. It was the first photograph. I can see you at last, your mother's arms framing your hair, which doesn't look blonde, since the print is bad. Your dress could be satin. It seems to be wet, clinging to your knees. You are staring at what must have been the cowled head and shoulders of the photographer and except for your stare, which is remarkably direct, you seem an ordinary child.

A
ND IT IS the spirit of that photographer that impels this book. James Vance, his passion for documentation, for capturing in a frame the shades of experience. Fascinated and maybe appalled by the wealth of his senses, did he take a puritan pleasure in sliding the print out of the acid bath, in seeing all those brash colours reduced to variations of grey? Or was the delight in the image ghosted on to the clean plate? As a boy, he hears Muybridge lecture in the Ancient Concert Rooms about his plates of galloping horses and wrestling men. He holds his father's sleeve, who queries loudly the airborne legs. But James just sees horses, as real as any that galloped on the Meath estate. And devotion to the magic of such images must have seemed a worthwhile thing to the man he gradually becomes. More than a pastime and yet less than a profession, since he had money, Lili tells me and his life, without the focus of necessity, needs its point. Does he grow with a conscience, Lili, a Protestant one, large and shambling, drawing him like a magnet towards all that he is not? And James Vance was unlike most of what he saw around him. So this conscience blooms, becomes like his person which is large and shambling, often ashamed of itself, ready to retreat at the slightest rebuff. His height comes to find expression in a stoop, his conscience in a constant apologetic demeanour which Lili claims was a kind of
pride. History has decreed that he is more than mere Irish after all, and while his person seems bent on destroying this distinction, his speech retains it. His accent stays with him like a bad lung. He would open a door, Lili tells me, enter a room with a movement that always seemed on the point of checking itself. It gave her what she calls her ‘turgid' feeling. But it can't stop me loving him, loving his obsession with days, months and years, with time and all its alterations in the faces he loves, on the building he loves, on the country he loves, as high collars must have made way for double-breasted suits, Ringsend brick for Wall Street concrete, as the waistcoats and pampooties of Aran islanders made way for shiny overcoats and steel-tipped boots. I think of the perplexity of the eternal child, of the vanity of all his efforts, as he tries to suppress the windmills of time, change and chaos into an ordered progression of prints, a march of moments pencilled in days, months and years, the four corners of each stuck down with Cow Gum, six prints to a page in that bulky album, hard-covered and black, like a Bible. I love the hopeless faith of this documentation, I pity the lack of faith that makes it necessary. I see both of us trying to snatch from the chaos of this world the order of the next, which is why even now, so long from the end, I am tempted to call him ‘father'.

HIS FATHER'S OBSESSION was for paint daubed on canvas. He could be seen around this time sitting on Bray prom, near the end of his years, trading on the fact, conscious of the enigmatic figure he cuts, furiously unmoved by anyone who stared, his black suit and
boots and his white hair (‘Bohemian') and the sea that he painted repeatedly, if it was not the promenade walk or the hotels on the road proper. Lili preferred him infinitely and takes endless pains to disprove consanguineous similarities. It is the difference, she claims, between photography and paint—

BUT TO GET back to the photographer, what I can see is his fascination with matters technical and his huge delight in that contrivance, and in every development of it. And even given what she sees as excess of humility, I imagine him taking a hidden pride, a sly pleasure in the mechanics of that black box. He knew its powers, how it worked. He would walk down the slums on the north side and plant the legs of his tripod among the turds and rotting vegetables and give pennies to thin boys to stand in attitudes of deprivation. I suspect he gave pennies because the attitudes of deprivation look so forced: he was a bad photographer after all, the only valuable thing about his ‘social' prints being the buildings behind the faces. I can almost see the copper gleaming in the thin boy's eyes. So picture him, the Protestant who had exchanged his horse for a conscience, on the Gloucester Diamond surrounded by vegetable thieves and dissolute husbands and all kinds of brassers, attempting to keep his thin kids quiet for the length of an exposure. They would have heard of the way the image magically wafts on to the coated paper. They would have gathered, from those tenements without parallel anywhere in Europe, into a respectful half-circle, a good six feet between each of them and the youth with his cowl, the magic of technology fascinating them all
the more because they were so unfamiliar with it. And among those on the other hand who would have disdained that magic—as they would have, I imagine, in the Abbey's Green Room—he would have been blessed with a magic of a different kind. For as he began his theatrical prints years later, he would have then been able to claim that sure sense of solid craft, that ‘know-how', that abstract concern with detail which is the tradesman's defence against the leisured, the educated, the effete.

WHICH IS NOT to say that he himself wasn't leisured, educated or effete. On the contrary, by virtue of his background he could well have been all three. We have already seen his way of opening doors. If we open the door slightly wider we can see him in that house in Sydenham Villas, facing Bray Head, its left side towards the sea front where in his last years his father used to paint. The last in a series of houses they owned, all of them round Bray and its environs, the first of which bordered on Lord Meath's estate and vied with it as a house of ‘quality', I can see its precise, peeling, shabby grandeur; both its inhabitants with the accents of wealth, with the bric-à-brac of wealth thrown in odd corners round those rambling corridors, with everything to do with wealth except the momentum which keeps wealth going. Their ambition must have wandered, generations ago, from the sturdy concerns of their Huguenot forebears. They once owned property in Bray, a small ceramics factory, a shop in London and another in Dublin. Someone had scattered delftware round Europe from there, renowned once for its blue and green handpainted
lozenges, for its whorls and for the brittle ‘ting' each rim would give when plucked with the thumbnail. But as the parsimony of fathers is changed to the patrimony of sons and the painter had inherited along with an income an impatience with the details of commerce which he handed to the photographer as an inadequacy, the shops were leased to thrifty chemists and the factory, which had shut one year now long beyond memory, stayed shut, stacked with layer upon layer of forgotten, unsold delft.

T
HE VANCE FORTUNE proves more brittle than that delft. It lasts with the glaze of its lozenge and the scallop of its edge intact to find its home in antique collections. But their estate decays with the symmetry of poetry leading to the photographer, a thin trickle of dividends and the house in Sydenham Villas. Lili claims James was half-hypocrite, with his assumption of the causes and tenets of the revival, that he had ‘airs below his station' which she seems to think are even worse than airs above. But one can glimpse something different—the thin sense of despair, the slow irony of history that reduces the difference between his house and that of his Papist neighbours to that of a coat of paint. He carries that difference like his conscience, like a bad lung. I see him on the slopes of Dublin Bay, somewhere around Killiney, in autumn, when the eucalyptus bark is peeling, reeking with the smell of tomcats. The sea is viscous, metal-hued. That difference has preyed on him, it becomes an effort to walk upright. He has read Hegel, Marx, Saint-Simon and has glimpsed the sublime unity through his favourite, Rousseau. The exhaustion of his background seems to lift. He sees the tide of history, and people simply washed.

He must love that sea, he feels, he must welcome all its movements, and among them the ebb and erosion of his class. For who is
more uniquely placed, he asks himself and almost shouts the question at the hillside, to give themselves freely, wholeheartedly to Nationalist Ireland? It is their very base of privilege and the decay of that base, the one shearing them of all self-interest, the other opening their eyes, that gives them uniqueness. Who? he shouts this time and the echo could shift rocks. It returns, without an answer. And so he turns and decides to accept. Typically, Lili might say. To accept the decay of his fortunes and the iniquity of them, to retain the paltry privilege he has left and to work towards the elimination of all privilege. He climbs the hill, peels off some eucalyptus bark and rubs his teeth with it. And as the flavour spreads round his mouth, draining all the moisture and as his tongue retreats from the flavour of resin, the question persists with him. He sees the neatness of his formulations, how he has followed them with his shambling rigour, only to be led back to precisely the state he was in when the formulations began. And is it simply the state, he wonders, that suits him best? Is all the agony of thought, he wonders, is it just a wheel that turns and changes nothing, however wide the circumference, always returning to where it began? The cones of eucalyptus are around his feet as he heads for the Vico Road, like odd excretions from those striped erotic trees. He kicks them aside with his high-laced boots, their heavy soles that could belong to an intelligent tradesman or a gentleman who aspires to be an artisan.