Free The Past by Neil Jordan Page A

and shoulders of the photographer and except for your stare, which is remarkably direct, you seem an ordinary child.

THREE
    BRAY, 1922

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    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