Free The Past by Neil Jordan Page B

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.

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    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