Brian Dillon, the writer and critic, is sitting in his front room in Greenwich laughing about the time he was on the Rathmines College public speaking team. Dillon was repeating his Leaving Certificate at the college and, as recounted in his superb new book Ambivalence, found public speaking a surprising way to overcome his shyness.
He was elected to the two-person team representing the college in provincial competitions. His fellow team member, it turns out, was the future Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald. Dillon’s performances shocked his peers, who considered him a deeply serious, neurotic young man. But once on stage, Dillon was transformed. He borrowed camp and obscene jokes from his favourite comedians. He mock-abused the fashion sense of the event’s chairperson. And, inspired by the work of the Viennese Actionists, he threw a bag of offal into the audience.
“Mary Lou’s winning speech,” he says, “was an argument about which way round toilet roll should hang. And I can’t remember which way round she wanted it to go ... but I remember thinking it was the wrong way!”
On one level, Ambivalence is a straight-up memoir of Dillon’s life between the ages of 17 and 26, taking us through the shocking death of both his parents within the space of five years, his initially disastrous attempts at getting through university, and his longing for a more fulfilling, culturally rich life. But it is also a poignant and sometimes very funny account of a life in late 1980s and early 1990s Dublin and an elegy for the revolutionary force of an education gleaned through wide and close readings of music and style magazines, German films and French theories.
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Dillon lives in southeast London with his wife, the writer Emily LaBarge, and their exuberant border collie, Belle, who keeps a suspicious eye on our conversation. Dillon’s books have previously focused upon grief, ruins, hypochondria and the oblique pleasures of essays and sentences. Indeed, you could say Dillon is an expert on the melancholy condition.
While Ambivalence touches upon these topics, the tone is lighter and the pace increased. It is the first of Dillon’s books that feels like a genuine page-turner – which may have something to do with the distancing effect employed in the book’s narration. Ambivalence is narrated in the third person, through the prism of a character only ever known as “B”.
“I wanted to write a book about education,” says Dillon. “I was running a whole academic programme in creative writing at Queen Mary University and it was a time when it felt as if education in the arts and humanities was under attack. And I thought I wanted to write something that was directly polemical about the value of an arts education. And then I realised that I would bore myself to death!”
Dillon points out the window across to the other side of Greenwich Park.
“So, I was sat writing in a cafe just over there and one day I started writing ‘he’ and ‘B’ instead of ‘I’. Immediately something happened. It allowed me to say things in a way [I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to]. It was a relief because the other great fear was of writing a book where the middle-aged writer smiles a wry smile at his youthful foolishness. I wanted to take this person seriously. That doesn’t mean the reader has to take them quite as seriously as he takes himself.”
But Dillon had plenty of reasons to take himself seriously in his late adolescence and early twenties. The book opens in late 1986. B’s mother has just died and he is lost, confused and secretly in love with his androgynous best friend. He fails to get enough points to attend university and is forced to repeat at Rathmines College where the public speaking events allow him to glimpse a more exciting version of himself. But that, too, soon ends in failure when his performance in a provincial competition falls flat amid a weak joke about Gay Byrne – who is in the audience – and the realisation that he sounds like “an insufferable posturing snob – and a bore”.
[ Affinities by Brian Dillon: A unique and masterful critic joins the dotsOpens in new window ]
In fact, the most fascinating figure in the early pages of Ambivalence is B’s father, who cycles to his civil service job in a three-piece suit and maintains a magnificent library in the family home, with beautiful editions of Tolstoy, de Quincey, and even copies of the Catholic Marxist journal Slant.
Yet there is a heartbreaking sense of thwarted ambition in his depiction. After the death of his wife, he is unable to face the sophisticated literature of his own library and can only read the consolations of Anthony Trollope and Patrick O’Brian. Within a few years, he collapses and dies suddenly one morning while walking through Harold’s Cross after attending Mass.
“My dad left school when he was 14,” says Dillon, “to become a messenger boy for the post office. And then he went back to university in the mid-’60s when he was in his mid-30s, and he had literary ambitions, he published some poems. He read an astonishing amount and incredibly widely for somebody in that period. But you’re correct in that something stalls for him, but it’s not just the classic thing of the civil service as a kind of place for frustrated intellectuals; it was also because things went wrong, particularly my mother getting sick.”
With both parents now dead, B and his two brothers are left to fend for themselves in the family home. What follows in Ambivalence is quite shocking.
“My brother kicked me in the balls at the front door,” Dillon recalls, “but I also threw a knife at his head! But it’s more about this strange kind of enclosed, turbulent little world that we retreated into, or found ourselves in [after our parents died]. Somebody said to me recently that it was a little bit like the world that Bono found himself in after his mother died with his father and brother, so you have these three men living in mourning – but not admitting they’re mourning. So I’m sure that the situation that I’m describing when I described that violence is familiar to many people, and it’s probably particularly familiar to many people in the wake of bereavement.”
After his father’s death, B returns to his library and reflects on his father’s own reading and his commitment to the value of literature.
“That is where a great deal of my own interest in and commitment to writing comes from but also, once my parents had died, it is now very obvious to me that I spent a long time looking for father figures. I remember watching an interview with Derek Jarman and it might just have been the tweed jacket and the antiquated bearing, but I recall thinking: ‘I’d like Derek Jarman to have been my Dad!’ So there’s something about an overidentification with these male, artistic, intellectual figures, that, of course, you don’t see at the time.”
The book is filled with moments of joy: a trip to Paris where B buys obscure French literary journals, smokes Gitanes, drinks Pernod and opens up to his friend about his dreams of being a writer; an encounter with a heavy-metal loving engineering student who takes B on exhilarating motorcycle rides around the UCD campus; and B ponders “could he genuinely love anyone who has not read and admired at least one book or article by Jacques Derrida?” before offering the definitive response: “Unthinkable.” Dillon’s writing, whether intentional or not, has never been so amusing. Indeed, Ambivalence foregrounds the wrongheadedness of youth but never judges it; in fact, it celebrates it.
“An aspect of the book,” he reflects, “is this sense that while chasing this dream of what it would mean to be a particular kind of writer or thinker, [important] things fall away. B, or I, is left with this very small coterie of friends who become my family because my parents have gone. And it’s very protective and self-protective, and I think the book is about the construction of a very self-protective, neurotic, hypochondriac, scornful, contemptuous character in order to kind of get through things. And I guess, the title ‘ambivalence’ is partly about that. It’s about the degree to which this thing that you chase becomes a trap.”
Yet B’s dreams were not in vain and, towards the end of the book, the B character more closely coincides with Brian Dillon, the writer and critic sitting across from me in a beautiful front room lined with books and records in Greenwich. Is it glib to suggest that Dillon lives the life his father wanted to live? He thinks about this for a long moment.
“That thought comes to me fairly regularly, especially as I am just five years younger than my dad was when he died. When I finished university and when I went on to do my PhD, all my extended family would say: ‘He would have been so proud of you!’ [But] I think, everything I love in art, literature, life is the precise opposite of everything my Dad loved. And so, I mention in the book this conversation that I had with him where I said, ‘I think I want to be a journalist’. He thought I meant a reporter [but] I didn’t mean that. I meant I wanted to be Gore Vidal or something, and my father’s fear was: ‘my child has set his sights on a racket!’”
But let’s flip that: how does Dillon think his father would feel about his life as a writer, critic and essayist? Would he approve? There is no pause this time.
“Well,” he says, smiling, “I think he would be well into it!”
Ambivalence is published by Fitzcarraldo on May 7th
