Crossing the Line. Martin Dillon
coffee brewing in an Italian percolator. His daily routine included a walk with Heine round the drab streets of the Lower Falls and the nearby Dunville Park. His gait was as eccentric as his personality, and he minced rather than walked, always dressed in a finely tailored suit with polished, laced shoes. Looking back, I suspect he would not have been out of place on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in James Joyce’s day. He had very few paintings by his brother, Gerard, in his small ‘kitchen house’, but the blind on his downstairs window was a painted canvas – a gift from Gerard. I can recall Uncle Gerard arriving one summer day to wallpaper the tiny living room and staircase. He completed the task by using watercolours to draw heads and abstract shapes on the wallpaper.
Owing partially to his dream of becoming a professional singer, Joe had moved to London when he was younger. While he’d been blessed with a superb tenor voice, he lacked the money to pay for classical training, and his ambition quickly evaporated. Still, his love of opera brought him into contact with creative, bohemian types and provided him with a busy social life. This allowed him to live freely as a gay man – something he kept secret from his family back home. Ironically, after he returned to the family home in Belfast years later, he had a falling out with Gerard when they discovered they loved the same man – a prominent, married pianist. Initially, the pianist had a secret affair with Joe for several years until he met Gerard at a party Joe was hosting, and he fell madly in love with him. The pianist dumped Joe and began an affair with Gerard that lasted for a decade. The pianist was Joe’s last lover for reasons he never explained.
But other more compelling reasons may have prompted him to change his life so drastically, to the point he became celibate and a regular churchgoer. His health was declining, and he was obsessed with his mortality. He feared the dark and began a pattern of staying up till four in the morning and sleeping until midday. In some respects, I believe the early religious indoctrination he received from his mother found him again and convinced him Catholicism would bring him peace. Further, celibacy undertaken as a penance would save him from God’s retribution. The man, who once considered the priesthood, was undertaking the priestly requirement of a life without sex.
Of course that metamorphosis was nowhere on the horizon earlier in his life when his sister Molly joined him and Gerard in London, saying she, too, needed to escape the parochialism of their native Belfast. She chose London primarily to fulfil her dream of becoming a female underwear designer.
By any stretch of the imagination, the siblings made a strange trio. Joe was lean, sophisticated and high-camp, while Gerard was small but robust and slightly effeminate. Molly was very butch and loved wearing tailored men’s suits. Much to Gerard’s dismay, she still regarded herself as his guardian and emotionally smothered him with her forceful personality. In the late 1940s, after their parents died, Joe declared he was tired of the London scene and returned home.
THREE
Gerard Dillon: The Making of an Artist
In his early teens, Gerard was highly influenced by Molly and Joe, two siblings determined to pursue creative careers. As a boy, Joe had expressed a desire to be a priest, but in his teens he chose instead to pursue a career as an opera singer. Molly dreamed of being a costume designer and Gerard, who loved drawing and painting, had ambitions to become an artist. Gerard had to settle for a job as a house painter, but he confided to Molly that it enabled him to learn to use paint and colours.
By then, he was a shy 18 year old with a gentle personality and a sense of humour that hid a deep secret. He was gay and troubled by awful feelings of guilt, stemming mostly from a religion that branded homosexual acts mortal sins – the kind of sins that would send him straight to Hell. In an effort to deal with his emotional pain and apparent ‘sinfulness’, he naïvely turned to the Catholic Church for help. During confession in Clonard Monastery, he sought absolution for harbouring deep emotional desires for young men. The priest angrily told him it was not enough to confess his sins. If he did not change his ways, he would burn in Hell for all eternity because his desires were ‘unnatural’. When Gerard explained he could not change how he felt, the priest threatened to physically eject him from the confessional. He warned Gerard that he could be excommunicated. The experience left Gerard disillusioned with Catholicism, and he decided churchgoing was no longer for him.
Feeling trapped on all sides, he followed his brother, Joe, to London where he worked as a house painter and undertook a range of construction jobs, sometimes labouring alongside Joe. It wasn’t long before Gerard learned his older brother was also gay. But it was a topic they didn’t discuss, and Joe denied Gerard access to his gay circle. Gerard later confided in George Campbell that he felt Joe did not want to be responsible for him. Joe was either reluctant to encourage Gerard’s homosexuality or feared Gerard would outshine him in his social milieu. The latter was probably closer to the truth because one of Joe’s boyfriends left him for Gerard soon after they were introduced. The loss, or ‘steal’ as Joe saw it, hurt him deeply and encouraged him to build a fence round his private life.
As soon as Joe returned home to Belfast, Molly and Gerard moved into the same building. They had separate apartments because Gerard wanted his privacy. Life near Molly turned out to be more than he bargained for, and the small price he paid her for his apartment cost him his privacy. Since he was her tenant, she felt she could arrive in his place unannounced, pour herself a drink and sit down. If he was relaxing with a friend in the garden, she would often open her window upstairs and eavesdrop on their conversation. She might make obtuse observations about a bird or a strange cat on the garden wall as a way of inserting herself into their discourse.
Eventually, he managed to escape her clutches by renting an apartment in a quiet, upscale part of London. It gave him more privacy, but it did not reverse his tendency to conduct many of his sexual encounters in the shadows. He also continued to work hard, mostly doing odd jobs. Though he didn’t have much money, he saved what he could to buy paints and canvasses and to travel to the West of Ireland, a place he fell in love with on his first visit there in 1944. After experiencing the Blitz of London, the exquisite landscape of Ireland’s rugged west captivated him.
On 13 October 1944, he wrote a letter to Madge Connolly, a friend in London, containing illustrations. It is a letter I treasure. In it he described a trip he made to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, with his friend, the artist George Campbell:
Well pet, I got to the Aran Islands for three weeks – my God it was the most glorious holiday I’ve ever had, I think. What a change away from the world, complete and absolute peace, living a very natural, almost primitive life from day to day, not knowing what day of the week it is, hearing no news except a scrap when the boat arrived from Galway once a week … I painted life on Inishmore and had there good luck to sell two watercolours to visitors to the island. It helped me along. We stayed with Pat Mullen who has a lovely house on Frenchman’s beach. He has plenty of books naturally, and some lovely records – the New World Symphony – lots of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and others and scores and scores of Irish dance music and ballads. We had a few dances in Pat’s during our stay. It was not unusual for Pat to come home at 12.30 a.m. and drag us out of bed to have a dance – bringing along with him a young island girl. There is no woman in the Mullen house – just Pat and his son, PJ, who is a male edition of Barbara. He is great fun and was a wonderful companion, very simple and childlike – with a wonderful sense of humour. He is absolutely unspoiled tho’ he has been in the Merchant Navy.
There was a genuine innocence in the way Gerard described dancing in the early hours to recordings of Irish music. It was something he inherited from his childhood. He liked nothing better than a traditional Irish get-together with music and people reciting passages from their favourite plays. All his life, he had a love for Irish folk ballads and classical music. It was a passion he shared with his brother, Joe, and with George Campbell, who played guitar like a true flamenco musician. In another part of the same 1944 letter, he explained why the West attracted him:
Travelling nowadays is the only drawback. It takes the train (a 3rd rate train too, very uncomfortable) 6 to 7 hours from Dublin to Galway – and later it took the Steamer nine and a half hours from Galway to Inishmore. Of course it was a wonderful experience. They (the islanders) were getting ready for the yearly fair in Galway. The steamer stopped at Inishmore first because it