Raymond Deane: Composing the story of life as an alcoholic

In My Own Light: A Memoir

Author: Raymond Deane

ISBN-13: 978-1908308573

Publisher: The Liffey Press

Guideline Price: €17.95

Raymond Deane is one of our leading composers, with many important orchestral and chamber works, and three operas in his catalogue, several of which have been commercially recorded. He is the author of a seminal essay, The Honour of Non-Existence (1995), exposing the invisibility of the composer in Irish society. He is a political activist, having established the Ireland-Palestine solidarity campaign.

He is also one of our leading alcoholics. Leading, because for several years he was ahead of the posse in his drunkenness, and leading now because he has written an honest, straightforward and fearless account of his hell.

Many Irish people will not, or cannot, confront their alcoholism. By going public, Deane has not only fulfilled an essential personal need – to tell one’s own story – but he has also performed a vital public service by making clear how profoundly alcoholism can affect the person, the family, the work, the psyche, and how the condition can be transcended. He has shown that causing pain to others – in Deane’s case parents, siblings, girlfriends – is one of the worst stigmata one can bear in sobriety.

We have a vocation for alcohol. The late Michael Hartnett believed religiously that an Irish poet must be drunk. The sight of him hauling himself, hand-over-hand, along the railings of Baggot Street in desperate need of a pub will never leave me. I’ve seen Raymond, too, in a similar condition, but one is not frightened by these shockers if one is pursuing the same route.

Inside the bottle

Many of Deane’s experiences are unique, as they are for all alcoholics. His descriptions of daymares read like magical realism. All the negatives which have underpinned his life become real demons when he experiences panic attacks, amnesia and delirium tremens. We all need demons but only a few can confront them. I can’t. Deane has shown that he can. He tells both sides of the story: the view from inside the bottle and then from the outside. That is rare, and he achieves that.

As a result of death-defying binges, he suffered appalling hangovers, the cure for which was more drink, quickly.

After his first hangover, he resolved to never drink again. He soon persuaded himself that “I could be a ‘normal’ drinker”. But increasing drunkenness led to incapacitation as his “normal” state - he couldn’t compose, or function as any kind of recognisable human being.

Total physical collapse came after decades of abuse and three suicide attempts. Deane’s recovery is due to willpower, the love of a woman, and his commitment to the “wonderful art” he had “betrayed”.

The prurient reader will skip to page 125 and his first drink, passing over what appears to be an unremarkable childhood. All through his puritanical upbringing we are waiting for something to happen. It doesn’t. But no one writes memoirs of a happy childhood. Deane would have us believe that his was close to idyllic. There was “precious little misery”; he was cherished by his parents. But somewhere in there was the key to “my life’s eventual descent into darkness and chaos”.

He is an artist, and he knows how to present a sub-theme effectively. When it appears in the major key, the facts about this happy childhood make it clear it was built on uncertainty, insecurity, fear of displacement and isolation. The silences in each childhood episode speak louder than the angry shouting.

Suicide attempts

This is both a memoir and a confession. The memoir of childhood segues into the confession of alcohol. It is not a self-pitying monologue.

There is no attempt to either impress with the squalor of his condition or enlist admiration for his recovery. Despite a Dantesque gambit: “the hell of alcoholism comprises innumerable vicious circles within a vicious circle”, he plays it straight down the middle, which sometimes makes for uninteresting reading. Even the suicide attempts are told matter of factly.

The title comes from his aunt's comment that he had placed himself between the light source and his reading. That could be regarded as a subconscious desire to make everything darker, less amenable to reason. It might, for example, explain Deane's fascination with the gothic (he once considered an opera based on Melmoth the Wanderer and wrote a mock-gothic novel, Death of a Medium).

Deane defines a dipsomaniac as someone who can forego alcohol for prolonged periods.

Many writers and composers – the late AJ Potter was one – stay dry while working, and make up for it afterwards. Deane, too, has stayed sober for periods when he had a commission to complete, and as such he would qualify for dipsomania rather than alcoholic, were it not for the forza del destino which takes over as soon as he shows it the green light.

He took his first drink at 15: “The first station on a lengthy Calvary along which I would struggle for another 20 years.”

I had a head-start on Raymond. I first got drunk at the age of three, rendering all the nursery rhymes in my repertoire and I quickly found myself, in Raymond’s words, “bottled in”. Raymond speaks of his fear of growing up. Maybe his nursery rhymes became the avant-garde works by which he came to notice as a composer, a dismembering and debunking of the received wisdom.

He was an enfant terrible as a young composer – a dangerous presence in Irish music in the 1970s.

As a young drinker he was more terrible to himself than society.

Deane has always presented a dour, forbidding profile, and this has survived sobriety. In conversation he can be baffling and infuriating. A man who admits to loving salad cream can’t be all good.

There are many points in this story where the amateur psychiatrist can leap to conclusions: the inexplicable mysteries of the child, the loneliness of the long-distance drinker, the angry face to the world, confusion of fact and fiction to construct an acceptable memory.

The late John Moriarty observed that it is much more difficult to receive than to give. Deane says “I have never been a good guest”. It explains why he found it easy to “renege on participating in any transaction that was uncomfortable for me”. He rationalised it: he was a genius, therefore lonely, therefore depressed, therefore a drinker.

His self-delusion, that an alcoholic could not be responsible for his actions, is probably the most telling point in his story. To admit one’s alcoholism to others is comparatively easy. Admitting it to oneself is the real challenge.

Richard Pine's latest book is The Disappointed Bridge: Ireland and the Post-Colonial World.