Take note, it ain’t called Diary Of A Gay Man. One of Moore’s skills is to explore the state of maleness without necessarily dwelling on his own orientation – although your average missionary-positioned monosexual will learn a lot about what it means to still be considered deviant in the 21st century. One of the author’s preoccupations is how males use contact-sport fucking as anaesthetic to a deeper ache. Consequently, the terrain he covers includes the sweat-drenched annexes and anterooms of subterranean clubs, as well as tube-lit bedsits. There are also a whole slew of apparently miscellaneous but subcutaneously interlinked meditations on war, work, power games, television’s theatre of cruelty, the meaning of community and the single life. His anonymous letters to the cosmos can be lewd and lustful as well as lonely testimonials, blues braggadocio or torch songs composed in spiritual quarantine. But the ‘black dog’ is always on the prowl. In one of his finest pieces, Moore acknowledges Andrew Solomon’s analogy of clinical depression as creepy-crawly ivy before expanding it to include bindweed, or convolvulus, a fast growing white-flowered weed that only propagates more fiercely the more you try to rid yourself of it.
“At night, the flowers look particularly attractive,” he writes. “Depression is a night-feeling, of shadows and shades and increased sensitivity to compensate for limited sight. One’s worldview becomes strangely like the image in the viewfinder of an infra-red camera: seeking out energy instinctively, the shapes one sees being primitive projections of one’s own desires and compulsions, blurry Turin-like saviours, offering ghostly promises of redemption.”
The book’s final lines quote Eleanor Rigby’s existential inquiry: “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”Diary Of A Man may not have the answer, but it does ask all the right questions.
Peter Murphy: Rather than a series of stand-alone columns on topical subjects, this book seems to return again and again to the theme of displacement, a longing for connection in London’s human zoo.
Dermod Moore: “It’s a curious thing about timing. The book literally came out within a few days of me stopping work as a psychotherapist. And it wasn’t planned like that, it was one of those coincidences, ’cos I arranged this sabbatical 18 months ago. So this has been an extraordinary review period, looking back on 12 years in London: that was then. I’m back in Dublin in a very different mood. It does seem like a chapter of my life is over. I’m moving to Italy for five or six months to write, staying with friends, all I have to do is pay for wood and electricity and detox from London, get the old creative juices going.”
There’s an amusing piece in there called ‘Creativity: It’s Cool For Cats’ where you describe the various neurotic things a person does in order to avoid writing.
“I’m easily distracted! If you want to stop yourself getting distracted by sex, then take yourself away from where the sex is! You can beat yourself up for years on end, and I did. The answer is you just move away from the distractions. It’s startlingly practical. And that’s what I’m doing.”
It’s interesting how much of the book speaks to males as a species, regardless of sexual orientation.
“I’ve come to realise that what I thought was my own private experience – and I’m a particular subset of a gay man who happens to like sex – when I began counselling and being a therapist and listening to men who weren’t gay, it was like, ‘Hang on – I recognise this!’ And I wouldn’t ordinarily have had that level of intimate conversation with heterosexual men before I started counselling. It’s not part of what we do, really, unless we’re really drunk, and then it’s not the same thing. Whereas listening to the struggles of men in general, I think we’re very obsessive, we need to distract ourselves, usually with work. Certainly, the arrival of kids and mortgages and that particular shock to the system is ultimately good for them. Yes, it’s stressful, but they’re happier within themselves ’cos they’ve got responsibility. But left to our own devices, we do seek... not something relational, but we’re always looking, and that’s a cause of frustration and an awful lot of pain. Women do that too, it’s just that in my experience, a lot of what preoccupies us is precisely this issue of trying to get away from the relational to something else imaginal, fantastic, erotic, special. Fireworks, really.”
The musings on male suicides seem connected with the idea of a generation of young men who have no idea what their function is in society anymore, caught between old macho and new man stereotypes.
“It’s a cliché, but I read that they’re now cloning embryos with two mothers. That’s an extreme example, but there’s something in that about, ‘What do men do when women are far better at adapting to the workplace, and through multi-tasking, can cope with modern life infinitely better than men?’ The danger with trying to respond to feminism is that then it becomes, ‘Ah, poor men, sure we can’t look after ourselves.’ But how can we take it seriously, looking at the purpose of our lives in a deeper way than just climbing up the greasy pole of career or ambition? That’s the problem with having lost a strong faith like Catholicism. What do you replace it with? We still need ideas of what it means to be a good man, a moral code of some kind. I wish I knew the answer to that one. It’s not money, I know that much.”
One of the book’s strongest attributes is that it manages to talk about emotions and feelings in a precise manner, without employing codified Oprah-isms.
“It is weird to look back on some of those pieces. I think I’d no choice when I was feeling particularly low. What do you do, do you call in sick? Or do you just stick at it? One of the things I worried about was that it would be too self-obsessed and too self-referential to work, and that people would wince reading it, and yet I didn’t know how to negotiate that, I just did it anyway and managed to not get sacked. But it helped not living in Ireland, so I didn’t bump into people. I’d manage to have chats with folks on the phone and not mention the column, and therefore I could almost, as it were, dissect the feelings, press Send, get it off to HOTPRESS, and that allowed me detachment.”
You can almost sense the author growing up over the course of the book, even though the pieces aren’t in strict chronological order.
“The column started off anonymously, as a way of trying to separate myself. It’s a curious thing about Ireland. We’re sensitised to the collective. We don’t particularly like people who stand out. We don’t necessarily cause ructions unless there’s drink involved, but that’s different. I think that’s true of me anyway. We tend not to say uncomfortably raw things sober and in company. And in a way, I took off to London so I could write about it and not have to cope with the reactions. So the distance helped me get forensic.”