Literary world will miss a real
man of words
The death of Irish novelist John McGahern has robbed the country
of one of its most distinctive writers. RONAN McGREEVY explains why his
work should be cherished for years to come.
 By RONAN McGREEVY
THE DEATH of novelist John McGahern last week provoked a deluge of tributes
which went well beyond the usual eulogies accorded to a dead writer.
In many ways he personified the country that Ireland used to be. He understood
how hard life was for the people around him. He understood that fear was
often the most pervasive emotion in people’s lives: fear of poverty,
which was all pervasive in the area of north Roscommon/south Leitrim where
he grew up, and the fear of dying and death, to which he became well acquainted
at an early age.
He understood why people feared the Church and, even worse, eternal damnation
and how a demoralised society resorted to silence and hypocrisy to function.
He also understood the emigration experience to Britain having been an
emigrant himself.
In his last novel That They May Face The Rising Sun there is a brilliant
description of the netherworld that many Irish emigrants to this country
find themselves in.
Joe Ruttledge is a returned emigrant who has come home to live around
a lake in Co. Leitrim. When asked what he has against England he replies:
“Nothing but it’s not my country and I never feel it’s
quite real or that my life there is real. That has its pleasant side as
well. You never feel responsible or fully involved in anything that happens.”
McGahern wrote about the struggles of ordinary people to be decent, because
he was himself a decent man.
I had the privilege of meeting him on a couple of occasions. He had gone
to school with my father and his success as a writer was a great source
of vicarious pride for many of us who are from Leitrim.
He wrote beautifully of places like Slieve An Iarainn, the Iron Mountain,
where his mother grew up and which dominates the whole of south Leitrim,
and Carrick-on-Shannon, my home town, making us look anew at familiar
places.
He knew that beauty and austerity were handmaidens of each other and he
was never sentimental about either. “The soil in Leitrim is poor,
in places no more than an inch deep,” is the opening line of his
acclaimed Memoir.
He resorted to self-deprecation as we Leitrim people often do when describing
our native county. He liked to tell the story about the crow which flew
over Leitrim and brought its lunch with it.
His prose and his public persona might have given him an air of austerity,
but he could be great company. I remember meeting him shortly after he
lost out on the Booker Prize for his novel Amongst Women.
He laughed as he recalled how he had won the Booker Prize at lunchtime
and lost it at teatime because one of the judges changed his mind. “That
cost me £50,000,” he said as if it was no worse than losing
one of his bullocks in a drain. His verdict on AS Byatt’s Possession,
the novel that beat him to the prize, was withering. “A load of
sh***,” he said.
McGahern’s books were profound but they were never less than readable.
He proved that being a serious writer didn’t have to mean writing
books that were inaccessible to ordinary people.
He was a beautiful prose stylist who could write perfect sentences because
he understood the demands of his craft. As one reviewer said: “One
cannot appreciate McGahern’s prose unless one understands the strenuous
purging that produces his final text. For every published page he writes
about six that are discarded.”
Many people have praised McGahern’s courage and his integrity. He
dared to lay bare the undercurrents of brutality of the Ireland he grew
up in, and was banned for his troubles.
The banning of The Dark with its graphic accounts of masturbation and
its hint at clerical sex abuse was a dreadful low in the cultural life
of the country.
He became a cause célébre but it was typical of the man
that he refused to join in. He felt the book wasn’t worth it and
could have been written better. He was more concerned too about what the
ban did for the reputation of his country than for his own reputation.
McGahern has been credited with opening up Ireland and taking on the forces
of nationalism and clericalism but he was never a political writer. He
was only interested in how institutions like the Church and state impacted
on the individual.
His real focus was the family and the real courage he exhibited as a writer
was to lay bare the painful circumstances of his upbringing.
Again and again in his prose he returned to the relationship with his
parents — his father a pious brute and an emotional cripple; his
mother a considerate soul and the light of his troubled childhood.
Her death when he was nine was an event which from which he never recovered.
She had wanted him to be a priest but like James Joyce whose mother’s
death was also a source of eternal grief that vocation morphed into being
a writer.
“I did, in the end, answer to a different call than the one she
wished for me, and followed it the whole of my life. When I reflect on
those rare moments when I stumble without warning into that extraordinary
sense of security, that deep peace, I know consciously and unconsciously
she has been with me all my life.”
That passage is derived from Memoir where it is clear that his mother’s
death was the defining moment in his life. More than his literary success,
the banning of The Dark or his sacking as a national school teacher.
McGahern’s great strength as a writer was his ability to excavate
his own upbringing and make it real for Irish people everywhere from his
generation.
His one weakness was his failure to engage with the country Ireland has
become in any meaningful way. Having more than done his bit to create
a modern society, he wasn’t much interested in chronicling what
followed. He was too autobiographical a writer for that.
It’s not certain whether he had the breadth of vision to be regarded
as a truly great writer but in many ways it does not matter.
Unlike established giants such as James Joyce or Samuel Beckett McGahern’s
works are widely read and understood well by the public.
President Mary McAleese put it best when she said he made an “enormous
contribution to our self-understanding as a people”. That and some
of the most beautifully-written stories in the English language is how
he will be remembered.
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