A Deep Well of Want

Preface by Eamonn Wall

A few months ago at a Western Literature Association Conference in Montana, I attended a panel on the work of Wallace Stegner, an author like John McGahern whose work was primarily focused on the western region of his country. I was struck by the quality of the presentations that morning and deeply engaged by the approaches the speakers took to Stegner’s work. Not only did they discuss his writings in the traditional manner – in every respect the scholarship was impeccable – but they also did something else. All spoke of the ways that Stegner’s work had entered their own worlds and invaded their psyches, and they explored how his fiction and essays had helped them understand their own places on earth and pushed them toward enjoying more mature and meaningful lives. I loved these presentations for their combinations of insight and passion, vigour and fire. Also, their enthusiasm took me back to my own beginnings as a reader, student and scholar when I was reminded by my superiors of the need to depersonalize my responses to literature to become a better professional. In my own life as a scholar, this is a dictum that I have both heeded and resisted. On the one hand, I understand the need to establish some distance and reserve but, on the other, I have always found it hard to separate myself from the almost speechless emotion of first encounter with a book and an author. At that point where we meet it first, we might devour a novel or poem or essay or play with the whole fibre of our being. Vicariously and memorably, Paul Butler’s work brings me to that overpowering place of first contact with a literary work.

A Deep Well of Want: Visualizing the World of John McGahern is such a welcome addition to the McGahern scholarship: in many respects, it is ground-breaking. Like the scholars I heard that morning in Montana, Butler brings a complex and nuanced vision to his study. His book is part traditional scholarship, underlined by the research and example of Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida and others; part autobiography, in which Butler traces his engagement with John McGahern’s work back to various alignments in his own life – the difficult and complex childhood that he shared with McGahern, and his move from Dublin to Leitrim as an adult – and it is in part a collection of original images that he has made that are set in McGahern country, that elucidate the writer’s work, that reveal to us in images responses to the word pictures that McGahern painted on the page. Photography was Butler’s first love, and it is an art that he has a unique talent for. He also possesses a deep empathy for McGahern’s writing and the place that helped form and guide his writing.

A Deep Well of Want: Visualizing the World of John McGahern is a hybrid work or bricolage or collage or a multimedia work where all the parts run seamlessly together. Butler demands that we question what we mean when we use the term ‘study’. It is not that he omits or devalues the traditional elements that belong in a literary study but that he adds to these by including two aspects of his own creative work – autobiography and images – and by taking this tack enlarges what literary criticism is. He pushes it in new directions. Butler’s work can be compared to the work of other transgressive Irish writers such as Tim Robinson, Kevin Whelan and most recently Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose Ghost in the Throat, her wonderful engagement with the life, writing and places of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, is a companion text to Butler’s. It is also a book that shares a vision and structure with John Berger’s Ways of Seeing; however, to achieve similar ends Butler reverses Berger’s process. Though genres are useful frames, they can constrict an artist’s vision and may be set aside to allow a particular work to develop organically. When artists like Robinson, Whelan, Ní Ghriofa, Berger and Butler write literary criticism, or history, or geography, or folklore, or media studies, they engage with genres in new ways in producing work that is formally different, allowing them to ask new questions. The approaches that these writers take underline Environmental Literature, and Butler’s settling in County Leitrim in 2001 is a mirror image of Cheryll Glotfelty’s move from east to west, made two decades earlier:

In 1990, I drove a Ryder van from Ithaca, New York, to Reno, Nevada, with a head full of ideas and a heart full of yearning. … In graduate school, I had periodically strayed from course work to become self-tutored in deep ecology and literary ecology, absorbing works such as Bill Devall and George Session’s Deep Ecology and Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival. The bioregional notion of reinhabitation struck a powerful chord, providing a theory to validate my deepest desires to have a lasting home. To those of us who cannot claim to be native to anywhere but the road, reinhabitation offers the hope that it is possible to become native to a place. The process of reinhabitating a place entails learning the natural history, indigenous lifeways, and cultural traditions of a place and, in turn, actively participating in the continuous making of the place. As the eloquent bioregionalist Gary Snyder suggests, ‘find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there’. That’s exactly what I aimed to do.¹

Glotfelty is a pioneer of ecocritical and bioregional literary studies: some might call her the founder of both. Reinhabitation can be applied to both McGahern’s and Butler’s decisions to settle in Leitrim. Paul Butler’s specific focus is on Memoir. He engages with what is outside and inside, both the natural and built environments. Reading his text, we are privileged to see what he sees and to glimpse aspects of the area that McGahern portrayed so well and which played such an influential role in his formation. Butler, like all good scholars, guides us through an author’s work and environment. When I first read McGahern, my sole focus was on his larger-than-life characters like Moran and Reegan, and I either ignored the environment or understood it in a very limited way. Like Glotfelty and Snyder, Butler puts the environment, in the largest sense, in the foreground – all writers paying homage to the non-human.

At the conclusion of A Deep Well of Want: Visualizing the World of John McGahern, Butler reveals how he has achieved a kind of mindfulness in his own life, in part the product of his engagement with the arts of photography, writing and McGahern’s work. In his recent book, Derek Gladwin writes:

In The Truth About Stories: A native narrative, the Cherokee author and professor Thomas King discusses the universality of stories in our social histories and in relationship to ourselves. He affirms that the ‘truth about stories is that’s all we are’. Stories simultaneously define, heal, and create our lives.²

The arts he has learnt and practiced have helped Paul Butler to reframe raw material into an original work that is rich and life-affirming, while also being of high moral, intellectual, critical and artistic quality. Mindfulness is hardly the kind of term that John McGahern would have embraced; however, his work and the example of his life certainly pushed him, as well as his Irish readers, towards a deeper understanding of people, places and time on earth. Having read Paul Butler’s work, and seen and reflected on his splendid photographic work, I certainly have gained a deeper understanding of John McGahern’s work.

Eamonn Wall

University of Missouri-St. Louis

1 Cheryll Glotfelty, ‘Finding a Home in Nevada? Teaching the Literature of Place on Location’, in Laird Christensen, Mark C. Long and Fred Waage (eds), Teaching North American Environmental Literature (New York: MLA, 2008), p. 5.

2 Derek Gladwin, Rewriting Our Stories: Education, Empowerment, and Well-Being (Cork: Atrium/Cork University Press, 2021), p. 9.