The John McGahern Companion

Note: ‘J.M.A.’ denotes John McGahern Archive, University of Galway Library. All images reproduced with permission of the McGahern Estate.

There are several people and organisations that have made this Companion possible. First, we would like to thank the pool of talented contributors for agreeing to be involved in the project (the uptake on our invitations was extremely high) and the manner in which they accepted our editorial suggestions.

Paul Butler’s images are a major enhancement to the book, from the striking cover to the inside pages. His in-depth knowledge of McGahern’s work and the fact that he has been living in Leitrim for a few decades at this point mean that Paul ‘sees’ things in the landscape and the people of his adopted county in a way that resonates with McGahern’s own aesthetic appreciation of place.

We wish to extend our special thanks to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fund, Dublin City University, Le Moyne College and GIS-Eire for contributing towards the production costs that accrued due to the high number of images in the book.

All efforts have been made to secure full prior permission for any archive images included in this publication. We acknowledge the help of the McGahern Estate for assistance on reproduction of images from the John McGahern Archive at University of Galway. Should any queries be raised regarding any images sourced from the John McGahern Archive, please contact Dr. Barry Houlihan, Archivist at the University of Galway Library (barry.houlihan@universityofgalway.ie). No further reproduction may be made of any of the images or photographs found within this volume as sourced from the McGahern Archive at University of Galway Library for commercial use for any reason without prior written permission. We also acknowledge permission from Harvest Films to use stills from the film adaptation of That They May Face the Rising Sun.

During his lifetime (1934–2006), John McGahern experienced several highs and lows on the human and artistic levels. He lost his ‘beloved’1 mother when he was 10 years old, an event that still pained him six decades later. His relationship with his father was a fraught one, and the rancour the writer bore towards the McGahern family patriarch was still palpable in his seventies. He wrote lovingly about walking to school with his mother in Memoir, even going so far as to repeat some of the details of what they saw, a tendency that in no way can be attributed to carelessness, but rather was a means of highlighting their significance and the writer’s rootedness in place. The following passage is a good example of the evocations of these precious moments:

In good weather we always walked. There was a drinking pool for horses along the way, gates to houses, and the banks were covered with all kinds of wild flowers and vetches and wild strawberries. My mother named these flowers for me as we walked, and sometimes we stopped and picked them for the jamjars. I must have been extraordinarily happy walking that lane to school. There are many such lanes around where I live, and in certain rare moments over the years while walking in these lanes I have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace, in which I feel that I can live for ever. I suspect that it is no more than the actual lane and lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss. These moments disappear as suddenly and as inexplicably as they come, and long before they can be recognized and placed.2

This was a time of innocence characterised by a spontaneous rejoicing in the beauty of nature and the bonds that tied the young boy to his mother. The Proustian involuntary memory is also a strong motif, transporting the mature adult back in time to a period of blissful happiness, when mother and child walked hand-in-hand through the lanes of Leitrim and observed the rich foliage, familiar landscape, flora and fauna. McGahern regularly refers to an abode belonging to the Bradys, which they passed on this daily journey, along with other landmarks that are evoked repeatedly in a type of prayerful refrain. This was happiness at its most pure. With time would come knowledge of life’s more sinister aspects: the cruelty inflicted on children, the loss of innocence, alienation from the world, failed relationships and, ultimately, death:

We grow into an understanding of the world gradually. Much of what we come to know is far from comforting, that each day brings us closer to the inevitable hour when all will be darkness again, but even that knowledge is power and all understanding is joy, even in the face of dread, and cannot be taken from us until everything is. We grow into a love of the world, a love that is all the more precious and poignant because the great glory of which we are but a particle is lost almost as soon as it is gathered.3

In this Introduction, we have chosen to imitate McGahern’s tendency when reviewing books he admired to quote at length from certain works, which for him was the best way of demonstrating the power of good writing. McGahern was the ultimate wordsmith, especially towards his life’s end when he knew instinctively how ‘to get the words right’, a phrase he employed to describe his artistic methodology. The lines above are a good example of how, with the passing of time, McGahern understood existence in a way that provided genuine insights into the human condition, its wonder and transience. The ‘great glory’ that is glimpsed often coincides with our imminent departure from the physical world.

Twenty years on from his death, readers are still fascinated by McGahern’s work, mainly because of how he so subtly described human existence in all its fragility, in all its evanescent glory. He did not fear death, and yet, he did not want to leave the material world or the people who inhabited it. He knew from painful experience that the ‘great glory of which we are but a particle’ was finite and that we are destined to return to whatever we emerged from in the first instance. The image of his terminally ill ‘beloved’, left abandoned in the cottage in Aughawillan, away from her husband and children who had been moved to the barracks in Cootehall, never ceased to torment her eldest child. Later, McGahern would bitterly regret not spending those last few minutes with his mother, not assisting her as she faced the unknowable abyss that is eternity. And yet, he would nevertheless sense her presence throughout his life: ‘She never really left us. In the worst years, I believe we would have been broken but for the different life we had known with her and the love she gave us that was there like hidden strength’.4 He continued, ‘I know that consciously and unconsciously she has been with me all my life’.5

The ‘beloved’ was undoubtedly McGahern’s Muse, the one who inspired and comforted him. Rarely has any mother been so richly acknowledged by an artist as Susan McGahern was by her son. She was the soothing presence, the one who showed her children the beauty that was all around them—in nature, religion, art and people. Indeed, we feel that the paean McGahern composed to his mother needs to be acknowledged in this Companion to make readers aware that we would not be celebrating this canonical writer 20 years after his death had he not relentlessly sought to be reunited with her through his artistic quest. The last lines of Memoir read:

I would want no shadow to fall on her joy and deep trust in God. She would face no false reproaches. As we retraced our steps, I would pick for her the wild orchid and the windflower.6

Written at a time when he was very much aware of his own impending death from cancer, Memoir anticipates a joyful reunion beyond the grave, where mother and son would be happy in the renewed presence of the other. Dermot McCarthy argues that Memoir allows the reader to identify specific connections between the fictive and autobiographical worlds and to consider how all McGahern’s writing, when read as an organic whole, composes ‘a continuous effort to work through his life using the compensatory powers of the imagination to shape experience into the pattern of myth, ultimately, the sublimation of the personal in the universal story of fall and redemption’.7 This is a good summation of the primary achievement of a body of work that began in 1963, with the publication of the award-winning first novel, The Barracks. It continued with the banning of the second novel, The Dark (1965), which led to the author losing his job as a primary school teacher in Clontarf. This experience was later described in his third novel, The Leavetaking (1974 and 1984), the first of two experimental novels published in the 1970s, the second being The Pornographer (1979).8 In this middle period, McGahern was trying to find the style and material that best suited his art, and though one can see obvious faults with the two novels, there is no way he could have written his chef d’oeuvre, Amongst Women (1990), and the beautiful last novel That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), without having undergone this experimentation.9 Both were made into successful adaptations, the former as a TV drama, the fruit of a collaboration between the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ and the BBC, and the latter as a film directed by Pat Collins and produced by South Wind Blows, Harvest Films and Cyprus Avenue Films. Given the film’s recent success and the fact that it received plenty of media coverage upon its release, it is not surprising that a few chapters in the Companion are devoted to this work. One might be surprised at the fact that Amongst Women does not feature very strongly in the chapters included here. Writing in the Observer on the 7 May 1990, shortly after its publication, John Banville noted, ‘We have the feeling that we have not so much been reading as living’,10 an observation that captures the essence of this highly accomplished novel. Its carefully crafted style and wonderful evocation of a close-knit family unit under the domineering control of a patriarch produces a narrative that transcends language and culture, giving the local a global dimension. Novels and literary works in general drift in and out of fashion. Amongst Women’s harsh realism does not possess the pastoral tone of That They May Face the Rising Sun, and it could well be that the contemporary world needs comforting words to compensate for the dangers currently assailing the planet. We live in a time of self-destructive climate change and when nationalistic totalitarianism is manifesting itself in a way not seen since the 1940s and 1950s. The horrific genocide that was perpetrated on the inhabitants of Gaza by Israel, whose Jewish forebears had themselves been subjected to attempted extermination during World War II, shows how history can repeat itself in the most cruel and unexpected manner. Russia’s expansionist desire to take over Ukraine, the increased isolationism and xenophobia at the heart of President Trump’s America and the increase in popularity of Far-Right Movements across the globe foreshadow a perilous future. The success of the film version of McGahern’s last novel and the adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Foster into the Irish language film An Cáilín Ciúin may well point to a need for reassurance by people assailed from all sides by disquieting events.

McGahern is an equally renowned short-story writer; many of his short stories concentrate on the same themes as the novels: familial tensions in rural Ireland; conflict between sons and their fathers; problems with frustrated sexual desire; the oppressive influence of Catholicism and its subsequent negative influence; the lived experience of exile in places like Dublin and London; working the land and often dying without having brought it under control. Nightlines (1970) and Getting Through (1978) preceded The Collected Stories (1992), ending with a beautiful novella, ‘The Country Funeral’, which had not been published previously and is undoubtedly McGahern’s greatest piece of short fiction. After his death, Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories (2006) was published and featured two new stories, ‘Creatures of the Earth’ and ‘Love of the World’, both of which McGahern had worked on down through the years without ever feeling they were ready for publication. Another work that he was still toiling away on before his death was the adaptation of a Tolstoy play, The Power of Darkness, which was first staged in the Abbey Theatre during the Dublin Theatre Festival in November 1991 and received very negative reviews.11

This whistle-stop review of McGahern’s oeuvre reflects on the career of a writer who was greatly admired and has left an indelible mark on the Irish literary landscape of the second half of the 20th century in particular. However, apart from the fact that 2026 marks the 20^th anniversary of his death, what is the reason for producing a Companion honouring his work?

In their lifetime, artists have the opportunity to create both the art and the context in which that art can be appreciated and understood. For example, McGahern’s Memoir is an effort that offers his readers a version of his life and world that might explain his fiction, showing how his stories came from particular places and events. His persona of the bluff countryman, close to the harsh realities of the land, was a mask that camouflaged the intelligence and intention behind his work. These are not just anecdotal stories but crafted narratives. The death of the artist, of course, means that the art must fend for itself, must rise or fall on its own merits. This collection attests to the unassailable fact that John McGahern’s writing still elicits a response from his readers, their engagements offering valuable insights and illuminations, suggesting how the work can continue to be revisited for fruitful critical investigation.

Death itself is a significant concern and recurring theme in his work, beginning with The Barracks, which features the poignant passing of Elizabeth Reegan. Death’s constant presence lends urgency to his characters’ lives and to their struggle to make sense of, and find meaning in, their lot. McGahern’s aesthetic vision of the ‘day’ as the fundamental unit of his art12 is borne out of this Heideggerian notion of ‘being-towards-death’. The passing of time brings a certain clarity to the past and even to the recent past. We can now see the shape and arc of McGahern’s oeuvre in ways that he and his readers could not have appreciated at the time. The movement towards a kind of acceptance of the world and the people in it, and the note of redemption struck in That They May Face the Rising Sun, are apparent now in ways they might not have been in 2002. The focus on the individual’s relationship to the ‘day’, and the wholeness of life it encapsulates, is undoubtedly essential for McGahern, and he articulates this idea magnificently in the figure of the returned emigrant Johnny and in his death. The ritual surrounding the preparation of the body for burial is scrupulously detailed. These actions possess a double function: they respect the dead man, while also making his death bearable for those who remain. It is a recognition of the fragility of existence and of the human world’s efforts to comprehend death in life: ‘The innate sacredness of each single life stood out more starkly in death than in the whole of its natural life’.13 This ceremony, which gives the singular body back its unique individuality, is akin to the act of writing itself for McGahern, as he repeatedly renders the dignity of life as it is lived in the everyday.

This Companion volume also arrives at an important juncture in McGahern studies. The literary archive of John McGahern was first deposited at the University of Galway Library during the author’s own lifetime. Since then, it has grown and expanded through further additions, as well as through adjacent literary collections of correspondence and writings between McGahern and close friends. These collections include extensive archives of letters between McGahern and Niall Walsh, a close family friend, as well as letters between the writer and Patrick Gregory, a trusted editor and critical voice based at Knopf in New York, who published works by McGahern in the United States, often for the first time.