posted on 25 Jan 2017

Memoir by John McGahern

One early evening over the Christmas period I happened to turn on Radio 4 Extra  and heard a marvellous John McGahern short story called A Slip Up, read superbly by Sean McGinley. It was one of a series of stories recorded a few months after McGahern died in March 2006 aged 71. Hearing it read in McGinley’s warm, soft Irish brogue captured not just the story but the immense hinterland of history, politics, culture and language that lies behind everything McGahern wrote.

It sent me back to McGahern’s only full-length work of non-fiction, Memoir, from 2005. Even the terse, self-deprecating title seems to exemplify McGahern’s modesty and speak of his unshakeable faith in language and its ability to be wrought into every shade and shape and nuance necessary for the human experience. McGahern’s literary methods were not those of the previous generations of great Irish avant-gardistes such as Joyce, Beckett, or Flann O’Brien. He was closer to the great Russian social realists of the nineteenth century, to Chekov and Turgenev.

McGahern’s work is deeply informed by loss and the melancholy and pain of the human experience, with a specific rural Irish dimension. In a lovely early passage in Memoir he writes of the deeply sunken, high-banked lanes around his home in Country Leitrim, lanes he walked with his mother from as early as he could remember.

“There are many such lanes around where I live,” he writes, “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 I can live forever. I suspect it is no more than the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss.”

Surrounded by sisters, and with a distant and unpredictably brutal father who only visited the family home when on leave from the Garda barracks twenty miles away where he served as sergeant, pain and loss marked the family’s life from McGahern’s earliest years. Their mother died from cancer when McGahern was just ten and the youngest of seven children less than a year old, and the family was uprooted, relocating to the Garda barracks where they experienced, McGahern says, “direct rule” in their father’s personal dictatorship . This was the kind of brutal family life that could exist – and of course still does exist – away from prying eyes, especially when sanctioned by a repressive society and state.

But this is most emphatically not a misery memoir. McGahern’s work is of an entirely different order. Its concern is not simply the self but the social, political, cultural and historical circumstances that shape the self and the family, and it is this more than any other single characteristic that most deeply informs everything he wrote.

In devoting a lifetime to creating fiction from his immediate surroundings and circumstances in rural Ireland he somewhat resembles William Trevor, who died in 2016. But he has none of the occasional gothic or macabre touches that Trevor sometimes does. McGahern’s territory is the prosaic, the satisfaction of life’s unchanging patterns and continuity – and the forces that disrupt or destroy this continuity.

McGahern’s early novels and stories explored this harsh autobiographical world in great depth and seem to form a sort of series. He has spoken himself of writing about a world which during that period “was a virtual theocracy” and all of his work is deeply concerned with power in human relationships – whether the brutal male power of a repressive, patriarchal society, or the indirect or hidden power of the state and church. His later work is perhaps more mellow, as exemplified in his last long novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, which may well be his masterpiece.

Returning again to the deeply shaded lanes of rural County Leitrim which he walked with his mother as a child, in the final lines of Memoir McGahern says: “If we could walk together through those summer lanes…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.”

This beautiful book is an indictment of male domination and manipulation, and of state and religious hypocrisy. It delves deeply into the mystery of human and family relationships. And yet despite the rage and unhappiness that McGahern’s father was both responsible for and capable of, this is still paradoxically a gentle and deeply humane book. It is unflinching but it isn’t unsparing or unforgiving. One mystery it throws remarkably little light on, however, is that of how McGahern rose from such beginnings to become the modest giant of twentieth century Irish literature. For the answer to that we must read his fiction – and try and work it out for ourselves.

 

Alun Severn

January 2017