John McGahern

Authority and vision

Željka Doljanin, Máire Doyle, Željka Doljanin, Máire Doyle

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781526100566
• eBook ISBN: 9781526105066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

This unique collection brings together essays by experts from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, education, journalism, creative writing and literary criticism, to offer new insights into the writer, his work and his legacy. Featuring a range of distinguished contributors, including Roy Foster, Paula Meehan, Frank McGuinness and Melvyn Bragg, along with a previously unpublished McGahern interview, the collection enhances the existing body of criticism, extending the McGahern conversation into new areas and deepening appreciation of the considerable achievements of this great writer. The volume, which also features an original poem by Paula Meehan written in honour of McGahern, will stimulate the interest of students, researchers and general readers of Irish literature and culture.

1
Introduction

Željka Doljanin and Máire Doyle

When John McGahern died in 2006 he did not bequeath a particularly large body of work. Written across five decades, his published work comprised six novels, three collections of stories, a memoir, two volumes of collected stories and one play – an adaptation of Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness. He also scripted a number of radio and television adaptations. Reviews, essays and other prose pieces were brought together in an edited collection after his death.¹

McGahern's relatively small literary output may be accounted for by his creative imperative and his commitment to style. He once said that ‘rather than write novels or stories I write to see’.² This perception of writing as an act of seeing, of discovery or self-discovery, did not lend itself to a steady flow of finished work – or work that he was satisfied with. McGahern continuously refined and edited his work, believing that it was the writer's primary duty to write well. This commitment to the precision and refinement of style which, for McGahern, underpinned the writer's search for the elusive image, was evident in his earliest publishing experience: having found a publisher (Faber & Faber) for his first novel, ‘The End or the Beginning of Love’, he made the unusual and courageous decision to withdraw it, feeling dissatisfied with its quality. He offered in its place The Barracks, an extract from which won the prestigious AE³ Memorial award from the Arts Council, and which won the Macauley Fellowship on its full publication. Much of the content of the unpublished novel, parts of which had been published in X: A Quarterly Review, later emerged in a refined form in his next novel, The Dark. McGahern also later rewrote the second half of his third novel, The Leavetaking, and republished it ten years after it first appeared.

The banning of The Dark, his quiet refusal to make a fuss about it (although he grieved in exile) and his subsequent return to Ireland in the early 1970s rendered him a radical and courageous writer among peers and younger aspiring authors who also sought to emulate the particular exactitude and scrutiny of his prose. On the occasion of McGahern's death, Seamus Heaney said that he had established ‘standards of artistic excellence and personal integrity that worked silently and strongly within the entire literary community’.⁴

Paula Meehan, who was inspired by McGahern in the formative years of her own career, pays homage to McGahern with a poem and a memoir piece included in this collection.

John McGahern is one of those writers whose work continues to be appreciated across a range of readerships. This appreciation has its source in the quiet, calm authority, the steady, patient hand of his writing, working always towards the vision which he describes as ‘that still and private world which each of us possesses and which others cannot see’.⁵ But McGahern's particular skill is that in striving to see he reveals, often with startling clarity, that private world. Only within that private world, the world of the self, can authority be claimed. It is the authority that young Mahoney aspires to in the closing stages of The Dark when, recognising the futility of seeking licence for his life from external sources, he retreats into a known world so that he may emerge again to find his own authority – his own ‘state of mind’. For McGahern this is the task both of the writer and of the human being.

As a writer who eschewed the notion of himself as ‘artist’ he addressed his task through a commitment to style, what he called the ‘revelation of the personality through language’.⁶ Like Joyce, he also rarely gave his characters language that could not be claimed as their own, even when, like the dying Elizabeth Reegan in The Barracks, they struggle towards understanding. There is irony in young Mahoney's optimistic hope that authority may even manifest itself as ‘calmness … in the face of the turmoil of your own passing’,⁷ but it is a calmness that has already been found in the character of the dying Elizabeth in McGahern's first novel. Like Elizabeth, young Mahoney too will have to find his way out of the dark into his own understanding of the world and his place in it. McGahern believed that this ‘revelation of the personality through language’ was best demonstrated by Joyce and Flaubert, whose writing he admired for its lack of judgement and self-expression.⁸ However, in this detachment, this lack of self-expression and the full dedication to the exactitude of prose out of which the reader himself draws what is implied, McGahern saw the only possible way of achieving truth and authority. Within his own brand of realism, his writing derives authority from a similar detachment and ability to view the familiar with a curiosity of an outsider, yet with a sense of particular closeness to the subject – what Declan Kiberd aptly defines as ‘a combination of felt intimacy and achieved distance’.⁹

While he was neither determinedly nor deliberately a chronicler of social and cultural change, there is no doubt that McGahern's novels and stories are suffused with the consciousness and values of the time. His work acts as a form of poetic record of the middle and late decades of the twentieth century in a way that speaks to both individual and collective memories, while also addressing the transition to modernity. In his assessment of the modern Irish novel George O’Brien identified John McGahern as part of a new generation of Irish writers that emerged in the post-war period who were more concerned with narratives of individual rather than of national sovereignty.¹⁰ O’Brien considers that the work of McGahern, along with that of Brian Moore, Aidan Higgins, and Edna O’Brien, demonstrated ‘increased emphases on sexuality, passion and emotional life; on the existence of an autonomous, distinctive, conditioning-resistant inner life; on the presence of the spirit, not understood in religious or sectarian terms but more humanistically as a matter of energies, hungers and drives’.¹¹ The underlying universality of this very particular exploration of the human condition means that his work consistently transcends geographical and cultural boundaries.

Despite the fact that McGahern's work had won awards and been held in high esteem by other writers since he first emerged as a published author in 1963, it did not begin to receive the critical attention it deserved until Denis Sampson's seminal study, Outstaring Nature’s Eye, was published in 1993. The publication of Sampson's insightful and comprehensive book followed the 1990 nomination, and short-listing, of McGahern's fifth novel, Amongst Women, for the Booker Prize. For many readers, critics and other writers this novel was McGahern's ultimate stylistic achievement: he had, it seemed, found the perfect words. McGahern's next (and final) novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, marked a turn outward – away from the ‘pool of Narcissus’ that had hindered characters’ journeys towards their place in the world in earlier work. The last novel and a number of late short stories continue his scrutiny of the individual's relationship to one's environment, but the focus shifts from the private to the public, or common, realm, and the yearning for self-knowledge through others – through the broader community of mankind – is explored.

The literary criticism that has emerged since Sampson's first book, and particularly since McGahern's death, underpins McGahern's status as an exceptional writer of rare vision who wrote with startling lucidity and moral clarity. This vision could be realised only through painstaking attention to detail, and McGahern shared with Henry James the belief that ‘responsible lucidity can be wrested from [the darkness] only by painful, vigilant effort, the intense scrutiny of particulars’.¹² It is this ‘intense scrutiny’, allied to a depth and breadth of vision, that invites interest from a broad readership that includes general readers, scholars from a variety of disciplines and prose writers from diverse cultural backgrounds. This collection harnesses that interest by inviting contribution by literary critics (new voices alongside well-established scholars turning to McGahern for the first time), as well as creative writers and academics from fields such as history, sociology and education. The critical diversity achieved offers the reader fresh readings of McGahern's work and influence through a variety of perspectives, interpretations and theoretical and critical approaches, whether the topics chosen address familiar themes in McGahern criticism or have not been previously explored.

This kind of analytical diversity could be achieved only through an essay collection. Since Sampson's first book, McGahern criticism has largely been configured around a number of scholarly monographs, which continue to be produced: three alone in 2016.¹³ Since McGahern's death, monographs on Catholicism (Maher), his early writing life and influences (Sampson), memory (McCarthy), imagination and tradition (van der Ziel), modernism (Robinson) and McGahern's classical style (Shovlin) have been published. While these books demonstrate a sustained academic interest in McGahern's writing and provide scholars with an opportunity to assess his oeuvre in its entirety, and in a specific context, they attest to the depth, but not necessarily the breadth, of interest in his work.

Although our contributors have come to McGahern from different interests and disciplines, convergences between the themes of their essays are evident. McGahern's work was often concerned with the debilitating personal and societal legacy of the struggle towards national and self-determination, and three essays in the collection seek to respond to this struggle in their exploration of the post-revolutionary space and the lingering aftermath of a movement that promised so much. Nicholas Allen (Chapter 3) focuses on the physical landscape to show how the inadequacy of the State that emerged after 1922 is reflected in the characters’ shifting relationship with the landscape, to which they are often very attached, even though the connectio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• The Woodpile
• 1 Introduction
• 2 X: A Quarterly Review and McGahern’s modernism
• 3 John McGahern: landscape and the lost republic
• 4 Hand-rails to the past: McGahern and the memory of the Irish revolution
• 5 ‘What was it all for?’ John McGahern’s critique of Irish republican nationalism: an ethical reading
• 6 The stranger in the fiction of John McGahern
• 7 John McGahern’s ‘Oldfashioned’ and Anglo-Irish culture
• 8 Learning to love the world: the educational vision of John McGahern
• 9 Love and sex: McGahern’s personal and detached reflections
• 10 Love and the world: marriage and McGahern’s late vision
• 11 ‘Extraordinary breathing space’: afterlife vision and redemption in the work of John McGahern
• 12 Writing violence: John McGahern and Flannery O’Connor
• 13 The lived narrative versus the learned narrative
• 14 Inside McGahern’s workshop
• 15 John McGahern
• 16 An interview with John McGahern
• Afterword
• Select bibliography
• Index