Remembering John McGahern

A few years ago, in the mid-1990s, I asked John McGahern if he were a religious believer. We were sitting in a pub in Co Leitrim, a county where, he said in his joking, gentle way “even the Protestants were poor”.

John said he wasn’t really a believer, no. But the Catholic church had been ingrained into him, part of his culture and formation, and to cast off all its trappings would be to take away something organic, and even spiritual, from his being.

Towards an earlier Irish Catholic establishment, which had sacked him, banned his work and virtually anathemised him, he showed a graceful forgiveness. “Ah, they were different times,” he said, philosophically.

McGahern had a great sense of humour and what really amused him, at least in retrospect, about his hard times back in the early 1960s, was the resentment that he had incurred for going off and marrying a Finnish lady (his first wife, Annikki Laaksi). Subsequently, there was to be a divorce. But he was reprimanded for this exogamous union on strangely patriotic lines.

“And Irishwomen goin’ around with their tongues hangin’ out, looking for a husband!” went the most piercing reproach.

Hey! Irishwomen needed husbands – why did he have to sell out to the competition from Finland! Another flavour of the time, indeed, where many women feared the stigma of being “left on the shelf” as unmarried spinisters. (There was a truly horrid category for such females in Britain, when the genders were unbalanced by the loss of men in wartime: “surplus women”.)

John McGahern was a man who had achieved great wisdom, notably in his latter years. He had been, in effect, a martyr to the Irish Censorship Board, after his second novel, The Dark, published in 1965, was banned (after it was seized by the Customs & Excise). It stunned him, and he went into self-imposed exile for a time thereafter. All the same, it was a controversial book for that era: it contained what were then shocking passages about masturbation. And the F-word appeared on the first page.

Matthew Evans, of the publishers Faber & Faber, told me that there had been a four-hour board meeting at the very top level discussing this startlking appearance of the F-word in the text. There was real concern about this, in London, let alone in Ireland. Some of the board members considered the use of the F-word “coarse” and “lowering”: but in the end, the decision was made that the book had such literary merit that its value outweighed the vulgarism. Yet it was a close-run thing.

By the 1990s, when Roddy Doyle published “The Van”, there were ten mentions of the F-word on every page. And everyone thought it a great lark.

By the 1990s, indeed, the Sisters of Charity were selling “The Dark”, wanking scenes and all, in their hospital shop at St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin. Thus do values change.

There is no need to reiterate the narrative of John McGahern’s life, for he told it all most beautifully in his “Memoir”. Or most of it. He seemed more interested in his early life than in his adult years, which are more desultorily treated. Seldom has a country childhood been more lyrically evoked: and that sense of being part of the landscape never left him. After some years in Dublin, in London and also in Finland, he returned to Co Leitrim, with his devoted second wife Madeline, living unpretentiously and drawing upon his roots for inspiration.

Unforgettably, he once wrote: “The best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.” He was not one for hob-nobbing with fashionable writers’ circles in cities, though he would obligingly travel where he was invited: and gave a generous talk at Listowel Writers’ Week last year, even in the middle of his cancer treatment.

But he believed that writers needed quietness and contemplation and remembering: not the hubbub of public clamour. John was totally devoid of any kind of phoniness.

He told me that the most important influence on his life, as a writer, was an old Anglo-Irish peer, a rather broken-down relict of the gentry who had lost his only son in the Second World War. The old peer was henceforth only interested in bee-keeping, and his beard was encrusted with honey and other flotsam. But he opened up his library to John, as a young boy, and John spent every hour he could reading his way through that library. “Without that, I’d never have become a writer,” he said.

Through all of his work, even when bleak, went the thread of redemption. And we never know who may turn out to be the agent of our redemption. Though not an orthodox believer, there was something near to the hermit and the rustic saint about the man.

Irish Independent 3 April 2006