
John McGahern, 1992 © Steve Pyke/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Discussed in this essay:
The Pornographer, by John McGahern. New York Review Books. 272 pages. $17.95.
If you were asked to name the finest Irish writer of the second half of the twentieth century, a strong case could be made for John McGahern. By 2006, when he published his final book, a work of autobiography that was titled All Will Be Well in the United States but in Ireland simply Memoir, his mastery was so established that his peers were rolling their eyes at it. “I feel—what shits we have to be—he’s got too good at what he does,” complained Seamus Heaney. McGahern’s uncannily musical prose conjures the texture and speech of provincial Irish life, making his books continuations of the Irish Literary Revival that began with Yeats. But the mantle of Irish naturalism fit McGahern so snugly that he spent much of his career chafing against it. Early on, he earned the disdain of his literary forebear Frank O’Connor for claiming never to have so much as thought about his books. The glories of tradition were burdened with sentimentality and nationalism, and McGahern instead proclaimed an affinity for Samuel Beckett, who had emigrated and wrote in French. In McGahern’s books, Beckettian rejection collides with an impeccably classical style. He describes the jarring emptiness of Catholic ritual in prose of such sonorous beauty that it achieves the soothing rhythms of prayer.
Nowhere is this tension more evident than in McGahern’s stagings of the deaths of characters modeled after his mother. Or rather, how he repeatedly stages them. He wrote six novels; in three of them, a mother or mother figure dies of cancer. These deaths, taken with the reprise we get in his memoir, recall the Gospels’ four versions of the Passion—one scene amplified by retelling and complicated by variation, the ultimate narrative threshold through which the meanings of the world are all transformed. In his first novel, The Barracks, from 1963, he enters the mind of a dying woman, a stepmother named Elizabeth who succumbs to cancer in isolation. Her attitude is less one of fear than of gnawing bitterness at the anticlimax of her ending. The consolations of the church—its promise of miracles—have become nasty jokes to Elizabeth, whose ultimate revelation amounts to a vision of “futility.”
McGahern’s 1974 novel, The Leavetaking, hews closer to the events of his life (parts of it are reproduced almost verbatim in All Will Be Well). In its pivotal scene, Patrick, a child, bids goodbye to his ill and bedridden mother as movers empty the house of its furniture. (The children are being taken to live with their father in a police barracks in another village.) As Patrick leaves, “the beating apart of the beds rang through the house, rusted at the joinings by damp; the thin walls shivered at each beat, and the picture of the Sacred Heart swayed on its cord.” The earthquake that in the Bible accompanied Christ’s death has been replaced by the echo of hammer blows on metal. It is a moment of profound spiritual terror that prefigures nothing except the blunt facts of pain and loss.
In The Pornographer (1979), whose reissue last year by New York Review Books heralds the first U.S. publication of McGahern’s work since his own death from cancer in 2006, the furious disillusion of The Barracks and the anguish of The Leavetaking harden into a cold and weary acceptance. Now it is the narrator’s aunt who is laid up in the cancer ward, sneaking brandy to ease the pain. The narrator is no longer a child, and the aunt is old enough to speak matter-of-factly—as though “running through a tenant’s contract”—of what is going to happen: “It’s only after years that you get some shape on things, and then after all that you have to leave. It’s comical.” She ends on a note that echoes Beckett, but manages to be even more pessimistic: “You want to go on and you can’t.”
Absent in The Pornographer is the drama of lapsed faith, its narrator’s belief in any higher power having disappeared long before the story begins. Having gained distance from the raw wounds of grief (and having moved away from a direct representation of his mother), McGahern describes the aunt’s funeral in perfect accordance with her negative epiphany:
After the High Mass she was wheeled from the altar on a shining new trolley not unlike the trolleys used to gather in trays and used dishes in big wayside cafeterias, and we carried her on shoulders down the steps to the open back of the hearse.
Clear and precise, rhythmic without being insistent, and despite the cynicism of the imagery, strangely tender, the writing achieves a formal elegance that sacralizes its sacrilege. Fatalism feels startlingly exalted.
“A terrible new life was beginning,” is what McGahern says of his mother’s death in All Will Be Well. He was nine years old at the time. He and his six siblings (he was the eldest) were living with their mother—Susan, a schoolteacher—in a village in Ireland’s County Leitrim in 1944, while their father, Francis, a police sergeant, lived twenty miles away in a barracks in Roscommon. Susan had been diagnosed with breast cancer a few years earlier and had undergone an operation to remove the tumor. She and Francis were warned that pregnancy would increase the risk of recurrence. But they had another child even so, and when the cancer returned, it was incurable.
The new life was indeed terrible. McGahern describes a bucolic childhood abruptly replaced by his father’s rages and domineering control. Francis had fought in the War of Independence between 1919 and 1921, and afterward served with the Garda, though there was so little crime in rural Ireland that he had nothing meaningful to do. “In any army in peacetime you have to arselick and know the right people if you want to get on. I was never any good at getting on with people,” grouses the aging Michael Moran in Amongst Women (1990), McGahern’s unsparing, fictional reckoning with his father. Francis watched as men he had once commanded outpaced him professionally. He was reduced to issuing traffic summonses and fining people who allowed weeds to grow in their fields.
In the barracks, Francis was verbally and physically abusive toward his children. The beatings were so regular that neighbors threatened to report him to his superiors, though they never did, even after Francis attacked McGahern’s sister with a garden spade in full view of the block. Until Francis remarried, he shared a bed with his son, and he would sometimes masturbate while massaging the boy’s stomach and thighs. As soon as he could, McGahern left home on a scholarship to pursue an education degree in Dublin. He had promised his mother that he would join the priesthood, but by then his Catholic faith had thoroughly eroded; he chose teaching, her own profession, as a compromise.
He published The Barracks to critical praise, if few sales, while working at a boys’ primary school in Dublin. With grant money he received on the strength of the debut, he took a yearlong leave of absence to travel abroad, during which time he married Annikki Laaksi, a Finnish theater director. Laaksi was a Protestant divorcée, so he kept their marriage secret from his employers, who operated under the auspices of the Catholic Church. McGahern completed his second novel during this interval: The Dark (1965), a gloomy, impressionistic coming-of-age story about an adolescent boy trapped between the expectation of good Christian conduct and his overwhelming sexual awakening. The evocation of the boy’s impure actions, as well as the undertow of sexuality in both his parish priest’s solicitude and his father’s violence, caught the attention of the censors, who typically busied themselves outlawing pulp erotica. Even before it became available in bookstores, copies were seized by Customs and Excise officials. Soon after, The Dark was banned by the Censorship Board.
When McGahern returned from his leave to resume teaching, he was fired. His employers blamed his marriage, but McGahern would later recall that when he met with the parish priest who managed the school, his first words were, “What entered your head to write that book? Such a terrible schemozzle you caused that I couldn’t take you back after that.” The scandal, which became known as the “McGahern affair,” had the ironic effect of thrusting him even more publicly into the role of a writer. McGahern went to England during the furor and spent much of the next decade in London, Paris, and Helsinki. Censorship gave him something painfully vital to an Irish artist—the gift of exile. It also crystallized his subject matter. Ireland, he saw, was not unlike his father’s household. The church was the dominant authority, and society under its petty, theocratic rule was “childish, repressive and sectarian.” People were habituated to constant surveillance and capricious punishments. (During difficult births, McGahern notes in his memoir, doctors would break women’s pelvic bones rather than perform Caesarean sections, because this was considered more in line with Catholic doctrine.) The fear and desperation that had marked McGahern’s upbringing were, in fact, national characteristics. “I know no one who has caught so well the peculiar hopelessness of contemporary Ireland,” wrote Anthony Burgess, an odd yet earnest compliment. The personal abjection in McGahern’s novels is best understood as an allegory of social despair, which is in turn allegorical of a godless existence.
Though he would mine the experience for his work, McGahern mostly avoided pronouncements about his censorship and, when he was asked, discouraged a group of fellow writers from organizing a letter of protest on his behalf. This was partly because it pained him to see the country of his birth disgraced in so public a manner. But the deeper reason was that McGahern was not quite convinced that The Dark was good enough to merit the attention. His early novels, as he seemed aware, are gripping but erratic, and of them, The Barracks holds up best. In his debut, McGahern shrewdly projects his youthful disenchantment onto the seasoned figure of the sickly, middle-aged stepmother. Her lonely death possesses a terrible credibility, at times recalling The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
In his later books, the challenge of transmuting personal experience into art is more apparent. The Dark takes the unusual tack of changing its point of view from chapter to chapter, alternately presenting the impressions of its nameless protagonist from the first, second, and third persons. Though its experimentation is sometimes lauded, the effect is one of uncertainty, as if the writer couldn’t commit to a choice. Published nine years later—from here on, McGahern would compose his novels slowly and with painstaking deliberation—The Leavetaking consists of two sections. In the first, the narrator remembers his mother’s death from cancer. In the second, he relates the circumstances of marrying a divorced woman and being dismissed from his teaching job. There are powerful passages in both parts, but it is never clear how they hang together. Before the novel was reissued in 1984, McGahern rewrote much of the second section, hoping to create what he called an “inner formality or calm,” but it still feels piecemeal.
It is in The Pornographer that McGahern achieves this sought-after balance, especially with regard to the two themes, death and desire, that most possessed him. The narrator is an unnamed thirty-year-old living alone in Dublin who gets by writing erotic vignettes involving the characters Mavis Carmichael and Colonel Grimshaw. Their escapades, some of which are reproduced at length, are replete with the usual imbecilities of dirty talk (“I want to see that gorgeous soft mound on high”), yet the writing is clever enough to make it evident that the narrator is a frustrated artist. “Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one’s own blood,” he thinks ruefully after completing an assignment. Even pornographic trash cannot simply be hacked out; a part of the author must believe it.
The narrator, however, would prefer never to believe anything. Jaded after a recent heartbreak, his acquaintances are few. One is his aunt, who raised him after the deaths of his parents, and who has come to a city hospital to be treated for what may be terminal cancer. Another is his employer, Maloney, a flamboyantly sardonic publisher whose pornographic magazine has grown popular in defiance of (or perhaps due to) the country’s censorship laws. “Ireland wanking is Ireland free,” he declares, in Falstaffian fashion.
The Pornographer is a riposte to the banning of The Dark, a very mordant kind of revenge. The novel begins with the narrator meeting his bachelor uncle, who has come to the hospital from the country. The uncle is nervous at the prospect of seeing his dying sister, but as the visit proceeds—as formalities are observed and small talk is dutifully made—he grows more comfortable. The narrator is meanly gratified to find his deepest pessimism confirmed:
Now that [the visit] was taking place it amounted to the nothing that was the rest of our life when it too was taking place. It would become part of our life again in the memory. In both the apprehension and the memory it was doomed to live far more vividly than in the taking place. Nature had ordered things well in that we hardly lived our lives at all. Our last conscious moment was the moment when our passing nonexistence and our final one would marry.
Such is the violence of his frame of mind when, under the “cattle light” of a city dance hall, he picks up a woman and brings her home. She is thirty-eight years old, inexperienced and ready for a fling, but while she agrees to a strictly sexual relationship, she soon interprets his behavior as budding love. Angry at her growing attachment, he tells her he won’t marry her, even if she gets pregnant. Then she does.
From here, The Pornographer stages a great and terrible humbling. The woman, who wants to keep the baby, moves to London to avoid scandal, waiting out the pregnancy alone in the hope that the narrator will join her. Unwilling to submit to the travesty of a loveless marriage, he refuses to share any more than a financial part of her or the child’s life. McGahern weaves the increasing brutality of this abandonment into scenes of the aunt’s dying. By the end, the narrator declines even to see the baby boy, leaving the woman to her fortunes in London, where she has found lodging with a sympathetic Irish family. For the aunt’s part, she has dispensed with all illusions of recovery—“her coldness shook me, her perfect mastery”—yet she fights to stay alive with a determination that leaves the narrator unnerved, for it sharply underscores his cowardice.
Far more overtly than in McGahern’s previous novels, the reproaches in The Pornographer extend to the hypocrisies of Irish society. McGahern conveys an icy rage that the men and women of Ireland are forced to sneak around and have sex like guilty teenagers. (“Doesn’t the whole country look as if it’s wetdreaming its life away,” Colonel Grimshaw quips.) The novel ends with a virtuoso lampooning of the aunt’s funeral that cuts straight through the rural superstitions and drunken blubbering. But the bulk of the narrator’s loathing is reserved for himself, and for his presumption of superiority and the way he holds himself apart from the ceremonies that give people meaning. All that he had dismissed as “farce” (the religious reverence of death; the pieties governing sex) acquires the awful force of consequence. The novel’s most shocking line is spoken by the aunt’s nurse, whom the narrator is both attracted to and intimidated by. She is younger and has no hang-ups about sex, and she is also surrounded by death. When the narrator expresses amazement that his aunt keeps struggling to live, the nurse is unimpressed. “Life,” she tells him, as though anyone could see it, “is very sweet.”
A key scene occurs in The Leavetaking after the McGahern-like boy has been sent to live with his father after his mother’s death. He and his siblings are not allowed to attend her funeral. As the boy waits at home, imagining her burial, he takes a clock from the cabinet and hides with it in a grove of laurel trees, tormented by his inability to stop its “steel blue hands” from advancing, knowing that each passing minute takes his mother farther from him. From then on, time is a measurement of loss.
The idea of empty time—of minutes and hours ticking by unfulfilled—haunts McGahern’s characters, lending an atmosphere of eerie philosophical dread to the realistic depictions. It is in these tableaux of monotonous waiting that Beckett’s influence is most recognizable. (“You want to go on and you can’t” is, of course, a stark reversal of “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”) In The Pornographer, Beckett’s lanky shadow hovers over the narrator’s invocation of nothingness in an inner monologue that adopts the stressed cadences of liturgy:
What had I learned from that clandestine night? The nothing that we always learn when we sink to learn something of ourselves or life from a poor other—our own shameful shallowness. We can no more learn from another than we can do their death for them or have them do ours. We have to go inland, in the solitude that is both pain and joy, and there make our own truth, and even if that proves nothing too, we have still that hard joy of having gone the hard and only way there is to go, we have not backed away or staggered to one side, but gone on and on and on even when there was nothing, knowing there was nothing on any other way.
The abiding paradox of Beckett’s writing is that nothing is itself something, and can beguile the mind if one is able to accept it. Certainly it provided him substantial material. “To know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker,” he writes in Molloy. The narrator’s like-minded discovery in The Pornographer is that rejection alone is inadequate as metaphysics. Some manner of living must be embraced to transform the quality of time’s passage. For the narrator, this is writing itself—ironic because he devotes himself to producing mindless raunch. But at no other moment does he feel as free and unburdened as when he is writing, except perhaps during the release of sex. These are activities during which time ceases to be oppressive. “Seldom is it given, but when it is it is the greatest consolation of the spinning, time passing—sizable portions of time—without being noticed.”
Reading, too, offers a way into the world by taking one, for long periods, out of it. One of McGahern’s most striking childhood memories in All Will Be Well is of reading indiscriminately from library books with such deep concentration that his sisters removed his shoes and placed a hat on his head without him noticing. McGahern’s own work reproduces this feeling of charged oblivion. The dynamic interplay he achieves between poetry and despair—the calibrated, hypnotic beauty of his prose—is wholly absorbing. Bleakness is instilled with pleasure, and the reader experiences the solace of disappearing, mind and soul, into a text.
Can there be a Passion without a Resurrection?
In the Seventies, McGahern and his second wife—Madeline, an American photographer—bought a cottage by a lake in Leitrim, and the two settled there permanently. This was the land of his mother, a place of poor soil but with flourishing hedges that grow so high on the banks along the lanes that “the trees join and tangle above them to form a roof, and in the full leaf of summer it is like walking through a green tunnel pierced by vivid pinpoints of light.”
It was here, in the solitude of Leitrim, that McGahern’s craftsmanship reached sublimity. Amongst Women, which was short-listed for the 1990 Booker Prize, is a word-perfect, powerfully perceptive depiction of a weakening father. McGahern winnowed it to fewer than two hundred pages from drafts that exceeded one thousand. The same exacting process of writing and revision went into his next novel, By the Lake (2002), the unimaginative U.S. title for That They May Face the Rising Sun.
One of the great novels of the twenty-first century, By the Lake is markedly unburdened by the inner turmoil of McGahern’s previous work. It is thoroughly local, unabashedly concerned with Irish customs. Its prose is tranquil, pellucid, and naturalistic, favoring dialogue over introspection or philosophy. If Beckett can be detected, it is only in the breach, as this book is the product of a peaceful seeker, a novel of moments and sensations rather than a pointed depiction of familial and social entropy.
Its story concerns Joe and Kate Ruttledge, who have moved from England to rusticate in the Leitrim countryside. They are ensconced in the happenings and gossip of their neighbors, who take turns stealing every scene. We meet Joe’s uncle, known as the Shah because of his business acumen; their gregarious friends across the lake, Jamesie and Mary; the ladies’ man John Quinn, who is always on the lookout for propertied women to wed; the charmingly ruthless IRA leader, Jimmy Joe McKiernan; and others of various trades and temperaments. Viewing them through the proxy of Joe, McGahern refuses to romanticize these characters, who are often admirable but also, by turns, nosy, deceitful, aggressive, and ridiculous. What matters is their realness, their compatibility with their environment.
The novel cheerfully rushes along “in attendance on small tasks,” and in its scenes of mowing and lambing and shed making, there is something of a Tolstoyan idyll. The seasonal rites, as old as pagan times, are so ancient and organic that no one thinks to question them. “There’s nothing right or wrong in this world. Only what happens,” counsels Jamesie, putting a seal on a brief disagreement. One day Joe comes home and overhears Kate and his uncle chatting:
As he listened to the two voices he was so attached to and thought back to the afternoon, the striking of the clocks, the easy, pleasant company, the walk round the shore, with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.
In this state of rapt immediacy even the striking of the clocks sounds like a benediction; empty time has been enriched.
By the Lake takes us worlds away from the suffering of The Leavetaking or the derisive existentialism of The Pornographer. Despair has dissolved into the ordinary busyness of daily living. There is, of course, a funeral in the novel; death remains an inevitable part of the natural order. But this too has been transformed. The fear and hatred of death that shrouded McGahern’s prior novels, and bore in him a stubborn resistance to so much of Ireland and its bequests, has fallen away. In the serenity of the scene, we sense a great coming to terms. Joe and his neighbors help to prepare the body for the viewing, an act “as intimate and warm as the act of sex.” When they dig the dead man’s grave, they ensure that his head lies to the west, as is the tradition, “so that when he wakes he may face the rising sun.”