A look at the late Irish novelist John McGahern.
A memoir, All Will Be Well, has just been published which brings up interesting questions about biography and art … I like the point of view in the article. That the greater truth can be found in his fiction. Those who look to biography for all of the answers usually have a rather simplistic view of art itself. They want the DIRT. They want ANSWERS. They then go back and read the stories, assuming that every piece of it is somehow biographical. But no – McGahern’s life was his life, of course, and that is interesting – but there is a greater truth to be found in the fiction. There are those who, on dying, when asked: “What was the meaning of your life?” would point to whatever art they had created. There – you want to understand me? Don’t look at my childhood, or read my diaries, or talk to my friends. No. Read my novel! Etc. McGahern’s journey as an artist – being seen as a throwback – or as somehow nostalgic for a world that has passed – or as insufficiently condemning towards the Catholic church – is all in that article. His books (especially Amongst Women
) are not to be missed. He’s a good writer period.
Here’s the incoherent piece I wrote when I heard McGahern had died.
An interesting bit from the article I posted a link to above:
He was recognised as a master craftsman: a succession of awards and prizes confirmed that. But McGahern also came to be seen as something he never was, nor tried to be: a chronicler of Ireland?s journey from the past and an explorer of Irish identity.
As he tried to explain in interviews, this way of looking at things held no attraction for him. It was not interesting; there was something childish in questing after the machinery of identity. He disliked the notion of the writer as romantic artist, a courageous solo swimmer in a sea of archetypes.
He wrote about the world he knew and the world his people had known for generations in rural Ireland. He came from the Catholic middle classes, and although he had left the faith behind, he refused to condemn it. It was part of what he was.
It has always been too easy to stereotype McGahern. When his second novel, The Dark, was banned in Ireland, and he was forced by the Catholic church to resign from his teaching job in Dublin, some wanted to use him as a cause c鬨bre, a literary crusader against the old repression.
McGahern rejected the role. He noted that Samuel Beckett was one of the few to inquire after his personal opinion before agreeing to join an anti-censorship campaign. To others, it seemed that McGahern must have been so deeply brainwashed by Irish Catholicism that he refused to denounce it.
But he was no campaigner. If there was any denouncing to be done, it could be undertaken by the reader after engaging with the truth of his fiction. He did not want to dignify the ban by openly opposing it. Readers of his work could see what had angered the hierarchy: not just the frank sexuality, but a portrait of a religious institution without spirituality, devoted to secular power.
Again, here’s the whole article. Very interesting.
By the Lake (or: That They May Face the Rising Sun) – by John McGahern
John McGahern will probably be most remembered for Amongst Women, a novel that ranks up there with one of the best books I have ever read. He died last year (here’s what I wrote about him then), and his last…