The Pornographer, by John McGahern

I’m reading The Pornographer, a novel by John McGahern. I read his By the Lake last year (excerpt here), and his Amongst Women is one of my favorite books (excerpt here) – so I decided to go back and fill in the blanks in the McGahern canon, including his memoir All Will Be Well.

Here’s an interesting post about McGahern, thoughts about who he was as a writer, and what he meant.

Anne Enright, winner of the Booker Prize last year for The Gathering said about McGahern, and Irish writers in general:

I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this. I can’t think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true. John McGahern was an immensely angry, dangerous, and subversive writer. But he was domesticated by the Irish academy incredibly fast. There’s the idea of the “authentic Irish” that he keys into.

Subversive not like peep-show subversive. But subversive as in revolutionary. He said what nobody wanted him to say. Which was the truth, as he saw it, about life on the ground in Ireland. He was sacked from his job. His first novel was banned in Ireland. Eventually, they came around – and he was more famous in Ireland than he ever was abroad (although, in the wake of his death, that has much changed). He is one of Ireland’s greatest all-time writers. His stuff is haunting. He uses a gentle pen – nothing firebrand-ish about him. You lose track of where you are when you are reading his books, the atmosphere is so all-encompassing. And for the most part, it seems like he is just describing what happened … The depths of his books are not immediately apparent. He does not make a big obvious deal about his themes. But they are there, and they resonate in the reader long long after you finish the book. I mean, the silence of that house in Amongst Women was deafening – and it seems like I can hear it still. And the characters he creates leave an indelible mark. He’s one of the best. And yes, you might miss how angry he is, and how courageous. Nobody thanked him at the time, for just telling the truth, as he saw it, about the Church, and sex, and politics in Ireland. He was pilloried. I guess he could take comfort that he was in good company (ie: Joyce, another writer who was run out of town on a rail after telling the truth about Dublin and Dubliners). He has the last laugh, I suppose – any list of great Irish novelists usually has him in the top 5, and small wonder. He is a very local writer – which I wonder is one of the reasons why his fame did not spread much further outside Ireland? But his very local-ness reminds me of two quotes:

Thomas Hardy, who was also accused of being “provincial” – and writing about the same 10 square miles of ground – had this to say:

“A certain provincialism of feeling is invaluable. It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done.”

And then a quote from photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, who had this to say about photographing Marilyn Monroe:

She’s American and it’s very clear that she is – she’s very good that way – one has to be very local to be universal.

Both of these quotes seem to me to be applicable to John McGahern, and his particular and specific power as a writer. He is Irish. His books could not take place anywhere else. You can hear the brogues in his language (much more than you can in, say, Banville’s stuff). McGahern writes in a brogue. And yet by being “very local” he has become “universal”. And his stuff, which has a “certain provincialism” also becomes “the essence of individuality”. You cannot remove his people into other lands, and have them retain the same sense of truth. Ireland is a character in his books, although it is rarely mentioned. LIke I said, he does not dwell, he does not use a giant hammer to make his points … and in that way, he is the most subversive writer of them all. Because it is hard to pinpoint exactly what it is he is doing or saying – and so he drove the officals mad! “We KNOW this is subversive, dammit … but we don’t know WHY!! He’s up to no good, that’s clear!”

I mean, sometimes it is obvious why – he was very open about sex and writing about sex – and just look at the title of this book!! Hugely confrontational! The Pornographer? In 1970s Ireland? What are you, nuts? You can’t say that!!

But he does.

In The Pornographer we meet Michael, a quiet man who makes his living writing erotic stories for an underground magazine. He writes trash. He is given the names of the characters by the editor of the mag – “Okay, so this one will be about The Colonel and a little tart named Mavis …” and off he goes. He doesn’t even have to worry about plot – that is given to him as well. But the sex is all his to write. It’s graphic stuff. “Fuck me fuck me O Jesus fuck me” cries poor Mavis as she humps the Colonel in Majorca. Michael lives a rather aimless life, it seems (I’m early on in the book) – and is, at the moment, taken with caring for his aunt, who is dying in a nearby hospital. Her husband won’t come to visit her. The book opens with Michael taking his uncle (his aunt’s brother) to see his sister in the hospital. His uncle is a country man, a working man – a true McGahern type, rural, rough, nobody’s fool, and highly practical. He makes appointments with a couple of different distributors in Dublin, to get machinery parts, while he’s there. There’s this absolute stunner of a sentence:

My uncle saw his own state as the ideal, and it should be the goal of others to strive to reach its perfect height. For me to disturb its geometry with any different perspective would be a failure of understanding and affection.

Wow.

Michael tells no one what he does for a living. It’s vague. He’s a “writer”. He had a failed love affair which seems to have made an impact. He asked her to marry him, she said no. And now he is left in the lonely quiet aftermath.

Here’s an excerpt – a connection being made between the ritual of the mass and the ritual of sitting down to write. Of course, sitting down to write porn. Ah, McGahern. I love your subversive self.

There was no sound when I opened the door of the house and let it close. Nor was there sound other than the creaking of the old stairs as I climbed to the landing. I paused before going into the room but the house seemed to be completely still. I closed the door and stood in the room. Always the room was still.

The long velvet curtain that was drawn on the half-open window stirred only faintly. A coal fire was set ready to light in the grate. The bed with damaged brass bells stood in the corner and shelves of books lined the walls. Books as well were piled untidily on the white mantel above the coal grate, on the bare dressing table. Beside the wardrobe a table lamp made out of a Chianti bottle lit the marble tabletop that had been a washstand once, lit the typewriter that rested on a page of old newspaper on the marble, lit an untouched ream of white pages beside it. I reflected as I always did with some satisfaction after an absence that the poor light of day hardly ever got into this room.

I washed and changed, combed my hair, and washed my hands again a last time before going over to the typewriter on the marble, and started to leaf through what I had written.

We used to robe in scarlet and white how many years before. Through the small window of the sacristy the sanded footpath lay empty and still between the laurels and back wall of the church, above us the plain tongued boards of the ceiling. It seemed always hushed there, motors and voices and the scrape-drag of feet muffled by the church and tall graveyard trees. Kneelers were no longer being let down on the flagstones. The wine and water and hand linen had been taken out onto the altar. The incessant coughing told that the church was full. The robed priest stood still in front of the covered chalice on the table, and we formed into line at the door as the last bell began to ring. When it ceased the priest lifted the chalice, and we bowed together to the cross, our hearts beating. And then the sacristy door opened on to the side of the altar and all the faces grew out of a dark mass of cloth out beyond the rail. We began to walk, the priest with the covered chalice following behind.

Among what rank weeds are ceremonies remembered, are continued. I read what I had written, to take it up. My characters were not even people. They were athletes. I did not even give them names. Maloney, who was paying me to write, effectively named them. “Above all the imagination requires distance,” he declared. “It can’t function close up. We’d risk turning our readers off if there was a hint that it might be a favourite uncle or niece they imagined doing these godawful things with”; and so Colonel Grimshaw got his name and his young partner on the high wire joined him as Mavis Carmichael.

This weekend the Colonel and Mavis were away to Majorca.

“Write it like a story. Write it like a life, but with none of life’s unseemly infirmities,” Maloney was fond of declaring. “Write it like two ball players crunching into the tackle. Only feather it a little with down and lace.”

I am not sure what is to come – I’m really looking forward to the book.