The Letters of John Mcgahern, edited by Frank Shovlin
ALEX CLARK The Letters of John Mcgahern Edited by Frank Shovlin Faber £30
John Mcgahern said letters are ‘never quite honest. Often out of sympathy or diffidence or kindness or affection or self-interest we quite rightly hide our true feelings.’
He was writing in 1991 to the critic Sophia Hillan, who had asked for permission to quote one of his letters in a monograph.
It’s impossible to work out whether his opinion of letters reflected general misgivings or a more specific anxiety – even admission – about his own.
How would we know? Mcgahern’s novels – from his first, 1963’s The Barracks, to Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun – are taut masterpieces of the art of showing through concealment. They are stories that operate through constraint – an unhappy family, inescapable location or overwhelming emotion. And yet they suggest something much broader and more capacious about human experience.
He is, for example, a master of the passive voice, as in this sketch of
Bill Evans, a character in That They May Face the Rising Sun: ‘He would have known neither father nor mother. As a baby, he would have been given into the care of nuns. When these boys reached seven, the age of reason, they were transferred to places run by priests or Brothers. When he reached fourteen, Bill Evans was sent out, like many others, to his first farmer.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mcgahern’s letters are – when compared with some in the literary canon – usually circumspect, often businesslike and frequently fond without being impassioned. The great dramas of life – an early love affair that came to nothing, the break-up of his first marriage or the deaths of friends and family – are conveyed phlegmatically, even ironically.
‘It was the heart my father died from, but he sank slowly, fighting each inch,’ he wrote to his friend Niall Walsh in 1977. ‘The sisters seem calm enough. The prospect had been dramatised so that I suspect the real thing was a let-down.’
In the next paragraph, he details the purchase of some cows, and the pressure to deliver a new novel to his publisher.
He had previously characterised his sisters’ response to his father’s illnesses as hysterical. But, again, one must read between the lines. Mcgahern’s mother had died of breast cancer when he was ten, and his father had been living in Garda barracks in Roscommon.
Subsequently, Mcgahern and his six siblings were sent to live with his father. It had not been an easy relationship, and when Mcgahern’s story Bomb Box was published he sent his son an abusive letter.
‘Incidentally,’ Mcgahern wrote to his editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, ‘he got the allusions completely wrong.’
Mcgahern’s first career was as a teacher. Although he appears to have had a gift for it, it brought him trouble. When his second novel, The Dark, was published, it was seized by Irish customs officers and then banned in Ireland, on the grounds of its supposedly obscene content. Mcgahern turned down the offer of support from Samuel Beckett, preferring to take his lumps.
He was then suspended from his position at the Belgrove national school. Both the novel and his marriage to the Finnish director Annikki Laaksi, which had taken place in a foreign register office, were too much for the authorities to stomach.
‘It’s a long and mostly boring story,’ Mcgahern explained to his American editor, later relaying, without comment, what the school’s priest said to him: ‘That was an awful schemozzle that book made; put your foot right into it. I couldn’t take you back; there’d be uproar, teaching. What are you going to do for yourself now?’
What the writer did was to take himself away and write a series of obliquely brilliant novels that laid out the realities and contradictions of Irish life from the mid-twentieth century onwards.
He wrote about everything – sex, the Church, domestic violence and the Troubles – from an angle. His novel The Pornographer is in fact more about familial duty and the conflict between town and countryside than it is about the sexually explicit stories his protagonist creates.
His letters give a sense of a man ferociously interested in creating work. Aside from the pleasant exchanges he has with fellow writers – including Seamus Heaney and Colm Tóibín – and the occasional broadsides he issues, especially when he thinks a publisher might be about to land a stereotypically Irish cover on one of his books, he keeps his emotions in check.
If we are truthful, we might say that the collection doesn’t make for fantastically racy reading. But it does provide a wonderfully consonant picture of the man and his novels.