John McGahern: A reluctant hero

Sad the day we heard of the death of the great Irish writer, John McGahern. He had been suffering from cancer, but the end came suddenly all the same, at the Mater Hospital in Dublin. He was but 71 years of age.

The news, when it hit, left me reeling. There was a feeling of dislocation that hasn’t lifted yet, even five days on. A great artist and a hugely attractive, honourable and decent man has been stolen from us by the brutal march of time, and the ravages it leaves in its relentless wake. His loss will be keenly felt. It already is.
“Ní fheicimíd a leithíd arís”: the old Irish cliché that we’ll never see his like again is entirely apt to the man. John McGahern was a singular character, who fitted no one’s assumptions of what a writer should be. How many giants of Irish literature have continued to work a farm while producing a series of novels of enduring distinction, individuality and importance? How many have conducted themselves with such dignity and composure through the hard years as well as the good? How many have been so widely liked and respected by their peers – and by the general public alike?
To anyone who loved Irish literature and who believed in the importance of art, John was a hero, albeit an unlikely and reluctant one. He suffered for his, and by his example in doing so played a huge part in advancing the struggle by Irish writers and artists for recognition in a country that had, through most of the 20th century, been deeply suspicious and mistrustful of creativity of any kind.
His first book, the award-winning The Barracks was well received, but it was with The Dark that he invoked the wrath of conservative Ireland. The novel was banned and he was sacked from his job as a teacher in a school in Clontarf, in Dublin, as a result. He was hurt massively by the treatment meted out to him – but he wasn’t bitter about it, rather taking the view that the book might have been better written, and surmising that if it had been, it would likely not have inspired the outrage and antagonism with which it was met.
He lived in London and elsewhere abroad for a number of years. After his first marriage failed, he returned to Ireland and moved back to Leitrim – where he was based for much of the past thirty years with his second wife, Madeline Green.
His brilliant novel, Amongst Women, set in the West of Ireland that he knew intimately and loved, was nominated for the Booker Prize and subsequently turned into a successful TV drama. It is perhaps his finest work, a masterpiece that captures the anger and frustration of a man whose emotions have been calcified by bitterness in prose that excavates depth and meaning from the most deceptively unadorned expression of the ordinary.
That was followed by the wonderfully resonant That They May Face The Rising Sun (called By The Lake in the US), which was acclaimed as the work of a master of literary economy. It was a rare book in that it reflected a sense of inner peace and happiness, conveyed through prose that was at once brilliantly crafted and gently ecstatic.
His most recent book Memoir gives a moving and sometimes angry account of his own life story, taking it up to the death of his father Frank – to whom he is seen to be particularly and uncharacteristically hostile. Along the way, it offers a remarkable insight into the rural Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s. But most of all, it is sustained cry of love to the mother that he lost when he was a boy, and to whom he remained deeply in thrall to the very end. It has been on the best sellers list for many months – a reflection of the huge affection, which has lately grown in Ireland, for a writer of real and magnificently understated genius.
Hot Press interviewed John McGahern on a number of occasions. He proved to be a man of great wisdom and composure. There was no bitterness at all in the way he spoke, or in what he had to say, even though he had been treated abominably by the Irish state during his early years. He emerged as a character of genuine warmth and real eloquence, qualities that were important also to his work – which has a marvellous, measured, precision. He used language sparingly, paring his work down to the essentials – a technique which lent its quiet lyricism an even greater power. To him, it was always about the word: everything else was of secondary importance.
Now he is gone. But John McGahern leaves behind an important body of work, that is crucial to our understanding of Ireland in the 20th century. More than that, however, it has the timeless quality of great art, offering a unique and deeply personal insight into what it is to be human.