John McGahern, the preeminent Irish writer of his generation, was best known for his rural writings. Much of his work was set in the counties of Leitrim and Roscommon, the midland landscape he left as a young man and to which he returned in his thirties. All his writing life he harvested stories from the same fields and townlands, repeating and reworking themes, tropes, and even characters with a quiet, cumulative power. His voice could be lyrical, but it was bare of sentiment and sometimes somber. From the earliest his prose possessed a Chekhovian lucidity. A realist who rarely intruded himself upon the page, by the last he had erased himself entirely. With typical humility, he did not rate himself as being important to his own memoir, which he completed after a terminal diagnosis:
My own separate life, in so far as any life is separate, I detailed only to show how the journey out of that landscape became the return to those lanes and small fields and hedges and lakes under the Iron Mountains.
McGahern’s first two novels share the pull of deep narrative time that he found in the countryside, but they draw from the difficult events of his childhood and are far from serene. His debut, The Barracks (1963), tells the story of a woman dying of cancer, as McGahern’s own mother had died when he was nine. Also like his mother, she is the wife of a police sergeant in the Irish midlands. McGahern later wrote that he kept the setting but imagined the characters—yet he also kept the disease. It is an odd mix. Perhaps by staying close to his own life, a writer could transcend the personal. “It is not a novel,” he wrote, “but an attempt to break that form down into a religious poem.”
There were other, more vengeful reasons for repurposing the stuff of his own experience. McGahern’s second novel, The Dark (1965), was banned, in part for its discussion of masturbation. In his letters, he is scornful of this public outrage (“The Auld Sock has just got an award for its translator in France”), but the book also contains a scene in which a priest climbs into a boy’s bed, and another in which the boy is sexually assaulted by his father. Shortly before he died, McGahern’s memoir confirmed that his father, Frank, had been sexually abusive as well as ordinarily brutal. When this man asked the young McGahern what his aim was in writing, he answered, “To write well, to write truly and well about fellows like yourself.”
Sometimes McGahern played with the was banned, he was fired from his job as a schoolteacher in Dublin, and his union refused to support him. The general secretary told McGahern he had turned himself into “a hopeless case entirely” by marrying a “foreign” woman (she was Finnish). His next novel, (1975), is about a teacher who has been sacked for the same specious reason.
