Outstaring Nature's Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern

By Denis Sampson

This first book-length study of the fiction of John McGahern traces his development as an artist by providing a detailed reading of each of his five novels and three collection of stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Lilliput Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 1993
• ISBN: 9781843513254

Book preview

John McGahern. Courtesy of Madeline Green.

Outstaring Nature’s Eye

The Fiction of

John McGahern

Denis Sampson

The Lilliput Press

Dublin

For Gay

I knew myself too well. There was more caution than any love or charity in my habitual going home. It was unattractive and it had been learned in the bitter school of my ungiving father. I would fall into no guilt, and I was already fast outwearing him. For a time, it seemed, I could outstare the one eye of nature.

JOHN MCGAHERN

, Gold Watch

We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling, unforeseen, wing-footed wanderer…. He is of all things not impossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can never be a portion of our being…. I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing.

W. B. YEATS

, Per Amica Silentia Lunae

In art the question: how? is more important than the question: what? If all that you repudiate appears as an image—note: as an image—in the writer’s mind, what right have you to suspect his intentions…. No man of real talent ever serves aims other than his own and he finds satisfaction in himself alone; the life that surrounds him provides him with the contents of his works; he is its concentrated reflection; but he is as incapable of writing a panegyric as a lampoon.

IVAN TURGENEV

, Introduction to Collected Edition of Novels, 1880

The common end of all narrative, nay, of all, Poems is to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion—the snake with it’s Tail in it’s Mouth.

S. T. COLERIDGE

, Letter to Joseph Cottle, 7 March 1815

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Identity of the Artist

1. The Barracks: Suffering, Memory, and Vision

2. The Dark: Choice and Chance

3. Nightlines: Repetition of a Life in the Shape of a Story

4. The Leavetaking: Memory Becoming Imagination

5. The Pornographer: The Writing on the Wall

6. Getting Through: Imperfection in a Mirror of Perfection

7. High Ground: The Natural Process of Living

8. Amongst Women: The Troubles and the Living Stream

Conclusion

Appendix: Biographical Outline

Works Cited

Index

Copyright

Preface

John McGahern’s fiction has had a large and loyal audience for thirty years, yet the critical reputation of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelist remains enigmatic. The Barracks (1963) and The Dark (1965) won him a position as the most significant writer of prose in the generation after Beckett; indeed, many reviewers of the latter novel spoke of his work as on a par with the early Joyce. This comparison recurred also in reviews of later novels and stories, although his development as a writer through the seventies and eighties has evidently puzzled many, and the overall unity and direction of his oeuvre remain undefined. Comments on his work in histories of Irish literature are routinely laudatory, but interpretation is cursory and vague, and for many years his literary reputation was stuck fast in the mold of the Irish writer whose gestures of independence are punished by censorship and expulsion from his teaching position. But McGahern avoided the public role in which he was cast by the political issues surrounding the publication of The Dark, and for fifteen years he quietly nurtured his talent without promoting or defending his art. The respect of his peers has grown with the years. Academic articles on his work are few in number, however, and apart from a handful that examine the art of a particular novel or story, the bulk of general commentary has followed a thematic and repetitive approach and gives the distinct impression that the secret of McGahern’s art has eluded his readers. The popular and critical success of Amongst Women in 1990 won him a wider international audience, yet although his work has been loved, hated, and honored, his novels and stories have not received the careful reading they deserve from critics and scholars.

The readings that follow are an attempt to get close to the vital energy of McGahern’s art of fiction. His work is an organic whole, as in the case of any writer, but McGahern’s is a special case. He has not ranged out far in search of exotic material, but what may appear to be an obsessive interest in a small, largely rural, world is not in itself reason to think his work minor or merely of local concern. In most of McGahern’s fiction the true adventure consists in the engagement of the imagination with the everyday; he is, in short, a poet who happens to write in the medium of realistic prose. He has chosen to share with the reader the play of light and dark over an intimately observed local landscape, but, more tellingly, he shares the drama within the perceiving subject and between consciousness and place. One of the most remarkable features of these eight volumes of contemporary fiction is that they circle and converge on one another, and the reader is invited to contemplate the process of making within the context of an evolving life. Each new fiction casts light on earlier stories and novels, and, as McGahern has suggested in talking about Yeats, these successive stanzas are linked by refrains in the manner of a ballad.

Like other regional writers, he has made it his aim to go deeper and deeper into the soil of personal experience so that it is distilled by poetic perception until it assumes mythic patterns. If this brackets him with Thomas Hardy in the minds of some readers, the organic integrity of his work also has a more modern and contemporary quality because, like Proust or Yeats or Joyce, he includes the story of the evolution of the observer, the artist searching for his vision and for the renewal of his vision. Some readers are drawn into his work because it appears to be confessional in a frank and contemporary way, but insofar as the story of the young man growing up in the Irish countryside is autobiographical, it is so because the origin of the artistic vision and the stories of its renewal are dramatized through that material. The realistic mode thus becomes the site of a myth; place and personal experience are fused in a symbolic style to bear witness to a poetic vision of the human facts of suffering and mutability. As Gold Watch dramatizes it, the bereft individual comes face to face with the cyclops eye of Nature and must call on the resources of imagination to outwit, temporarily, the ultimate biological fate.

While many comparisons might be made with Irish writers of his generation and earlier in the areas of social and psychological insights, I have set myself another task. I have tried to follow McGahern’s own sense of the literary traditions to which he feels an affinity and the critical discourse in which he articulates his own sense of the creative process and of the literary medium. Some of the prominent figures are, predictably, Irish—Yeats, Joyce, Beckett—but McGahern reads them in their European literary contexts and ranges widely over many centuries of European writing for the foundations of his art and for his understanding of his role as artist. While it is tempting to trace his dialogue with philosophical and literary traditions, his fictional medium is created out of the examples and insights of Flaubert and Chekhov, Joyce and Proust. These are the main names that will recur in the following pages, but it will be seen that McGahern’s encounters with modernism simply gave him the intellectual discipline and context to pursue the search for his own style.

My method is straightforward and perhaps too pedestrian for some readers, but McGahern’s curious status has required me to address myself to different audiences. The bulk of the book is made up of individual chapters devoted to a single novel or collection of stories. My reading of each novel is an attempt to map those areas where technique and material most clearly reflect the vital presence of a personal vision; while I establish the coherence of each separate work, I also try to define each work’s part in an evolving whole. McGahern’s comment that Dubliners may be read as a novel has led me to view each collection of stories as an integrated work, although I have singled out certain key stories in each volume for extended study. McGahern’s development during each decade may be observed by situating each volume in relation to the novels. My hope is that these extensive discussions will inspire other readers to recognize the complexity of his art of fiction and to explore further where I have left off.

An introductory chapter draws on interviews, reviews, and other statements by McGahern to provide the necessary ambience of the writer writing. Almost all of this material comes from the eighties when he became a more public figure, and so I have had to sketch the path by which the boy from the Roscommon-Leitrim countryside became the mature artist he was, already, when The Barracks was published in 1963. From that point on, the going didn’t get easier for, following the banning of The Dark in 1965, he became, more determinedly than before, a writer who spoke only through his books: a new one has appeared at roughly five-year intervals ever since. His identity as an artist is, then, in his art, and although it may strike some critics as old-fashioned to say so (and McGahern’s wry story Oldfashioned has much to say that is pertinent about fashions and reputations), it may be because there is so little else to go on that his art has not become known to a much wider international audience.

Readers may question the appropriateness of my title for it will quickly become evident that I slide from staring to seeing in my attempt to describe McGahern’s narrative style. It is the poetic vision, the gold watch of fiction itself, which redeems that mundane material of self and family and place and which has already been stared at, perhaps too analytically. Gold Watch, that key story in McGahern’s oeuvre from which I have taken my title, may be seen as the essence of his technique: on the level of realism, it presents a character who is a skeptical rationalist to the point of anguish and absurdity, while on the symbolic or poetic level, the character’s experience is placed in a web of resonances and archetypal patterns that redeem the bitterness and the poignancy of the irresolvable conflict between father and son, transforming them so that they seemed fixed like a leaf in a rock. The fusion of frailty and hardness in such an image of the framing of particular moments in art; the prose that registers the triumphs and the absurdity of the person in time; the proximity of vision and blindness, of form and flux—all are suggested by Gold Watch, which epitomizes the heartfelt need and the felicity of McGahern’s artistic endeavor.

Acknowledgments

I was fortunate to meet John McGahern in early 1979, and a conversation I taped on that occasion, now partially printed in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 17, no. 1 (July 1991), has been the inspiration for my thinking over many years. My greatest debt is to John and Madeline McGahern for renewing that inspiration through conversation and correspondence, although I must note that I alone am responsible for these interpretations of his fiction, and nothing I have written here has been seen by the artist.

My debts to a handful of critics, notably, Michael Foley, Roger Garfitt, Thomas Kilroy, and Paul Devine, will be evident. Although J. C. C. Mays has not written about John McGahern’s work, I am conscious of a lasting debt to this exemplary teacher and scholar-critic, for many years a lecturer at University College, Dublin. George O’Brien’s enthusiasm for the project and his comments on earlier drafts have been invaluable in maintaining my energy during the writing. I would also like to thank John Wilson Foster for his early reading of the manuscript and for his comments on it; his support of the project was also crucial at that stage. I thank David McGonagle of The Catholic University of America Press for his interest in my proposal from the beginning and all those at the Press for the courtesy of their communications with me. In addition I offer thanks to Philip Holthaus, meticulous copy editor, whose thoughtful scrutiny of my sentences led to many improvements in clarity and style.

My first effort to articulate what I believed was significant in McGahern’s art was a brief essay on The Leavetaking in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 2, no. 2 (December 1976), and I would like to acknowledge the sustaining interest and encouragement of its editors, Andrew Parkin, Brian John, and Ronald Marken. In particular, parts of the discussion of McGahern and Proust included here appeared first in an article in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 17, no. 1 (July 1991) and my Checklist of writings by and about McGahern to which I refer readers appeared in the same issue. Quotations from John McGahern’s work are included by kind permission of the author and of Faber and Faber Limited.

The encouragement of my Irish and Canadian families has been a lifeline which cannot be acknowledged in this medium. From stuffing newspaper clippings in letters to indulging my solitary activities as reader and writer, different individuals have supported me in many ways, no one more than the person to whom I dedicate this book.

Abbreviations

John McGahern’s novels and volumes of stories are cited in the text as follows:

Note: In the cases of the last four books, the numbering of pages in paperback editions published by Faber and Faber corresponds to the numbering of pages in hardbound editions.

Introduction

The Identity of the Artist

Unlike many contemporary writers, John McGahern abstained for almost twenty years from influencing the critical reception of his work except through the medium of the fiction itself.¹ In fact, it appears that becoming a cause célèbre in 1965 impelled him to adopt his own version of silence, exile and cunning. The publicity surrounding the banning of The Dark in Ireland and his dismissal from the teaching position he had occupied for ten years endangered his ability to write, he has reported,² and so he withdrew from the hazards of public categorization or castigation to define the direction of his artistic development. He left Ireland at that time, and when he returned to live in the West of Ireland, settling eventually in the countryside of his childhood, he rejected the public role of social or literary commentator. When he began to give interviews fifteen years after The Dark, he appeared bemused by the fads and fashions of literary reputations and by the ironies of moral and political self-righteousness. Yet indirection conveys its own truth; the satirical strand of his work has grown to accommodate not only a wide-ranging preoccupation with religious, political, social, and sexual dogmatism, but also a concern with tribal forms of repression, and with literary stereotyping.

John Updike’s review of The Pornographer in the New Yorker was given the title An Old-Fashioned Novel. McGahern appears to have planned an oblique rejoinder: he wrote a story called Oldfashioned and wanted to have his next book called after it.³ In that story, a comic vignette of his own career, a country boy grows up to become a successful academic who also made a series of documentary films about the darker aspects of Irish life. As they were controversial, they won him a sort of fame: some thought they were serious, well made, and compulsive viewing, bringing things to light that were in bad need of light; but others maintained that they were humourless, morbid, and restricted to a narrow view that was more revealing of private obsessions than any truths about life or Irish life in general (HG 55). Thus McGahern plays with the whole issue of reputation, cunningly incorporating it into his work so that he can evade those broader categories that would deny his work its distinctiveness and its authenticity.

McGahern’s refusal in the sixties and seventies to comment on his own work, or to become a public figure, allowed him the deeper freedom to define himself as an independent artist. He has seemed willing to wait for his readers to discover the paths he has opened up for his own development. He may seem oldfashioned, then, in insisting that it is the work of art that is valuable, and his own life merely a distraction from it. And yet, when his oeuvre is looked at as a whole, it becomes evident that among the pleasures he offers—and this accounts for his popular success in Ireland—are meditations on the currents of familial and communal life, on the domestic history of the revolutionary decades of Catholic Ireland in the midcentury, on the burden of being a woman or a man in such a society. This is the material of McGahern’s art, for he is a deeply engaged observer of Irish society. It is the immediacy of his images of local life, in the country or in the city, that allows his fiction to be read as realism, but it exists also as a symbolic art in which the concrete image becomes a locus of meaning in an indeterminate world. I think all good writing is local, he has said, in the sense of place, and I think nearly all bad writing is ‘national.’⁴ In saying this, he is not only guarding his own freedom as an artist to set the terms of his participation in literary and political controversy but is insisting on the concreteness of the artistic image and the dangers posed to it by bad writing, or, as he will later dramatize it, by pornography.

In this, he is reflecting one of the lessons of his master, Joyce, or, rather, of Flaubert, expressed in the conversation of Stephen Dedalus: The feelings excited by improper art are desire or loathing…. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion … is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire or loathing.⁵ The equally celebrated terms in which Yeats stated a comparable goal, to become neither rhetorician nor sentimentalist, are another touchstone for McGahern’s determination to create his own vision of reality.⁶ Only a careful study of the art of his fiction will clarify the central importance to him of art itself as a way of knowing, and will direct the reader back with appropriate attention to the deeply felt psychological and social resonances of his work.

John McGahern has associated his wish to become a writer with his discovery in school that not only were places he knew in the Sligo-Leitrim-Roscommon region real physical places but also they existed in the musical and memorable poems of W. B. Yeats:

I think there is a peculiar moment in everybody’s growing up when there is that language change from being marvellous stories, like movies, and marvellous songs, which words always are for me, so that you suddenly realize that these things are about your own life … when [writing literature] becomes a moral activity. I suppose if it did happen with anybody it was with Yeats, because we used to go to the sea in Sligo. I suppose Yeats gives me more pleasure than any other writer, and more constant pleasure: to actually see the names like Knocknarea and Queen Maeve’s Grave, and I stood among a crowd at Drumahair, His heart hung all upon a silken dress—to actually know that those placenames were places that I knew like Boyle or Carrick on Shannon.⁷

This statement suggests that an intimate connection between place and style, the symbolic force of concrete images, was central to McGahern’s identity as a writer from the beginning. Yeats’s poems of longing and dreams in which the persona is anchored to the place-names appealed to the young McGahern because the pleasure of the language itself was given a moral dimension. If the experience of the teacher-mother in The Leavetaking recalls this discovery of Yeats’s poetry, then her association of poetry with memory and with the infusion of the poetical personality into the words (L 38) conveys McGahern’s own sense of the essential mystery and magic that literature finds in ordinariness.⁸ The value of marvellous stories or songs or movies as pleasurable diversion is now transformed; literature as a vocation is discovered, and a personal vision or truth is attached to specific effects of language. The local and ordinary world, the experience of a young country boy, became through the magic of Yeats’s verse the potential material of art.

These discoveries by the young McGahern seem to be echoed in two other childhood experiences he has recalled: the death of his mother when he was ten years old and his discovery of books. His early years were spent with his mother, a teacher; after her death he went to live with his father in the police barracks at Cootehall. McGahern has commented on this move: [I]t was my first experience of the world as a lost world and the actual daily world as not quite real.⁹ The phrase the lost world hints at the central importance that Proust will have later in his artistic life, and indicates the significance of memory as a means of restoring reality to the world. These literary and metaphysical resonances of that experience came later, but the boy seems to have made his own discovery that time and the world are ever in flight and that words alone are certain good. In The Solitary Reader, he tells how he had great good luck when I was ten or eleven. I was given the run of a library. I believe it changed my life and without it I would never have become a writer.¹⁰ McGahern’s essay re-creates the circumstances of his boyhood visits to a Protestant house in the neighborhood of Cootehall where he read indiscriminately, but the older McGahern associates those days with an experience of Proustian intensity: There are no days more full in childhood than those days that were not lived at all, the days lost in a favourite book…. Nowadays, only when I am writing am I able to find again that complete absorption when all sense of time is lost.¹¹ Reading and writing conquer time not simply by recovering the pure concentration of childhood but by restoring a sense of authentic reality to the self.

Yet that intense pleasure changes, he goes on to say, and becomes more akin to what he spoke of in relation to Yeats, although he associates it here with a later phase of his youth when he went to live in Dublin and with a more deliberate search for particular works of literature. This search becomes a more personal quest for faith or truth: [W]e begin to come on certain books that act like mirrors. What they reflect is something dangerously close to our own life and the society in which we live. A new painful excitement enters the way we read…. The quality of the writing becomes more important than the quality of the material out of which the pattern or story is shaped.¹² McGahern describes the great excitement of discovering European classics in literature, in the theater, and in the cinema, but he has already associated his interest not with an indolence or drug but with our growing consciousness, consciousness that we will not live forever and that all human life is in essentially the same fix.¹³ While The Solitary Reader describes the ambience in which McGahern grew into a literary life in Dublin, it is also a kind of manifesto that claims for literature that personal reality experienced by the solitary reader, without which the word is spiritually dead.¹⁴ This sensitivity to the pleasure and to the spiritual reality or truth in poetic language, which the mature McGahern has articulated as a critical norm, is affirmed most accurately in his own novels and stories.

His discovery of the meaning and value of literature appears to be continuous with these childhood experiences. Therefore it is scarcely surprising that his fiction is rooted in the childhood place. What may be surprising, however, is that the place and the experiences associated with it in his realistic fiction appear not to be moments of positive illumination, at least not overtly so. In the sixties when his first two novels were published McGahern became known as a realist, a naturalist, even, who wrote of characters who were victims of the most squalid and repressive aspects of Irish rural life. In The Barracks, he depicted the death by cancer of a middle-aged woman and then, in The Dark, he presented the claustrophobic world of an abused adolescent boy. The visceral account of violence and isolation and suffering upset some readers, but others recognized that scrupulous meanness and the presence of Joyce in other ways were a guarantee that it was the quality of the writing rather than the quality of the material that deserved attention.

McGahern did not become a poet or a man of letters in the manner of Yeats; instead, he became a prose writer in the footsteps of Joyce. While Dubliners was undoubtedly an early stylistic model, in ways that a later essay on the book suggests, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a model for the psychological observation of a young Catholic male, that novel and Ulysses can be seen as reference points for the working out of an aesthetic theory for fiction. The figures of Joyce and Yeats actually combine in the formation of McGahern’s identity as an artist. Joyce’s Dublin is where McGahern lived as a young man, and its features as a local place are definitively evoked and transformed in many of his stories, in The Leavetaking, and in The Pornographer. McGahern found in both writers a decisive emphasis on personal experience of a local place as an anchor for an art of symbolic transformation through style, and so, when McGahern began to write, he wrote with their authority of the places in which his imagination was rooted.

John McGahern grew up in the countryside outside Carrick on Shannon, in Leitrim to the east of the town and in Roscommon to the west, and the place-names of that region and the river Shannon itself provide a tangible location for much of his fiction. He was born a decade after the War of Independence and the Civil War had ended, and the violence of that period and the heroic role won by participants were a living history. They lived on in his childhood because his father and other family members had been actively involved, and his father’s subsequent career as a police sergeant maintained an intimate and disillusioned connection with the large-scale political and social movements that animated the newly independent state. These were also the decades when insular nationalism and conservative Catholicism were shaping the new society, the decades when liberals and writers like Sean O’Faolain voiced their opposition to censorship and to what McGahern has referred to as the competing bigotries in both parts of the divided island of Ireland.¹⁵ The bleak, male-dominated world of the barracks, and later of a small farm, during these decades is a representative situation in McGahern’s fictions. Over and over he returns to these settings to present abrasive father-son conflicts, and to offer the terrifying anatomy of frustration, disillusionment, and repression characteristic of a boy growing up in the shadow of a man whose life story, as it is revealed in Amongst Women, appears to be an allegory of Irish society itself in this century. This world of the father, of imprisonment in the darkness of violence and tyranny, of ignorance and insensitivity, of the destruction of dreams of renewal and heroism, represents a grim and heartfelt truth about many currents in Irish life, but they are not the only features of that place and time that engage his interest.

The world of childhood he captures in the fiction is an intimately personal one in which ordinary life appears to remain largely untouched by political changes.¹⁶ The country life of farmers and villagers is less a social world than it is a world of physical labor, often in unhospitable climatic conditions and always changing according to seasonal changes. The rituals of planting and reaping, of haymaking and potato-picking, and the dependence on rain and sun represent an elemental way of life. Social intercourse in this world is banal and awkward when it is not abrasive. Communal rituals such as sporting events or dances or weddings are rarely alluded to, and conversation is little more than the sharing of clichéd gossip, it too a routine that excludes personal feeling. The isolation of the dying Elizabeth is, in effect, no greater than the isolation of her husband, Sergeant Reegan, the isolation of the adolescent Mahoney no greater than that of his father, or of any of the characters in Nightlines.

Yet one communal ritual was critically important to the young McGahern in this place. The ceremonies of the Catholic church were central to his imaginative development; on numerous occasions he has associated poetry with those ceremonies. The countryside he describes is not the West of Ireland that Yeats had discovered as a child and had returned to as a mature artist; in contrast to Yeats, who believed that a pre-Christian spirituality permeated the folk life of the people, McGahern presents the social life of the people as impoverished, prosaic, and bleak. In his view, the Church provided the people with what Yeats believed it denied them: The folk tradition had died except for the music. Some sense of the myths lingered on, but as a whisper. The sense of mystery, of luxury, of beauty or terror, all came from the Church, in its rituals and ceremonies.¹⁷ He insists that the influence of the Church was positive: I have nothing but praise for the Catholic Church. When I was growing up, it provided the only notion of poetry, of truth. It dealt with space and time, it had ceremonies, it had something more than earth itself.¹⁸ This remark echoes a favorite quotation from Proust, which he has used on a few occasions to explain his attitude towards the place of the Church in everyday life: The Church should be there if for nothing else for the spire that lifts men’s eyes from the avaricious earth.¹⁹ While the power of the institutional church, of which he was himself a victim when he was fired from his job, is