April 7, 2022 35Letters from a Scattered Place
Clair WillsThe Letters of
John McGahern
edited by Frank Shovlin.
London: Faber and Faber,
851 pp., $40.00Seamus Heaney once char-
acterized the Irish novelist
John McGahern as a rumi-
nant, given to chewing the
cud. He meant it as a com-
pliment. He was defending
McGahern’s third novel,
The Leavetaking (1974),
against the charge of re-
cycling material from his
first, The Barracks (1963).
The accusation wasn’t un-
fair. The death from can-
cer of McGahern’s mother,
Susan, when he was ten, is
at the core of both novels,
and it’s described in very
similar terms. Later he re-
turned to it again, in terri-
fying detail, in his memoir
All Will Be Well (2005).
But, Heaney suggested,
the echoes and repetitions
were irrelevant. This is how
memory becomes imagina-
tion, by repeating itself.
John McGahern was
born in County Leitrim in
the northwest of Ireland in 1934, the el-
dest son of a police sergeant and the vil-
lage schoolteacher. He was of the same
generation, broadly speaking, as Hea-
ney, the playwright Brian Friel, and
the poet and critic Seamus Deane, who
were growing up on the other side of
the newly constituted Irish border, and
like them he was lucky in his schooling.
While Heaney and Deane got to take
advantage of the British government’s
extension of free secondary education
for all, landing themselves places at
St. Columb’s College in Derry, Mc-
Gahern’s good fortune was the newly
opened secondary school run by the
Presentation Brothers in Carrick- on-
Shannon, the largest town in Leitrim,
an eight- mile bicycle ride from home.
His place at the school (“years of
luck and privilege—and of grace, ac-
tual grace”) saved him from a job in a
hardware store, and eventually led to a
teaching qualification, a degree in liter-
ature from University College Dublin
(he attended night classes while work-
ing as a teacher), and a dedication to
writing. When he died, aged seventy-
one, he had published six acclaimed
novels, more than thirty short stories,
an autobiography, some reviews and
essays on the art of fiction, and one
really terrible play (a hypermelodra-
matic version of Tolstoy’s The Power of
Darkness crossed with the Kerry Ba-
bies double- infanticide scandal of the
mid- 1980s).
All but the last of these works turn
on the events of McGahern’s early life
in Roscommon and Leitrim, or are set
in that landscape. His experiences as a
young man in London and Dublin, de-
scribed in his 1970s novels, The Leave-
taking and The Pornographer (1979),
are filtered through memories of his
youth at home. All Will Be Well mainly
focuses on his life up to the age of about
fifteen, as it was lived in various houses
in the two northwestern counties. In afew score pages toward the end he races
through his teaching career, a first
marriage in London, and being sacked
from his job after his second novel, The
Dark, was banned for obscenity by the
Irish Censorship Board in 1965.
“My own separate life, in so far as
any life is separate, I detailed only to
show how the journey out of that land-
scape became the return to those lanes
and small fields and hedges and lakes,”
he writes. He gets back as quickly as
possible to where he began, the Leitrim
landscape of his childhood, which is
also the setting of his masterpiece,
the 2002 novel By the Lake, about a
returned emigrant, Joe Ruttledge, or
rather, about the community to which
Joe returns, with his English- born wife,
after years in London.
There is no real plot to By the Lake.
Instead, in highly patterned and almost
incantatory prose, McGahern evokes a
year in the life of a rural village, attend-
ing to the effects of the seasons and the
rhythms of ordinary life and speech.
“Nothing has changed or seems likely
to change,” says Ruttledge:The lambs were now out with their
mothers on the grass, hopping as
if they had mechanical springs
in their tiny hooves, sometimes
leapfrogging one another. Jamesie
helped Ruttledge harness the old
horse plough to the tractor and
guided the handles as they turned
sods and tore up ground at both
houses for spring planting. Jamesie
had been in the bars of Shruhaun
on Patrick’s Day and complained
that people with big bunches of
shamrocks in their coats who had
been off drink for Lent were foot-
less. The fruit trees were fertilized
and pruned. Flowers were planted
out. The bees were making cleans-
ing flights from the hives and gath-
ering pollen. Out on a bare rock,in the middle of the drinking pool
by the house, the black cat sat as
studious as a scholar amid all the
spawn and stirring of the pool as
she waited to scoop up with one
white paw any amorous frog that
rose too close to the rock.What’s extraordinary is the way these
simple, declarative sentences (such hum-
ble verbs: “showed,” “turned,” “helped,”
“sat,” and, most simply, “were”) unfold
into an account of a border community’s
fifty- year habits of evasion, indirection,
and obfuscation. The plain prose hides
a pileup of cruelties and injustices. One
storyline features a man on the run
from British soldiers, his cry for help
caught “between the need to be heard
and the fear of being heard.” It’s a per-
fect description of McGahern’s nar-
rative voice, like an anthropological
participant- observer, both inside the
life of a place and uneasily independent
of it.
As he puts it in The Barracks, “The
road away became the road back.” It’s a
phrase he repeats in The Pornographer.
Again and again the novels and the
stories say: back home, back in those
early days of childhood, back in
the room where his mother died, or the
room where he slept with his father,
the river where they fished, is where
you will find the real.The letters in this volume, edited by
Frank Shovlin, an Irish scholar and
professor at the University of Liver-
pool, were written after that life back
home had ended, and the “journey out”
had begun. (Apart from one, a letter
written by the young John—known as
Sean at this point—in 1943, to thank
his father for a present of a comic
book.) They tell the story of a public,
professional man, through his interac-
tions with agents, publishers, editors,and translators, and his
colleagues in the English
Department at Colgate
University in upstate New
York, where he taught
for many years. The let-
ters are time off from the
writing life, and so, in ef-
fect, time off from that
chewing of memory into
imagination.
McGahern was a cau-
tious letter writer. In the
mid- 1960s he apologized
to Patrick Gregory, his
American editor at Knopf,
for fussing about other
people seeing his corre-
spondence: “I only meant
when I was there in NY in
your flat that there were
letters about which made
me uneasy since they were
mine. Forgive the fear.”
Letters left lying about
are hostages to fortune.
Not only are they open to
being read by a third party,
but they can be misread
and misinterpreted. Or
perhaps even worse, their
secrets can be correctly
interpreted, but by the
wrong person. “I think the
difficulty of dealing with letters is that
they are never quite honest,” he wrote
apropos a collection of letters by the
Irish novelist Michael McLaverty, with
whom he corresponded. “Often out
of sympathy or diffidence or kindness
or affection or self interest we quite
rightly hide our true feelings.”
I have a hunch that McGahern’s fear
of letters getting into the wrong hands
was laid down early. The striking thing
about the family he grew up in was that
relationships were, for long stretches
of time, conducted primarily by corre-
spondence. For seven years after they
became engaged his parents lived a
considerable distance apart, when his
father was posted to a Garda (police)
station in Galway. They wrote back and
forth; she waited; he played the field.
They eventually married only after she
called a halt to the delay and mailed
back the engagement ring. But most of
their married life was also spent living
separately—she with the children near
the various primary schools where she
worked, he in the barracks, visiting on
days off. That’s why McGahern was
writing to his father to thank him for
the comic book, because his father
wasn’t there. When his mother was in
the hospital, the children stayed with
their father and wrote to her.
This habit of letter writing marks the
family out as part of the emerging rural
Irish middle class, despite their relative
poverty. McGahern’s memoir looks
like an account of remembered days in
rural Leitrim in the 1930s and 1940s,
and that’s partly what it is, a celebra-
tion of the ordinary and the rhythms of
the day- to- day. But it’s also an analy-
sis of his parents’ correspondence, in
which he’s a third party, decoding his
mother’s diffidence and kindness and
skewering his father’s self- interest.
McGahern was growing up inside an
epistolary novel with a tragic plot—an
experience that would surely teach youJohn McGahern; drawing by Patrick Swift, circa 1960Estate of Patrick SwiftWills 35 37 .indd 35 3 / 9 / 22 3 : 46 PM