36 The New York Reviewthe power of writing, and the need to
keep control of it.He appears not to have kept copies
of his own letters—most of them were
handwritten, occasionally they were
typed by his wife Madeline, and toward
the end of his life they were dictated to
her and sent via e- mail. Shovlin has gath-
ered this collection together by search-
ing through institutional archives (the
records of publishing houses and the
BBC written archives, for example),
and by contacting individual corre-
spondents. But some people couldn’t
find their old letters from McGahern,
and others preferred to keep them pri-
vate. Although Shovlin doesn’t say this,
some were destroyed. McGahern’s first
wife, Annikki Laaski (“Anu”), a silent
presence in this volume, explained in a
2006 interview in the Irish Independent
that she had torn up their correspon-
dence. She found herself wishing she’d
kept some, if only to disprove the ex-
culpatory account in his memoir of the
breakup of their marriage.
In the pre- phone era of the late
1950s and 1960s McGahern wrote long,
chatty letters to various male friends,
such as Tony and Jimmy Swift, whom
he met in a Dublin dancehall; Tony
Whelan, met at St. Ann’s hostel in
Bethnal Green while working on Lon-
don building sites during the summers
off from his degree; and Joe Kennedy,
met in a lodging house while teaching
for a short spell in Drogheda. The talk
is mostly serious; he’s given to lush de-
scriptions of the natural world and re-
flections on loneliness. He indulges in
a kind of weary postadolescent search-
ing for truth and “vision” in writing:
“Life for me is a physical thing like a
woman. I love the bitch and try and
tell all sorts of things because I must”;
“No one seems to even know about lit-
erature anymore; to realise death.” To
Whelan he sends a clutch of poems that
read like a hybrid of Auden, Yeats, and
parts of the Mass. Here are a few lines
of “The Cross”:The shudder through our flesh
forgets
To ripple to its sob
And we are sure the shadow met
In the night is ours at last
And that a cross on the road is
turned
To the rectangular beast.McGahern writes long letters to his
youngest sister, Dympna, encouraging
her, in a distinctly paternalistic way, to
expand her mind:Do you read much now? You must
be careful, what you read and do
now will shape the whole richness
of your lifetime. Do try and be alive
to things all day, not bored or su-
perior to others or critical or clever
or full of notions and opinions.
Remember that life is eternally
passing—for others as for yourself
and they too have to endure in the
lonely cell of themselves.With the Belfast novelist Michael
McLaverty he discusses Tolstoy, in
comparison with Joyce and Proust;
his dislike of Sean O’Faolain’s novels;
his favorite work by Thomas Mann,
Felix Krull. He finds a Maeve Brennan
story in The New Yorker “vulgar”; he
dismisses The Bell Jar as “poor- poor,all the adjectives.” He objects to “the
common notion that you can make
an art out of your life”—what he calls
“the autobiography stunt!” For this
reason he is also (at this early stage in
his experiments with writing) against
plot. Instead, “there must be some
morality”:I often think the realest reason
I write is, having lost my formal
faith, I am self compelled to pray
or praise. If I did not need to do
it I would stop tomorrow, but there
seems little else.His ambition, he explains to Patrick
Swift, is “to give passion and pattern
to the lives of people being eroded out
of their existence in the banality and
repetitiveness of themselves”—a sen-
tence written in September 1960 that
serves as a good description of By the
Lake, published over forty years later.Letters to Charles Monteith in 1963
describe the “frightful shindy” at home
following the publication of The Bar-
racks, when his father—incensed by
McGahern’s portrayal of him—refused
to allow him into the house. And they
hint at something close to a nervous
collapse later that year, while he was
writing The Dark. The first draft of the
novel, he explains in November 1963,
“almost finished me”:Images of old horror started to
come at me without warning and
with horrible violence, atmo-
spheres of evil. For weeks I lived
in a state of pure panic. They’d
always come suddenly. And the
only time I was free of them was
strangely when I was working with
them.These were images, surely, of his
domineering and frustrated father
masturbating against him in the bed
they shared after his mother had died,
and the sexual undercurrent to his fa-
ther’s violent beatings of his children.
Those passages in The Dark are still
disturbing to read, years after first en-
countering them.
But for a year or more before this
collapse McGahern had been in cri-
sis. Following a broken love affair with
an unnamed woman, he had become
“crazed with suffering” the previous
summer. Then in the spring of 1963 he
had got Joan Kelly, a journalist with the
Irish Press, pregnant—an experience
he later wrote about in The Pornog-
rapher (a novel about which the kind-
est thing to be said is that the sexual
politics are of their time). Both the
letters written around this time and
the novel display a singular lack of em-
pathy. He apologizes to Joe Kennedy
for a “chaotic time” in May 1963 and
explains, “This person will be on my
hands till the end or almost the end of
June. Then she goes.” As though that
would be the end of it. Joan did go, to
London, where she gave birth to a son
whom she raised by herself.
In the novel the Joan character is
represented as culpable because she
doesn’t want to use contraception,
and the John character is punished by
being punched in the face— as though
that were the end of it. Shortly before
the novel was published, nearly sixteen
years after the affair, Joan approached
him for support, and McGahern hadthis to say to Jimmy Swift (who was
acting as go- between):Do you have any idea of the boy’s
position, as such: does he feel he
should have a father like others,
rights to assert, see the actuality or
whatever?
There was no formal request
previously. This woman—a Mrs
Capon—had been told the story by
Joan, and approached me herself.
From what she said, I understand
that Joan was pushing for the boy’s
recognition, at that time, 8 years or
so ago. When Joan elected to keep
the child, as opposed to having it
adopted, I told her that this situa-
tion was likely to arise. And when
it did that I would be unavailable.
It was considered part of my bru-
tality at the time.
From my point of view, for what
it’s worth now, there is just the
chance of a concessionary lie to
the boy OR wait in the knowledge
that anybody can call on any of us
at any time, with the usual hazard-
ous consequences.The last sentence is puzzling. McGahern
wasn’t facing the possibility that any-
body could call on him at any time—just
his son and his son’s mother. And in the
end he did see them.
Later in the summer of 1963, presum-
ably after Joan was off his hands and
while he was working on the first draft
of The Dark, McGahern met Mary
Keelan, a graduate student at the Uni-
versity of Chicago, to whom he wrote a
number of letters in which he gave his
views on women and love: “Very few
women have a deep religious sense, only
social religion, establishment”; for a
man “to be loved is almost to lose his
identity, but I have often noticed this
difference”; “I think you fog things,
Mary. I think that woman and earth
are the opposite not the same as work,
which is murderous and destructive, a
road that leads to the wall”; “I know this
impersonality is hard for you or for any
woman, but I need you to be patient, if
you press too hard or force, and it seems
to be particularly American, you kill.”
It’s true that these letters were writ-
ten when he was young—but not that
young. He was turning thirty. I imag-
ine he’d have been a real pain to meet
in the flesh at this age. An emotional
drama king, who had somehow con-
vinced himself of his own rectitude and
self- control, and gave himself a pass
to be condescending about emotion in
others. Actually, I must be wrong about
that. He must have been charming.
Women so easily fell in love with him.
Perhaps predictably, given the tone
of these letters to Mary Keelan, when
they met again the following summer
in Paris it was a disaster, and they
soon went their separate ways. On that
same Paris trip McGahern met An-
nikki Laaksi, a Finnish radio producer,
and by October he had dedicated The
Dark to her (the book was already in
production) and moved to Helsinki to
marry her. Eighteen months later he
met Madeline Green, the daughter of
a wealthy businessman, in New York,
and when she moved to London in 1967
(where the McGaherns were then liv-
ing) they began an affair. As the situ-
ation at home became more and more
untenable, McGahern tried to keep
the different parts of his life separate.
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