April 7, 2022 37ing Gregory, his American editor, to
“write two letters, one with no hint of
disturbance to 43B Gore Road; and the
other to the school. Please forgive me
for this.” I found myself relieved—for
everyone involved but also for myself
as reader—when he settled down.The second half of the book—let-
ters from the late 1970s onward—of-
fers a respite from all the relationship
shenanigans and the dubious views
of women. By 1975 he was, he wrote,
“tired of climbing other people’s stairs.
It’s eleven years of having no place
now.” After being sacked from his
teaching job in Dublin (either for writ-
ing The Dark or for getting married in a
registry office—it’s never entirely clear
which was the greatest sin), he had
lived in London (first with his twin sis-
ters who were nurses at Whipps Cross
Hospital, and then with Anu in various
rented properties in Bethnal Green,
Walthamstow, and Victoria Park), with
Anu in Helsinki and southern Spain,
and with Madeline in Paris, where she
owned a flat on the Rive Gauche. There
was also a spell in a house found for
McGahern and Madeline by the poet
Richard Murphy in Cleggan, County
Galway.
Finally he and Madeline bought Fox-
field, a house and farmland “beside
the lake,” or one of the many lakes, in
County Leitrim: “It’s a scattered place.
Foxfield is the post- office and church.
Fenagh is the village, 2 pubs, 2 miles
away.” But it was a good deal less scat-
tered than the life they had been living.
They began experimenting with part-
time, summer farming: “We bought 4
in- calf cows, and they’ve had 4 calves,
all heifers. One of them got joint ill, but
was treated, and seems all right, if a lit-
tle shaky. We’ve started to put up a shed,
and seem owned as well by the acres.”
Foxfield was the road back, but just
at this point in McGahern’s career all
sorts of international offers came his
way. He spent two years teaching in
Newcastle and Durham in England;
there were spells teaching summer
schools in Devon and Galway, and at
Trinity College Dublin; for over thirty
years he taught regularly at Colgate
University, sometimes for a semester,
sometimes for the whole year.
That meant plenty more climbing
of other people’s stairs, and it put him
squarely on the Irish American liter-
ary circuit, much of which—including
teaching gigs for Heaney, McGahern,
a nd Mu r phy — ap p e a r s t o h ave b e en i n i -
tially brokered by Monteith. For some
years McGahern alternated at Colgate
with Murphy. Bitchy tales of Murphy,
dubbed “the Poet” and sometimes
“kissy Dicky,” were a form of currency
exchanged in letters with editors Mon-
teith and Gregory and Matthew Evans,
such as this account of Murphy’s visit
to Paris in 1969: “There’s no conceal-
ing the homosexuality anymore, it
rampages in the face. As always he was
more fun in his absence than presence.”In 1981 the McGaherns bought a
house in Dublin’s Stoneybatter neigh-
borhood, and five years later another
farm. They also had Madeline’s flat
close to Notre Dame in Paris, and they
spent long periods in New York. But the
letters make very evident that Foxfield
was where they felt at home. “We have
no telephone but mostly because thelines have not come this far,” McGahern
wrote to the English poet and translator
Michael Hamburger (himself a connois-
seur of orchards), describing the farm.We live in 45 acres of poor land
between two lakes close to the bor-
der. Enniskillen [across the Irish
border] is the nearest big town and
we go there almost every week. We
have animals and trees, our or-
chard and garden, but it is all more
happy go lucky/unlucky than effi-
ciently run. Though we are not the
worst around.Throughout the 1980s, through hun-
ger strikes, border violence, and the
Anglo- Irish Agreement, McGahern
makes no mention of the political situa-
tion in Northern Ireland. I was surprised
to find nothing about the Enniskil-
len bombing, which killed twenty- nine
people in 1987, given that the town was
where the McGaherns shopped and so-
cialized. Nothing on the abortion and
divorce referendums of the 1980s. Al-
most nothing on politics at all. Which
doesn’t mean that McGahern didn’t
think about politics, just that he didn’t
write about it.
Instead the news he sent to his inter-
national correspondents was ultra- local.
In August 1981 he described in a letter
to Alain Delahaye, his French trans-
lator, how the brother of his neighbor
Francie had died on a visit home from
England and he and “a crazy chemist
from Dublin” had laid out the body.
The following year, he wrote again:Not much news in Foxfield. The
cow had a bull calf the colour of
café au lait on Good Friday. The
early plum tree is in white blossom.
There’s fine weather, frost at night.
The old woman up the lane—I
was mowing her meadow when
you were here—died in Sligo last
Thursday, was buried in Fenagh
on Sunday. She broke her hip and
died of homesickness. The post-
man scolded me and a few locals
for standing on neighbouring tu-
lips as we started to fill the grave.
The postman is known as Weedy,
from weeds in the garden, he is bad
tempered and busy and small. The
hunger for news is a symptom of
a long oppressed people. It rages
here. Francie hates to see you twice
the same day—“No good. Nothing
new. No news. No news.”Readers of By the Lake will recognize
both these passages. “No news. Came
looking for news,” cries Jamesie, the
Ruttledges’ neighbor from across the
lake, ritually.
But this isn’t McGahern nostalgi-
cally chewing the cud of his childhood
memory. He was describing the world
as he encountered it on his doorstep.
Some of the most tetchy letters in this
volume were written when he was
driven to fury by book- cover designs or
publicity that he felt over- Irished him.
He didn’t want to be pigeonholed as
an Irish writer, and he also objected to
being described as a realist. The drama
over The Dark, the banning and the
sacking, and then the leave- taking, set
him up in the public imagination as an
antiauthoritarian figure, a champion of
the “separate life,” saying no to church
and state in the name of personal lib-
erty and independence. But he was al-ways looking for a road back. (^) Q
MR. BEETHOVEN
Paul Griffiths
Paperback • $17.95
Also available as an e-book
“[A] quixotic and original work of
historical fiction.. .Mr. Beethoven
is the work of a skillful and
imaginative writer, gifted at evoking
the sights and sounds, the custom
and attire, of an earlier era.”
—Joseph Horowitz,
The Wall Street Journal
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
“The great composer pays a visit to Boston in
this high-concept novel about Old World musical
genius and emerging American society....
Stylistically rich and thoughtfully conceived
historical fiction.” —Kirkus, starred review
It is a matter of historical record that in 1823
the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (active
to this day) sought to commission Beethoven to
write an oratorio. The premise of Paul Griffiths’s
ingenious novel is that Beethoven accepted the
commission and traveled to the United States
to oversee its first performance. Griffiths grants
the composer a few extra years of life and,
starting with his voyage across the Atlantic and
entry into Boston Harbor, chronicles his adven-
tures and misadventures in a new world in
which, great man though he is, he finds himself
a new man.
Relying entirely on historically attested possibili-
ties to develop the plot, Griffiths shows Beethoven
learning a form of sign language, struggling to rein
in the uncertain inspiration of Reverend Ballou
(his designated librettist), and finding a kindred
spirit in the widowed Mrs. Hill, all the while keep-
ing his hosts guessing as to whether he will
come through with his promised composition.
(And just what, the reader also wonders, will this
new piece by Beethoven turn out to be?)
The book that emerges is an improvisation, as
virtuosic as it is delicate, on a historical theme.
“A masterly and witty historical fantasy... [that]
feels authentic... Griffiths incorporates music
criticism, send-ups of convoluted 19th-century
prose, excerpts from letters, and even auction-
catalog descriptions of correspondence and auto-
graphs. This wild quilt of styles brings a very human
giant of the Classical and Romantic periods viv-
idly to life.)” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A formidable display of fantasy scholarship.”
—Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian
EDITH WHARTON’S GHOST STORIES
A collection of spectral tales,
selected by the author
No history of the American uncanny tale would
be complete without mention of Edith Wharton,
yet many of Wharton’s most dedicated admirers
are unaware that she was a master of the form.
In fact, one of Wharton’s final literary acts was
assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her
most chilling stories, written between 1902
and 1937.
In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” the earliest tale in-
cluded here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress
continues from beyond the grave, and in “All
Souls’,” the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly
woman treads the permeable line between life
and the hereafter.
In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mer-
cilessly illuminate the motives of men and women,
and her ghost stories never stray far from the
preoccupations of the living, using the supernat-
ural to investigate such worldly matters as vio-
lence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the
rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that
stares back from the abyss of one’s own soul.
These are stories to “send a cold shiver down
one’s spine,” not to terrify, and as Wharton ex-
plains in her preface, her goal in writing them
was to counter “the hard grind of modern
speeding-up” by preserving that ineffable space
of “silence and continuity,” which is not merely
the prerogative of humanity but—“in the fun of
the shudder”—its delight.
“It’s this alertness to the terror of being a
stranger in one’s own house, in one’s own self,
that makes Wharton such a fine and frightening
writer of ghost stories.” —Hermione Lee, The
New York Review of Books
“Mysterious and coolly menacing stories of the
supernatural.” —Dan Chaon, The Week
GHOSTS
Edith Wharton
Selected and with a preface by
the author
Paperback • $16.95
Also available as an e-book
ALSO FROM NYRB CLASSICS
THE NEW YORK STORIES
OF EDITH WHARTON
SELECTED AND
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY ROXANA ROBINSON
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
Wills 35 37 .indd 37 3 / 9 / 22 3 : 46 PM