Lessons the Master Taught Himself

This piece began as part of a conversation with John McGahern’s biographer Frank Shovlin about what John was like as a teacher to I consider how John taught writing reflected his views of the craft.

This was an interesting exercise for two reasons. First, I knew that John didn’t believe writing can be taught; second, I think that John used his teaching as a means of clarifying in his mind what he had taught himself—for he was always picking up ways of thinking about writing and borrowing from writers he admired (from antiquity to the present). Here are some of John’s major principles boiled down based on my experience and conversations with him.

Choose the telling, unexpected image. John was fond of repeating Chekhov;s notion of the broken bottle.  The shorthand for the expression is “Don’t talk about the moonlight. Show me the light glimmering on a shard of broken glass.” This is based on a letter Chekhov wrote to his brother: “In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.”  When you read John’s descriptions, you can close your eyes and envision a world more real than what you know.

Allow the rhythm of life to motivate the language, giving movement and order to life’s stasis and randomness. Not only must the detail create the picture in the mind’s eye, the rhythm of the language should move the reader through the scene. John almost never taught using his own work as an example, but both image and rhythm are captured best in the opening of McGahern’s story, “My Love, My Umbrella,” a particular favorite of mine:

It was the rain, the constant weather of this city, made my love inseparable from the umbrella, a black umbrella, white stitching on the seams of the imitation leather over the handle, the metal bent when it was caught in Mooney’s grating as we raced for the last bus to the garage out of Abbey Street. The band was playing when we met, The Blanchardstown Fife and Drum. They were playing Some day he’ll come along/The man I love/And he’ll be big and strong/The man I love at the back of the public lavatory on Burgh Quay, facing a few persons on the pavement in front of the Scotch House. It was the afternoon of a Sunday.

Make the voice the human voice—the voice of people living their lives. In the words of John Butler Yeats, “A man with his wife or child and loving them, a man in grief and yielding to it, girls and boys dancing together, children at play—it is all dreams, dreams.  A student over his books, soldiers at war, friends talking together—it is all dreamland—actual life on a far-away horizon. The best way to test the voice is to recite the work aloud and listen for its rightness,” John said, reciting from memory the words of Robert Frost: “Only the sound of the human voice entangled in the words can save poetry from singsong, prose from itself.”  John believed that the voice of the work can be dramatically shifted from work to work, and always pointed out the cadence and sound of lines from Yeats’ “Purgatory” to make his point: “….Half-door, hall door, Hither and thither day and night, Hill or hollow, shouldering this pack, Hearing you talk…”—the human voice taking on a ghostlike quality as if it is coming from another world.

Write through suggestion, not statement.  The real focus of a story or novel, John believed, is to be buried under the bondo of the vehicle; it isn’t written as a bumpersticker on the fins or back window. I once wrote a scene with a band that played a song lyric that carried the theme of what I was writing: “I can’t be happy/Like I wanta be happy/unless I make you happy, too.” He put a checkmark next to this, as a way of reminding himself to tell me a secret of his: “This is the kind of thing that can be shown over about 100 pages.”  In the Pornographer, for example, the real theme is so hidden you wouldn’t know it, though John once said what he had in mind: “How young people go to the city to live, while old people stay in the country to die.”

Writing is suggestion, not seduction, so don’t overwhelm the reader with technique.  As Kierkegaard points out in The Diary of a Seducer, real enjoyment is not stolen pleasure. The art of seduction gives the other freedom to feel devoted and fall in love on their own. Put in Beaudelaire’s words: “Who would have too much technique would be a monster; who would do without would be a fool.” 

Good writing is not biography. In the words of Camus, "Art is the distance that time gives to suffering, It is man's transcendence in relation to himself."

Dialogue is a stacked deck of language, not regular human speech. It needs to reflect character, provide the ambiance and interest but not necessarily move anything along. The more subversive, sly, wry, off-beat, or comically interesting the better. His example was always the misquotation “lux upon lux is crux upon crux” section of Joyce’s short story “Grace” from Dubliners.

The writer should be objective and invisible. Style is closer to authenticity than originality, as Auden said. In the in the words of Patrick Kavanagh, the writer’s role is to be “the namer, not the beloved.”

The poetry of fiction is showing time pass.  One of the things that John did exceptionally well was making stories move with simple techniques to reveal the passage of time—for example, the famous way he would show the rhythm of the changing seasons on the farm, with its work of gathering in the hay and bringing cattle to market. He taught our class this through the opening of Faulkner’s story, “A Rose for Emily,” where Faulkner shows the Negro with the market basket repeatedly coming to the house and how things had changed each time. I learned from this its inverse as well. The fiction of poetry is not showing time pass, but making a moment last. 

Write with empathy and compassion for all characters.. To have reality, characters must be seen with dignity and compassion, in the pity of their passing lives, John wrote in a letter to the novelist and short story writer Michael McLaverty. The artist cannot be superior or indifferent to the character—even those they may dislike or who live outside of the societal norms—because we “are all together by our nature.” In the words of WH Auden, “we must love our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart.”

Feel confident in invention.  John always said, ‘Art is not life. Life is less believable than fiction. Drawing too closely from the experience can be deadly.” Hemingway once said that what’s important is not what’s said, but what lies under the surface. John agreed with that to an extent, but stressed the importance of creating a sense of distance, and reshaping the world by blending memory with imagination. “Art is artifice. It is fabrication. But every lie is based on an element of truth.”  In a sense, the truth is the jigger of hard liquor in the drink; it is what makes the heart warm and the mind stir. But the drive to write is fueled by capturing a truth that is simple and elusive and often built out of pain.  One of the things John introduced me to was The Letters of John Butler Yeats. The greatest piece in there is the letter of John Butler Yeats to his son Willie about dreamland. It summarized John’s view of reality and fiction, creating a world that was vaster and more sumptuous than any human habitation, that was built “all out of our spiritual pain—for if the bricks be not mortised by actual suffering, they will not hold together.” I once asked him what was the thing he learned most as a writer, and he said, “as I get older, I get to the pain faster.”

Keep the tone steady and sharp like a tuning fork.  Because I would write for weekly classes, I always kept my own writing short and sharp—core scenes that were unique and interesting and could be developed into something larger. Even as a poet, I try to grow what I am doing from a page at a time, and carry on if the piece deserves or needs to grow for its own sake. My own belief is that all writing starts in a sprint and sees how far it can go.  John liked this approach.  He said that he himself worked this way. Every now and then he would purposefully write the sharpest two pages he could write a what he called a “tuning fork” to make sure that all the writing was consistently at a high level.

Know the rules you are breaking.  Whether rules of punctuation or taking risks in ways of telling a story, John was adamant that writers know what language can allow, and that when the situation called for it, to break rules intentionally to add to the effect. I believe this is what attracted him to the Scottish poet W.S. Graham who was greatly influenced by James Joyce and had a comic ability to talk to the words as if they were people and carry on imaginary conversations within his poems.

Learn from your material. I only learned this from writing two book-length poems, finding how the narrative develops organically, using history, conflict, various rites of passage, and other factors that are there from the beginning based on who the characters are and what they need to achieve their destiny/growth or to embody some larger dilemma. John shows how this is done better than I can tell. A story like “The Conversion of William Kirkwood,” for example, follows its own path, against expectations. The younger Kirkwood, a Protestant idler with no seeming good sense, helps young Lucy who grows up in his house with her catechism, and everyone thinks he is doing it to marry the young woman. But when he finds a wife, it is someone who will set up household and cut ties with Lucy’s mother, Annie May, the housekeeper, and the girl, which upends everything. The story is designed to asks its own unique question: "whether there was any way his marriage could take place without bringing suffering on two people who had been a great part of his life, who had done nothing themselves to deserve being driven out into a world they were hardly prepared for."

Some of the best stories are tragic—there can be no good outcome for anyone—which often reflects the choices we find in life. But John was also fond of two statements about tragedy that rounded his view, and made tragedy the preferred outcome. He loved this quote from D.H. Lawrence, “True tragedy ends in triumph and is a great kick at suffering.”  And also William Butler Yeats’ gradn statement in his autobiography that those thoughts and experience that truly sustain us are those that carry a tragic view. In Yeats’ words:

As life goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us victory, whether over ourselves or others, and it is these thoughts, tested by passions, that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in all those that must spin a web out of their own bowls) the victory is an intellectual daily re-creation of all that exterior fate snatches away, and so that fate’s antithesis; while what I have called the mask is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internal nature. We begin to live as we discover life as tragedy.

You are only allowed great flourishes every 50 to 100 pages. We all want to be lyricists on every page but the goal is not the flourish but creating the imaginary space for others to enter and believe in. You can let it rip every 100 pages if you are a novelist; I haven’t figured it out what’s allowed for a poet. But as Flaubert wrote in one of the few flourishes in Madame Bovary: ”We write songs for bears to dance to when we want to make music that will melt the stars…”

Keep at it. Your biggest weaknesses can become your strength. John would say this, and I loved the spirit of it. The meaning of this comment is something that you can probably see best fro, the growth John showed from his first unpublished novel to The Barracks.  I’m not sure what his weaknesses were, he had few, though he made mistakes. The first 80 pages of his book, The Leavetaking, include his best writing, with language that sees the world as if under a magnifying glass or microscope, the second half had to be rewritten because he wrote it as if he threw his glasses away… I also suspect that his biggest weakness had something to do with his lack of interest in plot and his unusual uses of flashback that no writing teacher would suggest anyone try because it is so difficult. Yet if one looks across his works, the most difficult technique was often his starting point. I think of the openings of many of his stories that throw you into worlds that are different than ours where a novitiate nun will have sex with a stranger before entering the convent, and nothing happens across whole novels, or the same characters from stories and novels reappear…)

What holds a story—or Ireland itself—together. When I had an independent  with John, I once went to his office with a stack of books from a writer I had grown to love—the German writer Heinrich Boll. I had read The Clown and was blown away by the bitter comedy of the marginalized truth teller who takes what he sees and expands it for all to see, while the people of Cologne didn’t care for the truth he told, wanting to move on with their lives and never come to grips with the past.  John pulled out from the stack a book that interested him—Boll’s Irish Journal. He had never read Boll, but the next meeting I had, he discussed how Boll used the recurring image—the safety pin—as a way of getting something across—about the frugality of the people of Ireland in the 1950s, the simple things that help one survive, and what holds his beloved country together. This was a technique he liked to use himself, he said—a return to an organizing image that held a work together.  This is similar to rule number two—having an underlying, hidden truth, direction, and purpose—the line on which to hang your wash.

Writing is done for its own sake—it knows nothing of reward. Writing is focused on faith and passion and suffering, not the laurels that may come with it. All success and failure is private. What happens outside the writing are either lucky or unlucky accidents. All art approaches prayer and is not something that you can count on to support you. It is easier to rob banks than to make a living as a writer.

Writing is close reading, not only of one’s own work but of others who can become part of that work. One of his favorite quotes was from Proust’s On Reading Ruskin: “We can develop the power of our sensibility and intelligence only within ourselves, in the depth of our spiritual life. But it is in contact with other minds, which reading is, that the education of the ‘manners’ of the mind is obtained.” He would often talk about the connection between writer and reader. Reading is—at its best—a subversive act in which solitary readers take what the writer offers and makes it wholly their own. The writer’s role is to create the imaginative world that the reader can enter to take what they can find. Several books have been written on how John developed his writing ability at such a young age—his first published book—The Barracks—written in his 20s that may be his most solid work of fiction, and particularly daring as it sees the world through the eyes of a fictionalized version of his own mother who is dying of cancer.

Write every day.  John suggested that one should spend at least an hour every day focused on writing.  It wasn’t about keeping in “touch” with the muse and staying on top of the work. And it wasn’t important to actually be writing but being in a space that was separate from the world. We all need time to allow images and visions to visit and cultivate our own private world. This all something that we can take away.