Small Comedies: The Letters of John McGahern
John McGahern (1934-2006) is widely considered the most important fiction writer in Ireland after Joyce and Beckett in the latter half of the 20th century. A risktaker and truthteller, McGahern’s five novels, memoir, and many (timeless) short stories at times exposed the cruelty and repression of life in rural Ireland but also helped him make sense of his own life and gain a vantage point for his role in chronicling his country’s slow evolution from the backward world of his childhood into a modern country.
He was governed by powerful aesthetics and principles of writing and art—gained from his voracious reading—that he absorbed into his worldview, all of which are on display in his collected letters
The letters reveal much about him as a person, his guiding principles and the life changes that gave him the grist he needed to continue to reinvent his world. His letters provide a window into the people and events that shape his fictional world, and the real people who supported him as an artist—lifelong friends and those who worked with him on getting his books out into the world. Most importantly, the letters provide an unfiltered view of who he was and are a vehicle through which we can see how he turned the experiences of his life into his work, revealing much about his attitudes that made him a singular artist.
John was my professor at Colgate University in the late 1970s. In his classes I received a private tour of Irish literature and master classes in creative writing, and he oversaw my independent study, which he named, “Studies in Memory and Imagination.” I knew John to be kind, sly, solicitous, learned, and—when he felt like it—wickedly funny, with the emphasis on wicked.
Most of all he was high-minded and private.
It wasn’t that he wouldn’t talk about himself. But his work was so deeply autobiographical, I felt I knew him from the small kernels of truth his fictions were based on. I didn’t want to intrude on his life any more than he was willing to offer. And for John, the work of writing was all that mattered. In one of the letters at the end of the book to the writer and publisher Neil Belton, he writes: I’m afraid I’m seldom kind when it comes to writing. I think it’s too important.” It was separate from his teaching, his great learning, and his presence. Writing for him was a solitary labor that was devoutly pursued, holy and secretive, a private world he created for all to see, recollected to the last whitethorn.
John’s way of communicating about writing and literature was to make sharp commentary on what he saw and, ultimately, drift into quotation. He would show you how the vision of a work—often one of his favorite works—was made flesh in the detail of the language, how Yeats could shift his rhythm and diction to something otherworldly and more eerie than dream, and taught you how writers showed time pass (the poetry of fiction) and how poets could make the moment last (the fiction of poetry). And he could always reach into the carefully catalogued library of his mind for the right quotation or example. He particularly loved expressions that crossed the boundaries of what they were trying to say: “True tragedy ends in triumph and is a great kick at suffering.” (D.H. Lawrence) “Who would have too much technique would be a monster; who do without, would be a fool.” (Beaudelaire) He also didn’t care f the authors he taught didn’t fit the course title. I once asked him how he could teach Willa Cather’s My Antonia in a course on “The Contemporary Novel.”
“There’s nothing more contemporary than good writing,” he told me.
From the moment I read his first book of stories, Nightlines, in the field behind my dorm, I wanted to learn what I could from him, and understand his way of looking at the world, how the artist turns the poor and sordid facts of life into something more precious.
I was stunned, and quite amused, when I read his letter to Niall Walsh, which was probably written around the day I first met him.
The students are very different. Self expression is OUT. Explanatory writing is in. All are worried about grades, about law or medical school. And heaven has provided the usual quota of clowns. (p. 432)
I had some personal knowledge of John’s letters. I didn’t write letters to him often and I’ve never kept the few that he sent. I preferred to meet up when he came back to campus or, in later years, when he was on a new book tour. But once in a letter to me, knowing how long I spent perseverating over a book I was writing, he wrote me with extreme directness and kindness: “Sometimes its best to have a book published. It’s the only way to put an end to it.”
He didn’t really write in cursive; his lettering was a mix of English and some type of blotchy cuneiform. In the words of poet John Montague:
‘Your handwriting is so bad that it brings me comfort since mine (which people have always found terrible) couldn’t come within an ass’s roar of yours for incomprehensibility. You also write on both sides of light paper, thus ensuring hat the script on both sides is blotted out by the other. You should buy a typewriter.
The letters here are all translated into clear print. That is not the obstacle. More challenging is reading the letters of a writer who admits how much he dislikes writing letters.
In a note to Patrick Swift, the editor of the short-lived but highly influential art and literary magazine, X, he says, “I don’t like writing letters. So I seldom do—which physics nothing. It is so easy to be anything except honest here.”
He tells Michael McLaverty, the first writer he ever reached out to and got to know, “It is a great achievement for any man to state, even once, a measure of his experience truthfully. Your books have given me a better appreciation of life as well as their own pleasure.”
His honesty—and capacity for harsh judgment of what he knew best—is clear throughout the letters. He tells Colm Toibin that he can’t fully appreciate his book on Henry James, The Master, because of his own bias against writers writing books about writers. His last letter reveals that he has felt no urge to further prop up Seamus Heaney’s high position in literary circles. “I have found no sustenance in Heaney’s verse for many years, and even the charm of the early work has worn badly.”
Early in the early letters, he bristles on reading a story by a writer (Maeve Brennan) that McLaverty recommended:
“I found the story a coarse exposition of human longing, vulgar, and the writing leaden with statement. The people for me had no reality or dignity, they were not seen with any vision, or in the pity of their passing lives… I found she was superior or at least indifferent to these people, something a human being I think cannot be, and definitely no artist, for are we not all accursed together in our nature…
He tells McLaverty that he is actually hiding from Mary Lavin (someone they both like), because John dreaded having her ask him what he thought of her most recent work.
A significant portion of the letters are sent to his editors, publishers, and translators who are part of the enterprise that supports his work. But as with letters, John treated publishing as a necessary evil. He thought the whole business of readings, reviews, rewards, sales, and bestseller lists, and awards a kind of rigmarole. The day he becomes the first prose writer to win the AE Memorial Award, he begins to celebrate but stops himself short.
For a little while, the morning it came, I was excited as a schoolboy with the Award, and then afterward there was the blank inscrutable face of my work that knows nothing of awards or rewards, but only faith and passion and suffering and the long availability, which we call work, will move. The most gladness my success,…is to affirm in my bones that all success and failure are private. What happens outside that are either lucky or unlucky accidents. For all art approaches prayer.
This may sound self-important or overblown but it was something that John consistently felt, a kind of rule he lived by that made him secretive and separate. There is a line in his fourth novel The Pornographer (1979) when Mahoney, the editor and one of John’s best characters, says to the narrator: “You’re a waster and corrupter with a priest’s face.” There was something angelic in him that was not born from religion, but, more likely from going through the experience of being an abused child who lost a beloved mother at a young age. He was like an addict for whom writing was a way to relieve and relive his past, that made him able to remember and see large and oblong what most of us could not bear. As he grew older, what he learned most as a writer was "to get to the pain faster,” he once told me. And he said often—without self-pity and with a wry smile—that writing was a tough career choice. “It would be easier to rob banks than to make a living as a writer.”
John once wrote to the effect that, felt in the moment, our lives seem so serious and daunting, but seen from the mind it could be viewed as comedy. There are many moments in letters that must have been truly agonizing for him, that when read today seem pure comedy.
He has women problems and publishing problems, nearly always in bunches. He tells Jimmy Swift—the older brother of Patrick Swift and a powerful artistic influence on McGahern--that a broken love affair has left him “so crazed with suffering now that I have no calm to see anything.. It’ll soon be over, I say again and again all day like a prayer. I have no hope, only it drags on and on, and I know I am coming to the end of my strength, I cannot endure more.” The recovery must have been unusually successful, for not long after, John is out with a fine young woman who work at—and writes short stories for—the New Yorker. He courts a graduate student from the University of Chicago. He has a liaison with a beautiful journalist that results in a child born out of wedlock. And not much later—seeming in a blink (in 1965) he marries Finnish theatre director Annikki Laaksi. Four years—and not so many letters later—he meets his second wife, the American photographer Madeline Green, who he recognizes immediately will be his life’s partner.
There is so much to follow in these letters, which do not always flow sequentially or with the same detail to suggest motive or intent as in a novel, but editor Frank Shovlin has done a terrific job introducing the characters and providing cross-references and background
While his second novel is banned and he marries Ms. Laakksi outside the Catholic Church, this leads the religious authorities to sack him from his teaching job at the Belgrove National School. In a decision that comes down from the bishop and is delivered with reluctance from the priest who runs the school, John—newly married—finds himself out of work, and not (solely) because his book is being banned.
What’s funny about all this?
The character that John presents in many of his stories and books is the guy who is usually dumped and recovering. But in the real world, it seems he almost always got the girl.
Meanwhile, the censorship of The Dark is a publicity machine. The BBC does a special TV feature about the controversy. The poet Patrick Kavanagh even tells him he believes that John manufactured the crisis as a ploy to rack up sales.
This sounds like the opening of a Billy Wilder movie.
Though he wrote in a deep-toned language that Seamus Heaney once called “cello music,” I typically find much to laugh about in all of John’s work. In a sense, it was because of the careful portrayals of people and society—the way I laugh watching an Ibsen play, not because it is funny, but because he nails the character and culture.
Also humorous is the back-and-forth with his eloquent, erudite editor, Charles Monteith at Faber and Faber. They discuss repeatedly how many times John can use the word “fucking” in his first novel. McGahern writes to Charles:
I have gone through the “fuckings,’ I could eliminate all Reegan’s indeed every one except three or four in chapter 3, the doctor’s dialogue, used to shock Elizabeth’s awareness into a harsh, despairing world of particular consciousness. I don’t know how I can really leave out these without harming the work…
But after an unsatisfactory response from another person at Faber, John McGahern is like the woman who bought a pair of shoes and can’t take his eyes off everybody else’s.”
Also I see in the Dolman, which you probably have by this since you’ve advertised there, that Aidan Higgins has printed more than once FUCKKEN, which is even courser than fucking. And I think that f… would harm the book; it’d put an artificial look onto the doctor’s dialogue..
Monteith actually goes into an economic analysis. It seems it is kind of a quota system for “fucking.” You are allowed one or two—it’s past the time of Lady Chatterly’s Lover—but to go beyond a few is to temp fate with the censor.
I also find quite fortuitous and quite humorous that in the period between publishing The Barracks and The Dark, it seems, the turmoil of his life was such that he generated the grist that would become his next two books. By getting sacked for marrying outside the Church and for exposing sex abuse in Ireland and challenging the Church’s authority with is second book, he has set himself up to write the The Leavetaking and has the makings of the major plot line of The Pornographer.
Some reviewers of the letters have pointed out that John behaved abominably toward the mother of the son he had out of wedlock just as John fictionalized it in the novel. But the letters reveal, many years later, Jimmy Swift set up a meeting for John and Madeline meeting with his son and the mother. The meeting seems to have gone with some grace.
If there is one place where in Yeats’ words "the perfection of the life” falls far short of “the perfection of the work” it is the ending of his first marriage. While it was clear that McGahern could not live in Finland and that his Finnish wife could not live in Ireland, and that from the outset there were questions about how well the marriage would work, the few letters about this era show that while the marriage is ending McGahern has already moved on, having met his second wife, Madeline Green in New York City. The suffering of the split appears to have been left to his first wife to endure alone. But there is not enough information here to know exactly what happened or how John addressed the situation. I’d be interested in learning more in the upcoming biography that Frank Shovlin is writing.
John believed that good writing—and good living—was all about good manners. In the most simplistic analysis, the novels and stories focus (like Jane Austin’s novels) on how people treat each other, what they want from each other, and how that works out.
You can see traces of this in John’s wanting to come across as a good client to his distinguished editor, Charles Monteith. Many times in their early acquaintance he notes to Charles that he doesn’t want to come across as “vulgar.” The reason becomes all too clear. That vulgarity is personified by his father, Frank, the Garda Sergeant, who makes his own comic appearance when John’s first book—The Barracks—is released. The book reveals the family’s dirty laundry and John describes the brouhaha that ensues, his own comic disinheritance, a scene that could be right out of any one of his novels:
There was a frightful shindy at home. I think I mentioned how I was visited here. Then my abused sisters were summoned from the East and West for conference—my brother who is in London again and has a petty wild career behind him is considered for years in worse light than me, so was not brought into the presence for fear of sacrilege—and I was formally expelled from my home, and poor inheritance. I got a note, ‘The blinds are drawn, the lamp lit, and an ex Sergt. of police prefers to ponder in the dark until the lamps show light or at least flickers, and the rest is silence.” It as then that I realized that the old blackguard was enjoying himself in his life. He made speeches… “If he can write, why can’t he write about South America or some of those exotic places, and he can make more money…. The local bumpkins say they’ll ‘dip me’ if ever I show my face again in Cootehall. The priests in Billinamore removed the book from the County Leitrim library where my aunt lives as unfit for public consumption. It’s such an absurd country, but from a safe distance I am as well to enjoy it quietly, too…”
Another simple rule John had in portraying even his worst enemies and in the letters of advice to other writers, is to show people in balance—true to themselves, as they are. The letters reveal the extent to which he was careful to present an uncle he never cared for in a fair and balanced light. The line in all of his books that reveals this most might be in The Dark, when the narrator has the distance, love and self awareness to recognize the strange and wonderful beauty that is his overbearing, self-absorbed, and violent father. Out of nowhere he writes: You are marvelous, my father.
The letters reveal how much John benefited from long-term friendships with people like Jimmy Swift—a stalwart of literary Dublin (who helped Kavanagh publish his complete poems and introduced John to the writings of Proust and was an intellectual sounding board. ) Equally significant, his enduring friendships with a slew of writers, professors, doctors, and publishers and translators who became close friends are regular company in his correspondence. He was particularly lucky to work with Charles Monteith at Faber and the American publisher Patrick Gregory and later Sonny Mehta at Knopf.
Not all was smooth sailing. On reading The Dark in manuscript, the editor of Macmillan in New York City is appalled by the lurid sexual content—from masturbation, blowing the lid on clerical abuse 20 years before it would come out, pederasty, and the suggestion that some well-to-do family men are molesting their hired. The head man at Macmillan writes: “I think it would be (and I say this with all sincerity) a great mistake to have this present manuscript published here or in England for the sake of the Young Man’s reputation. It is a most unpleasant book with details that make the skin creep…” Yet Charles Monteith knows exactly what to do with the material—he edits the most controversial scene—and finds the right words to put on the jacket as a matter of warning to readers and to set their minds right on opening the book.
Another letter reveals how spoiled John may have been by having Monteith and Gregory constantly on his side. John shows his Irish when an American publisher sends him a hackneyed cover design, which John says will be detrimental for sales and reviews.
19 September 1970
Dear Peter,
My heart fell at the sight of the cover.
1) Impression: a schoolgirl’s book (11-15).
2) A chocolate green or green chocolate of the pig in the kitchen.
My prose stands against everything the cover says. Surely Yeats, Joyce and Becket gave Irish letters some universal dignity
I might let it pass if I thought it would find its readers.
My experience is that people likely to buy a book are people who enjoy the language. A cover like that is the same as selling cheese under a sugar label.
MacMillan published The Barracks with an Irish cover. It got sensitive Irish reviews. It sold 750 copies.
Knopf published The Dark in a typographical cover. It got tough wide reviews as literature. It sold 3,500 copies and with a little luck could have done better. Irish except Joyce/Becket wasn’t mentioned in the reviews.
That hankering after the little old homestead is played out. Grove have no need of it. The cover is lazy, unimaginative, and it stereotypes, since whoever designed it thought it a cliché, a long dead one at that. Why can’t it just get decent type and red and black, if nothing can be better thought of … (284)
Some of the most enjoyable moments of the letters occur after he meets Madeline Green. Though they are almost inseparable for the rest of their lives, and usually just have to wink at each other to show their affection, the love letters between John and Madeline through the years are mutually supportive, lighthearted, and refreshing. So too are the letters of their life together after they buy a farm in Foxfield in County Leitrim where he grew up.
A few good days and since then the usual foul weather. We have water and electricity but still live partly among the builder’s rubble. I have to think how little we’d have got done if we hadn’t turned up. Obviously the builder spends his life flitting between one point of harassment and a greater. He tells me if he ‘got started, it’s not one but twenty books I’d have to write about the people and troubles I have to put up with’ Since he’s got the water going he’s vamoosed again—more harassment required.(368)
Nestled in his home place among the fields he knew as a child, the world got smaller for John.
In the end, John’s reticence doesn’t fully leave, but he is a little more likely to tell stories that are steeped in the local world:
Not much news in Foxfield. The cow had a bull calf the color 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 postman scolded me and a few locals for standing on neighboring tulips 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 the symbol of a long oppressed people. Francie hates to see you twice the same day – No good. No news. No news. No news. (541)
John’s last novel—That They May Face the Rising Sun (By the Lake)–is built around such small detail. The book is a kind of love story for the way of life that he and Madeline found together in their later years.
He was also quite gracious when things don’t go his way. When the Board of the Field Day Theatre Company rejects putting on John’s play, “The Power of Darkness,” he writes Brian Friel, the company’s co founder, to allay any concerns about his role in the rejection of the play.
I never took the rejection of the play in any way personally. I knew that the play wasn’t political. I also know that plays by ageing novelists are, historically, a disaster zone. While I was, I suppose, disappointed, there were also reasons that made me feel, in fact, quite relieved by the decision. So all it seems to be is a misunderstanding… (645)
At the end of the letters, after he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, McGahern notes that the writing that he has struggled with for so long is becoming easier.
There is not too much difference here, other than the adjust to a different reality, a reality we always knew was there, and unavoidable, but is still there, different when it comes. I used to have ways of avoiding going to the room to write, disliking the intensity and total absorption, but now I’m glad o fit, it belongs more to now than when we felt free in acres of time; and that too was necessary, and is. I find have to be socially more careful; all society excludes this knowledge n order to function. There was a to do for an old friend of mine, Alf Rowley, a barman in Mohill, two years ago. He was dying, and the function was to help pay bills. He had less than a week afterwards. He had a fine singing voice, and at the end, before The Soldiers Song, he rose and thanked them, and then sang I Bid You all Goodbye. There wasn’t a stampede for the door, but it was the next best thing, and mutterings about the poor man not being in his right mind, the Leitrim way of describing a lack of tact.
How does an artist say farewell? John won’t sing in the end, but he followed a book full of laughter and love for the place he lived and grew with his memoir that was written to once more reinvent the ghostly world of his past.
At the end, the letters reveal a man who knows something about happiness. He would say in interviews that happiness is nothing you could expect or go out of your way to find. But it is known by living in time and feeling the day pass slowly through you.
The humor and the detail of his writing shine through this book. The work –and even the illness itself—ultimately turns into a blessing.
…the cancer seems to be held. The scans were good before this new course. When I began the memoir I didn’t expect to have the time to finish. In some mysterious way these years have been more rich and full than any others. I hardly think about the disease at all other than as background. Maybe it is just the body’s plentitude.
After covering the same ground for one last try, he could at last forget the pain, however slow or fast he was to come to it, his life and world so full of plenty.