I have now read all of McGahern's work; sadly this
is the last such exactingly prepared book that I
presume will appear under his name. Any admirer
of his novels The Dark, The Leavetaking,
or That They May Face the Rising Sun (aka
By the Lake) will find much here to document
how McGahern hacked out from his own servitude to
father, school, and state much of the raw material
for his widely praised prose constructions. While
he never attained the prominence granted many less
talented scribblers, McGahern's recognised as one
of Ireland's foremost stylists, with an eloquence
that unflinchingly scrutinises the terror as well
as the fleeting beauty of this our only life. 'We
come from darkness into light and grow in the light
until at death we return to that original darkness.'
(40) McGahern was one of the first writers, early
in the 1960s, to stand up against the bishops, headmasters,
and political cronies to defend a secularised, sexualised,
and cosmopolitan ethos. He returned from continental
and London exile to support himself as a writer,
living in the Co Leitrim, fittingly beneath the
Iron Mountains. He suffered for his rebellion as
a young man, but what we read in these pages is
more his childhood torments.
Most
deeply rooted in the straitened years of the 1940s
and 50s excavated here are seeds of what blossomed
into his first novel The Barracks and his
best known work, Amongst Women. Michael Moran,
in the latter novel, was a veteran of the old IRA
turned Garda who inveighed against the Free State
that had sold out the ideals of the Republic, but
whose bitterness poisoned the lives of his family.
McGahern's own father was the model, and the fiction
does not seem to have needed any more example for
imitation. In That They May Face the Rising Sun,
a new IRA man lurks in the Leitrim village, whose
activities at a later, if unspecified, date bring
back the menace of the true believer as well as
the idealism that spurs on the violence then shuddering
a few miles away over the border. McGahern, unlike
nearly any other Irish writer who comes to my mind,
presents in such figures nuanced presentations of
men more complicated than their militant facades
would betray to even their intimates. Having grown
up with an IRA veteran and having lived most of
his life in Co Leitrim, he presents in his fiction
the rhythms and the stasis of country life over
our past century. Amidst placid fields and barren
clay, his ex-soldiers mull and mewl and mutter.
McGahern knows how long lingers the call to arms,
and his descriptions of fighters forced to retreat
or resigned to retire offers readers the long silence
after Republican actions, rarely shown in fiction
or fact. The daily grind replaces that adventure
lived on the run.
Confronted
by McGahern's bullying father Francis McGahern (Sgt),
as he signs his chillingly precise letters, we see,
as in Michael Moran, the costs borne by those who
fought then and then again for a Republic, and who
resented the compromised state that they had to
live in, serve, and endure. The Sergeant and his
men at the barracks would, when indolent, pen imaginary
'Patrols of the Imagination' in the ledgers to satisfy
inspectors. (38) The gardaí would laugh;
Sergeant did not. Humour escaped him. Both themselves
and those they marry and engender also bear the
brunt of such men's unfulfilled longings and the
cruelty that they mete out to those around them.
The men think they find sweetness with marriage
or career, but these soon sour and the lusts that
ignited their youthful fanaticism flare. These terse
veterans reminisce little about their exploits,
and for this they are truer to actual IRA volunteers
themselves. Those who boast of flying columns or
clandestine operations while perched upon the barstool
are rarely those who had been entrusted by and for
the Movement.
McGahern,
in his fictional and factual studies of Moran and
his father, inspects their legacy, standing for
that of the 26 Counties: such men as the gardaí
shuffle through the bleak mid-century decades of
small pay towards a secure pension. Paid for not
by the virtual Republic, always postponed. They
will never see the dawn or greet the sunburst. Such
unsparing tone, permeating memoir and story, often
is shadowed more than sunny. This does create a
challenging read. Memoir reenacts McGahern's
psychological and physical skirmishes with his father
after the lingering death from cancer (halfway through
the book, when the author was nine) of his beloved
mother.
The grimness of great stretches of this memoir sobers
any naive page skimmer expecting a rural idyll romanticised.
About his mother's slow decline, McGahern muses:
'Those who are dying are marked not only by themselves
but by the world they are losing. They have become
the other people who die and threaten the illusion
of endless continuity. Life goes on, but not for
the dying, and this must be hidden or obscured or
denied.' (125). McGahern having crossed to the
other side and whatever heights or oblivion lie
there knows now what he did not know as he wrote
these words a couple of years ago.
I
would have edited more of the micro-detail that
McGahern presents, as not all of it is germane to
his larger arc, although he labors long in providing
the meticulous array of details and spare dialogue
to chisel his printed creations. Memoir does,
as many autobiographies do, conjure up both scintillating
scenes from the writer's earliest years and exactingly
rendered dialogue that befuddles more forgetful
people like me: how many of us can recall with any
precision more than a vignette or two of what we
said and saw at, say, six years of age? I suppose
this enhanced recollection distinguishes the more
talented from the rest of us.
McGahern
labored long over rewritings and revisions of his
work before publication. Perhaps his early death,
soon after this memoir appeared, may account for
the hastier (only by comparison with his other works,
whose publications were spaced out often over decades
rather than years) appearance of Memoir.
Intriguing to find that the Knopf American printing
that followed first is titled the meliorative All
Will Be Well - terse contrast with the poetic,
Celtically symbolic, and appropriate That They
May Face the Rising Sun title given by Faber
to his final novel that for Americans was replaced
by the less evocative if still enigmatic By the
Lake. Why either work gets a new title for a
foreign audience remains curious: I like to think
that Knopf was repairing by this recent renaming
the damage done by bestowing upon his last novel
such a bland moniker.
The
lack of breaks in the autobiography deepens the
feeling of unrelenting struggle engaged in by the
narrator. Without chapters to pause between, the
compression of events and emotions increases the
oppression that McGahern felt and that he forces
us to experience-a constricted form of the memoir
reiterates its crushing content. His reminiscences,
however lacerating, emerge clearly and simply. Of
his father, he notes his personality: 'If they
were people he could look up to, he would have been
full of an unsteady charm; if they were deferred
to him and were useful, he could be capriciously
avuncular and solicitous: at the very worst, they
would be guaranteed unlimited free advice.'
(161) McGahern sums up, with carefully deployed
punctuation and pauses, a man he grew to despise
yet one, as the son must acknowledge, as fallible
as he or you or I. 'My father never willingly
let go of any relationship, no matter how bad it
was. In this he was aided by the gentle country
manners that were loath to turn anybody away.'
(285) This tenacity entangles the son- unable to
flee his mercurial father.
With
such close attention to foibles and fate, Memoir
thickens. You feel trapped in the telling of his
difficult coming of age. Beauty and sorrow tumble
one after the other. You never know which will appear
next as you read--he recreates the surprises and
terrors of anyone's life, no matter, as he says,
how softly led. 'I am sure it is from these days
that I take the belief that the best of life is
lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm
journey through the day, where change is imperceptible
and the precious life is everything.' (87)
But
the book is lopsided. Presumably intentionally,
unless McGahern anticipated a sequel? However, as
half the book brings us up to only his ninth year,
the remaining couple of decades rush by with alarming
brevity. 'Over many days and months, gradually,
a fantastical idea formed. Why take on any single
life- a priest, a soldier, teacher, doctor, airman-
if a writer could create all these people far more
vividly? In that one life of the mind, the writer
could live many lives and all of life. I had not
even the vaguest idea how books came into being,
but the dream took hold, and held.' The author
does not have intimations of being what he will
become until he's late in his teens, and this occurs
first on p. 217 of a 290 pp. account.
Necessarily
and deliberately, McGahern's education, young adulthood
and the start of his career is crammed into much
less space. I would have preferred much more attention
to his maturation as a writer than the attenuated
emphasis paid his early formation. I understand
the polarity of his parental positions and how they
marred McGahern's own soul. Yet, if more follow-through
had been given to how he wrested himself free of
the restraints of his family and his nation, this
would have made for a more memorable, and also less
jerkily fast-forwarded, depiction of himself. (This
portrait of the artist as a young man conveys shades
of Stephen Dedalus at the end of Portrait;
like Stephen, McGahern too returns, however, to
Ireland after overseas self-exile has not fully
freed the artistic imagination from its first inspiration.)
Yet, McGahern knows that he cannot stand apart smugly
from his inherited legacy, in its joys and its sorrows,
and he comes to accept this if not find comfort
in it later in his telling.
Despite
its uneven pace, this story will endure as a self-penned-
and as always in any self-portrait,- a prematurely
engraved epitaph. McGahern's courage in standing
up for himself against the powers of Church, School,
and State makes for engrossing if often reticently
told autobiography. Refusing the comforts of faith
as he grows, he nonetheless is fair-minded and balanced
in crediting the good that the Church instilled
in him during very dark years. Never concealing
the sins, but noticing too the comforts, he looks
at himself with as much detachment as he does others,
no easy feat, considering what we now know would
have been his last couple of years (dying at seventy
of cancer)as he wrote this memoir.
He
hides as much as he exposes, the privilege of any
teller of one's own tale. This is recommended for
those already familiar with his fiction, as his
early publications find only bare mention here.
The Barracks, The Dark, The Leavetaking,
Amongst Women, and That They May Face
the Rising Sun in order and in retrospect chart
the growth of McGahern, at only a small distance
from his imaginary efforts. McGahern never fell
into the tired reaction of making a book about an
author writing a book, however. He uses his hard-won
experience but keeps his attention most on what's
out there before him, not what hides within. He
treats others fairly but exactingly, and expects
the same in return given him.
He
could be, in his own public stance, perhaps no less
laconic or cutting than his father. A literary figure
whose family had grown up alongside the McGaherns
told me of a hapless lady at a reading who asked
the author if some detail from his latest fiction
emerged from his fact. McGahern thundered back:
'I will treat that comment with the contempt which
it deserves.' His father might have looked down
from wherever he perched in the afterlife upon his
son and recognised a kindred spirit after all. Of
course, fiction always eludes by definition the
restraints of fact.
Yet
without such a life as he tells in Memoir,
McGahern's imagination would not have shoved itself
free into the liberation that he sought in the aesthetic
call and not in the pedagogical career that he began,
teaching in secondary schools all over the island
as a young man. He managed, I add, to broaden his
focus as he matured. Nobody in his pages is left
a caricature. On page he never mellowed, but in
person perhaps he displayed as the years passed
his father's 'country matters'. At NUI Galway two
years ago, he read excerpts, one from this memoir
in progress and one from his last novel. For an
hour, hundreds of us were captivated. He came, he
spoke, he left. No questions. I wonder now if he
already suffered from the cancer which would take
his life as it had that of his mother.
A
grounding in McGahern's short stories and novels-
from his harsh and bracing to his calmer and forgiving
accounts- is necessary if you wish to savor the
textures here evident, poignantly, in Memoir's
last two pages. He spent a decade writing That
They May Face the Rising Sun, and his craft
is never hurried or unmeditated. As with his last
novel, the last couple of pages, the open-ended
conclusion to Memoir, ends his intense final
narrative elegantly and powerfully.
