Tracing John McGahern’s steps through Memoir’s pages and Paul Butler’s images

Paul Butler’s wonderful exhibition, The Deep Well of Want, encapsulates better than any words I can utter the essence of John McGahern’s enduring legacy as a writer and chronicler of an Ireland that is possibly on its last legs.

What Paul manages to do with his work is to foreground the rootedness of McGahern’s world, his attention to detail, his unique ability to make of one place an everywhere. The photographs adorning this spectacular space show the relics, not of an ancient civilisation, but of a way of life that was in evidence up to a few short decades ago, and which still survives in pockets around the country today. It is a world where religion, especially Catholicism, played a significant role, where it was a constant struggle to eke a living out of relatively poor land, where emigration led to depopulation and devastation, and where a strong sense of community sustained people in their hour of need.

I am not qualified to talk about Paul’s photographs other than to say that they are aesthetically pleasing to me and that they demonstrate a side of McGahern’s skill as a writer that is really worth underlining.

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The Deep Well of Want is Paul Butler’s photographic interpretation of John McGahern’s world and it is a hugely important one. The stunning skies, the tree-lined lanes, the derelict houses, the religious symbolism, are beautifully rendered in Paul’s photographs, which convey McGahern country in all its wistful splendour. Photograph: Paul Butler

McGahern always struck me as a writer with a keen sense of place. Readers of his fiction will note strong similarities between the figures and landscape it evokes and the people and places he knew in real life. He was acutely aware of how important it was to write from personal experience.

His characters and settings are at times painfully real, whether it be the stoical Elizabeth Reegan in The Barracks, who, on the threshold of a painful death from cancer, really “sees” the beauty of nature for the first time; or the uncertain groping towards adulthood of young Mahoney in The Dark; the tyrannical actions of the patriarch Moran in Amongst Women, or the unrelenting womanising of John Quinn in That They May Face the Rising Sun. These characters are made of flesh and blood and we have the strong impression that, in creating them, McGahern borrowed certain traits from people whom he would have known in the Leitrim area, or from family members, especially his parents.

Hence, with the publication of Memoir in 2005, readers were able to recognise the extent to which McGahern’s fiction drew its inspiration from the western midland counties of Roscommon and Leitrim where he spent the majority of his life. By this, I am do not wish to imply that McGahern indulged in a form of autofiction. In fact, were he to have directly transposed actual events and characters into fiction, the result would have been a disaster from an aesthetic point of view. It would have reduced the whole exercise to “mere journalism”, as he put it to me once during an interview.

As is clearly evident from Pat Collins’ moving documentary, John McGahern: A Private World (2005), the writer was irresistibly drawn back to the lanes and fields of his childhood, an area to which he returned to live with his wife Madeline in the late 1960s. Memoir reminds us that McGahern drew closely on personal experiences when framing his fictional settings and characters.

I propose to discuss the importance of place in Memoir, McGahern’s final major publication before his death in 2006, and to link this reading to some of the main threads running through Paul’s exhibition.

Memoir opens with the following lines:

“The soil in Leitrim is poor, in places no more than an inch deep. Underneath is daub, a blue-grey modelling clay or channel, a compacted gravel. Neither can absorb the heavy rainfall. Rich crops of rushes and wiry grasses keep the thin clay from being washed away.”

This description is deliberately designed to anchor the narrative in a particular place. It serves to distinguish Leitrim from other parts of Ireland, to show what is unique about its landscape. Paul’s photographs capture the distinctive topography of Leitrim in a way that illustrates the visual integrity of McGahern’s narrative, which is not always negative, as we can gather from the following lines:

“The hedges are the glory of these small fields, especially when the hawthorn foams into blossom each May and June. The sally is the first tree to green and the first to wither, and the rowan berries are an astonishing orange in the light from the lakes every September.”

McGahern was intent on delineating for his readers the scenes he observed for the majority of his life and that formed the basis of his artistic inspiration. He wanted to capture the colours, smells and feel of the environment that moulded him and which he mined for his inspiration. What is remarkable is how little the surroundings changed from the time McGahern ran and played and worked in these same fields up until his death in 2006. This may explain the capacity of certain landmarks to transport the writer back to the time when as a boy he used to walk through these fields and along those lanes with his beloved mother. They would pick flowers in the summer on their way to the school or else go a different route to collect milk from Ollarton’s. The lanes were the most conducive when it came to prompting what Proust would refer to as “involuntary memory”:

“I must have been extraordinarily happy walking that lane to school. There are many such lanes around where I live, and in certain rare moments over the years while walking in these lanes I have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace, in which I feel I can live for ever. I suspect that it is no more than the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss. These moments disappear as soon as they come, and long before they can be recognized and placed.”

Whereas for Proust the trigger was the taste of the “madeleine” or little biscuit that he dunked in his tisane, for McGahern it was the atmospheric lanes that opened up a real treasure trove of memories. Inevitably they revolved around his mother, to whom he was very close and who died when he was only 10 years old. Pain and loss are miraculously transformed into the joy of being reunited temporarily with the “beloved”, to whom Memoir is an unashamed paean.

Note how such moments can never be deliberately willed into being; the extraordinary “peace” that he feels is like fairy gossamer; it slips through his grasp as quickly as it comes. He never talks of being able to relive the past in other settings; involuntary memory was tied strongly to the lanes of Leitrim. Inevitably, with the approach of death, a death he knew was imminent after he was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years before his demise, the awareness of the physical world which he was soon to leave behind became even more acute:

“We grow into an understanding of the world gradually. Much of what we come to know is far from comforting, that each day brings us closer to the inevitable hour when all will be darkness again, but even that knowledge is power and all understanding is joy, even in the face of dread, and cannot be taken from us until everything is. We grow into a love of the world, a love that is all the more precious and poignant because the great glory of which we are but a particle is lost almost as soon as it is gathered.”

As we grow older we come to a greater appreciation of people and the physical environment which surrounds us. Then, just as we are becoming aware of the “great glory” we are part of, it is time to leave it behind and face into eternity. Aughawillan, Ballinamore, Grevisk, Drumshanbo, Drumahair, Mohill, Drumkeerin, Carrigallen, Corramahon, Keshcarrigan, Fenagh, Dowra, Leitrim, all these towns and villages with their resonant names are lodged in the mind of McGahern readers. They recur like a refrain as though in the act of naming them, the artist is attempting to immortalise the role they played in his emotional imagination.

I think it is fair to say that McGahern, like his close friend Seamus Heaney, reflected purely on the human condition and created an art that opens out on a world that is as beautiful as it is intolerable. In an interview with Denis Sampson in 1979, McGahern underlined the essential role that writing played in his life:

“It was through words that I came to see the little I do know about the world, and it was through words that I came to see the world. Rather than write novels or stories, I write to see. And the seeing is through language.”

I share Dermot McCarthy’s reading of Memoir as a work that makes clear how “the lost image”, like “the lost world”, is the mother-image, the mother-world, and that the “grave of dead passions and their days” where McGahern sought them is memory and the unconscious, the personal labyrinth that he entered through the portal of writing and somehow transcended through the art of fiction (Dermot McCarthy, John McGahern and the Art of Memory). There were issues which he needed to confront before he died, particularly the passing of his mother and the problematic relationship with his father. The gentle tone of Memoir, its almost pastoral air of celebration, is imputable to the fact that his mother is at the heart of the narrative, guiding the writer’s pen, showing him the splendour of nature, the goodness in people, the joy of living. Her family came from the Iron Mountains, near the village of Corleehan, and the interior of the house is described in the following manner by McGahern:

“A few religious pictures and a shop calendar were on the whitewashed walls, and a small red lamp burned beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart on a narrow mantel above the hearth. The space above the lower room was open beneath the thatch and reached by a ladder.”

The omnipresent Sacred Heart lamp, the religious pictures and shop calendar on the walls of the house, these are things that Paul Butler’s camera is attracted to also. The Deep Well of Want is a very apposite title for Paul’s exhibition. It describes an essential aspect of McGahern’s art, this obsession with digging deep into the land of Leitrim and the minds of its inhabitants. The curtains left on the window frames of deserted houses, the bottles of whiskey on the shelves, the abandoned razors, the boxes of food, the religious iconography, all these elements bring us to the heart of McGahern’s preoccupations.

By providing such details of house interiors, McGahern was undoubtedly paying homage to a way of life that he realised was disappearing. A quick drive through Leitrim soon reveals the ravages wrought by the abrupt end of the Celtic Tiger. Abandoned housing estates are one thing, but the prevalence of crumbling old houses whose inhabitants have long since left the area reinforces the notion of a lost generation. Who is left to recount their story? Does it just fade as the roofs cave in and the walls crumble?

The house in which McGahern and his siblings lived with their mother near Aughawillan is no longer visible, the gate and lane that led down to it being almost completely overtaken by vegetation. When trying to understand the constant naming of the landmarks in McGahern’s work, I came to realise that it was a deliberate ploy on his part to preserve these loci in the memory of readers who might subsequently want to reimagine what the mother and her young son saw as they walked along lanes and through fields:

“We walked to Ollarton’s with a can for milk. We wore coats, as the night had turned cold under a clear, pale moon. We passed Brady’s pool where the horses drank. Across from the pool was Brady’s house and the smaller house where the old Mahon brothers lived. In the corner of the meadow below Brady’s was a dark, deep quarry.”

People and places, places and people, these are what mattered to McGahern. The Bradys and the Mahons probably no longer live in these houses, that is, if the buildings are still standing in the first instance. Similarly, no one now travels to Ollarton’s for fresh milk. But these customs and places were intrinsic to the shaping of an artistic vocation that would eventually culminate in a work that offers a wonderful evocation of place. And throughout it all is the kindly presence of Susan McGahern, whom her first-born child cherished like no other:

“The happiness of that walk and night under the pale moon was so intense that it brought on a light-headedness. It was as if the whole night, the dark trees, the moon in the small lake, moonlight making pale the gravel of the road we walked, my mother restored to me and giving me her free hand, which I swung heedlessly, were all filled with healing and the certainty that we’d never die.”

But of course we do die, if by death one means the end of earthly existence. What McGahern is suggesting here, however, is that through an artistic re-presentation of such key moments it is possible to prolong them forever in the reader’s imagination. Writing about the happy moments with his mother is counterbalanced by the reign of terror that Sergeant Francis McGahern inflicted on the children after their mother’s death. With the latter, it was always a question of self-preservation:

“When there was a bad beating and the storm had died, we’d gather round whoever was beaten to comfort and affirm its unfairness, and it lessened our misery and gave strength to our anger. We learned to read his moods and to send out warnings in an instant so that we could vanish or take some defence, such as the simulated appearance of abject misery.”

Books too were a source of happiness, a means of being transported into the world of the imagination. There were occasions when such evasion from the real world was more than welcome. Religious rituals served a similar purpose: “In an impoverished time, they were my first introduction to an indoor beauty, of luxury and ornament, ceremony and sacrament and mystery”, he wrote. Corpus Christi was the feast of summer, when rhododendron branches were cut from the Oakport Woods and used to decorate the grass margins around the local village. Banners and flowers, white linen on the altar, massive crowds heading to the church where the Host was taken from the tabernacle and carried by the priest beneath a gold canopy, solemn benediction, all these are recalled as sacred moments. Secondary education with the Patrician Brothers in Carrick-on-Shannon imbued a love of learning in young McGahern that would last a lifetime. Life in the training college in St Pat’s did not compare favourably, but at least it afforded him the freedom to sample the social and cultural scene in Dublin and to make his first tentative moves towards becoming a writer.

Then the wheel came full circle and he found himself back among his people, a few miles from where he had lived with his mother. It was like a homecoming: “The people and the language and the landscape where I had grown up were like my breathing…”, he admitted. Reading Memoir is a stark reminder of the transience of life, the elusiveness of happiness, the preciousness of love. Not surprisingly, the narrative ends with the writer and his mother walking on the lanes, where he shows her fish bones and blue crayfish shells at the lake’s edge. As if anticipating their imminent reunion after his own death, the last lines read:

“Above the lake we would follow the enormous sky until it reaches the low mountains where her life began.

“I would want no shadow to fall on her joy and deep trust in God. She would face no false reproaches. As we retraced our steps, I would pick for her the wild orchid and the windflower.”

One can almost imagine mother and son floating above the Leitrim landscape, ecstatic at being once more in the comforting presence of the other, looking down at the flowers and the animals, the trees and the lanes, in the eternal state where pain is banished and love reigns supreme.

The Deep Well of Want is Paul Butler’s photographic interpretation of John McGahern’s world and it is a hugely important one. The stunning skies, the tree-lined lanes, the derelict houses, the religious symbolism, are beautifully rendered in Paul’s photographs, which convey McGahern country in all its wistful splendour.

[ The Deep Well of Want  ]

[ Staging McGahern 2016, ]