The 10th anniversary of John McGahern’s death in 2016 may well have provided the inspiration for the three titles on his work that have been published in the last 12 months: Stanley van der Ziel’s John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition (Cork University Press); Richard Robinson’s John McGahern and Modernism (Bloomsbury); and the most recent, Frank Shovlin’s Touchstones: John McGahern’s Classical Style (Liverpool University Press). All three concentrate on the aesthetic quality of the writing and the intertextual devices employed by McGahern. According to Shovlin, the hints and references in the text are not always clear, but “the more hidden the allusion, the more rewarding will be the prize when it is uncovered”.
Shovlin borrows the noun “touchstones” from the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold, who maintained that a writer should always keep in mind lines and expressions from the great masters, that can then be profitably applied to new work. Outlining the various approaches adopted by critics to McGahern’s work, Shovlin points out the relative paucity of critics who read the fiction in the way he (McGahern) wished to be read, namely, “as a writer of great literature”. (It seems to me that such an analysis ignores two of the most prominent figures in McGahern studies, van der Ziel and Denis Sampson). Dismissing the “baldly biographical” and the “socio-historical” techniques, it is suggested that the “mature reader” has a duty to “eventually arrive at a more profoundly literary or poetic approach to the fiction if its full power and beauty are to be unveiled”.
Comments like these could be accused of elitism, as they give the impression that only those with an in-depth knowledge of literature are capable of savouring McGahern in all his glory. However, it is indisputable that he is a writer who can be read profitably on many different levels; as a chronicler of the northwest midlands of Ireland, as a social realist, as someone with a strong visual capacity, especially evident in his depictions of landscape and people, or as an artist with the unique ability to make of one place an everywhere. Of course, it is reductive of McGahern’s art to view fictional characters as direct transpositions of real people, or to claim that novels are pure biography. By the same token, discounting completely the extent to which McGahern borrowed on experiences and events from his life when composing his fiction is equally foolhardy.
Gustave Flaubert’s comment, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”, was not a statement that he was the main character of his novel, but that he invested so much of himself in the composition of the work that it became in some way indissociable from his personality and character. Albert Camus’ autobiographical novel The First Man reveals patent similarities between the main character and his creator in a way that is not injurious to its artistic integrity. Francis Stuart drew directly on his experiences in war-torn Germany in Black List Section H, one of the most autobiographical novels ever written, and nevertheless hailed as a classic by many. Finally, no one could claim that the autobiographical is completely absent in Joyce either.
Joyce and McGahern, while seeing the dark shadow cast by clerical power in Ireland, and both abandoning their faith, could use its language and beauty to embellish their work
Good art demands that emotion be controlled, that memory be distilled, that the act of creation open out onto something that is purer and more uplifting than simple reproduction. McGahern stated in numerous interviews and articles that the direct transposition of personal experiences into fiction is not advisable. “Sticking too closely to the facts”, in his view, runs the risk for a novelist of descending into what he referred to as “mere journalism”.
That said, however, “mature readers” can also be found in the ranks of those who may miss the allusions to Yeats, Joyce, Stendhal, Camus, Kavanagh et al in McGahern’s work. Also, the way in which a writer might “want to be read” is not necessarily the way s/he “should be read”. However, notwithstanding certain reservations with regard to the tenor of certain views expressed in the Introduction to Shovlin’s study, it has to be said that his reading of McGahern is both revealing and challenging.
He is also extremely adept at what was described by a graduate student of mine as “literary detective work”. The many hours spent in the McGahern Archive in the Hardiman Library in NUI Galway researching this book have yielded rich fruit. Having access to various drafts of McGahern’s published and unpublished work, his correspondence, his handwritten notes, all enabled Shovlin to show the writer in a new light. For example, while I was aware of McGahern’s connection with X through his friend and the co-editor of this literary journal, Patrick Swift, I never realised that the journal was so particular about the writers it published. Shovlin notes: “It was an unapologetically elitist little magazine that always championed the idea of the poet as clerk or workman as opposed to tormented, Byronic genius. In McGahern, X found an enthusiastic disciple.”
We felt an exhilaration at the possibility that literature could belong again to the streets rather than to the Church and university and the worn establishment.
With this type of philosophy, it is no surprise that McGahern’s first published prose, passages from The End or the Beginning of Love, appeared in X. The writer’s decision not to go ahead with the publication of this novel, in spite of having secured a contract from a prestigious publisher, shows a real concern in the still young writer with “getting the words right”, a McGahern trait that is borne out by Shovlin’s analysis of the intertextuality evident in his texts.
Understandably, Joyce and Yeats are the most obvious influences, with the former’s “scrupulous meanness” and avoidance of self-expression being of particular significance as far as McGahern was concerned. Shovlin expertly shows the distinction made by Joyce between the classical and the romantic in a quote from Stephen Hero: “By ‘classical’ I mean the slow elaborate patience of the art of satisfaction. The heroic, the fabulous, I call romantic.”
No need to point out which approach would have appealed more to McGahern. The fact that Joyce “was in thrall to Flaubert” did not unfortunately tempt Shovlin to delve into McGahern’s shared fascination with the French writer. One of the most important links that Shovlin draws between Joyce and McGahern is in their portrayal of Catholicism:
“Both writers, while seeing and understanding the dark shadow cast by clerical power in Ireland, and both abandoning their faith, could come to an accommodation with it and use its charms, language and beauty to fortify and embellish their work.”
Yeats too is used as a “touchstone” in the realm of faith. Discussing the poem Ego Dominus Tuus and the impact it may have had on McGahern, Shovlin argues that McGahern did not simply use Yeats “as a template or stencil”. No, the primary interest of the poem for McGahern lies in the debate it opens up about whether one is better off living a life dedicated to the pursuit of material wealth and outward success, or “a life of the mind, of withdrawal from the world and inward contemplation”. Joe Ruttledge, in McGahern’s final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, would appear to have opted for the latter and it enables him to find peace of mind in the company of his wife and the community living around the lake where the novel is set. For Maggie Ruttledge, the mother whose daughter is callously murdered by an egotistical husband in the posthumously published Love of the World, old age also brings a heightened awareness of the beauty in the physical landscape that surrounds her:
“Close by, a white moon rested on the water. There was no wind. The stars in their places were clear and fixed. Who would want change since change will come without warning? Who this night would not want to live?”
The Monaghan poet Patrick Kavanagh features in one of McGahern’s short stories, Bank Holiday, where he is not portrayed in a favourable light: he is loud and irascible, acutely aware of his notoriety and the benefits it affords him. Still, Shovlin detects in passages from The End or the Beginning of Love an affinity with Kavanagh, and especially his great epic of rural poverty, The Great Hunger.
Commenting on Kavanagh’s rather bohemian lifestyle in an essay he wrote for a publication that was edited by the poet’s brother Peter, McGahern noted how Kavanagh opened up new vistas for the writers coming in his wake: “We felt an exhilaration at the possibility that literature could belong again to the streets rather than to the Church and university and the worn establishment.”
Shovlin visibly relishes the challenge of seeking out intertextual references in McGahern’s work. His comments on Stendhal are particularly interesting in this regard, as he is the first to draw serious attention to this link. The main attribute that attracted McGahern to the French writer was his classical style, a trait Stendhal shares with both Joyce and Flaubert. The Camus connection is less satisfactory, concentrating mainly on The Myth of Sisyphus and Camus’ comment that we should imagine the protagonist in that work, whose punishment consists of constantly having to roll a rock up to the top of the a steep slope only to see it slip down again, as being happy. It would have been more revealing, in my view, to examine Camus’ wistful descriptions of Algeria in Nuptials and The First Man, which have definite resonances with McGahern’s later work, or even in a more detailed analysis of what the “absurd” actually meant for Camus.
McGahern liked to paraphrase Joyce's comment that the piano is the coffin of music, by saying that a book is the coffin of words
Proust features mainly in the chapter devoted to Dante's epic style and the Conclusion. If there was ever a "touchstone" for McGahern, it was surely the author of the monumental A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust's concept of involuntary memory was employed by McGahern in the same way as he strove to emulate the style indirect libre of Flaubert. McGahern liked to paraphrase Joyce's comment that the piano is the coffin of music, by saying that a book is the coffin of words. He explained this to me in an interview: "The book, in fact, doesn't live again until it finds a reader and you get as many versions of the book as the number of readers it finds." This observation may well account for the richness of McGahern criticism at the present time, which allows for a wide variety of readings, none of which can ever be the definitive one.
Frank Shovlin's study has much to recommend it and it is to be warmly welcomed as an erudite, yet accessible, reading of a writer whose star is certainly in the ascendant, if the vast array of recent books devoted to his work is anything to go by.
Eamon Maher is currently editing, with Derek Hand, a collection of essays for Cork University Press which emanates from a symposium they organised in St Pat's Drumcondra last April to mark the 10th anniversary of McGahern's death
