Making the local universal

ESSAYS: Love of the World: Essays By John McGahern. Edited by Stanley van der Ziel Faber, 448pp. £20

THE APPEARANCE of what is pretty well the complete non-fictional prose by one of Ireland’s greatest writers of fiction is a very significant event. From this ample and compelling collection of John McGahern’s essays, it emerges, unsurprisingly, that he admires most the writers who display the same gifts of lucidity and observation that characterise his own stories and novels. “Essays” is a loose term for the collection, as the editor, Stanley van der Ziel, explains in his Preface (which follows Declan Kiberd’s brilliant Introduction). The writings collected here are organised in six sections: Writing and the World; Places and People; Autobiography, Society, History; Literature; Prefaces and Introductions; Reviews. Elaborate as this classification is, something of the kind had to be done because such different kinds of writing are covered, extending in scope from the mostly brief reviews of section six and the slight, epigrammatic reflections of the opening section, to the distinctive travel pieces amongst the Places and People and the wonderful essays of the Literature section. In the 100-odd pages of that section we find McGahern’s great pieces of criticism – on Dubliners, the stories of Alistair MacLeod, the letters of John Butler Yeats (the poet’s father), and, above all, the great essay on Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach.

It is perhaps not accidental that two of the writers that McGahern returned to most frequently and insightfully were Joyce and MacLeod, great novelists who were also outstanding exponents of the short story, the form they mastered first. (It is remarkable that McGahern saw in MacLeod's short stories precisely the excellence that was later so much admired in his masterpiece, the novel No Great Mischief.) The passing remarks about George Moore here voice the same central interest in long and short forms of fiction: Moore was "a writer of genius" and the stories in The Untilled Fieldare "as fresh on the page today as when Moore wrote them to be translated into Irish in 1900". This of course is the company of McGahern himself: apart from him, of the Irish writers since Joyce, only William Trevor so far has been a major exponent of both genres. Despite his own unchallenged place as a brilliant writer of short stories, McGahern always insisted on the primacy of the novel because it is the social form, reflecting a complete and settled community. Hence his admiration for An tOileánach, which he believed "lies closer to Mount Olympus than it does to the Roman gate of heaven that we used to pray to in our youth . . . Besides, more than any single work in English it reflected the reality of the lives of the people I grew up among and who brought me up".

These observations contain in miniature McGahern's views of the world, views that he returned to again and again in his major works, from Amongst Womento That They May Face the Rising Sunto Memoir. Two things in particular are emphasised here: McGahern's devotion to the local (as in his repeated and much-quoted image, that "the local, when the walls are taken down, becomes the universal"), and his increasing optimism throughout his life. It is a remarkably cheerful development for a writer whose early career was so much associated with controversy, especially over the loss of his job as a National Teacher after the publication of The Darkin 1965. The main title of the Memoirwas All Will Be Well. The same kind of semi-mystical positiveness ("All shall be well" comes from the medieval English mystical anchoress Julian of Norwich) occurs in many of the pieces here – as of course it also did in McGahern's last novel, the largely sanguine pastoral That They May Face the Rising Sun.The title here, Love of the World, is, we learn, borrowed from the great Jewish secular mystic, Hannah Arendt.

This positiveness is particularly linked to the local, especially to his own locality in County Leitrim: “I think of Mohill as one of the happiest towns in the world”, he writes. Kiberd links this to McGahern’s campaign against the Puritanism of the “Roman gate of heaven” which blighted his career as a schoolteacher. That Puritanism was as opposed to the natural good manners of country people, acknowledged here in the people of Achill, as it was to the “old, joyful world of wakes and pattern-days, festivals and carnivals” (in Kiberd’s terms: my memory is that those things had their downsides too). But it is right to stress the positives in summarising McGahern’s writing about the ends of those eras. He became increasingly forgiving of all individuals, and even of institutions. Thinking back to his teacher training in Drumcondra, he reminds us sharply that “When so much is being said against the Church, I believe that it was the Church that was mainly responsible for the high esteem given to teaching and learning here [in Ireland], an old respect for the schools”. In a life-enhancing way we are taken back at the end of the piece pointedly called “My Education” to the real rationale of the local: “I am back in the rushy hills now, back in my own place. Life is the same everywhere. I think that the quality of feeling that’s brought to the landscape is actually much more important than the landscape itself.” By the end, McGahern’s philosophy was that of a person wholly at home in the world, and the only real tragedy is the loss of the world. This is a wonderfully life-enhancing book.

Bernard O'Donoghue's Selected Poemswas published by Faber in 2008