A Deep Well of Want. Visualising the World of John McGahern: a Leitrim love song

John McGahern talked of his own writing as being an act of looking for and writing an image. His closely crafted scenes and characters, often of a slowly unfurling rural life, are like photographs in textual form. In “A Deep Well of Want” photographer Paul Butler visualises the intersection of two life stories: that of his own and that of McGahern as part of a photographic journey through his adopted homeland of Leitrim, where he has now lived for more than 20 years.

The book is a dual photo memoir, a brave and honest telling of Butler’s often troubled childhood and his difficult and ultimately broken relationship with his parents. Similarly, McGahern and his siblings famously suffered at the hands and the words of their brutish and bullying father, Frank McGahern snr, a sergeant in the newly formed Garda. The gentle schoolteacher, Susan McGahern, John’s mother, died of cancer when the boy was just aged 10, a blow from which he was never fully reconciled, emotionally or psychologically. If our home lives shape so much of our childhood selves, Butler’s “visual statements”, reflecting Leitrim in a McGahern-tinted lens, show just how homeplaces, from the cottage to the country field, influence how we react with and remember our local environments.

The book is a lovesong to Leitrim. It is a place that though struggles in parts to sustain the flora and fauna that inhabits its inch-thick soil but yet grips the hearts and minds of those who fall for its charms. “Leitrim and the north-west are very distinctive. Hidden, forgotten and full of ancient mystery. I love where I live and over time and through what I record I have come to a realization of why John McGahern wrote so fondly of this place.” Paul Butler’s photographs record and archive the passing life and landscape, the ritual and time of a place that lies largely outside the passing consciousness of the rest of the country.

Butler’s photographs, of which there are more than 120 in the book, carry a deep aura of the sacred and the mystical as they capture moments of stillness illuminated in exquisite light. The rolling pastoral landscapes of Leitrim or the decaying domestic scenes of long vacated country cottages are all way-markers through time of a neglected and almost forgotten place. A rich light holds the essence of each photograph, from tree-lined country laneways, frayed net curtains on ivy-covered windows, to morning fog stubbornly rising over Lough Rinn.

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In the informative captions that accompany each image, Butler explains in detail the technicalities of configuration of aperture setting and exposure lengths used to capture each scene — the care and craft of the photographer’s work is akin to McGahern labouring over a draft manuscript, editing lines and sentences until it became a complete picture in words.

Butler’s photography and McGahern’s writing of place complement each other intimately throughout. I am reminded of those who have written of the Irish landscape in terms of its time, meaning, and of its own private language — the embodied language of place and people and how it speaks to each new generation who make it their home. Manchán Magan, Tim Robinson and Dervla Murphy are but some of those who bring the image and reflection of their place in time to the reader in such vivid words. Here, Butler adds a photographer’s perspective, of images so deeply layered, so nuanced in their telling of visual stories that they flow off the page as much as any written description.

During Covid-19-enforced lockdowns, Leitrim’s sparsely populated countryside fell even quieter. “It felt like the world was empty,” Butler adds. Living in Farnocht in the south of the county, his images of ruined interiors, and the subtle ordinariness of everyday objects, tell of an all-but-vanished way of life that still feels impossibly recent, one where life was very much dictated by the rhythms of seasons and nature. As McGahern tended his small Leitrim farm it wasn’t as a form of mindfulness to escape the busy life in which he could have embedded himself, of writerly circles and busy academic campuses. Instead, its plainness and simplicity were a sanctity and wellspring for the creativity in his work. It was out of nature and his local environment that the literary world was furrowed and reaped.

McGahern’s uncanny natural eye guided his writing so much that he could write about a vase of flowers in a window, and while the noise of a sawmill laboured on the distant Lakeland horizon, the dying flowers behind the lace curtain seemed somehow unnatural, as their beauty ebbed and faded, a sign of the sad fate that would befall Elizabeth Reegan in The Barracks. In this beautiful and poignantly pitched photo memoir, Butler has created a lasting record and an important social study of the land to which McGahern gave voice.

Writing about the 19th-century photographs of Lietrim taken by Leland Duncan, McGahern wrote of the historic images: “They speak to us out of a world that has disappeared; but such is the magic and mystery of art that they do so with a richness and depth that life rarely gives. Time has become a reflection”. In a digitally saturated world, where relentless imagery scrolls through our thumbs daily, the pace and peace of Butler’s photographs offer a new reflection of McGahern Country and into McGahern’s world, inviting us to stop, breathe and look.