THE LOCAL man serving coffee in the Dock arts centre in Carrick-on-Shannon threw his eyes to heaven and wondered how much more there was to say about John McGahern, three summer schools on.
Quite a lot as it turned out. Upstairs the French professor had just finished her lecture, which was entirely devoted to just one short story, Love of the World, which many in the audience later confessed was new to them.
Prof Liliane Louvel revealed that McGahern is widely read in both French and English in her country where he is considered one of the leading international writers.
She and Prof Denis Sampson from Montreal described McGahern as a poet.
Indeed, McGahern described two of his novels, The Barracks and The Dark, as “religious poems”, and had been very interested in Patrick Kavanagh’s religious sensibilities, said Prof Sampson. “But Kavanagh was an example of someone he never wished to be,” he said.
“He thought he was an echo of his father.”
But then again, Co Sligo-based writer Kevin Barry pointed out in his talk Moving to McGahernland that, while it is not generally acknowledged in polite society, “writers generally hate each other”. In fact, the more one writer admires another the greater will the corresponding hatred be, he explained.
Barry ruefully admitted that while Ireland is a very small country “every last ditch in the country has its own bard, every rock in the place has been host to an epiphany.”
Yesterday’s proceedings were firmly located in McGahernland but that is only slightly to the south of “Dermot Healy land” and marginally west of “McCabe land” which could of course mean either Patrick or Eugene, he added.
It’s hard to find a ditch that has not already been conquered. He himself had been perturbed to discover on reading Amongst Women that the brooding angry Moran who stared bleakly into the fireplace slowly rotating one thumb over another, was “a replica” of several of his older male relatives. In other words “some old farmer up in the arse end of Leitrim” had stolen his clothes, he suggested to a very amused audience.
Barry, having decided to relocate from Britain to Leitrim a few years ago, has ended up a stone’s throw from McGahernland in a former barracks overlooking a lake.
When he set up his office “I very gingerly turned the desk away from the view of the lake”, he confessed. A local woman who had to abandon The Barracks on her first attempt, admitted it was too close to the bone at the time. McGahern had written about the way people were and the way they talked and about the sound of cattle walking in the frost.
“It is disappearing but it will be there in 100 years’ time thanks to him.”
