17 John McGahern

‘Real life,’ John McGahern once observed, ‘is too thin to be art.’ He was talking about the necessity to reimagine reality before it can be turned into fiction. His novels contained elements of autobiography, but they were not autobiographical. Yet, his final book, written at the very end of his life, was his own autobiography, Memoir. Among its many interesting insights is the confirmation it provides of what had previously been a woolly impression concerning the extent of McGahern’s reworking of the detail of his own life into his stories.

It could plausibly be argued that Memoir was McGahern’s single literary mistake. By chronicling the literal reality from which he had forged so much of his fiction, it exposes the undercarriage of his imagination to a scrutiny that may ultimately risk damage to his reputation in the eyes of future generations unencumbered by the present-day deference to certain artists by virtue of the scale of their reputations. Before the publication of Memoir, McGahern’s other books had a total life of their own, set free from literal connections by the nature of the fictional contract. After Memoir, they become something else – not fact, but no longer quite fiction either. By setting down the raw material from which his essential life-perspectives were forged, McGahern left a hostage to fortune: an apparently faithful record of factual events for literary critics and academics to pore over.

Because of the deference problem, it has not been remarked upon that there is something extremely odd about Memoir. Although dominated by McGahern’s memories of his parents – the mother who died when he was a child and the father with whom he carried on a disturbed relationship into adulthood – Memoir has a feeling of being artistically incomplete. Several times in the book McGahern states that he never understood his father, Frank McGahern, a Garda sergeant cast as a brooding, violent presence in the lives of his wife and children. Actually, it’s clear that the young McGahern disliked, perhaps even hated, his father, and that this dislike or hatred was not in any degree dissipated by the writing of Memoir. There is no moment of grace between father and son that might be deemed the cathartic moment of the book. At no point does the author seem to reflect on this in a detached manner. It is as though he is utterly unaware of it.

There are many ethical issues arising from the modern fad for biography-as-art. The fashioning of literal literature out of the raw reality of real human lives, especially of those – generally males – who become so blackened in the reporting as to leave in the world only a negative impression, is a deeply dubious phenomenon. The modern view is that anyone has a right to tell his own story: the truth must out, and let the consequences take care of themselves. This is ‘art’, after all.

But there is also a question of justice. Usually it is the case that individuals damaged by such literatures are, by virtue of being deceased, in no position to rebut any of the charges. No human being can claim to have a monopoly on the truth about another. But no human being exists only in the perspective of another. Even when relationships are fraught, there are always two sides to the story. It is a heavy responsibility, then, when a writer decides to put on record what may turn out to be the sole account of the existence of another – named – human being.

John McGahern’s reputation as one of the English language’s greatest novelists is well deserved. He is correctly regarded as a giant of fiction writing, an astute observer of the subtext and nuance of human communication, with a poet’s eye for the human dilemma at the point of contact with reality. But the artist has a duty to tear his vision from the prism of a culture and see clearly into the lies a society may be insisting upon telling for all kinds of warped reasons. Memoir raises the awkward possibility that, in certain respects, John McGahern was unable to do this.

Since the aftermath of the Famines of the 1840s, Irish society has been run by the diktats of an ideology that elevated the mother to the status of put-upon Madonna, and reduced the father to that of brooding menace on the periphery of family life. This crude act of social engineering was effected by the Catholic Church, for the purpose of controlling the somewhat licentious appetites of the Irish and preventing a repetition of the calamity that their libertine habits had caused to befall them. After independence, this initiative gained a new impetus. In a society that had been traumatized twice – by famine and by civil war – the Church usurped the power of the civil authority and assumed, in effect, the role of moral government, recruiting the mother in the home as its agent of control, and with her assistance reducing the father to a barely tolerated provider devoid of moral authority. This resulted in a crude caricature of masculinity that became normalized in Irish society to the point of invisibility: the silent, passive-aggressive father and the saintly, martyred mother. Adding outrage to injury, having banished the father to the fields or the fair, the culture then laughably interpreted the rage born of his marginalization as the roar of the oppressor.

Such stereotypes abound in the work of John McGahern – for example Mahoney in The Dark and Moran in Amongst Women – seething, pent-up beasts whose emotional retardation is rarely examined but merely exists, like the hawthorns or the meadow blowing in the breeze. In their own way, then, these stories add to the accumulation of prejudice concerning the psychology of the Irish male: creating a further sense that silence or violence is his primary mode of expression.

This stereotype has been deeply damaging in Irish culture, and continues to have baneful consequences for men in a society that, despite being 50 per cent male, appears to have no capacity to articulate the reality of male experience.

To be fair, McGahern would have been the first to repudiate the idea that he had a role as a social historian. He once told the Guardian that he was suspicious of all ideologies: ‘Joyce called them those big words which make us unhappy. I think they have very little to do with life and everything to do with the struggle for power.’

Yes, but this surely places an added burden on the artist to be alert to the way ideologies can infect reality and inflict great pain on human beings. To simply say that one is not interested in ideology is to say that life can somehow remain immune to its effects. This is a cop-out greatly favoured by artists and writers in today’s Ireland.

The reception of Memoir was universally and unambiguously glowing, and to a considerable extent deservedly. But it was striking that these reviews, and indeed virtually all the commentary that has attended McGahern’s life and work, appeared oblivious of the extent to which the writer had harmonized with the discordances of a deeply damaged culture. In the wake of his death in 2006 there was, for example, much of the usual guff about McGahern’s depiction of the ‘patriarchal reality of Irish society’. By this analysis, Moran in Amongst Women (seemingly more than loosely based on McGahern’s father) is the tyrant king who rules over all within his gaze. Just as it is clear from Memoir that McGahern had little interest in the roots or nature of his father’s demons, so also is it obvious that in his writing of fiction he accepted at face value many of the flimsiest myths of his society. But, caught between the hyper-visible power of the Church and the invisible power of an undeclared matriarchy, Moran’s rage was really the rage of the impotent.

Memoir suggests that the explanation for McGahern’s myopia was that he himself had not yet begun to see into the total truth of his own father. Whether he should have written the book or not is beside the point: more interesting is what all this tells us about how a culture manages to recruit the wounded among its spokespersons to preserve a convenient version of itself long after this has become outdated or even irrelevant. Writers, who should be challenging and dissenting, very often contribute to the malign weave of a culture by virtue of a failure properly to interrogate their own experiences and backstories. For who, if not the artist, will describe things other than as they seem?