Showing posts with label John McGahern. Show all posts

Sunday, October 29, 2023

“Bathed in an incredible sweetness of light” / A Reading of John McGahern’s “The Wine Breath”

John McGahern

“Bathed in an incredible sweetness of light”: A Reading of John McGahern’s “The Wine Breath”

Liliane Louvel

70 | SPRING 2018
Special Issue: Haunting in Short Fictionp. 153-166

Résumé

Les écrits de John McGahern, ancrés dans la société irlandaise rurale qui se développe à partir des années 1950, n’ont a priori rien de fantastique, rien d’une expérience de lieux fantomatiques. Cependant, une forme de hantise s’attache à certaines nouvelles, comme c'est le cas de « The Wine Breath ». Cette simple histoire d’un vieil homme qui renonce au dernier moment à effectuer la course pour laquelle il s’est rendu chez un voisin, est l’occasion de montrer comment, par la grâce d’une vision qui tout à coup fait rejaillir de sa mémoire un souvenir ancien, le vieux prêtre est hanté par son passé. À cette occasion, l’écrivain dépeint une expérience métaphysique et phénoménologique qui amène le lecteur à suivre la récurrence du souvenir revenant trouer de sa vérité mortelle « le tissu fragile de la vie quotidienne ». L’histoire est celle du désenfouissement d’un jour de l’enfance, perdu et brusquement revécu dans la blanche vision éblouissante qui rejoue la neige d’une journée particulière.

Reading John McGahern's "Love of the world" a fistful of images

Liliane Louvel

AUTUMN 2009
THE SHORT STORIES OF JOHN MCGAHERN

Résumé

This paper focuses on McGahern's particular use of images and metaphors as a means of concentrating the energy of a short story. This double entendre of McGahern's is also part and parcel of his use of irony and paradoxes. He was a great one for humour but could also use scathing irony when he disapproved of his contemporaries. “Love of the World” bears traces of this. I will try to show that a central image condenses the whole story perhaps true to one of McGahern's only critical texts about his work: “The Image”. This fine text written years before “Love of the World” perfectly applies here. It holds under the reader's eyes a Medusa's mirror in which “the totally intolerable” is reflected. In this text he develops one of his favourite ideas, that of the link between image and imagination and how one strong image often triggers the writing of a story or a novel.

John McGahern by Patrick Swift

"Along the edges": along the edges of meaning

The 100 best novels / No 97 / Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)

John McGahern / A brief survey of the short story

Claire Majola-Leblond

Abstract

This paper is an invitation to read John McGahern’s short story “Along the Eges” as a mimetic exploration of a hazardous ridge between separateness and togetherness. The narrator settles along the edge of perspective, denying the reader the stability of interpretation. The experience is that of radical Otherness, dark and dazzling

Plan

EVENING, the dark edge of love

MORNING, the bright edge of love?

The two-edged (s)word of fiction; dividing to relate

Texte intégral

Nightlines, Getting Through, “Doorways”, “Crossing the Line”, “Along the Edges” 1… McGahern’s titles repeatedly and rather enigmatically at first, focus on lines, borders, limits, thresholds, eventually offering a precious invitation to metaphorical reading.

Book Review 097 / Amongst Women by John McGahern / A Masterful Irish Novelist

Amongst Women by John McGahern

Takes One To Know One: A Masterful Irish Novelist

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 97 / Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)

Colm Tóibín

June 8, 2010

Early in 1989, the Irish novelist John McGahern came to my house in Dublin for supper. He had not published a novel for 10 years. I knew because he had told me in a number of letters that he had been struggling with a novel, and I knew also that he sometimes believed he was finished as a novelist. Over supper we did not mention novels. It was only when he was going that I noticed a large envelope on the hall table. "Have a look at that," he said shyly before leaving my house.

A Psychoanalytic Deconstruction of Perspective in John McGahern's 'The Dark'

John McGahern

A Psychoanalytic Deconstruction of Perspective in John McGahern's 'The Dark'

The 100 best novels / No 97 / Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)

John McGahern / A brief survey of the short story

By Rebecca A. Demarest
inquire 2010, VOL. 2 NO. 10

You, he, they, and I. All of these pronouns are used in John McGahern’s The Dark to refer to the central character who, when named, is simply given a surname: Mahoney. Young Mahoney is a troubled youth who is coming of age in the brutal Irish society and culture of the 1950’s, and suffers beatings, sexual abuse, and various other traumas and embarrassments at the hands of his father, his priests, and teachers. He is in turns a care-free Irish youth, going on fishing trips with his family and studying hard for his exams, eventually winning a scholarship. But even this victory is sullied by his father and the humiliation he wreaks. In response to these brutal situations, each of the thirty-one chapters in the short novel have four separate points-of-view which serve as a vehicle to illuminate the psychological impact of the situation as well as serve as a coping mechanism for the narrator to come to terms with the trauma he endures.

Cows and cadences / John McGahern by Robert McCrum

John McGahern

Cows and cadences

Robert McCrum remembers John McGahern, a dedicated novelist

The 100 best novels / No 97 / Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)

John McGahern / A brief survey of the short story

he John McGahern I knew was more than the author of Amongst Women, Ireland's foremost contemporary novelist. To me, he was a keeper of cows, a farmer in his native Leitrim, living on the edge of a tranquil brown lake, the setting for his last novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002). He liked to joke that he was an amateur farmer who wrote to defray the costs of the herd. This was a characteristic McGahern irony. In truth, he had a deep affinity for the land and its creatures, and he was instinctively a dedicated novelist who found in his isolated farm the solitude he needed to write, described with typical modesty as a process of staring out of the window. The rural landscape of his youth was the source of his inspiration and its stories his stories. He could find meaning in the exchange of glances in an empty room, and was emphatic that it was the half-expressed word that was truly eloquent. He saw the writer's job as conjuring suggestions in the reader's mind, and understood fiction as an imaginative collaboration between the novelist and his audience, especially in Ireland.

McGahern devoted himself to his art with extraordinary single-mindedness. His home had an almost monkish simplicity, illuminated and cheered by the queenly grace and candour of his wife, Madeline. I remember staying at Aughaboneil one springtime, shortly after the international success of Amongst Women, his greatest novel. Sprays of hawthorn were frothing in the lanes, and he responded to the fresh green lanes of the countryside, more poet than novelist, speaking in that wry, humorous brogue. As we walked the blind fields of his land, he repeated its stories, some of them tracing back to the potato famine. McGahern had an extraordinary memory for telling detail, and, slightly at odds with the stripped-down austerity of his prose, a wicked sense of humour.

Behind the mask of the country farmer come to market was a sharp, cosmopolitan intelligence alert to the foibles and vanities of the literary world. McGahern certainly knew the price of cows, but not many Irish writers of his generation had such a sure command of English prose and its subtleties. He often said he lived midway between Sligo and Enniskillen. It was the magic of his writing, expressed most powerfully in his valedictory Memoir (2005), to evoke the soft breath of the Irish language, which he knew intimately, while making the complex, and sometimes painful, translation to the dominant cadences of the English.

THE GUARDIAN

Tessa Hadley's top 10 short stories
The 100 best novels / No 97 / Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)
John McGahern / A brief survey of the short story
John McGahern / A family touched with madness
John McGahern / Farewell to rural Ireland's voice
Cows and cadences / John McGahern by Robert McCrum
A Psychoanalytic Deconstruction of Perspective in John McGahern's 'The Dark'
John McGahern / "Along the edges": along the edges of meaning
John McGahern / "Along the edges": along the edges of meaning
Reading John McGahern's "Love of the world" a fistful of images
“Bathed in an incredible sweetness of light” / A Reading of John McGahern’s “The Wine Breath”

DE OTROS MUNDOS
Irlanda / Escritores varios
John McGahern / Cuentos completos / Reseña
John McGahern / Escritor irlandés
John McGahern / Navidad

RIMBAUD
Memoir de John McGahern / L’enfance comme ultime horizon

Monday, June 1, 2020

John McGahern / Farewell to rural Ireland's voice

John McGahern

Farewell to rural Ireland's voice

Sean O'Hagan recalls the day he met the celebrated Irish writer John McGahern, who died last week

The 100 best novels / No 97 / Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)

John McGahern / A brief survey of the short story

Sean O'Hagan

Sunday 2 April 2006 00.52 BST

hen I met John McGahern for the first time last August, just before the publication of Memoir, his extraordinary excavation of a childhood blighted by a bullying father, he fleetingly mentioned his 'illness', and only then when the tape recorder was turned off. He seemed in good spirits, engaging and slightly mischievous as we relaxed, post-interview, in the Dog & Duck in Soho.

As we parted, he invited me to come and visit him at home in County Leitrim, which I said I would, but, because of work and family commitments, never made the time to. I was saddened and filled with regret when I heard the news on Radio 4 last Thursday: 'John McGahern, the Irish novelist, has died, aged 71.'

I would have liked to have got to know him better, but I am grateful, too, that I got to meet him. He was entertaining company, engaging and opinionated, and with a glint in his eye when he told certain stories of home - the kind of stories that, in their gleeful, gossipy detail, spoke volumes about the ongoing cut and thrust of rural Irish life, even in times of relentless change.

He reminded me in some ways of our neighbours at home, farmers mainly, who often step down off an idling tractor to pass the time of day with my father, one muddy boot resting on the gate, as the talk turns inevitably to cattle and land, who has died and who is ill.

This, too, was John McGahern's literary stock in trade, the rendering of small lives lived out against the odds in a country that, when he began writing fiction, seemed unable to shake off the dead weight of its repressive, priest-ridden past. In 1965, his second novel, The Dark, was famously banned in Ireland for being pornographic, and he lost his teaching job on the instructions of the Archbishop of Dublin, the joyless John Charles McQuaid. One gets a measure of what kind of man McGahern was by his reaction to the ban, which was neither to protest it, or accept it, but to simply ignore it. 'I didn't think it was worth protesting about,' he told me. 'It would have given the censorship board too much honour. For me, all that mattered was whether the book was well written or not.'

McGahern wrote steadily and with quiet dedication for a few hours every day and often, he confessed, discarded months of endeavour when it led him nowhere. 'You write and write and create a world,' he said, 'or it can all just as easily disappear.'

In all six of his novels, McGahern created what he memorably described as 'that inner formality of calm that all writing, no matter what it is attempting, must possess'.

In 1990, his fifth novel, Amongst Women, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was generally regarded as his masterpiece, at least until the startling arrival of his sixth and final work of fiction, 2002's That They May Face the Rising Sun. Set amid a small rural community in Ireland, the homes of which are spread out around a lake, it is an experimental and impressionistic evocation of everyday life in which, as he put it, 'Nothing happens. And, everything happens.'

He called it his 'anti-novel' and seemed genuinely surprised that it had ended up on the Northern Ireland GCSE syllabus, as well as becoming his bestselling book in America. Success, like his short-lived infamy, never fazed him. The work, long laboured over and refined to a kind of stark, descriptive poetry, was everything.

'In a way, you have to follow your own life,' he said, towards the end of our meeting. 'That's what I wanted to do from the start. Everything begins with one person and one place. It's like John Donne's line: "For love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere." That's really what I try to do in my writing.' And that is what he did, beautifully, and without compare.

THE GUARDIAN

Sunday, May 31, 2020

John McGahern / A family touched with madness

John McGahern

A family touched with madness

He's been denounced from the pulpit and seen his work banned as pornographic, says Sean O'Hagan. Now Ireland's greatest fiction writer, John McGahern, has published a moving memoir

The 100 best novels / No 97 / Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)

John McGahern / A brief survey of the short story

Sean O'Hagan

Sunday 28 August 2005 11.33 BST

John Donne did not write 'Let us make one little room, and everywhere', as stated below. He wrote: 'For love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere.'

'One thing you find out while writing a memoir,' says John McGahern, 'is what an uncertain place the mind is.' I am sitting in the half-dark of a Soho bar listening to Ireland's greatest living writer of fiction describe some of the unexpected difficulties he underwent while writing his first factual book. His soft voice and carefully wrought sentences echo the cadences and craft of his prose so much so that it is as easy to be mesmerised by his spoken words as his written ones.

John McGahern / A brief survey of the short story

John McGahern. 1960
Illustration by Patrick Swift

A brief survey of the short story part 59:

John McGahern

Returning over and over again to the same territory, these bleak but beautiful stories build into a complete fictional world

The 100 best novels / No 97 / Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)

Chris Power
Tuesday 24 June 2014 11.00 BST

During his lifetime John McGahern was frequently called Ireland's Chekhov. It's a description that carries the flavour of journalistic laziness, but there is something common to their ability to largely efface themselves from their prose, and their skill at drawing meaning from the lives of everyday rural people: teachers, farmers, labourers and policemen. McGahern clearly learned a great deal from Chekhov, and he even included a tribute of sorts in his story The Beginning of an Idea, where a character struggles with a fictionalised biography of the Russian. But he preferred deflecting the comparison when it arose: "I think there is nothing that Chekhov wrote that isn't wonderful", he told an interviewer in 1991. "Chekhov is one of the few writers that didn't write enough. You can't pay a writer much more of a compliment than that."

It could be said McGahern didn't write enough: six novels and three short-story collections in a career of 44 years. He always took his time, scrapping much more than he kept, sometimes writing more than 20 full versions of a single story. But then you could say, the more you explore his work, that most of it is a rewriting, a revising of a small stock of theme, incident and location. The setting is sometimes Dublin, occasionally London, but usually Co Leitrim where the soil is poor, "in places no more than an inch deep". The period is most often the 1950s, and even in stories set later the Troubles do not intrude. He delves into the tensions between Catholic Irish and representatives of the Protestant Ascendancy, but always at a personal level.

On the page McGahern is a realist, and some consider him conservative, but taken collectively the stories have an experimental edge, or at least a strange one. Consider the way he reuses certain characters, most notably an emotionally abusive farmer and his second wife, Rose, who appear prominently in the stories Wheels, Sierra Leone and Gold Watch, and are mentioned in several others. In each of these stories the narrator visits from Dublin and clashes with the father. Yet Rose, the farmer and the returning son are not intended to be the same characters from story to story. Rather they are archetypes of some kind, and through its repetition the struggle enacted in each story comes to seem like some eternal battle from myth.

The father is there from the beginning, incarnated as a Garda sergeant in McGahern's first novel, The Barracks (1963). At the time Anthony Burgess said the book "has caught so well the peculiar hopelessness of contemporary Ireland", and it is true that a strand of hopelessness runs throughout McGahern's work. As Nicholas Wroe notes, "the horrors are always there in McGahern", even if they are of a quiet, despairing sort, as when a hungover and jilted man looks on a Dublin street:

There were five steps up to each house. The stone was granite. Many of the iron railings were painted blue. Across the street was a dishevelled lilac bush. They'd taught us to notice such things when young. They said it was the world.

Or when a teacher (McGahern's occupation before his second novel, The Dark, was banned, and he was driven from Ireland) stares out of the classroom window, willing three o'clock:

Outside, the three stone walls of the playground run down to the lake, the centre wall broken by the concrete lavatory, above it the rapid sparkle of pinpoint flashes of sunlight on the wings of the blackdust swarm of flies; and on the windowsill in a jam jar a fistful of primroses some child has gathered from the May banks. In the stream of sunlight across the blackboard the chalkdust floats, millions of white grains, breathed in and out all day, found at night in the turnups of trousers, all the aridity of this empty trade.

Or when a priest remembers his mother's descent into senility:

… and then the day came when he had to admit that she no longer knew who he was, had become like a dog kennelled out too long.

This is brutal material in its way, and McGahern's dark energies are nowhere more forcefully expressed than in the extraordinary Hearts of Oak, Bellies of Brass (1970). Collecting his pay after another punishing day of shovelling on a London building site, the narrator reflects:

I love to count out in money the hours of my one and precious life. I sell the hours and I get money. The money allows me to sell more hours. If I saved money I could buy the hours of some similar bastard and live like a royal incubus, which would suit me much better than the way I am now, though apparently even as I am now suits me well enough, since I do not want to die.

The men labour, drink, and "go round to Marge and Kathleen", prostitutes who live "in the condemned row, moving from empty house to empty house ahead of the demolition. Limp rubbers floated in the gutters Monday mornings while they slept in the daylight." It is a cycle seemingly without meaning or end, one of many that confirms the wheel as the central image of McGahern's work: the identification of life as a recurrent pattern. In Parachutes it reappears as a depressive's vision:

It was as if we were looking down a long institutional corridor; the child in the feeding chair could be seen already, the next child, and the next … the lawnmowers in summer, the thickening waists. It hardly seemed necessary to live it.

In the story Sierra Leone, one of several McGahern stories about unsuccessful love affairs, the narrator notes with weary acceptance, "the old wheel turned and turned anew, wearing my life away; but if it wasn't this wheel it would be another." But in Oldfashioned, one of his most ambitious and remarkable stories, some air is let in, if only temporarily: "The wheel of the summer turned pleasantly. The seeds pushed above ground, were thinned. The roses and the other flowers bloomed. The soft fruit ripened and Mrs Sinclair started to make jams in the big brass pot." And in the late story The Country Funeral, the repetitious cycles of country life, in particular the wake and burying of the dead, are seen not as markers of the claustrophobic narrowing of life, but acts that deepen the connections between people.

From McGahern's earliest books there is an extraordinary grace and power to his descriptive writing, particularly of landscape. (Dublin does not receive the same careful attention, and remains – perhaps intentionally – insubstantial.) His descriptive abilities grew as he continued to labour at his style, culminating in the descriptions of Gloria Bog in The Country Funeral, located in the heart of the territory where so many of his stories take place. He describes the bog with great beauty and plainness of language, first at dusk:

Without any warning, suddenly, they were out of the screen of small trees into the open bog. A low red sun west of Killeelan was spilling over the sedge and dark heather. Long shadows stretched out from the small birches scattered all over the bog.

And then at night:

It was a clear moonlit night without a murmur of wind, and the acres of pale sedge were all lit up, giving back much of the light it was receiving, so that the places that were covered with heather melted into a soft blackness and the scattered shadows of the small birches were soft and dark on the cold sedge.

If you have not read McGahern before these passages may seem unremarkable. I suspect their effect, and that of his prose generally, depends in part on repetition, its wheeling returns to the same places, the same people, the same situations, and that its impact grows with each repetition just as a ritual accretes meaning the more it is performed. Beneath these descriptions of Gloria Bog lies the sediment of his many other evocations of Leitrim, a landscape he recreated with the persistence of Paul Cézanne painting Mont Sainte-Victoire. "My only concern", as McGahern once said, "is that I get the sentence right and describe my world clearly and deeply."

THE GUARDIAN