A letter posted to John McGahern in October 1987 was more than an average fan letter. “Dear John,” it opened, “I have been meaning to write you this letter and tell you the following story for some time.” The letter’s author, Pat Feeley, a fellow teacher, had attended an Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) meeting in Abbeyfeale, Co Limerick in 1965. Feeley recounted his memories of the meeting, which was held in the weeks that followed the banning of McGahern’s second novel, The Dark, and the subsequent loss of his job as a teacher in Dublin.
When “any other business” was called for at the crowded meeting, Feeley stood up and asked: “What does the INTO propose to do in the John McGahern case?” Total silence followed. The chair of the meeting responded by asking: “The John McGahern case? What case is that? I never heard of it.” Feeley, naively, told the story of the fate which had recently befallen McGahern, before the chair “spread out his hands with the palms upwards and, with his eyes on the ceiling, said, ‘It’s all news to me.’”
A new tranche of correspondence and other materials has recently been added to the McGahern Archive at the James Hardiman Library in the University of Galway. Comprising more than 1,000 letters sent to the author from Irish and international literary figures, translators of his work, publishers, editors, as well as from family members and general readers of his work, this newly available archive represents an invaluable contribution to the study of McGahern’s writing as well as to the understanding of his many networks and circles of conversation.
Letters to McGahern gathered in this archive include those from Seamus Heaney, John Updike, Jennifer Johnston, Brian and Anne Friel, Eavan Boland, Richard Murphy, Melvyn Bragg, Mary Lavin, Hilary Mantel, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy and Tom Paulin among hundreds of other correspondents.
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The people who populate the voices recorded in the letters to an author, as well as of those relationships developed and often broken along the way, are hugely significant. Now, for the first time, hundreds of letters sent to McGahern, from his formative years as a young writer in the late 1950s, through to time of his death in 2006, are fully catalogued and accessible. This correspondence also adds to and contextualises the recently published The Letters of John McGahern edited by Prof Frank Shovlin.
One of the earliest letters in the archive is from the famed editor of the New Yorker, William Maxwell to assistant editor (and later fiction writer) Elizabeth Cullinan. “The John McGahern story [Strandhill, the Sea] went through.” Maxwell adds that “if you see any more of this calibre floating around Dublin, start them on their way to me”. Letters from Cullinan to McGahern are also interesting in revealing how much she was influenced by his stories. She states that she has “... just read Nightlines and I think it’s a perfect book”. Cullinan adds she met Mary Lavin in New York recently, who had also recently read McGahern’s Nightlines, and was convinced a character in the book was named after her.
A file of more than 40 letters from poet Richard Murphy to the McGaherns begins in 1965 with Murphy writing following the death of his own father. Murphy writes that he visited McGahern’s father and his sister Dympna at their home in Grevisk, Co Roscommon. Murphy clarifies that The Dark was not mentioned “out of courtesy” to McGahern’s father and stepmother. He adds the prescient observation that “the banning of the book did more harm to the country than to the book itself”.
The letters also dovetail with social and political news of the day. In March 1972, Murphy recalled a recent visit to Belfast, where he also met the Heaneys, saying [the city] “reminded me of London in the air raids, to look at the streets, most of them like mouths with bad teeth”. McGahern sent Murphy a copy of his The Leavetaking, prompting Murphy to reply in January 1975, in praise of McGahern’s voice, imagery “and the triumph of words over pain ... the many passages that I read and re-read, rejoicing in the style that can cut stone, are pure lyric poetry without mesh of metre or rhyme’s peal of bells.” Murphy’s allusion to stone here is revealing. The presence, form and indeed excavation of stone was a common theme in his work, including his 1985 publication, The Price of Stone & Earlier Poems.
The letters sent to an author are less often anthologised, if at all. Yet, they offer a remarkable cross-section through the literary and personal networks, friendships and relationships that intersect with the literary and creative worlds. How do other writers approach and critique McGahern’s writing? What of their own self do they bring to the reading of his works? So much in these letters ties to the world, both physical and imaginative, out of which McGahern wrote and crafted his stories and novels. Ian McEwan, for instance, wrote to McGahern in 2006 stating that he “would dearly love to come and see the land that lies around your imagination”.
Similarly, the French writer Michel Déon (who lived primarily in Ireland since 1968) wrote to McGahern in 1996, discussing the selection of short stories in the French edition of McGahern’s Les Créatures de la Terres et Autres Nouvelles, translated by Alain Delahaye. (The file of letters from Delahaye, the long-time French translator of McGahern’s work, is the largest in the archive from any one person.) Déon lamented that stories My Love, My Umbrella and Bank Holiday were not included before adding The Country Funeral meant most to him from living in rural Ireland where “these gatherings [funerals] are so genuine, so opened [sic] that they are mostly an occasion to break the stillness of country life”.
Paddy Swift (a close friend of McGahern along with his brother Jimmy) was a co-editor, along with David Wright, of X magazine, based in London. The periodical was the first to publish an extract of McGahern’s first novel, The End or the Beginning of Love. Writing on X-headed paper, Swift advises McGahern of the interest surrounding his early work from various publishers. Titles and plans for the book are discussed (The Grindstone was one less-alluring title suggested by Swift.) The novel was not published in the end, withdrawn by McGahern, and its manuscript resides in the archive at NUI Galway.
Elisabeth Schnack was a translator of many important works from Ireland, Britain and the United States from the 1950s through to her death in 1992. As well as works by McGahern, Schnack translated books by Mary Lavin, Seán Ó Faoláin, George Moore and many other Irish writers, into German. During her work translating The Barracks, Schnack wrote to McGahern regularly in 1971, asking questions and clarifying the meaning of single words and phrases from McGahern’s book, including “to save the turf — to carry it away?”, “they jigacted”, and “They might get a hell of a land — nothing? Or bad land?” Schnack visualised and researched the spaces of the lives and places of McGahern’s characters to such detail that she ended the letter by saying: “Now I’ll go to my police station and ask for expressions, and then I’ll find a footballer. The Catholic expressions I got explained by a Catholic friend.”
The exchange also reveals that Schnack requested, and received, a hand-drawn map of the floor plan of the barracks in Cootehall from McGahern. “I cannot start typing before I understand fully!” she exclaimed. McGahern did draw such a map, a visual record recalling the spaces and rooms of the barracks in which he lived and his father ruled.
As many of McGahern’s novels and stories are discussed throughout the vast files of letters, so too is his play The Power of Darkness. A version of Leo Tolstoy’s play of the same name, it was directed by Garry Hynes and first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in October 1991. Critics accused the play of being melodramatic and sentimental of “old Abbey” rural dramas. The plot centres on a dying wealthy horse dealer, Paul King, and the jealousies and scheming at play by those who surround the dying embers of this rural Irish patriarch. McGahern later acknowledged the language in the play “had been too colourful and idiomatic that it skimmed over what was at the heart of the play”. McGahern talked of “the old fear of famine”, “the confusion and guilt and plain ignorance that surrounded sex”, “the sad lusting after respectability” and singled out the Kerry Babies case as an example of the prevailing social attitude and the suffocating weight of public ceremony and religious doctrine.
Tom Murphy wrote to McGahern in the wake of the play’s panning by critics in 1991, incredulous at the reception, slamming the “famine mentalities” of those who dismissed it. The poet Robert Greacen further added, in a letter to McGahern: “I think every society is unwilling to face its problems/prejudices/intolerances. Ibsen found that out in his native Norway.” One wonders how a new production of the play might fare today in a very different Ireland from the one that first saw it.
Various publishers’ files include letters, contracts and royalty statements. A letter from Barrie and Rockliff publishers in London enclosed a cheque for £40, being the fee for the extract from The End or the Beginning of Love, published in X magazine, one of the first such payments for writing McGahern received. Royalty statements from Faber and Faber for 1966 reveal The Dark outsold The Barracks by almost two to one that year.
Across the archive is a wealth of new material, from letters from Nobel Prize winners, to fan mail from the general public, as well as files of literary and personal photographs, all of which capture and share a further glimpse into the mind, writing and life of John McGahern.
Dr Barry Houlihan is an archivist at the University of Galway
