YEARBOOK: Seán MacBride: A Republican Life 1904-1946By Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid Liverpool University Press 245pp. £65
NOW IN ITS FOURTH YEAR, The John McGahern Yearbookhas established itself as a fitting forum for critical assessments and artistic appreciations of the late Leitrim writer's work. Although it doesn't come cheap, it delivers high standards of design and production and deftly facilitates both specialist and community perspectives on the man and his fiction.
Volume 4 carries on the fine work of its predecessors; it is also the richest so far in terms of visual content. In addition to the now-familiar images of manuscript pages from the McGahern Archive at NUI Galway, this edition features a selection of arresting black-and-white photographs of Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s, the place and time in which McGahern said he came of age intellectually.
The volume's guiding theme is the educational dimension of McGahern's work, including his own attitudes to the teaching profession. Stanley van der Ziel argues that The Darkexpresses one of the writer's central beliefs: true knowledge has need of "neither vast buildings nor professorial chairs nor robes nor solemn organ tones", but is rather a matter of learning to discover our own place in the world through acts of reading. In a similar vein, Michael Griffin draws illuminating parallels between McGahern's views on teaching and those of the American novelist John Williams, highlighting their shared conviction that teachers should respect "the essential mystery and magic in all real poetry" rather than reduce it to "the factual or sentimental", as the narrator's schoolteacher-mother in The Leavetakingputs it.
Both Joan Dean and John McAuliffe recall what it was like to be a student of McGahern's during his tenure as writer-in-residence at NUIG in 1993. Dean remembers the democratic openness of his weekly seminars, the syllabus for which began with Synge's The Aran Islandsand ended with the short stories of Alice Munro. For McAuliffe, the most striking aspect of those seminars was McGahern's fascination with poetry, particularly that of Yeats. He goes on to offer a mini tutorial of his own, persuasively showing how a key scene in That They May Face the Rising Sunredacts and revises Easter 1916. In the process, he endorses Frank Shovlin's thesis that Yeats is the single most important influence on McGahern's prose, a claim that rebalances scales usually weighted in favour of Joyce.
Comparing the soundings that different readers take from the same texts is one of the perennial pleasures of the yearbook. Where McAuliffe sees the imprint of Yeats in That They May Face the Rising Sun, Conor Montague traces the influence of George Moore's 1905 novel, The Lake,arguing that McGahern "collaborated with his long-deceased compatriot to continue weaving the thematic threads left hanging by Moore".
Responses to Amongst Womenare more polarised here. Nuala Ní Chonchúir regards the central protagonist, Michael Moran, as immature and controlling but "not altogether unpleasant". Not so Mary O'Donnell, who takes a much harder line on Moran, comparing his despotic tendencies to those of Hitler and Stalin. Impatient with his stubborn refusal to let go of old grievances, she argues that Moran is not a great literary creation because he lacks "complexities such as mercy and honesty, an ability to transcend one's own script". Perhaps so, but this is to undervalue the significance of that haunting scene near the end of the novel when the dying patriarch escapes his carers to gaze upon "the emptiness of the meadow" and realise, too late, that nature's indifferent plenitude makes a mockery of all human pretensions.
Adrian Hodges's account of his 1999 television adaptation of Amongst Womenmerely served to remind me of how superior the ur-text is to the four-part serial. I've always felt that the decision to invent an entrepreneurial London career for Moran's estranged son, Luke, was ill-judged, and reading Hodges's rationale has not changed my mind.
Hodges explains that Luke "had to be more than the largely off-screen presence he is in the book, not least because the final, restrained and very moving confrontation between father and son at Sheila's wedding might have lost impact if we had not followed Luke's journey to London more closely and seen his own development into a man very like his father". By taking such liberties with the text, however, Hodges violates the very quality that Dermot Healy draws attention to in his essay on the role of food and prayer in Amongst Women:McGahern's "acute literary discipline in not giving in to the reader's wish, or his own wish, for reconciliation to arrive". The screenplay also clouds the thematic purpose of Luke's alienated absence from Great Meadow, which is to underline his symbolic death in the eyes of his father and to exemplify the truth that "only women could live with Daddy".
The final essay reminds us not only that there are different McGaherns but also that one’s response to his work can change radically over time. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne recalls how “downright scary” McGahern’s narrators’ views of young women were when she first read him, in the 1970s, “so judgmental of hips and legs and faces, and in such a raw way, like a farmer at a mart”. Later, she would come to love the “thisness” and “thinginess” of his style, his life-affirming ability to describe the physical world with sensual precision. That McGahern can discomfit and delight in this fashion is just one measure of his elliptical genius.
Liam Harte lectures in Irish and modern literature at the University of Manchester. The paperback edition of his most recent book, The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001,is published by Palgrave Macmillan this month
