John McGahern knew that if he could work hard enough and slowly enough, he could produce prose which would be deeply deceptive in its simplicity, and would express everything, writes Colm Tóibín
In 1979 a proof copy of John McGahern's novel The Pornographer arrived at In Dublin magazine where I was working. The book was read in a short time by a number of us who wrote for the magazine. We were in our early 20s and not special fans of the work of McGahern and yet we were stunned by the book.
The story was set in a Dublin we recognised but, in its relentless darkness, in its sombre dramatisation of sex and death, it could equally have been written by a French existential novelist. Also, in the way the writer played with narrative, it could have been written by a modern anti-novelist. And yet it was rooted in a world which McGahern had already established in his three previous novels and two books of stories - the dull life of Ireland, full of rain and families and priests and early closing time. It made me, for one, reread McGahern's earlier work with new attention.
Six years later, when his book of stories High Ground appeared, I was sent to interview him. These new stories were less brooding, less dark than his earlier work, and written with a new sort of fluency and skill. It was clear from a few of them that he had been looking carefully at the Ireland of the 1980s; in others, he was back in the watchful and introverted landscape of his past. When I went to Galway at the time of publication and saw him address an audience, I was surprised by his good humour, his outgoing manner, his skill as a performer and his obvious relish of the audience's response to him. I had imagined him to be shy and mostly silent.
When I went to Co Leitrim to interview him, I found him a mixture of the deeply reticent and utterly honest; I also discovered that he was extremely funny; he really enjoyed discussing the foibles and strange vanities of the people in the society around him and the wider world. He loved telling stories. And then when he spoke about the books he was reading or the work he was doing he changed completely, became almost strict as well as serious.
He spoke always with great intensity and enthusiasm about books. I was surprised how little he had read of contemporary Irish writing and how much he was steeped in the French 19th century. At that time, Enniskillen, rather than Dublin, was his capital, and after Enniskillen, Paris.
But more than anything, I remember the quality of the hospitality in that house by the lake, how much care he and Madeline put into that. I was to discover over the next two decades how much good manners and courtesy mattered to both of them.
In that interview, he told me that he viewed the completion of one story, Bank Holiday, from the new book as a breakthrough, having made as many as 50 drafts of it. Maybe it was after the interview, when he knew I was not taking notes, that he said he was having real difficulty with a novel-in-progress. And certainly over the next few years in a few conversations and a few letters, he made it clear that the book was not working and that he was not sure he would be able to rescue it. He mentioned the possibility that he was finished as a writer, that his work was done.
He began to come to Dublin more often. I remember one evening in the summer of 1989 meeting him by accident on Capel Street and going to a city-centre restaurant with him. Perhaps the fact that he saw so few outsiders made him a most wonderful friend on an evening like that. He was full of laughter, immense charm and wit. His company, in all its concentrated sparkle and charm, was a kind of gift. Then one night, later that year, he and Madeline came to my house in Stoneybatter. On his way out, John pointed to a large envelope he had left on the table and said it was the new book. I could read it at my leisure, he said. As soon as he and Madeline had left, I began to read the opening pages of Amongst Women.
It was a pleasure to write to him a few days later to say that he had produced a masterpiece and that for the rest of his life people would come up to him to thank him for this book and would think of him with real gratitude. Over the next while, as we spoke about it, I discovered that he was happy with what he had finally produced, having made Amongst Women from a much longer original text. He knew that he had got it right, but he insisted that he did not think it would sell in any numbers, nor be well reviewed. Since he had not produced a novel for so long, he was not even sure that his publishers would want this book.
He spoke about his considerable literary fame in France with lightness and amusement. He was lucky, perhaps, that it was Samuel Beckett who drew him to the attention of French publishers, and this meant he was translated at first by a French poet and was appreciated for the cadences of his prose as much as for his insights into Irish sexuality or repression. At one of the many symposiums of Irish writers in France in the 1990s, of which he was always the bemused and hesitant star, when there was a heated discussion about the need for us all to write about Irish politics, he spoke only once, and it was magisterial.
"It is a writer's job to look after his sentences," he said. "Nothing else." This was what gave him his immense power in Ireland over the past two decades. He had been deeply wounded by his early experiences of censorship, but instead of arguing with the church or the State, instead of bitterness or shrillness, he worked on his sentences. Once, when I was editing an anthology, he gave me an essay on the Catholic church, in which he rose above the disputes of the past, to express gratitude for prayer and ritual and stained glass. Out of his argument with himself he made his fiction; out of other arguments he made jokes. Mostly, however, he stayed quiet.
He disapproved of vanity, foolishness, loud parties and constant foreign travel. Often, especially in the 1990s, he would suggest in no uncertain terms to me that I should stay home more than I did. He himself had now spent almost three decades, with just a few breaks to teach in upstate New York, in a small house overlooking a lake in Leitrim, labouring on rhythms and harmonies in prose, and the rest of the time working on his farm. He knew that the range of his narratives would remain limited and narrow, and he was almost proud of that. He somehow knew too that if he could work hard enough and slowly enough, he could produce prose which would be deeply deceptive in its simplicity, and would express everything.
As the people who tried to build a factory near his house were to learn, John McGahern was a most formidable man. It is almost a ritual between writers who are friends that they will think of something good to say about each other's books around the time of publication, no matter what. John did not take part in this ritual. Instead, he told you bluntly what he thought of your book in a letter. I was not alone among Irish writers who waited for such letters with trepidation.
One night in Co Leitrim, when he had recovered from his first bout of illness, Catriona Crowe and myself sat up late with him. We drank and talked. He had found the hospital and its community of doctors and nurses interesting and funny, as well as difficult. He was half amused and half annoyed at being offered professional counselling in the face of death, he said. He sighed at the very thought of it. Then he lifted his glass and drank and, having left a few seconds of silence, he spoke again: "We bloom only once, and you would want to be very foolish not to know that." He looked at us and laughed calmly, and then resumed an earlier discussion about some recent books he had loved - the stories of Alistair MacLeod and the novel Charming Billy by Alice McDermott.
In the morning, he and Madeline took us for a walk along the lane by the lake, the world of his last novel, That They Might Face the Rising Sun. I remember him explaining the strange brutality of the way in which swans send their young away from them and into the world. He was, as always, fascinated by things in their variety; he was also laughing and talking, managing in his manners and responses the same gift for poise and grace his readers find in his sentences.
In Memoir, his last book, he was to find that gift useful one more time. It seems immensely sad, despite his own calm acceptance of our fate in the world, that his great gift for words and for friendship has bloomed only once, and will not come again.