Connect: Among the ironies that most amused the late John McGahern was an edition of the French translation of his 1979 novel, The Pornographer. His French publishers issued the book with a cover on which a rainbow arched over a traditional Irish thatched cottage set against a rolling mountainside. The title on this idyll was La Pornographie.
It looked a cover more suitable for Peig. It's difficult to imagine anything less pornographic than a traditional Irish thatched cottage.
It's unlikely many have interiors like classical bordellos: dark red drapes, low-powered lamps, mirrored ceilings, that sort of thing. There is, however, a barely buried truth in that cover: McGahern wrote about, among other matters, the secretive sexual abuses that took place in traditional rural Ireland.
He did so in the 1960s and it was to be three decades before journalism emulated him. He was avant garde without the nonsense that term implies. He looked the opposite of an artistic innovator - the countryman's cap, pullover and overcoat guaranteed that. But more than any other realist writer, he detailed, if not quite a hidden Ireland, one that was practically unspoken.
In doing so, he notoriously fell foul of the Catholic hierarchy and lost his job as a national schoolteacher. The rest of his story is well known. His fiction, with its farmers, guards, domestic tyrants, forlorn lovers, children and suffering stepmothers, takes place in archetypal fields, villages and bogs. Breathing life into the apparently stultifying ordinariness of rural life makes his writing superb.
But theme needs style for artistic elaboration. McGahern's pared, fastidious, seemingly simple prose style expressed more, much more than an ornate style could. His writing appears as ordinary as his characters or the places in which they live their lives. In that sense, his ordinariness has the power of, say, Primo Levi's equally unsensational Auschwitz memoir, If This Is a Man.
McGahern knew that style works best when it's integral to and reflects theme. He always wrote facing a wall, instead of, for instance, vainly seeking inspiration from a view of the serene Laura Lake outside his house. He said he could rewrite a page 30 or even 40 times before he was satisfied with it. If that seems extreme - and it is - it was the price he was prepared to pay for his art.
He cared deeply about language and it was that - arguably even more than airing dark themes in his fiction - which made him great. He could certainly have written the classic line: "Sorry about the long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one." He knew that writing was hard work - not work like digging holes for poles, but difficult, laborious and exasperating work nonetheless.
"I have found the most serious mistakes I have made were when I have drawn from life, when I have actually stuck close to the way things happen. That's where the prose is dead," he said. He knew too that just replicating speech - taping it and transcribing it onto the page, for instance - was not, contrary to popular belief, the way to create believable or engaging dialogue.
There must always be authorial art, even if with McGahern its aim was invariably to mask itself, rather as traditional Irish families masked themselves. Most members of most families felt - and presumably still feel - almost a sense of duty to have one persona for the outside world and another for the home. McGahern, in contrast, reportedly behaved the same with almost everybody.
This trait suggests either a great confidence or a great doubt in his own identity. With McGahern, it unquestionably meant great confidence.
After all, he had stood up to the greatest power in 1960s Ireland - the Catholic hierarchy. It moved to protect itself by removing him from his job, but while it won that particular battle it has clearly lost the war, with good and bad consequences.
There was, of course, a great deal to kick against in the Ireland of McGahern's youth. The place was deliberately isolated by de Valera's policy and by neutrality in the second World War. The fact that this State labelled a global war in which about 54 million people were killed an "Emergency" tells its own story. The State was so inward-looking that it grew musty, forcing tens of thousands to leave.
Anyway, the prevailing wisdom holds that the Ireland of John McGahern has all but died with him. There are still vestiges of that country to be felt, but they are weakening.
Unfortunately, it's not just McGahern's rural themes that are being eclipsed; his style is too. He was, as has been said, Ireland's foremost prose writer - at least in fiction - since Samuel Beckett died.
John McGahern showed the universal significance to be found in local life. It's a lesson WB Yeats knew early, when he deemed vital the importance of rootedness in creative writing.
Patrick Kavanagh too understood the supremacy of the local. In his 1938 poem Epic, he wrote of Homer making the Iliad from a local row.
Anyway, John McGahern is gone and his passing diminishes the world. Mind you, it also puts the vacuousness of our increasingly coarse "metropolitan elite" into perspective.