Feature:The early days of John McGahern's career are illuminated in a cache of letters that recently came to light, writes Susan McKay
'Dear Mr McLaverty, I have wanted to write to you for some time, but I have found it difficult to address you. I have never written to an author before. I am a native of north Roscommon, and work in a national school in Dublin." So begins a wonderful new book of letters.
The author of this, the opening one, is the young John McGahern, and he was writing to Michael McLaverty.
It was 1959. McGahern was 24, and, though he did not say so in this opening letter, he was writing his first novel, The Barracks. McLaverty was 55, had published seven novels and two collections of short stories, and was the headmaster at a large secondary school in Belfast.
McGahern wrote in his first letter of McLaverty's most recent book: "To read it was like coming into a new country." He spoke of his excitement at one of the older author's stories being such that he read it to his class, and then to his younger siblings.
It had taken courage to write the letter - his nerve had failed him once before and a letter had gone unsent, he admitted. He went on: "But I do not want to make a display of my personality. I believe that it is a great achievement for any man to state, even once, a measure of his experience truthfully. Your books have given me a better appreciation of life as well as their own pleasure." McLaverty replied warmly, with suggestions for further reading, including Mary Lavin, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield and "Tolstoy's great, great story The Death of Ivan Ilych." McGahern had already read them all, except the Tolstoy, and McLaverty's suggestion had sent him off to read not just the story - which was, he decided, better than Joyce's The Dead - but the novels. In Tolstoy he found "the seeds of Proust's great novel: the quarrel about the changing of love in time". Not all of McLaverty's suggestions met with such praise. McGahern was bored and irritated by Seán Ó Faoláin's highly wrought work. "I wished that somebody would nail a grocer's calendar on the wall and say something ordinary," he wrote.
By 1961, McGahern had sent The Barracks to McLaverty. McLaverty loved it. "Your work afforded me the same rush of delight that used to come over me when I saw my algebra teacher write on the board "simplify", he wrote. Like Chekhov and Tolstoy, McGahern had shown "that simplicity is the finest ornament of any style." McLaverty was fascinated by his "fine control", which was rare, he felt, in young writers. His style "had the sting and clarity of an early morning in October". His people "were as alive and biting as a chapped finger in a frosty wind". Later, he would praise McGahern's "wonderful gift for intimacy". By this time the two writers were on first-name terms, and McLaverty signed off as "your friend".
Both of them were driven. McLaverty wrote about frustration - "the burden of school" left him little time "to follow the heart's desire" to write. McGahern wrote that the "realest" reason he wrote was that, "having lost my formal faith, I am self compelled to pray or praise. If I did not need to do it I would stop tomorrow, but there seems little else." Writing was "faith and passion and suffering." The correspondence covers the notorious events that followed the publication of The Dark. McLaverty admired the book for "its painful sincerity and its pared-to-the-bone style". It must have been "a heartbreaking and exhausting book to write", he said. McGahern was greatly relieved by his reaction. The book had been violently received in some quarters. The worst review, he said, "was by a Dublin public house oracle, Anthony Cronin".
McGahern had known the book might be banned, and it was. He was fired, at the behest of then archbishop John Charles McQuaid. "What disturbs me very much is that the book's a religious book if it's anything at all," McGahern wrote in one of several letters that convey anxiety and depression about his situation. "The whole business," he wrote, "reminds me of the more savage pieces of Carleton."
This book, Dear Mr McLaverty, has been edited with great care by John Killen, one of the fine librarians at Linenhall Library in Belfast. McLaverty died in 1992, and, following a symposium on his work in 2005, his family donated his archive to the Linenhall. While cataloguing it, Killen found the letters. "This correspondence leapt out at me," he says.
He was excited, as readers will also be, by the frankness and perceptiveness of these exchanges about what is important in life and in writing. He was also struck by the maturity and seriousness of purpose shown by the young McGahern. McGahern died in April. The early years of his long and distinguished career are movingly illuminated in this lovely volume.
Dear Mr McLaverty: The Literary Correspondence of John McGahern and Michael McLaverty 1959-1980, edited by John Killen, is published by Linenhall Library, Belfast, £9