He was the man who changed Ireland simply by describing it, writes Fintan O'Toole
Years ago, after he had stirred up opposition in Co Leitrim to the threatened pollution of a lake, John McGahern told me rather proudly of what a local politician had said about him: "That writer bastard has them all riz." I suggested that it might make a good line for his tombstone, and he laughed at the notion. But afterwards it struck me that it would be a bad epitaph after all. He did watch local politics with a gleeful, gossipy relish, delighting, for instance, in the way the public phone-box (then a treasured amenity) moved from one side of the street to another in the village of Fenagh, depending on who was in power, sitting outside the pub of a Fine Gael supporter for a while, then moving towards the premises of a Fianna Fáil publican.
He did, occasionally, stir things up. But ultimately he was, as a public figure, something much more profound, and much more disturbing, than an agitator. He was the man who revealed our world to us and forced us to recognise it. He changed Ireland, not by arguing about it, but by describing it.
On second thoughts, then, a better epitaph might come from another phrase that he had heard spoken and that also delighted him that day. He had been down in the local garage. A farmer had broken the lock on his car door. Another farmer stood looking at the mechanic trying to fix it. He watched for ages. Observing intently but saying nothing. At last he brought forth a Delphic utterance: "Tricky yokes locks." McGahern repeated the phrase to himself. He loved its bizarre economy, the way three words summed up an entire character, the way ordinary speech twisted itself without warning into a kind of elliptical poetry. And it would fit well on his gravestone, because locks surely are tricky yokes, and he unpicked them with a safe-cracker's finesse. The one he worked on most of his life was the lock of Irish silence and secrecy. Of Moran, the main character in his best novel Amongst Women, he notes "the inviolate secrecy he instinctively kept around himself". McGahern unpicked inviolate secrecies and entered the strangest, yet most familiar territory of all: the interior of the Irish family.
At first glance, it may seem odd to say about McGahern, of all writers, that he changed anything. In some ways, he seemed like an impervious rock in the stream of social upheaval that swept through Ireland, gathering pace from the 1960s onwards. He chose to live in an apparently old world, basing himself on a small working farm in Leitrim. He looked and often dressed like a 1950s schoolteacher. He ignored literary fashion ("Tradition, when all is said and done," he told the critic Eamon Maher, "is civilisation."). He never caught the rampantly commercial spirit that became the national ethic, writing in the same calm style, with the same classic simplicity throughout his career and accepting, for most of it, pitiful advances from publishers. From the first words in his first novel, The Barracks, published in 1963 - "Mrs Reegan darned an old woollen sock as the February night came on . . ." - there was a sense of a world that was even then beginning to vanish, a world in which socks were too expensive to be thrown away when they wore thin. On the surface, he might have seemed too far from the cutting edge, too careless of the day's sensations, to be a real force in a rapidly shifting society.
His very prose, after all, aimed not to produce jagged discontinuities or feverish agitation, but to induce a kind of tranquillity. It has the simple, unruffled poise of a great old ballad, and when it doesn't, it fails. Perhaps his best summary of his own ideal came in the preface to the second edition of The Leavetaking in 1974. The first version of the novel is the only one of his books that he really disliked. Having re-written it, he explained why in that preface: "The work lacked that distance, that inner formality or calm that all writing, no matter what it is attempting, must possess." Distance, formality, calm - these are not, it would seem, the qualities of a revolutionary.
It is poignant that, in his marvellous and deeply moving Memoir, he writes of the moment at which he became a reluctant cause celebre of Irish modernisation - the banning of The Dark in 1965 and his sacking from his job as a primary-school teacher in Clontarf in Dublin - that he felt the whole controversy might have resulted from an aesthetic failure on his part, a lack of calm in his prose.
"I wondered privately," he admits, "if the novel had been written less quickly and with more care that they might not have noticed." For those for whom McGahern was defined by his brush with infamy, his accidental heroism, it is a shock to realise that what bothered him most about the whole affair was the possibility that he might have escaped it by writing better. He never wanted to break down the doors, just to pick the locks.
What's behind those doors, though, was itself potent enough to overturn a nation's self-image. By accurately describing the human interiors of Ireland, McGahern helped to alter Ireland's sense of reality. The starkest example of this is the issue of child sex abuse. When it hit the headlines in the 1990s, it was spoken of as a stunning and awful revelation, a secret that hardly anyone knew. Yet it is there in black-and-white in The Dark, 30 years before. The book opens with the young protagonist, Mahoney, being forced to strip naked and bend over a chair to be beaten by his father, who derives a sexual pleasure from the act. Shortly afterwards, the boy is sexually abused by his father. Later, he stays in a priest's house and the priest comes into his room at night. The description is eerily like something that would be spoken aloud in Ireland decades later in States of Fear or the Ferns Inquiry: "His hand closed on your arm. You wanted to curse or wrench yourself free but you had to lie stiff as a board, stare straight ahead at the wall, afraid before anything of meeting the eyes you knew were searching your face."
Such awful privacies were unspoken and, in the case of The Dark, unspeakable. Officialdom had no place for them, and though most Irish people knew about them, they did not want to really know them. But McGahern's calm persistence, his unrelenting integrity, drove them into our collective heads. The very conservative of the surface, the avoidance of shrillness or stridency, made the act of insinuation all the more explosive. His work became a kind of photographic negative - it had no garish colours, but its shadows captured not just the darkness that was there but also the healthy society that was absent. For McGahern was a realist in the same sense that Samuel Beckett was: a realist who described absences.
In a wonderful essay on Tomás Ó Criomhthainn's account of his life on the Blasket islands, McGahern wrote about the way its "people and place seem to stand outside history". The same seems, at one level, true of a book like Amongst Women, in which a family is its own universe, "a completed world". But it is outside history in a very specific sense. History hasn't happened. It has stalled and stagnated. The Ireland McGahern wrote about was a country that did not exist, a nation that had failed to come into being. In Amongst Women, the central character Moran is a version of McGahern's own father, a domestic tyrant. But his rage is rooted in blighted hopes. Moran had commanded an IRA flying column against the Black and Tans, trying to create a state. The reality never matched the dreams, and the ageing Moran is so soured that he believes that all the violence was for nothing: "Look where it brought us. Look at the country now. Run by a crowd of small-minded gangsters out for their own good. It was better if it never happened."
The revolution had produced, in Moran's bitter phrase, "a country, if you'd believe them". He patently doesn't believe "them" - the church, the State - and he doesn't believe that he has a country.
What's left in the absence of a country is, in McGahern's vision, a series of independent kingdoms called families, each ruled by an absolute monarch. Feminists in the 1960s and 1970s wrote a great deal about patriarchy; McGahern embodied it. The family of his books - essentially his own - is a patriarch's domain where the father is both church and state, a petty, violent God, and a draconian one-man government. And in this narrow world, there is another vast, animated absence. The mother, like his own mother, is dead and, as he makes clear in Memoir, he mourned her loss all his life. Grief is what fills the void where a country should be. But - and this is the miracle of his creativity - the grief is so large, so tender, so deeply connected to nature and beauty and language, that it brings what is lost back to life.
In the end, John McGahern's leavetaking will be not unlike the obsequies he describes so perfectly in his long story The Country Funeral. In it, he writes of a country house during a wake as a place divided between grief on the one hand and an imaginative sociability on the other: "It was as if the house had been sundered into two distinct and separate elements, and yet each reflected and measured the other, as much as the earth and the sky. In the upper room there was silence, the people there keeping vigil by the body where it lay in the stillness and awe of the last change; while in the lower room that life was being resurrected with more vividness than it could ever have had in the long days and years it had been given."
John McGahern was always in that grief-stricken upper room, keeping vigil over its silences, and always in that lower room of language and friendship, resurrecting lives with an immortal vividness.