Bryan MacMahon, the Irish writer who best personified the local artist, died on Friday night at the age of 88. His life and most of his work were based on his native north Kerry, where he always lived.
Novelist, short-story writer and dramatist, Mr MacMahon was also an accomplished folklorist, collector of traditional music and song and an authority on Shelta, the language of the travelling community. This knowledge was to prove useful when writing his play The Honey Spike, which was first performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1961 and revived as recently as January 1993.
One of the most anthologised of Irish writers - his story The Windows of Wonder is one of the most famous examples of the Irish genre - he was a surprise omission from the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. He was author of Children of the Rainbow, a novel published in 1952, as well as of several short fiction collections, including The Lion Tamer, which was first published in the US during the war years; The Red Heavy Coat; The End of the World; and The Sound of Hooves.
His absence from the anthology was noted with regret by the editor of the "Irish Fiction 1965-90" section, who lamented the inability to "spare room for the fine work of Bryan MacMahon". Still, there wasn't enough space to include John Broderick or Molly Keane either.
Any attempt to understand either MacMahon the man or MacMahon the writer must begin with the enormous impact his 44 years spent as a schoolmaster in his native Listowel had on him. He often likened the role of a teacher to that of a storyteller and actor.
Speaking in an interview in October 1992, MacMahon explained: "When you are a teacher you're six hours an actor on stage every day of your life. You are an actor and you have to hold their full attention." His oral memoir, The Master (1992), is dominated by his experiences as a teacher. The title refers to his chosen profession, not his art.
The son of a mother who had devoted her life to teaching, Bryan MacMahon was as if predestined to teach. For him, education was always a liberating privilege. There was a strong didactic element in his work, albeit a nondogmatic one. His fiction is concerned with explaining the cruel ironies of nature, particularly birth and death. However, it is always tempered by benevolence.
Far from the savagery of Liam O'Flaherty, MacMahon's dramatic vision is essentially realistic and never vicious. While an interest in nature prevails throughout his work, he always considered himself a small-town rather than rural writer, above all with a commitment to evoking an Ireland of reality rather than one of myth or nostalgia.
In plays such as The Honey Spike he took on several of the themes which have traditionally stalked, and continue to stalk, Irish life: the fear of impending birth, death in birth, social ostracisation, sexual love as a source of disgrace and shame.
The play focuses on a young traveller couple. A year married, they are awaiting the birth of their first child. Breda is intent on giving birth in the "Honey Spike", a hospital in Co Kerry. However, as the play begins, the couple are miles away at the Giant's Causeway in Co Antrim. The action develops into a race against time and nature as well as human hostility.
His first stories, The Good Dead in the Green Hills and Exile's Return, were published in Sean O'Faolain's literary journal, The Bell, while the same magazine's poetry editor, Frank O'Connor, accepted MacMahon's first poem.
Throughout his long career MacMahon avoided the two main scourges of the professional creative writer: he never suffered from writer's block and he never received a rejection slip.
In person, he was energetic, restless, opinionated, interested in everything and happiest when taking charge. More than many who aspired to being liberal, MacMahon managed to balance his genuine liberalism and openminded ness with a strong feel for tradition. The weight of lives lived, the value of the commonplace and ordinary were essential to his sense of history. History and literature, he always maintained, were mutually dependent.
MacMahon traced the Irish short story tradition as reaching back from O'Connor, O'Faolain, Corkery and Joyce to Moore's Untilled Field and to the form pioneered by Chekhov from Tur genev, who inherited it from Gogol.
Born in Listowel on September 29th, 1909, he was educated locally at the national school and then at St Michael's College in his home town. He trained as a teacher at St Patrick's College in Dublin. But, influenced by his father's poor health and his mother's insistence, he resigned his Dublin teaching post and returned to Listowel for life.
In 1936 he married Kitty Ryan and they had five sons. It was MacMahon, whose interest in writing went far beyond his own work, who had the idea of setting up the first Writers' Workshop in Listowel, which in time developed into Listowel Writers' Week.
A hard-working, practical writer sharing many of the qualities of his fellow north Kerry man, John B. Keane, MacMahon at his best wed common sense, humanity, instinct, accessibility and a natural understanding of the social and traditional orders which continue to determine Irish life. Respected as an exponent of traditional Irish fiction, he injected this with an awareness of the new possibilities presented by social change.
He will be remembered as an open-minded and honest observer, intent on creating an authentic voice. Ever the teacher, he wanted his fiction to entertain, teach and, above all, explain the complexities and contradictions of Ireland, her attitudes and her people, to the Irish and to others.
Active to the end, his last book, a collection of fictional dialogues between men and women, is due from Poolbeg shortly. It is entitled A Final Fling, and Bryan MacMahon would probably smile at the irony.
