Last Saturday, as we scattered down the slopes from Aughawillan church where we had laid John McGahern to rest, we were lashed by fierce rain. The clouds had threatened all morning as we gathered and waited, and now all that dark fury hit us. But almost as quickly, the sky cleared and rainbows appeared, writes Denis Sampson.
As I drove down through the centre of the country, this April day of rain and sudden, spectacularly vivid rainbows in adjoining fields continued for hours. In its bleakness and beauty, it was a day for John McGahern.
The first time I met him, in Montreal in February 1979, he spoke of Proust and Chateaubriand's Memoirs d'Outre Tomb. When he began to quote from memory, I knew immediately that he was revealing a secret to me, the secret of where he found his inspiration in other writers. I was young and ignorant and he insisted to me that I must know Proust's observation that Chateaubriand was never so immortal as when he fully accepted his own mortality, when he knew that he was no more than the flower blooming briefly on the hillside. All the hobnobbing with the political and social elites of Napoleonic France counted for nothing in the sense of things.
And when I visited John in Leitrim a few months later, I began to see how the imagination that lived most intensely among the words of great poets also had its feet on the ground where the flowers that brought colour into the landscape were actually rooted. We turned the hay together in his front field. I think I passed a crucial test that day, for my own childhood on a farm further down the Shannon valley had left me enough familiarity with hay-making and milking the cows.
We walked the fields together, from one lake to the other, and his love of the small place that he now occupied was clear. He could spend periods at the college in New York State or elsewhere, but he was rooting himself in this landscape and among the people whose images would populate his fiction - a fiction I would later try to explore in my book, Outstaring Nature's Eye, the first critical work devoted to John.
Indoors, as we sat around the table enjoying the good food and drink that was always available with such grace in Madeline's kitchen, John often quoted from favourite writers, from Yeats, Hardy, Proust and Chekhov. He invoked their presence and that of other classic writers with an enthusiasm and a desire to share which suggested that he was still discovering the contours of his own imagination. Our conversations over the next 25 years, at his house in Leitrim, or other places in Ireland, or in Montreal or Toronto, whenever he came to Canada, touched on his literary enthusiasms, new and old - mostly old, though I felt a gradual opening out as he grew into his maturity and his fame, as the poet I had first known became a moralist, a historian and commentator. I remember a reading in Galway in the 1980s when I recognised that this was about to happen. I was surprised to discover what a great reader he was, how he had the audience in the palm of his hand, how much they loved him.
Later, as his confident movement into the later vision became established, and he became a much more public figure in Ireland, he would be his own man and almost apologise for the pretensions of literary name-dropping. A very sociable side emerged, a great pleasure in performance, a relish of the attention Amongst Women won for him, an acceptance of a public role in a new Ireland; all this I was aware of, and happy about, as he achieved his deserved recognition, but I will always remember him - perhaps because I live away from Ireland - as a writer whose imagination lived most intensely among words - his own and those that inspired him.
He taught Ireland how to read itself, yes, and taught me how to read myself - and how to read; but when the period for teaching is over, his work will be honoured here and elsewhere for other qualities. "All that matters is the quality of the writing," he would repeat over and over, apparently teaching, and upholding a universal literary value, yet reminding himself of what mattered in his vocation.
I recently spent some time in the archives of University College Galway looking at the manuscripts of the novels and stories donated by John. I was moved all over again by the dedication to perfection that was his goal, by the massive reworking and rewriting that went into the struggle to get his essential images in the right place and the right order. Much of his work is so disarmingly accessible and immediate in its visceral impact that the art becomes invisible; covering those thousands of pages with pencil and biro was a labour that he wished to keep concealed in his workshop. His smiling later manner almost makes the writing of stories and novels seem easy, and yet his was an immense labour over many years, a labour of refinement and of literary judgment.
The papers he has left to the library will be seen by a few scholars, yet in them is buried the secret of his genius as a writer. For those of us who knew him and enjoyed his marvellous company, there are countless readers who know him only through the words on the page.
It is those words that will guarantee that in the future his living presence will continue to be felt intimately. I feel honoured to have come close on a few occasions to feeling the private well-springs of literary genius, although John would have been the last person to allow the word genius into the conversation.