Rite & Reason: Anyone who has read John McGahern's writings knows he was fascinated by the "smells and bells" of his early religious experience, writes Eamon Maher
John McGahern would have been 72 years old next Sunday, November 12th. That is not old by today's standards. His death on March 30th last elicited tributes from around the world.
Many described him as having been Ireland's greatest living novelist. All spoke of his massive contribution to Irish letters. How things had changed since 1965, when The Dark was banned and its author dismissed from his position as a national school teacher in Clontarf.
Amongst Women, in 1990, was probably the novel that consolidated McGahern's reputation as a major literary figure. John Banville captured the essence of this book when he wrote: "We have the feeling that we have not so much been reading as living."
Indeed, McGahern's special literary gift was his ability to transport us to a familiar world peopled by characters who were always compelling, even if at times violent, domineering and self-absorbed. They didn't need to be nice for us to recognise them. It was difficult not to identify with their struggles, to live them out as if they were our own.
When assessing McGahern the writer, one should never doubt the courage it took to tackle some of the taboo issues he treated in his novels. A recurring subject was sexual and physical abuse in the home and it was the frank and forceful way McGahern captured this thorny issue as early as the 1960s that led to his temporary marginalisation by the largely conservative literary censorship board in Ireland.
But it would be wrong to see him exclusively as a chronicler of traditional rural Ireland at a specific time in its evolution. He felt that was the work of the historian and the journalist: his role was simply "to get his words right".
He achieved this through a simple, carefully sculpted prose that was in harmony with the people and customs of the northwest midland area of Leitrim and Roscommon in which most of his fiction was set. This is where McGahern spent most of his life; it was in a special way his place. He was painstaking in his attempts to register its rituals and way of life.
The opening pages of Memoir describe minutely the poor soil of Leitrim, the hedges that surround its small fields, the lanes on which he walked to school as a young boy with his beloved mother.
We can gauge the importance of this landscape from the following lines: " in certain rare moments over the years while walking in these lanes I have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace in which I feel I can live forever. I suspect it is no more than the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss."
Despite having abandoned the formal practice of his Catholic faith at a young age, there remained much respect in McGahern's portrayal of the symbols and imagery of Catholicism: "The church ceremonies always gave me pleasure, and I miss them even now. In an impoverished time they were my first introduction to an indoor beauty, of luxury and ornament, ceremony and sacrament and mystery."
Because of the problems he encountered with some aspects of the institutional church, some were surprised that he arranged his own funeral Mass, concluding with a decade of the Rosary at the graveside. But anyone who reads his novels and short stories closely will know he remained fascinated by the "smells and bells" of his early religious experience.
As he lies in Aughwillan Cemetery, reunited with his mother, Susan, John McGahern's light shines even more brightly than it did during his lifetime.
Fintan O'Toole summed up his legacy in the following manner: "He changed Ireland, not by arguing about it, but by describing it." McGahern would have appreciated such a succinct assessment.
Eamon Maher is the author of John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal (The Liffey Press, 2004) and is working on another book on the life and works of McGahern.