Review: John McGahern's 'Love of the World'

John McGahern

Love of the World: Essays (2009)

Edited by Stanley Van der Ziel

John McGahern was perhaps the greatest Irish novelist. His output was not prolific, but the luminous, unshowy clarity of his writing, and the perfectly cadenced sentences with which he built his worlds, justify comparisons with Gustav Flaubert. His two last, and most acclaimed, novels Amongst Women (1990) and That They May Face The Rising Sun (2002), are not driven by their plots, but instead gather momentum through their attentiveness to the subtle, variable ways in which human relationships are spun, and the cosmic reflection of these patterns in the changing seasons. It is this quality of slow intensity which perhaps explains why, for years after reading his works, his readers are left with the vivid pictures that they summon: a prospective son-in-law’s fumbled attempt at familiarity, or an old man playing a final, astonishing game of darts. McGahern did not seek out great events, but exalted the everyday through the steady, unquestionable power of his rhythmic sentences. During the course of this collection of essays and reviews, he frequently repeats Thomas Aquinas’s statement on the value of the image: ‘The Image is a principle of our knowledge. It is that from which our intellectual activity begins, not as a passing stimulus, but as an enduring foundation.’ There are few more certain ways to intuit the truth of this phrase than to read McGahern’s short stories and novels.

This collection will come as a revelation to all the readers who have loved his books. Those whose inner ear became accustomed to the penetrating sanity of his voice, and who have not found his equal since his death in 2006, now have a collection of his thoughts on literature, places, people, society and history.  Though there will be no more novels, the books McGahern reviews and the quotations he chooses guide the reader towards the writers that inhabited the novelist’s own mental landscape. Alistair MacLeod appears repeatedly, as does the vivacious, humane intelligence of John Butler Yeats. It is by such triangulation that the process McGahern described as ‘readers finding their writers’ continues.

Though McGahern was harmed by censorship – his second novel was banned and he lost his job as a teacher as a result –  the experience did not make him rancorous. The sanity of his approach to reading, learned from the negative example of the famously acid literary world of mid-century Dublin, is salutary for reviewers and critics today: ‘we [McGahern and his friends] were inclined to avoid the word “literature” like the plague. There were just books that were well written, that cast light and gave pleasure or solace. Even in literary circles of the time, there was a kind of didactic judgemental violence that I link with a censorship mentality. Surely the good manners of the mind require us to put aside a book we do not like with regret, not venom’ (pp. 97 - 98).

There is no need for such a caveat to apply to this book. The only question is whether, after his death, a new generation of readers will come to know his work. There are signs that his novels, so underappreciated for so much of his life, are getting the attention they deserve. A summer school takes place in Ireland each year and Hermione Lee’s recent essay on his work was given pride of place in the TLS. Although I do not think The Pornographer (1980), an examination of the quandaries, dodges and epiphanies of a young writer in Dublin, has yet been given its due as a novel, The Barracks (1963) is recognised as a precocious first work and his final two are acknowledged masterpieces.

When I sent a copy of That They May Face The Rising Sun to my grandmother, who lives near McGahern’s hometown, she praised the way ‘he captures the speech of the Leitrim people perfectly.’ Like so many other Irish writers in the twentieth century, McGahern’s renderings of the life of his area might be considered his defining achievement. The Leitrim that appears in so many of his works becomes an everywhere. A story from one of the essays, inspired by overhearing an Enniskillen barman’s mockery of the quietness of Leitrim, tells us at once about McGahern’s feelings towards his part of Ireland, and also about his own wide reading: ‘I like to remember and imagine John Walter Cross (whose cousin, Leland Duncan, took remarkable photographs of Leitrim in the late 1880s and 1890s), sitting in an Oxford tea-room soon after George Eliot’s death and overhearing a group of students mocking her seriousness. In their ignorance they might as well have been talking about Belcoo or Leitrim. As he left the tea-room, Cross approached their table. ‘Excuse me for intruding, but she wasn’t like that at all. She was serious but she was also great fun. I was married to her’ (p. 26).