Walking the country lanes this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of life, the emergence of us collectively from our months-long personal cocoons and the feel of summer in the air. Here in the midlands and border region, these are the same roads that a man of my profession walked years ago.
ohn McGahern might be over a decade gone now, but he exerts a powerful pull over our rural lives still in the working of the land, the interpersonal relationships of village life and the treatment of the artist in the community.
McGahern’s work stands as a decisive body that documents the end of one way of rural life (as he called it himself, the 19th century Ireland we lived in during the 1950s and 1960s) and the beginning of the world that has taken its place.
From Amongst Women to That they may face the Rising Sun, McGahern recounted a world known to most Irish people of a certain age but, as a short documentary programme on RTÉ this week showed, he was not always so loved or revered. Indeed, his second novel The Dark was banned.
McGahern is someone I have long admired. His work talked of a world I knew intimately – for Longford and Leitrim are right beside each other, and in many ways our county border is a porous one where we travel between each other’s lands without thought of being outside the sphere of one’s homeland, for it all feels a jovial closeness.
To the larger rural world I inhabited he was a farmer who wrote; my father often met him in Mohill mart in the years of my childhood. However, to the international world he was something over different – a writer who happened to farm.
McGahern’s journey to the farming life was not so straightforward, and it was his second novel that led ultimately to that great shift. He went from being an urban teacher and writer to – after a period of wandering – being a man of the rooted earth.
The Dark is one of the finest novels of adolescence in Ireland, a book that documented a young man’s journey through the Leaving Cert to college and ultimately to finding oneself in that period of life. The Dark examined themes of sexuality, abuse and the clerical life; while like all of McGahern’s work it was fiction, it held elements of, one assumes, lived truth.
After the publication of his first book, The Barracks, McGahern, who had been working as a primary school teacher in Dublin, was awarded a fellowship and so he took a year’s sabbatical and travelled overseas.
While away, he would meet and marry his first wife, Annikki Laaksi, a Finnish theatre director.
The world he saw was a different one from that he returned to when his next novel, The Dark, was banned shortly after publication by the Irish board of censorship. It had gone as far as to seize advance copies of the book, and McGahern found himself the centre of attention wherein the book was being talked about from pulpits to parliament.
As the RTÉ documentary Cosc went on to detail, McGahern was then sacked from his teaching post under the instruction of the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid.
McGahern did not fight the censorship, viewing it as meaningless. Indeed, the documentary went on to say McGahern thought the whole affair made a laughing stock of the Irish people. Samuel Beckett was to write to McGahern to offer his support, although that offer was politely declined.
“The truth is John was very pleased after the book was banned because it got him a lot of attention internationally, adding to his success,” an interview reported in this paper.
"Marrying me soon afterwards in a registry office abroad was deliberate, to make the conflict even sharper.”
The greater blow to McGahern, it seems, was the loss of his job. As the wonderful Cosc documentary went on to explain, it hurt the young man far more deeply than the wrath of an out-of-touch censorship board.
The whole affair would send him into the wilderness, and he emigrated to the UK and did not publish again for a decade.
Can we imagine what the outcry would be now if one of our own young writers or poets had been treated this way in the modern-day – if the likes of Donal Ryan or Sally Rooney found their work obstructed from the public?
The Twitter storms would not only have forced a reversal of the laws, they would – we hope – now create a position where McGahern could have been protected and allowed to continue with his life instead of being hounded out of Ireland.
What is perhaps most galling about the affair is that we, the public, lost out on 10 years of writing from Ireland’s foremost novelist of his generation.
It is a long time for a field to remain fallow, and that perhaps was the greatest crime to arise from the The Dark affair. Instead of writing, McGahern worked on building sites and later picked up some teaching posts.
When he did return to Ireland, he bought a small farm in Leitrim and took up the life of a farmer and writer. His works were to gain in power and majesty as each emerged slowly over the years. These were all honed and beautiful things.
It is to his credit that he still has a quiet hold on the country, a clarity through which we can see ourselves.
Walking those country lanes this week, I think of John and how he did not hold a grudge – he was bigger than that. He was a man meant to write about the world we have all lived through. He made sense of it for us, and that has made all the difference.