On the occasions when I met John McGahern in Galway or Dublin, or once farther afield in Poland, the conversation often gravitated towards poetry. He had both an imaginative understanding of poetry and the professional interest of a one-time teacher and university lecturer, but also as an observer of the literary world in Ireland, Britain and in the United States, where poets featured either as individuals he had come across or whose work he knew by heart. McGahern’s knowledge of poetry is shown throughout his own writing, both in the fiction but also in the literary journalism he published over many years. He was an intensely lyrical writer himself and the sense of language in which his fiction revels is very close to a poet’s understanding. In the short piece called ‘The Image’ he remarks, ‘The Muse, under whose whim we reign in return for a lifetime of availability, may grant us the absurd crown of Style, the revelation in language of the unique world we possess as we struggle for what may be no more than a yard of lead piping we saw in terror or in laughter once.’1
That sense of things conveying emotional meaning filtered through the imaginative control of his prose is a discipline close to the highest forms of poetry-making. It is little wonder that of the poets McGahern returned to most – Philip Larkin, Patrick Kavanagh and, less often, W.S. Graham – each is known for his lyrical control of difficult emotional states, existential mindscapes and desires, and the ‘struggle’ to re-enact transcendent silences.
It is possible to read McGahern’s fiction as an epic search for a prose equivalent of poetry; to render in descriptive English the speech rhythms of a way of saying and seeing things, infused with the intellectual and literary allusions of his own educational upbringing in Ireland, alongside the cultural inflections of the life he discovered as a young writer in the Dublin of the 1950s and beyond, growing into the artist he became.
It would take quite a bit of ground indeed to cover it all – examining the role of the national syllabus in which John McGahern was taught and which he in turn taught, tuned to an English literary tradition of ‘the greats’, with its strong emphasis on learning passages by rote; ‘very quotable’, as it has been described to me.2 Upon this foundation, McGahern would develop his own tastes in reading widely in French and other European writing, as well as in British and North American literature. Instead, I’ll focus on the intriguing poetic nature of McGahern’s writing, look at what he wrote about poets and poetry and also show how, in one of his best-known stories, ‘Bank Holiday’,3 poetry becomes the essential part, the fulcrum of the fiction itself, before finishing with a brief reference to the ending of his novel, The Leavetaking.
John McGahern’s work is so full of lyricism, it is difficult to select only one or two examples to illustrate the value he placed upon getting the words right. So often it is the visual quality of his language that carries the moral freight of his meaning. Think of this setting, for example, in the poignant, pitch-perfect ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’:
All the doors of the house were open when he got to Cunningham’s but there was nobody in. He knew that they must be nearhand, probably at the hay. There is such stillness, stillness of death, he thought, about an empty house with all its doors open on a hot day. A black and white sheepdog left off snapping at flies to rush towards him as he came through the gate into the meadow. It was on the side of the hill above the lake. In the shade, a tin cup floated among some hayseed in a gallon of spring water. Across the lake, just out from a green jet of reeds, a man sat still in a rowboat fishing for perch. They were all in the hayfields, the mother and father and four or five children. The field had been raked clean and they were heading off cocks. All work stopped as the hatted man came over the meadow. The father rose from teasing out hay to a boy winding it into a rope. They showed obvious discomfort as they waited, probably thinking the teacher had come to complain about some of the children, until they saw the pale green envelope.
‘I’m sorry,’ the hatted man said as he watched the father read, ‘If there’s anything I can do you have only to tell me.’4
The details accumulate inside the wider frame of the empty house ‘until they saw the pale green envelope’ and the spoken words which break the hypnotic silence: ‘I’m sorry.’ Apart from the narrative value of the passage – the bringing of bad news within the workaday routine of haymaking – the sense of timelessness and of expectation are poetically charged by precise and specific images: the sheepdog left off snapping at flies and that tin cup in a gallon of spring water. Life goes on in its own circular way, no matter what grief or tragedy comes along. The stated ‘such stillness, stillness of death … about an empty house with all its doors open on a hot day’ has the ring of a poetic line, fulfilled by those details and the varieties of light and shade, inaction, expectation. It really is wonderfully achieved lyricism.
Or take the following passage from ‘Doorways’, a simple enough paragraph of description to which the appended dialogue brings a surprising shift in perspective:
As we walked I pointed to the stream of cars going slowly down to the sea. The roofless church was two miles from the hotel. At first, close to the hotel, we had come among some half-circles of tents in the hollows, then odd single tents, and soon there was nothing but the rough sea grass and sand and rabbit warrens. Some small birds flew out of the ivy rooted in the old walls of the church, and we sat across the faceless stones, close to a big clump of sea thistle. Far away the beach was crowded with small dark figures within the coastguard flags.
‘In America’, she said, looking at the lighthouse, ‘they have a bell to warn ships. On a wet misty evening it’s eerie to hear it toll, like lost is the wanderer.’
‘It must be,’ I repeated. I felt I should say something more about it but there was nothing I could say.5
The images of ruin and the slightly gothic setting of the scene are spiked with tension that surfaces with that curious literary-like reference, ‘like lost is the wanderer’.
But if McGahern’s fictional characters are self-conscious at times, they are also quite literary-minded. In ‘Strandhill, the Sea’, the guests staying in Parkes’ Guest House in County Sligo take refuge from the inclement weather in language games, naming things, swapping quotations with one another:
‘Names are a funny thing,’ Ryan said without thought.
‘Names are a funny thing, as you put it,’ Ingolsby repeated sarcastically.6
The story deals with literary value in an ironic and playful manner. The narrator is chastised for having ‘comics’ – which he has lifted from the local shop without paying for them: ‘Why have you to be always stuck in that trash? Why can’t you read something good like Shakespeare that’ll be of some use to you later?’7 (Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw pop up again in ‘Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass’,8 as testers of character.) In the guesthouse the discussion of Shakespeare’s ‘validity for the modern world’ leads in turn to the following exchange among some of the guests:
The people in the room had broken up into their separate groups, and when Miss Evans raised her arms in a yawn out of the chair Haydon leaned forward to say, ‘There must have been right old sport last night.’
‘I beg your pardon, Mr Haydon,’ she laughed, pleased.
‘The way all women are, all on their dignity till the business gets down to brass tacks and then an almighty turn of events. And who’d object to an old roll between the sandhills after the dance anyhow?’ He raised his voice, as if to irritate Ingolsby, who was pressing a reluctant Ryan on Wordsworth.9
Ingolsby, the retired lecturer in English, meets ‘hostility’ to the ‘themes of [his] ponderous conversations’,10 and as the story reaches its conclusion, McGahern seems to pitch the teacher’s self-importance against the narrator’s imagining inside the house by the sea, a subtle rendering in which poetry and its authority are relocated in the much more modest yet pleasurable form of reading a comic:
It was some consolation to Ryan that he’d [Ingolsby] abandoned the poets, but his eyes still apologized to the room. He’d make his position even clearer yet, in his own time.
The turning of the pages, without reading, pleasure of delaying pleasure to come. Heroes filled