John McGahern

John McGahern was born in County Leitrim. He became a primary school teacher and then a full-time writer. He is now recognised as one of Ireland’s finest writers of fiction. Amongst his most celebrated works are The Barracks and his latest novel, Amongst Women.

Reading and Writing

I came to write through reading.  There were few books in our house, and reading for pleasure was not approved of.  It was thought to be dangerous, like pure laughter.  In my case, I came to read through pure luck.  I had great good fortune when I was ten or eleven.  I was given the run of a library.  I believe it changed my life and without it I would never have become a writer.  The library belonged to the Moroneys.  They were Protestants.  Old Willie Moroney lived with his son, Andy, in their two-storied stone house, which was surrounded by a huge orchard and handsome stone outhouses.  Willie must have been well into his eighties then, and Andy was about forty.  Their natures were so stress-free that it is no wonder they were both to live into their nineties.   Old Willie, the beekeeper, with his great beard and fondness for St. Ambrose and Plato, ‘the Athenian bee, the good and the wise . . . because his words glowed with the sweetness of honey’, is wonderfully brought to life in David Thomson’s Woodbrook.  Willie had not gone upstairs since his wife’s death, nor had he washed, and he lived in royal untidiness in what had once been the dining room, directly across the stone hallway from the library, that dear hallway with its barometer and antlered coatrack, and the huge silent clock.  The front door, with its small brass plate shaped into the stone for the doorbell, was never opened.  All access to the house was by the back door, up steps from the farmyard, and through the littered kitchen to the hallway and stairs and front rooms.

David Thomson describes the Moroneys as landless, which is untrue, for they owned a hundred-and-seventy acres of the sweetest land on the lower plains of Boyle, itself some of the best limestone land in all of Ireland.  The farm was beautifully enclosed by roads which ran from the high demesne wall of Rockingham to the broken walls of Oakport.  The Moroneys should have been wealthy.  They had to have money to build that stone house in the first place, to build and slate the stone houses that enclosed the farmyard, to acquire the hundreds of books that lines the walls of the library: David Thomson, though, is right in spirit, for Willie and Andy had all the appearance of being landless.  Most of Andy’s time was taken up with the study of astronomy.  Willie lived for his bees.  He kept the hives at the foot of the great orchard.  They both gathered apples, stored them on wooden shelves in the first of the stone houses of the farmyard, and they sold them by the bucketful, and seemed glad enough for the half-crowns they received.  As a boy, I was sent to buy apples, somehow fell into conversation with Willie about books, and was given the run of the library.  There was Scott, Dickens, Meredith and Shakespeare, books by Zane Grey and Jeffrey Farnol, and many, many books about the Rocky Mountains.  I didn’t differentiate, I read for nothing but pleasure, the way a boy nowadays might watch endless television dramas.  Every week or fortnight, for years, I’d return with five or six books in my oilcloth shopping bag and take five or six away.  Nobody gave me direction or advice.  There was a tall slender ladder for getting to books on the high shelves.  Often, in the incredibly cluttered kitchen, old Willie would ask me about the books over tea and bread.  I think it was more out of the need for company than any real curiosity.

I remember one such morning vividly.  We were discussing a book I had returned and drinking tea with bread and jam.  All I remember about that particular book was that it was large and flat and contained coloured illustrations, of plants and flowers probably, and these would have interested Willie because of the bees.  The morning was one of those still true mornings in summer before the heat comes, the door open onto the yard.  Earlier that morning he must have gone through his hives – the long grey beard was stained with food and drink and covered his shirt front – and while he was taking some jam it fell into the beard and set off an immediate buzzing.  Without interrupting the flow of his talk, he shambled to the door, extracted the two or three errant bees caught in the beard, and flung them into the air of the yard.

I continued coming to the house for books after the old beekeeper’s death, but there was no longer any talk of books.  Andy developed an interest in the land, but it proved to be as impractical as astronomy.

I have often wondered why no curb was put on my reading at home.  I can only put it down to a prejudice in favour of the gentle, eccentric Moroneys, and Protestants in general.  At the time, Protestants were pitied because they were bound for hell in the next world, and they were considered to be abstemious, honest, and morally more correct than the general run of our fellow Catholics.  The prejudice may well have extended to their library.  The books may have been thought to be as harmless as their gentle owners.  For whatever reason, the books were rarely questioned, and as long as they didn’t take from work or prayer I was allowed to read without hindrance.

There are no days more full in childhood than those days that, in a way, were not lived at all, the days lost in a favourite book.  I remember waking out of one such book in the middle of the large living room in the barracks, to find myself surrounded.  My sisters had unlaced and removed one of my shoes and placed a straw hat on my head.  Only when they began to move the wooden chair on which I sat away from the window did I wake out of the book – to their great merriment.  Nowadays, only when I am writing am I able to find again that complete absorption when all sense of time is lost, maybe once or twice in a year.  It is a strange and complete kind of happiness, of looking up from the pages, thinking it is still nine or ten in the morning, to discover that it is past lunchtime; and there is no longer anyone who will test the quality of the absence by unlacing and removing a shoe.

Sometimes I wonder if it would have made any difference if my reading had been guided or structured, but there is still no telling such things in an only life.  Pleasure is by no means an infallible, critical guide,  W.H. Auden wrote, but it is the least fallible.  That library and those two gentle men were, to me, a pure blessing.

A time comes when the way we read changes.  This change is linked with our growing consciousness, consciousness that we will not live forever and that all human life is essentially in the same fix.  We find that we are no longer reading books for the story and that all stories are more or less the same story; and we begin to come on certain books that act like mirrors.  What they reflect is something dangerously close to our own life and the society in which we live.  A new, painful excitement enters the way we read.  We search out these books, and these books only, the books that act as mirrors.  The quality of the writing becomes more important than the quality of the material out of which the pattern or story is shaped.  We find that we can no longer read certain books that once we could not put down; other books that previously were tedious take on a completely new excitement and meaning; even the Rocky Mountains has to become an Everywhere, like Mansfield Park, if it is to retain our old affection.

This change happened to me in the Dublin of the 1950s.  Again, I think I was lucky.  There were many good second hand bookshops in which one could root about for hours.  One book barrow in particular, on a corner of Henry Street, was amazing.  Most of the books found there would now be described as modern classics.  How the estraordinary Mr. Kelly acquired them we never asked.  There were times when books were discussed in dance halls as well as in bars.  It was easy then to get a desk in the National Library.  The staff were kind and would even bring rare books on request.  There were inexpensive seats at the back of the Gate Theatre, and there were many pocket theatres, often in Georgian basements.  Out in Dun Laoghaire there was the Gas Company Theatre where we had to walk through the silent showroom of gas cookers to see Pirandello or Chekhov or Lorca or Tennessee Williams.  The city was full of cinemas.  I remember seeing Julius Caesar with Gielgud and Brando, playing to full houses in the Metropole.  And there was the tiny Astor Cinema on the quays where I first saw Casque d’Or, Rules of the Game, and Children of Paradise.

Much has been written about the collusion of church and state to bring about an Irish society that was insular, repressive, and sectarian.  This is partly true, but because of the long emphasis on the local and the individual in a society that never found any true cohesion, it was only superficially successful.

I think that women fared worst of all within this paternalistic mishmash, but to men with intellectual interests it had at the time, I believe, some advantage.  Granted, we were young and had very little to lose, but the system was so blantantly foolish in so many of its manifestations that it could only provoke the defence of laughter, though never, then, in public.  What developed was a freemasonry of the intellect, with a vigorous underground life of its own that paid scant regard to church or state.  Even an obscene book, we would argue, could not be immoral if it was truly written.  Most of the books that were banned, like most published, were not worth reading, and those that were worth reading could be easily found and quickly passed around.  There is no taste so sharp as that of forbidden fruit.  This climate also served to cut out a lot of the pious humbug that often afflicts the arts.  Literature was not considered ‘good’.  There was no easy profit.  People who need to read, who need to think and see, will always find a way around a foolish system, and difficulty will only make that instinct stronger, as it serves in another sphere to increase desire.  In no way can this clownish system be recommended wholeheartedly, but it was the way it was and we were young and socially unambitious and we managed.  The more we read of other literatures, and the more they were discussed, the more clearly it emerged that not only was Yeats a very great poet but that almost singlehandedly he had, amazingly, laid down a whole framework in which an indigenous literature could establish traditions and grow.  His proud words, ‘The knowledge of reality is a secret knowledge; it is a kind of death,’ was for us, socially as well as metaphorically, true.

The two living writers who meant most to us were Samuel Beckett and Patrick Kavanagh.  They belonged to no establishment, and some of their best work was appearing in the little magazines that could be found at the Eblana Bookshop on Grafton Street.  Beckett was in Paris.  The large-hatted figure of Kavanagh was an inescapable sight around Grafton Street, his hands often clasped behind his back, muttering hoarsely to himself as he passed.  Both, through their work, were living, exciting presences in the city.  I wish I could open a magazine now with the same excitement with which I once opened Nimbus:  ‘Ignore Power’s schismatic sect,/lovers alone lovers protect.’  (The same poet could also rhyme catharsis with arses, but even his wild swing was like no other.)

When I began to write, and it was in those Dublin years, it was without any thought of publication.  In many ways, it was an extension of reading as well as a kind of play.  Words had been physical presences for me for a long time before, each word with its own weight, colour, shape, relationship, extending out into a world without end.  Change any word in a single sentence and immediately all the other words demand to be rearranged.  By writing and rewriting sentences, by moving their words endlessly around, I found that scenes or pictures and echoes and shapes began to emerge that obscurely reflected a world that had found its first expression and recognition through reading.  I don’t know how long that first excitement lasted, for a few years, I think, before it changed to work, though that first sense of play never quite goes away and, in all the most important ways, a writer remains a beginner throughout his working life.  Now I find I will resort to almost any subterfuge to escape that blank page, but there seems to be always some scene or rhythm that lodges in the mind and will not go away until it is written down.  Often when they are written down it turns out that there was nothing real behind the rhythm or scene, and they disappear in the writing; other times the scenes or rhythms start to grow, and you find yourself once again working every day, sometimes over a period of several years, to discover and bring to life a world through words as if it were the first and (this is ever a devout prayer) last time.  It is true that there can be times of intense happiness throughout the work, when all the words seem, magically, to find their true place, and several hours turn into a single moment; but these occurrences are so rare that they are, I suspect, like mirages in desert fables, to encourage and torment the half-deluded traveller.

Like gold in the ground or the alchemist’s mind, it is probably wise not to speak about the pursuit at all.  Technique can certainly be learned, and only a fool would try to do without it, but technique for its own sake grows heartless.  Unless technique can take us to that clear mirror that is called style – the reflection of personality in language, everything having been removed from it that is not itself – the most perfect technique is as worthless as mere egotism.  To reach that point we have to feel deeply and to think clearly in order to discover the right words.  Once work reaches that clearness, the writer’s task is ended.  His or her words will not live again until and unless they find their true reader.