The story of his life

THE standing army of Irish poets, in Patrick Kavanagh’s felicitous phrase, is ever expanding, but the number of field marshals of modern Irish prose is decidedly fewer and simpler to name: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Francis Stuart, Aidan Higgins and the youngest among them, John McGahern.

McGahern was treated as an heir to this powerful lineage with the publication of his first novel, “The Barracks” (1963), which takes place in a rural police station and focuses on an abusive father and his children. With his second novel, “The Dark” (1965), McGahern established himself as a controversial writer because of the book’s overtones and hints of inappropriate intimate relations between a young man, his father and a priest.

The subsequent banning of the book by the censorship board in Ireland and McGahern’s marriage to a divorced woman (resulting in his dismissal as a primary school teacher in Dublin) gave him an unnervingly lurid reputation. Today all of that seems a long time ago and a little embarrassing in the aggressively secular and modishly trendy Ireland of 2006. Happily, McGahern’s writing has endured. And so has he, living and writing on a farm in County Leitrim.

More than 30 years ago, I reviewed “Nightlines,” McGahern’s first collection of stories, and found his work to possess an acid-like incisiveness. No sentimentality, no coyness and no avoidance of the carnal wounds that people carry. His candor made other writers look dishonest. This was also true of the fiction that came after: “The Leavetaking,” “The Pornographer,” “The Collected Stories” and an award-winning novel of an Irish Republican Army veteran, “Amongst Women.” My opinion even weathered the appearance of his most recent and rather bloated novel, “By the Lake,” in 2002.

But with the publication of the memoir “All Will Be Well,” the reader moves into a treacherous place. Only time will tell whether McGahern has ruined his reputation and the desire of readers ever to seek out the novels that gave him his place in the world. Those books are so boldly imagined that it comes as a shock to realize, with “All Will Be Well,” that what we credited solely to McGahern’s art draws much from his own life.

This is not to say that “All Will Be Well” is a poorly written book, a bad book, an unmoving book, an unfelt book. In fact, it would be easy to write a review praising McGahern’s memoir -- its words fill me with awful feelings of a powerless identification with McGahern, his brothers and sisters (he is the oldest of seven) and their bleak childhood.

From the moment of their births, the children endured a constant and unrelenting campaign of physical and psychological abuse by their policeman father. The memoir also relates McGahern’s development as a writer and follows his movement from Ireland and back again. One of the milder moments of paternal abuse occurs when word comes that his mother has succumbed to breast cancer after many years of illness. Her death is at the core of this book, severing it into two. Their father, the teen McGahern and his sisters and brothers (some barely out of diapers) begin to say the rosary:

“The girls were confused by all the emotion and strangeness and had reverted to laughing again, looking at one another mischievously through latticed fingers, until my father paused and said, ‘Can no respect be shown to the dead or do I have to enforce respect?’ They were frightened and began crying again. ‘Crying isn’t respect. The respect your poor mother needs now is prayer.’ ”

“All Will Be Well” is an icy, meticulous delineation of the torment that a father inflicted upon his children. At the same time, McGahern creates a touching portrait of enduring Irish womanhood in the figure of his schoolteacher mother. When she’s hospitalized for the first time, she writes to her husband: “Yes I know where I stand now and so God knows best. I am sure with His help I will be quite alright. I am not a bit worried about it at all ... it is awfully good of you to fast and I think it is too much for you. But you know best. Still it is a lot to do. I place my trust in God knowing all will be well.”

After the death of their mother, the children are taken care of by a series of housekeepers while McGahern notes the almost obscene eagerness of his father to find a new wife. By accident, McGahern does well in school and receives a scholarship to a top boarding school, then to a teachers college in Dublin, and discovers the artist’s voice that both saves and banishes him.

But here is the mortal risk McGahern is taking with this book: Will his readers ever return to the novels, in particular “The Barracks” or “The Dark,” if they now realize that those fictional records of abuse and pain were essentially autobiographical, a fact that McGahern denied at those rare times when he talked about it?

By saying little about his work, and by living abroad in England, Finland and the United States, McGahern allowed his work to represent itself, and he avoided being a public personality. The novels were read with little reference to him and became known as reliable touchstones of artistic daring because they insinuated readers into the intricate knot created between the abuser and the abused, the beater and the beaten. To follow the fiction with a memoir seems to fly in the face of the wisdom of Tolstoy, who started in autobiography and moved into the higher truth of fiction.

It is painful to quibble with McGahern’s memoir. He gets so well the isolation, the sheer loneliness of Irish country life, the petty nastiness, the meanness, the stultifying hypocrisy of church and state. At the same time, he deftly describes the great consolation of religious faith, a faith separate from its priestly embodiment. The memoir seems, in spite of itself, to be a testament to the enduring comfort one may find in the practices of the Catholic Church (much like the novels of Georges Bernanos).

And yet, “All Will Be Well” stumbles because McGahern never once reflects on why he is writing this book: The reader assumes that McGahern must have decided to “tell the truth” and was no longer willing to allow his fiction to speak for him. He falls into a simple chronological narrative and the fake superficial authority that comes with this approach: It all presumes one has control of such material, that one can make sense of everything. We know life isn’t that way. His novels and stories, on the other hand, require the engaged and active complicity of the thoughtful reader.

McGahern’s enduring power as a storyteller remains in his stories, which invite collusion and imagination. Often I have heard in Ireland, from those with a historical bent, that time erases much of a writer’s work and all anyone can hope for is to be remembered for a lyric (if that). I would send the reader to the brief “Korea” in McGahern’s “The Collected Stories” for all that is great and good in his work: A father tries to cajole his son into immigrating to America because he has heard that, once the son is there he might get drafted and be killed in the line of duty -- the father would be entitled to a large death benefit.

No one should be discouraged from reading “All Will Be Well,” but any reader should plan to stop at the moment of the mother’s death -- what comes after that is the usual story of a clever boy from the provinces getting on in school, becoming a teacher, learning to write, the scandals, the divorce, the return to Ireland after years away. Of course, along this predictable route, the language is always stunning, and the final words of this review should be his: “We grow into an understanding of the world gradually. Much of what we come to know is far from comforting, that each day brings us closer to the inevitable hour when all will be darkness.... We grow into a love of the world, a love that is all the more precious and poignant because the great glory of which we are but a particle is lost almost as soon as it is gathered.” *