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CHAPTER FIVE

THE PASSIONATE TRANSITORY: JOHN MCGAHERN

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 those pages week after week. Rockfist Rogan and Alf Tupper and Wilson the Iron Man. The room, the conversations, the cries of the seagulls, the sea faded: it was the world of the imagination, among the performing gods, what I ashamedly desired to become.11

‘Strandhill, the Sea’ is about the poetry of the prosaic and ends with a poetic riff to the mundane transformed in the eye of the beholding narrator. In ‘My Love, My Umbrella’, one of McGahern’s most ‘Frenchified’ tales, reminiscent of Jean Paul Sartre’s shorter fiction, the Dublin-based lovers’ first encounter with each other is mediated through the presence of ‘a poet’ as they sit in Mooney’s Bar in Lower Abbey Street, eating beef sandwiches with their glasses of stout:

Soon, in the drowsiness of the stout, we did little but watch the others drinking. I pointed out a poet to her. I recognised him from his pictures in the paper. His shirt was open-necked inside a gabardine coat and he wore a hat with a small feather in its band. She asked me if I liked poetry.

‘When I was younger,’ I said. ‘Do you?’

‘Not very much.’

She asked me if I could hear what the poet was saying to the four men at his table who continually plied him with whiskey. I hadn’t heard. Now we both listened. He was saying he loved the blossoms of Kerr Pinks more than roses, a man could only love what he knew well, and it was the quality of the love that mattered and not the accident. The whole table said they’d drink to that, but he glared at them as if slighted, and as if to avoid the glare they called for a round of doubles. While the drinks were coming from the bar the poet turned aside and took a canister from his pocket. The inside of the lid was coated with a white powder which he quickly licked clean. She thought it was baking soda. Her father in the country took baking soda for his stomach. We had more stout and we noticed, while each new round was coming, the poet turned away from the table to lick clean the fresh coat of soda on the inside of the canister lid.12

Poets and poetry, language and literary allusion abound in McGahern’s shorter fiction. His characters and narrators often refer to their own education (as in the ending of ‘High Ground’)13 and in drawing upon that experience they sometimes allude to various influences such as Church language, which appears in conversation in ‘The Wine Breath’.14 In the same story discussion takes place about the understanding of ‘common names’ and how this links in with the poetry inherent in the naming of things – flowers, townlands and religious ceremonies. In this extract the exchange opens with reference to the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem ‘The Little White Rose’:

‘And, no doubt, the little rose of Scotland, sharp and sweet and breaks the heart,’ he heard his friend quote maliciously. ‘And it’s not the point. The reason the names of flowers must be in Latin is that when flower lovers meet they know what they are talking about, no matter whether they’re French or Greeks or Arabs. They have a universal language.’15

And when his characters are not thinking aloud about such language matters, reference can be made to how religion and poetry combines in their minds, such as poor old McMurrough, who in ‘The Recruiting Officer’ ‘now lay in the Sligo madhouse reciting poetry and church doctrine’.16 McGahern also draws attention to the cultural space of ‘books’ as the physical embodiments of a kind of imaginative freedom, from the autobiographical opening of his essay ‘The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands’17 and his praise of the Moroney’s Library of his young boyhood, to his experiences of reading Kavanagh and Beckett in 1950s Dublin.

Literature, and its quintessential beat, poetry, are material things which matter to McGahern, and the essays collected in Love of the World reveal as much. Here, McGahern’s indebtedness is clearly expressed in an extraordinary range of poets, many of whom he refers to with pleasure and real enthusiasm. W.H. Auden, William Blake, Louise Bogan, George Mackay Brown, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, David Gascoyne, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Graham, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, Philip Larkin, D.H. Lawrence, Louis MacNeice, Eugene Montale, Edwin Muir, Richard Murphy, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stevie Smith, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth, David Wright, Yeats and the poet’s father, John Butler Yeats, whose correspondence with his son McGahern abridged.18

What McGahern drew from these varied poetic sources – American poets, less well known British poets such as Gascoyne, Wright and Graham, fellow Irish writers – and his use of quotation in his fiction from Burns, Matthew Arnold, and Shakespeare, among others, is the subject of a study all to itself. If I can isolate a few quotations, however, it might show how the figure of the poet and the power of poetry were integral to the very fabric of McGahern’s fiction-making and also, possibly, to the Ireland out of which he came.

As I’ve already mentioned, of the two living writers who meant most to the young McGahern in 1950s Dublin, Patrick Kavanagh and Samuel Beckett, Kavanagh was pre-eminent, and recollecting the time McGahern writes: ‘I wish I could open a magazine now with the same excitement in which I once opened Nimbus: “Ignore Power’s schismatic sect/Lovers alone lovers protect.”’19 The two lines McGahern quotes here are from the ending of Kavanagh’s poem ‘Prelude’ included in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems,20 a book of poems that will figure large in McGahern’s own writing. In a 1987 review of Peter Kavanagh’s portrait of his poet brother, McGahern considers how Patrick had such a powerful ‘individual vision, a vigorous gift for catching the rhythms of ordinary speech, and … was able to bring the images that move us into the light without patronage and on an equal footing with any great work.’21 In the same review, McGahern identifies Kavanagh’s Kitty Stobling as a ‘new world’ recovered:

These later poems are steeped in space and time while still happening in one clear, specific place. What they have in common with the early poems is the genius that restores the dramatic to the ordinary and the banal. I remember well the excitement of reading poems like ‘Prelude’ or ‘Auditors In’, or ‘Kerr’s Ass’ or ‘The Chest Hospital’ for the first time in manuscript.22

Incidentally, McGahern tells us in ‘The Bird Swift’,23 a memoir of the painter Patrick Swift, that the manuscript he read was a typescript of Kitty Stobling made for Kavanagh by another member of the Swift family. It was through Patrick Swift that McGahern met in London the ex-South African poet David Wright, who with Swift was editing the magazine X, which had accepted for publication McGahern’s first piece of prose.24

In the closing (and uncharacteristically rhetorical) flourish to the review of Peter Kavanagh’s book, McGahern paints a picture of Patrick Kavanagh that is both homage and echo of the slightly earlier representation of the poet in ‘Bank Holiday’,25 which is such a key focus to what happens emotionally in the story:

His extraordinary physical presence, whether seated in a chair or walking up a street with his hands clasped behind his back, always managed to convey more the sense of a warring crowd than of a solitary person. He was also a true poet and I believe his violent energy, like his belief that people in the street steered by his star, raised the important poems to permanence. They have now moved from Mucker by way of the Grand Canal and the Chest Hospital to their own place on Parnassus.26

‘Bank Holiday’ is a richly seductive portrait of Dublin as seen through the eyes of a 50-year-old civil servant, who has in quick succession lost both his parents and seen his marriage dissolve. His bachelor life is conveyed in quick flashes of wit, while a sense of Larkinesque pique attends his lonely existence. In Webb’s Bookshop, the poetically named Patrick McDonough27 is discomfited by the brown-overalled manager as he peruses some books before leaving, hot and bothered, only to discover back in his flat that an old friend, James White, has suggested to Mary Kelleher, a young visiting American academic (her research is mediaeval poetry), that she should look up McDonough when she is in Dublin. They meet and start to fall in love in Bernardo’s Restaurant in Lincoln Place. The story circles in and out of a poetic vortex of walking and talking which takes them through the Bank Holiday heat towards the East Wall and strand:

‘Oh, it’s cold.’ She shivered as she came out of the water, and reached for her sandals.

‘Even in heatwaves the sea is cold in Ireland. That’s Howth ahead – where Maud Gonne waited at the station as Pallas Athena.’28 He reached for his role as tourist guide.

‘I know that line,’ she said and quoted the verse. ‘Has all that gone from Dublin?’

‘In what way?’

‘Are there … poets … still?’

‘Are there poets?’ he laughed out loud. ‘They say the standing army of poets never falls below ten thousand in this unfortunate country.’

‘Why unfortunate?’ she said quickly.

‘They create no wealth. They are greedy and demanding. They hold themselves in very high opinion’.29

The ‘all that’ to which Mary refers is poetry and its presence in the public sphere of the city, and as she is about to discover, it is all very much visible:

It was into this quiet flow of the evening that the poet came, a large man, agitated, without jacket, the shirt open, his thumbs hooked in braces that held up a pair of sagging trousers, a brown hat pushed far back on his head. Coughing harshly and pushing the chair around, he sat at the next table.

‘Don’t look around,’ McDonough leaned forward to say.

‘Why?’

‘He’ll join us if we catch his eye.’

‘Who is he?’

‘A poet.’

‘He doesn’t look like one.’

‘That should be in his favour. All the younger clerks that work in my place nowadays look like poets. He is the best we have. He’s the star of the place across the road. He’s practically resident there. He must have been thrown out.’

The potboy in his short white coat came over to the poet’s table and waited impassively for the order.

‘A Powers,’ the order came in a hoarse, rhythmical voice. ‘A large Powers and a pint of Bass.’30

The connection here between Patrick McDonough and Mary Kelleher, like the relationship dramatised elsewhere in ‘Peaches’,31 for example, is revealed through the life of poetry and the perceived public place of ‘the poet’ in modern society. The individuals are seen, and in turn see each other, in terms of how the imaginative life is reflected (sometimes comically, sometimes perversely) in Irish society’s altering self-consciousness during a decade of increasingly fraught social and economic change.

In ‘Bank Holiday’, the lovers’ blossoming romance begins with a poem – W.B. Yeats’s ‘Beautiful Lofty Things’ – and is conveyed through an encounter with Patrick Kavanagh, the unnamed poet (‘the best we have’),32 before concluding with the unnamed book of his which, by the look of it, is Kavanagh’s Come Dance with Kitty Stobling. You can read this fictional encounter in ‘Bank Holiday’ with the knowledge that, according to Antoinette Quinn’s essential biography of Patrick Kavanagh,33 the event in the story had its roots in an actual experience of McGahern’s. In the fictional reimagining, McDonough (a kind of latter-day Gabriel Conroy) is, for a second time, rattled by the poet’s comment:

‘You’re a cute hoar, McDonough. You’re a mediocrity. It’s no wonder you get on so well in the world’, the poet burst out in a wild fury … and stalked out, muttering and coughing.

‘That’s just incredible’, she said.34

Incredible too that when McDonough and Mary return to McDonough’s flat, Mary asks, ‘Do you have any of the poet’s work?’ to which her soon to be lover retorts:

‘You can have a present of this, if you like.’ He reached and took a brown volume from the shelf.

‘I see it’s even signed,’ she said, as she leafed through the volume. ‘For Patrick McDonough, With love’, and she began to laugh.35

As the narrative deepens into the couple’s romantic and physical attraction, that poetry book travels with Mary on her journey to in-laws in Dundalk (where else? – Kavanagh country!) and when she returns she remarks: ‘“I read the poems at last”. She put the book with the brown cover on the table. “I read them again on the train coming back. I loved them.”’36 Why not just put ‘the book back’? The fact that we have that ‘brown cover’ mentioned twice suggests a definite bond with an actual book, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, which did indeed have a brown cover. And in the Chekhovian passage that follows, McGahern and his character McDonough reveal their hand, for the ‘very pure love sonnets’ which McDonough refers to are undoubtedly the self-same sonnets in Kitty Stobling by which the real-life Patrick Kavanagh would be recognised for generations of readers to come:37

‘I’ve long suspected that those very pure love sonnets are all addressed to himself … That was how the “ignorant bloody apes and mediocrities” could all be short-circuited.’

‘Some are very funny.’

‘I’m so glad you liked them. I’ve lived with some of them for years.’

Later, over dinner, McDonough asks Mary to marry him. So the phantom book of poems becomes quite literally a love token shared between both characters as the unlikely and contradictory poet-figure of Kavanagh turns into an ungainly muse-like cupid. This is not quite as fanciful as it might appear, since McGahern has got form in this regard.