BishopAccountability.org
	Memorial Day in Ireland an Opportunity to Remember Author John Mcgahern By Tom Shea The Republican May 30, 2010 http://www.masslive.com/tomshea/index.ssf/2010/05/memorial_day_in_ireland_an_opp.html This weekend, many will head to cemeteries to visit the near and dear. My trip this week was to the far away and the never-met. My wife was just finishing a week at a writers’ conference outside Dublin, and I’d spent much of that time reading away at Dublin’s National Library, so a literary detour seemed a fitting next step. A tiny graveyard in the microscopic village of Aughawillan, two hours northwest along the twisting, turning, winding roads of County Leitrim, was our destination. In “The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction,” novelist Colm Toibin calls the late John McGahern’s writing “the most impressive body of work of any Irish writer in the second half of the century.” McGahern has been awarded, acclaimed and studied, yet, like Roddy Doyle, Nuala O’Faolain, Claire Keegan, Dermot Healy, Joseph O’Connor and Theo Dorgan and other shining contemporaries, is left off the “Irish Writers and Poets” series of postcards and tea towels offered in tourist shops. A bookstore clerk and a librarian in the largest local town were clueless about his final whereabouts. We stopped at the gardai station. “Just the one road - but it meanders,” the officer said in what turned out to be a chassis-challenging understatement. But that one road indeed led to St. Patrick’s Church, where caretaker Charlie stopped watering flowers to direct us. “John McGahern? He’s right around the corner.” Like the majority of the author’s admirers, I knew him only from his solid collection of six strong novels, three astounding short story collections and one achingly beautiful memoir. Add to that the steady stream of related newspaper clippings sent by my sister Mary. She lives in County Kerry, the part of the country I know best, five hours south of McGahern’s county. Leitrim’s rolling horse-dotted geography was new to my eyes, but his pages already had made it familiar. He set most of his work in his native Midlands, a place as tough due to its rocky farmland as its economic depression, conservatism and heavy-handed Roman Catholicism. If you’re fond of the sweater-wearing shamrock-picking view of Ireland, pick another writer. The New Yorker’s review of McGahern’s must-read must-own “The Collected Stories,” (don’t miss the gut-turning “Korea”) assured “There’s not a hint of blarney in these thirty-four stories.” There’s just a whole lot of reality in these tightly written tellings of a mid-20th-Century agrarian Ireland on the cusp of social change yet still bound tightly to the constraining expectations of family, village and church. John McGahern was born in Dublin on Nov. 12, 1934, the eldest of teacher Susan and IRA guerilla-turned policeman Frank’s seven children. The kids spent summer breaks living with their father at the police barracks, and remained there permanently after Susan’s death. That was a shattered time for John, whose beloved mother was insulation against Frank’s abuse. In many ways, the memoir “All Will be Well” is as much a love story of mother and child as it is a recounting of a family’s growth and struggle. McGahern’s second novel, “The Dark,” published in 1965, resulted in his most long-lived celebrity. Scenes, including one suggesting a priest’s sexual advances, resulted in its being banned by the government in what was then considered “Holy Catholic Ireland.” The author was fired from his job as a grammar school teacher and left the country for life in England and France. When he died from cancer at a Dublin hospital in 2006, a wave of clippings arrived in our mailbox, including an Irish Times photo of his wife and sisters standing at the foot of his grave. Suzanne and I stood in that very place this week, before the unadorned rectangle of gravel marked by a tall granite Celtic cross and the names and dates for Susan McManus McGahern and her son John. Caretaker Charlie described other pilgrims, “From China and even Australia,” who regularly leave photos, letters, flowers. He talked about the annual McGahern summer festival that brings three busloads of fans. I was glad we had the place to ourselves at 8 o’clock on that still-sunny May night. On vacation, I rarely know what day it is. Yet as a fan of Bob Dylan, I was aware it was his 69th birthday. And as a grateful reader of another man who told many truths about life, I knew it also was the day that I finally got to stand before John McGahern and say a prayer of thanks.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.