McGahern told his story and modern Ireland's writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent.
He spoke in a preoccupied whisper, yet his voice, unexpectedly resonant in a reading, would fill a room - and will, through his stories, continue to be heard. John McGahern, a writer of place, made a study of the ordinary while also chronicling the closing chapters of traditional Irish rural life and its haphazard transformation into suburbanised anonymity.
There is anger in his domestic realism, a rage as immense as that of Kavanagh. There is, however, an important difference. McGahern, the admirer of Flaubert, Hardy, Chekhov and Scott Fitzgerald, was never bitter; he kept his festering resentments in check and his sly humour framed moments of lyric inspiration, astute, bitter-sweet observation and candour.
His critical intelligence was finely tuned and highly sophisticated, while his grasp of social, political and behavioural nuance, those tiny defining gestures and slights, real and imagined, was second to none.
The work - 34 short stories, six novels, a seriously underrated, poorly produced play, and Memoir, published just last September - tells his story and also that of the emerging modern Irish state. His intensely personal, quasi-confessional fiction achieves the resonance of art through its complex simplicity and deliberate, persuasive, rather formal, rhythmic prose. A McGahern narrative is vibrant, often bleak and authentic Irish social history.
He listened and described, felt and suffered. Above all, he understood.
McGahern's humane scrutiny of life, love and grief set him apart. His was a life shaped by two defining emotions: his love for his mother and his fear of his tyrannical father.
The sheer energy demanded by such contrasting emotions first made him a witness, eventually a writer and ultimately a recorder of life as lived.
There was also courage; he was a truth teller and those truths tended to be harsh. Having learnt about suffering as a child denied an adored mother, he become apprenticed to humiliation by his father. The State subsequently took over, McGahern's books were banned, while the Church decreed marriage to a divorced woman would cost him his teaching career - and it did. Unlike many Irish writers, McGahern stayed put. He never left, nor did he retreat into lofty seclusion. He was able to write about Irish rural life because he chose to be part of it.
He was amused that the despairing honesty, once considered a crime of betrayal, had become his badge of honour, particularly as he knew there were those who had seen his wider comments as more reflective of his private fixations. He parodied this in the short story Oldfashioned, in which the clever educated son Johnny becomes academically successful beyond his social origins and is ridiculed for it. McGahern the revered writer neither lost his sense of irony nor his memory.
"The barracks itself was a strange place," he writes of the barracks at Cootehall, the most famous of his childhood homes, in Memoir (2005), "like most of the country at the time. Though the Free State had been wrested in armed conflict from Britain, it was like an inheritance that nobody quite understood or knew how to manage. The Catholic Church was dominant and in control of almost everything directly or indirectly. In a climate of suppression and poverty and fear, there was hardly any crime and little need of a barracks in a place like Cootehall, other than as a symbol."
A long gap - almost 30 years - stands between the appearance of his outstanding debut The Barracks (1963), the story of Elizabeth Reegan, once a nurse and now an ageing, childless, dying wife, and his fifth novel, Amongst Women (1990), the work which should have won him the Booker Prize but didn't, although it did secure for him belated fame and national approval. The Ireland which decided to celebrate Amongst Women was the same Ireland which had shunned The Dark in 1965.
By the 1990s his earlier rejection had been relegated to myth, his stories had become classics and the appearance of his graceful earthy pastoral, That They May Face the Rising Sun, in December 2001 - some three months ahead of the original publication date - was a cause for jubilation.
Never had a one-time prodigal been so thoroughly rehabilitated. That elegiac final novel, in which McGahern was effectively to announce his leave-taking, examined the society of a small community and its specific history composed of lives, events and rituals evolving over the course of one calendar year.
It is a jaunty performance, as if much of the natural darkness, brutality, injustice and hallmark power swings of his work have been depleted. The tone of the narrative is a milder variation of that which sustained his finest of several magnificent short stories, The Country Funeral, itself a study of the weakening tensions that once separated the rural from the urban. A mood of content settles over That They May Face the Rising Sun, although several of the characters are caught in their personal turmoils. The politically independent but political McGahern again airs his anti-Republicanism. Gentle and slow-moving it may appear, but that final novel, in which McGahern more determinedly than ever observes the natural world and its cycles, is knowing and quick-witted and must be his defining testament.
His landscape is Roscommon and Leitrim, the barren villages near Carrick-on-Shannon and Boyle and Lough Key; sparse, narrow clusters of settlement clinging to a small, mean life in which the priest, the schoolmaster and the Garda sergeant dominate the minds, the fears, the dreams, the very souls of the people trapped within them.
In contrast with this grim pastoral of the west and the midlands are the furtive raids on Dublin in which his characters undertake desperate pilgrimages to shabby ballrooms, dance halls and pubs in search of escape and possibly love.
Taking a cue from Kavanagh's sonnet Epic in which Homer's ghost confides to the poet, "I made The Iliad from such/A Local row. Gods make their own importance", McGahern crafted his "own importance" by evoking the authenticity of sorry experience. His themes are obsessional: death, suffering, pain and loss of love, of faith, and of hope. If his men are weak and tend to approach romance with equal measures of apathy and desperation, his women are practical, almost heroic, if never idealised. Few portraits of any female character in world literature convince as powerfully as the carefully plotted account in Amongst Women of Rose's determined pursuit and capture of Moran, followed by her stoic acceptance of his domestic tyranny.
Right up until that final novel, dead mothers and bullying police sergeant fathers overshadow the lives of central characters who are invariably bored, unambitious teachers haunted by suffocating childhoods and as adults can claim failed relationships and possibly even a failed vocation. It is interesting to see the breadth of vision and social analysis achieved by McGahern within what was a small, almost predictable repertoire of themes, devices and motifs. Most importantly, it was he who encouraged a reluctant country which has never enjoyed looking at itself to shed the old sentimentalities and complacencies and admit the hypocrisies. His vision was larger than his surroundings because he was an inspired psychologist who knew the Irish psyche and a writer who possessed an ability to convincingly enter the heart and mind of a given character.
While The Barracks is a heartbreaking book, no doubt drawing on the memory of his mother's illness, there are wonderful moments such as Elizabeth's rueful irritation at being drawn into yet another banal conversation in which she has no interest. ". . . this world on which she'd used every charm to get accepted in was falling to ashes in her hands . . . She'd escaped out of London, she'd not escape out of this . . . she could scream, the desperation she'd experienced on her coming back on this conversation."
In common with William Trevor, McGahern has a feel for characterisation and is capable of making acharacter express a multitude in what seems a passing comment. In Along The Edges, yet another McGahern character must pay the price for his careless dithering as the woman he has treated too casually for too long has had enough and rejects his belated proposal. "There was a time when I thought I was getting involved with you, but then you didn't seem interested, and women are practical."
Although the early work, The Barracks, The Dark and The Leavetaking (1974, partly reworked and republished in 1984) is strongly autobiographical, it should not detract from the range of his stories, several of which - most notably, as mentioned, The Country Funeral - represent the best of McGahern. His finest short stories stand equal to those of O'Connor and Trevor.
It is fitting and curiously satisfying that a career begun with such personal grief should conclude in such thoughtfully recounted detail in Memoir. Yet before that there is the daringly autobiographical element which runs through That They May Face the Rising Sun, a narrative of voices, chat, much gossip, and local scandal. In that book, with its sequences of social comedy juxtaposed with vivid insights into country life, such as market day, animals being bought and sold, the laying out of a corpse and a disastrous match, McGahern boldly had a married couple, Joe and Kate Ruttledge, settling in middle age in the lakeside community. There they engage with their neighbours, share in the local dramas and raise their embarrassingly well-tended animals. Perhaps they are the McGaherns? Perhaps it is only coincidence? Included among the social set-pieces are many silences, meditations, descriptive passages, which are lyric and, significantly, melancholic.
It is the prelude to the leave-taking begun with his slow illness and completed yesterday in a death that was not unexpected, but is no less shocking for that.
Two enduring images of McGahern linger in my mind. One is of the man, eager as a boy, showing off the wide views from his modest house of Leitrim's watery landscape. The other is of the professional writer, complete in dishevelled black suit, as if hastily dressed for a funeral or perhaps merely to stand at the back of the church, reading at Cúirt three years ago. His strong voice contrasted with his frail appearance. In Judge on Trial, Ivan Klima refers to "moral grandeur". It is a phrase that applies to John McGahern, whose belief in truth and the worth of small lives, and abiding sense of justice, taught a nation to look at itself with open, more honest eyes.