Fr Liam Kelly yesterday revealed an error in John McGahern's Memoir. Kelly and McGahern were, the latter used to say, "far-out cousins", and it was to the home of Kelly's grandparents that McGahern's father, a garda sergeant, used to come courting his future wife, Susan.
In the book, McGahern claimed that during one such visit, persons unknown stole his father's Crombie coat. In fact, said Kelly, to his grandparents' great embarrassment, the theft was of the sergeant's bicycle.
At the Carleton Summer School at Clougher, Co Tyrone, Kelly said he met McGahern soon after the author and his wife Madeline Green returned to live in Leitrim in 1974. The three became friends.
"His was a generous spirit - he shared his knowledge and his books with me . . . Celebrating John's Mass was a great privilege, a small way of saying thanks to him for his kindness." Kelly officiated at McGahern's funeral Mass in Leitrim on April 1st.
McGahern had more reason than James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to leave Ireland, Kelly said. "He was treated badly by church and State and he did leave for a time. He was a shy and retiring man and he wanted to avoid the fuss and attention. But within five years he returned. He had every reason to harbour grudges but he didn't . . . He was bigger than all that."
McGahern's great work was rooted in the places he knew, places like Ballinamore and Cootehall and Aughawillan.
"He will forever be linked with the landscape of the rural northwest," he said. But he reminded the school that when McGahern spoke once at the opening of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, he told students they would not find the heart of Yeats at Lissadell or Drumcliff, but in his poems.
"Read what he wrote', he said, and we should bear this in mind." He said future historians would look to McGahern to learn about 20th century Ireland, and the vanishing of an older way of life.
He was not afraid to look at the harsh realities of life.
"His mother's death when he was a nine-year-old boy ensured that, but he lived a very full and happy life."
McGahern believed "all good writing was local and nearly all bad writing is national," said Kelly. "He had all the material he needed. The challenge was to think clearly and feel deeply, and he did. He liked to quote John Donne, 'love makes one little room an everywhere'."