JOHN McGAHERN believed in the value of education and, four years after his death, he continues to teach, fans of the Co Leitrim writer heard last night.
The theme of the fourth international seminar and summer school, established in the writer’s honour, which opened in Carrick on Shannon last night, is “Literature and Education”.
One of the striking things about McGahern's writings was an ambiguity about education and the number of teachers that populate the work, The Irish Timeswriter Fintan O'Toole told the gathering. He said the two professions that shaped McGahern's work were the guards and teachers, not least because they represented the State. The failure of the teacher carries extra weight in the work because in a subtle way it reflects the failure of the State, which never became the Republic that had been promised, he suggested.
The audience, which included McGahern’s sister Margaret and his cousin Paddy McManus from Ballinamore, were reminded of the extraordinary descriptions in his work about the joy and wonder of getting access as a child to a library in a neighbour’s house.
O'Toole said there were copious accounts of "bad education" in the work, not least in the opening pages of Memoirwhere he stated baldly: "I don't think that I learned anything at school in Lisacairn."
Dr John Kenny, academic director of the seminar and summer school, said this year’s theme seemed even more appropriate since the publication of McGahern’s essays, which underlined how important education was to him. “He believed that education of the imagination was one of the most crucial things in cultivating oneself,” said Dr Kenny.
McGahern’s cousin said he believed the writer would have been pleased with the seminar. O’Toole reminded those present how much McGahern learned from the people of his own community.
The writer’s favourite line was not from Beckett or Joyce or Flaubert but a comment he heard from an elderly Leitrim man at a filling station in Mohill, where someone had locked themselves out of a car.
After watching in silence for 20 minutes as a small crowd battled in vain with the lock, the elderly man eventually spoke.
“Tricky yokes, locks,” he remarked to the delight of the writer who thought it the best sentence he ever heard.
