ࡱ> AC@%` bjbjNN .*,,  8 ( .jPPPPPPPP-------$y/h1J-PP-PP-ZPP--PD s|(j--0.+2+2B+26XP6^pPPP--RPPP.    $       The Book of Irish Writers, Chapter 49 - John McGahern, 1934-2006 John McGahern spent his early years in Co. Leitrim. Life with his mother, who was a primary school teacher, was idyllic: My mother named [wild] flowers for me as we walked I must have been extraordinarily happy walking that lane to school. McGahern would never quite get over his mothers death when he was 10. After this the family lived with their unpredictable and authoritarian father, a garda sergeant, who was stationed twenty miles away in Co Roscommon. His father is the model for the many patriarchal figures in McGaherns writing. McGahern was educated by the Presentation Brothers. He also remembers being given the run of a neighbours library: I picked the books with nothing but pleasure in mind and read them the way a boy now might watch countless TV dramas Nobody gave me direction or advice. This was a rare instance of freedom for the young McGahern. He trained as a teacher and also took a degree from University College in Dublin. In 1955 at the age of 21 - he began to teach in a Dublin school. Aged 29, McGahern published his first novel, The Barracks, to critical acclaim. The award of a fellowship enabled him to take a break from teaching - which he spent mostly in London. Here he married a Finnish theatre director, Annikki Laaksi, in 1965. That same year his second novel, The Dark, was banned. This led to a scandal as McGahern was sacked from his teaching post at the behest of the Archbishop! A trade union official told him: "If it was just the auld book, maybe maybe we might have been able to do something for you, but with marrying this foreign woman you have turned yourself into a hopeless case, entirely. McGahern stood his ground, forcing the authorities to sack him rather than quietly resigning. Characteristically he refused to become embroiled in any larger protest, despite many offers to help. In London his marriage broke down. He married again and after several years returned to Ireland, and bought a small farm in Co. Leitrim. McGaherns career as a writer can be split into three phases, though there is a continuity through all of his writing. His first two novels - The Barracks and The Dark - are revelatory about Irish society, detailing a world in which, as McGahern puts it: Violence reigned as often as not in the homes One of the compounds at its base was sexual sickness Such honesty was very much ahead of its time. His next two novels show the impact on him of being banned. The Leavetaking, from 1975, is the story of a teachers last day at school - knowing that he will be sacked that evening. Four years later, The Pornographer was a more blatant and uncharacteristic response to the censorship that McGahern had suffered. Michael, the narrator, makes a living by writing rather innocent pornography - while at the same time messing up his love affair with an older woman. By contrasting harmless pornography with the real pain that can come through actual affairs of the heart, McGahern mocks the whole idea of censorship and shows how pointless it can be. "A marvelous novel, deep, moving, rich and resonant, about love, lust, life and death."Sunday Express "An admirable book, one of the finest I have read for a long time...I cannot recommend Mr. McGahern too strongly."The Sunday Telegraph In 1990 McGahern published Amongst Women. Its account of the Moran family as their father dies doesnt just look unsparingly at rural life. Instead it summarises a whole phase of Irish social history. Moran has always, as the novel puts it, contrive[d] to be in permanent opposition. He is a domestic tyrant whose alienation from society dominates the novel. When Moran dies so too does an old authoritarian version of Ireland. Amongst Women provides a complete and complex portrait of Ireland as it moved into a new age. McGaherns final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, appeared in 2001. Named for the custom of burying the dead facing eastward, it is a magnificent and moving account of the lives of a small community living around a lake. Supposedly mundane lives are given dignity, even grace through the simple power of McGaherns writing to reveal The innate sacredness of each single life. John McGahern wrote stories in such a way that no one could ever consider the characters in them as anything but important. As he put it in a late interview: The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space. There is some justice in saying that John McGahern wrote the same story over and over again - but only because he wanted to make it perfect enough to contain the whole world.     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