As a writer, I am not of
the minimalist school. On the contrary, I tend toward the prolix. But I hope I have enough of an innate sense of the structure and limitations of language to avoid overwhelming--or, worse, boring--my readers. A good writer needs an
instinctive feel for honesty in his writing. John McGahern had this. He never
overwhelmed; he was unsparingly spare, even austere, more of a word-painter,
adding a daub here, wiping away a stroke there, than a word-musician orchestrating
vast themes. His language is luminous; he was a Vermeer of words. Rachel Andrews discusses him in her excellent
review in the Dublin Review of Books of Love of the World, a new collection of his essays. McGahern was a slow and deliberate writer; it took him twelve years from
Amongst Women to finish That They May Face The Rising Sun (By
The Lake in the U.S.), and he rewrote endlessly. "He was also a ruthless editor," says Andrews, "paring Amongst
Women down to two hundred pages from its original twelve hundred, in the
process creating spare, exact prose in which no word or phrase is redundant."
This is virtually Beckettian, or halfway down the Beckett highway;
but McGahern's main inspiration was James Joyce, not generally thought of as a writer of restrained
style. And yet, McGahern reminds us, Dubliners is a great work of art
because “the method is that people, events, and places invariably find their
true expression ... Everything is important in Dubliners because it is
there and everything there is held in equal importance.” There is nothing
extraneous to the narrative, in other words; nothing gratuitous or flashy. McGahern
himself embodied these writerly virtues that are so vital to true artistic engagement.
And Art was his only engagement; he cared nothing for politics, or the pursuit
of fame. Of course, he was repeatedly criticized for not being sufficiently "committed," and he was occasionally challenged, obnoxiously, in public. Andrews tell us what happened at the Booker Prize dinner in 1990, the
year Amongst Women was shortlisted. "As Kenneth Baker, then
chairman of the Conservative Party, paused to tell McGahern how much he had
enjoyed his work, the writer and critic A.N. Wilson called out: 'Do you realize,
Mr Baker, that the novel glorifies the IRA?' McGahern knows better: 'Amongst
Women glorifies nothing but life itself....'"
Others wanted him to compromise but he would have none of it. “It
is a writer’s job to look after his sentences,” he said, “nothing else.” He
looked after them well. Here are some, from his memoir All Will be Well.
"The fields
between the lakes are small, separated by thick hedges of whitethorn, ash,
blackthorn, alder, sally, rowan, wild cherry, green oak, sycamore, and the
lanes that link them under the Iron Mountains are narrow, often with high
banks. The hedges are the glory of these small fields, especially when the
hawthorn foams into streams of blossom each May and June. The sally is the
first tree to green and the first to wither, and the rowan berries are an
astonishing orange in the light from the lakes every September. These hedges
are full of mice and insects and small birds, and sparrowhawks can be seen
hunting all through the day. In their branches the wild woodbine and dog rose
give off a deep fragrance in summer evenings, and on their banks grow the foxglove,
the wild strawberry, primrose and fern and vetch among the crawling briars. The
beaten pass the otter takes between the lakes can be traced along these banks
and hedges, and in quiet places on the edge of the lakes are the little lawns
speckled with fish bones and blue crayfish shells where the otter feeds and
trains her young. Here and there surprising islands of rich green limestone are
to be found. Among the rushes and wiry grasses also grow the wild orchid and
the windflower."
Magical. Here's my essay on the man and his work.
