John
McGahern, author of the novels Among
Women, The Pornographer, and The Dark (the last of which which was
banned in the know-nothing, Church-suffocated Ireland of the early '60s), as well as numerous Chekhovian short stories and
the crystalline memoir All Will Be Well,
died in '06 and was memorialized widely, including here, by me. Truly, the
Ireland he grew up in was very much the obscurantist, repressed place Joyce
describes in A Portrait of the Artist As
a Young Man; and that McGahern evokes vividly in All Will be Well. He had to get out to evolve as a writer, and did
so, to France, Finland, and the U.S., returning finally to rural Ireland where,
he said, he could write badly as well as anywhere. In fact, he missed it, and
knew it was where he belonged, bonded equally by love and contempt. Similarly, like
so many ex-Catholics, he both treasured and despised the Church. But one thing
he, and many "cultural Catholics," among whom I count myself, value
beyond measure is the place accorded Beauty and Tradition in the pre-Vatican II
Church.
"Before
the printed word," observed McGahern in a short remembrance written just
before his death, "churches have been described as the Bibles of the poor,
and the Church was my first book. In an impoverished time, it was my
introduction to ceremony, to grace and sacrament, to symbol and ritual, even to
luxury. I remember vividly the plain flat brown cardboard boxes in which tulips
for the altar, red and white and yellow, came on the bus in winter when there
were no flowers anywhere."
And no
guitar masses anywhere, either.
