| John McGahern  By
Frank Shouldice
Popular Irish author John McGahern succumbed to cancer and was buried
at a ceremony in the Co. Leitrim townland of Aughawillan. He was 71 years
old. Although the author was born in Dublin his name was firmly associated
with County Leitrim.
His father’s work as a garda (Irish police) sergeant took the McGahern
family to the border county when John was a child. His writing career
spanned four decades, with a 1963 debut The Barracks which drew on autobiographical
experience as the eldest of seven children in a garda station. Although
a quiet-spoken man McGahern drew controversy without courting it. Neither
did he shrink in the face of the conservatism that dogged Ireland throughout
his writing years.
Even his day job as a schoolteacher stoked the rigidity of 1960s Catholic
Ireland when he married a Finnish woman in a registry office. After his
second novel The Dark was banned in Ireland he was fired from his teaching
post in the Dublin suburb of Clontarf. No explanation was given but it
was later revealed that Archbishop John McQuaid was involved in the decision.
He moved to London for a while. His marriage broke up and he returned
to Ireland with American photographer Madeleine Green. The couple moved
to Mohill, Co. Leitrim, where McGahern continued to write.
His output, without being prodigious, was well received critically but
it was his 1990 novel Amongst Women that broke into international readership
when nominated for the Booker Prize. Four years ago he completed That
They May Face the Rising Sun and fittingly, McGahern’s last work
was Memoir, which he wrote last year. On hearing of his death American
novelist Annie Proulx joined a list of tributes. “I hope John McGahern
has gone straight to some writer’s minimalist heaven,” she
said.
“A pleasing room with a table, a chair, a cupboard of good paper,
a rich pen and generous ink, for I can’t bear to think of a universe
without his stories.”
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