Former student recalls modest McGahern

JOHN McGAHERN "never dined out" on the controversy surrounding the banning of The Dark, a former student of his recalled yesterday.

Prof Joan Dean of the University of Missouri-Kansas City told the John McGahern International Seminar  that when he was asked to sign a petition in support of McGahern at the time,  Samuel Beckett had asked whether the Leitrim man wanted the petition.

“He was the only one who thought to ask and I said ‘no’,” McGahern later recalled.

McGahern frequently told the story of the head of the teachers’ union who, after the writer was sacked, told him that if it was only “the auld book” that they could have done something for him.

But his marriage to a foreign woman had turned him into “a hopeless case entirely”.

In Memoirthe writer  also recalled that the protest which mattered most to him at the time of his dismissal, came from the parents of the children he had taught in Clontarf.

The writer’s views on education were the subject of much scrutiny at the seminar.

Dr Stanley van der Ziel of University College Dublin said McGahern  probably became a teacher in the true sense after he left the profession.

McGahern thought deeply about the process and believed that by reading books about others, you discovered yourself, added the professor.

The academic remarked that a regular theme of McGahern’s work centred on how one can, through reading,  develop the ability to use the imagination of another person.

One of the most unattractive characteristics of contemporary culture was the emphasis on “being true to yourself” as if this subsumed one’s responsibility to others, he added.

“Reading and writing are intimately connected,” said Dr van der Ziel.

The seminar, which continues today with a visit to Aughawillan where McGahern is buried alongside his mother, Susan,  is being attended by many of his Leitrim neighbours as well as by students and academics.

Mohill native Mary Cashin told the gathering that on the morning that McGahern’s remains were brought home she “a non-demonstrative Leitrim woman” had left her home in Ennis at dawn in order to pay her respects.

“I made a pilgrimage and I supposes I was surprised that the people of Mohill who had lined the streets  clapped him as the hearse drove by.

“It wasn’t planned but that is how people felt about him, although we would never have bothered him if we saw him in Earleys or out and about in Mohill. I brought my six-year-old son Jenan with me and I said to him: ‘remember this’.”

Unlike many of those present, Cambridge student Laurie Tuffrey (21), who was raised in Derbyshire and who is doing his dissertation on the Leitrim writer, never met McGahern.

“I cannot wait to visit Aughawillan and Cootehall,” he said.

“It’s thrilling to see the places  he writes about and to meet people who actually knew him”.