John McGahern’s quest for perfection and insight into Ireland highlighted

Every year at the John McGahern international seminar there are academics and literary types who pepper their conversations with references to the time they saved hay with the great man, or the fine dinners they had with John and his wife, Madeline, at their home in Leitrim.

So much hay was saved and so much entertaining was done, it seems, that cynics could be forgiven for thinking that it’s no wonder the last novel took over 10 years to arrive .

This year, Gerbrand Bakker, winner of the 2010 Impac Literary Award was a refreshing feature of the programme. He arrived in Carrick on Shannon just days after picking up the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, and made a surprising admission. He had never heard of McGahern before getting the invitation and couldn't even pronounce "McGahern". But he was so enthused by everything he heard in Leitrim that the morning after his arrival he went out and bought four McGahern books.

Potential affinity
Dr John Kenny of NUIG, creative director of the seminar which finished on Saturday, had a good reason for inviting Bakker: "I think John would have liked his work."

Less successful writers attending the three-day event may have been dejected by the insights gleaned into McGahern’s constant striving for perfection. Dr Frank Shovlin, a former student of the writer spending a year trawling through the McGahern archive in NUIG, revealed that there were 23 drafts of one short story, while McGahern withdrew the first novel he wrote – even though it had already been accepted by Faber.

Fergus Fahey, the man in charge of the archive, explained the logistical problems of putting order on the treasure trove of papers, 90 per cent of them undated, many handwritten in school copies or Eason's A4 jotters in a fairly illegible scrawl. Half of Amongst Women was discovered in one box and another chunk in a different box.

Curse of the novel
Fahey noted that McGahern himself said sometimes he did not know whether he was starting a novel or a short story, and when he realised it was a novel he said to himself: "Oh no not again – that is the next four years, then."

McGahern’s fascination with politicians is well-known, but Mark Patrick Hederman, the abbot of Glenstal Abbey, detailed how he had documented so much more about 20th-century Ireland. He had grown up in an Ireland where physical punishment was “embedded in every part of our society” and where psychological abuse was not recognised.