McGahern annual tribute detects green shoots in work

THE VIOLATION of the Irish countryside that occurred during the Celtic Tiger may have partly accounted for a change in emphasis in John McGahern’s later work, one academic suggested yesterday.

Wexford native Eamonn Wall, a professor of English at the University of Missouri-St Louis, told the sixth international seminar in the writer’s honour that a search for a “green John McGahern” might initially seem destined for failure.

For the past two days, McGahern fans have wondered what his views might have been about everything from fracking to the fiscal treaty.

On this topical subject, they had to make do with the wry comment of historian and McGahern fan Prof Diarmaid Ferriter, who told the gathering: “I am fed up waking every morning to hear that the markets are not happy.”

The seminar concludes today with a visit to Aughawillan, Co Leitrim, and more lectures on McGahern, his landscape and his relationship with James Joyce.

Landscape was absent from much of McGahern’s early work, possibly because there was little point in describing what had hardly changed in several lifetimes.

“McGahern might have felt that such descriptions belonged on John Hinde postcards and tourist-board calendars instead of in serious writing,” said Prof Wall.

President Michael D Higgins put it in his own inimitable way in a message to the seminar when he wrote: “There is an authenticity in the writing that eschews all false pastoralism.”

Describing Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun as elegies, “and not always fond ones, for vanishing times and people”, Prof Wall said the later change in emphasis may have been due partly to McGahern’s sense of his mortality.

“Visits to Cootehall and other places represented in McGahern’s fiction will provide object lessons in how the Irish countryside was violated during a 20-year period,” he said.

One change obvious to seminar participants, many attending for a repeat visit, was that the barracks at Cootehall was closed when they dropped by yesterday, having been one of 31 Garda stations shut by Minister for Justice Alan Shatter last December.

The local community is keen to see McGahern’s childhood home preserved as a memorial to the writer, who immortalised the building in his work. In previous years McGahern fans lingered in the public office, imagining what life may have been like for the 10- year-old boy and his siblings after they moved in with their father, Sgt Frank McGahern, following the death of their mother.

McGahern’s sister Monica, who regularly attends the annual seminar, compared the experience to attending an anniversary Mass for a loved one. “I come with fear and trepidation every year but the people are wonderful – it feels like an anniversary Mass, a way of honouring the dead,” she said.

Reluctant to give any opinion on the annual homage to and scrutiny of her brother’s writings, she said she shared her brother’s love of reading, although he did not always approve.

“I used to read his books – I’d find them when I was making his bed – but if he caught me he’d say, ‘You are too young to be reading that’,” she recalled.