THE fifth anniversary of the death of John McGahern falls on March 31st. When the news filtered through that he had passed away in 2006, a sombre mood took hold of the country. For many people McGahern had been a reassuring presence, someone whose writings captured in a special way the Zeitgeist of a nation. Commentators noted the special role Catholicism played in his work, in spite of his self-professed agnosticism. A new study just published examines the complex relationship the writer had with Catholicism.
McGahern lost his job as a primary school teacher after the banning of his second novel, The Dark, in 1965. The then Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, intervened directly to ensure that the writer be dismissed. This novel had not only described the masturbatory activities of its adolescent main character, but even went so far as to depict inappropriate sexual behaviour by a priest towards an adolescent male cousin, as well as sexual abuse by a father on his son.
The Irish public was not prepared for such a realistic portrayal of what were still taboo subjects at the time. In a letter to Michael McLaverty, a writer whom he admired greatly, McGahern stated: “What disturbs me very much is that the book’s a religious work if it’s anything at all”. This view was not shared by the Catholic Church or the Censorship Board and McGahern unsurprisingly found himself deprived of his main source of income and forced to leave Ireland to seek alternative employment abroad.
In an interview from 2001, McGahern showed few signs of bitterness about what had happened to him. In fact, he was at pains to point out the positive aspects of his Catholic upbringing: “The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book,” he said. “And it’s through the church I first came to know all I’d know of manners, of ceremony, of sacrament, of grace.” Influenced no doubt by his devout mother, McGahern regretted reneging on the promise he made to her that he would become a priest. Literature became a type of surrogate priesthood: “Instead of being a priest of god, I would be the god of a small, vivid world.”
While he appreciated rituals like Benediction, the Stations of the Cross, the Corpus Christi processions, the May altars erected to the Virgin Mary, he was also conscious of the repressive side of Catholicism: “Authority’s writ ran from God the father down and could not be questioned. One of the compounds at its base was sexual sickness and frustration, as sex was seen, officially, as unclean and sinful, allowable only when it too was licensed.”
By portraying the society he was brought up in as it was and not as how people would like it to be, McGahern put himself on a collision course with the church, a conflict from which there could only be one winner. By the time of his death, however, a reconciliation of sorts had taken place, as evidenced by the presence of seven priests at the altar for his funeral Mass in Aughawillan, which ended with a decade of the rosary being recited at his grave.
In spite of arranging such a traditional funeral, John McGahern remained a non-believer to the end. Nevertheless, his literary vocation was closely linked to a religious quest, a quest that required a painful dredging up of past traumas, that demanded a cold look at the society that shaped him and an unflinching commitment to render in a truthful manner the people and society that made him into the writer he subsequently became. The Irish public that had demonstrated such revulsion for The Darkcame to revere the author of Amongst Women(1990), That They May Face the Rising Sun(2002) and Memoir(2005), as they began to recognise the accuracy of McGahern's depiction of Catholic rural Ireland.
It would be impossible to do McGahern's work justice without remarking on the central role the Catholic religion plays in it. It is omnipresent in the language his characters use, their recitation of prayers, their observance of rituals. In his wonderful essay, The Church and its Spire, McGahern observed how at a certain point his spiritual needs could no longer be met through the Catholic Church. This did not mean that they failed to find an outlet elsewhere, however. He regretted how in Ireland, rather than espousing Gothic architecture with its noble spires lifting man's gaze from the avaricious earth, we went instead for the Romanesque spirit, which he described as "the low roof, the fortress, the fundamentalists' pulpit-pounding zeal, the darkly and ominous and fearful warnings to transgressors". Now that that particular church appears to have all but disappeared, it is fortunate that we can still find traces of it, should we so wish, in McGahern's writings.
Eamon Maher’s The Church and its Spire: John McGahern and the Catholic Question,with a foreword by Fintan O’Toole, is published by the Columba Press