RITE AND REASON:JOHN McGAHERN passed away three years ago this month. In the intervening period, his grave in the cemetery of Aughawillan has become, in the words of Declan Kiberd, "a place of pilgrimage".
I have been in that lovely church and cemetery myself and it enabled me to feel very close to the spirit of McGahern, who spent the majority of his life in this area.
The national school where his mother Susan taught and where he attended is just down the road from the church, as are the ruins of the house in which she died. It is appropriate that the beloved mother and son now share the same grave, in the heart of the countryside, that was a source of such joy to both of them.
The timing of John’s death, March 30th, could not have been more appropriate. This is the period in early spring when flowers begin to blossom, birds to sing, days to lengthen, as nature undergoes its wondrous regeneration. It is right that we should think of McGahern at such a time.
While adroit at evoking nature, he was superb in his depictions of the rituals surrounding death. The Country Funeral is rightly hailed as a classic. In it, we witness how three brothers, John, Philly and Fonsie Ryan, undergo a change in their relationship as they travel west from Dublin to attend the funeral of the maternal uncle, Peter.
McGahern knew the significance of a funeral in rural Ireland. It was not simply a question of putting a corpse in a coffin and burying it. No, certain customs had to be observed: food and drink bought for the wake; a detailed discussion and appraisal of the man’s life; the funeral Mass and the laying to rest of the body.
Philly, who works on the oil rigs, is struck by the warmth of his uncle’s neighbours and feels a strong attraction for the area around Gloria Bog, where Peter lived.
Fonsie, confined to a wheelchair, does not share Philly’s enthusiasm for the area or its people. Yet, as he watches the funeral cortege making the tortuous ascent towards Killeelan cemetery, he cannot help finding “the coffin and the small band of toiling mourners unbearably moving”.
The Country Funeral makes us aware of the transience of life, a transience that is graphically captured in the following lines from The Pornographer: “The womb and the grave . . . The christening party becomes the funeral, the shudder that makes us flesh becomes the shudder that makes us meat”.
Likewise, the laying out of Johnny’s corpse in That They May Face the Rising Sun assumes a particular metaphysical resonance for the agnostic Ruttledge: “The rectum absorbed almost all of the cotton wool. The act was as intimate and warm as the act of sex. The innate sacredness of each single life stood out more starkly in death than in the whole of natural life.”
Exposed to the traumatic loss of his mother at the age of 10, McGahern explored the difficulty of coming to terms with the prospect of eternity through characters like Elizabeth Reegan in The Barracks, the mother in The Leavetaking, and Moran in Amongst Women.
In an interview with Mike Murphy, the writer quoted the comment of a friend of his who was a bone-setter: “Ah yes, when you think of it, life’s a shaky venture.”
The interesting part of the sentence for McGahern was the sub-clause “when you think about it”, because mostly we don’t think about it.
He did reflect deeply on it, however, and while enthralled by life, people and places, he was also acutely aware of their finite nature. His passing, while not totally unexpected, marked a watershed in Irish social history.
The country was losing the bard who understood in a unique way the psyche of its people. The simple, dignified funeral, the Mass celebrated by his cousin, Fr Liam Kelly, the recitation of a decade of the Rosary at the graveside, were all in conformity with a man who respected local tradition and appreciated the importance of ritual.
I must make the trip again to Aughawillan this summer.
Eamon Maher is writing a second book on McGahern entitled The Church and its Spire: John McGahern and the Catholic Question, which will be published by Columba Press.