THE SIR JOHN T. GILBERT COMMEMORATIVE LECTURE, 2020
JOHN MCGAHERN’S DUBLIN THE 23rd ANNUAL SIR JOHN T. GILBERT COMMEMORATIVE LECTURE, 2020 DUBLIN CITY LIBRARIES
by Frank Shovlin
John McGahern’s Dublin The 23rd Annual Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture delivered on 23 January 2020 by Professor Frank Shovlin, Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool
First published in 2021 by Dublin City Libraries, 138-144 Pearse Street, Dublin. 2, Ireland. Copyright for text Š Professor Frank Shovlin, Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9500512-3-9 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
THE SIR JOHN T. GILBERT COMMEMORATIVE LECTURE, 2020
JOHN MCGAHERN’S DUBLIN by Frank Shovlin
The Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture 2020
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COLM TÓIBÍN , writing in 1986 after travelling to hear John McGahern read in Galway
from his new book of short stories, High Ground, interviewed him afterwards and had this to say about Dublin and its place in McGahern’s work: There is no evocation of Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s as powerful as his. […] He was living in Dublin. Over and over he went to the theatre, to the cheap seats in the Gate, where Lord Longford was putting on Shaw, Chekhov, Wilde, to the Gas Company where he saw Lorca’s ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ maybe ten times. The library in Fairview was good, and beside Roche’s Stores there was a man who sold books from a barrow at half-price. He sold no rubbish, but more importantly he sold banned books.1 Tóibín’s enthusiastic summation of this aspect of the urban fiction tallies with McGahern’s own memories of Dublin in the late 1950s, a place of opportunity and of cultural sophistication if one were of a mind to seek it out. If it achieves nothing else, I would like this lecture to finally put to bed what McGahern calls in an e-mail the month before he died “the myth of Farmer John”: The myth of Farmer John is not my doing. Over the years many TV crews have been here who wanted me to play the farmer. This I always refused. I was a writer who happened to live on a farm. I read lately in a couple of places that I hide my own sophistication or lack of it. That is for others to judge. Maybe I should buy a top hat and go to Dublin more often and talk about who’s in and who’s out and who met who in Paris in the 1920s.2 For Tóibín to so closely link McGahern with Dublin life will come as a surprise to some who are likely to associate him almost wholly with his native Leitrim and North Roscommon. When the young Patrick Moran, narrator of McGahern’s third novel, The Leavetaking (1974), seeks employment in a Dublin national school, it works in his favour that he is a country man, from Leitrim. Maloney, the stern principal closely modelled on Mícheál Kelleher, McGahern’s real life Clontarf headmaster, in hiring Moran tells him that “City people are all right in their way but they don’t have those good solid traditions behind them that we who come from the country have”.3 John McGahern was both born and died in Dublin. The biographical notes that appear on the covers of his works almost always tell us he was born in the city in 1934. While this is true, mother and child returned to the west days after the birth in a nursing home in Percy Place, Ballsbridge, and McGahern spent most of his life up to the age of 9 living with his mother – and later sisters and brother – in various parts of Leitrim, most notably in the Aughawillan area where his mother Susan was
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Faber cover of The Pornographer (1979) featuring the Church of Mary Immaculate, Rathmines in background. Courtesy of Dublin City Library and Archive.
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a national school teacher, where she died in 1944, and where she is buried today alongside her eldest son. After his mother’s death all of the McGahern children moved in with their father, Frank, to the garda barracks in the North Roscommon village of Cootehall where he was sergeant. John continued to live there until after he sat his Leaving Certificate exam, very briefly attended University College Galway and then in October 1953 took up a place at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra to train, like his mother before him, as a national school teacher. All of this is set out memorably and beautifully in his last published book, Memoir (2005), and finds its way in various forms into much of his fiction, most notably in the first two novels, The Barracks (1963) and The Dark (1965). From 1953 to 1964, the year he left his Clontarf school on sabbatical, he lived mainly in Dublin (there were periods in London, Athboy and Drogheda) and it is these years I wish to focus on here, both as they were lived and as they were fictionalized. Memoir, the single best source for biographical details, focusses almost wholly on McGahern’s young life in Leitrim and Roscommon though it does include a short, lively section on city life towards the end. “Only in Dublin”, writes McGahern, “could I disappear into my own and my secret life without being noticed”.4 It would be hard to overstate just how crucial this particularly urban silence and solitude were to McGahern both as a writer and as a man. In his thinking on the need for anonymity he fell early under the influence of the great German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke who issued repeated warnings to writers trying to make their way in the world. McGahern’s favourite of Rilke’s works, his one novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), sees the eponymous Malte wandering the streets of Paris recalling episodes from his aristocratic Danish past, warning against the perils of fame: as yet I did not understand fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones. Young man anywhere, in whom something stirs that makes you shiver, profit by the fact that no one knows you.5 That suspicion and mistrust of fame – or any kind of recognition – remained with McGahern throughout his life and as a young man making his way in the world he found Dublin, at least for a time, the ideal place to hide in plain sight. McGahern’s fourth novel, The Pornographer (1979), his most Dublin-centric book, sees the unnamed narrator, after a visit to his dying aunt in a cancer hospital closely modelled on St Luke’s, Rathgar, glad to escape back into his anonymous city life:
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The next day I put aside for what I liked doing best. I did nothing, the nothing of walking crowded streets in the heart of the city, looking at faces, going into chance bars to rest, eating lunch and dinner alone in cheap, crowded restaurants. And without any desire for meaning, in the same way as I had been surprised at her bedside, I sometimes felt meaning in this crowded solitude. They all had a purpose, that it had to have, the people coming and going, the ships tied up along the North Wall, the changing delicate lights and ripples of the river, the cranes and building, lights of shops, and the sky through a blue haze of smoke and frost. And then it slipped away, and I found myself walking with a light and eager step to nowhere among others, in a meaningless haze of goodwill and general benediction and shuffle, everything fragmented again.6 One hesitates to call McGahern a flaneur, but the description above of a young man aimlessly and anonymously walking a city’s streets owes at least as much to Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge as it does to Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. And it is one of only many such passages across McGahern’s novels and stories. This ‘crowded solitude’ worked as an escape for McGahern who had taught for an academic year in Athboy, County Meath after leaving the training college, followed by a stint at the Christian Brothers in Drogheda. Though life in St Pat’s was strict and cloistered, it allowed the teenage McGahern his first taste of city life, a freedom that is recalled in The Leavetaking: They took two years to train us as teachers, each day enclosed between morning Mass and evening Devotions in the chapel before we climbed the stone stairs to our cubicles. Between classes and study and meals we circled the path round the football field in twos or threes or fours talking of women, the old lime trees and high wall between us and the red neon of the Drum Cinema, the growling roar of the distant city. For a few hours we were allowed out Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, and they found us in cinemas. Sunday was the one day we had completely free, though the gates were shut at ten. Sunday afternoon we went to dances, most of the girls at the afternoon dances from the girls’ Training College across the city.7 He then recalls one such dance: “The queue in Granby Row that warm Sunday afternoon for the Kingsway, Matt Talbot’s altar against the wall, the little wooden kneeler and statue of the Virgin dustcoated and shabby”.8
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In an effort to escape the structured surveillance of smalltown life in Athboy and Drogheda, McGahern began to study for a BA degree at night in University College Dublin. “I hated the small town where I then taught”, recalls Patrick Moran in The Leavetaking, “and wanted to get to the anonymity of the city at any cost. […] I had started night lectures as excuse to escape the dreariness of the evenings of the small town”.9 Michael Duggan, the lonesome teacher of ‘Like All Other Men’, finds himself in a similar predicament at the opening of that story and turns to Dublin to find relief: Nurses, students, actors and actresses, musicians, some prostitutes, people who worked in restaurants and newspapers, nightwatchmen, a medley of the old and very young, came to these afternoon dances. Michael Duggan came every Saturday and Sunday. He was a teacher of Latin and history in a midlands town forty miles from Dublin, and each Friday he came in on the evening bus to spend the whole weekend round the cinemas and restaurants and dancehalls of O’Connell Street.10 In this story he both wins and loses a girl in the course of a night. After sleeping together in a hotel bedroom, she tells him that they have no future as she is on her way to enter life in a convent. The story ends with aimless wandering towards Bus Áras: The river out beyond the Custom House, the straight quays, seemed to stretch out in the emptiness after she had gone. […] Thinking of her, he found himself walking eagerly towards the Busarus… but almost as quickly his walking slowed. His steps grew hesitant, as if he was thinking of turning back. He knew that no matter how eagerly he found himself walking in any direction it could only take him to the next day and the next.11 As with all of McGahern’s fiction, the reader senses that this stark fate is not just that of Michael Duggan, but of us all. But the city was not just a place of lonesome courtship; there were other, livelier sides to urban life: My life in Dublin of the time would not have been much different to the lives of many young men. We worked. We went to dancehalls and cinemas and theatres; the big hurling and football matches in Croke Park, race meetings in the Phoenix Park or Baldoyle or Leopardstown; we met and talked and drank and argued in bars. In hot summers we swam in the seas around Dublin or went on excursions into the Dublin Mountains. The girls we picked up in dancehalls we courted in doorways and back alleys, and on dates took them to cinemas or out to places like Howth by the sea. Oysters were cheap then, as were the
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plates of fresh prawns sprinkled with parsley. They were served in small bars by the sea, with plates of buttered brown bread and slices of lemon and pints of stout. The girls didn’t drink stout or beer; the more adventurous had wine or gins-and-tonics and even brandies; most of them didn’t drink alcohol.12 McGahern’s attitude to literary Dublin was not nearly as positive as his happier memories of cinema attendance and trips to Croke Park: it is notable that, among his close friends in Dublin (to whom I will turn shortly) there was no writer. While he had huge respect for the work of Patrick Kavanagh, he disliked the man and the famous world of the Dublin writers’ pub, with McDaid’s of Harry Street to the fore, as set out in a letter of October 1964 written from Helsinki where he had travelled to marry the Finnish theatre director Annikki Laaksi whom he had first met a couple of months earlier in Paris: The McDaid world is such a jungle that it’s impossible. There’s a few images. When Cronin’s Riley failed here I heard Kavanagh go round McDaid’s: ‘Phoor Cronin. Phoor Cronin. Aah, sad, sad. His ambition was to rrite a bestseller before he was forty. Med too many enemies. Phoor Cronin. Sad. And the whife ‘ll cause trouble. Dissapointment. Were led to believe, how there was big advances on the job. And he’ll never ger another publisher. Because he wont sell 800 copies. It wont pay for the fucking printing even foo fum.’ A few times Cronin got editorial power and he didn’t print his friends -- actually he printed the mostly dull steady respectable contributors -- and he’ll never be forgiven for that. Only Kavanagh could do that and get away. He did. And then Cronin saying, ‘But he was different. He could be generous once -- at least he was to me.’ I can’t tolerate Kavanagh but he’s a real poet and that’s rare, even when he’s as bad as you say there’s something distinctive about it. And after Beckett he’s probably the only one of that whole generation, though that’s hardly praise. One could circle about the shindy forever but it’s tiresome and it belongs more to conversation.13 This world of Kavanagh holding court among the literary hangers on is brought vividly to life in short stories like ‘Bank Holiday’ and ‘My Love, My Umbrella’. Here we meet a barely fictionalized version of Kavanagh in ‘Bank Holiday’: The Sunday streets were empty, and the stones gave out a dull heat. They walked slowly, loitering at some shop windows. The doors of all the bars were open, O’Neills and the International and the Olde Stand, but they were mostly empty within. There was a sense of a cool dark waiting in Mooney’s, a barman arranging ashtrays on the marble. They ordered an assortment of
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“The McDaid world is such a jungle that it’s impossible.” McDaid’s bar on Harry Street in 1965. Courtesy of Dublin City Library and Archive.
sandwiches. It was pleasant to sit in the comparative darkness, and eat and sip and watch the street, and to hear in the silence footsteps going up and down Grafton Street. It was into this quiet flow of the evening that the poet came, a large man, agitated, without jacket, the shirt open, his thumbs hooked in braces that held up a pair of sagging trousers, a brown hat pushed far back on his head. Coughing harshly and pushing the chair around, he sat at the next table.14 After a row with the poet over cigarettes the couple cross the road to McDaid’s but quickly think better of staying: The door of the bar across the way was not open, and when he pushed it a roar met them like heat. The bar was small and jammed. A red-and-blue tint from a stained glass window at the back mixed weirdly with the white lights of the bar, the light of evening from the high windows. A small fan circled helplessly overhead, its original white or yellow long turned to ochre by cigarette smoke.15 Despite his early suspicion of the staged nature of literary Dublin, McGahern was soon to be a famous writer himself and would have to decide on the degree to which he wished to be part of the metropolitan artistic scene.
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After the publication of his first novel The Barracks in 1963 McGahern’s public profile was inevitably raised, and he became even more concerned about privacy and his ability to write and to live unhindered by the intrusion of prying eyes. But McGahern did have a small, tight circle of friends in Dublin of the late 1950s and ‘60s, with 3 men held especially close: Kevin Lehane, Tom Jordan and Jimmy Swift. Lehane, thirteen years McGahern’s senior, was a cinema manager, newspaper columnist and connoisseur of Dublin pub life. McGahern’s American editor for The Dark, Patrick Gregory, writes to John of his Dublin encounter with Lehane in July 1965 and their mutual membership of what he calls the John McGahern Fan Club: An associate member of that august body is certainly Kevin Lehane. He was splendid. I called at the theater at 10 in the morning two days before my departure. Although he was on duty all that day, and free only from 7 to 9 at night, we agreed to meet for a pint before his night duty commenced. We had a pint, then another, and Tony Lennen (of the Irish Times) joined us. Kevin, realizing that the jig was up, phoned the theater and told them that he wouldn’t be there that evening. We drank on until closing time – changing pubs from time to time, in lieu of the “sightseeing” tour that Kevin felt he should be offering me. He phoned me up the next morning, and in spite of his delicate condition (he has ulcers or something and really shouldn’t drink at all) bravely invited me to lunch. When I return to Dublin I shall try to take better advantage of his knowledge of the city.16 While Gregory’s visit was too fleeting to allow him full use of Lehane’s scouting skills, the jovial cinema manager was McGahern’s most important guide to the intricacies of Dublin’s streets, its pubs, and its people. In 1980 he published an affectionate book about the city’s street life, made up from a series of articles originally published in The Irish Times in the 1950s under the pseudonym Tom Corkery. His prologue to the book ends thus, showing the great affection in which he holds his hometown: The Dublin social, as distinct from the cultural, scene is very varied. It goes on all the year round and ranges from art exhibitions to horse racing to literary festivals via medical and scientific congresses. It is not to say of course that these grave and learned conventions of the arts and sciences are designed by their organisers as social binges; it is only that they inevitably end up that way. And for all her visitors the city changes its face; high-spirited in an aristocratic way for Horse Show Week, jovial in a robust manner for returning American Gaels and GAA finals, hail-fellow-well-met for the rugby internationals, long-
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Kevin Lehane. Courtesy of the John McGahern Estate.
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haired and long-winded for the theatre festivals. […] Standing solidly by his own street corner, monarch of all he chooses to survey, the Dublin man looks blandly, ironically, imperturbably at his masters and his festivals, sometimes, only sometimes, wondering as he views the changing scene if he is not in danger perchance of becoming the only real stranger in the strange new city growing up around him.17 McGahern reviewed Lehane’s book in The Sunday Independent of 4 January 1981 and was warm in his praise both for its author and for the city that forms its subject: “This is a lovely book. I might be tempted to refer to it as a bewk, so contagious is its idiom, were it not for the certainty of being blowed out of it by the citizens, with their inexhaustible arsenal of non-sequiturs, that come to such vivid life in its pages.”18 Lehane was born in Sandymount in 1921. His father, a master tailor, was a partner in Lehane and McGurk, Eustace Street. After a period living with aunts in Limerick, Lehane returned to Dublin where he took up employment in the city’s thriving cinema business. The Adelphi, Carlton and Corinthian were among the most popular city-centre cinemas, while venues like the De Luxe, Camden Street, the Grand, Fairview, and the State, Phibsboro, added to the choice. Lehane managed the Mary Street cinema, among others, before going on to manage two of Dublin’s best-known cinemas, the Capitol and Ambassador. In his writings, he drew on his experiences as a cinema manager, his knowledge of Dublin’s pub culture, and his affection for his native city. Lehane also contributed to This is Ireland, a magazine for tourists, and was the chief contributor to Dublin: An Official Guide in the late 1940s. McGahern, the young country schoolteacher, could have found no better man to introduce him to the subtle complexities of Dublin life. While Lehane had one particular set of extremely useful skills, James ‘Jimmy’ Swift was probably the single most important influence on McGahern’s artistic development and thinking as he developed as a writer in late 1950s and early 1960s Dublin – it is a debt acknowledged by McGahern in the dedication of The Barracks. Denis Sampson in his book Young John McGahern that focusses on these years describes the importance of the relationship with Jimmy Swift and his brothers: Towards the end of 1955, a chance meeting with Tony Swift, a young painter, set McGahern’s life along an entirely new track. Memoir relates that the meeting happened in the bar of a dancehall, and that it led to his introduction into the Swift family and their home on Carrick Terrace, off Dublin’s South Circular
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Road. Five brothers ran a display advertising business, with a factory near Amiens Street railway station, and in time, when he moved back to Dublin, he would become part of this large, closely knit family.19
Jimmy Swift and John McGahern in conversation. Courtesy of John McGahern Estate.
McGahern met Jimmy Swift every Friday night in the Stag’s Head pub over several years. Swift was widely and deeply read and, like all of McGahern’s close friends, was quite a bit older than he was. He is fictionalized as the character Lightfoot (Lightfoot was the name of McGahern’s landlords at 57 Howth Road) in McGahern’s fiction, first in ‘Wheels’ after the narrator overhears a comical conversation between two railway porters about the failed suicide attempt of a colleague:
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They’d fill the trolley, the smile dying in the eyes as they went past, the loose wheels rattling less under the load, the story too close to the likeness of my own life for comfort though it’d do to please Lightfoot in the pub when I got back. “Looked at with the mind, life’s a joke; and felt, it’s a tragedy and we know cursed nothing,” he’d said last night over pints of Guinness.20 And then four years later in The Leavetaking: Lightfoot, not my friend since he found friendship disgusting, quoting Proust that it is the halfway house between physical exhaustion and mental boredom. Only what one loves is, as we comically try to hang on to what must pass, and I respect Lightfoot too much to claim him for a friend against his will. The simple feeling that such as he is alive is enough to make my own life more bearable and he made that wet evening in the deathroom general for me when he spoke of his own mother. We sat at the long marble counter of The Stag’s Head, the silver clock on the slender stem crowned with antlers and the scroll of tempus fugit.21 Another of the Swift brothers, Patrick or ‘Paddy’, was, in the 1950s, making a name for himself as a painter and had art criticism published in the Dublin magazine Envoy (1949-51), edited by John Ryan whose sister Oonagh he married. Moving to London and establishing friendships in the Bohemian Soho set, he became a crucial support for the young McGahern, publishing him for the first time in the literary magazine X that he co-edited with the South African-born poet David Wright. The whole magazine has a distinctly Irish flavour: as well as publishing McGahern’s first work it placed Beckett on a pedestal, and saw contributions from Anthony Cronin, Aidan Higgins and Patrick Kavanagh. The third one of McGahern’s close Dublin friends (though they never mixed together) was his teaching colleague Tom Jordan. A native of Kilrush, County Clare and a former Christian Brother, he became a schoolteacher on leaving the Brothers. The two men worked in Belgrove (or officially Scoil Eoin Báiste), Clontarf alongside one another over an eight year period from 1956 to 1964. The Leavetaking, which fictionalizes McGahern’s final day as a teacher in Belgrove, sees Jordan brought vividly to life as Mr James: “Mr James’s class. March. Cle, deas, cle,” the headmaster at once sends the line moving towards the classroom, apologizing as James hurries past him to catch up with his class. “It’s only just to get them moving, Nil aon deifir, a mhaistir.” “Gura maith agat, a mhaistir,” the quiet James thanks him as he
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Tom Jordan. Courtesy of John McGahern Estate.
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The Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture 2020
goes past to catch his class. “Cle, deas, cle, deas,” James takes up to try to concentrate the life he feels haemorrhaging under the headmaster’s eye until he can get to the quiet of the classroom, where he’ll try to restore his loss of self with a quiet curse before making the class stand for prayer before work, the work he’ll do scrupulously and well.22 Jordan’s experiences in the Christian Brothers and especially of leaving the order lie at the heart of McGahern’s story ‘The Recruiting Officer’: “Old Cogger dithered till the day before I had to leave, but at nightfall brought home two likely fits. I picked one, and packed it, and off we set by bus for Limerick, to all appearances two Christian Brothers going on some ordinary business, but old Cogger would come back alone. We did not speak on the way.”23 John and Tom remained close friends for the rest of Jordan’s life, with the McGaherns frequently staying with the Jordans in Raheny and Tom and his wife Blainid coming for annual summer stays in Leitrim. Tom Jordan remained one of the very few people to whom McGahern would send work in draft and the friendship was unwavering and deeply sustaining. McGahern’s close association with Dublin ended in summer 1964 when he took a year’s unpaid sabbatical from Belgrove School. Belgrove, having grown rapidly over the years, was now divided into Senior and Junior Boys. McGahern went with the Seniors and was finding life as a teacher more and more challenging and painful. On 21 September 1964 he formally left the school (though he had in fact left Dublin earlier that summer) to travel for a year, funded by his winning of the £1,000 Macaulay Fellowship in Prose Fiction awarded by the Arts Council of Ireland. The fellowship had to be used in furtherance of the successful candidate’s liberal education, with the only condition being that the Secretary of the Arts Council (then the novelist Mervyn Wall) should be satisfied that the money be utilised in accordance with the wishes of the donor, William J. B. Macaulay, a prominent Irish diplomat who had served in Washington D.C. and at The Holy See. In August 1964 McGahern was introduced to Annikki Laaksi in Paris by the Guardian’s Paris correspondent and later director of the 1967 film The Rocky Road to Dublin, Peter Lennon. He spent much of that autumn in Finland, before returning to London in January 1965. In May of that year he and Annikki left London for southern Spain – McGahern was keen to avoid what he knew would be the inevitable media circus around the publication by Faber of The Dark that month. His escape to Spain proved judicious, the book was banned in Ireland, discussed in the Dáil, and when McGahern tried to return to his job in Belgrove the following autumn he was dismissed. This meant, in effect, the end of McGahern’s Dublin period and in the months that followed he was full of longing and regret for the city which had meant so much to him.
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He writes to his American editor about the whole affair from Dublin in October 1965: It’s a long and mostly boring story, I’ll try to shorten it. The 8th May telegrammed to phone them, it was to tell me not to come. I didn’t telephone and presented myself for work. They were very afraid, the teachers. The headmaster read me a note that I was suspended until the priest interviewed me, this would have to be after the 6th of November, end of his holidays. I then saw the Union: they were willing to fight sacking on the grounds of DARK; but not on a civil marriage. I do not think I could go through the farce of a ceremony, cage Anu here, bow my head, work humbly for them; and live with myself, and work with myself. Anu doesn’t want to go through with it either, and she doesn’t want to live in Dublin, which I want, but it seems impossible, it seems it must be the woman’s land of London. So I meet Anu in London tomorrow. We’ll decide over the days what to do. I’ll then go to see the priest after November the 6th and probably get sacked. Nothing now can affect my work, it grows only more clear, this journey into my changing self, in search of style. But physically and financially it cannot be as easy in London as it was.24 It is clear that Annikki’s dislike of Dublin had more to do with McGahern’s decision to leave and settle in London than had the censorship controversy. In another letter to Gregory written from London just before embarking for Spain McGahern writes: “It rained every day in Ireland. Dublin gave Anu the sense of a city drained of its best talent for whatever that’s worth – but sea air sours the Guinness Joyce heard them say.”25 Later that autumn, now living rather unhappily in London, he writes to Jimmy Swift of the differences between the two cities: Remorseless fog, blue where it can’t be penetrated, utterly depressing. In Dublin there’s always an expectation of some change or there’ll be some crack in the sky, to little virtue certainly, but not here. I always want to laugh when I see a sun or moon over London, it seems always they’ve come to the wrong place.26 McGahern would miss it all: the bars, the restaurants, the cinemas, the dancehalls. But they would all be summoned up and immortalized in his fiction.
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Interior of the Scotch House bar, Burgh Quay in the 1960s. Courtesy of Dublin City Library and Archive.
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Dublin lived stronger and shone more vividly in McGahern’s imagination than it ever had in his quotidian life there as a citizen. And it is here that we must return to Colm Tóibín’s view of the work as summoning up a Dublin more alive and accurate than any writer of his generation. Take these moments from ‘My Love, My Umbrella’: It was the rain, the constant weather of this city, made my love inseparable from the umbrella, a black umbrella, white stitching on the seams of the imitation leather over the handle, the metal point bent where it was caught in Mooney’s grating as we raced for the last bus to the garage out of Abbey Street. Or The band was playing when we met, the Blanchardstown Fife and Drum […] at the back of the public lavatory on Burgh Quay, facing a few persons on the pavement in front of the Scotch House. […] At every interval they looked towards the clock, Mooney’s clock across the river.27 In this story as elsewhere, McGahern was especially drawn to memories of his old stomping grounds of Clontarf, Drumcondra and, especially, Fairview, as we see in this moment from ‘Sierra Leone’: ‘I suppose it won’t be long now till your friend is here,’ the barman said as he held the glass to the light after polishing. ‘If it’s not too wet,’ I said. ‘It’s a bad evening,’ he yawned, the rain drifting across the bandstand and small trees of Fairview Park to stream down the long window. […] For several months I had been frustrating all his attempts to get to know us, for we had picked Gaffney’s because it was out of the way and we had to meet like thieves. Dublin was too small a city to give even our names away.28 We see McGahern’s characters back again in the bars of Fairview for The Pornographer: Spring was late, and when it came it was more like early summer. Fairview Park was full of flowers and young men, their trousers tucked into socks, kicking footballs under the greening trees, using their cast-off clothes to mark the goals. I had played with them once. They were mostly apprentice barmen on their day off. Corporation workmen started to assemble scaffolding and ladders and then to paint the bandstand.29
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“‘It’s a bad evening,’ he yawned, the rain drifting across the bandstand and small trees of Fairview Park”. Fairview Bandstand, courtesy of Dublin City Library and Archive.
In a revealing letter of 14 October 1975 to the young American editor, Jonathan Coleman, who McGahern had first met when Coleman was working as an intern at Ian Hamilton’s glossy London magazine, The New Review, and who was at this point working in a junior capacity at Knopf in New York, McGahern gives a straightforward summation of The Pornographer as a novel that draws much of its motive force from setting up an opposition between country and city. The letter is written from Newcastle upon Tyne where McGahern was a visiting Arts Fellow at the university: What’s written is scattered but the shape is clear. The male character is a Civil Servant, who makes a lot of money writing hard porn for a blue magazine. At the beginning he’s being mocked and pressed by the editor to give up the Civil Service (He’s the first of my characters to have more money than he needs).
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He’s been brought up by an Aunt and Uncle, simple decent people. The Aunt is dying of cancer in the city hospital, and he all the time through the action, till she dies, brings her in bottles of brandy, since she doesn’t trust “the auld drugs”. The Uncle comes up to see her now and again – he owns a garage – inarticulate with pain in the face of death. The pornographer has a place in the country. Only one of the women has been there, the one he’d hoped to marry. He goes to considerable lengths to prevent any one else going there, except his Uncle, and the Porn editor. On a level it’s the City and the Country clashing in the Psyche. After the failed idyll – a bid for sexual order – he meets – the opening of the novel in Time Present – a journalist – 38 (he’s 29) – she gets pregnant, refuses an abortion, puts pressure on him to marry. The chickens have come to roost. She’s basically an eternal full of brightness, says he’s sick. One of these terrible instincts without mind, all is black and white. She has the child in London while he attends the funeral in the country. He’s just come from London, a last bid on his part to get rid of the child – adoption – and she to get him to assume responsibility. And he’s beaten up by a protector. He’s black and blue for a wedding as well as for a funeral. McGahern concludes this summary with typically mordant wit: “What I haven’t worked out is the resolution but you can see it’s the usual hopeful brew”.30 And we see this ‘Country v the City’ opposition right from the novel’s opening via the discomfort of the country uncle arriving to visit his sister in hospital: He’d put himself completely in my hands and shambled by my side towards the taxi rank outside the station, the raincoat over his arm, hand gripping the brandy bottle. Only once did he speak on the way to the hospital, to remark on the stink of the Liffey as we crossed Butt Bridge. “The city would sometimes make you want to throw up,” he said.31 The unnamed pornographer goes to the Metropole ballroom on O’Connell Street where he first meets Josephine: Far below in O’Connell Street toy cars were streaming past, and most of the small figures on the pavements seemed somehow comic in their fixed determination to get to wherever they were going. […] It was no longer possible
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The Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture 2020
“Everywhere now there was the sense of the fair and the hunt and the racecourse.� The Metropole Ballroom in 1954, courtesy of Dublin City Library and Archive.
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to see onto the dance floor, the space at the head of the steps packed with men, and men on the steps below struggled to push through. Everywhere now there was the sense of the fair and the hunt and the racecourse.32 Where did The Pornographer come from? It is a world of city bedsits, dark bars and newspaper editors, caught perfectly in the following passage where the unnamed narrator meets up with his editor, the eccentric Maloney, in a Mary Street public house: I took the story in Friday evening to the Elbow Inn. Every Friday evening the people from the paper met there just after work. I took the story in instead of posting it because I wanted to borrow a car or van for the river trip. Maloney had his back to the counter when I came in, pulling on a cigar. Around him there were three or four different conversations going but they all formed a single and distinct whole from the rest of the bar, and people were continually circulating between the points of conversation. There was a tradition of wit on those Fridays which resulted in a killing and artificial tedium. Though they put out pornographic papers it would be difficult to tell them from any bank or insurance party except that their dress was perhaps that bit more attractively careless. Some of the girls said “Hello-stranger” to me between the smiles and handshakes but it had as much significance as “yours sincerely”. Maloney bought me a drink and I gave him the story.33 McGahern got to know this world partly through his friendship with the Dublin newspaperman, Joe Kennedy. Kennedy first met McGahern in a Drogheda café and boarding house when McGahern taught in the town in 1955. Kennedy was then a junior reporter on local newspaper The Argus and had digs in the boarding house. He joined the Irish Independent as a junior sub-editor shortly afterwards, remained for about a year, and then went to London where he freelanced with a news agency and a weekly paper before becoming production editor of an industrial magazine for the bakery industry. Kennedy returned to Dublin in 1960 to work with the Evening Herald where he stayed until 1973 working variously as a production sub-editor/feature writer; features editor; deputy editor, writing features entertainment and the arts. When The Barracks was published in 1963 Kennedy wrote to McGahern at Faber seeking an interview and the two men renewed acquaintances. In 1973 Kennedy was poached by the Sunday World as its first editor, staying for 5 years before leaving to freelance. Through Kennedy’s contacts McGahern published his short stories ‘The Stoat’ and ‘A Slip-up’ in Man Alive, a short-lived Irish men’s magazine and an important prompt for McGahern towards thinking about pornographic writing
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The Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture 2020
“I took the story in Friday evening to the Elbow Inn. Every Friday evening the people from the paper met there just after work.” The Elbow Inn 1971, courtesy of Dublin City Library and Archive.
and its nature. Alongside The Elbow Inn, among the places McGahern would meet Joe Kennedy and others were The Duke, The Palace, Graingers, Madigans of Moore Street, The Bachelor Inn (known colloquially as The Batch), The Oval and The Dark Horse on Talbot Street near Connolly Station, convenient for the train to his home station of Dromod. It would be wrong to give the impression that McGahern was a big drinker – he was not. But he did like Dublin and London pub life and was a connoisseur of the well run, quiet public house. Having returned to live in Leitrim in the mid-1970s, a few years later McGahern, along with his sister Margaret, bought a small house in Stoneybatter which he and Madeline used on their visits to the city. Writing to Frances Kiernan, his editor at The New Yorker, in March 1982, he describes the new place and brings the news from Ireland: The government fell here, and there was an election, an indecisive one, and it looks as if we’ll have a crowd of crooks in power.
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Nothing else much. Saw a delightful production of She Stoops to Conquer in The Abbey.34 A few solid Australian movies. Re-reading Turgenev (what a wonder he is) and digging odd bits of the garden, the style desultory. I grow sort of fond of Dublin. Where the house is suits me, in the unfashionable middle of the city, near the markets, and the river, the dirty Liffey, with the old churches and the brewery chimneys on the hill. On the other side stands the Zoo and the Main Lunatic Asylum – no nation needed it so much.35 This distinct affection for the capital was a feeling that remained throughout his life. The last time I saw John McGahern he was standing at the Luas stop on Abbey Street, anonymous, alone, a face in the crowd. I was on a tram going the other way and suppressed an urge to jump off and say hello. I wish I had acted on instinct: I would never see him again. Within 6 months he was no longer among us: John McGahern died in the city of his birth on 30 March 2006.
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The Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture 2020
E N D N OT ES 1
Colm Tóibín, The Trial of the Generals: Selected Journalism 19801990 (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1990), 97-98.
2
John McGahern e-mail to Stanley Van der Ziel (14 February 2006). This communication along with over a thousand other letters and notes from McGahern will be published in September 2021 as part of Frank Shovlin (ed.), The Letters of John McGahern (London: Faber and Faber).
3
John McGahern, The Leavetaking (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 14.
4
John McGahern, Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 217.
5
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1964), 74. A heavily marked up copy of this edition forms part of McGahern’s library.
6
John McGahern, The Pornographer (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 62-63.
7
McGahern, The Leavetaking, 85.
8
Ibid., 85-86.
9
Ibid., 14.
1 0 John McGahern, ‘Like All Other Men’, Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 201. 11 Ibid., 210. 12 McGahern, Memoir, 240. 13 John McGahern to Patrick Gregory (25 October 1964), Patrick Gregory papers, Special Collections, Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. 14 John McGahern, ‘Bank Holiday’, Creatures of the Earth, 309. 15 Ibid., 311-12. 16 Patrick Gregory to John McGahern (July 1965), in private hands. 17 Tom Corkery [Kevin Lehane], Tom Corkery’s Dublin (Dublin: Anvil Books, 1980), 13. 1 8 John McGahern, ‘A Bank of Non-Sequiturs: Tom Corkery’s Dublin’, Love of the World, ed. Stanley van der Ziel, int. Declan Kiberd (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 302. 19 Denis Sampson, Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 45.
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2 0 John McGahern, ‘Wheels’, Creatures of the Earth, 3. 2 1 McGahern, The Leavetaking, 30-31. 2 2 McGahern, The Leavetaking, 20. 2 3 John McGahern, ‘The Recruiting Officer’, Creatures of the Earth, 81. 24 John McGahern to Patrick Gregory (17 October 1965), Patrick Gregory papers, NUIG. 2 5 John McGahern to Patrick Gregory (April 1965), Patrick Gregory papers, NUIG. 26 John McGahern to Jimmy Swift (October 1965), in private hands. 27 John McGahern, ‘My Love, My Umbrella’, Creatures of the Earth, 58. 2 8 John McGahern, ‘Sierra Leone’, Creatures of the Earth, 211. 2 9 McGahern, The Pornographer, 105. 3 0 John McGahern to Jonathan Coleman (14 October 1975), in private hands. 3 1 McGahern, The Pornographer, 11-12. 3 2 Ibid., 31. 3 3 Ibid., 76. 3 4 Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer - The Mistakes of a Night, adapted by Tom Murphy, premiered at The Abbey on 11 February 1982 and ran to 41 performances. 3 5 McGahern’s house in Stoneybatter was very near Grangegorman psychiatric hospital.
This lecture uncovers the influence of Dublin on the life and work of the writer John McGahern. Whether pounding the pavements, visiting its bars and ballrooms, learning and teaching in its classrooms or talking with friends, Dublin and its inhabitants seeped into McGahern’s mind and his prose. Illustrated with passages from McGahern’s work, Frank Shovlin argues that Dublin shaped this writer at least as much as his rural habitat. John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and brought up in the West of Ireland. He was the author of six highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories. His novel Amongst Women, which won both the GPA and the Irish Times Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a four-part BBC television series. His work has appeared in anthologies and has been translated into many languages. His last book, Memoir, was published in 2005. McGahern died in Dublin on 30 March 2006.
J O H N T H O M AS G I L B E RT was born in Dublin on 23 January 1829, and
died there on 23 May 1898. Author of the influential three volume A history of the city of Dublin, published in 1854-59, he was a firm advocate of documenting the history of his native city using primary sources. His work on manuscripts relating to the city alerted him to the need for the preservation of Irish public records, many of which were in a neglected and vulnerable condition. He commenced a campaign which eventually led to the setting up of the Public Record Office in the Four Courts. He calendared the records of Dublin Corporation, which date from the twelfth century, and began the series of printed volumes Calendar of ancient records of Dublin. As an inspector for the Historical Manuscripts Commission, he examined the holdings in many of Ireland’s great houses and municipal councils. He prepared for the press and supervised the printing of Facsimiles of the national manuscripts of Ireland and Historic and municipal documents of Ireland A.D. 1172-1320, the latter was published as a volume in the Master of the Rolls series. His very valuable library of books and manuscripts relating to Dublin and Ireland was purchased by the then Dublin Corporation after his death and forms the nucleus of the special collections of Dublin City Libraries. To mark the centenary of John T. Gilbert’s death in 1998, Dublin City Council established an annual commemorative lecture series. The aim of the series is to celebrate the life and work of Gilbert, and the history of Dublin, the city whose past he wished to uncover and promote.
Published by Dublin City Libraries ISBN: 978-0-9500512-3-9