Memoir is an outline of Ireland
By JOHN FREEMAN
Published March 17, 2006
By adulthood, the landscape of memory is often lush and deeply watered, but it is literally so for those in the west of Ireland. In County Leitrim, where novelist John McGahern grew up, the ground is so wet in some parts it cannot be cultivated. It simply stews in peaty bogs, which belch and sigh into the mist. Farmers raise sheep or young stock, which they sell off before the animals reach full age.
In McGahern's poignant new memoir, All Will Be Well, the contours of his world and those of his own memory become one, creating a story that is often beautiful but stagnant, singular yet oddly unconcerned with meeting readers on some of their own terms. There is no comparison between it and recent Irish-American memoirs, say by Frank McCourt or Larry Kirwan. No one would mistake McGahern for a raconteur.
He is, however, authentically and irrevocably of his place. Raised the eldest child of a poor family of Catholics in towns across Leitrim, McGahern grew up in the shadow of an overbearing, disciplinarian father and a sweet, but often sick mother. The family moved often and abruptly, and were separated from their mother for long stretches at a time. For a while they lived in the barracks of the police station, where McGahern's father was the name and face of the law.
If McGahern's father was one pillar of authority, God was the other. "Prayers were said each morning," McGahern writes. "Work and talk stopped in fields and houses and school and shop and the busy street at the first sound of the Angelus bell each day at noon. Every day closed with the rosary at night. The worlds to come, hell and heaven and purgatory and limbo, were closer and far more real than America or Australia and talked about almost daily as our future reality."
McGahern painted this world in grim, but memorable strokes in his 1963 novel, The Barracks, the story of a family inhabiting a nameless Irish village in the mid century. What's different here is how McGahern dramatizes reaching back to recall these events. Like Cormac McCarthy unleashed on Ireland, McGahern unspools great long threads of landscape description that reach back and back and back, as if writing their way toward a primordial place.
In one section, McGahern describes how the happiest moments of his childhood came when his mother got a brief reprieve from the cancer that eventually claimed her. "With her each morning we went up the cinder footpath to the little iron gate," McGahern recalls, "past the deep, dark quarry and across the railway bridge and up the hill by Mahon's shop to the school, and returned the same way in the evening."
All Will Be Well feels like a book that is trying to hold onto this moment too long. There are no chapter breaks and few textual pauses. The prose crowds around and at a certain point feels like it is trying to literally enforce McGahern's belief "that the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything."
In a sad sort of way, All Will Be Well becomes a much better book once McGahern's mother finally does die, for it releases in the prose all the anguish and grief and anger that McGahern seems loath to tarnish his memories with. He recalls how his father was so cheap they would boil cows' heads for dinner; how he tried to hire a housekeeper he could control, and then became offended when a very capable candidate felt emboldened to campaign for the higher calling of wife. "So, you think you're man enough for the job?" McGahern remembers his father saying, before he stormed out of the room.
Eventually, as so many writers do, McGahern had to go away from all this before coming back to it as material, and his description of this journey rounds out the book in a way common to many writers' memoirs. One can hardly blame McGahern for leaving. The genius and the sadness of All Will Be Well is that it makes us understand why, after all his father's emotional stinginess and stubborn austerity, he could wind up no place else on Earth.
Reviewer John Freeman is the president of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in New York.