Review
“Powerful.... If you haven’t read McGahern, this is a good place to start, at the heart of a lyric grief and an embittering passion.”
—The New York Times Book Review
"Few have a story so full of pain and beauty as that of the revered Irish man of letters John McGahern."
—The Boston Globe
“McGahern seeks not to exploit his past but to understand it and to make it pertinent and meaningful to others.”
—The Washington Post Book World
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
John McGahern is the author of six highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories, and has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including an award from the Society of Authors, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Prix Ecureuil de Littérature Étrangère and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Amongst Women, which won both the GPA Book Award and the Irish Times Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in County Leitrim, Ireland.
From The Washington Post
Now in his early seventies, John McGahern was born and reared in rural Ireland. His family's circumstances were modest but not impoverished. His father, Frank, was a sergeant in the police, known as the Garda Force, and his mother, Sue, was a schoolteacher. The place in which their large family lived was primitive: "There was no running water then, other than in streams or rivers, no electricity, no TV, very few radios, and when newspapers were bought they were shared between houses. Each locality lived within its own small world." Escape was difficult, yet McGahern made it in the larger world. He became a teacher himself, then a writer of novels and stories to whom recognition came early. He lived in many places, but three decades ago, he returned with his new wife to settle down in a house surrounded by fields that "have hardly changed at all since I ran and played and worked in them as a boy."The obstacles he had to overcome in order to live as he wanted were far more formidable than place and circumstance. When he was 9 years old, his mother died after a long siege against breast cancer. Not merely was little Sean (as he was called) bereft at the loss of this kind, loving woman to whom he was utterly devoted, but suddenly he and his siblings had no cushion between themselves and their tyrannical, overbearing father. Frank McGahern "could be charming, even gallant, when he wanted," but he was utterly humorless and had a "calculating coldness." He could be brutal as well, and his little children were his victims:
"Young as we were, we were soon forming our own defences and adapting to the harsher laws of the world. We were very close together in years, and drew closer. Natural rivalries were suppressed. They couldn't be afforded. All our energies were concentrated on surviving under our father. . . . When there was a bad beating and the storm had died, we'd gather round whoever was beaten to comfort and affirm its unfairness, and it lessened our misery and gave strength to our anger. This gathering into a single band formed gradually over a number of years."
The children were sustained by each other and by the memory of their mother, who had given them "her practicality and quiet cheerfulness, and the unusual gift of making people feel better about themselves." She may not have been a saint, though she was deeply religious, but she had saint-like qualities that gave her children strength when they were most in need of it. She "often came to me as if in a dream," McGahern writes, a nearly palpable presence that enabled him to survive his father's many cruelties and in time to fight back against them.
From the above the reader will be tempted to conclude that All Will Be Well, though obviously well-written, is yet another memoir of childhood abuse and triumph over it. Nothing could be further from the case. Though that is indeed what happens here, as told by McGahern it bears no resemblance to the self-administered therapy undertaken by so many younger writers who seem to know nothing about life except their own childhoods and their real or imagined (or fabricated) agonies. McGahern understands that life is complicated and that no human being should be reduced to a caricature that serves the memoirist's purposes. His effort here is not to pillory his father but to understand him, to find the human being behind the petty despot.
"Your father is an actor," people often said to McGahern, and finally he realized the truth of that: "He was a man who acted out his life in parts and who lived out his life, as far as it was possible, in roles, nearly all of which he had abused while remaining protected within the role. He had set out as a gifted, difficult only child, both over-protected and spoiled, while remaining exposed to his mother's violent corrections." In his case, violence begot violence. His son believes that Frank McGahern was happiest when, well before his marriage, he fought for the Irish Republican Army, "where his propensity for violence was tempered by cold calculation and a keen sense of self-preservation." By contrast, his work with the Garda gave him little outlet -- "What work did they do? Occasionally they summonsed people for not having lights on their bicycles at night, for after-hours drinking, for assault, or trespass, owning unlicensed dogs, possessing fields of thistle, ragwort or dock" -- so he turned his fury on his children.
Like many other Irishmen of his day, Frank McGahern probably "married for sex." Because of "the power of the Church and the Church's teaching," sex outside marriage was forbidden: "There was no other way to have it. The result was usually the arrival of a large number of children in rapid succession. There were families in which the children were cherished, but many more where they were resented as unwanted mouths that had to be fed." Frank McGahern's family was one of these. Though Sue cherished her children, her husband vilified them: "We were made to feel a burden and to feel ashamed." In sudden rages, he treated the children as punching bags and scarcely lowered the level of violence when he was beating a girl rather than a boy.
By the time he was a young man himself, John McGahern "knew him better . . . than I knew any living person, and yet I felt I had never understood him, so changeable was he, so violent, so self-absorbed, so many-faced. If it is impossible to know oneself, since we cannot see ourselves as we are seen, then it may be almost as difficult to understand those close to us, whether that closeness be of enmity or love or their fluctuating tides." His relationship with his father did indeed fluctuate; there was love as well as hatred, times when the two were happy together and enjoyed each other's company, times when for whatever reason the father courted the son's affections and won them.
When Frank McGahern died, "the intensity of the conflicting emotions -- grief, loss, relief -- took me unawares," though even then "I cannot say I have fully understood him, and leave him now with God, or whatever truth or illusion or longing for meaning or comfort that word may represent." By contrast, no such conflict colors his memory of his mother. When she came back home after treatment for cancer, "it was as if my lost world was restored and made whole and given back," and the joy that he felt then remained with him ever after, a healing and restorative presence.
His mother hoped that he would become a priest and say Mass for her, but his life took a different direction. In his early teens, he discovered reading, "a strange and complete happiness when all sense of time is lost," much of which he did floating on the nearby river in a small boat. Gradually "a fantastical idea" formed in his mind: "Why take on any single life -- a priest, a soldier, teacher, doctor, airman -- if a writer could create all these people far more vividly? In that one life of the mind, the writer could live many lives and all of life. . . . Instead of being a priest of God, I would be the god of a small, vivid world. I must have had some sense of how outrageous and laughable this would appear to the world, because I told no one, but it did serve its first purpose -- it set me free."
McGahern has taken full advantage of that freedom. He has published six novels and four collections of short stories, received numerous honors and much well-deserved praise. He is regarded as one of Ireland's finest contemporary writers, not least because he writes about his native land with such clarity and honesty. His difficult childhood informs much of his work -- in particular his best-known novel, The Dark (1965) -- but in that as in this memoir, he seeks not to exploit his past but to understand it and to make it pertinent and meaningful to others. All Will Be Well is evidence enough of how well he has succeeded.
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The soil in Leitrim is poor, in places no more than an inch deep. Underneath is daub, a blue-grey modelling clay, or channel, a compacted gravel. Neither can absorb the heavy rainfall. Rich crops of rushes and wiry grasses keep the thin clay from being washed away.
The fields between the lakes are small, separated by thick hedges of whitethorn, ash, blackthorn, alder, sally, rowan, wild cherry, green oak, sycamore, and the lanes that link them under the Iron Mountains are narrow, often with high banks. The hedges are the glory of these small fields, especially when the hawthorn foams into streams of blossom each May and June. The sally is the first tree to green and the first to wither, and the rowan berries are an astonishing orange in the light from the lakes every September. These hedges are full of mice and insects and small birds, and sparrowhawks can be seen hunting all through the day. In their branches the wild woodbine and dog rose give off a deep fragrance in summer evenings, and on their banks grow the foxglove, the wild strawberry, primrose and fern and vetch among the crawling briars. The beaten pass the otter takes between the lakes can be traced along these banks and hedges, and in quiet places on the edge of the lakes are the little lawns speckled with fish bones and blue crayfish shells where the otter feeds and trains her young. Here and there surprising islands of rich green limestone are to be found. Among the rushes and wiry grasses also grow the wild orchid and the windflower. The very poorness of the soil saved these fields when old hedges and great trees were being levelled throughout Europe for factory farming, and, amazingly, amid unrelenting change, these fields have hardly changed at all since I ran and played and worked in them as a boy.
A maze of lanes link the houses that are scattered sparsely about these fields, and the lanes wander into one another like streams until they reach some main road. These narrow lanes are still in use. In places, the hedges that grow on the high banks along the lanes are so wild that the trees join and tangle above them to form a roof, and in the full leaf of summer it is like walking through a green tunnel pierced by vivid pinpoints of light.
I came back to live among these lanes thirty years ago. My wife and I were beginning our life together, and we thought we could make a bare living on these small fields and I would write. It was a time when we could have settled almost anywhere, and if she had not liked the place and the people we would have moved elsewhere. I, too, liked the place, but I was from these fields and my preference was less important.
A different view of these lanes and fields is stated by my father: “My eldest son has bought a snipe run in behind the Ivy Leaf Ballroom,” he wrote. In some ways, his description is accurate. The farm is small, a low hill between two lakes, and the soil is poor. My father would have seen it as a step down from the world of civil servants, teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen, tillage inspectors to which he belonged. Also, it was too close to where my mother’s relatives lived and where I had grown up with my mother. The very name of the Ivy Leaf Ballroom would have earned his disapproval.
A local man, Patsy Conboy, built it with money he made in America. He first called it Fenaghville—it was the forerunner of the Cloudlands and the Roselands—and later it became, more appropriately, the Ivy Leaf. All through the 1950s and into the 1960s he hired famous dance bands. In spite of being denounced from several pulpits, the ballroom prospered and Patsy Conboy became a local hero, dispensing much employment. People came by bus, by lorry, hackney car, horse trap, on bicycle and on foot to dance the night away. Couples met amid the spangled lights on the dusty dance floor and invited one another out to view the moon and take the beneficial air: “There wasn’t a haycock safe for a mile around in the month of July.” All the money Patsy Conboy made on the dancehall was lost in two less rooted ventures: a motorcycle track that turned into a quagmire as soon as it was used and an outdoor, unheated swimming pool amid the hundreds of small lakes and the uncertain weather. They were not rooted in the permanent need that made the ballroom such a success.
Patsy was more than able to hold his ground against the pulpits. When he was losing money digging the unheated swimming pool out of daub and channel, men turned up for work with letters from their priests stating that they had large families to support and should be employed. Patsy was unmoved: “My advice to you, Buster, is to dump the priest and put a cap on that oil well of yours. They have been capping such oil wells for years in America. Families are smaller and everybody is better off.”
He was living close by when we bought the snipe run. The Ivy Leaf was then a ruin, its curved iron roof rusted, its walls unpainted, and Patsy had gone blind. Nothing about Patsy or his ballroom or the snipe zigzagging above the rushes would have commended themselves to my father. We settled there and were happy. My relationship with these lanes and fields extended back to the very beginning of my life.
When I was three years old I used to walk a lane like these lanes to Lisacarn School with my mother. We lived with her and our grandmother, our father’s mother, in a small bungalow a mile outside the town of Ballinamore. Our father lived in the barracks twenty miles away in Cootehall, where he was sergeant. We spent the long school holidays with him in the barracks, and he came and went to the bungalow in his blue Baby Ford on annual holidays and the two days he had off in every month. Behind the bungalow was a steep rushy hill, and beside it a blacksmith’s forge. The bungalow which we rented must have been built for the blacksmith and was a little way up from the main road that ran to Swanlinbar and Enniskillen and the North. The short pass from the road was covered with clinkers from the forge. They crunched like grated teeth beneath the traffic of hoofs and wheels that came and went throughout the day. Hidden in trees and bushes on the other side of the main road was the lane that led to Lisacarn where my mother taught with Master Foran. Lisacarn had only a single room and the teachers faced one another when they taught their classes, the long benches arranged so that their pupils sat back to back, a clear space between the two sets of benches on the boarded floor. On the windowsill glowed the blue Mercator globe, and wild flowers were scattered in jamjars on the sills and all about the room. Unusual for the time, Master Foran, whose wife was also a teacher, owned a car, a big Model-T Ford, and in wet weather my mother and I waited under trees on the corner of the lane to be carried to the school. In good weather we always walked. There was a drinking pool for horses along the way, gates to houses, and the banks were covered with all kinds of wild flowers and vetches and wild strawberries. My mother named these flowers for me as we walked, and sometimes we stopped and picked them for the jamjars. I must have been extraordinarily happy walking that lane to school. There are many such lanes all around where I live, and in certain rare moments over the years while walking in these lanes I have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace, in which I feel that I can live forever. I suspect it is no more than the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss. These moments disappear as suddenly and as inexplicably as they come, and long before they can be recognized and placed.
I don’t think I learned anything at school in Lisacarn, though I had a copybook I was proud of. I was too young and spoiled, and spoiled further by the older girls who competed in mothering me during the school breaks. I remember the shame and rage when they carried me, kicking and crying, into the empty schoolroom to my mother. Everybody was laughing: I had sat on a nest of pismires on the bank until most of the nest was crawling inside my short trousers.
I am sure my mother took me with her because she loved me and because I had become a nuisance in the house. I had three sisters already, the twins Breedge and Rosaleen and the infant Margaret, not much more than three years spanning all four of us. Our grandmother had been a dressmaker and stood arrow-straight in her black dresses. My handsome father, who stood arrow-straight as well until he was old, was her only child. She had been a local beauty and was vain and boastful. She was forever running down the poor land of Leitrim and its poor-looking inhabitants, which must have done nothing for her popularity. It was true that my father’s relatives were tall and many were handsome: “When we went to your mother’s wedding and saw all those whoosins from Cavan—Smiths and Leddys and Bradys and McGaherns—we felt like scrunties off the mountain,” my Aunt Maggie told me once laughingly. The McGaherns set great store on looks and maleness and position. There was a threat of violence in them all, and some were not a little mad and none had tact. There was a wonderful-looking first cousin of my father’s, Tom Leddy, a guard like my father, who had also married a teacher. He was stationed at Glenfarne on the shores of Lough Melvin. Years later, out of the blue, he called soon after my father had remarried to find my stepmother alone in the house, a clever, plain-looking woman who adored my father and was both his slave and master. Having introduced himself forthrightly, he demanded, “Who are you? Are you the new housekeeper?” “I’m Frank’s wife,” she responded. “Frank’s wife,” he looked at her in amazement and broke ...
