John Mcgahern's Classical Style
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Liverpool Repository Touchstones: John McGahern’s Classical Style Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. — Matthew Arnold In memory of Seumas Gildea (1927-2015) i Table of Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Touching Stones: Matthew Arnold and the Canon 1 1 We Other Clerks: James Joyce and the Classical Temper 27 2 A Walking Mirror: Stendhal, Horace, Nietzsche 50 3 One lone paperback: Tolstoy and Religious Sensibility 69 4 Magic: The Centrality of W. B. Yeats 86 5 Instinct: Douglas Stewart and Sex 112 6 The fume of muscatel: Yeats's Ghosts 125 7 Bohemian Rhapsody: Patrick Kavanagh and Generation X 140 8 Absurdity: Camus comes to Clones 164 9 Aristocracy: Andrew Marvell, W. B. Yeats and the Curse of Cromwell 178 10 The Consolations of Nothingness: William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Prayer 195 11 Deliberate Happiness: W. B. Yeats and the Inner Life 216 12 Stranger in Paradise: Dante and Epic Style 234 Conclusion: What Then? 260 Bibliography 268 ii Acknowledgements My colleagues at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool have always been supportive throughout the composition of this study. In particular I want to thank Niall Carson who was the first person I floated the Touchstones idea with and whose good cheer made me believe this was worth doing even on the darker days; his comments on early drafts strengthened the book beyond measure. Kate Marsh, Professor of French Studies at Liverpool, as well as being a lover of great literature, was a terrific help to me on a range of matters from Stendhal's uncle to the subjunctive mood. The ever generous Whitney Standlee caught several embarrassing errors in the manuscript. Anthony Cond and all at Liverpool University Press have been great to work with: the whole operation is a model of efficiency without ever losing respect for the intricate timing of good scholarship. Madeline McGahern, who it has been my pleasure to become acquainted with while writing this book, kindly answered several questions for me and shared memories of her late husband's life and work. A Study Abroad Fellowship bestowed upon me by the Leverhulme Trust and a further visiting fellowship granted by the Moore Institute of the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) allowed me to spend a very enjoyable year working through John McGahern’s papers in the James Hardiman Library at NUIG – I would like to thank staff at the library, especially Kieran Hoare, Fergus Fahey and Margaret Hughes, for their assistance. While at Galway I had the good fortune to share an office with Deirdre Ní Chonghaile who was the most convivial of colleagues and from whom I learned iii much. Time spent with John Kenny at Galway’s Department of English taught me more about McGahern than any other scholarly source. Staff at the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool have been unfailingly helpful. Other McGahern scholars who have been an influence on my thinking and who I would like to thank include Denis Sampson, Stanley van der Ziel, Tom Walker, Richard Robinson, Eamon Maher, Adam Bargroff and Raymond Mullen. Much of this book was written in the magnificent Picton reading room of Liverpool's Central Library. There, surrounded by the great books of the world, I found a haven from the distracting chores of modern university life. As Touchstones is a book about books, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the profound effect the quiet, contemplative times in that beautiful monument to Victorian sensibility had on my mind. Less quiet is my daughter Beatrice who was born in the period that I was beginning to make serious inroads into Touchstones. Despite treating me to large doses of sleep deprivation, her presence in the world has been a joy and an inspiration. My son Frank and wife Maura have been wonderful and patient companions. I also owe an immeasurable debt to my parents, brothers and sister. Most importantly of all, this book and my mature admiration for McGahern have been nurtured by a group of close friends who gather annually at the graveside in the churchyard of Aughawillan. After paying our respects we go on to make a day of it in far flung western outposts. I like to think John McGahern would approve, for nobody knew better than him that the day is the whole show. iv Abbreviations There follows a list of John McGahern's work frequently referred to in abbreviated form throughout this book: AW Amongst Women B The Barracks COTE Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories CS The Collected Stories D The Dark GT Getting Through HG High Ground L The Leavetaking LOTW Love of the World: Essays, ed. Stanley van der Ziel, int. Declan Kiberd M Memoir N Nightlines P The Pornographer PD The Power of Darkness TT That They May Face the Rising Sun v Touching Stones: Matthew Arnold and the Canon The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. – Matthew Arnold, 'Dover Beach' 1 Declan Kiberd, John McGahern’s one time pupil and later one of his more astute critics, tells a story in the introduction to McGahern’s posthumously collected essays that illustrates nicely the Leitrim writer’s reverence for the canon, the classic tradition of English literature: McGahern was a slow, ardent reader and his relaxed but vigilant attention was a kind of prayer. A friend who called once upon him found an anthology of poetry open at Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. Months later, that friend returned, only to find the volume open at the same page. ‘I’m still looking at it,’ McGahern laughed, ‘except that now it has started to look back at me.’1 That careful reading, that same fixed attention that McGahern brought to Arnold in order to unlock the meaning of ‘Dover Beach’ is required of every reader who comes to McGahern’s work in pursuit of truth and clarity. McGahern was acutely conscious of the artificiality of art. He was fond of quoting Gustave Flaubert, one of his most consistently present artistic exemplars, on the subject of artistic intercession, stating in the moving television documentary made towards the end of his life, A Private World, that the artist should be like God in nature: everywhere present but nowhere visible. This combination of overarching authorial power with continuous invisibility is consistently achieved by McGahern across his works and makes him a difficult writer to critique. It is a quality of style assigned by Paolo Vivante, a favourite classical scholar of McGahern's, to the work of Homer: "The smoothness of a pervasive and self-consistent style gives us the illusion of a work of 1 Declan Kiberd, ‘Introduction’, in John McGahern, Love of the World: Essays, ed. Stanley van der Ziel, int. Declan Kiberd (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), xxii. 2 art as impersonal as nature itself".2 Where do McGahern’s sentences come from? What are they made of? What is their inspiration? What, if anything, are they meant to do? There are times when his prose is so seamless that it appears to be without parentage, sprung from the page as if by magic, as if it were ‘natural’. But there are other moments in McGahern's writing where, however briefly, the reader can see some stitching in the cloth, moments in which his prose gives up a secret – sometimes deliberately, sometimes not – as to its origins. Close reading is described memorably by Tom Paulin as a process of "finding something hidden in the daylight". It is a process that is "at times obsessive, a matter of trusting hunches and intuitions, and weighing particular words that for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent seem to stick."3 Harold Bloom says something similar in The Anxiety of Influence: "Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem".4 To hide one's influences, to cover one's traces, is not merely to play some clever game à la Joyce's comment about keeping the professors guessing, but to give greater depth and profundity to one's work. This study will concentrate on a selection of such moments. Much is hidden, and it is my purpose to reveal some of the veiled allusions to texts and writers admired by McGahern, to 2 Paolo Vivante, The Homeric Imagination: A Study of Homer's Poetic Perception of Reality (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1970), 7. 3 Tom Paulin, Crusoe's Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), xii. 4 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, second ed.