Authors: John Waters
17
John McGahern
‘R
eal life,’ John McGahern once observed, ‘is too thin to be art.’ He was talking about the necessity to reimagine reality before it can be turned into fiction. His novels contained elements of autobiography, but they were not autobiographical. Yet, his final book, written at the very end of his life, was his own autobiography,
Memoir
. Among its many interesting insights is the confirmation it provides of what had previously been a woolly impression concerning the extent of McGahern’s reworking of the detail of his own life into his stories.
It could plausibly be argued that
Memoir
was McGahern’s single literary mistake. By chronicling the literal reality from which he had forged so much of his fiction, it exposes the undercarriage of his imagination to a scrutiny that may ultimately risk damage to his reputation in the eyes of future generations unencumbered by the present-day deference to certain artists by virtue of the scale of their reputations. Before the publication of
Memoir
, McGahern’s other books had a total life of their own, set free from literal connections by the nature of the fictional contract. After
Memoir
, they become something else – not fact, but no longer quite fiction either. By setting down the raw material from which his essential life-perspectives were forged, McGahern left a hostage to fortune: an apparently faithful record of factual events for literary critics and academics to pore over.
Because of the deference problem, it has not been remarked upon that there is something extremely odd about
Memoir
. Although dominated by McGahern’s memories of his parents – the mother who died when he was a child and the father with whom he carried on a disturbed relationship into adulthood –
Memoir
has a feeling of being artistically incomplete. Several times in the book McGahern states that he never understood his father, Frank McGahern, a Garda sergeant cast as a brooding, violent presence in the lives of his wife and children. Actually, it’s clear that the young McGahern disliked, perhaps even hated, his father, and that this dislike or hatred was not in any degree dissipated by the writing of
Memoir
. There is no moment of grace between father and son that might be deemed the cathartic moment of the book. At no point does the author seem to reflect on this in a detached manner. It is as though he is utterly unaware of it.
There are many ethical issues arising from the modern fad for biography-as-art. The fashioning of literal literature out of the raw reality of real human lives, especially of those – generally males – who become so blackened in the reporting as to leave in the world only a negative impression, is a deeply dubious phenomenon. The modern view is that anyone has a right to tell his own story: the truth must out, and let the consequences take care of themselves. This is ‘art’, after all.
But there is also a question of justice. Usually it is the case that individuals damaged by such literatures are, by virtue of being deceased, in no position to rebut any of the charges. No human being can claim to have a monopoly on the truth about another. But no human being exists only in the perspective of another. Even when relationships are fraught, there are always two sides to the story. It is a heavy responsibility, then, when a writer decides to put on record what may turn out to be the sole account of the existence of another – named – human being.
John McGahern’s reputation as one of the English language’s greatest novelists is well deserved. He is correctly regarded as a giant of fiction writing, an astute observer of the subtext and nuance of human communication, with a poet’s eye for the human dilemma at the point of contact with reality. But the artist has a duty to tear his vision from the prism of a culture and see clearly into the lies a society may be insisting upon telling for all kinds of warped reasons.
Memoir
raises the awkward possibility that, in certain respects, John McGahern was unable to do this.
Since the aftermath of the Famines of the 1840s, Irish society has been run by the diktats of an ideology that elevated the mother to the status of put-upon Madonna, and reduced the father to that of brooding menace on the periphery of family life. This crude act of social engineering was effected by the Catholic Church, for the purpose of controlling the somewhat licentious appetites of the Irish and preventing a repetition of the calamity that their libertine habits had caused to befall them. After independence, this initiative gained a new impetus. In a society that had been traumatized twice – by famine and by civil war – the Church usurped the power of the civil authority and assumed, in effect, the role of moral government, recruiting the mother in the home as its agent of control, and with her assistance reducing the father to a barely tolerated provider devoid of moral authority. This resulted in a crude caricature of masculinity that became normalized in Irish society to the point of invisibility: the silent, passive-aggressive father and the saintly, martyred mother. Adding outrage to injury, having banished the father to the fields or the fair, the culture then laughably interpreted the rage born of his marginalization as the roar of the oppressor.
Such stereotypes abound in the work of John McGahern – for example Mahoney in
The Dark
and Moran in
Amongst Women
– seething, pent-up beasts whose emotional retardation is rarely examined but merely exists, like the hawthorns or the meadow blowing in the breeze. In their own way, then, these stories add to the accumulation of prejudice concerning the psychology of the Irish male: creating a further sense that silence or violence is his primary mode of expression.
This stereotype has been deeply damaging in Irish culture, and continues to have baneful consequences for men in a society that, despite being 50 per cent male, appears to have no capacity to articulate the reality of male experience.
To be fair, McGahern would have been the first to repudiate the idea that he had a role as a social historian. He once told the
Guardian
that he was suspicious of all ideologies: ‘Joyce called them those big words which make us unhappy. I think they have very little to do with life and everything to do with the struggle for power.’
Yes, but this surely places an added burden on the artist to be alert to the way ideologies can infect reality and inflict great pain on human beings. To simply say that one is not interested in ideology is to say that life can somehow remain immune to its effects. This is a cop-out greatly favoured by artists and writers in today’s Ireland.
The reception of
Memoir
was universally and unambiguously glowing, and to a considerable extent deservedly. But it was striking that these reviews, and indeed virtually all the commentary that has attended McGahern’s life and work, appeared oblivious of the extent to which the writer had harmonized with the discordances of a deeply damaged culture. In the wake of his death in 2006 there was, for example, much of the usual guff about McGahern’s depiction of the ‘patriarchal reality of Irish society’. By this analysis, Moran in
Amongst Women
(seemingly more than loosely based on McGahern’s father) is the tyrant king who rules over all within his gaze. Just as it is clear from
Memoir
that McGahern had little interest in the roots or nature of his father’s demons, so also is it obvious that in his writing of fiction he accepted at face value many of the flimsiest myths of his society. But, caught between the hyper-visible power of the Church and the invisible power of an undeclared matriarchy, Moran’s rage was really the rage of the impotent.
Memoir
suggests that the explanation for McGahern’s myopia was that he himself had not yet begun to see into the total truth of his own father. Whether he should have written the book or not is beside the point: more interesting is what all this tells us about how a culture manages to recruit the wounded among its spokespersons to preserve a convenient version of itself long after this has become outdated or even irrelevant. Writers, who should be challenging and dissenting, very often contribute to the malign weave of a culture by virtue of a failure properly to interrogate their own experiences and backstories. For who, if not the artist, will describe things other than as they seem?
18
Mike Murphy
T
here has been a tendency, since the meltdown of the Irish economy in mid-2008, to look backwards for reference points to the 1980s. Some commentators have been trying to depict the 1980s as a dark and forbidding landscape, much in the way that, a generation ago, people tried to present the 1950s as having happened in black-and-white. This is bad history and completely unfair to a time when, by virtue of innocence, lack of expectation and long familiarity with hardship, the effects of financial privation were not accorded the repetitive, gnawing emphasis they are today.
Although things were certainly bad back then, there was not the constant sense of foreboding there has been this time around. Most people recognized that the breadth of human life embraces more than economics. There was a general sense that not only would Ireland survive the recession, but that the future was broadly promising. People got on with things, often against odds that would nowadays cause people to lie down on the roadside and die.
Among the reasons for this underlying sense of relative positivity was that there wasn’t this constant commentary, from early morning until midnight, telling us how awful everything was. Back in the 1980s, it was possible to get up in the morning and go about your business with the radio on, without constantly being impelled to slit your wrists. In those days, Radio One opened up with a music and chat programme, presented by Mike Murphy, which ran until ten, interrupted at eight and nine by news bulletins and
It Says in the Papers
.
Mike had the ability to give you a sense of heroism about being up and about in the morning. He had a comedy slot called ‘yowza yowza’ and he bantered between the farming news and the weather (there were no traffic problems in those days), and played shite music, which is what everyone expected first thing in the morning.
After the nine o’clock news, he did a long interview until ten, often with a well-known personality or public figure. This was usually interesting, and deeply serious, because Murphy was interested in people and how they ticked, and unafraid of getting into what people thought and felt about life in general. Then we had
The Gay Byrne Hour
, which was occasionally as good as it was later ‘remembered’, and after that John Bowman presented
Day by Day
, bringing all the current affairs stories that nowadays we get assaulted with on
Morning Ireland
before we can even get out of bed. It was a matter of tone and perspective; the whole morning package seeming to be rooted in a more balanced perception of reality. There was less depression then, far fewer suicides and no phone-ins.
There are a good few people who could be blamed for what has happened to the Irish sense of perspective, but the most obvious is Mike Murphy. He was still a relatively young man in the early 1990s when he turned his back on broadcasting and went off to get rich for himself in property development. Had he not done so, it is likely that the current disposition of the Irish people would be a great deal sunnier than it is.
Murphy was an exotic character. There was a story going around at one time that he had failed his Leaving Cert. This was untrue. Mike had never taken the Leaving Cert – it was the Inter he failed. Also a failed actor, he became one of Ireland’s most successful broadcasters in an era when there was some serious competition. He didn’t seem to have an obvious talent, except, perhaps, the ability to make fun of his lack of obvious talents, but somehow the sum of his incompetence added up to something uniquely wonderful. He could make people laugh without being offensive. And yet, when the occasion demanded it, he could address himself to serious matters. He was the ideal man to wake you up in the morning, because he refused to get too heavy about anything until he was satisfied that his listeners were wide awake. Then he introduced his daily guest – perhaps a politician, artist, writer, or environmentalist. Once the people of Ireland had had their porridge, Mike seemed to think, they were ready for anything.
But then Mike fecked it all there and fecked off for himself. The people of Ireland were left to the tender mercies of David Hanly and David Davin-Power, saying ‘Good Morning’ in unison, like the Two Ronnies, in a way that put your teeth on edge. The jokes in the morning became fewer and farther between. Mike moved to lunchtime, but eventually threw his hat at it altogether.
Nobody could quite believe that Mike was serious about jacking it all in. It was true that he had not been regarded as quite the equal of Gaybo, but he had his own following and was as loved by the public as it is possible to be. But Mike was adamant and never once looked back.
There is an episode that some observers believe was a key factor in his decision to quit. In the spring of 1985, an article appeared in
Magill
magazine that caused many people to gasp in horror. It was written by somebody called Donal Whelan, and it was a vicious article about Mike. It praised Mike’s radio programme and sense of humour, but complained that, latterly, something had been happening to Mike. He had, said Mr Whelan, ‘discovered art’. Mr Whelan berated and jeered at Mike for his new-found interest in art, which it was alleged had brought about the destruction of a glorious career. Mike, he felt, had become pretentious and had lost his chirpiness. ‘The man who knew no fear,’ wrote Mr Whelan, ‘the broadcaster as happy as the day is long, who joked and jeered until the cows came home, has been looking at paintings and reading books. When he sits in the studio he carries the burden of these things with him. He wants to be serious and enlightening and it is awful to watch him try.’
It was a cruel and nasty article, but it was also, in a certain two-dimensional sense, accurate. It seemed to foretell, by looking deeply into the core of the problem with Mike Murphy, a tragedy that would soon befall the entire nation: we would all succumb to seriousness and ponderousness.