Aubrey Malone
The famous Irish author had a different type of religion, writes Aubrey Malone
John McGahern had well documented problems with the Church, and with his faith, but he always struck me as having a holy sense about him, even a monastic one. It was in his simple bearing, his self-effacing nature, in the frugality of his lifestyle.
He retained this right through his life. Though a non-believer at the time of his death in 2006, he wanted a Catholic funeral. Indeed, his funeral Mass was a concelebrated one.
Last year I had the arrogance to write a biography of him. I didn’t feel qualified for the task. I wasn’t a close friend of his, merely an acquaintance, and neither am I a McGahern scholar, like those who’ve written academic books on him. But I still undertook it.
I had interviewed him in 1990 apropos his Booker-Prize nominated book Amongst Women and we kept in contact by phone and in letters afterwards.
He never played the role of ‘the writer’ to me. “How are you?” he would always say anytime I rang him, as if I was the important one.
We both shared roots in Co. Roscommon. My mother was from there, and he knew some of my relatives. He was always more interested in personal talk than what he called ‘rubbish’ about books.
And yet he was a visiting professor of literature to many American universities. I have often found in life that those of the greatest intelligence are the ones who play it down most.
Eminences
Likewise with religion. Those who have the deepest thoughts in this regard are not the ones who go about the place “like eminences”, as he once put it to me, but those who downplay their spirituality.
“The Bible was my first book,” he said, “and it was my most important one.” Even when he lost his teaching job in the 60s due to events in his private life, he never held any bitterness towards the Church, which ‘hired and fired’ at the time.
He spent some years as a supply teacher in England afterwards. When he came back to Leitrim to live in the early 1970s he formed many friendships with priests.
These he kept up all his life, meeting them at social events and treating them exactly as he always did even when the country was beset with anti-Catholic feeling.
It was the Irish Catholic’s Mary Kenny who broke the news of John’s return to Ireland in her capacity as an Irish Independent columnist. She writes about meeting John in her recently-published book The Way We Were: Catholic Ireland Since 1922 published by Columba Press.
John wasn’t initially pleased at this news coming out as he wanted to keep his head down but I think he was glad afterwards. As I say in my book, “The prodigal son didn’t come home to eat the fatted calf but to raise it.” His new life was as a small freehold farmer.
“When I was young,” he said once, “Heaven was as real a place to me as Canada or Australia. I felt if I climbed up beyond the top branch of the highest tree I would eventually reach it. Religion was the weather of my childhood.”
I sometimes feel that when people lose the belief in heaven as a physical place, they lose their religion as well. In other words they throw the baby out with the bathwater.
When John stopped believing in ‘apple pie in the sky when you die,’ or the man with the white beard on his Olympian throne as the ‘penny Catechism’ instruction of John’s youth may have intimated, they go through a similar transition.
Likewise, when members of the clergy fail through human error, this has also led to people leaving their religion. John was against this.
Opinion
In his later years he felt the tide had swung too far against priests in popular opinion after the abuse scandals broke.
This despite the fact that he believed John Charles MacQuaid, the archbishop of Dublin at the time of his sacking, was firmly behind it. I asked him once if he didn’t know he was walking into a lion’s den by marrying in a registry office and publishing The Dark, a book which dealt with many sexual issues which were taboo at the time.
“I didn’t think about these things,” he replied, “All I was concerned with was getting the words right.” In some ways, literature became his religion in his adulthood.
His mother had wanted him to be a priest. He promised her he would honour that wish when she was dying of cancer.
John was just ten at the time, and fervently praying that she would survive. When she didn’t, he felt God betrayed him.
Again, there’s a faultline in this kind of thinking. One can’t go from ‘God betrayed me’ to ‘God doesn’t exist.’ This seemed to be at least a part of what was going on with him.
Instead of taking religious vows, he entered what he came to call the ‘second priesthood,’ ie. the teaching profession. When I met him in 1990 I told him my mother had also wanted me to be a priest.
Two members of my family had already entered seminaries as I was growing up. Like John, I ‘settled’ for the ‘second priesthood’ of teaching.
Routines
I entered St Patrick’s Training college in Drumcondra approximately 20 years after he did but many of the same routines were in place. The system had relaxed somewhat but I still felt a church-like aura in the building, perhaps because of the stained glass on the windows.
I interviewed John a second time on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 2004. He was ill with cancer by now but he didn’t tell me. Two years later he was gone from us.
His legacy lives on. In nearly all of his books there’s a huge sense of the sacramental, of the excitement of ritual he experienced upon stepping into a church as a boy. I don’t think this ever abated, even when it became transmuted into his literary ambitions.
The writer-cum-film director Neil Jordan, who was a pupil of his in Clontarf, once said, “I just thought of him as a teacher when I was in his class. Today he’s almost like an archbishop.”
Aubrey Malone’s biography of John McGahern, Leitrim Observed, is currently on sale, published by Aureus Press at €20.