A conversation with John McGahern

this program is made possible in part by a grant from the rouse company foundation the Howard County poetry literature Society presents the writing life writer and musician Terry winch talks with novelist and short story writer John McCarran hi my name is Terry winch welcome to the writing life it's my real pleasure today to be talking with John McGowan one of Ireland's most distinguished novelist and short story writers he's published five novels the most recent of which is amongst women and several collections of short stories that have just been released and published in this country as the collected stories by Knopf John welcome to how Coppola chose show one of the things I that occurred to me in reading your work is that although its critics often characterize your fiction as very dark and bleak and depicting a very kind of repressed world I found that there was an awful lot of humor although sometimes black humor in your work when I'd like to think there is two and of course there's a lot of confusion about optimistic and pessimistic it's taught that optimistic is good pessimistic is bad what I actually think that both optimism and pessimism are equally irrelevant to the writer that his job is to get at the facts of the truth and how those are perceived I think depends on the readers mood the writer can only bow in fact my favorite optimist is an American that jumped off the Empire State Building and the wind teeners heard him as he passed the 22nd floor say saying so far so good that's my favorite man do you intentionally write with humor in mind no I mean one writes by instinct in my case I often have it's an image or a color that's in my head for seven or eight years and I mean I eventually have to write it down to see what's there and when I do write it down often it goes away that there's nothing there and other times it grows into work but always what one thought was there in the beginning changes if it becomes work and one is just trying to get the words right and in order to get the words right you have to actually feel deeply and think clearly in order to find the right words for the world that you're trying to bring us bring together of course you go crazy if you thought you had to write a whole novel you write it a bit by bit and day by day you know as you get through life for instance when I was writing amongst women there was a scene for years in my head of a London Road and a to marry a married couple living above a park in summer the trees used to green and in winter then died away and you could see the children's swings inside the park and that was the beginning of amongst women and it was about 200 or 300 pages of the novel of the original novel set in London and then this family from Ireland came and pushed all that London material which was the beginning of the novel ouch and in fact the London material only got two or three pages in the final version of amongst women but you know that reminds me of something I did want to ask you about there there's a sense in your fiction of a lot of things left out in order to sort of leave in the most important things I think of you know not for instance in in amongst women we never hear a single word about the the the first wife of the main character Maura Norman basically it's a search for the image and you know the type of fiction writer that I am is that the image is central to the whole grammar of the work and it's basically trying out of their maths of feelings and thoughts and emotions to bring that image that moves us out into the light it could be a simple thing as a wedding ring that won't stay on tinning fingers that have to be searched for and it's actually searching among all the rubble of our lives in order to get that clear image that brings it together and I think that that the image is the first thing and that's held together by the music of the rhythm of the prose and that the last thing is the shape which is the most conscious part but but to find the image one feels and thinks and one works by instinct and that's actually brought to life by the rhythm that connects the images and it's only when the thing is finished that you put an overall intellectual shape on it mm-hmm what ISM and no point in putting a shape on dead crows it's like sending a dead man out to a wedding [Laughter] when the the dark was first published in 1965 it's kind of a well-known fact that the Irish censorship board banned the book a fight and that shortly thereafter you lost your job as a teacher in Dublin and I wonder if you could possibly reminisce a little bit about what that felt like oh it was very unpleasant because then we all that mattered and in a way is that the state and church had got together so it's almost like a theocracy I think I mean I have a great deal of affection and gratitude to the Catholic Church though I no longer belong to it but it was the dominating influence of my life and it was the early weather of my life and I think that year you know that you can't reject any of your life win that it all is part of love and the church was the early weather of that life but by coming together with an insecure state which it's amazing to think I young the state of Ireland is is I don't think it was good for either church or state and it made the church much more interested in power and less interested in spirituality and I think that unless any religion is spiritual it'll die even and a theocracy and of course I was due I was implied as a state teacher it was the church that had complete control of Education and the trans there they hired and fired the teachers of the state paid for them and inspected that they did the work well of course it was very grand I got fired by the Archbishop of Dublin himself as Dominic got fired by an archbishop and so did he actually call you and no he ordered the priest who was quite upset to fire me and it's very strange then the day I got fired into school I mean people think I wrote about in the leave-taking but in fact if you're Ross part and it's that's similar scene but it isn't isn't like it happened at all in fact I was the most composed person in the school and all the people I had talked with and had taught would moslim for eight or nine years they were quite upset and were making me in his cups of tea and asked him was the anything that they could do for me and it was like there's a Spanish film called executioner when the sexy the person to be executed is quite happy to costigan and have to drag the executioner there and they never gave any official expect the union press for a reason and all they got from the church authorities was mr. McGann is well aware really of the reason for his dismissal there was a very sort of a amusing story because then Becket and people like that in Paris were very well they didn't like it and they wanted to get a protest going against this and Becket first of all he said he'd have to read the book first and he read the book and liked it and he was the only person oddly enough that actually insisted that you're going to have to ask mr. Berger and as they want to protest mm-hm and I wrote back to tank the wall in Paris and I say how grateful I was to them but I thought I didn't want to any protest because I thought that it would honor the damn thing too much when I got a when the dark ball hit us afterwards was on band and I got this telegram radio and TV want you I actually refused to leave Paris and I thought it would be almost as disgraceful to make money on the damn thing in the end as to actually take any part in the beginning the sources that was ever got to an official explanation was it was a friend Rebecca called a doctor Leventhal who was the reader of French in Trinity College mm-hmm and was their rather charming man called professor O'Brien who's professor of French and Godwin they knew one another well who was headed the censorship board and dr. Levin got a little bit careless when he retired to Paris and he had in the previous week got his severe ticking off from the waiter at the Dom cafe for not actually buttoning his trousers properly and that he shouldn't be sitting out her a respectable cafe without the door a good establishments like that with the trousers in the shape that it was in and Quinn or Brian Kemp Paris Liv and Allison they all gone crazy in Ireland what in the name of God are you doing banning megahertz Bohr and a brilliant thing we can't have people running around Ireland with their flies eleven pal took it very personally that's as close as we got to have an official explanation which is a bit like that where the country runs itself is there still honor censorship or no and I think that was the last serious book go really to be banned and I think it's a it's a good job because it's a it's a self-defeating thing that shippings in something all that matters I think in writing is whether a ting is well written or not mmm-hmm and I actually believe that if a thing is well written and I just don't mean fancy writing that if it's written with intelligence and wood feeling it can't be in morrow that in fact that true writing is always moral mm-hmm and also it's also self-defeating because actually by banning something it's like sweets or alcohol you actually make it more attractive course and I think everybody under 25 read the back Derick on the sheet I think yeah you know and it became a kind of cult book so in fact what you're trying to forbid you know ban is actually you're actually making it more attractive so you're actually on doing what I set out to do in the beginning which isn't a very good idea even from somebody's point of view lack of censorship point of view do i I was thinking about this earlier today how in some ways I I think a lot of American writers would envy anyone writing something potent enough and relevant enough in their particular culture to get banned it's almost in some ways a badge of honor as you say it became very popular and it it certainly you know established you and I actually for the barracks when all this debt crisis that's really and establish an establishment which was a disgraceful position to be in 24 what am i know what the dark changed all that certainly I was the black beast and I lost my job and I had to work and scrounge for a living in London for four or five years and I actually hadn't wasn't able to write in London farts here for you maybe I wouldn't have written any time because out times in my life that I haven't been able to write was so I think I think that this I think it'd be very easy to repeat the same stuff over over again but I think that each new work for a writer is a new beginning is that a writer in a way as always a beginner I think when he ceases to be a beginner he's almost dead so that I think that you have to begin a new and renewal and I think areas of silence is as necessary as speech so that speech and silence I think are interdependent even in writing itself punctuation and paragraphs are forms of tact yeah and consequently forms of silence yeah do you write in according twenty sort of routine or do you just when you get a new when you get an idea for a book or when you do break that silence huh what happens I've often written for three or four months and found that it was not since I was writing yeah and the waste paper basket would have been my publisher yeah and then after a while you know whether it's going to be a short walk mainly because of its rhythm because a novel is like a large house it has looser rhythms and I mean the intensity that is nested for a short story will be intolerable over the length of a novel so this year and of course you know that once you have a novel under your hands you can say goodbye further the next four or five years because a novel is very unlike a story you mean you can write a story because of its shape and its sizes you can keep it all in your head you could write on a train or even walk in the street are not working but for a novel you really have to go to work every morning and seven days of the wings yeah and of course you know what gets done on the page is only about five percent of actually what was the novel mm-hmm and you know everything about those characters and those people and in fact by the end of a novel it's quite sad because they actually become more real than the people you're living with and you know what they're doing exactly in any situation and then you have to let them go and wait a while and you start against them is like moving to a new town could you read something for us well in the sense of writing is often you get certain passages that they lean on very like at the tuning fork in the schoolroom that something that you find is true and that you actually lean on these passages to try to raise the rest of the prose around it I wondered the passage says I did lean on a lot when I was writing amongst women is this passage about time and also deals with mourn who is there in a tyrant in one sense but he's actually reality is much more complicated like that because he sometimes can be very charming and his daughters especially love him and like all tyrants they're almost grateful for any relief so his charm is actually much more powerful than a person who might be all the time charming because he's not a charming man and the two girls come home and this little passage from Dublin because his their brother has finally left the house and they think that he's going to be very upset by this but much to the surprise he accepts it and this is the passage around that he drives them to the station at the end of this day and he says I'm thankful for all you did for Michael he surprised them by saying as the waited in the car outside the railway station the next evening were sorry we couldn't get him to come home more Anna mumbled I know you did your best that's all anybody in the family can do on the platform he kissed them as the Train drew in they told him they would be down again before very long the two sisters were silent as the train crossed the Shannon traveling through fields as the train was pulling into Drummond the small platform blackwood people like themselves returning to Dublin at the end of the weekend Mona said in an emotional voice no matter what this a daddy can be wonderful Sheila nodded her head in vigorous agreement when daddy's nice he's just great he's like no other person and even the small white stones under the lights on the station platform took on a special glow morn went out to the road and throws the iron gates under the you after returning with the car from the station he listened for the noise of the diesel train crossing the plains behind the house but it had already passed the light was beginning to fill but he did not want to go into the house in a methodically way he set out to walk his land filled by blind field he had not grown up on these fields but they felt to him as if he had he had bought them with the money he'd been given and leaving the army the small pension wasn't enough to live on but was working the fields he had turned it into a living he'd be his own man here he had thought and for the first time in his life he'd be away from people now he went from field to field no longer kept as well as there once where the hedges ragged stones fallen from the walls but he hardly needed the fields anymore it did not take much to keep rose and himself it was like grasping water to think how quickly the years had passed here there were nearly gone it was in the nature of things and yet it brought a sense of betrayal and anger of never having understood anything much instead of using the fields he sometimes felt as if the fields had used him soon they would be using someone else in his place it was unlikely to be either of his songs he tried to imagine someone running the place after he was gone could not be continued walking the fields like a man trying to see man is the time I leaned on that passage what's a wonderful passage that's really nice a lot of your ear of fiction is is set in rural Ireland and in an almost kind of timeless universe and I mean sometimes it feels like it could be the nineteenth century or the 1920s or contemporary times and I wonder what I mean Ireland seems to me to have changed a lot in the last 10 or 20 years I think of you - and Sinead O'Connor and the way in which Ireland has sort of seems to have entered contemporary life more than it did even a generation ago confusion about that because then primarily a writer writes out of this private world you know which is always spiritual and I think nothing survives in a way that hasn't a quality of life for of the spirit and I think that each of us have a have has a private world within ourselves and it's a world that others cannot see and it's the only difference between the reader and the writer is that you know that the writer has a talent like somebody who can sing or paint and he can actually bring dramatize that pride to his own private world which is the opposite of autobiography because it's actually a word shaped according to an order and a plan which be nice if life was that part that what it's a series of accidents and and I think that there that each person when he reads a book actually reads it with the same private world that the writer writes out of mm-hmm and I actually think that if I never know how a book is going to turn out when I begin it and I have a feeling that if I wasn't setting out again on a beginning and on a discovery is that there'd be no excitement for the reader to find out either and somehow you can't take that tension that's in the prose even though the arrangement of the words may not be very different because changed words and you actually changed the whole stress of them and the stress of the meaning but I do think that I really disliked the notion of the artist as hero I much prefer the notion of the artists astruc you know and I think it's another 19th century and the blog of his a mr. James Joyce has the left hand so far mm-hmm because I think that there's no difference except in talent between the writer and the reader and in fact a book is a dead thing until it comes to life in a reader's mind and if you have a thousand readers for the same book you won't have a thousand different books yeah yeah you've been compared with all kinds of people check off Joyce and a lot of influences of them have been cited for your your work although obviously you're a very unique writer have you had much involvement with American fiction do I mean I think that probably American writing is in that you know the England is like five or six different languages now yeah you know this well I think mr. optic said when you give amongst women the GP award he says that him that were all pupils in the school of the late British Empire and that he said very nicely that he taught that them Irish and Americans were the star pupils there and whatever what Irish I certainly think that you know some of the most exciting writing in English has come from America I mean Melville was one of my early influences and you know I still think Moby Dick an especially Bartleby the Scrivener is one of the greatest books ever written and it's as modern and as profound as Kafka in fact there's nothing different from Bartleby and the metamorphosis you know you know and this Ambrose Bierce is the person I like I like a woman writer called I saw in the recent Henry James biography that he liked a family Sarah Orne as you're doing what I think isn't appreciated enough here she was a European writer and because she just thought about that Marvis about this to the one place like Jane Austen in Maine I like Willa Cather very much Flannery O'Connor discharged you know mr. Lonelyhearts is a wonderful book so I asked you about the furniture and I mean now you have Alice Munro in Canada I mean you have an Australian literally of an Irish literature you have and and I think a wonderful American I like for Richard Ford stories I mean I think they're I think it's a very for very exciting time in America yeah I do John I'd like to really thank you for being here today it was a real pleasure talking with you and does a pleasure to be here great and thank you all for joining us on the writing life

Channel: hocopolitso

Views: 11,326

Rating: 4.9304347 out of 5

Keywords: John McGahern, Literature (Media Genre), Irish fiction, Irish novel, Amongst Women, The Dark, The Barracks

Id: 1t74XXQZEDk

Length: 25min 47sec (1547 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2015