The Letters of John McGahern ed. by Frank Shovlin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Letters of John McGahern ed. by Frank Shovlin Yen-Chi Wu The Letters of John McGahern, edited by Frank Shovlin (London: Faber and Faber, 2021, 880 p., hardcover, $40) In the 2005 documentary A Private World, John McGahern is seen in his Leitrim farmhouse, walking around the neighborhood with his dog, and reading books in his humble study room. These images seem to confirm a common perception of McGahern as a rural Irish writer, a wordsmith disengaged from the Dublin literary establishment. In his early career, when the controversy surrounding the banning of his second novel, The Dark (1965), placed him in the limelight, the young writer kept a low profile. In his later career, when the success of Amongst Women (1990) attracted renewed public attention, the mature writer stayed mostly at his country homestead, keeping publicity activities to a minimum. Partly because of his reticence, much of McGahern's life—private and professional—remained undisclosed. In this regard, The Letters of John McGahern, edited with admirable professionalism by Frank Shovlin, is an important contribution to McGahern scholarship, painting a fuller picture of McGahern as a literary man and a professional writer. The subjects of McGahern's literary relationships and biographical stories have attracted much critical attention, but most scholars focus on the writer's early career. John Killen's edited work, Dear Mr McLaverty (2006), is the first collection of McGahern's letters. While it gives us a glimpse of McGahern's epistolary style, it is restricted in scope, collecting only his correspondences with fellow writer Michael McLaverty. Similarly, Denis Sampson's Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist (2012) centers around the formative years of McGahern's writing career. Sampson's short biography shows us that McGahern was uninterested in the literary scenes of Dublin's Grafton Street—which he later dubbed "the Dublin pub crowd"—dominated by big personalities such as Patrick Kavanagh; nor was he comfortable in Mary Lavin's literary salon, which McLaverty encouraged him to attend. Reading Sampson's account, one is left with the [End Page 137] impression that McGahern was an outlier. McGahern's Memoir (2005)—published in the United States as All Will Be Well—does little to rectify this view of him as a lone writer. The memoir is more about his parents than himself. Most of his adult life, especially his later career, is skimped in the end. The Letters of John McGahern is thus a significant contribution: it places McGahern front and center, while the figures of his parents retreat to the background and his early and later careers receive equal attention. Among its achievements, the book complicates the common perception of McGahern as a recluse by showing the networks that he built around himself; it also shows a professional writer at work from the mid- to late twentieth century. In the introduction, Shovlin writes: "contrary to certain received views of him as an isolated gentleman farmer," McGahern "travelled a good deal and lived at many addresses in Ireland, England, the United States and France." McGahern's second wife, Madeline, is an American immigrant, and she owns properties in Paris. The couple vacationed in France regularly. Moreover, many of these relocations were facilitated by university fellowships. McGahern was a visiting fellow or writer-in-residence at numerous institutions outside Ireland, including Colgate University (where he returned more than once), University of Reading, Durham University, Newcastle University, and University of Victoria in Canada, among others. He formed good relationships with his colleagues in these institutes. Through their correspondences, we see McGahern working as a professional writer, engaged in literary events, giving lectures, and doing the odd editorial work. For instance, he proposed to edit a collection of Irish prose writings for Faber, which did not come to fruition; he also championed literary works that he admired—under his recommendation, Vintage reissued American author John Williams's Stoner (1965), which became a publishing sensation. McGahern might have kept his distance from the Dublin literary circle, but he was certainly not an isolated gentleman farmer; he had established himself in a global literary network. Similarly, although he shunned the big personalities in Dublin's literary pubs, he maintained good...