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Book Notes: Enright Honors McGahern

By Tom Deignan

Fall 2024

October 18, 2024 by Leave a Comment

"The Pornographer" by John McGahern.

Next year will mark six decades since celebrated Irish novelist and short story writer John McGahern was censored and banned in his own country.

Now, another celebrated writer – Anne Enright, Ireland’s first-ever “laureate” for fiction – is commemorating McGahern’s life and career with fond memories as well as new revelations.

Back in 1965, McGahern wrote The Dark, which explored a range of taboo topics, such as masturbation and sexual abuse. This was only McGahern’s second novel, following The Barracks (1963), about a middle-aged woman who marries a widowed policeman with three children. The woman’s life is threatened by cancer, something the writer knew all too well. His mother succumbed to the disease when he was nine. His father was a police sergeant in the Garda Síochána.

But once The Dark was published, not only was McGahern’s work deemed obscene, he was fired from his job as a Dublin teacher, and his union did little to fight authorities.

John McGahern by © Patrick Swift. 1960

None of that prevented McGahern from becoming “the preeminent Irish writer of his generation,” Enright notes in her introduction to a new edition of a later McGahern book, provocatively titled The Pornographer.

“After The Dark was banned, (Ireland’s) general secretary told McGahern he had turned himself into ‘a hopeless case entirely’ by marrying a ‘foreign’ woman’ (she was Finnish),” Enright notes.

This turns out to be just one of several scandals and secrets McGahern lived with.

That’s one reason why the 1979 book has such a bold title – to taunt those who might have seen him as a “dirty” writer.”

The Pornographer is sexual but hardly pornographic. According to Enright, it’s more about “the difference between smutty fantasy and a real encounter.”

There is also a secret “love child” in the story, a detail few paid much attention to in the late 1970s.

After McGahern died in 2006, Enright notes, the author “wanted no pomp and circumstance, no singing or sorrow. He wanted a simple ceremony and to be buried in the old traditional ways of the country.”

And yet, Enright adds: “A week after the funeral I heard a rumor that his son had been in the congregation. This story was both striking – I did not know he had a son – and possibly false.”

The touching story of McGahern’s life and death, his writing and family, can be found in Enright’s introduction to the new edition of The Pornographer from New York Review Books.

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