Heart of Darkness

John McGahern has been aired on The Blob because banned for scandalizing the theocracy which was running Ireland at the time. He was not the most prolific of the pantheon of Irish writers but his short list of novels sold well [if not in the Republic]and won literary prizes. I've read a few; coming back for more even though they tend to black-dog rather than pink-fluffy. Djerzi, one of my oldest pals came to stay for a tuthree days and he insisted I read McGahern's 'Memoir' which was published 20 years ago. We're both a bit institutionalized so I can obey orders. Our local part-time mini-library had a copy, so I added Memoir to our pile of something for the weekend and sacked out for most of a rainy Sunday to read it.

McGahern grew up in Co Leitrim, the oldest of a family of seven created by a school teacher and her Garda Sergeant husband. She contributed sparkle, ideas, cookies and unconditional love; he contributed the starting teaspoonful and a pervasive bullying sense of his own importance. The family would have been larger if the poor woman hadn't sickened and died, from breast cancer, when she was 42 and John/Sean was 10.  Even before the mother died, the household supported a succession of young girls to help with the children and housework. Boys were never taught how to sew on a button, let alone how to get ingredients together and cook a nutritious meal. After the mother's death, the Help was required to step into her place with assistance from any girl-childer as they became competent (before their time in a foreshortened childhood?). The rest of their childhoods were endured in the Garda Barracks in Cootehall [R].

I'm a generation younger than McGahern and grew up in a different country. When I was 6/7, my sister and I attended a primary school in Portsmouth. Towards the end of the one academic year we spent there, I boasted that I had never been beaten. Aha hubris, in that final fortnight, for trifling transgressions I was hit with a stick, by an adult, on five (5!) separate occasions. Over the next 12 years until I was old enough to vote [in 1972] that form of punishment was completely scrumpled up and thrown away . . . in England. The McGahern siblings witnessed the normal [cripes! for some definitions of normal] round of beatings in school. Some teachers more depraved than others. But at home they were subjected to savage beatings with slaps, fists, sticks . . . a shovel - by their father. They protected each other as best they could and got to read the room and act together to minimize the unpredictable unstable assaults.

McGahern the writer spend the rest of his life trying to understand, and excuse, and come to terms with the psychic destruction lashed out by the damaged savage who engendered him.

Many years later, he goes to visit with the longest-serving of the Helps. "Katie's husband was over six feet, slow and sure of movement, remarkably handsome and strong; he belonged to that generation of men who had no consciousness of their good looks other than as a form of strength". Which says much more about McGahern than the man he's just met for the first time. It's a [clunk clunk] feature of the book that the narrator wants us to know if such-an-one is symmetrical or not. I don't look in a mirror from one year's end to the other, but I know men who do: maybe assessing people's value as function of how attractive they are is part of your normality. But for me, at this point in my development as a human, it's [clunk clunk] with frankly racist / sexist /otherist overtones.

Another quote "She was walking with us past Brady's pool and Brady's house, and the house where the Mahon brother's lived, past the deep dark quarry, and over the railway bridge and up the hill past Mahon's shop to the school".  One of McGahern's (more attractive) stylistic devices is to use this sentence repeatedly through the book. As if in old age he is playing and re-playing a silent home-movie clip of the together times before Loss flushed the happiness from his young life.

The John McGahern Barracks is a community voluntary project - tours, archives, hot-desk hub and seminar rooms. Barracks, like for soldiers? Last week.