Customer Reviews

All Will Be Well: A Memoir

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Though McGahern is not well known in the United States, his books were very influential in Irish literature. His early work, "The Dark", a family saga including an abusive father and a seductive priest, was banned in Ireland in the 1950's. He was forced to find work in London and the United States before returning to Ireland.

This memoir, particularly focusing on his childhood years is strangely flat in places, but where it illuminates is in his relationship to his mother, and, in the true Irish fashion; his relationship to her MEMORY. She takes on a quietly iconic status, so that, even though she died when he was 8 years old, her influence is all over his writing.

He reminds one of another great Irish writer of an earlier era, Patrick Kavanaugh. Both deal with rural Ireland of bygone times. Both are past-haunted. There is none of the squalid, almost humourous tone of Frank McCourt. McGahern has more dignity. The manipulative nature of his relationship with his father is also a dominant theme. His father was an "old" Irish male, a rigid police sergeant who lived in the Gardai barracks most of his married life. The clash of wills and ideals is palpable between the two men. McGahern was transformed by his writing into something which transcended his tortured youth.

I heard of his death today. Perhaps he will receive his worldwide recognition postumously. He certainly deserves it.

McGahern's memoir is a lovely block of tender writing. It's the kind of writing you can smell. He talks of lanes and fields and the way he describes them make you nostrils flutter. It's strong stuff at times and you can see where some of his fictional characters (especially Moran) had their birth. It's a intricate look into this man's life. It's real and there's no egos here just stark realism.

I have read all of McGahern's work, and sadly this is the last such exactingly prepared book that I presume will appear under his name. Any reader of The Dark, The Leavetaking, or By the Lake (aka That They May Face the Rising Sun) will find much here to document how McG hacked out from his own servitude much of the raw material for his justly praised prose constructions. Most deeply rooted in the straitened years of the 40s and 50s excavated here are seeds of what blossomed into his first novel The Barracks and his later success Amongst Women. The tone, shared with his fiction, often is shadowed more than sunny. This does make for a challenging read in parts, notably as the book goes on and McG battles with his father after the death (halfway through the book, when the author was nine) of his beloved mother.

The grimness of great stretches of this memoir makes it sobering for any naive reader expecting a rural idyll romanticized. I would have edited more of the micro-detail that McG presents, as not all of it is germane to his larger arc, although he labors long in providing the meticulous array of details and spare dialogue to pace his vignettes. McG is known for his concerted rewritings and revisions of his work before publication. Perhaps his early death, soon after this memoir appeared, may account for the hastier (only by comparison with his other works, spaced out often over decades rather than years) appearance of "All Will be Well." Intriguing to find that the British version that appeared first is titled only "Memoir;" terse contrast with the more poetic and much more fitting "That They May Face the Rising Sun" title abroad of his final novel that for Americans was redubbed the less evocative if also enigmatic "By the Lake."

The lack of breaks in the autobiography deepens the feeling of unrelenting struggle engaged in by the narrator. You feel more trapped in the telling of his difficult coming of age. Beauty and sorrow tumble one after the other. You never know which will appear next as you read--he recreates the surprises and terrors of anyone's life, no matter, as he says, how softly led. "I am sure it is from these days that I take the belief that the best of life is lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything." (87)

But the book is lopsided. Presumably intentionally, for perhaps McGahern anticipated a sequel? However, as half the book takes place only up to his ninth year, the remaining couple of decades rush by with alarming brevity. The author does not have intimations of being such until he's late in his teens, and this occurs first on p. 217 of a 290 pp. account.

Necessarily and deliberately, McG's young adulthood and the start of his career is compressed into much less space. I would have preferred much more attention to his maturation as a writer than the extreme emphasis paid his early formation. I understand the polarity of his parental positions and how they marked irreperably McG's own soul, but if more follow-through had been given to how he wrested himself free of the restraints of his family and his nation would have made for a more memorable, and also less suddenly fast-forwarded, depiction of himself. (This portrait of the artist as a young man conveys shades of Stephen Dedalus at the end of Portrait; like Stephen, McG too returns, however, to Ireland after overseas self-exile has not fully freed the artistic imagination from its first inspiration.) Yet, McGahern knows that he cannot stand apart smugly from his inherited legacy, in its joys and its sorrows, and he comes to accept this if not find comfort in it later in his telling.

Despite its uneven pace, this story will endure as an self-penned and as always in such books, a prematurely engraved epitaph. McGahern's courage in standing up for himself against the powers of Church, School, and State makes for engrossing if often reticently told autobiography. Refusing the comforts of faith as he grows, he nonetheless is fair-minded and balanced in crediting the good that the Church instilled in him during very dark years. Never concealing the sins, but noticing too the comforts, he looks at himself with as much detachment as he does others, no easy feat, considering what we now know would have been his last couple of years (dying at seventy of cancer)as he wrote this memoir.

He hides as much as he exposes, the privilege of any teller of one's own tale. This is recommended for those already familiar with his fiction, as his early publications find only bare mention here, but a grounding in his harsh and bracing, and later more nuanced and forgiving, tales is necessary if you wish to savor all the textures here evident, poignantly, in the last two pages. He spent a decade on By the Lake, and his craft is never hurried or unmeditated. As with his last novel, the conclusion to "All Will Be Well" ends this intense narrative elegantly and powerfully.

This story, so beautifully told, of McGahern's family is like a microcosm of Ireland in the 1940s and 50s: the rough indifference of his callous father alongside the selfless warmth of his mother. So it was in Ireland during that time: an era marked on the one hand by the cruel exclusion of those who did not buckle to the rigid demands of society, in contrast to much altruism and a shared sense of decency.

How McGahern didn't emerge a bitter man from his childhood (the latter part of which was dominated by his father) is beyond me. But it seems that he chose to build on the strengths inherited from his mother and to disregard the rest.

He writes beautifully. His descriptions of the rituals of country life, the ordinary events and day-to-day struggles, are conveyed in a way that manages to be both simple and sublime. About his mother he writes with honesty and heartbreaking grace. It is a book to keep and reread.

This is the kind of book that ligers on in the memory long after the reader has finished the final page. It's a very vivid portrait of a deeply devoted sons love for his mother only for her to die and for authors life to be dominated by a bullying insensitive rural policeman father in a tiny hamlet with no crime to tackle. This truly is a wonderful book that is enriching and life affirming.

I am only a few years younger than John McGahern and my maternal grandparents grew up in County Leitrim prior to coming to the US in the early 1890's. McGahern chose to focus on his early years for most of this book because, in many ways, it is an ode to his mother. The author's Mom was an educated woman who taught in the local schools, but sadly, she died from cancer when the author was 9 years of age. From then on, he and his 4 younger siblings were raised by several "hired girls" and his father, who was a Sargeant in the Garda (the Irish Republic national police).

McGahern, who died around the time this book was published, was an excellent writer who captures what life in County Leitrim was like as he was growing up in the late 30's and 40'. He describes how he rode his little bicycle for miles at a very young age in order to spend the weekend with his father where he was stationed. We are also told how his demanding father had him cutting turf from the bog from an early age and that his father seldom, if ever, uttered a work of praise or encouragement to him or his siblings.

Later in the book, we learn that some of McGahern's writings were banned in his native country. It is to his credit, that McGahern never engages in tirades against his tyrannical father or the Catholic Church in Ireland. However, from this book and his writings in general, it is clear that he stood up to both his father and the Church.

John McGahern's memoir summarises the leitmotifs of his fictional works, where recurring themes of abused children, put-upon wives, and dominating, "old-school" husbands are echoed here. Indeed, one can trace the genesis of the themes of his novels from the people, places, and circumstances that provide the unity of his prose in "All Will Be Well".

And the kind of man and writer into which McGahern matured is elegantly presented in this quote (p. 87):

"I am sure it is from those days that I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything".