Love of the World: Essays (review)

In a posthumously published collection of short stories by John McGahern, Creatures of the Earth (2008), readers found a largely unknown story, "Love of the World," which dates from the 1990s and appeared in the English literary magazine, Granta. The story—a violent and disturbing tale of spousal abuse and murder—ranks among the most pessimistic of all of McGahern's works. Such darkness is almost nowhere to be seen in the collection of McGahern's essays with the same title. Editor Stanley van der Ziel has gathered together ninety-five of McGahern's essays, several previously unpublished, and organized them into six sections with extensive notes and references to their publication history. Declan Kiberd, who was a student of McGahern's at Belmont School for boys in the 1960s, introduces the collection.

McGahern's literary energy focused on the novels and short stories that stand today among the canonical works of twentieth-century Irish literature. His essays, Kiberd says, are "fugitives—occasional pieces done at the mercy of time and chance." Yet, over the course of four decades McGahern left a substantial body of nonfiction on a range of literary, personal, and social topics. Reading the more than 400 pages of McGahern's two-, three-, or four-page essays in long stretches is a wondrous experience. What emerges most clearly is the distinctive voice of John McGahern himself: unadorned, honest, and kind. But we also meet the experiences, people, and places that we know from their transformations into fiction, and generous analyses of authors and works that reveal McGahern's own concerns. The deep joy that McGahern took in the ordinary grows clear.

The first section, "Writing and the World," opens the collection with the few examples of McGahern's thoughts on writing, including his famous and revealing essay "The Image" delivered as a preface to a 1968 reading at the Rockefeller University. The essay stands as the author's clearest statement of what writing is and why he writes: "Art, "McGahern says, "is an attempt to create a world in which we can live . . . a world of the imagination over which we can reign, and by reign I mean to reflect purely on our situation through this created world of ours, this Medusa's mirror, allowing us to see and to celebrate even the totally intolerable."

The next section mingles travel, memoir, character studies, and reflection. Essays here speak of his love of his own County Leitrim—"the poor heart of . . . Ireland"—and the beauty of the West, where on a drive from Clifton to Cleggan "in one heart-stopping moment, sky and ocean seem to merge into one another and run all the way out above Cleggan Head to the islands." These essays quietly celebrate the unnoticed pub and the overlooked artist, the local reporter, and the view from a Trinity College window. They expose the same attention to character and setting apparent in his fiction, and distinguish themselves by their ensitivity to a changing world both inside and outside Ireland. With change comes loss, and McGahern is drawn to memorializing worlds that are already or will soon be gone: he writes of Leland Duncan's photographs of nineteenth-century Leitrim, of the Gallaghers who lived in the now-ruined cottage by a Leitrim lake, and of the last music hall in England. Each memory speaks "to us out of a world that has disappeared; but such is the magic and mystery of art that they do so with a richness and depth that life rarely gives. Time has become reflection."

The section "Autobiography, Society, History," offers the shaping moments of his life that will be familiar to readers of both his fiction and his 2005 Memoir, published in the United States as All Will Be Well: the free use of the Moroney's library when he was a boy, the control of the Cootehall parish priest, his broadening secondary education with the Presentation Brothers, and the...