All Will Be Well: A Memoir (review)

Irish autobiography has a long and storied tradition. One thinks of the panoramic sweep of Yeats's Autobiographies, purposely titled in the plural to reflect the various personas that great poet evolved over his career in the assiduous pursuit of his art, or of the relatively narrow, but nonetheless searching focus of Tomás Ó Criomhtháin's An tOileánach (The Islandman), which recounts his time living on the Blasket Islands. John McGahern's All Will Be Well promises to join this tradition, as one of the most memorable and best regarded of Irish autobiographies—in part because McGahern, who died on March 30, 2006, holds his own life and that of his family up to the same extended scrutiny that he places his fictional characters under in his devastatingly powerful novels and short fiction.

One quibble to begin: why must the book be retitled for American audiences with the Hallmark Card-sounding moniker, All Will Be Well, instead of the title of the Irish edition, Memoir? Do the Irish and British really consider us so chirpingly optimistic? McGahern himself was never so; the title change puts a superficial gloss of concord on a life often marked by discord. The most charitable interpretation is that the American editors thought that McGahern's survival and emergence as one of the world's—not just Ireland's—leading writers, justifies the change. But the generic-sounding and original title befits the sort of life McGahern lived: unassuming, courageous, and particular, yet universal. Memoir suggests that this could have been any life, though, a somewhat misleading notion when we consider that McGahern's life was singular in both its beauties and ugliness, its fidelities and betrayals. His fiction always constituted an exercise in truth-telling, whether about the pettiness of small-town life or about the sexual abuse committed by some priests in the Irish church; it is no wonder that All Will Be Will chronicles his own life and that of his family with a fierce regard for the truth.

That truth is grounded in the particular comforts of the landscape that frame the beginning and end of the memoir: the nearly enclosed lanes of rural County Leitrim that he walked as a boy with his mother and then later, as a man, when he returned there in the mid-1970s after teaching in Dublin and living abroad. This landscape is nearly inseparable from his memories of his mother, upon whom the fictional Elizabeth Reegan was partially based in The Barracks (1963), his first published novel. Reegan dies too young, as did McGahern's mother Susan. If Amongst Women (1990), a novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize, enabled McGahern to finally exorcise his great fear and loathing of his bullying father, All Will Be Well—begun after the author was diagnosed with cancer—allowed him to convey his great affection for his mother, whose love for her young children sustained them through repeated physical and verbal abuse by their father after her death from cancer when young Sean, as he was then known, was nine.

These country lanes of Leitrim have hedges on their banks "that are so wild that the trees join and tangle above them to form a roof, and in the full leaf of summer it is like walking through a green tunnel pierced by vivid poinpoints of light." They seemed to have functioned as surrogate mothers, with their womb-like roofs of trees and hedge walls, protecting and enclosing both the young boy Sean and the grown writer John. McGahern notes at the beginning of the memoir that "in certain rare moments over the years while walking in these lanes I have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace, in which I feel that I can live forever." He concludes by noting that when he...