John McGahern: Much stranger than fiction

Amid the plethora of popular memoirs recalling experiences of abused childhood, John McGahern's Memoir (to be published by Faber in September) will stand out as being in a quite different league.

In the book, the very distinguished Irish writer, Booker-shortlisted for his novel Amongst Women, reveals in characteristically fine and restrained prose a shocking story: that of growing up in the west of Ireland in the 1940s, losing his beloved mother to breast cancer, and being left with his unpredictable, extremely violent police sergeant father, a man capable of beating his children so severely that on more than one occasion he came close to killing them.

That autobiographical themes have fed into McGahern's fiction is clear--his first novel, The Barracks, depicts a police sergeant's wife dying of cancer, while Amongst Women is the story of a profoundly dominating father's effect on his young daughters. But the writer says that producing a non-fiction memoir was a "very strange" experience because the material he had to work with was so much stranger than anything he could get away with in fiction.

"A lot of life isn't believable--it's only believable because it happens," he explains, on a visit to London from his home, a small farm in county Leitrim. "Fiction always has to be believable, so one is always inventing and imagining reality. There are two episodes from my father's life that I wrote as short stories and they were never satisfactory--but they work perfectly in the memoir."

Love and hate

It is only now, at the age of 70, that he is ready to write about his childhood, he says. In part, the book is a tribute to the gentle mother who died when he was nine, and about whom he writes very movingly, expressing all the simplicity of his absolute love for her as a young boy.

Her influence has continued in his life, he explains. "I have had these very strange experiences over the years, when I'd be walking in certain lanes and I get an extraordinary happiness and peace, a feeling that one is eternal. Immediately you try to look at it, it disappears. It took me a long time to trace it back to when I used to walk to school with my mother, along similar lanes. Then I know that consciously and unconsciously, my mother has been with me all my life."

The book is also an attempt to solve the riddle of the father he never understood, who in fact "refused to be understood", as he puts it. "Almost as a fiction writer, I see my mother as light and love, and that my father's world was a world of violence and darkness."

Some episodes he had blocked from his mind; his sisters had to remind him of the time Breedge, one of the girls, fell off her bicycle and was beaten by their father with a spade.

And McGahern is fascinated by the strange paradoxes of his father's psyche: how he wouldn't visit his wife when she was dying, yet organised such a big, extravagant gravestone that he trespassed on surrounding plots; or how he never resented spending money on the children's clothes, "because people would see the clothes," yet hated the expense of feeding the children, and so kept them half-starved. They would be up each week as he read out from a small notebook how many pounds of butter or loaves of bread they had consumed.

Falling foul of authority

His father was able to continue unchecked because of the acceptance of authority in those times, McGahern says. "In that paternalistic mishmash, it began with God the father, then there was the priest, the doctor, the schoolteacher, the head of police--and he was the head of police."

McGahern has had his own fair share of conflicts with established authority. When his second novel The Dark was banned (it contained masturbation scenes) in the 1960s, after offending the Archbishop of Dublin, he lost his living as a primary school teacher. "Since it was the priests, no one would ever appoint me again."

He was forced to find employment in Britain and America, and when he returned to Ireland worked on his small farm to supplement his writing income. "It's about 50 acres. We have five cows, they are pets really."

Until Amongst Women was published, he was known within his local community as a farmer who wrote, rather than as a writer who farmed, he says. "They used to ask me whether there was much money in this writing business, and I used to reassure them that there wasn't.

"I actually enjoy farm work, especially if it helps me avoid writing. But since Amongst Women became so well known, I'm thought of as a writer now. It was in a way more pleasant being a farmer, because one had a function in the community. I think it's much more pleasant not to stand out. There's a phrase in country speech that 'the shady places are the safest'."