'Robins feeding with the sparrows': the Protestant 'Big House' in the fiction of John McGahern.(Critical Essay)

Just as certain motifs and observations recur in his novels and short stories, gaining strength and consolidation with each utterance, so too do the public pronouncements of John McGahern, such as they are, take form around the repetition of certain fundamental personal truths. Of these, McGahern's assertion that the Catholic Church was his 'first book' and his 'most important book' is arguably the most familiar, and the one which still retains the capacity to surprise. (1) It comes, after all, from a non-believer whose work explores an Ireland darker and more complex than that which the established church attempted to mould into being, and who suffered himself at the hands of that church following the publication of his second novel The Dark in 1965. (2) This statement is often accompanied by others which reinforce the sense that McGahern views his early encounter with Catholicism as having been close, in its form, to the act of reading; he admires the role played by the architecture and iconography of the church as the 'bibles of the poor', adding that, for these worshippers, Catholicism's aesthetic splendour 'wasn't ornament [but] was a function'. (3) Of his own youth, he has said that Catholic ceremonies provided 'the only notion of poetry', as well as a 'sense of mystery, of luxury, of beauty'. (4)

Having, then, provided him with his first experience of the word, the impact of Catholicism on McGahern's fiction is a powerful one, and certainly, as he writes in a 1991 essay on the genesis of his creative process, it was through an act of reading that he 'came to write'. (5) Ironically, however, this first step towards writing was simultaneously a step away from Catholicism, away from that 'first book'; or rather, away from the metaphorical incarnation of that first book towards one more literal.

For, poetic as it may have been in an abstract sense, in reality the church-bowed climate of his youth wanted little to do with what it perceived as the luxuries of the literary. 'There were few books in our house', McGahern has written, and just as few, he hints, in an Ireland 'guided by a philistine church', in which any activity considered indulgent or unnecessary met with the warning phrase, 'the devil finds work for idle hands'. Reading for pleasure was just such an activity; 'thought ... dangerous, like pure pleasure'. (6) Unsurprisingly, then, it was not in his own home, nor in Cootehall church, that the young McGahern came upon the books that sent him on his own journey to literature. Those he found in the library of a nearby Protestant house, the Big House inhabited by the 'gentle, eccentric' father and son Willy and Andy Moroney, (7) and in the works of a Protestant poet from the next county to the west:

 
   I think there is a peculiar moment in everybody's growing up 
   when there is that language change from being marvellous 
   stories, like movies, and marvellous songs ... you suddenly 
   realise that these things are about your own life ... I suppose 
   if it did happen with anybody it was with Yeats, because we used 
   to go to the sea in Sligo. I suppose Yeats gives me more pleasure 
   than any other writer, and more constant pleasure: to actually see 
   the names like Knocknarea and Queen Maeve's Grave, and 'He stood 
   among a crowd at Drumahair, his heart hung all upon a silken 
   dress'--to actually know that those placenames were places that 
   I knew like Boyle or Carrick-on-Shannon'. (8) 

Just like the first reading of Yeats, the time spent by McGahern 'lost' in the books of the Moroneys was bound up with that sensation deemed most contemptible from the Catholic perspective: 'I read for nothing but pleasure', he writes of those days. (9) And in this pleasure is the awareness of a deep subversion; from the 'silken dress' in the poem McGahern cites from Yeats ('The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland') to the hundreds of books in the Moroney library, to the house itself, with its ornate, unused front door, its huge orchard and outhouses, and to the beekeeping and astronomy by which the owners passed their days, everything about this life revelled in 'ornament'. But it did not do so at the expense of 'function'. Rather, in the Big House, ornament and function, style and purpose, beauty and utility existed as twin elements in the living of a life. Among the 'royal untidiness' of the Moroneys' house, between the barometer and the 'huge silent clock' (p.104), and in the occupations with which the Protestant men passed their days--Willy in beekeeping, Andy in astronomy--the emerging aesthetic consciousness of the young McGahern discovers the state of being which, in future, will guide his style as a writer; that 'complete absorption when all sense of time is lost', that perfect 'absence' in which the words themselves are all that count. 'To write', he says in an interview, 'one must have, as Yeats said, "that calm that is an ordered passion"'. (10) Such calm and such discipline of action inform the literary style which he will develop as his own; it is in the Big House, in which the possibility of writing was born for McGahern, that he finds the template for his aesthetic's very form. Interestingly, in a 1940 essay on the Big House, Elizabeth Bowen had pinpointed this precise confluence, drawing in fact on the writer, and the idea, set to become one of McGahern's chief stylistic influences as she argued that the Big House was like 'Flaubert's ideal book about nothing, sustain[ing] itself on itself by the inner force of its style'. (11) For McGahern, too, as is clear from his self-critical preface to the revised edition of The Leavetaking in 1982, the ideal book is a model of the attitude towards experience which he encountered in the Big House; the original book had failed by lacking, he writes, a certain 'distance', an 'inner formality or calm'. (12) It had failed, that is, to sustain itself on itself, turning instead to what McGahern calls 'self-expression', a preoccupation with the way things are rather than with the quality and form of the expression. It had failed to bring the writer to what he elsewhere calls 'the clear mirror that is style', and was thereby 'as worthless as mere egotism'. (13) It is my argument that McGahern's thematic engagements with the Protestant Big House have meaning not simply as 'genre pictures', as Otto Rauchbauer has described them, but as the embodiment, the vehicle, for the search which is at the heart of his fiction. (14) This is the search for the 'clearness' of style, for formal truth and calm, for what he has entitled, most simply and aptly, a system of 'literary manners'. (15) It is the fiction itself, then, that will provide the best illustration of this quest.

McGahern's short story 'Oldfashioned' is one of the few to deal directly with the relationship between the remnants of the Protestant Ascendancy and the new Ireland, and it throws interesting light on the relationship between his fiction and the ways of the Big House. The story illuminates perfectly that difference between 'self-expression' and what he establishes, in an essay drawing heavily on Flaubert, as expression that has value: one that rings rich and true. (16)

'Oldfashioned' seems to draw partly from McGahern's own experience in the Moroneys' house, in that it is the story of a young Catholic boy, the son of a Sergeant, who falls into friendship with a Protestant couple who have come back from England to renovate and occupy the 'decaying' parsonage in the locality (Collected Stories, p.251). Working in the Sinclairs' garden and sitting with them at their 'formal lunch' (p.256), he finds himself living as if in a dream. Significantly, it is in terms of the difference between true expression and its opposite that he understands the source of his fulfilment: