‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ by John McGahern

McGahern began his relationship with the New Review as early as its second issue, when it published an extract from his brilliant novel, The Leavetaking. It is this self-contained piece from a year later, however, that I really love.

Composed, like its title, of three parts, it starts with the accidental death of an Irish worker on a London building site. Then it moves to County Leitrim, to the moment when the man’s family learn of their loss. Then it’s several weeks later, and we’re at a dance held to raise funds for the family, who have bankrupted themselves flying their boy over from England. All this, which says so much about Anglo-Irish relations at that time, and manages to be first shocking, then devastating, then heartwarming – all this in just a few pages. It’s a masterpiece of concision.

First published in the New Review, October 1975. Collected in Getting Through, Faber & Faber, 1978

‘Korea’ by John McGahern

What could be more idyllic than a father and son spending a summer’s day fishing? Plenty of things, it turns out, as is usually the case in a McGahern story, especially one about father-son relationships. No quality time to be had in this case. For one thing, the fishing is not about catching a mess of trout to fry up for a leisurely campfire meal under the stars; it’s about making enough extra money to supplement the bare subsistence income from a small family farm. The fish are oily eels supplied to London restaurants, and even the poor man’s white fish is reserved for selling in local village. And to make things worse, the father is in danger of losing his commercial fishing license to make way for a growing tourist trade of holiday fisherman who don’t like competition.

Money is so tight that the father suggests the son consider emigrating to America, “the land of opportunity,” unlike Ireland, “a poky place … where all’s there’s room for is to make holes in pints of porter.” The father says he’ll “scrape” together money for fare somehow. The son says he’ll think about it. He prefers to wait for results of his school exams, which will dictate his future options, or lack thereof. The father doesn’t have much use of “highfalutin” learning. Regardless, both know this is their last summer working together on the river, and that tension hangs over the story. (Sorry, no names provided, only nameless characters negotiating a timeless business of family obligations and welfare.)

McGahern scaffolds this conflict with two short, searing stories about war, starting with the father’s traumatic experience as POW in the 1919 Anglo-Irish War of Independence, when he witnessed two executions of comrades, barely escaping a similar fate by luck of the draw. He reveals this experience only at the prodding of the son, and later regrets having spoken of it, cutting the son off when he attempts to bring it up again because reliving the war “disturbed me no end. … And the most I think is that if I’d conducted my own wars, and let the fool country fend for itself, I’d be much better off today. I don’t want to talk about it.” The only thing he does want to talk about is the son going to America.

The second story concerns a former local boy – who does have a name: Luke Moran – who went to America, was drafted, and died fighting in Korea. In compensation, the family gets a hero’s funeral for beloved son Luke and a $10,000 insurance payment from U.S. government, in addition to monthly $250 payments Luke earned while on duty. (Naming “Luke” makes him appear more alive in death than our father-son duo, who appear more dead in life.) A veritable lottery, even if the price of tickets was steep.

While preparing for another night on the river, the son learns of these events by overhearing a conversation between his father and a neighbor, and realizes the father’s ulterior motive for shipping him off to America: betting the farm, literally, on prospects of the son getting drafted and suffering a similar fate: “In the darkness of the lavatory between the boxes of crawling worms before we set the night line for the eels I knew my youth had ended.” The father’s “personal wars” have been passed on to the son, who conducts his own private ambush by declining the father’s offer to emigrate, acknowledging, “It’ll be my own funeral,” if things don’t work out for him in Ireland.

The casualties of this family war are piling up, and the roiling mixture of the son’s guilt, love, and murderous thoughts for his father in the final paragraph buckles my knees every time I read this story.

First published in The Atlantic, October 1969, and available to read here. Collected in Nightlines, Faber & Faber, 1970; also in John McGahern: The Collected Stories, Vintage, 1992, and Irish Short Stories, The Folio Society, 1999, which includes a powerful set of illustrations, one for each story, by Irish printmaker David R. Rooney. Picked by Tom McGohey. Tom taught Composition and directed The Writing Center at Wake Forest University for 20 years. He has published essays in Fourth Genre, Sport Literate, and Thread. Two of his essays have been cited as “Notable Essays” in Best American Essays.

‘Gold Watch’ by John McGahern

“It was happiness such as I’d never known,” proclaims the narrator during this stunning story’s airy opening. He and an old girlfriend (unnamed throughout; “beautiful as ever”) have been reunited on a “lazy Saturday morning” in Dublin. The pair soon move into a flat. The narrator buys “fruit or wine or a bowl and, once, a copper pan”. They marry quietly – “two vergers as witnesses” – in a Franciscan church down by the quay. But romantic love – all bliss and ease and freedom – is very much a counterpoint here, a foil to the story’s real centre of gravity – the dismal, grinding pull of the narrator’s family home.

“‘And yet you keep going back to the old place?’
’That’s true. I have to face that now. That way I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel anything.’
I knew myself too well. There was more caution than any love or charity in my habitual going home.”

The meetings between father, son, and stepmother Rose, in the “old place” re-enact age-old psychological battles (this unhappy domestic triangle make strained appearances in other stories too). McGahern portrays – with a touch at once light and grave – each stage of the internecine struggle: the vituperative aggressions, the “false heartiness” of the truces, the doleful silent retreats. And the story’s final, remarkable scene – hinging upon the gift of a gold watch – sees the terrible, eerie transubstantiation of the father’s cruelty into both physical and symbolic form.

First published in The New Yorker, 17 March 1980, and collected in High Ground and Other Stories, Faber & Faber, 1985, and Collected Stories, Faber & Faber, 2014

‘High Ground’ by John McGahern

The disconcerting ending of ‘High Ground’ exemplifies Moran the narrator’s uncertainty and indecision over whether or not he will take up Regan’s offer to contrive to install him as the school principal. There’s an open-endedness in the conclusion, yet a hint that the narrator will decline the offer. He prefers the objectivity of high ground, the kind of landscape he has observed Regan against as they talk and as he is able penetrate Regan’s motives. Moran sees the machinations of Regan, the local TD [equivalent of MP in the Irish Parliament – Ed.] from a distance, and will not deign to become entangled with them or local politics, although this is never made explicit. Here are the elements of many McGahern stories: land, quarrel, manliness personified in different ways; and, behind this, the difficulties of love and where it is found. I love McGahern’s writing, novel and stories, though I think he excels in the latter. I love the darkly strangeness, the physicality of the countryside, his delight in nature in all its form and the sheer musicality of his prose. It truly sings. He is a master of the form and one only continues to learn from him.

First published in The New Yorker, March 1982, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in High Ground and Other Stories, Faber, 1985, and Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories, Faber, 2006

‘Lavin’ by John McGahern

Lavin, an elderly blacksmith, ‘close to the poorhouse’, in a rural Irish backwater, where most of McGahern’s brilliant stories are set, is the local paedophile. He is taunted by the village kids, who are both frightened and fascinated by him. What’s most clever and disturbing about this story is that McGahern makes you sympathise with Lavin, who was once young and handsome but who had ‘taken no interest in girls though he could have had his pick’. You sympathise with a life wasted in hard work; as the narrator remembers ‘…hardly a day passes but a picture of Lavin comes to trouble me: it is of him when he was young, and, they said, handsome, gathering the scattered tools at nightfall in a clean wheatfield after the others had gone drinking or to change for the dances’.

(from The Collected Stories, Faber, 1992)