John McGahern: Quotations

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From the novels
The Barracks (1963): ‘She [Elizabeth] was determined to grasp at a life of her own desiring, no longer content to drag through with her repetitive days, neither happy nor unhappy, merely passing them in the wearying spirit of service; and the more the calls of duty tried to tie her down to this life, the more intolerably burdened it became.’ (Faber edn., 1963; p.14.) ‘The level glare stained the red roadway on the water to the navigation signs and the grass of the river meadows was a low tangle of green and white light. It came so violently to the window that she’d turn away, spelling the word [“beautiful”] Willie had asked her in inarticulate wonder.’ (p.53.) ‘She could no longer feel the sticky dampness of the stuff she was kneading with her hands or taste it if she touched it with her tongue or see it other than through a clear covering of glass - it felt as if the surfaces of her body had turned dead. She was existing far within the recesses of the dead walls and gaping out in mute horror.’ (p.57?)

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The Barracks (1963) [Elizabeth on her husband:] ‘There had never been any real understanding between them, but was there ever such between people? He’d have none of the big questions, what do you think of life or the relationships between people or any of the other things that have no real answers? He trusted all that to the priests as he trusted a sick body to the doctors and kept whatever observances were laid down as long as they didn’t clash with his own passions.’ (p.54.) ‘It all came round again if you managed to survive long enough.’ (p.56.) ‘He had forced her to see farther than marrying for a house and position and children. She had seen the happy solution of her whole world in love and mutual sympathy [...] She’d never be able to dream of happiness again.’ (p.76.) ‘A total love was the only way she had of approaching towards the frightful fulfilment of being resonant with her situation, and this was her whole terror and longing’ (p.78.)

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The Barracks (1963): ‘She did not want an ensured imitation of other people’s lives any more, she wanted her own, and with the wild greed of youth. Safe examples that had gone before were no use - her mother and father and the nurses about her - she could break her way out of the whole set-up [...]’; ‘The impossible became turned by fierce desire into the possible, the whole world was beginning again as it always has to do when a single human being discovers his or her uniqueness, everything becoming strange and vital and wondrous in this the only moment of real innocence, when after having slept for ever in the habits of other livers, suddenly, one morning, the first morning of the world, she had woken up to herself.’ (p.72; var. p.87.)

The Barracks (1963): ‘A simple trap this half-hour of peace and quiet was, she'd have had more peace if she’d kept busy to the point of physical breaking-strain. She couldn't ever hope to get an ordered vision on her life. Things were changing, going out of her control, grinding remorselessly forward with every passing moment.’ (Faber Edn. 2002; p.50.)

The Barracks (1963): ‘It was so beautiful when she let up the blinds first thing that “Jesus Christ”, softly was all she was able to articulate as she looked out and up the river to to the woods across the lake, black with the leaves fallen except the red rust of the beech trees, the withered reeds standing pale and sharp as bamboo rods at the edges of the water.’ (p.170.) [The foregoing both quoted in Paula McDonald, PG Dip./MA Essay, UUC 2011.)

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The Barracks (1963): ‘There were no answers [...] in the end all things were lost in contemplation.’ (p.137.) ‘the door of love’ (p.152.) ‘Nothing could be decided here. She was just passing through. She had come to life out of mystery, and would return, it surrounded her life, it safely held it as by hands; she’d return into that which she could not know; she’d be consumed at last in whatever meaning her life had. here she had none, none but to be, which in acceptance must surely be to love. There’d be no searching for meaning, she must surely grow into meaning as she grew into love, there was that or nothing and she couldn’t lose.’ (p.179) [The foregoing variously quoted in Jürgen Kamm, ‘John McGahern’ 1990, pp.177-79 and Conor Doris, UG Diss., UUC 2003.]

See also quotations Douglas Dunn [op. cit.,], p.211: ‘the nowhere of herself’; ‘It seemed as a person grew older that the unknowable reality, God, was the one thing you could believe or disbelieve in with safety, it met you with imponderable silence [...]’

The Barracks (1963; Faber Edn. 2002): ‘[Reegan] donned the uniform of the Garda Siochana and swore to preserve the peace of the Irish Free State when it was declared in 1920.&; (p.109.) ‘Sam Browne too, the one time it was dangerous to wear it in this balls of a country. And I wore it to command - men, soldiers, and not to motor around to see if a few harmless poor bastards of policemen would lick me fat arse, while I shit about law and order.’ (p.231.)

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The Dark (1965): [Sharing a bed with his father:] ‘It was impossible to lie close. The loathing was too great. He lay far out on the bed’s edge, but as Mahoney moved in his sleep, all the clothes began to be dragged away, gathering in a huge ball around Mahoney, till only a sheet was left to cover him out on the bed’s edge. it was bitterly cold and the loathing had soon to perish in the cold. He had to draw close to the sleeping heap of warmth.’ (p.21.) ‘[A]n authority that was simply a state of mind, a calmness even in the face of the turmoil of your own passing [...] The moment of death was the one real moment in life, everything else took its proper position from there, and was fixed forever ...]’ (p.51.) ‘The moment of death was the only real moment in life; everything took its proper position there, and was fixed forever, whether to live in joy or hell for all eternity, or had your life been the haphazard flicker between nothingness and nothingness’ (p.69.) ‘You didn’t know very about yourself so. The mirror was before you now, temptation to probe to see other pictures of you in her mind, but it was no use, she had had her life as well as you, every life had too much importance and importance to be only a walking mirror for another.’ (p.94.)

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The Dark (1965) - on the priesthood: ‘You’d not have to worry about a job or what people thought. In your death you’d be a priest, a priest of God, the death already accepted in life, the life already given into His keeping before it was required, years before, in your youth. [...] There was a fierce drag to go down to … give your life into that death, but no, you’d set your face another direction [...]’ (q.p.)

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The Dark (1965): ‘The other appeals - comradeship, the sharing of mysterious power, working in exotic counties where arranges and lemons grew alongside the road, walking with the great of the land - never moved you much. In the reality your life moved in the shade of a woman or death. Only the lifeless or blind fell for the lesser of these. This was just the destruction of entering the dream around delight of the woman or the disciplined waiting in the priesthood of Christ.’ (p.127-28.)

The Dark (1965): ‘That was it simply, and you had set your face the other way from it, towards the bauble. You were heading out into an uncertain life, sacrificing the certainty of a life based on death; for what you didn’t know, windblown excitements and imaginings that in the humdrum of their actuality might soon get stripped of their sensual marvel.’ (p.127.)

The Dark (1965): [Goodbye to father from the bus]: ‘[H]e wanted to say it now for everything if he could, no bitterness or anything else in some vision of this parting of both their lives passing utterly alone and lost in time, outside the accidental places and manner of their happening, and then one absolute compulsion to praise or bless.’ (p.163.)

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The Dark (1965): ‘[T]he terror of an unclear recognition of the reality that set you free.’ (p.182.) ‘One day, one day, you’d come perhaps to more real authority than all this, an authority that had need of neither vast buildings nor professional chairs nor robes nor solemn organ tones, an authority that was simply a state of mind, a calmness even in the face of the turmoil of your own passing.’ (p.188.) ‘[To be a priest] you’d not have to worry about a job or what people thought. In your death you’d be a priest, a priest of God, the death already accepted in life, the life already given into His keeping before it was required, years before, in your youth.’ [q.p.] If you married you would plant a tree to deny and break finally your father's power, completely supplant it by the graciousness and marvel of your life, but as a priest you'd remain just fruit of the cursed house gone to God. [p.84.]

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The Dark (1965) [The Dean’s scorn:] ‘there seemed contempt in his voice, you and Mahoney would never give commands but be menials always to the race he’d come from and still belonged to, you’d make a schoolteacher at best. You might have your uses but you were both his stableboys, and would never eat at his table.’ [q.p.] ‘One day, one day, you’d come perhaps to a more real authority than all this, an authority that had need of neither vast buildings nor professorial chairs nor robes nor solemn organ tone, an authority that was simply a state of mind, a calmness in the face of the turmoil of your own passing.’ [q.p.] ‘The Holy Father had defined a vocation as three things: good moral character, at least average intelligence, a good state of health.’ [q.p.].

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The Dark (1965): ‘You didn’t know very about yourself so. The mirror was before you now, temptation to probe to see other pictures of you in her mind, but it was no use, she had had her life as well as you, every life had too much importance and importance to be only a walking mirror for another. [94] ‘There was a fierce drag to go down to [...] give your life into that death, but no, you’d set your face another direction’ [...] ‘That was it simply, and you had set your face the other way from it, towards the bauble. You were heading out into an uncertain life, sacrificing the certainty of a life based on death; for what you didn’t know, windblown excitements and imaginings that in the humdrum of their actuality might soon get stripped of their sensual marvel.’ [127]

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The Dark (1965): ‘The other appeals - comradeship, the sharing of mysterious power, working in exotic counties where arranges and lemons grew alongside the road, walking with the great of the land - never moved you much. In the reality your life moved in the shade of a woman or death. Only the lifeless or blind fell for the lesser of these. This was just the destruction of entering the dream around delight of the woman or the disciplined waiting in the priesthood of Christ.’ [127-28]

The Dark (1965) [saying goodbye to his father from the bus:] ‘[H]e wanted to say it now for everything if he could, no bitterness or anything else in some vision of this parting of both their lives passing utterly alone and lost in time, outside the accidental places and manner of their happening, and then one absolute compulsion to praise or bless.’ [163] ‘You want to go out into the world? You want girls and women, to touch their dresses, to kiss, to hold soft flesh, to be held in their caressing arms? To bury everything in one swoon into their savage darkness?’ [q.p.] ‘Dream of peace and loveliness, charm of security: picture of one woman, the sound of wife [...]’ [82] ‘God before life’ [83]. ‘This was the dream you’d left the stern and certain road of the priesthood to follow after, that road so attractive now since you hadn’t to face walking it any more, and this world of sensuality from which you were ready to lose your soul nor so easy to drag to your mouth either for that one destructive kiss, as hard to lose your soul as to save it. Only in the mind was it clear.’ [178].

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The Leavetaking (1974): ‘It was the first break in the sea of faith that had encircled me, for what if God was but the same deception. I shuddered as if I had felt already that the journey would be dark and inland through sex and death, the sea continually withdrawing.’ (p.63.) ‘Could not the small acts of love performed with care, each normal, mysterious day, be a continual celebration, as much as the surrender of the dream of woman whould allow the dubious power of th elaying on of anointed hands [i.e., the priesthood]?’ (p.156.) [On national school-teachers:] ‘When we teach history Britain is always the big beast, Ireland is the poor daughter struggling while being raped, when most of us know it’s a lot more complicated than that.’ (p.162.) ‘No boat needs so much trust to put to sea as it does for one body to go human and naked and vulnerable into the arms of another.’ (p.170.) ‘We will be true to one another and to our separate selves, and each day we will renew it again and again. It is the only communion left to us now.’ [The above all quoted in Conor Doris, UG Dissertation, UUC 2003.]

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The Pornographer (1979): ‘We can no more learn from another than we can do their death for them or have them do ours. We have to go inland, in the solitude that is both pain and joy, and there make our own truth, and even if that proves nothing too, we have still that hard joy of having gone the hard and only way there is to go, we have not backed away or staggered to one side, but gone on and on and on even when there was nothing, knowing there was nothing on any other way. We have gone too deep inland to think that a different physique or climate would change anything. We were outside change because we were change (p. 203.) ‘By not attending, by thinking any one thing was as worth doing as any other, by sleeping with anybody who’d agree, I had been the cause of as much pain and confusion and evil as if I had actively set out to do it. I had not attended properly. I had found the energy to choose too painful. Broken in love, I had turned back. let the light of imagination almost out’ (p.251.) See also narrator’s aunt: “It’s only after years that you get some shape on things, and then after all that you have to leave. It’s comical.” (ibid., p.144). Also: ‘It seems we must be beaten twice, by the love that we inflict and then by the infliction of being loved, before we have the humility to look and take whatever agreable plant we have never seen before, because of it being all around our feet, and take it and watch it grow, choosing the lesser truth because it’s all we’ll ever know.’ (Quoted in Eamon Maher, John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal, 2003, and quoted in Bridget O’Toole, review of same, in Books Ireland, March 2005, p.48; for further quotations from various editions, see RICORSO Library, “Authors”, via index, or direct)

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Amongst Women (1990): ‘As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters. This once powerful man was so implanted in their lives that they had never really left Great Meadow, in spite of jobs and marriages and children and houses of their own in Dublin and in London.’ (p.1.) [Moran to McQuaid:] ‘What did we get for it? A country, if you’d believe them. Some of our johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family working in England. What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod.’ (p.5.) ‘He [Moran] had never been able to deal with the outside. All his dealings had been with himself, and that larger self of family which had been thrown together by marriage or accident. he had never been able to go out from his shell of self.’ (p. 12). [Moran to Maggie:] ‘Life is a peculiar venture. You never know how low or high you’ll. No matter how your rise in the world never look down on another.’ (p.61.) [On the effect of the family rosary:] ‘The closeness was as strong as the pull of their own lives; they lost the pain of individuality within its protection.’ (p.85.) [The family’s response to the encroaching death of Moran:] ‘They were so bound together by the illness that they felt close to being powerful together. Such was the strength of the instinct that they could force their beloved to remain in life if only they could, together, turn his will around.’ (Ibid., p.178.) ‘He [Reegan] slipped out to the fields [...] and on to the meadow. It was no longer empty but filling with a fresh growth, a faint blue tinge in the rich green of the young grass. To die was never to look on all this again. It would live on in other's eyes but not his. He had never realised when he was in the midst of confident life what an amazing glory he was part of.’ (p.179.) [For longer quotations, see attached.]

The ’RA: [Moran]: ‘the war was the best part of our lives. Things were never so simple and clear again.’ (q.p.; quoted in Deborah McWilliams [guest ed.], ‘Across the Pond: Reflections on Irish Writing - A View from the Irish States’ [Spec. Iss.], Studies, 88, 351, Autumn 1999, Introduction, p.268.)

On McQuaid, his former IRA colleague: ‘After years he had lost his oldest and best friend but in a way he had always despised friendship; families were what mattered, more particularly that larger version of himself - his family.’ (Amongst Women, p.22.)

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Memoir (2005): ‘The soil in Leitrim is poor, in places no more than an inch deep. Underneath is daub, a blue-grey modelling clay, or channel, a compacted gravel. Neither can absorb the heavy rainfall. Rich crops of rushes and wiry grasses keep the thin clay from being washed away. / The fields between the lakes are small, separated by thick hedges of whitethorn, ash, blackthorn, alder, sally, rowan, wild cherry, green oak, sycamore, and the lanes that link them under the Iron Mountains are narrow, often with high banks. The hedges are the glory of these small fields, especially when the hawthorn foams into streams of blossom each May and June. The sally is the first tree to green and the first to wither, and the rowan berries are an astonishing orange in the light from the lakes every September. These hedges are full of mice and insects and small birds, and sparrowhawks can be seen hunting all through the day. In their branches the wild woodbine and dog rose give off a deep fragrance in summer evenings, and on their banks grow the foxglove, the wild strawberry, primrose and fern and vetch among the crawling briars. The beaten pass the otter takes between the lakes can be traced along these banks and hedges, and in quiet places on the edge of the lakes are the little lawns speckled with fish bones and blue crayfish shells where the otter feeds and trains her young. Here and there surprising islands of rich green limestone are to be found. Among the rushes and wiry grasses also grow the wild orchid and the windflower. The very poorness of the soil saved these fields when old hedges and great trees were being levelled throughout Europe for factory farming, and, amazingly, amid unrelenting change, these fields have hardly changed at all since I ran and played and worked in them as a boy.’ (p.1)

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Memoir (2005): ‘The barracks itself was a strange place, like most of the country at the time. Though the Free State had been wrested in armed conflict from Britain, it was like an inheritance that nobody quite understood or knew how to manage. The Catholic Church was dominant and in control of almost everything, directly or indirectly. In a climate of suppression and poverty and fear, there was hardly any crime and little need of a barracks in a place like Cootehall, other than as a symbol. / The place was run on lines that were no longer connected to any reality, if indeed they ever were. Though my father slept every night in the barracks, the guards in their turn had to leave their own families and sleep the night beside the telephone that hardly ever rang, even in the daytime. I cannot remember anybody coming to the barracks at night. If there was a sudden death or illness, people went to the priest, or to the doctor if they weren’t poor. / The familiar sounds each night were the heavy boots of the barrack orderly taking down the bedclothes from the upstairs room to make up his bed for the night beside the phone. We’d hear the sounds of raking and blowing as he started the fire in the morning and then the unlocking of the back door when he went down to empty his chamber pot and bucket of ashes into the ash pit over the river. We were able to tell the different guards by their sounds and footsteps. Sometimes in the mornings they hummed or whistled, which always set my father muttering.’ (p.32.)

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Memoir (2005): ‘No matter how strong that faith was, it could hardly alleviate the human pain of losing everyone who depended on her whom she loved and held dear. She had no one to communicate this to after her forty-two years in a world where many loved her.’ (p.117; quoted in Paula McDonald, MA Diss., UUC 2011.)

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Memoir (2005): [on foregoing the priesthood]: ‘I would no longer have to die in life in order to circumvent death and the judgment and to keep the promise to her I loved. Instead of being a priest of God, I would be the god of a small, vivid world. I must have had some sense of how outrageous and laughable this would appear to the world, because I told no one, but it did serve its first purpose – it set me free.’ (p.205; quoted in Paula McDonald, MA Diss., UUC 2011.)

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Sundry writings
Aran Islands: ‘I believe that this island lies closer to Mount Olympus that it does to the Roman gate of heaven that we used to pray to in my youth.’ (Essay on An t-Oileanach by Tomás Ó Crohan, in The Irish Review, Spring 1989, p.62).

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‘The Image’, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (July 1991), p.12 [prev. as preface to revised edn. of The Pornographer]: ‘When I reflect on the image two things from which it cannot be separated come: the rhythm and the vision. The vision, that still and private world which each of us possesses and which others cannot see, is brought to life in rhythm - rhythm being little more than the instinctive movements of the vision as it comes to life and begins its search for the image in a kind of grave, grave of the images of dead passions and their days. / Art is an attempt to create a world in which we can live: if not for long or forever, still 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. [...] It is here, in this search for the one image, that the long and complicated journey of art betrays the simple religious nature of its activity: and here, as well, it most sharply separates itself from formal religion. [...]’ (For full text, see infra.)

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James Joyce’s Dubliners [article], as ‘Dubliners’, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (July 1991), p.31-37: ‘Dubliners has often been compared to The Untilled Field; Moore’s stories are seen to have foreshadowed Joyce’s, and they are linked in trying to establish a tradition for that dubious enterprise, The Irish Short Story. I do not use ‘dubious’ in the pejorative sense, other than the absurdity of trying to tout one race or literary form above any other. Remarkable work in the short story has come continually out of Ireland, but it is likely that its very strength is due to the absence of a strong central tradition. Stanislaus Joyce is most persuasive in his articulation of this problem for the Irish writer, if problem it be; for to live here is to come into daily contact with a rampant individualism and localism dominating a vague, fragmented, often purely time-serving, national identity. James Joyce’s remark about the citizens of Trieste - ‘They are all for the country when they know which country it is’- could be equally true of his own countrymen. Moore expressed this rowdy individualism, and in some respects he personified it, as did Patrick Kavanagh later, but it is not applicable to Joyce. [...] Particularly in “The Boarding House”, “Grace”, and “The Dead”, pun, coincidence, and echo are used as a writer of verse would use the formality of rhyme, deepening the sense of the lives of these mortal-immortal Dubliners, drawing together the related instincts of the religious, the poetic, and the superstitious. / The prose never draws attention to itself except at the end of “The Dead”, and by then it has been earned: throughout, it enters our imaginations as stealthily as the evening invading the avenue in “Eveline”. Its classical balance allows no room for self-expression: all the seas of the world may be tumbling in Eveline’s heart, but her eyes give no sign of love or farewell or recognition./ Joyce does not judge. His characters live within the human constraints in space and time and within their own city. The quality of the language is more important than any system of ethics or aesthetics. Material and form are inseparable. So happy is the union of subject and object that they never become statements of any kind, but in their richness and truth are representations of particular lives - and all of life. / I do not see Dubliners as a book of separate stories. The whole work has more the unity and completeness of a novel. Only in the great passages of Ulysses was Joyce able to surpass the art of Dubliners. In many of these, like the Hades episode, his imagination returns again and again to his first characters, his original material.’ (Beginning & end; for full text, see infra.)

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Maurice Goldring, Pleasant the Scholar’s Life: Irish Intellectuals and the Construction of the Nation State, reviewed by John McGahern in The Irish Times (23 July 1994), “Weekend”: MacGahern recounts Goldring’s Marxian view that, in the outlook of the early Sinn Féin, to be included in the nationalist ideological circle one has to be middle-class - eloquent but wealthy as well; ‘it was a history of nationalist and Catholic Ireland from which the people were excluded’. He goes on to speak of the exclusion of women, and children, and quotes Shaw’s quip when the bishops objected to the sending of children to England for want of food during the 1913 Lock-Out, ‘There are some dwellings in Dublin that if they took the children out of them, the adults would misbehave themselves’; but ‘the old and ever-present cry went up that those stating the facts were writing for the English. [On violence:] ‘The construction of the tradition of violence in Irish cultural nationalism at once made its use easier in future conflicts such as that in the North. Where there is no tradition to support it, violence becomes more difficult to institutionalise. Once this happens, though, Goldring sees little point in its criminalisation and he believes that the violence will not disappear until it is absorbed and is able to express itself through normal politics, as in the other European democracies. He differentiates between the violence in the North and the violence that led up to 1922, and he also separates that violence, loyalist as well as nationalist, from purely social upheavals.’ MacGahern also chooses to select a view of the Cruise O’Brien household [as in O’Brien, Rx]. See an alternative reading of Goldring in Mark Bowles contrib. to ‘Summer Books’, Fortnight Review (July/Aug. 1994), p.11, where the writer summarised Goldring’s conception of Easter 1916 as a ‘middle-class putsch’ of shopkeepers, teachers, clerks and journalists who managed to make their claims to represent the Irish nation appeal to the largest constituency on the island. In illustrating the idea of the class hegemony Bowles quotes Goldring as follows: ‘In order to rule a group must have an ambition, an image of the future acceptable to a wide range of people.’

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Autobiographical?: Interview with Rosa González, in Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics, ed. Jacqueline Hurtley, et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1998): ‘[...]I think that all autobiographical writing is by definition bad writing unless it’s strictly an autobiography. Writing, fiction espeically, is life written to an order or vision, while life itself is a series of accidents. It would be very nice if life gave us fiction, but it never does. Also, I don't think it is difficult enough; for some reason, in order to have true emotion one has to reinvent everything, and there is this strange contradiction that the more artificial the language becomes, actually the more true the emotion is, because in a way the language is being refined through the artificial to receive the emotion, and I think that instant words that come out of life are almost superficial emotion. So that actually, what’s easy in writing is nearly always bad and what is difficult is always likely to be true. / Comparing writing to painting or drawing, I’ve noticed that I’ve always made my worst mistakes when I’ve kept too close to realism. It has to be re-invented or re-imagined, and I think that’s because it has to conform to an idea. That’s why the short story is called “The Beginning of an Idea”.’ Further, on being asked about cosmopolitan aspects of Irish society, or even setting his novels outside Ireland altogether:] ‘No, that doesn’t interest me. In other writers depth has always interested me much more than variety. And one has no choice anyhow, because generally something is in one’s head for years before one writes it down. Sometimes when one writes it down it disappears, and then other times when one writes it down, it starts to grow. Also, one is always writing for a certain time before one knows whether it is going to be a novel or a short story, and if it is a nove one is in big trouble because that means the next three or four years is gone.’ (p.45.)

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‘The Church and Its Spire’, in Love of the World: Essays (2009): ‘[...] I have nothing but gratitude for the spiritual remnants of that upbringing, the sense of our origins beyond the bounds of sense, an awareness of mystery and wonderment, grace and sacrament, and the absolute equality of all women and men underneath the sun of heaven. That is all that now remains. Belief as such has long gone.’ (p.133; quoted in Paula McDonald, MA Diss., UUC 2011.)

‘The Solitary Reader’ in Love of the World: Essays (2009): ‘I think that women fared worst of all within this paternalistic mishmash, but to men with intellectual interests it had at the time, I believe, some advantage ... What developed was a Freemasonry of the intellect with a vigorous underground life of its own that paid scant regard to Church or state.’ (p. 91; both of the foregoing quoted in Paula McDonald, MA Diss, UUC 2011.)

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Ireland back when: ‘The whole notion of [Irish] society was patriarchal, from the concept of God the Father right down to the father who actually dominated the household and dictated even when the rosary should be said [...]’ (Interview with Joe Jackson, ‘Tales from the Dark Side’, in Hot Press, 14 Nov. 1991, p.19; quoted in Conor Doris, UG Diss., UUC 2003.)

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‘Whatever you say, say nothing: “Eye on the 20th Century: Ireland 1950-1959”, in The Irish Times (30 Dec. 1999): ‘People did not live in Ireland then. They lived in small, intense communities, and the communities could vary greatly in spirit and character, even over a distance of a few miles; and I believe the real pain or emptiness for many exiles was that the places they had left were far more real to them than where their lives were taking place and where their children were growing up with alien accents. There was a hidden bitterness, but sometimes it was not so hidden. / I heard it expressed clearly on a London building site in 1954 [...]. Most ordinary people went about their sensible pagan lives as they had done for centuries, seeing all this [Church and State] as just another veneer they had to pretend to wear like all the others they had worn since the time of the Druids. [...] Dublin was more a provincial capital than a city then, much smaller, friendlier.’ Further, ‘It was easy to fall into conversation ... there were good secondhand bookshops ... the city was full of cinemas ... We paid little heed to the pieties of Church and State. The Censorship Board was thought to be a joke ... no taste as shap as that of forbidden fruit ... I thinkg of the decade beginning with the lighting of the paraffin lamps as darkness came on, the polishing of the globe, the trimming of the wicks, the adjustment of the flames, as it had been done for generations. By the end of the decade every house had electricity. Most people had radios, eveyr soon they would all have television. The world that had stayed closed and certain for so long would soon see nothing but change.’

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Alistair MacLeod, Island: Collected Stories (2001), Introduction: ‘running through the work is the irony that it is human ingenuity that is bringing an end to this traditional world’; remarks that MacLeod’s work is masculine in its strengths and its vulnerabilites. The men and women of the stories inhabit separate worlds. They are drawn together for love or procreation and then part, further withdrawing into their separate worlds. … This is stated with sympathy and palpable regret, but it is also seen to be as inevitable as fate.’ (From abridged version, printed in The Irish Times, 2 June 2001, “Weekend”, p.15.) [Note: MacLeod won the IMPAC Dublin Prize in 2001.]

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Youth & Age: ‘I’m only interested in what I know and care about. One of the more uncomfortable facts about growing old is that while you are failing, everything around becomes more interesting, because you know more. One of the hard things about being young is that most of the time you don’t know what the hell is going on around you.’ (Interview, quoted in Eamon Maher, John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal, 2003, and quoted in Bridget O’Toole, review of same, in Books Ireland, March 2005, p.48.)

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Catholicism & Nationalism (interview with Eamon Maher, Tallaght IT, 2000): ‘No, I mean I have nothing but gratitude to the Church. I would think that if there was one thing injurious about the Church, it would be its attitude to sexuality. I see sexuality as just a part of life. Either all of life is sacred or none of it is sacred. I’m inclined to think that all of life is sacred and that sexuality is a very important part of that sacredness. And I think that it made a difficult enough relationship - which is between people, between men and women - even more difficult by imparting an unhealthy attitude to sexuality. By making sexuality abnormal and by giving it more importance in a way than it has - by exaggerating it.’ (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index or direct.)