Word: mcgahern
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...John Mcgahern...
...your review of John McGahern's The Dark [Feb. 18], you quote Samuel Johnson: "The Irish are a fair people. They never speak well of one another." They don't act well to one another either. The Dark has been banned from Ireland, and McGahern has lost his teaching post at a Dublin school. He has, it seems, committed two unforgivable sins: not only has he written a "dirty" book; he has also (God protect us from all harm) married outside the church...
...DARK by John McGahern. 191 pages. Knopf...
...Ireland," said George Moore, "is a fatal disease." Author John McGahern gloomily agrees. In The Barracks, a first novel of keening intensity, he called the disease cancer and described how a woman dies of it in a squalid Irish village. In The Dark, his second novel, he calls the disease despair and describes how it drains and ultimately destroys a young man of talent...
Some parochial Irish critics, scandalized by McGahern's lascivious imputations against clerisy and family, have argued that his image of Ireland is false. They miss the point. The author may not be true to life but he is true to significance. He may be uncertain in technique but he is sure of what he feels and means, and he is honest in a way that is traditionally Irish. "The Irish are a fair people," Samuel Johnson wrote. "They never speak well of one another...