`A Triumph About Failure'

“When you take away prizes and the business of publishing, writing lives or dies by those two solitary figures – the writer alone with his work and the reader alone with the book.”

This is the late John McGahern, and in his words I hear the stringent Irish gift, or curse, for reducing existence to essentials -- a welcome antidote to conventional wisdom, which romanticizes writing or judges it a viable career option, like selling RVs. McGahern’s words recall John Berryman’s one-sentence distillation of Stephen Crane: “Crane was a writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.”

His remarks come from an interview he gave RTÉ Radio 1, in Ireland, in 2000, and later collected in Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy, published by Lilliput Press. In answer to Murphy’s preceding question, McGahern says:

“Writing is an instinct. I’d say that I write to see. [A neat inversion of Conrad, who said his purpose in writing “is, above all, to make you see.”] I suspect that unless there’s a sense of excitement and discovery for the writer, the reader will not have much sense of excitement or discovery either.”

McGahern’s stories are matchless for their time, neither self-consciously artsy-fartsy nor glib and commercial. Their language is artfully compressed, realistic but never abjectly so. Every story writer worth his or her salt is eventually compared to Chekhov, and in McGahern’s case the comparison is apt, though the Irishman’s language is more poetic than the Russian’s. Both succeeded, against odds, in getting “human feelings right.” Here’s more from McGahern’s interview:

“All I know about the process of writing or the experience of writing is that it doesn’t feel like self-expression. What you think you’re going to say always changes when it gets down on the page. One is trying to be true to the original experience, but seldom by the time it’s finished has it anything to do with the way you imagined it in the first place. It changes through working with language. There’s a great deal of confusion about the material and writing. The material doesn’t matter; it’s how the writer handles the material that matters. You could get a book that’s a triumph about failure or you could have a boring book about success.”

His observations, to my satisfaction, resolve the rancorous misunderstandings over the relation between content and form. Compressed to a single, Hollywood-style, high-concept sentence, even Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Ulysses, novels with adultery as a major theme, sound unreadably banal. McGahern again:

“I think that the basic grammar of writing is very simple. I see the image at its heart, and that can be a piece of thistledown, a wedding ring, or a banana skin. Part of the writer’s function is to pick out the images that sharpen and dramatize and bring the scene to life. The rhythm is the emotional binding of the images. Especially in novel-writing the rhythm is very close to tact in manners – when to be silent, when to speak. Paragraphs and punctuation are part of that. The novel is the most social of all the art forms. The short story is much more closely linked to the poem and drama than to the novel. After the rhythm and the image, the final shape that you give a book – and naturally that’s most difficult in a novel – is closely linked to the material or the content and the way it is seen. In that sense, I think that shape and content are indivisible.”

Such a lovely, pitch-perfect image – “the rhythm is very close to tact in manners – when to be silent, when to speak.” He might also have likened rhythm to dynamics in music – piano or forte. The American master of such modulation in prose fiction, of course, is William Maxwell. Another was John Williams, whose Stoner was much-loved by McGahern. From him, a final comment, one that aptly recalls the work of all the writers I have mentioned – McGahern, Chekhov, Maxwell, Williams:

“All good writing is suggestion, because, in a way, it’s completed by the reader. All bad writing is very close to statement. That is why opinions don’t have much place in writing.”