March 2016 sees the tenth anniversary of John McGahern’s death. Author of six novels, three stand-alone collections of short stories, one play, a memoir and numerous essays and reviews, McGahern was Ireland’s most accomplished writer of prose fiction since Joyce and Beckett, and I have been an ardent admirer of his work since my first encounter with it in his fifth novel, Amongst Women, published in 1990. A couple of years after that early encounter I had the good luck to be taught by him as part of an undergraduate English module at University College Galway, and found him a quiet but compelling and charismatic presence.
Like so many writers before and since, McGahern relied on literary periodicals to get his work before a wider public audience, and over the years his short stories appeared in a very wide array of magazines and journals, from The New Yorker to The Kilkenny Magazine. Two of his stories, ‘My Love, My Umbrella’ and ‘Swallows’, were first published in The London Magazine, in 1970 and 1971 respectively. McGahern’s faith in both stories is reflected by their presence in both The Collected Stories of 1992 and Creatures of the Earth in 2007. ‘Swallows’ is set in the west of Ireland and revolves around an encounter between a garda sergeant (a frequent character in McGahern’s work going back to the first novel The Barracks (1963) – his own father had been a serving member of An Garda Siochána) and a civil engineer investigating a fatal traffic accident. ‘My Love, My Umbrella’, which formed part of McGahern’s first collection of stories Nightlines in the same year as its initial publication in The London Magazine, is set in Dublin where McGahern lived and worked for several years as a primary school teacher.
My forthcoming study from Liverpool University Press, Touchstones: John McGahern’s Classical Style, seeks to examine the ways in which McGahern alludes in his prose to a series of canonical greats, from Dante to Beckett in order to enrich his own writing. The opening chapter turns to thoughts of Joyce, and it seems an appropriate point of departure in the current context, given that one of the stories I consider there is ‘My Love, My Umbrella’:
In thinking about Joyce, McGahern returns again and again to the idea of the writer as dispassionate and precise, eschewing the gusto and emotion usually associated with a more romantically tinged sense of the artist. Writing for McGahern is a job like any other, not some mystical vocation; it is a question of slow, patient work rather than sudden, flashing brilliance. In all of these artistic proclivities, McGahern is inspired by Joyce and by Joyce’s most eloquent mouthpiece, Stephen Dedalus. In reflecting on this inspiration, we should dwell for a moment on Stephen’s most ample explanation of the classical temper, that which comes in Stephen Hero, Joyce’s abandoned test run for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Like McGahern, Joyce could admire the romantic artist without having any desire to emulate him. ‘It is many a day’, Joyce writes in his essay on the nineteenth-century Irish romantic poet James Clarence Mangan, ‘since the dispute of the classical and romantic schools began in the quiet city of the arts’. The preparations for what would become this essay are described in detail in Stephen Hero where it bears the title ‘Art and Life’. Here the romantic temper is held up alongside the classical and is found wanting. Stephen tries to sum up what he means by ‘the classical temper’ in a fractious exchange with the President of the College. ‘By “classical” I mean the slow elaborate patience of the art of satisfaction. The heroic, the fabulous, I call romantic’.
A problem faced by every Irish writer of fiction since Joyce is how to prevent one’s indebtedness to the man from becoming a kind of plagiarism, and McGahern takes this conundrum on more successfully than anyone in the Irish post-war canon in novels like The Barracks and The Dark, and short stories like ‘My Love, My Umbrella’ and ‘The Wine Breath’. Shaking off Joyce’s all-pervasive presence while at the same time paying him homage only came about for McGahern, however, through what Flaubert – a hero of both Joyce and McGahern – calls ‘atrocious labour’. One of the major reasons, one suspects, for the self-suppression of McGahern’s first (unpublished) novel, ‘The End or the Beginning of Love’, is that it owed too much, too clearly to A Portrait of the Artist. In his scrapping of this first attempt at a novel, McGahern was notably repeating Joyce’s own actions in giving Stephen Hero the flames only to see the work rise again through the much more polished, more cautiously oblique and less autobiographical Portrait. For McGahern, ‘The End or the Beginning of Love’ is revised and rethought as The Dark, his celebrated 1965 novel that was banned by the Irish Censorship Board and contributed to him losing his job as a primary school teacher in Dublin. Both A Portrait and The Dark focus on an Irish Catholic boy as he struggles to overcome the obstacles set in his path by country, church and family.
While The Dark would be the last McGahern novel in which Joyce would so clearly be a presence, he did not disappear entirely. Dublin’s northside suburbs were used by him for another, much more nuanced, Joycean adaptation in ‘My Love, My Umbrella’. The title is an homage to Joyce’s strange, fragmented, posthumously published meditation on unrequited love and lust, Giacomo Joyce, which ends with the gnomic words ‘Love me, love my umbrella’. This eccentric prose poem was written by Joyce in about 1912 while he lived and worked as an English teacher in Trieste, but was not known to a wider public until Richard Ellmann published it with Faber in 1968.
The title of McGahern’s story is not the only overlap with Giacomo Joyce. When Ellmann writes about Joyce’s hero and his ‘erotic commotion’, or describes his ‘erratic, contorted introspection’, he might just as accurately have been writing about the unnamed central character of McGahern’s story. ‘My Love, My Umbrella’ sees two unnamed characters engage in a brief and rather unsatisfactory love affair in which the man’s umbrella becomes a fetishistic prop for their al fresco lovemaking. Because the woman lives in a boarding house, the couple are forced into exploring each other’s bodies behind Fairview church where there is ‘a dead end overhung with old trees, and the street lights did not reach as far as the wall at its end’. Here they have the first of several furtive encounters:
Our lips moved on the saliva of our mouths as I slowly undid the coat button. I tried to control the trembling so as not to tear the small white buttons of the blouse. Coat, blouse, brassière, as names of places on a road. I globed the warm soft breasts in hands. […] Will she let me? I was afraid as I lifted the woolen skirt; and slowly I moved hands up the soft insides of the thighs, and instead of the ‘No’ I feared and waited for, the handle became a hard pressure as she pressed on my lips.
I could no longer control the trembling as I felt the sheen of the knickers, I drew them down to her knees, and parted the lips to touch the juices. She hung on my lips. She twitched as the fingers went deeper. She was a virgin.
‘It hurts.’ The cold metal touched my face, the rain duller on the sodden cloth by now.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ I said, and pumped low between her thighs, lifting high the coat and skirt so that the seed fell free into the mud and rain, and after resting on each other’s mouth I replaced the clothes.
In all of this there are several striking similarities with Giacomo Joyce. The female characters in both are virgins, and there is a preoccupation with descriptions of underclothes: ‘A skirt caught back by her sudden moving knee; a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a leg-stretched web of stocking’. Any reader familiar with Ulysses will catch echoes too of Leopold Bloom’s masturbatory fantasies on Sandymount strand as he fixes his tired gaze on Gerty McDowell. While the ‘seed’ produced in ‘My Love, My Umbrella’ falls on stony ground – or rain and mud to be precise – Joyce’s imagined climax, while remarkably similar to McGahern’s, leads to more fertile territory:
She leans back against the pillowed wall: odalisque-featured in the luxurious obscurity. Her eyes have drunk my thoughts: and into the moist warm yielding welcoming darkness of her womanhood my soul, itself dissolving, has streamed and poured and flooded a liquid and abundant seed….. Take her now who will!
While the fetishistic imagery of Giacomo Joyce engages McGahern’s imagination in his composition of ‘My Love, My Umbrella’, it is to another Joycean tale of failed love that we must turn for profounder thematic parallels.
McGahern’s story is, on first reading, a darkly comic tale about lust and the absurdities to which it will stretch, but a more sympathetic interpretation might see it as a meditation on human loss and loneliness. As the man and woman of the story draw closer, the man becomes afraid. He fears, in particular, the inevitable loss of freedom attendant upon parenthood, and the quiet, dull life of the suburbs. These fears take hold of him and he allows the relationship to drift. Lying to his lover that he will ring her during the week after what he secretly intends to be their last encounter, he is in a state of ecstasy: ‘I was so clownishly elated that I threw the umbrella high in the air and laughing loudly caught it coming down’. But within days his mood changes as he begins to realize his loss: ‘there was the exhilaration of staying free those first days; but it soon palled. In the empty room trying to read, while the trains went by at the end of the garden with its two apple trees and one pear, I began to realize I’d fallen more into the habit of her than I’d known’. But now the tables have turned and when he begs his lover to return to him, all the power lies with her and she rejects him. After one, final meeting when she agrees to see him more out of pity than affection he is left alone and broken:
The same night after pub-close I went – driven by the urge that brings people back to the rooms where they once lived and no longer live – and stood out of the street lamps under the trees where so often we had stood, in the hope that some meaning of my life or love would come, but the night only hardened about the growing absurdity of a man standing under an umbrella beneath the drip from the green leaves of the trees.
In lonely places such as this, death draws near: ‘Through my love it was the experience of my own future death I was passing through, for the life of the desperate equals the anxiety of death’.
There is much about this narrative of a lover and the abandonment of the safe happiness of a romantic relationship for unspecific, vaguely egotistical reasons that is strongly reminiscent of another of Joyce’s stories ‘A Painful Case’. Here, the misanthropic Mr James Duffy abandons Mrs Sinico when he feels she is drawing too near and is desirous of more than he is prepared to give. Like the lovers of ‘My Love, My Umbrella’, Joyce’s characters ‘met always in the evening and chose the most quiet quarters for their walks together’. Like the man in McGahern’s story, Mr Duffy realizes much too late what he has lost in letting the relationship fall away, and the narrative becomes by the end a kind of ghost story. Years after the end of the affair, he is reminded of what he has given up when reading in the newspaper an account of Mrs Sinico’s lonesome death on a railway line: ‘he had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory – if anyone remembered him’.
In the final, heartbreaking paragraph of Joyce’s story one sees a reflection of McGahern’s lover beginning to realize, too late, what he has lost ‘while the trains went by at the end of the garden with its two apple trees and one pear’. For Mr Duffy, ‘outcast from life’s feast’, the same despondency sets in amid the sounds of trains and shadows of trees:
He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.
The conversation between ‘A Painful Case’ and ‘My Love, My Umbrella’ is conducted in hushed tones. The unmistakeable indebtedness that was owed to Joyce by The Dark and even more strongly by its aborted forerunner, ‘The End or the Beginning of Love’, has disappeared, and in its place is a quieter but no less reverential homage.
Frank Shovlin is Professor of Irish Literature in English at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. He is author of The Irish Literary Periodical 1923-1958 (2003) and Journey Westward: Joyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival (2012). His next book, a study of John McGahern’s style, will be published as Touchstones later this year by Liverpool University Press. He has recently begun work editing The Letters of John McGahern for Faber.