"I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years"
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Patience is not only a virtue here; it is a method. To claim that nothing is written without living for seven or eight years in the mind is to submit art to the slow test of memory and to the moral sieve of time. What survives that long is not fashion or cleverness but an image, a cadence, a knot of feeling that proves it can bear the weight of language. The years strip away what is decorative and leave what is necessary.
John McGahern’s work embodies this. His quiet, exact prose seems simple because the sentences have been pared back by long gestation and endless revision. The rural fields, lakes, and kitchens of Leitrim do not arrive as scenic description; they arrive as weathered facts of consciousness, stored and turned over until they carry both tenderness and severity. Memory is not nostalgia here but a discipline. By letting material lie fallow, he allows it to compost into nourishment for the work, so that when a story appears on the page it feels inevitable, as if grown rather than made.
This stance is also a refusal of speed. In a literary world that rewards immediacy, he trusts the slow rhythm of rural life and the slow rhythm of truth. Characters like Moran in Amongst Women do not come from a topical impulse. They are distilled from years of observation of power and love, authority and its costs. The long dwell time lets contradictions breathe; cruelty and care coexist without commentary because the writer has watched them coexist in memory.
There is also an ethics of accuracy. Time tests the self-serving myth, the melodramatic flourish, the false ending. What remains after seven or eight years tends to be the hard kernel of experience he can state plainly. That restraint gives his last novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, its luminous calm: the daily round, attended to without haste, becomes the shape of a life. To write like this is to trust that what is truly yours will not leave you, and that only what lasts belongs on the page.
John McGahern’s work embodies this. His quiet, exact prose seems simple because the sentences have been pared back by long gestation and endless revision. The rural fields, lakes, and kitchens of Leitrim do not arrive as scenic description; they arrive as weathered facts of consciousness, stored and turned over until they carry both tenderness and severity. Memory is not nostalgia here but a discipline. By letting material lie fallow, he allows it to compost into nourishment for the work, so that when a story appears on the page it feels inevitable, as if grown rather than made.
This stance is also a refusal of speed. In a literary world that rewards immediacy, he trusts the slow rhythm of rural life and the slow rhythm of truth. Characters like Moran in Amongst Women do not come from a topical impulse. They are distilled from years of observation of power and love, authority and its costs. The long dwell time lets contradictions breathe; cruelty and care coexist without commentary because the writer has watched them coexist in memory.
There is also an ethics of accuracy. Time tests the self-serving myth, the melodramatic flourish, the false ending. What remains after seven or eight years tends to be the hard kernel of experience he can state plainly. That restraint gives his last novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, its luminous calm: the daily round, attended to without haste, becomes the shape of a life. To write like this is to trust that what is truly yours will not leave you, and that only what lasts belongs on the page.
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| Topic | Writing |
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