Week 10: “A people who were satisfied with frugal comfort”?: Nostalgia & Prudery in the Mid-Century

Writing Ireland

Read more at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/mar/31/guardianobituaries.books

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jan/05/fiction.books

John McGahern (1934-2006)

“The semi-autobiographical nature of many Irish novels may remind us that autobiography itself has an important place in Anglo-Irish Literature. Many writers have written autobiographies, memoirs, reminiscences, or recollections – the term used varies – and there are times when autobiography reads like a novel of revenge.”

Roger Joseph McHugh and Maurice Harmon, Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature from Its Origins to the Present Day (Dublin, 1982), p.285.

“There was no running water then, other than in streams or rivers, no electricity, no TV, very few radios, and when newspapers were bought they were shared between houses.”

McGahern, Memoir, p.16

“A somewhat condescending backward look at an allegedly more innocent time, the barely credible precursor of the much more accelerated here and now, and on the other hand as appropriating, endorsing and promoting images and ideas, which, by being represented as simple and traditional, function as a means of resisting the modernising present.”

O’Brien in Harte, Modern Irish Autobiography, p.234.

“In that country, individual thought and speech were discouraged. Its moral climate can be glimpsed in the warning catch phrases: a shut mouth catches no flies; think what you say but don’t say what you think; the less you say, the more you’ll hear. By 1950, against the whole spirit of the 1916 Proclamation, the State had become a theocracy in all but name.”

McGahern, Memoir, p.210.

“Over many days and months, gradually, a fantastical idea formed. Why take on any single life – a priest, a soldier, teacher, doctor, airman – if a writer could create all these people far more vividly? In that one life of the mind, the writer could live many lives and all of life. I had not even the vaguest idea how books came into being, but the dream took hold, and held.”

McGahern, Memoir, p.205.

“My father said he loved oranges then, and when he knew he was going to be married he bought two dozen oranges in Galway and went to sit on a park bench and ate them all. He felt he would never be able to afford oranges again once he was married. In those first years his fears couldn’t have been much realized other than in his imagination. My mother’s salary was higher than his.”

McGahern, Memoir, p.57.

Read more at:

http://www.tcd.ie/longroomhub/digital-atlas/writers/kate-obrien/

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3509330

Kate O’Brien (1897-1974)

Next Week

Week 11: A Special Role?: Irish Women as Image and

Idea