New Voice

First of all, Secular Sundays would like to wish everyone a happy new year and all that. We dip a toe into 2010 with trepidation, here at New Voice. We can’t say we are all that optimistic, politically or economically speaking. Literature, however, is another matter, and we are prepapred to plunge into the literary waters of 2010 with the wild abandon of the Christmas Day lunatics at the forty foot, promised, as we are, new work from DeLillo and Amis. Following on from the glut of work by heavy hitters the like of Roth, Auster and Banville (though we didn’t like the Banville at all) and Carver and McGahern, released at the end of 2009, we can’t really complain, although we’d love something new from Cormac McCarthy – if anyone has heard anything on this front they might let us know. We had a moment of panic a few weeks ago when we noticed (I’m not sure why I’m sticking with the ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, the stout I’m consuming, perhaps) a headline announcing his auctioning of his typewriter for charity. Apparently somone bought him a new one, though, for a fiver or something, so hopefully we will get something before long. In the meantime, we must make do with the film version of The Road, which we await, again, with some trepidation.

One of the presents I (the ‘we’ is getting ridiculous, I’m beginning to sound like Bernard Dunne) found under the tree was a copy of McGahern’s essays, the appropriately titled Love of the World. Just how appropriate becomes increasingly evident reading through the essays. I have only begun to do so, but it is clear that his prose will not disappoint, held in comparison to his fiction. The same economy of language is employed to convey the same multitudes, Banville for one (as, in fairness, he alluded to himself in this week’s Guardian Review) could take note.

McGahern, in the essay ‘The Solitary Reader’, writes about how the nature of one’s reading changes, if one sticks with it, at a certain point. When young, we read for the escape, rather than the use of language or the ideas conveyed (even if it is the quality of these that allow, or facilitate the escape). All of us will identify with his description of ‘waking’ from being immersed in a book. One of the things that cause this immersion in a text is the evocation of place. Place is probably a little restrictive, by place I mean a place in time, as experienced or imagined by an author. This evocation of place is something that I certainly read for as a child – whether it was the rooms in 221b Baker Street (I’m terrified to see what Guy Ritchie has done to them) or Castle Rock or any of the other small Maine towns Stephen King depicted and then terrorised. While, as McGahern says, our reading experience changes as we develop intellectually, this evocation of place never ceases to be important – capturing the experience of poet and his environment in a fusion of time and place was William Carlos Williams’s poetic project. He believed the poem was a unique ‘thing’ birthed by the male and female elements of the poet interacting with the world, both natural and man –made.

McGahern’s great gift is certainly this evocation of place, evident obviously in his fiction and now, in his essays. The previously unpublished essay ‘Blake’s of the Hollow’ written about his favourite pub, is an absolute gem. Blake’s of the Hollow will undoubtedly experience a wave of strange, pale, socially awkward visitors (readers, that is) poking around, ordering a pint and mentally ticking off, from the remembered inventory, the lamps, “the ceiling and panelling” that are of “pitched pinewood” or the office that overlooks the bar and “could belong in a theatre or ship,” the snugs in the landing or the “patterned tilework of the floor,” not to mention the pint of Guinness or the “delicious sandwiches neatly cut into squares with generous measures of tea in the old aluminium tea pots”. The essay describes a pub but captures an atmosphere, a way of life, a moment in time, a time, for example, when one could arrange to collect one’s mail in the local pub. The essay is brief, but it may as well be a substantial short story, such is the cast of personalities and characters it conjures up (especially the man who comes, Thursday afternoons, to drink champagne and read the Financial Times, a short story all by himself), and the lives it suggests. Indeed, it is an essay, but if we were to visit Blake’s of the Hollow after reading this we would, no doubt, come away feeling slightly disappointed, or empty, no matter how little the pub has changed aesthetically (the kind of experience and slight disappointment McGahern actually describes in the next, also excellent essay ‘Dreaming at Julien’s’). It will not be as McGahern experienced and described, for that image was his and is now gone. Better, I think, not to go but to read the essay and reread it and enjoy the imaginative Blake’s and the lost world it suggests.