13 - John McGahern
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
All Will Be Well is John McGahern's account of his life, from a grim childhood to the start of his career as a novelist with the publication of The Barracks (1963) and The Dark (1965), books that established him as one of Ireland's most impressive writers. He was born on November 12, 1934 in Dublin, the eldest child of a family that eventually came to seven children. He spent his early years in Ballinamore, County Leitrim. His mother was a teacher, employed when her health permitted in Aughawillian and other small, remote schools in Leitrim. She was an ardent believer in the Catholic faith that surrounded her. As McGahern recalls in All Will Be Well:
Prayers were said each morning. Work and talk stopped in fields and houses and school and shop and the busy street at the first sound of the Angelus bell each day at noon. Every day was closed with the Rosary at night. The worlds to come, hell and heaven and purgatory and limbo, were closer and far more real than America or Australia and talked about almost daily as our future reality.
His mother's most intense hope for her son was that he would become a priest and that she would live to attend his first Mass. She died of cancer in 1945. McGahern's father, like my own, was a police sergeant. McGahern's was one of the first generation of policemen (the Garda Síochána) established by the Irish Free State in 1922.
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- Irish Essays , pp. 226 - 234Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011