In May 1965, two hundred and sixty copies of The Darkness, a novel by Irish writer John McGahern, traveled from London to Dublin, where they were seized by customs officials and forwarded to the Irish Board of Censorship of Publications. No one knew who had reported it to customs; the country’s finance minister eventually admitted that it would not have been “physically possible” for the officers to have read the book before it reached their hands. A month later, the censors officially banned “The Dark” from sale and distribution in Ireland, possibly because of its depiction of adolescent sexuality – the teenage protagonist, like most boys his age, masturbates a lot – and also of sexual predation: the narrator is bullied by his father and at one point a Catholic priest gets into bed with the boy. McGahern was then thirty years old; The Darkness was his second novel and, after being suppressed by the Irish authorities, he joined a club that included works by such prominent Irish authors as Brendan Behan, Seán Ó Faolain and Edna O’Brien (but not, however strange, James Joyce), along with Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, DH Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh and many others.
At the time of the seizure, McGahern was in Spain, on leave from work, at a Catholic boys’ school in Dublin. That fall, McGahern wrote in his memoir, he returned home and tried to resume his teaching post, but the principal barred him from his classroom. “Such a terrible mess that I couldn’t take you back after that,” the parish priest who oversaw the school later told McGahern, adding: “You went and ruined your life and you made my life miserable too so.” McGahern hoped the national teachers’ union might advocate on his behalf, but found it “careful and hostile”. (When he met with union board members to discuss his options, he found that some of them “drank whiskey to support themselves.”) Union leadership indicated that McGahern had made matters worse for himself by his recent marriage, outside the Catholic Church, to a non-Irish divorcee. After a few years, McGahern himself divorced.
In his memoirs, McGahern laments what he calls “the collusion between church and state to create an Irish society that is childish, repressive and sectarian”. These qualities, he suggested, were encapsulated in the fallout over “The Darkness” that became widely known as “the McGahern Affair.” Much of the Irish press agreed with him. Editorial in Irish Times warned that by banning the novel “we risk making ourselves an international laughingstock”. Even the conservative one Irish Independent objected to the Censor Board’s decision, which he said seemed “likely to give Mr. McGahern the reputation of a great novelist, which he may not deserve, or of a pornographer, which he hardly deserves.”
Fourteen years later, McGahern reinstated the accusations against himself by titling his fourth novel The Pornographer. Its unnamed narrator is a thirty-year-old Dubliner who writes nonsense for pay; McGahern generously shares excerpts from the work, which follows the ongoing adventures of a pair of sex acrobats with the Vonnegut names Mavis Carmichael and Colonel Grimshaw. (“‘Fuck me, oh my fuck, oh my Jesus,'” he feels her nails dig into his back as the hot seed gushes pleasantly free, pounding against her.”) The narrator’s publisher advises him to write his porn “like life, but without any of the obscene handicaps of life.”
McGahern’s novel will certainly leave the handicaps. The narrator makes regular hospital visits to his beloved aunt, who is dying of cancer and depends on him for brandy. “I only take it for the pain,” she says, as if she needs to apologize for her suffering. He frequents a Dublin dance hall where crowds of precocious patrons exude “the heavy thrill of predation and vulnerable flesh” amid “a gathering staleness”. There he meets an elderly woman with no sexual experience, Josephine, she of the “half-broken hymen”, with whom he likes to sleep, but who otherwise bores and annoys him. She becomes pregnant, and much of the rest of the novel—too much—plays out the narrator’s refusal, over and over again, to marry Josephine, as she desperately wants, or otherwise take responsibility for her or the child. McGahern hammers so long and so hard on these denials, in fact, that one wonders what he’s denying more: God, the country, the patriarchal family structure, or the whole damn thing.
The Pornographer is not, as one might expect, a lightly fictionalized retelling of the McGahern affair. But he borrows from the author’s life, as Anne Enright writes in her introduction to the new NYRB Classics reprint of the novel: When McGahern was the same age as his narrator, he fathered a child he refused to acknowledge. And the book often seems to be in direct conversation with “The Dark,” in the sense of an older person talking to his younger self. (“The Dark” was not banned in 1970, and the fallout surrounding its publication helped lead to revisions to Irish censorship law.)
The nameless hero of “The Dark,” though not yet an adult, is already moving toward death; his imagined deathbed is the scene of an agonizing internal debate over whether he can wrest enough control over his sexual urges to become a priest. His case for the priesthood: “You will choose your death, you will give up a desire other than God. You will die in God on the day of your ordination. Your whole life will be death in preparation for the last moment when you will part with your flesh and go away. His (much stronger) case against:
The act of becoming a father, according to this logic, can extinguish the legacy of a father’s abuse. Many others in McGahern’s corpus (including what is perhaps his best-known novel, Among Women ) are dominated by an erratic, sometimes monstrous patriarch; in his memoirs, McGahern wrote that he was abused by his father in a scene very similar to that in The Darkness.
But The Pornographer, despite its focus on fatherhood and pregnancy, bears few traces of Oedipal drama—the narrator is uninterested in the sentimental revenge of family formation. For better or worse, he finds a third way between fatherhood and the Catholic priesthood: he eagerly deals with the mechanics of conceiving a child but ignores the consequences. Enright notes that some of McGahern’s writings about sex are “priestly”—sex substitutes for the religious rituals he shuns. (“The moment is always the same and always new,” the narrator muses.) Sexual desire is its own liturgy and house of worship, and the commitments of the sexually liberated Irishman, like those of any clothed man, must be undivided.
With The Pornographer, McGahern, who rose to literary fame as a martyr to a cruel and stifling patriarchal structure, seems to be asking whether one can excuse oneself from the house altogether—not dismantle it, but simply slip out the back door. The narrator has certain connections he honors and duties he faithfully observes: carrying pages to his editor, easing his aunt’s pain. He is surprisingly attentive to Josephine, even kind at times. In general, however, he finds comfort in the zone somewhere between stoicism and nihilism. Unlike the boy in The Darkness, he does not agonize over the meaning of his death; instead, he is mildly troubled by the meaninglessness of life. When his uncle visits him, he thinks, “Now that this was happening, it was nothing, which was the rest of our lives when this was also happening.” Sometimes he does things as if just to prove to himself the futility of all human and spiritual efforts, as when he begs God for his uncle to live forever: “I murmured the prayer with all the more power, for I knew it could not be answered.” For the child of “The Dark” everything had too much importance. For the adult from The Pornographer, nothing matters enough.
McGahern never specified exactly when The Pornographer, published in 1979, took place, but some historical markers place it between the late sixties and mid-seventies. After Josephine becomes pregnant, the narrator’s friends offer to arrange a legal abortion for her in London; this places the events of the novel no earlier than 1967, when the British Parliament passed the national legislative equivalent of Roe v. Wade. (Abortion was legalized in Ireland in 2019.) Josephine is subject to what was known as the ‘marriage ban’, which until the mid-1970s required most civil servants in Ireland to leave their jobs when they married or became pregnant. Upon leaving, the woman may receive a “spousal benefit” based on her length of service; Josephine, who has worked at the same bank for twenty years, is to receive a large salary, but only if she can convince her suitor to marry her. “She doesn’t get a dime if she just has to resign,” the narrator explains sadly. Needless to say, simply keeping his job is out of the question. (Irish employment law did not expressly prohibit pregnancy discrimination until 1994.)
For girls and women in twentieth-century Ireland to be unmarried and pregnant was tantamount to a crime against the Catholic state, and little mercy was shown even to the very young or to victims of rape or abuse. Some were called to hard labor in the infamous Magdalene laundries; others were walled up in so-called mother-and-baby homes, where abuse and neglect were widespread and babies were buried in mass graves. In recent years, Ireland’s reckoning with this horrific history has taken various forms, including a government commission report on the nightmare of mother-and-baby homes that ran to three thousand pages and Claire Keegan’s Booker Prize finalist Small Things Like These. which is now a movie starring Cillian Murphy.
Josephine, in different hands, could be a charming diversion from this national tragedy. She is a generation older than the typical Magdalene inmates; she has social connections, social capital, and even a wealthy gentleman admirer in London who is willing to enter into a marriage of convenience. Most importantly, and unlike most victims of Ireland’s carceral state of mother and baby, she wants to be pregnant. McGahern strongly implies that Josephine, facing the final years of her fertility, found a man to get her pregnant by accident on purpose in the hope of forcing him into marriage, and that the man she chose, perhaps half-consciously, went along with her scheme – the sexual part, not the husband. The narrator is untroubled by the overwhelming ontological reality of the impending baby. It has nothing to do with him, he insists, and by law and custom he is right. “Under Irish law,” writes Enright, “an illegitimate child is considered a filius nullius—a child without a father.” (A child born out of wedlock had no claim to the paternal inheritance; it was not until 1987 that Ireland abolished illegitimacy as a legal status of the children.)
The narrator’s behavior towards his pregnant mistress is cold-blooded and also passive – he cannot help it, it is beyond his control. He is still, like the boy in The Darkness, overcome by Catholic anger and his own sexual desire. Yet, wrongly, his behavior is also justified, even codified, by church and state. (To put it another way: there was no Magdalene washing machine for wayward teenagers.) It is what it is—what is he supposed to do about it? This is the question that plagues many of the narrator’s encounters with Josephine, and their book-length two-step would be more interesting if it weren’t so pointless—if McGahern wasn’t constantly pushing the reader to notice how stupid and yet strangely devious she is she.
