“The Pornographer” Reissue, Reviewed: John McGahern Mined the Pain and Perks of Mid-Century Masculinity
In May, 1965, two hundred and sixty copies of “The Dark,” a novel by the Irish writer John McGahern, travelled from London to Dublin, where they were seized by customs officers and forwarded to Ireland’s Censorship of Publications Board. No one knew who tipped off customs; the nation’s finance minister eventually admitted that it would not have been “physically possible” for officers to have read the book before it reached their hands. A month later, the censors formally banned “The Dark” from sale and distribution in Ireland, presumably for its depictions of adolescent sexuality—the teen-age protagonist, like most boys his age, masturbates a lot—and also of sexual predation: the narrator is molested by his father and, at one point, a Catholic priest gets into bed with the boy. McGahern was then thirty years old; “The Dark” was his second novel, and, in being suppressed by Irish authorities, it joined a club that includes works by such prominent Irish authors as Brendan Behan, Seán Ó Faoláin, and Edna O’Brien (but not, oddly enough, James Joyce) along with Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and many others.
At the time of the seizure, McGahern was in Spain, on a leave of absence from his job, at a Catholic boys’ school in Dublin. That fall, McGahern writes in his memoir, he returned home and attempted to resume his teaching post, but the headmaster barred him from entering his classroom. “Such a terrible shemozzle you caused that I couldn’t take you back after that,” the parish priest who oversaw the school later said to McGahern, adding, “You have gone and ruined your life, and you have made my life a misery as well.” McGahern hoped that the national teachers’ union might advocate on his behalf, but he found it “careful and hostile.” (When he met with the union board members to discuss his options, he discovered that some of them “had taken whiskey to brace themselves.”) The union leadership pointed out that McGahern had made things worse for himself with his recent marriage, outside the Catholic Church, to a non-Irish divorcée. Within a few years, McGahern himself was divorced.
In his memoir, McGahern laments what he calls “the collusion of Church and State to bring about an Irish society that was childish, repressive and sectarian.” These qualities, he implied, were encapsulated in the skirmish over “The Dark,” which became broadly known as “the McGahern affair.” Much of the Irish press agreed with him. An editorial in the Irish Times warned that, in banning the novel, “we are in danger of making ourselves internationally ridiculous.” Even the conservative Irish Independent objected to the censor board’s decision, which it said seemed “likely to confer on Mr. McGahern the reputation of being a major novelist, which he may not deserve, or of being a pornographer, which he scarcely merits.”
Fourteen years later, McGahern reclaimed the accusations against him by titling his fourth novel “The Pornographer.” Its unnamed narrator is a thirty-year-old Dublin resident who writes smut for pay; McGahern generously shares excerpts from the work, which follows the continuing adventures of a pair of sexual acrobats by the Vonnegut-ish names of Mavis Carmichael and Colonel Grimshaw. (“ ‘Fuck me, O fuck me, O my Jesus,’ he feels her nails dig into his back as the hot seed spurts deliciously free, beating into her.”) The narrator’s publisher advises him to write his porn “like a life, but without any of life’s unseemly infirmities.”
McGahern’s novel is sure to leave the infirmities in. The narrator makes regular hospital visits to his beloved aunt, who is dying of cancer and depends on him for brandy. “I just 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 prematurely aged patrons exude “the heavy excitement of preying and vulnerable flesh” amid a “gathering staleness.” There, he meets a sexually inexperienced older woman, Josephine, she of the “half-shattered hymen,” whom he enjoys sleeping with but who otherwise bores and irritates him. She becomes pregnant, and much of the rest of the novel—too much—enacts the narrator’s refusal, over and over again, to marry Josephine, as she desperately wants him to, or to otherwise take responsibility for her or the child. McGahern hammers so long and so hard on these disavowals, in fact, that one wonders what more is being renounced: God, country, the patriarchal family structure, or the whole damn thing.
“The Pornographer” is not, as one might expect, a lightly fictionalized revisiting of the McGahern affair. But it does borrow from the author’s life, as Anne Enright writes in her introduction to the new NYRB Classics reissue of the novel: When McGahern was around the same age as his narrator, he fathered a child whom he refused to acknowledge. And the book often seems in direct conversation with “The Dark,” in the sense of an older person talking to his younger self. (“The Dark” was un-banned in 1970, and the debacle surrounding its publication helped lead to revisions in Irish censorship law.)
The nameless protagonist of “The Dark,” though he has not yet reached adulthood, already finds himself hurtling toward death; his imagined deathbed is the stage of a tortuous internal debate over whether he can wrest enough control over his sexual urges to become a priest. His case for the priesthood: “You’d choose your death, you’d give up desire other than in God. You’d die into God the day of your ordination. All your life would be a death in readiness for the last moment when you’d part with your flesh and leave.” His (much stronger) case against:
The act of becoming a father, according to this logic, can snuff out the legacy of a father’s abuse. Much else in McGahern’s corpus (including what is perhaps his best-known novel, “Amongst Women”) is dominated by a volatile, sometimes monstrous patriarch; in his memoir, McGahern writes of being molested by his father in a scene that closely resembles one in “The Dark.”
But “The Pornographer,” despite being centered on paternity and pregnancy, bears few traces of Oedipal drama—the narrator has no interest in the sentimental vengeance of family formation. For better or worse, he finds a third way between fatherhood and the Catholic priesthood: he avidly engages in the mechanics of conceiving a child but disregards the consequences. Enright observes that some of McGahern’s writing on sex is “sacerdotal”—sex replaces the religious rituals that he eschews. (“The moment is always the same and always new,” the narrator muses.) Sexual desire is its own liturgy and house of worship, and the sexually liberated Irishman’s commitments, like those of any man of the cloth, must be undivided.
With “The Pornographer,” McGahern, who attained literary fame as a martyr to a cruel and stifling patriarchal structure, appears to ask if a man can excuse himself from the house altogether—not dismantle it, but just slip out the back door. The narrator has certain bonds that he honors and duties that he faithfully observes: bringing pages to his editor, bringing pain relief to his aunt. He is surprisingly attentive to Josephine, even courtly at times. All in all, though, he finds comfort in a zone somewhere between stoicism and nihilism. Unlike the boy in “The Dark,” he is not tormented by the meaning of his death; instead, he is moderately troubled by the meaninglessness of life. When his uncle visits, he thinks, “Now that it was taking place it amounted to the nothing that was the rest of our life when it too was taking place.” Sometimes he does things as if only to prove to himself the futility of all human and spiritual endeavors, as when he asks God that his uncle might live forever: “I murmured the prayer with a force all the greater because I knew it could not be answered.” For the child of “The Dark,” everything mattered too much. For the adult of “The Pornographer,” nothing matters enough.
McGahern never specifies exactly when “The Pornographer,” published in 1979, is set, but certain historical markers plant it between the late sixties and mid seventies. After Josephine becomes pregnant, friends of the narrator offer to arrange a legal abortion for her in London; this places the novel’s events no earlier than 1967, when the British Parliament passed the nation’s legislative equivalent of Roe v. Wade. (Abortion was legalized in Ireland in 2019.) Josephine is subject to what was known as the “marriage bar,” which, until the mid seventies, obligated most women employees in Ireland to leave their jobs when they married or became pregnant. On her resignation, a woman could receive a “marriage gratuity,” based on the term of her employment; Josephine, who has worked at the same bank for twenty years, is due a large payout, but only if she can convince her suitor to marry her. “She doesn’t get a penny if she just has to resign,” the narrator explains ruefully. It need not be said that simply keeping her job is out of the question. (Irish employment law did not explicitly prohibit pregnancy discrimination until 1994.)
For girls and women in twentieth-century Ireland, to be unmarried and pregnant was akin 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 conscripted into hard labor at the notorious Magdalene Laundries; others were walled up in the so-called mother-and-baby homes, where abuse and neglect were rampant and infants were buried in mass graves. In recent years, Ireland’s reckoning with this ghastly 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 film starring Cillian Murphy.
Josephine, in different hands, could be a fascinating outlier to this national tragedy. She is a generation older than the typical Magdalene inmates; she has social bonds, social capital, and even a wealthy gentleman admirer in London who is willing to enter into a marriage of convenience. Crucially, and unlike most victims of Ireland’s mother-and-baby carceral state, she wants to be pregnant. McGahern strongly implies that Josephine, facing the last years of her fertility, found a man to get her accidentally-on-purpose pregnant in the hope of pressing him into marriage, and that her chosen man, maybe half-knowingly, went along with her scheme—the sex part, not the husband part. The narrator is unfazed by the overwhelming ontological reality of the imminent baby. It has nothing to do with him, he insists, and, according to law and custom, he is right. “Under Irish law,” Enright writes, “an illegitimate child was deemed filius nullius—the child of no father.” (A child born out of wedlock had no claim on the paternal estate; it was not until 1987 that Ireland abolished illegitimacy as a legal status for children.)
The conduct of the narrator toward his pregnant lover is cold-blooded and also passive—he can’t help himself, it’s beyond his control. He is still, like the boy in “The Dark,” outmatched by Catholic wrath and by his own sex drive. Yet, perversely, his behavior is also condoned, even codified, by church and state. (Put another way: There were no Magdalene Laundries for wayward teen-age boys.) It is what it is—what is he supposed to do about it? This is the question that nags at many of the narrator’s encounters with Josephine, and their book-length two-step would hold more interest if she weren’t so vacuous—if McGahern weren’t constantly nudging the reader to notice how stupid and yet oddly conniving she is.
