Writer recalls a boy, country coming of age

Everyone has a life and a true story to tell, but few have a story so full of pain and beauty as that of the revered Irish man of letters John McGahern.

Just published in America, McGahern's ''All Will Be Well" is partly the story of his coming of age, but more than that it's the story of his loving mother and brutish father and of Ireland as it once was, totally in the power of the Catholic Church. A milestone in the breaking of that power, vividly described in the book, involved McGahern himself.

In a 43-year career, McGahern has published six novels, including his most recent, ''By the Lake," two collections of short stories, and a play, mainly set in rural Ireland. He was to have been in Boston this week on a book tour but has been receiving treatment for cancer and had to cancel the trip. In a telephone interview yesterday from his farm in County Leitrim, where he lives with his wife, he talked about the writing of this family story.

''I never thought of writing it," said McGahern, 71, ''but in the last five or six years, people started writing about me and getting a lot of it wrong. And then my sisters found an extraordinary cache of letters in an attic. They brought them to me and asked me to write the book."

He was the oldest of seven children of Susan and Frank McGahern. Susan, a star of her family, received a university education by scholarship, and became a schoolteacher in the village of Aughawillan. Frank was a sergeant of the Gardai -- the national police -- who lived in the Cootehall barracks, 18 miles from his wife and children.

Two more contrary characters can scarcely be imagined. Susan was patient and kind, deeply religious, and according to her son, in an age when sadistic beatings were routine in schools, ''she would get into trouble because she never beat the children." But Frank was the sort of man who sees everything and everyone as instruments for his use. Though he could turn on the charm, he was often pathologically cruel and scheming, and domination of others was his constant object.

''He was a strange man," McGahern said. ''It was said the Lord God could not get on with him. His type is often very intelligent but can only take in from the outside what reflects on them. Living in a narcissistic world, though intelligent, they learn nothing."

The sensitive boy bonded with his gentle mother, but the heartbreaking catastrophe at the center of the book is her death from breast cancer in her early 40s, when John was 10. Frank would not come near the house during the last month of Susan's life, and actually sent a van to move the children and most of the furniture to the barracks, while his wife had not yet breathed her last. Years of emotional abuse, near-starvation, and constant beatings followed, until one by one the children escaped into marriage or jobs away from home. John, who loved to read, became a teacher in Dublin and then a writer.

Despite the extraordinary scenes in the book (one sister was driven into a temporary cataleptic state by the beatings, and a delegation of junior officers once threatened to report the sergeant if they didn't stop), McGahern never raised a hand to his father. His most telling resistance was once to laugh in his father's face during a beating. ''By not hitting him," he said, ''I had emotional dominance over him. I would point out how illogical his behavior was."

Yet it deeply affected him. ''I often notice that I can work perfectly in a violent atmosphere," he said. ''If there is violence, it's as if there is a gear clicking in me. I am efficient and deadly."

From James Joyce to Samuel Beckett, many Irish writers went into exile. But not McGahern. ''My generation reacted against that," he said. ''It was said that to become an Irish writer, you had to go abroad, but to me that was the height of nonsense. You can't imagine Proust having to leave France to be a French writer. I said, 'I can write as badly in Ireland as anywhere else.' "

He might have gone, though, had not years of facing attack at home taught him to face it down in public. His first novel, ''The Barracks," was published quietly in 1963, but in 1965 his second, ''The Dark," was banned in Ireland for its sexual content by the church-dominated censorship board. In addition, McGahern was fired from his teaching job on orders of the archbishop of Dublin. Refusing to go away quietly, he went to the school to claim his room but was coldly rebuffed by the teachers union as well as the priest headmaster.

''The clergy had total power," said McGahern. ''I was shocked to read in the letters that in order to get a school [teaching job], my mother had to pay the priest the same amount as she had paid for her breast surgery. They dominated and stultified -- though they did many good things, too. It has been extraordinary for me to see in my lifetime the collapse of that power."

The banning became a national embarrassment (printed in England, the books were actually confiscated at the Dublin docks), and some say it was the beginning of the end of the church's power over the morals of the nation.

''There was shock among a wide spectrum of the reading public at the way he was treated," said R.F. Foster, the Irish biographer of W.B. Yeats, who teaches at Oxford University. ''When the history of the late 20th century in Ireland is written, the banning of 'The Dark' will be a key moment." Today McGahern ''is hugely looked up to and revered," Foster said. ''He is not only a fine writer, but he stayed in unfashionable Ireland, pursuing his art with unimpeachable integrity."

He shows no bitterness toward his father, now dead, or the church, though he is no longer a practicing Catholic. He said, ''Someone wrote that I have a hatred of the church. The opposite is true. I gave a talk in Belfast, and was invited to attack the church. I could no more do that than attack the weather."

Though he didn't become a priest, as his mother had wished, McGahern did keep his deathbed promise to her, ''to take care of the others and keep them together" until they were grown.

The beauty of her memory still burns within him. He writes, ''She never really left us. . . . I believe we would have been broken but for the different life we had known with her."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.