The New Yorker:

Years after John McGahern became the center of a national censorship debate, his novel “The Pornographer” cast an impassive eye on death, sex, and patriarchal repression.

By Jessica Winter

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.

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