The Pornographer

by John McGahern, Anne Enright (introduction)

By “arguably the most important Irish writer since Samuel Beckett” (The Guardian), a character study of a young resident of Dublin who pens erotica for a living, making his money through fantasy while denying the realities of love and sex in his life.

The Pornographer is the story of a writer down on his luck, not a Dubliner but a resident of Dublin penning far from erotic tales to make ends meet. These tales—revolving around the “delicious, unending revel” of Colonel Grimshaw and the typist Mavis Carmichael—form a mordant counterpoint to his own, much more complicated existence.

Thirty years old, befogged by alcohol, sensitive yet indifferent to all emotional weather, he meets the slightly older Josephine, a clever, cautiously optimistic magazine editor who soon confesses her love, and though the feeling isn’t mutual (as he makes painfully clear) the affair goes on; Josephine becomes pregnant; and, this being Ireland in the seventies, the piper must be paid.

Not cruel but callous, the pornographer reels through his days, paying regular visits to a beloved aunt from the country who now lies dying in Dublin, and to his publisher, a citified and cynical Polonius who advises him to “be careful not to let life in.” As the days turn into months, he begins to wonder what letting life in might look like. What would it mean, and where would it lead, to do right by others?

First published in 1979, John McGahern’s fourth novel is a character study of rare and unsparing insight. In rhythmic, lyrical prose, McGahern gives voice to the longing and self-loathing of a soul caught between a traditional world he believes he has rejected and a brave new world of advertised freedoms, sexual and otherwise, which offers no guarantee of love.

Genres: Fiction, Irish Literature, Ireland, Literary Fiction, Literature, 20th Century, Religion

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

McGahern began his career as a schoolteacher at Scoil Eoin Báiste (Belgrove) primary school in Clontarf, Ireland, where, for a period, he taught the eminent academic Declan Kiberd before turning to writing full-time. McGahern's second novel 'The Dark' was banned in Ireland for its alleged pornographic content and implied clerical sexual abuse. In the controversy over this he was forced to resign his teaching post. He subsequently moved to England where he worked in a variety of jobs before returning to Ireland to live and work on a small farm in Fenagh in County Leitrim, located halfway between Ballinamore and Mohill. His third novel 'Amongst Women' was shortlisted for the 1990 Man Booker Prize.
He died from cancer in Dublin on March 30, 2006.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 3 out of 5]

SOFT-CORE


Ger Ryan e Tony Doyle in “Amongst Women” la miniserie tratta da un altro romanzo e sceneggiata dallo stesso McGahern nel 1998.

L’ennesimo scrittore irlandese.
E quindi facile aspettarsi, e incontrare nelle pagine, pub, whiskey, Guinness, gin.
Altrettanto facile sentire i recensori parlare di Joyce: nulla di scritto che esce dall’Irlanda può più essere esportato senza scomodare il grande geniale dublinese errante.

Il protagonista io narrante, di cui mai apprendiamo il nome, è un giovane molto affezionato a una vecchia zia che sta morendo di cancro in ospedale: la va a trovare e le porta il suo analgesico preferito, il brandy.
La sta forse aiutando a morire?
Sì: nel senso che cerca di renderle gli ultimi giorni di vita più gradevoli, e quindi, regalandole una morte meno dura.

Questa zia è il suo unico affetto: è un uomo che appare incapace d’amore.
Una sera va a ballare e conosce una donna più grande di lui (ha trent’anni suonati!).


Un altro momento di “Amongst Women”.

Lei è molto sentimentale, e sessualmente inesperta: la religione cattolica (e visto che siamo in Irlanda, è un condimento che non poteva mancare) la spinge a non voler usare contraccettivi.
Per lui è soprattutto sana attività sessuale, quasi pura idraulica - per lei attesa d’amore.
Così, lei rimane incinta.

Ma lui non vuole saperne: anzi, la prospettiva di diventare padre aumenta il suo desiderio di fuga.
Occorre aspettare la morte della zia perché lui si concentri sulla vita che sta per nascere.


”Il pornografo” è il titolo italiano di “Inserts”, film del 1975 scritto e diretto da John Byrum, interpretato da Richard Dreyfuss, Jessica Harper e Bob Hoskins, che nulla ha a che fare col romanzo di McGahern.

La pornografia del titolo sono solo le storie che il narratore deve inventare per guadagnarsi da vivere.
E lo stesso McGahern intervistato diceva che:
la pornografia nel libro è una metafora: perché è l'opposto della sessualità, o, quanto meno, sta alla sessualità vera come la tecnica della scrittura sta alla creatività letteraria.
Ciò nonostante l’associazione dei pornografi californiani, quando il libro è stato pubblicato in America, sul loro organo ufficiale, Fuck Books, riconobbe che quello del libro è un ottimo soft-porn.


Susanna Basso alla cui bravura di traduttrice dobbiamo tanta letteratura di lingua inglese.

Non posso dire che un gran bene dell’alcol, è l’unica cosa che ti porta via. Andare via, fuggire.
Proprio come fece il grande geniale dublinese errante sempre tirato in ballo a sproposito.


Il Nobel per la letteratura 1995 Seamus Heaney insieme a Brian Friel e Peter Fallon al funerale di John McGahern nella chiesa di St Patrick ad Aughawillan.

[Hanneke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although written in an admirable and special style, I got impatient with the content and the characters of the novel along the way and hastened through the pages to the end. I could not possibly pinpoint why the story and characters of the novel irritated me, but they did.

[Tony]

The first-person protagonist of this novel is, as the title informs, a writer of erotica. He doesn't do it as a fetish, nor to necessarily titillate; it's just a convenient paycheck. He drinks. A lot. But he's not a drunkard. He has sex, and a lot of that, too. But never love. He is, we will gradually learn, cold, heartless, way beyond pragmatic. But not evil. He will, for example, be quite tender with his dying aunt, she who raised him. So maybe he's just detached, exceptionally guarded. Maybe, yes. But we don't like him. He's painted so we can't. And it's obvious he doesn't even like himself. But he's accepted that.

The set-up of plot, which explains all this, is that he meets a woman in a dance hall, and they rather quickly go to bed. She falls for him; he does not fall for her. But he will sleep with her, for a month or so, even as he becomes annoyed at her. When she becomes pregnant he tells her she can abort or find adoption, but they won't marry, and he will have nothing to do with the child. He could not be clearer about this.

Now know this: Anne Enright, in the obligatory nyrb-classics Introduction, informs us that the basic outline of this story is largely autobiographical. I may have read it then as the author's self-flagellation.

Published in 1979 originally, the writing and themes seem a bit outdated now. Yet, there were moments.

Our self-aware narrator says this: By the time I left I no longer felt the vulnerable single person that has to take on suffering and death. We upholster ourselves.

When he learns of his aunt's death: I broke, and far off I could hear the wildness in my crying. Guard the human person well even in all its meanness, in its open hand, spite, venom, horror, beauty--profane sacredness, horrible contradiction.

His boss served as a kind of Polonius, the better to spout the occasional witticism, bromide or counterpoint: "This isn't Grenoble and I'm not Stendhal's uncle."

Our narrator cannot be more clear that he will not marry, will not be a father, and will not even be nice. The mother-to-be seems unable to accept that. Oh boy I sure picked a winner, she says over and over. And twice she tells him this: You sound more like a lawyer than a person. Oh boy.

[A. Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's something so sophisticated about this book, built on the complexities of its surprising title. It's difficult to sort out what conclusion can be drawn about the reference to pornography. McGahern is never explicit about that because it is so much more than raunchy sex scenes. That becomes clear in the second story Michael, the pornographer, submits to his editor. The characters are the same, the activities are the same, and the supposedly wild cries of pleasure are identical. The only thing that changes is the location. It is neither artful (we're talking pornography, here, not erotica), nor imaginative, but Michael is pragmatic: he is a writer, and he can earn a lot more money doing a lot less work if he writes his pornographic installments about the antics of Mavis and the Colonel. It's a paint-by-number kind of thing. And running parallel to this professional trajectory is Michael's personal sexual and romantic life. I've seen it written that Michael is insensitive to the suffering of a woman who loves him. I don't agree that he is--he simply does not love her. He is bluntly honest from the start: he wants to have sex with her, but if she conceives, he will not marry her. Guess what happens. She keeps thinking he will change, and he keeps not changing. That's just about the oldest story there is. Michael is not heartless. He does feel some responsibility, and he provides condoms but she (who is never named) refuses, insisting there is no danger of conception. On the other side of this is a man who loves her, but whom she does not love. Michael loved the woman before her (who did not love him), and he loves the woman after her (who might love him but nothing is sure). He loves his dying aunt who adores a husband who is not (at best) loving toward her. This is the agony of love, and perhaps that is the pornography McGahern understands. Michael observes of his lusty characters, Mavis and the Colonel, that he supposes they live happily enough, if they can be said to live at all. On its surface, this novel might be mistaken for the stumbles of a sexual revolution, but truly it is a consideration of the very deepest human things, about love and sex and belonging. And, how seldom, how very seldom, those things align.

[Mark Mullee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of all McGahern's novels, I have heard the least about The Pornographer. I don't have an explanation why this is, only the suspicion that it may have something to do with some readers' and critics' discomfort at a vulgarity that McGahern makes no attempt to either justify or finally reject. The element of sexual fantasy in the novel is not one of ecstatic physical love that some books use to draw readers, but a kind of mocking turned against the protagonist, who is unable to deal with his own relationship with an older woman, and who ministers helplessly to his aunt dying in hospital. As in all McGahern’s work, the pages are permeated by a sharp understanding of human behavior, especially the human tendency to evade reality.

I will also point out that not only does McGahern do what other novelists don’t do, he also doesn’t do what other novelists do repeatedly and predictably. For example, he doesn’t insert “drinking scenes” awkwardly into the exposition. The protagonist is always drinking but very rarely drunk. Without resorting to dramatic passages of drunkenness, McGahern manages to insinuate alcohol into the very fabric of the novel, which is a much darker presence. Also, his women characters are not flimsy placeholders that serve only to explain the motivations of the men, as I’ve seen in so many of the novels I’ve read. Each has her own motivations, which follow logically from her personality rather than her sex, and by their actions these characters drive the plot in crucial ways, in contrast to the male protagonist who, like so many of Joyce’s characters in Dubliners, suffers from a profound moral paralysis.

[Lynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful novel. Beautiful and sparsely written demonstrating the complexity of human beings, How is it that one can be callous and compassionate in the same person. Tender and brutal. Highly recommended

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

And all I can do is keep on telling you
I want you
I need you
There ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you… (Meatloaf)

Meatloaf’s classic “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” kept running through my head as I read John McGahern’s The Pornographer.

The novel is set in early ‘70s Ireland, where abortion for any reason was illegal and out-of-wedlock births still carried such a social stigma that woman went to absurd lengths to prevent making them public. Our narrator, the “pornographer” of the title, is a writer who’s settled into the comfortable if sterile life of writing trashy short stories for a magazine, coasting through life without purpose. He’s recently come off a failed romance where the woman did not love him the way he loved her and the subsequent break up was bitter. Additionally, he’s coping with the lingering terminal illness of his aunt. One night he goes to a dance hall, where he hooks up with an older woman (38 to his 30). It turns out she’s practically a virgin and has no experience with relationships. From the beginning she has unrealistic expectations from the relationship, though the narrator is clear with her that there’s no long-term future to it. Which is to his credit IMO but he doesn’t have the courage to break it off and continues to sleep with her. Since she refuses to use protection, relying on the rhythm method, she becomes pregnant.

I can’t say I enjoyed The Pornographer but I did appreciate it as an utterly believable portrait of human relationships – a minefield of miscommunication, refusals to listen, unrealistic expectations and cowardice. There’s no arc for the narrator. He’s still much the same man he was on page one as on the last page, if perhaps a bit wiser. He muses at the end:

“’You’d have seen me if you had been paying attention,’ she’d once said to me, the night she came towards me across the floor of the Metropole. By not attending, by thinking any one thing was as worth doing as any other, by sleeping with anybody who’d agree, I had been the cause of as much pain and confusion and evil as if I had actively set out to do it. I had not attended properly. I had found the energy to choose too painful. Broken in love, I had turned back, let the light of imagination almost out.”

I liked the novel, but I can’t recommend it to anyone. Read it if it sounds intriguing but don’t blame me if it’s not your cup of tea.

[NB: Don’t take my description of relationships above as a misanthropic screed against them. I like relationships; even the most introverted of us need human contact to be fully sane. My point was that they require work.]

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sometimes you and an author don't hit off. This is on of those times.

[Conor Tuohy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just read it, I don't want to describe it, it made me feel.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The closest thing to a comic novel McGahern ever wrote. It hums with vitality and not merely because of its subject. So far as I can remember, this is the only one of McGahern’s novels with an urban setting. You get the impression the author wasn’t keen on the Dublin literary world. But watching the normally tight-as-a-wingnut McGahern bare his satirical teeth is quite bracing.

[Annelie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very sophisticatedly-written book, although the two main plots are simple. Feelings of love are arrows towards nowhere, its recipient so often incapable of mirroring those feelings. Michael, the pornographer, knows this fact of life even as he writes the smooth, budding romance between Mavis and the Colonel, which replicate his dysfunctional romantic relationships except for their complexity and dissonance.

I fear that readers will interpret Michael as unfeeling
or unfair to the unnamed women whom he impregnates. However, that just isn’t true: Michael was clear with his intentions from the start, continually asked her to accept his usage of condoms, and then offered to pay for the abortion when she ended up pregnant. He clearly articulates his emotional boundaries while providing ample financial support. Maybe I’m being too hard on her, but this woman really annoyed me since she continually misinterpreted Michael at every turn, disrespecting his own desires out of blind belief in the inevitability of romance.

This book had many truly exquisite passages, many of which capture Michael’s inner emotional depth as well as general musings about art and life. I will remember these passages for a long time. While this book is pretty far from my target genre, it’s a very strong NYRB classic and written with mix of masterful concision and spellbinding, sinuous prose that has definitely compelled me to read more of McCahern’s books.

[Mariga Temple-West · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, the RELIEF I felt upon finishing this book!

In-term-in-able.

The aunt is dying. Oh please, please, I can't take another hospital visit, PLEASE just die already. And then there's an in-term-in-able wake, and an in-term-in-able funeral, and an in-term-in-able visit to the headstone shop to look at the headstone. And that idiot Maloney blathering on. None of the women have names but we get a detailed itemization of every drink drunk, every whiskey, beer, lager, bitter, glass of wine, and how much, two carafes, double brandies, large brandies, small brandies, etc. etc. etc.

This book did have its good points, the characters were interesting (but not Maloney). The protagonist used women for sex yet was surprisingly sensitive with them, never forcing them, he wasn't a predator. The woman who got pregnant is an interesting study of a person childlike and not fully developed. The story between her and the protagonist was interesting but even that dragged on and on. And on. ...And on.

And the author goes on and on making "profound" pronouncements about life, death, sex, etc. but then you're just so sick of it you don't care.

[David S]

A book so misanthropic I had to put it down a few times just because I had enough of being with this guy. I really appreciate how unapologetic McGahern is in presenting our narrator as both slightly unreliable and deeply unlikable. What makes this work are the harsh kernels of truth in the observation that the narrator provides, like it's hinting at these ideas we all have that we hate to admit exist within us. It's also quite a fleshed out portrait of the world these characters inhabit. There's a lot of repetitive scenes in it (going on a date, visiting the aunt in the hospital, family time with the uncle) that work to emphasize the monotony while also giving every character some space to breathe.

By the end I was quite taken with it! We reach some hard truths about guilt, love, and what we owe to others. I think the one thing I wasn't quite sold on is this idea that the narrator being a pornographic writer was hindering his ability to properly navigate romantic relations. Feels a little trite maybe?

[Bill Keefe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my second McGahern book. Having read "That They May Face the Rising Sun," I had to read more of McGahern's work. The first one to arrive in the mail was, "The Pornographer." Not considered among his best, it was, nonetheless, engaging from beginning to end. Darker and more troubling than TTMFTRS, "The Pornographer " explores the layers and shades of our emotions and our relationships. His eye is keen and his pen works with the precision of a surgical knife, as he lays open our fears, our doubts and our hopes, always bounding them, never letting us expect to much. There is bright light and night but most of the book is in mist and grey and apartment light. Most of the dilemmas are simple but the options complicated. As in TTMFTRS, there is no fast pitched action or grand dramatic event but unlike TTMRTRS, this book revolves around a single protaganist with a central dilemma, so you read on to discover the resolution, and in so doing, you, yourself are opened to the wounds of love, of life and of death in your own life. McGahern doesn't let you alone as a reader. Thanks to this, I emerge from each reading more sober, more reflective, prepared to be better...but the mist is still on the ground.

[Konstantin R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

[rating= B-]
John McGahern has a very good eye for characters. Whether they be sickly aunts or porn-writing nephews, he creates them and thoroughly goes into them. This novel is about lust and love; love for an aunt, lust for a middle-aged woman. And although the plot may seem banal, McGahern uses these clichés to make his point all the more poignant: people will be people. The very fact that the pornographer cannot love but only lust, is a bit trite, yet this is precisely used to point out that he has turned away from love because of his past. Only faint glimpses of who his "true" love was appear, nothing concrete or intruding. There is also a play on two woman, the aunt and the lover. However these two parts of his, the pornographer's, life are somewhat weakly tided together. The fact that he might or might not (at the end) marry his lover is based on the very fact of the aunt's pending demise. The two lives are meant to mirror or parallel one another, and they do...mostly. But McGahern, as always, delivers a very quite, intense novel with delicate diction and beautiful thoughts and images. Unlike The Dark, this novel does not delve into a fast-pace plot; it is more in the vein of That They May Face The Rising Sun in which characters are front-and-center.

[katryna · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love watching horrible depraved men ruin their lives to a point of reckoning

this book has some of the most profound statements i’ve ever read sandwiched in between somewhat mundane prose and im realizing that may be my favorite writing style i’m gonna read everything mcgahern has ever written byyyyyyye

“I too stood mutilated by another gate, believing that I could not live without my love; but we endure, as the first creature leaving the water endured, having first tried to turn back from the empty land. Having drunk from the infernal glass we call love and knowing we have lived our death, we turn to love another way, in the ordered calm of each thing counted and loved for its impending loss. We learn to smile.”

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great book by McGahern. The book has some really touching themes – how the end of a life can be fulfilling and courageous, while the start of another life can be heart wrenching and undignified.
There’s also beautiful, extraordinary prose throughout the book. This might be my favorite: “…by thinking any one thing was as worth doing as any other, by sleeping with anybody who’d agree, I had been the cause of as much pain and confusion as if I had actively set out to do it. I had not attended properly. I had found the energy to choose too painful. Broken in love, I had turned back, let the light of imagination almost out. Now my hands were ice.”

[John Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5⭐
The density and intensity of internal narrative here will not appeal to casual readers. There's often a lot to unpack in the formulation of emotion, and just in transitional/reflective passages such as this:
"It must surely be possible to be out of our life for the whole of our life if we could tell what life is other than this painful becoming of ourselves."
And this:
"Now that it was taking place it amounted to the nothing that was the rest of our life when it too was taking place. It would become part of our life again in the memory. In both the apprehension and the memory it was doomed to live far more vividly than in the taking place. Nature had ordered things well in that we hardly lived our lives at all."
Patient consideration is necessary to understand the complex and seemingly conflicted state of mind of the narrator/primary character. While he appears to have so much figured out and is sure of what he wants, his internal dialogue betrays perpetual tension, albeit a tension counterbalanced by the wisdom he has gained through experience.
McGahern's prose is erudite and strewn with insights that arrest.
And man do they do a lot of drinking.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a 5-star read for snobby reasons. The prose is brilliant and benefits from careful reading for the idiomatic Irish expressions as well as unforced, almost casual lyricism. Are the characters likable? On the surface maybe not, but they certainly are poignant and worthy of sympathy. The profound statements on love, sex, and relationships are universal but still so Irish. And as always with reissued titles, do NOT read the preface until after you've read the novel. Enright ties together threads and descriptions that resonate better afterwards and also sheds heartbreaking light on McGahern himself - details that should ideally not skew the reader's experience.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing was confusing to me at first, disjointed, old, and Irish, and I nearly gave up, but my steadfast dedication to completing everything, even bad books, was rewarded with a fortuitous turn: this book actually was great! It just needed about 60 pages to start cooking with gas. Only recommended to the most stubborn NYRB Classics fans.

[Chris Waterford · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was impressed immediately with the quality of the writing but the story was like marrying oil and water---for me, the weird mix of different strands just didn't work.
5/10

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a book for those invested in the likability of their characters. These people are delusional and self-centered, denying the situation and pushing onward. And that’s what make them fascinating.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Ireland wanking is Ireland free"

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

All I really have to say about this book I randomly picked up at a resale bookstore is, the protagonist is a real son-of-a-bitch.

I may have a more intelligent review later, but likely not.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

All of McGahern's books are just a little bit strange, and The Pornographer is no exception. It certainly has an interesting conceit: about a young man in Dublin in the late-'70s who makes a modest living writing pornography in those innocent, pre-internet days. He is what my mother might call a "libertine", ready to bed anyone who will have him, but he's no great romancer: he tells his partners that he's only interested in the sex, wants no commitments or responsibilities. This philosophy is tested when one girl gets pregnant and leaves for London to have the child.

Against this background is another plot altogether, something that would be quite familiar to William Trevor. The pornographer's aunt—a woman who raised him after the deaths of his parents—is in hospital with a terminal cancer. McGahern is not coy: he states straight out that the impending death of one person and birth of another are the counterwieghts balancing each other in life's equalibrium.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d have given this three and a half if that was an option. It’s a beautifully written book that encompass a story line that is stark, and often bleak. Like all the best books though, it has a kind of truth - not the fabricated ‘truth’ an author might insert into a story to make it ring, but the authentic kind that develops from the characters and naturally as a story, as if they were real beings acting like real people do.

It’s the sort of book that sometimes will make you stop in reading to reflect on something you’ve just come across, and perhaps something that resonates with your own experience. Not everyone will like the characters as people, and the blunt pragmatism of the main character - the pornographer - will offend some, I reckon. Others might recognise in him a harsh integrity, and ultimately a spark of hope.

I’ll rate books on whether I’d read it a second time. I probably wouldn’t this, but I’d recommend it should be read.

[Aaron Ambrose · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second McGahern novel, and he is now two for two in killing me softly with his pen. The set-up isn't fancy: A young man in late-1970's Dublin, deeply burned by love, has retreated to a life of monastic writing (of pornography), unserious dalliances with women, and more recently, attending his aunt/adoptive mother as she slowly dies. McGahern is a master of beguiling, revealing dialog - it's a master class in astute psychology, while impossibly 100% plausible as real people talking to each other. And here our protagonist's particular station in the world - educated, pragmatic, chewed up by love, socially manipulative but largely honorable - leads to observations and insights that stopped me in my tracks and made me re-read several times to absorb properly. McGahern is quickly joining my all-time favorite authors club.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

The principal issue for me in reading this book is how the protagonist could somehow remain sympathetic while basically abandoning a pregnant woman, aimlessly writing pornography, and occasionally visiting his dying aunt in the hospital. And yet, I liked the main character and the narrative to, at least, finish reading the book.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much a book of birth, life and death. The death inevitable, the birth an avoidable accident and the life - of the Pornographer of the title - managed awkwardly and badly, but with such humanity that his fate becomes of real concern.
The whole enwraps and absorbs, and slis down smoothly as Baileys.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent engaging story which is set in Ireland in the 1970's.