SOURCE: "High Ground," in Re-reading the Short Story, edited by Clare Hanson, Macmillan Press, 1989, pp. 86-97.

'High Ground' is the title story of the contemporary Irish writer John McGahern's third collection—he has also written four novels. It is not the leading story of the volume, however: that one (the first) is called 'Parachutes'. These stories, and these titles, fascinate me, because they are at once (as their altitude suggests) aloof, distinct, cool and yet (as the ambiguities of the titles hint) prepared to enter into a relationship, to establish a stance or line between reader and text: prepared by the writer, as I take it, who creates the taste by which he is to be enjoyed, first by designating the space within which this process is to take place.

It is the relationship between the sense of process and that of design in the short story—specifically, here, in these two stories and in the relationship between them—that I want to explore.

Perhaps I had better confess at the outset that you may feel this question is compromised by the writer and the works I have chosen. Though I shall not assume that you have read High Ground I expect you will recognise its characteristic preoccupations and procedures: the fascination with personal crises of disappointment and loss, particularly within the family, which seem obscurely to point beyond the personal. These belong not only to this collection and to McGahern's work, but familiarly to the Irish short story, which exploits the capacity to move, as in McGahern's work it quietly does, from the personal to the national, and the emotional to the political, if not overtly, then by implication—though it is occasionally explicit, as in the story here called 'Oldfashioned', where the local Sergeant's son is befriended by the English Colonel and his lady. In 'Parachutes' and 'High Ground' the sorrow of the abandoned lover wandering in the dislocation of Dublin streets, trapped between obsessive memories and the importunities of his drunken friends, or the unease of the young man whose choice between personal loyalty and advancement shifts into the public sphere of politics and job: these constitute intimate crises, but are also felt to be symptomatic of an encroaching national confusion of romantic and historic loyalties and political pragmatism: an identity compromised on the one hand by outdated affiliations and on the other by self-abnegation in a dislocated modernity.

The question arises, whether in this context it is possible to sustain my opening claim that the writer creates the taste by which he is to be enjoyed, first by designating the space within which this process is to take place. Is the space in fact a given: the space of Ireland, and of Irish history (a space in time)? Is the writer bound simply to move within this area? The consistency of tone and the interrelationship of stories within the High Ground volume, and McGahern's work as a whole, might be judged either to support or to refute this idea. Figures are recalled, and situations developed; a world is constituted, polarised between the cold alienation of Dublin, and the different chill of a lost country (not named, but thought to be McGahern's own Co. Leitrim). Is this a matter of text or context, within the writer's control, or governing his procedures?

I shall return to these questions and to the Irish tradition later, but for the moment I want to focus on that aspect of consistency which might be regarded as thematic or stylistic, or both together, but which we might all agree seems characteristic both of the author and of the chosen form: that is the predominant quality of self-containment in these stories, which challenges us to approach each one individually. It is this independence of stance, together of course with the wry, exact recognition of everything which qualifies it, all the trammels of circumstance, personal, social, historical, literary even, to which Irish writers from Yeats and Joyce onwards have exhibited such an ambivalent exasperation and reverence: this embattled independence is what allows, and even challenges us to take these stories on analytically, and not primarily as subjectively bound descriptions of the conditions of their generation. This is what makes the stories readable to an audience outside those specific conditions, which makes them literary texts.

It is the conjunction of this embattled independence with the short story form that I want to explore. What is it within the work that tells us, formally, what to expect, and hence determines readerly satisfaction and disappointment; and how is this formal strain related to the matter of the text?

Henry James wrote of the novel form that its distinguishing characteristic is elasticity, the capacity to grow more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould. It is not, in other words, a formal property, but a formal propensity, a capacity, which James sees as the thing which makes the novel what it is: its genetic inheritance, if you like. Given this critical coup with the notoriously anarchic novel form, it is remarkable how resistant to definition the short story has proved: how hard it has been to do more than find two main concerns, with plot and atmosphere, each apparently requiring quite different formal properties: the story and the sketch. Why should the short story be harder than the novel to define? Perhaps because James's technique has not been followed: we have expected to find outlines; but we should perhaps look rather for directions, an inherent determination rather than achieved definition. The notion of determination against definition may even indicate what the link is between matter and form, since we could also interpret this in psychological, or indeed in political terms.

The titles of our stories give us a starting point: or perhaps I should say, a direction. The sense of movement develops between their various available meanings, and in the space between the two titles, and between the titles and us. 'High Ground', for instance, could be geographical or moral; we could think of painterly ground, and bas relief; we can not escape an inherent tension between the verticality of 'high' and the horizontal of 'ground'. Both 'High Ground' and 'Parachutes' work in naturalistic and in symbolic ways, and this is characteristic of the stories too: it may indeed prove to be their determining characteristic. From the volume title High Ground to the opening 'Parachutes' we are precipitated into movement, a fall; and we are prevented, too, from moving too fast: it is an impeded movement—so that a sense is developed not merely of space but also of time: together with verticality, there is velocity. If the elasticity of the story form stretches between naturalism and symbolism, it could also be held taut by the space/time rhythmic interchange, and the balance of being and knowing, state and process. What I hope to show is how these stories are held by these two possibilities, between being and knowing, and how this is reflected in the text by the prose rhythms (I do not mean just the stylistic traits, though in this short paper I will concentrate on prose style as it is so immediate to our experience as readers)—the rhythms of statement which are caught between rhythms of discovery and rhythms of recovery: one, if you like, proper to the High Ground of Ireland, and the other to the space which the text creates for itself.

The prose rhythms seem to correspond to the title of 'Parachutes' in their arrested development; and the opening interchange, which I shall quote in a moment, also asserts this tendency through its obliquity. Both rhythms and obliquity could be seen as mimetic of emotional distress; but they also function as the necessary and enabling condition of the narrative: thus answering to both the suggestions of 'Parachutes'—the fall and the salvation—and in this the opening movement anticipates the eventual gently ironic twist by which the 'parachutes' which appear in the last pages of the tale are no machines of prevention at all, but organisms of propagation: the drifting seedheads of thistledown, which rise before they fall, and disperse to create new growth, though at the cost of much waste. They look like the skirts of the dancing girl, and they figure the failed affair: brief, extravagant, but not quite wasted, since it gives the germ of this tale. And if we move, as I suggested we might, from the personal to the political, there is another irony in the translation of military equipment to natural forms, and there is salvation implicit in the undetermined but irrepressible fecundity of the Dublin waste ground where the thistles, and the stories, grow.

That political dimension is immanent though never explicit in the imagery from the first.

'I want to ask you one very small last favour.'

'What is it?'

'Will you stay behind for five minutes after I leave?'

It was the offer of a blindfold, to accept the darkness for a few minutes before it finally fell.

The opening announcement of foreclosure, the determined, simple cadences, the inversion for the reader of ending and beginning, of darkness and light, the powerful, threatening image of the blindfold, are brilliantly compressed and oblique. This obliquity is made to take the formal mimetic stress of emotional expression: into the deadpan, we read anguish. The direct first person is discreetly harnessed by the deictic construction introducing an emotive metaphor: 'It was the offer of a blindfold . . .' There is a sequence of short, declarative sentences, stripped of most modifiers and qualifiers, which acts like a stylistic tuning fork to our readerly ear, so that elaboration when it comes reaches its full effect: and the effect is both one of recovery, the recreation of the moment, and of discovery, bringing out the acute sensation of loss. Between these the statement is polarised as achievement and failure: being and knowing are set at odds, though vitally interdependent: only in this parting is the quality of relationship between them laid open to our view.

She turned and walked away. I was powerless to follow. She did not once look back. The door swung in the emptiness after she had gone. I saw the barman looking at me strangely but I did not care. The long hand of the clock stood at two minutes to eight. It did not seem to move at all. She was gone, slipping further out of reach with every leaden second, and I was powerless to follow.

The story follows the circular rhythms of recall; as it began with 'one very small last favour', it ends (Miltonically) 'as we set out'; and implicit in this rondo is the disruption of the parting: a disruption which finds its stylistic counterpart in the narrative decorum of the first person mode (that is, a singleness laid open to view). My argument is that McGahern uses these devices of style—and larger motifs: narrative circularity, repetition and the interplay of space and time—all introduced easily without violence to the illusion of naturalism, but with an ulterior purpose: not to displace naturalism, but within its conventions to express, or explore, or simply activate a different level of significance, which is the one we respond to not just as readers but specifically as short story readers. In promoting the distinct interests of process and of design, he instructs us how to read.

This argument not only supports the double force of a style which is both mimetic and self-conscious, engaging and cool, which we might perhaps expect in an unhappy love story, but it also makes critical room for those occurrences in the text which I think might otherwise be hard to explain or justify. The devices I have in mind range from a series of references to books—the pages of a book, another slim volume, a Roman missal—to the kind of literary discussion which quotes Burns and Hazlitt, or the conversational dissection of the words 'comprehension' and 'apprehension'—terms which we can scarcely suppose to be merely accidental or merely plausible in a naturalistic sense.

These literary joggings of the elbow are reminiscent (perhaps again designedly so) of Joyce—not only in Dubliners but in Portrait and Ulysses too—where issues of language and text serve not only for personal characterisation but also to raise the historical matter of Ireland, colonialism, and domination in religious, economic, and even family and sexual politics.

In 'Parachutes' these textual signals crop up intermittently, and not, I think, simply at random: what happens is that the text oscillates between an inner and an outer space and time, and these shifts are marked by the intrusion of the textual prompts. So the opening movement shows the speaker waiting in a bar for his lover to leave, rushing out to look for her, then coming on a group of friends in another bar: and his private world clashes with their social existence; but we feel the awkwardness through this curious signal:

Paddy Mulvey was reading a book, his eyes constantly flickering from the page to the door, but as soon as he heard my name called his eyes returned fixedly to the page.

The friends are guarding a brown leather suitcase for Halloran: another cache of secrecy, which will eventually be forced open—to reveal women's underwear and a missal—illustrating, as I take it, both the indecorum and the inutility of such inquisitiveness, and so indirectly endorsing the value of mystery. The pages, the suitcase, the slim volume, do not prompt curiosity in the protagonist: they are the signal for recoil to his own secrets:

I tried to listen but found the arid, mocking words unbearable. Nothing lived. Then I found myself turning towards a worse torture, to all I wanted not to think about.

The inner space and the pocketed time of memory are given a specific narrative location and duration: dinner a few days before Christmas at her sister's home. McGahern's feeling for locality allows a close match of naturalistic specificity and symbolism here. The claustrophobia is insistently detailed:

The house her sister lived in was a small semidetached in a new estate: a double gate, a garage, a piece of lawn hemmed in with concrete, a light above the door. The rooms were small, carpeted. A coal fire burned in the tiled fireplace of the front room.

From this fireplace the cosy prospect of a predictable future is disturbing; but the 'vague unease' is finely slanted through a postmortem on the way home. It is not the polite sidestepping nor the open expostulation of conversation that designates the emotional cramp of the design, but the shifts and returns of mood and tense amongst the verbs in this account. The transposition of conflict to the level of syntax is strangely decent, yet unyielding. This is the precise rhythm of history and future, the circumscription of possibility:

'What did you think of them?' she'd asked as she took my arm in the road outside.

'I thought they were very nice. They went to a great deal of trouble.'

'What did you think of the house?'

'It's not my kind of house. It's the sort of house that would drive me crackers.'

'What sort of house would you like?'

'Something bigger than that. Something with a bit more space. An older house. Nearer the city.'

'Excuse me,' she said with pointed sarcasm as she withdrew her arm.

I should have said, 'It's a lovely house. Any house with you would be a lovely house,' and caught and kissed her in the wind and rain. And it was true. Any house with her would have been a lovely house. I had been the fool to think that I could stand outside life. I would agree to anything now. I would not even ask for love. If she stayed, love might come in its own time, I reasoned blindly.

And this is where a hiatus, a shift towards the story's present, confronts us—unlike the romantic escapist Yeats' echo of 'the wind and the rain'—with the inexorable consistency of its experience. The sequence may look superficially inconsequential; but at another level, the following casual remark articulates a continuing theme and links the 'then' and 'now' worlds through their concern with what is and what might have been.

'Do you realise how rich the English language is, that it should have two words, for instance, such as "comprehension" and "apprehension", so subtly different in shading and yet so subtly alike? Has anything of that ever occurred to you?'

This was Mulvey now.

'No, I hadn't realised.'

The pluperfect is exactly right: I hadn't realised, but now I have: that is what the story is about.

'Parachutes' moves in two ways: random, like the drifting seedheads, and determined, like the falling aviator; and the relation between the two could be described as suspension, which is the office of the parachute and the condition of the short story. It is at once provocatively self-referential and engagingly inexplicit. A paragraph ostensibly relating the last moments in the bar, for instance, is also an epitome of the whole tale: but it does not claim to be that, and so the effect is not one of closure, but the statement in which recovery and discovery are exactly poised, where the space has been made for what had to be said. Vocal and balletic rhythms here distance and objectify the feeling which informs the last sentence of this extract, at once coolly controlled and extraordinarily passive and impersonal: 'A whole world had been cut from under me.' This blind fall is carefully prepared:

They started to quarrel. I bought a last round. It was getting close to closing time. Eamonn Kelly had begun an energetic conversation with himself, accompanied by equally vigorous gestures, a dumbshow of removing hat and gloves, handshakes, movements forward and back, a great muttering of some complicated sentence, replacing of hat and gloves. The Mulveys had retreated into stewing silences. I was bewildered as to what I was doing here but was even blinder still about possible alternatives. A whole world had been cut from under me.

'High Ground' is like 'Parachutes' in several ways: the Irish setting; the first person mode; the negotiation of time through memory; the apprehension of an unstatable future against which the story's present is played out. But it is different too. Less urbane (the setting is rural, the speaker a younger man), less literary, less provocative towards the reader, and stronger in its affirmations. It looks more naturalistic, but the effect is a more direct confrontation with conditions of being; less concern with ways of knowing. Whatever perspective we have on 'High Ground' stresses design more heavily than process. In 'Parachutes' prose and narrative rhythms engage our attention; in 'High Ground' it is contours which require our notice: place is foregrounded, and even time has a solid, almost tactile quality: so the busy man 'won't beat around the bush', while the old Master's walls are hung with ancient calendars that have faded into the paper.

A sense of place is economically and even sardonically sketched in a series of small details approaching visual/verbal puns. Here worldly advance is signalled by a sequence of houses built on each others' insurance money in a sort of domestic cannibalism. Not yet engaged in that world, the young protagonist lets his boat drift, sits with his lover in a borrowed Prefect, goes home to help reroof his father's house: he lives amidst drifting and making do, amidst continuities and reciprocity. The arrivist Senator, however, appears in a different relation to the land:

He had bulldozed the hazel and briar from the hills above the lake, and as I turned to see how close the boat had come to the wall, I could see behind him the white and black of his Friesians grazing between the electric fences on the far side of the reseeded hill.

He sits on the wall and comes 'to the point'. What he offers young Moran is a 'position'. The issue, through another pun, is one of 'principle': the headship of his old school, where his Master would be turned 'out on the road'. Which way to turn? Where to stand?

This is not answered. The conclusion is low-key and determinedly naturalistic, couched in the Master's conversation from the high stool in the bar (The downward slope from the high stool is longer and steeper than from the top of Everest.'), where he speaks of high things. He extols the high values of home, of staying still, 'practically at the source of the Shannon'. He claims, There are people in this part of the country digging ditches who could have been engineers or doctors or judges or philosophers had they been given the opportunity.' But we hear him through the listener outside, and this perspective complicates the security of place, and suggests the nonnaturalistic significance of the moment too. The tale is rounded to a close which holds all the possibilities—the ways of advance, retreat and of evasion—in careful balance: process is captured in design, and the mutual compromise of knowing and being are presented through the narrative contentions of youth and age, and the dimensions of time and space. Perhaps it is worth noting that while 'Parachutes*, the disappointed love story which opens the collection, is followed by 'A Ballad', 'High Ground' comes near the middle of the volume, and is held between 'Crossing the Line' and 'Gold Watch'. Between space and time.

In approaching these tales as examples of the short story form I have tried to work within the confines of the individual text and then the collection, taking the line any reader might follow, and exploring how the author has laid down directions, and created both parameters and volume, made the space of the story: in this process, the dimensions of space and time are material for his art. But they are also, of course, the conditions within which he works: there is a context for these texts, both geographical and historical, in literature and in life, and this certainly also conditions our reading and must be taken into account as we look for what I began by calling the 'inherent determination' of the form.

John McGahern, who lives near the border, is writing out of contemporary Ireland, out of an embattled, impoverished and fiercely self-conscious land: one with a peculiar sensitivity to geography and to history. He is also writing out of an Irish tradition, a specific short story tradition, working within these conditions, which provide not only obsessive themes, but also an attitude, a literary tone, poised between dispassionate control and deep engagement. The name I am sure you have been waiting for me to acknowledge is Joyce, and Dubliners, like Dublin, is certainly a presence in McGahern's world: not simply (if it can be called simple) through the sense of place, but also through the techniques of oblique progression through a sequence of tales at once separate and interlinked, and through the exposed solipsism of stream-of-consciousness poised against direct speech. But there is also another precursor, whom McGahern himself acknowledges. This is George Moore. His collection of stories, The Unfilled Field, has a relationship to McGahern's country stories which balances Dubliners and the city; both, of course, are subsumed in a larger category of Irish stories, for in both the presence of the other Ireland is felt beneath the surface. Moore, like Joyce, and later McGahern, writes of an Ireland bound in by bigotry and poverty, but also by beauty and pride; an Ireland which cannot be borne but can never wholly be left behind, even though the young emigrés, the 'wild geese', have flocked since the famine to America, while Irish intellectuals have turned to Europe, and particularly to Paris, for a freedom compromised at home by the hold of the church and the irreconcilable demands of political confusion. What Moore calls the 'depopulation question' lies behind every coming-of-age, every romance, every new job or old home, every struggle and betrayal: life is lived, or endured, in the knowledge of a possible exile, possible renunciation, or betrayal, which is both personal and national. George Moore's fine story The Wild Goose' ends with a paragraph which High Ground could accommodate with ease:

He left early next morning before she was awake in order to save her the pain of farewells, and all that day in Dublin he walked about, possessed by the great joyful yearning of the wild goose when it rises one bright morning from the warm marshes, scenting the harsh north through leagues of air, and goes away on steady wingbeats. But he did not feel he was a free soul until the outlines of Howth began to melt into the grey drift of evening. There was a little mist on the water, and he stood watching the waves tossing in the mist thinking that it were well that he had left home—if he had stayed he would have come to accept all the base moral coinage in circulation; and he stood watching the green waves tossing in the mist, at one moment ashamed of what he had done, at the next overjoyed that he had done it.

It is not just the emotional and moral territory that we recognise here, but, as I should like to argue, the way we come to know them: the directions implicit in the phrasing itself: the prose rhythms, the balance of literal and figurative language, the nervous accuracy of tense, mood and voice in the verbs, which tell us where the boundaries lie that this tale strains against, and urges the need to overstep. May I give the last sentence again, with this in mind, as a fitting conclusion?

There was a little mist on the water, and he stood watching the waves tossing in the mist thinking that it were well that he had left home—if he had stayed he would have come to accept all the base moral coinage in circulation; and he stood watching the green waves tossing in the mist, at one moment ashamed of what he had done, at the next overjoyed that he had done it.