You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm talking to

Column Tobin, who has a piece in the latest issue of the LRB on the Irish novelist and short storywriter John McGahn. It's a review of McGahn's letters, edited by Frank Chauvelin. Column To Bean's 10th novel, The Magician, came out last year. He has a book of poems, Vinegar Hill, forthcoming from Carcanet. Hello, Column, and thank you very much for joining me. Hello, Tom, hi. An addition of a writer's letters is bound to raise questions about the relationship between

their life and their writing.

And John McGahn's childhood clearly informed his early novels, and the first letter in the book

is one that he wrote as a child to his father at the age of eight.

Do we recognise the writer of that letter in the children in McGahn's novels?

No, it doesn't seem as frightened as the children are in the books. He's attempting to

ingratiate himself with his father and he's talking about his uncle. But the interesting part is that

this, you know, establishes the idea that he was brought up with, you know, by his mother, who was, who was a teacher.

And his father was a policeman and lived some distance away. So the father wasn't in the household as the children were growing up.

But when the mother died and John McGarheim was aged 10 or 11, the entire brood, he was the eldest, I think there were six of them, were all moved into the barracks in Cout Hall, where the father, I think, ran a very strict regime.

And it's that regime in a way that's covered in novels like the dark and indeed in bits of the leaf-taking and in some of the short stories. So, no, that first letter

is very much, you know, a strange letter from a son to his father who's living some distance

away, sort of thanking him for presence. So it's sort of attempting to keep the peace. And it's mentioning

his uncle and his uncle, it will become the figure, larger than life figure

called the Shah in a novel called That They Might Face the Rising Sun, which was John McGarran's last

novel.

And his father, who appears to be often to have been very angry, was also very angry when the barracks,

his first published novel, came out in 1963.

And he called it an immoral disgrace.

And what was it that provoked him in that way?

I think the letters are interesting because they give us a background. I would have presumed

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