‘With the growth of the intelligence’, writes McGahern, ‘we learn to differentiate the pure from the impure. The tolerance of admitting that our temperaments are themselves limited. Stendhal & Chateaubriand. Byron & Keats’. The quote is drawn from a handwritten, undated fragment of non-fiction held in the McGahern Archive. The document consists of a list of numbered observations about reading and writing – my opening quote comes from number 6. Number 7, in its amalgam of Chesterton, Auden and Proust, is even more revealing in its consideration of literary influence and the sustaining power of a great tradition:

That Stendhal (b. Henri Beyle 1783–1842) should make the list of writers from whom McGahern draws sustenance should not come as a surprise. One of the canonical figures of nineteenth-century French fiction of which McGahern was such an admirer, Stendhal makes glancing appearances throughout the Leitrim writer's oeuvre, and is directly if somewhat puzzlingly mentioned in The Pornographer:

In this novel about sex, its representation and misrepresentation, the comment is probably a reference to an incident in Stendhal's childhood and to his uncle, Romain Gagnon, an incorrigible libertine, who covered the terrace of his house in Grenoble with an array of flowers. Stendhal fondly recalls looking at the stars with his uncle, surrounded by these flowers.