‘Joyce's temperament was essentially classical’, argues McGahern in his one published essay to look at Ireland's greatest fiction writer, an essay which quickly becomes not about Joyce at all but about Gustave Flaubert, a writer beloved equally of McGahern and of Joyce. What did McGahern mean by this? To prove his claim about Joyce's artistic tendencies, he turns to the composition of Dubliners and to the famous passage from Joyce's letter to the publisher Grant Richards in which he says that he has written the stories ‘in a style of scrupulous meanness’. But that does not really help us in defining classicism. What is useful is what McGahern has to say immediately after his long quote from the letter to Richards: ‘The authority and plain sense suggests that Joyce was well aware that he was working within a clearly defined tradition’.

Here McGahern can only mean a European tradition, rather than an Irish one, for he has already agreed in his opening paragraph of this essay with Joyce's brilliant, if ever jaundiced, brother Stanislaus who was scathing about the limitations of any Irish writing lineage. To live in Ireland, writes McGahern, ‘is to come into daily contact with a rampant individualism and localism dominating a vague, fragmented, often purely time-serving, national identity’. James Joyce would have agreed. ‘A nation which never advanced so far as a miracle-play’, he argued of his native country in one of his earliest essays, ‘affords no literary model to the artist’.