He was one with the place where he lived as few people are. And he was a man, to paraphrase Hardy, who used to notice such things.

Yet when I think of him, I think of the rainy, shadowy, dark-grey Dublin of his youth and mine, where the golden light from pubs was almost the only light along the quiet streets. And I have been thinking of him lately. There was an article in The New York Review of Books recently by Professor Denis Donoghue . . . a kind of general look at John McGahern's work on the occasion of the publication in the US of his memoir. A whole generation was introduced to English and American literature in UCD by Prof Donoghue . . . I was myself . . . and remember his magisterial teaching with a mixture of awe and heartfelt gratitude. He left Ireland, of course, and ascended in the US to the heights of critical authority. But a cat may look at a king, and I thought his piece on McGahern disfigured by various kinds of snobbery.

For the first time in my life, I wrote a 'letter to the editor' to the NYRB. I hinted at the snobbery by referring to Prof Donoghue's tone as one of "metropolitan hauteur", and then I addressed a couple of specific points in the review. I don't know whether the letter will be published.

I don't care. The only person I would have liked to see it was John. Not that I was any kind of friend of his . . . I've been in his company only about once a decade since he was a young teacher in Dublin and I was a student. I don't even know whether he remembered, when we bumped into each other, that we did know each other well for a while. I have a memory of him showing me, in an ice-cream parlour in O'Connell Street, a telegram from TS Eliot at Faber and Faber enthusiastically accepting The Barracks for publication, and I know he told me a sad anecdote about the day he met Eliot. But I don't altogether trust my memory. Those days were such a chaos of emotion and learning and having no money and ignorance and drinking and falling in love and missing busses and always having wet shoes. I got things wrong back then. And I was so wrapped up in myself, I hardly saw other people. But I knew that John was extraordinary, though he was only a national school teacher who taught, among a huge class of boys, my own young brothers . . . keeping order, I may say, not a bit more delicately than the other teachers.

He didn't seem to me to be good-looking or attractive. And he was nearly as poor as I was, after he paid for his lodgings. Once, a man from his own part of the country, who was a manager in the Adelphi cinema, gave us a free meal in the cafe there. I remember the little lamp on the table and that we had bacon and eggs and tea in a silvery pot. It was a red letter day, that. I remember that we went out to Skerries on a bus one weekday, in summer, and walked along a headland full of lightheartedness. We walked on Howth Head too, and we walked miles and miles around the middle of Dublin. Or we went to the afternoon movies or we sat in pubs, eking out one drink. The pub we used to meet in in Fairview turns up in the great story 'Sierra Leone'.

There was no emotional connection between us. Yet I valued every hour of our awkward friendship. I respected him, then and always.

He had come out of childhood and youth a formidable person. He wasn't finished with suffering . . . he had been rejected by a woman he was mad about, and I remember how it used to hurt him when an ad came on that ran in the cinemas then . . . an ad for Mystic nylons, where a witch-like woman ran nylon stockings through her long hands. But he had already made himself. He was already embarked on a life of heroic honesty. He already knew what he meant by being a writer. He gave me, what he could ill-afford, a copy of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Now, I see that John, for all that he was shabby and provincial-looking and unregarded and about to incur the hatred of the deathly Ireland of that time, had already absorbed Rilke's advice; "that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people".

There should be sorrow today, that that passage ends . . . "And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always." No more life for John.

But there was a distance from experience in him from the start . . . the distance he used, I suppose, in the making of his art . . . that prevents me from pitying him even for his death.

John had pieced his broken heart together after he lost his mother. He had made himself into a true stoic. I don't think I've ever met anyone who so fully accepted the way things are. In the simplest way, he was always ready to die.