It was the one room of the house that Patrick McCabe was forbidden to enter. The study in the family home in Clones, Co Monaghan was his father’s haven, the room where he would shut himself away for hours, away from the distractions of his family, hoping to fulfill his ambition to become a professional songwriter. For the most part, the attempts came to nothing, but the young McCabe was curious enough to sneak in occasionally, to rummage through the clutter of papers and typewriter ribbons.
One day, however, McCabe came across something new in the study. His father had recently written a song entitled County Tyrone, which was something of a success, having been recorded by Ulster singer Eileen Donaghy. Hence McCabe’s intriguing find, which opened up a whole new world.
“I came upon this royalty cheque in his office, when I was about nine,” McCabe recalls. “So I thought, ‘You can get money out of this as well.’ He’d be beavering in there writing — the other songs didn’t do very well, but this was quite a beautiful song. He got it printed up, and tried to sell it at the Ulster finals, where of course people were like, ‘Who’s this b******s?’ So I started to discover all these things at once: that you could get money out of it, that it’s not going to be easy, you’re going to get reviled. So I toyed around, writing bits of things.
“But I suppose when my father died (I was about 17), there was a sense of something unfinished.
I can’t quite name it, I don’t even want to name it, it’s too deep. It was such a huge disappointment to everybody. John McGahern wrote (in his memoir) about his father never going to see his (dying) mother — but my mother never went to see my father either; he was hospitalised three times. So like with these things, she was running away from his death and I’m running away from her doing it. I had this sense that the story’s not told; there’s something awful going on here. And I suppose The Butcher Boy was the first real acknowledgment of that.”
It is nearly 15 years since the publication of that acclaimed novel — later made into a film by Neil Jordan — which saw McCabe mine the unhappy family circumstances that initially impelled him to be a writer.
But while McCabe has succeeded where his father failed, becoming a full-time writer, the 51-year-old author’s wounds are apparently still open. Certainly, he seems more driven than ever by a need to explore forbidden places: his bleakly brilliant new novel, Winterwood, is suffused with a near-mythic sense of foreboding.
It recounts the tale of Redmond Hatch, a country boy whose apparently blissful marriage is haunted by his troubled past, in the shape of Pappie Strange, a folksy musician and homicidal paedophile. Later, as Hatch reinvents himself in the modern Irish media world, his dark secrets push him inexorably towards a dreadful endgame, made all the more disturbing by McCabe’s preference for the allusive over the explicit. Winterwood is part Faustian fable, part gothic ghost story, part unsettling dissection of Irelands old and new, but the most resonant element to the book is what McCabe calls its “bleak world-view”.
“There’s no redemption at all in it — this is as dark as it gets,” McCabe says. “In a way, with this book, I was in revolt against the elegy of my own style. There’s a tendency towards the elegiac in everything I’ve done — towards the end, there’s a kind of a hope thing. So I said, no, I’m going to swing that right back on itself, because I don’t see things that way any more. It’s like redemption is the deus ex machina that you’re dragging in because you still believe. And I don’t think I do still believe in it.”
Tellingly, small rural towns full of dysfunction and menace remain the touchstone of his work. Some critics may despair about his continued fixation on such subjects, but, for McCabe, to do otherwise would be dishonest: “For me, it’s all about blood, and it’s all about style,” he says. “That’s the sort of people I came from.”
Certainly, McCabe says he has “always fed off the theatre of eccentricity, of which every small town had a more than adequate quota.” His attraction to such behaviour is hardly coincidental. Born in 1955, McCabe describes the family backdrop to his childhood as “intoxicatingly fractured”. On the surface, his father was “a classic 1950s figure, with a big top coat, papers stuck to his pockets, always something creative going on”, but the propriety masked a troubled reality. “They were refined. It was all so small-town, lower-middle class. But it was all f***ing burnt down through drinking and all sorts of crazy behaviour.”
The circumstances that saw McCabe’s father develop a drink problem and go through a succession of different jobs before his early death are still raw for McCabe: “I won’t say too much about my domestic arrangement, because I don’t want to be discourteous about the dead, but let’s say there was a lot of unhappiness.” But the pain he experienced was the prime force behind his writing from the very beginning.
“It was the core of everything: why is this beautiful world so unhappy? It’s not working, why is that? There was this thing I found in (late Irish writer) John Jordan’s letters; he said all creative writing should be the objective correlative of a deep spiritual wound. I think that’s a fair enough assessment.
“In fact, far from wanting to write the dark place, it was wanting to get into the light, to get away from all this stuff. But maybe that’s a harder thing to do through writing than you think. Maybe you only get through that through family. If you see that your kids aren’t going around writing crazy stories, maybe you’ve done your job right.”
Certainly, from the off, McCabe has been assiduous in pursuing as normal a family life as possible: “I’m so ordinary and traditional in so many ways,” he says. Though he was publishing short stories even while a student at St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra, after meeting his wife, Margot, in the mid-1970s, McCabe preferred steady employment as a teacher to the penury of a struggling writer.
“If I saw that you could make money out of writing, then I was quite serious about planning this thing. So I read every literary biography I could find. Then I started to discover this thing is littered with disaster — from Baudelaire to Rimbaud, they’re all lunatics and they’re all dying early. So I thought there must be some way around this, that if you get somebody who will stick with you on the course, you could actually go the whole way on this. It would be a hard road, but you could do it. And we met as kids, but we were very clear about it. And it worked, in the sense that the principle was, nobody close to me would be damaged by this, otherwise I’ll abandon it. I’d seen my father die, and it’s not worth it.”
Accordingly, McCabe’s literary career proceeded slowly: he taught in Dublin and London as his early novels, Music on Clinton Street and Carn, earned minor acclaim, but little else. The publication of The Butcher Boy in 1992 changed everything, however: McCabe’s kaleidoscopic tale of Francie Brady, the murderous misfit son of an alcoholic father and a harassed mother, became a bestseller and earned him a Booker nomination.
“The whole Booker prize jamboree erupted, but it evaporated just as quickly,” he recalls. “But it was a bit like finding the royalty cheque — nothing happened after that. So I knew that’s what was going to happen, I had been warned about this. So it was just like my old man, go back into the office. Except that he ran into a bit of a problem with it, and because of that, I had the armour on, as it were. So I just settled into writing another book.”
Since then, books have come regularly, albeit to varying reactions: impressive novels such as The Dead School were followed by the light fictional works Mondo Desperado and Emerald Germs of Ireland, which even McCabe calls “ultimately frivolous”.
The steady output can belie an artistic angst: he is still disappointed by the “middling” reviews that greeted Call Me the Breeze, 2003’s sprawling psycho-political panorama. “Maybe you can only write a book like this (Winterwood) having done the huge big sweep of something like Call me the Breeze, which was a kind of a Matterhorn to climb,” he says.
Winterwood is all the more effective for its simpler style. It is McCabe’s best book in a decade. Even in its bleak portrayal of primordial urges, it acts as valediction for the vanishing small-town eccentricities of his youth: “The edges are being shaved off, there’s no place for these guys.”
One might think McCabe, who is back living in Clones, would be happy to see this world consigned to the past: after all, he wrote largely to escape his own smalltown childhood. But no. These days, McCabe writes for himself.
“As you get older, you get more in command of your craft,” he reflects. “Maybe because you feel relaxed about it, and your children are all right and your marriage is relatively stable, that frees you up to do a lot stylistically. You can go into these dark places. This is not such an emotional book, whereas I reluctantly acknowledge The Butcher Boy is very personal.
It touched on a lot of very deep emotional sores, regrets and so on.
“But anybody who has problems with their father has to come to terms with him. I deeply loved him, but I was at war with him.
He died in the middle of my adolescence — not a good time for a father to die. And you look in the mirror one day, when you’re 40, and you see him looking back out at you, and you better have figured it out. And I had figured it out. That was the end of it.”
Winterwood is published by Bloomsbury
