Eugene McCabe: The great - but often forgotten - laureate of indeterminacy

CULTURE SHOCK:The vague nature of his native borderland has defined Eugene McCabe – his work and his reputation – for much of his 80 years

IN FEBRUARY 1995, after the Irish and British governments had produced the joint framework document that ultimately led to the Belfast Agreement, Eugene McCabe wrote a superb essay for The Irish Times. Near the start of it he pondered dictionary definitions of "border" and related words. For "borderland" he found the definition "a vague or undetermined situation, condition or place".

McCabe, who celebrated his 80th birthday this week, has lived almost all of his life in the physical borderland of Monaghan and Fermanagh, where there are the “same trees, crows, fields, outbuildings” on both sides, but also amid that hauntingly undetermined sense of a place that could never simply be itself. He is the great laureate of this indeterminacy, charting its inevitably tragic outcomes while holding somehow to the notion that it might someday become a blessing.

Among the "vague or undetermined situations" is McCabe's own reputation. There were four new Irish plays in English at the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival. Two of them, rightly or wrongly, have been forgotten: James Douglas's The Ice Goddessand MJ Molloy's The Wooing of Duvesa. The third, Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!, has become a classic of modern theatre. The fourth was Eugene McCabe's King of the Castle. It, like much of McCabe's work, seems to share in both fates at the same time. It is half-forgotten, an afterthought in any list of major Irish plays. But when it is remembered, as in Garry Hynes's powerfully visceral production for the Abbey in 1989, it looks awfully like a masterpiece.

Among other things, King of the Castleis revolutionary in its raw, visceral sexuality. As versions of, or variations on, the Phaedra theme of a love triangle between an old king, his young wife and a young man, King of the Castleshares much with TC Murray's 1924 Abbey drama, Autumn Fire.

Murray’s protagonist, Owen Keegan, ends the play in darkness with his rosary beads for comfort, “mumbling prayers while the beads pass slowly between his fingers”. Sex is inseparable from sin, and the only cure for sin is prayer.

But in McCabe’s play there is something else altogether: a dark ferocity, certainly, but also a genuine sense of tragedy. His central figure, Scober “the King” MacAdam, who pays a farm labourer to impregnate his young wife, is a victim both of the single-minded energy that has driven him to material success and of the in-turned resentment of the society around him.

The play’s borderland is comfortable with neither success nor failure, neither power nor powerlessness, and this uncertainty can express itself only in violence.

In this, King of the Castlelooks both backwards to Abbey "peasant" drama of the 1920s and forwards as a dark premonition of the larger violence that was to come.

In McCabe's 1978 story Cancer, which maps the emotional landscape of the Border conflict with a chilling precision, one of the characters, Dinny, talks of a piece he has cut out of the Anglo-Celtnewspaper. It is about his tribe, the MacMahons: "Kings about Monaghan for near a thousand years, butchered, and driv' north to these bitter hills, that's what it said, and the scholar that wrote it up maintained you'd get better bred men in the cabins of Fermanagh than you'll find in many's a big house."

In that Irish Timesessay McCabe refers to this same Anglo-Celtarticle, much quoted by his mother, a MacMahon. He recalls its original claim that the kings-in-hiding in Fermanagh have to this day "an inborn grace". And he remembers attending with his mother a lecture on the actual history of the MacMahons, "tales of intrigue and betrayal, of cattle-raiding and brutality, burnings and drownings, no hint anywhere of inborn grace". Later, after a long silence, his mother delivered her verdict: "I'm not sure, dear, that that man had all his facts right."

McCabe's impulse has always been more towards the tales of betrayal and brutality than the self-aggrandising myths of hidden nobility. He is, in King of the Castle, in his short stories and in the novella Victims, essentially a realist. Yet, like his mother, he is not entirely inclined to trust history, either.

In one sense this is because he has an almost Greek sense of ordained doom, as if the violence of the borderland is so deeply embedded it is beyond human intervention. In Cancer, for example, the disease itself acts as a metaphor for the conflict:

“A doctor told me once,” says Dinny, “it could be in the blood 50 years, and then all of a shot it boils up and you’re a goner.” And yet that notion of “inborn grace” never entirely vanishes. There is too much honesty in McCabe’s writing, too much of what was surely, during much of his writing life, a justified pessimism, for it ever to be treated without scepticism.

But in his masterpiece, the 1992 novel Death and Nightingales, it has a subterranean presence that is oddly powerful. The story's tragic bleakness is evident from its stunningly cheerless opening: "A lack of bird-call, a sense of encroaching light and then far away the awful dawn bawling of a beast in great pain." (Beckett would have been proud of that sentence.)

The novel’s central character is a human borderland, the Catholic stepdaughter of a Protestant farmer, and is thus enmeshed in an inevitable tragedy. Yet the telling of that story does rise above both the illusions of myth and the brutalities of history into the pure, mesmerising grandeur of a great ballad. If there is no grace in the dangerous uncertainties of his borderlands, McCabe has found it in the writer’s obligation to fix those maddening indeterminacies in language.