A detour through McCabeland

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW - PATRICK MCCABE:His latest novel recently completed, Patrick McCabe is focusing on the brave and antic Flat Lake arts festival, on his home soil of Clones, which he helped pioneer

THE MONAGHAN MAN comes out of nowhere, silently sliding a hand through the wrought-iron bars and announcing his presence with a gentle nudge in the small of your spine. When you turn around, there is Patrick McCabe, neat and mischievous, standing all alone and framed by the indifferent grandeur of St Mel’s Cathedral. “Never leave your back open in Longford,” he advises warmly. “That’s the way they like to get you.”

Although McCabe lives for part of the year in London nowadays, he is back on old turf regularly, and after he guides us up to take a seat on the broad steps of the cathedral, he makes light of a series of projects that provide just about sufficient fuel for his furious imagination. He has recently finished a new novel set in the late 1950s which, he says, is a kind of elegy to that generation of Irish people. He has just rewritten his treatment of The Dead Schoolfor a Nomad stage production – "I felt I had underwritten it the first time, so when this opportunity came up, I f***ing jumped at it," he explains with relish. But foremost in his mind is the Flat Lake, the brave and antic arts festival that he has helped to pioneer with film-maker Kevin Allen. This year's performers range from the Church Hill Silver Band to the Lindyhop Swing Dancers, and the Flat Lake is probably the only festival in the world that includes the following blog boast: "The best news yet is that Charles Lamb ( A Dissertation on Roast Pigand other prose masterpieces) has just phoned the Flat Lake office and has confirmed that, yes, he will be pulling pints behind the bar – the cheapest festival bar in Ireland." If the real festival is anything like the cyber version, then it ought to be a hoot.

McCabe is casual when he talks about the Flat Lake, but it is obvious that he cares deeply about it and has coloured it in a way now familiar from his fictions about the Border towns of his imagination: the super-saturated pop-cultural references, the fly humour and rich dialect, the mocking of all pretension and, underlying everything, a burning affection and reverence for the place. In a recent essay in the wonderful John McGahern Yearbook(Volume 2, 2009), fiction writer Kevin Barry makes an observation that probably holds true for anyone who has put pen to paper creatively: "Ireland is overwritten. As you begin to write your own fictions, you find that the names of your seniors and betters are already daubed across all of the available landscape. You wouldn't have to go too far north of McGahernland to find yourself in Dermot Healyland. Go northeast and you would be hitting McCabeland, with its neighbouring principalities assigned to Patrick and Eugene. Pity most of all those young wretches who must trot their characters across the city of Dublin, a place overwritten to the point of graphomania."

It is true that the bearded man now glorying in the sunny steps of St Mel's is widely regarded as Irish literature's custodian-in-chief of the mid-Ulster borderlands, distorting and magnifying all its complexities and its humours. He is most immediately associated with his home town of Clones, particularly given that Francie Brady will eternally roam the streets of that town for the generations who fall under the spell of The Butcher Boy. But he is very fond of Longford too, where he came to teach as a 19-year-old in 1974 and where he met his wife, Margot.

IT IS ONE of those turbulent Irish July days, fresh and blowsy, the sky racing and every so often coming good with powerful blasts of sunshine. McCabe is so pleased with the rays that he decides it too warm for the formality of scalding tea and sandwiches in the Longford Arms and is content to just chat on the steps. He has always regarded the casual meeting on the street as one of the great luxuries of the Irish provincial towns he has lived in. The day before we met was Ulster final day in Clones and that evening, he heard someone remark that St Tiernach’s Park “was so f***in’ crowded that you couldn’t turn a sweet in your mouth”. McCabe took pleasure in just repeating the phrase and it is as good an explanation as any as to why these well-tramped grounds have proven an inexhaustible setting for his fictional world.

“All these things that came so naturally – there used to be so much of that in the air, and what you were doing was assimilating the language that formed your style,” he says. “Much of The Butcher Boy is just dialogue, an extended riff on language. And if there is a landscape in which I am comfortable, it is probably these little places. But what made them so was probably what made them so in the 1850s: you meet someone and sit down and talk and have all the time in the world. Paradoxically, now that that is no longer the case, they are a little less interesting. If these places are becoming more urban and you have big housing estates and nothing in the centre, then you might be better in a city. You might have to accept the natural death of small places.”

I am not sure that McCabe fully believes this. But he was born when Clones was entering an economic decline from which it has yet to recover and which was probably the most marked difference from the Longford into which he ventured as a young teacher.

"Yeah, well, the thing I notice is that Clones is a real Protestant town," he says. "It wasn't the ascendancy, it was the middle-class merchant Protestantism I was familiar with – the solicitors, the butchers, that sort of thing. It was probably coming to an end when I was growing up, but you could still feel a real sense of order. And it was probably one of the great missed opportunities in Ireland, the fusion of Catholic and Protestant, in that the Protestant natural sense of order and civic duty would have been a good mix. I often think the artistic process is like that: a good editor, which is the Protestant side of your mind, and then this mad lunatic going around setting fire to things, which is the Catholic side, the imagination. I don't know! Longford had a different feel . . . more southern, more Catholic. It was owned, I suppose, by the Reynolds brothers and was all about business in a new sense. There is a great book about here: The History of the Longford Golf Society. And in the 1960s you see these guys and they remind me of some of these guys from Bond, you know, snappy suits and ties, and they were pretty snazzy to look at. You know, they like a good time, they like a pint.They were a whole new breed, and when I came here first they wore Italian suits, you know, and they were businessmen and it seemed like a forward-looking town."

As McCabe talks, he gazes out at the gentle procession of street life in Longford as if imagining that disappeared town of big lapels and country music. You get the impression there is no detail from 1970s Ireland, from milk-carton designs to blink-and-you-miss-them country and western bands that escaped him.

McCabe's father, Bernard, was a Belfast man but lived most of his life in Co Monaghan. He worked in a variety of jobs, from stonemason to town clerk, but was, at heart, a musician and a reader. It was from his father that McCabe developed his fascination with comics. His mother, Dympna, was from Co Tyrone and had an equally sharp and curious mind. The shades of his parents' lives and sometimes volatile relationship drift through McCabe's work. Their presence is felt to a haunting degree in The Butcher Boy, most poignantly when Francie wanders the seaside town of Bundoran in search of the Over the Waves BB in which his parents stayed for their honeymoon. Bundoran always held a kind of magical quality in McCabe's mind.

“Never got the opportunity to go down and do the auld stint in the Holyrood ,” he sighs. “But some guys did. There was a guy used to go down in the 1950s and 1960s and play Russ Conway tunes in Brian McEniff’s places. It was the town you went to lose your virginity and make a few bob. See, my father and mother got married there and the imagined reality of the place is as valid for me as what it might actually be.”

McCabe emerged from Clones in a confused time. He spent a miserable secondary-school period boarding in St Macartan’s near Monaghan town and had to cope with the sudden death of his father in his final year. Republicanism was rife across the borderlands, Clones was bombed twice (no group assumed responsibility) and there was much nationalist posturing and hard talk going on in the bar rooms.

“It was too macho for me and I never believed in it,” McCabe says. “Anyway, I was much too into the hippy culture.” In Clones, I ask, astounded. “Yeah. Well, it was just me! I was the only card-carrying member. Nah, there were about five or six of us.”

Like many of his generation, he couldn’t wait to leave – but out of curiosity more than antipathy for his home place. He traded in Dublin for London – “I wanted bigger places, I wanted to eat them up” – and has only good to say about London and the English, shaking his head in amusement as he elaborates on the obsessive way in which the Irish study their treatment by the English. “A lot of that is just Irish baggage. The English just aren’t that interested in us.”

His circular journey from his childhood to England and, after the publication of 10 novels, radio plays and short stories, back to the Midlands again, was chronicled in Dara McCluskey's frank and reflective film, Patrick McCabe: The Flesh and the Devil. One of the reasons McCabe collaborated was that he has constantly been asked about his source material and this seemed a good way of putting it all on record. It resulted in a deeply personal film that, he says, "could leave me open to accusations of self-pity – which have been levelled at me". The only time he becomes subdued is when asked how extended family members felt about the portrait of his childhood. "I don't want to talk about it. You can imagine."

McCabe says it took him a while to realise that it was legitimate to include the detritus of his own existence in his work. “That is what fiction is all about. Real good art is – Joyce is the master of that. You never think that bits and pieces of your own existence and experience are good enough for fiction.”

FAMOUSLY, HE WROTE the original draft of The Butcher Boyin traditional formal style and reimagined it after his manuscript was rejected. The end result was lavishly praised on both sides of the Atlantic and earned him his first Booker nomination and a film version by Neil Jordan. But if none of this had happened, he would not have stopped writing.

“Never,” he says. “It would be like not breathing. I would go mad. I couldn’t! I almost start shaking when you ask that question.”

Almost accidentally, conversation turns to Winterwood, his 2006 exercise in queasy fairytale gothic. "People said they felt like having a bath after reading it," McCabe admits. "Well, to be generous to myself, I felt it was rather prescient in its analysis of the boom. To be ungracious to myself, I would say it was too vile to read. But it was about the dark, burrowing peasant soul of the new rich. On that level, it worked. It was also meant to be a fairytale and a folk tale. I found it very easy to write – says something about me, doesn't it."

But those hoping for a return to the japes of the murderous Francie are wasting their time; the thought of returning to old ground bores McCabe. “Tires me out,” he sighs. “The irony is that it is that kind of disdain for popular perception that led me to Francie Brady in the first place.”

The streetscapes may be familiar but McCabe’s imagination pulls him towards new possibilities. He is like a time traveller: he can place himself back in the heart of the haze of 1970s Ireland while simultaneously welcoming innovation. For example, he will interview the projectionist of his beloved Luxor cinema as part of the Flat Lake festival, but he doesn’t bemoan the Luxor’s demise. “It had become an eyesore,” he says. He champions private treasures but accepts their passing as natural.

Expanding on Winterwood, he says: "My view of reality is that we are living in a couple of different dimensions and we don't know what they are. You travel on until someone close to you gets sick or something really bad happens to you. Then you have people in mental hospitals going mad with grief, you know, and when you are in those zones you wonder who is controlling everything. Is everything mapped out? And there is a suggestion in that book – you always hear of people narrating in the God voice, but what if it is not the God but the antichrist telling the story? When everything seemingly benign is malign and is chillingly choreographed?

“And so much of our lives is choreographed. Even think of the war in the North for 30 years. Who was choreographing that? Because an awful lot of things happened conveniently for certain people. I don’t have an answer to that, I would even be afraid to give an answer to it. But if that can be done on a temporal level, what is the real story about?”

That is what he has been figuring out in a writing life now in its fourth decade. McCabe’s energy and what seems to be an unquenchable optimism augurs well for his fans, as it means the best work may yet be unwritten. The winter months are when gets most of his work done, but now he is in full-on Flat Lake mode.

He has a theory that traditions don’t die, but merely become dormant. Not so long ago, he found himself at the Rory Gallagher Festival in Ballyshannon, which was an utter throwback to the festivals of his youth, with no-holds-barred street drinking and everyone from teenagers to greying, delighted 1970s survivors rocking until dawn. It all felt filthy and natural and irresistible, as if it had sprung from some common need. That is the mood that inspired the Flat Lake. “Not to bring things back,” he clarifies. “To reinvent them. All these things are in the genes. Look at Planxty in 1973 – you could have said, ah, that’s just old music. But oh no, those guys were on to something totally new. And looked what happened then! So I think in the next 10 to 15 years, you might find a lot of reinvention of stuff like tradition.”

McCabe has patented his own brand of Irish reinvention and God only knows where his mind might lead him next. He looks back at St Mel’s and chuckles as he sees himself back there, holding court on the steps. “People goin’ by sayin’, ‘Look at those f***in’ eejits, with delusions of Athenian grandeur’.”

Walking through the town, he is in high humour and enthuses again about the potential of the Flat Lake. “Come up,” he says affably as we part. “Bring yer big press pass,” he shouts, in what sounds like an invitation to the world. And then he saunters off down the main street of Longford.

FAMILYMarried to Margot Quinn, an artist. The couple have two teenage daughters.

BEST KNOWN FORHis novels The Butcher Boy(1992) and Breakfast on Pluto(1998) were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later translated into films directed by Neil Jordan. His most recent novel, The Holy City, was published this year.

WHAT'S NEXTHe has just finished a new novel. A new stage adaptation of his 1995 novel The Dead Schoolwill play in venues throughout Ireland this autumn.

The Flat Lake Festival runs from Aug 14 to 16 at Hilton House, Clones, Co Monaghan: theflatlakefestival.com. The Dead School, by Patrick McCabe, will be performed by Nomad Theatre Network at Draíocht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown, from Sep 23 to 26 as part of Dublin Theatre Festival and at various venues thereafter: nomadtheatrenetwork.ie