Patrick McCabe is so angry one suspects he just might bite the edge off his glass of Guinness rather than sip from it. And why is McCabe enraged? Perhaps, in part, because his flight from Heathrow to Dublin was delayed by three hours. But there's obviously more to it than that. The sense of tension in the man's voice, the almost fevered look in his eyes, that perilously positioned pint, all seem somehow symptomatic of the pain that sits at the centre of his best writing.
Then again, McCabe did once admit that all his life he has been acutely aware of "the random and inexplicable nature of death" - an awareness which has defined so much great literature since the earliest days of Greek tragedy, and which clearly influences his work. Indeed, such considerations wind their way, like a bloodied string of rosary beads, through all his novels, from The Butcher Boy (1992) to Breakfast on Pluto (1998). Likewise, the nine dramas McCabe penned for his forthcoming Emerald Germs RTE radio series all stem from a similar psychic space.
One, Love Story, may even contain McCabe's soul cry. "I didn't want you to carry me! I never asked ya, or him, or any of youse: `please, mammy make me'. And the way I feel I don't care!" as screamed at the mother who is finally murdered by her son, Patrick McNab, the central figure in all these plays. That said, highlighting his mastery of black comedy, McCabe then follows this tirade with the deliciously Irish punchline: "and I hate your stupid dinner!" Yet it's the thought that he's seen purely as a "humorous" writer that is maddening McCabe today. Though, presumably, not so much that he wants to kill.
"I've had problems but I never wanted to actually murder anyone," he says, smiling slightly, sitting in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel. "I want to love everybody. And the ultimate nightmare is love thwarted. What you really want to do is love everybody. Particularly your mammy!"
But if you can't love, you kill? As in "Each man kills the thing he loves"?
"There is a bit of that, yeah," he says. "In The Butcher Boy, the reason the guy murders anyone is that love is re-routed. And in all my work there is that thwarted romanticism. Heartbreak, really. And I'm glad you heard despair in Love Story. Because people tell me `you're funny' and I say, `I'm not. I don't think there's anything funny in this world.' So if Love Story upset you, that's what it's supposed to do. It is a primal scream. Because I'm fed up, in this country, with people `doing' Charlie McCreevy impersonations, tribunals and in-jokes about politicians. These are just distractions. I want to get back to something more primal than that. It isn't funny to me any more. I'm more interested in what hurts people. And what makes people laugh. But art is about your heart being broken. Love Story is about being in love, whether you're 17 or 40, and losing that love. That's what I want to talk about. I'm just not interested in all that stuff from the 1990s, payola, VIP magazine, new money. It just doesn't get to me at all."
All of which makes one wonder just how much of the "thwarted romanticism" in McCabe's writings reflects a similarly frustrated romanticism in his own life. In Love Story, for example, the 45-year-old Pat McNab remembers himself as a fumbling 17-year-old, the kind of kid who really did feel blissful throwing snowballs at his beloved "Bridie" an idea they, eh, nabbed from the Ali McGraw/Ryan O'Neill movie of the same name. So is this thinly-veiled autobiography?
"It's all me," he says, categorically. "Love Story is about the first time I fell in love. It's all real stuff. And it's nice to be honest about that. I am 45 and married, with two daughters. But to talk to a woman, in 1972, in the Sports Centre in Cavan was an excruciating experience." Why? "Maybe because this was a small country, trying to find its own identity in the face of British oppression. I'm not even going to suggest it was just the Catholic Church. But what other way could it have been? You were a tenant in your own country. You had two oppressors. One, the Catholic Church; the other, the British thing."
But let's cut from the generalised to the particular, in terms of McCabe's life. Surely there are many Irish men, and women, of his generation, who didn't feel "oppressed" by either of these forces? And could quite easily or effortlessly, communicate, say, with the opposite sex? Even in 1972?
"Who were these people?" McCabe retorts. "Even if they were from Dublin, they had the same problems. They might have been a little more urbane, but when they went to London, they were as shamefaced and as red-faced as the rest of us who came from the bog-arse of Monaghan."
Maybe. Maybe not. Yet cutting even closer to hearth and home in relation to Monaghan, where McCabe was born and raised, were his own psychic tensions also familial? As in, when the almost sickly possessive "mammy" in Love Story, poisons her teenage son's love affair with "Bridie"? Was that McCabe's reality?
"Let me put it this way," he responds, cautiously. "There was a fella, down Greece way, sometime before the birth of Christ and he wrote Oedipus Rex. Do you think it changes? I don't. A man wants to murder his father and ride his mother. It doesn't matter whether it's Ireland or Greece."
Quite. But the question remains. When McCabe writes is he tapping into these archetypes or accurately capturing his own home life? Many strange and strained feelings, directed towards mothers, certainly surface in his novels and plays. Similarly, in the introduction to Emerald Germs, he focuses on the sense of longing felt by his "hero" after the man murders his mother only to realise his bed at night is now "hopelessly bereft of her big warm rolls of fat, when she would respond in answer to his anxious night-time query: "Are you there, Mammy?" "Yes, yes, of course, I'm here, son! As I always will be." To hell with Oedipus Rex. Wouldn't Freud have a field day with such taboo subjects?
"Yes, but I'm not attracted to taboo subjects, as such I'm attracted to the truth," McCabe replies. "And I really don't think those fundamentals change. We can put a veneer over it but, whether it is in the work of Jim Thompson or Sophocles, there are some primal things that are scary. I'm not setting myself up as someone who talks about why a man might have a difficulty with his mother. But I am deeply interested in the primal impulse that moves me. It's denial that screws people up. And I'm a damaged-goods person, I admit. But listen to songs with lyrics like `one was my mother, God rest her, I love her/ And the other was my sweetheart'. Those singers are not sure who their lover is. Is it their mother? You can trash that, say it means nothing. But I think it means an awful lot. People are deeply confused about who they love."
Did he ever want to kill his mother?
"Sometime, yeah," McCabe replies matter-of-factly. So he must have hated her at times? "Deeply," he says. Asked why, he then takes us even deeper into that primal pool, mumbling "for giving birth to me, I suppose". Pushed to elaborate, he explains: "That's why the line you tuned into, in Love Story, really is my primal scream. For sure. I wouldn't deny that for a second. My mother is, now, dead, but if we meet in the Elysian Fields we'll have a serious argument. About things that were left unresolved. People die. That's something we have to accept. But you cannot be dishonest about all this. You love your mother. You hate your mother. And this is the theme that links the stories in Emerald Germs.
"Yet the beauty of fiction is that it's about the whole human race. It's not about a particular hurt. So, to answer your earlier question, yes, I'm talking about my own pain but I'm also tapping into archetypes."
The fact that Emerald Germs is a collection of short stories/plays based on pop, rock or traditional Irish tunes such as Love Story, For What it's Worth and Whiskey on a Sunday, reminds us how central music has always been to McCabe. Of "seismic importance," he says. The Butcher Boy, of course, was based on a ballad of the same name. Likewise, The Dead School, his 1995 novel, had at its core two songs: Macushla, as recorded by John McCormack and, eh, Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by the well-named Middle of the Road. The former he sees as "one of those strange songs from my father's time" with its "weird" lyric: "Death is a dream/ love is for real." The latter, a "mindless pop tune from the 1970s", he used as a "point of contrast" in terms of the "Gothic horrors" in Ireland at the time. "What was happening in the North - internment without trial," he explains. In Emerald Germs, McCabe uses music in much the same way. Whether it's "original hits" or incidental music composed by Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer.
"I describe this whole series as `uneasy listening for bachelors'!" he says, summing up the series. "It is Oedipal. It's not whimsical at all. It's a very serious work for me. But then, as I say, I don't like writing whimsy. I've more to do with my f---ing time."
Patrick McCabe will appear with Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer on Under The Influence next Saturday at noon on RTE Radio One. Emerald Germs will be broadcast at 11 a.m. on the same station throughout July and August. A collection of short stories of the same name will be published this autumn.