Patrick McCabe, the author born in Clones, Co Monaghan, made his name in the premillennial years as the poet laureate of the unreliable narrative. Now, 33 years after his second novel, The Butcher Boy, blasted a bomb-crater in Irish literature, the publishing industry itself has become the unreliable narrator. Things are not what they were, and all previous certainties have been revoked.
McCabe, adrift in the corporate culture of the 21st-century book business, went rogue a couple of years ago, forsaking traditional distribution models for the literary crowdfunding platform Unbound. It made sense. McCabe was always too untidy, too wilful, to be a career novelist. His body of work is less a succession of stand-alone titles than a half-century long radio broadcast from a Border town of the mind. Sometimes the signal is fuzzy and crackles with static, sometimes it’s in sync with the culture.
“I wish it was approached like that,” he considers, on a video call, “because it gets ... I wouldn’t say annoying, because people can make what they can of it, but when you’re operating in the commercial world, it’s like, you know, this is a novel ... ”
The Naked Lunch moment for any young writer: the realisation that your agent’s or editor’s allegiances are to the industry that pays their bills, not the author they speak to every two or three years. I remember a remark McCabe made some 15 years ago, about advising a young writer to go the indie route rather than growing old and bitter because some trust-fund baby editor didn’t like his book.
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“Well, to be perfectly honest I was very lucky, because even getting on to that track is very, very difficult,” he says. “Because of the commercial nature of publishing there’s a backlog of authors who want to get on that, and there’s only so much a small publisher can do, so you’ve got a whole sort of supermarket build-up, and they may not be able to give it the attention that maybe, say, a ’70s rock label would have. But nonetheless the principle holds good that you will be an awful lot bloody happier.
“This whole idea of making money out of novels is a relatively new thing. It started in the ’80s with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. That hadn’t happened before. A book was published by an eminent author, sold 2,000 or 3,000 copies, was reviewed in the New Statesman and the Guardian, and that pretty much was that. But in the ’80s this kind of new pop star [emerged], late night review programmes, Martin Amis‘s teeth, all that kind of stuff became news.
“And as we know, this is all cyclical. So that came to an end in the mid-’90s and something else took over, the career novelist. But someone at my age, it would be very difficult to say the words ‘career’ and ‘novelist’ in the same breath and not be embarrassed.”
The irony is, McCabe is in the top .0005 percentile of writers who’ve actually been published and had significant cultural impact.
“Well, maybe for a while, but that didn’t necessarily last. I mean, if you were to look at the sales figures of a lot of those books, you wouldn’t be inclined to say that.”
It’s like the Velvet Underground: everybody thinks they sold a lot more than they did.
“I think that’s probably the truth, and far be it from us to disabuse them! But anyway, when I met John Mitchinson, when he was setting up Unbound, I said, ‘I’ve got this book (Poguemahone, 2022), I’m afraid to even send it to anyone, because I know it’ll be lying on the desk, people will probably actually get hostile towards it, and it’s kind of a fusion of James Clarence Mangan and Val Doonican.’ And he said, ‘Send it to me.’
“To be honest it was the first time almost in years that I’d had a response from an editor that was what you would call human and enthusiastic, not that awful phone call that we are all familiar with, that dread kind of, ‘What were you trying to do?’ as a precursor to letting you down and saying they can’t do anything with it.
“But he was quite the opposite. He said he’d be proud to publish it. We both knew that it wouldn’t particularly sell. As it turned out, it acquitted itself pretty all right. But the point we’re trying to make is that it was very enjoyable to do. You didn’t wake up with that awful sickly feeling in the morning that I used to get when I was teaching double maths, you know? I didn’t get into this to make myself feel miserable. And he took on Tim O’Grady at the same time, a friend of mine. So I would hold with what I said to the young writer.”
So, in this spirit of following the bliss, McCabe is performing at the behest of Danny Denton at the Cork Midsummer Festival, with accompaniment from pedal-steel guitarist David Murphy and multimedia artist Michael Lightborne. Howl On will be “part soundtrack, part poetic memoir, a fever dream in which Patrick Kavanagh flirts with psychedelia, communes with John Lennon and ponders notions of town and place”.
“It’s a voices thing with music and so on,” he says. “It’s very free-form. It doesn’t even have to be current or popular music or anything, it could be any kind of music, but it just happens to be, in this case, roots or contemporary country American, mixing Kavanagh with that. But sometimes it changes ... Sure you know all this, you do a lot of performance yourself.”
Left-wingers … were terribly boring f**king people, not a laugh to be found anywhere
— McCabe on Dublin in the 1970s
Mainly because if I’d restricted myself to writing only novels, I’d have gone mad – and bankrupt – years ago.
“And you might be unfulfilled, you know? There’s definitely an argument to be made for that. Say you have a successful book, or you have something that looks like it might be going to go somewhere, you’re then almost shackled to a kind of career that you never intended. Particularly if you’ve got young children. You might have had the impulse to do all sorts of creative things, but now suddenly you’re called a novelist, and there are all sorts of expectations then with, ‘Well, can you do it again?’ And they might let you do it once or twice again, and then they might say, ‘No, you can’t do it again.’
“But if you never wanted to do that in the first place, that becomes a problem. You know, I’m not trying to wriggle out of anything here, or second-guess anything, but when you said that thing about a frequency, I mean, it’s like fresh air to me. It’s this thing of nobody is putting obstacles in your way, which has become so much my experience. ‘Convince me, convince me.’ It’s kind of like it unshackled me.”
Which leads us to McCabe’s new novel, Goldengrove, narrated by one Chenevix Meredith, an undercover British government operative recounting his days spent masquerading as a theatrical agent while attempting to identify Irish terrorist networks. It’s a pungent journey into the underbelly of 1970s Dublin, an homage to the post-Baggotonia era, a landscape of fleapit cinemas showing soft porn and “continental movies”, of crime jazz and Brit noir nostalgia, a time when gossip columnists and Celtic playboys rubbed up against left-wing agitprop and confrontational theatre practitioners.
“In the early ’70s Dublin was just getting the tail end of that Royal Court explosion that began with [John] Osborne and David Storey and other people,” says McCabe. “We had our own politics, because there was a lot of unfinished business here obviously, but the left-wing thing meant subsidised theatre, you know, soup and a roll, that kind of thing. I didn’t really go for the agitprop because I found the discourse and the dialectic among left-wingers ... they were terribly boring f**king people, not a laugh to be found anywhere.
“You see it even more extreme these days. You know, you really want to lighten up, folks, because you’re not having as big an impact on the world as you think you are. A lot of the stuff that I have in the book about the Matchbox Theatre and all that, the fact that it was being done was exciting, that was enough for me. But the people I hung around with, we weren’t responsible enough. We were just 17, 18, years of age, really not ready for this revolutionary stuff in that sense. Artistically it was Dedelus, a bit of Bukowski maybe.”
Goldengrove, like most of McCabe’s books, exists in the queasy space between horror and comedy. How does he maintain the tonal balance?
“For me, all my life really, there has been a kind of an interplay between, ‘Would you rather not be born at all?’ or ‘What a brilliant place this beautiful world is.’ And I can never make up my mind, that’s the God’s honest truth!”
Goldengrove is published by Unbound. Patrick McCabe, David Murphy and Michael Lightborne perform Howl On as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival on June 22nd, at 7pm at UCC
