Eugene Mccabe
Writer and farmer whose plays and stories tackled unflinchingly Irish life in the borderlands
EUGENE MCCABE, who has died aged 90, was an Irish short story writer, novelist and playwright who explored the social, sexual, religious and political fault lines of Irish life – especially on the borderlands between the Republic and Northern Ireland, where he lived for most of his life.
His 1992 novel Death and Nightingales, which was adapted for television by BBC Two in 2018 in a production starring Jamie Dornan, was described by the author Colm Tóibín as “one of the great Irish masterpieces of the century” and hailed by Hilary Mantel as one of the best books she had ever read.
Mccabe first shot to fame – and notoriety – as a playwright, when his King of the Castle was staged during the 1964 Dublin Arts Festival.
Scober Macadam, the king of the title, is a taciturn Leitrim farmer – a self-made man who, through sheer grit and tenacity, becomes the local Big Man, buying up the land his neighbours fail to maintain and acquiring a big house in which to install his beautiful young trophy wife.
But there is one thing missing: a child. And the vicious local “begrudgers”, out to pull him down for bettering himself, will not let him forget it. “Take me, I’m a man, I’ll put a belly on you,” one tells the young wife.
Scober himself is a match for such savagery, though, and, taking the practical view of a farmer whose prize bull fails to do the necessary, hires a younger man to impregnate his wife.
The play, which Mccabe said was based on a story he had heard from a priest, won the Irish Life Theatre Award, but its frank discussion of sex and its dark take on the Irish rural idyll caused outrage. It even moved the professor of Irish at University College Dublin to write a letter of condolence to Mccabe’s mother, in which he expressed “sympathy for this awful play Eugene has written”.
Nevertheless, it marked the emergence of a writer unafraid to tackle the pathologies stifling Irish society.
Mccabe lived and worked, first as a farmer and then as a writer, on the family farm in Co Monaghan, 400 yards from the border with Northern Ireland. Although Mccabe’s work was always associated with the border, he was actually born in Glasgow on July 7 1930, the third of seven children, to Catholic parents from Fermanagh and Monaghan.
His father was a successful publican and young Eugene was sent to board at a prep school run by the Benedictines in Edinburgh. Each year the family spent the summer holidays at a holiday home near Clones, Co Monaghan. The year Eugene turned nine, however, the family did not return to Scotland. “Hitler marched, and my father announced, “We’re staying’,” Mccabe recalled. “If it hadn’t been for the war, I would have grown up a little Brit.”
Young Eugene continued his education at Castleknock College in Dublin and University College, Cork, where he read English and History.
In 1940 Mccabe’s father and maternal grandfather had bought a farm near Clones. After graduating, Mccabe took up farming there: “I was serious, I was no hobby farmer. It was advanced farming. I loved it.” Within a couple of years he had a herd of 40 Friesians.
He wrote his first poem, about the death of a dog, aged 10. Later, listening to some radio plays on RTÉ: “I thought they were appalling, I thought to myself, ‘I can do better than that’ and decided to have a go.”
He sent off his first play “in about 1959 or 1960”. It was accepted for broadcast. By 1962 he was at work on King of the Castle.
In Ireland he was best known for Victims, a 1973 trilogy (Cancer, Heritage and Siege) of screenplays for RTÉ which caused outrage for their exploration of sectarian violence during the Troubles and the hatred, suspicion and misunderstanding of both communities on the Border.
In a 2012 Tribute to Eugene Mccabe, Andy Pollak observed that, almost uniquely among Irish Catholic writers, he was equally able to write about the terror and contempt of Protestant border farmers and UDR men as about the anger and vengefulness of their Catholic neighbours: “And he is able to see into the wounded humanity of both communities and evoke sympathy with the most unlikely people – people driven demented by religion and politics and death and drink and bigotry.”
For many years, Mccabe combined the business of farming cattle and sheep with writing, and, partly because of that and partly as a result of the meticulous care he took over language and craft, he was not prolific.
“I write very, very slowly,” he said. “And I throw a lot of stuff out.”
Death and Nightingales was published in 1992 after a 10 year hiatus. It was his only novel and was immediately hailed as a masterwork.
It was born out of a bleak story Mccabe had heard about a woman who had chanced upon her lover as he and a friend were busily digging the grave in which the lover intended to place her, after cheating her of the money he had tricked her into stealing from her stepfather, then killing her.
Set in Fermanagh in 1883, against the backdrop of the Fenian Dynamite Campaign – a bombing orchestrated by Irish republicans against the British, the novel’s central character, the Catholic stepdaughter of a Protestant farmer, symbolised all the tensions of the borderland.
The narrative opens with an evocation of nature out of joint – “A lack of bird-call, a sense of encroaching light and then far away the awful dawn bawling of a beast in great pain” – which set the tone for a tale of deception, betrayal and abuse of love.
Mccabe also wrote several acclaimed short story collections, including Tales from the Poorhouse (1999) and Heaven Lies about Us (2005).
Mccabe mostly kept himself to himself, seldom giving interviews. There was surprise, therefore, in 2011, when he wrote to the Irish Times to take exception to an unflattering review by Eileen Battersby of a book by his friend Dermot Healy.
In his letter to the paper he claimed that in a workshop he had used a “truly, stunningly bad” ghost story she had written as an example of how to avoid writing “shite and onions” (a piece of Joycean invective). His attack caused controversy in Ireland and caused Healy to express embarrassment that his friend had jumped to his defence in such a manner.
Eugene Mccabe married Margot Bowen, an Aer Lingus air hostess, in 1955. She survives him with three sons and a daughter.