Life
1930- ; b. 7 July in Glasgow, where his family lived until outbreak WWII;
his gf. owned a 20-acre farm nr. Shercock, County Cavan; his f. went to Glasgow Univ.;
succcessful publican and hotelier; ed. St. Andrews, Benedictine Prep School
in Edinburgh; holidays in Clones; remained in Ireland during the war;
ed. Killashee, Co. Kildare, Castleknock College, Co. Dublin, and University
College, Cork (English and History); invited to write novel by London
publisher Rupert Hart-Davis who had liked a short story of his, leading
to discovery that he could write dialogue; m. Margot Bowen; farmed
first in Wicklow, then in 1954 at Drumard House, taking over family farm
in Clones, Co. Monaghan (purchased by his gf.), located 400 yards from
the border; started writing in 1962 and called himself ‘a farmer
who happens to write, or a writer who happens to farm’; sent first
play, A Matter of Conscience, to Hilton Edwards at the Gate in
1959; shared critical honours with Brian Friel at Dublin Theatre Festival,
1964 for King of the Castle (revived 14 Sept. 1970, and again in
1989), the story of an impotent farmer who gets a younger man to impregnate
his wife, based on a story gleaned from a clergyman; involved in writing
The Riordans in the 1960s; also Pull Down a Horseman (1966;
pub. 1979), play dealing with career of James Connolly and produced as
part of the 1916 commemorations; Breakdown (1967); Swift
(1969), which failed at the Abbey; wrote plays for television Breakdown;
Some Women of the Island; A Matter of Conscience;
The Funeral; RTÉ screened Victims, ‘a trilogy
dealing with contemporary Ulster’, novella with the stories ‘‘Cancer’’
and “Heritage”; adapted Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the
French serialised on RTÉ/Channel 4, 1979; wrote Gale
Day (1979) commissioned by the Abbey and RTÉ at centenary of
Patrick Pearse’s birth; issued Death and Nightingales (1992)
a tragic pastoral novel set in 1883, in the wake of the Invincibles; ‘‘Heaven
Lies Around Us’’ (1997), a tale of incest; issued Tales from
the Poor House (1998), four dramatic monologues set in Famine Ireland,
commissioned and screened in Irish and English versions on RTÉ/TnaG.
DIW DIL FDA OCIL
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Works
Plays, King of the Castle (Dublin: Gallery; Newark: Procenium
1978), [rev. edn.] (Oldcastle: Gallery 1997); Roma ([Dublin: Turoe
& RTÉ 1979), 60pp. [for television with short story from which
it was adapted]; Cancer (Newark: Proscenium [1980]) [for television
with short story from which it was adapted]; Pull Down a Horseman/Gale
Day (Dublin: Gallery 1979) [one-act plays].
Short fiction, Victims: A Tale from Fermanagh (London: Gollancz; Cork: Mercier 1976), 128pp. [novella, and stories ‘‘Cancer’’ and ‘‘Heritage’’]; Heritage and Other Stories (London: Gollancz 1978), Do., (Dublin: O’Brien 1985), 147pp. [contains ‘‘Truth’’; ‘‘Victorian Fields’’; ‘‘Roma’’; ‘‘Music at Annahullion’’; ‘‘Cancer’’, ‘‘Heritage’’, ‘‘Victims’’]; Christ in the Fields: A Fermanagh Trilogy (London: Minerva 1993), 197pp.; Tales from the Poor House (Oldcastle: Gallery 1999), 126pp. [contains ‘‘The Orphan’’, ‘‘The Master’’, ‘‘The Landlord’’, and ‘‘The Mother’’]; also‘‘Strangers’’ [story], in Irish Writing, Quarterly, No. 26 [q.d.], pp.22-28.
Fiction, Cyril: The Quest of an Orphaned Squirrel (Dublin: O’Brien 1986), [for children]; Death and Nightingales (Secker & Warburg 1992), 230pp, and Do., (London: Minerva 1993), French trans. by Renée Kérisit, Ode funébre (Paris: éditions Marval 1994);
Miscellaneous, Foreword to Michael Davitt, trans., Padraic Pearse, Rogha Dánta/Selected Poems (Dublin: New Island 1994), pp.7-18; Introduction to John Minihan, Shadows from the Pale: Portrait of an Irish Town (London: Secker & Warburg 1996), 113pp. [photographs].
Occasional, “For Margot Bowen”, poem, in The Irish Times, Weekend, 10 Nov. 2000, p.11 [‘Let’s ignore the curlew’s lament nor mind/The brown hawk circling high above the wood …’].
Criticism
Benedict Kiely, review of Cancer, in Irish Times (20 Nov.
1976), [q.p.].
Robert Hogan, ‘Since O’Casey’ and Other Essays on Irish Drama (Colin Smythe 1983), pp.140-42.
Christopher Fitzsimon, The Irish Theatre (Thames & Hudson 1983), p.196.
D. E. S. Maxwell, Modern Irish Drama 1891-1980 (Cambridge UP 1984), pp.169-70.
Daniel Murphy, interview with McCabe [recorded in the Dept. of Education at TCD], in Education and the Arts, ed. Daniel Murphy (Dublin: TCD 1987), pp.175-182.
D. L. Kirkpatrick, Modern Dramatists (London: St. James Press 1988), pp.350-51.
Carlo Gébler, review of Death and Nightingales in Fortnight (Nov. 1992).
Carlo Gébler, review of Death and Nightingales, in The Spark (3 March 1992), pp.48-49.
Eileen Battersby, interview with McCabe, The Irish Times (8 Aug. 1992), weekend section.
Interview on Ulster Radio (BBC), Saturday 2 Feb. 1993; ‘‘‘This Place Owns Me’’: Eugene McCabe in Conversation with Simion D.’, Irish Studies Review, 7 (Summer 1994), pp.28-30 [with photo-port. by Ray Geary].
Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press 1997) [on Death and Nightingales], pp.138-40.
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Notes
Peter Fallon & Seán Golden, ed., Soft Day,
a Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Writing (Dublin: Wolfhound; US:
Notre Dame UP 1980), contains extract from King of the Castle.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed., (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects from Heritage and Other Stories, ‘Cancer’ [1036-42], relationship between Catholic and Protestant in rural Ulster, Lisnaskea, an IRA atrocity; UDR and Army activity; and memories of the expulsion of the MacMahons by Cromwell; described as ‘ highly gifted, if reluctant, writer’; King of the Castle [1182-86]; BIOG & COMM 1305 [as above]. D. E. S. Maxwell [sect. ed.] calls him a highly gifted if reluctant writer [who] farms the family holding in Co. Monaghan; wrote a trilogy of plays for television under the title Cancer; one section of this was published as a short story [sic], Victims (Mercier/Gollancz 1977). The other two, ‘Cancer’ and ‘Heritage’ appeared as short stories in Heritage and Other Stories (Gollancz 1978).
D. E. S. Maxwell, Modern Irish Drama 1891-1980 (Cambridge UP 1984), ‘His dramatic talent is undeniable, but represented in his more recent work by a trilogy of television plays written for RTÉ on the Northern Irish troubles’. (pp.169-70.)
Gollancz Ltd. publisher’s notice for Christ in the Fields (1993) avers that ‘Cancer’ appeared in Dublin Magazine, and after in Heritage & Other Stories (London: Gollancz 1978), and that the ‘three tales were conceived as one. this is their first time to be published in one volume.’
Helena Sheehan, Irish Television Drama (RTÉ 1987), lists The Apprentice (1979); Cancer (1973); John Montague, A Change of Management, adapted by McCabe and directed by Jim Fitzgerald (1970); McCabe, The Funeral, dir. by Louis Lenten (1970); McCabe, Gale Day dir. by Pat O’Connor (1979); McCabe, King of the Castle, dir. by Louis Lentin (1977); McCabe, A Matter of Conscience (1962) dir. by Shelah Richards [pp.94, 98]; Brigid K Nalton, Mr Power’s Purchase, adapted by McCabe, dir. by Chloe Gibson (1964); McCabe, Portraits: The Dean [Swift], dir. by Chloe Gibson (1973); McCabe, Roma, dir. by Louis Lentin (1979); with Michael Voysey and Neil Jordan, Sean, dir. by Louis Lentin (1980); McCabe, Some Women on the Island, dir. by Chloe Gibson (1964); McCabe, Victims : Cancer, Heritage, Siege [the trilogy], dir. by Deirdre Friel (1976); McCabe, Winter Music, dir. by Pat O’Connor (1981); Thomas Flanagan, The Year of the French (1982) [6 episodes], adapted by Eugene McCabe and dir. by Michael Garvey [RTÉ/C4/FR3]. Also with others scripted The Riordans from 1979.
King of the Castle concerns Scober MacAdam, who has acquired by greed and exploitation a former Big House in Co. Letrim; sexually impotent, and goaded by gossip, he devises a plan to effect the impregnatiion of his young wife; the play concerns the mutual infliction of wounds by the couple and also the community.
Dermot Bolger remarks on King of of the Castle that ‘Eugene McCabe is - and has always been - a fiercely honest, raw, brutal (in the finest sense), and magnificent writer’ (cited in Dufour 1998 Catalogue in regard to Bolger, ed., Padraic Pearse, Rogha Dánta: Selected Poems, with introduction by Eugene McCabe [pp.7-18] and Iar-fhocal le Michael Davitt [pp.75-79], New Island Books, 1993.).
McCabe gave an account of the inspiration of the title of his novel Death and Nightingales in an interview on Ulster Radio (BBC), Saturday 2 Feb. 1993, in the course of a nature programme,.
Colm Tóibín, Walking the Border (Macdonald 1987), photos by Tony O’Shea, Chap. 8, ‘The Walls of Derry’, Tóibín meets McCabe and his wife Margot at their house, Dromard, Co. Fermanagh, the farm straddling the border near Lackey Bridge, closed; McCabe talks about the targeting of the UDR and RUC which is experienced by the Protestant locals as genocide; the chapter includes an account of the genesis of his two books published in the 1970s, Victims (1976) and Heritage (1978); got the idea for Heritage from a woman living in the abandoned house at Lackey Bridge who also cleaned in Dromard; also worked across the border for the Johnston; she mentioned that there was friction in the household because a son Ernest had joined the UDR; Tóibín cites the opening of the story, and ends recounting how the McCabe’s heard shooting one night, Sept. 1980, and learnt the following morning that Ernest Johnston had been shot dead; they listen to the car radio appalled; the character in Heritage had been shot dead; now the original had been shot dead as well (pp.107-110).
Victims (1976), The IRA takes a big house family hostage in order to demand the release of prisoners; the IRA family of McAleers is dominated by the mother, ‘an Irish Queen Victoria, with de Valera’s nose and Churchill’s mouth’, and her sons Pascell and Pacelli (Tick and Tock) the bombmakers. Harriet, quizzed at the close by a reporter, declares, ‘The world is still beautiful’. Note: The novel was reviewed by Ben Kiely in The Irish Times (20 Nov. 1976), [q.p.].
Swift, failed in its original 1969 production at the Abbey Theatre, directed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, with Micheál Mac Liammóir playing Deane Swift. It was sucessfully rewritten in 1972 as an expressionistic study of Swift's madness.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)