Building a mansion of words

INSIDE STORY: As PAT MCCABE prepares to have his latest book ‘Poguemahone’ published thanks to the support of readers, he spoke to THOMAS LYONS about the past, the present and the future.

What is an appropriate time on a Wednesday morning to start discussing universal truths? Such esoteric discourses are generally broached in the early hours of the morning but, when the leader of the conversation is one of the finest literary voices this region has produced, you just have to go where the conversation brings you.

Patrick ‘Pat’ McCabe’s place in the pantheon of Irish literature alongside Patrick Kavanagh, Dermot Healy or John McGahern has been cemented by his 14 published works.

Since his first children’s book ‘The Adventures of Shay Mouse’, he has mined the argot and dialect of this area to craft wondrous brooding works that challenge the reader to reflect on reality and unhinged fantasy.

McCabe’s latest offering bears the glorious title ‘Poguemahone’. The author is using Unbound.com, the equivalent of crowdfunding for novels, to allow fans of his writing support him in getting the book printed. As of Wednesday, March 31, it had reached 98% of its funding target.

“I wanted to make a city out of my town and make a mansion out of my terrace. A linguistic mansion,” he says of the motivations a 17-year-old Clones lad to put pen to paper.

Breaking new ground

Since those first scribblings his approach to his craft has changed. The advent of his third adult publication, The Butcher Boy, catapulted him into the best seller category. Here we are 29 years later and the author is breaking new ground.

Unbound rewards readers’ support with a range of benefits. From early proofs, digital editions, hardbacks, launch tickets and even dedications in the printed novel depending on price range.

“The world has changed dramatically,” McCabe says of his publishing route. “I didn’t get into writing for money. Major publishing is a matter of profit and loss. I was really into the art of the thing. When I came across John Mitchinson, who was a kind of a genius editor, I thought, this is the way I want to go. He’s a great editor. He was formerly Dermot Healy’s editor, actually. He understood the book. And I just didn’t bother going anywhere else with it.”

The aforementioned Mitchinson is a writer, publisher and the co-founder of Unbound, the award-winning crowdfunding platform for books.

For McCabe being pushed in a new publishing direction by technology is emancipating: “I belong to the ‘50s as much as to the ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s. That’s the tradition I came up, but I’m no Luddite and never was. This whole Internet explosion happened. I’m very interested in it, but perhaps not very proficient. I could see its potential through my children. I find it liberating.”

Unusually for a child of the ‘50s, the author is not fixated on the physical book.

“I think that day has kind of gone away,” he replies to a query about the importance of the paper page.

“The printed word is where it starts, but I can go anywhere after that. I’ve also worked a lot in theatre with Padraic [McIntyre of Ramor Theatre who has adapted a number of McCabe’s books for the stage] and various other people. I like to have the physical book, but that’s a sentimental attachment. What I’m interested in is ‘what you’re saying’ and ‘who you’re trying to reach’ and ‘how you’re doing it’.”

Audiobook

As part of the Unbound support patrons have access to an audiobook of Poguemahone. The writer turns reader for this particular format: “I don’t know who listens to audio books. I like doing them, and I’m told they’re very popular these days,” he says.

Performance is nothing new to him, he has quite a few film credits as an actor under his belt including turns in Breakfast on Pluto, Perrier’s Bounty and, most recently, in Philip Doherty’s award winning Redemption of a Rogue.

The digital technology that allows Unbound to exist also has a negative side: “One of the most notable characteristics of the Internet Age is a lack of reflection; the appeal of sensation and instantaneous gratification that brings. Fragmentation of a sort has begun, the world is splitting up into clubs. We have various book clubs of different character and maybe the reflection takes place in those forums.

“People don’t have the time to sit by a fireside leisurely turning the page and ruminating. That day is over. There are still people who do it, but smaller numbers. Generally speaking, the manner of reading I was used to is gone. People do not familiarise themselves with the canon. I went to a boarding school where people read a lot of Latin and the classics. All that sort of thing that was in the air, but that’s gone. Many people will say they’re glad it’s gone, but anyway, we’re in a different place now. Poguemahone and Unbound is a part of that change,” he explains.

Such observations are not rose tinted wistful reminiscences of the past: “Culturally, you could argue that although not everybody was interested in Latin, it was in the air. They were breathing in the same oxygen, so an unintentional by-product was a respect for scholarship. Parents wanted their children to be educated. I’m not really arguing the case for it, because it’s just what it was. It was like the weather of one’s early life, as John McGahern used to say. I can’t imagine there’s the same respect for scholarship now as you had then.”

The internet has put a turbo engine on the steamroller of time. In doing so we have left behind some of the difficulty of acquiring knowledge and what is not hard won is easily lost: “Through the Bible, the classics, Greek mythology and so on, there was, certainly in the English speaking world or the Western world, an acceptance of what you might have called the eternal verities. It was what people knew to be good, but that’s all tossed up in the air now. What is truth? Everybody has their own version of it,” he muses.

The plot

The author has described his new work as a ballad, a free verse monologue narrated by Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, who is looking after his sister Una, now 70 and suffering from dementia in a care home in Margate. As with any of McCabe’s novel a linear plot line would bear little resemblance to the journey the reader takes as they survey the world through the mind’s eye of individuals with skewed views of existence.

“Poguemahone is almost a traditional folktale thrown up in the air in the way of the Internet is throwing things up in the air. It’s still very rooted in the world of Irish Folklore, but combined with a touch of modernity,” he says.

The story tells of a call girl in 1950s Soho, the experience of counterculture in the ‘60s, exile and emigration. McCabe says such elements are just part of the story: “It’s not meant to be shocking,” he says. “Art always tell the truth as best it can. I mean Victorian London was full of Irish prostitutes whether people accepted it or recorded it.”

Mental health issues are not new themes for McCabe to dissect in his work. Butcher Boy was published in 1992, but McCabe rejects a suggestion he was a lone voice: “There’s nothing new about mental health issues. People say Ireland never spoke about these things. Well, go back to 1963 you’ll find a book by Hanna Greally called ‘Bird’s Nest Soup’. There was plenty about mental health issues in there.

“If you read the work of John Broderick you’ll find it, if you read the work of Liam O’Flaherty, you’ll find it. There’s a lot of retrospective revisionism about what people were talking about in rural Ireland at that time. Having lived through it I know that it’s not always entirely accurate,” he states.

The writer is credited with creating a unique genre, all of his own: “Some people like it, some don’t. It goes in and out of fashion. It’s not entirely breaking new ground. Joyce covered all these aspects of human nature, not just mental illness, but everything, all the failings and triumphs of human beings. So did people like John McGahern. I was only doing it a different way, perhaps because I grew up in the ‘70s, and ‘60s. Those influences are global influences. Perceptions and cultural developments were bound to bleed into it to some extent.”

Support

McCabe is appreciative of the support he has received to help bring his latest work to print: “In the last five years I wondered do I have readers and who are they? I’ve had great supported for Poguemahone, for example, Catriona O’Reilly and Cavan County Council, Nomad Theatre Network, and Somhairle Mac Conghail of Monaghan County Council who all supported the work.

“That’s a very pleasurable thing at this stage of my life, to be supported by Cavan and Monaghan, which is essentially where I come from. So that has been very cheering. There’s a whole swathe of people from the UK and further afield saying this book is worth publishing and maybe that’s enough for me.”

“I’m very grateful to Monaghan and Cavan County Council. They really did give it a bedrock and a vote of confidence. There was a time when the artist was at loggerheads with their community, or even the country, but that day is confined to the dustbin of history.”

Although McCabe’s work is set in the wild frontiers of the human mind, there is a very definite geographical influence as well: “Really it’s a bit of Cavan or Monaghan or Fermanagh, though I may give it a different name. It’s in your bloodstream and that’s all there is to it. When I was 17, I used to say, ‘I want to make a city out of my town and make a mansion out of my terrace.’ A linguistic mansion.”

If you would like to know more about Pat McCabe’s ‘Poguemahone’ details can be found on unbound.com