_{T.P. Flanagan Castle Cauldwell, 1983. Watercolour on paper, 66 x 98 cm. Collection of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon}  

 It was the opening of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig in the summer of 1981. There had been a marvellous moment when Garret FitzGerald and Charlie Haughey had shaken hands – it was right in the middle of a general election campaign – before the photographers were ready to capture the moment. When asked to do it again, FitzGerald refused.

Brian Friel stood on the front steps of the house and made a short speech saying that artists should come to the house not only to work on their art but to relax, take life easy.

Some time that afternoon, I stood in the hallway of the old house with Friel and Eugene McCabe as they spoke about Tyrone Guthrie and the impact he had had on their lives. It wasn’t the same, Eugene said, after Guthrie died. As a writer, he missed having him as a reader, listening to his comments. Guthrie’s response was the one that mattered most. Friel nodded in agreement and said that he felt like that too.

Later, I asked Eugene to expand on what he had said to Friel. Guthrie, he said, had a way of looking at you closely as he asked what you were working on. And then he would remember everything you said and he would ask you about it the next time you met. And he exuded a sense that there was nothing more important in the world than what you might do as a writer.

While Friel could be combative and abrasive, Eugene McCabe was more soft-spoken, open to people, engaging, amused by things. He was on the board of Annaghmakerrig in the early days. A few times when I was staying there in the 1980s he and his wife Margot invited some of us from that big house over to his own more modest-size house on the other side of Clones.

The McCabe house, Dromard, on a small hill very close to the border, was a Georgian farmhouse that had been splendidly restored. It included a long dining-room with a large window that faced north. Over that dining-room table, with Eugene and Margot, everything was open for discussion. They were remarkably open-minded and curious and smart and funny.  

But there were two long shadows over the table-talk on those evenings. One was the north, and the other was the fact that Eugene was not writing. And I wondered sometimes if the two were connected.

By that time, Eugene had written a famous play ‘King of the Castle’, first performed in 1964. And in the mid-1970s, he had published a novella and a collection of stories, several of which were adapted for RTE television. He had also been one of the writers on ‘The Riordans’, the Sunday evening soap opera set on a farm. Eugene was a farmer as well as a writer and kept a dairy herd.

One of the problems with adaptation is that it can concentrate on the plot and the characters in a piece of fiction. This is normally fine, but if the fiction depends on its style and its tone, as Eugene’s does, then it can lose a great deal. At least three of the stories in ‘Heritage’ (1976) - the title story, a story called ‘Cancer’, and a story that I go back to over and over ‘Music at Annahullion’ - are masterpieces

These stories are set in a territory that is unyielding, unforgiving, filled with silence and secrets, old grudges and sharp hatreds. ‘Music at Annahullion’ is set in a smallholding where two brothers and their sister live uneasily in what feels like the aftermath of something. The story’s plain style is peppered with constantly changing rhythms and moments of sour observation that, displaying an extraordinary control over register, can be transformed into pure shivering beauty.

These stories are set in the very landscape we looked out on from that dining-room. If Clones was the nearest town to Dromard, then Enniskillen was its natural capital. But the bridge, Lackey Bridge, very close to Eugene’s house, that marked the border, had been blown up by the British Army so it was not easy to drive to Enniskillen.

One day in 1986 I told Eugene that I was going, as a reporter, to attend the funeral of a part-time UDR man who had been shot dead by the IRA while working in a field on his farm near the border. His young son was with him. Eugene knew the name of the place where it happened and the name of the family. And he knew also, since it had been in the papers, that those who committed the murder had crossed into the south at a point very close to Lackey Bridge.   

The Troubles meant that there was no natural interaction any more between neighbours on the Monaghan-Fermanagh border. The IRA campaign and the British Army presence created daily tension. One day in 1986, when I was staying with the McCabes, I noticed that you could see the British Army look-out post from the long window on the first-floor landing. This meant that the soldiers could also see into the house.

The more I got to know the area – by this time I was walking along the border to write the book that became ‘Bad Blood’ – the more I saw that every little sign - such as a car turning suddenly, or a lone figure appearing in a field, or a sound, or even a remark – could mean something that only a local would know how to interpret.

It struck me how hard it might be to settle down each day, quietly adding pages to a novel in that atmosphere. I noticed how preoccupied Eugene was. A few times, when we spoke about writing, he insisted that he had something in his mind and was determined to begin again. But it wasn’t happening.  

In the summer of 1991, while staying again at Annaghmakerrig, I got a message to contact Eugene and I drove over to Dromard. He had, he said, finally finished a novel. But that is when new problems began. He worked in longhand, but no one could read his handwriting. So he had recorded the entire novel on a Dictaphone and found someone who could type it. But the typist did not know about apostrophes and so the text was filled with ‘didnt’ and ‘dont’ and many other oddities.

As far as I remember Eugene gave one copy to me and sent another to John McGahern, who admired the book.

In Dublin, I read ‘Death and Nightingales’, as the book was called. The sentences and images seemed chiselled, hard-won, rendered with an astonishing attention to rhythm and nuance. I was so enjoying the style that I was shocked by the plot. I simply did not see it coming. When I finished the book, I was certain that it would be still read a century from now.

If there are layers in ‘Death and Nightingales’ that come for myth and history, another layer emerges from the time when the book was actually written and the place where it is set. Even though the events take place over a single twenty-four-hour period in May 1883, the shadow of the Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s gather over the book.

For any reader of ‘Death and Nightingales’ in 1992, the figure of Liam Ward, his ruthlessness, his knowledge of the intricacies of this contested space, his feeling of dispossession, would have had great contemporary echoes. The sense of deep division, long-held bigotry, with history as something unfinished, would also have struck the reader as being fully contemporary.

What gives the book its stark power comes also from the slow evocation of things that are fully noticed - rutted lanes, the watery sky, the interior of the house, the farm and its workings, the politics of the day, the relationship between servant and master.

McCabe’s novel is stylish; it depends on rhythms and cadences. It moves sometimes obliquely, using subtle systems, slowing things down, then offering a single, acute observation. It would be easy to imagine, as the novel unfolds, that McCabe is more interested in creating a mood, writing scenes that are both timeless and locked in time, drama that is convincing, frightening and chilling.

Eugene McCabe died two years ago, on 27 August 2020, at the age of ninety. His novel ‘Death and Nightingales’ was published thirty years ago, on 24 August 1992.

  Colm Tóibín (August 2022)