The pain of seeing your book become a film, a restaurant in Lviv, and Erica Wagner makes potato chip cookies
Issue #3: With Pat McCabe and Henry Marsh
Yesterday evening at the Southbank Centre in London, the finalists of the TS Eliot Prize for poetry were reading their work. The shortlist this year, from the late Gboyega Odubanjo to Hannah Copley, is remarkable. It is a particular joy that our Boundless columnist, Katrina Porteous, is in the running for her recent collection Rhizodont. Katrina is a great friend and an extraordinary poet. It is always a real pleasure to see people get the recognition they deserve. Katrina will be appearing next week on the Boundless podcast, where she will be chatting to Erica Wagner, our Editor-at-Large, about everything from the sea to the passing of time.
I was reflecting yesterday on what it is that makes Katrina’s work special. There is remarkable attention to detail, her ability to hear sentences is excellent, and often she’s writing poems that have been a very long time coming. Her work is born out of years of listening and watching. But as much as anything, though, I think what makes her the poet she is, is that she doesn’t really fit anywhere particular and nor does she seemingly really want to. She writes about fish and birds but she also writes about AI, rocks, and space. She does it her way.
In today’s issue of Boundless we’re running a piece by the great Irish novelist, Pat McCabe. His 1992 book, The Butcher Boy, is one of the most powerful novels I’ve read. I was struck when speaking to him on our podcast that he too does things his way. He is never frightened to challenge accepted thoughts about Ireland. It is, be it in poetry or fiction, easier to head along with the herd. Having a crowd can elevate you but I think that when you stand back, you realise that truly remarkable work tends to be made by those who plough their own furrow.
Patrick Galbraith, Editor
When Hollywood puts your darlings on the block
The great Irish novelist, Pat McCabe, on the joy and terror of seeing his 1992 masterpiece, The Butcher Boy, turned into a film
In an inspired speech to the MusicCares Foundation, in 2015, Bob Dylan observed: ‘These songs of mine, more than anything I think of them as mystery plays, the kind Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then and I think they’re on the fringes now. They sound like they’ve been travelling on the hard ground.’
I myself first heard The Butcher Boy ballad when I was nine or 10 years old at a music festival held in my hometown of Clones, Co.Monaghan, at a time when the privation of the 1950s was beginning, at last, to show signs of receding.
I remember vividly the young girl in the sheepskin jacket and knitted white Aran sweater singing it — they were like the wings of a songbird, the lyrics as they alighted from her lips. But if she was young and blazing with every aspect of possibility, you could tell that the song itself was old, even ancient.
In Moore Street where did dwell
A butcher boy I loved right well
He courted me my life away
And now with me he will not stay
I wish my baby it was born
And smiling on its Daddy’s knee
And me, poor girl, to be dead and gone
With the long green grass
Growing over me.
Already I had the film adaptation completed in my mind — it would star Michael J.Pollard as my soon-to-be eponymous schoolboy-killer, Francie Brady. And, somewhere in there, would be the ubiquitous anthem of that particular period, P.F. Sloan’s ominous Eve Of Destruction.
Pat’s new book Goldengrove, a vicious black comedy set in 1970s Dublin, will be published by Unbound later this year
🎙️ Listen to Pat chat to Patrick Galbraith, the Editor, about Irish priests and the difficulty they had casting the lead role in the first episode of the new Boundless podcast
Lviv's Old Market in 1995
Writer and neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reminisces on his time in the historic city, for our 'There's A Street in my Neighbourhood' series
I first saw Staryi Rynok — the Old Market — in Lviv in the winter of 1995. I have a photograph of myself standing on the snow-covered pavement, wearing a fur hat. Nobody would dream of wearing such a hat now in Ukraine — they are associated with the past, and with Russia. Beanies have become universal. Besides, climate change has made winters much milder.
Behind me you can see the crumbling, blackened facades of the ancient buildings that form the square, many of them derelict. Lviv is one of the historic cities of Eastern Europe. It had a large Jewish population and was a centre of Jewish learning. Many of the historic buildings around the square were once owned by Jews but there are very few Jewish people left now, after the mass murder of the Second World War.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been back to Lviv since 1995 — and on each visit I could see how the grim past was fading away.
Henry Marsh is co-founder of Hospice Ukraine, a charity that supports palliative care in Ukraine. His latest book And Finally: Matters of Life and Death is published by Jonathan Cape
Erica Wagner leafs through her mother’s scrapbook of recipes that never got made
My mother was what you might call a ‘fantasy cook’. Our usual fare, when I was growing up in the 1970s on New York’s Upper West Side, was broiled fish, spaghetti and meatballs, or chicken soup with matzoh balls. (My mother spent decades perfecting her matzoh balls.)
Yet she subscribed to Gourmet magazine and read the recipes in the New York Times religiously. She kept scissors and Scotch tape to hand, and between 1965, when she married my Dad, and not so long before her death in 2009 (the same year Gourmet shut up shop, as it happens) she maintained a small squadron of recipe books, mostly containing recipes she would never ever cook. There are about 15 recipes for cassoulet. We never once had cassoulet.
There are, however, also recipes collected from friends — and later, from me — which give a somewhat more realistic picture of our culinary lives at home. Above, beloved Aunt Roseanne’s potato chip cookies, the shortening/margarine a relic of the time: try butter. Below, my mother’s notes to herself regarding how many days to allow when cooking a pot roast (slow-cooked beef brisket, to you) or a method for cooking bacon in the oven.
We weren’t, aren’t, a family of heirlooms. Our precious objects are not, for the most part objects at all, but stories; I tell them to my son, though he was still a little boy when his grandparents died — but he loves the chain of memory. And I have these books, which reveal my mother’s dreams for a culinary future she never reached — yet somehow it’s still out there, beckoning.
Erica Wagner, Editor-at-Large