When Hollywood puts your darlings on the block
The Irish novelist, Pat McCabe, on the joy and terror of seeing his 1992 masterpiece, The Butcher Boy, get turned into a major 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.
The reason I chose Michael was because of his dimpled chin and quirky offbeat manner, which was how I envisaged the character from its inception. But, perhaps, more than anything, it was on account of his impish likeability — so evident in his performance as the petrol pump attendant, C.W. Moss, in Arthur Penn’s ‘60s classic, Bonnie And Clyde.
It didn’t matter — because in the end, he wasn’t cast. And neither did P.F. Sloan, or his song, appear. With the very first slaughter, as I was soon to discover, in film, being the slaughter of your darlings. Not, as I was soon to find out, that I had any reason to complain.
Bob Dylan, like myself, is fond of deploying the vernacular in his work. ‘I sang a lot of come-all-you-songs’, he commented in that same MusicCares address, ‘there’s plenty of them, too many to be counted: ‘Come all you fair and tender ladies’; ‘Come all ye good people and listen, while I tell’; and of course, there’s ‘Come gather round people, wherever you roam.’
In some ways the Butcher Boy isn’t a novel at all, but rather a song closest, in its structure and intention, to the broadside ballads of Dylan and others who were becoming popular in the mid-’60s, when the story of Butcher Boy was already germinating.
But other disparate, musical influences are also never far away, those drawing room melodies such as ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls’, from Balfe’s opera The Bohemian Girl, having so memorably featured in Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’, the rhythm and blues beat of Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard, the omnipresent sacred Victorian hymns of the time, including ‘Sweet Heart Of Jesus, Fount Of Love And Mercy’, and somewhere offstage, impishly cavorting along the perimeter of our protagonist’s cranium, an entirely unreasonable number of soap-bubble pop song confections, not least among them Johnny Kidd And The Pirates’ ‘Shakin’ All Over.’
The eventual director of Butcher Boy, my 1992 novel about a boy who escapes in a violent fantasy world as his own world collapses, was Neil Jordan and he was familiar with all of these songs — just as he was familiar with rural Ireland. Which brings me back to the subject of the vernacular. Warner Brothers was keen to flatten out much of the dialogue — a great deal of which, in several conversations with me, they admitted to finding ‘incomprehensible’.
An appraisal which must not be considered in the slightest way unreasonable, considering that such phrases as ‘I’m up from the bogs in my boots and my togs and I’ll fuck sods of turf at the ref’, and ‘There he goes now, off on his bike to Bundoran where the fleas ate the missioner.’ And so on. To be honest, it would have ruined me had such an editorial decision ultimately come to pass, being as the internal rhythms had a rough and obstinately intentional poetry of their own. Miraculously, the director somehow stood his ground and persuaded them to permit the existing-and final-script to stand. Even to this day I marvel at how this was done. As I do at how effortlessly we seemed to secure the services of what had to be the creme de la creme of Irish and British acting, including Stephen Rea, Rosaleen Linehan and the great Tom Hickey.
‘In a way The Butcher Boy was, and remains, an effort to comprehend the beautiful, horrendous circus-magic of the world’
We may not have signed Michael J. Pollard or have ended the movie with the jangling chords of P.F. Sloan and Barry Maguire. But we did succeed in landing Fiona Shaw and in persuading Elliot Goldenthal to score our melancholic, subtextual musings. Operating much as Stanley Kubrick had done in A Clockwork Orange, relaying the essential story through the device of a deliriously irresponsible elliptical counter-narrative so often at odds with the action being presented on screen.
Against all the odds, the completed effort did well, and still is watched by many people today. Joan Didion has written eloquently about the craft of writing and why one might surrender to such an impulse, so often taxing, and just as often with no meagre hint of the absurd and illogical about it. There is something of the presumptuous bully in every one who approaches such an act, she suggests, finding in it a way of imposing oneself on other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. And which may be true – the buttonholer in the public bar, the after dinner speaker who has long outstayed their welcome.
But I would have to respectfully insist that, for this particular novel at least, The Butcher Boy, the opposite case might have to be advanced. With, if anything, it having been authored not out of a sense of grandiosity or self-aggrandisement or quite wilfully invading the potential reader’s private space, but in the faintest hope of being understood, in some small way furthering communal human solidarity. Hoping, against hope, that someone might have both the interest and the time to indulge one’s efforts at articulacy. I think of writing more as scratchings on a tombstone, as cave paintings declaring to future generations unborn that like you, once upon a time, I was here too.
Francie Brady, if he has anything, possesses an eye for the ordinary extraordinary — that sudden unremarkable appearance of a sweet wrapper and its Mad Men colours, the giddy flash of a painted sign board on an otherwise unremarkable day but also the slant of the rain as it falls upon a gable-end. In some ways the prose style reflects the twin worlds from which it was derived, varying between the stark greys and black-and-whites of the late 1950s to the unexpected luridness of the early days of ‘color’. I generally tend to think of it as being analogous to the works of Roger Corman (principally his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations) being projected in some alternate Dudley D.Watkins universe, scripted perhaps by Gogol or Dujardin.
There, indeed, may be those whose motivations, in writing, are those of the needy aggressor. But, pace Didion, I would humbly suggest that this is not where The Butcher Boy comes from. In a way it was, and remains, an effort to comprehend the beautiful, horrendous circus-magic of the world. The world outside and Francie Brady’s world within. It was James Joyce who first introduced the concept of the stream-of-consciousness ‘riverrun’ interior monologue.
And, of course, from birth, The Butcher Boy is a tale of essential, existential loneliness. Which is why, whether in the cave or around the fire, we retreat from any urge to relate our humble story alone. And why we look around, in anxious hope as we raise our hand-and say to those figures-who, begin to emerge, gathering shadows, out of the dark:
‘Come all you people, gather round me till you hear.’ Hear my humble story. Which, at the end of the day, in my novel, is a story about heartbreak really. And why it could only close with the melancholic lyric from the timeless, eponymous ballad:
O make my grave large wide and deep
Put a marble stone at my head and feet
And in the middle a turtle dove
That the world may know
I died for love.
That’s what I wanted them to do with the movie — and all I can say is, I sincerely hope they did.
Pat McCabe’s forthcoming book Goldengrove, a vicious black comedy set in Dublin in the 1970s, will be published by Unbound in May 2025.
🎙️ Listen to Pat chat to Patrick Galbraith, the Editor of Boundless, about the adaptation of The Butcher Boys, and their plan to gather a gaggle of various Patricks at the pub in the first episode of the new Boundless podcast.