The American newspaper columnist Charles McCabe (1915-1983) was addicted to marriage and alcohol, and made regular attempts to give up both, never with complete success.
At age 67, after a long period of abstention, he met his future fourth wife on an ocean voyage, falling for her so hard he took three months off his daily column to house-hunt.
As usual, the optimism was unfounded. A marriage begun at sea soon hit the rocks. McCabe returned to the job, alone again. Weeks later, he was found dead of a cerebral haemorrhage, after a fall in his apartment.
The other addiction may have been implicated there. Either way, he had been prolific until the last. Till the last too, unlike some of us, he had never needed the gun-to-the-head of a deadline to write.
His long-time editor, Gordon Pates, introducing a posthumous collection of McCabe’s work, gave him the editorial equivalent of a 21-gun salute: “He was six columns ahead at his death”.
Born in the middle of the Atlantic, on a ship from Queenstown (now Cobh), McCabe grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. He was a crime reporter there and elsewhere for many years. Then he settled in San Francisco, where he found his true vocation.
In 1955, when he was already 44, the San Francisco Chronicle invited him to write a sports column. It was a subversive idea, because McCabe despised “the insane religion of sports in America”. He nevertheless revelled for five years in outraging fans with his “refusal to take seriously the grand passion of their lives”.
From there, aged 50, he graduated to a five-days-a-week general column, wherein he fully found his voice. Now he could write about his own daily doings. Hence the title, with a Hiberno-English flavour: “Charles McCabe Himself.”
Of the result, the mayor of San Francisco said McCabe was the only Catholic he knew who went to confession in public and got paid for it.
As James Degnam points out in a foreword to the anthology, McCabe was in some ways a “walking cliché”: the tough, hard-drinking New York Irish newspaper man.
He even dressed in the style known as “rumpled columnist”, covering his beer belly in baggy suits, wearing unpolished but handmade shoes, and sporting a shillelagh.
And true to the genre, McCabe’s own “drinking career” was one of his running themes. In between spells of drying out, this included having “five ales” every morning, after hammering out a column conceived the night before.
But Degnam argues that McCabe was also “one of the great originals”, who wrote “about things that just aren’t written about in American newspapers . . . about Horace Walpole’s letters, about Swift and Montaigne and Dr. Johnson and Lady Mary Wortley Montague . . . about Botticelli and Raphael and what Lord Melbourne said about Raphael’s uncle, architect to the Pope”.
Of course, drawing from his extensive research, McCabe also wrote much about women, with whom he was said to be “both fascinated and baffled”.
Regular subjects included the one who had brought him into the world. She inspired this reflection, among others: “The Irish mother regards the pangs of birth as the price she pays for the possession forever, and in fee simple, of the body, soul and gaiety of her children.”
His own gaiety remained sufficiently intact, meanwhile, for him to want to marry four times.
The first and last partnerships were tempestuous and brief. The second, to publishing heiress Peggy Scripps, was long enough to produce several children.
The third, to English aristocrat Lady Mary Campbell, lasted a respectable length of time too. Long enough, perhaps, to outlive the frisson such a match must have had for what Pates – laying it on thick – called “one whose forebears had slept with the pigs in the grinding poverty of rural Ireland”.
His accumulated experience turned McCabe into a philosopher of male-female relationships. Between marriages, he once wrote ruefully:
“The thing I miss most as a bachelor is the talk, damn it. Those long, rhapsodic voyages into self that passed for passionate exploration of each other. These came at the beginning of the arrangement. You never forget them.
“You meet a number. You know. Then, if you are like me, you embark on a conversation that lasts anywhere from ten hours to long months, occasionally interrupted by sleep. You are filled with the wonder of finding the Echo to your Narcissus. Except that your Echo has love returned. You think.”
In a less lofty marital metaphor, the job of writing a daily column has been compared (by Chicago journalist Ed Lahey) with “being married to a nymphomaniac”. The reason: “As soon as you get through, you have to start again.”
But writing about his actual wives, McCabe seems to have most enjoyed the meeting of minds involved.
That regretful column was prefaced with an old cannibal joke: “My wife made good soup, but I miss her just the same.” Looking back on the favourite of his failed marriages, however, he suggested the cannibalism had been mutual: “In the end, I’m sure, we both made good soup. And, speaking only for the party of the first part, I miss her just the same.”
