CHAPTER TWO
PLUNKETT’S CITY
The selection of Strumpet City as the ‘Dublin: One City, One Book’ choice in 2013 brought back into public view a great novel. In what follows I would like to consider the novel from a particular angle as mediation between poetry and the city of Dublin. It will come as little surprise when I say that Strumpet City is itself full of poetry. For not only is James Plunkett’s writing charged with a poetic lyricism from the beginning to the end of the novel’s almost 550 pages, but different kinds of poetry pervade the text as well. For all the realistic detail and historical sweep of the story, there is a great sense of the physical and natural world, which is captivating, even when the focus is disturbing and grotesque, such as poor Rasher’s death scene. The streetscapes and civic spaces of two urban environments (Dublin and Kingstown) are the twin-tracks along which run the parallel, if at times intersecting, lives of Plunkett’s unforgettable characters. The journey between both these dramatized worlds is rendered swiftly but tellingly in Plunkett’s attentive descriptiveness:
Yearling, back in the city for the first time in six weeks, remarked anew its characteristic odours; the smell of soot and hot metal in Westland Row station, the dust-laden air in streets, the strong tang of horse urine where the cabbies had their stand, the waft of beer and stale sawdust when a public house door swung open. If the fishing in Connemara had been poor this season, at least the open spaces had given him back his nose.1
While there is movement between Dublin and Kingstown, and an awareness of the coastline of Dublin and its southern shores, Strumpet City is also characterised by numerous walks in and around the city and jaunts out to the seafronts. These walks – as characters talk to one another, but also observe the city around them – are part of a long tradition of perambulation in Irish writing.2 Certainly in terms of twentieth-century Irish writing, Dublin is a greatly walked city. Out of this journeying the experience of what is seen – from the gardens and houses of the middle class to the inner-city tenements of the working class, to the public parks, available spaces and greens, intimacies of the snug pub life, canal ways and urban villages – are translated by the writer’s mind into fiction and poetry.
Strumpet City is rooted in a particular time as much as the characters are formed by the lives they lead in particular places: Chandlers Court, the Catholic Presbytery, and the houses of upper-middle-class Kingstown. The novel begins in 1907 and concludes in 1914 with a troop ship leaving Dublin Bay for the battlefields of the First World War. The centrepiece of these seven years is the 1913 Lockout and the struggle for social justice and democracy in Ireland, with Dublin as the cockpit.
Swirling around this intensifying period of political and economic conflict, Strumpet City embodies, with an understated yet revealing intelligence, the cultural world of the time. A little like Joyce in ‘The Dead’, Plunkett points to the kind of poetic life of the streets in the cultural preoccupations of the drawing room, with a tragic and, at times, tragi-comic intensity contrasted with the fraught propriety of manners. In the middle of this contradictory world there is, as a fixed point of reference, Rashers Tierney, like a figure out of mid-nineteenth-century post-famine Ireland.
A Raftery-like figure, Rashers can turn his hand to writing ballads, songs and street rhymes, playing his tin whistle and making recitals at the drop of a hat, or more likely, a penny. On the other hand, the Bradshaws, Yearlings and Father O’Connor entertain themselves somewhat differently:
Mr Yearling suggested the introduction to the second act which contained a sombre opening for the ’cello, but little else that the company could manage satisfactorily, because of the disposition of the voices and the fact that it required a chorus too. Father O’Connor came out best, with a moving interpretation of ‘Is Life a Boon?’ Mr Bradshaw remained silent but Mr Yearling supplied an obbligato on the ’cello. Then Mrs Bradshaw, knowing how much her husband enjoyed singing and not wishing him to feel neglected, closed the score and produced a volume of Moore’s Melodies which contained duets which occupied everybody, the priest and Mr Bradshaw on the voice parts, accompanied by piano and Mr Yearling’s clever ’cello improvisations. Then she asked if it was time for soup.3
The singing of ‘Life is a Boon’ sentimentally brings to Yearling’s mind a Joycean-like epiphany, similar to those of Joyce’s masterly story ‘The Dead’. And a little like the argument between Gabriel and Miss Ivors in the same story, there runs throughout Plunkett’s novel an under-acknowledged narrative concerning the intellectual arguments of the time. As he heads into town to meet Father O’Connor, we are told that Yearling ‘liked travelling by train especially on the Kingstown line’:
He liked the yachts with coloured sails in the harbour, the blue shape of Howth Hill across the waters of the bay, the bathers and the children digging sandcastles. These were pleasant to look at in the last hours of an August evening [1912]. Yearling loved his city, her soft salt-like air, the peace of her evenings, the easy conversation of her people. He liked the quiet crossings at Sydney Parade and Lansdowne Road, simply because he had swung on them as a schoolboy. The gasometers near Westland Row were friends of his. He could remember passing them many a time as a young man making amorous expeditions to the city. When he looked at these things they in some way kept the presence of loved people who were now dead or in exile … .4
The idyll of the moment is soon to be shattered, however, and who is associated with this pivotal change of tone, but none other than William Butler Yeats:
‘I hope Mr and Mrs Bradshaw are enjoying the theatre,’ Father O’Connor offered. They had gone to the Abbey to see Mr Yeats’s Kathleen ni Houlihan and a play called The Eloquent Dempsey by a Mr Boyle. Later they would call to the Imperial for a light supper with Yearling and Father O’Connor. Father O’Connor’s cloth forbade him to enter a playhouse. Yearling had been disinclined.
‘They’re welcome to my share of Mr Yeats,’ he said, rising to look more closely at the street … What he saw drove the thought from his mind. There was no traffic to be seen in the street below. At the end near the bridge a cordon of police stood with batons drawn.
‘Come and look,’ he said to Father O’Connor. They both stood and watched. Yearling opened the window a little. From the streets to their right came the sounds of people shouting and glass breaking.
‘My God,’ Yearling said, ‘a riot.’5
As the riot unfolds, with looting and ‘a bombardment of stones’, Yearling ‘opening the windows wider, drew Father O’Connor with him as he stepped out onto the balcony. “Bradshaw should have come here,” he remarked, pointing to the milling crowd below. “There’s the real Kathleen ni Houlihan for you.”’6
History has literally broken into Yearling’s reverie of his past life as both he and O’Connor are confronted with the reality of their city’s poor attacking the forces of law and order. It is an important juncture in the novel, roughly halfway through. A little later, Yeats comes back into the frame. It is the following year on St Patrick’s Day. Yearling and O’Connor have spent the evening in the drawing room of the Bradshaw’s Kingstown home where they have been singing some of Moore’s Melodies:
On the way home Yearling and Father O’Connor spoke of Ireland in a sentimental way, of her sad history, of her hopes of nationhood so often and so bloodily thwarted, of the theatre of Mr Yeats and Mr Synge. Father O’Connor confessed that he had not seen any of the plays, but he had heard that they were in tone and language somewhat immoral. How much better Tom Moore had served Ireland through the medium of music and literature. He quoted:
‘Dear Harp of my country in darkness I found thee
The cold chain of silence had hung o’er thee long.
When