A Lonely Passion: James Plunkett and the Trusting and the Maimed
It was in 1970 while on a trip in Ireland my grandparents found a paperback edition of the 1955 book The Trusting and the Maimed and Other Irish Stories by the Irish writer James Plunkett and brought it home and gave it to my father. I don’t think anyone in my family ever read it, including my father. Occasionally I would take it out of a drawer and stare at its cover. It looked like something out of the bible. It had a great mass of twilit orange-black clouds towering dramatically above a dark mountain. I never knew that it was considered as something of a classic of contemporary Irish realism. When I eventually read The Trusting and the Maimed I discovered a humane writer of quiet and unexpected power. James Plunkett is best known for the excellent 1969 novel Strumpet City set amidst an event little known outside of Ireland: the tumultuous 1913 citywide lockout of every one of Dublin’s trade unions from employment, the result of a massive wage and hours strike called forth by James Larkin – a Liverpool-born socialist labor organizer of spine-tingling and persuasive speech. Larkin who organized a strike of dockworkers in Belfast in 1907 before coming to Dublin in 1908 had theatrically pronounced to great crowds of Dublin’s enormous population of working poor – “I have come to preach the divine message of discontent.” “He thundered against low wages and bad housing in nightly harangues that mixed the vernacular with quotations from Whitman and Shelley,” wrote Plunkett. “The masses listened spellbound, even when they didn’t quite understand.”
The strike lasted for nearly five months. On O’Connell Street in Dublin today, Larkin’s statue stands with outstretched, exhorting arms. Patrick Kavanagh wrote a poem that saluted Larkin that included these words. And Tyranny trampled them in Dublin's gutter Until Jim Larkin came along and cried The call of Freedom and the call of Pride And Slavery crept to its hands and knees And Nineteen Thirteen cheered from out the utter Degradation of their miseries. Plunkett, who passed away in Dublin 2003 at 83, idolized Larkin throughout his life and worked personally for Larkin as his secretary for his Workers Union of Ireland for two years between 1945 and Larkin’s death in 1947 in a small office in which Larkin would often stop into to smoke and talk. He wrote two plays about him as well, the radio play Big Jim and its stage adaptation The Risen People, written for the Abby Theater.
James Plunkett who was dark-haired and willow slender, was a penname Plunkett assumed when he began publishing his first stories in his early twenties in the early 1940’s while working for the Dublin Gas Company and writing at night. These were published in Irelands’ most prestigious literary journals of the day, Irish Writing and The Bell. His real name was James Plunkett Kelly. Plunkett later in life explained that Kelly was too common a name in Ireland and, as a writer, “I would have been submerged.” He was born in 1920 in the respectable Dublin neighborhood of Sandymount, the birthplace of William Butler Yeats who was also greatly affected by the Dublin Lockout and wrote the poem September 1913 in commemoration. His home, his grandmother’s house, was near the estuary of the Liffey river and Dublin Bay near a round stone Martello tower of the same kind Joyce as a young men lived in, just a few miles away, with for six nights in 1904 with Oliver St. John Gogarty whom Joyce subsequently turned into Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. The family lived in this neighborhood until they moved to inner city Dublin on Upper Pembroke Street near St. Stephen’s Green park when Plunkett was six-years-old. The two Dublin James’s, Plunkett and Joyce, shared several things in common, including a Dublin working class heritage. Each attended the strict Christian Brothers Schools and were athletic and musically talented – Joyce was a gifted tenor who sang one evening in 1904 on a concert bill before the young tenor John McCormack while Plunkett played the viola professionally. As a writer of fiction, James Plunkett honored Joyce through his sober, frank realism and almost neutral prose as well as what the Irish writer Anthony Cronin discerned as Plunkett’s absolute “refusal to invent or indulge in a factitious ‘Irishness.’” Plunkett’s portrait of post-war Dublin in The Trusting and the Maimed is a fatigued disconsolate city. Many of his characters suffer religious guilt and anxiety of the afterlife.
The one story in The Trusting and the Maimed to take place outside of Dublin, “The Wearing of the Green,” reflects James Plunkett’s opposition to the social and religious conservatism and conformity of the post-Independence years in Ireland. In it a young Dublin schoolteacher named Purcell, who seems a partial self-portrait of Plunkett, arrives to teach in a village backwater, Ballyconlan, where a lone railway line leaves town on a hill out to open bog and moorland “that reflected a lonely and indescribably poignant sky.” He takes into his home Joseph the Fool, an outcast with a harelip who is jeered by the children of town. Unbeknownst to Purcell he is also dangerously embittered and eventually plants a bomb at a Festival Dinner at a hotel gathering of the leading figures of the town. When Purcell somewhat naively creates a choral society and then a performance troupe comprised of young people he is scrutinized by parish priest and the local Chairman of the Gaelic League for respectively mingling the sexes and promoting non-Irish music. Eventually, the village financial power, Murphy, begins to openly oppose Purcell’s inroads of modernity into Ballyconlan and this and the misinterpretation of a relationship Purcell has with a female student finally compel Purcell to leave Ballyconlan. Plunkett’s stories of distressed, regretful lives unlike Joyce’s Dubliners are imperfect, sometimes both labored and in passages overwritten, such as the title story “The Trusting and the Maimed.” Yet even here Plunkett sticks to what he knows of Irish life and the final effect is often memorable. In it a young unwed woman, Rita Kilshaw, becomes pregnant during a day at the seaside with Casey, a callow municipal clerk. When her condition becomes apparent Casey disappears – later he breaks a leg and stranded in the Dublin Mountains and fights for his life. Consumed with remorse and terrified, Rita wanders through Dublin until she comes to the Liffey river which she follows “until the rattle of cranes unloading ships warned her that that the dock area was just ahead.” The river was now quite full. It flowed in a brown flood quietly between slime-encrusted walls and smelled of the sea. Spires and towers cluttered in smoky disorder the horizon ahead. A Franciscan church rose behind ugly railings to her right and on the opposite bank the hands of the public clock stood at five–almost tea time … Gulls circled with sharp cries. Going home was out of the question. She could not sit down at table with the family in the drab loneliness of the kitchen to lie to them when she was asked why she had not been home to lunch. She could not sit listening to the radio in the front room with the holy pictures staring at her from the walls. The water she had considered but dismissed. There were too many people. Besides it was a mortal sin. If she did she would go straight to hell. She would plunge deep through the turmoil of river and tide into flames and everlasting torment. She then enters a church and attends confession and is told by a charitable priest that she is forgiven but that she must go home at once to inform her family of her pregnancy. As she begins the walk home, Plunkett writes, rain begins to fall: “It was a soft, cold curtain of rain which swung sadly over the streets and flecked noiselessly on the dark waters of the river.” Arriving home, Rita goes into the kitchen. She stood for some time in the darkness, her hair wet, her bag clasped under her arm. Her thoughts were slow and confused and in the back of head was an incessant murmuring. She knew she had been heard. It was not possible to open the hall door and go down the narrow stairs without being heard. But though she waited tensely for some time nobody called. She repeated to herself: “He said you’re to forgive me that God had already forgiven me. He said to tell you. He said God has forgiven me and that’s why I am to tell you that if God has forgiven me you are to forgive me too.” As she goes up the hallway, “the murmuring grew. She flung open the front door. It took her some time to realize the murmuring had not been in her head. Her father and mother and her two younger brothers and sisters were all on their knees. Her mother looked around first. They were saying the family rosary.” In the accomplished and resonant story “A Walk Through Summer” which was not in the original edition of The Trusting and the Maimed but included in later editions, Plunkett portrays the undoing of an affair between another thoughtful, decent young man and a beautiful married woman deriving in part from the vomit of an irascible blind man at a party. As a Polish war refugee patiently cleans the mess from the floor, the man accuses her with darkly-comic insensitivity of being insufficiently Catholic: "Foreign Catholics is notorious luke-warmers,” he says. “They’re not a patch on Irish Catholics. The Pope himself said that." The story, which ends humorously, feels almost like a parable. Two stories in The Trusting and the Maimed with autobiographical connections for Plunkett are “Weep for Our Pride,” which has been anthologized in Irish short story collections, and “Dublin Fuslier.” In “Weep for Our Pride” a boy, Peter, is unfairly beaten by his nationalist schoolteacher, a huge, bullying “fluent speaker of Irish” with wrists of “matted black hair” who, according to Plunkett’s 1972 memoir and Irish travel book The Gems She Wore, is a portrait of a teacher Plunkett had in the early 1930’s. The shell-shocked World War I veteran, Marty, who wanders in delusions through the streets and bars of Dublin in “Dublin Fusilier” is based on the psychologically war-scarred men Plunkett saw on his street as a young boy. While the mordant and absorbing story “Mercy,” with faint echoes of Beckett, follows the consciousness of an embittered man who works at a nightshift at a construction site in North Dublin while fearing death, “The Damned” follows the fearful footsteps an altar boy tortured by thoughts and dreams of his dead father – killed while drunkenly leaning out of a train. Traversing Dublin’s cold, dark streets to serve morning mass he passes a Protestant churchyard His feet rang emptily on the path. Sometimes from a faraway street he heard feet as early as his own give answer. And now three different bells were ringing. The street lamps were on, which made it look like night, but the darkness was cold and more lonely than night darkness. From around corners a small sharp wind made ambush now and then and in the unswept gutters pieces of paper flurried ands scraped. He passed the graveyard of the Protestant Cathedral. Once it belonged to the Catholics but the Protestants took it. They desecrated the Altar and the holy vessels. They would burn forever in hell for that. He glanced fearfully through the railings at the leaning headstones and thought of their blackened tormented faces howling through the flames and their screaming, struggling nakedness, and then he thought of himself, his soul pure and white, hurrying through the dark, windy early-morning streets to serve Mass and receive the Immaculate Host which was God Incarnate, the Unsuffering Victim, and he shuddered ... As he looked at the headstones a piece of white paper whirled past him in with startling suddenness. The wind pinned it against the railings. It flapped and struggled. Then it went whirling and spinning again into the darkness among the tombstones, lost and helpless, pursued by the wind. He hurried on, frightened. . . . After the Irish and international success of Strumpet City, James Plunkett who was by the end of his life regarded warmly in his native city as a conscientious man, wrote two more accomplished novels, 1977’s Farewell Companions, a semi-autobiographic account of Ireland between the world wars, and 1989’s
The Circus Animals about the early 1950’s period in Ireland. Today in Ireland it is Strumpet City and The Trusting and the Maimed which are regarded as James Plunkett’s most lasting achievements with critics and readers differing in their opinions of which is the stronger and where James Plunkett’s true talent lay. Yet each book remains worthy of discovery.
It was in 1970 while on a trip in Ireland my grandparents found a paperback edition of the 1955 book The Trusting and the Maimed and Other Irish Stories by the Irish writer James Plunkett and brought it home and gave it to my father. I don’t think anyone in my family ever read it, including my father. Occasionally I would take it out of a drawer and stare at its cover. It looked like something out of the bible. It had a great mass of twilit orange-black clouds towering dramatically above a dark mountain. I never knew that it was considered as something of a classic of contemporary Irish realism. When I eventually read The Trusting and the Maimed I discovered a humane writer of quiet and unexpected power. James Plunkett is best known for the excellent 1969 novel Strumpet City set amidst an event little known outside of Ireland: the tumultuous 1913 citywide lockout of every one of Dublin’s trade unions from employment, the result of a massive wage and hours strike called forth by James Larkin – a Liverpool-born socialist labor organizer of spine-tingling and persuasive speech. Larkin who organized a strike of dockworkers in Belfast in 1907 before coming to Dublin in 1908 had theatrically pronounced to great crowds of Dublin’s enormous population of working poor – “I have come to preach the divine message of discontent.” “He thundered against low wages and bad housing in nightly harangues that mixed the vernacular with quotations from Whitman and Shelley,” wrote Plunkett. “The masses listened spellbound, even when they didn’t quite understand.”
The strike lasted for nearly five months. On O’Connell Street in Dublin today, Larkin’s statue stands with outstretched, exhorting arms. Patrick Kavanagh wrote a poem that saluted Larkin that included these words. And Tyranny trampled them in Dublin's gutter Until Jim Larkin came along and cried The call of Freedom and the call of Pride And Slavery crept to its hands and knees And Nineteen Thirteen cheered from out the utter Degradation of their miseries. Plunkett, who passed away in Dublin 2003 at 83, idolized Larkin throughout his life and worked personally for Larkin as his secretary for his Workers Union of Ireland for two years between 1945 and Larkin’s death in 1947 in a small office in which Larkin would often stop into to smoke and talk. He wrote two plays about him as well, the radio play Big Jim and its stage adaptation The Risen People, written for the Abby Theater.
James Plunkett who was dark-haired and willow slender, was a penname Plunkett assumed when he began publishing his first stories in his early twenties in the early 1940’s while working for the Dublin Gas Company and writing at night. These were published in Irelands’ most prestigious literary journals of the day, Irish Writing and The Bell. His real name was James Plunkett Kelly. Plunkett later in life explained that Kelly was too common a name in Ireland and, as a writer, “I would have been submerged.” He was born in 1920 in the respectable Dublin neighborhood of Sandymount, the birthplace of William Butler Yeats who was also greatly affected by the Dublin Lockout and wrote the poem September 1913 in commemoration. His home, his grandmother’s house, was near the estuary of the Liffey river and Dublin Bay near a round stone Martello tower of the same kind Joyce as a young men lived in, just a few miles away, with for six nights in 1904 with Oliver St. John Gogarty whom Joyce subsequently turned into Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. The family lived in this neighborhood until they moved to inner city Dublin on Upper Pembroke Street near St. Stephen’s Green park when Plunkett was six-years-old. The two Dublin James’s, Plunkett and Joyce, shared several things in common, including a Dublin working class heritage. Each attended the strict Christian Brothers Schools and were athletic and musically talented – Joyce was a gifted tenor who sang one evening in 1904 on a concert bill before the young tenor John McCormack while Plunkett played the viola professionally. As a writer of fiction, James Plunkett honored Joyce through his sober, frank realism and almost neutral prose as well as what the Irish writer Anthony Cronin discerned as Plunkett’s absolute “refusal to invent or indulge in a factitious ‘Irishness.’” Plunkett’s portrait of post-war Dublin in The Trusting and the Maimed is a fatigued disconsolate city. Many of his characters suffer religious guilt and anxiety of the afterlife.
The one story in The Trusting and the Maimed to take place outside of Dublin, “The Wearing of the Green,” reflects James Plunkett’s opposition to the social and religious conservatism and conformity of the post-Independence years in Ireland. In it a young Dublin schoolteacher named Purcell, who seems a partial self-portrait of Plunkett, arrives to teach in a village backwater, Ballyconlan, where a lone railway line leaves town on a hill out to open bog and moorland “that reflected a lonely and indescribably poignant sky.” He takes into his home Joseph the Fool, an outcast with a harelip who is jeered by the children of town. Unbeknownst to Purcell he is also dangerously embittered and eventually plants a bomb at a Festival Dinner at a hotel gathering of the leading figures of the town. When Purcell somewhat naively creates a choral society and then a performance troupe comprised of young people he is scrutinized by parish priest and the local Chairman of the Gaelic League for respectively mingling the sexes and promoting non-Irish music. Eventually, the village financial power, Murphy, begins to openly oppose Purcell’s inroads of modernity into Ballyconlan and this and the misinterpretation of a relationship Purcell has with a female student finally compel Purcell to leave Ballyconlan. Plunkett’s stories of distressed, regretful lives unlike Joyce’s Dubliners are imperfect, sometimes both labored and in passages overwritten, such as the title story “The Trusting and the Maimed.” Yet even here Plunkett sticks to what he knows of Irish life and the final effect is often memorable. In it a young unwed woman, Rita Kilshaw, becomes pregnant during a day at the seaside with Casey, a callow municipal clerk. When her condition becomes apparent Casey disappears – later he breaks a leg and stranded in the Dublin Mountains and fights for his life. Consumed with remorse and terrified, Rita wanders through Dublin until she comes to the Liffey river which she follows “until the rattle of cranes unloading ships warned her that that the dock area was just ahead.” The river was now quite full. It flowed in a brown flood quietly between slime-encrusted walls and smelled of the sea. Spires and towers cluttered in smoky disorder the horizon ahead. A Franciscan church rose behind ugly railings to her right and on the opposite bank the hands of the public clock stood at five–almost tea time … Gulls circled with sharp cries. Going home was out of the question. She could not sit down at table with the family in the drab loneliness of the kitchen to lie to them when she was asked why she had not been home to lunch. She could not sit listening to the radio in the front room with the holy pictures staring at her from the walls. The water she had considered but dismissed. There were too many people. Besides it was a mortal sin. If she did she would go straight to hell. She would plunge deep through the turmoil of river and tide into flames and everlasting torment. She then enters a church and attends confession and is told by a charitable priest that she is forgiven but that she must go home at once to inform her family of her pregnancy. As she begins the walk home, Plunkett writes, rain begins to fall: “It was a soft, cold curtain of rain which swung sadly over the streets and flecked noiselessly on the dark waters of the river.” Arriving home, Rita goes into the kitchen. She stood for some time in the darkness, her hair wet, her bag clasped under her arm. Her thoughts were slow and confused and in the back of head was an incessant murmuring. She knew she had been heard. It was not possible to open the hall door and go down the narrow stairs without being heard. But though she waited tensely for some time nobody called. She repeated to herself: “He said you’re to forgive me that God had already forgiven me. He said to tell you. He said God has forgiven me and that’s why I am to tell you that if God has forgiven me you are to forgive me too.” As she goes up the hallway, “the murmuring grew. She flung open the front door. It took her some time to realize the murmuring had not been in her head. Her father and mother and her two younger brothers and sisters were all on their knees. Her mother looked around first. They were saying the family rosary.” In the accomplished and resonant story “A Walk Through Summer” which was not in the original edition of The Trusting and the Maimed but included in later editions, Plunkett portrays the undoing of an affair between another thoughtful, decent young man and a beautiful married woman deriving in part from the vomit of an irascible blind man at a party. As a Polish war refugee patiently cleans the mess from the floor, the man accuses her with darkly-comic insensitivity of being insufficiently Catholic: "Foreign Catholics is notorious luke-warmers,” he says. “They’re not a patch on Irish Catholics. The Pope himself said that." The story, which ends humorously, feels almost like a parable. Two stories in The Trusting and the Maimed with autobiographical connections for Plunkett are “Weep for Our Pride,” which has been anthologized in Irish short story collections, and “Dublin Fuslier.” In “Weep for Our Pride” a boy, Peter, is unfairly beaten by his nationalist schoolteacher, a huge, bullying “fluent speaker of Irish” with wrists of “matted black hair” who, according to Plunkett’s 1972 memoir and Irish travel book The Gems She Wore, is a portrait of a teacher Plunkett had in the early 1930’s. The shell-shocked World War I veteran, Marty, who wanders in delusions through the streets and bars of Dublin in “Dublin Fusilier” is based on the psychologically war-scarred men Plunkett saw on his street as a young boy. While the mordant and absorbing story “Mercy,” with faint echoes of Beckett, follows the consciousness of an embittered man who works at a nightshift at a construction site in North Dublin while fearing death, “The Damned” follows the fearful footsteps an altar boy tortured by thoughts and dreams of his dead father – killed while drunkenly leaning out of a train. Traversing Dublin’s cold, dark streets to serve morning mass he passes a Protestant churchyard His feet rang emptily on the path. Sometimes from a faraway street he heard feet as early as his own give answer. And now three different bells were ringing. The street lamps were on, which made it look like night, but the darkness was cold and more lonely than night darkness. From around corners a small sharp wind made ambush now and then and in the unswept gutters pieces of paper flurried ands scraped. He passed the graveyard of the Protestant Cathedral. Once it belonged to the Catholics but the Protestants took it. They desecrated the Altar and the holy vessels. They would burn forever in hell for that. He glanced fearfully through the railings at the leaning headstones and thought of their blackened tormented faces howling through the flames and their screaming, struggling nakedness, and then he thought of himself, his soul pure and white, hurrying through the dark, windy early-morning streets to serve Mass and receive the Immaculate Host which was God Incarnate, the Unsuffering Victim, and he shuddered ... As he looked at the headstones a piece of white paper whirled past him in with startling suddenness. The wind pinned it against the railings. It flapped and struggled. Then it went whirling and spinning again into the darkness among the tombstones, lost and helpless, pursued by the wind. He hurried on, frightened. . . . After the Irish and international success of Strumpet City, James Plunkett who was by the end of his life regarded warmly in his native city as a conscientious man, wrote two more accomplished novels, 1977’s Farewell Companions, a semi-autobiographic account of Ireland between the world wars, and 1989’s
The Circus Animals about the early 1950’s period in Ireland. Today in Ireland it is Strumpet City and The Trusting and the Maimed which are regarded as James Plunkett’s most lasting achievements with critics and readers differing in their opinions of which is the stronger and where James Plunkett’s true talent lay. Yet each book remains worthy of discovery.
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