Tuesday, May 05, 2009

A Lonely Passion. James Plunkett and 'The Trusting and the Maimed'


In 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 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.

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. 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 realism and through what the Irish writer Anthony Cronin saw 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 with a female student finally compel Purcell to leave Ballyconlan.
In the title story “The Trusting and the Maimed” a young unwed woman,
Rita Kilshaw, becomes pregnant during a day at the seaside with a callow municipal
clerk, Casey; when her condition becomes apparent he disappears and later breaks a
leg and is stranded in the Dublin Mountains.
Consumed with remorse and terrified, Rita wanders the city until she comes to the
Liffey. She then follows the course of the river “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.
Two stories in The Trusting and the Maimed with autobiographical connections for Plunkett are “Weep for
Our Pride” which has been anthologized in Irish writing
collections, and “Dublin Fuslier.” In “Weep for Our Pride” a boy, Peter, is unfairly
beaten by his nationalist schoolteacher who according to Plunkett’s 1972 memoir and Irish travel
book The Gems She Wore: A Book of Irish Places, 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 North Pembroke Street as a boy.

In the story “The Damned” a boy is tortured by thoughts and dreams of his dead
father, killed while leaning drunk out of a train. After the Irish and international success of Strumpet City, James Plunkett wrote 1977’s Farewell Companions about Ireland between the world wars and 1989’s The Circus Animals about the early 1950’s in Ireland.
Today in Ireland it is Strumpet City and The Trusting and the Maimed which are
regarded as James Plunkett’s finest and most lasting literary achievements. Each is
worthy of rediscovery.

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