Kevin's Journal

2009-07-10T10:22:00.000-07:00

A Lonely Passion; James Plunkett and The Trusting and the Maimed

James Plunkett (1920-2003) the Dublin novelist, short story writer and playwright is

most recognized as the author of the epic novel Strumpet City (1969) set during the

prelude to and events of 1913’s upheaval of the Dublin Lockout of tens of thousands of

city workers from employment for more than half a year – the result of a titanic wage and

hours strike called by James Larkin, the fiery and charismatic socialist labor organizer

who had come to Dublin in 1908 from Belfast, where he had organized dockworkers the

year before.

Bred in the Liverpool slums of Irish parents, “Big Jim” Larkin, 32, was strikingly

handsome, “tall and broad-shouldered, with a commanding presence,” Plunkett wrote in

a 1961 article The Mission of Discontent. “His hat was dark and wide-brimmed – and

my mother remembers it being rumoured in those early days that he never removed it

because he was anti-Christ and was obliged to hide a third eye that was set in the centre

of his forehead.” To crowds of the city’s impoverished and working poor Larkin

“thundered against low wages and bad housing in nightly harangues that mixed the

vernacular with quotations from Whitman and Shelley. The masses listened spellbound,

even when they didn’t quite understand.” 1.

The strike lasted for nearly seven hard and violent months. It ended, in a sense, in

failure – the employers including the man who led them, William Martin Murphy, the

unflinching owner of the Dublin United Tramway Company among other businesses,

refused to grant tangible concessions to the city’s by then hungry or famished workers,

among them coal carters, dockers, tram workers, porters and others. But Larkin inspired a

generation of Irish – among them Sean O’Casey who deemed Larkin the “Irish

Prometheus” and worked in food kitchens and collected funds during the strike and as

secretary of Larkin’s Irish Citizen’s Army protected worker’s demonstrations.

Still another, from the following generation, was James Plunkett. Plunkett called Larkin

the greatest man he ever knew and supported trade unionism throughout his life, and

between 1945 and Larkin’s death in February 1947 worked personally for Larkin as his

branch secretary for his Workers Union of Ireland in a small office beside Larkin’s own.

Plunkett recalls in the 1985 essay Remembrance of Things Past once

telling Larkin he had proof that an employer had “lied deliberately to us” during a

conference, but Larkin “refused to let me make use of it. ‘Hit a man in his pocket,’ he

told me ‘but never in his pride.’”

James Plunkett and The Trusting and the Maimed

2009-07-10T10:19:00.000-07:00

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

James Plunkett (1920-2003) the Dublin novelist, short story writer and playwright is

most recognized as the author of the epic novel Strumpet City (1969) set during the

prelude to and events of 1913’s upheaval of the Dublin Lockout of tens of thousands of

city workers from employment for more than half a year – the result of a titanic wage and

hours strike called by James Larkin, the fiery and charismatic socialist labor organizer

who had come to Dublin in 1908 from Belfast, where he had organized dockworkers the

year before.

Bred in the Liverpool slums of Irish parents, “Big Jim” Larkin, 32, was strikingly

handsome, “tall and broad-shouldered, with a commanding presence,” Plunkett wrote in

a 1961 article The Mission of Discontent. “His hat was dark and wide-brimmed – and

my mother remembers it being rumoured in those early days that he never removed it

because he was anti-Christ and was obliged to hide a third eye that was set in the centre

of his forehead.” To crowds of the city’s impoverished and working poor Larkin

“thundered against low wages and bad housing in nightly harangues that mixed the

vernacular with quotations from Whitman and Shelley. The masses listened spellbound,

even when they didn’t quite understand.” 1.

The strike lasted for nearly seven hard and violent months. It ended, in a sense, in

failure – the employers including the man who led them, William Martin Murphy, the

unflinching owner of the Dublin United Tramway Company among other businesses,

refused to grant tangible concessions to the city’s by then hungry or famished workers,

among them coal carters, dockers, tram workers, porters and others. But Larkin inspired a

generation of Irish – among them Sean O’Casey who deemed Larkin the “Irish

Prometheus” and worked in food kitchens and collected funds during the strike and as

secretary of Larkin’s Irish Citizen’s Army protected worker’s demonstrations. The poet

Patrick Kavanagh was another. He later saluted Larkin with lines engraved on the statue

of Larkin on O’Connell Street.

And Tyranny trampled them in Dublin's gutterUntil Jim Larkin came along and criedThe call of Freedom and the call of PrideAnd Slavery crept to its hands and knees
And Nineteen Thirteen cheered from out the utterDegradation of their miseries

Still another, from the following generation, was James Plunkett. Plunkett called Larkin

the greatest man he ever knew and supported trade unionism throughout his life, and

between 1945 and Larkin’s death in February 1947 worked personally for Larkin as his

branch secretary for his Workers Union of Ireland in a small office beside Larkin’s own

at Thomas Ashe Hall on College Street in which Larkin, white-haired and still formidable

in his seventies, would sometimes stop in to smoke a pipe and chat with his youngest

staff member. Plunkett recalls in the 1985 essay Remembrance of Things Past once

telling Larkin he had proof that an employer had “lied deliberately to us” during a

conference, but Larkin “refused to let me make use of it. ‘Hit a man in his pocket,’ he

told me ‘but never in his pride.’”
II.

James Plunkett was a penname taken when the slender, dark-haired and intelligent

young man from Dublin’s North Pembroke Street began in the early 1940’s writing

gritty realistic stories with understated compassion about Dublin life while working as a

clerk in the Dublin Gas Company. His real name was James Plunkett Kelly—Kelly was

too common a surname for writer in Ireland at the time, Plunkett explained: “There were

too many Kellys. I would have been submerged.” 3. These stories were soon being

published in Irish Writing and Sean O’Faolain’s publication The Bell – in 1955

ten would be published together, first in the United States, as The Trusting and the

Maimed and other Irish stories; the book would be published in Ireland in 1959.

James Plunkett Kelly was born on May 21, 1920 in the Dublin neighborhood of

Irishtown, next to the suburb of Sandymount, birthplace of William Butler Yeats who

wrote the elegiac, hope-fallen poem September 1913 with its rebuke of the city’s

intransigent business leaders.

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone

Throughout Plunkett’s fiction and factual writing of his native city there is often a

dichotomy between the beautiful and admirable and the disheveled and destitute. The

grace and serenity of the Dublin Mountains, Dublin Bay and the tall Georgian houses of

the city compete with the inelegance of “the spires and chimney factories, the smoke and

hustle” of the working city and the indigence of the slums with buildings “bent under the

weight of families” smelling “of woodrot, overcrowding and grinding poverty.” In his

1972 Irish travel book The Gems She Wore Plunkett recalled how by following

Sandymount Strand north from his home one arrived at rougher Ringsend with its

“pawnshops, fish and chip shops, a soccer ball ground, tenements (and) public houses”

and poorer still Thorncastle and Brunswick streets “with their adjoining tenements,

warrens of disease and hunger.”

James Kelly’s home, his grandmother’s house, was near the estuary of the Liffey and

Dublin Bay; Plunkett remembered a parlor, “like most in Dublin,” which

had never finally acknowledged that the age of Victoria had crossed the bar. There were the usual ageing geraniums waiting to catch pneumonia from a breath of fresh air. There was a china cabinet displaying the family pieces, all far too precious to be actually used.

He recalled being “not yet two,” and jolted “into wakefulness” one night by “the sound of

motor engines and a sudden volley of shots.” Still a young child, he learned there had

been a Black and Tan ambush “a street or two away.” He lived in this neighborhood until

his family moved to inner city Dublin to a “small flat” on North Pembroke Street near St.

Stephen’s Green when he was six-years-old. He attended the Synge Street Christian

Brothers’ School where Flann O’Brien and the poet had Pearse Hutchinson also attended

and which was, he writes, “often over-crowded” with an “unrelenting emphasis on

religion, nationalism and the Irish language: prayers every hour; classroom orders given

mostly in Irish; punishment in the blink of an eye.” His dependable, resilient and beloved

father was a chauffer and a proud member of Larkin’s union and a Great War veteran, a

transport driver in the Army Service Corps, who on his return to Dublin after the

Armistice received criticism and slurs as did many of the 200,000 Irish soldiers who

fought alongside Great Britain. In Plunkett’s historical and semi-autobiographical 1977

novel Farewell Companions which follows Irish history from the Irish Civil War to the

approach of the Second World War, the central character Tim McDonagh, who is partly

based on Plunkett, recalls as a child a Remembrance Day in the early 1920’s when his

mother bought a memorial poppy “because his father had fought in the war and one of his

uncles had been killed in France and another came home wounded only to die” while

another uncle “was shot dead in Dublin fighting for the Republicans.” During a moment

of silence everyone was quiet “except for the Republicans.”

The Republicans set off fireworks and shouted ‘Up the Republic’ and burned the offices of the British Legion. They wore lilies and one of them snatched the poppy from his mother’s coat as they were going home. He tried to kick at the man but he was too small and the man laughed at him. ‘Never mind him,’ his mother said, ‘he’s only one of De Valera’s cornerboys, reared on robbery and loot.’”

But later at home, after singing a song “to cheer him up” then “lighting the gas for their

meal,“ he finds that she “was in tears.”

James’ father died in 1937 when he was 17 leaving him as the oldest son the only

family wage earner. Forced to leave school, Kelly labored at the Gas Company at a

starting wage of one Irish pound per week. When away from work he wandered

throughout Dublin, as he writes in The Gems She Wore, “scribbling little verses about

what I saw.” What he saw, the harsh reality of lives lived in slums and tenements still

decrepit and festering since 1913 and the visceral impact of hearing orators, including

James Larkin himself, “shouting” for social justice and living wages outside the walls of

City Hall and the Irish Houses of Parliament on Sunday afternoons, helped Kelly to

discern that he, in fact, held a socialist perspective on life. James Plunkett wrote: “These

ill-dressed orators, Larkin among them, ignored Social Science. They even ignored God.

They were, by all respectable standards, outrageous. Yet they were undeniably Irish. As

Irish as Robert Emmet or Wolfe Tone.”
III.

In The Gems She Wore James Plunkett wrote, “the Ireland I grew up in and its people

found it as natural to believe in God as it was to breathe the air." But he recollected a

childhood in which

Religion – I mean the Catholic religion – kept our young minds focused on our essential depravity. At an early age we could distinguish between Attrition and Contrition; we knew the difference between Actual and Sanctifying Grace. It taught us how to confess our sins. We were experts on Sin: original sin, venial sin, mortal sin, sins of omission and commission, occasions of sin. There were reserved sins too, but these were for obscure villainies.

Irish Catholic religious tension, anxiety and guilt arises often and sharply throughout The

Trusting and the Maimed including in the grim story of adolescence, “The Damned:”

about John, a Dublin altar boy, whose father is killed while leaning drunkenly out of a

train as they are in the countryside outside Dublin. Tormented by the thought his father’s

soul is in hell, John recalls while on the altar serving early morning mass with Father

Rogan how he cried in confession the previous night. The priest had consoled John that

God has surely forgiven his father but insecurities and psychic terrors and visions

envelop him

Father, he said, I think my Daddy is in hell.
Father Rogan, his vestments rustling softly like the whispering of holy voices, turned his head indicatively but unobtrusively and began to recite the Sanctus. Catching the priest’s voice almost too late, he reached out his hand and rang the altar bell. The congregation knelt. The sound of their knees meeting the wooden kneeling boards echoed like a long-drawn-out roll of distant thunder. The golden flames which tipped the candles wavered and steadied. Then it was quiet.

Seeing “the perspiration on his forehead,” Father Rogan would later “call him to his

room.” In title story “The Trusting and the Maimed” a young unwed woman, Rita

Kilshaw, becomes pregnant during an excursion at Dublin Bay. Consumed with remorse,

she wanders the city then follows the course of the Liffey 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 … She had turned back and walked up-river then, pausing often to note the swirling conflict when the tide began to force its way against the river. Gulls circled with sharp cries. Going home was out of the question. She could not sit down 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 down through the turmoil of river and tide into flames and everlasting torment. So it was either home or walk on and on or the church. While she hesitated a woman passed her and she prayed, “Jesus, O Jesus,” because the woman was big with child.
“The Half-crown,” published in The Bell in 1951, follows teenage Michael Kavanagh,

furious at his parents for not lending him money for a three o’clock train, as he

unsuccessfully tries to meet up with friends and a girl he has a crush on at the County

Wicklow mountain seaside of Bray Head.

He thought of cool waters, of Anne Fox in her red bathing costume raising her round arms to let cool water fall from them glitteringly. She would climb Bray Head in her light cotton frock, slim knees bending, a sea fragrance about her.
It would not be easy to find them. She might go anywhere about the Head to lie
in the bracken. She might lie in the bracken with Dorgan. He would have to search and search.

While in St. Stephen’s Green he sees a child playing with a half-crown coin as her

grandfather is about to fall asleep on a bench. Michael thinks –

You could stand a girl’s fare and buy her ice cream, or buy cigarettes to smoke after a swim, and fish and chips to eat from a paper bag on the way home with the lads at night. The coin went up and down and he folowed it greedily with his eyes –

then weighs the moral consequences and spiritual punishment of theft.

To steal a half-crown could be mortal or venial. Three conditions were required for mortal sin and these were: (1) grave matter; (2) perfect knowledge; (3) full consent. It would be mortal to steal it from a poor man, but venial to steal it from a rich man, because it was dependent on the gravity of the injustice done. Not that he cared whether it was mortal or venial because he had committed sins of impurity which were always mortal and killed the soul, and it was eight months since his last confession. Automatically he almost said, ‘and I accuse myself of my sins.’ When the slide went back in the darkness the priest didn’t say a penny for them he said well my child and with tongue stuck to roof and sweat of shame you had to tell. If you were caught you were a (not-nice-word) thief.

Eventually he steals the coin but is thwarted by his conscience when he attempts to board

the train to Bray Head and sees the girl and her grandfather together get on board the

train.
IV.

James Plunkett like many independent and artistic-minded Irish artists often seemed to

himself to be a stranger in a strange land during the insular and deeply conservative years

of the post-Indepdendent Irish Free State and the roughly two decades following – years

of nationalism, economic stagnation and record emigration as well as widespread book

censorship and what seemed to be a host of senseless and puritanical restrictions against

potentially immoral, but previously normal and natural, social activities including

dancing. These years often tested the patience and personal patriotism of myriad Irish

authors including the short story master Frank O’Connor whose stories Plunkett greatly

respected and who with Peadar O’Donnell assisted Sean O’Faolain with The Bell, and

who also became a friend of Plunkett’s during the 1960’s. Of the Irish-speaking

O’Connor, whose translation of Brian Merriman’s Gaelic 1781 medieval poem The

Midnight Court was twice banned by the Censorship Board, Plunkett, noted: “When

some opponents in an effort to clear the good name Irish literature, suggested that the

translation was entirely O’Connor’s own work, Frank regretted it wasn’t true, but

remarked that it was the only compliment Ireland ever paid him.” Other writers included

Sean O’Faolain, who was censored several times both for fiction and works of Irish

history and culture and, many years later, the young Edna O’Brien whose debut 1960

novel The Country Girls, “denounced as a smear on Irish womanhood,” was banned in

addition to being burned by a priest in a churchyard of the town of Scarriff in her native

County Clare. 5. O’Faolain laid much blame on the shoulders of the Irish Catholic

Church. He wrote in 1949

It is no part of the function of the church to make policemen do its work, and that is precisely what the Church does in Ireland when it works through the State, by means of political lobbying, to tighten up the Licensing Laws, or to enforce a Censorship of books, or to control public amusements such as dancing, or to censor the Cinema, or to prevent Birth Control, or to abolish Divorce. This is
either the spiritual arm abdicating in favour of the temporal; or the spiritual arm pushing the temporal arm before it.” 6.

In “The Wearin’ of the Green,” the lengthy third story in The Trusting and the

Maimed, James Plunkett allegorized what he grasped to be spirit-blinding hypocrisy of

culture, nation and religion through the eyes and experience of the humane character

Purcell, who seems to be a rough self-portrait of Plunkett himself, a young teacher from

Dublin who arrives to remote and dreary Ballyconlan where a lone railway line leaves

to “the moorland beyond, a long deserted tract of bog which reflected a lonely and

indescribably poignant sky.” When he arrives, Purcell kindly takes into his home Joseph

the Fool – an outcast with a harelip who is jeered by the town’s children – to live with

him in a cottage “on a hill from which at night they could see such drab lights as the town

boasted.” Unbeknownst to Purcell, Joseph is dangerously embittered at the trinity of

powers in the village – the parish priest Father Finnegan; Lacey, chairman of the Gaelic

League; and Murphy, the factory and hotel-owning “man of property and power” who

with entrepreneurial cynicism capitalized on his patriotic efforts during the Irish War of

Independence. Enraged at how these men go on to treat Purcell and Murphy’s earlier

banishment of his brother after he eloped with his daughter, Joseph arranges to plant a

time-bomb –

in his possession since the time of the Trouble, when his brother did the difficult jobs and Murphy kept in the background, giving the orders and accepting the credit. It was a heavy and ungainly affair which had been made in the Fitting Shops of the Railway Co. in Dublin and smuggled out with several others for use, first against the British and later against the Irish themselves –

at a festival gathering at Murphy’s hotel of these men and “the lesser light of the Gaelic

League and the Old I.R.A.” The core of the story is Purcell’s ill-fated if naive work to

establish a Choral Society of young people, “sons and daughters of the outlying farmers”

and employees of Murphy’s Flour Mills and button factory, and then stage a production

of The Pirates of Penzance. These modest inroads of modernity at once raise the scrutiny

of Father Finnegan, the gray-headed parish priest, for mingling the sexes, and the

suspicion of the humorless Lacey, with a Gaelic-speaking gold fáinne emblem in his

lapel, who objects to non-Irish music and waltzing because it is “foreign” and who wants

to co-opt the choir under the umbrella of the Gaelic League. Lacey tells Purcell how

Murphy would like to do the same.

‘It is very nice of him,’ Purcell said, ‘but doesn’t he own enough of Ballyconlan already?’
‘He’s a man of much influence, who could do a lot to help,’ Lacey observed – rather uneasily, Purcell thought. ‘He has a wonderful national record.’
‘Did he kill a lot of people?’
‘I expect so. He was in the War of Independence from beginning to end. And self-made, too.’

Soon enough Purcell’s loneliness and estrangement turn to astonished frustration. The

final straw arises when through protecting a dark-haired tinker student Sally Maquire

from her abusive father by allowing her to stay in his home for a night he is construed as

partaking in a sexual relationship. Defeated, Purcell leaves Ballyconlan, telling Joseph for

good measure he will leave Ireland as well.

V.

According to The Gems She Wore, two of the stories in The Trusting and the Maimed

relate to Plunkett’s own childhood in Dublin; one the often anthologized story of

boyhood, “Weep for Our Pride” whose tweed-clad English teacher Mr. O’Rourke who

would pound “the desk with huge hairy fists” as he recited patriotic poems such as

Lament for the Death of Eoghan Roe was an Irish-speaking nationalist Plunkett had at the

Christian Brothers in the early 1930’s who beat students with a leather strap, as he does

Peter the protagonist, when they erred in their recitations. “To be children of promise

could be very terrifying, especially as the image of Ireland they were giving us bore no

relationship to the world most of us were doing our best to grow up in,” Plunkett wrote 7.

The other story if “Dublin Fusilier,” whose World War I veteran, Marty Callaghan,

before the war a trade union band bandmaster during the Lockout of 1913, wanders in

fitful phantasmal delusions through the streets and bars of Dublin is based on

psychologically-scarred former soldiers Plunkett saw as a boy on the streets near his

home: one who would direct traffic, another man who as Marty does flung “imaginary

grenades at imaginary machine gun nests;” and another, a large “straight-backed man

with a walking can and a waxed moustache,” not “quite on his rocker,” “who would

never pass me by” while sitting “under the tall houses of Lower Leeson Street and

wishing my father would come home from work.” He would slope his arms then “salute

and declaim:

Two cigars
For two hussars
A pint and a bottle of stout

I would nod. This was as usual.
Another salute:

Two sardines
For two marines
A pint and a bottle of stout

Another nod. Another salute.

Two bugger-alls
For two Donegals
A pint and a bottle of stout”

Bugger-all “meant ‘nothing at all,’” Plunkett notes. “It was an expression, I knew,

permissible only to the adult male.”

One of the most memorable stories wiithin The Trusting and the Maimed is the

dry-as-bones “Mercy,” adapted by Plunkett for a 1953 Radio Eireann program, a

Becketian portrayal of a guilt-ridden older man, Fred Toner, haunted by mortality,

estranged from his son and mourning a newly dead friend as he works a nightshift

watching a construction site near Christ Church Cathedral, a digging which “exposed the

tunnels which honeycombed that part of the city, vaults which radiated from the

Cathedral, ancient sewers which ran down Winetavern Street to the river. Once they had

been drinking cellars and rebel plotting dens. Now the rats had taken possession.” The

story echoes Plunkett’s description in The Gems She Wore of Dublin’s John’s Lane

Church, across the road from “the great drays of Power’s Distillery and Guinness

Brewery,”

its spire high above the corwded pavements kept one watchful eye on heaven and the other on what was going on around it. Its interior, hushed and saturated with devotion, spoke of God in the accent of the poor. The flickering candles begged a thousand favours, the votive lamps, in glass cups of red and blue, bloomed their thanksgivings about the shrines of St. Rita and the Mother of Good Counsel. The church was always busy with the prayers of women with shopping bags, or the old men aware of the slow trickle of sand.

The three final stories in The Trusting and the Maimed are “The Web” about a Black

and Tan raid and a family betrayal during the the Irish War of Independence; “Janey

Mary,” which follows a Dublin tenement girl who is knocked unconscious and badly

injured while searching for food for her mother in winter; and the long concluding story

“The Eagles and the Trumpets,” about a series of mischances that ultimately impede a

love relationship.

In 1954 the year before The Trusting and the Maimed was published (Anthony Cronin

praised the book in The Bell for its “quiet realism; “refusal to invent or indulge in

facitious ‘Irishness;” and its “very real and unsentimental compassion”) that James

Plunkett play for Radio Eireann about Larkin and the events of 1913, Big Jim, was aired:

Plunkett adpated this into the successful 1958 Abbey Theater play, The Risen People.

During 1955 Plunkett was forced to quit his position as branch secretary of the Workers

Union of Ireland then led by James Larkin, Jr. Plunkett had taken a writers trip to the

Soviet Union that had been organized by the unapologetic socialist Peadar O’Donnell

who Plunkett deeply admired, as he did Larkin, for his courage and humanity. The Cold

War fallout was substantial: Plunkett was denounced in Dublin and throughout Ireland in

newspaper editorials, in mass sermons, and even in county council meetings, something

Flann O’Brien writing as Myles na Gopaleen noted with wry amusement in Irish Times

column Cruiskeen Lawn. A resolution was passed demanding Plunkett’s dismissal at the

union which Plunkett had joined at 18 one “sunlit evening” in 1938 after walking across

O’Connell Bridge with a friend to Larkin’s headquarters at Unity Hall after making an

agreement with a group of co-worker friends at the Gas Works that they would only join

if accepted by Larkin personally, which occurred.

There was a bare hallway leading to a bare staircase and a room with bare floorboards and a rough wooden table at which, under a bare electric light bulb suspended from its cobwebbed cord, the Man Himself was seated. He was tall, heavily built and obviously of great physical strength, with a lock of white hair that fell down over his forehead and a large, bent pipe which required vast quantities of matches to keep it up to the mark. In no time at all the matter of our joining his Union was lost among a hundred and one things besides: a welter of notions, topics and opinions that seemed to offer themselves in a ceaseless flow to that powerhouse of ideas which, I soon found out, was Jim Larkin’s mind.

Plunkett remembered receiving a call one Saturday morning at the Union office (“we still

used to work on Saturday mornings in those days”) from Brendan Behan asking to see

him at a bar on the quays of the Liffey and there being told “he deplored the witch hunt

and intended to write a letter to the papers in my defense.”

I was alarmed, knowing that public sympathy from a notorious non-conformist such as Brendan would ruin me altogether. I told him so. He begged me not to worry. He intended to sign the letter (he said) Mother of Six. Then he looked down at his pint-drinker’s belly which protruded several inches between him and the counter and contemplated it for some time. ‘On second thoughts,’ he decided at last, ‘maybe I should make it Mother of Seven,’

With a wife and three young children to care for, Plunkett took a position as the

assistant head of drama and variety at Radio Eireann. He worked there for the next

twenty years becoming a producer-director and then as head of features until 1975 when

he moved to Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE) as a senior producer and where he received in

1965 and 1969 two national Jacobs Awards, until his retirement in 1985. For the research

of a favorite RTE program he and Frank O’Connor traveled throughout Ireland exploring

and documenting the Irish monastic movement – “Frank’s lifelong pre-occupation and

love,” 1. as Plunkett expressed it.

Following the decade of difficult labor to make Strumpet City and then its

international success in 1969, Plunkett moved in 1971 with his wife and then teenage

children to a Glencree valley in County Wickow whose mountains, “always much more

to me than mere landscape,” Plunkett has visited and loved since his childhood. After

1977’s Farewell Companions, Plunkett wrote his final novel, 1990’s The Circus Animals

that follows marriage and religious tension in early 1950’s in Ireland.

When a young child, James Plunkett Kelly remembered in Remembrance of Things

Past, he often wished that he could live to be eighty because “I would have reached the

year 2000 and straddled the breadth of two millennia. The ambition to do so took root

and persisted throughout childhood.” He eventually did so and passed away in Dublin in

May 2003 at 83. The writer and RTE broadcaster Tom McGurk who worked beside

Plunkett Kelly for many years recalled a caring, sensitive man, “hugely modest about his

own achievements,” who

had seen left wing politics from the inside and the outside (and) had been a living witness to the struggle for the improvement of living conditions for the least privileged in society. Yet in the end I think he came to realize the enduring power of art over politics as an agent of change.

The humane and historical Strumpet City and the compassionate and accomplished

stories of The Trusting and the Maimed are a legacy of an unusually mindful and

decent as well as talented twentieth century Irish writer.

2009-05-05T15:10:00.002-07:00

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.

2009-05-05T15:10:00.001-07:00

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. 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 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 conscientous man, wrote two more accomplished novels, 1977’s FarewellCompanions a semi-autobiographic story about Ireland between the world wars, and 1989’s The Circus Animals about the early 1950’s in Ireland. Today in Ireland Strumpet City and The Trusting and the Maimed which are regarded as James Plunkett’s most lasting achievements. Each is worthy of discovery.

2009-05-05T15:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-05T10:30:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-04-11T11:55:00.003-07:00

I waited there for several monts listening to the distant sound of cars on the streets and hills and then a passing elevated train and then I walked up the steep street that led to the steps which led to the church and walked inside.
I counted three other people inside the church, all ancient-looking women kneeling alone and saying their rosaries, the beads dangling through their fingers. I considered getting up to go before mass began but thought silence and ritual felt comforting.
As I waited I prayed but my thoughts were difficult. I thought of
Mr. Hennessy and tried to put him out of my mind. I stared up at a station of the cross above my head lit by the purple and light of stained glass: it was an image of Christ falling with the cross upon his back. I kept my eyes on the engraving and I tried to pray. A swell of organ resounded through the church. Turning I saw the priest I had seen on the street. As he turned to look at the tiny congregation I think he saw me. I thought of leaving but stayed on.

2009-04-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

I waited there for several moments listening to the distant sound of cars on the streets and hills and then a passing elevated train and then I walked up the steep street that led to the steps which led to the church and walked inside.
I counted three other people inside the church, all ancient-looking women kneeling alone and saying their rosaries, the beads dangling through their fingers. I considered getting up to go before mass began but thought silence and ritual felt comforting.
As I waited I prayed but my thoughts were difficult. I thought of
Mr. Hennessy and tried to put him out of my mind. I stared up at a station of the cross above my head lit by the purple and light of stained glass: it was an image of Christ falling with the cross upon his back. I kept my eyes on the engraving and I tried to pray. A swell of organ resounded through the church. Turning I saw the priest I had seen on the street. As he turned to look at the tiny congregation I think he saw me. I thought of leaving but stayed on.

2007-07-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

Where the land fell away to woods a tombsone stood mute and abandoned

Thomas Wallis Evans
Born Feb 9, 1848
At Wilkesbarre
Died At Germantown
May 26, 1897

it said. I copied on a piece of paper I found in my pocket and tried to imagine the face. Across the always flowing waters of the river was a city section of ancient mills and stone churches and steep hills which visited on days away from the market. The ways in which the light of winter appeared on the sides of mills and chuches made me think of the boredom and melancholy of childhood. I crossed the bridge over the river and when I reached a steep hill stared back at the cemetery.
A priest silent and reserved appeared then climbed the steps of a church.

2007-07-23T08:54:00.000-07:00

I waited there for several monts listeing to the distant sound of cars on the streets and hills and then a passing elevated train and then i walked up the steep street that led to the steps which led to the church and walked inside.

I counted three other people inside the church, all ancient-looking women kneeling alone and saying their rosaries, the beads dangling through their fingers. I considered getting up to go before mass began but thought silence and ritual felt comforting.

As I waited I prayed but my thoughts were difficult. I thought of

Mr. Hennessy and tried to put him out of my mind. I stared up at a station of the cross above my head lit by the purple and light of stained glass: it was an image of Christ falling with the cross upon his back. I kept my eyes on the engraving and I tried to pray.
A swell of organ resounded through the church. Turning I saw the priest I had seen on the street. As he turned to look at the tiny congregation I think he saw me. I thought of leaving but stayed on.

2007-06-26T14:31:00.001-07:00

Where the cemetery sloped away to the flowing waters of the Schuylkill River the land became heavily wooded.
Across the river was a city of long disused stone mills and church spires that I visited on days away from Hennesey's market. I loved how the weak light of winter fell on the gray schist of the buildings, reminding me always of childhood. I went there.
On a steeper hill I stopped and turned to look back across the river toward the cemetery. A bird circled black on the whiteness of an obelisk peak. I thought of Eileen and tears rose again in my eyes. Just then a clergyman in black walked past by on the sidwalk all silence and reserve, hands clasped behind himself. Observing him disappear around a bend in the street I thought of church; of mass. I hadn't been in years. I climbed that very high street to where the heavy stone steps of the church began and, climbing them, opened the thick wooden door. It was extremely dark and smelled of incense. I thought of the tombs and took a seat on a creaking pew and then waited.

2007-06-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

I was lost. All that I had hoped for was taken away from me.

The sky seemed to have fallen. My body ached.
I walked to the cemetery past the tombs and obelisks that I had loved for years alone, their whiteness and grayness admist the greeness of the grass and trees seeming to caution me from what I knew not.

The manager of the cemetery, a silent man with a black beard lived in a quiet cottage by the southern gate. I decided to speak to him. I stepped inside and there he was at a table apparently doing his taxes or some other work. There were large photographs of large obelisks framed above his dark head. He looked up. His eyes seemed confused.
'Do you have work?' I asked. 'Anything at all?'
He shuffled the papers and then stared at the ceiling for some time. He seemed confused. Then he cleared his throat.

'Please get out,' he said pointing to the door. 'And don't come back to this cemetery.'

"But this is a public cemetery" I said.

"No, it is certainly not," he said. "I don't want to see you here again."

2007-03-10T20:09:00.000-08:00

I returned to work that following Monday looking for Eileen.
I spend the better part of the morning bagging the groceries of middleaged housewives in housecoats and sensible black shoes heavier than my own glancing over at the oaken door of Mr. Hennessy's office wondering if she was busy with some inventory records or some other task. But she never appeared. In fact I never saw her again. Just before my lunch break Mr. Hennessy called me into his office.
There were cigarette butts crushed into the dust-laden floorboards. I could smell his cologne and it was nauseous.
“You’re through here” he said. That was it.
I pushed open the heavy door and walking past the curious eyes of the other employees stepped out.

2007-02-14T19:59:00.000-08:00

That Sunday I met Eileen at 2pm on a stone stairway littered with horse chestnut shells ; the gusting sky was layered thick in gray clouds. Seeing her there her eyes filled with curiosity her cheeks flushed waiting for me beside a somber receiving vault felt like a dream.
We wandered and it began to rain. In an iron-gated family plot leaves tumbled past and, pausing, I recited to Eileen the poem from the market again and then, taking her damp hands in mine, somehow kissed her.

Eventually we sheltered in the marbled eaves of an old imposing mausoleum and held each other as our clothed dampened, ours fingers intertwined and trembling.

2006-11-18T18:19:00.000-08:00

As Ive said throughout this period I was greatly attracted to Eileen.
One day while at work I came up behind her as she placed a can of beets on a shelf. I can still see the label in my head. As she turned I said, “The kiss of the sun for pardon The song of the birds for mirth You’re nearer God’s heart in a garden Than anywhere else on earth.” She stopped and looked at me the way the policeman had that evening. “Where did you learn that?” she said. At the cemetery, I told her. I then asked her if she would like to visit it with me. How I managed all of that is beyond me. When she agreed I could have cried there among the earthen-looking sacks of baking flour and tins of artichoke hearts. I arranged for us to meet the following Sunday at the old side entrance to the cemetery; the spot I cherished most. That rest of that week I knew Mr. Hennessey was aware of something different. Eyeing me even more carefully then usual he said, "How goes it Mr. Melville? Anything new on the horizon?" I kept my peace waiting for the week to end.

2006-10-05T19:41:00.000-07:00

Where the cemery sloped away to the banks of the Schuykill there was an overgrown path of family tombs. Resting on a broken stone pillar was a gowned ivy-shrouded limestone angel.
The land fell steeply away to wooded hills. I can still recall a single tombsone that stood mutely alone

Thomas Wallis Evans
Born Feb 9, 1848
At Wilkesbarre
Died At Germantown
May 26, 1897

Across the flowing waters of the Schuylkill was a city of long disused stone mills and church spires that I visited on days away from Hennesey's market. I went there.

On a steeper hill I stopped and looked back across the river to the cemetery. A bird circled on the whiteness of an obelisk peak. I thought of Eileen of her graygreen eyes and the softness of her cheek.

Then a clergyman past by on the sidwalk all silence and reserve, hands clasped. I ventured to the river.

2006-08-29T19:05:00.000-07:00

One late summer evening while crossing a twilit hill a policeman who had parked his squad car in the lot beside the abandoned train tracks over a high moldering stone wall from the cemetery saw me after closing time and yelled to come over. When I foolishly did he looked at me from head to toe as if I wasn’t real. I didn’t feel quite real myself.
“What are you doing in the cemetery?” he said, with almost savage emphasis on the word. I told him I found it “peaceful.” For some reason he seemed to find this explanation enough and let me go.
I worked throughout much of that period as a bagger at a market not far from where I lived. It was a job as drearily pointless as it sounds – bagger.
I worked there for nearly three years filling untold sacks of paper under seventy watt floresecent lighting. As I bagged I ruminated on the cemetery – the odor of scotch pines around proud family tombs and the grandeur of the purple stained glass windows within, of decaying leaves and autumn afternoons and low wind blown clouds. Usually I dreamed myself back into its black gates. As you can imagine I wasn’t much of an employee.
These flights of fancy were one of the reasons I was dismissed. The other had to do with Eileen whose winter gray eyes and freckled forehead for, some reason, beguiled me.
She worked as the assistant accountant behind the oak door of the manager’s office which a cloud of heavy grey smoke perpetually hung. The nicotine that Mr. Hennessey was addicted to.
“Have you finished your novel yet?” is what he constantly asked, that ridiculous smile on his face, his robin's blue eyes fixed on me like a cat pining an injured bird. He was well aware of my aspirations. But I never attempted any response beyond "...Not yet!” my voice dry as an ash vase.

He Saw the Lane

2006-08-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

Throughout the last three years I’ve been reading Freedom Song, a collection of three novels by Amit Chaudhuri – an author with a talent for enshrining the pleasures of the everyday and of the near waking dream.
Reading these often sensual and evocative stories told partly through a prism of childish wonder, particularly A Strange and Sublime Address – about a ten-year-old’s visit to his uncle’s Calcutta home during summer vacation and Freedom Song about an pleasant extended visit by a woman named Mini to the Calcutta home an old friend – reawakened memories of visiting my maternal grandparent’s home in Bala Cynwyd Pennsylvania and memorably combing through its rooms, hallways and chest drawers on holidays. Chaudhuri’s tales are as much about Calcutta, its myriad lanes and back streets and apartment dwellings where life occurs through sequential unremarkable daily rituals, as they are about the character’s. The novel’s each have spare rudimentary plots - a woman wandering through the silent rooms of a spacious apartment on an early autumn afternoon while everyone else sleeps, a retirement age manager of a financially depressed state-owned candy manufacturer daydreams over his newspaper and cup of tea in a building tucked behind “a huge rusting gate that opened reluctantly to outsiders,” three people on an uneventful car trip to a health clinic on the outskirts of Calcutta. These are the essense of whole chapters. The novellas at moments approach preciousness but not to the point of marring the stories.
I liked especially this passage – “Winter came only once a year, and it changed the city. It gave its people, as they wore their sweaters and mufflers, a sense of having gone somewhere else, the slight sense of wonder and dislocation of being in a foreign city. Even the everyday view from their own houses was a little strange. Smoke traveled everywhere, robbing the sunlight of its fire. Afternoon, with its gentle orange-yellow light, was the warmest time of day, though the wet clothes, assisted by a breeze, dried more slowly than in summer. And as the orange light fell on the brickwork and sides of the houses, it was easier to tell, from the flushed rose center that now appeared on a terrace and now a parapet, that its origins lay in fire.”

Two Dublins

2006-07-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

I’ve recently read two books of 1950‘s fiction influenced by James Joyce and about Dublin: one written by a namesake, James Plunkett, The Trusting and the ed, (1959) a collection of short stories; and The Ginger Man, (1955) by the Irish-American expatriate J.P. Donleavy. A paperback copy of The Trusting and the ed sat in in the top of my father’s bedroom dresser drawer during most of my childhood. My father’s parents found the book during a 1970 trip through Ireland. While in my grandfather’s ancestral hometown in County Armagh they were derided by a man for seeking their "roots” and were hurt and offended enough they vowed never to return to Ireland. The cover photograph of a twilit bank of orange black clouds towering biblically above a dark crested mountain (which I now imagine are the Dublin Mountains) and its back photograph of James Plunkett hair curled and eyes squinched in wind worked their way into my imagination. They are now as familar to me as my own face. The Ginger Man I found in a used bookstore on Walnut Street in Philadelphia on a winter day a few years ago.
Both books are of a dim, parochial nearly claustrophobic 1950’s Dublin little changed since Joyce. The Ginger Man involves a Protestant Irish-American, Sebastian Dangerfield, who is studying at Trinity College Dublin while habitating a dank flat with Marion, his long-suffering English wife who is driven to hysetria by his drinking and philandering. The novel features farcical Freudian scenes such as Sebastian rushing to catch a train after using a public bathroom and exposing himself unintentionally to shocked riders (including a horrified hiding behind a newspaper) and pulling a chain to flush a toilet and sending his own excrement pouring through a kitchen ceiling on to Marion’s screaming head. Donleavy's part mocking, part admirable portrayal of Dublin is, if often transparently Joycean, at moments beautiful. “Eight o’clock. The streets were wet, puddles of water on the granite blocks. Western clouds swarming soundlessly catching up the turf smell from the steaming chimney pots on this chilly Saturday night. Bird feet moving his soul through this Danish city. The horse voices of newsboys punctuating the corners of streets behind. Up here in West Friar Street I can hear them saying rosaries.”
James Plunkett’s real name was James Plunkett Kelly which I was disappointed to discover while doing some research following his at 83 in 2003. Plunkett’s most famous book was a sweeping 1969 novel Strumpet City about the "Great Lockout" of trade unionists in Dublin in 1913.
A Joycean passage I admire is from "The Damned" in which an altar boy, consumed by dread for the sake of his father’s soul, walks through Dublin's early morning streets to attend mass.

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 ness, 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.

2006-07-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

21 Jun 2006 by Kevin
My first words in my journal. I should note the title of this journal was 'A Meek Journal' and was primarily based on Psalms 37:11 regarding the fact the meek shall eventually inherit the earth.
I changed the title to Kevin's Journal.
I should note that while this is not a religious writer's journal, I do believe in the great wisdom of that bible passage. Just a note.

Today I visited a beautiful church today with my father, Tom Plunkett, on his suggestion; Bryn Athen New Church cathedral in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. It is a majestic Swedenborgian church, a branch of Christianity I was familiar with a bit really only through the work of poets William Blake and William Butler Yeats and some of the music of Van Morrison. We drove out in the morning, a beautiful warm first day of summer '06, and did a walking tour first through the calm, beautiful cool interioir of the church, made of stone and wood from throughout the country including granite taken from a quarry just about a mile away in Pennypack Park, and then we walked across the church grounds. We were both both charmed both by the unusual beauty of the church and a group of attractive young woman groundskeeping and planting flowers who were truth be said diverting. A unique, very intriguing church. Afterwards we ate corn beef sandwhiches at a sit down deli named Murray's just a few miles away.