.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.
