of ‘The Tower’ as a haunting conclusion to a haunted work. In this work a man in old age seeks to recall the image of a lost love … only to have the words she inaudibly speaks, at last come fully to his own mind, like a communication from the dead; ‘but the clouds of the sky … when the horizon fades … or a bird’s sleepy cry … among the deepening shades’.56
And so the ghostliness of … but the clouds … brings us to one abiding element in both writers since, in the words of Katharine Worth, ‘Beckett’s are ghost plays too in Yeats’s sense of a ghost as a clinging presence, an emanation from some obscure region of consciousness or a mysterious continuation of mind outside the body: “An earth-bound shell, fading and whimpering in the places it loved.”’57 But for one addendum – a final curious, random, utterly unexpected and probably unconnected piece in this sketch of Beckett’s Yeats.
In his contribution to a centenary celebration, Reflections on Beckett (2009), Terence Brown wrote about how Beckett was ‘wonderfully alert to how modern media with their machines were altering the ways in which human beings would experience selfhood’ and, what is more, that ‘Beckett hints at an irreducible ghostlike presence of the human in his late works for television.’58 Brown contrasts this with Yeats’s obsession with the spirit world, something that started early in his life and lasted until the very end.
Brown goes on to mention that in the 1930s Beckett would visit Thomas MacGreevy in his London lodgings at 15 Cheyne Walk Gardens, a house owned by Hester Dowden. Miss Dowden was a famous spiritualist, and while there is no evidence that Beckett had anything to do, or would have had anything to do, with such a carry-on, he did occasionally play duets with Dowden and, according to Brown, ‘enjoyed the musical evenings she arranged’. Quoting Knowlson’s biography, it seems clear that Beckett ‘got terribly tired of all the psychic evidence [and wondered] what it has to [do] with the psyche as I experience that old bastard’.59 Unlike Yeats then in every way, one would think; the Yeats fascinated by spiritualism, automatic writing, spirit guides, absent healing, and all the rest of it. Beckett never travelled down that strange path although I can’t help thinking that some of his characters might ‘dabble’ a bit.
Clearing out my late mother’s books, I came across This is Spiritualism by Maurice Barbanell (1959). I remember the book from my childhood – a rather transgressive feeling of dabbling in the dark arts pervaded the book, and remarkably still does. The book, like its subject, belonged to a time between the wars she and her family had lived in London and, by all accounts, spiritualism was quite fashionable. Flicking through the pages of this book, in which Hester Dowden and W.B. Yeats feature, along with information on clairvoyance, ectoplasm, materialisation, mediums, psychic eye and faculties, psychosomatic disease, reincarnation, spirit bodies, spirit clothing, spirit healing, trance, vibrations, and umbilical cords, I chanced upon an image of the clairvoyant Jack Webber, one of several dealing with séances, ghostly presences, afterlives, self-communing with the past, voices from beyond the grave.
Notwithstanding his understandable scepticism and impatience with Yeats’s fantastic flights of fancy, did Beckett happen in upon one such session in Hester Dowden’s Cheyne Walk Gardens, hearing things, imagining what was going on elsewhere in the house? Were similar books lying about the place or descriptions circulated to his displeased if curious mind – who can tell? Did Beckett retain Hester in his novel Murphy as Miss Dew (‘no ordinary hack medium, her methods were original and eclectic’)60 while for the image of Murphy in his ‘medium-sized cage’ in ‘his rocking-chair of undressed teak’61 the entranced medium Jack Webber, bound hand and foot in his chair, looks unerringly like Beckett’s anti-hero – or is it just that I am beginning to see things?
CHAPTER TWO
PLUNKETT’S CITY
The selection of Strumpet City as the ‘Dublin: One City, One Book’ choice in 2013 brought back into public view a great novel. In what follows I would like to consider the novel from a particular angle as mediation between poetry and the city of Dublin. It will come as little surprise when I say that Strumpet City is itself full of poetry. For not only is James Plunkett’s writing charged with a poetic lyricism from the beginning to the end of the novel’s almost 550 pages, but different kinds of poetry pervade the text as well. For all the realistic detail and historical sweep of the story, there is a great sense of the physical and natural world, which is captivating, even when the focus is disturbing and grotesque, such as poor Rasher’s death scene. The streetscapes and civic spaces of two urban environments (Dublin and Kingstown) are the twin-tracks along which run the parallel, if at times intersecting, lives of Plunkett’s unforgettable characters. The journey between both these dramatized worlds is rendered swiftly but tellingly in Plunkett’s attentive descriptiveness:
Yearling, back in the city for the first time in six weeks, remarked anew its characteristic odours; the smell of soot and hot metal in Westland Row station, the dust-laden air in streets, the strong tang of horse urine where the cabbies had their stand, the waft of beer and stale sawdust when a public house door swung open. If the fishing in Connemara had been poor this season, at least the open spaces had given him back his nose.1
While there is movement between Dublin and Kingstown, and an awareness of the coastline of Dublin and its southern shores, Strumpet City is also characterised by numerous walks in and around the city and jaunts out to the seafronts. These walks – as characters talk to one another, but also observe the city around them – are part of a long tradition of perambulation in Irish writing.2 Certainly in terms of twentieth-century Irish writing, Dublin is a greatly walked city. Out of this journeying the experience of what is seen – from the gardens and houses of the middle class to the inner-city tenements of the working class, to the public parks, available spaces and greens, intimacies of the snug pub life, canal ways and urban villages – are translated by the writer’s mind into fiction and poetry.
Strumpet City is rooted in a particular time as much as the characters are formed by the lives they lead in particular places: Chandlers Court, the Catholic Presbytery, and the houses of upper-middle-class Kingstown. The novel begins in 1907 and concludes in 1914 with a troop ship leaving Dublin Bay for the battlefields of the First World War. The centrepiece of these seven years is the 1913 Lockout and the struggle for social justice and democracy in Ireland, with Dublin as the cockpit.
Swirling around this intensifying period of political and economic conflict, Strumpet City embodies, with an understated yet revealing intelligence, the cultural world of the time. A little like Joyce in ‘The Dead’, Plunkett points to the kind of poetic life of the streets in the cultural preoccupations of the drawing room, with a tragic and, at times, tragi-comic intensity contrasted with the fraught propriety of manners. In the middle of this contradictory world there is, as a fixed point of reference, Rashers Tierney, like a figure out of mid-nineteenth-century post-famine Ireland.
A Raftery-like figure, Rashers can turn his hand to writing ballads, songs and street rhymes, playing his tin whistle and making recitals at the drop of a hat, or more likely, a penny. On the other hand, the Bradshaws, Yearlings and Father O’Connor entertain themselves somewhat differently:
Mr Yearling suggested the introduction to the second act which contained a sombre opening for the ’cello, but little else that the company could manage satisfactorily, because of the disposition of the voices and the fact that it required a chorus too. Father O’Connor came out best, with a moving interpretation of ‘Is Life a Boon?’ Mr Bradshaw remained silent but Mr Yearling supplied an obbligato on the ’cello. Then Mrs Bradshaw, knowing how much her husband enjoyed singing and not wishing him to feel neglected, closed the score and produced a volume of Moore’s Melodies which contained duets which occupied everybody, the priest and Mr Bradshaw on the voice parts, accompanied by piano and Mr Yearling’s clever ’cello improvisations. Then she asked if it was time for soup.3
The
