story, there runs throughout Plunkett’s novel an under-acknowledged narrative concerning the intellectual arguments of the time. As he heads into town to meet Father O’Connor, we are told that Yearling ‘liked travelling by train especially on the Kingstown line’:
He liked the yachts with coloured sails in the harbour, the blue shape of Howth Hill across the waters of the bay, the bathers and the children digging sandcastles. These were pleasant to look at in the last hours of an August evening [1912]. Yearling loved his city, her soft salt-like air, the peace of her evenings, the easy conversation of her people. He liked the quiet crossings at Sydney Parade and Lansdowne Road, simply because he had swung on them as a schoolboy. The gasometers near Westland Row were friends of his. He could remember passing them many a time as a young man making amorous expeditions to the city. When he looked at these things they in some way kept the presence of loved people who were now dead or in exile … .4
The idyll of the moment is soon to be shattered, however, and who is associated with this pivotal change of tone, but none other than William Butler Yeats:
‘I hope Mr and Mrs Bradshaw are enjoying the theatre,’ Father O’Connor offered. They had gone to the Abbey to see Mr Yeats’s Kathleen ni Houlihan and a play called The Eloquent Dempsey by a Mr Boyle. Later they would call to the Imperial for a light supper with Yearling and Father O’Connor. Father O’Connor’s cloth forbade him to enter a playhouse. Yearling had been disinclined.
‘They’re welcome to my share of Mr Yeats,’ he said, rising to look more closely at the street … What he saw drove the thought from his mind. There was no traffic to be seen in the street below. At the end near the bridge a cordon of police stood with batons drawn.
‘Come and look,’ he said to Father O’Connor. They both stood and watched. Yearling opened the window a little. From the streets to their right came the sounds of people shouting and glass breaking.
‘My God,’ Yearling said, ‘a riot.’5
As the riot unfolds, with looting and ‘a bombardment of stones’, Yearling ‘opening the windows wider, drew Father O’Connor with him as he stepped out onto the balcony. “Bradshaw should have come here,” he remarked, pointing to the milling crowd below. “There’s the real Kathleen ni Houlihan for you.”’6
History has literally broken into Yearling’s reverie of his past life as both he and O’Connor are confronted with the reality of their city’s poor attacking the forces of law and order. It is an important juncture in the novel, roughly halfway through. A little later, Yeats comes back into the frame. It is the following year on St Patrick’s Day. Yearling and O’Connor have spent the evening in the drawing room of the Bradshaw’s Kingstown home where they have been singing some of Moore’s Melodies:
On the way home Yearling and Father O’Connor spoke of Ireland in a sentimental way, of her sad history, of her hopes of nationhood so often and so bloodily thwarted, of the theatre of Mr Yeats and Mr Synge. Father O’Connor confessed that he had not seen any of the plays, but he had heard that they were in tone and language somewhat immoral. How much better Tom Moore had served Ireland through the medium of music and literature. He quoted:
‘Dear Harp of my country in darkness I found thee
The cold chain of silence had hung o’er thee long.
When proudly, my own Island Harp I unbound thee
And gave all thy chords to light Freedom and Song.’
Yearling agreed. He said he wished often that he could have been present when the brave Tom was bringing tears to the eyes of pretty ladies in early nineteenth-century London drawing rooms by singing them songs that were sweetly seditious.7
What follows is a short discussion between the two men about what will happen. Home Rule is ‘a mirage’ Yearling states, ‘Carson will stop it’, before both he and Father O’Connor leave and Yearling drops off the priest at his church where the ‘railings were black and forbidding, and the bulk of the church rose darkly against the sky’. The sense of imminent catastrophe deepens from this point onwards as the Lockout begins. The political heat is turned up and local disaster comes to Bradshaw’s Kingstown door with the collapse of tenements Bradshaw owns and the death of several of the occupants.8
‘We live in terrible times,’ Mrs Bradshaw said. The ambulance bells, the gusting wind, filled her with foreboding. Outside the cosy circle of lamplight lay all the uncertainty and hardship of the world.
‘I went shopping in town last week,’ she told them. ‘It was terrifying. There were little children everywhere and they were begging for pennies.’9
The priest will have none of this, though. Speaking ‘directly to Mrs Bradshaw’, he remarks, ‘“I know how cold and even cruel it must all sound to a nature that is tender and maternal, we must harden our hearts.” Her husband set his mouth and nodded approvingly. She lowered her eyes.’10 But it is Yearling who reacts, and it is telling to see how:
He found his sympathy to be completely on Larkin’s side. The discovery filled him with good humour. In future he would help them whenever he could. He would not be the only one of his class to do so. George Bernard Shaw had spoken for them. George Russell, the mad mystic, had written a scathing letter against the employers. William Orpen, the painter, and several highly respectable intellectuals were denouncing William Martin Murphy and his policy of starvation.11
Yearling does indeed follow this path. He meets the ‘poet William Mathews’, a ‘follower of Jim Larkin’ and is inducted into Larkinism:
the fashion among the writers and the intellectuals. Moran in The Leader has suggested that Liberty Hall ought to form a Poet’s Branch. Russell had written a moving letter in the Irish Times on the strikers’ behalf. Shaw had championed them at a meeting in London. ‘You should write them a marching song,’ Yearling suggests, ‘something bloodthirsty’, to which Mathews replies, ‘I’ve done a little more than that … I’ve helped in Liberty Hall.’12
Outside of those drawing-room lyrics that are sung to accompanying piano and cello, and the regaling of the songs of the streets and political ballads of which Strumpet City has its share, there is the allusive presence of the great founding fathers of Irish cultural nationalism – Yeats, Synge and George Russell – set alongside the hard-core political and trade union activists, based around the all-embracing figure of Larkin. However, we should not forget the somewhat curious figure of the visiting German Jesuit, Reverend Father Boehm, ‘a Gaelic scholar of distinction’ who is to lead the Rosary during St Patrick’s Day and deliver the sermon (in Irish) on devotions at St Brigid’s.
At supper, the German priest discusses early Irish monasticism and Kuno Meyer’s Ancient Irish Poetry, reciting ‘The Hermit’s Song’, a ninth-century poem on which the unctuous Father O’Connor remarks: ‘“What a pity we cannot all follow the poet”, regretting the need to be involved with the world.’13 Bearing in mind what is actually happening in their world, the Dublin he is living in, the yearning to escape has its own kind of sad story attached. For Father O’Connor’s ‘involvement’ is going to get much more torturously present as he is called away from the supper and the ‘amicable and talkative’ Father Boehm by the news that ‘Someone has been killed – or has been found dead, I cannot be sure which – in Chandlers Court.’14 Once again, the poetry of the moment – in this instance, literally the poetry of the Irish monastic tradition – is interrupted by the reality of the lives or the appalling death of the poor Rashers Tierney. The revelatory moment that awaits Father O’Connor has its own poetic intention which, in deference to those who haven’t yet read the novel, I will pass over.
For
