as Yearling’s, and rejection, like Bradshaw’s or O’Connor’s, his sense of ordinary working lives was not based on the urban poor but of the idealised rural labourer – the peasant. That said, Yeats was aware of ‘the great hardship’ – his words – that the Lockout of 1913 had caused and several of the poems written during the time in which Strumpet City is set are in themselves distinctly political statements. As Terence Brown remarked in his critical biography The Life of W.B. Yeats, ‘the poet in his mid-forties remained a passionate man who could be overcome with intense feelings of anger, perhaps the most eruptive emotion in his psychological make-up. Not all was mask and studied performance.’15
Yeats’s distaste for the materialistic-minded business class who orchestrated the Lockout is well-documented, including, to quote Yeats, ‘an old foul mouth’, William Martin Murphy. Murphy had attacked Yeats and in the Irish Independent, which Murphy owned, had disapproved of the proposals of Hugh Lane, Lady Gregory’s nephew, for a Dublin Municipal Gallery of Art. The cultural politics surrounding 1913 – from the symbolic visit of the British monarchy in 1907, with which Strumpet City opens, to the shuttering up of Yearling’s house in Kingstown and his return to London (‘It was time to go. There was nothing to stay for any longer’)16 – the sense of weighing up history at a critical point of change is recorded in Yeats’s poems of the time as the beginnings of the end of imperial rule in Ireland. In part, at least, Yeats’s poetry gives voice to this process as one of cultural change.
Written over fifty years after the events of 1913 and what 1913 ultimately led to, Plunkett’s novel had of course the benefit of hindsight. Yeats worked instead on contemporaneous instinct and immediate reaction. It was some achievement. One need look no further than his poem ‘September 1913’, written in August 1913 and published in The Irish Times on 8 September 1913 as ‘Romance in Ireland: On reading much of the correspondence against the Arts Gallery’. The poem was published in an interim collection before appearing in Responsibilities, Yeats’s breakthrough volume of 1914.
As a poem of its time, ‘September 1913’ sets down a marker about what Plunkett refers to as ‘the stricken city’ and its likely future. ‘September 1913’ is full of subdued anger and dismissiveness directed at those with money and business solely on their minds who demonstrate little genuine feeling for the integrity of the country and its idealistic past and use nationalist sentiment for their own gain. The disdain that Yeats expresses here and in other poems written at the same time – ‘lethal broadsides’ as they have been called – such as ‘Paudeen’ and ‘To a Shade’ – are explicitly connected to events taking place in what he calls, in ‘To a Shade’, ‘the town’: Dublin.
Indeed, ‘To a Shade’ locates the city topographically in almost the same way that Yeats name-checked the rivers, hills and townlands of his beloved west of Ireland. The references here, though, are to the ‘monument’ – Parnell’s monument at the top of O’Connell Street, the ‘gaunt’ houses of Dublin that anticipate those ‘grey eighteenth-century houses’ out of which the leaders of the Rising will appear in ‘Easter 1916’, and to Glasnevin, the resting place of the great Irish leader, Parnell, another of Yeats’s spirited anti-heroes, who had been buried in Glasnevin a generation before in 1891.
Over thirty years ago, Terence Brown noted in a landmark essay on ‘Dublin in Twentieth-Century Writing: Metaphor and Subject’ that, for Yeats, ‘Irish reality, at its most authentic, is rural, anti-industrial, spiritually remote from the life of the town or city.’17 Yet it is possible to discern a change taking place in ‘To a Shade’ as the city is ‘momentarily transformed by the evening light and by a purgative wind from the sea, allowing for a moment of austere drama and possibly an earnest of the future’.18 Brown goes on to suggest that in Yeats’s talismanic poem ‘Easter 1916’, which is set in Dublin (Yeats called the Rising in a published note to an expanded trade edition of Responsibilities published in 1916, ‘the Late Dublin Rebellion’), though suffused with images of the countryside, Yeats’s ‘transformation of the city is no momentary trick of evening light’.19
For the future Senator, Yeats had discovered in ‘Easter 1916’ a way to celebrate – along with much else – ‘an absolute transformation of a city from apparent comic irrelevance to a tragic centrality in the drama of a nation’s regeneration’. The ‘greasy till’, ‘shivering prayer’, ‘old Paudeen in his shop’ of the poems of 1913–14 had been redeemed.20
And this is basically where Strumpet City leaves us too, in the knowledge of what would happen in the intervening years between the outbreak of the First World War, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War to the beginnings, forty-five years later, of the Northern ‘Troubles’ which were just unfolding at the time James Plunkett’s novel was first published in 1969.
CHAPTER THREE
BORDER CROSSINGS
In John Hewitt’s A North Light, his memoir of twenty-five years in a municipal art gallery,1 there is a wonderfully revealing moment when he recalls attending, as a delegate from Northern PEN, the re-interment of W.B. Yeats’s remains in Drumcliff cemetery in County Sligo on 17 September 1948. Yeats had died on 28 January 1939 in south-eastern France and had been buried there, according to his own wishes: ‘If I die here bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo.’2 The delay was attributable to the intervening war.
Behind the scenes, various Irish writers, including Thomas MacGreevy, diplomats and Yeats’s family and friends, were involved in arranging the re-interment and the occasion itself was by all accounts a neatly staged, poignant and dignified one, attended by many of the leading figures of the time, including Louis MacNeice, Austin Clarke (‘that scrupulous poet’ as Hewitt calls him),3 Frank O’Connor, Lennox Robinson, Maurice James Craig and Maud Gonne’s son, Seán MacBride. Maud Gonne, Yeats’s muse light, was absent, ‘afflicted with arthritis’ and ‘remained in Dublin’, according to Roy Foster.4 Seán MacBride was the Irish government’s Minister for External Affairs, and one-time Chief of Staff of the IRA.
Hewitt’s setting of the scene shows a keen eye for detail and also a sense of uncertainty about what to expect as the cortege approaches Sligo town on its short journey to the Church of Ireland burial ground, five miles north-west of the city so much identified with Yeats, his poetry and his family connections:
Newspapers were folded away, like two waves of breaking foam, as the feeling of an approach ran down the street. Children were hoisted on shoulders. In the stillness, for the first time, I could hear far away the cry of pipes, wild and sad, and the slow distant thump of drums. Soon they rounded the corner and came down the hill towards us.5
Ever-vigilant for the telling moment or hint of tension in the air, or possible indiscretion, Hewitt remarks on the accompanying music as ‘the pipe band of local lads in their blue serge Sunday suits, tense and tall with dignity … came forward slowly step by step, the drums crepe-wrapped and anonymous’. The choice of ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, in spite of ‘what Yeats had written of Tom Moore’ [‘merely an incarnate social ambition’ and ‘never a poet of the people’]6 is praised by Hewitt, along with the band: ‘it seemed’, he writes, ‘decorous and just, a tune we could all share’.7 So the sense of community underpinning the commemorative moment is in Hewitt’s mind as Yeats is finally laid to rest in his own home. Hewitt’s gloss on the occasion is worth quoting in full:
And somehow, I was glad that it was the local civilian band and not the brass and braided uniforms of the state. It was enough that the old poet’s body had been brought back from the Mediterranean sunshine in an Irish gunboat called Macha, for he had been, maybe chief among them who had made that gesture possible.
Hewitt then quotes the (in)famous
