The Wrong Country. Gerald Dawe
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 all his high talk to the contrary, Yeats – a shadowy presence throughout Strumpet City – was emotionally and intellectually ‘involved with the world’. While he swung like a pendulum throughout his writing life between engagement such 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,