Strumpet City: One City One Book Edition

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When I was about done with this review, I found the following wonderful appreciation of the book. It's from the Introduction to the latest edition of the novel, by Fintan O’Toole. http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/boo... Winner of the BBC National Short Story award for The Grotesques from her short story collectio n Sudden Traveller ( Faber ) The video image for Strumpet City has been digitally remastered, and is presented in a widescreen, enhanced for 16:9 TVs, format. I could be wrong, but I doubt this film was originally shot in widescreen (considering its relatively small budget), so it appears that it's been matted to fit the new 16:9 dimensions. Many of the shots look extremely cramped, with the tops of characters' heads cut off by the framing -- further evidence to me that the original frame ratio has been altered. While I would have preferred the original aspect ratio, the video image is sharp and clear. Plunkett himself later confirmed this “I wanted Dublin itself to be the hero, you know, in a mystical kind of way, with Larkin as a sort of ‘Deus ex machina’.” It was the city, and not just the inhabitants of its Nighttown, that lay prostrate and prostituted; defiled by corrupt intrigues between slum landlords and city councillors – indeed many of the councillors were themselves landlords. Its superficial beauty and fading grandeur hid disease and decay. Lily Maxwell, the only prostitute to feature in the novel, epitomises the city’s condition. She believes she is diseased although she, like the city, and like its most oppressed citizenry, remains proud, beautiful and capable of deliverance. Plunkett’s nostalgic love for the old city, it sights, its smells, its people, is evident throughout.

Overall, Plunkett’s novel can only be accurately characterised as a triumph! I thoroughly enjoyed the read and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the social history of Dublin - despite the fact it is a novel it certainly introduce the reader to the themes which one imagines would have informed the historical events upon which its narrative is based. Asked by Niall Sheridan on Writer in Profilewhat was the function of Literature, James Plunkett said it was to “reveal the reality of what surrounds us", to find and share a '' moment of recognition of a truth" - something as Sean O'Faolain also saw would cause the reader to say: "That's exactly it". James Plunkett died on May 28th 2003, aged 83. Special mention should also be made of Mrs Bradshaw, an upper class lady, who while trying to help in small ways cannot see the bigger picture and would be quite content for things to sty as they are, with the poor getting occasional handouts but otherwise knowing their place. When Plunkett started contributing to The Bell in 1942 he was advised by Sean O’Faolain to write from his own experience. This advice he followed in Strumpet City. Plunkett grew up on the Ringsend side of Sandymount and the drama is mostly located around that area: south from the Liffey along the eastern shoreline. It was here that so many of the port workers lived. The area had not changed much since 1913 when Plunkett grew up and later worked there. Most of the tenements remained and the level of poverty was only somewhat ameliorated. He started work in the Gas Company along the quays where nearby in Windmill Lane Tonge and Taggart, most likely “Morgan’s Foundry” in the book, was still operating. When he became a union official he got to know James Larkin and many members of the union who were “out” in 1913. He modelled some of his characters on these and absorbed their stories. There were other influences. Like all Dubliners of his time he would have observed one or more “Johnny Fortycoats” wandering the streets and from this image he created the comic and tragic figure of Rashers Tierney. He also had insights into the middle class, who lived at the posher end of Sandymount. Plunkett’s father worked as a chauffeur and he would have heard stories from him about the rich people he drove. He was an altar boy and used his knowledge of Catholic ceremony and regalia in the episodes involving the priests.

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The series also showcases the appearance of many stars of Irish soaps who were latterly to make prolonged appearance in future episodes of Glenroe and Fair City, people like Brendan Caldwell, Eileen Colgan, Donal Farmer and Alan Stanford.

Our children, suffering, going hungry without even clothing. Education is very expensive yet we are told that it is a basic need. Why can't it be free like oxygen. James Plunkett published two further novels, Farewell Companions (1977), which partly drew on his childhood and early adult experience, and The Circus Animals (1990), which included incidents drawn from the controversy surrounding the Russia visit of 1955. The success of the radio play led to it being expanded for the stage in the Abbey Theatre as T he Risen People in 1958. The suggestion to expand it came from Sean 0'Casey, who wrote later to David Krause: "I am glad you met Jim Plunkett. He wrote a radio drama about Jim Larkin and sent me the book of what he had written. I thought it good, and recommended him to lengthen it, and make it fit for stage. I'm glad he did this and wish the work every possible success. He is as you say an Honest writer, and brave too; he has written some fine short stories and has a fine literary talent. But he too must walk warily." In 1955 James Plunkett took part in a controversial cultural visit to the Soviet Union with Antony Cronin and other writers and artists. Condemnation of the visit, led by the Catholic weekly newspaper The Standard, included criticism in the Dail, votes of censure at a number of County Councils and, most seriously, a motion to dismiss Plunkett from the union. Brendan Behan told Plunkett he deplored the witch-hunt and offered to write to the newspapers in his defense. Plunkett wrote later: “I was alarmed, knowing that public sympathy from a notorious non- conformist such as Brendan would ruin me altogether. 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 for 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'. “ Plunkett also recalled that whenever he was asked later what he could have learned about the Soviet Union in a four week visit, he would reply: 'Not much, but I learned a hell of a lot about Ireland'. For his career as a writer he dropped the Kelly surname, becoming simply James Plunkett, and he had a short story published in (the Dublin literary journal) The Bell in 1942. His first two efforts had been rejected, but the editor, Sean O'Faolain, encouraged him: "Why don't you write about your own experience and why don't you write on plain subjects?". He followed the advice and completed another story called The Working Class. This was published together with another story called The Mother, a title he changed from Hurler on the Ditch on O'Faolain's advice. The Bell devoted a full edition to his stories in 1954 under the title The Eagles and the Trumpets. This was later expanded and published as the short story collection The Trusting and the Maimed.Winner of the 2020 Orwell prize for political writing for Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me ( Picador ) The power of Strumpet City comes from the human stories that illustrate this drama. One of the first reviewers was the playwright Denis Johnson (whose play on Robert Emmet had given Plunkett his title). He wrote: " Something of much more impact ( than a biography) - a novel in which the story of Dublin's industrial upheavals from 1908 to 1914 are seen through the eyes of a carefully selected group of characters playing out their parts in counterpoint. In spite of the title, the City itself is not at the centre of the picture. It is the people that interest Jim Plunkett as should be the case in any social document as readable as this."

Sorry, we live with the hope that God is going to reward our suffering. We are slow to blame him and accept our fate as handed to us. During the 1960s, Plunkett worked as a producer at Telefís Éireann. He won two Jacob's Awards, in 1965 and 1969, for his TV productions. In 1971 he wrote and presented "Inis Fail - Isle of Destiny", his very personal appreciation of Ireland. It was the final episode of the BBC series "Bird's-Eye View", shot entirely from a helicopter, and the first co-production between the BBC and RTE. Rashers Tierney, in lesser hands, could have been merely the embodiment of the horror of near absolute poverty. He is utterly destitute, despised and bullied by officialdom. He occupies the margins of life and of history, too poor even for the collective self-assertion of the workers. He is reduced almost to the level of his friend and equal Rusty, his beloved dog. He is King Lear’s “unaccommodated man . . . a poor, bare, forked animal”. This thought is taken up early in the novel itself, where, in a rare and discreet intervention of the authorial voice, Plunkett notes children searching bins for “half-burnt cinders”: “They came each morning from the crowded rooms in the cast-off houses of the Rich . . . The clothes they wore had been cast off by their parents, who had bought them as cast-offs in the second-hand shops.” In this imagery, there is the suggestion that the people themselves are cast-off humanity, discarded and of little value.

Plunkett’s objective rather was to remind the reader how it felt; how the city’s most deprived suffered in an unequal struggle against its most privileged. His story captures the simple truth which no post-modernist abstraction should ever be allowed to obscure. Today when antiheroes dominate our fiction we may sometimes forget that there are historical events that are best judged in binary terms: good and bad, justice and injustice. Plunkett, in his old-fashioned way, was never in any doubt which side of this divide he was on. That’s what makes Strumpet City so authentic, and such a pleasure to read again. Nowhere was this more evident than in drama. Although the national broadcaster had produced two well-written soap operas, most of its few attempts at historical fiction were embarrassing to watch. Badly scripted, badly structured and dominated by hammy scene stealing, they were seen more as an attempt to the drama department to justify its underfunded existence rather than as an attempt to entertain. It was rich in themes which range from socialism, trade-unions, strikes, police bruatlity, religion, poverty etc. At a more fundamental level, though, the novel is the story of Dublin in its most turbulent period. Most have taken the ‘Strumpet’ of the title to be an illusion to Dublin’s teeming brothels “the haunts of sin” which Leopold Bloom was accused of visiting just a few years before. But Plunkett clearly meant it to be descriptive of the city itself in the same way that Denis Johnston, from whom he borrowed the title, did: