Peg Plunket: Memoirs of an Irish Whore by Julie Peakman

This review appeared in an edited form in the Sunday Times on the 5 July 2015.

This book has a dirty little secret. It contains not a scrap of titillation. The most radical perversion recounted involves a little mild toe play: "His unspeakable pleasure was picking, washing, and cleaning my pretty little toes." Even the brutal rape that occurs late in the book is covered by the discreet phrase "we were forced to comply with their infamous desires." This will come as a disappointment to those expecting an Irish Fanny Hill or to those who have read Peakman's previous book A History of Sexual Perversion. It's hardly Peakman's fault as she's dealing with a set of memoirs in which the writer claims "I am careful not to pen a single line that can excite a blush in the most refined cheek". Notwithstanding the dearth of dirt, this is a mildly entertaining account of the life of a charismatic and resourceful woman and of the quaint mores of a bygone era.

The book is based on the Memoirs of Mrs. Margaret Leeson written in 1798. Margaret (Peg) Plunkett was born in Delvin, County Westmeath some time around 1742 - the date is disputed by historians. Peg subsequently adopted the name Leeson from one of her early protectors. Her father Matthew Plunkett "possessed a very handsome property near Corbetstown". The memoirs were written late in her life and were an attempt both to raise money and to frighten her debtors into paying up lest they feature in her book. The original memoirs are wildly unreliable and relentlessly self-serving but they nonetheless provide a fascinating glimpse of life in 18th Century Dublin.

Peg was a high-spirited often wilful girl and her comfortable middle-class life came to an abrupt end when her father gave control of his properties to her violent and domineering older brother. After a series of savage beatings Peg decamped with a Mr. Dardis who promised to marry her - the sine qua non for sleeping with respectable girls in those days. However the sex happened but not the marriage and a disgraced Peg was ostracised by her family and headed for starvation. She decided that the solution to her problems lay in profitable compliance to men's desire. "I vowed to yield myself to the first agreeable and profitable offer that is made to me". She asks of those who might judge her: "Were you ever at the point of starvation?"

There followed a sequence of lovers and protectors who would shower her with gifts and house her in splendour. These included Thomas Caulfeild, Mr. Lawless, Mr. Leeson, and the Reverend Lambert. Keeping Peg was clearly an expensive business and she revelled in it: "Champagne is a wine I never loved but only as it was dear, and I liked to put those who treated me to as much expense as I could."

But Peg was torn between her desire for security and her adventurous spirit and was forever spiting the hand that fed her. She produced nine children by various lovers but they get scant mention and most appear to have died prematurely - one from shock after an assault on her house and another from an "inward complaint." Lawless was perhaps the great love of her life and when he fled to America to escape his debts, Peg's heart hardened and she decided to make a business out of what initially had been a way of ensuring a comfortable passage through life. "In short I was to become a compleat Coquet." Later on she leased a house on Drogheda Street with her friend Sally Hayes and it soon became the place of low resort for fashionable Dublin. Peg suffered no shame about her business. She regularly took her entourage of trollops to the theatre as a way of advertising their charms.

It seems men went a whoring as a matter of routine in those days. Her admirers included the Duke of Rutland, who was Lord Lieutenant at the time. He parked a troop of armed and mounted soldiers outside while her house while he and his friends indulged in a 16-hour revel. The Duke's notorious appetite for claret eventually caught up on him and this heroic bon viveur died from liver disease in his Phoenix Park Lodge at the age of 33.

Peg alas also came to a rather sticky end. While returning home one night she and a companion were set upon by a gang of ruffians and were robbed and raped. This assault resulted in a serious venereal infection, probably syphilis, and she died in abject poverty not long after. An attempt at a cure using mercury probably hastened her demise. She was working on her memoirs right to the very end and the last entry reads poignantly: "good heavens my fingers refuse to do their office".

The sub-title of the book, Memoirs of an Irish Whore is misleading. These are not the first person memoirs of Peg but rather a very loose biography written in the third person. It's still an interesting story but it lacks the true voice of this extraordinary woman. It's a kind of Peg for Dummies. The best bits are the occasional extracts from the original memoirs. Also, Irish readers may find the potted Irish history a bit tedious. If you want to encounter the authentic voice of Peg you will be better served by the 1995 Lilliput Press version of the memoirs edited by Mary Lyons. Or better still visit the manuscripts room of the NLI and experience the real thing.

Quercus

240 pp

€?

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Nihilists at Work in South Dublin: Review of Here Are the Young Men by Rob Doyle

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 6th July 2014

The spirit of Nietzsche looms over the action in Rob Doyle's darkly exhilarating first novel. But don't be alarmed, the book's intellectual architecture is well concealed beneath the boozing and braggadocio of its protagonists. The nearest we get to an explicit acknowledgement of the great German thinker's influence is Scag's philosophical riff half way through which contains a tasty chunk of Nietzsche's apocalyptic prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra - unattributed but with added 'fuckin's.

The novel portrays the antics of four epically disgruntled teenagers in that hiatus between sitting the Leaving Certificate and heading off in the directions designated6 by their results. You may acquire a hangover just by reading about their drug-fuelled ride through late Celtic Tiger Dublin. Drugs and drink are constantly sought and consumed and most of the action stems from their effects. Getting wasted is the one solid ambition they all share. But the boys behaviour is dictated by the cosmic squalor all around them. They are living in the twilight of the idols. God is dead, school is out, Church and State have failed them - the robber barons rule the land. Their irreverence and frantic drinking is a way of dealing with the void. Beneath the surface hedonism there is a dark undercurrent of seething emotions where terror, despair, and violence lurk. We know what we're in for as soon as we reach the fly-leaf. There's a quote from E. M. Cioran - a man famous for bemoaning the "inconvenience of existence". These youthful nihilists casual misogony is only trumped my their sustained misanthropy There are a few superficial similarities to the novels of his namesake Roddy, a writer admired by Rob. They share an ear for dialogue, particularly the oath-laden demotic of Dublin. However while Roddy has colonised the north side, Rob's characters roam between Greystones and Tallaght - with frequent excursions to Temple Bar and to Killiney Hill and its environs. These are south side boys but definitely not D4. One of the quartet's mother is a cleaner for God's sake. This is different territory in other ways also, a realm beyond good and evil.

Early on we encounter a spectacularly vile anti-Bono tirade that will give plenty of readers pause. But these are just the spewings of Kearney the book's resident psychopath. He will get his comeuppance. He's just reflecting darkly the level of invective often directed by Dubliners at this amiable and enormously successful rock musician. Pure Paddy begrudgery. And if that scene disturbs you wait until you get to the snuff movie description.

In addition to the juvenile nihilism of the four characters, there is an attendant sexual anxiety that afflicts all of them except, ironically, Cocker. It's as if this last avenue to escape and transcendence is also closed to them. Matthew is weak and vacillating and he knows it - he has moral fibre issues. He's also timid with girls and when he finally gets his much sought after Jen to bed discovers that he can't perform - not surprising perhaps considering the volume of drugs he has consumed. This is a horror for any man but for the shy teenager it's a trauma that ruins everything. Jen is unfazed by the sexual failure that blights his love for her. The girls in this novel are very relaxed about sex and its trappings compared to the boys. His later encounter with her and Kearney in flagrante merely compounds his misery and rage. This is a tragic unresolved love story at the heart of the action. Cocker seems to be benignly indifferent to the girls. In fact the Cocker character is the least well-drawn of the four, as if Doyle needed a foil for the erratic antics of the other three. He alone doesn't enjoy his own chapter headings which are divided between Matthew's first person agonising and the third person descriptions of the deranged Kearney and the over sensitised Rez. Kearney has a violent streak that emerges early on. He is obsessed with ultra violent computer games and creates alarming personal web cams. His attitude to girls is brutal and pragmatic, date rape is to be admired and eventually practised. Rez is the smartest of the four. He agonises about the human condition and raises the conversation above the bestial level struck by Kearney. His girl-friend dumps him all the better to frolic abroad with a clear conscience and when he discovers her emails to a friend gloating about her pleasuring by some holiday-camp Lothario he is quite undone - most particularly by the unfavourable comparisons she makes with his own sexual ministrations.

Half way through Doyle introduces the book's most likeable character, the old punk and stoner socialist Scag - who "dreamt of the day when the working classes refuse to work". He acts as Matthew's mentor and guide around Dublin in a way that faintly echoes Bloom and Daedulus's more restrained peregrinations. He points Matthew along the path of true stoner righteousness, which means avoiding a career at all costs.

The novel turns even darker in the latter stages. A trip to the US exposes Kearney to a snuff movie and he returns to Dublin with his vicious urges cranked up a few notches. The occasional outbursts of casual violence become more regular and more extreme - his inner psychopath comes out to play. He tricks Matthew into complicity in one of his crimes and from there things escalate to a murderous and fiery denouement - in Greystones of all places. This is a fine debut from Doyle. It shines a light into a relatively unexplored region: the psyches of our youth, adrift in a world where the old verities no longer exist. And its fast-moving episodic structure makes it a rollicking good read. God may be dead, but a new literary star is born.

 

Lilliput Press

304 pp

€13.99

John P. O'Sullivan

July 2014

 

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Portraits of the Artists 5: Brian Bourke

An edited version of this profile appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 24 Feb 2013.

Brian Bourke in his studio - February 2013

There's always been something of the outsider about Brian Bourke.  He was thrown out of NCAD as part of the annual cull and later thrown out of St. Martin's College of Art for deviations from the planned programme of studies.  So he went his own way, unburdened by what was current and fashionable in the art world.  His art school expulsions encouraged him to cut out the middle man and learn directly from the great masters.  He spent his free time at the National Gallery, the Courtauld and the other richly endowed galleries and museums of London.  An encounter in the National Gallery with Antonio del Pollaiuolo's Apollo and Daphne was a seminal moment - it confirmed for him the path he would follow.  And those laurel trees took root in his imagination.  In London he also discovered the newly published Beckett and developed a taste for absurdity. This is an artist so independent that he quit the Independent Artists group because they introduced a selection policy akin to the one he despised at the RHA.  He occasionally courts this outsider image identifying himself with the exiled Sweeney, and the deluded Don Quixote. But there's nothing deluded about Bourke.  He has carved out a successful career in art and supported himself and his large family for nearly fifty years.  Nor is he showing any signs of slowing up.  His new show, opening in Taylor Galleries on 28 February, consists of 43 new paintings - all interesting some masterful.

In 1968 the Cold War was at its bitterest as Dubcek's attempt at liberalisation in Czechoslovakia was crushed ruthlessly by troops from the Warsaw Pact countries.  As war clouds gathered Bourke was going about his business in a forest studio in Bavaria not far from the Czech border.  His sombre paintings of the trees around him from that period were given a sinister edge by the inclusion of low-flying Starfighters.  These Allied fighter planes were keeping a watching brief on Germany's border and as Bourke painted they roared overhead intruding on his sylvan studies.  They were a daily reminder of the fragility of our existence at that time and an intimation of mortality as significant as the skulls he loves to include in his work.  His new show also features aeroplanes flying over woods.  These however belong to model plane enthusiasts in Belmont, County Offaly where one of his sons lives.  They provide a peaceful and playful echo of that fraught earlier period.  

Brian Bourke's first one-man show took place in the Dawson Gallery way back in 1965.  That fabled gallery was run by the late Leo Smith and his youthful assistant was John Taylor. Nearly 50 years later Bourke continues this relationship around the corner at Taylor Galleries in Kildare Street.  Bourke has seen the ebb and flow of the art market, the periods of being in fashion, and of being beyond the artistic pale.  It has been a precarious existence at times. When I spoke to him recently he described feelingly a period at the start of the Eighties when he lived "half-way up a mountain in Connemara, with no electricity or running water".  Bourke and his wife Jay (a fellow artist) had a new baby and the art market was stagnant.  Just when things were at their bleakest, the Aosdana scheme was launched.  With one bound our hero was free.  Colm O'Briain, chairman of the Arts Council at the time, was an admirer of Bourkes.  He helped the artist to surmount the hurdles that led to membership and, crucially, qualification for the Cnuas.  Bourke's career has been punctuated by such timely financial boosts.  The cottage he lives in outside Moycullen was bought over 20 years ago with the proceeds of his involvement in the Gate's Samuel Beckett festival in 1991.  The well-heeled international audience the festival attracted were quick to buy Bourke's associated work which was on display in the theatre.  A past connection with the Gate had given him this opportunity to display his wares and reap the rewards.  He spoke nostalgically of the relationship between artists and theatre folk in the old days.  He was a big admirer of James McKenna's work ("a very underrated man" he opined) in both spheres and of Deirdre O'Connell late of the Focus Theatre.  He pointed out a treasured portrait of O'Connell in a corner of the studio.  Another outsider resolutely following her star.  

Bourke is a great talker and unexpectedly a great mimic.  His stories of the old days in the Graphic Studio Dublin (GSD) are punctuated with hilarious imitations of some of James McCreery's many comic utterances.  He related an unrepeatable anecdote about Eelagh Brady (Charlie's wife) and a large handbag.  Bourke has retained an appreciation of the ladies.  There was a twinkle in his eye when he spoke of the late Mary Farrell Powers who was one of the founders of the GSD.  He painted her twice, showing her long legs to advantage in pieces that are downright erotic.  An attractive woman, many were "in lust with her" he remembered.  He also tells a story of Anne Yeats interrupting a printing session with him because she had to collect Ezra Pound from the airport and bring him to the Hibernian Hotel to meet her mother - the illustrious George, W.B.Yeats' widow.  On returning to the GSD, Anne Yeats described how Pound and her mother had sat in the lobby without a word for an hour or so and then went on their respective ways.  A scene worthy of Beckett.

Brian Bourke is both dyslexic and discalculate and it may be that these ostensible handicaps have helped to make him the artist he is today.  He is quite open about it and confesses his discalculia means an absolute dependence on Jay for managing the household finances.  Many famous artists were dyslexic, including Leonardo da Vinci, Rodin and Picasso. This is  hardly surprising since dyslexia means essentially that the right-hand side of the brain is stronger than the left. Therefore dyslexics are inclined to have more highly-developed visual skills.  In addition they often suffer in an academic environment and so turn to the practical.  He certainly has an appreciation of and enthusiasm for colour that marks him out from many of his more chromatically restrained peers.  I also got an illuminating demonstration of his practical skills.  Bourke uses his studio walls as easels for his larger works.  Our photographer asked him to pose against a couple of specific paintings which we didn't realise lacked the relevant screws for hanging on the wall.  Quick as flash he whipped out a drill, made the holes, inserted the screws and had the two large paintings in position before we could demur.

Occasionally the amiable anecdotalist gives way to pungently expressed opinions when something touches a nerve.  He has no time for alcoholic artists and is quite scathing about anyone who would glamorise that tendency:  Charlie Brady and Brendan Behan were cited.  He doesn't buy into the myth of the tortured genius damping down his fevered brain with drink.  He saw too much of it in Ireland during the Fifties and Sixties.  Another subject that gets him going is overpricing.  He has always striven to keep his prices accessible - even through the boom years.  There was an implicit rebuke here for certain artists who maintain unreasonably high prices even as the art market tumbles. 

When you consider Bourke's work across his career there is a surprising consistency between what he was doing back in the Sixties and what he is doing now.  The locales and the subjects have changed but the current show's major difference from those earlier shows is the general lightening of tone.  A painting such as Apple Tree, Ower, Autumn 2  is positively Arcadian compared to his early work.  He agrees that his palette is not as dark these days.  He worked in a lower key back then he maintains.  He likes to compare colour to keys in music, a comparison not surprising from one who wields a mean bodhran and counts Frankie Gavin amongst his friends.  All the Bourke tropes have endured however:  the preponderance of trees, the disturbed skies, the palette suffused with reds and green, the circular interludes to escape the tyranny of the rectangle (as in Small Apple Tree 1) and the painted frames. His portraits continue to be almost hieratic.  They have the stripped-down formalism of African art - examples of which abound in his County Galway cottage. They studiously avoid background detail, focusing on the sitter rather than dissipating their energy in attendant frippery.  His aim is to "avoid the Victorian".  There is also a series of exquisite minimal drawings notably Mother and Daughter 1.

There was a  hiatus in the otherwise consistent evolution of Bourke's work.  In the early 90s he was offered an apartment in New York with a view filled with the skyscrapers of Manhattan.  He painted a series of minimal, stylised and beautifully composed studies of these bleak buildings in golden and russet colours.  The show was a great success both critically and commercially.  They pointed away from Bourke's usual style and towards a more stripped down vision, not quite Mondrian yet but heading in that direction, It seemed that abstraction beckoned.  But it was a one off.  He feels now it was a response to a particular time and place - and he has never had cause or opportunity to repeat it.  He is  no enemy of abstract art, being an admirer of Charlie Tyrrell's work, but he paints in response to what he sees around him.  If he was confined to a mundane urban locale then he could perhaps escape into abstraction but in his current situation he is happy to chronicle friends, family, and especially the seasons' differences in the countryside around him.

As I was leaving Bourke's cottage I noticed an invitation from Aras an Uachtaran on the mantle-piece.  So much for my thesis of him being an outsider I thought.  This ultimate indicator of official acceptance was, however, deceptive.  Bourke and Jay have been friendly with President Higgins and his wife for many years and their friendship continues, notwithstanding Michael D's change in circumstances.