IT is ironic that at a time when it appears few Irish writers can do wrong, Paul Smith, one of the last of the banned generation of artists who left Ireland to live and work abroad, where his work was highly praised, should die in relative obscurity. His death last week in Dublin, which he returned to in 1972, was marked only by his admirers, many of whom made up the small attendance at his funeral. Yet his powerful second novel, The Country woman, published in 1962, is surely a modern Irish classic.
Harrowing and explicit in its brutality, the novel, set in post Treaty Ireland, and based on his Dublin childhood, is extraordinary for its linguistic assurance, emotional control and, above all, for Smith's ability to move the reader while avoiding sentiment. Molly Baines, the countrywoman of the title, is a Juno figure raising a large family alone in two rooms, whose happiness is destroyed when her brutal husband returns from the first World War. In the character of Pat Baines, Smith has created one of the most menacing figures in literature.
Throughout the novel Molly is seen as an innocent, and her Wicklow background makes her a foreigner in Dublin. Smith's evocation of Dublin slum life provides an extraordinarily vivid slice of social history, and the family story is told against a backdrop of familiar themes poverty, hungry children born of loveless and forced sex by drunkard husbands, unemployment, emigration, and women suffering in silence because the Church has told them to. Smith's anti clerical stance, handled with cool detachment, angered the establishment, as did the raw sexuality. Not surprisingly, his novels were banned in Ireland until 1975.
Born in 1920 and raised in two rooms on the banks of the Grand Canal, Smith is believed to have left school at the age of eight. Young Tucker, the narrator of Annie (1972), describes the resourcefulness of young Dublin children scrabbling for cinders and mastering the art of petty theft in order to stay alive. Smith's first job was driving a donkey cart, followed by menial work in factories and on boats; eventually he ended up as a costume designer in Dublin. Hunger and being barefoot were accepted by him as facts of life, and he never complained about the toughness of his early years. Instead, he always recalled his childhood as a happy one thanks to his remarkable mother, the real life Molly Baines.
By the late 1960s Smith's wandering life, which had found some focus in the arts world, produced his first novel, Esther's Altar (1969), set during Easter Week 1916. Obvious comparisons with O'Casey's world of Dublin slums were made, and to some extent Smith's dialogue echoes the earlier writer's tone of lyric desperation. This continued in The Country woman, but that novel quickly shakes itself free of any influence; it is Smith's true voice. Throughout the 1970s, after the publication of Annie, he began to speak about a work in progress which was to acquire a near mythic status and has yet to be published. There were other books, but he was essentially a Dublin writer, a committed urban realist. In 1987 Picador reissued - The Countrywoman and Annie. Paul Smith, an outsider and an aesthete, lived quietly in Dublin. In 1991 he made a forceful and provocative contribution at the annual Kate O'Brien Weekend in Limerick, when he spoke of his old friend's poverty and loneliness. Smith was ever the outsider, and his honesty remained his defining quality both as a writer and as an individual.
