Smith, Paul

by Lawrence William White

Smith, Paul (1920–97), writer, was born 4 October 1920 at 4 Masterson Lane (off Charlemont St.), Dublin, one of ten children of Edward Smith, wheelwright, and Kate Smith (née O'Brien), originally of Co. Wicklow. His father, who had served in the British army during the first world war, was violent, alcoholic, and improvident. Living in two rooms near the Grand Canal in desperate poverty, the family subsisted through the patient resourcefulness of Smith's mother, who died when he was 12. His formal education was rudimentary. After age eight, when he found work as a delivery boy, he attended school intermittently until age 13 while working at a variety of casual jobs. Thereafter he was a machinist in a garment factory. Hired for walk-on parts by Hilton Edwards (qv) and Micheál MacLiammóir (qv) of Dublin's Gate Theatre (c.1936), he entered a different orbit; he toured with Gate fit-up companies and worked on costume design and production, often in collaboration with MacLiammóir. He met Orson Welles at the Gate in 1951, and, by his own assertion, worked as costume designer (though uncredited) on several of Welles's film projects, including Othello (1952), Chimes at midnight (1965), and an aborted Faust. After living in Paris, he taught English at Uppsala University, Sweden (mid 1950s), where he began to write, motivated partly by a desire to subvert academic pretensions about literary craft, partly out of rage against Irish nationalist platitudes. The resultant novel, Esther's altar (1959) – a brutally explicit depiction of Dublin slum life set during the 1916 Easter rising – was meant as an angry assertion of the irrelevance of the rising for Dublin's poor. Eliciting stern moral and political condemnation in Ireland – like his subsequent early novels it was banned until 1975 – the book was enthusiastically received in the USA, where it appeared amid the celebrity of another writer of the Dublin working class, Brendan Behan (qv).

During the 1960s Smith lived in the USA, Canada, and Australia, continuing to write and to generate income in a plethora of trades: radio actor, book reviewer, theatre correspondent, barman. In his second novel, The countrywoman (1962), he achieved perhaps the most powerful novel ever written of the Dublin slums, well deserving of its description by many critics as a near-masterpiece. Basing his long-suffering protagonist, Molly Baines, on his own mother, he exhibits a mastery of authorial control, both emotionally moving and entirely unsentimental. While the obvious comparisons to Sean O'Casey (qv) are merited, Smith's treatment of slum life is the more harrowing: the language more raw, the humour more ribald, the vision more grimly searing. Two more novels quickly followed: The stubborn season (1962), about an innocent Irish girl adrift in the seamy underworld of contemporary London; and ‘Stravaganza! (1963), a burlesque of Dublin cultural bohemia. Despite continuing critical acclaim, Smith struggled financially. Declared bankrupt in a law suit regarding repayment of a loan he allegedly obtained while receiving psychiatric treatment in Melbourne (1967), he moved to London, where he was assisted financially through the largesse of Victor Bonham-Carter, secretary of the Royal Literary Fund. Annie (USA, 1972; UK title Summer sang in me, 1975), an elaboration of an earlier short story, deals with a Dublin slum childhood in a more lyrical vein than his earlier treatments. Though he moved back to Dublin in 1972, purchasing a house on Convent Rd, Blackrock, he often worked abroad, especially in America, where he wrote short-story adaptations for television and several unpublished plays, some produced by the Actors' Theatre, Los Angeles. He reworked Esther's altar for BBC television (1965) and as a stage play, ‘The totem pole’, performed in Los Angeles (1978); a revised version of the novel was published as Come trailing blood (1977). A member of Aosdána, Smith received the American Irish Foundation literary award (1978).

While details of autobiography supplied by Smith to publishers and interviewers must be evaluated with caution, when speaking or writing of the inner truth of his experience he was fearlessly honest. His work is remarkably uneven, often within a single book, segments of which may be ill-conceived, unconvincing, or bombastic. Always a compelling writer, he composed numerous good passages and one great book. Shunning literary limelight, he lived his final years quietly at his Blackrock home. He was unmarried. He died in Dublin on 11 January 1997. A stone tablet to his memory stands by the Grand Canal near Charlemont St. bridge.