Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  O’Casey was still teaching himself Irish and was soon to embrace the emblem of the Gaelic League, An Claidheamh Soluis, or the Sword of Light, first in half-farcical circumstances over a bookshop in Tyler Street, later at a branch of the League he attended regularly for some years before becoming himself an official in the organisation. It was paradoxical that he, with his weak eyes, became increasingly an organiser, and inevitably figured sooner or later as secretary to any organisation he joined. He was also developing a taste for the sport of hurling, although here too, poor eyesight was unlikely to help him.

  So where should he turn? He was at the crossing of many paths: each, in Gaelic imagery, with its own sword to grasp. Which one should he follow? “The Sword of Light! An Claidheamh Soluis, the Christian Faith; the sword of the spirit; the freedom of Ireland; the good of the common people; the flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life — which was it? Where would he find it?”[54]

  Over the next twenty years he was to follow each of these paths in turn, until he found that none led where he wanted to go. The pattern was the same: his involvement with a particular cause would reach a pitch of intensity before he began to see the flaws in it. By this means he would re-enact the expansion of the hopes of his early years and their dramatic foreshortening caused by his father’s death.

  Eventually he perceived that what he held in his hand was no longer a sword but a pen, a more subtle and provocative instrument, that could be turned many ways at once and at the same time, and could produce unexpected effects, not least laughter at the causes he had formerly embraced.

  3 — Fiery Blossoms

  O’Casey, aged twenty-three, was by now extremely well read, and could, had he so chosen, have found employment in a clerical job, or tried to qualify for something higher. Instead, shunning the advantages his reading and his contacts might have commanded, he adopted the more positive persona, for an intellectual, of a common labourer. On the suggestion of his old school friend George Middleton, a member of a Loyal Orange lodge, he started work for the Great Northern Railway of Ireland. Once again O’Casey owed employment to a privileged social position, and had himself taken no action to find it.

  How solidly did he work on the railways? His autobiography devotes fewer pages to his nine years on the railways than to his week’s work at Eason’s. His other rapidly expanding interests, among them now that of writing, suggest the work was casual, even seasonal. Probably he found, while working on the GNR, not the exploitation he depicted to make socialist propaganda much later in life, but the laziness and even comically incompetent corruption which he satirised in a series of articles for the Larkinite Irish Worker in 1912 and 1913, the years immediately after he left the railways.

  But it was only the persona of a working man he adopted — and that mainly in relation to his middle-class friends. He made little effort to communicate with other members of his railway gang, while he defied his loyalist superiors by making a show of studying Irish during meal breaks. With something of the reputation of a “scholar”, he would sometimes be entrusted with collecting the weekly wages from the cashier and distributing them to the gang. Mick, now a well-paid postal worker, was still the main support of the Casey household, and was, by all accounts, the more attentive of the two sons to their mother, helping her by cleaning and running errands. Had O’Casey left the GNR in 1904 or 1905 he could have borne witness to Shaw’s philosophy of the true artist by letting his mother “drudge for his living at seventy [Susan Casey was seventy in 1905], sooner than work at anything but his art”.[55] But he must have found the work experience valuable, and the hours were perhaps flexible enough to allow him to remain on the job, while the outdoor labouring improved his physical health.

  For some years at any rate O’Casey felt proud of his work, claiming that his body caught up to, and fell into alignment with, his developing mind.[56] His first job was as a bricklayer’s assistant; he worked six days a week, twelve hours a day, for a total of eighteen shillings a week. He would carry bricks in a hod, help erect scaffolding, dig earth or concrete with a pick. At another time he carried sleepers, “slippy, hot and pungent with the soak of creosote”. For this work he was paid on the basis of how many “quarters” — periods of three hours — he put in per day; he might work twelve days in a fourteen-day period, and for the next fourteen days might not necessarily work at all.

  The proof that he did not work full-time lay in the number of other activities in which he immersed himself between 1903 and 1911, when his allegiance next shifted significantly. Judging by the scant reference made to this period in the autobiography, and the way in which he transferred into it tragic events, like the death of his brother Tom, which happened much later, one can only assume that these years were, as Tolstoy observed of happy families, all alike, and had no history.

  When O’Casey laboured alongside navvies who were laying a monster drain he still knew his own identity as separate from theirs: “Not one of these brawny boys had ever heard of Griffith or of Yeats … What to them were the three Gaelic candles that light up every darkness: truth, nature, and knowledge? Three pints of porter, one after the other, would light up the world for them.”[57] He was, as his fellow workers observed, “odd”, and not much of a mixer; not that he was truculent or aggressive in his defiance of authority, but he seemed eccentric. They recalled that often he did not turn up for work. His superiors found him “a cranky devil”, one of them saying he was often to be seen leaning on his shovel, staring into space and day-dreaming, and that, as at school, he was often absent. Although he was cautioned frequently by his superiors, in particular on his laziness, they tolerated him, presumably because while being cussed he was not an actively disruptive force in the work gangs.

  He was also remembered for his refusal to join in the various little rackets that went on, such as paying the foreman a commission to obtain building materials for use at home; on the occasion of Edward VII’s Coronation in 1902, he refused a day’s pay given to workers for the holiday and boycotted St Barnabas’ church when he found it covered with flags.[58]

  *

  Tom Casey quickly started a family, ultimately having two boys and a girl, while Bella now had a family nearly as large as her mother’s. She lost a son, Nicholas, who died in 1904, aged two, of a stomach ailment, and Josie and Joseph (né Isaac) in the same year lost a daughter, Eileen, who was only a month old. But Tom’s position in the Post Office improved over the next few years — he became head sorter on the Belfast mail — and he remained part of the Casey family circle, leaving his wife at home and out of it. On Sundays they would gather for afternoon dinner, usually at the Beavers’. As Martin Margulies, the first chronicler of O’Casey’s early life, records:

  Tom and Mick would drift over several hours early, so that they could stroll through the country with Beaver while Beaver — a bird fancier who kept a large parrot at home — flew his pigeons. When O’Casey arrived later with his mother, he would settle himself in the best armchair, take a book from the shelf, and read placidly through the evening as the conversation swirled around him. Sometimes he would pause to sip at his cup of cocoa, which he prepared himself from a packet of chocolate which he carried in his pocket.[59]

  At other times O’Casey participated in prayer meetings, “volunteering long fervent prayers” which were dreaded because of their length. “We heard his voice ringing out loud and clear, in that drawling, lilting way he had of speaking …”, Edward Griffin’s daughter said later, and added, “He would have made a great preacher.” After Sunday services he would escort the rector’s two oldest daughters home to the Rectory in Charles Street, often accompanied by his sister’s children, whom he dropped off at Rutland Street. While walking he would playfully mock the essays the children were preparing for school.

  *

  O’Casey’s first direct contact with the Gaelic League was in 1905 or 1906, at the Mulachy branch which assembled over a boot shop in Talbot Street,
round the corner from where he had acted at the old Mechanics’ Theatre in Abbey Street. The meetings there were irregular and ill attended, and soon were abandoned: he and a fellow railway worker, Peadar O’Nuallain, watched the benches being taken away after the last meeting, and Peadar was in tears. Next they assembled more regularly in Drumcondra, in Carlingford Road, very near Richmond Road where Tom lived, and the Botanic Gardens. Their use of these premises did not last long either, although O’Casey, somewhat inconsistently with his supposed six-day week on the railway, would spend Saturday half-holidays coating the walls with paint; another member, Paddy Callan, used to drop by to see how he was getting on. The meeting place was unconventional, a ground-floor shop front with an unfinished room above it, the result of a neighbour’s complaint over lack of light. They were driven from Carlingford Road by another neighbour who claimed they were lowering the “caste” of the road.[60]

  The Drumcondra branch, called Lámhdearg (Red Hand), finally came to rest in more modest quarters, what O’Casey called a tumble-down shack in Seery’s or Boylan’s Lane, a squalid charnel house, at one time used as a place to deposit the dead, near North Strand. The air here was foul, but the learning of Irish gathered pace and soon O’Casey himself was an instructor, although conscious that he did not belong to the class that ran the League — “the Civil Servants, Customs Officers, Teachers, and others of the budding Irish Gentry”.[61] These would not attend such a poor branch — although some of them put their noses round the door once or twice a year, and O’Casey recalled visitors such as Seamus Deakin, a chemist, and Sinéad Ni Fhlannagáin, the future Mrs Eamon de Valera, who challenged the opinion that a woman’s place was in the kitchen.[62] Sinéad Ni Fhlannagáin, who was very pretty, once acted the part of the Fairy in Douglas Hyde’s The Fairy and the Tinker: when she asked George Moore about taking up a stage career he replied, “Height five feet four; hair, red; name, Flanagan; no, my dear.”[63]

  O’Casey arrived early before each meeting, in the bad weather ploughing through frost and snow, and then used to open up, sweep the floor, light the fire, and get the room ready: he admitted that he worked a lot harder at night time than during the day. There was a workers’ club next to the League premises, and here they ate supper and brewed tea. Sometimes, perhaps two evenings a week, they would hold an all-night ceilidh with dancing, and he also contributed articles and ideas to a “Manuscript Journal”.

  O’Casey, as was his wont, assumed the position of secretary, and it was at this time also that he began to take a serious interest in hurling. He flung himself into the sport with more gusto than finesse — he was said to have killed a sparrow in flight, mistaking it for the ball.[64] He would regale club members with humorous tales of a mythical brother named Adolphus O’Casey, a character based on Joseph: Adolphus, a social climber, scorned common girls, affected a posh accent, pronouncing his name “O’Caysay”. Adolphus opposed the activities of the Gaelic League. In reality, so too did Mick, who displayed the average Irish mentality, growling at O’Casey, “Irish, what good’s Irish in a British country?”

  Later, probably because the game was better organised there, O’Casey hurled in the Ard Chraobh, or Central Branch, with two Aran men, and with his former companion, Peadar O’Nuallain, who ticked him off for wearing a muffler instead of a collar.[65] Another team-mate, Ernest Blythe, who also suffered from poor eyesight, remembered being taken home to meet Susan Casey and being given tea, butter, bread and jam in O’Casey’s “ordinary working-class home”; he and O’Casey, with others, campaigned for church services in Irish, wrote letters soliciting money. One night O’Casey spoke to Blythe about the Fenians, at first in a roundabout way, then, having sounded him out, asked him directly if he would join the organisation known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, to the Teeling Circle of which O’Casey now belonged. “I don’t believe in assassination,” Blythe told him, to which O’Casey replied, “Nor do we, we’re organising for open warfare.”

  Blythe, who found O’Casey confident, without self-pity, a man who could take as well as administer a joke, was induced to join the much more sinister Brotherhood, although its activities were as yet extremely low-keyed and, according to Blythe, monotonous. But Mick Casey, when he heard of his younger brother’s participation in the organisation, was fiercely critical: “Join that crowd,” he told Sean, “and you’re finished. You’ve lost your freedom.” O’Casey all during this time favoured a separate republic for Ireland, while others espoused the moderate policies of Arthur Griffith, with his “dual monarchy” idea.

  *

  The Casey family received its next major blow in 1905, when Bella’s husband, Nicholas Beaver, fell seriously ill — “quietly going mad”, as O’Casey put it, with GPI, or general paralysis of the insane. Beaver, who by then had attained a good position as head of the GNR parcels office, was taken to the Richmond District Lunatic Asylum, off the North Circular Road, at the other end of which O’Casey himself was later to live. He describes how his brother-in-law was driven to “the house of strident shadows, to dress in the rough grey tweed of the loony pauper, to wear the red woollen handkerchief so tied that when one became restless, a keeper could seize it, pull, and choke all movement …” He took him in himself, he claims, noticing his fellow inmates:

  Dotted here and there in the grounds were the dismal brothers of disorders grey, their red mufflers making them look as if their tormented heads had been cut off, and pushed crookedly back on to their necks again.

  Bella, selling off her possessions all the while, had to move with her five children from Rutland Street, where they had lived in modest comfort, to a shabby tenement in Fitzgibbon Street, where they survived for a while on Beaver’s savings, although unable to disguise that they had crossed the significant line dividing those who could still cling to respectability from those who had become downright pathetic:

  She had married a man who had destroyed every struggling gift she had had when her heart was young and her careless mind was blooming. He had given her, with God’s help, a child for every year, or less, that they had been together. Five living, and one, born unsound, had gone the way of the young and good, after being kept alive for three years … Ah! faded into the forgotten past were the recitation of bits from Racine’s Andromaque and Iphigénie, or from Scott’s Lady of the Lake, the confident playing of waltz, schottische, polka, and gavotte on a piano in a friend’s house … Now she went about everything like a near-drowned fly in a jar full of water.[66]

  Even Susan Casey could not startle her daughter into resistance to this decline.

  Here at last, through his sister, was O’Casey’s first direct and painful experience of poverty, genuine cause for the “poor mouth” he puts on when describing his early life. It was no longer, however, early life; O’Casey was now twenty-five: his sensitivity to Bella’s tragedy shows how much of the quality and richness of life he had perceived by that time, how deeply and broadly he still, with regard to his own future, registered potentiality. But he still thought of it as early life because he still lived exactly as he had when a child, cared for entirely by his mother, now a toothless old lady of seventy, over whose five feet he towered but to whose cantankerous virtues he remained entirely obedient. Susan Casey had slaved for twenty-five years to keep him well fed and comfortable, but it was his sister who, from an early age, had nourished him intellectually, and in the devoted care Bella had shown him before she married, and in the early years of her marriage when Beaver had been absent, she had been an extension of his mother. The degree to which his feelings had been protected and cocooned by his family and his religion showed in one of the first poems he wrote. “The Soul of Man”, dated November 1905, ends with the lines:

  When Life’s bright dawn the world was gilding,

  Man’s infant mind went Babel building.

  But want of knowledge man defeated,

  And left the work but half-completed:

  For broadening powers of mind alone

  C
an climb upon God’s highest throne.

  And man, unshaken, still shall seek —

  Ignoring all the gods’ derision —

  To make eternal silence speak

  To look behind life’s hidden vision,

  Till Thought may weigh and sift and scatter,

  And mould again the life of matter.[67]

  The by now absurd genteel pretensions of the Casey family were seen again when Bella’s eldest daughter, Susan, who had, like Bella, been sent to the fee-paying Central Model Schools, was not allowed to work at anything which might demean her position as a lady. Bella herself was reduced to scrubbing floors three or four times a week at a shilling a time.

  O’Casey had been putting down his political ideas in school exercise books since he was about twenty: one of these early scribblings, in the form of a “Petition”, approved Protestant opposition to the idea of Home Rule, claiming it would reduce Ireland to “a state of chaos equal to that which troubled Nature before the World was Born”. In May 1907, in the midst of the family trials, O’Casey had his first article published, in the Peasant and Irish Ireland; this was “a satiric fantasy throwing a mockery of glory” over the chief secretary for Ireland, Augustus Birrell’s, policy speech on Irish education. O’Casey savagely denounced Birrell’s views as alien to the interests of the new spirit in Ireland: “After all, what is Irish Education to a fresh battalion, a new gunboat, or the comfort of the police force? To gain a huge lump of the world as Empire would evoke the admiration of the gods; what doth Séaghan Buidhe [John Bull: literally ‘Yellow John’] profit if Ireland should save her national soul?” Appropriately entitled “Sound the Loud Trumpet”, the article appeared under an early pseudonym, An Gall Fada, the “Tall Foreigner” or Protestant. O’Casey read out the piece at Gaelic League meetings, convincing himself, because it had convinced others, that he could write.