Sean O'Casey: A Life
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But the heartening effect of such publication must have palled, later in the same year, when Nicholas Beaver died and was placed in a coffin, to be subjected to his brothers-in-law’s scrutiny. Mick said you could see from “the marks around his head where … the skull had been lifted, and the brain removed: ‘Practising on him they were’.” So died a man who, in the words of his former C.O., Captain Campbell of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, had “always borne a good character”.
Bella had to move, but where? The list of his sister’s possessions which Sean brought back early one morning in November 1907 to his mother’s home in Abercorn Road was wonderfully precise: as if the wool of false poverty had suddenly been pulled from his eyes on confronting the real thing. He felt a quite desperate fear that he might be seen herding these possessions by a Gaelic League friend or Republican brother. The inevitable scavengers — omnipresent witnesses to Irish misery — gathered:
A group of them were even now standing to stare at the unhappy little heap of scrap in the kennel, then over at Sean leaning against the railings of the rotting houses; for this sort of thing was to them a song … Someone in trouble, someone in sorrow, a fight between neighbours, a coffin carried from a house, were things that coloured their lives and shook down fiery blossoms where they walked.
For the time being Bella and her family created a hellish state in Abercorn Road that fitted O’Casey’s worst nightmare: nine of them were squashed into the two small bedrooms. Their living conditions were now nearly like those prevailing in the true slum Georgian tenements with their hosts of ragged poor, sometimes as many as a hundred to one house. Even so, O’Casey himself, as he makes clear, never went hungry; the GNR had become absolutely crucial both to his survival and his self-respect. He says bluntly that if he gave his sister sixpence a week, it meant doing without a book, or part of a book. It was his ambition to write, his middle-class aspiration not his very life, that Bella’s decline threatened:
It wasn’t a pleasant job for him to be eating a dinner with a little army of hungry eyes watching him, so, working near or far, he took his dinner with him. Taking his breakfast wasn’t so bad, for they were all still asleep, though it wasn’t easy always to arrange table and chair so that the legs didn’t pinch their prostrate bodies; and the smell of the room from the breaths of the sleeping bodies made the air of the room thick and sluggish, even though he kept the window open, especially to him, in from a first quarter’s work in the fresh and frosty air. At times, a surge of hatred swept through him against those scarecrow figures asleep at his feet, for they were in his way, and hampered all he strove to do, and a venomous dislike of Ella [Bella] charged his heart …[68]
*
In the meantime Dublin had become drama-mad. While O’Casey’s energies were being asserted in the humbler areas of national revival, the high flyers, Yeats and Maud Gonne, had resigned from the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Maud Gonne had formed the Inghínídhe na hÉireann, the Daughters of Erin revolutionary society, whose first success, she claimed, was virtually to stop Dubliners from enlisting in the British Army. She had joined forces early in 1901 with W. G. Fay’s National Dramatic Company, an enterprising group run by the brothers Willie and Frank Fay, who were as deeply committed to an Irish dramatic revival as Maud Gonne was to Republicanism. “We thought it was time,” wrote Frank Fay, “to make the Irish accent and idiom in the speaking of English a vehicle for expression of Irish character on the stage and not for the sole purpose of providing laughter.” After several years of indifferent success, during which the new movement achieved renown with productions such as that of Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in which Maud Gonne played the lead, In the Shadow of the Glen proclaimed the arrival of the astonishing talent of J. M. Synge.
A permanent home was found in the building where nine years before O’Casey had trod the boards as Father Dolan: the Mechanics’ Hall was rebuilt and transformed into the Abbey Theatre at an estimated cost of £13,000, under the supervision of Annie M. Horniman. This English heiress to a tea fortune did more than anyone else to make sure the theatre was built. She later made Manchester a centre of serious theatre, and inspired Lilian Baylis to turn the Royal Victoria Coffee Music Hall in London into the Old Vic Theatre. Although Miss Horniman had been Yeats’s close associate for five years, she soon fell out with the nationalist aspirations of the Fays’ company: later she wrote that “love of wicked politics, which teach you to hate each other so intensely, has spoiled my efforts at the Abbey Theatre”. It was perhaps as well she was out of the way by the time O’Casey came along.
The Abbey Theatre opened its first season on 27 December 1904, a Tuesday, with Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand; Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News was the curtain-raiser. Yeats made a speech on the opening night. Two years later, in 1906, the theatre rejected Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, provoking its author to declare to a reporter, “Here’s a play by an Irishman on Ireland as original as anything could be, as sympathetic with the genius of the people and in every way racy of the soil. Why don’t the National Theatre people give it?” [69] One reason, Shaw said, was that certain speeches in it “would so enrage all Nationalist auditors that they’d rise as one man and burn the house down”.
There was no truth in this; the Abbey rejected John Bull’s Other Island on the grounds of casting: no actor in the company was considered good enough to play Broadbent. Also Yeats did not much like the play, although he later changed his mind. Otherwise, apart from a flock of internal troubles, all predictable, the Abbey’s modest reputation continued to increase until 1907, the crucial year in its history. In January of that year the curtain rose on Flaherty’s public house, on a dark autumn evening on a wild coast of Mayo, with Pegeen Mike mulling over her shopping list. In J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World the Abbey management had at last found a play that not only provoked riots but was itself a symptom of the rising national temperature. Trouble was anticipated from some quarters over the daring inclusion in the text of such words as “God” and “bloody” — hardly an innovation as far as Irish speech was concerned — but no one considered the devastating effect the use of a five-letter word, the feminine of “shirt”, denoting a long-obsolete garment lying close to a woman’s skin, would have.
“AUDIENCE BROKE UP IN DISORDER AT THE WORD SHIFT,” Lady Gregory informed Yeats, away in Scotland, by telegram. The row over this word, which has seemed extraordinarily infantile to later generations, was nevertheless what sparked off the Playboy riots. There were deeper causes, however, as was claimed by both sides in the dispute: there was the religious objection to playwriting itself, and the position that “art for art’s sake” was against the national interest. Many people, not all of them stupid, genuinely believed that Synge’s play constituted a slander on the fair name of Ireland. O’Casey observed the effects of the Playboy in his local branch of the Gaelic League, where everyone was tense and aflame with indignation. Ayamonn O’Farrel was the worst: “Some blasted little theatre or other has put on a play by a fellow named Singe or Sinje or something … a woeful, wanton play; bittherin’, bittherin’, th’n, th’n th’ bittherest thing th’ bittherest enemy of Ireland could say agin’ her!”[70]
Even more upsetting than a garment’s proximity to woman’s naked flesh was the Shaughraun element in the Playboy. The challenging irreverence of Boucicault’s prototypical comic Irish hero, shaped into Christy Mahon by the hand of a literary genius, threatened the established order. What hurt in the play — and still does — was its truthfulness to life. Maxim Gorky later wrote, “In it the comical side passes quite naturally into the terrible, while the terrible becomes comical just as easily.”[71] For J. M. Synge, a truly wise artist, did not inject his own point of view; he just exhibited the people. “They are half gods and half beasts, and are possessed of the childish desire to find a ‘hero’ among themselves.”
Thanks only to the tenacity of the directors of the Abbey, the Playboy continued to be performed, the rea
ctionary audiences kept in order by rows of policemen standing in the aisles. Railway worker O’Casey was not yet part of this Dublin, where, as Mary Colum wrote, “Between Abbey Street and College Green, a five minutes walk, one could meet everyone of importance in the life of the city at a certain time in the afternoon.”[72] But the Dublin literary tradition of supplying great playwrights to the English-speaking stage had again been demonstrated.
Although an outsider on the Dublin literary scene, O’Casey had not abandoned, even in the reduced family circumstances after Beaver’s death, his search for a meaning to his life; nor did he lose that margin of energy which he had begun to commit to the Irish revival. Like many of his countrymen, even the dullest and most frustrated of tenement dwellers, he had a passion for freedom. One of the first restraints he threw off, in the year following the Playboy riots and the death of his brother-in-law, was that of Anglicanism. How this came about is not clear, for he later recorded very little about his early religious feelings, but it may have had something to do with the reaction of Edward Griffin, to whom he sent his satirical article, “Sound the Loud Trumpet”. Being deeply fond of Griffin, he expected encouragement, but the response from the rector was a profound silence. Some weeks later O’Casey ventured to ask him what he had thought of the piece. Griffin placed a hand gently on his shoulder: “The man who wrote that article, John, is a traitor and ought to be in jail.”[73]
According to George Rocliffe, the parishioner of St Barnabas’ who had been his contemporary at school, O’Casey left St Barnabas’ in 1908 because the new church organ had been built in England. However, he stayed in touch with Griffin, and never ceased to be favourably disposed towards him. A further reason for lapsing from Protestantism was the strain, now intolerable, imposed on his belief in a just and fair God by the suffering in his own family.
After living for several months in Abercorn Road, Bella moved with her five children into new lodgings, a small cottage round the corner in Brady’s Lane, where George Middleton had been O’Casey’s champion in his school days against the local bully boys. Having defaulted on the rent, Bella was evicted from this place, humiliation which O’Casey, again with Middleton, helped her overcome by moving her furniture into a vacant one-room cottage in near-by Church Place; there she lived rent-free for six months until she was able to move to a larger place next door. By now O’Casey’s attitude to his sister was rather grudging: he saw little of the family, he says, and never enough to give him a worrying thought. But he did complain that she had lifted a jug from his dresser, and that some of his mother’s blankets were gone from the sofa where she dossed down.
Another irritating aspect of Bella’s family which helped to keep O’Casey away from church was their begging: he says that his sister used to solicit a few pence from him after the morning service in order to feed her children, and that he would stay behind in church to avoid meeting them.[74] If O’Casey had as yet produced none of the work of an artist, he was certainly displaying the egotism of one, at least the struggle, as Shaw defined it, “between the artist man and the mother woman”.[75] His treatment of his sister’s family was at odds with the selfless charity of actions he later performed — and records himself as performing — towards other people’s poor children. But by then he had an audience and saw himself as working in the cause of his fellow men.
Other considerations were in 1908 turning him away from the Established Church. Although the Gaelic League was led by Douglas Hyde, the Trinity College-educated son of a Protestant rector, the Catholic outlook had soon come to dominate the organisation, in turn influencing O’Casey. He had seen attempts to have the Irish language introduced into Anglican services, both in his own parish and at St Patrick’s Cathedral, if not fail outright, be only tepidly embraced. Now a new Catholic and nationalist friend, Frank Cahill, a teacher in the Christian Brothers’ School at St Laurence O’Toole’s, the church whose dirty, squat spire O’Casey could see from the window of his room, invited him to join the Laurence O’Toole Club of which he, Cahill, was a founder.
Cahill, two years younger than O’Casey, became a great influence on him. O’Casey never mentions him in the autobiography — they later fell out — even though Cahill was the model for the central figure in O’Casey’s first play. A great story-teller and mimic, the younger man had a habit of visiting the Four Courts of Dublin’s judicial system to find material for his ready wit and observation. According to Margulies:
… on weekends, he and O’Casey would stroll together along the Royal Canal, bringing their lunches with them, while Cahill spun stories of what he had seen. These walks lasted the better part of the day. Often, after they had returned, the two would stand outside Cahill’s house and talk until two or three in the morning. If Cahill was a remarkable yarn-spinner, O’Casey was a patient listener, and … was blessed with an unusually retentive memory besides. He took no notes of their many conversations, but he paid close attention to what was said, interrupting occasionally to ejaculate, “Ah, there’s a good one, Frank!”[76]
O’Casey, too, was developing his gift for mimicry and his insatiable curiosity about his fellow beings. He was still with the GNR, and we have the clearest picture of his activities at this time late in 1908, when he was working at the Dynamo Room in Sutton, from which the trams were driven up to Howth Summit and pulled down again. From the roof, where he was adding parapet coping to the gables and doing repairs,[77] he saw fields of corn and ploughs in action for the first time.[78] He remembered one winter in Howth,
when all telegraph-poles were down with a weight of snow, & coming down, in the tram, [they] had to dig a way along through the snow-drifts. At the Station, making for the train, every second wave came tumbling over the wall, sending itself right over train & station buildings. A dash for the train as soon as a wave went over, or we would have been swallowed up be the salt sea.[79]
Later, after he had left the GNR, he listed his grievances against it in lively style in a series of articles for the Irish Worker, inveighing against the “Pomps and Charities” of the foreman, Reid, as well as another overseer, Hayden, at the Dublin running shed. Reid, he alleged, was ever anxious for the comfort of his gang, “selling them off bad clothes — a pair of blankets like tissue paper …”, while Hayden, “a genteel cultured ‘boy’, had a habit of receiving money from the cleaners to get his own selection”. He also cast withering scorn upon one Turkington, the superintendent of goods, who was trying to found a temperance union among the men; it reminded O’Casey of Conn the Shaughraun: “Sure Conn’s father was a real good man when he was sober.” But he never was sober …
To judge by the cutting sharpness of the detail, O’Casey also participated in chaotically wasteful schemes like the innovation of a special “motor service” to Howth, the carriages to be housed in a huge, incompetently designed shed, the brainchild of “Birmingham and Yorkshire and London importations”.[80] He tried later to incorporate in his autobiography a mocking account of this battery- or dynamo-driven “new-fangled” train on its first experimental run, but abandoned it after a few pages.[81]
There was also the construction of cattle “banks”, to simplify the dispatch of cattle by rail, a “long-drawn-out comedy”. This task was confided to “a so-called carpenter, general pimp and spy, and particular confidential servant named Higgins. This creature — huge of stomach, huge of limb and huge of head, in which was said to be a microscopical brain, of which I have my doubts — was a genius for doing everything wrong.” A day came when the bank was smooth and level beneath the complacent gaze of “the doughty Milling”, an engineer at the Dublin end, and his henchman. “They wouldn’t let a crow alight on the bank till it was ‘dry and settled’.” But a few months after, the pitching had forced its way through the sand and clay, and “very soon that bank was as bad as a rocky and flinty ravine in the heart of the Rocky Mountains”. The savage tone audible here is as much that of Jonathan Swift as of the authentic O’Casey, who had yet to emerge.
He speaks first, and very fluently and eloquently in Irish, then launches out into a violent Republican oration in English, stark and forceful, biblical in diction with gorgeous tints of rhetoric and bursts of anti-English Nationalism of the most uncompromising style … Yes, he reminds them, when roused by his sharp words they murmur interruptions taunting him with the poverty and degradation of the Dublin workers, there is all that in life. Half to himself he speaks, lowering his voice to an intense whisper, but there is something else: joy.
Walter Carpenter, a leading socialist propagandist, rises and would argue with O’Casey. “O’Casey rises in a fury and growls in Irish like a thunderstorm that he wishes no Englishman to teach him.” He strides through the door “with flames in his eye and his fists clenched”, as Carpenter protests, “‘Tell him for Gawd’s sike that I am not an Englishman but a Scotchman and that I ’ad the honour to drop a tear in the grive of Charles Stuart Parnell.’”
His behaviour was not always aggressive: Paddy McDonnell, another Gaelic enthusiast of the period, recalled how determined and tenacious O’Casey was, especially strong and able as an organiser, but also a lover of argument. He liked to draw people out by playing devil’s advocate: if a student expressed interest in learning Irish he would test his seriousness by declaring, “It’s a damn language — dead as a dodo.” He had a hearty laugh, despite often looking ill, and was a fine impromptu speaker. He loved to appear before Protestant debating societies to defend the capacity of the Irish to rule themselves, and knew how to draw laughter from a hostile audience. If a book he had not read came up for discussion he would go off and read it, coming back later to give his opinion. Stephen Synott, who worked in Webb’s Bookstore, on the South Quay, remembered the tall, shabbily dressed O’Casey, in hobnailed boots and a muffler and wearing spectacles, calling twice a week to browse through the stock and buy cheap or second-hand books. Synott grew to know his tastes and set aside favourites, “Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Ibsen, or a Chambers Dictionary or occasional English grammar”.[83]