Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  Ill-health was a recurrent problem: this time it was tubercular swellings in his neck. He had suffered these when younger, and his mother, on a neighbour’s advice, had painted them with iodine three times a day.[144] O’Casey recalled that Jim Larkin, noticing the lumps, sent him to a clinic where he was rudely handled but advised to have surgery. Eventually he was allotted a Union bed in the Laurence O’Toole ward of St Vincent de Paul Hospital, although not until 15 August 1915, after Larkin’s departure from Dublin.

  By then O’Casey was something of an outsider to the ITGWU, although he still frequented Liberty Hall. The impulsive, flamboyant leadership of Larkin had been succeeded by the more accommodating manner of James Connolly, who had started out on the Marxist left, but was now stepping into what O’Casey called “the broad and crowded highway of Irish Nationalism”.[145] (“We all regarded Jim Connolly as Red,” Frank Daly reported. “But after he met Pearse no one ever heard a word of Communism out of him again.”[146]) O’Casey and his fellow malcontents were now impelled to find their platform outside the Hall: ranging themselves on the steps outside, they harangued those who entered and left, earning themselves the derisive title of “the Steps Committee”.[147]

  O’Casey’s operation was performed successfully by an almost deaf surgeon called Mr Tobin, who had lost his only son in Flanders and who identified with the numbers of British Army wounded shipped from France that he had to treat. In his free moments he would ask soldiers, “Where did you get your blighty, son?” and when he heard the name of the place, murmur, “Ah! my son spent his last moment a long way off: but yours was near enough, son; near enough.”[148] He seemed to think that when he was close to these men he was closer to his son.

  O’Casey’s growing insight into a mother’s emotions declares itself when he writes of Tobin attempting to conjure up his son by joining in the singing of war songs: “You wouldn’t get a mother doing it … She’d feel it too deep … Neither in noise of song nor murmur of story would she bring back the sad, sunny dust of his shape again, but in the deep and bitter loneliness of remembrance.” Although nursing a painful and hacked-about neck, he was forming a deeper emotional identification with the mother losing her son, which one day he would forcefully express through Bessie Burgess:

  There’s a storm of anger tossin’ in me heart, thinkin’ of all th’ poor Tommies … dhrenched in water an’ soaked in blood, gropin’ their way to a shattherin’ death, in a shower o’ shells! Young men with th’ sunny lust o’ life beamin’ in them, layin’ down their white bodies, shredded into torn an’ bloody pieces, on th’ altar that God Himself has built for th’ sacrifice of heroes![149]

  O’Casey set the first act of The Plough and the Stars, which he did not write until 1924-25, in November 1915, just a few months after he left hospital and was recuperating at home. That date was highly significant: not only was the first performance of The Plough, in February 1926, followed shortly after by his actual exile from Ireland later that year, but the earlier moment of November 1915, when the play begins its account of the Easter Rising of 1916, signalled O’Casey’s own inward exile from events and the intellectual ferment around him. Through a mixture of his own physical frailty and his mother’s intense protectiveness, his pain and frustration was deepening into the negative capability of a writer.

  During this period, too, he was notably silent in the letter columns of the press. He had abandoned the “romantic cult of Nationalism”,[150] as he said sixty years later, “and saw the real Ireland when I read the cheap edition of Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island; hating only poverty, hunger and disease”. The involvement with the Citizen Army had been his last sustained attempt to act purely within the dictates of his ideals, and even here he had been bitterly frustrated: “Labour”, he commented, “had laid its precious gift of independence on the Altar of Irish Nationalism.”

  So he withdrew into the shadows, growing a beard to cover the scars of the operation, and becoming more and more of an autodidact. He now saw the rising strength of the Irish Volunteers with the eyes of a cynic, and particularly he viewed its romantic thirst for blood in the cause of Irish independence as irrelevant to the struggle of the working class. Although he was never directly to dramatise the events of 1913 with success — his comic gift, when it came to writing a play with a message, always remained subservient to abstract ideas and propaganda — it was to this defeated hope of the workers coming to power that he remained loyal. But in the shadows where he lay, and was to remain for years — subsisting, it is said, on only the barest of necessities — he could not but respond emotionally to the way ordinary Dublin people were affected by the events of the next few months. There was an added dimension to his experience of those events: although he was no longer a member of the Republican leadership, he had known most of the leaders well. So he participated and yet did not participate; part of him remained an insider, in his own imagination close to former friends like Pearse, Clarke and even Bulmer Hobson. Another part of him remained the commentator and outsider: the mocking chorus to the national catastrophe about to unfold.

  *

  There were, in the Volunteers, two active groups with opposing intentions: one was headed by MacNeill, the Volunteers’ chief of staff, and Hobson, who now repudiated IRB strategy and envisaged a cautious defensive policy until the end of the war; the other was led by Arthur Griffith, Tom Clarke, who now took an anti-Hobson line, and Padraic Pearse, who openly advocated bloodshed — “The old earth of the battlefields is thirsty for the wine of our blood.”

  The first of these factions was still, on paper, in charge of the Volunteers, but the second, bent on securing martyrdom — or more than martyrdom, crucifixion — wrested control away from the moderates. James Connolly, commandant of the 300-strong Citizen Army, was also a prime mover in the idea of an insurrection: Pearse had managed to win him over to a plan for concerted action of the two forces. Pearse and his staff planned their rebellion to take place on Easter Day 1916, but without telling MacNeill. The authorities could see Irish Volunteers and Citizen Army units parading openly, but took the chances of a rising lightly, failing to understand the idea of deliberate self-sacrifice which, together with hope of aid from Germany, now motivated Pearse and his fellow conspirators.

  On the Tuesday before Easter, a rumour of the mooted rebellion reached Hobson, who at once went to MacNeill; in the early hours of Good Friday morning he and MacNeill visited Pearse, who admitted the rumour was true. In the ensuing confusion MacNeill countermanded the order for “manœuvres” on Sunday, which had been Pearse’s signal for the Rising to begin. A further blow to Pearse’s plan was the scuttling of a German ship, the Aud, which had arrived off the coast of Kerry with a cargo of arms: no one was there to meet her. Roger Casement, the Republican who had been negotiating with the German High Command, landed on the west coast off the submarine which had escorted the Aud, and fell into the hands of the authorities. Unlike the others, he was widely regarded as a German spy. Father Breen, O’Casey’s friend in the St Laurence O’Toole church, persisted in this view until “the British rope was around the indomitable man’s neck”.

  Indeed, as O’Casey said, there was in the whole affair “too much of an Irish heaven … and too little of the Irish earth”,[151] or, as a character remarks in the novel The Red and the Green, by the Dublin-born Iris Murdoch, “Why could the Irish get nothing right? Such dunces deserved their slavery.”[152] O’Casey relished the farcical side to the claims of the Republicans, as when, years earlier, Seamus Deakin, who like himself did not take part in the Rising, had outlined the means by which the British Empire could be brought to dust:

  In a room, back of the shop, he showed me pictures and diagrams of Airplane stations & Zeppelin sheds in the Rhineland facing Britain. They were in, if I remember right, Stead’s Review of Reviews. He, Deakin, was quivering with excitement. The airplane was going to win the freedom of all little subject nations, & make them secure forever — including our own homeland, of
course. “An aeroplane” says he “will cost only £50, & so, from a military point of view, every little nation will be as mighty as the biggest.” Then he paused for breath. “England,” says he, when he got it again, “is going to go up in dust.” When I demurred, saying I dunno about that, & that, like everything else, aeroplanes were bound to go up in price, he said “Nonsense; you’ll see, Sean.” By now, I’ve seen pretty clearly, though all the way home I couldn’t help thinking how easy it was for a man to believe what he wished to believe.[153]

  The reality was not so farcical; when the Rising did take place, on the Monday instead of Easter Sunday, far fewer supported it than the leaders had hoped. It was a force of less than 2,000, including one hundred women, which seized virtually the whole of the centre of Dublin and held out for nearly a week until the British were reinforced. But the appeal of the Volunteers to the country as a whole fell flat, for, as Captain White, now commandant of the Derry Volunteers, said, “The Irish National Volunteer Movement had no definite ideals and no definite objective. I was a blind leader of the blind.”[154]

  Public opinion as a whole was hostile to the Republicans: most of middle-class Dublin favoured the status quo, and Bulmer Hobson, a leader whose opinions were typical of the “silent majority”, was kidnapped by Republicans just before the Rising so that he should have no influence over events. Those who fought did so with extraordinary bravery and tenacity, although fewer than one in twenty died in the fighting. Two O’Toole friends of O’Casey, Jimmy Shiels and Johnny McDonnell, were combatants, although Johnny’s brother, Paddy, just twenty-one years of age and O’Casey’s close friend, stayed at home, on the principle that two sons of one family should not both be put at risk. Another O’Tooler, Mick Smith, was holed up in Jacobs’ Biscuit Factory: he told O’Casey that he could see through the window of a flat opposite, the tiny coffin of a child which stayed there unburied because the family dared not venture out. Later, in The Plough and the Stars, O’Casey developed this emotive detail in a subplot.

  O’Casey watched the Citizen Army parade in front of Liberty Hall before taking up its rebel positions; he himself, he said, was “a little loose on his legs, and nursing a septic neck-wound”.[155] He resented Connolly’s not raising over Liberty Hall the Citizen Army flag of the Plough and the Stars, which he had so lovingly sponsored, but a plain green Republican ensign instead. He had advocated the underground guerrilla tactics of the Boers, not the formal insurrectionary methods the Republicans actually used. Take off your uniforms, he had said, and keep them for the wedding. But no one heeded his advice, and the Volunteer refused his article on the subject.

  On Thursday of Easter Week O’Casey, as a former nationalist activist, was arrested, and herded with others into St Barnabas’ church where he was locked up for the night. He had a copy of Keats in his pocket and he remarked, as he grew in grace and wisdom, his status as a hero rapidly diminished. The British gunboat, Helga, firing from the mouth of the Liffey, had reduced Liberty Hall to a shell and toppled Connolly’s green flag; O’Casey was worried about his mother because the Helga’s shells were hitting the East Wall. On the same morning field artillery opened fire on the Republican stronghold in the GPO and while incendiary mortars were lobbed on to the roof, surrounding buildings blazed.

  Next day, while fighting still raged in O’Connell Street, giving it the look of a town in war-ravaged Belgium, O’Casey was allowed home, only to be re-arrested with a hundred other men on the Friday night and marched by a detachment of Welsh soldiers to a grain store, where he was again locked up for the night. The following morning they were released a second time. “Will we have to come back tonight?” asked a detainee. “If we want you, we’ll fetch you,” answered the Tommy.[156] O’Casey returned home accompanied by a kind-hearted soldier who commandeered some grub for him and his mother from Murphy’s.

  At six on the Friday, in the GPO, Clarke, Sean MacDermott, Joseph Plunkett and a founder member of the Volunteers known as The O’Rahilly, who the week before had been Eoin MacNeill’s chief courier for cancelling the Rising, gathered round Connolly. Unable to walk from two wounds, and scorning advice that he should be removed to hospital, Connolly stationed himself under the portico where the fiercest assault from the enemy was expected. They held a council, as a result of which the sixteen wounded and twelve women were smuggled out to Jervis Street Hospital under the care of a captured British MO who had been tending wounded Republicans. Then, from floors now smouldering with cinders, The O’Rahilly led a diversionary attack of thirty men on a barricade placed to cut off their retreat.

  What remains to sing about

  But of the death he met

  Stretched under a doorway

  Somewhere off Henry Street;

  They that found him found upon

  The door above his head

  “Here died the O’Rahilly

  R.I.P.” writ in blood.

  How goes the weather?[157]

  He fell at the doorway of Kelly’s fish shop at the corner of Sackville Lane, where he scrawled a note to his American wife.

  Next morning after breaking out of the Post Office and burrowing and hacking their way through the walls of Moore Street shops and basements to Number 16, a poultry shop, Pearse and the rest capitulated. Fourteen leading Republicans were finally executed, out of the ninety-seven condemned to death by General Sir John Maxwell’s courts martial; they included Clarke, Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, who married Grace Gifford in Kilmainham Gaol on the eve of his execution, and the badly wounded Connolly, who had to be propped up on a chair in the prison yard. Countess Markiewicz, as a woman, was spared. So was Eamon de Valera, who carried an American passport. Pearse, the man who had contrived the whole sacrifice, spent his last moments writing about the beauty of this world:

  Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy

  To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,

  Or a red ladybird upon a stalk.[158]

  As for the Citizen Army flag, “Some say it was burned in Liberty Hall,” when it was shelled by the Helga; “some that it fell from the top of a building held by the ICA when the building went up in flames; some that a British Officer took it away with him after the surrender of the IRA.”[159]

  *

  It was the failure of the rebellion which became its final glory: had the English, to turn Shaw’s clever-sounding but ultimately foolish phrase on its head, not been so stupid in their wisdom and not begun executing the leaders, until popular outcry forced them to halt, then the Christ-like sanctity of those leaders would never have been established, and the rebellion would never have been seen as a holy event in Irish history. It was Padraic Pearse, a devout Catholic, who carried the identification with Christ to its ultimate limit: as Jesus had died for the ungodly so he, in dying for Holy Ireland, gave his life for the disbelievers in independence and won a moral victory over his oppressors. And as in the case of Jesus, it was his own people — the likes of Murphy, but even some of the Volunteers themselves — who betrayed him.

  O’Casey’s account, twenty-nine years later, in his autobiography, of Pearse appearing steady before his captors was contradicted by the Ulster Protestant playwright and critic St John Ervine: Pearse, Ervine said, according to a Castle official had reeled like a drunken man, “His great head, made hideous by a squinting eye, lolling from side to side as if it were about to fall out.”[160] O’Casey replied that although Pearse did have a very slight cast in one eye, he feared death no more than the legendary hero, Cuchulain. The exchange shows two Protestants of a fundamentally nineteenth-century cast of mind making the mistake of seeing Pearse’s death, like Christ’s, as an act of moral exemplism, not of fidelity. Both forgot, possibly, that Christ at one point felt forsaken by the Lord, while Peter thrice denied his Master. Bernard Shaw questioned the value of the entire Rising: the event which it followed, he said, the “mutiny of the British officers against the Home Rule Act”, was far more important, and “shattered the whole cause for parliamentary governm
ent throughout the world”.[161]

  But the potent image had been created. When O’Casey came to treat the Rising in his irreverent Boucicault manner, in 1926 in The Plough and the Stars, the image had hardened into orthodoxy. O’Casey’s emotions in 1916 were volatile, he was both moved by and excluded emotionally from the rebellion: how could he not feel his own cowardice — with a deep, self-consuming bitterness that the revolt had not followed the path he wanted — in the face of so much heroism? Even his hated “Madame” had behaved with impeccable courage: after surrendering at the College of Surgeons, Countess Markiewicz refused a chivalrous British officer’s proffered transport and marched her detachment away. She, too, had been tried and sentenced to death — a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. Worse and worse, from O’Casey’s point of view, she became, on her release in the general amnesty of June 1917, a convert to Catholicism.

  O’Casey’s fluctuating emotions, which could also be construed as excuses for not doing more, later became fixed when he fiercely dismissed the Rising as a “fiery-tale, a die-dream showing a false dream that no soul saw”, or more simply as “naked foolishness a child’s patthern of war”. Nearer the event, although with a touch of cussedness even then, he identified its true hero as the peripheral but much loved figure of the pacifist, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington. He was “like all really sincere pacifists,” Captain White said, “the most pugnacious of men … there was no one in Dublin who had not at one time or another broken an umbrella over his head.”[162] Out in the streets, at imminent risk of his life from stray bullets, Sheehy-Skeffington was trying to stop people looting, and had already, in front of Dublin Castle, pulled a bleeding British officer to safety, when he was arrested. He fell into the hands of a sadistic British officer, Captain Bowen-Colthurst, who had been stimulating his own ferocity with Old Testament texts, and this man had Sheehy-Skeffington shot in cold blood. The atrocity was hushed up until another officer, Major Sir Francis Vane, persistently called attention to the case. Later Colthurst was “detained during the King’s pleasure” at Broadmoor asylum for the criminally insane.