Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  But he did genuinely thank Lady Gregory for his success, saying (as she recalled):

  “I owe a great deal to you and Mr Yeats and Mr Robinson, but to you above all. You gave me encouragement. And it was you who said to me upstairs in the office — I could show you the very spot where you stood — ‘Mr O’Casey, your gift is characterisation’. And so I threw over my theories and worked at characters, and this is the result.”[284]

  Soon after Juno opened Jack Daly visited the Abbey, with the real-life Boyle himself in tow. Daly wore a pair of boots given to him for church-going by a lady — he had thanked her profusely, saying, “Now I can kick anyone who annoys me into a blooming pulp”.[285] He was furious at the play and brought a lawyer along with a view to suing O’Casey for defamation, but Boyle would not agree, saying the cap did not fit.

  Juno did so well in its first week that it was kept on for a second, guaranteeing O’Casey further royalties. Yeats’s brother, Jack, the painter, came on the first Saturday night; so did James Stephens: they could find no seats so Dolan and Lady Gregory, after the overture was over, brought them chairs. Augusta Gregory had “Casey” with her, and they sat together: she was taking him under her maternal wing.

  When the mother whose son had been killed — “Leader of an ambush where my neighbour’s Free State soldier son was killed,” cries out, “Mother of Jesus put away from us this murderous hatred and give us thine own eternal love” I whispered to Casey, “that is the prayer we must all use, it is the only thing that will save us, the teaching of Christ”. He said “Of humanity”.[286]

  9 — Green, White, Orange — or Yellow

  Friendship with William Butler Yeats eluded O’Casey, although he tried hard, in 1924, to get behind the great man’s mask; but shyness, in the acute form manifested by Yeats, was inconceivable to O’Casey, more gregarious and used to people, and he took the haughtiness at its face value. Yet he could see that the poet, fifteen years his senior, was in many ways a prisoner of the exalted position he held, surrounded by his hangers-on, whom O’Casey called his “Gaeligorian guards”; without them, O’Casey felt, another side of Yeats might have been seen: gossipy, innocent, ready to laugh.

  This may have been a naïve view, but behind, on the one hand, the elaborate artifices of the esoteric dreamer for whom complete knowledge of the higher mysteries of life was the goal, and on the other hand the legerdemain of the highly successful literary operator who had, like his swan with Leda, the instinctive knowledge of when to apply the “brute blood” of power, there could in Yeats be detected something he had in common with O’Casey. Both were Protestant to the core. “I am proud”, Yeats was to say in the Irish Senate in 1925, in a speech defending divorce, “to consider myself a typical man of that minority.” Although O’Casey would not have gone as far as to declare arrogantly, with Yeats, that “We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence,” he did feel that he possessed the same independent spirit.[287]

  Both men also believed in the value of literature, particularly of poetry, and in the poet as hero, seeing his consciousness of liberty as the implacable enemy of religion. Yeats followed in the footsteps of his father who had written:

  Religion is the denial of liberty. An enforced peace is set up among the warring feelings. By the help of something quite external, as for instance the fear of hell, some feelings are chained up and thrust into dungeons that some other feelings may hold sway, and all the ethical systems yet invented are a similar denial of liberty, that is why the true poet is neither moral nor religious.[288]

  And, in contrast to George Moore, he had been even more directly outspoken against censorship: “I believe that literature is the principal voice of the conscience, and that it is its duty age after age to affirm its morality against the special moralities of clergymen and churches, and of kings and parliaments and peoples.”[289] Both Yeats and O’Casey also found in Ireland their area for action, a battleground for their inner convictions as well as a potent symbol that could totally suffice their needs and preoccupations.

  Underlying Yeats’s early dramatic theory as exemplified in The Countess Cathleen, first performed at the Abbey in 1899, had been the notion that spiritual reality was of paramount importance, and that plays should manifest “in one way or other the existence of an invisible world”: “My own theory of poetical or legendary drama,” he said, “is that it should have no realistic, or elaborate, but only a symbolic and decorative setting.”[290] However, in the twenty-odd years that separate The Countess Cathleen from the production of The Shadow of a Gunman, Yeats’s original notion had undergone considerable modification, reflecting his typical flexibility and his subtle and intricate attempts to balance and integrate the opposites within himself. Synge had brought into the movement a fantasy of realism based on traditional Irish parricidal feelings. Lady Gregory brought a lively sense of comedy, and a natural ear for local dialect — Yeats, echoing Wordsworth, wrote approvingly of this to a friend in 1905, “I believe more strongly that the element of strength in poetic language is common idiom, just as the element of strength in poetic construction is common passion.” Later, during the First World War, the younger American poet, Ezra Pound, persuaded him to turn The Player Queen, the tragedy with which Yeats had been wrestling for many years, trying to sort out his characters’ problems of secret daemons and antithetical selves, into something lighter, so that he could escape from allegory: he did this at last, “when I had mocked in a comedy my own thought”.[291] At that point Yeats would clearly have been able to recognise the irreverent appeal of such a writer as O’Casey when he came along.

  But the pendulum swung the other way, for Pound also tempted Yeats back into esoteric drama, through his advocacy of the Noh play, so that the Faustian spirit of the much older man was again stirred to experiment with what Pound called “an art for the few, for the nobles; for those trained to catch the allusion … it is a symbolic stage, a drama of masks — at least they have masks for spirits and gods and young women”.[292] Yeats then began writing At the Hawk’s Well, another of his plays dramatising the myth of Cuchulain, returning to his earlier ideal of theatre as an unpopular, mysterious art, directed towards an “audience like a secret society where admission is by favour and never to many”.

  A few weeks after the opening of Juno and its wide public acclaim Yeats invited O’Casey to join that society: “Will you come in on Monday March 31 at 8.15? My play the ‘Hawk’s Well’ is being done that evening with masks, costumes and music by Edmund Dulac.”[293] He told O’Casey that it would be a quite informal gathering, attended only by those connected with the arts. And, “No day passes without my hearing praise of your play.”

  O’Casey may have left behind his bluchers on this occasion but later he was still projecting his sense of incongruity in the poet’s Merrion Square drawing room, finding it full of the Gaeligorian guard, the men “immaculate in shiny sober black, the women gay and glittering in silk sonorous, and brilliant brocade”. No one spoke to O’Casey and he felt they were ill at ease with a tenement-dweller among them. “Yeats suddenly caught sight of him, came quick to him, and guided Sean to the front, where he wheeled over a deep and downy armchair. — You’ll be able to see well here, he said.”[294]

  Conversation between the pair did not progress further: Yeats would probably not have known what else to say. O’Casey, for his part, found the evening ridiculous; he was oblivious to such concerns as Yeats’s “terse, vivid diction” which recommended At the Hawk’s Well to T. S. Eliot as “modern” when he saw it in Islington.[295] But Mick Dolan holding a spear and spouting “I am named Cuchullain; I am Sualtam’s sin” didn’t exactly translate the Noh convention into Irish with any degree of success for O’Casey, and he was impelled to retreat into riotous imaginin
gs:

  he wondered how they would feel, what would happen, if Fluther, furiously drunk, came tumbling into the room, looking for someone to fight him.

  — Any two o’ yous, any three o’ yous; your own selection; anywhere yous like — here or in th’ sthreet![296]

  Fluther Good, the “well-oiled” carpenter of The Plough and the Stars, had hardly been conceived, let alone written, when O’Casey visited Merrion Square on the day after his forty-fourth birthday. He had made a few jottings about the play, however. When Holloway met him at Webbs, on 20 May, he “happened to mention something about stars and he said that is strange. I am thinking of writing a play called The Plough and the Stars about Liberty Hall and Easter Week 1916.”[297]

  *

  As might be expected, the wooing was the other way in Augusta Gregory’s case, even though she was now in her seventy-third year. O’Casey found it much easier to respond unequivocally to her, both in her image as Protestant aristocrat landowner and the warmer reality of her as endearing Mother Superior to the Abbey players and writers, whom, from Yeats and Lennox Robinson on down, she fussed over and cared for as if they were her own children. O’Casey became a particular favourite, at any rate at first, as he accepted her patronage gratefully, and submitted willingly to her advice — she always rather fancied herself, with justification, as a play doctor.

  Lady Gregory and O’Casey had much in common, including a stern streak of Protestant moralising, and a commitment to the working class and to pacifism. Her mother had been a proselytiser of peasant Catholics, while O’Casey’s father, Michael Casey, had worked for a proselytising mission. Above all O’Casey fulfilled an ambition of Lady Gregory’s: to see a genuine working-class playwright rise from the slums (or almost), embodying the new nationalism — pulling himself up, as it were by his own bootstraps — repaid the tremendous efforts she had made on behalf of Irish theatre. Yet sometimes, perhaps, she hankered more than a little after the role of the English patroness and lady of letters for which she had neither quite the stature nor the financial resources.

  She too was a commercially successful playwright — a success which had eluded Yeats, so that by now his ambition no longer seriously operated in this sphere — and she and O’Casey shared the ability to entertain an audience. In 1924, she earned royalties of £467, no mean income in those days, and an indication, perhaps, of what O’Casey’s plays would earn in the next year or two. But she was never very rich and on principle travelled third class in trains, practising stringent economies in her household which must have reminded O’Casey of his own mother. In a restaurant, she would empty the sugar basin and take its contents home in a used envelope.

  O’Casey, who was responsive to external gestures, admired her composure and common touch in the third-class compartment when she met him for the last stage of his journey to her country house at Coole, to which he was invited in June 1924. Touchy as he was towards those with any power or authority, in her case these were authentic externals, and he never turned on her later. As he wrote, reviewing her Journals twenty years later, “Living her own life with insistent intensity, Lady Gregory lived, at the same time, ardently, a life among the plain people. She knew Curley the Piper as well as she knew Yeats, and Ardrahan Church better than Westminster Abbey … Though far from being well-off, she gave of what she had and added a large part of herself to the gift.”[298]

  Others, however, have remarked on Lady Gregory’s aloofness and condescension, finding her possessed of an annoying and insincere vein of flattery and “a mouth that was inflexible”.[299] And O’Casey, oddly in one of his political leanings, overlooked the fact that her long-deceased husband’s fortune, with which he had acquired Coole Park, had been made mostly out of India. Perhaps he found it a little too easy to waive his class hatred in the case of certain individuals who took him warmly to their hearts. Perhaps Lady Gregory, too, was playing her part in the game by accepting without question his statements about his early illiteracy and his refusal to take tea with her in the Green Room because he had to attend to the setting of some concrete. There may have been an element of willing self-deception on both sides.

  “June is coming & the sun is gaining strength … There are the woods to wander in, & there is quiet for writing,” Lady Gregory had written, to which he had answered, tongue in cheek, “Isn’t it a pity that there are no amusements there? How splended it would be if the Woods of Coole were vibrating with throngs of Joy wheels and Charoplanes.”[300]

  He stayed a week, instead of the two he had been invited for, and was her sole guest. A “trim, stout, sturdy figure”, with a bit of a lisp — Lennox Robinson complained later of the way O’Casey caricatured her speech defect in print — she made him very comfortable in the Georgian house, which swarmed with servants who could be summoned with the snap of a finger against a tiny Burmese gong, “that gave a soft, pensive, penetrating note”.[301] She told him her sorrows, the loss in the war of her beloved son Robert, leading his air squadron in Italy, the drowning of her nephew, Hugh Lane, when the Lusitania was sunk off the Cork coast — leaving, like Boyle’s deceased cousin in Juno, a disputed will which enabled the British authorities to carry out their “despicable robbery” of his fine picture collection. But she also told him of her joys — her grandchildren, the house at Coole, and, of course, the Abbey.

  In the evenings she indulged with O’Casey her love of literature, which he later affectionately recalled, especially her reading to him from Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, that huge sprawling epic drama of the Napoleonic Wars, which she pegged away at night after night, while he battled away to keep himself awake and “be polite to the Spirit of the Years, the Spirit of Pity, the Spirit of Rumour, the Spirits Ironic and Sinister … [till] she could murmur, half-exhausted, Dat’s de end!”[302]

  Did he really enjoy the splendid scenery at Coole? In his thank-you letter — what could be a greater sign of middle-class civility than an eloquent encomium? — he wrote, “I have long pondered over whether the beautiful pictures & statuary, the glorious books, or the wonderful woods, river & Lake of Coole deserve the apple of praise — for they are like the three competitors that stood before & showed their charms to Paris — but I think I must choose the woods, the Lake and the river.”[303] But much later he said he “never cottoned on to the woods”, because they were gloomy — perhaps reflecting a weak-sighted man’s understandable dislike of an ill-lit place — although he acknowledged that Yeats loved them. Any individual response to the river and the lovely lake seemed anyway to have been pre-empted by Yeats (not to mention Shakespeare, in Mercutio’s “Queen Mab” speech), and O’Casey sank in artificial, gooey reverence. This wasn’t O’Casey country.

  He could manage only one original image on this well-beaten literary track: a heath covered with butterflies, a “host of blue evanescent divinity”, and fancifully placed Lady Gregory among them: “How delightful the sturdy black figure of her ladyship would look doing a slow, graceful, if a little stiff, minuet among the brilliant-blue fluttering things.” But even here he was still looking over his shoulder at Yeats: “Sean wondered if Yeats had ever set eyes on these.” There were decided disadvantages in arriving at the tail-end of a literary movement, especially when it came to visiting Coole Park.

  *

  In July O’Casey began the play, the consequences of whose production led more directly than anything else to his self-imposed departure from Ireland. He was thinking of calling it The Plough and the Stars, “after the name of the flag of the Citizen Army”, wrote Fallon,

  the design for which had been suggested by the poet George Russell. He didn’t like work. (Who did?) He had to drive himself to it. In fact he had to write on a piece of paste-board which he displayed on his mantel-piece: GET ON WITH THE BLOODY PLAY! He was getting on with it. Would I like to hear some which he had written that day? … So far as I remember, it was a very funny scene and mainly concerned the Covey.[304]

  The character called the Covey was by this st
age more developed than the others, for O’Casey lifted him from The Crimson in the Tricolour, displaying his wisdom in not, now that he was established, allowing other theatres to consider those earlier plays rejected by the Abbey, but to keep them as a source of dialogue for later plays.

  But he was also writing a new one-act play, which quickly overtook the longer project, and he submitted the shorter piece, after cutting it down heavily, towards the end of the month of July. A comic vignette of North Dublin life, taking place in a provision store O’Casey knew in Dorset Street, Nannie’s Night Out centred on a meths-drinking nannie who is wooed by an assortment of suitors, and displays a reckless penchant for chaos in her drinking bouts.

  In the same month, as a gesture of reconciliation, the Free State Government released Eamon de Valera, who had been in Arbour Hill Prison for almost a year. De Valera’s name was again on everybody’s lips, and O’Casey wrote to Lady Gregory, “I am glad that de Valera is out again, & read that he says we must go back to 1917. I wish he would read Back to Methuselah, and long a little less earnestly for the salvation of his countrymen. A great many of us are really too anxious about the souls of other men.”[305] The release prompted him to reminisce, and Holloway noted, “Of all whom he met with in the old Sinn Fein Days, he liked Mrs de Valera the best. She was a very bright, unassuming, intelligent woman; he knew her as Miss O’Flanagan, and heard her lecture very agreeably in Sinn Fein halls. ‘It is such as she should represent Ireland in Parliament.’” But much later, when de Valera was President of the Republic, O’Casey told another friend that Mrs de Valera had fallen by the wayside, for “all she does now, seemingly, is to write little plays in Gaelic for production by convent childer”.[306]