Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  O’Casey was never again to form so close a relationship with a theatre, or to involve himself so intimately in the production of his plays as he had at the Abbey. There probably could not have been a Dublin trilogy without the Abbey Theatre, but, said Lennox Robinson, “You mustn’t tell him, for he thinks there could be no Abbey Theatre without him.”[430]

  But the Abbey had been more than a matrix for his talent: it was also a natural habitat for the species O’Casey, as described by bird-watcher Holloway: earnestly standing, cloth cap on head, demolishing an interlocutor’s argument, gaunt, often dominating physically, a finger poking and stabbing his opponent’s chest as he made his points. Perhaps guilt over the success which came only after his mother’s death activated in him something which it would be an exaggeration to call a death-wish, yet was a deliberate placing at risk of his talent.

  But all these reasons (or excuses) for separation from Ireland stemmed from a deep-rooted emotional need: they were not rational, or the result of conscious judgment. To be surrounded by the results of his former nationalism was humiliating; to see on every side no change in the stifling morality which suppressed, as he saw it, the needs of the individual, was demoralising to him — it would have been a remarkable and brave decision to stay on, given that he had the resources to move away. Success is a notorious destroyer of first marriages. Later, when inveighing against Ireland with all the psychological conviction he could muster, O’Casey forgot how many friends he had also made.

  *

  The delights and freedoms of England blew away dark thoughts of Ireland. A well-heeled patronage created for him a rich and variegated tapestry on which his imagination could feast. The centrepiece of his new life was the fascinating Eileen on whose pretty face and figure his ambitions became day by day more unshakeably fastened. He was, in middle age, escaping from a narrow self-consuming world to begin a different life: who could blame him for his new-found sense of celebration, his impulsive response to the call of a healthy young woman to experience life to the full?

  What emerged in his next play, The Silver Tassie, which he began in 1926 and took until early 1928 to finish, was a stronger, more callous attitude than that of the more complex Dublin plays, which had observed ironically the discrepancy between the actual world and the ideal. In the protagonist of the piece, Harry Heegan, a former Dublin football hero mutilated by the war in the trenches, O’Casey buried once and for all the victim inside himself; and the play, despite his intention of making a powerful protest against the horror and pity of war, seemed more to justify a selfish, hedonistic approach to life — to espouse the philosophy of a winner. As Susie says at the end of the play,

  We can’t give sight to the blind or make the lame walk. We would if we could. It is the misfortune of war … But we, who have come through the fire unharmed, must go on living. (Pulling Jessie from the chair) Come along, and take your part in life! (To Barney) Come along, Barney, and take your partner into the dance![431]

  This was exactly what O’Casey was himself attempting to do with Eileen, and it meant numerous and fundamental readjustments. He seemed slightly, perhaps, to be gaining the upper hand in Eileen’s affections: in the four months in which she played Violette, the soubrette, in The Street Singer, O’Casey took over from Ephraim more of the role of protector, inviting her frequently out to “a simple dinner” in the Queen’s. One day he was seen, by the biographer Peter Quennell, sitting on the “rather shabby red-plush banquettes … grim and silent”,[432] while Eileen “gave way to a desperate flood of weeping”.

  Ephraim had been telling her that “it was my name englamoured you!”, as O’Casey complained, but as he looked into her “big, soft, humorous blue-grey eyes” it was more his quiet and tender persistence.[433] He reflected in a letter to Fallon, in October, with a wonderful (no doubt unintentionally) phallic drawing of himself holding a pen, crouched down behind a bottle of ink, on the proximity he still felt to Ireland: “Isn’t it strange that the biggest bastard I’ve met over here is an Irishman, and a Catholic (or was) as well. However the most adorable woman I ever met was Irish, and a good Catholic too, so the whole thing remains a mystery.”[434] Eileen was still suffering from sciatica, and one afternoon in Bond Street she met O’Casey by chance: “My dear child,” he said, “you look ill. Come and talk.”[435] His role in her life as father, lover and tutor grew larger as the autumn passed.

  In December the scales tipped in O’Casey’s favour: Eileen, on holiday on the Riviera, went one evening with friends to dine in Monte Carlo, and met Ephraim’s wife: “an attractive woman,” she wrote, “to whom he was most attentive”. “Somehow I saw that my position was false,” she remembered, and told Ephraim “that we should end our relationship”. But they were both “exceedingly upset … and agreed to do nothing more until we had got back”. O’Casey wrote to her curtly after her return: “I hope you had a good time in Monaco.”[436]

  *

  O’Casey had begun thinking about The Silver Tassie in London a few months after he arrived: he claimed he got the idea from the man he affectionately labelled “the biggest bastard” he’d met in London, Billy McElroy. One day during the miners’ strike, McElroy had been sitting idly in his office when he started humming a tune which O’Casey had never heard before. He began to sing the words:

  Gae fetch to me a pint o’ wine,

  An’ full it in a sulver tossie;

  That I may drink before I gae

  A service tae my bonnie lossie.

  But it’s no’ the roar of sea or shore

  Wad mak’ me langer wish tae tarry;

  Nor shout o’ war that’s heard afar —

  It’s leavin’ thee, my bonnie lossie.

  [437]

  O’Casey found the tune humming in his mind long afterwards: he would, he decided, give his next play the title of the song.

  However, if Burns’s romantic lyric — and McElroy’s raucous and defiant rendering of it when the coal market had caved in and there wasn’t so much as “a bean in th’ locker” — helped build in O’Casey some central emotion he wanted to express through the play, Wilfred Owen’s bleak and scorching poem, “Disabled”, first published in his Poems of 1920, provided the more compelling and realistic image of the crippled soldier which became the framework of the play:

  He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,

  And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,

  Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park

  Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,

  Voices of play and pleasure after day,

  Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him …

  One time he liked a bloodsmear down his leg,

  After the matches carried shoulder-high.

  It was after football, when he’d drunk a peg,

  He thought he’d better join. He wonders why …

  Someone had said he’d look a god in kilts,

  That’s why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,

  Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts,

  He asked to join. He didn’t have to beg …

  Now, he will spend a few sick years in Institutes,

  And do what things the rules consider wise,

  And take whatever pity they may dole.

  To-night he noticed how the women’s eyes

  Passed from him to the strong men that were whole …[438]

  Owen’s poem even, if we include the brief flashback in a stanza not quoted, up to the line in which the disabled man had poured his “colour … down shell-holes till the veins ran dry”, gave O’Casey his four-act structure for The Silver Tassie. Act I shows the hero, on leave in Dublin during the war, as the full-blooded football idol and courtier of his girlfriend Jessie; Act II, the shell-holes and trenches; Acts III and IV, the pitiable condition of the hero revealed after the war — although in O’Casey’s treatment considerably, and dramatically, inflamed.

  Although it is impossible to determine the exact ch
ronology, O’Casey had never worked so slowly on a play as he worked on Tassie. Act I, set in Harry Heegan’s Dublin home overlooking the dockside — familiar O’Casey territory — was probably completed during 1926: it depicts Harry’s father arguing politics and religion with his friend Simon in the expected O’Casey manner. The name Heegan is reminiscent of the mutilated Captain Logan found “beyant Finglas”, his ear shot in pieces — but between them there are significant differences. The family is better off than any previous O’Casey family, and, by contrast with the previous plays, no character displays passionate, volatile feelings about the war. Less distinct, too, is Susie’s religious orientation: she is depicted as a fanatic but whether she is a Catholic or Protestant fanatic is not made clear.

  Heegan’s mother, too — perhaps a sign that O’Casey was outgrowing a dependence on such feelings, or growing to depend on someone besides his mother — is shallowly, almost sterilely drawn, scared as she is that Harry may miss his boat back to the front (via England), and she lose her weekly allowance. But vitality and humour remain evident in the character, which bears the signature of O’Casey’s distinctly individual naturalism.

  By the end of 1926, he had this act finished. Eileen’s absence in France made his thoughts revolve fondly towards Lady Gregory, and he dispatched a warm Christmas Eve missive:

  I suppose you think (forgive me for not writing to you) I have allowed former memories to be submerged by Glamour of London. I haven’t, & feelings for & remembrance of you are as deeply affectionate as ever. I am living here as quietly as I have lived in Dublin; abiding alone even throughout the Christmas Festival. I am now — very tranquilly — working on a new play.[439]

  In the next month he sent off a request for eardrops to Jim Kavanagh in the North Circular Road, enclosing a prescription which proved to be the wrong one: the lonely winter had sent his thoughts back to Dublin.

  There appeared to be little pressure on him to complete the new play and so he took his time, while his designs, especially as to how to develop it in the second act, grew more ambitious. His reputation as an international playwright also grew rapidly: far-flung managements perceived universal relevance in his tin-pot Dublin; foreign audiences identified their own social predicaments with those of his characters. Production of the three Dublin plays was mooted in Russia, Germany and Sweden, while others were to follow all over the world. The effect of all this “colour and stir” was to make him determined not to repeat himself in his fourth major play, just as he had not repeated himself in any of his previous three.

  He now took his courage in both hands and made a dangerous leap, with Act II, into a form of dramatic vision he had up to then only mildly touched on — a vision explored in the so-called “expressionist” plays of Ernst Toller, Gerhart Hauptmann, Frank Wedekind, and Strindberg in his Dream Play. In The Plough and the Stars he had pitched his second act in a very different key — illustrating poetically, rather than directly developing the action — and had included in that act one or two expressionist devices. This had been wholly successful, although many people had found the act unnecessary: but Yeats, who understood its motivation and poetic force, had been its most appreciative supporter.

  If the motivation of Act II of The Tassie was the same as that of The Plough, its poetic force was to be very different. O’Casey had absorbed dramatic theory directly from plays such as Masses and Men and Hinkemann, but also from powerful advocates of expressionism such as Huntly Carter, whose books on Russian cinema and theatre and on European drama he read in 1926. Carter in many of his challenging statements gave a tempting lead to O’Casey: “Certain plays of Ernst Toller”, he wrote, citing Masse-Mensch, “contain a succession of scenes that pass from actuality to dreamland and back again.” He called such writers as Toller “dramatists of the Chaos” (remember O’Casey’s famous phrase in Juno, “The world’s in a state of chassis”), showing how they created the form of their drama out of the despair and neurosis of the defeated German people — showing “a strange enthusiasm for destruction for the purpose of exalting a humanistic ideal”:

  This sort of destructive drama brought a demand for an equally destructive treatment. Something was required to give fullest expression to the attack, something that would knock the play-goer senseless and leave him to recover fully converted to the “message” of the play. Hence came an aggressive kind of representation called Expressionism.[440]

  O’Casey, too, wanted to see the old world order destroyed. A poor Bolshy who was “shaking the devil’s paw”, the light for him glowed beyond Germany, in the East. He put his name on a “virulent Red pamphlet” issued during the Leith by-election in March 1927.[441] He had, as he wrote to Lady Londonderry, a “fierce, jagged Communistic outlook”; a desire to put over a message, which had, from the point of view of the Abbey’s directors, severely blemished earlier plays such as The Harvest Festival, seized hold of him once more.

  His bold conception for Act II starkly contrasted, in an Irish and paradoxical fashion, with the delightful outcome, from O’Casey’s point of view, of his rivalry with Ephraim for Eileen’s hand. While he brooded theoretically and Miltonically on the horrors of the Great War — and his infernal landscape has as much of Satan’s Stygian gulf and gloomy plain in it as of Flanders — another, lighter, part of his sensibility was engaged in a marital comedy nearer to the work of playwrights such as Lonsdale and Coward, for whom he expressed a mocking contempt. Eileen, now out of work in London, was contemplating auditioning for Ephraim’s new musical, The Desert Song, with Rudolf Friml’s score, due to open at Drury Lane in April. O’Casey made it a test of her feelings towards him: if she auditioned it meant she would lose him.

  She now found O’Casey the dominating force, explaining that it was his power of words, in his letters and in what he said to her, which had won her. While as for him, she was now “within me darling as it is said that the Kingdom of Heaven is within a man”.[442] There had been a time when he could do without her — but no longer. He did not think it was within him to love her as he did: they were “captives of each other”.

  So she did not try for the Drury Lane part. Unfortunately, once when she had fixed to meet O’Casey at her flat in St Andrew’s Mansions, Ephraim turned up, and there followed a nasty confrontation. She described O’Casey as frail, “but almost ready to knock Lee down”, while Ephraim was “stockily built and resolute”.[443] They disappeared together around the block to talk things out. O’Casey reappeared to tell her that he wanted them to marry and that he had made this clear to Ephraim.

  After this, life settled down for both of them. They went about together, visited theatres and art galleries and enjoyed a rich companionship. Eileen’s mother hovered over them threateningly, pointing out that O’Casey was a Protestant, considerably older than Eileen, and came from a poor family: moreover, that he was embarked on a perilously insecure career and would never be able to provide for her properly. But neither of them found it difficult to evade Mrs Reynolds’s clumsy tactics, although in 1927 she moved in with Eileen for a time. Eileen tended very carefully to her appearance — Sean, she said, always noticed dress and colour, liked “good legs, and skirts then were short and free”. Some hefty dress bills arrived which she could not meet: “You mustn’t send them to Ephraim,” O’Casey told her, and promptly settled them from his royalties.

  They were now lovers, he enjoying her “knee and thighs looking out from under the folds of your skirt … to fondle your legs, & caress your white thighs … press you panting to me”. But a part of her still strongly missed Ephraim. She admitted frankly that her affair with him had been very physical and sexual — while O’Casey’s notion of sex was very romantic, very ethereal. Not as strong and full-blooded, but with its own endearing force and purity, so that he was now finding his own love coming back “verified” in the “look of love in your beautiful eyes”.

  She, too, found her protective feelings awoken: “Take care of yourself,” she wrote to him in her earlie
st preserved letter, headed Savoy Hotel, “and your work which is very precious, the very best is always worthy of care; therefore darling try and save all your nerve and energy for your work; get into the air in the day, eat what you can enjoy … My most ardent hopes are for your work dearest.”[444]

  *

  After Easter O’Casey was working on the second act. Gaby Fallon asked him to come home, tempting him with the joyful sights of an Irish spring, but O’Casey replied, “I have no home — the foxes have holes & the birds of the air have nests, & I have just a place to rest my head.”[445] But his head during the night times when he wrote was full of the grim litany of destruction with which he was committed to tearing away the veil of the ordinary bourgeois appearances of Act I. He unleashed the Chaos of War, as he saw it, in the “jagged and lacerated ruin of what was once a monastery”.[446] Religion, or the echo of its observance, is littered among the “blood dance of His self-slaying children”. A howitzer broods over the broken remnants of men — a “Croucher” chorus figure made up like a death’s head, a man tied to a wheel, a fatigue party who move ammunition boxes, a fussy observer, a staff-wallah issuing gas-mask instructions. Wounded men are carried on, tipped up on the stretcher to sing a song, then carried off.