Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  The house he and Eileen found was not the one they had originally sought: this one was smaller, cheaper, and on a shorter lease, only seven and a half years. A two-storey semi-detached in a Georgian terrace in Woronzow Road, St John’s Wood, NW8, it had a basement kitchen equipped with a huge range — noticed more by O’Casey than by Eileen, who was not yet in the mood to settle down to domesticity. She still loved clothes, gaiety, but also the lilac, laburnum and apple trees in the front and back gardens. O’Casey hated the disruption of the move, in January 1928, and the extra spending it entailed at Heals and Harrods, the plumbing needed for a hot bath, and numerous other headaches (they hadn’t money enough to carpet the rooms right up to the walls). But they were better set up than most, with a Bechstein piano, and John’s Head of a Gitana, which O’Casey bought off the painter at a Chelsea gallery for twenty-five pounds. As a wedding present John gave the couple the first of his two paintings of Sean — “a princely gift”, O’Casey called it. This was hung on the sitting-room wall over the mantelpiece; one visitor noticed how everything in the room was organised to match it in scale and taste.[460]

  O’Casey, who now wore spectacles, with large lenses and silver rims, soon noticed that he did not much like the neighbourhood. It was expensive to shop in and full of rich people. He discovered that ownership, even if only of a lease on a small house, caused all kinds of problems not hitherto met by the tenement, or bed-sit, dweller: “Jasus, it wasn’t half as easy as it had looked!”[461] The anti-property hackles began to rise, and he heard Proudhon’s dictum, “La propriété, c’est le vol”, beating in his head. Of course he and Eileen could have purchased outright a freehold further out, say in Hendon or in Edgware, but they would have had to forfeit their “gipsy-aristocrat” status and come down to earth.

  Neither was prepared to do this. But O’Casey kept his tenement room intact, carrying it everywhere with him. From now on it became his study. Perhaps this single room, in which he always kept a made-up bed, remained the true home of his heart, in which he still lived with his mother, but now enclosed securely in a house of his own, with a wife and family. “Wherever it was, it would be full of his personality, even to the fact that he hung his hat and coat behind the door, never in the hall. He would change his boots when he came in, so his slippers stood ready by the fire.”[462] In Woronzow Road this space of his own reminded him of the return room in Mountjoy Square: small, furnished with shelves of books, it had a small desk, an armchair, and a narrow bed against one wall.

  A more humble suburban life would not have suited a couple still courted by the very rich. They now employed as a daily Eileen’s former dresser, Mrs Earle, who cooked and cleaned for them. From Woronzow Road they went to dine at Londonderry House in Park Lane, and met Ramsay MacDonald, the former socialist Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, the incumbent Conservative, Lord Carson, leader of the Ulster breakaway Protestants, as well as poets and musicians such as Rutland Boughton and James Stephens. One evening O’Casey asked his hostess, “I wonder if it would be a great deal of trouble if I had a little pot of tea?” She granted his wish, and soon others wanted tea as well: Edith Londonderry established “a pot in the small room at the back” — O’Casey, even in Park Lane, established his snug little Dublin corner.

  Later, he issued his usual disclaimer for North American admirers:

  Lady Londonderry had to live through a decline and fall; a shock, for she, and all of her class, refused to believe that social evolution was bound to write Ichabod on the lintel of every grandee house in the land. Lady L. had formed a society of her personal friends; a society to which she gave the name of THE ARK. Each member received, or chose, the name of some animal. On being accepted by ‘Circe’, the animal received a badge, a bronze square piece, having the image of Noah’s Ark on it, surmounted by a broad ribbon-bow of the Stewart tartan. I think Eileen still has hers … I didn’t join in, refusing to get entangled in anything like a coalition of antagonistic forces.[463]

  But O’Casey did belong to the Order of the Rainbow, as it was called, whose other members included Churchill, Princess Helena Victoria and John Buchan:

  You will find there a Queen,

  A jockey, a Dean,

  With perfect affinities sorted;

  A sculptor, an actress,

  A world’s benefactress,

  By crowned heads and clergymen courted[464]

  Members were called after a bird, insect, beast or reptile, or a magical or mythological creature whose first letter accorded with the first letter of his or her Christian or surname. Winston Churchill was the Warlock, Sean O’Casey the Spider.

  He found Edith Londonderry “charming”, and was “content with her friendship without even seeming to agree with political affinities”.[465] Well he might not: her view of the Southern Irish was that they were not fit for democracy. “They are of a different race. They want firm, wise but powerful control, to prevent them from trying to eat each other up. Someday someone may arise who is powerful enough to be loyal to the Crown and great enough to be humble, and lead the people back into the United Kingdom.”[466] Yet at the time O’Casey was content to soak up her hospitality, preparing to explode his own bomb — his new play — which he hoped would help blow the social order apart.

  In one sense, O’Casey felt more at home in London than in Dublin: England had, with its first Labour government, that of Ramsay MacDonald, passed a peak of socialism, while the country, still cherishing illusions of an Empire which had even then lost economic power, was beginning to embark on a series of leadership crises which were to continue on and off for forty years at least. Socialism had proved it was not a radical force in British society, while conservatives like Winston Churchill, who had warned of the new Soviet imperialist attitude (“The bear is padding on bloody paws across the snows to the Peace Conference”), were disheartened and isolated. Although O’Casey had little in common with the leaders of the Bloomsbury group, who he thought were out to devitalise literature — just as certain Church of England clerics such as William Temple, Bishop of Manchester, later Archbishop of York and Canterbury, were doing with religion, removing from Christian belief its specific spirituality in favour of more Marxist and materialist concerns — he did share the former group’s pacifism, its atheism and its anti-imperialism. Its more languid addiction to “the higher sodomy” O’Casey later roundly denounced: “I know some of these ‘Literateurs’ — nancy boys in art.”[467]

  He did, however, early in 1928, dine with Lady Ottoline Morrell in Bloomsbury Street, where he and Eileen met Julian Huxley and his wife, Juliette, formerly the Morrells’ governess. The evening provided some authentic O’Casey comedy. Eileen, now heavily pregnant, wore a black lace dress pleated from the neck, and when they arrived realised she had forgotten to put on the heavy silk slip that went under it; her underclothes were all on show. Lady Ottoline, herself in startling white silk with white face powder and her dark red-purple hair, responded to the humour of the situation. O’Casey burst out laughing, so did Eileen, who wore her coat through dinner. O’Casey tucked into the fish, but failed to notice he had also helped himself to lemon, which he loathed, and reacted with a horrified squeak.

  O’Casey never encountered Bertrand Russell, nor did he feel challenged in his continuing admiration for Soviet Russia by Russell’s description of it as “a close tyrannical bureaucracy with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar’s, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling”.[468] Russell had gone there himself to see. But for O’Casey, as for many English intellectuals, Russia had become Utopia on earth, an atheist’s substitute for heaven. O’Casey never went to Russia — indeed never crossed the English Channel — but Julian Huxley, who journeyed over routes carefully arranged by the Soviet authorities during the great Russian famine of 1932, found “a level of physique and general health rather above that to be seen in England”,[469] while Shaw, too, was an ardent admirer and later met Stalin during a brief visit.

  But,
O’Casey promised Lady Gregory in early 1928, there was no politics in his new play. By the end of February he had finished it hurriedly, and on 28 February wrote to her with the glad tidings, saying he would show it to no one else until he heard that they had received it in Dublin,

  so that I may be able to say that The Abbey Theatre was the first to get my new effort.

  I hope it may be suitable, & that you will like it. Personally, I think the play is the best work I have yet done.

  I have certainly put my best into it, & have written the work solely because of love & a deep feeling that what I have written should have been written.

  But by his own admission, he had already passed a copy to Barry Jackson, who had not yet responded.

  In mid-March O’Casey followed up the play’s dispatch with an excited flow of letters anticipating acceptance and with suggestions, both rash and premature, as to how it should be cast, as well as blustering assertions of its imminent publication by Macmillan and of the large sum (£500) he was being offered for newspaper articles (he did not like writing journalism and did none at this time). Confident of returning again shortly to Ireland, he discussed sympathetically with Lady Gregory one of her own great causes, the return to the Dublin National Gallery, from the Tate, of her dead nephew, Sir Hugh Lane’s, famous picture collection. With a touching personal affection — but perhaps rather cynically loaded, given the depth of his need and the response he was expecting — he wrote:

  I don’t believe you’ll ever really grow old, for there always was, & always will be, a lot of the child in your soul. Like my mother, who aged & aged, but kept her keen, bright eyes, her intelligent mind & her humourful laugh for ever.[470]

  *

  Robinson was the first of the Abbey triumvirate to read The Silver Tassie: he went through it three times and his initial feeling was one of satisfaction that O’Casey had made an attempt to do something new, for, as O’Casey himself believed, he could not go on writing slum plays for ever. But the word Robinson employed for this attempt was “groping” — he did not believe O’Casey had wholly succeeded. He liked the expressionist second act: “difficult to do and get right but not impossible … should be very effective.” His reservations concerned the last two acts, which reminded him of the early O’Casey in The Frost in the Flower; his judgment here was astute, for O’Casey was slipping back, almost in reverse — with success the keynote instead of failure — into that earlier mode of writing.

  Robinson, who apparently expected the theatre, as a matter of course, to produce The Tassie, passed it to Lady Gregory whose opinion, recorded as she said in her diary, was “I absolutely agree with LR’s criticism, the beginning is fine, the two first acts — then such a falling off, especially in the last — the ‘persons lost in rowdiness’.”[471] She then, to keep a copy by her, typed the first three acts and copied the fourth by hand. What greater sign of devotion could there be?

  The script was forwarded to Yeats in Rapallo, but missed him there, for he had already left for Dublin; it arrived back on 16 April, whereupon Yeats, without consultation with Lady Gregory or Robinson, read it himself. He took three nights — feeling increasing disappointment: “You were interested in the Irish civil war,” he wrote to O’Casey, “and at every moment of those plays wrote out of your own amusement with life or your sense of its tragedy; you were excited, and we all caught your excitement; you were exasperated almost beyond endurance by what you had seen or heard as a man is by what happens under his window, and you moved us as Swift moved his contemporaries.”[472]

  But, he went on, O’Casey was not interested in the Great War, had never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals, and so had written

  out of your opinions. You illustrate those opinions by a series of almost unrelated scenes as you might in a leading article; there is no dominating character, no dominating action, neither psychological unity nor unity of action, and your great power of the past has been the creation of some unique character who dominated all about him and was himself a main impulse in some action that filled the play from beginning to end.

  The size, the scale, of the World War, was wrong for O’Casey’s dramatic imagination: “the whole history of the world must be reduced to wallpaper in front of which the characters must pose and speak.” He then asked if Shakespeare educated Hamlet and King Lear by telling them what he thought and believed? No, he answered, Hamlet and Lear educated Shakespeare. “The control must be theirs.”

  Yeats only marginally softened this central damning criticism by saying, in his high-handed covering note to Lady Gregory, that his was only “an opinion” and did “not absolutely reject”. But it was far from being a tactful and considerate exhortation by a sympathetic friend to the author to make some changes. And Yeats went on to recommend to Lady Gregory devious means by which O’Casey could save face by publicly declaring that he had himself withdrawn the script for revision — if he agreed with the criticism, that is; if he did not, he could offer it to a London management. And if no London management took it, he could “keep it by him revising or not revising as he pleases”.

  That Yeats’s criticism of the play had validity cannot be denied: but it was tactlessly expressed and showed abysmal lack of understanding of any author’s — never mind O’Casey’s — susceptibilities. Yeats should have known by now what he was like. To suggest that O’Casey should withdraw his play could be construed as a calculated insult, especially as Yeats had gone on — in his letter to O’Casey — to upbraid him for the evidently huge effort he had put into writing The Silver Tassie. “I can imagine how you have toiled over this play,” but “A good scenario writes itself … What business have we with anything but the unique?”

  Why did Yeats take such an extreme view? He himself attributed it to splenetic age; in a few months he would come near to death with congestion of the lungs. Others ascribed his response to jealousy: O’Casey’s plays had attained a popularity with audiences to which Yeats could never aspire. He might have felt that to let O’Casey experiment in his own literary domain would be to risk seeing him succeed, and become a great dramatic poet where he himself had failed. Yet, in the light of his judgments on earlier O’Casey scripts, Yeats’s opinion did show consistency. He was a harsh critic: the standards he set himself were the standards he applied to others. He could never, as O’Casey himself well understood, descend to show ordinary human considerateness in matters of artistic judgment, which he put on a different plane. Part of the force of his reaction came from his genuine disappointment: a wiser, more worldly man might have seen that with all the personal upheavals O’Casey had been undergoing he might not produce — at least for the time being — another Juno.

  Yeats’s expectations were in any case excessive, when O’Casey had already given the Abbey three outstanding plays. Everybody had learned from those plays — including Yeats himself, some of whose grit and power as an elderly poet stemmed from the abandonment of his lyrical, pastoral voice and his adoption of a harder, more disillusioned and essentially urban tone. Where else could he have got this from but O’Casey? To say he owed part of his enduring greatness to O’Casey is not an exaggeration, for the popular acceptance of O’Casey’s work forced Yeats to see that he himself had to make contact with the real world of his day. An increasing awareness that he had not many years to live made him appreciate the processes of life, especially love, as never before.

  Perhaps, unbeknownst to him, O’Casey had become a mentor, a model for Yeats, and pointed the way to make him give up his poetic isolation and esotericism, and directly engage the heart. Hence Yeats’s particular scorn of O’Casey’s Act II “technical experiment”, hence his sense of betrayal at O’Casey’s attempting to tackle something outside his own direct experience. Yeats himself had never been deeply aroused by the World War, beyond the powerful lines in “The Second Coming”:

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned.[473]


  As it brought only passive suffering it remained remote, peripheral to his central obsessions, one of which was that tragedy causes joy in the man who suffers.

  In many of its particulars Yeats’s opinion was right, although his sweeping dogmatic generalisations could be argued with (and were, of course, scorned by O’Casey). But what did weaken The Silver Tassie compared with the three previous plays was its absence of any emotionally unifying series of events in which all the characters participated, whether they liked it or not. The Great War was an intelligent but not an underlyingly cohesive substitute for the historical integrity of the other plays. A fatal deficiency — one that Yeats did not notice — was that it lacked their humanity and humour.

  Bessie Burgess’s stinging comment to the revolutionaries in The Plough and the Stars, “Call themselves Catholics, when they won’t lift a finger to help poor little Catholic Belgium”, was truer, and demonstrated greater perception about the involvement of Ireland in the Great War, than any comparable statement in The Silver Tassie. The nihilistic aims of expressionist drama ill suited O’Casey’s instinct for warmth and cocky defiance in the face of authority and repression. The darkness, the seriousness, of The Tassie is manufactured. The ritual slaughter in Act II, intended to mock the ritual of the Church, makes the act ponderous. Yet somewhere within the play the laughter was trapped and waiting to be released. Perhaps, more in the Boucicault manner, O’Casey should have treated the whole field of slaughter as a farcical wake. Had he been more miserable inside, he might have found release in laughter: personal happiness made him solemn.

  Yet Yeats’s judgment — and particularly the action of rejection undertaken on the basis of it — was profoundly unfair, and unwise. Every artist has a right to fail sometimes, and O’Casey had certainly earned himself the right to experiment with a play which was by no means wholly a failure, and which over the years, with changing styles of production, won many more admirers than Yeats’s stilted verse dramas. The Tassie is a play which, as Robinson pointed out, challenges the theatrical imagination — a director’s piece. The Abbey had shown itself all too willing to produce, not only honest failures, but works of drivelling and hopeless incompetence — as O’Casey and everyone else well knew. As the influential drama critic, St John Ervine, himself a playwright and a Northern Irishman, said later, in support of O’Casey: