Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  Cochran and he went off together to do battle with C. L. Gordon of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, who asked for fifteen omissions or modifications in the text of the play, mostly of religious blasphemies of a fairly straightforward and, by later standards, mild kind (“Holy God”, “Goddam”, etc.); the office also objected, in Act I, to “arse” and “we’ll rape her”, in Act II to “pissing”, “does he whore well?”; in Act III to “Hurt her breast pulling your hand quick out of her bodice did you?” and “peering pimp”. The pair found the censor alert and friendly and, having ultimately to change only six words, they had an “interesting discussion of the drama”.[514] Cochran’s presence was a great salve to O’Casey’s hurt feelings: he had himself produced, in his latest revue, a musical number, “Dance, Little Lady, Dance”, noted by O’Casey as “a marvel of Expressionism”.

  A mixture of dreamer and financier, Cochran was the ruling showman of the West End; he managed entertainments like stocks and shares, but with an eye to Higher Art. He proclaimed The Silver Tassie a great play: it will, he said, be our “classical war play — revived in ten and twenty and fifty years’ time. It is a perspective of war by a great mind. It breaks rules … just as Coward breaks them in Bitter Sweet — What is wrong with our English theatre is that rules are not broken often enough.”[515] O’Casey overlooked the bracketing of himself with Noël Coward. He preferred instead to admire Cochran’s taste in art: he owned pictures by “Cezanne, Renoir, V. Gogh, Degas & John”.

  In October Cochran disappeared to New York, where he presented a new revue bringing him receipts of £7,000 a week, prompting O’Casey’s comment to his faithful buttie Fallon, “so you see my boy GENIUS and ART sometimes have a reward greater than a cup of cold water”. O’Casey passed the time with frequent visits to the Tate Gallery, and showed pride in his own picture collection, writing to Lady Gregory, “We have six originals now, & some beautiful prints by modern artists. We have declared war on the clumsy, gaudy, garish, picture-degrading cult of gilt framing, & enclose them all in simple oak, walnut or ebony frames.”[516]

  *

  Gaby Fallon kept him in touch with the Abbey and its main autumn production of King Lear, with F. J. McCormick in the title role: O’Casey still read the Irish papers avidly, and asked, “Did you see see pee see’s [Constantine P. Curran] praise of King Lear? He says, says he that K. L.’s a Katabolic Kharacter.”[517] The new O’Casey, who instead of feeding directly on life and observation now devoured articles and gossip, made much sport of the news that Robinson had taken a temporary post as drama adviser at the University of Michigan: “that’s the place for Robbie. What about holding a class in the open on the shores of the Lake? Such a fin de siècle idea! Everybody bring a cushion. Lecturer in extraordinary to Thespis. And draw me salary from The Abbey all the while.” When Yeats’s highly praised volume, The Tower, appeared in 1928, he did more than pour scorn on it — he wasted valuable time reactivating his hostility over The Tassie, writing to Oliver Gogarty:

  I’ve read Yeats’s “The Tower” in fact — as [Lennox] Robinson would say — three times in all, and it doesn’t satisfy me. He builds better in wattles than he builds in stone. And all the silver-throated bugles that blew about this bloody book! There isn’t a good line about life from one end of the book to the other, though there are several bad ones about death … Age like a tin can tied to a dog’s tail? … And that loud-lauded passage “Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind and took a mess of shadows for its meat.” Thought of by a quattrocento mind & written by quinquagesima fingers … There is nothing natural here; it is all forced.[518]

  O’Casey not only hated Yeats’s imagery of cock or hen on golden bough (“May I be one of the passing gents that listen”), but the birds singing in the Woronzow Road garden also got on his nerves. Gogarty tried to put him right in a buccaneering, witty reply which veered close to giving offence but just about kept on the right side of O’Casey and his “philosophysing with an hammer”:

  There is no greater artificiality than being natural in literature. If it were possible that naturalness were literature, you and the rest would be well superseded by a dictagraph. Where would the fashioning faculty be? All we can do with our life in Art is to form, to shape something. That is why my family is a better achievement than my verses.[519]

  O’Casey valued the medical side of Gogarty’s skill and later consulted him about having his tonsils out. Perhaps bad teeth were adding to his troubles now. Extensive extractions were followed by the planting of new ones in his mouth (“I don’t know [he wrote to Fallon] … whether to condemn progress that takes away teeth, or progress that gives one a new set … However, they’re feeling more hopeful now, & in years to come, I will be able to hang on to an iron bar”).[520] A hard winter made the pipes burst in Woronzow Road in early 1929 and O’Casey took time off to watch the skaters on Hampstead’s Whitestone Pond: “on every house [he wrote to Augustus John] you can see plumbers crawling over the roofs and along the walls massaging the pipes. Cascades of cursing everywhere.”

  Eileen was still feeding her young son, Breon, who was “going along like a house on fire” and now well over double his birth-weight. She played a decisive part in the staging of The Tassie by suggesting early in 1929 that John design the set for the controversial Act II. Cochran concurred, whereupon Eileen approached John, visiting him in his Chelsea studio. O’Casey, possibly embarrassed, wrote to John about the question which “her good & impetuous nature has thrust between us”[521] — sounding like an indulgent father. “A remarkable girl,” he declared; “over the year that is gone she has raced to a perception & enjoyment of art that is very gratifying.” Elaborately humble, he continued that it was the case of “an angel rushing in where a devil feared to tread” and “though the present day English stage is unworthy of the consideration of any serious artist, yet I have the encouraging reflection that the play isn’t beneath the thoughts even of Augustus John”. John agreed to design the second act.

  Another man might have been anxious about his wife visiting this notorious womaniser, but not O’Casey. Conscious of himself as a much older man, he encouraged Eileen — or so it seemed to her — to be attractive to other men. David Astor, who encountered the O’Caseys at this time, when they visited his mother, Lady Astor, was struck by Eileen’s audacity: “I was very young,” he recalled, “and she took my hand and half-flirted with me as we walked around the garden. She was very forward with men and gave them confidence.”[522] When they rejoined O’Casey, Astor noticed that he was “amused and didn’t seem to mind”.

  Cochran, too, encouraged Eileen’s independence: one weekend when they were with him in Cookham, and had finished discussing The Tassie, he took her aside and asked when she meant to return to work. She would find it hard, he said, to settle and needed to go out in the evenings. Pointing out how much older O’Casey was, he insisted that she ought to pick up the threads of her career. He invited her, a few weeks later, to audition for Noël Coward’s Bitter Sweet.

  O’Casey was not doing much writing: a short story, called “The Star-Jazzer”, later collected in Windfalls (1934); a few autobiographical sketches which were to form the basis for his future autobiography. He had developed some ideas for the London play he had mentioned to journalists three years before, but not much, if anything at all, had been committed to paper. It was a vain boast that he made to Fallon, in April 1929, that The Tassie was rarely in his thoughts. He sold the film rights of Juno to British International Pictures for £1,000 during this spring; he was offered the job of scripting Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, the picture John Ford directed, which he turned down at once, inspired by the example of Shaw — possibly a mistake considering the ease with which he could write brilliant vernacular dialogue.

  Eileen was offered the part of Jane, one of the bridesmaids, in Bitter Sweet; her protracted absence on tour, their first long time apart, put a strain on the marriage. On the date of the pre-London opening in Manchester, O’
Casey wrote to her, self-pityingly, that he was “fighting bravely, if hopelessly, in an effort to disassociate myself from a sense of loneliness and pain”. He could hear Breon’s teething cries, or his “peevishly proclaiming his hunger”.[523] Nanny, and Mrs Reynolds as well, were there, and Sean took the child off to his room: “We must be careful not to let him feed too much on attention from women.” He did not like Eileen’s mother mixing too much with Breon, “particularly when you aren’t there”. While the tone of emotional blackmail was strong, he ended that she must not lose heart because she was away. He had tried, he said, to send a telegram to Noël Coward but could not.

  When they were back together again he wrote to her, in the second of two letters dated 9 July, “Breon must only take you away from me for a few moments,” although earlier he conceded that he does, “in his own little way, need his daily association with his mother”. The separation was agony: “We pay the penalty of love with pain … I have done what I said I would do: I have made you love me.” But he regretted he had not known her whole past earlier in their relationship, “& I would have been kinder and gentler & more useful to you”.

  When, a little later, he wrote the prose poem “Gold and Silver Will Not Do” (also in Windfalls),[524] he addressed it to her: although eventually substituting another name. “Eileen most fair; Eileen most desirable of women; Eileen whose personality tempers my thought, and whose loveliness brings pride to my pleasure …”

  *

  Bitter Sweet triumphed in Manchester, with ten curtain calls on opening night and wonderful notices next day. It began its enormously successful and long run at His Majesty’s Theatre on 19 July 1929. Eileen remained in the show until it closed nearly two years later, fulfilling what she described to Sean as her “deep, burning longing to earn something myself to leave you freer to do what you will with your writing”. Although it meant she had to forgo appearing as the first Jessie Taite in The Silver Tassie, she was again in her element. Cochran sent her carnations on the first night. She regretted that O’Casey could not bring himself to send Coward a note (she had told Coward he would): “Would it really be wrong to your conscience to wish him success?” she asked.[525] “If it be good and from God, then shall it stand,” was his final word, and he did not revise his opinion.

  On the day of Bitter Sweet’s London opening O’Casey answered yet another conciliatory letter from Lady Gregory (“believe me affectionately your friend”, she had ended[526]) in the same spirit, although he complained of his health and bad eyes, things that had “entrenched themselves in me in Childhood”.[527] But he had, he told his old friend, “many reasons indeed for believing that the goodness of God hasn’t altogether left me alone”. He then went on to describe his simple life and how little money they had. But his life-style that same evening somewhat belied the profession of “a simple life”. Bitter Sweet’s opening cost him thirty-four pounds, the price of the tickets Eileen bought and sent to many friends, anxious that the show should be well received. O’Casey attended with Eileen’s gynaecologist, Harold Waller, who thought the music bad; he himself found the “wording” worse. He must have been aware that Cochran’s success with the Coward play would help him produce The Silver Tassie.

  Augustus John had made no progress with his ideas for the set of Act II when Raymond Massey, who was to direct the play, called on him in September. Massey found the painter distracted and nervous, with “not only an open mind but a blank one”. It was obvious that O’Casey’s meticulous delineation of the setting, more than a page of script, left John feeling hampered and frustrated. He showed Massey some large charcoal drawings he had made as a war artist with the Canadian forces at the front: one of a ruined chapel had a resemblance to O’Casey’s detailed description, and they settled on it as a basis for the design. Two days later Massey managed to extract two more sketches, “frightening, grizzly and jagged, O’Casey’s scene was there”. Massey proceeded, with the aid of some outstanding scene painters and builders, to translate John’s ideas into reality. They hoped John might himself paint the figure of the Virgin on the stained-glass window of the chapel.

  O’Casey, at his first meeting with Massey, had informed him he could be of no help with the second act. Over lunch at The Ivy, Massey asked about the play’s inconsistencies and inaccuracies about the war, and if they were intentional. The question aroused O’Casey’s ire. Massey told him that this would be the fifth war play he had directed in the past few years.

  It was, however, the first which was in a symbolic or expressionistic form; the others had demanded complete authenticity. Sean with obvious anger said that of course the flouting of authenticity was intentional. It was done for dramatic or satirical effect. The character switch in the role of Susie — a religious fanatic in the first act and in the final two acts a gay party girl — was justified by the play’s development.[528]

  O’Casey, however, kept quiet about the Abbey’s rejection.

  Massey learned nothing about the play at lunch, except that there was no room for balanced opinion. “It was all out and no holds barred … there could be no compromise with reason. The emotional range was supreme and the act was no interpolation but the core and substance of the play.”[529]

  *

  The “whirl & sweep” of rehearsals — short, according to Massey — soon excited O’Casey, as did the high-calibre cast: Beatrix Lehmann played Susie, Binnie Barnes Jessie; O’Casey’s favourite, Barry Fitzgerald, came over from Dublin to play Sylvester Heegan, while the “genius” Charles Laughton, as Harry, rehearsed, wrote O’Casey to Fallon, “with amazing strength & pathos”.[530] Not only were the international film careers of Fitzgerald and Binnie Barnes launched in this production but a young Welshman, just down from Oxford, also made his West End debut, as The Trumpeter in the second act.

  Emlyn Williams showed at once a sharp and satirical eye: “every day after rehearsal we spent a tedious hour standing round a piano repeating over and over again the Catholic Gregorian chants, in Latin and Greek … which we were to intone offstage in the weird second act; a posse of professional waiters at a wake.” The group soon called itself “Cochran’s Choir”. Laughton, as Heegan, was described by Williams as “massively crouched in an old wheel-chair, knuckles white round the arms of it, eyes protruding wildly in a pale pudge of a moon-face. He looked nearer fifty than thirty.” One young walk-on cracked, “Footballer my eye, looks more like the football!”

  Laughton became deeply obsessed by the difficulties of his part; especially his Irish accent which he felt was up against the real thing all around:

  Christ these Irish parts, but it can happen the other way round — when I went to Dublin recently to get the feel of this, I saw a tremendously Oriental play which started with the Muezzin in the market place and weird Arab music — fine until one of the hooded figures on his knees turned to his neighbour and said, “Methinks the wind of Allah boiteth mighty cold in the bazaar tonoight”.

  This exploded him into helpless laughter which transformed the smouldering sufferer into a mischievous fat cherub. Just as swiftly there was a dissolve back to the sufferer: he sighed, slumped forward and started to glower, ready for his next entrance. Then a hoarse near-Irish mutter of despair, “Will Oi ever get it roight, damn an’ blast …?”[531]

  “Too intense to move me,” Williams described the play as a whole.

  The star, even one as bright as Laughton, was a poor substitute for the Abbey’s twenty-year-long ensemble tradition, whose human and instinctively comic underpinning The Tassie possibly needed. O’Casey remained touchy about Yeats and the Abbey, and in mid-August when a report appeared in the Birmingham Gazette, the Sheffield Independent and the Nottingham Journal that the play had already been produced at the Abbey, and that, at a Wicklow house party, Yeats had made disparaging references to it, he wrote to Yeats and to the papers in question, demanding denials and apologies. Yeats later explained to Lady Gregory:

  The journalist claimed to have met us on the st
ormy & rainy night when the “Silver Tassie” — which afterwards went to America — was produced in Dublin for the first time. I replied that I had of course given no interview to anybody on the subject in Wicklow or elsewhere. However I did not get Casey’s letter until seven or eight days after he had posted it.[532]

  In London O’Casey, swept along on the glamour of the impending first night, granted an interview to George Bishop of The Observer, which Bishop introduced with “The story of Mr Sean O’Casey is a modern epic.”[533] Juno was “the poorest thing I have had produced”, O’Casey told Bishop and, with equal silliness, said that “I would make it a penal offence for any man to write a play without being able to declaim two or three of Shakespeare’s plays by heart.” He refused, with a bold flourish, to be interviewed by Hannen Swaffer for the Sunday Express — making sure that Swaffer felt the snub.

  As usual when he was under pressure, his eyes hurt and he felt unfit, this time with tonsillitis, so that he called in Gogarty to inspect his throat. Lady Gregory delighted him with a report that a portrait of her granddaughter by George Russell was not very good, but when she sent her best wishes for the first night and informed him of her intention to see The Tassie, and hoped she might be able to visit him and meet his wife and son, he retaliated: “The production has made my mind a-flood again with thoughts about the play’s rejection by the Abbey Directorate, & bitterness would certainly enter into things I would say about W. B. Yeats, & L. Robinson if we were to meet; bitterness that would hurt you, and I am determined to avoid hurting you as much as possible.” He ended vindictively, “So knowing how I feel, & guessing what I would say about the many Artistic & Literary Shams squatting in their high places in Dublin, I feel it would be much better to set aside, for the present, the honour & pleasure of seeing you & talking with you.”[534]