Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  Eileen, after the closing of The Immortal Hour, had been recruited into Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle, and then, later in 1932, into Cochran’s Mother of Pearl, in which once again she had a small part and was understudying the role of the French maid, Fifi. The play opened in Manchester at the Christmas of 1932: again O’Casey was left on his own with Breon and the girl Tessa, whom he now believed to be unreliable. Breon became ill with bronchitis, and Eileen had to sack Tessa, because, as she said, “Once Sean had turned against anybody, he would never look back.”[573] Christmas passed — not a happy one — and O’Casey asked Eileen why she was feeling lonely in Manchester. Didn’t she have a crowd there, or was it only in London that she felt lonely? “It can’t be worse there than it is here, for it’s worse here than it could be anywhere.”[574] The only relief he expressed was that Christmas was over, so “no more kids [were] howling out a Hail to the ever blessed morn”.

  The Chiltern nights were bitterly cold at the New Year of 1933: Eileen wrote to Breon from Manchester and O’Casey reported that his son made him read the letter over and over again while he “listened and hummed & hummed, till he was satisfied & then tucked it under his pillow”. Eileen grew frightened that Breon might forget her: she arrived back at Chalfont St Giles at five one morning, having managed to obtain a lift from a violinist who lived locally. When Mother of Pearl moved to London, she took Breon to stay with her in her Baker Street room. O’Casey, in the meantime, applied himself to organising an education for his son. A school run by some Carmelite friars did not attract him at all — suspicious of their teaching methods, he believed they only wanted to indoctrinate the children entrusted to them. “Anyhow what more can they teach him than we ourselves do?” he asked.[575]

  The return of spring brought new hope, both of the completion of Within the Gates and of improvement in the O’Casey finances. The play was, he now emphasised, the “hardest job that I have ever attempted, making me exclaim with Yeats, ‘my curse on plays that have to be set up in fifty ways!’”[576] But Within the Gates was as yet some months away from being ready for production. Eileen was still in Mother of Pearl when on 20 May O’Casey, who never remembered birthdays, sent her a few pounds to buy a hat and his favourite item of female wear — camiknickers. “I wish it were a hundred & one,” he declared. “It’s really a bitter thing to know you want so much & that I can give you so little.”[577] By this time, however, Eileen, having played Fifi several times when her principal, Eve Manning, was off, had found her work in the theatre pulling against her marriage, and saw that the struggle to fulfil her ambition was counterproductive and futile. Her career was a self-indulgence she could no longer afford: she realised she had married a man who needed her with him constantly, and she resigned herself to slipping back into the Chalfont domestic routine.

  *

  By now the strain on O’Casey had become great. The completion of Within the Gates brought a whole new wave of preoccupations and tensions: there were songs to be put to music, there was the torture of submitting the script — much more trying for the successful playwright than for the successful novelist, for an option acquired by a management by no means guarantees a production. Indeed Cochran, to whom O’Casey first sent the new play, turned it down straightaway, though with a rejection letter which did not displease:

  You have written some grand stuff and I am intrigued by your manner of introducing the singing, although you have created another difficulty for the producing manager, who must find an actress who can sing. The non-singing actress is difficult enough to find — the combination is very rare. I wish I could see my way to risk the production, but frankly I can’t …

  You can’t go on writing fine things, Sean, unless they bring some material reward. I suppose you are tired of people advising you to get back to the method of “Juno”. I wish you would. [578]

  But Within the Gates was very different from what he was writing ten years before. The Gates are symbolic as much as real, the battlefield universal in this morality play on prudery and sexual freedom, while the Hyde Park setting often seems like a cross between a Boucicault village green and a mystic Garden of Love. Words are the weapons chosen for O’Casey’s attempt to “release drama from the pillory of naturalism and send her dancing through the streets”.[579] Jannice, the young prostitute and heroine, wants to give up her profession but rejects the salvation offered by the pious pedlars of goodness such as the Salvationist and the Bishop: true to her Shavian mould, in spite of the way the world has let her down, she dies with reckless defiance: “I’ll go the last few steps of the way rejoicing”. O’Casey intends every character to symbolise a type Jannice meets on life’s journey, while the young whore herself is meant to represent young women to whom life fails to respond but who want to maintain their truth and integrity. Often the dialogue, bearing the signs of immense diligence, sounds awkward, especially when O’Casey tries to reproduce Cockney: “It’s not ’ims afryde to come; it’s you’re afryde to stye. Spice-time gives a noo meanin’ to th’ universe.”[580]

  Rejection of Within the Gates on the grounds that it was too “highbrow” may have flattered O’Casey’s vanity — it was a bit like Jackson’s rejection of The Tassie as “too shocking”. He wrote to Cochran in an uncharacteristically meek vein: “Your advice to go back to the genius of ‘Juno’ might be good for me, but bad for my conception of the drama.”[581] Clearly he accepted the refusal at its face value. The impatience and agony of waiting, the bitterness and disappointment of rejection found no outlet: Fluther’s derogatory temper could not find a target. O’Casey now smoked sixty or seventy cigarettes a day and had done so ever since he could afford to buy them: “Instead of being a drunkard he was a cigarette person,” said Eileen; “he would even chain-smoke before breakfast.”[582]

  After the months of tension he looked pale and had become breathless, with a severe pain in the region of his heart. The local doctor ordered an X-ray, but no irregularity was found (O’Casey claimed that a scarred lung hid his heart). But Eileen and O’Casey had worked themselves up to such a pitch of intensity that in desperation they called Edith Londonderry, who sent a car to Chalfont St Giles to collect O’Casey and bring him to Harley Street for the examination by Dr Bertram Nissé. This specialist told him and Eileen that there was nothing wrong with him, except that he had to stop smoking. “You don’t look pleased, either of you,” said Nissé. “We were thinking of the main scene,” said Eileen; “him about to die, and me with the small child!”[583]

  Norman MacDermott, the licensee of the Royalty Theatre, where J. B. Fagan had so successfully presented Juno, brought further relief when he said he would like to produce Within the Gates. Compared with the dilatoriness that had attended the setting up of The Tassie, the speed with which MacDermott propelled Within the Gates on to the stage should have been a tonic for O’Casey’s intemperate heart. He cut down his smoking drastically, noting on the back of each day’s packet the previous day’s total. Finally he took up a pipe. The advance, too, paid by MacDermott, was a beneficial accessory.

  A new American pen friend, the critic George Jean Nathan, added his voice to the chorus of praise O’Casey was beginning to conjure into being. If Shaw could not generate the same full-blooded enthusiasm for Within the Gates as he had for The Tassie — saying now:

  Sean O’Casey is all right now that his shift from Dublin slums to Hyde Park has shewn that his genius is not limited by frontiers. His plays are wonderfully impressive and reproachful without being irritating like mine. People fall crying into one another’s arms saying God forgive us all! instead of refusing to speak and going to their solicitors for a divorce[584]

  — there was Nathan’s friend, Eugene O’Neill, to take his place:

  It is a splendid piece of work. My enthusiastic congratulations to you! I was especially moved — and greenly envious, I confess! — by its rare and sensitive poetical beauty. I wish to God I could write like that![585]

  Moreover T. E. Lawrence, writing to
Lady Astor (and signing himself “Your Airman”), having by this period reached his apogee of anonymity and limpid ecstasy, declared, “How far he has gone since he was in Ireland, on paper! This play is London and human (and inhuman) nature: all of us, in fact; and about as helpless … When a rare Irishman does go on growing, you see, he surpasses most men. Alas that they are so rare.”[586]

  But Augustus John, painting the elaborately “anonymous” Aircraftsman Shaw, was more quizzical and down to earth. He found himself puzzled by O’Casey’s summary treatment of Cockney dialect, “which is really pretty subtle & complicated with its numerous sub-dialects”.[587] He didn’t know enough about Bishops and their sisters to judge what O’Casey was doing, but “whores I do know something about, so much indeed that I am unable to generalize with confidence as you have done. In any case that good old word has lost its pristine kick except as an expletive, & like ‘Sin’ & ‘Virtue’ belongs to an obsolete & Theological vocabulary.” John, for all his posturing, spoke his mind, and O’Casey did not take kindly to his comment: the two men hardly met again.

  The rehearsals were as auspicious as the advance praise. As far as O’Casey was concerned, they were conducted from the vantage point of the Astors’ London town house, 4 St James’s Square, where, as O’Casey wrote to Lady Astor, he was as comfortable as he ever hoped to be — “or wish to be saeculo saeculorum”.[588] In fact so agreeable and “cosy” did he find the aristocratic residence that he stayed there at weekends, rather than take on himself the “fatigue of a visit to Chalfont”.

  He was pleased with the casting: Marjorie Mars as the Young Woman, Douglas Jefferies as The Bishop, Sir Basil Bartlett as The Dreamer, and even MacDermott, the producer, struck him as an “Artist” and a very clever fellow.

  But only at first: soon he and MacDermott were at loggerheads, and O’Casey revised his opinion abruptly downwards. He issued a stream of notes and directives to MacDermott about the staging, the incorporation of the music, and was categorical about what would, and would not, work. MacDermott objected — it emerged that he was not greatly experienced as a director — whereupon O’Casey pulled his self-justification lever: hadn’t MacDermott, he asked, told him to feel free to criticise, but when he did so he was publicly rebuked for his interruptions. Wielding his powerful rhetoric, O’Casey advanced on his floundering interpreter with repeated “You will remember”, “You frequently quote your experience”, mercilessly pointing out MacDermott’s shortcomings and inconsistencies. MacDermott was reduced to pacing up and down his office, shouting his opinions at the playwright, and an alternative scenario was played out, with the interpreter’s difficulties becoming the author’s opportunity.

  The first night at the Royalty didn’t satisfy O’Casey either: he sat, chin cupped in hands, in a box with Bernard Shaw and, according to the sardonic observation of Gordon Beckles in the Express, “with a twisted smile, listening to his own ranting denunciations of the world’s hypocrisy”.[589] But O’Casey’s private thoughts were full of dissatisfaction for the “timid and agitated” production. Charles Morgan, in The Times, was more respectful; “Mr O’Casey’s fierce play is that very rare thing — a modem morality play that is not a pamphlet but a work of art … He is opening up a new country of the imagination from which, by its rigid photography, the fashionable theatre has hitherto been shut out.”[590] But neither praise, nor awareness of the production’s shortcomings, stopped O’Casey’s now Swiftian habit of savage retaliation: when Beckles challenged him to say what the play really meant he wrote to the Express; “My mission in life is not to give to Gordon Beckles a higher mind than he has, for I am not a worker of miracles.”[591]

  James Agate made some more heavyweight criticisms. Having called O’Casey “the greatest living dramatist but one”, he picked apart the richly coloured strands of his careful literary weave, labelling it pretentious, the characters “both real and unreal, earthbound and fantastic”, so that the play read “like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ interleaved with Euclid”. He identified one cause of the weakness — divorce from Ireland:

  Mr O’Casey is essentially an Irishman who, while labelling his characters English and dropping the accent, still retains the Irish idiom. Take the Old Woman, for example. Any drunken old lady who is Irish has that poetry in her which befits her for Kathleen-Ni-Houlihan, whereas the capacity to soar is not in the English Mrs Gamp. If this play were translated back into the Irish in which it was conceived one might take a very different view of it.[592]

  Agate was also cruelly revealing of O’Casey’s rose-tinted view of the basic little scrubber: “the young street-walker is the idealised harlot that intellectual Bloomsbury is always running after. She prates rather than prattles, uses words like ‘oblate’ and talks about ‘composing hymns to intellectual beauty’.” John might have agreed with his assessment: Toulouse-Lautrec, too.

  “A big sneer and a little snarl here,” O’Casey snapped back in a 2,000-word reply to the Sunday Times, which published two-thirds of it.[593] Yet he had failed to grasp the central point Agate was making — he admired O’Casey for its opposite in the Dublin plays — namely that he had lost his knack of understanding an English audience. Agate tacked a short note on to the end of O’Casey’s agitated refutation: “The difficulty is that I write in English and Mr O’Casey thinks in Irish.”

  As if to prove Agate’s point, Within the Gates came off after only twenty-eight performances. The result was to shutter off a little more of O’Casey’s understanding, and increase his power to nurse a grievance. Why didn’t they see that to experiment was far greater and more noble an aim? To a request in 1934 from the publishers, Collins, to include an excerpt from Juno in a manual of English literature for schools, O’Casey reflected with plaintive incomprehension, “Curious they can’t see that Within the Gates is better literature than Juno.”[594]

  Just as the British Foreign Secretary, George Canning, once claimed that he had brought the New World into existence “to redress the balance of the Old”, O’Casey redressed his inner balance of self-esteem and fury with the heartening comments of George Jean Nathan and, later, Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times critic. Never again in his life did he take note of English critics, except to abuse and vilify them. Even sympathetic voices, like that of Charles Morgan, he later dismissed scornfully.

  *

  “It is a proud thing to me to fondle in my mind the high opinion you have of my play,” he had written to Nathan after Nathan’s extravagant praise of Within the Gates. After the mauling the play received in London, O’Casey’s hopes revived when his American agent, Richard Madden, negotiated a New York production for later in 1934 (an earlier bid by Nathan to have it produced by the prestigious Theatre Guild had failed). He managed to persuade himself that it would be the play’s first “true” production. In July it had become clear that both from a personal and an artistic view the New York production would be exciting. George Markle and John Tuerk, the play’s backers, met O’Casey in London and arranged for him to travel to America to attend rehearsals and the first night.

  Suddenly here was the prospect of escape from the darkness, failure and impoverishment of these years which had followed hard on the success of the Dublin trilogy. Optimism rose in his breast: he would leave in September. Nathan invited him to be his guest. “It will be good”, O’Casey told him, “to walk on a new earth, & sleep under a new sky.”[595]

  Eileen shared in these hopes. She had apparently given up her stage career for good, and, having moved beyond her excitement over the insecurity and wildness of the café society demi-monde, took the logical next step and became pregnant. Only in this pregnancy did she recover fully from the emotional scars left by the abortion. But she accepted without complaint the financial restraints imposed by having to exist entirely on O’Casey’s income — a little boosted by continuing royalties from The Plough and the Stars, Juno, and now by the American advance for Within the Gates. Poverty — living at rock-bottom subsistence level — never
worried O’Casey, he had done it all his life, with the few interruptions caused by windfalls which had been quickly used up. Far from being a handicap, poverty helped him maintain his aristocratic independence.

  It was of course now no longer the poverty of an earlier time; it was the poverty of a famous man who had rich and powerful friends and a position in line with his own imaginings. And there was always some money coming in, however little. More important, there was always hope. The Dublin trilogy provided, not only then but for the rest of his life, an intermittent return of interest similar in many ways to that provided by a lump sum of capital investment. As in the years with his mother, he and his family would never wholly starve. Indeed he was more comfortable than he had ever been: his index of a high standard of living was the same as it had always been — a coal fire constantly burning in his room and a full cellar from which to supply it. Coal was cheap and plentiful.

  Eileen showed unquestioning fortitude and acceptance: “Don’t look on the dull side of finance,” she told him; “it is a waste of energy in our case.”[596] If the going became hard they would need energy to face that: in other words, ignore money. She did not complain when he spent days penning a 2,000-word letter to a newspaper — he composed such letters as carefully as dialogue in a play, sometimes with greater difficulty — nor did she mind when he turned down film offers, believing it was “beneath” an author to write scripts.

  Eileen, her baby due to be born around Christmas 1934, did not accompany O’Casey when he left Liverpool for New York in mid-September on the liner Britannic. But she had convinced Sean that they should move back to London, and had found a large flat in Overstrand Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, overlooking Battersea Park: money advanced by Macmillan paid for the first quarter’s rent. While Eileen, six months pregnant, managed the worry and work of moving, O’Casey went off to spend the week prior to his departure for the USA in Northern Ireland with the Londonderrys. It was his first break since moving to Chalfont St Giles three years before: he and Eileen had not been able to afford a seaside holiday for six years.