Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  He had a $3,000 advance, a first-class ticket, supplied by Messrs. Tuerk and Markle, a new suit bought for him by Lady Astor, a sober, working-class cloth cap which replaced the exotic fedora of his sporting days with Augustus John, a new upbeat to his stride, and a guarantee with the bank of £200 from Edith Londonderry, to tide the family over till his return from New York — with, it was hoped, fistfuls of dollars. But actual cash was still in short supply: he and Eileen found they had £30 and split it between them. (Later, he wrote from on board the Britannic saying he wished he’d taken the lot: travelling first class, he complained, perhaps with traces of the old poor mouth, he could barely scrape together enough for the tips. It was clear he also had $100 with him. Still, it was hardly a fortune.)

  The visit to Mount Pleasant, County Down, became in his autobiography the subject of a turgid and ungrateful sermon on the decline of the British aristocracy — with gleeful interventions on the rise of communism:

  The Commies are comin’, oho, oho,

  The Commies are comin’, oho, oho.[597]

  and with sidelights on the Ulster spirit (“the god-confident protestant David is always going forth to fight boastful catholic Goliath”), as well as the shameful neglect of St Patrick’s burial place in Saul Abbey, Downpatrick, and the sacred spot in Saul where St Patrick celebrated his first Mass in Ireland.

  The actual visit was filled with lonely thoughts of Eileen and Breon, and a sinking feeling at the months ahead. Awe at the splendour of the Londonderrys’ establishment, with its sea views, semi-tropical vegetation of orange, olive trees and hydrangeas growing like weeds, did not wholly remove his choked-up feeling of missing Eileen. He penned a benediction to his patrons: “Brigid and Columcille with all the Irish Saints beside them, be with you both, and with your charming household, now and forever.”[598] He had crossed over to Northern Ireland in a three-quarter gale: Edith Londonderry, promising to “keep an eye on Eileen”, put him on another steamer at Kingston back to Liverpool to board the Britannic.[599]

  Soon he was passing Galway and having struck up a friendship with the ship’s surgeon, a Dublin man, O’Casey became more settled on board the huge ship. He justified his departure on the grounds that he was collecting funds (“England couldn’t afford to keep him”); he enjoyed life-belt drill, during which he was commended by the officer in charge as the most efficient member of the squad. Eileen sent him a wireless message and he responded with three or four passionate love letters, in which he noted that the English and American passengers, trying to amuse themselves, were “a melancholy sight”;[600] elsewhere they were described as “a decrepit lot”, and when attired for a ship’s ball their fancy dress “looked like coloured shrouds”.

  George Jean Nathan later was accorded the stature that O’Casey gave his other heroes like Larkin and Shaw, but his overblown praise of the American critic has the ring of a reward:[601] it was never an admiration conceived in the knowledge that the idol was indifferent to, or ignorant of, his devotee’s existence. Whatever the merit of his critical opinions, Nathan’s main claim to a place in the O’Casey pantheon was as an honest and passionate champion of the plays, in particular the unpopular ones: he called Within the Gates “one of the true masterpieces of the modern theatre”. In the flesh, although something of a dilettante and a snob, Nathan at once showed himself a considerate and generous host. O’Casey was lodged in the hotel where he himself lived — the Royalton on West 44th Street — and O’Casey told Eileen, “I’ve rarely seen such a man who has such a beautiful smile. It lights up his whole face and makes one love him. The Irish smile is a mile or more behind his smile.”[602]

  The pace of New York upset O’Casey at first, but one thing he observed with great admiration was the absence of the institutionalised conception of Divinity — all New York’s cathedrals were “huge buildings of commerce and trade”. He later compared favourably with Moscow’s (when had he been to Moscow?) these steel and stone monuments which coldly ordered churches out of sight and which decreed “Come unto me all you who labour, and we will give you work. Work! Labour the aspergas me of life, the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow — security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.”[603]

  Rehearsals of Within the Gates began well and continued that way. A week after his arrival O’Casey moved to the Devon Hotel to stay with his managers Markle and Tuerk. As usual he found himself getting the slim end of the stick in the negotiation of subsidiary rights; he discovered that he would have to pay $250 for Herbert Hughes’s score — elaborate orchestrations of tunes he mostly supplied himself — while he worried that the costumes might be a “bit too gorgeous”.[604] As the first night at the National Theatre approached, the full New York publicity network sprang into action: Nathan and Eugene O’Neill proclaimed the virtues of the play and its author; there was a big spread in the Sunday New York Times on 21 October. After a run-through of the play the same night, O’Casey told Eileen that Lillian Gish, who headed the cast of seventy, was “good though she is a little frail, & may not have the great vitality needed to keep the part always in a high key, but on the whole she is fine”. His apprehension, he was glad to find out, was completely mistaken.

  The opening night audience mystified him; he was not sure if it was dumbfounded or spellbound — he suspected the first. But the lively and generally favourable reviews created a succès d’estime and his suspicions cleared. Audiences filled the large theatre for well over a month, and soon O’Casey found himself appreciably in pocket; having earned back his $3,000 advance, he began sending cheques for his share of the takings back to Eileen — £380 by the end of November, always hoping for more. But then the houses began to drop off, prompting some fears. “Don’t say anything to anyone about the bad business,” he instructed; “one thing’s certain — if I hadn’t come here the play wouldn’t have run a week … When I leave they’ll take it off.”[605]

  He was probably right: O’Casey the character was equal to any of those in the new play and he had quickly become a New York celebrity. Eugene O’Neill liked him (“You haven’t got a bad fellow for a husband and a sweetheart!” he told Eileen). Markle invited him to Pennsylvania for a weekend; he excited the disapproval of the coloured maid of Brooks Atkinson when he came to dinner at Atkinson’s apartment wearing a turtle-neck sweater instead of a shirt and tie; he was sketched for the Herald Tribune. He could spin, as he did in the New York Times on 14 October, all the old myths of his Irish background, although he mysteriously omitted from them the one of his true age: “He was born in 1880, said he, ‘so anyone can compute how old I am now’.”[606] He even found himself blessed by Catholic priests: one in Pennsylvania praised his play and sent his blessing — O’Casey took the blessing, he told Eileen, and thanked him seriously; another, a Jesuit, told him it was a great play. Better than approbatory priests, the Abbey Players from Dublin, visiting New York on tour, were spitting venom when they heard of his success — or so he was told by Barry Fitzgerald. Delight at this was only equalled by the emotion he felt when one reviewer, after seeing Within the Gates, said that beside it Noël Coward’s Conversation Piece, which had also just opened in New York, looked “like a monkey on a stick”.[607]

  But being a celebrity could also be tiring. He refused invitations to a dozen parties after the first night, so exhausted that he just slipped away from the first and hurled himself into bed; at another time, in a synagogue, having addressed his audience on the curious resemblance between the Jews and the Irish, he stood and shook hands with a hundred people — “and not a pretty girl among the whole of them”; he spoke in Boston, at Harvard, on “The Old Drama and the New”, complaining that out of the seventy-five dollar fee he had to pay his hotel, his rail fare, and made the equivalent of four pounds. He met other, more faded celebrities, including Vera Brittain, a “tattered, worn & fragile figure — though she wore an elaborate orchid in her breast” who, at a Macmillan party, was listening to endless flattery fr
om other guests and sucking it all in. When he wasn’t thinking of the need to make “a little store of money” to keep them going for a year or two, he thought of Eileen, back in London with the new life inside her. He declared, in a yearning moment, “After we have nursed the baby we shall have a joyous time together renewing our courting.”[608] He had seen, he said, a good many pretty girls in New York, but not one came up to her. In imagination she was always in his arms, and — as he constantly reminded her — imagination was a “powerful thing” in him.

  O’Casey left America on the Britannic on 14 December, before the New York run of Within the Gates finished, and prior to an American tour of the play, due to begin in Boston in January. He formed a higher opinion of the American character than of the English, and would, Eileen said later, have stayed on in comfortable America if he could — he always liked to stay on where he was comfortable. The American streak of generosity touched him most. The reverse was true of London, which he found cold and ungiving, its critics in particular unsociable and conceited.

  One thing that did terrify him about America was the patriotic fervour expressed by its women’s clubs, at one of which he spoke: prior to the speeches a full-voiced soprano sang “The Star-Spangled Banner”, while he watched the flag itself unfurled in floodlights. Moved at first by terror and apprehension, he still found more than a measure of justification in the emotional tension which, he honestly reminded himself, he had once enjoyed at the sight of the Irish Republican tricolour — and then at the International’s red flag. “Nationality was something even deeper than life in a man’s nature … Good it must be, and it will persevere.”[609] Even the Roman Catholic Church frowned somewhat on it in the fear it might lead to the deification of the state — an added attraction.

  The United States had flattered him above all as an Irishman. O’Neill’s friendship, Nathan’s sincere adoration, Atkinson’s more perceptive praise, these had made him proud to be Irish: and, paradoxically, this had all happened out of his attempt to write a wholly English play. For the rest of his life, with one exception, he was never again to seek a subject outside of Ireland.

  Before addressing “America’s mothers, sisters, daughters, sweethearts, and wives”, he had listened to Irving Stone describe the life he had written of Van Gogh, and perceived the value of biography as being that of “the making of a great man to live again”. Another speaker put forward a claim which touched the austere, patronising disdain with which O’Casey had surveyed the reading habits of Yeats and Russell, namely that, as he mockingly reported, “the nickname of whodunnit given to detective fiction was conceived by star-crossed envy engendered in those who couldn’t achieve success in the creation of convulsive consternation”. But fortunately the speaker noted that communist Russia didn’t give this “art” much status!

  O’Casey’s own address came as an anti-climax — he lectured the good women on the need to be cautious of success, and never afraid of failure: how could one be sure that failure was not “success in a shroud”? It left his bewildered audience pondering just exactly what the phrase could mean: perhaps only the completely unknown Samuel Beckett knew fully, having credited O’Casey with dramatising “the slump in the human solid”.

  Had the American women understood that O’Casey himself deeply and instinctively preferred failure (“chassis”) to success, he might have provoked a riot. But there was little evidence in their social or cultural history that Americans loved failures, or extended to them their glowing hospitality — it was O’Casey’s success that attracted them, they wanted to buy it and share in it because it reflected on them. His story, that of the poor Irish boy who made good, was one of those self-perpetuating myths that sustained the heart of America. O’Casey, the character, and the struggle of his life interested the patriotic women’s clubs more than anything he actually wrote.

  As the atheist set sail he sent his blessing to Eileen: “God be with you, sweetheart.”

  16 — Pink Wilderness

  Once a proselytiser always a proselytiser: early 1935 brought O’Casey pricks of persecution sufficient to goad him into new zeal. The Irish Censorship of Publications Board banned his new volume, Windfalls, and the Mayor of Boston, Frederick W. Mansfield, refused to allow Within the Gates to open at the Shubert Theatre in Boston on 21 January, because it was “anti-religious and obscene”. The first refusal did not hurt O’Casey’s pocket, for there was no great sale for his “thing of shreds & patches”, as he dismissively referred to the collection in a letter to Nancy Astor; but the second was a more serious blow to his harmless, Giraudoux-esque fantasy, and led to the cancellation of a tour of thirteen cities, and thus to the loss of some thousands of dollars of expected royalties. The churches — this time Methodist as well as Catholic — trotted out their now-familiar clichés about an O’Casey play. One may wonder whether it was by now not the song but the singer, to which the authorities in both countries were objecting. So powerful had been the publicity machine, so strong the projection of O’Casey as a working-class, atheistic rebel, that it was as though at a rival preacher that these touchy, backward-looking organisations were lashing out. As O’Casey kept plaintively pointing out, to friends and foes alike, worse language could be found in the Bible, as well as in many other unbanned plays and books.

  But two souls, of preacher and poet, fought uneasily within O’Casey’s breast over the next few years, and neither left the other entirely alone. Curiously though, on his return from New York the preacher grew strangely, perhaps dangerously, silent. While Harvard students collected signatures for a petition in support of their “master playwright and crusader in the drama”, O’Casey sat in the Battersea flat with Eileen, heavily pregnant, waiting for their second child to be born. By now its delivery was a fortnight overdue: financial deprivation and the stress of waiting wore down his nerves. His temper was bad, and often, sitting at Eileen’s bedside when she was moved to a nursing home, he would fume at the disgusting conditions he found in the place for which they were paying twelve guineas a week — the “wobbling walk of the housemaids, the dirty tray of slopped-over tea, the dirty window, the whole aspect of continual carelessness”. Eileen tried gently to quieten him, pointing out that his temper would make “bad things worse”. Although he had been with Eileen less than a month he wrote later that he would like to see a “celibate cleric stay with a pregnant woman day after day, hour after hour, during the last three months of her trial”.[610]

  The trip to America finally severed O’Casey’s remaining ties with Ireland, nourished and maintained for more than eight years through his correspondence with Gabriel Fallon. Nathan now took over as the “buttie” O’Casey was never to find in England, and to Nathan rather than to Fallon O’Casey described the “chassis” of Niall O’Casey’s birth on 15 January. Eileen had complained of pains, and the matron wanted to keep the contractions on the move:

  the missus protesting & half afraid to stir, & I arguing with [the matron], seeing with a layman’s eye that the moment wasn’t far off, & telling the Matron her business. But the Lady-Matron kept on “Just a little walk,” & we were fully cloaked & on the steps to go out, when the missus rushed back, tore off her clothes, & the kid was born inside of twenty minutes! And after four weeks in which to prepare, when the time came nothing was ready, & the poor kid actually had the baby herself while the nurse was telephoning for the doctor, & the Matron was washing her hands & looking for the chloroform.[611]

  Niall had a bruised head and a bruised eye, Eileen had to have stitches and later O’Casey complained that the doctor charged fifty guineas.

  Unfortunately none of the fluency, unexpected comedy and realism of this account found its way into dramatic form; O’Casey as a playwright was now beginning the longest fallow period of his life, which lasted until 1940, when his pro-Soviet play, The Star Turns Red, was published.

  However, at the beginning of 1935 money had to be found. 1935 turned out to be one of their best years: O’Casey received subst
antial royalties from a diversity of sources and on 28 June banked a cheque for $10,752.71 from the sale of the film rights in The Plough and the Stars to RKO, Hollywood.[612] On 9 February he had made an unexpected guest appearance as a New Statesman reviewer, with a savage onslaught on the published text of the long-running play, Love on the Dole, a powerful but sentimental treatment of the theme of unemployment. Perhaps stung with envy at the success of Ronald Gow and Walter Greenwood in his own area of experience — and still (as he wrote) filled with fears that his long-overdue second child might be stillborn (or Eileen need a Caesarean) — he claimed that Love on the Dole, “delivered” out of a novel of the same name, was “either dead before it was taken from the belly of the novel, or the two drama surgeons killed it as they were taking it out. There isn’t a character in it worth a curse, and there isn’t a thought in it worth remembering.”[613] He then, surprisingly, asserted the artist’s superiority over the temporal powers of the world: “He is above the kings and princes of this world, and he is above the Labour Leaders and Proletariat, too.”

  This messianic utterance provoked a flaming row — of course. Disappointment over Within the Gates, displacement caused by having to move back to London into a mansion flat in what he thought of as a snob-ridden road in Battersea, conflict over the direction his writing was taking — all this inner pain needed alleviation.

  But the row led, indirectly, to a touching reconciliation with Yeats. In the last years of her life Augusta Gregory had been so upset at hot patching up the quarrel with O’Casey that she had instructed Yeats, as one of her last wishes, to win O’Casey’s forgiveness. The attack by O’Casey on Love on the Dole gave the old and increasingly ill Machiavellian the opportunity he needed — especially when, soon after the review, he received a genial note from O’Casey — the “first sign of amity since our quarrel”. This change in O’Casey, and his proclamation of the artist’s superiority, pleased Yeats. “He has attacked propaganda plays in the New Statesman and that may have made him friendly to me,” he told an intimate friend. Now, as in 1926, Yeats came to O’Casey’s defence. Writing to Ethel Mannin, who had praised Love on the Dole for its cogent statement on behalf of Revolution, and abused O’Casey for being jealous because Love on the Dole had been compared to Juno, Yeats warned her: