Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  Macmillan questioned whether the articles would still be fresh enough to warrant publication in book form; O’Casey rounded on him fiercely, saying everything he wrote had perforce to be combative, for “the sword I have swung so long is now stuck to my hand and I can’t let go”.[636] His plays were, he said, important, therefore his defence of them was equally so — a questionable argument. Macmillan had also asked if the book wasn’t a bit too much like “brawling in church”; O’Casey replied that Jesus Christ had done exactly that “before me, and I occasionally follow in His steps”. Macmillan raised no further objection and sent him a contract, so that O’Casey could then boast to Nathan that his publishers had jibbed at the book at first, but “then fell silent when I told them that the first to create a brawl in church was Jesus Christ”.[637]

  But Macmillan went on trying to persuade O’Casey to modify the contents of the collection. He visited the Overstrand Mansions flat, asked politely if O’Casey would consider changing “Coward Codology” and “The Cutting of an Agate”, the main attacks on his bêtes noires. No, said O’Casey; Macmillan gave way. “It could have been a dangerous half hour,” said Eileen, “but thanks to Harold’s tact and graciousness, it was just a sensible talk.”[638]

  Without doubt The Flying Wasp — its title taken from a remark by Agate that there was “a nest of wasps that must be smoked out, because it is doing the theatre infinite harm” — damaged O’Casey’s reputation, not only because it insulted the English literary and theatrical establishment, but also because his habit of verbal intemperance had become tiresome. Even O’Casey’s American friend and champion, Brooks Atkinson, called The Flying Wasp, in the New York Times, “a scrappy and truculent volume with some bright retorts tucked away in its pages but no strong line of argument or reasoning. It is petty in attitude.”[639]

  *

  “Beware of entering into a sham,” O’Casey wrote, “lest you become part of the sham yourself.”[640] But he wielded his own sword with a wilful disregard for truth when he rode into battle with Malcolm Muggeridge, who had attacked the Soviet system in a Daily Telegraph article on the Moscow treason trials of 1938. O’Casey wrote two letters to the Telegraph, both of which were refused publication; he then expanded the letters into an article called “The Sword of the Soviet”, which the Daily Worker published, and in which he taunted Muggeridge for being “a cock that won’t fight”. Muggeridge rose quickly to the taunt, saying he was ready to debate publicly with O’Casey their respective attitudes towards the Soviet regime. However, “The Dean of Canterbury, Professor Laski, the Duchess of Atholl, Sir Bernard Pares, the Webbs — these I can understand; but the author of Juno and the Paycock — I admit I was surprised.”[641]

  O’Casey, bested in the actual content of the quarrel, side-stepped Muggeridge’s arguments, ignored his challenge, and simply complained of press censorship exercised by the Daily Telegraph over his two original letters. But Muggeridge would not let him get away with it:

  O’Casey, you know perfectly well that you have behaved badly. You know perfectly well that no newspaper can be expected to publish every letter which may be submitted criticising articles which have appeared in its columns … If you have decided to plump for Stalin and throw in your lot with his Comintern sycophants inside and outside the U.S.S.R., then cut out talk about free play and the freedom of the press.

  O’Casey replied by impishly distorting Muggeridge’s words to “He says, O’Casey knows perfectly well that no newspaper can be expected to publish letters critical of articles appearing in its columns”. [642] The omission of “every” can only, at best, be described as wilful. O’Casey went on to crow about misbehaving. He knew what he was doing; he warmed to the image of himself as a carrion crow: to see himself as pecking at the decaying carcass of a dead imperial system suited the by now larger-than-life O’Casey character. Its worst trait was perverse ignorance. He refused to go and see the Soviet Union for himself.

  Soviet emissaries, such as Timofei Rokotov, the editor of International Literature, wooed him or were wooed by him. In 1939, for Rokotov, he wrote an article on “Literature in Ireland”, in which he said of Yeats, who had died earlier in the year, that he was the greatest poet who wrote in the English language. In his earlier period, building his poetry on the legends and romances of the Gaelic past, Yeats had, O’Casey claimed, “fled too far away from the common people, turning the poet into a cold aristocrat who turned his head up to the heavens, looking at no-one below the altitude of a star”. However, in the last years of his life, “Yeats became much more human, drew nearer to the world’s needs, and, as he told me himself [my italics], became intensely interested in the new voice of the resurgent working-class speaking in its own way, and demanding the earth and the fullness thereof.”[643] Fortunately for O’Casey Yeats was not around to refute this. Even in O’Casey’s account, in his autobiography, of their last meeting, Yeats was as defiantly anti-communist as ever. In fact, O’Casey had mocked Yeats’s later poetry with its realistic, ordinary images: “Wedding” the sublime to the ridiculous, he had commented, polishing bone “till he thinks it ivory”.

  But in those hectic and arid years before the Second World War, O’Casey’s claims as to what was “communist” became not only out of proportion to reality but strangely, almost insanely — if one fails to admit the coherence of his system of selective likes and dislikes — personal. “Hail to the Coming of Communism”,[644] he wrote to a Cambridge undergraduate, Peter Newmark, whom he befriended during a visit to Cambridge in 1936 to address the Shirley Society of St Catharine’s College on “The Holy Ghost Leaves England”.

  St Francis, as well as Shaw, he told his old buttie Gaby Fallon, was “more of a Communist than he was a Bourgeois or a Conservative or a Fascist”;[645] while his friend Nathan — no doubt to Nathan’s own extreme surprise and mystification — was dubbed “the great proletarian critic” and “a red revolutionary in the theatre”. Imperious Nathan had the reputation of a great snob and socialite, but for O’Casey, “You want the best that can be given to the art of the theatre, and that is the creed of the communist. It’s not for nothing that your profile on the cover of your last book stands out against a background of Red.”[646] Nathan later tried to tell him that communism was bad for a playwright.

  The members of the aristocracy whom O’Casey knew and liked were not exempt from this comradely hug: he tried to insinuate to Lady Astor that because of her good heart — and because of his — she must be on his side, i.e. that of communism. But he acceded at the same time to Lady Astor’s charge that Russia was killing all her intelligent people, that communism hadn’t come yet to Russia. The revolution, however, was definitely coming to England: to Harold Macmillan he wrote: “When I talk to you, I am in the Revolution: & when you talk to others, you are in the Revolution. How? Because we are intelligent men; & intelligent men must ever be thinking of bringing about a change.”[647]

  He was even more explicit to his publisher in October 1939, when Macmillan and his family moved out of Birch Grove, which became a nursery school during the war, into a cottage in the stables: he was sure, he said, that he and Lady Dorothy would be happy in a cottage because they were “Communists in heart”.[648]

  *

  Why did O’Casey withdraw so much into a world of his own, and why did he dissipate his energies in needless but self-gratifying squabbles during the time the family lived in Battersea, from late in 1934 until late in 1938? Part of the answer lay in the nature of that twilight world of the 1930s when it was still possible in England to remain out of touch with the reality of what was happening in Central Europe, in Hitler’s Germany, and to the East, in Stalin’s Russia. But the main part of the answer, in O’Casey’s case, lay in his relationship with Shaw.

  With this last of his necessary father-figures O’Casey no longer had the thrust of cynicism — perhaps because he was now in his middle fifties — with which to penetrate the weaknesses of a man whom he worshipped with a passion borde
ring on idolatry. He did not perceive the appalling extent to which Shaw had suffered from shyness and vanity. He did not understand that his early setbacks had made Shaw develop a watertight but completely artificial self-esteem, or how he could, through wit, mockery and flattery, keep the whole world at a distance. O’Casey was quite needlessly in awe of Shaw: while not his equal as a rumorist, he had an emotional range and power so much greater than the older man’s; greater humility and naturalness; above all, genuine passion. And, as Macmillan noted, O’Casey was always so much more attractive a character.

  But he felt himself an intellectual inferior. Would Shaw disillusion him? Never; because O’Casey was for Shaw a reflection of the problems he had himself suffered as a young man: and he elicited admiration from this mirror-image of himself, whose glass had a rougher density. “Your husband was luckier than all of us,” Shaw told Eileen; “my family was very middle of the road, respectable — and restricted about what the neighbours would say. But you — you got the meat.”[649]

  Sometimes O’Casey would go out of his way to show subservience to him, tailoring his judgments and making quite untrue assertions, such as that when he read of Shaw’s shyness, he realised “that this very shyness & pride is deeply set in my own nature.”[650] He preferred it to the hypocrisy and complacency of the English: “No wonder Swift went mad.” Pride certainly was set deeply in O’Casey’s nature, but not shyness.

  It may be the fact that Shaw never tried to wield direct authority over O’Casey that made O’Casey blind to his shortcomings, the most significant of which Shaw was only too much aware of himself. His bid to be a sage and propagandist first, and an artist and entertainer only incidentally and second, had failed lamentably: only in the second role was he universally admired. He was the twentieth century’s first and most famous victim of what later became known in some circles as “repressive tolerance”: his witty castigation of morals amused those at whom it was directed, acting as a safety valve for their repressed finer feelings, enabling them to compete with each other and to exploit the poor (or the rich) even more vigorously than before.

  Both Shaw and O’Casey held the belief that the mass of the people was incapable of forming its own judgments, and that, therefore, the fact that it rejected communism meant it had been seduced, bribed, or brainwashed by the capitalist authorities. Indeed, Shaw’s disenchantment with the British liberal democratic process had become final: in his view Ramsay MacDonald, by reaching an accommodation with the privileged and the powerful, had put an end to socialism working. When it came to Stalin, Shaw’s attitude might be summed up as, “What does a bit more slaughter matter — as long as true socialism is the result. After all, Stalin was not unique in history …” He didn’t, perhaps, see that the slaughter would not be negligible, nor that it was unlikely to cease, in his own lifetime at least. Shaw’s imagination — and by extension O’Casey’s — was too gentlemanly, too much a product of the essentially decent moral atmosphere of the late-nineteenth-century British Empire, to envisage the totalitarian system of George Orwell in Animal Farm and 1984.

  With the new play he was writing between 1935 and 1939 in Overstrand Mansions, O’Casey remained wholly under the sway of Shaw, making a deliberately outspoken statement in favour of communism, unrelieved by even a trace of self-mockery or ordinary humour. The Star Turns Red was a disastrous marriage of the two least successful sides of his rich and broad talent — the tendency to crude, rhetorical propaganda, and the desire to turn the nihilism of expressionism into a poetry of optimism. Dedicated to those who “fought through the great Dublin lock-out” of 1913, the time is set as “Tomorrow, or the next day”, but really smacks of the present. Red Jim, the hero, might have been based on Larkin, but he bears a greater affinity to some of the worst stereotypes of Auden and Brecht. O’Casey gives the pretty girl, Julia, who supplies some sexy touches, the most memorable line: “It’s the bitter heart that flaunts the bitter word!”[651] The play was unrepentantly expressionistic in style and overtly propagandist: the cast of characters, which includes a Purple Priest, Four Saffron Shirt Troopers, a Woman with Withered Child, a Young Man with Cough — as well as the hero, Red Jim — gives the work’s flavour exactly.

  O’Casey had begun The Star Turns Red as far back as 1925, when he was still living in Dublin’s North Circular Road. At that time he called it The Red Star. It figured in his correspondence with a Soviet woman living in Berlin who had written to O’Casey to ask what he was working on. As he was busy attending rehearsals of The Plough and the Stars O’Casey made little progress, although he did tell Lady Gregory that he had hopes of writing what he called a “Labour play”. The idea came from the visit of Jim Larkin to the Soviet Union in 1924, when he had gone to represent Ireland at the Fifth Communist International: O’Casey was conscious that he still hadn’t paid full tribute to his old friend and hero, nor had he brought to a successful conclusion his attempt, in The Harvest Festival, to write a play about the great Dublin lock-out of 1913, in which he had been so active. However, before he ceased contact with his Russian admirer, Raisa Lomonosova, he sent her a telegram late in 1925: STAR STILL A NEBULA.[652]

  So it remained for over ten years. So indeed, for some, it remains today. But the metaphorical leap that O’Casey’s mind accomplished in changing the title before the play was finally published, in February 1940 (causing, as he had hoped in 1937, “another bloody big row” — it was published during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and therefore, at least technically, achieved the feat of serving as “enemy propaganda”), was over the gap between the Red Star of Lenin and the original Star of Bethlehem. He saw his Red Jim, based on Larkin, as John the Baptist heralding the rise of communism. By late 1938, having rejected another idea, of substituting Jack Cade as hero (and offering him to Shaw as a communist St Joan), he felt he was making progress, and he finished the script in early 1939.

  Upon its completion the familiar interior self-justifying process took over. He no longer had any severe or challenging critics, although he could joke a little with Nathan when dispatching the completed Star Turns Red: “As well as being something of a confession of faith, it is, I think, a play; &, possibly, the best of its kind which has been written — which isn’t saying a lot. There are, anyhow, some good lines in it. It is, I think, much more compact than Within the Gates, though I don’t yet know just how much of the verse form ought to go to a play dealing with present-day life.”[653] He sent another copy to Richard Madden, one to Harold Macmillan, and a fourth, by registered post, to Timofei Rokotov in Moscow, adding “with deep regards to All who are working to add to the power and greatness of the Great Soviet Nation”.

  The so-called non-aggression pact which Stalin signed with Hitler in August 1939, prior to the bipartition of Poland, was cemented at the end of September by a Soviet-German treaty of friendship. Stalin then occupied Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, and made war on Finland; while Sweden provided Germany with vital iron ore, and enabled it to overfly its country (later helping to secure the conquest of Norway), the Soviets supplied Hitler with enormous quantities of raw materials, including a million tons of grain and 900,000 tons of oil, in return for arms and ammunition. Mussolini, Hitler’s long-term ally, gave it as his opinion that Stalin, no longer a Bolshevik, now practised “a kind of Slavonic fascism”.[654]

  Rokotov soon wrote back to O’Casey, offering to publish The Star Turns Red in Moscow, which delighted the playwright; he had, however, to refuse: Macmillans declined to allow more than an extract to appear. How publication in Moscow could affect British sales — the excuse O’Casey gave Rokotov — was not explained. When, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, O’Casey realised that The Star Turns Red did not stand much chance of a production in England; any aspersions cast on its quality could be safely put down to the political climate.

  O’Casey thought that the Russo-German pact had come about because Stalin was a “realist”:

 
The fact of an understanding between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia is a long story; but it was inevitable, and anyone who watched things for the past couple of years could see it coming. I myself shocked some Liberals here nearly a year ago by saying that an understanding between Germany and Russia was not only possible but certain, if England and France refused to take their chance of forming a peace front. Had Russia undertaken to fight Germany, she would have been left in the lurch as Poland was left; but Stalin is no fool, whatever else he may be. People make the mistake of thinking that communists are idealists. On the contrary, we are realists.[655]

  Harold Macmillan wrote to O’Casey in October saying he intended to delay publication of The Star Turns Red till the spring of 1940; but George P. Brett, president of Macmillan, New York, turned it down, saying:

  Not only do I feel that the publication of this play in America at this time would do you immeasurable damage, but by the same token it would damage us too. America is rabid against Communism … it would be a sure way of alienating your friends among the readers in this country.[656]

  Turning to matters closer to hand, but not wholly forgetting Hitler, O’Casey was now also expressing his view that the partition of Ireland should be ended: “Double partition”, he called it.[657] “It divides Ireland from Ireland, and separates Ulster from herself … A clique isn’t going to keep Dal Riada, Oriel, Tirowen, and Iveagh from the rest of Ireland. Ulster is as Irish as they make them. [In Ulster is Cave Hill, beside Belfast, where the Founders of the United Irishmen took the oath to drive the English out of Ireland. These men were Protestants, by the way.]”[658] He compared the English in Ireland to the Nazis, re-espousing his long-abandoned nationalism, which in the early months of the war turned to fierce support for Irish neutrality: