Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  He and O’Casey got on well; Curry, too, was an idealist. O’Casey recommended an Irish friend, Leslie Daiken, to apply for a job there. He also told Curry that, as a communist, he was in favour of “preferential treatment to all in all schools — that is the adopting of educational methods to each child according to its needs”.[674] The fees were eighty pounds per child per term, but as Shaw, the convinced egalitarian and socialist, told Eileen, “The higher the standard for the young, the better, so long as it is good and simple. They will try all their lives to fight for better living for themselves and others.”[675]

  Yet at Dartington Hall, although recommended by Shaw, the children were expected to set their own standards — nothing was demanded or exacted from them. Neither O’Casey nor Curry seemed to know what to do if the children’s standards or needs got out of hand, became violent or self-gratifying. Curry, a conscientious man whose manner inspired loyalty among the children, with time became increasingly disillusioned, suffered a nervous breakdown, and finally concluded that children, in this imperfect world, were better off under some sort of benevolent dictatorship. Dartington Hall’s reformative zeal depended, in its heyday, on a strong if oppressive sense of order in society as a whole. It was, like O’Casey himself, Protestant in its inspiration. When, many years later, its principles became widely accepted in society, the school collapsed — but so, by then, had most formal values in society itself. Of course the reformers would never admit that their Protestantism was at the centre of any moral decline. Sex was the Achilles heel of Dartington Hall, although, fortunately for them, none of the O’Casey children suffered as a result of the freedom: they, perhaps more than most, were suited to attend such an establishment because early on they found agreeable pursuits they could follow. Breon became a painter and jeweller, returning after an art school course in London, to live in the South West; the daughter, Shivaun, attended the Central School of Drama, Swiss Cottage, later moving to the Drama Centre, before taking up an acting and directing career.

  O’Casey had first visited Dartington Hall as a possible participant in the Elmhirsts’ experiment. They proposed that he become a colleague of Michael Chekhov, nephew of the Russian playwright, who ran the school’s drama department. This could have provided a secure source of funds for the children’s education, but Eileen told Mrs Elmhirst, who offered the post to O’Casey, that it would be a catastrophe, and a sheer waste of anyone of his quality. Dorothy Elmhirst, a queenly American, overwhelmed Eileen and made her feel she was returning, unconsciously, to her younger days when she had been patronised by the rich. But Leonard Elmhirst, who, according to David Astor, was a “slightly scatty agricultural reformer”, gave Eileen no such feelings, and they became friends.

  Although Lady Astor visited the O’Caseys in Totnes — and they saw her once in her constituency town of Plymouth — she told them playfully that it was “dreadful” of Shaw to proclaim the virtues of such a school, an opinion O’Casey hotly disputed. They had now dropped out of wartime London society, and the capital city, for O’Casey, soon became only a memory — not a very pleasant one, as he recorded; its life was “too sloven, too outspread, and too voluminous to weave any conforming pattern a human mind could frame; the world-weaving activities here created but a bewildering tangle in London’s life”.[676] He even thought the poets and prelates buried in Westminster Abbey were smothered in the city’s impenetrable tapestry.

  Not only had London never inspired him — he had only Within the Gates to thank it for — it left behind its own “chassis”: their lease on the Overstrand Mansions flat, in the “most snobbish, bourgeois, locality in London”,[677] still had time to run. The O’Caseys had secured, as they thought, verbal agreement to their not paying the rest of the rent, but the landlord sued for a year’s rent in default of written notice. Sean and Eileen travelled to London to attend the hearing, staying at the Strand Palace Hotel. They found their plea made by an inexperienced young “junior” instead of the distinguished advocate they thought they had engaged, and lost both the case and the money.

  Although still living in rented accommodation — they could at that time, when property was cheap, probably have taken out a mortgage or even bought a house outright — Devon suited them domestically. They were comfortable. O’Casey had slipped back into that familiar tenant-landlord structure which, deep inside, answered a need in him. At any time the grumpy dentist owner, having given the agreed term of notice, could have repossessed the house, but for sixteen years he did not. There were advantages to being a tenant, even if by now a tenant of a very superior and famous kind. It made O’Casey a permanent victim, kept him in touch with the poor, the underdog, his spiritual brethren to whom he returned increasingly in his autobiographical expansiveness. It kept the old wounds open while providing the fuel for class animus. The move to Devon may not have been a considered one, but it answered the needs of O’Casey’s negative capability; it provided, as well as comfort and security, pain and uncertainty.

  In Devon, the O’Caseys hit upon the real world again, a world they could enjoy as a family and one which re-awakened and fed O’Casey’s imagination. He began chopping wood, digging the garden and working about the house; he shared positively in his children’s interests — Breon had become attracted to “the Drama”, as O’Casey told Nathan: “He likes American comics, films, & their broadcasts. Anyway they’re better than ours.”[678] Later on the town, local park and area became flooded with American soldiers of every hue and description: O’Casey chatted at length to a homesick GI from Kansas City.

  The war disrupted them at the beginning, when they had three poor East End evacuees staying in the house, but Eileen had plenty of help, a nanny for the children as well as a regular daily, and the evacuee children did not stay long. She threw herself into mastering first-aid and learnt how to deal with incendiary bombs by “creeping, done out in dungarees, on her belly into a hut filled with old furniture, set ablaze with magnesium”. Later they had a refugee boarder from Dartington Hall, a boy called Peter who needed, as Eileen put it, “a different billet”. The O’Casey children, however, not being boarders at Dartington Hall, coped happily with the double life of home and school, although they did not mix the two. Breon never invited other boys home to his house: Niall, more sociable, with a lively sense of humour, did not bring friends home either; later he played the trombone, and had an excellent ear for imitating accents. O’Casey, never resting from his work, happily tolerated their noise, careless as they were of “the tumult of mind afflicting the old codger”.[679]

  Shivaun, with whom O’Casey developed an especially close relationship, remembered him playing games with her: Grandmother’s Footsteps, Kick the Can, or Tink Tonk Tinker’s Man. He would impersonate a little boy for her or turn the table upside-down to make it into a boat. He was always accessible, and not at all authoritarian. Only once did he raise a hand and threaten to smack her — she was arguing with Eileen, who seeing the expression of shock on her daughter’s face, immediately took her to one side, exclaiming, “What have you done to Shivaun?” “Damn the pair of you,” said O’Casey.

  War had its hazards. To observe the black-out they had to cover more than twenty windows in the rambling house. Once in the night a bomb exploded locally, and O’Casey, leaping out of bed in the dark, tripped over something and “fell recklessly, dinting my back into the coal-scuttle”.[680] At another time, during an incendiary and high-explosive bomb attack, a window blew in, and the ceiling fell in the garage. Niall, aged seven, cried and “his little body shook” while he clung to his father who cuddled and kissed him “into quietness and peace”.[681] Tingrith had a comfortable warm cellar, reached by a trap door in the kitchen floor, where they could take refuge. They had also bought a steel-topped Morrison shelter which they stationed just inside the front door and under which they could also sit out the raids while the house shook from bombs falling nearby. One day when a leopard had escaped from a local zoo, O’Casey tried to stop Niall from
going to school.

  He kept up a stream of eccentric, uninformed comment in his letters to friends. The army needed a few slum products in it as leaders, he told Jack Daly, a former O’Tooler, now living in Oxford — like “the guttersnipe, Rommel”.[682] He began writing regularly for a Moscow magazine, while in the summer of 1942 he sent an impassioned plea to Winston Churchill to lift the government’s ban on the publication of the Communist Daily Worker. Although some of its staff resigned, the paper had remained loyal to Russia during the Hitler-Stalin pact. “Add another horse to your chariot of war,” he told the Prime Minister in Churchillian tones,[683] reminding him that the two of them were once members of Lady Londonderry’s Wednesday “Ark”: Churchill had been the Warlock, wearing a “Bronze Ark in the centre of a Stuart tartan ribbon bow”. He himself, he didn’t remind Churchill, had been the spider. But the ban was lifted.

  The Totnes Catholic priest, “Father Ned”, visited O’Casey four or five times a week for a meal and a chat, so that, as O’Casey said, “we practically went through the war years arm in arm”. They had much in common and would swap Dublin City lore and tales of odd encounters. Both loved this animated conversation and their shared sense of humour: “We heard the German bombs fall at midnight, and saw Plymouth a flame of fire”.[684]

  O’Casey’s productivity showed a steep rise during the early part of the war. The conditions of fear, physical deprivation, and hope in the England of the early 1940s were uncannily similar to those in Dublin between 1919 and 1923 — although, of course, England lacked the deep religious divisions. These conditions, and the courage he saw everywhere displayed by ordinary people, stirred O’Casey’s gifts nearly as powerfully as they had been stirred twenty years earlier. Between his arrival in Totnes and the point at which the tide of war began turning, in mid-1944, he wrote two further volumes of autobiography which, though uneven, contained some of his finest prose, as well as two further plays, Purple Dust and Red Roses for Me.

  *

  Purple Dust, which he had begun in London, shows a marked improvement on The Star Turns Red. An elaborate burlesque, it abandons propagandist abstractions for character, albeit character on the stagey side. The Shaw of John Bull’s Other Island was again a strong influence, as if O’Casey had set out, in a roundabout way, to update it: peasant stage Irishmen given such names as Jack O’Killigain and Philip O’Demsey, comically displace two stage Englishmen called Stoke and Poges (the village of Stoke Poges, where Gray wrote his Elegy, was adjacent to the unhappy Chalfont St Giles). The younger man, Poges, was based on O’Casey’s old Mephistopheles, Billy McElroy, the Belfaster of Scottish extraction whom O’Casey had for a time trusted, when “just a gaum”; now he dismissed him as “the most egoistic & selfish mortal that ever crossed my path”,[685] as he told the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid in 1949. MacDiarmid’s first wife, Peggy Skinner, had left him in 1930 to live with McElroy.

  The two middle-aged Saxons in the play have settled, with their Irish mistresses, in a dilapidated mansion in a remote part of Ireland. Apart from the genial pastoral confusion — a kind of “state of chassis” en plein air — of conflicting cultures from which the Celts emerge as demonstrably superior to the English gulls, Purple Dust celebrates pagan licence and primitive joy, or the “lower inclinations of the people”, as Canon Creechewel, the local priest, calls them. As the two crafty Irishmen detach the mistresses from their corrupt landlords, they echo earlier calls to freedom from Ibsen and Synge:

  An’ you, young girl, sweet bud of an out-spreading three, graft yourself on to the living, and don’t stay hidden any longer here. Come where the rain is heavy, where the frost frets, and where the sun is warm. Avril, pulse of me heart, listen to me, an’ let longin’ flood into your heart for the call of life …[686]

  The call of life? It may have seemed a little remote in 1940. The sound, secure, and fundamentally middle-class world which was a prerequisite for such dreams was in the process of passing, as the more brutal “freedoms” of the modern world — the imaginative self-expression of German fascism, the class “freedom” of Russian communism, the permissive, consumer “freedoms” of liberal American democracy — began their own struggle for supremacy. As an industrial power England had already fallen behind in the race, and it turned, in mid-war, to the pipe-dream of the Welfare State, in spite of each English person being said to owe “as much as it would take him to earn throughout a lifetime”.[687] Ireland was no longer the twentieth century’s cockpit for revolutionary change, but a remote and idyllic backwater: left behind, who knows, perhaps for its own good. Anyway, in Purple Dust, O’Casey indulged its backwardness.

  Devon, too, was an idyllic backwater, perfect for the cultivation of visions. Remembering his early youth in his second instalment of autobiography, Pictures in the Hallway, which in O’Casey’s inexact chronology covered roughly the years between 1891 and 1902 (but taking a huge step out of sequence to describe his brother Tom’s death in 1914), he recreated his theatrical apprenticeship as Father Dolan in The Shaughraun. I Knock at the Door had been too much a random collection of impressionistic sketches, as if the past were a religious procession of characters great and small. But, apart from re-awakening his long-neglected Boucicault instincts in playwriting (the best elements in Purple Dust stem from these), O’Casey gave Pictures in the Hallway much more dramatic timing and development. If the first book’s successes — Susan Casey (or Casside) hurrying home with the dead child in her arms; the wake and funeral of Michael Casey; Bella’s departure for her wedding without a word from her mother; the old vagrant Jew conned into replacing the broken window — if these are Boucicault set-pieces, in its sequel O’Casey achieves greater continuity and growth.

  His mother’s purchase from a kind Jew of a new suit for Sean (or Johnny, as he was still called in this instalment); the presentation of the clock to the Hampton and Leedon boss; the attempted seduction of “Alice” in the stockroom; the shenanigans over the buying and selling of damaged crockery to Biddy by the tight-fisted Mr Anthony: all these episodes are eminently actable. Other qualities in the book also reflect the renewed influence of Boucicault, now adapted to prose narrative: the awareness of vivid backgrounds (the painting of backcloths is one of the autobiography’s most consistent achievements); the reduction of individual characters to stock types or “humours” so clearly incompatible that the expectation of a clash — either comic or tragic — is always being set up, then either fulfilled or delayed. The sly, comic soliloquys, and the “staged” tableaux also owe much to Boucicault’s influence: “Shakespeare’s good in bits; but for colour and stir, give me Boucicault.”

  *

  Purple Dust had to wait to be staged; its publication, in November 1941, did little to enhance O’Casey’s popularity. James Agate was re-alienated by it. When the actor-manager Alec Clunes announced in early 1942 that he had plans to present the play at his Arts Theatre Club, in London’s West End, Agate wrote disapprovingly, and telegraphed Clunes, “PURPLE DUST ALL DUST AND NO PURPLE STOP LEAVE ALONE STOP.” When O’Casey with characteristic vehemence but unusual brevity told the Sunday Times that he had refused Clunes the play, presumably hoping by this avowal to salvage some pride, Agate turned on him savagely:

  Is he like that diva before whom Berlioz imagines some critic bowing low and stammering: “Your voice has the sublimity of the Heavenly Choir. Your trill is more amazing than the sun. Saturn’s ring is unworthy to crown your head. Before you humanity can but prostrate itself; deign at least that it embraces your feet.” In reply to which poverty-stricken meed the singer shrugs her beautiful shoulders and says, “Qu’est-ce qu’il me chante, cet imbécile?” …[688]

  Was he like Wordsworth, who required admirers en masse to service every page, every word, every comma? “Must every word about Mr O’Casey be jam scooped out of a silver tassie with a golden spoon?” Turning to the play, Agate judged that it was “not the moment to produce a witless lampoon at the expense of the English, too busy fighting for freed
om to answer back”. Purple Dust had to wait until 1943 for its first performance, by an amateur company in Newcastle upon Tyne.

  A much better play, however, was under way, and for once O’Casey did not pause to take up the cudgels for it — and endure further humiliation by having his letters rejected. At first he called the new piece At Sea in a Gold Canoe, but later changed the title to Red Roses for Me. The darkening of social mood in England, as the country stood alone against Hitler, found a truer reflection of defiance, perhaps, in the way O’Casey interwove various strands of his prodigious talent in this newer play than in his “skit” on the English, which he had not intended to have taken at all seriously or symbolically — or so he said, anyway. The plot of Red Roses for Me was lifted almost wholly from The Harvest Festival, but the intensity and seriousness of the earlier, rejected play was toned down and broken up as O’Casey wove into it more autobiographical experiences from his Dublin years (he was at the same time writing Pictures in the Hallway), from the, by now, failed communist idealism of more recent years, and his expressionist experiments, from The Silver Tassie to The Star Turns Red.

  Although he sentimentalised rather than deepened the central characters of Ayamonn and his mother, Mrs Breydon, a direct authenticity, long absent from his dramatic work, made its moving return, as when Ayamonn praises his mother for her care of him after his father’s death. Maire Keating, O’Casey’s long-standing early passion, reappears in the character of Ayamonn’s girlfriend, Sheila, a fine figure of a girl, who carries herself with a graceful sturdiness, but whose large, sympathetic brown eyes grow dim, now and again, with “a cloud of timidity”. Ayamonn sacrifices his love for her to his youthful idealism and his love of death.

  In one way it was an indication of O’Casey’s lack of development, that age and experience gave him no deeper perspective on the situation he presented in Red Roses for Me than the one he had known as a young man, and had written up as happening to Jack Rocliffe in The Harvest Festival. Yet if he never again progressed beyond re-living vivid memories of his youth, O’Casey found, in Red Roses for Me, a magical means of transcending those events theatrically — raising them to a level of symbolic importance — which gives that play a new dimension.