Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  Later in the war Macmillan established a virtual overlordship of the Mediterranean theatre of war: “viceroy by stealth”, John Wyndham called him, and he had, among other unpleasant duties, to sort out the forced repatriation of White Russians who had fought alongside the Germans and the handing over of Yugoslavs to Tito’s vengeful Partisans, in the certain knowledge, as he recorded in his diary, of what would befall them. “He might have been happier among the books,” O’Casey had commented to Daniel Macmillan, unaware of Harold’s problems: yet he would certainly have done as Macmillan had done. He always claimed Russia had no territorial ambitions.

  As well as occasionally seeing Harold, Eileen went out to dinner in London with old friends such as the impresarios Sidney Bernstein and Lee Ephraim, who could supply seats for the theatre and give her a taste of her old life. Sometimes she would take two of the children, leaving one behind with Sean and their daily. She needed these breaks, which in no way detracted from her love and esteem for Sean.

  Life in Totnes did not altogether suit her, but she put up with it bravely. At one particularly bad juncture her face swelled up, her neck disappeared and her hands became grotesquely fat: O’Casey said, “It’s a terrible thing to have happened. But it’s a strangely interesting face, rather like some of those in Aesop’s fables.”[701] Breon drove her for treatment to Torquay; the doctor there told her later that she had had a nervous breakdown, and needed more gaiety. She took up old-time dancing for a while.

  O’Casey would never accompany her when she went out, or up to London. She accepted that he lived in his own world, and did not blame him for it. He was visited often by American GIs who, in civilian life, had been connected with the theatre — one such was Nathan’s friend Thomas Quinn Curtiss, who later became the drama critic of the International Herald Tribune — or who had taken courses in Irish literature. Elderly literary figures were soon to be in demand, as subjects for postwar American doctoral theses; and American university libraries would provide a welcome source of supplementary income as they began their exhaustive trawling for memorabilia. Some friends from O’Casey’s Dublin visited: Jim Larkin, in August 1943, and Jack Carney, who helped Larkin edit the Irish Worker, and with whom O’Casey corresponded voluminously on socialist issues. But he missed other friends; the only contact he had with Shaw for many years was a packet of signed postcards for Breon to sell at Dartington Hall to make pocket money. O’Casey still kept his life-long pleasure in smoking, cigarettes now having given way for the most part to the pipe, in which he smoked a blend of thick twist, torn into shreds and left marinating in a jar under a moist cabbage leaf.

  Prior to the war he had taken out Irish nationality for his children, presumably as a precaution if the Germans invaded England. Don’t, Shaw told him midway through the war, bring up Breon “as that most despicable of all shams, a stage Irishman”.[702] Breon was born an Englishman, breathed English air and knew English people, “having Raleigh for his local hero. To him his dad must always be a funny sort of fellow, let us hope beloved and admired, but still a curiosity.” O’Casey let the children’s Irish nationality lapse.

  Although Shaw and O’Casey did not meet again, their occasional correspondence was affectionate, especially in October 1943 when Charlotte Shaw died from osteitis deformans. A long and ingratiating letter written in 1945 to Shaw, asking if he could borrow two books to help Breon pass an exam, received no reply. Early in 1950 the Irish High Commissioner, John Dulanty, took Eileen along to see the ninety-three-year-old Shaw, who was ailing: Dulanty told O’Casey, “Herself and myself had a pleasant hour with Bernard Shaw, who greeted her with ‘Well, Eileen, you’ve still got your good looks.’ He was obviously glad to see her. (I wandered out of the room to give them the opportunity of a mild flirtation!) Amongst other things he talked to us, God help us, about his super super tax income poverty, and how but for an annuity which he bought years ago — ‘the first time I came into money’ — he would now be in Queer Street.”[703]

  With her eye for the great historical moment, and her great fondness for and loyalty to Shaw, Eileen went back alone to see him several times in the last year of his life. He joked with her and gave her advice about the children. He enjoyed the visits and in May wrote to O’Casey:

  My dear Sean,

  Eileen, still lovely as ever, gave me a photograph of the lot of you which pleased me so much that I have had it framed and look at it quite often. Your marriage has been a eugenic success: the Heir Apparent is a stalwart who must count me as a Struldbrug which is what I actually look like. I keep my wits about me much better than my legs; that is the best I can say for myself.[704]

  Eileen was one of the last to see Shaw before he died in November 1950, aged ninety-four. She found him looking “woefully thin, but his humour hadn’t abated, & his eyes gleamed as brightly as ever”. In his stark room, relieved only by photographs of Gandhi, Stalin and himself, Shaw told her that O’Casey was “the luckiest of us all”[705] because he had had freedom to play in the streets as a child and had experienced the warmth, as well as the deprivation, of working-class life: “I had a skivvy and a maid who used to leave me outside pubs: poor boys of my age humiliated me when I would have liked them to accept me.” He told her that “if there’s an Almighty, I’ll have a helluva lot of questions to ask Him”. Eileen said the two of them would get on very well. He made her stroke his forehead. She thought that he was back in imagination with his mother, wanting her comfort. It was wonderful, he murmured, to feel “the touch of a soft Irish hand & hear the soft sound of an Irish voice”.[706] Perhaps his last words were “his love to the O’Caseys”.

  Shaw did not remember the O’Caseys in his will, although they were perhaps the only family towards whom he had consistently felt family-minded: he left the bulk of his money and royalties to an alphabetical reform which would have made him immortal, and to institutions which had helped him and would reflect glory upon him. Yet, as O’Casey wrote in his autobiography, “His epiphany was the showing forth of man to man. Man must be his own saviour; man must be his own god. Man must learn, not by prayer, but by experience. Advice from God was within ourselves, and nowhere else.”[707]

  Shaw’s relationship with O’Casey had been an uncomplicated one: linear, unbroken by quarrels, serviced by common targets and mutual admiration. O’Casey once challenged him, at a lunch at Lady Lavery’s, about having to keep talking — brilliantly — all the time; he also decried Shaw’s taste in painting: this was about the sum of his criticism. “It’s up to Sean now,” Shaw had told Eileen, “to carry on the fight,” no longer recalling that O’Casey was himself now an old man of seventy. “Then it’s up to one or both of the boys if their lives aren’t wasted in another war.” And the girl? One may question how deep an instinct feminism was, even in this most famous male champion of women’s rights.

  O’Casey was greatly offended later when Shaw’s Ulster champion, St John Ervine, left out of his biography any mention of their friendship. He wrote a long, indignant letter emphasising their similarities and the bonds between them.

  *

  Eileen, too, received much praise from O’Casey. “I’m too used to you now to feel safe & comfortable without you,” he wrote during one of her absences. “I feel rotten — a full-up feeling in my belly & a stronger sense of being by myself.”

  Eileen’s mother, still addressed as “Mrs Reynolds” by O’Casey, was settled near by in a room in Paignton. Eileen would slip out of Tingrith, not telling Sean if he had fallen fast asleep, and drive over to see her.

  Kathleen Reynolds complained peevishly about every aspect of her daughter’s life, not least about Sean, and she continued her emotional blackmail over her real, or imagined ill-health. She also bombarded Eileen with letters, until one day O’Casey could stand it no more, and wrote to Sister Catherine, Eileen’s cousin, a teaching nun at Maynooth College, who had become something of an arbiter in these family quarrels:

  You must have heard a lot about our imperfect
ions, it’s time you heard about those of Mrs Reynolds “Something from the inner side of the world” … I have often wondered how an intelligent woman like you failed to see through her pietistic pretences … Her life, according to herself, has been but a never-ending litany of woe … there hasn’t a year passed that she isn’t dying: that a few more weeks will see the end of her in that she is riddled with disease — cancer, arthritis, valvular disease of the heart, asthma, emphysema! … I never met before a woman who could manufacture complaint as readily and as glibly as Mrs Reynolds … Ever since I came across her, eighteen years ago, she has been dying at regular intervals.[708]

  He then quoted “at random” from some of her letters to her “Dearest Eily”:

  [1942:] … My knees are so bad I cannot walk much. Would to God I was dead and out of it all. [1932:] … If you had seen the sister of the ward she would have told you how very ill I was, and am, and not fit to be worried. [1942:] Since Saturday my nose running and legs aching all over. I am not fit to be moving … [1935:] I am quite crippled with my arthritis. It is my neck arms and legs now … Things have gone to the devil in this house, no maids, and Mrs Burke is drunk at all hours. [1935:] … My throat is bad. Between that and my heart I feel very ill. Please send me some money as unless I have nourishment I will never get well. I wish I had a chicken as I cannot eat the dinners here. [“See, however bad her throat was she was ready to down a chicken,” O’Casey interjected here.] [1933:] My heart is very bad again. I don’t know how I am going to get through the moving job. It’s no use people with bad hearts trying to do things … Have you any idea where the net curtains are. [“The ‘awful pain’ doesn’t stop her from thinking of the net curtains,” noted her son-in-law.]

  O’Casey concluded his tour de force on Mrs Reynolds’s comi-tragic condition by telling the good Sister that her prayers were needed far more for this idle and selfish woman than for the conscientious, hard-working Eileen. The beautiful examples he quoted of the processes of life never, alas, found their way into a play.

  Indeed, as he wrote this letter he was finishing his next piece, Oak Leaves and Lavender, from which it appeared that he had his priorities wrong. O’Casey tried not only to do the impossible — namely, to render the average Englishman’s speech — but also to deliver a tribute to his adopted land’s behaviour during the Blitz. At its most propagandist the play shares both the method and the sentiment of Coward’s film In Which We Serve and his Cavalcade: yet O’Casey lambasted the British High Command for its lack of imagination after the D-Day landings, and was also at work on the third book of his autobiography, Drums Under the Windows, in which the abuse of his adopted land reached its peak.

  J. B. Priestley, reviewing the published version of Oak Leaves and Lavender, found that O’Casey

  has enlarged his method, heightened his manner, done more and more telescoping and symbolising, and piled on the rhetoric, to make up for the loss of all that Dublin flung into his lap, to show us what a Communist Celt of genius can do even with English life and character. Much of the drama has gone, and we are left with opera without the orchestra.[709]

  O’Casey got back at Priestley by calling him a “minor moper acting the part of a prophet in the wilderness”. He sent Nathan’s comment, “a fine play — far & away above any play on war he has encountered for years”, to half a dozen of his correspondents. Much later G. Wilson Knight applauded the play’s “eighteenth-century spirits and its extraordinarily skilful realisation of a society on the brink of death”.[710]

  Bronson Albery elected to produce Oak Leaves and Lavender, but as a possible director O’Casey spurned Michael Redgrave: “Pity [he] was so conceited — it is a baneful thing in any man; worse in one with talent.”[711] He declined the outstanding abilities of Hugh Hunt, calling him “not an Irish producer, anyway”. He scattered misjudgments like random machine-gun fire, over friend and foe alike.

  Finally Ronald Kerr was found to direct Oak Leaves and Lavender: he visited O’Casey in Devon, where the playwright spotted at once, he said, that Kerr wasn’t the right man to do the play, but hadn’t the courage to tell him so. An odd fellow, O’Casey found him, “one who could keep talking for hours without saying a single thing”. O’Casey ventured out of Devon to see the play at Eastbourne before its London première at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, in May 1947; he found it “a frightened thing, apologising for its appearance on the stage”.[712] Later, when he recalled it, “his heart’s blood pressed into his head, and all the world became red”. Yet Bronson Albery had clapped Kerr “on the back continually”. Later Kerr committed suicide: O’Casey’s parting shot was more in the vein of Marston than of Boucicault: “The fellow’s gone now, making his exit by way of a gas-oven, giving in a kitchen a better production than he ever gave on a stage.”[713]

  O’Casey afterwards owned to Breon that the play was a failure: “Even today, I leave behind me the failure of Oak Leaves and Lavender; having learned a lot from it, which I hope may serve me in the future.”[714] The defeat created medical problems: an X-ray of his chest showed, he told Daniel Macmillan, “the lungs scarred from silicosis”,[715] which in turn had caused the occasional pneumonic trouble. “This (they say) has wrenched the heart a little from its right place.” Yet royalties from a growing number of overseas productions were on the increase, and they had changed the Morris for a Ford. “I don’t get into it often.”

  18 — Divorce, Irish-Style

  “It’s hard enough to write, or try to write, one’s own life, but to do justice, or injustice, to another’s, is harder still,” O’Casey told Lennox Robinson,[716] who had served him faithfully as friend and enemy, when Robinson attempted to write Lady Gregory’s life, an idea he abandoned later in favour of editing her journals. O’Casey in his own autobiography showed fewer and fewer qualms about the deliberate injustice done to the lives of others as he waded deeper into controversial times and areas, with the third volume, Drums Under the Windows, published in October 1945.

  When informed that a book club wanted to distribute an edition of I Knock at the Door O’Casey had taken a swipe at Gollancz’s Left Book Club: “I hated his vulgar, cheap-looking editions, without the least semblance of taste on cover or contents.”[717] He was frankly amazed at the good sale of Drums — Macmillans had 8,300 copies in print — especially as he had felt less confident in it than in the previous volumes, but happy at the money. He was now better off than he had been for ten years, despite turning down the whopping offer, of as much as $100,000, to write a screenplay of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel for David O. Selznick in Hollywood.

  But if the public responded warmly to Drums Under the Windows, so that it quickly sold out, the critics, on both sides of the Irish Sea, treated O’Casey with the usual roughness and affection. Both the previous volumes had been banned in Ireland by the Censorship of Publications Board, for their atheism and gross immorality; Drums was passed, however, which led to a memorable review of all three by Padraic Colum, in Irish Writing:

  These memoirs show Sean O’Casey as a great writer who is prone to a great fault: the fault is wilfulness; it is shown not only in the unconventional incidents and expressions which he makes use of, but in an abandonment to his own issues and his own idiom. Take the first chapter in Pictures in the Hallway, the description of the death of Parnell as it affects Johnny’s family: it begins magnificently, goes on memorably, and then we come to lose patience because we think the writer isn’t going to hold back from saying anything that comes into his head.[718]

  The main damaging influence was that of James Joyce: Colum could not bear O’Casey when he “plays Jeff to Joyce’s Mutt”.

  Sean O’Faolain endorsed this view in his own publication, The Bell: whenever O’Casey “deals with the intimate, private material he can be moving, terrifying and sensible,” he said; “but whenever he comes up against anything that is superficially exciting or violent, such as one of those big public things,”

  he races off into pages
of rhodomontade, noisy rhetoric, embarrassing jocularities, heavy-handed satire, the most naïve kind of Joyceisms (“Dominus woebuscums”, “the Rebubblicans”, “all bankum”, “crowds of queerternions”, “Mutt Talbot”, “quiet as a none breathless with mad oration”, “their dustiny”) and into bad English.

  O’Faolain accused O’Casey of carelessness and of not working over his copy enough: “arrogant and presumptuous”, he called his attitude. Because, O’Faolain continued, a man had literary talent, it did not follow he had political judgment: Shaw had both, but Voltaire only the latter. O’Casey should have stuck more to literature.

  Certainly it was true that neither Macmillan brother dared exercise editorial control over O’Casey (beyond Harold’s advice to him to employ more commas), although they took pains over avoiding any possibility of libel in the books. O’Casey assured them that many of the passages queried had no likelihood of being read by those they concerned: that the persons mentioned were dead, that such-and-such a story was common knowledge, or, in one case, that “the ‘doctor’ here described never existed. He is purely a phantom of my imagination, as is most of the chapter.”[719] Clearly the publishers were not all that deeply bothered about O’Casey’s methods or intentions. They certainly never challenged him in the way Yeats and Lady Gregory did with his early plays.

  O’Casey, “creative and careless alike to the point of wantonness”, O’Faolain summed up, left an impression of those troubled years of Irish history “as if one entered a smoky cabin and, dimly, by the flicker of a smothered fire, caught glimpses of history from the half-seen figure and mumbled speech of some old angry prophet by the hearth”.[720] Yet he conceded that the description in Drums Under the Windows of the first appearance of the flag of the Plough and the Stars should be in every Irish schoolbook and prose anthology.