Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  Though O'Casey's family was nothing like the poorest of the poor, this was a life which he knew fairly well. His father died when the boy was young, bequeathing to his son a love of books, especially the sentimental melodramas of Dion Boucicault, in which O'Casey delighted to act. Their robust juxtaposition of farce and tragedy was a lesson he would apply in his plays, despite the raised eyebrows of some fastidious critics. O'Casey's idea of a well-made play was only partly conditioned by Abbey precedent: indeed, his autobiography recalls how he stood in a milling crowd outside the theatre on the night of the Playboy riots, consumed with curiosity yet cursing his inability to afford the shilling admission fee.4

  An even more potent influence were the conventional Victorian melodramas (which he saw regularly at the Queen's Theatre for sixpence) and the stock situations of the music-hall variety show. Hence his delight in the comic male pair, straight man and joker, Davoren and Shields, Joxer and the Paycock, Uncle Peter and the Covey, Simon and Sylvester, each duo traceable to the stock Irish types of English drama. Though accused by purists of perpetrating another stage-Irish fraud, O'Casey breathed life into a moribund tradition, so that it was later available to Samuel Beckett, in such couples as Didi and Gogo, or Hamm and Clov. Indeed, the younger Beckett would astutely link O'Casey's drama to the music-hall in a handsome tribute: "Mr. O'Casey is a master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sense – that he discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities. This is the energy of his theatre, the triumph of the principle of knockabout in situation, in all its elements and on all its planes, from the furniture to the higher centres".5 Despite their youthful pomposity, those sentences explain O'Casey's immediate acclaim from Dublin audiences, for he saved the Abbey from financial ruin by wooing large numbers of the Queen's audience to his plays.

  Before his advent, cynics complained that Yeats and his co-directors had a machine which tested each play for a mystery ingredient dubbed PQ (peasant quality); but after The Shadow of a Gunman audiences could see new kinds of character in an urban setting. Whether they were actually witnessing a radically new form of drama is doubtful, but certainly they were seeing elements of the variety-show in the revised contours of the Abbey play. These successes permitted the short-sighted labourer (then in middle age) to escape from poverty and they gave him the chance to challenge some of the emerging orthodoxies of the new state. While he entertained audiences with a song and a joke, he could question some of their ingrained assumptions. This Shavian technique had its dangers, of course: people, confronted with a sweetened propaganda pill, might learn how to suck off the sugar coating and leave the pill behind.

  Nonetheless, O'Casey asked vitally important questions at just the right time. Though an early enthusiast of the Gaelic League, he detected a fatal addiction to respectability among his cohorts, some of whom had "confused the fight for Irish with the fight for collars and ties".6 These people, he sourly noted, despised the labourer whose Irish was in truth far better than theirs. At about the time of his breach with the Citizen Army, O'Casey initiated a caustic analysis of the Gaelic League: "the problem of havin' enough to eat was of more importance than of havin' a little Irish to speak". By 1919 he had extended his critique of idealism to the sacred entity of socialism itself: "Self-realization is more important than class-consciousness. Trade Unionism may give the worker a larger dinner-plate – which he badly needs – but it will never give him a broader mind, which he needs more badly still".7

  Nevertheless, the playwright was marked forever by his early years as a loyal assistant and secretary to Connolly in the Irish Citizen Army. It was as a socialist orator that he had first developed his rhetorical skills, with the constant repetition of key words and sonorous phrases to create a rhythmical, rolling cadence, mounting towards a crescendo in the closing sentence. This is a technique to be found not only in purple passages of his History of the Citizen Army, but in many protracted speeches of the plays. There is one major difference, of course: the style used in the history to extol military action is later used, even more powerfully, to denounce it. As a style, it won worldwide acclaim in the 1920s and 1930s, especially among emerging black writers, for whom Langston Hughes spoke when he wrote: "The local and regional can become universal. Sean O'Casey's Irishmen are an example. So I would say to young Negro writers, do not be afraid of yourselves. You are the world".8

  That style could produce remarkable effects, as in Seamas Shields's commonsensical outburst in The Shadow of a Gunman: "I believe in the freedom of Ireland and that England has no right to be here, but I draw the line when I hear the gunmen blowin' about dyin' for the people, when it's the people that are dyin for the gunmen! With all due respects for the gunmen, I don't want them to die for me!"9 Shields, a man who has repented of his former republican idealism, orates from his untidy bed and is closer to O'Casey's views than any other character in a powerful, if finally coarse, play. He has the sharpness of mind to expose the ways in which war can mask its hideousness in the symbols of Christian belief:

  The country is gone mad. Instead of countin' their beads now they're countin' bullets; their Hail Marys and Pater Nosters are burstin' bombs – petrol is their holy water; their Mass is a burnin' building; their "De Profundis" is "The Soldier's Song" and their creed is, I believe in the gun almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . .10

  Despite this intensity, the character develops a shrewd line in self-deflation. Reminded of a time when he himself believed in nothing but the gun, he jocularly replies "Ay, when there wasn't a gun in the country". Shields may also speak for O'Casey in his assertion that his is not an attitude of cowardice so much as one of practicality:

  . . . you're not goin' to beat the British Empire by shootin' an occasional Tommy at the corner of an occasional street. Besides, when the Tommies have the wind up they let a bang at everything they see – they don't give a God's curse who they plug . .. It's the civilians that suffer, when there's an ambush, they don't know where to run. Shot in the back to save the British Empire, an' shot in the breast to save the soul of Ireland.11

  For O'Casey the twin competing factions of Orange and Green had become dreadful images of one another. However, a vital question remained: was this diagnosis that of a cynical, sidelined nihilist, or did O'Casey offer it from some alternative point of vantage?

  He had at least one thing in common with James Joyce: a conviction that the songs and stories of the past always celebrated the wrong people, the smiters rather than the smitten. For all his impatience with republican militants, he was deeply moved by the assertion of the hunger-striker Terence MacSwiney that it was not the people who could inflict the most but those who could suffer the most who would win in the end. Hence his insistence that real heroism often emerges wherever and whenever it is least expected, frequently in women like Juno or Mary Boyle. Yet this heroism, on inspection, is often no more than a sturdy refusal of all abstract ideals in the name of the suffering human body. Mrs. Boyle, for instance, may sound at times like a commonsensical socialist, when she tells her wounded nationalist son: "You lost your best principle when you lost your arm: them's the only sort o' principles that's any good to a workin man".12 But she uses the same cutting eloquence to deride the labourist politics of her daughter: "When the employers sacrifice wan victim, the Trade Unions go wan betther be sacrificin' a hundred".13 To her daughters insistence that a principle is still a principle, she corrosively responds that principles don't pay the shopkeeper. Yet she becomes the moral centre of O'Casey's play, which itself amounts to little more than an attack on all -isms and a celebration of those wives who pick up the pieces left in idealism's wake.

  O'Casey's code scarcely moved beyond a sentimentalization of victims, and this in turn led him to a profound distrust of anyone who makes an idea the basis for an action. If this was radicalism, Irish-style, it was a bleak illustration of the old truism that in Ireland "socialism" never stood for much more than a fundamental goodness of heart. As a d
ramatist (if not as a prose-writer), O'Casey proved no more capable than any of his characters of developing or analyzing an idea. He was at his best in describing the horrors of war rather than its causes: and he could show, with poignant detail, the defeat of entire communities in the face of imperial coercion, nationalist naïveté and the blindness of ordinary people to their real self-interest. But he seemed unable in any work of art to raise questions about the quality of thinking which could give rise to such blindness. He did issue his stirring demand, through Juno Boyle, that people abandon idealist illusions: she tells her daughter that war and want have nothing to do with the will of God: "Ah, what can God do agen the stupidity o' men?"14 In this fashion, he told people that they had the power to shape their own lives, to be the subjects as well as the objects of history: but he aborted the dialectic at that point in a play which resolutely mocks anyone who takes an idea seriously. Ideas in his schema are anti-life: those who spout aphorisms from texts, whether theosophical or socialist, all emerge in the end as blathering and blithering idiots. This is not just true of Juno and the Paycock but of The Plough and the Stars which, for all its flaws, remains a remarkable play. In it, O'Casey confronted himself with the greatest technical challenge of his career, the challenge also faced by Yeats: how to represent onstage a revolution in all its nobility, its baseness and its unprecedented turbulence.

  On the surface at any rate, O'Casey had many advantages with this topic. The Rising hardly needed to be theatricalized; it simply needed to be transferred from street to stage. Despite the patent sincerity of its leader, Patrick Pearse was, in the words of one of his staunchest female admirers, "a bit of a poseur".15 He wore an ancient sword through much of the urban guerrilla confrontation and insisted on handing it formally to the leader of the British forces at the moment of surrender. The theatricality implicit in the choice of date and location was evident also in the demeanour of the rebel leaders: MacDonagh carried a swordstick and cloak, Ceannt wore a kilt and played bagpipes in the lulls between fighting, Plunkett sported Celtic rings and bracelets and, having been condemned to death by the court-martial, married the beautiful Grace Gifford in a midnight ceremony before his execution at dawn. In casting themselves in these self-appointed roles as sacrificial heroes, they were conscious of re-enacting the Cuchulain myth. Even the Proclamation repeated the Gaelic conceit of Ireland as a woman summoning "her children to her flag".

  Yeats's poem "Easter 1916" is happy to treat the rebels as they saw themselves, but O'Casey is resolute in his refusal of such artfulness. A paradox ensues. The national playwright spurns the theatricality of the rebels and searches instead for signs of a defiant poetry on the lips of the urban poor, whereas it is the national poet who celebrates the insurgents in terms drawn from tragedy. O'Casey despises such heroics as boyscoutish vanity and he mocks the obsession with swords and uniforms as the decadent vanity of self-deceiving men. While Yeats lists the names of the warrior dead, O'Casey worries about the nameless civilian casualties. Where Yeats salutes the heroism of the rebels – while, of course, questioning its necessity – O'Casey goes farther and questions the whole idea of a hero. The Cuchulain cult appears to the playwright less as a spur to battle than as a confession of impotence. It is only the timid and the weak, he implies, who desire the vicarious thrill afforded by the blood-sacrificing rhetoric of Pearse, the speaker at the window in the second act.

  This treatment must have recalled for older members of the Abbey audience Synge's own mockery of the Mayo villagers in The Playboy of the Western World it had been a mark of their emptiness that they should have made a nonentity like Christy Mahon into a celebrity. In both cases, it was probably the critique of heroism (rather than specific irritants such as Synge's use of the word "shift" or O'Casey's juxtaposition of the Citizen Army flag with a prostitute) which roused nationalists to protest. The 1926 audience was tolerant enough of Yeats's refrain "A terrible beauty is born", but O'Casey later savaged it in his autobiography by titling one of its chapters "A Terrible Beauty is Borneo" (source of the famous Wild Man).16 The difference between Yeats's and O'Casey's responses can best be explained with reference to another play, The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht. There, a youthful radical had appealed to Galileo to defy the church inquisition and, having been rebuffed, lamented "Unhappy the land which has no heroes": and that is the voice of Yeats. After due reflection, however, Galileo responds with the sad wisdom of experience: "No, unhappy the land that is in need of heroes"17: and that is the voice of O'Casey.

  Not everybody concurred with Yeats's vision of the Rising as a Greek tragedy. At the end of the episode, one British officer sarcastically quipped: "The Irish ought to be grateful to us. With a minimum of casualties to the civilian population, we have succeeded in removing some third-rate poets".18 The remark, though flippant and insensitive, has a kind of honesty about it: the honesty of a man who is still too close to an event to grasp its long-term significance. It is useful in other ways, too, because it reminds us that for every person a great public event is, also, and finally, a private experience. For most Dubliners, the week was memorable because of the difficulty in finding bread and groceries. Such personal considerations might also explain the public activities of many leaders, if we could only know for sure: it has been suggested, for example, that Pearse's school was in debt by Easter 1916 and that a rebellion appeared to him to be as good a way as any of escaping pressing creditors.

  Apart from his political reservations, O'Casey had a personal reason for staying out of the Rising: he had to nurse his ailing mother, of whom he was sole support. This explains that poignant scene of the play which has the future rebels declare that "Ireland is greater than a mother/wife"19: O'Casey did not agree and chose to spurn the abstract Mother Ireland for the flesh-and-blood woman who needed his support back in East Wall. For years, through his work in the Gaelic League and Citizen Army, he had helped to wind the revolutionary clock: now, as it started to strike, he stayed away. Much the same might be said of Yeats who, as a young man, had been a figure in the Irish Republican Brotherhood: but in later years the Playboy riots marked his irreparable break with militant nationalism. Yeats was reported to be rather insulted that the leaders had not informed him before taking action. His immediate response was coloured as much by private as by public considerations: the knowledge that young rebels had been excited by his plays; the involvement of Pearse with whom he had collaborated; and, of course, the death of MacBride who had been his rival for the hand of Maud Gonne. Looked at in this way, O'Casey and Yeats appear as figures complementary to the rebel leaders. Men like Pearse and MacDonagh had begun as playwrights and poets but, having failed to satisfy their natures in art, turned to a life of action.20 O'Casey and Yeats had been political activists but, growing weary of the rigidity of many nationalists, had turned for glory to a life of art. It can be argued that while the writers were frustrated revolutionaries, the rebels were frustrated poets. Presumably, this was what the British officer meant by his quip.

  The power of "Easter 1916" arises from the balance maintained between Yeats's public and private responses: his bardic duty to celebrate the dead was countered, as has been shown, by a personal questioning of hearts which seemed to have enchanted themselves to a stone. The latter image was borrowed by O'Casey for Juno and the Paycock: "Sacred Heart of the Crucified Jesus, take away our hearts o' stone an' give us hearts o' flesh!".21 The final effect of Yeats's poem is a balanced assessment of the event, implicit in his subtle use of the stone image: for its very fixity and immobility cause ripples in the stream, just as the rebels by their unchanging fidelity changed everything. The tribute to those rebels seems the richer for being able to survive hard questions: it is self-critical, unlike the "ignorant goodwill" of the fanatic. "We make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric", said Yeats, "but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry".22 "Easter 1916" enacts that truth in its poised debate between public and private voices. This is not consistently the case with O'Casey's play, which so
metimes seems less a quarrel with himself than with others, a retrospective attempt to justify his absence from the Rising and to question the motives of those who fought. His political reasoning is sated by the Covey:

  When I dunk of all th' problems in front o' the workers, it makes me sick to be lookin at oul codgers goin' about dhressed up like green-accoutred figures gone ashtray out of a toy shop!23

  Later, he will remind listeners that more die of consumption than are killed in the wars, "because of th' system we're livin' undher",24 and the only war worth fighting is to improve the material well-being of workers. In all this, tainted witness though he be, the Covey speaks for O'Casey who attempts in The Plough and the Stars to compose a tragedy of irrelevance – on the irrelevance of the rebels to the needs of the people in whose name they act, or the irrelevance of the speechifying Pearse to the needs of a prostitute. The irrelevance declares itself most obviously for O'Casey at the level of language. Pearse is heard to use the resonant idiom of Christian religion to promote his military purpose ("without the shedding of blood there is no redemption") and this leads to a confusion of realms: the listeners think themselves excited by a political challenge, when actually they may be responding to the familiar imagery of the Mass. The Covey's materialist diagnosis is vindicated, even if his shying away from Rosie Redmond exposes him as a prude: the crowd thrills at first to the rhetoric of Pearse, and then discredits his cause by their looting. O'Casey, therefore, chooses to locate Pearse offstage, suggesting he is not really a force in their lives: but mere may be other, technical reasons for this treatment. Just as Synge's marginalization of Catholic priests owed much to his ignorance of rural spirituality, so O'Casey faces a problem which confronts all artists of revolution: how to render a turbulence which has eluded all previous framing devices?