Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  O’Casey’s birth in 1880 he describes in terms similar to animal parturition, which shocked people in 1939 when he published the first volume of his autobiography. His mother, he wrote, clenched her teeth, “dug her knees home into the bed, became a tense living mass of agony and effort, sweated and panted, pressed and groaned, and pressed and pressed till a man-child dropped from her womb down into the world”.[10] This suggests that O’Casey had an extremely hazy notion of obstetrics, and had not witnessed a child’s birth, even that of one of his own. His wife, Eileen, later verified this. The notion that a woman in labour could find the anatomical resources to dig her knees “home” in a bed suggests that he had, for all his vaunted working-class earthiness, a middle-class fastidiousness towards matters of the flesh. That he was born with a caul, the womb membrane that sometimes covers a child’s head, seems incontestable, although he does not mention it in his first volume. His mother sold the caul, considered a charm that could ward off drowning, to a sea captain to keep in his cabin.[11]

  *

  The year of O’Casey’s birth, 1880, was marked by unprecedented labour unrest in Dublin, reflecting the scarcity of employment: demonstrations were as yet unorganised, although one particular grievance, the award of a Dublin Corporation sewer contract to a Scottish company, pointed ominously to the diminished standing of the Dublin worker in the face of competitors both from the north and overseas.[12]

  The neighbourhood into which O’Casey was born was comfortable and secure, however. His father, according to how one interprets the evidence, was either the rate-payer or principal tenant, even sub-landlord, of the large house at 85 Upper Dorset Street. Michael Casey may well have made up part of the rent from subletting rooms in the house. In any event, he and his family occupied considerably more than the single room which was the usual accommodation for a poorer family. They were respectable people, with a parlour kept swept and ready to impress visitors, with refreshments to serve them. The house itself was of brick, consisting of four storeys and a basement, and had been built in the mid-eighteenth century. Not far away was the birthplace of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, while round the corner, in Eccles Street, James Joyce later set up a fictitious house for Leopold and Molly Bloom.

  Contrary to popular belief, ownership of real estate was very common among shopkeepers and publicans, the class that formed the Catholic backbone of Dublin at this time. Some tenements were said to have five levels of ownership, thus ensuring a wide, but highly primitive, distribution of wealth from property. Tenement ownership (or occupancy) was by no means considered disreputable.[13] The grievances of those at the lowest level, reduced to living little better than pigs, showed on the other hand how stagnant Dublin’s commercial life had grown, for as a manufacturing town it had been overtaken by Belfast. It had all but stopped producing wealth and its people had, instead, become obsessed with the declining value of their property.

  The landlords had their own grumbles. In the tenement houses piping and gutters were stripped off and sold as scrap metal, banisters were used for firewood, corridors and privies soiled with human excrement; for average tenement dwellers, it was said, “to beat the landlords is the first great object of their lives”.[14] In 1914 the Lord Mayor of Dublin claimed that 30,000 eviction notices were served annually on tenants — roughly one for every ten of the population, although only a small proportion were followed by notices to quit. At the same time it was estimated that in a single year nearly three million pawn tickets were issued, most of them to members of the working classes, and the loans worked out at an average of two pounds, four shillings per head of the population.[15] (Joyce later, in a typical Dublin aside complaining of his supporters and hagiographers in the United States, said they “would bring out a collection of my selected pawn tickets”.)

  Tenements in Dublin were large houses under multi-family occupancy, on which the rates were paid by the landlord. The house at 85 Upper Dorset Street was not a tenement, nor was the smaller terraced house of two storeys a short walk away from it at 9 Innisfallen Parade, “below St Ignatius Road, beside Father Gaffney’s School”,[16] to which the Caseys moved two years after Sean’s birth. There, in what would now be called “unfurnished accommodation”, the Caseys had their own furniture, including, at one stage, a piano; Susan loved flowers and kept potted plants, in particular a most mysterious one, which apparently had no tuber, root or bulb: “in the spring it thrust up a rosy tip of life, and in the summer turned into a wealth of variegated leaves, garnished by thick velvety blossoms of a rich red, with a saucy blob of tasselled gold in its centre. She called it the Resurrection Plant.”[17]

  It was in Innisfallen Parade that the Casey children had scarlet fever, and were nursed by Susan; she put Tom, who did not contract the illness, in the same bed with Mick, who had the worst case, but Tom remained mysteriously immune in spite of his mother’s efforts.[18] Here, too, the young Sean faced the greatest torment of his life, and its greatest challenge. One day when he was five (according to him), “small, hard, shiny, pearly specks appeared on the balls of his eyes. He began to dread the light; to keep his eyes closed; to sit and moan restlessly in the darkest places he could find.”[19] His brothers, on the advice of a friend, plunged his head under cold water in a bucket to cure the weakness, and when he struggled,

  they pushed him further down till the water flowing through his nostrils gurgled down his throat, almost choking him, leaving him panting for breath, shivering and wet, in the centre of reproaches and abuse because he had kept his eyes fiercely closed underneath the water.

  The complaint was later diagnosed as chronic conjunctivitis, or trachoma, brought on by reduced circumstances; but the Caseys were in such circumstances only later, after Michael Casey died in 1886.

  *

  O’Casey knew little of his father, who died when he was six. The cause of Michael Casey’s death, as recorded on the death certificate, was “disease of the spine” believed to be the result of a fall. In recollection his son could offer only general notions of him, such as that he knew his Bible well, “most of it in the letter and all of it in the spirit”, showing that a man “could always go straight to God without passing round saints and angels”. Michael Casey knew he wanted to give his five surviving children the best education, and had worked hard to provide it. He had a fine love of learning, had studied Latin, and among his books, tucked away in a recess at the side of the fire, O’Casey listed d’Aubigné’s History of the Reformation, Milner’s End of Controversy, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, as well as the English Bible, the Latin Vulgate, and even the opposition’s version from Douai. There were Gibbon, Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott; the poets noted by his son included Pope, Milton and Keats. Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding was clearly a favourite with the elder Casey, while Bishop Berkeley’s more dangerous teachings, which supported God through human perception and cast doubts on the existence of the real world, were locked away in a drawer, it being understood such books were only for those minds “big enough to understand that they were rubbish”. The neighbourhood respected Michael as a scholar; to help him spend his life among his books he smoked Cavendish cut plug.

  O’Casey’s description of his father as having a “sometime gentle, sometime fierce habit of criticism” and as being “famed by all as one who spat out his thoughts into the middle of a body’s face” sounds very much as if the son were describing himself.[20] And the retrospective scene he makes of Michael Casey reclining crippled in a horsehair armchair with a spine injury, the result of a fall from a ladder which slipped from under him, while the young Sean, sent by his mother, runs out to buy him tobacco, gripping the money in his little fist, is rather stereotyped, although it may be true. Unlike O’Casey’s best autobiographical writing it does not seem to be based on his own memory, and was probably concocted from something his mother told him. It is also echoed in his own play, The Silver Tassie, in which the crippled soldier and ex-football hero, Heegan, confined to a wheelchair, jerks his way
round spying on his old girlfriend making love to his best friend.

  But while O’Casey was able to give Heegan a ferocious, bitter vitality, poor Michael Casey, in his son’s portrait of him, has none, or little, of that life. Sean attends his funeral, eavesdropping on the cab-drivers who arrive to pick up the mourners, and who boast of their drinking the night before. O’Casey’s acoustical sensitivity is beautifully registered in the way he almost scores their dialogue, receiving, as if in compensation for his damaged eyes, an enlarged delight in speech rhythms. Sean does not want to kiss his father: “— I couldn’t, I couldn’t, he sobbed. Don’t ask me, mother, don’t ask me to kiss him, I’m frightened to kiss a dead man.” No other views or reports of his father exist.

  *

  Although O’Casey says his eye trouble had already begun when he was five, as he continually underestimated his age by three or four years until he was well on in life, its onset should probably be placed at around 1888 or 1889. In his account in the autobiography his father is already dead when Susan Casey takes Sean to St Mark’s Ophthalmic Hospital for treatment with a Mr Story. The painful symptoms — watering of the eye, sticky lids, and acute sensitivity to light — today respond to antibiotics, and trachoma caused by poor living conditions, especially inadequate water, is now more a social problem than a medical one. But in O’Casey’s childhood the treatment was laborious, bathing the eyes in hot water, frequent applications of lotions and ointments, and the wearing of bandages; rest and the tonic, Parrish’s Food, were also prescribed. But the boy’s eyes did not deteriorate as feared, while in the long term the pain he endured was more than compensated for by a fierce desire to possess books, the only thing in life towards which he ever showed acquisitive passion.

  In the early parts of his autobiography O’Casey is intent on showing how he grew up defiantly individual in the face of conditions which would have stifled a lesser man: he blames an unjust and inhumane God, whom he does his best to mock and vilify, and a corrupt and occupying foreign power, the British. But there was another side to the Imperial presence; when nearly seventy, he recalled having visited Stonybatter, a North Dublin working-class area, as a child, and watched the redcoats going in and out of a soldier’s home there, and wished he was one of them.[21]

  It is hard not to believe that the older Casey boys at least continued to pass a comfortable if unchallenging time for some years after the death of their father. Christopher (Kit) Casey, Sean’s nephew, who was a stevedore, spoke out unequivocally against the picture O’Casey paints of his family circumstances: “They weren’t as poverty-stricken as the books say. He wasn’t a poor boy as depicted by some writers. While he was with the Caseys he never knew what want was.”[22]

  Other evidence bears out this testimony. The daughter of O’Casey’s sister Bella was photographed with her grandmother in the early 1890s: in the picture Susan Casey appears plump and well dressed. The photograph itself is the work of a professional photographer, whose services no slum dwellers of the time could have afforded. Another of the Casey grandchildren, Tom’s son, John Joseph Casey, described how when he visited his grandmother, which was often, he found her pleasant-mannered, and dressed in a spotless white apron. At mealtimes they always had meat. There is also a photograph of O’Casey himself, taken during the same period, which shows him elegantly dressed, in a suit of good material whose buttonhole displays a splendid flower. The crowning sartorial touch is a new soft flannel hat with turned-up brim and a cord going round under the chin. Also photographed were Mick and Tom, Bella and her husband Nicholas. Mick appears as a proud, broad little peacock of a man, an instantly recognisable O’Casey character.

  As the oldest Casey child, Bella’s advantages were considerable, and it was she who emerged from childhood with a coherent career structure: at seventeen she entered a teacher training college, passing the final examination in 1885, just before her father died. She then left home to take up a teaching post. For the next five years, critical to the Casey family fortunes, she taught and lived at St Mary’s Infants’ School, Mountjoy Street. There confidential reports from inspectors describe her as “attentive”, with “a very attractive manner”. “Discipline is well maintained,” runs another evaluation, “teacher’s manner is gentle, and seems to suit young children well.”[23]

  From Dublin records it can be established that during Bella’s tenure of her teaching post at St Mary’s, Sean began attending school there. Even he, in an unguarded moment in his early seventies, admitted his presence there, and recalled in a genuine rather than fabricated memory being promoted from wearing a red and black plaid petticoat, to trousers.[24] The records show that his attendance became more regular with the years, and that his standard of reading, arithmetic and spelling was satisfactory.

  In 1887, the year after his father’s death, he received the prize of Alone in Zulu Land for “proficiency in Holy Scripture and Church Formularies”, which he explained away later as having been achieved by his capacity to repeat from memory passages he had not been able to read. This seems unlikely, and it too contradicts his contention that he had no learning until much older; at another time he recalls, “in a bible Sean had had when a kid … a marginal note telling the world that Adam meant red earth”.[25]

  O’Casey was to tell Lady Gregory, when he was in his early forties and beginning to make headway with his plays, that he had not been to school until he was sixteen and up till then had not learned to read and write. What he presumably meant was “read seriously” — at another time he mentioned classics he had not read by that age; this was similar to the report that “O’Casey never drank” — what people meant by this was, “never drank heavily”. The aristocratic Lady Gregory, who had wealth and intellectual acumen but no great worldliness, was deeply impressed by his admission:

  Casey told me he is a labourer, and as we talked of masons said he had “carried the hod”. He said “I was among books as a child, but I was sixteen before I learned to read or write. My father loved books, he had a big library, I remember the look of the books high up on shelves.” I asked why his father had not taught him and he said “He died when I was three years old, through those same books. There was a little ladder in the room to get to the shelves, and one day when he was standing on it, it broke and he fell and was killed.”[26]

  *

  In 1887 both Mick and Tom Casey left their jobs in the Post Office and enlisted in the army, Tom in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and Mick as a telegraphist in the sappers. This represented a decline in their status, for serving men were mostly working-class Catholics while the Post Office was a Protestant-staffed establishment. The wound to their mother’s sense of social position was deepened when in 1889 Bella, up to that time the ascendant star in the fortunes of the Casey family, married an acquaintance of her brothers, Nicholas Beaver, a Protestant serving in the 1st Company of the King’s Liverpools. Two years older than he, she had clearly been drawn to his striking good looks and dark hair. O’Casey unfairly demotes Beaver from the rank of lance-corporal which he held:

  an’ I’m here waitin’ for tomorrow’s darkness when a girl that never lifted her clothes an inch above her ankles’ll have to take them all off an’ give everything she holds dear to the man of her choice in spite of me mother for ever pickin’ at me because poor Nicholas isn’t anything higher than a drummer, as if rank mattered in any way to a true-hearted an’ pure girl who truly loved a man.[27]

  This impulsive marriage confirms that the Casey children, for all their puritanism, basically pleased themselves, suggesting that Michael Casey, had he been alive, might have encouraged his daughter’s self-indulgence, or that Bella reacted strongly against her mother’s stricter and more typically Protestant attitudes. But the children were not especially ambitious; rather the reverse, even the beautiful and hard-working Bella.

  When she and Beaver married, Beaver had five years still to serve; stationed in England, he was in Dublin only on leave. Bella was living in a top-floor flat pr
ovided by St Mary’s School, and her mother, although she refused to attend the marriage ceremony, now moved in with her, together with Sean and his brother Isaac. The latter had left school at the age of fourteen and was working as an office boy for the Dublin Daily Express. The flat was in a building that is now a Dominican home for boys; its magnificent entrance hall had been decorated by Robert West, a famous Irish stuccoist, and the interior included a “Venus room”. It was not at all the cheerless dwelling O’Casey describes, in which Bella takes her bath — “she brought from the little yard a galvanised bath … Then she stripped herself naked, stepped into the bath, and washed her body all over.”[28]

  One day, against his wishes, Sean was taken by the newly-weds to the sea at Bray: he felt deeply alienated as they kissed, held hands, and looked at each other. Sent off to play on the beach, he cautiously watches the sea “glide in over the brown sand”,[29] and while dwelling on his misery fails to spot a wave washing up his ankles. He is then afraid his mother will punish him if she discovers that he has got wet — she believed sea-water “would decay you” — so he removes his boots to dry them, using one to beat a crab to death. Everything about the sea makes him sick, and he longs to be taken home to his nice dark house. When Bella forces him to say “goodbye” aloud to the sea, he adds under his breath “blast you sea and all that in you is, and each flame of sun that smites be damned forever”. Later O’Casey omitted from his autobiography this painful account of what may well have been his first trip to the seaside.

  Although the family was not as well off as during Michael Casey’s lifetime, they were still comfortable. But in 1890 Bella became pregnant, left her job and they had to vacate the school premises. Their new address was in a different area, over to the east and near the East Wall, and Sean who was nearly ten changed schools, from the one at which his sister taught to St Barnabas’ National School.