Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  He and Bella would quarrel, even after her baby was born: according to an unpublished sketch of his, he is reciting from a poetry book when Bella snatches the book and sits on it; when he tries to tip her off the chair, she threatens to tear up the book. The chair hits the floor and Sean pushes Bella’s legs up over her head — “If your drummer boy was here now, he’d see something worth while.” The argument makes the new baby scream, so if it happened Sean could not have been much more than eleven.

  No. 25 Hawthorne Terrace was a cheerful one-storey cottage of two rooms and a kitchen; rates and rent were both lower than the last address at which the family had lived when Michael Casey was alive. But there was a small garden plot in front and a yard to the rear, with a water tap and a dry privy of which the family had sole use. Sparsely populated and with wide tracts of open ground, the new neighbourhood, Susan Casey’s choice, was less central, and there were fewer professional people among the residents; it was a sober locality of ship’s officers, bottle-blowers and artisans employed in local factories.[30] Its character has changed little in a hundred years; now, as then, it houses the lower middle class.

  For the eleven- or twelve-year-old Sean the neighbourhood buzzed with sounds: “Women standing at their doors this side of the street were talking to women standing at their doors on the other side of the street, and murmuring against the confusion that had come upon them.” Relating more often to the world through voices and smells than through what he sees, Sean hears the drying clothes “flutterin’ on the lines”, dislikes the smell of beer, but rejoices in the “spice of Ireland”, the hawthorn tree, whose “scented message of summer’s arrival came pouring out in her blossoms, and went streaming down the little narrow street”.

  The Protestant vicar of St Barnabas’ parish, the Revd J. S. Fletcher, was an unkind man to whom O’Casey, in his autobiography, gives the name Hunter, because the vicar’s son, the Revd Harry Arthur Fletcher, later became a friend of his; thirteen years O’Casey’s senior, this man showed him great kindness. The senior Fletcher, if O’Casey is to be believed, persecuted him on account of his poor attendance at school, and insisted on his being punished when the boy one day turned on the schoolmaster Slogan (actually John Hogan, a hard-drinking Galway man). Goaded into a rage by being unfairly treated in class, Sean dealt the schoolmaster a savage blow on the head with a large and heavy ruler, following this up with a kick in the shins before fleeing home to the protection of his mother.

  It is impossible to determine whether this vividly created incident really took place. Only one contemporary of O’Casey’s at St Barnabas’ school has been traced, and this man, George Rocliffe, testified to Hogan’s barbarity but knew nothing of the episode. Rocliffe did, however, although two years O’Casey’s junior, remember that Sean missed many classes, and that when he was present, his eyes were frequently bandaged. “This led his classmates to tease him, but O’Casey won their respect by his eagerness to participate in their games in spite of his handicap. A determined youngster, he was not an aggressive one”, never to Rocliffe’s knowledge getting into a fight. All the pupils at St Barnabas’ appeared to Rocliffe well fed and comfortably clad. His bandaged eyes apart, O’Casey did not stand out from the others.

  The way “Hunter” is described by O’Casey reveals that by this time the boy Sean not only missed having a father, but that his sense of loss had developed, perhaps exaggeratedly, into a deep resentment towards any man who wanted to exercise over him any paternal authority.

  — There is to be no putting-off of the punishment, Mrs Casside [Casey], the hard mouth said; remember that. The caning must be given while the blaguardly act is fresh in the mind of the boy.

  The soft quivering mouth of the woman sitting on the butter-box covered with the old red cloth hardened to the hardness round the mouth of the minister.

  — Tomorrow morning, the soft mouth that had hardened said, the boy will be where God, through the doctors, may give ease to his eyes. The harsh hand that fell on him today shall not fall on him tomorrow, or the next day, and its dark shadow shall he never see again. Tell that to Slogan from the boy’s mother.[31]

  His mother’s protection was possibly not wholly beneficial. While Hunter clearly deserved the contempt O’Casey shows him, O’Casey was increasingly to adopt, and develop for the sake of his image, a violently anti-authoritarian stand. Where witnesses at the time, like Rocliffe, saw a gentle, pacific boy, O’Casey when he recalled his early days portrays himself as a lawless upstart, especially ill-disposed towards those men who did not give him unqualified praise or attention. But he worshipped women: the whole sex, practically, became in his eyes hallowed by the uncritical love and devotion his mother gave him. She even supported him when he “fecked” or stole a lump of bacon and an egg from Liptons: after admonishing him severely, “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on”, she dons bonnet and cape and leaves the house with sixpence to buy a “couple o’ nice heads of cabbage” to go with the bacon.

  For all his mother’s exclusive care, however, Sean was not to have the good fortune granted his three oldest siblings — although not to Isaac — of being educated to the age of seventeen or eighteen. In 1894, the year after Nicholas Beaver was discharged from the army and signed on as a porter on the Great Northern Railway, and after Bella and her baby daughter had moved out of Hawthorne Terrace into a cottage of their own, Sean, not quite fourteen years old, was sent out to work. Although his attendance record at St Barnabas’ School had been poor, he had benefited enormously from his qualified sister’s constant presence at Hawthorne Terrace. She tutored him at home and he could read, even on his own admission, the stories in The Boys of London and New York.

  He was now thin and lanky, with masses of hair which his mother was at pains to brush back from his forehead. His first job interview was with the wholesale chandlers, Hampton and Leedon, on the same side of Henry Street as the General Post Office from which the defeated Republicans were to break out in 1916. And so he set out one warm spring day in 1894, dressed in an Eton collar and blue Melton coat, carrying a reference from “Isabella Beaver”, as his sister signed herself, to meet Mr Anthony Deverell, one of two brothers who owned the firm. Upon learning that O’Casey was a Protestant, Deverell engaged him to start at eight the following morning at a salary of three shillings and sixpence a week.[32]

  2 — The First Sword

  In November 1890 when O’Casey was a little over ten years old, Charles Stewart Parnell was overtaken by a sexual scandal, which, in the words of James Joyce, befouled and smeared “the exalted name”.[33] Parnell, the first of O’Casey’s heroes, had been for some time an important figure in Casey family lore: a Protestant aristocrat who led the Irish Home Rule Party in the House of Commons — it held eighty-five seats there, including seventeen of the thirty-three Ulster seats — he had over ten years raised Irish expectations of self-government to their highest point since January 1801, when the Irish Parliament was formally abolished and Ireland made part of Great Britain. Parnell was a solitary individual, admired across the political spectrum, by rich and poor, by Joyce as much as by W. B. Yeats; the latter put him alongside his earlier Protestant champions, Grattan, Swift, and Bishop Berkeley, although an antithetical tone later entered Yeats’s attitude:

  Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:

  “Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.”[34]

  Just when his party’s alliance with Gladstone’s Liberals seemed about to achieve power both for the Liberals and himself, when he was being lionised in English Liberal society and had been given the freedom of Edinburgh, Parnell was cited as co-respondent in the divorce action of a fellow MP, Captain O’Shea, with whose wife he had been having an affair for ten years. With the Catholic clergy mobilised against him, the party was irredeemably split, and although he tried to exonerate himself (at least with the clergy) by quickly marrying Mrs O’Shea, he made little headway
against the clergy. He died, aged only forty-five, less than a year after the verdict in the divorce case was handed down. The whole scandal was a grave blow to the Irish nationalist cause.

  Parnell makes his first appearance in the later mythicising of O’Casey’s own life at a particularly significant juncture — just before Sean’s birth, when the body of the “second Johnny” is being carried home by his mother from the hospital where she has waited in vain for medical attention. A festive crowd halts the cab, “bringing Charlie Stewart Parnell to the Rotunda with bands and banners, where he’s to speak on the furtherance of Home Rule for Ireland”.[35] “Ireland’s greatest son,” declares the cab-driver. “I’d sell me hat, I’d sell me horse an’ cab, I’d sell meself for him, be Jasus.”

  Parnell, a father figure for the whole of Ireland, is at once related to, even identified with, Sean’s own father, soon to die, and becomes the first of O’Casey’s father-substitutes, a strong but misty presence at first who is gradually defined more clearly and worshipped more deeply as the young Sean’s vision of life widens. So, when Parnell dies, in England at his wife’s home in Brighton, as a result of overstretching himself in a by-election tour of North Kilkenny in October 1891, the event forms the basis of a moving and dirge-like section entitled “A Coffin Comes to Ireland”, describing the impact of the death on the Casey household.

  The impact of Parnell’s death on O’Casey did not lessen, as did that of earlier Protestant Irish leaders such as Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, with the passage of years. Here was the essential difference between the years when O’Casey was entering his teens and earlier periods of Irish history: the pace of Irish nationalism now began to accelerate. Not only in O’Casey’s own retrospective vision, but in the work of Lady Gregory, George Moore, Synge and others, Parnell was a decisive figure; he inspired Joyce’s famous lines:

  This lovely land that always sent

  Her writers and artists to banishment

  And in a spirit of Irish fun

  Betrayed her own leaders, one by one.

  ’Twas Irish humour, wet and dry

  Flung quicklime into Parnell’s eye.[36]

  The quicklime referred to was cement thrown in his eyes by Irish workers in Kilkenny — which, as O’Casey pointed out some fifty-six years later in a letter to a friend, showed he got damned little gratitude for his efforts “to serve the Irish peasant”.[37]

  Not only Parnell’s fall, but the founding of the Gaelic League, by Douglas Hyde, to restore Irish as the national language, and the anti-jubilee demonstration of 1897, in which Yeats took part with Maud Gonne and James Connolly, the ex-British Army socialist who later commanded the Republican garrison during the Easter Rising — these were important elements in the nationalist ferment. O’Casey was at an impressionable age, and these events helped to form his vision of the Ireland of his time. It was as if the scene designers and lighting men were for twenty or more years hammering and sawing and moving material and equipment into position, and then — with the actors given only a few skimpy rehearsals — had suddenly to switch everything on for the Easter Rising of 1916. The whole of Ireland became a stage ringed with footlights, blazing with drama. O’Casey, as the witness on the spot, not only observed the preparations, he grew into and out of each act in the tragedy, as his country gave birth to a national identity. He was able, in the end, to record the process as much from within as by means of his observant but often cynical eye.

  *

  As stock boy at Hampton and Leedon, the wholesale chandlers to whom he later gave the mocking names of Hymdim and Leadem, to express his disgust at the Protestant mercantile superiority in his native city, his powers of observation were sharpened too, as for the first time he became interested in the processes of life. The hundreds of Hampton and Leedon employees were part of the lower-middle-class world of Dublin in the ’90s, a world whose vanities, aspirations and sad deficiencies, compared with those of the outside world, were delineated with scrupulous tenderness by Joyce in Dubliners, published in 1914. There was a significant difference between Joyce’s observation and O’Casey’s, however. Joyce’s characters yearn for the great outside, rebelling against the shabbiness of the Dublin streets. The atmosphere he paints is a claustrophobic one: everyone knows everyone else, gossip and details of personal scandal pass quickly from ear to ear, nothing remains in darkness and mystery. O’Casey’s view of the same world is intolerant and extreme — and more self-centred. He depicts the Hampton management as a conspiratorial hierarchy which calculatedly robs the poor and exploits the weak and helpless. The Deverell brothers embody evil:

  A cloudy sneer rippled over the tight thin lips of Anthony, and his bony fingers twisted round each other, like the snakes on the head of Medusa. From a side squint, Johnny saw his pallid face redden, and his frosty eyes glitter with a cold glare.[38]

  O’Casey too, like a character in a Jonsonian comedy, adopted a humour: his was impudence and he begins pilfering on a large scale, giving the impression that he stole anything that could be hidden under his coat. When his mother discovers this she proposes deeper and wider pockets so that he can filch more, and with greater ease. But was O’Casey’s picture of this activity true? He never referred to it later, in letters to friends, although he did mention, when he was over seventy, that he was sent to collect a monthly cheque on behalf of his employers from the Guinness office in St James’s Street; this hardly suggests that Hamptons considered him unreliable.

  Compared with Joyce’s careful revelations of sexual awakening in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, O’Casey’s awareness borders on impersonality. In Hamptons he apparently fancied a Presbyterian girl who sorted dusty china in an out-of-the-way attic, on a step-ladder which gave him a liberal view up to the “lacy halo” of her drawers. But when a more serious sexual passion threatens to engulf the two young Protestants, their innate puritanism slams on the brakes: “He was clawing at her skirt when her eyes opened again, with a start; she tore his hands away, panting and pressing herself out of his grasp, till she stood, breathless and flushed, beside the little dusty window.”[39] He becomes more involved in the girl’s response than in his own violence of feeling. Even as an adolescent O’Casey’s view of sex was highly stagey: not experienced individually, but presented as if someone else was looking on. At no time, in no room or location, it seemed, could the door be locked, and some privacy of thought or feeling be established.

  The unlocked door — a genuine symbol of Irish poverty — was to play a greater part in his life in the next few years. His brothers were becoming hardened drinkers, and while all three of them lived at home with their mother and Sean in Hawthorne Terrace, Tom and Mick, as serving soldiers, were absent except when on leave. Isaac exerted the greatest personal influence over Sean, with a result that neither of the brothers could have prophesied in 1894. Now in his early twenties and still working on the Express, Isaac had constructed a stage in the sitting room, and here the brothers, together with neighbourhood friends, began to act out plays; as Bella’s eldest daughter said later, there were parts for everyone including the family mongrel.

  But this was only the beginning: Isaac began to take part in charity performances, for example one at the Coffee Palace, Townsend Street, which included scenes from Boucicault’s The Shaughraun, as well as a minstrel show and part of Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 3. Isaac had been assigned the role of Richard of Gloucester in the last, and wanted his younger brother to impersonate the victim-to-be, Lancastrian King Henry. His mother was against Sean taking part, saying he was too young. But Isaac was her main financial support and so he had his way: he had also given Sean, until he began working, tuppence a week pocket money.

  In 1895 Sean had the chance to act in what had already become his favourite work, The Shaughraun; he later confirmed in a letter that this was the first play he ever saw, performed at the Queen’s Theatre, in Pearse Street, at that time a music hall. “It was a wonderful revelation. Then, it seemed the
world was lit by footlights.”[40] Although Sean, like Mick, had shown ability at sketching and lettering and had hopes of becoming a painter and designer, from the time he saw his first Boucicault, the theatre began to rival his love of painting. His father had always held that Shakespeare was the greatest writer of all time, but Sean, despite Bella’s sniffing at mention of the name, seemed inclined to champion Boucicault. In this he was emulating Isaac’s friend, Charles D’Alton, the comedian and actor-manager, who said, “Shakespeare’s good in bits; but for colour and stir, give me Boucicault.”[41]

  Dion Boucicault had been born Dionysus Lardner Boursiquot in 1820, in Gardiner Street, Dublin, just round the corner from Hawthorne Terrace. Boucicault grew up unsure whether his father was the elderly wine merchant whose surname he bore, or the prolific Lardner, originator of the 134-volume Cabinet Encyclopaedia, from whom he took his two forenames. The son wrote hundreds of plays, most of them indescribably shoddy and derivative, but in The Shaughraun (1874), his best play, he displayed a comic inventiveness which had a profound effect on later playwrights, among them Lady Gregory, Synge, O’Casey, Behan and even Beckett. What was daring as well as seminal in The Shaughraun was that Boucicault moved its stock Irish comic rogue from being a peripheral figure right into the centre of the play.

  “Shaughraun” means literally “wandering” or “straying”. There had always been an Irish vagabond or slave figure on the English stage, cunning, clownlike or simple. There had also been stock Irish characters of the more pompous kind, such as the braggart Captain Macmorris in Shakespeare’s Henry V. Boucicault, however, saw that if you put the two types together you might make something more than a stage stereotype. The perception was based on himself and his own superb skill as a comic actor: what if he could embody both the vain and insufferably ridiculous pretension and the parasite’s subversive wit in a single character? Would this not be something of a revolution?