Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  The characters of Myles-na-Coppaleen (in The Colleen Bawn, 1860), Shaun the Post (in Arrah-na-Pogue, 1864) and Conn the Shaughraun won universal popularity for the Irish rogue-hero. His heroic mockery also accorded with the new mood of Irish nationalism in the ten years after Boucicault’s death in 1890: here were the traditional weapons, trickery and irreverence, with which the Irish had always fought their masters, but suddenly infused with new combative possibilities as Irish nationhood became more than a fantasy.

  It is not difficult to see why O’Casey responded so positively to The Shaughraun, for he was himself becoming something of a Shaughraun in life. The Fenian Brotherhood during the late 1860s had made unsuccessful attacks on the British, and Boucicault’s farcical plot involves not only a Fenian rebel on the run, but a police spy colluding with the 41st Regiment of Foot, along with other fantastic ingredients. But the play is held together by its hero, Conn the Shaughraun, whose lies are forgivable because they are so monstrously comic. His whole end in life is uninterrupted leisure, in parody of the idle rich who had long been Ireland’s landlords; yet when it comes to the various comic crunches in the plot, Conn shows himself resourceful to the point of glorious absurdity. After simulating death from a British bullet, he acts the corpse at his own sham wake, and, unobserved, helps himself to whiskey provided for the sustenance of the keening mourners. As his sweetheart points out after his resurrection, when his mother falls on his neck, then whacks him for his deceit, “If he hadn’t been murdered, he couldn’t have saved us.” It was not only by the speech rhythms of Boucicault’s play that the teenage O’Casey became intoxicated, learning some of the lines by heart, but also by the triumphantly irreverent attitudes behind those rhythms; he could not have failed to note that the best comedy often emerged from the most marked contradictions.

  Isaac Casey, too, under whose influence Sean lived at this time, was a bit of a Boucicault character: he fancied himself as an actor but, according to some contemporaries, quarrelled with the director, wouldn’t learn his lines properly, and was generally short on stage discipline, sometimes making his entrance from the wrong side of the stage and dubbing in his own lines. He had a reputation for being moody and snappish, a bit pompous: O’Casey shows him as unpredictable and liable to dash expectations. But Isaac’s passion for the theatre was constant; first a member of the Townsend Dramatic Society, which performed in disused stables, he later joined the Liberty Hall Players who, with proper sets and costumes, played to audiences of forty or fifty, in scenes from Shakespeare or Boucicault in which Sean sometimes took part.

  When extolling the virtues of Boucicault Isaac’s friend D’Alton had quoted a passage from The Shaughraun:

  FATHER DOLAN: I’d rather see her tumble down in death an’ hear the sods failin’ on her coffin, than speak the holy words that would make her your wife; for now I know, Corry Kinchella, that it was by your means and to serve this end that my darling boy, her lover, was denounced and convicted.

  C. KINCHELLA: ’Tis false!

  FATHER DOLAN: ’Tis thrue. But the thruth is locked in my soul (he points finger at heaven), an’ heaven keeps the key![42]

  declaring, “How could anyone beat this.” Isaac for a while acted in D’Alton’s company, the Mechanics’ Theatre, in Abbey Street, giving his brother a free pass to watch from the bench placed at the front. D’Alton’s brother-in-law Charlie Sullivan often played the leading Boucicault roles, with Isaac in small parts. One day when they were performing The Shaughraun they needed a last-minute replacement for an actor who had fallen ill. The part was that of Father Dolan, and Sean, being tall and ascetic-looking, as well as already knowing much of the script by heart, was quickly rehearsed, costumed, and had the make-up of a Roman priest hurriedly smeared over his face: thin streaks of brown across the forehead, wrinkles under his eyes, and flour over his hair to make it grey. Clutching a breviary in his left hand, and gesturing with his right, he appears to have acquitted himself well.

  *

  O’Casey had now left the wholesale chandlers where he had worked for over a year, whether of his own free will, or following a row with his employers over a fine imposed unfairly, cannot be verified. His own later account too easily slips into gratifying what was by that time his image of himself as a downtrodden but impudent and defiant member of the working class. His account of his next job, at Eason and Son the newsagent, where he worked as a van boy, starting at four in the morning, and which lasted only a week, shows him refusing to remove his cap to show suitable respect to his employers when collecting his wages. He narrates the incident proudly, feeling the “hero-heat that surged through Cuchullain in the core of a fight”,[43] displaying a mock-heroic bravery which O’Casey intends to be ironic. No recriminations from his tolerant mother appear to have followed his dismissal, so clearly the family could afford, if only barely, for Sean to adopt this stance towards the world of business and employment. He was now sixteen and it may have been at this point that his health deteriorated sharply: he was later to claim that he suffered so badly from beri-beri, caused by hunger, that everyone thought he would die or never walk again.[44]

  O’Casey said he obtained his position at Eason’s through the Revd Harry Fletcher, son of the hated J. S. Fletcher, a Trinity College graduate who was standing in as curate at St Barnabas’ during an illness of his father. Under the influence of the new curate — tall, kind and handsome, and roughly the same age as Sean’s brother Tom — Sean developed into a more deeply committed Anglican. His father’s books were what one would expect to find in the collection of a man all his life associated with Protestant principles: it was these principles which the most intellectually gifted of Michael Casey’s four sons was to explore over the next year or two.

  Reflecting perhaps the religious ambivalence of his father’s Limerick family, Sean responded enthusiastically to the High Church ritual which Harry Fletcher introduced into St Barnabas’ services. He was receiving instruction from Fletcher himself, who encouraged his wider reading and supplied him with books (out of church funds Fletcher bought books for poor children in the East Wall area); O’Casey also began at about this time to study Irish and to think of changing his name from John to Sean, “his right name”, although he had always been known in his family circle as Jack and this never changed.[45]

  With Tom convalescing from a serious illness after leaving the Dublin Fusiliers, and Sean disinclined to pursue anything — other than reading — more than half-heartedly, the Casey family resources were dwindling, and in 1897 Susan and her four boys moved again, this time to 18 Abercorn Road. The nondescript grey pebbledash terraced house, lying in the formidable shadow of St Barnabas’ itself, looked out from its upper-storey window on to the Great Northern railroad and the Royal Canal alongside. Over both of these a narrow bridge carried the pedestrian to the courtyard of the other giant house of worship of the area, the Catholic St Laurence O’Toole church, “with its ugly bloated spire”, to which O’Casey was later to transfer his allegiance, at least socially. As in Hawthorne Terrace the family had a dry privy and water tap in the yard, but this time, significantly, they shared the house and its amenities with another family, the Sheelds, who lived downstairs. Again O’Casey makes an important distortion of circumstances in his autobiography, for by placing the Sheelds family upstairs and the Caseys downstairs, he exaggerates the noise and disturbance caused, as he claims, by eight children always running up and down the stairs and shouting above his head; he also says that the Sheelds children were half-fed, dressed in shreds and patches, and forever quarrelling.[46] The house, too, according to him, was alive with bugs.

  The area was indeed a shabbier one than that of Hawthorne Terrace, with the docks of the North Wall several blocks away, beyond the cattle yards; but — and there are still neighbours who remember the Caseys living in Abercorn Road — it was not a slum. In what was to be her last home, Susan Casey strove with her customary Protestant zeal to keep up appearances. Bella’s and Isaac’s children
later testified to the spotless state of the rooms, the cloth on the kitchen table and the plentiful supply of meat, as well as tea, bread, butter and jam. Susan Beaver recalled her granny’s piercing eyes. One main cause of family friction, a nephew remembered, was studious Sean’s refusal to find work.

  In March 1898, on a lovely sunny spring day just before his eighteenth birthday, his head having been touched by the hand of a bishop of the Church of Ireland, O’Casey was confirmed a Protestant in Clontarf parish church. Here he publicly renewed his baptismal vows; sang “Veni Creator Spiritus”; and received, as he says, “a fuller grace from the Holy Ghost”. As he passed with his companion, Nicholas Stitt, into the church, he met Jenny Clitheroe, an early sweetheart, whom he had once encountered in a field of poppies and daisies and defiantly kissed, although even then, with her studies of Euclid and her shy grey eyes fixed on the future, she had been too grand for him: now as they walked by each other “she closed her eyes, and gave a little disdainful toss to her head”. Jenny worked as a cashier in Sir John Arnott’s select drapery house.

  But the richness of High Church ritual made up to O’Casey to some degree for his feeling of poverty. Future wealth of spirit was the promise:

  From the big east window ahead of him, there were the twelve apostles, baked in brightly-coloured glass, looking down on them, carnivalled in bellalluring robes of blue, yellow, red, green, black, brown, purple, orange, Hebrew umber, Chinese white, and Hindoo crimson, glowing like titan tulips in a Persian garden. The sunlight, now, came strolling through them, their eager faces shone with a thousand tints, their coloured cloaks rippled as if blown by a gentle breeze from heaven, their limbs quivered as if they were about to step forward in a sparkling procession over the heads of the congregation.[47]

  The splendour of this Anglican ritual had an uncomfortable sequel: the popular Harry Fletcher fell foul of the Loyal Orange Order: at first the loyalists began a hissing campaign when they saw his black cassock, defiantly spoke the creed while the choir sang and shouted “Popery!” But as Fletcher went on bravely challenging them with his fine vestments and ritual, which appealed to the poorer members of the church, they withdrew funds from him, flung stones at the church windows and generally made life so unpleasant that he had to contemplate leaving the parish.[48]

  He called one night on Sean to say goodbye and found him deep in conversation with his Catholic friend Ayamonn O’Farrel, a tram conductor, who had given him O’Growney’s Simple Lessons in Irish and had first called him “Sean”. After praising the young man for his industry at his books, Fletcher tells them the reason for his visit is that he is being driven out by his congregation’s “deep-set emotions of an ignorant evangelism”. After Fletcher has gone, Sean argues with O’Farrel that he belongs to the one Catholic and Apostolic Church, to which his friend replies, “I always thought yous were protestants.” Ah, ripostes Sean, “St Patrick founded our Church as he founded yours.” To be Irish transcended both Catholicism and Protestantism.

  O’Casey was now keenly learning Irish, although ashamed to say too much about it in public. And while he stalwartly maintained his position as a communicant Anglican, giving classes at Sunday School, his mother, her true-blue heart fortified by his continuing adherence to her faith and standards, suffered a set-back with Isaac, who one day announced he was going to marry a frail girl, Johanna, or “Josie”, Fairtlough. As he was the first of her sons to marry, one might have assumed Susan Casey would be glad; as Isaac was betrothing himself, moreover, to the daughter of a thriving family of grocers and tradespeople whose name went back to the Norman Conquest — genealogy being always an important consideration in Ireland — Susan might look for an alleviation of the family circumstances. Josie’s brother, William, was clearly set to become an influential man and later held office in the Transport and General Workers’ Union. He also owned a fleet of lorries which, in the preparations for the Easter Rising, he used for gun-running from Howth.[49]

  But Susan Casey was a Protestant and Josie a Catholic. The marriage took place in the Catholic Pro-Cathedral of Dublin and she refused to attend. She could be very severe and disapproving. O’Casey himself appears not to have liked Josie, calling her “stumpy”, a “perky-faced lass” with an air proclaiming she was a born lady. Isaac, however, seemed only too pleased to flee into Catholic security, adopting the superior tone of his in-laws and insisting his brothers dress properly when visiting them, which enraged Sean, who by now, having awarded himself the status of “poor scholar”, was abandoning his earlier habits of clerical attire. “O’Casey and Mick were commanded to wear collars and ties … O’Casey, the more bashful of the two, would redden and leave, but Mick would storm in unbidden, snarling he was ‘as good a man with a muffler’. And Isaac himself would greet Bella’s children with a broad, conspiratorial wink and caution them — in tones imitative of Josie’s carefully cultivated accent — ‘Now, boys and girls, we have to be precise’.”

  Demonstrating the Casey family’s almost Russian volatility of nomenclature, Isaac had with marriage become Joseph — he had loathed being called Isaac — and himself converted to Catholicism. But while he pursued greater middle-class respectability, the marriage did not transform his predilection for the easy life, and he still drank heavily, pulling his hat down over his eyes when he’d taken a drop too much. He drank not only evenings but afternoons, using the takings from his in-laws’ grocery shop, and paying for Mick and Tom to join him.[50] Fortunately O’Casey had already formed a strong aversion to drink — had squashed in himself that active ingredient of his brothers’ subsequent decline.

  With the loss of Isaac’s earnings, with the recall of both Tom and Mick to the colours for the duration of the Boer War in 1899-1900, and with Bella no longer working, the Casey household was finally on the downward slide. At first it was on a gentle and comfortable incline, making Sean skimp a bit on food and clothing but not disturbing his dedicated study of Irish, of German — he claims he learnt some German at this time — nor the leisured life he led arguing with his friends, attending nationalist or religious meetings, or participating in noisy demonstrations such as the anti-Boer War riot in 1899. There he spotted James Connolly, Arthur Griffith, and the lovely Maud Gonne, before the hoof of a charging police horse grazed his leg and split his trousers from knee to ankle. In this episode, as he reports it, he is then taken home by a glamorous fellow demonstrator who feeds him an egg and tea and retires, complaining that her skirt and petticoat have been “creased an’ twisted with the crush of the crowd”.[51] She emerges from her bedroom a little later dressed in a dark-green shawl, which is fastened with a large brooch decorated with the picture of a naked girl. This signals the loss of his virginity. After leaving the girl half dead from his amorous exertions, he never mentions her again.

  Close to his mighty mother’s side, O’Casey’s Shaughraun-like leisure in shabby declining Dublin was little interrupted between 1900 and 1903 by work, although he always had an enormous number of self-appointed tasks on hand: Susan Casey connived in his self-improvement, cooking and caring for him as ever. While he repeated passages from Shakespeare or Goldsmith, Susan did the washing for his sister’s family as well as for her own and was presumably paid for it by Bella; she also washed for another woman, her remuneration for this being sixpence and a glass of porter. His mother did more than feed Sean’s body, she fed his idealism during the first years of his full manhood. His Protestant nationalism was given a boost too, when the Revd Harry Fletcher was replaced, not by a regalia-sporting Orangeman, but by Edward Morgan Griffin, gentle son of a Methodist and ex-secretary of the Hibernian Bible Society. O’Casey got on well with him, joined his Bible classes and became secretary to the church’s Foreign Missions work. Griffin now took over from Harry Fletcher the role of mentor priest in the Casey family.

  O’Casey’s brighter conception of the Christian faith persisted. Mentally, he was broadening his horizons, but he was to remain a non-conformist Protestant in outlook even u
pon abandoning the Church some years later. He was gradually becoming more of a non-conformist in Shaw’s definition of a Protestant as “theoretically an anarchist as far as anarchism is practicable in human society: that is, he is an individualist, a freethinker, a self-helper, a Whig, a Liberal, a mistruster and vilifier of the State, a rebel”.[52] But in the period from 1900 to 1903 when he was embarking on manhood without work, dreaming for a while first of a career as a painter, only later of becoming a writer, O’Casey’s Protestant outlook was mingled with an ardent nationalism. Sometimes the two commitments were movingly fused: “A holy city’s our city of Dublin … more ancient than Athens; more sacred than Rome; as holy as Zion.” Yet he would never fight for her, for all too often she was also “Rotten Dublin; lousy Dublin, what had it for anyone? What had it for him? Poverty and pain and penance. They were its three castles.”[53] He knew even at this time, long before the drums of revolution and then civil war beat under his windows, that he would never be a soldier, he had neither the character nor the constitution. Even in the crowd, defying the mounted police in Parliament Street in the anti-Boer War demonstration, he knew at heart he was scared and it was no use pretending otherwise.

  His favourite brother, Tom, returning to Post Office employment after his discharge from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers at the end of 1900 (he had taken part in the Relief of Ladysmith), regaining by this time his former status and a decent wage, followed Isaac into marriage in February 1903. The girl he chose, Mary Kelly, to Susan Casey’s horror was another Catholic, a plumber’s daughter, far lower down the social scale than Josie and even unable to read. At least she and Tom were not married in a papist church, but even so Susan refused once again to be present at the event, in a Register Office. Now, in Abercorn Road, only Mick and Sean were left with Susan.