A less sympathetic view was expressed by Bulmer Hobson, a prominent Republican who was writing manuals on guerrilla warfare and who often dined with O’Casey on Saturday nights in 1909 and 1910 at the house of Seamus Deakin. Deakin, another leading Sinn Feiner and member of the Supreme Council of the IRB, used to invite O’Casey, said Hobson,
partly because he was an entertaining talker, and partly because we thought he needed a meal. He was an unskilled labourer, frequently unemployed … He suffered from a very distressing complaint; he had in-growing eyelashes and they had to be plucked out at frequent intervals — this was extremely painful and his eyelids were also red and sore … He was guided by his emotions and never listened to reason. He poured violent abuse on everybody who did not agree with him.[84]
Hobson’s character assessment may owe something to the unconvivial treatment his former dinner companion later meted out to him:
Bulmer Hobson … editor of Irish Freedom and head bottle-washer of all National activities, with his moony face, bulbous nose, long hair half-covered by a mutton-pie hat, a wrapped [rapt?] look on his face, moving about mysterious, surrounded by the ghostly guns of Dungannon:
Ireland awoke when Hobson spoke — with fear was England shaken.[85]
As if this was not enough, O’Casey heaps scorn on Hobson’s writings in Irish Freedom as “nothing more than hundreds of dead thoughts on thousands of cold, leaden slabs of words”.
Tom Clarke, the old Fenian who had spent half a lifetime in British prisons, was another prominent member of the Teeling Circle, in which it seemed at times O’Casey functioned as court jester, delivering himself of a wry song like Feste or spitting his venom at the audience with the bitterness of Thersites. Clarke owned a number of tobacconist’s shops, two in Amiens Street near the landmark of the Five Lamps, and later one in Parnell Square. O’Casey found Clarke impatient with the timidity and caution of many of the younger members of the Brotherhood. This he applauded, and became a staunch helper to Clarke. Clarke’s wife remembered O’Casey calling by for her husband, speaking little to her, “giving her only a curt nod as she stood behind the counter, and leaving with a shrug of the shoulders when Clarke was not in”.[86] O’Casey, in his dogsbody role, discharged without pay or publicity such tasks as the loading and unloading of copies of Irish Freedom, sold in Clarke’s shop, but subjected the older man to much chivvying about Hobson, provoking Clarke till he would awake from his doze, spring to his feet and, “fire flashing from his remarkable, eagle-like eyes”,[87] order O’Casey to desist or leave the shop. Clarke was to be closely involved in 1916 in planning the Easter Rising, of which he was one of the leaders; he was subsequently court-martialled, sentenced to death, and executed in Kilmainham Gaol.
Having transferred much of his allegiance from his own parish church to the St Laurence O’Toole Club, O’Casey now helped Cahill organise a pipers’ band. Among his first published letters, written in 1910, was a fund-raising circular dispatched to various local worthies who might be counted on to support the “strictly non-sectarian and non-party” revival of the Irish War Pipes whose music “led the Irishmen to victory on many a hard fought field”.[88] This was a canny way to foster the nationalist spirit, ostensibly harmless, but essential to the morale of any future freedom fighters. O’Casey, to whom the idea of a band had an instantaneous appeal, became the Hon. Sec., signing himself with an official flourish “S. O’Cathasaigh”. In the following year he sent the same circular, with a covering letter in Irish, to Lord Castletown of Upper Ossory, a well-known supporter of the Gaelic-language revival, enclosing also a highly competent drawing in red, green and black ink, of an Irish piper. “It’s surprising how the picture enticed people to send us a subscription,” he said later. Tom Clarke became the band’s nominal head.
The band itself, initially rehearsed by a flute-player as no expert piper could be found, was first seen in the streets of Dublin in 1910, making it the oldest pipers’ band on record — it still exists today. Marching in kilts knitted by Cahill’s sister, and displaying a banner presented by Douglas Hyde and Padraic Pearse, the pipers led the procession from Seville Place to Wolfe Tone’s grave at Bodenstown. O’Casey accompanied them but did not play. On one occasion he was brought before a judge by a policeman who alleged that the pipers were playing within the limits of St Mary’s church during a service. By the church gates they had been playing “The Peeler and the Goat”, the ballad of a goat arrested for high treason, to taunt their police escort. O’Casey addressed the court in Irish, meekly pointing out that the band had only been marching, not playing, and saying that as he himself had been baptised in St Mary’s no offence could possibly have been meant. The case was dismissed. One night Sean borrowed some pipes and practised them at home; the noise was so terrible that, according to Kit Casey, Tom’s younger boy, Mick got hold of a gimlet and bored a hole through the pipes.
The O’Toole clubroom was “as big a slum hovel as the [Gaelic League] one in Seery’s Lane, a back shanty off of Strandville Avenue, North Strand”.[89] Some of the pipers were also hurlers, and had a flag with the O’Toole emblem of a silver lion embroidered on it. Later O’Casey recalled many of his old friends, bewailing the “great scatter since I walked beneath the glimpses of the moon in the street of the parish of O’Toole”:
Tommy Lynch and his brother of the dour face — Feardorcha [the dark man]; M. Lawless, Mackey, called Lar, Colgan — a very devoted labour man now [in 1947], and a baiter of the poor communists; Carroll, the well-dressed, who married Miss Wisely — Molly to her friends; Fitzharris, gone the way of all flesh; Seumas Moore of whom I’ve heard nothing for a long time … Sean, Michael and Tom, the clarinetist; and last, but by no means least, the bould Kevin O’Lochlain.[90]
O’Casey omitted from this list another piper, Thomas Ashe, whose death at the hands of the British in 1917 was to inspire his moving lament for a wasted life.
O’Lochlain, a civil servant with a thin sunken chest and the odd capacity of flicking a book from the top of his head by exerting strong scalp muscles, dreaded smutty stories, as did O’Casey, but had the history of the Gaelic Athletic Association on the tip of his tongue. The great passion he communicated to O’Casey was for the writings of Bernard Shaw, whom O’Lochlain called “the cleverest Irishman the world knows, Sean. A wit of wonder. A godsend to men who try to think, who’s creating a new world out of new thought. Read John Bull’s Other Island and the Ireland you think you know and love will vanish before your eyes.”[91] O’Casey did not much want it to, and later, in his seventies, admitted to his relative good fortune: “On the whole, they weren’t bad days … and I would neither be unwilling nor ashamed to live them all over again.”[92] At the time his truthful response to the poverty round him was tolerance: “We were then, apparently, unconscious of the way in which we lived, and stayed so till Jim Larkin came to show us all how shocking were the conditions that surrounded us.”[93]
In 1909 the circumstances of the Casey household improved sharply, for the British Government began paying old age pensions and from January Susan Casey received the maximum allowance, five shillings a week. “That’s a feather in your cap,”[94] chortled Mick, who was still bringing home his respectable Post Office wage, or that part of it which he did not drink away: one day someone upset a bowl of stout and he was on all fours, lapping it up from the floor with his tongue. Susan Casey’s grandchildren now had strict instructions not to make a noise when they visited Abercorn Road, and had to tiptoe through the parlour in order not to disturb their Uncle Jack, when he was busy reading or writing. Kit Casey recalled being in the room one day with a friend who was fingering some of O’Casey’s books, when they heard “Uncle Jack’s footsteps coming up the stairs. Well he caught my friend with the book, The Imitations (sic) of Christ it was, and took it off him, looked at it and then he blamed me for it. Then he threw another book at me and told me to read it but when I looked at it I wasn’t interested in it and I told him so. ‘You know as much about C
harlie Chaplin and Tom Mix as Peter and Paul,’ he said.”[95] Later O’Casey inserted this phrase, slightly altered, into the mouth of Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock. Kit found his uncle a disagreeable fellow, who “never worked. Only fifteen months with the Great Northern Railway and a few months with a builder that he knew, but if his mother hadn’t some hot scones ready for him when he came in in the evening she’d get a scolding from that terrible tongue of his.”
*
O’Casey had hero-worshipped Parnell with the imagination of a child. His next great father figure had heroic dimensions, but was man-sized and real. In a passage deliberately echoing that on Parnell’s return, in “A Coffin Comes to Ireland”, Jim Larkin, the great Irish labour leader, lands in Dublin one day to address the Irish masses. As on that other day of bitter cold and black sky, Larkin’s epiphany was marked by harsh weather:
Through the streets he strode, shouting into every dark and evil-smelling hallway, The great day of a change has come; Circe’s swine had a better time than you have; come from your vomit; out into the sun. Larkin is calling you all![96]
But the time of O’Casey’s mind had never been quite the same as the time of the clock, and he had first seen and met Larkin at least two years before the “Prometheus Hibernica” arrived in Dublin to rouse his union to confront the wicked employers before the great Dublin lock-out of 1913. The Liverpool-born Larkin had come from Belfast, in 1908, to organise the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, then called the Irish Workers’ Union, and during that year had successfully called strikes by the carters, canalmen and maltmen, despite the hostility of traditional trade unionists, threats of blacklegging, and the high unemployment.[97] O’Casey had already persuaded the IRB to select a committee to see how it could be brought into closer touch with Larkin’s militant labour movement. O’Casey and a friend were chosen to visit Larkin, by now running the Irish Worker, to publicise the committee’s activity, and the enthusiastic Larkin promised he would do all he could to help. O’Casey’s other IRB colleagues ignored the contact made, and let the whole idea slip, leaving O’Casey nursing a potential grievance.
His new sword of light had, however, been located, and in 1911 he himself joined the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. A fellow worker in the GNR later claimed that O’Casey never belonged to that union, only to the National Union of Railwaymen, but whatever the truth, O’Casey was fast heading towards a showdown with his railway employers. Earlier in that year he had refused, out of sheer cussedness, to join a compulsory pension scheme. How his dismissal at the end of 1911 actually came about is once again, and typically, obscured by contradictory explanations and “Irish fact”. George Wisdom, a GNR workman, said O’Casey was working one day on the building site for a staff dining hall in Amiens Street, opposite Mullett’s pub, when the foreman, Reid, seeing him leaning on his shovel, reprimanded him, whereupon O’Casey snapped back. He was suspended for insubordination. Others say that as a casual worker he left by default, simply not turning up for work.
O’Casey had his own angle; the reason for his dismissal, he said, was that he had been overheard attacking working conditions in the GNR, and praising Jim Larkin. He wrote two letters, on 7 and 18 December, to try to find out the exact cause of his dismissal, but received no satisfaction; he then sent off his letters and the replies he had received to the Irish Worker, to create a stir and some pro-labour, anti-British propaganda. He rounded off what was printed with a biting appeal for justice: “In the department in which I worked (the engineering) the unfortunate men were at the feet of a sleeven English engineer named Whilden. Well, God made him, so we’ll call him a man; and a cold, wolfish-hearted foreman named Reid, in whom is neither truth, honour, nor candidness.”[98] He claimed, moreover, that in his ten years’ service on the GNR he had missed only about eighteen hours’ work; that he was a total abstainer from alcohol, and had been ill for only a fortnight — yet, he concluded, he had been “dismissed because he refused to be a slave to an Irish cur or an English importation”.
Whilden’s own memorandum on O’Casey’s dismissal acknowledged that the cause was his refusal to join the pension fund: “In addition his eyesight is defective and it is doubtful if the Company’s doctor would pass him — further he is inclined to be idle and has been warned on several occasions.” O’Casey omitted these considerations in putting his case in the Worker; it is possible that he did not see them. He later gave a further reason for his dismissal: his refusal to sign a form circulated by the Employers’ Federation, forswearing allegiance to Larkin’s union — though in fact the form was not in use until some two years later, after the 1913 lock-out.
Perhaps the most valid reason of all for O’Casey’s discharge lay in four words that he had added to his account in the Worker, after his description of the foreman, Reid. The words were “Of these more anon”. For by now Larkin had offered O’Casey the opportunity to expand on his views of the GNR in a series of articles for the Irish Worker, or else O’Casey had gone to Larkin with an idea for these articles. They represented O’Casey’s first big opportunity to express in print a succession of views, and he was not going to miss it in order to lift or turn another sleeper, or repair another rail — especially as he had now established his credentials as a working man.
The twentieth century, said Ibsen in a speech to a workers’ procession in Trondheim in 1885, would belong to the workers, and to women. O’Casey had fulfilled his aspiration and won his new identity in the fertile breeding ground of Dublin’s highly mobile society. His own obstinate character, combined with his mother’s devotion to him and her resourcefulness on his behalf, had maintained his freedom to develop. He would continue for some years to sacrifice at twin altars, of idealism and discontent, without knowing whether the fire that consumed his offerings was a purification or a waste, leading ultimately to victory or defeat.
4 — The Third Eye
“He could put a loaf on a plate and a vase on the table,” O’Casey said of Larkin. The two men had much in common, but with significant differences. When he came to Dublin in 1908 Larkin was thirty-two years of age, four years older than O’Casey; he had proved his power in Belfast with masterly organisation of the new weapons against employers: the paralysing dock strike, his campaign to stop people buying “tainted” goods — made by black-leg labour — and his volcanic oratory. He had managed to smash through sectarian divisions, persuading Orangemen and Catholic nationalists to march together in unprecedented unity. He achieved little immediately, though with the shooting of Catholics in the Falls Road by troops, and the mutiny in the Royal Irish Constabulary, the myth of Larkin’s power began to grow. He was condemned as a socialist, an anarchist, a papist, or, by the Dublin press, an Orangeman. He wore a dark, wide-brimmed hat — obliged to do so, according to some, to hide the third eye set in his forehead, proving beyond all doubt that he was the Antichrist.
Larkin’s background was more truly urban working class than O’Casey’s, although a grandfather had farmed in County Armagh and wielded a shillelagh to emphasise his Fenian opinions. As with O’Casey, there was always a touch of the countryside in his speech, a “glow of poetry and idealism”, according to one biographer. His father had emigrated to Liverpool where he worked in a factory for twenty years, while Jim himself began in the same factory as an apprentice. At seventeen he threw up the job and stowed away in a ship of the Harrison Line bound for New York. He was discovered, and showed his defiance of authority by refusing to work for the rest of the voyage unless paid the proper crewman’s rate. The captain was not impressed: Larkin spent the rest of the crossing in irons while rats ate through his leather toe-caps.
On reaching New York he was sent to gaol, and here began avidly reading literature and social theory. Even these hagiographical details were not enough to satisfy the Irish predilection for mythology: in one version of the stowaway story Larkin reached the River Plate with eleven other rebels who went on strike for better conditions, finally s
ecuring as wages a square-faced bottle of gin each day.[99]
Repeated humiliation at the hands of employers formed the basis of Larkin’s rise. He accepted every set-back or harsh word not as an individual, but on behalf of the lowest-paid workers, transforming the slights into a wider persecution of “Labour”; he took all his fellow workers’ sufferings personally. The blows to pride and dignity fuelled his sense of inferiority to such an extent that it erupted in a glow of superiority, and his rhetoric became flavoured with phrases such as that his enemies ought to “bow down before the labourer’s son”. But if in argument he could be savage, intolerant and completely disregarding of facts, paradoxically, he could also show unexpected generosity and kindness towards his foes. Infinitely more conciliatory than O’Casey, in no way did he cultivate, or sink into, a disgruntled or downtrodden appearance. He wore a collar and tie always, a waistcoat and well-polished shoes: in his lapel he sported the union insignia of the red hand. Yet he took, as O’Casey would in future take, his authority from poverty, and while in Dublin from its slums: “Hell has no terrors for me,” he answered a churchman once:
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 7