Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  I’ve lived there. Thirty-six years of hunger and poverty have been my portion. The mother who bore me had to starve and work, and the father I loved had to fight for a living. I knew what it was to work when I was nine years old. They can’t terrify me with hell.

  Like O’Casey Larkin did not drink, and campaigned vigorously against alcohol, and the practice of paying dock labourers their wages in public houses, with its consequent abuses.

  When he set out to organise the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union in Dublin, the mounting unrest was particularly ripe for Larkin’s brand of preaching: “the divine mission”, he called it, “of discontent”. He did not have to look far to find the social attitudes he wished to change; one such was expressed in a Chamber of Commerce paper, on the deterioration of slum-dwellers:

  Once drawn into the abyss they speedily lose, not merely their sense of self-respect, but their capacity for sustained exertion. At the same time the thought of all that is implied in this vicious housing system … should make us chary of playing the role of critic to employers who have to use this damaged material. [100]

  Larkin’s own weekly paper, the Irish Worker, began publication on 27 May 1911 and except for a few weeks when he was either in gaol or travelling abroad he edited all of its 189 issues before he left for America in the autumn of 1914. The stamp of his personality is evident in the colourful mix of satire, opinion, reportage, poetry and songs that filled its four pages. The Worker tried to combine Irish nationalism with Larkin’s avowed aim to free the worker from industrial oppression, but it was opposed by the Parnellite Irish Parliamentary Party, and Larkin would not tolerate spurious nationalist sentiment: he was condemned heartily by Arthur Griffith, who listed the consequences of his policies as “workless fathers, mourning mothers, hungry children and broken homes. Not the capitalist but the policy of Larkin has raised the price of food until the poorest in Dublin are in a state of semi-famine — the curses of women are being poured on this man’s head.”[101] The arguments have a familiar, circular ring.

  O’Casey resisted all-out commitment to the Larkinite position for some time, still thinking of himself first and foremost as an Irishman, and only second as a worker, in spite of his spirited attacks on corruption in the GNR. But, largely on Larkin’s side, the paradoxical spirit of Bernard Shaw — of whom O’Casey’s fellow O’Tooler, Kevin O’Lochlain, was such a passionate advocate — had seized his imagination.

  The figure of St Laurence O’Toole towering over the top of the Pro-Cathedral had changed the head of the holy man for the head of the smiling sage. Sometimes, when Sean was swinging his pick, the red beard came close to his ear and the musical voice said — Take it easy, man; don’t kill yourself for any employing exploiter … England cannot do without its Irish and its Scots today, because it cannot do without at least a little sanity.[102]

  He grasped at once the drunken side of Shaw’s teetotalism — saw how ideas for him had become an alternative to drink — and in this observation there was perhaps more than a sidelong glance at his brother Mick: “Then the musical voice went into a laugh, and added, Idolatrous Englishman and fact-facing Irishman are proved today, for though I shock you, you are fearlessly facing me, aren’t you? Of course you are; and a lot the better for it.” O’Casey had read the paper-covered edition of John Bull’s Other Island, while in the 10 February 1912 issue of the Worker Larkin published the shortened Preface; these more than coloured O’Casey’s thinking, they upset him. “— A man without a soul, said the Gaelic Leaguers; nothing is sacred to him — not even the slums!”[103] Two ideas fought one another in this new view of Ireland learned from Shaw: the Irish dream without efficiency, and the English efficiency without a dream. Efficiency, O’Casey concluded, could come from a dream, but not vice versa.

  *

  At the end of 1912 it was clear that O’Casey, in spite of having become a more frequent contributor to the Worker — sometimes he now signed himself Craobh na nDealg (the Thorny Branch, in deliberate contrast to Douglas Hyde’s pseudonym, the Pleasant Little Branch) — was still protecting himself with a shield of reluctance and doubt, although in an article, “Leather Away the Wattle, O”, he reported sympathetically on a Larkin meeting. When you attend a meeting at Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the ITGWU on Custom House Quay — later the nerve centre of all workers’ unrest in Dublin — he said, “You leave on the doorstep your Religion, your Nationality, and your Respectability.”[104] Of Big Jim in action, he noted:

  The lecture was brimful of force, argument, statistics, and humour. Jim’s himself! The Lecturer also used the wattle on some husbands who devoutly believe that from the day their sweethearts become their wives they bid goodbye to the world for ever and all the innocent joys thereof.

  O’Casey chastised the Gaelic League for offering only a “hesitating and an insecure hand to the General Worker and the Docker”, and concluded, “Although we cannot agree with all Jim’s opinions, National, Social and Biological, we are constrained to say what Schumann said to his friend Chopin, ‘Hats off, gentlemen; a genius!’” O’Casey made an attempt at this time to write a play on the subject of Liberty Hall, but abandoned it.

  Larkin received a weekly wage of two pounds, ten shillings as General Secretary of the Union; he was living in a rented flat in Auburn Street with his wife and three sons. It is not clear whether O’Casey received any payment for his contributions to the Irish Worker. He never mentioned his penniless state to his Gaelic League friends such as Clarke or Cahill, although he readily accepted hospitality; it may be that he was paid minimal expenses for some of the numerous secretarial functions he performed — in 1913 he was to add to these another secretaryship, that of the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee — but if so these could hardly have constituted a living wage. He continued to read avidly at night, his back room in Abercorn Road lit by a single candle.

  As late as February 1913 he was defending Irish nationalism against “Euchan”, a columnist in the Worker, who argued that they were living in a purely commercial world and that the battle of the future in Ireland would be between Capital and Labour. O’Casey now wielded a quite distinctive sardonic tone: “So, Euchan, you sneer at the pike. It’s not the first sneer that winked at the Gael from the face of The Worker. The weapon only bruises the hand that flings it.”[105] He challenged “Euchan” — the actor-journalist who in Ireland called himself A. Patrick Wilson, in Scotland, Andrew P. Wilson — to a public debate in “an old spot by the river”. Euchan refused with a scathing rebuke to O’Casey’s two columns of “aimless futility, tinged here and there with obvious spite”,[106] condemning him as a “poor old Rip Van Winkle … [with a] motley collection of prehistoric red-herrings”. O’Casey, bloodied but unbowed, clearly loved the fight, released a new flow of invective, prompting Euchan’s rejoinder, “What a complicated piece of decayed mechanism this writer’s brain must be.”

  O’Casey, still taking the part of nationalism against labour, was finding his allegiance more and more strained, especially in a controversial case which surfaced during 1913. The Revd Michael P. O’Hickey, Professor of Irish at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and a former President of the Gaelic League, wanted to introduce compulsory Irish at the National University, a notion which had O’Casey’s full support. He campaigned vigorously, “while cheers”, as he put it, “went rippling from one end of Ireland to the other”. But the official Catholic clergy, identified for the first time as an object of O’Casey’s hatred — a strong leftover trace of Protestantism here — turned on O’Hickey, calling on him to resign or be dismissed from his Maynooth post. He resigned, and a furious campaign was initiated to reinstate him. O’Casey thought all Sinn Fein Republicans ought to support O’Hickey vigorously, and although some did, among them Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill, the Professor of Early Irish History at University College, their efforts were not militant enough or sufficiently backed up by other Republicans. O’Casey outlined the reasons sardonically:

  —
We can’t afford to have the bishops against us, said the Sinn Fein Republican, and, besides, Dr O’Hickey himself would never give permission for such an action.

  — Oh, no-one suggests he should be asked, retorted Sean impatiently; and as for the bishops — shall we, who have nothing to lose, run away from them, while O’Hickey, who has everything to lose, be left to face them alone?

  — We’re with him in spirit, said the Republican unctuously. Now I have work to do for the Sinn Fein Bank, and I must be off, so slán leat, he said, speaking the only Irish words he knew.

  O’Hickey took his case to Rome, O’Casey contributing towards his expenses the money he was saving to buy a new coat; however, scurrilous reports were circulated about O’Hickey’s incompetence and insubordination in Ireland, and the case dragged on in the Vatican for years, while various evidence was considered. O’Casey portrays even Hyde as turning on O’Hickey.

  Finally the appeal made by the Pope himself to the Rota, the ecclesiastical court, was withdrawn; and O’Hickey died in 1916, by then a broken and neglected figure.

  It was just the kind of cause célèbre to become part of O’Casey’s mental furniture, and he carried it around with him for years, championing both O’Hickey’s dead cause, as something with which to whip the Catholic Church, and O’Hickey’s friend and supporter, Dr Walter McDonald. O’Casey believed that five years after O’Hickey died betrayed by his Gaelic friends, although they bought him a costly coffin and gave him a splendid funeral, with “me Lord Archbishop taking Hyde and his friends out to dinner, and back to the Cathedral again, where a rousing sermon was given eulogising the quiet-minded, harmless dead man for compiling five wee books of cuckoo Irish for beginners”.[107] Another of O’Casey’s swords of light was beginning to tarnish.

  *

  But there were so many shifts in belief and cross-currents of disillusionment in the years 1912 and 1913 that no one in Ireland quite knew to what they were committed. Padraic Pearse in 1912 supported a big Home Rule meeting, yet even then, according to O’Casey, was in his heart an IRB man, although “there was an IRB doubt about him”. Later O’Casey was to call Pearse “a great humanist, stretching out his deep affection for all men”,[108] but in singing his praises he had to ignore the fact that Pearse took the side of the employers against the strikers in 1913 and often rode the Dublin trams, a flagrant act of strike-breaking.[109]

  As a member of the Teeling Circle in 1912-13, O’Casey made a further attempt to unite his nationalism with his growing labour convictions by helping Pearse, then a teacher at the Irish language school, St Enda’s College, with his Irish pageant of The Cattle Raid of Cooley. O’Casey did the publicity, exhorting the Worker’s readers to attend, “The Boy Corps of Ulster hurling on the field. The news of Cuchulain’s wounding; the march of the boys to defend the frontiers, till the Hero recovers; the scene of the men of Ireland around their Camp Fires.”[110] But two months after Pearse’s pageant, the men around the camp fires became a reality, as the clouds of uncertainty rolled back to reveal two opposing armies, the workers and the employers.

  In August 1913 a form (the one O’Casey claimed he had signed two years earlier) was issued by the newly formed Federation of Employers, containing a disclaimer which ran, “I agree to immediately resign my membership of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (if a member) and I further undertake that I will not join or in any other way support that union.”

  Ever since Larkin had established himself in Liberty Hall labour relations had been deteriorating — and accelerating towards crisis since the beginning of 1913. Strikes and lock-outs swiftly followed one after another, while, ignoring libel writs, the Irish Worker rapidly expanded its circulation through its non-stop lampooning of employers and criticism of social conditions; the libellous pieces appeared under such sobriquets as “Mother of Seven”, “Liberty Boy”, “Caliban”, “Locked Out”, and “One of the Oppressed”. The leaders of the respective sides were well matched: Liverpool’s Larkin against William Martin Murphy, owner of Clery’s department store, the Imperial Hotel, the Irish Independent and, most significantly of all, the Dublin United Tramways Company.

  On 19 August Murphy paid off the distributors of his newspaper because they refused to sever connections with Larkin’s union; next day employees at Eason’s, where O’Casey had worked, walked out because they too refused to handle the Independent. On 21 August Larkin was struck violently in the face by one Peter Sheridan, a clerk, who wielded a stick and drew blood. Sheridan was sentenced to six weeks in prison, but Larkin interceded on his behalf to have him freed. Such impulsive generosity won Larkin great support, and when the next move in the fight, the calling out of the tramwaymen, came on 26 August, the stoppage assumed threatening proportions:

  SCENE: A TRAM STOP ON THE DALKEY LINE

  1ST GENTLEMAN: Conductor — does this car go to Ballsbridge?

  CONDUCTOR: I’m no longer on duty, sir. I’m on strike. (Shouting) Hey, Puddiner! It’s ten o’clock!

  DRIVER: Wha …?

  CONDUCTOR: It’s ten o’clock.

  DRIVER: Right — me hearty. We stop where we are! I’ll take off the trolley.

  1ST GENTLEMAN (unbelievingly): On strike …? In Horse Show Week —![111]

  The troops were put on alert, police reinforcements were drafted in from the countryside, pensioners were sworn in as gaolers: on the streets horse and foot patrols appeared everywhere.

  On the evening of the 26th Larkin seized the initiative: speaking to strikers outside Liberty Hall he said, “This is not a strike, it is a lock-out of the men who have been tyrannically treated by a most unscrupulous scoundrel … We will demonstrate in O’Connell Street. It is our street as well as William Martin Murphy’s. We are fighting for bread and butter. We will hold our meetings in the street and if any one of our men fall, there must be justice. By the living God, if they want war, they can have it!”[112]

  In the next few days there were scuffles and fights between strikers and “scabs”, and with police; Larkin and four others were arrested for libel and conspiracy on Thursday the 28th, but released the next day on bail. On the Friday the police banned the mass rally Larkin had called for Sunday, but Larkin burned the order paper at a meeting. Everyone eagerly awaited the big Sunday demonstration: would Larkin have the courage to turn up, as promised, at the Imperial Hotel? The gladiatorial combat between Larkin and Murphy caught the whole city as it moved to its climax: “Larkin will meet his Waterloo,” gloated the Independent; “Murphy will reach St Helena,” the Worker snarled back. With money and the forces of the Crown on his side, Murphy was convinced he had beaten his antagonist: “I have broken the malign influence of Mr Larkin and set him on the run. It is now up to the employers to keep him going … this convicted and mean thief had nearly become the labour dictator of the city.”

  On Saturday the police tried again to arrest Larkin, but failed, taking off two of his lieutenants instead: one, James Connolly, a slow-spoken Edinburgh-born Irishman who rarely smiled, told the court that he did not recognise the proclamation banning the Sunday meeting in O’Connell Street, “because he did not recognise the English Government in this country”. Connolly refused to give surety for bail: he was sentenced to three months in Mountjoy Gaol where, going on hunger strike, he was released after one week.

  On the Saturday afternoon there was more trouble in the docks, with pitched battles between strikers and police. During a baton charge at Eden Quay, two union men, James Nolan and James Byrne, were beaten to death. O’Casey was later among the crowd on the pavement in O’Connell Street as their funerals passed: “Here it came, the Dead March in Saul, flooding the street, and flowing into the windows of the street’s rich buildings, followed by the bannered Labour Unions, the colours sobered by cordons of crepe, a host of hodden grey following a murdered comrade.”[113]

  These casualties and others, not fatal but equally bloody, did not prevent the courts and police proceeding with ruthless vigour to stamp out the
unrest. But Larkin eluded them: he had powerful protectors, in particular Countess Constance Markiewicz, eldest child of the Anglo-Irish landowner Sir Henry Gore-Booth: born in Buckingham Gate, London, she was married to the Polish Count Casimir Markiewicz. She now hid Larkin in Surrey House, her residence on the fashionable outskirts of Dublin.

  *

  “Sitting there, listening to Larkin, I realised that I was in the presence of something that I had never come across before, some great primeval force, rather than a man. A tornado, a storm-driven wave, the rush into life of spring and the blasting breath of autumn, all seemed to emanate from the power that spoke”[114] — so wrote the forty-seven-year-old Con Markiewicz, not yet over her first flush of left-wing idealism. She and her husband, however, had to disguise their protégé as something other than a primeval force if they were to get him past the hundreds of police clustering in O’Connell Street — at that time still called Sackville Street — to prevent him addressing the rally on Sunday the 31st. The working-class leader was encased in the Count’s frock coat, bent himself double to assume crabbed age, and with the straggly growth of beard of an old and enfeebled clergyman glued to his face and chin by the Abbey Theatre actress, Helena Moloney, dispatched with his “niece” in a taxi to the Imperial Hotel.

  According to Miss Moloney, Larkin’s physical courage failed him at the last moment and he did not want to appear: she and the Countess insisted.

  O’Connell Street was jammed with thousands of people, most of whom were there to see if Larkin would keep his promise. Mick Casey was there, as a spectator: unlike his younger brother, he began as a cynic and ended so. The gladiatorial combat had reached its killing time: even at this climax there was never the sense of a clash of impersonal forces which, as Marx believed, shaped human destiny; nothing, either, of the deliberately cold alienation effect that Bertolt Brecht tried to impose on his political characters. Politics had not yet become dehumanised or humourless. At one thirty p.m., on the Imperial’s balcony, in full sight of those in the street below, Larkin, wearing his beard and frock coat, addressed the crowd with his familiar roar. His first words, delivered with a bow, were that he was there as promised to address a public meeting. The police reacted violently, a score of them rushing to the hotel, where they entered and seized Larkin: he now, according to Miss Moloney, cringed with fear, saying, “Don’t strike me now, don’t strike me now, I’ll go quietly.” [115]