Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  Downstairs the cheering grew, but not many people understood that Larkin’s appearance was also the signal for the massed forces of police to charge the crowd, possibly out of panic — 200 of them were hurt in the ensuing fray — driving the demonstrators towards O’Connell Bridge and also into Prince’s Street where they were met, and trapped, by a large body of reserves. The police had no compunction about ferociously batoning the heads of the fleeing crowd.

  Larkin, hustled away under arrest, had won the day, for by goading the police into over-reacting he had turned public sympathy in his favour. But the bosses’ attitude further hardened: three days later 400 employers met — the largest gathering of its kind ever held in Ireland — under the chairmanship of Murphy himself, and resolved “not to employ any persons who continue to be members of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union”.[116] The lock-out was a reality: Larkin had achieved unification not only of the workers, but of the bosses.

  O’Casey was one of those who, in his own account, fled from the police onslaught. This was the day when the “big-headed, dark, big-mouthed man, with a weighty moustache that gave a bend to his shoulders and curtained off the big mouth completely” became the symbol of living Ireland, of the only Ireland worth belonging to. The Irish worker had at last turned against his oppressors. But O’Casey also perceived that while his passions were aroused by “Bloody Sunday”, he was not himself a hero, and, shivering with fear and shame, wished he had not come. He measured his own courage against Larkin, his “Prometheus Hibernica”, admitting he cut a poor figure. He describes the apparition of his hero at the window of the Imperial Hotel, mistakenly claiming that Larkin swept the beard from his chin (photographs of his arrest show the copious disguise still in place). In the charge O’Casey desperately sought to escape, the crowd suffocating him with its breath which, steamy and thick, was like that of a herd of “frightened cattle in a cattle-boat tossed about in a storm”.[117] He could not get away, and expected at any moment a baton to crunch down sickeningly on his skull.

  The crowd bore him in its surge down the narrow lane leading to the Pro-Cathedral, where he nearly fainted, but reached safety — and fell at once into a fictional reverie, both celestial and farcical, involving the Dublin statues of St Patrick and St Laurence O’Toole. The two saints are furious with Larkin the rabble-rouser. They blame Bishop Eblananus; when the feeble, gasping bishop is summoned to the top of Nelson’s Pillar, he tries to excuse himself to Patrick, who accuses him of not doing his duty to the people. “Control yourselves, gentlemen,” Nelson cautions them, and Patrick can’t take any more, discharging all his pent-up fury on the Admiral: “Control yourself!” he shouts. “If you could, you wouldn’t send your murdherous polis out to maim an’ desthroy poor men lookin’ for no more than a decent livin’. Gah! If me crozier could only reach up to you, I’d knock your other eye out!” The reverie ends as O’Casey is brutally brought down to earth:

  Along a wide lane of littered bodies, amid the tinkling of busy ambulances picking them up, one by one, pushed, shoved, and kicked by constables, the man with the cleft jaw trudged to jail, the wide stitches in his wounded face showing raw against his livid skin, the torn bandages flapping round his neck; shouting, he trudged on, Up Jim Larkin! Nor baton, bayonet, nor bishop can ever down us now — the Irish workers are loose at last![118]

  In a grotesque parallel, the events of the Horse Show, Ladies’ Day and the usual parties had proceeded, unscathed by Larkin’s hundred-headed Hydra; that year it was reckoned to have been the best ever held. But in the socially dead season that followed Dublin for ever lost its late-nineteenth-century imperial innocence. The lock-out forced everyone to take sides: the police raided the poor in their tenement dwellings, smashing their ragged belongings and decorations, assaulting women and children in a reprisal which roused Larkin’s uncouth followers to attack ordinary citizens who still tried to work. Dublin was not a city in which, numerically, the working class predominated, and middle-class opinion, while disparaging the severity of the police response, deplored the disruption and violence. The dialogue of two ordinary law-abiding workers trying to make their way home renders the unhappy atmosphere:

  “Looks like rain, Mick.”

  “Aye,” — (pause) — “I wish the bloody strike was over, that a man didn’t have to thramp the sthreets into Dublin, and could ride the bloody tram, ordinary.”

  “Aye, indeed. A lousy road, into the city, on a wet night especial.” (pause) “There’s a meeting at Inchicore Cross just after knock-off time.”

  “Oh! Should be good …”

  “They say Jem Larkin’ll be out here himself, speakin’ tonight.”

  “Uh-huh. That’ll be broke up of course” — (pause) “There’s no way of gettin’ past the bloody polis at Inchicore Cross. That means the long way round for anyone who wants to miss the meetin’.”

  “Uh-huh. An’ I hate that bloody road, on a wet night.”

  “Me, too.” (pause) “To hell with them. I’m going by Inchicore Cross.”

  “Sure, sure.” (more briskly) “You’ll be shoeing a shaft, then?”

  “Aye.”

  “Make it two.”[119]

  A shaft was a sledge-hammer handle which was “shod” with a piece of red-hot iron piping. The men were ensuring that no one would mess them about, not even the police, armed with shorter and lighter batons.

  But the violence being used by the police had a new ally, starvation, which Murphy thought would quickly force the workers into submission. He did not reckon on the stiffening resistance and the widespread support the workers and their families were gaining, especially abroad — in England and, not surprisingly, in Russia. A pamphlet by V. I. Lenin applauded “the Irish Proletariat … awakening to class-consciousness”,[120] and Larkin, a “man of seething Irish energy performing miracles among the unskilled”.

  The literati of Dublin, hitherto aloof, declared their feelings in a letter to the press from George Russell, who signed himself “AE”, addressed to the “Four hundred masters of Dublin”. “You may succeed,” he told them, but “the men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding and scheming to strike a fresh blow … It is not they — it is you who are blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the social order.”[121] At Liberty Hall O’Casey was introduced to Russell: “O’Casey — another rebel,” said Larkin.[122]

  O’Casey, the ubiquitous secretary, now offered his skills to the Women’s and Children’s Relief Fund, and he was party, along with Con Markiewicz and Larkin, to the planning of measures such as the temporary evacuation of workers’ children to Catholic families in the north of England — an impractical scheme impulsively supported by Larkin for its daring, but scuppered, amidst general approval, by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. The Fund also set up a food depot in Liberty Hall, with stocks augmented by the arrival of two supply-laden ships from the Cooperative Society in England. O’Casey himself was concerned more with clothing than with food, but, seriously undernourished himself, and with gnawing pains in his legs, he says he hobbled down on a stick to be from ten in the morning until twelve at night in and out of Liberty Hall. But his faith was now strong:

  What life would remain in the human body if the heart were plucked out and cast away?

  We know that the Transport Union is the heart of all our strength and all our hope.[123]

  The conflict witnessed by O’Casey in 1913 fed an imagination already disposed to view life in strong dramatic colours, but the spawning in the wake of the strike of a unique militant organisation did more than anything else prior to 1916 to spark off his talent. Again, it was Larkin who was midwife to a new idea, in the British Isles, at least: an army to support the workers.

  The idea came from a wayward ex-British serving officer, Captain Jack White, DSO, an Ulster Protestant nationalist. Son of Field Marshal White, Governor of Gibraltar and a friend of Kitchener, White was something of a soldier of fortune. He had gallantly fought with a
Scottish regiment in the Boer War, although he later resigned his commission and became a believer in free love, a Tolstoyan, then an international socialist. Why not, he suggested, form a citizen army along the lines of the Ulster Volunteer Force which Edward Carson had begun in Belfast the previous year to defend the Protestant loyalists against the eventuality of Home Rule? The justification for such a force — namely, unchecked police brutality and violation of the rights of working men — was to hand: it needed only the will.

  The providing of political will was Larkin’s speciality, and in October he held a meeting in Beresford Place to launch the Irish Citizen Army, in the course of which he declared: “Labour in its own defence must begin to train itself to act with disciplined courage.” If Carson had permission to train his braves of the North to fight against the aspirations of the Irish people, he said, then it was “legitimate and fair for labour to organise in the same militant way”.

  But, as the Army’s first chronicler, “P. Ó Cathasaigh” — O’Casey himself — remarked, the response was not nearly as great as was hoped for, and nowhere near that received in the North by Carson. The launching itself was greeted with enthusiasm; O’Casey’s own discontent gave way to hope, so that when he writes of Dublin as “surging with a passion full, daring, and fiercely expectant; a passion strange, enjoyable, which it had never felt before with such intensity and emotion,” the passion he was describing was perhaps as much his own as the city’s. Yet even among the ranks of the first recruits, numbering clerks, artisans, labourers, United Irish Leaguers, Republicans, Sinn Feiners and students of Gaelic, O’Casey sensed impending disillusionment. He could see the people of Ireland were “not ripe enough to be shaken from the green tree of Nationalism into the wide basket of an Irish Labour Army”.[124] Here was one reason, surely, that it inspired him: he knew it was bound to fail, and that, quixotically, he was destined to become its champion.

  It certainly supplied him, on the non-stop carousel of Dublin politics, with the excuse he was now seeking to leave the Irish Republican Brotherhood, to which he had previously looked to defend with force the workers against the implacable unity of law-enforcement bodies. He had grown too much aware of the shortcomings of other members of the Brotherhood and would not stop voicing his criticisms of Bulmer Hobson to Tom Clarke. Intellectually, with the exception of Pearse and Seamus Deakin, his chemist friend, and Clarke, he found the movement lacking, making the point that Sinn Fein or Irish Freedom never mentioned art, science, or music: all of them “feared the singing of Yeats”.

  It might not have mattered if he had kept these opinions to himself, but what irked Deakin and Clarke — whose dedication, the intense flame of whose hatred for England, had burnt away all enjoyment, so that Clarke’s fifteen years of distorted life in jail seemed to O’Casey a waste — was that he argued perpetually with them, exposing their shortcomings, picking holes in their commitment, especially to the working class. O’Casey himself championed “union between the separatist and the railway labourer, the factory hand and the transport worker”.[125] One day Deakin asked him in his shop if he was prepared to obey the leaders and cease his criticisms; O’Casey replied no.

  So he left the Brotherhood, pulling out of it three others, Kevin O’Lochlain, Jimmy Moore and Frank O’Growney, who shared his feelings. The “purer flame” of the Citizen Army now enjoyed his exclusive patronage, and he transferred for a while much of his former religious feeling — he could now be outspokenly atheistic — into its symbols and rituals, which he supported with evangelical fervour.

  The struggle was hard. The Citizen Army enjoyed some initial success, but soon struck leaner times, for the bosses stepped up the pressure to return to work and men began to dribble back in their hundreds. Worse, only a month after the founding of the Citizen Army, a rival force, the Irish Volunteers, with the aim of uniting all shades of nationalist opinion, was launched by the Brotherhood. It had much more middle-class appeal than the Army and was eagerly supported by young men who were impatient of waiting for Home Rule and had grown weary of the older politicians, such as John Redmond of the Parliamentary Party. Recruits came from the very groups of which O’Casey had once been part, in particular the Gaelic Athletic Association, and the Gaelic League itself, which supplied leaders like Padraic Pearse and Eoin MacNeill.

  O’Casey went along with some worker comrades to the Volunteers’ enlistment meeting at the Rotunda Rink on 25 November, where, as Bulmer Hobson wrote: “The audience was unanimous in its support of the Irish Volunteers, but an unpleasant scene was created by an organised crowd from Liberty Hall, … who refused L. J. Kettle a hearing … Kettle read the Manifesto, but the din created by the Liberty Hall men made his voice inaudible.”[126]

  Hobson became secretary of the Volunteers, while Sir Roger Casement, a former British diplomat, was made treasurer. A predominantly moderate organisation at first, the Volunteer Army was seen by a more militant wing of the IRB, which planned to seize control of it, as a potential force of insurrection. Above all it was not proscribed by the authorities, so while the lock-out lasted, which it did until January 1914, support for the Citizen Army dwindled.

  O’Casey grumbled at their rivals’ superior facilities: they had halls to drill in, and when the Citizen Army Council asked the Volunteers for the use of these rooms on certain nights of the week they were emphatically refused; the Volunteer leaders had more energy and time to devote to their force than the labour leaders, whose responsibilities were wider and greater. Drills of the Citizen Army became irregular, numbers were further reduced, until the down-hearted Captain White found himself with only one company of faithful stalwarts.[127]

  The end of the lock-out in early 1914 was a godsend to the Army. Food and money had run out. On 30 January Larkin declared in public, “We are beaten. We make no bones about it; but we are not too badly beaten still to fight.” Two days later 3,000 builders signed the employers’ form promising not to join the ITGWU: this began the drift back to work on Murphy’s terms. James Connolly provided the bitter lament: “And so we Irish workers must go down into Hell, bow our backs to the lash of the slave driver … eat the dust of defeat and betrayal.”[128] He and Larkin turned their fury on their British counterparts for failing to support them with a sympathy strike. But they could claim victory of a kind, for, in their own terms, they had raised the level of class-consciousness and, as believers in the class war, had produced for those ready to applaud it a magnificent curtain-raiser, the only one of its kind in Europe, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; they had also awakened the public conscience to the appalling conditions of the Dublin poor.

  *

  It may be that Thomas Casey, Sean’s favourite brother, would not have become seriously ill and died on 6 February 1914, at the age of forty-four, if he had not gone out drinking so often with his two brothers, Joseph and Mick, and weakened his constitution. The soldierly boy of the three, Tom had kindness of heart. His son Kit later said he was a steadying influence at home and was quiet and easy-going; Kit and his brother were made to attend the Roman services, the religion of their mother, Tom’s wife, Mary. O’Casey’s charity reaches its nadir in his account of Mary, whom he rechristens Agatha, calling her toweringly ignorant, badly built in body, slovenly, unrefined: above all her superstition seared his imagination. She would sit and sip her beer answering a flat “yes” or even flatter “no” to every question, till one crept away: “She had got Tom, and there she sat, thick and stout, like a queen cactus on a kitchen chair of state.”

  Sean’s feelings about Tom were as possessive and Protestant as those of his mother: Tom was too good for Mary, and when he was dying, of peritonitis, it was O’Casey who demonstrated his great love for his brother by bringing him home and carrying him up to his room, where he laid him down gently in the easy armchair, watched by Mary: “Tom’s yellow-skinned wife glared at them sleepily from the half-lidded eye, and balefully from the wide-open one, like a lassie direct in descent from the one-eyed coon �
� no, like a woman Balor of the Blows.” O’Casey’s invective turns more sour, even repellent:

  Ah, Tom, if it had only been a comely face, a rustling petticoat, and a slender leg that had betrayed your poor life to a woman, enhanced by a shimmer of a little silk. But no! It was pendulous breasts, a ponderous belly, a clumsy foot, and a vacant yellow face that brought you close to this.

  He could hardly have considered Tom’s own feelings, for Tom had been living in apparent harmony with his wife since they married eleven years before. O’Casey’s anti-Catholicism, too, reaches morbid proportions in his recreation of Tom’s death: having already sent for his mother and Bella, he calls in the Protestant rector of St Barnabas’, the Revd Edward Griffin, to offer prayers for the dying man. Griffin will, he assures his mother, read the service at the graveside. When they arrive at the house Catholic Mary curses the Caseys — “I don’t want his home to be a clusther of the ragged Casside [Casey] army, for the one that’s just gone was the only decent specimen among yous, so he was, an’ all who knew him, knows that. Me husband, me poor husband, you come of a dirty lot.”

  After a row about the expense of the funeral O’Casey leaves the destitute widow, who soon after has to begin scrubbing floors to support her children: “He gripped her angrily by the shoulder, putting his face close to hers to say venomously, Go in a carriage with you, is it? Why, you yellow-skinned Jezebel, if I could I’d put a wide sea between us both, and never bathe in it if I thought you were anyway near its margin!”[129]