Sean O'Casey: A Life

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Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 10

by O'Connor, Garry


  Such intemperate treatment was possibly more a reflection of O’Casey’s condition of self-pity when he came to write this, than of any feeling that could truly be called love for Tom. Its pathology is almost Swiftian, especially as, according to Tom’s children, Sean was not even present at Tom’s death: if this is indeed true, his depiction of himself as a dark avenging angel is pure fiction. To O’Casey’s claim that he paid for the funeral himself, Tom’s son Kit answered later that his own family paid and that he still had the bill — from “Kerrigan in the North Strand who traded under the name of O’Neill”. Moreover, Kit Casey said Sean borrowed twenty sovereigns from his mother after Tom’s death and never paid them back. [130]

  If O’Casey was fictionalising events yet again, misrepresenting his family, this time displaying an exaggerated hostility which the mild-mannered, very quiet “Uncle Jack” would have been unlikely to show even had he been there, a more significant distortion of the truth is in the matter of time. To achieve a cumulative effect of misery, and make a procession of family corpses, he places Tom’s death before that of his brother-in-law, Beaver, who in fact died seven years earlier. He then has Tom’s death follow that of Bella, who still had another four years to live. Great fiction it may be, but as autobiography it shows a curious lack of respect, as if brothers and sister were little more than models to be placed in whatever arrangements may satisfy the artist. That O’Casey loved Tom is never in doubt, and he pays a heartfelt tribute to him: but he has no compunction about sacrificing his brother to that inner Protestant animus against the Catholic Church, making his wife Mary a symbol of its petrifying influence. How did it come about that a writer who could so vividly evoke sympathy for the sufferings of characters he invented, could so coldly withhold it from the living? Hatred can be as vitalising a force as love: Yeats might have had O’Casey in mind when he later wrote:

  Out of Ireland have we come,

  Great hatred, little room.[131]

  *

  In the meantime, in early 1914, O’Casey had been sniping at the growing army of Volunteers from the columns of the Worker: quoting John Mitchel’s demand for an “Ireland for the Irish, not for the gentry alone”, he accused the Volunteers of being a crowd of “chattering well-fed aristocrats and commercial bugs”, basing their movement on Henry Grattan’s “Tinsel Volunteers” of the 1780s, and he tried to woo away from them the Irish peasants and workers who were joining in such large numbers. A former Citizen Army man, James MacGowan, who had sat with O’Casey at the recruiting table, repudiated his attack as the “croaking of a self-constituted prophet”, and claimed that the identification with the movement of such men as Padraic Pearse, P. Macken and Tom Kelly was a guarantee of workers’ interests. Ah, O’Casey replied, Pearse went on using the trams in 1913 “while the workers of Dublin were waging a life and death struggle”. He was indefatigable at seizing on points with which to wound, although MacGowan scorned his arguments as vague, evasive, and as misrepresenting his own. While O’Casey showed agility in being able to jump over “troublesome points”, MacGowan wrote, “the whole tone of his letters is evidence of the spite which frustrated ambition engenders. In them is reflected the narrowmindedness, the shallowness and the pessimism which are the chief characteristics of the cynic and sceptic.”[132]

  In March 1914 O’Casey was asked if he would assume the post of secretary of the Citizen Army, and he accepted. He then escalated the minor but significant war of his own devising, fomenting Larkinite discontent against the Irish Volunteers. The Citizen Army was reorganised, given its own constitution and plan of action, which included recruitment, the proper supply of uniforms, regular drilling, and camping out during the summer months. The provision of uniforms had its comical side, not that O’Casey was yet in a mood to see it: Captain White ordered from the tailors, Messrs Arnott, fifty uniforms of dark green serge, with broad slouch hats in the same colour, “jauntily turned up at one side”, but the Council decided that no man could bring his uniform home until he had paid for it. The result of this, says O’Casey, was that when there was a parade in Croydon Park the confusion of undressing and redressing “rivalled some of the tragic episodes depicted in Dante’s Inferno”.[133]

  The boots issued created a different kind of problem in the early days of this workers’ army, while O’Casey quickly saw the Commandant’s limits:

  Captain White was indeed the son of a general, but that makes him no better than if he had been the son of a gun. I know more about the boots given to those whose broken boots “prevented them from marching” … Most of those who got these boots pawned them — some for food, some for drink — a few days later. Captain White had a bad habit of distributing largesse to those who flattered him, and when advised against this practice, resented it. On one occasion, he promised a fine topcoat he was wearing to three different men. No one could depend on his enthusiasm for more than a day. He ordered the uniforms from Arnott’s, guaranteeing fifty pounds for them, without a by your leave from the Army Committee; and the collection of this money meant work night and day to promote a festival in Croydon Park that the Captain shouldn’t be short. The fact is that Captain White was a noble fellow, but a nuisance.[134]

  The recruiting drive in the countryside was an uphill struggle, too: O’Casey relates how he, Captain White, Countess Markiewicz and P. T. Daly journeyed to Lucan in the Captain’s car.[135] On arrival they found “ominous quietude” and O’Casey felt it would be a long time before the locals grew “sufficiently class-conscious to understand the elementary principles of Labour thought”. The same indifference was shown in Clondalkin, with the residents “gazing fixedly towards the Captain’s motor car as if it were some dangerous machine calculated, if approached too closely, to upset for ever the quiet rhythm of the pastoral life”.

  O’Casey was celibate in this period, without even a steady girlfriend, although he found some girls attractive, among them Frank Cahill’s sister Josie. A passing girl or woman often evoked a casual sexual response: he was never averse to noticing a shapely calf, or a sudden flash of white thigh, as the wind whipped up a skirt, but in these months of involvement with the Citizen Army it was the flag which held his attention most, provoking in him bursts of intense lyrical feeling, perhaps a sublimation of sexual desire:

  Then the flag came — the Plough and the Stars. A blanket was spread over a wall, and the flag spread over the blanket so that it couldn’t be defiled by the grimy evil of the wall. All pressed back to have a good look at it, and a murmur of reverent approval gave the flag a grave salute … There it was; the most beautiful flag among the flags of the world’s nations: a rich, deep poplin field of blue; across its whole length and breadth stretched the formalised shape of a plough, a golden-brown colour, seamed with a rusty red, while through all glittered the gorgeous group of stars enriching and ennobling the northern skies.[136]

  O’Casey mentions the fabric advisedly, for he had earlier had the imported satin of Republican badges changed for Irish-made poplin. His reverent, even jealous, feelings for that flag were never to leave him; nor the emotive force with which he was able to wave it, or trail it before audiences in his plays, sometimes thrusting it at them like a goad, sometimes tantalising them and seducing them with its magic.

  One reason that, while devoting himself completely to the Army’s cause, O’Casey gradually uncovered a further bone of contention — even while fulfilling his heart’s desire, for the mock-heroic antics of the Citizen Army had completely captured his imagination — was his growing instinct for drama. Having now read so deeply, not only Shakespeare and Boucicault but more recently, thanks to a generous gift of books from Deakin, a wide range of other authors including Butler, Landor, Washington Irving and Jack London, he viewed the rivalry between the Citizen Army and the Volunteers not only in ruthless Darwinian terms, but also as having the pomp and ceremony of a Shakespearean Roman or history play.

  He wanted the armies to be rivals, and as secretary agitated towards that end,
fighting for his version of the truth with divisive fury. He was sensitive to the Volunteers’ great charm and appeal to all sections of the public. Bulmer Hobson’s persistent attitude towards labour he called “the attitude of the witches towards the intrusion of Faust and Mephistopheles:— ‘Who are ye? What would ye here? Who hath come slinking in? The plague of fire into your bones!’” He challenged the Volunteers’ President Eoin MacNeill to debate with the Citizen Army’s executive council “the ambiguous principles of the Volunteers’ Constitution, and the class basis of the Provisional Executive … consistently antagonistic to Labour”. [137] MacNeill curtly replied that he was ignorant of the distinction. O’Casey’s former friend, Tom Clarke, turned against him and declared, in a letter in May 1914 to a friend: “Larkin’s people for some time have been making war on the Irish Volunteers. I think this is largely inspired by a disgruntled fellow named O’Casey.”[138]

  *

  The Citizen Army was now a thousand strong. O’Casey recruited actively, creating confidence in timid youngsters who were not quite sure of their suitability, participating with Larkin in a festive pilgrimage to Wolfe Tone’s grave in June. The summer of 1914 saw, as well as the drilling with broomsticks and hurling clubs, concerts held in Croydon Park, when Jim Larkin would sometimes get up and sing “in a hoarse, tremulous voice”, a shy side of him which O’Casey noted, “The Red Flag” or “The Risin’ of the Moon”. They organised a marathon, and a “Citizen Army’s attack on a Cowboy Stockade”; during warm nights they camped under the stars, which led O’Casey to reflect, in contemplating the beauties of nature, “to what a small compass shrinks even the Constitution of the Irish Citizen Army! How horrible is the glistening, oily rifle to one of the tiny daisies, that cowers in a rosy sleep at my very feet.”

  But the glistening, oily instruments were in short supply, although the Citizen Army managed to pick up some of those smuggled into Howth in July 1914 for the Volunteers. Joseph Casey, himself an ICA man, brought some of these in with his brother-in-law, who owned a fleet of trucks and took part in the gun-running. This event, described by O’Casey as a “fraternal mingling” of the Volunteers and the Citizen Army, led to casualties when the Castle authorities made a half-hearted attempt to seize the arms but failed. Confronted by a jeering, stone-throwing mob on the march home the Scottish Borderers opened fire in Bachelor’s Walk and killed three civilians. Public opinion rallied to the side of the Volunteers, and even O’Casey noted the glow of fellow-feeling engendered between the rival armies as the guards of honour “around the funeral cortèges were composed of alternate units of members of the Citizen Army and Volunteers”.[139]

  Although he quoted, as epigraph to a three-page chapter in The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919) devoted to his break with the Army, Cassius’s comment, “In such times as these it is not meet that every nice offence should bear its comment”, O’Casey’s actions over the next few weeks were comments on a “nice offence”. Countess Markiewicz, a member of the Citizen Army Council, also belonged to the women’s auxiliary, Cumann na mBan, of the Volunteers. O’Casey wanted her expelled. He took exception anyway to certain elements in her character. First, she was a member of the upper class, and O’Casey had at this time — he was later to relax this attitude towards members of that class who favoured him — a hatred on principle of such people, saying even of the Countess, who was noted for her wide espousal of causes, that she was a “spluttering Catherine-wheel of irresponsibility”.[140] She had wounded him with a disparaging remark about his Plough and Stars flag — before returning to oiling her automatic. At another time she held a rehearsal in the Citizen Army room in Liberty Hall and left a piano behind for O’Casey to move: he took this as a slight.[141] To the actress Helena Moloney, who called the Countess a fine woman, he once said, “Nyah — all that type ever wants is to get what it can out of the workers.”[142]

  When Captain White resigned from the Army — “trying too hard,” said O’Casey, and disappointed at results; White said he was accused of being an “uncontrolled military dictator” and that O’Casey drove him out — and when in his place Larkin was appointed Commandant, O’Casey introduced a motion that it should not be expected that “Madame could retain the confidence of the Council”, and that she should be asked to sever her connection either with the Volunteers or the Citizen Army. In forcing her to choose, O’Casey was supported by Larkin’s sister, Delia, an active union organiser. But Larkin himself, together with four other members of the council, opposed O’Casey’s motion, which was defeated by seven votes to six — the Countess voting for herself — and then moved that an apology should be tendered to the Countess, who now thought she deserved one. Secretary O’Casey, stung to the quick, said he could not apologise for what he “believed to be the truth”, and wrote out his resignation.

  At a meeting called a few days later expressly to paper over the differences, Larkin explained the attack made on the Countess, appealing to O’Casey to withdraw his accusations and cooperate with everyone. Those present were told by Larkin, according to his greatest admirer, that some people “lacked the broadmindedness one would expect from them”. But his speech was mainly conciliatory and noncommittal. O’Casey then clashed heatedly with Larkin, counter-attacking with a new resolution that the Countess be expelled “for bourgeois tendencies and fraternisation with the enemy”, i.e. the Volunteers. When he finished he stood sideways to the platform, with arms spread, saying, “I fear no man, physically or morally, not even the great Jim Larkin.” [143] Larkin tried to speak, but O’Casey went on and on, and when Larkin finally broke in O’Casey, together with several friends, walked out of the meeting. This time it was pain, not disillusionment, which struck O’Casey.

  Soon after that clash, still in October 1914, Larkin left Ireland for America, to raise funds there to rebuild the union, and with his allegiance to class before nationality, remained in America through the First World War; in his absence the Citizen Army passed into the hands of his deputy, James Connolly. Although Larkin had taken the side of his patron and protector, Countess Markiewicz, in the dispute, O’Casey at once forgave his great hero: his love for him was total and unqualified, and he never spoke or wrote a word against him. But his defiance of Larkin over the Countess revealed a curious streak, almost a deliberate blindness, to Larkin’s clear liking for a woman towards whom, in her old age, O’Casey was gratuitously insulting. The defiant little “chiseleur” inside O’Casey still balked at authority and refused to obey.

  Larkin’s sudden, impulsive departure established the distance necessary for the continuation of hero-worship. The most effulgent of O’Casey’s father-figures, Larkin was the hero O’Casey would like to have been but wasn’t, and his place in the pantheon was ensured by his sudden departure for the USA. Like O’Casey’s own father, Larkin had gone before O’Casey had a chance to know him better, and before his propensity for fault-seeking inevitably came into play.

  O’Casey also remained true to Larkinism, his hero’s political philosophy, which he later and mistakenly saw as embodied in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The communism or socialism of “Red Jim”, as he was later depicted in O’Casey’s play The Star Turns Red, was in essence a gentlemanly and British affair, with courtesy and fair-mindedness displayed towards enemies, an idealistic belief in justice, and a tolerance of cultural values even if they differed from his own. He always allowed his workers to hold dissenting views. O’Casey was right that he was a giant, but he was a giant who could only have existed on the stage of Irish history in 1913 and 1914. He fixed the scale of O’Casey’s political imagination, gave it breadth, colour and humanity. O’Casey owed him a great debt, which throughout his life he continuously and generously repaid.

  5 — They Dreamed and Are Dead

  “He could relax now in a kind of way,” writes O’Casey of his autobiographical hero, upon the severance of his connection with the Citizen Army. But in what kind of a way? He had no regular job, and not much paying work of
any kind — he still wrote for the Worker until it ceased publication at the end of 1914 — and looked for support from his mother and his brother Mick. He had made one attempt to write a play, but had given it up, so that even at thirty-five, as he became at the end of March 1915, he was having to content himself with O’Toole Club meetings where he could sing songs and declaim satirical poems. His life at this time revolved round his reading, his family, and the friendships he had formed at the Club in Seville Place.

  The 1914 War, at first expected to last only a short time, postponed the promised Home Rule for Ireland; but as it went on, it stimulated the ailing Irish economy. In the summer of 1915 Mick Casey, now aged forty-six, volunteered and was accepted for re-enlistment in the Inland Water Corps of the Royal Engineers; apparently he saved men from drowning on two different occasions. But with him gone, and O’Casey himself not working, Sean and his mother had scant resources. He received occasional gifts from friends and did from time to time, according to his nephew, borrow money; but he was intensely proud about asking for help: Tom Clarke’s wife, in later years, was astonished that the former frequent caller at her husband’s shop had never mentioned his straitened circumstances. Sean and his mother paid their weekly bills at Murphy’s shop in Church Street. O’Casey did once mention to his O’Toole friend, Paddy McDonnell, that he had not eaten meat for five years, but this is at odds with his glowing account of summer weekends at Croydon Park, when he breakfasted with the Army on a substantial bowl of porridge and milk, followed by bacon, eggs, bread, butter and tea.

 

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