Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  O’Casey, in a calculated insult to Connolly, referred to Sheehy-Skeffington in The Story of the Irish Citizen Army as “the first martyr to Irish Socialism”. Sheehy-Skeffington’s spirit of peace was the “living antithesis of the Easter Insurrection”, he was “the purified soul of revolt against not only one nation’s injustice to another, but he was also the soul of revolt against man’s inhumanity to man”.[163]

  Here O’Casey lapsed into writing propaganda, which so often cancelled itself out, as when later he fiercely, and with equal cussedness, defended those looters whom Sheehy-Skeffington was trying to dissuade from their unholy actions. Sometimes — perhaps increasingly, as he grew older — chaos appealed more than order to O’Casey: “Now the looters gambled before they went looting, and to go looting was a brave thing to do, for the streets sang songs of menace from bullets flying about everywhere.”

  Sean watched their wonderful activity, and couldn’t desecrate their disorder with dishonour. All these are they who go to Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation; whose noses are ground down by the clergy on the grindstone of eternal destiny; who go in mortal fear of the threat of a priest, he thought; but now he was glad to see they hadn’t lost their taste for things material.[164]

  As a supporter of Labour he could find comfort in the decision taken at the Irish Trades Union Congress in August 1916 to opt out of the national struggle; as an atheist, he despised the moral victory over oppression. But the conflict in him over not taking part — as much to do with his mother as with himself — simmered in him for years, and was only finally exorcised by writing The Plough and the Stars.

  But he did pay tribute to the insurrectionists: “The bonfires of Sinn Fein began to blaze on every Irish hillside, and thousands of the Irish people danced around the blaze of Sinn Fein, as if they warmed themselves at the fire of life. Parliamentarism was a sinking fire.”[165] He could have been thinking when he wrote this that he spent much of the summer of 1916 with about ten of the rebels whom Frank Cahill had smuggled out of the city centre to County Meath. Sean pitched down with them in a large meadow owned by Cahill’s cousin, while Cahill, who had a bad leg and limped, slept in his cousin’s house.

  Others of his friends had not been so lucky: Shiels and Johnny McDonnell had given themselves up and suffered the jeering of crowds lining the route to the dockside from which they were deported to Frongoch detention camp in Wales. O’Casey wrote to Shiels with a witty cartoon of a female aid worker and Frank Cahill with his arm around her, each holding a large can inscribed “Volunteer Fund”, which he captioned “Frank kicks two birds with the wan stone”;[166] he also referred to McDonnell’s brother, Paddy, who “felt ashamed” — at not having been allowed to go out and fight.

  In the same letter he described the horrible time they had had in his district: “Death was facing us back and front for days, but there must have been more righteous men amongst us than were found in Sodom and Gomorrah, for most of us came out safely, and could now listen to the ‘ping’ of bullets as serenely as to the chirrup of ‘the little dickie birds sitting in the tree’.”

  He sent further cartoons: of looting in the slums, of himself dodging bullets, of himself and Cahill as hobos round a campfire. He was in excellent spirits: “I try to laugh at the world — nay, I do not laugh at the world, but with the world, for a cheerful spirit will serve a man in Heaven or in Hell.”

  *

  “When I danced, & I danced often and I danced long, I always had on a pair of hobnailed boots,” O’Casey said later;[167] but if the boots were the proof of a working man’s identity, there was little work, apparently, to go with them. Scant reference to manual work of any kind is to be found in his letters, articles, or the memories of his friends or family. There are plenty of glimpses of O’Casey enjoying himself at the Club in the company of friends who were many years his junior. Some marvelled at his boisterous humour, at his booming laugh, at how little hostility or self-pity he showed in the face of poverty and illness. He would sing comic and sentimental songs, tell stories, and was the life and soul of ceilidhs, although to one young woman he could be “a puzzling figure, given to sitting and staring at some distant object, especially after someone had contradicted him”.[168] To the same woman he would pay old-fashioned compliments: “Ah, you have lovely hair, Josie.” Another found him a clumsy dancing partner, unattached to any girl in particular.

  One night the O’Tooles piped Douglas Hyde to the Mansion House on his return from a triumphant tour of America: afterwards they held a ceilidh, and then the pipers left, each with a girl on his arm. “O’Casey staggered home alone, on his shoulders the band’s huge drum.” At thirty-six he was still gaunt and lean of figure and although he slouched along the street in a shuffling, ungraceful manner, he looked tall and aloof. A friend arranged work for him at the Irish Independent: “I don’t need any work,” O’Casey snapped at him. Others said he resembled a scarecrow; when, just to provoke him, street urchins would ask the time, he answered them in Irish.

  In 1917 a new lay teacher joined Cahill on the staff of the Christian Brothers’ School. Good-looking, with a strong face and soft hazel eyes, Mary, or Maire, Keating looked like the traditional maid of many a poignant air. She lived in a two-storey house near the East Wall with two sisters, her mother and father. They were Catholics. Cahill introduced her in the Club. To O’Casey, who met her when she was twenty-two, he thirty-seven, she was much more than a decent and attractive girl:

  How quickly “Maire” may be written, how rapidly it can be uttered! … What a beautiful and adorable vision the little word conjures up before me. The vision of gentle grey-blue eyes, of light-brown golden hair, of soft cheeks, whose colour is the most delicate blend of the pale white lily and the blushing rose, the full white throat, but before all these, beautiful as they are — the gracious, gentle, loving, winning manner of my dear little loved one.

  After the passion of lock-outs, street violence, rebellion and martyrdom, O’Casey’s new sword of light gave to his eye a distinctly different glint. Even grim-visaged poverty was courting an amorous looking-glass — without any of Gloucester’s cynicism. The gallant ex-labourer was smitten with “a love so ardent and so deep that it resembles the fabled tree of which it is said that its roots penetrated to the earth’s centre while its branches blossomed in the higher heavens”.

  He began to write poems to Maire, and to post them to her, sometimes with a covering excuse such as “Forgive me for my execrable attempts at poetry”,[169] sometimes without even a date. He would lend her books — not his usual serious reading, but more frivolous offerings, such as Chevalier de la Maison Rouge or The Forty-Five Guardsmen. Once he told her he had written a ballad which could become a national anthem, and had shown it to his friends at Liberty Hall, who told him it was good but later handed it back to him without doing anything about it. Entitled “The Call of the Tribe”, its rejection had been a great disappointment:

  Like vultures from dark clouded skies they come swooping

  To feast themselves full on inanimate prey,

  The legends of England to Ireland come trooping

  To bear the best sons of our mothers away.

  REFRAIN:

  But the children of Ireland with hearts fixed and true

  Shall ever be faithful dear Eire to you![170]

  He had better luck with a more irreverent ballad, “The Grand Oul’ Dame Britannia”, which had first been printed in June 1916 under his pseudonym, An Gall Fada, and subsequently much reprinted as a “Broadsheet Ballad”.

  In early October 1917, for the second time that year, Maire fell ill — this time much more seriously. Sean was extremely upset; unable to visit her, he kept a diary, which, later, he posted to her: “Unhappy Sean!” he wrote on Saturday, 6 October, “An untrammelled spirit may make a universe of a tiny cell, but today illimitable space has become a prison surrounded by the dark walls of bitter disappointment.” The following Monday morning he expected a letter, but none
came, and by the next day the uncertainty made him “almost frantic”. Between three and four-thirty p.m. of that day he waited in East Road to see “Birdie”, Maire’s sister, walk home from school, but she did not pass. He returned home sick at heart.

  Wednesday saw him “hovering about Seville Place”, where he saw Maire’s mother going home from the Force Depot — Mr Keating was a policeman; here he “was sorely tempted to implore her to have pity upon me and tell me how my sweet Maire was”. The thirty-seven-year-old ex-labourer fell prey to love-sickness deeper that afternoon than on the previous one:

  Waited in East Road again from three to five in the hope of seeing Birdie, but she came not. Drank a cup of cocoa, and took the tram to the Park, waited outside the Shell Factory from 5.45 to 7 in the hope of seeing Maire’s Aunt Katie; did not see her. Filled with heart-breaking visions of Maire’s illness and its ultimate termination. Oh! Should Maire die, may God send death to me as well! Stood at the corner of 1st Avenue 10.30 p.m. tried to pierce the gloom and perceive with spiritual vision the face of my beloved Darling, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you! Oh! Why should I be ashamed?[171]

  Next afternoon he again waited in vain for Birdie, until he concluded she, too, must be ill. On Friday O’Casey wrote some lines of verse, but gave up in despair; on Saturday, he went along with three friends, Kevin O’Lochlain, Frank O’Growney and Matt Carroll, to a diversionary funeral, keeping up, as he wrote, “a lively conversation which made them laugh frequently, while I’m near to tears myself and my heart was bursting with grief”. In the evening, when at William Kelly’s shop discussing events with Charlie Russell, he was at last put out of his misery, for Mrs Keating came in, carrying parcels, and he overheard her say to Kelly — clearly he could not ask her himself — “Oh she is better now.”

  This was the week when on the other side of Europe, Lenin returned from hiding in Finland to St Petersburg, and when the momentous news of the October Revolution began to break in Dublin, yet O’Casey remained completely unaffected, slave as he was to a very different passion. Maire’s improvement was all that mattered in life, and when he heard of it, he talked so vehemently and quickly that Kelly and Russell thought he had been drinking. “May Christ be thanked!” he wrote. “Oh, God be praised!”

  All the summer of 1917 O’Casey had kept up his delicate and repetitive attentions. Recently Douglas Hyde had published translations of The Love Songs of Connacht, written in Irish by an anonymous woman who died romantically when very young: there was in O’Casey’s lyrical outpourings to Maire Keating something of the same direct and vulnerable feeling, although its expression was technically not as adept. When she left for a short holiday he wrote,

  The gentle flowers, the gentle flowers — Their softening charm is fled,

  For now they seem like blossoms strewn about the silent dead;

  They’re symbols now of sorrow deep and Joy’s swift sad decay —

  For my heart is filled with woe, with woe, since Mary went away.[172]

  More than their difference in age, their difference in religion made difficulties for the pair from the start. Although O’Casey in the autobiography describes Maire’s house as if he had been there — “the bedrooms were so small that a dim glance from one eye enfolded all that might be there. If you stretched out of the bed from the far side, you could put your head out of the window”[173] — he was never once invited in, and, if he had gone there, would have been very unwelcome. Her parents could never have tolerated a Protestant for a son-in-law; her father was the more lenient of the two, but her mother was adamant. The relationship was doomed from the start; sometimes and suddenly Maire would disappoint his hopes of seeing her; he would plead:

  Let me crave your forgiveness for expecting you to risk additional pain by acceding to my selfish appeal to meet me when the weather emphatically forbids it … It is my love which makes me selfish … It may be rash but it is passionate and strong. My only joy … is when I am with you, intensified when I hold you in my arms, and when I press ardent kisses on your sweet little mouth.[174]

  But — ardent kisses apart — it was, strictly in accordance with the prevailing mœurs, an unconsummated passion. They attended dances, took part in the activities of the O’Toole drama club, rode on trams to view the cliffs at Howth or pace the beach at Dun Laoghaire. A favourite walk was in Finglas, west County Dublin, where they trod the lane, Stella’s Walk, where Stella and Swift had enjoyed each other’s company. Maire, too, was excellent company for Sean and the warmth of her character, and the fun they had together relieved his former attachment to “mere complexity”. Although he now contributed an occasional article to Irish Opinion and seemed to accept that Ireland’s political aims had to be achieved before the class war could be begun (the Dublin Saturday Post in September 1917 published a letter of his on the issue of Labour and Sinn Fein), he had developed a wider view of himself which Maire, with her gentle manner, “wistfully patient in listening to his talk”, fed.

  *

  In late September the death of an Easter Rebellion hero who had been sentenced to death, reprieved, then released in the general amnesty, gave new impetus to his ambition to write. Thomas Ashe, a handsome golden-haired Kerryman, over six foot with a leonine head, had been an O’Toole piper and as such known to O’Casey. In August 1917 Ashe had made a seditious speech at Ballinalee in County Longford, “sowing the seed of Human Liberty in the hearts of the people”.[175] A few days later, walking in O’Connell Street, he was arrested by two members of the RIC and subsequently sentenced to two years in prison. He began a hunger strike in Mountjoy Gaol in September. Six days later, from a combination of pneumonia, forced feeding and ill treatment, he was dead.

  O’Casey first claimed Ashe as a supporter of the Great Strike of 1913, as much a labour hero as a Republican one. In a letter to the Saturday Post, he wrote: “It never made him less Irish to love and to fix his hope on the ultimate Emancipation of the Masses.”[176] There was just then a great revival in Republican hopes; the survivors of 1916 were now in key positions. “Was he out in Easter Week?” became the touchstone of Irish life. Eamon de Valera, the last commandant of Easter Week to surrender, and the ablest tactician of them all, was elected President of Sinn Fein in October, and of the Volunteers in November: “It was a curious choice to Sean, for to him de Valera seemed to be no Gael either in substance or in face, though he was probably one in theory.”[177] O’Casey could never envisage an excited de Valera on the hurling field, and, pulling a bit of rank, remarked he had never known him in his own Central Branch team. Worst of all, as far as O’Casey was concerned, de Valera knew nothing about the common people.

  An enterprising Dublin publisher, Fergus O’Connor, who had printed Republican pamphlets and been interned in Frongoch along with Shiels and McDonnell, undertook to print the lament for Ashe which O’Casey was now writing. It was a hurried piece of work, composed in the heat of the moment, melodramatic and overstated, but it had a strong, continuous emotion beating through it, with the whole account of Ashe’s end set out in the brooding, forceful tone of a soliloquy. Saturated with his reading of many books, O’Casey had found a power of utterance, if not yet a voice of his own, markedly different from anything he had shown till then.

  Thomas Ashe, Thomas Ashe, take a last look at the Irish sky, for when these grim gates open to let you forth, your strong body will be limp and helpless, your brave heart will faintly beat in a final effort to live for the people, and your eyes will be too dim to see clearly the kindly Irish skies that have watched your life-long efforts to free your Country and to uplift Her People. The gate closes: Thomas Ashe is separated forever from his relatives, his friends, and the Irish People — when once more they look upon him they find him dead![178]

  As O’Connor prepared The Story of Thomas Ashe for publication in 1918, together with some booklets of songs by “Sean Ó Cathasaigh”, the tempo of O’Casey’s life began to quicken. In November 1917 he was rehearsing, with Maire helping b
ehind the scenes, a charity show in aid of Meals for Necessitous Schoolchildren. To keep himself from idleness, as he put it, he arranged a concert, to include the performance of a one-act play, The Nabocklish (a rough approximation in Irish of “never mind”), in which he himself had a part. The whole occasion, which took place at the Empire Theatre on Sunday, 25 November, proved a great success. The house was packed, and hundreds of people were turned away.

  O’Casey commented that the one failure was himself. The Saturday Post was not quite so harsh, saying that O’Casey, as a dim-witted English tourist who wants to meet Irish rebels, “strove valiantly in a part that was altogether unsuited for him”. An English accent was never O’Casey’s strong point, either then or later, even on the printed page. But he also sang, with a friend, a “topical song” — a euphemism for a ballad — satirising John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party, called “The Constitutional Movement Must Go On”, which he and Fergus O’Connor had written together, and another, “I Don’t Believe It, Do You?” — items which won the “applause of the night”. Paddy McDonnell also took part in The Nabocklish, playing Jeremiah Cullinam, displaying nervousness as well as talent. Later they did The Nabocklish at 41 Parnell Square and “at the back of the houses in Leinster Avenue”.[179]

  When Tom Clarke was executed in Kilmainham Gaol he left £3,100 for his wife to distribute to the distressed; one of his tobacconist’s shops, at 77 Amiens Street, where in 1916 the Republican Nurse O’Farrell had met General Lowe prior to Pearse’s surrender and discussed terms, passed to the charge of William Kelly, who had now become a close friend of O’Casey. In mid-December Kelly and his wife took O’Casey to the Abbey Theatre to see Blight: The Tragedy of Dublin by “Alpha and Omega” (Oliver St John Gogarty and Joseph O’Connor), one of the first plays O’Casey claims to have seen there.