Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  They may have been accompanied by Frank Cahill, for at about this time Cahill, by now with a permanent limp, accompanied O’Casey home after they had seen a play at the Abbey; neither of them had much liked the play, and at the Five Lamps, near the O’Toole Club, where O’Casey had to turn off to the right, Frank told him, “You know, Sean, you could write a better play than the one we saw tonight!” O’Casey stopped and thought this over: “D’ye know Frank, I believe I could. I think I will.”[180]

  There may have been some irony in his reply, because the first play he sketched out, The Frost in the Flower, about which little is known before it was rejected by the Abbey Theatre two years later, has Frank Cahill as a central character. But, on the night he parted company from Frank, it is more likely his thoughts switched immediately, as he began walking home to Abercorn Road, to Maire, who lived at 14 First Avenue, just across from the Five Lamps. Little did he know then, with the auspicious moves his new literary friends such as the Kellys and Fergus O’Connor were making on his behalf, that in the following and fateful year, 1918, the two women to whom he had been closest all his life would die, while in the year following that Maire herself would fall seriously ill.

  6 — Lethe’s Wharf

  When he was seventy-four O’Casey wrote to the American critic, John Gassner, with whom he was discussing the idea of a one-volume abridgement of his autobiography, “Your suggestion that I should travel through the old territory again, & put up sign-posts of dates on the way, is a good and terrible idea! Recollection of dates is the one thing under God’s heaven & in man’s earth I can’t remember.”[181]

  Bella died on New Year’s Day, 1918. She had risen early to wake and give her son Valentine breakfast; he left for work and she crept back into bed, never to awaken again. She probably died from influenza, for there was a lot of it about even before the Spanish flu epidemic of the 1918-19 winter; O’Casey says the only symptoms she showed were the red and inflamed skin of erysipelas, and headaches which had gradually grown worse till she ceased working and donned a shawl.

  In the autobiography he placed her death some ten or more years earlier than it actually took place, adding it to the chronicle of earlier Casey family misfortunes. By doing so he obviated the need to describe in detail the long years his sister had spent in shabby, declining gentility, scraping to keep up appearances in her widowhood, with her five children to support — scrubbing floors in a pair of spotless white gloves, cutting an incongruous figure so that she was known locally as “the Duchess”.

  Of her five children, three were soon working, although her eldest daughter, Susan, was still prevented from exerting herself beneath her station, kept in a state of ladylike luxury to which her broken-down mother still aspired. The other daughter was a box-maker, however, while Valentine — the name itself conjures up the plush world of the department store — wielded a coal-yard shovel; his brother, “Sonny”, beat the usual Casey trail: apprenticed first to a printer, he became a timberman and then a quay foreman. The youngest son, O’Casey’s namesake John, at first got on well with his uncle, with whom he shared a taste for books; when Bella was still alive O’Casey allowed him the run of his library, until one day he found a book was missing and accused John of stealing it. “My mother was so angry”, said John, “she refused to set foot in 18 Abercorn Road till the book was found. When it did finally turn up Uncle Jack hastened round to apologise. Having sunk a foot in my estimation by calling me a thief, he rose two feet by admitting his error.”[182]

  On Bella’s death it was found that the insurance policy to pay for the funeral had not been allowed to lapse, in spite of O’Casey’s inveighing against the evil insurance companies, which he called “asps on the breasts of the poor”. The funeral, however, rubbed home the emotional dereliction — that gap between former hopes and actual achievements — the Caseys now felt. Bella had been the main thrust of their father’s efforts to give his children a good education and therefore a better position in life. But at her funeral there wasn’t even the postmen’s band playing, as there had been at Tom’s. Her hearse was drawn by a “scraggy mare bare of a plume”[183] to Mount Jerome where her coffin joined that of her father, her husband, and younger brother.

  Why did O’Casey not want Bella’s death, in his own subsequent re-arrangement of events, to happen when it did? There are two likely explanations. The year 1918 began a busy time for him, more full of hope than any previous year of his life. His Fenian friend, Fergus O’Connor, whose costly cap and well-cut Irish tweeds contrasted strangely with his own shabby attire, was actively promoting his pamphlets in the flurry of pro-Fenian activity of 1918. Sinn Fein clubs were sprouting up all over Dublin and O’Casey’s reputation as a pamphleteer and a “quare fellow” grew and grew, in the hothouse atmosphere of the city, through advertisements and readings. Three seven- or eight-page booklets of his songs — Songs of the Wren, Humorous and Sentimental, so called because of an old Irish song, “The Wren”, attributed to earlier rebels known as the Wren Boys — were in various stages of preparation. In January and February O’Casey wrote to O’Connor full of plans for future publications, telling him of friends of his, William Kelly and a Mr King, who also wanted to commission “reading matter”, as he called it.

  By now he was earning modest, certainly not negligible, amounts from his writing, in one letter mentioning having had at least five pounds from work published — one pound was a labourer’s average weekly wage, while his mother’s pension was ten shillings. O’Connor printed 10,000 copies of the first booklet of songs, selling them at one penny, and it was likely O’Casey received more than five pounds of the proceeds of £400 from this sale. With a Sinn Fein ballad he sent O’Connor he excused himself for his handwriting — he was using a new fountain pen, his first and one of the very latest kind, a Waterman, which Maire had given him. Later Maire Keating pointed out that O’Casey’s claim that he couldn’t afford a pen was exaggerated. “I know that wasn’t true,” she said.[184]

  The year 1918 was a happy one for this courting couple; while they were never formally engaged, it was believed that they would eventually marry, in spite of the disapproval of Maire’s father, and also of a new clerical friend O’Casey made at this time, Canon Brady. This priest strove for a time to convert him, “only to make him recite from the Koran in reply”.[185]

  But the second, possibly the main, reason O’Casey shifted poor Bella’s death to an earlier epoch of sorrow was that 1918 held for him the greatest personal loss of all: this he foreshadowed in writing to O’Connor on 13 February that he could not call round as much as usual because of the “continued feebleness of my mother who has nobody to look after her but myself”. Bella’s death had hit him badly in this respect, for Bella, living just round the corner in Church Place, had cared for him also in a very practical way: as he told O’Connor a week later, “I could call up now and again, but should you not be in I cannot wait as I formerly used to do, for since my sister died, I have to do all the washing, cooking & scrubbing in the house, unless I am prepared to reign in dirt, which I am not prepared to do.”

  His relationship with O’Connor soon soured, in spite of the extra work he was also doing for him producing “Homely Greetings” — personal, sincere and Irish — when the latter objected to his producing a similar line in greeting cards for a rival press. O’Connor then declined to publish some songs O’Casey submitted to him, affronting him so much that he wrote, “I cannot humiliate myself so as to allow you to become the arbiter as to whom I shall, or shall not, sell the poor effusions of my mind.”[186]

  O’Casey used as epigraph to the preface of The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, which he had begun writing for another publisher, Maunsel & Co., the lines from Julius Caesar:

  SEC. CIT: Answer every man directly.

  FIRST CIT: Ay, and briefly.

  FOURTH CIT: Ay, and wisely.

  THIRD CIT: Ay, and truly, you were best.

  The work drew deeply on Shakespeare’s depict
ion of civil disturbance as well as of rival armies. With agony piled on to its completion in September, when the British Censor returned it to him for amendment with his longhand underscored on every page in red, green and blue pencil, it was finally revised in October, after which the Censor passed it at proof stage.

  *

  His mother’s feebleness began to assert itself over her will to live. She was now over eighty years of age, and had taken her daughter’s death deeply to heart. Mick Casey was back in Abercorn Road. He had been discharged from the army because of a partial but worsening disability — arthritis in his right hand — on the basis of which he eventually qualified for a full pension, granted him in 1920, of twelve shillings a week. His discharge papers commended him on his sobriety, which when he strutted and boasted of this testimonial in the neighbourhood, must have raised an eyebrow or two. Mick’s presence at home again aroused murderous feeling in O’Casey, especially when Mick would get his ailing mother up to help him settle down to sleep.

  Maunsel & Co. paid O’Casey fifteen pounds advance for The Story of the Citizen Army — enough, he reckoned, with his mother’s pension, to keep the pair of them for seven months. But Susan Casey’s life was ebbing away quickly. O’Casey begins the justly celebrated and moving chapter of his autobiography called “Mrs Casside Takes a Holiday” with an account of his frantic need to cash the fifteen-pound cheque in time to buy her food to revive her strength — a hot-water bottle to keep her feet cosy, oranges to cool her hot tongue, beef tea. But when he had been fund-raiser, recruiting officer, treasurer, secretary of this and that, a functionary in a score or more of different organisations and a well-known local figure, perhaps it was stretching credulity to show himself, at the age of thirty-eight, ignorant of cashing a fifteen-pound cheque. Still, it is a glorious passage, as with great comi-tragic effect he projects his guilty feelings about his dying mother on to a gallimaufry of the hard-hearted commercial classes. The effect he wanted to give was that he, his mother, his sister and his brothers had been hard done by.

  The rest of the chapter makes a fitting elegy, powerfully expressing the depth of his gratitude towards his mother and her selfless support of him. For thirty-eight years he had lived with her under the same roof, the only one of her children to have been with her all the time. He imbues his sense of loss with enormous depth of feeling and emotional truth, all the better for including in it some self-mocking awareness:

  His beginning of bravery wasn’t too good … Self-pity had ambushed his hardy designs, and before he knew it, tears had welled from his eyes, and had splashed down on to the pale face so full of settled peace. The black eyes of her suddenly opened and, startled, stared up at his anxious face …

  — Ah! Jack, she murmured pitifully.

  But facts, again, took a holiday. In his grief he excluded the rights of all others, including his two brothers who were still living, as well as Susan’s grandchildren, to feel anything for themselves. He showed, like a jealous lover, almost inhuman possessiveness; “Life,” he wrote, “had wasted all her fine possessions.” And, “None, save he, could recognise her for what she was … Who was there to weep for her going? The poor had precious little time or chance to weep.”

  This superior, even patronising attitude of his was resisted and resented by the rest of his family. It was as if he were saying, on the one hand, the Casey family were the victims of social forces over which they had no control: all they could do was to struggle, uselessly, against their fate. Yet on the other hand he contradicted this view in his bitter personal assessment of his three brothers and his sister — writing that they “were all four failures: no one was there to point a way further on from where they found themselves when they entered into personal and responsible life”.[187]

  Of course he could not blame Susan’s own narrowness of mental outlook for the failure of her children — and of himself up to that point — because, as he viewed it, it was only her courage which had enabled him to survive. It was a courage, moreover — and O’Casey never quite had honesty or perception enough to grasp or admit this — that was based upon prejudice, even bigotry, a Protestant conviction that deep down inside, somewhere, in spite of the conditions she had to struggle under, she was one of God’s elect. It was this quality, carried on in her son, which brought out the best, but also the worst, in him.

  From independent accounts it appears that O’Casey’s control, both emotional and practical, over his mother’s death and burial was far from total. He was not alone with her when she died. He did not bury her without assistance — the name “M. Casey” appears on the funeral records — while a former Volunteer, Joe Adams, sat up with him the night after Susan’s death for the wake. He spent most of the night crying; according to his niece, he rose at one point, “draped a red cloth over a little table, set flowers on it, and placed the table next to the coffin”.[188] The publican’s wife, Mrs Brady, who lived at the back of Abercorn Road, in Church Street, provided the sheets and the candlestick for Susan’s wake: Mrs Brady who was “fond of the sup” was great friends with Susan because, according to a letter O’Casey wrote much later, “my mother took her part when Mrs Brady’s childer abused their mother for making ‘a show of them’. The children were, in a sense, right; but they didn’t mind because the drink injured Mrs Brady, and hastened her end, but because when she was tight, it offended their growing bourgeois sense of respectability.”[189]

  If the two versions of Susan Casey’s death are set alongside one another, the picture of O’Casey that emerges is more fascinating and complex than he was perhaps himself ever able to show, for it can be seen how his emotions manipulated reality: sometimes the effect hit its target square and fair, sometimes went lamentably wide of the mark. “Target” is the operative word here — the by this time sixty-eight-year-old autobiographer was, in the contemplation of his thirty-eight-year-old former self, often keen to notch up points, pay off old scores, and redress the balance of former feelings of inadequacy or inequality.

  *

  The younger man turned to more immediate consolations after his mother’s funeral, at which, incidentally, Isaac (Joseph) failed to arrive from Liverpool — he had not had time before the funeral to make the necessary travel arrangements — and from which the Revd Edward Griffin was another notable absentee.[190] Griffin had retired from his rectorship the year before, and fallen seriously ill, becoming an invalid. But friends still saw O’Casey out walking often with Maire, who for the sake of propriety would sometimes take him to see a friend of hers, Susie O’Brien, who enabled them to be together on their own. Maire did not mind his careless manner of dressing, saying he was never unkempt or dirty. When his eyes were tired, she noted, he would crinkle them up, and sometimes would not recognise someone he knew on the other side of the street; yet he did notice, one day when they were out walking and Maire’s sister and her boyfriend approached them, that Maire turned and hurried away from them, with him following. This humiliated him for days. Another time, when they were on the Glasnevin tram, the conductor, who knew Maire, came round for the fare and didn’t ask for money but handed O’Casey two tickets — in return for a kindness Maire had shown one of his children at school. O’Casey was up in arms: “Does he not think I can pay my own fare and yours too? Do I look in need of charity?”

  Maire called this the “sour pride he often talked about”.[191] It could be both a weakness and an embarrassment, she found. She criticised him later for misrepresenting his home: “In this way he was a bit two-faced. He had a thing about poverty. He liked to put on the Irishman’s poor mouth.” But she liked his continual talk and humour, with its often sarcastic turn. Outwardly abrasive, he was still driven by an inner passion. The loss of his mother had sharpened his need for another person, a need that sometimes, in the period immediately after her death, became obsessive. The pure sentiment of the songs was giving way, in a world less structured without his mother, to a dangerous restlessness of feeling.

  In spite of
the publication in April 1919 of The Story of the Citizen Army, and reviews in the Irish Independent and the Irish Statesman, his restlessness deepened as the year went on. From a letter he wrote to Maire in July, in a hand that had grown markedly less elaborate — the result of the Waterman — about a Sunday walk with his friend Joe Adams, it is clear that his political allegiances were being increasingly subjected to the alchemical action of his imagination. In Glasnevin village, he related, they visited a Protestant church

  reported to be the original site of a cell of Msoni Mopti — the patron of the district, and it is also the spot to which a loud-tongued tradition assigns the burial place of Robert Emmet … the churchyard was very interesting, evidently very ancient, but in a splendid state of preservation. Fanciful as ever, I seemed to see in the silent church an enlarged tomb in which every Sunday the dead had a meeting, and that we have been just in time to witness their exit, and their quiet and chill return to the surrounding graves that they had temporarily abandoned. Joe intercepted a little boy that wore on his breast a white medal … whom he asked to point out the place where Robert Emmett [sic] was buried. He shook his head and passed on. My God, said Joe, I suppose he never heard of Robert Emmett — I rebuffed Joe by murmuring “De mortuis nil nisi bonum [honour] …” so we bade farewell to the dead.[192]

  This Sunday communion with ghosts was followed, not by a Monday of hard work, to begin a new week, but a day, so he told Maire in the same letter, in which he wandered aimlessly about thinking of her, until heavy rain forced him to take shelter. His bitterness was such that he told her it would have been better had they never met, for now the “serpent of separation” was coiled round their hearts. He exhorted her to see other men: “Be kind to them … allow them to enjoy the pleasure of your personality.”[193] If she cannot give that joy to him, why should she deny it to others? And, he concluded, in a burst of overmastering self-pity: “Go, dear love, and danse, and let all who will admire you, for Sean will not be jealous, but proud of his dear love’s charms” — almost hastening to add, “But I indeed am very lonely”.