Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  If he was still suffering from adolescent passion at the advanced age of thirty-nine, one part of him was mature enough to be working, goaded not only by Maire’s keeping him at arm’s length, but perhaps also affected by feelings of insecurity at his mother’s absence. He made a radical new departure. He had begun in a dark blue notebook the year before a dialogue, called The Crimson Cornkrakes, on the subject of Bernard Shaw. The characters are identified only by initials:

  R. There is nothing solid in his writings. He treats of things that nobody is interested in.

  J. He treats of things in which everybody ought to be interested.[194]

  In the same exercise book he had written an outline for a play, The Harvest Festival, which he was now engaged in turning into a first draft. But this was by no means his only effort at playwriting. He was determined to put to use the meagre sum he had earned from Maunsel & Co. — a fortune to him, as he had observed — to “create things out of his own life”.[195] He was beginning to do things for himself: “pictures … that would be worth hanging in the Hallway for other people to see”.

  *

  But even the most modest of hallways, where he had won local recognition with his acting, ballad-mongering and political haranguing, would not take his first picture, The Frost in the Flower. The O’Toole Club was still the focus of much of his social energy, and he and his friends, notably Cahill, had their own clique. But they were an older generation now, and O’Casey was visibly intolerant of the younger men, especially of their cold nationalist aspirations, stripped of all the cultural embellishments he loved. They were potential gunmen of another breed: “What are they fighting for Ireland for,” he snarled at them once, “when they can’t even speak their own language?”[196]

  The tactful Catholic schoolteacher tried to get him to moderate his temper, but often took the side of the younger members. Cahill also attempted to persuade O’Casey to change his opinion of Mick, pointing out how often in the past his brother had supported him; he also found himself at odds with O’Casey’s impatience with his old friend Griffin, who had faithfully helped the Caseys in a variety of ways over many years. O’Casey would not listen to Cahill and went his own obstinate way. Worse, he found in the teacher’s modesty and his shortcomings, together with the raconteur’s wit and richness of character he displayed, a subject for satire; this portrait he swiftly set down, with little skill as yet in plotting or development of theme. He called his play The Frost in the Flower, the hurtful implications for his friend being clear even in its title: it was understandable that Cahill should have been wounded by this onslaught on his “indecision and failure to make anything of himself”.[197]

  Later O’Casey described the main character in the play as “full of confidence on gigantic questions he was never called upon to touch”, but “timid as a new-born mouse over simple questions concerning himself”.[198] Betraying professional insensitivity even in very amateur circumstances, O’Casey submitted the play to the O’Toole Club. His old friend Paddy McDonnell reacted: “We wouldn’t touch it at all, it was too personal.”[199] This first, handwritten version of The Frost in the Flower O’Casey also sent to the Abbey Theatre, where it was rejected sometime in 1919 — returned, he says, with a note saying “not far from being a good play”, but that one of the main characters had the tiresome habit of being too critical. Neither it nor a second version, which he re-submitted after re-drafting it, survives from these years.

  But he had made a beginning. He continued until late summer writing The Harvest Festival, willingly swopping the torments of “splashing his thoughts over what he had seen and heard”,[200] for his earlier frustrated attempts “to form Ireland’s life”. It was a significant advance and, like previous stages, one reached slowly and with pain. But in the formal attempt at playwriting on which he was now engaged, his choice of subject matter lagged far behind actual experience: he had returned to the strike and lock-out of 1913.

  Possibly it brought him a sense of security, to go back five or six years. The world of the past was simpler than the one he had to contend with in the present, and, as he demonstrated later on an epic scale in his autobiography, the past could be arranged to fulfil his deepest wishes. Although he had thought about beginning the play before Susan Casey’s death, one of The Harvest Festival’s main successes is the life it brings to the character of the hero’s widowed mother, Mrs Rocliffe. Through her, O’Casey brought his own mother back to life, although he did not yet have the gift of rounding out a character as he later did in reincarnating Susan Casey, conferring upon her immortality. But, as the first of the line, an often wooden prototype, Mrs Rocliffe has an authenticity in some of her speeches which shows the care O’Casey took to base his characters on real relationships, in this case his own relationship with his mother:

  I wish to God this strike was over, I’m never easy in me mind, the way Jack does be talkin’ about things. He has such a terrible temper, though he was always very gentle with me; an’ if he got into any trouble, I suppose they’d take the old-age pension off me; not that it’ud be much loss, though we’d miss it now, with nothing else comin’ into the house. I hope he’ll be in soon; he knows I want to go to the Harvest Festival tonight, an’ he promised he’d be in time to get his dinner & tea so that I could go. [She begins to sweep the floor.] I don’t think it’ll be long till Higgins turns Turk on us, it’s the long, sour face he had on him this mornin’ when I went in for a loaf an’ some tea an’ sugar, because he knew there was no money comin’ into the house, an’ maybe, wouldn’t be for a long time. An’ the winter comin’ on us too, as well. It would be better for me to be dead than to be sufferin’ like this at the end of me days.

  He also vividly depicts through Jack Rocliffe his own estrangement from the Church, putting forward, with a tolerance he learned from Larkin, the Church’s own conviction, through the mouthpiece of the Rector, the Revd T. Jennings, whom he based closely on Griffin. Indeed O’Casey’s defence of Jennings’s philosophy — against Rocliffe’s choice of Labour over God’s law — clearly re-enacts arguments they had at the time. The Rector is able to put forward his argument with greater human conviction than Jack:

  Oh, John, you wrong us, you wrong us. You know we sympathize with the poor, with God’s own poor. But we cannot escape from the existence of poverty. “The poor we shall always have with us” — the Master says so, and we must, we must believe it. It is our duty to preach patience and submission to God’s will to those that sit in the darkness of poverty, for we are told that these light afflictions will work an exceeding weight of glory. And you know, John, that the arms of the Church are ever around the poor; praying with and for them always, advising them constantly, and helping them whenever we can … But our ways are not your ways, John —[201]

  But Jack is not convinced by the Rector that violence will accomplish nothing, and that the real obstacle to a good social life is sin or selfishness. He throws himself into the workers’ struggle, when, as happened on “Bloody Sunday”, they clash with the police. Choosing between attending his local Harvest Festival and the street affray, he disappoints his mother, and the Rector, by asserting his new-found class-consciousness and leaving them. It is “the readin’ that has ruined him, the readin’, the readin’,” says Mrs Rocliffe: “after a while when he began readin’ I noticed a change in him.” Attacking lorries loaded with flour and driven by scabs, Jack is shot at and meets a hero’s death.

  The play then moves, in a third act, to vindicate his life of sacrifice, as his mother and the Rector — Jennings now becomes the earlier ritual-loving Revd Fletcher in disguise, with his local quarrels at St Barnabas’ brought to the fore in the drama — consort together to have Jack’s body properly buried: “I cannot turn a man away because he may be a Fenian, a Trades’ Unionist or an Orangeman.”[202] However the Rector, finally intimidated by the powerful interests ranged against him, has to back down, and turn away Rocliffe’s cortege. Later O’Casey recognised the Rector as being
the only worthwhile character in the play.[203]

  The Harvest Festival showed O’Casey’s competent stage craft emerging; the use of off-stage violence, with its repercussions for those on stage, was something he had clearly studied both in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People; the settings were imaginatively changed, the climaxes neatly, if predictably, handled. But the play had overriding weaknesses. There were far too many two-handed scenes, a flaw common to beginners, while O’Casey’s susceptibility to propaganda and abstract ideas ruined the central character of Rocliffe, his alter ego, or a projection of what he himself would like to have been (and yet could not, while remaining alive). Rocliffe has completely swallowed Larkin’s gospel of discontent, and regurgitates it in swollen, humourless chunks:

  TOM: And this is the glorious Brotherhood about which you are always preachin’.

  JACK: No Brotherhood can exist between you and me. You are a link in the chain that fetters me, & the sooner you are smashed to pieces the sooner I shall be free.

  TOM: And you call the employers beasts, an’ what in the name of God are you?

  JACK: A claw in the foot and a fang in the mouth of the great Beast of Labour. But such as you are a muzzle on Labour’s mouth, and a sheathe on its claw, so that we are rent and cannot rend again; are torn asunder and cannot injure the power that destroys us.[204]

  The Harvest Festival contains no mention of the Gaelic League, or Irish nationalism: no gods or holy myths are yet in evidence to tempt O’Casey’s profanity. The social chaos, or “chassis”, he predicates, caused by rival systems, is a very dull state compared to that he was later to depict as caused by complicated and paradoxical individuals, whose desires or ideals expose them to ridicule. To this extent the cartoons which he sent in 1916 to his Republican friends in Frongoch — Cahill touching up a female Volunteer fund-raiser, himself performing antic somersaults to avoid bullets during the revolt — more truly anticipated his comic genius than the valuable exercise of writing The Harvest Festival. Still, he was learning the hard way, and one of the first lessons he learned — a lesson which much later, unfortunately, he forgot, or wilfully ignored — was that he would not succeed with a play which had socialism as its central theme.

  The Harvest Festival is also revealing in a way O’Casey did not intend, for in spite of his trying to make it vindicate Jack Rocliffe — and possibly to justify himself for not taking a more active role both in the lock-out and the Easter Revolt of 1916 — the play is really more a vindication of his mother’s protectiveness: finally it seems to have been Susan Casey’s voice which had swayed him from taking part. The universality of the views which O’Casey puts into Mrs Rocliffe’s mouth, and which he later developed so movingly, was surely his own mother’s. When Rocliffe’s “butty”, Bill, tries to cheer Mrs Rocliffe up by saying they have disposed of the scab who shot her son and flung his body in the river, she answers, “I don’t know, Bill, I don’t know; maybe he, too, was the only son of some poor, old, heartbroken mother.”

  O’Casey owed his life to his mother in a much wider sense than the many years he existed under her practical love and care: he owed it to her because her broader humanity protected him from his own idealism. This is why he had a weakness for disillusionment, a weakness which now had a further motivating force, beyond the basic one that disillusionment helps you to survive. He hoped somewhere to find, behind all the tempting illusions of this world, his solid old mother again.

  *

  After sending off the closely handwritten sheets of The Harvest Festival, fifty-six in all, with “S. Ó Cathasaigh” on the title-page, to the Abbey Theatre, O’Casey’s love for Maire began to take on a new dimension of suffering. Without resources or professional confidence to back him up, he knew of no other way to make her capitulate than to inflict his own pain on her, intimidate her through guilt — while protesting that the very last thing he desired was to harm her in any way. Emotional exhaustion — perhaps from the effort of finishing The Harvest Festival — made him write more of his naïvely felt songs which, when they were later collected and published in Windfalls, were described by Samuel Beckett as “the model palace of a dynamiter’s leisure moments”.

  He had no one, now, to talk to at home, for he avoided Mick whenever possible, while his nephew John, who had lived for a while at Abercorn Road after Susan’s death, had moved on to stay with his married sister Susan. Mick was now fifty-two and his mother’s death had had no reforming effect on his drinking. He still believed in reincarnation: during John Beaver’s stay he told him that one day he would return as a goat and butt him. O’Casey and Mick quarrelled frequently over Mick’s dog, a lively, sturdily built Irish terrier which became friendly with O’Casey, but which Mick would force to crouch before him to show how superior man was to the lower animals.

  In May 1919 O’Casey had written to Maire, in spite of his atheistic convictions, “I hope you did not forget to pray for me last night; remember me always in your prayers, I beseech you, my gentle Maire. May God lift upon you the Light of His countenance now and forever.” Later when he wrote about her in his autobiography he spent several pages justifying the stance he took against her religion, attacking the clerical advice she was given. Yet Maire later claimed that the local priest was extremely sympathetic to the problem:

  My mother did speak to Father Flood about my relationship with Sean and told him that she considered it wrong for a Catholic girl to be going around with a man of little or no religious persuasion. But the priest did not advise her to stop me seeing Sean, nor did he ever advise me to stop seeing him. He said to my mother, “there’s good in the worst of us and bad in the best of us”. He told me to try and bring Sean to Benediction if I ever got the chance. He felt this would help to convert him.[205]

  In spite of their differences in faith they had been happy that summer, meeting far out in the country, so they might, as he put it, escape from prying eyes, and walk the hedge-lined roads: “She listened — how well she listened to all he said, to all he quoted.”[206] Enchanted by her presence he had written a poem of three stanzas which began:

  The summer sun is tightly folding

  Dear nature in a warm embrace

  With joy his ardent love beholding

  All mirrored in her flushing face;

  So, Mary, when I’m fondly gazing

  Upon your face so richly fair,

  Your tender glance sweet hope is raising,

  For me deep love seems pictured there.

  The seasons shall forget to come,

  The summer skies shall ne’er be blue,

  And voiceful birds in Spring be dumb

  When my heart shall lose its love for you.[207]

  and to which he added the note, “Maire — Dear, Gentle, Beloved — I offer this little effort to you, not because of any merit therein, but as an expression from a heart pressed full with ardent love for you. Maire, I love you. SEAN.”

  In late September, either of her own volition or through her family putting pressure on her, Maire broke off with Sean. At first he did not take it too seriously. It had happened before that, expecting to meet her, he had received an agonised little note saying she could never see him again. Several weeks had passed, he had withdrawn into his own company, then she had written again asking him to see her and they had resumed their meetings.

  This time, however, there was no recantation. September passed into October, October into November. Waiting to hear about his scripts at the Abbey, O’Casey prepared for possible publication a little collection of his published articles on nationalism, the Gaelic language and Irish labour which he called Three Shouts on a Hill. He sent the collection to Adelphi Terrace, London, where Bernard Shaw was living at the time, to ask the great man to contribute an introduction, but no answering cry was received, only an ungracious grumble. He liked, Shaw said, “the forword and afterword much better than the shouts, which are prodigiously overwritten”.[208] Shaw was impatient, too, wit
h O’Casey’s Gaelic leanings. To the request for a preface he flatly said no: “get published for your own sake, not for mine.” (He received one such letter a fortnight.) And he threw in some parting advice: “You ought to work out your position positively & definitely. This objecting to everyone else is Irish, but useless.”

  At the O’Toole Club, where he still went, although less frequently, they saw how short-fused O’Casey’s temper was growing in Maire’s absence. Group feeling, being sensitive to a man when he was down, focused unhappily on him when they had one of the mock battles they held to keep in training for the eventual war to win Irish independence. Actual clashes between Republican forces and the police and military were becoming more frequent towards the end of 1919, and sums of money were pouring in from the United States to boost the Republican cause. Lloyd George’s postwar coalition came under great pressure to resolve the crisis without resorting again to the open warfare of 1916.

  One Sunday night the O’Tooles started a mock attack at Seville Place, barring the doors and windows and making O’Casey the “enemy” who had to try and break his way in. Finding the resistance strong, O’Casey grew furious and tried even harder. When he thrust his way in through a window they beat him back with sticks and brushes, but he wouldn’t give up and finally broke through. By then he was seething with rage, which he turned on all of them: “He cursed us all and the language was terrible,” said Paddy McDonnell.[209] Later O’Casey was “brought up” before the O’Toole disciplinary committee for using bad language, but not expelled from the Club.

  Some degree of persecution may have been essential to him, but how much could he stand? Almost daily he was writing tortured letters to Maire, appealing to her to see him again. A few days before Christmas it was clear to him that everything was finished between them — she had written yet again beseeching him to accept her announcement that she had given him up. He decided then that he had better finally sever the relationship on his own part, and on Monday 22 December he wrote to her: