My Dearly treasured Deeply loved Darling Maire:
I’m afraid that you will assume from the letters that I have written before this that I am primarily selfish. But love is always selfish. I cling to you because it is life and joy to me. I write to you because this action gives me joy too. I’m sure for your sake I should do neither one nor the other.
You have said that my letters upset you terribly, and yet does it not seem that I have been, and am, indifferent to your — anguish? But I am not wholly indifferent, and if you still wish it, I shall write to you no more, and will from now seek to forget you. If ceasing to love should make you happy; if forgetfulness of me should make you happy — then try to cease from loving — and forget.
I know you will not think too harshly of me for manifesting my love for you in such a passionate and persistent manner. It was impossible that I should have loved in any other way my truly beautiful and sensitively cultured darling —[210]
Underlining, unusually for O’Casey, his sexual deprivation, he then went on to praise her physical attractions in Solomonic terms: her temples like pomegranates, her breasts like two fawns that were twins of a roe … But self-justification, for him, always lurked in the shadow of self-hatred: he felt horror and detestation at forcing his love on her, yet if he measured his stature against that of his rivals he could not “help thinking that I am worthy of offering you the full”. In some ways his view of love was similar to his view of class — feelings of inferiority rapidly transformed themselves into feelings of superiority.
After more assertions of love he acceded to her wish for them to cease seeing each other, concluding, “I can only do this because I love you dearly … it is not Fate neither is it the will of God that thus separates us, but the tyranny of old-fashioned thought that has come between. My love forever and forever shall be yours.”
To alleviate his misery, he had but one hope left, his plays. The one in particular about the lay teacher in a Christian Brothers’ School, which ended in a big party given for him which then turned out to be his crowning humiliation: O’Casey had a high opinion of this work, The Frost in the Flower, and high hopes of a production. It was based so closely on the life and people he knew.
He passed an exceptionally lonely Christmas — even then his least favourite time of year: it was the second after his mother’s death. Dominating him still was his feeling for her: “I thought the world vanished when my mother left me.”[211] Now the shock was being transformed into a permanent sense of loss.
But there was hope, as there always is, in the New Year, in the new decade, although it could not be far from his mind that, a few months after the decade began, his fortieth birthday would fall.
He was little prepared for the return by the Abbey Theatre of both his scripts at the end of January: “We are sorry to have to return these plays for the author’s work interests us, but we don’t think either would succeed on the stage.”[212]
Act Two
On the Run
1921-1927
I had to live on, live on, and fight and like
Yeats’s red cock, even lifted the head, clapped
the wings and crew.
7 — The Shaft Which Flies in Darkness
No letters either from or to O’Casey have been preserved from the period February 1920 to June 1921. In the wake of his mother’s death he abandoned his occasional journalism and withdrew into greater anonymity than before; nursing and moulding the emotions which remained locked inside him, he was practising a desperate patience. The loyal Protestant had gone; vanished, too, was the devoted son, the nationalist, the labour agitator and polemicist; the gentleman wooer, dallying and versifying, had been crushed. What was to take the place of these personae?
The letter of rejection he had received from the Abbey Theatre contained encouragement, especially for The Frost in the Flower: the reader had found its characters more lifelike than those in The Harvest Festival. Its faults were that it was “set too much in the one key throughout, and the endless bickerings of the family end by becoming wearisome. The decision of the hero to throw up his job is too well prepared for and does not come as a surprise.” O’Casey had sent them an earlier version of the same play, and this on the whole they had preferred, “except for the character of Shawn who was stilted and who is in this [second] version quite natural, though the author seems to have gone to the other extreme and made him almost common-place”. The implication was plain, and depressing: he was not even improving.
The report on The Harvest Festival, on whose text O’Casey was to draw many years later for Red Roses for Me and for The Drums of Father Ned, contained sound advice which, in his determination to continue writing plays, he took deeply to heart:
This play is interestingly conceived but not well executed. It is seldom dramatic and many of the characters suffer from being too typical of their class or profession (Williamson, Sir J. Vane, for instance). They are conventional conceptions, as unreal as the “Stage Irishman” of 20 years ago. If the author has got these typical figures firmly planted in his imagination we should advise him to try to replace them by figures drawn as accurately as possible from his own experience.[213]
The failure of his writing projects accelerated the deterioration of relations between O’Casey and his brother Mick. The ex-sapper Mick had begun to receive his partial disability pension of twelve shillings per week, and now only needed work of an irregular kind to top up his income, which meant he could fuel his contentiousness by heavy drinking. The brothers had never got on well and the years brought no growth of tolerance in either. Mick would try to force drinks on Sean, and once, as John Casey alleged, when stopped by the police for disorderly behaviour, gave Sean’s name instead of his own, with the consequence that O’Casey later spent a night in a cell.
Both resented, in differing ways, the degree to which Sean had been supported by Mick over the past twenty years; and their mother was no longer there to act as buffer between them. There were various quarrels over Mick’s Irish terrier, and the dog left Abercorn Road. Sean lived there for over a year after his mother’s death. In what must have been the winter months of late 1920 Mick, according to his brother, had dwindled into a wreck:
His glittering gate had always been the door of a public-house, and drunkenness was to him an inward sign of outward majesty and strength … Paint him as he was twenty golden years ago, and paint him as he is now, and one would have a horrifying picture of a worker Dorian Gray.
Had it not been for his mother, Sean claimed, he would have choked Mick to death long before; but now it was different: “no mother to wail, to plead, to sigh her heart half away from herself”. The brothers were clashing almost nightly, and Mrs Cunningham, downstairs in Abercorn Road, where the children had once kept O’Casey awake, complained she could not sleep.
One night, according to O’Casey, when he had just received payment for an article and for once had some money, Mick returned home late. Stumbling up the stairs, with the “raucous beery voice forcing itself to shape a song”, he deliberately knocked the ink bottle off the table where Sean was working. He launched into a vituperative assault: “— Writin’, be God, again! murmured the blurred voice of his brother; some fellas are able to give themselves airs! Scholar, is it? Scholar, me arse!”[214]
Twenty-three years they had lived together in Abercorn Road, and Mick — apart from his absences in the army — had been a main source of the family income. But O’Casey was in no mood, later, to spare him. Prince Hal was rejecting Falstaff-prior to refashioning him as some of his greatest characters: “— Who d’ye think y’are, eh? were sodden words borne to his ear by a gust of rotting breath … while the wobbling mouth slobbered out a black rosary of curses, many of the soiled words slimy with self-pity.”[215] Sean barged into Mick’s chest with his shoulder, and sent him crashing to the floor, where he stayed in a drunken stupor. In his fortieth year O’Casey was leaving home for the very first time.
*
> O’Casey’s depiction of his brother as in the last stages of alcoholic decay has been much contested. Tom Casey’s son, Kit, indignantly repudiated it, pointing out that O’Casey only had the courage to publish such an account after Mick’s death — he died in 1947, aged eighty-one, while the relevant volume of O’Casey’s autobiography, Inishfallen Fare Thee Well, was not published until 1949 — and never said anything derogatory about him in his lifetime. Moreover, Kit Casey claimed, Mick “was responsible for all the wit in the first three plays”.[216]
Other relations attested to the fact that Mick was “never stupidly drunk”, as some of them put it, and that he could always hold his liquor. His neighbours and friends saw no malice in him, and several insisted he never became obnoxious. Perhaps a truer picture of him would be as a pint-size Falstaff than as the drunken Caliban O’Casey depicted. In any event, O’Casey moved out. Just before Christmas 1920, he went to live at 35 Mountjoy Square, where he shared a room with Michael Mullen, an old friend from the Jim Larkin days. Like O’Casey, Mullen had written for the Irish Worker — twenty-seven articles in all, mostly about the illegal stuffing of ballot boxes. Far from being a Dubliner, Mullen had been born in the Aran Islands; his mother, a school teacher, was, so O’Casey wrote, “a hearty and insistent lass for the drink”. Mullen at thirty was near-sighted — “as bad as I am now”, recalled O’Casey at the age of eighty — and of an “odd slouching appearance … among the girls of Liberty Hall he was known as Pig’s Cheek Face, and the nick-name was very suitable, for he had the curious wide-spreading cheeks of the animal though it was well-relieved by the most lovely, large, limpid dark eyes I’ve ever seen in a man’s head”.[217] He spoke Gaelic fluently and was a prodigious worker; he had helped organise the Citizen Army.
O’Casey had now, as he reckoned, moved into the Dublin slums: he had become a true tenement-dweller, living in a decayed Georgian house in the same conditions as the 20,000 families he observed “wriggling together like worms in a putrid mass in horror-filled one-room tenements”.[218] “A long, lurching row of discontented incurables”, he called the houses of Mountjoy Square,
smirched with the age-long marks of ague, fevers, cancers, and consumption, the soured tears of little children, and the sighs of disappointed newly-married girls … the pillars were shaky, their stuccoed bloom long since peeled away, and they looked like crutches keeping the trembling doors standing on their palsied feet.[219]
Yet, again, there were witnesses to the effect that the houses in Mountjoy Square, while shabby and let in multiple tenancies, were far from being in the condition O’Casey described.
Mullen’s own account of 35 Mountjoy Square is not so bleak. He and O’Casey shared a small “return” room at the back on the ground floor; the two other large rooms on that floor housed “Fred” (his real name was Schweppe), a quiet, entirely reliable fellow deeply involved in the Republican cause. In the back room lived Fred’s family, while the front room was used for putting up gunmen on the run from the authorities. This Sinn Fein “safe house” was raided eight times, by police, British soldiers or Black and Tans, while Mullen lived there. At one time, he said, the neighbours had the idea that O’Casey was on the run, and tried to be particularly nice to him.
The room-mates got on well. Although Mullen was a devout Catholic, went to daily Mass, and was “desperately superstitious and afraid of hell”,[220] he and O’Casey never quarrelled. They would discuss literature, the Irish language and politics for hours on end; Mullen said that O’Casey knew Burns, Shaw and Shakespeare backwards, but had never read a word by Swift (which was untrue). O’Casey read him his own plays, although Mullen preferred “fireside home-spun folk stories to theatrical fireworks”.
The two men would go to bed at eleven every night and talk for an hour before going to sleep. O’Casey slept in the middle of the room in a collapsible bed — their quarters were quite cramped, but with no wasted space. In the morning O’Casey woke first, singing a song by Burns. He had a “sweet soft voice”, like that of a robin — “as a redbreast has a sweetness of its own, so did O’Casey”.
Through Mullen, O’Casey became involved in the Larkin cause again. Jim Larkin’s sister, Delia, lived in a flat in Mountjoy Square. A forceful woman, she had helped educate her brother on feminist issues, had organised relief for women and children during the great lock-out, and had remained active as a trade-union organiser. Larkin was still in America raising funds to rebuild the union, although his wife and children had stayed behind in Dublin. Another resident of Charles Street, on the south side of Mountjoy Square, was the Revd Edward Griffin, now an invalid and nearing the end of his life. Dorset Street and Innisfallen Parade were only a stone’s throw away; O’Casey had thus moved from the securely working-class area of his mother’s life, near the Tolka and the East Wall, back into the grander but socially more volatile area where they had lived in his early childhood when his father was still alive.
During this time, in the aftermath of the First World War, the Republican leaders were strengthening their hand, and demonstrating that strength in the general election of December 1918, when seventy-three Sinn Fein candidates were returned, as against twenty-six Unionists; the Irish Parliamentary Party won only six seats. One of the new MPs, returned for St Patrick’s Division, Dublin, was Constance Markiewicz, the first woman ever elected to the House of Commons. Always still, in O’Casey’s eyes, “in hysterical terror”, she had been converted to Roman Catholicism in 1917; later she served a term in Holloway Prison in London for her alleged part in a “German plot” and was still in prison when elected.
The Sinn Fein MPs did not take their seats at Westminster, and in January 1919 proclaimed themselves as the Dáil Éireann — Assembly of Ireland. De Valera, arrested the previous year, escaped from Lincoln Prison in February, and was elected President in April. Sinn Fein was declared illegal in August, and the Dáil in September, but the Irish hoped American pressure might still influence Britain to yield peacefully to their demands; the British themselves, hesitating between repression and conciliation, avoided a military solution.
In early 1920, however, the Irish Republican Army, as the reconstituted Irish Volunteers and Citizen Army now called themselves, began insurgency operations. Not with the foolhardy heroism of 1916, but in flying columns of fifteen to thirty strong, they planned to deliver disruptive blows on selected targets. By these they hoped to render Ireland ungovernable. In London a weak coalition government headed by Lloyd George, constantly under attack in Parliament and in the press, responded by forming two special forces outside the regular army, and a demoralised Royal Irish Constabulary: these were the Black and Tans, recruited mainly from among ex-soldiers in England and so named because their mixed dress of khaki coats, black trousers and caps brought to mind a well-known pack of Tipperary foxhounds; and a constabulary unit called the Auxiliaries, comprised of young ex-officers. As these special forces were largely undisciplined, and their enemy more or less unidentifiable, they became as much terrorists in their efforts to break the IRA and its sympathisers as the IRA were against them. A series of savage reprisals followed, described by O’Casey as “the Dublin slums at war with the British Empire”, although the common people were generally more spectators than combatants-caught, as P. S. O’Hegarty wrote in 1924, between “the devil of the Auxiliary’s pistol and incendiary bombs and the deep sea of the Irish Volunteer’s home-made bomb”.[221]
On 20 February 1920, after the shooting of a policeman, a curfew was imposed on Dublin: it was on a night during this curfew that O’Casey set the drama of his departure from Abercorn Road, portraying himself as constantly in fear of being stopped and arrested in the street. However, the celebrated raid on 35 Mountjoy Square, which O’Casey depicted twice — first in The Shadow of a Gunman and later in his autobiography — happened on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday of 1921, and as O’Casey lived only six months or so in Mountjoy Square, he could not have gone there from Abercorn Road before late 1920.
Mullen remarks that O’Casey grew absolutely terrified — “terror in the shape of a man”[222] (admitting that he himself was not the hero Cuchulain at the gap either) — and begged him to unlock the door so the Tans wouldn’t think he and Mullen were hiding. Mullen disagreed; it would be more suspicious, he thought, if the door were unlocked, as it might give them the idea the two men had stolen in there from somewhere else. O’Casey, petrified with fear, rushed in the wrong direction to find the door and fell over Mullen’s bed, scratching and clawing at the wall above it.
In O’Casey’s version of the raid, he is living alone on the ground floor at the front of the house; he sees, from his darkened room, the searchlight gliding up and down the street, he hears the party break down the front door and rush up the stairs and down. A large shed at the back of the house is broken into — a carpenter’s shop used, he believes, for the manufacture of explosives. His door, left unlocked so as not to be battered down by the intruders, is opened and Mrs Ballynoy, the wife of another tenant, lets herself into the room, where he sees that “A shoulder-band of the overall had slipped down, and she had saucily drawn an arm out of it altogether so that near half of her body to the waist was bare, and he saw a breast, rather lovely in the light of a candle, looking like a golden cup with a misty ruby in its centre.”[223] O’Casey then comments, adding absurdity to likely improbability, “In the midst of death we are in life”.
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 15