The lady’s husband, it later turns out, is himself the arsenalist, wounded when he tries to stop the raiders entering his shed. A timid, insignificant man, Ballynoy stands up in the lorry as he is driven away, “clouts” of blood dripping from his hands as he shouts, “Up th’ Republic”. In the pattern of other sexual adventures in his autobiography, O’Casey’s lust is thwarted as Mrs Ballynoy flees naked, clutching her flowered overall, up the stairs. While this is how he later — and fancifully — elaborates the incident, at the time what engaged him more was the plot of what became his first play to be staged, The Shadow of a Gunman, set (as he has it) in May 1920.
Mullen’s testimony is closer to the play: the Tans came to their room, he says, where one shone a torch in, asking who was there. Mullen replied, the two of them asleep. Finally they took away Fred and one of the young men whom they had caught, alleging he was making bombs. Mullen went to make tea, while the other man on the run returned from outside, with cuts from climbing over the walls. Returning to O’Casey, Mullen found him still bothered: “I’ve got the minute book of the Citizen Army here,” he told Mullen. “She asked me to look after it.” (The book could have been lent by Delia Larkin; in The Shadow of a Gunman the hero hunts feverishly for a possibly dangerous piece of evidence.) O’Casey went out and hid the incriminating book, possibly under a floorboard in the hall, before the owner of the house, furious at the broken door and windows, arrived.
While he was in Mountjoy Square, when his money ran out, O’Casey was employed by Delia Larkin as a janitor in the old Forester’s Hall, 10 Langrishe Place. He worked at cleaning and organising the hall for concerts and plays; and gathering funds “for Jim Larkin when he returned”, knowing the “opposition Jim would meet when he came home from the self-centred, conventional, ‘hero-frightened’ leaders of the Irish Labour Movement”.[224] O’Casey was paid thirty shillings a week for this work, meanwhile acting the part of a cockney burglar in a production of Special Pleading, by Bernard Duffy. Daily he contemplated from the hall, which had been both a church and a Methodist chapel, the terrace from which Bella had been evicted with her five children after Beaver’s death.
In America, Larkin had in 1919 been sentenced, in the wave of anti-Bolshevik feeling which swept the States, to ten years’ penal servitude for what the court described as “criminal syndicalism”. A committee was formed in Dublin to agitate for his release from Sing Sing; O’Casey later served for a time as its secretary. The activity hardly interrupted his efforts to replace with his own experience the stage stereotypes in the plays he was writing.
During 1920 and in early 1921 he completed his third full-length play, The Crimson in the Tricolour, on the struggle between Sinn Fein and labour. He described it as
a “play of ideas” moulded on Shaw’s style. It had in it a character posed on A. Griffith, a Labour Leader, mean & despicable, posed on whomsoever you can guess & the “noble proletarian” in it was later “The Covey” in the Plough & the Stars [The Covey quotes from John Bull’s Other Island], as was a carpenter who developed into “Fluther” [Fluther Good in The Plough and the Stars].[225]
The “Labour Leader” was William O’Brien, who had usurped Larkin’s post as General Secretary of the ITGWU, and whom O’Casey elsewhere described as “the big sharp shit”.[226]
O’Casey moved away from Mountjoy Square two or three weeks after the raid, which had left him going round in circles. “I wasn’t lonely for him,” Mullen commented on his departure. By the end of June 1921 he had changed his address to 422 North Circular Road, where a letter from Seamus O’Concubhair (James O’Connor), an old Republican friend and former Red Hand hurler, reached him. “Drifting”, O’Casey called this period of his life. He had written to O’Concubhair on the question of a faulty will, a problem affecting another lodger at 422, John Moore, who lived with his family in the flat above O’Casey’s new room. “The writing of the Will” engrossed O’Casey’s imagination until, several years later, he made use of it in the plot of Juno and the Paycock.
In the North Circular Road he now lived on his own.
*
The handwritten script of The Crimson in the Tricolour, which Mullen took along to the Abbey for O’Casey, was kept by the theatre for longer than the two previous scripts. Lennox Robinson, the director and playwright, who was responsible for the day-to-day management of the Abbey, wrote to O’Casey to say that they had lost it, and O’Casey, who had no copy, prepared himself to write out another version. Robinson then found the script, which relieved O’Casey and raised his hopes of the play’s being performed. These were further sustained by a detailed critique from Lady Gregory — at seventy still co-director, with Yeats, of the Abbey — which Robinson copied out for O’Casey:
“The Crimson in the Tricolour” (a very good name). This is a puzzling play — extremely interesting. Mrs Budrose is a jewel and her husband a good setting for her. I don’t see any plot in it, unless the Labour unrest culminating in the turning off of the lights at the meeting may be called one. It is the expression of ideas that makes it interesting (besides feeling that the writer has something in him). But we could not put it on while the Revolution is still unaccomplished — it might hasten the Labour attack on Sinn Fein, which ought to be kept back till the fight with England is over and the new Government has had time to show what it can do. I think Eileen’s rather disagreeable flirtation with O’Regan should be cut — their first entrance — or rather exit — or both, it seems to be leading to something that doesn’t come. In Act II a good deal of O’Regan and Nora should be cut. In Act III almost all of the O’Malley and Eileen part should be cut. The end is, I think, good, the entry of the workmen, and Fagan and Tim Tracy. I feel that there is no personal interest worth developing — but that with as much as possible of those barren parts cut, we might find a possible play of ideas in it. I suggest that (with the author’s leave) it would be worth typing the play at the Theatre’s expense with or without those parts. For it is impossible to go through it again — or show it, or have a reading of it while in handwriting.[227]
The following Friday at eight thirty p.m. O’Casey met Robinson for the first time. This had few immediate consequences, except for the typing of the manuscript. But O’Casey’s enthusiasm must have been kindled, and he began to see more plays. Joseph Holloway, who kept a daily record of what went on at the Abbey, later recorded that O’Casey told him he had liked Daniel Corkery’s The Labour Leader, which dealt with Larkin and the 1913 lock-out. He had also seen James Stephens’s The Wooing of Julia Elizabeth, set in a tenement, which was first performed in August 1920.
While The Crimson in the Tricolour awaited a final verdict, O’Casey wrote The Seamless Coat of Kathleen; this allegorical tale was printed in the Republican weekly Poblacht na h’Éireann on 29 March 1922.[228] O’Casey also sent a one-act dramatic version of it to Robinson, who swiftly rejected it. The “coat” of the title referred to the nominal unity of the new but highly controversial Irish Free State, product of the treaty negotiated by Lloyd George with the provisional Republican government headed by Griffith, Collins and a reluctant de Valera which had put an end to the Anglo-Irish war. To call the coat “seamless” was ironic, because the leaders of the rival Irish factions — Free State supporters on the one side, Irregulars or Diehards on the other — were organising for open conflict, and it must have come as little surprise to O’Casey to have his play declined by the Abbey directors at such a sensitive moment as “too definite a piece of propaganda for us to do”. They asked if there was any chance of O’Casey’s getting it done at Liberty Hall.
Patience was a necessary attribute for the playwright: in June 1922 Yeats reported on The Crimson in the Tricolour:
I find this discursive play very hard to judge for it is a type of play I do not understand. The drama of it is loose & vague. At the end of Act I Kevin O’Regan is making very demonstrative love to Eileen Budrose, & the curtain falls on what (in all usual stage manners) should have been her ear
ly seduction. In Act II without a word of explanation one finds him making equally successful love to Nora. In Act III one learns for the first time that Eileen has married Shemus O’Malley. We have not even been told that they were courting. We have only seen her refuse his escort to supper. Regan talks constantly of his contempt for organised opinion & suddenly at the end we discover him as some kind of labour leader — one organised opinion exchanged for another. It is a story without meaning — a story where nothing happens except that a wife runs away from a husband to whom we had not the least idea that she was married, & the Mansion House lights are turned out because of some wrong to a man who never appears in the play.
On the other hand it is so constructed that in every scene there is something for pit & stalls to cheer or boo. In fact it is the old Irish idea of a good play — Queens Melodrama brought up to date would no doubt make a sensation — especially as everybody is as ill mannered as possible, & all truth considered as inseperable [sic] from spite and hatred.
If Robinson wants to produce it let him do so by all means & be damned to him. My fashion has gone out.[229]
Yet it was not until the end of September, more than three months later, that Robinson finally said no to O’Casey, sending on Yeats’s comments without identifying him, and without the first sentence, or the second and third paragraphs of his report. Robinson mentioned the possibility that he and O’Casey might work over the play once more together, or discuss any future scenario O’Casey had in mind, so he could avoid getting the shape wrong.
Six years later, by 1928, O’Casey would have taken mortal offence at such an idea, but the forty-two-year-old ex-labourer — fallen at first, he said, like Lucifer, “never to hope again” — still had to have a play produced. Even so, in his reply to Robinson he foreshadowed future differences with Yeats — without as yet knowing he had been the reader — by proudly reaffirming his faith in the play. “I have re-read the work and find it as interesting as ever, in no way deserving the contemptuous dismissal it has received.”[230] Bristling with contrariness, he went on to challenge various judgments Yeats had made — such as that the play was “loose & vague” — “what could be more loose and vague than life itself?” He even cited “Yeates”, as he spelt the name, as an example of a man who behaved untypically and implausibly, which “the reader” had criticised O’Regan in the play for doing!
His crowning riposte was to Yeats’s stricture that an important action should not be performed in a play by a man who never appears on stage: O’Casey intended, he said, to write a play about Jim Larkin, to be called The Red Star, in which Larkin would never appear and would be responsible for all the action! (He did this eighteen years later and the result, The Star Turns Red, is perhaps the crudest and certainly one of the least successful of his plays.) His reply read as empty expostulation on the part of an unknown playwright in response to the views of the newly created Senator Yeats — in the following year he was to be given the Nobel Prize — and Robinson must have smiled when he read it. But he had judged O’Casey well, for resentment spurred him on to do his best and — in spite of his grumbles — to adhere painstakingly to all the advice he had received from the Abbey. He had already begun, that summer, a new full-length play based on the Black and Tan raid in Mountjoy Square, and was incorporating as threads of sub-plot various other incidents in which he had been involved in 1921 and 1922.
*
“I’ve been among children all my life,” O’Casey commented when seventy,[231] to a friend, but he had never suffered such a concentration of them before moving to 422 North Circular Road, where he claimed there were twenty. He had the front downstairs room which looked on a small scraggy sycamore tree and a crossroads: Innisfallen Parade was scarcely a hundred yards away. As sole occupant of the room, his rent was five shillings a week.
He now possessed a typewriter, on which he had himself typed out The Seamless Coat of Kathleen. When the house was quiet he would begin work, continuing until two a.m. In the basement lived the Kavanagh family, whose floorboards were rotted away with damp. Sometimes, if he went on working after two, one of the Kavanagh sons, Jim, would hammer on the ceiling with a broom for him to give over. In the room directly above O’Casey lived the Moore family, later models for characters in Juno and the Paycock.
About this time, back in Mountjoy Square in Delia Larkin’s flat, O’Casey met R. M. Fox, then an Oxford undergraduate, who later wrote a biography of Larkin and a history of the Citizen Army. O’Casey scorned both books, but at first he and Fox were friends. Fox had written an article calling for Larkin’s release from Sing Sing, which O’Casey got The Gael to publish, expanding it with passages of his own of which Fox knew nothing, but still crediting the younger man with the authorship. Fox was shown by O’Casey round the Dublin of mixed rule and jostling factions, and he found O’Casey generous with his time and his help: though O’Casey was by now in his early forties, Fox’s first impression was of “a man in his thirties, of slight build, straight, with quick nervous movements, sensitive features and peering eyes. Very soon I noted his gift for incisive comment.”
O’Casey took Fox first to Fowler Hall, formerly an Orange Lodge but now housing Catholic refugees driven out of Belfast in the Protestant pogroms of summer 1920 and after. Men, women and children lived there, under Republican guard, in rough, makeshift conditions. “Round the walls were heavily framed, massive portraits of Queen Victoria, Lord Carson and other Orange workers, gazing down in glassy-eyed disapproval of the scene.” The refugees told the two visitors of Northern Catholics who had had to jump from ships into Belfast Lough, swimming to safety while red-hot rivets, “orange confetti” thrown by the Belfast shipyard workers, fell round them. They heard too that the present position of all these refugees was perilous, because they were “cover” for a Diehard ammunition dump hidden in the basement.
Fox and O’Casey also visited the Four Courts, which Republican Diehards had occupied in defiance of the Free State Army. These Diehards, or Irregulars, were using law books to block up the windows in preparation for civil war, while Republican justice was being dispensed in the courts. They then mounted a tram; “as it swirled round College Green,” wrote Fox, “a motor car in the street backfired loudly. Suddenly I saw that all my fellow passengers ducked their heads. They knew Dublin and didn’t trust bangs. O’Casey smiled his sardonic smile.”[232]
*
The new play O’Casey was writing had the provisional title On the Run: he took for his setting the room he had lived in in Mountjoy Square, adapting the name to ‘Hilljoy Square’ — near-by Hill Street was where he had first acted with his brother Isaac’s Townsend Players. He told Joseph Holloway that he had begun writing On the Run in Mountjoy Square, and the setting he described was later corroborated by Mullen as fitting Number 35:
A Return Room in a tenement house in Hilljoy Square. At the back two large windows looking out into the yard … Running parallel with the windows is a stretcher bed; another runs at right angles along the wall at right … The aspect of the place is one of absolute untidiness, engendered on the one hand by the congenital slovenliness of SEUMAS SHIELDS and on the other by the temperament of DONAL DAVOREN.[233]
The time could be documented precisely: 19 May 1920, at the bitterest period of the Anglo-Irish conflict. The two main characters who share the bed-sitting room — the play required only a single set, by no means an innovation at the Abbey — were modelled on Mullen and himself; the former did not take kindly to seeing himself portrayed as a pedlar of second-rate cutlery and a cynical commentator on the new nationalism. O’Casey may have taken the shell of the character of Shields from Mullen, but he filled it with much of himself — his bitter disillusionment with earlier causes he had embraced, reinforced by the authority of Shaw in John Bull’s Other Island and its Preface.
There’s a fellow that thinks that the four cardinal virtues are not to be found outside an Irish Republic. I don’t want to boast about myself — I don’t want to boas
t about myself, and I suppose I could call meself as good a Gael as some of those that are knocking about now — knocking about now, — as good a Gael as some that are knocking about now — but I remember the time when I taught Irish six nights a week, when in the Irish Republican Brotherhood I paid me rifle levy like a man … Now, after all me work for Dark Rosaleen, the only answer you can get from a roarin’ Republican to a simple question is “good-by … ee”.
He also celebrated comically in Shields his own anti-heroic behaviour during Easter Week and after, his withdrawal from political commitment — but deepened with the raw emotional directness of the Dublin street-dweller:
But this is the way I look at it — I look at it this way: You’re not goin’ — you’re not goin’ to beat the British Empire — the British Empire, by shootin’ an occasional Tommy at the corner of an occasional street. Besides, when the Tommies have the wind up — when the Tommies have the wind up they let bang at everything they see — they don’t give a God’s curse who they plug.[234]
Davoren, the aspiring poet, O’Casey based fully on himself: into the character he put, with dispassionate, comic sharpness, sides of himself even more unsympathetic than he put into Seumas. He had a strong belief that Byron’s humour — which in Don Juan he admired — diminished him as a poet while Shelley, who had no humour, was always taken more seriously. Therefore Shelley could more easily be “sent up”, and so he depicted Davoren — whose presence in Hilljoy Square is mysterious to the other tenement dwellers — as moulding himself on Shelley, repeating lines from Prometheus Unbound, “Ah me, alas! Pain, pain, pain ever, for ever!” which in their deadly seriousness are intended to have an hilarious, and at the same time sad, effect. For, unlike Shelley, Davoren is a bad poet, a bit of a poseur — “poet and poltroon” — as well as a coward, prepared to exploit a pretty girl’s mistaken view of him as a gunman on the run. Brutally O’Casey carries the pretence to its logical conclusion, having the pretty girl, Minnie Powell, die at the end to save her hero. He never redeems Davoren, as Synge redeems Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World, or as a Conn the Shaughraun survives death and is revealed as the saviour of his friends.
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 16