Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  Particularly truthful, in both a comic and painful sense, in On the Run, is the extent to which O’Casey heaps ridicule on himself in his most intense phase of loving Maire, at the time when he wrote and dedicated so many heartfelt lyrics to her. It seems as if, putting into Shields’s mouth the cynical assessment of Minnie — a much more ignorant girl than Maire — he is purging himself of self-pity: “Surely a man that has read Shelley couldn’t be interested in an ignorant little bitch that thinks of nothin’ but jazz dances, fox-trots, picture theatres an’ dress.”

  He may have won a kind of subtle, imaginary victory or revenge over Maire by having Minnie die for her imaginary gunman in the form of the worthless Davoren, while Maire had failed to show, as far as O’Casey was concerned, enough courage even to defy her own family and stand by him. Minnie Powell, the first woman character O’Casey shows suffering heroically as a result of the weakness and folly of men, gains authority from the contradictoriness of feeling O’Casey shows over her commitment: she never becomes a cardboard heroine, nor do those who follow her. As Seumas says:

  A Helen of Troy come to live in a tenement! You think a lot about her simply because she thinks a lot about you, an’ she thinks a lot about you because she looks upon you as a hero — a kind o’ Paris … she’d give the world an’ all to be gaddin’ about with a gunman. An’ what ecstasy it’ud give her if after a bit you were shot or hanged.[235]

  The misogyny was but one side of O’Casey’s thought: Minnie, although in too accelerated a way to be wholly credible, takes on a tragic dimension.

  But it is the attitude towards failure which transforms O’Casey’s writing in On the Run. When he had seriously presented his lame friend, the alderman Frank Cahill’s weakness, in The Frost and the Flower, he had wanted to make a point about it, project a personal judgment. But now he was writing of the one thing about which he, of all people, might have been expected to be touchy, namely his own failure as a writer: “Oh, Donal Og O’Davoren, your way’s a thorny way [a reminder that O’Casey’s early Gaelic pen-name had been “the Thorny Branch”?]. Your last state is worse than your first.” He has the generosity of spirit to present the process of life itself, and, in doing so, to send himself up. The surroundings that so frustrated his ambition, namely the slums, are what make that ambition ridiculous. As Davoren says, “The poet ever strives to save the people; the people ever strive to destroy the poet.”[236] Here is another form of comic defiance to add to that of Shields’s resilient pacifism.

  O’Casey calls the unseen gunman friend of Shields Maguire; departing for an errand outside Dublin, he leaves a bag behind with Shields. Only later do Davoren and Seumas look inside, to find it full of Mills bombs: in taking the bag Minnie hopes to protect Davoren. The defiance shown by the self-sacrificing Minnie when she is hauled off is very similar to that of Ballynoy in O’Casey’s autobiography, but not to the real-life Fred of Mullen’s account, arrested during the raid. The gunman himself was based on James MacGowan, with whom O’Casey had shared recruiting during his Citizen Army days, and who later commanded the detachment of Volunteers left behind at Liberty Hall when the main body went to occupy the GPO. MacGowan definitely did not, at Knocksedan, catch something besides butterflies — in the play “two of them he got, one through each lung” — but lived on, carrying a bomb splinter in his head for some years, before it worked itself out. (He then carried the splinter around with him in a little tin box.) But in numerous other details On the Run was very close to life.

  When writing this play O’Casey had all the Abbey criticism, particularly that of Lady Gregory, in the front of his mind; later he told Holloway how much On the Run owed to Lady Gregory, especially to her advice, “to cut out all expression of self and develop his peculiar aptness for character drawing”. A handwritten draft he kept of the first scene shows only minor changes and three words crossed out. He had the play ready by mid-November, writing to Lennox Robinson on the 17th to tell him he intended to bring it over to the theatre the following week: “The play is typed — not faultlessly, I’m afraid — but the result is obviously immeasurably above my fiendish handwriting. I have to thank you and Lady Gregory for the self-sacrifice displayed by the reading of such a manuscript as The Crimson in the Tricolour.”[237]

  He heard from Robinson in February 1923 that On the Run had been accepted, although he was asked to change the title — another play had the same one — which he did, to The Shadow of a Gunman, an infinitely better and more subtle title which reflects the irony at the centre of the play. For “shadow” has a deeply Platonic implication — Plato’s ideal substances were reflected as shadows dancing on the wall of his cave — and yet Plato would have excluded the poet from the Republic. That the weak-minded poet in the play should represent the essence of the patriotic gunman is the ultimate mockery. But it seemed that O’Casey, who had an instinctive gift for incorporating powerful images into his work, was not conscious of the Platonism he mocked — except that he chose Shelley, the most Platonic of all poets, to be Davoren’s literary mentor.

  *

  The first performance of The Shadow of a Gunman took place just after O’Casey’s forty-third birthday: it was the last play of the Abbey season, tacked on for three performances after She Stoops to Conquer. On the same bill — the Abbey management must have felt it was too slight without a curtain-raiser — was T. C. Murray’s popular Sovereign Love. Two important funerals had taken place on the morning of that day of 12 April 1923: in London Sarah Bernhardt’s, in Cork that of Liam Lynch, a Diehard leader who had earlier, during the Irish war of independence, led the party that captured the only British military installation to fall, Mallow Barracks. Lynch was shot dead by Free Staters. There was now a Free State detachment on duty at the Abbey, as the theatres were threatened by the Diehards if they remained open.

  Lennox Robinson directed O’Casey’s play, Arthur Shields played Davoren, F. J. McCormick played Shields, and Gertrude Murphy took the role of Minnie. O’Casey had tried, Robinson wrote later, “to write plays in which he pursued a moral idea; he only completely found himself when he was content to act as a reporter”.[238] But with The Shadow of a Gunman his plays became “reporting of the highest kind, almost of genius”. The theatre on that Thursday night was less than half full, but the play immediately touched a chord: the audience, quick to pick up the political references, laughed and cheered frequently, and O’Casey, who watched from the wings, came forward at the end to take his bow.

  Next day O’Casey pasted cuttings of some of the glowing notices over jottings in a dark red notebook. The critic of the Irish Independent wrote that there were few plays in the Abbey repertoire that rivalled it, and “in satire” it was “in a class by itself”. All the character studies by the actors were praised. The Irish Times recommended that if O’Casey would remove “the small element of real tragedy from the end of his play … and [if he will] … call it a satire instead of a tragedy, there is no reason why it should not live for a very long time”. “What it lacked in dramatic construction,” recorded Joseph Holloway in his diary, “it certainly pulled up in telling dialogue of the most topical and biting kind … Out of the crudeness … truth and human nature leaped.”[239]

  By the second night, thanks to “word of mouth”, the Abbey was three-quarters full. Audiences were tired of war and of politics; here was someone at last getting back at both in a gutsy and irreverent manner, blowing both away in a gale of laughter. “A man should always be drunk,” as Davoren says to Minnie, “when he talks politics — it’s the only way in which to make them important”; uncovering a deeper passion of disillusionment with Shields’s cry,

  I’m a Nationalist meself, right enough — a Nationalist right enough, but all the same — I’m a Nationalist right enough; I believe in the freedom of Ireland, an’ that England has no right to be here, but I draw the line when I hear the gunmen blowin’ about dyin’ for the people, when it’s the people that are dyin’ for the gunmen![240]

 
The play’s faults were its strengths, the gallery of weak men so funny, like a string of vaudeville turns — the vainglorious, self-interested types of Tommy Owens, Grigson and Gallogher, presented a la Boucicault, were instantly recognisable — that it had become caricature as much as character-drawing; it seemed O’Casey had now learnt to sketch dramatically with the same boldness and simplicity he used in his cartoons. To Dublin audiences self-mockery was always endearing: in a city so small and intimate it created a cabaret atmosphere. Everyone could identify with Mrs Grigson’s query, “Do the insurance companies pay if a man is shot after curfew?” as with Davoren’s vanity:

  MINNIE: I know what you are.

  DAVOREN: What am I?

  MINNIE (in a whisper): A gunman on the run!

  DAVOREN (too pleased to deny it): Maybe I am, and maybe I’m not.

  MINNIE: Oh, I know, I know, I know. Do you never be afraid?

  DAVOREN: Afraid! Afraid of what?

  MINNIE: Why, the ambushes of course; I’m all of a tremble when I hear a shot go off, an’ what must it be to be in the middle of the firin’?

  DAVOREN (delighted at MINNIE’S obvious admiration; leaning back in his chair, and lighting a cigarette with placid affectation): I’ll admit one does be a little nervous at first.[241]

  By Saturday night Lady Gregory herself was thrilled, for the attendance was so huge — the largest, she said, since the first night of Shaw’s Blanco Posnet in 1909 — that many were turned away. Before the start of the performance she brought O’Casey round to the foyer, “to share my joy in seeing the crowd surging in”. O’Casey was now, by that third night, a celebrity, and Lady Gregory gave him her own reserved seat, next to Yeats, and herself sat in the stalls. O’Casey did not invite Mullen, who, not a bitter man, later remarked that “he forgot that my kind was alive”. Holloway was watching too: “The author is a thin-faced, sharp-profiled man, with streaky hair, and wore a trench coat and a soft felt hat. He followed his play closely and laughed often, and I was told he was quiet-mannered almost to shyness.” “The characters seemed strangers to me, but I enjoyed them,” O’Casey told Holloway afterwards.[242] He didn’t know that his neighbour, Senator Yeats, had been the hypercritical reader of The Crimson in the Tricolour.

  Later, the elderly O’Casey cast a veil of cynicism over his play writing debut: a run of only three nights, he wrote, was the first cause of vexation, the second the low box-office receipts — only thirteen pounds on opening night. Although Saturday’s full house brought in over fifty pounds, his share of the total takings amounted to less than four pounds, for which, because of the Abbey’s shaky finances and because he felt too proud to ask for it in cash, he would have to wait: “Less than four pounds! And he had bargained in his mind for twenty, at the least.”[243]

  But there was a much stronger side to the younger O’Casey who now bathed in a glow of success, a side that linked him with the shadow gunman Davoren, poet and poltroon, and it was to this side of O’Casey that Lady Gregory responded most markedly when they talked together:

  I forget how I came to mention the Bible, and he asked “Do you like it?” I said, “Yes. I read it constantly, even for the beauty of the language.” He said he admires that beauty, he was brought up as a Protestant but has lost belief in religious forms. Then, in talking of our war here, we came to Plato’s Republic, his dream city, whether on earth or in heaven not far away from the city of God.[244]

  He had found a new church — the Abbey Theatre — and for the present the iconoclast in him gazed in wonder at the range of images on offer.

  8 — Hearts of Flesh and Stone

  As O’Casey grumbled about his four pounds, there was no reason that he should have known — or cared — that the Abbey building, formerly the Dublin City morgue, had recently been mortgaged to pay off a debt of £1,153. Although the authorities had just acknowledged the theatre’s importance to the new Irish Free State by conferring on it an annual grant of £850, it could only employ six fully professional actors, each paid four pounds a week. Gabriel Fallon — Gallogher in The Shadow of a Gunman — was a civil servant by day; so, too, was Barry Fitzgerald, who, as Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock, was soon to be recognised as the great leading actor of the Abbey. The part-timers would dash from their offices at lunchtime, rehearse for half an hour, snatch a sandwich and coffee, and be back at their desks by two p.m. They would manage an hour and a half’s rehearsal after work, the main meal of the day at six thirty, and then start making up for the evening performance. They each received thirty shillings a week.

  Fallon worked in Transport Statistics in Dublin Castle, and Barry Fitzgerald (the stage name of William Shields, brother of Arthur Shields, the Abbey actor and stage manager) in an office two blocks away in the Department of Industry and Commerce. But F. J. McCormick (stage name of Peter Judge), who played Seamas in Gunman, the Abbey’s leading depicter of Dublin character, was a full professional, who began work at eleven.

  At first, O’Casey was in awe of the actors. Fallon recalled seeing “F. J.” usher him into the wings during the first performance.[245] “Certainly, why not? You’ll be all right there.” While the little pit orchestra under Dr John Larchet (“Larky”) played Mendelssohn’s “Son and Stranger” overture, O’Casey anxiously asked Fallon, “Are you sure I won’t be in the way here?” Fallon gruffly replied, “Dammit, you’ve written the play, you’ve every right to be here.” But O’Casey told him in a soft, persuasive voice, “The stage is really the actor’s place. Only he has the right to be here.”

  When the Abbey, angling for Horse Show Week custom, reopened in August, Gunman was the natural choice with which to begin the new season. But now F. J. — as subtle an actor as the Abbey had ever known — became a target for O’Casey’s revived critical spirit. After one performance he mounted the fourteen wooden steps which led from the stage to the flimsily timbered dressing rooms, to inform F. J.:

  “You’re after making a hames of my play, Mr Mac.” “How did I make a hames of your play?” asked F. J. “You made a hames of it at that particular line when Donal says ‘I remember the time when you yourself believed in nothing but the gun,’ and Shields says, ‘Aye, when there wasn’t a bloody gun in the country.’” Anyway F. J. asked him, “How would you say the line?” and O’Casey replied, “Oh, but I’m not an actor.”[246]

  Particular lines apart, O’Casey felt McCormick made Shields too sympathetic a figure.

  Gunman was now a sell-out and later became one of the most often revived plays in the Abbey’s repertoire. O’Casey worked less and less often as a casual labourer, although he did not own up to his new-found independence of means until the following year. He had completed two more one-act plays, The Cooing of Doves — full, as he said, “of wild discussions and rows in a public-house” — and Cathleen Listens In, “a jovial sardonic sketch on the various parties in conflict over Irish politics — Sinn Fein, Free State, and Labour”.[247] He preferred the first work, and received a shock when it was turned down in favour of the second. And although he later used The Cooing of Doves as the basis for the second act of The Plough and the Stars, he never admitted that the Abbey had done him a good turn by rejecting it when it did.

  Concentrating on play writing to the exclusion of almost everything else, O’Casey had by now withdrawn socially from the St Laurence O’Toole Club (but he still hurled), from his earlier friendships such as that with Cahill, and from family life. He still saw himself as a martyr, more now perhaps in the sense of the Greek, i.e. witness — and depended wholly upon himself. Applause from the public had to some extent become a substitute for personal love. Defending F. J. against O’Casey in an amiable discussion about F. J.’s acting in Terence MacSwiney’s The Revolutionist, M. J. Dolan, another actor-director at the Abbey, said, “Mac made one fatal mistake in the part; he occasionally played for applause, and thus became self-conscious.”[248] O’Casey told him, “Sure, we all play for applause in life, from Jim Larkin down.”

  Lark
in was released from Sing Sing in 1923, on the order of Governor Al Smith of New York: feted at the dockside when he left America, his progress through Southampton was no less triumphant, and in Dublin people stood shoulder to shoulder from Westland Row Station to Liberty Hall. But he soon found he could not take up just where he had left off after the great lock-out: O’Brien was firmly established in the ITGWU, and the executive refused to reinstate Larkin. Larkin distrusted the outlook of Arthur Griffith’s successors, who controlled the Free State: “Nobody in Ireland did anything but Sinn Fein,” he wrote; “Connolly and the other boys all recanted Socialism and labour and were good Sinn Feiners. My God, it is sickening.”[249] His view was roughly now that of O’Casey, who in 1919 had written in his Citizen Army history that Labour would “probably have to fight Sinn Fein”.[250]

  As he fought to re-establish himself in Dublin politics, later forming a rival union to the ITGWU, Larkin found other things had changed, in particular his marriage. Later, in a rare personal judgment passed on one of his greatest heroes, O’Casey said, “Of course, Jim was always religious — in the good sense of the word. I don’t think he acted quite justly to Mrs L. After all, it must have been a tough job to have been tied to Jim. He had very little time for any home-life. I think he made a mistake in not living with her when he came back. But I never said so to him — that sort of thing’s too private to be discussed with anyone.”[251]