If O’Casey had little time for Larkin in 1923, he had also severed connections with his former friends, the priests of both Catholic and Protestant denomination, such as Griffin’s successor, or Canon Brady, to whom O’Casey used to quote the Koran. He was in a virulently anti-Catholic mood, having mocked, in Gunman, the Church’s holy rituals:
Instead of counting their beads now they’re countin’ bullets; their Hail Marys and paternosters are burstin’ bombs — burstin’ bombs, an’ the rattle of machine-guns; petrol is their holy water; their Mass is a burnin’ buildin’; their De Profundis is “The Soldiers’ Song” …[252]
and now he turned on the stones of St Laurence O’Toole, with its “brawny and vulgar” façade,
[253] abusing it for refusing to shelter the body of a dead Fenian for a night.
In May he began sketching out a new play which he called Juno and the Peacock: on the inside cover of a seventy-two-page pink Grattan school exercise book he pinned an Irish Times cutting dated 8 May describing King George V, in “naval undress” and Queen Mary, wearing a heliotrope dress trimmed with Parma violets, visiting Raphael’s tomb in Rome. It was his custom to embellish work in progress with news snippets and reviews. Opposite he wrote out a scenario of the first two acts:
Act I —
Annie on strike; mother going out to work. Joxer outside enters when Juno leaves: enters singing. His talk with Andy. Interrupted by entrance of Juno. The dispute between the two of them. The lover of Annie’s.
The entrance of the Schoolteacher
The writing of the Will,
End I[254]
Second act details included “The cultivation of the teacher’s society, his love affair with Annie … The will to be proved. The borrowing of the money.”
The rest of the Grattan exercise book, except for eight blank pages, he filled, at different times, working from both ends of the book, with drafts of the first two acts (to be expanded in the finished script) and brief sections of Act III. He also used some pages for lists of characters and for experimenting with snatches of dialogue, e.g. “When are we going to get our — Quatta? — Quota”; “Thine to the point of Emancipation”; “Procrastinator & Prognosticator”, and the impressionistic, possibly overheard, “Andy Murphy … he lives in — where’s this he lived … it wasn’t in — no not in in in, it doesn’t matter. He was the son of oh you know him well … of one o’ oh what this his name was …”
During the summer of 1923 O’Casey also rewrote The Crimson in the Tricolour, and forwarded it to Robinson, who again said no. He tried to interest Dolan in producing it, and Dolan had given him suggestions, such as transforming the setting from outside a convent, where characters were “spouting socialism”, to inside a pub. But the play lacked characterisation or a solid enough plot for Dolan. “Always keep the interest on the move,” was his advice to O’Casey, giving him the example of Lennox Robinson’s popular The Whiteheaded Boy, which had been the last play produced by the Abbey before the Easter Rising of 1916, and which was now being revived late in 1923.
Robinson was rehearsing Cathleen Listens In in September but the production, presented at the end of the month in a triple bill with Shaw’s The Man of Destiny and Lady Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon, was a dismal failure. Holloway noted:
Somehow or other, despite … being a good skit, it missed the mark I think and fizzled out somewhat. It was full of subtle touches, most of which didn’t fit into dramatic effectiveness … It was types and not characters that made up the cast; therefore, none of the players made their parts live … There was a fine audience present, and excitement ran high to see how O’Casey would succeed in his second dramatic effort. The audience was eager to laugh with him, but couldn’t, only by fits and starts.[255]
O’Casey himself was mortified by the audience rising in silence at the end, as he saw it, and filing out of the auditorium. He was the only Abbey playwright, he said, ever to be deprived of even a single timid handclap: it looked as if his talent “would have to perish in silence”.[256]
But, in this most fertile period of his life, failure was a better tonic than success, for out of The Crimson in the Tricolour’s rejection had come Gunman: now, seething with disappointment, cap well down and hands in pockets, he walked home uphill to Number 422. “Once inside he swore an oath that he would write a play which would be such that the Abbey would not be big enough to hold the audience that would want to see it.”[257]
This meant intensifying the hasty and almost illegible efforts he had begun to make in the pink Grattan notebook.
*
Ulster, as was expected, having voted itself out of the Free State at the end of 1922, Ireland as a whole, under the separate governments of North and South, had gradually been settling down, although fighting continued in 1923 between the Free State Army and the Irregulars. Griffith had died, Michael Collins been killed in an ambush, but their successors, W. T. Cosgrave and Kevin O’Higgins, sternly implemented measures which led their main opponent, de Valera, to seek a cease-fire at the end of May 1923. But they were in no mood to respond. One of the main factors in undermining the power of the Irregulars had been the Catholic hierarchy, whose weight was thrown in on the side of the Free State (hence O’Casey’s increasing derision of it).
Living as he did in Diehard country, O’Casey’s sympathies were with the new breed of martyrs, the Irregulars, hunted down in the final revenge of the Irish Free State against its potential usurpers. In the week of 3 September 1923, even though de Valera had declared a unilateral truce, the killing went on. One of the victims was the sweetheart of Mary Moore, daughter of the family who lived in “the two pair back” above O’Casey in Number 422.
The CID had raided 422 several times; on one occasion, hauling the sheets off O’Casey, and pulling him roughly out of bed, they had pointed their revolvers at him till he could establish his identity. Both sons, and then the daughter, of Mrs Moore were dragged off to jail; but the girl’s sweetheart’s end was particularly savage. Captain Hogan — such was his name — had shot a Free-Stater, and had no benefit from the armistice terms. He was caught at the Dorset Street end of the North Circular Road. O’Casey had a picture of this man given to him later by Mary Moore, which he kept for many years.
Hogan was taken, as O’Casey told Holloway at the Abbey, “in the middle of the night … and brought out towards Finglas and brutally beaten with the butt end of their revolvers, and then told to run for his life while they fired revolver shots after him, taking bits off his ears, etc., and catching up on him again renewed their beating.”[258] Next day O’Casey had seen him dead — “more than just dead, for his belly had been kicked in, his right eye was a purple pulp, an ear had been partly shot off, and now, jagged and red-edged, stood out like a tiny fin from the side of his head.”[259] Finglas was where O’Casey had particularly enjoyed Maire’s company when they had strolled together down Stella’s Walk.
The image of the crippled Diehard victim was from the start central to the conception of Juno. From the first draft it would appear that the duplicated form of this image — Robbie Tancred first, and then his former comrade, Johnny Boyle, who “shopped” him — emerged only later, for Johnny hardly appears in the draft of Act I; another character called Jim, who later becomes Mary Boyle’s sweetheart, Jerry, fills his place. The notion of Johnny as an off-stage presence — a theatrical ploy which O’Casey always found attractive — he dispensed with as the urgency and immediacy of the theme, and of the real circumstances to which it related, dictated its own conditions. So in Act II:
JOHNNY (passionately): I won’t go! Haven’t I done enough for Ireland! I’ve lost me arm, an’ me hip’s desthroyed so that I’ll never be able to walk right agen! Good God, haven’t I done enough for Ireland?
THE YOUNG MAN: Boyle, no man can do enough for Ireland![260]
The Hogan atrocity supplied O’Casey with the first line of his play: Mary Boyle’s noticing a news item in the paper: “On a little bye-road,
out beyant Finglas, he was found.” So he could have written that line before Cathleen Listens In, but only just. The response of the Moore mother to this death and to the wholesale arrest of her children stirred him profoundly:
the kindly soul of the old woman found rest only in restlessness. One night, while her old husband slept, she had wandered out into a windy, sleety night, to be found the morning after, stretched calmly out, indifferent to the stinging rain and the bustling wind, on the streaming pavement of a windy turning, in a last, long sleep.[261]
Mrs Moore’s death and her funeral, which he attended — to help, as he said, “hedge the old man’s sorrow in” — aroused deep feelings, which had been but sleeping, about the death of his own mother, and about motherhood in general. He had dramatised these feelings once before, but unsuccessfully, in The Harvest Festival.
The comic plot of Juno also came, miraculously, from the Moore family. O’Casey remembered that this same family had been a different kind of victim more than two years before, when Mr Moore had been made the beneficiary of a faulty will. O’Casey had sent him for advice to his lawyer friend, James O’Connor, who tried — unsuccessfully, or so it appeared from O’Casey’s subsequent treatment of the subject — to have the will established in Mr Moore’s favour. O’Connor wrote to O’Casey to try and get the witnesses he required, “otherwise I fear that the first and second cousins would come in and with the investigations etc. necessary, would stretch out the final distribution of the estate to a very far distant date”.[262] O’Casey’s master stroke is to combine the two narrative elements — one potentially comic, the other potentially tragic — in the same play.
This mingling of elements was there in the first draft. Joxer, the typical Dublin wastrel — deceitful, lazy, hypocritical — and Boyle, the public-house lounger with the title “Captain” from being “only wanst on the wather” on a Liverpool-Dublin coal boat, were there, much of their dialogue untouched in the final version from this first scribbling — or if changed expanded from an impressionistic shorthand:
B. I often of a … cold & wathery night looked up at the stars & I assed meself the question — What is the stars, and it blowed & blowed & blowed, blew is the right word, Joxer, but we sailors always cry blowed.
JOXER: A darlin’ word, a darlin’ word.[263]
So was Juno, some of her great emotional outbursts intact and almost complete even then, including the one that became in its final version at the end of Act III:
I forgot, Mary, I forgot; your poor oul’ selfish mother was only thinkin’ of herself. No, no, you musn’t come — it wouldn’t be good for you. You go on to me sisther’s an’ I’ll face th’ ordeal meself. Maybe I didn’t feel sorry enough for Mrs Tancred when her poor son was found as Johnny’s been found now — because he was a Diehard! Ah, why didn’t I remember that then he wasn’t a Diehard or a Stater, but only a poor dead son! It’s well I remember all that she said — an’ it’s my turn to say it now: What was the pain I suffered, Johnny, bringin’ you into the world to carry you to your cradle, to the pains I’ll suffer carryin’ you out o’ the world to bring you to your grave! Mother o’God, Mother o’God, have pity on us all! Blessed Virgin, where were you when me darlin’ son was riddled with bullets, when me darlin’ son was riddled with bullets? Sacred Heart o’ Jesus, take away our hearts o’ stone, and give us hearts o’ flesh! Take away this murdherin’ hate, an’ give us Thine own eternal love![264]
It is, from the start, these three great characters who provide the play’s dynamism: its subtleties, its skilfully complex organisation of the rise and fall of the Boyle legacy, news of which the theosophist and schoolteacher Charles Bentham brings into the Boyle household, and Mary’s pregnancy, her rejection by her overspent and shattered father — all apparently came later. The poetic repetitions, such as Boyle’s “I’m telling you … Joxer … th’ whole worl’s … in a terr … ible state o’ … chassis!” rode through successive drafts. But some of Boyle’s Shakespearean expansiveness was cut down, for example when Mrs Madigan challenges him about his rank at sea:
MRS. I gather from what you say Mr that you were in your young days a sailor.
B. (expansively) Mrs I trod the decks o’ the finest ships that ever put into the port of (Glenrose?) Ah thems, thems was days, thems was days!
JX. A life on the rollin’ wave, a life on the boundin’ sea …
MRS. What were you Mr … Mate first or second (rank) class.
B. (solemnly) This is a democratic age Mrs … we wont discover about rank … “Rank is but a name” …
In place of this O’Casey wrote:
BOYLE: Another dhrop o’ whisky, Mrs Madigan?
thus concentrating the feeling Boyle’s call of the sea has awakened in Mrs Madigan.
The less strong characters, such as Mary and Jerry, grew more slowly. In the final version the pair have become more condensed, more rounded in what they say, while the semi-farcical interruptions — Johnny objecting offstage to Boyle putting on his moleskin trousers — have doubled in richness. In places the earlier script has some of the fussy, music-hall abruptness of Gunman: but unnecessary characters and extraneous business were later cut.
O’Casey included few songs and snatches of verse in his first draft: these, and most of the stage directions, were added later. To begin with Boyle’s walk is a “slow, semi-pompous strut”; later, a “slow, consequential strut”. His stomach, “perceptibly protruding”, becomes “slightly thrust forward”. O’Casey sketched Boyle’s head in the pink exercise book, and once or twice totted up his own rent and other costs of living.
*
Like Gunman, although more rich and complex in plot, Juno depends ultimately upon its characters’ foibles for its humour. Mr Moore, of Number 422, bereaved husband and thwarted father, who had stood at his wife’s funeral, his few white tufts of hair saturated with rain, embodied the opposite of vanity, but O’Casey had portrayed that failing so well in Gunman, with Davoren, that he saw even greater comic and tragic possibilities in it now. So, in place of Moore he has Captain Boyle, who combines Davoren’s vanity with Seumas Shields’s illusionism. O’Casey took the name of Boyle from a well-known Dublin character whom he used to visit at his flat in Gloucester Street, often finding there a quick-tempered down-and-out called Jack Daly who would call in regularly for a cup of tea. The pair would gossip for hours, while O’Casey sat near the fire listening, occasionally jotting down snatches of their talk on bits of paper (neither suspected him of doing this). Boyle also wrote verses, and those in Act II of Juno may originally have been his.
But like many rich creations, Boyle stemmed from more than one source: the character shared with O’Casey’s own brother Mick, and with Shakespeare’s Falstaff, his terrible thirst and his phobia towards work. Lennox Robinson gave O’Casey a volume of Chekhov’s plays at about the time he was working on Juno: it is perhaps, then, no mere coincidence that Boyle is deemed “Captain” for nautical exploits that are boastful lies, like those of the hired “General” in Chekhov’s farcical The Wedding Party, “You sail the seas without a care in the world.” Above all Boyle is a victim of the illusion that he will become free of debt and poverty — and, like the new Ireland, deliriously drunk and happy with its independence, he is to be cruelly disillusioned. Perhaps O’Casey — this time anticipating his habit of becoming disillusioned — was also issuing a warning to himself not to be too much affected by the slowly but significantly increasing royalty payments he received from the Abbey. (In the May 1923 exercise book an item of thirty-seven pounds is recorded, although this cannot be dated.)
As in The Shadow of a Gunman, the setting of Juno and the Paycock never changes. But while Gunman is more about a people at war, Juno, for all its deeply emotional pacifism — in which O’Casey, through Juno and Mrs Tancred, rejustifies and re-affirms his own non-combatant stance on taking up arms for a cause (or expiates, and apologises for, his own cowardice) — takes place in a poor tenement and addresses itself to the subject
of poverty and human aspiration. Susan Casey, both materially and emotionally, had protected her Johnny, whose intellectuality had in any case made him superior to the issues at stake. But Juno — so named, with typical O’Casey irony and comic deviousness, not, he said, after the Roman goddess of the hearth, but because the significant events of her life happened in June — has no such luck or ability to protect her Johnny. In Johnny Boyle O’Casey was depicting a “might-have-been” version of himself (as he did with Jack Rocliffe) although, fortunately for Juno, he did not allow the character to become much more than a sketch.
Much more powerfully and confidently than in Gunman, O’Casey shows without comment the processes of life. There had been plays before at the Abbey about the Dublin poor: A. Patrick Wilson’s The Slough; the harsh satire called Blight, which O’Casey had seen; Daniel Corkery’s The Labour Leader — but none of these made the audiences laugh, and each had emptied the theatre. O’Casey’s slice of life showed no one being exemplary, while the wonderful influence the Abbey triumvirate exerted over O’Casey squashed all ideology. We see the best and worst of everyone involved, and retain sympathy even for the obnoxious Boyle, whose escape from his sordid confinement into drink and dreams is lovingly felt, and for Joxer, whose wheedling acceptance of his Plautine lord’s dominance conceals the malice of the born arse-licker.
At forty-three O’Casey, not yet married, demonstrated through Boyle and Joxer how he, like countless other unmarried Irishmen, could conduct a non-sexual relationship with a “butty” based on overlooking the other’s faults in pursuit of a common aim such as drinking — to most intents and purposes a marriage. The great Irish gift for celibacy was possessed by O’Casey himself, who existed more or less happily in this condition for upwards of half his life. Juno shows, although only incidentally, how O’Casey coped with the state of non-marriage. The playwright embodies in Juno’s and Boyle’s loveless marriage what V. S. Pritchett once called “the ambition of every Dublin husband … never to go home”,[265] and the basic Irish male fear of women and of sex. The Irish man never grows up: he keeps not only the little boy alive in him, and the anarchic spirit, but the basic fear. Comically engaging in his infantilism, he is tragically inadequate when facing reality. And the basic fear — in marriage the fear of pregnancy — keeps the sexes polarised more effectively than anything else.
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 18