But woman has the courage: Juno, exalting the mother above the useless, segregated male, is a triumphant assertion of woman’s superiority over man: when Mary, rejected by her father and sweetheart, complains, “My poor little child that’ll have no father!” Juno replies, “It’ll have what’s far betther — it’ll have two mothers.”[266]
Would O’Casey always portray men disparagingly, as if trying to get back at his own father for dying on him so young? Nowhere else in his later plays is his distrust of men displayed so effectively as in Juno: it seems that he can only see men as betraying each other, failing in their ideals — as in the case of Johnny Boyle and Mrs Tancred’s son — or “gratifying” themselves in an essentially false, comic double act on the Laurel and Hardy principle (an example publicists later took up by trying to pair him with, for example, Barry Fitzgerald). He savagely parodies the whole masculine state of life, not only its ideals and its organisation but its petty and pathetic aches and pains. Perhaps he felt emotionally secure only in the mother-son relationship: what makes Juno and the Paycock cumulatively moving, in spite of its volatility of feeling and its sudden, unexpected and comic changes of pace, is the way it asserts the primacy of a mother’s emotions in counterpoint to the decline of the Boyle family’s hopes and aspirations.
After a cruel build-up of the family from poverty to a range of middle-class hopes and acquisitions — and O’Casey is here in his best vein of self-mockery, because he was himself filling up his room at Number 422 with books and new furniture bought with the royalties of Gunman, yet wary that his affluence wouldn’t last — he telescopes beautifully the deterioration of the Boyle household, intensifying its decline against a civil war background of savage reprisals. To do this he draws instinctively — and in the urgency of what he wants to show — on his own past experience, purging his family ghosts and at the same time bringing Susan Casey back to life as Juno. As Paul Claudel wrote to Jacques Rivière in 1912, “Do you believe for a moment that Shakespeare or Dostoevsky or Rubens or Titian or Wagner did their work for art’s sake? No! They did it to free themselves of a great incubus of living matter, opus non factum.”[267] The same motive underlay the making of O’Casey’s supreme masterpiece.
Apart from the overriding unity which Juno, in its diversity, possesses, there were many other biographically revealing touches. The play shows, to begin with, how little difference there was in Dublin at that time between a working-class man and his lower-middle-class counterpart. Boyle lives not in the fixed world of the poorest slums, but in the mobile world of middle-class aspiration, of hire-purchase and legal disputes, though, like O’Casey, for all his high opinion of himself he is quite happy to do casual part-time labouring — and even more happy to shirk it, mocking the once acute pains in his legs:
BOYLE: Won’t it be a climbin’ job? How d’ye expect me to be able to go up a ladder with these legs? An’, if I get up aself, how am I goin’ to get down agen?
MRS BOYLE (viciously): Get wan o’ the labourers to carry you down in a hod! You can’t climb a laddher, but you can skip like a goat into a snug!
There is Mick there, too, scorning Sean’s ambitions, when Boyle attacks his daughter: “What did th’ likes of her, born in a tenement house, want with readin’? Her readin’s afther bringin’ her to a nice pass.” [268] And there are echoes of his treatment by Maire Keating, although O’Casey reverses the roles, with Bentham throwing over Mary Boyle:
MARY: I imagine … he thought … we weren’t … good enough for him.
MRS BOYLE: An’ what was he himself, only a school teacher?
In Juno O’Casey also goes on mocking all the causes he had previously believed in, but he sticks with his image of Ireland as the stoical mother. What could be nearer the tone of Susan Casey, when she rebuked Mick or Tom before he married, as O’Casey has Juno rebuking the fear-tormented Johnny:
… it’s yourself that has yourself the way y’are; sleepin’ wan night in me sisther’s, an’ the nex’ in your father’s brother’s — you’ll get no rest goin’ on that way.
O’Casey never directly based a character in Juno on himself, but his unseen presence can be felt all through, pulling the strings, splashing on colour that came to him unsolicited through his unlocked door at 422. The momentum of a Boucicault play drives Juno forward, characters appearing and disappearing with all the unexpectedness of vaudeville turns, uttering the comic lies and deceits of knockers and desecrators who abhor holiness and hypocrisy of all kinds, but with one significant difference: the surroundings are scorchingly real.
O’Casey’s genius is that he has substituted the contradictions of changeable personality for the twists and turns of a Boucicault plot. He succeeded triumphantly in refining his model, deepening it emotionally, giving his own characters both lasting power and universal significance. Ireland in its history from 1916 to 1923 played out in miniature, and ahead of any other country, the dramas of nationalism and revolution that have absorbed the rest of the world for most of this century (and that still absorb Ireland); O’Casey, in depicting that Ireland, projected a lasting image of the vulnerable yet defiant human family caught in the tragic conflict between, on the one hand, its own failure and hopeful delusions, on the other the bitter, inhuman circumstances of war.
*
O’Casey completed Juno in the last weeks of 1923 and gave it to Lennox Robinson to read: perhaps he had in mind its future when he wrote to Robinson on 29 December, that he envied him “every word of the White-headed Boy”:[269] he had certainly read Robinson’s play, The Whiteheaded Boy, before writing Juno and had implemented Dolan’s advice to “always keep the interest on the move”. He told Holloway he had also been reading and enjoying Chekhov who “seems to let his characters speak as they please and get them into his play’s scheme”.
The keepers of O’Casey’s new temple were Yeats and Lady Gregory, but he still stood reverently on the steps, “the timid drama postulant,” as he said, “ready to wear any habit offered to him and take any vow required”: they had yet to embrace him socially, to grant him the status of novice or even son. Although his loyalty to Larkin’s ideals remained firm, Larkin himself was by now a discarded father figure: Yeats, who received the Nobel Prize in November 1923, became the new object of O’Casey’s hero-worship.
It was a measure of O’Casey’s innocence, continuing well into middle age, that while cynicism had affected so many sides of his personality, for his new mentors he had nothing but trust and admiration, although he had balked at Yeats’s criticism of The Crimson in the Tricolour. Here were demi-gods. He could not have known that an earlier hero of his, Padraic Pearse, had judged them both: “Lady G. enjoying her own pieces and laughing at her own jokes. Yeats does the same. Truly they were both like little children in their ways,” and complained in 1912 that the Abbey was “run too much on Ascendancy principles”.[270]
O’Casey’s first perception of Yeats, as recorded in his autobiography, was as a powerful and mysterious figure. He had spotted him (or says he had) at the Abbey during the Playboy riots in 1907, “a stately-looking man with long black hair, a lock of it half covering an eye, who had come to the entrance, and, in the light of a street lamp, stood looking dreamily at the agitated crowd”. But sixteen years passed before O’Casey was invited by Yeats to dinner, Robinson providing the link, at a well-known Dublin restaurant “bearing a sturdy poetical name”. O’Casey’s sense of humour did not desert him when he found himself at a table for three, with Robinson and Arthur Shields, in a far corner of the room (he was acutely sensitive of such placings):
Away in the dim distance, a far larger table served a number of persons whom Sean did not know yet, though, through a murmur of submissive conversation, he heard the booming voice of Yeats chatting in a lordly lilt about Utumara, Brahmin Mohini, birds born out of the fire, the two inflows to man’s nature.[271]
O’Casey was awakened out of the booming by Robinson asking him if he’d enjoyed the dinner: he answered, the rhubar
b and custard, yes, but the rest was badly cooked. His bluntness shocked Robinson, in turn embarrassing Sean. He remembered how good a cook his mother had been, especially with anything worthwhile, on the plain open coal fire. “A ceremonial meal to Megarithma, or any other deity”, wasn’t going to make him tell polite lies to his hosts.
On 12 February 1924, O’Casey told Holloway that Juno, now accepted, had not yet been put into rehearsal, although down to open on 25 February: clearly the Abbey management could respond with alacrity when they smelled the possibility of success. But Robinson had bowed out of directing the new O’Casey, his place being taken by Dolan whom, Holloway reported, O’Casey liked “best of all the actors in the company”. It was Robinson, however, who first told O’Casey they had F. J. McCormick in mind to play Boyle. O’Casey had fallen slightly foul of McCormick over his criticism of him as Seumas Shields; and since seeing Barry Fitzgerald appear in St John Ervine’s Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, he had thought him a born clown, ideal for the Captain with his arrogant, boozy humour.
O’Casey seemingly had little trouble in persuading Robinson that his was the better choice, although his tactless stating of his preference ruffled a few feathers, among them those of McCormick himself, who enjoyed a much higher status in the company than the part-timer Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald needed a great deal of persuasion: O’Casey and Gaby Fallon, newly become O’Casey’s close friend within the Abbey, spent much time trying to convince him, and he finally said yes.
The new company assembled on a February afternoon at five p. m., to give the part-timers a chance to be present, to read Juno for the first time. Wrote Fallon:
It seemed to be a strange baffling mixture of comedy and tragedy; and none of us could say, with any certainty, whether or not it would stand up on the stage. Sara Allgood [cast as Juno, she was Lady Gregory’s favourite actress, and tragic queen of the Abbey] had some difficulty in reading her script — several times she referred to “Joxer Daly” as “Boxer Daly” and had to be corrected … Barry Fitzgerald mumbled his way through the part of Captain Boyle and gave not the slightest indication that it was likely to be funny. F. J. McCormick applied his well-known Dublin technique to the part of Joxer yet nothing much worthwhile seemed to be emerging from it. All were agreed that the title of the play was not a good one and that the dialogue written for the part of Jerry Devine … was possibly the most stilted ever written in the history of the Abbey Theatre. There was a general feeling that the play lacked form, that it was much too “bitty”, that the mixture of tragedy and comedy “would not go” and that the author of The Gunman might well have overshot his mark.[272]
Even the eavesdropping and ever-present Holloway could not report much about Juno in rehearsal, and to most of the cast it was a routine production of another new play. Robinson said O’Casey disturbed him at one point by saying that all the characters were literally taken from life. “Would they,” wondered Robinson, “come to the back pit, recognise themselves and wreck the theatre?”[273] But O’Casey told him no, they never visited theatres — and he named the pubs they frequented.
In the week preceding the dress rehearsal, fixed for Sunday 2 March, Lady Gregory, who spent most of her time in her family home at Coole, County Galway, came to Dublin, but she, also a painstaking recorder of her theatre’s history, could find nothing to note. An end-of-run party for the previous play held up commencement of the dress rehearsal until five p.m. on Sunday. Abbey revelry was famed, and at this time the parties were held under armed guard — as in O’Casey’s play, Diehard retribution still took a grisly toll of those who had deserted its banner — so the cast, in particular Sara Allgood, an unquenchably festive spirit, arrived both tired and late.
O’Casey sat waiting in the stalls from four thirty, looking glum, and wondered if the dress rehearsal would actually take place — he couldn’t find a soul. He had an additional problem: his eyes had been playing him up badly, an ulcerated cornea not being helped by the extra pressure he had put on them by his feverish efforts at composition by poor light in the early hours of the morning, and by his constant retyping of Juno. He was now under the care of Dr Joe Cummins, Senior Surgeon at the Royal Ear and Eye Hospital, whom he visited at 38 Merrion Square East (Yeats lived at Number 82) and who kept him chatting till past midnight: they were “great friends”, O’Casey said later, although Cummins was “a strange man, one I could never quite fathom”.[274]
At last there was some action at the Abbey. As Fallon wrote:
Gradually the players filed in and quietly went to their dressing rooms … Lady Gregory and Robinson took seats in the stalls … The curtain rose about 5.36 p.m. So far as I could see and hear while waiting for my cue in the wings the rehearsal seemed to be proceeding smoothly. As soon as I had finished my part of Bentham at the end of the second act I went down into the stalls and sat two seats behind the author … I was stunned by the tragic quality of the third act which the magnificent playing of Sara Allgood made almost unbearable. But it was the blistering irony of the final scene which convinced me that this man sitting two seats in front of me was a dramatist of genius.[275]
In spite of the apparently casual attitude of the players to rehearsal, the opening, on Monday night, proved a total triumph. O’Casey this time sat in the second row of the stalls with a friend, and “with his cap on all the while” while underneath his trench coat — it’s “a fella in a Thrench coat” who calls on Johnny Boyle, when Joxer refuses to stick his head out of the window “an’ mebbe get a bullet in the kisser” — he wore a collar and tie. Rough serge trousers and the heavy Dublin boots known as “bluchers” completed his first-night garb. “A strange, odd fish,” commented Holloway.[276]
In Act III, the audience began to laugh as tragedy entered the Boyle family but soon became gripped by the awful actuality — there was always a safe margin in O’Casey for laughing in the wrong places, although not for crying. Afterwards they called for the author.
The critics were not wholly favourable: the mixture of tragedy and comedy was hard on traditional penpushers, and one called it outrageous, while “Jacques” (J. J. Rice) in the Irish Independent objected to the author’s verbal padding, attributing it to a thirst for “dialogue with a dig in it”. Jacques was otherwise approving. W. J. Lawrence in the Irish Statesman was the warmest and most accurate: O’Casey, he wrote,
is at once an iconoclast and a neo-Elizabethan … He lures us into the theatre under the pretext of affording us hearty laughter, and he sends us away with tears in our eyes and with the impression of direst tragedy heavy on our hearts. None but a neo-Elizabethan could accomplish this, since the secret of juxtaposing and harmonising the comic with the tragic, and thereby throwing the elements of terror and pathos into greater relief, have been lost to the English-speaking stage for over a couple of centuries.[277]
Yet O’Casey, whose admirers often provided him with the biggest glass to be shattered, would probably have insisted that Boucicault and old melodramas such as The Harbour Lights, Saved from the Sea, The Unknown, Peep o’day Boys, were more crucial antecedents.[278]
The Abbey rapidly became booked out for the rest of the week, ensuring that O’Casey would earn at least twenty-five pounds. While he had been dubious, even hurt, about the cutting of a scene during rehearsal — the main cut Dolan asked for, of a heavy-handed Act III scene taking place at night by the road and showing the actual shooting of Johnny Boyle — O’Casey also seems to have been uncertain of the quality of some of Juno’s finer touches, such as the drunken coda of Joxer and Boyle. To him the play still revolved around the figure of Johnny Boyle, who had been expanded from the first version.
Lady Gregory returned to see Juno a second time on Friday, bringing Yeats, who hadn’t seen it before. He thought it “very fine”, and it reminded him of Tolstoy: he told Lady Gregory, when they talked of The Crimson in the Tricolour, of which he had been critical, “Casey was bad in writing of the vices of the rich which he knows nothing about, but he thoroughly unders
tands the vices of the poor.” Lady Gregory rejoiced in the packed house, the play itself, and what she termed “the call of the Mother for the putting away of hatred”. She told Yeats, “This is one of the evenings at the Abbey which makes me glad to have been born.”[279]
She had a little talk afterwards with O’Casey in the Green Room.
I asked him to come to tea after the next day, the matinee, as I had brought up a barmbrack [Gort cake] for the players, but he said, “No. I can’t come. I’ll be at work till the afternoon and I’m working with cement, and that takes such a long time to get off.”
“But after that?”
“Then I have to cook my dinner. I have but one room and cook for myself since my mother died.”[280]
O’Casey’s excuse presumably did not stretch Lady Gregory’s credibility on this occasion, though she might have reflected that the tea party was to be late on a Saturday; anyway, as he confessed afterwards in a letter, he used at this time to “buy cooked pork in Yorkstetters”;[281] he might have been hurling, however, with Jim Kavanagh from the basement at Number 422.
There was now a new crowd at the club — “Paddy Callan & his brother Phil; O’Reilly, Michael O’Murchadhu, Leo Rush, Brown, Bennett, the Dunshaughlin lad who broke a leg & thrust a spike through his hand, trying to reclaim a ball beyond the chevaux-de-frise of the Magazine Fort.”[282] O’Casey could not afford to compromise his image at the Abbey. If the patrician Yeats kept his mask firmly on by haughtily talking down to “Casey”, O’Casey certainly could not for a moment allow his “poor mouth” pose to drop. Anyway, he must have sensed it wise to keep his distance — as well as not to be drawn into risking an opinion on the monstrous barmbrack. He eluded such small patronising gestures, perhaps holding out for higher invitations. Later he admitted he had told a white lie — “Fact I wasn’t working when Lady Gregory put the question to me,”[283] he said — because he did not want her to find him a more suitable job than labouring.
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 19