In late August O’Casey received news that Juno and The Gunman were to be published together early in the following year, by Macmillans of London. Daniel Macmillan, elder grandson of the founder of the firm, handled some of the most significant figures of the Irish literary revival, including Yeats; he now sought a puff for O’Casey from James Stephens, who had introduced him to the plays, and who had apparently said that O’Casey was “the greatest dramatic find of modern times”.[307] With packed houses continuing at the Abbey, O’Casey was now accounted something of a miracle-worker, one newspaper correspondent noting how audiences had become psychologically transformed. From their usual dour receptivity, “the habit of laughter” had seized them, so that “even in the most poignant moments of Mr O’Casey’s plays, a meaningless titter will set your nerves on edge”.
Outwardly O’Casey remained much the same, making the Abbey the centre of his social activities — his “club” — watching the audience thronging the vestibule before and after performances, “proud of the fact, but in no way swell-headed, his cloth cap cocked over his left eye, as his right looked short-sightedly at the audience’s eager rush”. Still a lonely figure, he “foraged for himself”, knowing, and calling on, a range of friends and acquaintances, from the very high to the very low. One day an old friend, now married to a Free State general, and affecting a “cockney [i.e. smart and English] accent”, stopped to give him a lift and invited him home to tea. “Now?” he said by way of interrogation, but she interpreted this as “no”. For godsake, he told her, stop affecting the cockney and speak as you used to in the old days.
The new rich were in the saddle — “beggars on horseback riding to the Devil” — and money flashed in their eyes and pockets. O’Casey’s antithetical self could still make a point of his poverty: as when he asked Holloway if he’d ever been to the Labour Exchange:
He had been there lately and tried to get to the hutch his docket was made out for, but the great crush of men in the queue almost made him faintish, and after about an hour and a half of it (and he still hours away from the hutch) he had to try and push his way out of the crowd. It is a terrible sight to see so many men out of work … He should like to show Yeats or Robinson such sights. Then they would be less ready to advocate the use of the lash.[308]
But he had difficulty in keeping his critical spirit on a leash, even with the sympathetic Holloway acting as safety valve, and, after only a short while as the successful author O’Casey began to show dangerous symptoms of the cantankerous fellow who had turned (if he did) on his manager at Hampton and Leedon, insulted his railway employers, and quarrelled with Madame Markiewicz and his idol Larkin.
He thinks Robinson has too many irons in the fire — his Never the Time and the Place is but poor stuff … I said, “He’d never be forgiven if he dispraised a piece of Robby’s.” “And why not, if one has an opinion, be allowed to express it?” he queried, and I replied: “I don’t know but such is the case when the Abbey is concerned. They never forgive those who criticize their work adversely …”[309]
How long would it take for him to turn on his new masters at the Abbey?
Although he was to “put on a poor mouth” to describe the Georgian house at 422 North Circular Road, for the Act III setting of The Plough and the Stars, as
a long, gaunt, five-story tenement; its brick front is chipped and scarred with age and neglect. The wide and heavy hall door, flanked by two pillars, has a look of having been charred by a fire in the distant past. The door lurches a little to one side, disjointed by the continual and reckless banging when it is being closed by most of the residents. The diamond-paned fan-light is destitute of a single pane …[310]
Gabriel Fallon found it a “respectable tenement”, its hall door closed, on “Landlord’s orders”, O’Casey said, when Fallon called one warm evening in September — his first visit to the playwright’s room:
Its most remarkable feature was its fireplace and the fire it held. I felt the heat of it as soon as I entered. There was a stretcher-bed to the left of the door, its head towards the near window; a washstand beside the bed-head. Rough book-shelves lined with second-hand books stood between the windows. There was a small table under the far window and on it the well-worn typewriter; beside it a plain chair. Each side of the fireplace there were shelved cupboards. On the right-hand wall going in, more book-shelves. In the centre of the room stood a round mahogany table; on it stood an oil lamp, books and papers. To the right of the fireplace there was an easy chair; and, facing the fireplace, a small settee.
“Did you have your tea, Gaby?” Again one is conscious of the quietly insistent, almost regal, note of hospitality. A throwback to the high halls and the groaning tables of royal Kincora … He offers me a choice of the easy chair or the settee. I take the easy chair … He asks me about rehearsals of Nannie’s Night Out now in progress.[311]
The one-acter opened towards the end of the month; but although exciting a great deal of attention it flopped (being a tail-ender to the main bill, a revival of Shaw’s Arms and the Man, it did not, however, turn away the crowds, and the houses were, on the whole, good). “But no sign of life came from the audience,” remarked the actress Beatrice Coogan, then still in her teens. “Not a laugh. Not a clap. An actor came off-stage shrugging ruefully.”[312] But just as the failure of Cathleen Listens In had spurred on O’Casey to carry his talent to new heights with Juno, so the tepid response to his one-act absurdity, which, he later wrote to Lady Gregory, he did not like very much, seems to have goaded him into assembling all the power he could muster to continue work on The Plough and the Stars.
This took much more protracted labour than Juno, and was a broader and more diverse subject than any he had so far attempted. He did not have in mind a simple theme like the one so helpful to the construction of Juno, of the crippled IRA man whose stony and appalling fate underpins the comic self-deceptions of the Boyle family. The huge canvas to which he now addressed himself depicted a whole class — the tenement class he knew so well, and with which he had now proved his gift for characterisation — caught up in an epic historical event, the Easter Rebellion of 1916, itself a central part of the dramatic action.
The scale of events was exactly right for representation. The dramatist’s instinctive choice of a subject the scope of which was suited both to his writing and to the resources of the Abbey stage and company, was completely justified. Unlike Shakespeare in Henry V, where the Chorus constantly apologises for a lack of material means to bring the colourful action fully alive, O’Casey had no sense of shortcomings. To begin with, he did not see the Rebellion of 1916 as at all heroic. His ragged tenement army was in the business of debunking.
For the emotion driving O’Casey to write The Plough and the Stars was hatred of the Irish Free State as it had emerged from the strife-torn years of 1916-23, “a discordant symphony in green”.[313] He hated the leaders, jockeying for position, seeing their actions as entirely guided by self-interest or revenge — “the stag dead, the hounds hunted the hounds” — and their betrayal of the hopes he and his fellow labour supporters had cherished prior to 1916. De Valera knew nothing of the common people, he was worse than Cosgrave — whom he devoured, like a “Cronus swallowing Zeus”. At least Cosgrave had joviality, a streak of erring humanity, but the “pietistic Spaniard” de Valera was dull and lacked magnetism. O’Casey could not understand the hold that he gained over the Irish people.
He despised, too, the new bourgeoisification of Ireland, the growth of the power of money, the new social stratification and snobbery that became rife. He revived, in his hatred, the old causes which even though he had become disillusioned with them, once evoked his loyalty and affection: the Irish language, for one, with the “cruiskeen lawn” rejected for the cocktail glass, while the teachers of the “adventists” and new Irish aristocracy were “working day and night educating the vulgar hilarity of jig and reel” from their joints. Having cast off British rule, the Irish were feverishly apin
g its refinements: even — an untypical posture of condemnation for O’Casey — its growing sexual licence. Women were employing experts to make “blue-prints to see how far their bodices could be lowered and still be consonant with diocesan doctrine and Dublin’s desperate need of attraction”.
The growth of the Church’s power — or rather its failure to decline — in the new State excited his irascibility to its highest pitch. Greater humiliation was there none, he believed, than de Valera kneeling before a visiting Cardinal from the Vatican. He ardently embraced the cause of Dr Walter McDonald, whose Reminiscences of a Maynooth Professor were posthumously published in 1925, and whose progressive theories he saw as threatening the power and secrecy of Rome. The new Ireland was “a theocracy, fashioned by the Vatican, and decked in the brightest sacerdotal array by the bishops of Maynooth”.[314]
Much though he might have liked to, O’Casey did not set out in The Plough and the Stars to show how the cause of the Easter Rising was betrayed by the Irish middle classes. Fortunately he was still influenced by the rejection of his early didactic plays, and he had the Robinson-Lady Gregory — even the Yeats — aesthetic firmly lodged in his mind while at work in 1924-5. So he managed, and with genius, to incorporate into the play’s conception the opinion of his old Citizen Army commandant, Captain White, that “the Irish question was the sexual problem writ large”. Showing the battle between a married pair, the Clitheroes — between Nora with her possessive ideal of motherhood, and Jack with his commitment to the Republican cause, which required sacrifice and which led ultimately to his death — he presented a fundamental conflict in any society facing violent change.
Eight years after the event, he could also, through the Clitheroes, relive the doubts and torn emotions he had experienced during the months prior to Easter 1916 and during Easter Week itself. The Rising had come at a critical time for him, when, long cherished by his mother, long unconsciously rejecting any obstacle in the path of his future development as a writer, he had begun to overcome the active sides of his personality and to develop a negative capability — of watching, observing, recording, feeling. It is ridiculous to assert that O’Casey could not have played an active role in the Rising because of his deficient eyesight: an extremely vigorous hurler, and hard-working secretary, he could have performed a dozen crucial jobs, from courier to staff officer, and an army always needs more noncombatants than combatants. But his sense of his own worth, his preciousness, as cocooned by his mother’s care and feelings for him, had outgrown his recognition of the validity of any brave, self-sacrificing gesture.
In real life his mother’s side had won, and the two of them lived through the Rising, as he said, dodging bullets with Frank Cahill. With good cause he later dedicated The Plough and the Stars, in its published form, “To the gay laugh of my mother at the gate of the grave”, for in it her spirit is triumphantly resurrected. His capacity for feeling had been preserved over the need for action — and with it his sympathy for the rogue, the looter, the coward, the wastrel. This was the unholy “Oisin spirit” as opposed to the “St Patrick purity and commitment” exemplified by Pearse and the other heroes of 1916.[315] No wonder O’Casey hated de Valera, who had taken part in the Rebellion and survived, his masculine ethic finally emerging as all-powerful — while O’Casey had avoided action, elevating cowardice into a virtue while feeling a deeper conflict, if not shame, over doing so.
But it was O’Casey who wrote The Plough and the Stars, and not de Valera. In the play O’Casey reverses what actually happened to him and shows the destructive, heroic principle winning — with Clitheroe being killed as a result, Nora losing her baby and retreating into madness, Bessie Burgess being shot by a stray bullet intended for a sniper, while the consumptive girl Mollser — neglected victim as much of poverty as of war — ends up sharing a coffin with Nora’s premature child. Even the Tommies who swarm over the tenements are, as O’Casey sketched them in, not such bad chaps; they don’t murder and rape on sight, but brew up tea and have a mocking compassion for those they hunt down. Cumulatively, then, in O’Casey’s dark vision of the events of 1916, his irreverence becomes far more than comic: it becomes a deliberate kind of profanity, a calculated act of desecration of what was now considered the most holy event in the emergence of the new Ireland, combining a nativity with a paschal sacrifice.
*
All through 1924, more under the tutelage of Lady Gregory than of anyone else, O’Casey was broadening his technical knowledge of play writing and the range of his general reading. He borrowed Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, finding it a “worthy supplement” to Shaw’s play, which he had read and was to see the following year at the Abbey; Upton Sinclair’s The Singing Jailbirds, on which he commented, “Honestly, I don’t think much of it as Drama, & very little of it as an expression of life. The Play is, I think, hysterical.”[316]
He had regularly been attending productions of the Dublin Drama League, founded in 1918, which performed at the Abbey on Sunday and Monday nights, and which introduced him to the work of other contemporary playwrights, among them Eugene O’Neill and Ernst Toller. So he was able further to dismiss The Singing Jailbirds as “not comparable” to either O’Neill’s Hairy Ape or Toller’s Masses and Men. Cautiously he was experimenting with one or two innovatory notions culled from these two authors in particular (as well as from Strindberg), and he also drew on the experience gained from Nannie’s Night Out, in which he had used expressionist methods in presenting deliberate stereotypes such as the Free-Stater, Farmer, Republican, and Labourer. The shortcomings of such effects having been powerfully, although not indelibly, recorded, he toned down similar stylistic devices in The Plough and the Stars, till they chimed perfectly with the overriding, sometimes almost photographic, realism.
The intermittent use in Act II of the offstage speech of the Republican leader — clearly based on Padraic Pearse — is one such expressionist device and helps to make that act, set in a “commodious public-house”, a theatrical image as universal as Shakespeare’s Boar’s Head in Eastcheap in Henry IV. The “voices in a lilting chant”, in Act IV, crying their “Red Cr … oss, Red Cr … oss! Ambu … lance, Ambu … lance!” in a much more frenetic and German manner, add to the confusion and hysteria O’Casey shows in the tenement as the British forces mount their final counter-attack on the Post Office, and the “glare in the sky seen through the window flares into a fuller and a deeper red”.[317]
Lady Gregory’s tutelage of her latest and greatest find was at its most inspired when she read to O’Casey from The Dynasts, for, tedious and long-winded as much of it is, Hardy’s work conveys a strong and brooding atmosphere of inevitable fate-as if the powerful protagonists were but puppets being manipulated by some amoral destiny. It is this sense of historical inevitability which, imported into O’Casey’s own chronicle, gives it unity and a confidence in its tragic progression, for The Plough and the Stars has no plot, as Juno had, no inexhaustible and grabbing music-hall mentality as in Gunman. The later play, in its multiplicity and subtlety of vision, could dispense with conventional plot, and could trace events with the flexibility and spontaneity of a camera recording actuality as it followed, in the jargon of later decades, the first “National Liberation Movement” of the twentieth century.
While O’Casey repeatedly claimed that he took his inspiration from the Citizen Army’s Plough and Stars flag — “a sacrament to the Citizen Army members”[318] — he also took, as he had in Gunman and Juno, much from other people’s lives. Clitheroe (whose forename, Jack, links him not only to his author but to Rocliffe in The Harvest Festival — another martyr, but to a different cause) was based largely on Sean Connolly, the Abbey actor and Citizen Army captain who commanded the City Hall garrison (which included three of his brothers and his sister); Connolly died on Easter Monday, which prevented the opening of a double bill at the Abbey on Thursday 25 April.
Fluther Good, the main comic protagonist, who bickers with his compani
ons Peter Flynn and the Young Covey — the three together provide a mocking chorus to the Rising as well as other aspects of Dublin life — had, like Captain Boyle, a real-life counterpart, John Good, dubbed “Fluther” when he once hit an itinerant flautist on the head with his own instrument. Similarity went no further than the name.
Much of O’Casey’s brother, Mick, went into Fluther: according to their nephew, Kit Casey, the playwright reproduced verbatim what Mick used to say, especially his comically pompous tricks of repeating words like “derogatory” and his drunken but always courteous pride: “What d’ye take Fluther for? You must think Fluther’s a right gom. D’ye think Fluther’s like yourself, destitute of a titther of undherstandin’?” Mick’s absurd self-protectiveness — the self-indulgence of a middle-aged man cosseted and pampered by his mother, as both Mick and Sean apparently had been — is revealed in his response to Mrs Gogan describing the onset of the killer consumption: “It’s only a little cold I have; there’s nothing derogatory wrong with me” and, later, “A man in th’ pink o’ health should have a holy horror of allowin’ thoughts o’ death to be festherin’ in his mind, for (with a frightened cough) be God, I think I’m afther gettin’ a little catch in me chest that time — it’s a creepy thing to be thinkin’ about.” When Mrs Gogan leaves, having punctured his weak vanity, which needs alcohol to sustain it, he collapses on a chair: “You can’t sneeze but that oul’ one wants to know th’ why an’ th’ wherefore … I feel as dizzy as bedamned! I hope I didn’t give up th’ beer too suddenly.” [319]
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 21