Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  O’Casey presented his brother affectionately in Fluther, showing him as he was, but underlining his capacity for courage in his vanity and weakness. It is Fluther who bravely rushes out to look for Nora when she madly follows her husband through the barricades; it is Fluther, alone, who defiantly, in the face of the Tommies rounding up the men, puts in a word for the rebels: “Fight fair! A few hundhred scrawls o’ chaps with a couple o’ guns an’ Rosary beads, again’ a hundhred thousand thrained men with horse, fut an’ artillery … an’ he wants us to fight fair!”

  A failed Irish marriage, similar to that of Boyle and Joxer, is shown in the profane squabbles of the Covey and Peter. This, with Fluther’s anti-heroic tirades, Rosie Redmond, the prostitute’s, fleshy baiting of political theorists, Bessie Burgess’s Protestant defence of the British war effort on the side of Belgium — “call themselves Catholics”, she sneers at the Irish nationalists, “when they won’t lift a finger to help poor little Catholic Belgium” — make The Plough a savage indictment of Ireland’s independence. Above all, this is crowned with Pearse’s cry for the redemptive blood sacrifice of heroes: “Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood.”

  But O’Casey never departs from capturing life accurately: as with Fluther, there was a real-life Covey, but the force of Covey’s character comes from O’Casey’s ironic depiction, in this narrow-minded left-wing idealist, of an earlier self: the basic inequality of his feeling is scornfully unmasked by Rosie, whose opinions he dismisses as a “prostitute’s” — a taboo, inflammatory word: “You louse, you louse, you! … You’re no man … You’re no man … I’m a woman, anyhow, an’ if I’m a prostitute aself, I have me feelin’s … Thryin’ to put his arm around me a minute ago, an givin’ me th’ glad eye, th’ little wrigglin’ lump of desolation turns on me now, because he saw there was nothin’ doin’.”[320] According to Maire Keating, with whom O’Casey was “walking out” again — after the first flush of his success he had renewed their on-and-off relationship — he made a big effort to authenticate Rosie:

  One evening he left off his collar and tie and put on a scarf instead — he said it made him look disreputable — and he went down to Burgh Quay. He hoped to meet the right sort of girl there. He didn’t have long to wait before one came up to him. He asked her a lot of questions and when he had got most of his information he put on the poor mouth and pretended he had no money. She took pity on the poor starving writer and took him to a café and bought him a cup of coffee.[321]

  Others found the seed of Rosie in “Honour Bright” a well-known tart, later a murder victim.[322]

  As for other characters, O’Casey drew on the rooms above and below in 422, and elsewhere in his locality; “Mrs Gogan” and “Bessie Burgess” were tenement-dwellers he introduced to May Craig, now F. J. McCormick’s wife, when she came to play Mrs Gogan. Mollser was based on an ailing Kavanagh child in the basement; for the dead Clitheroe baby he drew on the memory (or his mother’s) of his buried siblings. Captain Brennan, the Diehard of the Citizen Army who stiffens Clitheroe’s loyalty, wavering in the face of Nora’s onslaughts, was based on “Padjo” (Patrick Joseph) Flannagan, a Moore Street chicken butcher killed in Church Street, which explains Bessie’s lines, “th’ professor of chicken-butcherin’ there, finds he’s up against somethin’ a little tougher even than his own chickens, an’ that’s sayin’ a lot! … Choke th’ chicken, choke th’ chicken, choke th’ chicken!” Reversing reality, and making Brennan humiliatingly seek in civilian clothes to save his own skin — while having urged Clitheroe to his death — O’Casey again soils the heroic image.

  But the manner in which little details remained sharp in his memory from real events which time and imagination transmuted into art is best shown by the oak coffin of Mollser which stands on stage on two kitchen chairs, lit by two candles, while Peter, the Covey, and Fluther play cards, waiting for the undertaker’s men to carry it away and while the street outside is “hot shop”, the air “shakin’ with the firin’ o’ rifles, an’ machine-guns”. This recalled the experience of the O’Toole Club member, Mick Smith, fighting from inside Jacobs’ Biscuit Factory, who could see on the other side of the street, through the window of a flat, a tiny coffin waiting for burial: all during Easter Week the family had been too terrified to move it out to the cemetery.[323]

  The creation of The Plough was a painstaking act of willing a form to emerge “of its own birth”, as Coleridge described the poet’s imaginative procedure, which could express, to distort Wordsworth’s phrase, volatile emotions reactivated in tranquillity. There was none of the white heat of Juno about it, and O’Casey confessed early in 1925 that his work was often interrupted. As Holloway reported, “I … heard one workman say to another in D’Olier Street, ‘You’re a bloody fool to work for anyone if you can help it,’ and when I told O’Casey what I overheard, he replied, ‘Work was made for mugs.’ He hasn’t been working at the new play of late. He is lazy.”[324] He told Fallon he was worried about the Voice of the Man in Act II. “‘You see, Gaby,’ he said, ‘that speech is made up of extracts from speeches delivered by Padraic Pearse and there are people who knew Pearse who might object.’”[325]

  *

  For a man who sucked power and inspiration from failure, O’Casey now had to contend with growing success. Part of this was highly enjoyable even if, as he informed Lady Gregory, “I am very busy laying down linoleum in my room; having the floor sides stained & waxed & the window frames painted, and all the bother makes me feel far from friendly towards civilisation.”[326] To R. M. Fox, busy in London writing an article and seeking information, he replied with cantankerous certainty, an echo of the tone in which Shaw had paid him off when he sought help from him:

  I’m afraid you’ll have to write your article without any help from me. Desire for quietude is stronger in me than desire for publicity — the spirit is stronger than the flesh. It’s not due to modesty; I’d love to blow my own trumpet, but the work’s too hard. And even if others supply the trumpet, they expect you to provide the wind. This refusal isn’t singular; I have just declined to allow an artist to sketch my face, simply because I was too lazy.[327]

  In February 1925 Macmillan published Juno and The Gunman as Two Plays. They were widely and enthusiastically noticed; 1,500 copies were printed originally, priced at seven shillings and sixpence, and the book was reprinted before the end of the year, and three times in 1927; in New York, where Two Plays was published by J. J. Little and Ives Company, the print run was 15,000. Dedicated “To Maura and to the Abbey Theatre”, the copy O’Casey gave to Maire was further inscribed, “To the lovely and loveable Maura in whom the author found his first inspiration”.[328]

  A London management made plans to produce Juno, while a New York theatre also began negotiations to put it on. But, while he bathed everywhere in this glow of success — the usual backbiting comments of a few Dublin critics on the published plays in no way denting his well-being — O’Casey’s enthusiasm for the Abbey, the sword of light which he had carried for now well over three years, began to flicker. Perhaps success threatened the anger that kept the flame lustrous — or perhaps, as a commentator observed, he could only ever keep one enthusiasm alive at a time. For whatever reason, during the middle and towards the end of 1925 his relationship with the Abbey Theatre — although not yet with Yeats and Lady Gregory — began to deteriorate.

  *

  The Abbey Theatre had, by today’s London standards for either commercial or subsidised theatre, small means to meet enormous demands: it responded to these at its own modest level, and had developed extraordinary resourcefulness and flexibility. On the barest of lifelines provided by the backers, notably Annie Horniman, Lady Gregory, and latterly the Irish Free State, its company existed barely above subsistence level, most of its members subsidising their acting by working outside: for instance, F. J. Dolan, who as the director of Juno had been instrumental in O’Casey�
��s success, still worked in a Guinness brewery.

  Yeats’s plays had, as Micheál MacLiammóir wrote, “thinned down the stalls to a few ecstatic readers of poetry”,[329] but by the early 1920s his hopes for a poetic theatre were fading. The perfect diction and artificial style of acting instilled by Frank Fay and his brother W. G. (Willie), which had brought out the peculiar inflections of the Irish voice, were also on the wane, although clarity of meaning and careful attention to the sounds of words were still a powerful legacy. But Yeats had restored words to their sovereignty. The words now spoken were in the rich dialect of the Dublin tenements, with an urban directness and accessibility — some would say coarseness — of which Yeats had not dreamed.

  Yeats did not want his actors to have physicality, but to be as nearly as possible abstract mouthpieces. As O’Casey amusingly reported later, Yeats once even thought of “putting actors into barrels and, armed with a long pole, pushing them into any new position he wanted them to take”[330] (the barrels were to be mounted on castors). But he and Lady Gregory managed to get the actors to stay still, and in so doing “sent into the world a number of the finest actors the world ever saw”.

  The Fay style had another side to it — a side which looked towards the naturalism of Antoine, and the more robust genius of Coquelin — which was wonderfully adapted to O’Casey’s heightened naturalism. But Yeats was not entirely happy with the way the naturalistic vein of playwriting had emerged conqueror over the poetic vein. He complained afterwards, “We were to find ourselves in a quarrel with public opinion that compelled us against our own will and the will of our players to become always more realistic, substituting dialect for verse, common speech for dialect”,[331] disciplining that same thought in his lines:

  But actors lacking music

  Do most excite my spleen

  They say it is more human

  To shuffle grunt and moan

  Not knowing what unearthly stuff

  Rounds a mighty scene.[332]

  O’Casey’s shuffles, grunts and moans had cemented a new style of acting which gave to his work as much as it took from it: both were based on direct observation of the life and theatricality of the Dublin people.

  Of the Abbey players, although Barry Fitzgerald impressed O’Casey more, F. J. McCormick was probably the greater actor. He embodied the essence of impersonal dedication, even mediumship, that Yeats advocated as a necessary adjunct to art. F. J. was a self-effacing man, avoiding publicity, passing

  from juvenile leads to middle-aged character parts. He was unknown to the English stage and in fact unknown to all but Abbey Theatre goers … Even to his fellow players, McCormick remained little known except professionally. He came from his home to his dressing-room and then to the wings to wait to go on. As he stood there McCormick ceased to be and the character he was playing took over. If any of the other actors spoke to him he seemed not to hear.

  Fallon compared McCormick as Joxer with Fitzgerald as Boyle, finding in the former a deeper intensity of character, while Fitzgerald, in the manner of Laurence Olivier, seemed to have assumed the character he was playing as he put on each feature of the disguise:

  As he stepped back to survey in his dressing-room mirror the effect of his application of grease paint one noticed his right shoulder beginning to droop. As he completed his make-up this effect began to harden. By the time he was satisfied with his appearance as Boyle, his walk — in heavy boots — had become a slither and the drooped right shoulder had become a permanent feature of his characterisation. This I attribute to the inward conviction of his characterisation.

  There was no doubt in the actress Siobhan McKenna’s mind that McCormick, who descended visibly to Joxer’s level — even cracking coarsely profane jokes in his dressing-room as Joxer — was “incomparably the greater”. Siobhan McKenna, too, had a very high opinion of Lennox Robinson as a director: “Very underestimated,” she called him, “very inconspicuous, but he had a wonderful way of bringing out the best in any part, and didn’t mind where you moved or sat.” Robinson adhered to the policy of overriding trust the Abbey management had for its actors, allowing them to be largely self-directing.

  The small group of actors who made up the company were to all intents and purposes a family, bound together not only in some cases by blood ties or by marriage, but united, as a family is, by shared tensions, loyalties and feuds. The company did not always display harmonious family affection, as Cyril Cusack, who joined it later for a revival of The Plough and the Stars at the Embassy Theatre in London, noted:

  The Allgood sisters not on speaking terms; O’Rorke (according to Agate, “a magnificent Fluther”) and myself (the young Covey) at purse-lipped loggerheads; then, finally, and to crown all “togetherness”, Miss Allgood — Sara — in the wings suddenly, belligerently addressing me:

  “Do you think I’m fat?”

  “Well …” I began, a little defensively, “no-o …”

  “What, then?”

  “Well, I’d say …” — I thought I had hit on the right word — “I’d say … plump!”

  Just then, by the grace of God, Bessie Burgess had to make an entrance on-stage. But Miss Allgood never spoke to me again.[333]

  The Abbey’s genuine tradition, Cusack believed, was founded on the actors’ summoning of “stage presence”, which he defined as a quality distinct from personality — “which, as often as not, is just a page torn from the gossip-column”; and distinct also from “a real character — usually no more than a public-house adornment”.

  O’Casey should have had the good sense not to start finding fault with these “presences”, and have understood that the relationship between playwright and actors is a most delicate one, and likely to be upset by a single ill-judged word of criticism on the playwright’s part. Actors may pitch in and fight among themselves but they quickly kiss and make up; the playwright has a different status altogether, and many actors like to keep him at arm’s length: he can be an inhibiting presence — as well as hurtful.

  O’Casey may well have understood this, but his greater need was to express himself with a blunt honesty, and he tended always to see his own opinions as causes to be fought for. He had already incurred some ill-will for criticising F. J. (as Seumas Shields) for getting laughs in the wrong places — a story given wide currency in the numerous versions in which it has been circulated. He had insisted on his own choice of Fitzgerald to play Boyle, overriding Robinson’s choice of F. J.: not a bad thing in itself except that O’Casey subsequently took credit for it, and went out of his way to refer to the Abbey’s misjudgment in as wounding a way as possible. More recently, Holloway had warned him to be tactful in voicing his opinion of Robinson’s play, The White Blackbird. But towards the end of the summer of 1925 O’Casey became involved in a bitter wrangle — totally unnecessary — with the whole Abbey company.

  *

  The summer of 1925 passed well for O’Casey, as he continued to lead the life of a celebrity, while working on his new play. Though steadily, and apparently without hope, continuing his now much more sedate wooing of Maire, more desperate methods of courtship manifested themselves in his dealings with the Abbey actress, Beatrice Coogan, with whom, she recalled, he walked the streets reminiscing about the past. On one of these walks he was talking about his play in progress, when “the Church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar, loomed up, its door still open”.[334] “I’m going in here,” said Beatrice:

  A few yards round the corner was my home in Kenilworth Square. Every few moments my father would be out on the steps scanning all approaches. The church offered a strategic moment for parting from Sean. “Are you coming in to say a prayer?” I quipped, thinking that he wouldn’t, but wanting to soften my abruptness.

  His answer surprised me. “I’m not a Catholic” — I had assumed with a name like his that he was sure to be. “I am an agnostic,” he continued. “I believe in Christ and I consider that St Augustine was the only Christian after Christ.” Then after that
rather sententious remark his voice and even his face seemed to alter as he added, “But if you want me to, I’ll go inside and kneel with you while you pray.”

  She found his words strangely humbling; much later when he had walked her back to Kenilworth Square, disparagingly dismissing it as a “bloomin’ rich man’s square”, he refused to go away, but remained in front of the hedge that enclosed the park, a sinister presence in his trench coat. Next day while walking her dogs she came across him again: he had been out there all night and fallen asleep exhausted.

  Beatrice Coogan might just have been exercising a proclivity for “Irish fact”; but she continues with an account of the books he showered upon her as presents, among them G. K. Chesterton’s Life of St Francis, where she hits upon the truth: “I had the impression that there was a basic spirituality always striving within him.” She repulsed his attempts to kiss her. There was another girl she knew he had fallen for (presumably Maire), who “had found his preoccupation with the severities of life and its inequalities, and this business of retaining the aura of poverty and shabbiness, rather offsetting. So, I thought, was this business of breaking off from some grave discourse to administer a kiss like a wallop.”[335]

  O’Casey’s own view of his gallivanting was more spirited, although just as inconclusive: he wrote to Fallon, “Had Joyce Chancellor [another Abbey actress], [Raymond] Brugère [École Normale professor spending a year at Trinity] and Will [Shields, i.e. Barry Fitzgerald] with me on Thursday evening. The Brugère Butterfly was comically fluttherin’ around the chancellorian Rose all the evening. Poor little Joyce! a wistful little body, full of quaint charm.”[336] But the tension of his own unrelieved sexual appetite, though it found an outlet in the almost orgasmic as well as tragic ending of The Plough and the Stars, may well have contributed to the big bust-up with the Abbey actors in mid-August. It exactly coincided with his letter to Lady Gregory telling her he had finished the new play. He now had merely to give it a final look — “type the Caste”[337] — and he would be ready to avail himself of her “brimming kindness” and pay another visit to her, to “plunge enthusiastically into the wonderful woods of Coole”.