She also responded to O’Casey’s widening of the debate in his first reply, when he defended Nora Clitheroe’s womanhood (“The safety of her brood is the true mark of every woman”). Nonsense, thundered Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington: “Nora Clitheroe is no more ‘typical of Irish womanhood’ than her futile snivelling husband is of Irish manhood. The women of Easter Week, as we know them, are typified rather in the mother of Padraic Pearse, that valiant woman who gave both her sons for freedom. Such breathe the spirit of Volumnia, of the Mother of the Gracchi.”[377]
O’Casey defended himself in print against these attacks with memorable verve and humour, making the point over and over again that he was showing life as it was: men were mixed in qualities, he said: “The Staff of Stonewall Jackson [once] complained bitterly to him of the impiety of one of their number. ‘A blasphemous scoundrel,’ said the General, ‘but a damned fine artillery officer.’ Some of the men of Easter Week liked a bottle of stout, and I can see nothing derogatory in that.”
All men, too, showed fear, he wrote, quoting Job in his defence: “Upon the earth there is not his like, who is made without fear,” and giving illustrious examples, such as Hector (chased round the walls of Troy), and the Red Branch champions, Laoghaire and Conall, who fled leaving Cuchulain alone to face death “‘in the heaviness of dark sorrow’”. His parrying of Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington’s attack on his so-called “obscenities and indecencies” had a Miltonic splendour: “We know as well as Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington that obscene and indecent expressions do not make great literature, but we know, too, that great literature may make use of obscene and indecent expressions, without altogether destroying its beauty and its richness.” But, as might be expected, his most eloquent defence concerned his introduction of the Citizen Army flag.
They objected to the display of the Tricolour, saying that that flag was never in a public-house. I myself have seen it there. I have seen the Green, White and Gold in strange places. I have seen it painted on a lavatory in “The Gloucester Diamond”; it has been flown from some of the worst slums in Dublin; I’ve seen it thrust from the window of a shebeen in “The Digs”; but perhaps the funniest use it was put to was when it was made to function as a State robe for a Southern Mayor of Waterford.[378]
With such powerfully uttered truths set down O’Casey perhaps did not need to go further in his own defence, but he had an unfortunate weakness for polemics. And although, as he wrote to Sara Allgood in London, both his eyes were bad and painful, he seemed to be enjoying the “something of a whirlwind” the play had raised.[379] He therefore agreed to take part in a public debate with Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington, organised by Ryan, on 1 March 1926, at Mills Hall; perhaps having, in an earlier phase of his controversy-mongering, challenged so many of his adversaries to verbal tournament he could hardly back down (as they all, without fail, had done) and keep his colours flying.
The hall was packed: actors, playwrights, journalists, politicians and Republican personalities turned out in force. O’Casey was applauded as he took his seat; the chairman was Arthur Clery, Professor of Law at UCD and member of the Supreme Court. Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington spoke first; as a leading light of the Cumann na mBan she was a skilful public speaker and commanded attention easily. She repeated the charges she had made in the Independent, tellingly, adding a question: would O’Casey put on a travesty of Ulster Volunteers in Belfast before Sir James Craig and Lord Carson and not expect to have his theatre wrecked? She seemed to have much of the audience’s support, as in her low and soft, but carrying, tones she went on, “With regard to Mr O’Casey my own impression of him is that he has ‘a grouch’. He likes to see rather the meanness, the littleness, the squalor, the slum squabbles, the women barging each other, and the little vanities and jealousies of the Irish Citizen Army. He has rather the art of the photographer rather than the art of the dramatist.”[380]
In the meantime, listening to her address, O’Casey was feeling something similar to what he had felt on visiting Yeats in Merrion Square to discuss cuts in the play: the effects of an “airless room”, this time crowded, which “always made him sick”. “Neuralgic pain” was also “pressing on his eyeballs” — while his eyes were riveted with disgust on Maud Gonne MacBride, sitting next to Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington. She had, he believed, never understood Yeats, and was now a querulous old woman who uttered bitter words — “the colonel’s daughter still”.[381] When he stood up to answer Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington, the implosive force of the atmosphere and its hostile presences overcame him, and he had to sit down again.
Some people alleged that he collapsed from a pitiable lack of guts, but Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington, as her son Owen later said, saw that “he was clearly unwell, his sight was apparently not good, he had difficulty in reading his notes, and he was under great emotional stress before an unfriendly audience. When he was unable to go on and had to stop dead, my mother’s reaction was one of genuine sympathy. She … was well aware that she had started with the initial sympathy of the audience.”[382]
O’Casey’s back-up man, Lyle Donaghy, a Trinity College student, stepped into the breach, but he, too, apparently, after a spirited defence, felt suffocated, and sat down. Rallying, O’Casey rose a second time, determined not to be beaten, and then, if we can believe Holloway, drifted into “a sort of Salvationist address at a street corner”:
I am anxious [he said] to bring everyone into the public houses to make them proper places of amusement and refreshment. The play, in my opinion, is the best of the three produced. It has been said I have been writing for England. I am not writing for England. I am writing for England as well as for Ireland, and I don’t see why I should not.[383]
Afterwards, weary and scornful, he went home to 422, thankful for a lift “in the little car of Frank Hugh O’Donnell”, author of the play Anti-Christ. Thrust under the room door — or so he wrote — he found a telegram from J. B. Fagan, in London, “telling him that his play was coming off at one theatre, but another had been engaged, and the play [Juno] would go on there; but there wasn’t much chance of a new success, unless Sean came over for the first night, and so created a little publicity for the newer effort”.
England!
The “apotheosis” had become the crowning disillusionment: like his feelings towards the once lovely Maud Gonne, he now felt a surge of hatred towards Cathleen ni Houlihan: “He saw now that the one who had the walk of a queen could be a bitch at times. She galled the hearts of her children who dared to be above the ordinary, and she often slew her best ones.”[384] But, in the curious selective way his antagonisms worked, he exempted Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington from all ill-feeling, even his scornful humour, and later spoke of her with affection.[385]
It may be that Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington’s approach to him after the debate had mollified him: she shook hands with him with tears in her eyes, saying she had just read for the first time his tribute to her dead husband in his Story of the Citizen Army. Of Frank Ryan, who had led the attack on The Plough, and who later commanded the “Communist Irish” in the Spanish Civil War, O’Casey not only spoke proudly, but stated, “I was never an enemy of his.”[386]
11 — Free Wheeling
A few days after the fiasco of the debate, O’Casey, now approaching his forty-sixth birthday, made his first visit abroad, crossing from Ireland to Scotland — “tramped the quarter-deck like a man head-on to the wind & felt at home on the billows”.[387] Arriving in London at the weekend of 6 March, he was excited to be in the capital of Ireland’s ancient enemy, especially as he felt something of a conqueror there. Escorted everywhere by J. B. Fagan, who was organising Juno’s transfer from the Royalty to the tiny Fortune Theatre, he was “pulled here, pulled there; brought, bowing, before young men and women, before elderly men, before anyone who could write about him in the daily papers and in the weekly journals … Coriolanus O’Casside hurried here and there by Menenius Fagan.”[388]
The journalists identified him as a man in his forties, Irish of feature, silver-grey hair ove
r his temples, eyes heavy-lidded but brown and twinkling, voice soft and mysterious, with the speech of a writer and the accent of a workman. “I live in the slums of Dublin … At sunset you stand on the quays and look around at the blue mountains.” He regaled them with tales of collecting a daily dole of two shillings and sixpence, of pawning his trousers for five shillings before Juno was produced; he told them about his childhood, how his father died when he was six, how his brothers were better fed and better educated than he was. The journalists laid on thick the homespun charm: “There is material for a first-class film drama in O’Casey,” noted one.[389] A truer O’Casey was revealed when he was asked, at a photocall, to pin a bunch of shamrock to Sara Allgood’s breast: “You can have it if you want it but it’s pinning it on her arse I’ll be and not on her breast at all.”
When he broadcast on London 2LO, he became much oversimplified; the Daily Sketch had him saying to its reporter, “Sometimes Oi wish Oi was a labourer again — it’s a grand loife for a man — a grand loife. It gives me almost a homesickness to pass men now knocking down houses and building roads.”
The journalist Beverley Nichols interviewed him in a noisy tea-shop; even here, above the roar of traffic, clattering tea-cups, and the low moan of other customers, O’Casey wove a spell, as he described the experience of standing in Hyde Park. But Nichols and he soon crossed swords over Noël Coward’s The Vortex, which O’Casey had just read:
“Didn’t you think it a fine play?”
“No.” Rather fiercely he put five lumps of sugar into his tea-cup. “The people in it are absolutely artificial.”
“But they’re meant to be artificial. If he’d drawn them in any other way, he’d have been telling lies.”
“Nobody’s artificial.” O’Casey looked at me kindly, rather as though I were a child who could not quite understand why a × a = a2. “Nobody’s artificial,” he said. “Even insects aren’t artificial. Shakespeare drew artificial characters, but he gave them humanity. My point about these people is that they haven’t got humanity.”[390]
His character — or rather a caricature of his character — was becoming defined: in making him out to be a “rough diamond”, a Jack London type — the original, hobnail booted, working-class man, the equivalent of Rousseau’s noble savage of an earlier time — the journalists were representing him as the very opposite of what he was. O’Casey may have been a natural aristocrat, but his aristocracy was by no means that of an untutored peasant; it was more the refinement, indeed the essence, of Protestantism, allied to a belief that the successful practice of an art made one into a superior being. But being cast as an Irish working man gave him an immense psychological advantage in the drawing rooms of aristocratic ladies. He could clown, tweak noses, say all kinds of outrageous things, and his generous-minded but essentially timid British hosts would not blame him directly: they would put it down to the injustice their own fellow countrymen had inflicted on the poor, backward Irish.
All this must have produced a sense of inner distortion, which was finally to emerge as contempt. Not only did O’Casey display a certain kind of refinement, but, within the compass of his resources, he had always, like his mother, been a tremendous snob. This snobbery was now to be turned upon the English as selectively as it had, up till then, been focused on the Irish. Nichols, who had been so generous about him, was later dismissed with a wave of the hand: “Never saw a hobnailed boot in his life, not even in a shop window. Mignonette among the nettles.”[391] O’Casey had set his sights on higher contacts: “friends in spirit” like Lady Londonderry, who “quietly and cleverly placed a mantle of courtesy and kindness” round his shoulders when he came “lumbering into Londonderry House with Mary Grey and J. B. Fagan”.[392] The alacrity with which the intellectual aristocracy, the Londonderrys, the Astors, the Macmillans, put him on their invitation lists showed not only how responsive they were to the newest hero of the hour, but how available he was as a celebrity: within only a few days of being in London he had been taken by Lady Londonderry to see Rutland Boughton’s The Immortal Hour, had lunched with Lady Gregory, who had come over to help advance her protégé, while a portrait of him by the doyen of portrait painters, Augustus John, had been commissioned and was soon to be begun. Rejected as he felt by Dublin’s literary élite, he became, almost at once, the new theatrical sensation of London.
Part of O’Casey behaved as a new immigrant, “a guttersnipe”, and he identified with the many Irishmen and women before him who had first been confronted with the impressive sights of London. Yet, unlike most of them — and whisked as he was from place to place by taxi — he was hardly a poor newcomer. He found the bright young things, the flappers and “gem-like lads” encountered in the big houses, desperately sad, “already of life’s down and out”.[393] And where was the England of his imagination? Shakespeare was “unmentioned; Shelley apparently forgotten; Milton ignored”. Stepping up wide and deeply carpeted staircases, “in the twilight of the goods”, and bumping into men with orders dangling from their coats, Sean feels little else but defiance, belonging, as he sees it, to a greater and better aristocracy: that of thought.
*
The momentum of Juno’s success did not slacken with its transfer to the Fortune Theatre, where it went on finally to chalk up over 200 performances before Arthur Sinclair, who played Boyle, took it on a no less triumphant tour of the Midlands. Not many plays have the wit and power to captivate both a Dublin and a London audience. Probably owing to a poor cast, Juno was not able to repeat this success in its first New York production, in 1926 at the Mayfair: it had to wait for Abbey Company tours in the 1930s, and a 1940 production at the Ambassador with Allgood and Fitzgerald in their original roles, to deliver its full impact. The English critic, James Agate, had defined, in his Sunday Times review of the original London production, the essential lesson O’Casey had learned in Juno, which made the play so acceptable, namely that the English didn’t like their tragedy undiluted: “Mr O’Casey’s extraordinary knowledge of English taste … is shown by the fact that the tragic element in [Juno] occupies at the most some twenty minutes, and that for the remaining two hours and a half the piece is given up to gorgeous and incredible fooling.”[394]
The Committee of Selection for the coveted Hawthornden Literary Prize, which included Laurence Binyon and Edward Marsh, had already chosen O’Casey to receive the 1926 award. Lady Gregory later recalled that when O’Casey asked her if he should accept, she said, “Certainly. It is a compliment and the £100 will buy a good many new trousers.”[395] At the end of March, in a ceremony at the Aeolian Hall, O’Casey was presented with the £100 cheque by the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who had been Liberal Prime Minister during the eight years up to the Rising and had approved the execution of the leaders in 1916. At the ceremony, Asquith called Juno the “most moving and impressive drama that we have seen for ten, fifteen or twenty years”. O’Casey, wearing a grey lounge suit, varicoloured cardigan, and the black and yellow tie of the St Laurence O’Toole Club, responded to Asquith with several “sentences fervently spoken in Gaelic”, as the Irish Times reported;[396] he continued in English, saying that the prize “would be a happy memento of his visit to England, and, to use his own words, ‘a very darling example’ of his visit”. He accepted the award, he said, as a tribute to the Abbey and the wonderful acting of its players.
At the ceremony Lady Gregory proudly gave a thumbnail sketch of her protégé’s poor background, as outlined to her by O’Casey: but no one knew, least of all O’Casey (if we are to believe his uncritical admirers), that strictly speaking he did not qualify for the prize. Asquith described the Committee of Selection’s “relief and … revelation in the discovery of a still young man, who satisfied the conditions … in that he was under forty years of age [my italics]”.[397] For some time now O’Casey had been saying he was three to four years younger than he was; but even by this sliding scale he was well past forty when Juno was first performed at the Abbey in 1924. He was tradin
g on English ignorance of Irish efficiency. There is in Ireland, as Kenner notes, a “xenophobic delight in misinforming the stranger”. Yet even English journalists who had interviewed him in Dublin the year before, notably J. L. Hodson in The Observer, had his age correct to within a year. But he must have thought he could get away with it — and did. And there is no doubt he deserved a prize such as the Hawthornden.
The heady circulating kept up: “great buttie now of Sybil Thorndike,” he wrote to Fallon, “very natural kind, & lovable woman”; lunch with Maurice Macmillan, the chairman of his publishers — “made him wait a fortnight”. He played golf in Hyde Park, was elected an honorary member of the Garrick Club, and attended the Irish Club banquet on St Patrick’s Day night at which the Prince of Wales was also present.
Bernard Shaw, the object of O’Casey’s adulation ever since he had opened the green paper-covered edition of John Bull’s Other Island, became a new acquaintance, although not, at least to begin with, a close one. Indeed after a month in London O’Casey grew homesick, complaining to Fallon, “This is a lonely City after all: I wish sometimes I was singing ‘Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square’, for they’re so damned busy here, they haven’t time to make friends.”[398] He sent a pound to his carpenter friend Jim Kavanagh at 422 North Circular Road, asking him to pay his rent there up to 8 May.
His greatest need — and sense of greatest deprivation, all the more keenly felt for the success showered on him from all sides — was now for a woman. He still had a strong sentimental attachment to Maire Keating, to whom in February he had inscribed a newly published copy of The Plough and the Stars with “Dear Maire: There is none like unto thee in gentle loveliness, in kindness and in truth. Sean.”[399] But there was another, darker side to the relationship with Maire, which he revealed years later, from the relative security of marriage to someone else, expressing in violent wish-fulfilment what had been a tormenting absence of sex:
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 25