She went too far altogether without going far enough. It was a bit thick to applaud desire till it was a passion ready to overthrow everything, and then to expect a sudden thought of shyness or fear to trim it down to a cool-centred flame of torturing self-control. Pandering to passion; playing with passion, and then asking passion to behave itself.[400]
He even went so far as to imagine that if Maire gave in, even fainted, he would not stop: “In fact a faintness would make the job easier. When she weakened with emotion, that was the time to hammer a job on her.”
Besides Maire, there remained other, less powerful attachments in Ireland. The actress Beatrice Coogan reported that, on a stroll along the Liffey, O’Casey had asked her to marry him, promising if she did he wouldn’t leave Ireland. The sudden proposal, she wrote, sprang from his “angry hurt, his need for sympathy. He had spoken to me often about his first love and I suspected that even during my phase, and afterwards up to the time when he left Ireland and met the love that was to crown his life, he was still in love with the Maire to whom he had dedicated his first success.”[401] He had also, for a spell before leaving Dublin, and later in London, pursued Shelah Richards.
But now, at the end of April 1926, as a result of Fagan’s decision to replace Juno and the Paycock with The Plough and the Stars (and still keep most of the cast of Juno), O’Casey met in the management office at the Fortune Theatre a young Dublin-born actress called Eileen Carey, who by far outrivalled all his previous girlfriends not only in exquisiteness of looks and charm of manner, but in another and no less important ingredient, for a man whose name was now on everyone’s lips — worldliness.
*
Eileen Carey Reynolds, who took her mother’s maiden name, when she went on the stage, was exactly half O’Casey’s age when they met: but in her twenty-three years she had experienced much pain and disaster — as much, perhaps, as O’Casey in his forty-six — over a much shorter period and in more concentrated form. Her father, Edward Reynolds, had been an accountant; from Athlone farming stock, he had qualified in Dublin and emigrated to South Africa where he worked for a mining firm. Her mother, Kathleen Carey, who had trained as a nurse, joined Reynolds in Africa, where they married and settled down, and where two sons were born. The elder died; when the Boer War began Reynolds returned with his family to Dublin, where he began to gamble and failed to find work. At this point Eileen was born. Later, living in furnished rooms in London, the family suffered a further deterioration in its fortunes: Kathleen fell ill with rheumatic fever, while Eileen’s remaining brother, not properly cared for, got bronchitis and died. The shock to Kathleen Reynolds was dreadful, and she found in Eileen no compensation for the loss of her two sons.
After the Boer War Edward Reynolds set out to recoup his fortunes in South Africa, leaving wife and daughter behind; but he succeeded no better out there the second time than he had the first, and suffered a nervous breakdown. About 1910 he returned to England where, although never a serious mental case, he became a more or less permanent inmate of the Bethlehem Royal Hospital in London. He was not only ill but demoralised: his wife nagged him continually; and while his Catholic faith had lapsed, Kathleen had become a rigid and obsessive practitioner. Eileen visited him in hospital: “an enormous place … where people were sitting about in groups and my parents and myself were together.” When he died, of pneumonia in 1913, she had a “dazed notion” that she was “playing a part and had to keep looking sad for days”.
Kathleen Reynolds struggled valiantly to provide for her daughter and send her to school — sorrowfully reminding her how good-looking and like her father she was. As their circumstances grew shabbier, she insisted more passionately on her standards. Her family at home in Mayo had kept servants, and in South Africa they had had coloured houseboys, but now she herself sank into domestic service, becoming nurse-companion to an elderly lady. Eileen had to be dispatched to a convent. When Eileen reached adolescence her mother had become an even more doctrinaire Catholic: if you failed in any part of your faith you were “bad”, and that was that. Kathleen loathed sex, condemning it as “disgusting” without explaining why. The idea of escape through drink began to attract her.
At the Ursuline Convent in Brentwood, Eileen had her own problems, which reached a climax during her last term when she started to sleepwalk and have mild fits in her sleep:
The doctor said we must consult a nerve specialist, and he told us why I had broken down: a perfectly normal cause, the stoppage of my periods. I had not mentioned it to the nuns because in our code it was … secret and personal … My mother was sure I had inherited something from my father and must be going slightly mad.
But even at that time Eileen had a resilient personality — and a forgiving spirit, and she quickly resolved to escape her depressing background through her ambition to sing and to act. She soon found sponsors, and when she was ready for auditions she landed a job in the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, graduating from this into the exciting yet dangerous life of a London chorus girl.
To Kathleen Reynolds such a way of life was deeply shocking. Life with her grew progressively trying:
instead of seeing she was ill — for compulsive drinking is an illness — looked upon it sternly as a disgrace to us both. On recovering … she would … go to bed and send for the doctor, and if I were going out she would cry and say how dreadful it was for a child to leave her mother. I hated it, but convent training can make one submissive — a mixture of submission and revolt. At last I had to rebel in earnest. When she pawned one of my dresses I threatened to leave her.[402]
Leave her Eileen did in time, and although her mood fluctuated between hopelessness and extreme assurance, she began in general to have a good time as part of “café society”, modelling clothes and hats as well as keeping herself in work. She played a chiffon-draped harem girl in Pablo Luna’s The First Kiss, and a Cornish lass in a Napoleonic musical, Reginald Hargreaves’s Love’s Prisoner; then, in early 1925, she landed a job in the chorus of Rudolf Friml’s “Canadian Rockies Romance”, Rose Marie — one of sixty girls drilled to perfection by an American production team.
When Rose Marie entered on a long run at Drury Lane, Eileen had two steady boyfriends: one, a naval sub-lieutenant, would take her out after the performance. With the other, scion of a banking family, she frequented the Gargoyle in Dean Street and once went to a hunt ball. Soon Lee Ephraim, the American impresario of Rose Marie, began asking her to lunch and supper dances. Jewish, married, in his early forties, Ephraim was “unassertive, kind and husky-voiced”, said Eileen; he attracted her more strongly than the younger men she had been seeing. Having been virtually fatherless herself, she had deep need of an older man.
So Ephraim became her lover, although instinct warned her to keep their relationship a secret, not only for Ephraim’s sake but especially from her mother. She felt some pangs of conscience, for Kathleen’s religion still strongly affected her. But with Ephraim, and with the long and lucrative run of Rose Marie, at least she could now afford the clothes she felt were right for her: smart pleated skirts, polo-necked sweaters, tempting lacy underwear.
In the autumn of 1925 Eileen sailed for New York, where she had arranged to meet Ephraim, and hoped to join the American cast of Rose Marie. After some unpleasant adventures avoiding the casting couch, she joined instead a touring company in George M. Cohan’s American Born. The tour ended in failure, she was being bombarded with hysterical telegrams from her mother, and on Ephraim’s advice, and after a painful bout of sciatica, she decided to return to London. But before she left, a friend, Joan MacLean, who had just been given a part in the New York production of Juno and the Paycock, asked Eileen for her help with the brogue.
When she read the script Eileen’s imagination at once took fire: she felt a powerful affinity with the deeply disturbing and volatile emotions of the play. She left on the Mauretania determined on arrival to see Juno at the Fortune Theatre: she also set her heart on meeting the author, and if
possible joining the touring company of Juno. The faithful Ephraim arranged an appointment for her with J. B. Fagan, not of course knowing that in so doing he was conniving in his own downfall.
Meanwhile there had been a last-minute hitch in the casting of The Plough and the Stars, which was to replace Juno at the Fortune. Kathleen O’Regan, cast as Nora Clitheroe, fell ill two weeks before the opening night and a substitute was needed. So Eileen found herself being interviewed as a possible understudy by O’Casey and Fagan at the end of April. “Sean,” wrote Eileen in her memoir of O’Casey, “then aged forty-six, was a lean man with hazel eyes that were weak but strangely penetrating: he looked directly at you when he spoke. Now he stepped forward, took both my hands in his, and said in his rich and lovely Irish voice, ‘There is no need to be nervous.’”[403] They chatted warmly and she at once lost her anxiety: she hardly noticed Fagan’s presence in the office.
She was invited to play the part of Nora at a second meeting. But, having had little experience as a straight actress, she was full of misgivings: when she started rehearsals she found that some of the cast, sensing perhaps she had been preferred over other, better-qualified applicants because of her appeal to O’Casey, gave her little help. In particular Sara Allgood (Bessie) and Fagan’s wife, Mary Grey, cold-shouldered her. Still troubled with sciatica, she was taking strong pain-killers which left her dazed: Sean, she said, was “infatuated and did not hide it”. On 12 May, the sixth day of the 1926 General Strike, The Plough opened: desperately unsure of herself, Eileen had almost to hypnotise herself in order to get through the performance.
*
Next day, when O’Casey wrote to Fallon, he made no mention of how Eileen had affected him: he even complained, after describing how well The Plough had gone on its first night, that he was weary of “many things”, and that no woman had anything to do with it, adding “Nine weeks here now, & haven’t yet clicked with a woman.” But, along with the success of The Plough, he could boast of a new triumph: the next day he was to sit for his portrait by Augustus John, adding, self-mockingly, “& the end thereof shall be honour and great glory”. His comments on John do not show great perception of character: “He’s a splendid fellow, & utterly unspoiled. Says I’m a great Dramatist & slaps me on the back for breaking every damned rule of the Stage.”[404]
O’Casey had met John through another great new “buttie”, William (Billy) McElroy, a tall, picaresque Belfaster with white hair who dealt in coal slag, making the trains, as O’Casey once joked, run half as fast as they should. McElroy, with his strong accent and spontaneous manner, had a number of Dublin literary friends, among them Oliver St John Gogarty, and had even been seen in the company of the great Trinity College classicist, the Provost, J. P. Mahaffy, who, as John pointed out, “could hardly be expected to greet a tradesman with enthusiasm”. McElroy and O’Casey had taken to each other at once, O’Casey warming to the other’s humour, his volubility and his dubious air of prosperity. As well as owning racehorses, McElroy backed plays, and had money in both Juno and The Plough: to some extent he played Mephistopheles to O’Casey’s Faust, instructing the innocent Dubliner in the wicked ways of the world. John called McElroy “a kind of minor Horatio Bottomley”.
John, commanding and bearded, was at the peak of his fame and influence, and his adoption of O’Casey was extremely flattering to the playwright. O’Casey also liked the portrait, completed in one all-day sitting, from eleven a.m. to four thirty, telling Fallon that it was: “uncanny, powerful, embarrassingly vivid: an alert concentration wearing a look of (to me) shuddering agony”.[405] John, said O’Casey, liked it and thought it the finest work he’d done.
John, O’Casey and McElroy would dine together in the Queen’s, an Italian restaurant off Sloane Square, O’Casey finding nothing incongruous in the fact that McElroy and he could not, ideologically, be further apart. Having spent what he had made out of Juno and, according to O’Casey, no longer rich, McElroy had to find a new field for speculation. Because of the miners’ strike which continued after the collapse of the short-lived General Strike, coal was hard to come by; but a friend of McElroy’s had discovered a huge slag dump in the north, over which grass was growing. Unlikely as it may seem, when McElroy asked O’Casey to join him in the scheme to exploit this find, he consented and placed all he had at his disposal, signing a guarantee with his banker, Tom Berry of the Hendon Branch of Lloyd’s Bank. “It was terrible stuff, but it sold, for then, business firms would take anything, and it gave out some heat. It was bought cheap and sold dear. Fortunately for him (and for Me), it was a success, and he was able to give back the guarantee after a few months … Actually, he made more out of me than I made out of him.”[406]
Glorious companionship overrode ideology: in this carefree period O’Casey had cast himself in a very English role: Prince Hal among the “base, contagious clouds”. He became something of a dandy and, like John, smoked cigarettes of a special blend of tobacco bought at Morlands. O’Casey and John, noted Eileen, had two traits in common: both were intolerant in company unless themselves talking, and both unnerved those who intruded on their company by completely ignoring them. It was fortunate for Eileen that John found her attractive, for O’Casey was extremely sensitive to the opinion of his new friends. John, showing a heavy-handedness of which O’Casey might not have believed him capable, later commented on the playwright’s behaviour at a theatrical gathering:
There was nothing to drink but champagne; even the austere Sean had to have a glass. His intemperance is purely literary, and I used to think if he only drank more he’d blabber less. Pathos should be administered in drops, like medicine, never in a bucket; a subtle flavour rather than a thirst-quencher, to be guessed rather than gulped …
However that may be, I could swallow any quantity of O’Casey’s superb fun, and ask for more.[407]
Unlike Shaw, with whom he lunched in John’s company a short while after the portrait was completed (on 3 June), O’Casey never came to understand the English dislike of what John called, in his description of him, “stupid and even indecent” displays of sincerity.
But he did, almost at once, understand Eileen, and she found herself increasingly touched by the concern and tact of his attentions. He invited her to Trafalgar Square, Chelsea, where he was now living. The landlady, Mrs Sparrow, had laid the tea, but every time O’Casey made an approach to Eileen, Mrs Sparrow appeared with “Do you want any more milk?”, “What about some sugar?” or “Shall I clear?” They gave up and went for a walk in Hyde Park.
O’Casey then wrote to her, somewhat in the persona of a Protestant pastor, ostensibly about the role of Nora, but with deeper implications:
Be brave and be confident in the power and possibilities that are in you … If you should want any help in any way, any advice about a particular phrase or incident, ask me & all the fullness of sympathetic help that is in me will be freely given to you.[408]
In contrast with her other admirers, he bought her no expensive gifts: her first present from him was a box of six macaroons. He did offer her money, which she refused: “Receiving his royalties, he had no idea what money meant; through life he never cared for it.”[409]
After she played Nora for three weeks, all the time gaining confidence, Kathleen O’Regan asked for the part back; so Eileen found herself out of a job. Ephraim arranged for her to play the soubrette on tour in Frederick Lonsdale’s The Street Singer. O’Casey wrote to her with bracing words: “Remember the advice of Saint Teresa — ‘Pray as if everything depended upon God; work as if everything depended upon yourself’.”[410] But she was soon afflicted again with sciatica, the pain of which the other girls in the show tried to alleviate by ironing her leg with a hot iron and brown paper. One night she swallowed so many aspirins that she passed out just after coming off stage. O’Casey wrote and telephoned often, exhorting her to sleep and rest: but the tenderness he offered did not quite win out over the late supper dances which she still enjoyed with Ephraim.
To some extent, then, Eileen was a study for an O’Casey stage character. Having suffered in her early life, she could emerge comically defiant, with her loveliness and appealing qualities intact. Young though she was, she already embodied many of the qualities he worshipped in a woman, while others, such as a strong mothering power, were there in potentia. He viewed her as a great gift to him from life itself. He perceived, too, with acuteness, that she was much more tolerant and truly kind than he could be himself: she could get on with all sorts of people.
Over the next weeks he grew determined to win her, “quietly, patiently, and persistently”. But he knew little of the pain in her background, and she did not know him well enough to tell of it. Once, in a taxi on the way to the Fortune, he placed his hand on her knee, watching “her unmoved face”. He hated “Ephraim & his cool-blooded maddening manifestation of ownership. ‘God had created you for him, or he had created you for himself.’”[413]
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 26