There was a danger, too, in finding his dreams fulfilled in such a complete woman as Eileen. Would she not rob him of that generative emotion which had driven him throughout the writing of the Dublin trilogy: his sense of loss of the woman he had held most precious, and wanted to have living there with him again — his mother, and his cumulative shame and resentment at those years of poverty and thwarted ideals? Would she not, in fulfilling his sexual and domestic needs, rob him of that genuine comic pathos of isolation that could move people and make them laugh? Of the burning sense of identification he felt with his country’s fate? Wasn’t the greatest danger of all that she would make him a happy and richly fulfilled husband and father?
Whatever his fears, those practical fighting qualities which had, through successive disillusionments with causes, been transformed into the negative capability of a poet and dramatist — and had found expression in great work — were now roused again. The first positive step he took, in the months after meeting Eileen — and perhaps this was the boldest step of all, for a future with Eileen was by no means a certainty, merely a challenging possibility — was to turn his visit to England into a permanent stay. Increasing success and the stimulus of new friends and contacts — to which was now added the luck of finding “a very lovely lass” — clinched it.
*
In mid-May O’Casey cancelled plans for a temporary return to Dublin. He found himself increasingly drawn into the organisational side of the London runs of his plays, helping to find the New Theatre for the transfer of The Plough from the Fortune. Near the end of June he wrote to Fallon, in contrast to what he had said before, “I must say I feel at home in London now. It feels funny to read the Irish correspondents writing about Ireland in the London papers. The Free State — what the hell, & where the hell is it anyhow! I am going to a Dance on Thursday given by The English-Speaking Union: imagine a Gael going to an event like that.”[414] By July he had signed a three-year lease for a small flat in Clareville Street, South Kensington, and he crossed over briefly to Dublin to arrange the dispatch of some of his personal effects, leaving the rest behind to be auctioned off. Before leaving London, he wrote a letter to Maire asking her to see him: “many have I tried to love, but none have I loved”.[415] But they did not meet then, or ever again.
He now announced his intention, in an interview in the Daily Sketch under the headline “FORSAKING IRELAND — SEAN O’CASEY MAKES PERMANENT HOME IN LONDON”.[416] He had taken a flat in Chelsea as his “permanent home and workshop”, and intended, he said, to write a play about London people: “Human nature is just the same in a Chelsea environment as in Dublin, but in so many plays about London people one sees only artificial puppets moving.” He knew it would be a challenge, and probably his first London play would be a failure, but “I’m determined to make them see themselves as they are, sooner or later.” Besides, people did not seem to like him in Ireland any more: “I should not care to write a play about Ireland just now, with a possible bitterness in my heart.” There was one telling detail: it is significant that he should have claimed his address was in Chelsea, not Kensington. To the Irish Independent’s London correspondent he spoke on a more personal note, saying he lacked the patience to remain in Ireland: “The Irish have no time for those that don’t agree with their ideas and I have no time for those that don’t agree with mine.”
It can have been no surprise to him that such a view increased Dublin hostility towards him, although performances of The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey were as thronged as ever: but the backbiting in the press grew more pronounced, best shown in a Catholic Bulletin editorial:
British Drama knows its own. It was not for nothing that the Asquith, whose hands drip with the best blood of Ireland, ever since the week after Easter Week, 1916, should have been selected, when The Plough and the Stars was being put forward in Dublin, to present the writer of Juno and the Paycock with a special prize for excellence in British Drama. Here is the illuminating commentary on the central theme of the travesty of Easter Week and the men and ideals of Easter Week, the doctrine of The Plough and the Stars, the doctrine that “There’s no such thing as an Irishman”.[417]
To Joseph Holloway, his ear ever cocked for Abbey gossip, the writer, Brinsley MacNamara, commented that whereas in Dublin O’Casey had avoided all photos, interviews and so on, he now courted publicity at every turn. “Snobbery”, MacNamara called his stage-Irishman stunt in London, and continued that O’Casey’s plays lowered the tone of the Abbey. “Now that Ireland is getting re-Anglicised, O’Casey’s plays just suit the new class of audience who come to see them.”
Ingratitude, insincerity, arrogance, inverted snobbery-the charges against him, past and present, piled up, retailed with malice by Holloway, indicative of the bad feeling he now engendered in the wake of his departure. Mrs Frank Fay thought that when, long before, she asked him to dinner on a Sunday he displayed “the snobbery of humility”, for he told her he always stayed in bed on a Sunday and even though his brother was ill wouldn’t get up to enquire for him. “Monty [James Montgomery] thought this rather callous on his part,” wrote Holloway, “and said to him, ‘I am sure if your mother were ill you’d get up to see her?’ And he replied, ‘Not damn likely; why should I?’ Mrs Fay lost all interest in him after that.”
Neither M. J. Dolan nor F. J. McCormick now had any place for O’Casey as a friend, and Holloway himself even withdrew his early praise of the plays, calling O’Casey “as a depicter of the Irish … a false prophet with an insincere and distorted view of persons and things”.[418] But another friend of Holloway’s, John Burke, had the final word — a typical Irish word: “‘Last year it was all Sean O’Casey; now it is all shun O’Casey.’”
12 — A Part in Life
If O’Casey had made the right pro-Irish noises when in London, it would have been a very different story: but his deliberately callous comments were those of a husband wanting to justify separation from a wife with whom he had long had close emotional ties, but knowing he must now finally make the break. To provoke anger in the injured party was a help in making a clean separation: it also lifted some of the responsibility from the husband’s shoulders.
O’Casey’s final departure from Ireland, then, was not so much the exile he and most commentators called it, but the breakup of a long and stormy marriage, which had begun when, as a young man, he embraced the Gaelic language and nationalist causes, and which had lasted until his final expression of disillusionment in The Plough and the Stars — a span of twenty-five years. No one could truthfully say that he had not tried to make a go of it, or that he had been unfaithful: even his deep attachment to Maire, taxing though that had been, had not come near to rivalling it. It also could not be compared, in more than a superficial way, to the exiles of Shaw and Joyce: Shaw left at twenty for London and assimilation into English literary society: of his more than fifty plays only one, or with O’Flaherty, V.C. one and a half, had a wholly Irish theme. And Joyce’s flight — also at twenty, but to Paris — was that of the conscious artist determined to seek the liberty and mobility of wider perspectives: “When the soul of a man is born in this country,” he wrote in 1916, “there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”[419]
Caught in those same nets, O’Casey’s resilience and humour had flourished and turned the nets into trapeze wires and trampolines, on which he had bounded into dizzying eminence. Who could blame him, now, for seeking the greater scope and security England had to offer, especially as he had the prospect of a real wife, with a real family life to follow? He was wise enough even then to see his status as a celebrity as being only a temporary condition.
But graceful parting was not O’Casey’s style: what had been a progressive disillusionment (but with signs that idealism still lived) now hardened into retrospective bitterness. Unfortunately for his future, he had to have right on his side. Just as he had denounced the of
ficials of the GNR before throwing up his job on the railway, or accused Countess Markiewicz before resigning from the Citizen Army, he had to prove himself justified in his rejection of Ireland. So he drew up a long recriminatory list: some of the items on it were grievances he had already voiced in one way or another, but others were new, or almost new; every one related to himself and his position in Ireland, from his early days to the time of his leaving. These grievances, elaborated with infinite diversity, became a further but much more diffused and fragmented cause for which he would fight during the remainder of his life. But it could not, unfortunately, be called a fresh sword of light, nor was it an incubus of living matter that had to be discharged. Most of it was already dead matter — the past.
High on the list of immediate casi belli was the way he had been treated over The Plough and the Stars. “People just don’t seem to like me in Ireland any more,” he had told the Irish Independent.[420] Later he listed criticisms with which his work had been “stoned”: “His plays are phases of Dublin life as abnormal as they are transient … Is O’Casey a dramatist, or is he but a combination of the cinema and the dictaphone?” (Andrew E. Malone);[421] “A bad play” (Liam O’Flaherty on The Plough and the Stars); “O’Casey in his new play entirely lacks the sincerity of the artist” (Fred O’Higgins); “Mr O’Casey’s work was a crude exploitation of our poorer people in the Anglo-Irish tradition that is now moribund” (Austin Clarke); “The Drama of the Dregs … The peasant plays have been followed by slum plays, but their reign will not be long, though as entertainment these slum dramas are permissible. But truth is wanted as well as entertainment” (R. M. Fox).
There were not many such adverse criticisms, compared with the chorus of praise — and had he studied the past he would have found that every great work had its detractors. But his new recruitment drive was for detractors, just as the new factions he was beginning to define consisted of one that was pro-O’Casey and one that was anti.
His tolerance, too, of his literary peers in Dublin appeared to have evaporated as he contemplated the possibility of greater freedom and comfort available in London. His amazement knew no bounds when, on a visit to Yeats in the poet’s Lancaster Gate pied-a-terre, he discovered crime novels and Wild West stories on the shelves, and was informed by the poet, “I turn for shelter and rest to Zane Grey and Dorothy Sayers. One can read them while the mind sleeps.”[422] Oliver Gogarty too, O’Casey discovered, read Edgar Wallace, while Lady Gregory was not above dipping into Peg o’ My Heart, though snapping it shut quickly when he came into view; “Dope”, pronounced O’Casey. He himself had tried one or two detective stories, but they tired his mind quicker than Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding.
But the figure who best symbolised for O’Casey the narrow, parochial literary scene from which he was departing — and on which he wished to cast his dazzling scorn — was George Russell (AE). Yet those who knew him well portray a Russell who would have been the last person to try to make O’Casey feel socially inferior. Mary Colum, one of the best chroniclers of this period, describes the difference between a gathering at his house and one at Yeats’s: “AE liked to have every sort of person and had no awareness of class differences or the difference between the mind of a man and the mind of a woman. W. B.’s guests were selected … in AE’s one talked on draughts of tea or coffee, but in W. B.’s one’s tongue was loosed on sherry.”[423] Moreover, Mrs Colum continues, Russell was “magnanimous … unenvious, courageous, he had no prejudices, he was a free being”. A strong supporter of Larkin during the lock-out of 1913, he had even courageously declared, “All the real manhood of this city is to be found amongst those who earn less than a pound a week.” Workers looked to him as one of their spokesmen and counsellors.
The terms in which Russell and Yeats are described, in twenty densely written pages of his autobiography in which O’Casey and two friends discuss the pair, are completely the obverse (though the two are still counterposed) of those used by Mrs Colum. “There’s a genuine humility in Yeats’s arrogance, but there’s a deeper arrogance in AE’s humility”,[424] and “AE thinks he’s God’s own crooner” are just opening shots to pinpoint the target, which is then raked with salvo upon salvo of bitter invective; the whole chapter, which O’Casey calls “Dublin’s Glittering Guy”, might serve as a model, if one were needed, of how to control, diversify and infinitely extend, gratuitous insult. Russell became the literary butt, the scapegoat for departure, embodying all the falsity of the Celtic revival (“Celtic twalette”, Joyce called it) which lingered on, and from which O’Casey was prepared to single out only Yeats as a major figure.
Russell’s counterpart in the religious sphere, for O’Casey, was a man in almost every respect his opposite: a humble Dublin workman called Matt Talbot, who on Trinity Sunday, 7 June 1925, some nine months before O’Casey’s departure for London, collapsed from heart failure in Cranby Street, just round the corner from where O’Casey had lived briefly as a child, with his sister Bella. It was soon discovered, as stories emerged about him, that Talbot’s life had been a saga of religious devotion and self-imposed poverty. He attended Mass many times a day and observed spiritual disciplines that rivalled those of the most pious saints: for forty-one years, as one witness at his beatification said, “He had trod the rugged paths of penance.” Working men respected him: when they used bad language he would take a large crucifix from his pocket, hold it up and say, “Look, boys, see who you are insulting.”
When Talbot died they found a chain, “about the size of a horse’s trace, the links half an inch long, wound round the body; on one arm a lighter chain, on the other a cord. There was also a chain below one knee, immediately below the kneecap … so placed that it must have caused pain when kneeling.”[425] Although he himself had often said that wages were too low and that “No one can starve the poor into submission,” it was Talbot’s lack of militancy, his simple and austere support of the Catholic Church in Ireland that inflamed O’Casey’s anger.
Talbot worshipped at the altar of St Laurence O’Toole church, on O’Casey’s own former territory. He refused strike pay in 1913, preferring to borrow money and pay it back afterwards. Talbot would, wrote O’Casey sneeringly, stretch himself flat on the pavement to say his preliminary prayers, crawl up the steps on his belly to the big door closed against him, and lie on the stones till first Mass, after which he would go to work.
Ecce hobo sapiens. Blow, crumpeter, blow! So workers of Dublin, and the world, you know now what you have to do. Follow Matt Talbot up to heaven. You’ve nothing to lose but the world, and you’ve the holy chains to gain. Read this Glynn’s Life of Matt Talbot, then read Stalin’s Life of Lenin; and take your choice.[426]
Communism was the one positive article of faith O’Casey declared in England, but his interviewers, protecting him, did not make an issue of it. New friends, such as Bernard Shaw, cautioned him not to be so combative when, less intemperately and with a truly Shavian sense of paradox, O’Casey took the side of another Catholic hero, this time a dissident. Dr Walter McDonald, whose influential and controversial book, Reminiscences of a Maynooth Professor, was published posthumously in 1925, had been Professor of Theology at Maynooth, a colleague of the Irish-language enthusiast, Dr Michael O’Hickey, for whom O’Casey had campaigned vigorously in his early days. During the lock-out of 1913 McDonald showed himself, in articles and sermons, sympathetic to the workers’ cause. He was a supporter, too, of total abstinence, the only possible way, he claimed, “to wrest industrial supremacy in this land from the Saxon and prove that we are able to do our own business”.
McDonald addressed himself to large questions which few Irish Catholics allowed themselves to be troubled by at that time; his reasoning, viewed in the light of the Church’s own development, was very near present-day “liberation theology”. For example, in Some Ethical Aspects of the Social Question, published in 1920, the year of his death, McDonald had gone straight to the heart of the dispute between socialists and Catho
lics: “I cannot see that the concept of history on which their [Marx and the leading socialists] economic theories are based is of necessity materialistic.”[427] He developed this view defiantly, against middle-class Catholic theology:
Property in capital … is the consequence of inordinate appetites, not a necessity of human nature as such. Socialists look forward to a time when in the course of evolution the race will have attained to what will be practically a state of innocence, when there will be no inordinate lusts.
McDonald was not popular at all, which recommended him to O’Casey, who later devoted a whole chapter of the valedictory volume of his autobiography — as well as dedicating that volume to him — to his silencing by the bishops (“ecclesiastical electrocution”). O’Casey put his finger on a central weakness in the Church which McDonald was one of the first to identify, and which became the reason that “so many Catholic countries are in revolt today — clerical domination in lay activities has gone too far to be put up with any longer”.
Many years later, in a long polemical letter to the Daily Worker, O’Casey quoted the Catholic McDonald on press freedom: “A debating society or journal that is kept in leading-strings will do little good to its members or readers. If the Catholic Church has in her service hardly one strong, well-conducted newspaper or periodical, that is the price she pays for keeping all her journalists in bondage [italics O’Casey’s].”[428] The communist Worker was hardly likely to endorse such sentiments. They did not publish the letter.
*
Another reason, and a far more harmful one to his future as a playwright, for O’Casey’s leaving Ireland was the deterioration of his relationship with the Abbey Theatre personnel. He had already responded badly to F. J. McCormick’s public dissociation of the actors from the text of The Plough and the Stars, when it would have been wise of him to treat their embarrassment in a more conciliatory way — it was they, after all, who suffered the audience’s abuse on his behalf. McCormick had, whatever his views, served the plays faithfully, but O’Casey had not tempered his criticism; moreover, he had come increasingly to believe that the Abbey depended more on him than he on the Abbey. Resentment had been simmering on both sides, especially over the acting in Man and Superman and the incident when the brusque little carpenter, Seághan Barlow, had denied O’Casey access to the stage. This, O’Casey later wrote, was the decisive moment which convinced him that he should leave for England. But as the playwright Denis Johnston observed much later, “There are many of us who have been spoken to roughly by one of the two oldest inhabitants of the Abbey Theatre, but we don’t suffer deeply on that account. Still less do we publicise so minor an incident as a reason for never setting foot in the place again.”[429]
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 27