This became O’Casey’s descent into hell, his equivalent to Virgil’s Avernus, or the Circe section in Joyce’s Ulysses: he laboured hard at it, knowing that if this act were finally to work it would need several drafts to bring it to the right level of compressed power. He believed he was on to something infinitely more powerful than Journey’s End, “that backboneless & ribless play”[447] — failing to see that R. C. Sherriff’s play in its own way encoded and registered the futility and heroism of the conflict for the officer class and their families, who suffered proportionately much higher casualties than the workers. Indeed O’Casey rejected Journey’s End as he now rejected Juno — both plays being about people up against the reality of living through war. Above all he was escaping from “burlesque, photographic realism, or slices of life”.
This did not mean he abandoned his ritualistic thrashing of monstres sacrées, among whom he placed William Archer with his The Old Drama and the New (1923) which he called “the worst book on the theatre ever opened under the nose of man”.[448] (It was possibly “dethrimental” to O’Casey that he never studied Archer’s other, and better, book on the craft of play writing.) Also included in his list of the damned were James Agate, Arthur Wing Pinero, and the members of the Garrick Club who kept their musty library under lock and key. He fell out with J. B. Fagan; he’d already referred disparagingly to him as a “little manager-born within view of Oxford University”,[449] and disliked his objections to O’Casey’s rowdy friends McElroy and his son, who visited The Plough and shouted “It’s a bloody great play, it tis thawt”: “I gently tapped the little evening-clad pumpkin on his dainty shoulder” and said, “Next time they come, show them into a box”. But he outraged Fagan most with his cavalier treatment of the manager’s own script, And So To Bed, which Fagan gave him to read: first he forgot about it in “the excitement of his lady’s loveliness and the roar of London”,[450] then, when pressed, told him not to waste his time by making him read such trivial things.
It was not Fagan, anyway, who was presenting the next O’Casey, but Billy McElroy himself; O’Casey had no more need of Fagan, for McElroy and a partner had subleased the Royal Court from Sir Barry Jackson, and put on The Shadow of a Gunman in May 1927 for a two-month run, with an outstanding cast which included Arthur Sinclair (who also directed) as Seumas Shields and the Allgood sisters as Mrs Grigson and Mrs Henderson. The behaviour of the audience on the first night was, according to The Times, “criminally unintelligent”, and “saddening”. Eileen played Minnie Powell, and during the run of this play O’Casey continued work on Act II of The Silver Tassie. It was now clear to both him and Eileen that they wished to begin a family. Eileen claimed that she was keener than Sean to marry: O’Casey, “one of the most truly moral men I had known”,[451] would have behaved the same had they merely decided to set up house together. However, on Billy McElroy’s suggestion, O’Casey bought Eileen an engagement ring, of platinum with a sapphire surrounded by small diamonds. By the time they began seriously to think of marriage Eileen, who now spent more time in Clareville Street than she did in St Andrew’s Mansions, was pregnant.
But there were still separations, provoking, on O’Casey’s part, passionate outbursts with a Solomoniac ring:
Bright, fascinating things that often made me linger have lost their colour, & are pale gaunt shadows in the soft light of my love for you. When I lie down you are with me, & when I wake in the morning, behold you are there; your white hand is under my head, & I hear your voice like the distant singing of many birds.
My little Eileen, & she is fair, she is very fair; she is fair to look upon and very graceful, and the kisses of her mouth are desirable and lovely.[452]
In June, when houses at The Shadow of a Gunman were tailing off — they had been poor compared to those for Juno — Yeats called unexpectedly on O’Casey at the Royal Court. Refusing a whisky, on doctor’s orders, Yeats asked brusquely if O’Casey intended to give the script of his new play to the Abbey. There were rumours in Dublin, said Yeats, that he had decided to ignore the Abbey. O’Casey assured him that this was not so; yet he had — or so he later wrote — already promised to offer the script first to Sir Barry Jackson; in other words he did not necessarily intend to have the world première of his new play take place in Dublin.
In July O’Casey had finished half of his experimental second act when he decided to change the whole idea, so he went back to the beginning and started again. He had established a working routine in London: he would idle away the day, resting his eyes in the afternoon and bandaging them from the light until about four o’clock, then grow brisk and alert and start work. This he would continue until about eight, then break off for an evening meal. (Eileen, by her own admission, was at this time not much of a cook, although she later improved.) The pace of life was leisurely. “Myself, I’ve done no work,” he wrote to her in early August. “I have spent the passing hours sitting, walking, rambling, idling voluptuously in Kensington Gardens: Sean and carelessness have met together: idleness and he have kissed each other. Hallelujah!”[453]
But Mrs Reynolds returned to plague Eileen at St Andrew’s Mansions, prying into her life, reading her mail, and doing her best to dissuade her daughter from marrying O’Casey, whom she placed in her own generation rather than Eileen’s. Pressure on Eileen built up. Gunman had now closed and she left for a holiday in Bognor with friends. Both she and O’Casey were nervous at the prospect of marriage, although sure that they wanted each other: Eileen, in addition, had sunk into deep guilt on becoming pregnant. Although O’Casey was an atheist she still remained, as she termed it, “about the most bewildered Catholic ever”, and wanted to be married in church.
“I love you,” wrote Eileen from “The Bungie” in Bognor, where rain bucketed down and where her “esteemed” mother bombarded her with letters — four arrived in one day. She could picture him sitting in the front room, first in the chair,
then getting up with that quick movement … as if some thought would urge you. Then sitting on the sofa: hands clasped & unclasped as you think — then the careful settling of your cigarette in those ½ holders of white & gold. The smoke, all the while a movement, hand in pocket then out; over to the desk, an idle look through the papers; then perhaps a pause as one letter catches your eye. A long look along your book shelves, perhaps one taken down with a breath of contentment, then you will settle on to the sofa, almost patting the book before you open it, & read!
Her remarkable vision of him continued even to seeing how he used the fire: “I forgot the fire it should be on, to gaze into; some centre of colour to look at; to go away from & come back to.” She exhorted him not to eat too many eggs, but to go to the Queen’s, teasing him at the end of the letter, and echoing some gentle mockery of his, “Ah! What a strange girl you are!”
In spite of Mrs Reynolds’s attempts to dissuade Eileen, they made their plans to marry at the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer in Cheyne Row: but Eileen’s declaration of love frightened him, he replied, “because of the possibility of pain and disappointment to you. Day by day a dread of giving pain to others flickers in me to a fuller strength, and how much to me are you above all the others!” But she was not to worry about his diet: “Very good,” he called her pen-picture of himself and all his movements. “Very true indeed.”[454]
Meanwhile Eileen worried about the impending ceremony, and suffered increasing sickness in the early months of her pregnancy. On her return from Bognor she made her escape from the clutches of a grumbling mother to stay with a friend, Helen Elliott, who lived in Charles Street, near Berkeley Square, as O’Casey made a spurt forward with The Silver Tassie. He quickly sketched out Acts III and IV. In these, Harry Heegan, with little chance in the meantime to develop, had changed from the powerful and innocent football player into the broken-spirited mutilé de guerre.
Act III discovers him in a hospital bed, his blinded friend Teddy at his side and surrounded, like an uncomplaining Job, by feckless relations; here O�
�Casey was drawing on his three weeks in the ward of the St Vincent de Paul Hospital during 1915, when he himself had seen many badly wounded soldiers. In Act IV the football hero motif of Act I is reintroduced with ironic bitterness: Harry propels himself round the Avondale Club dance with ferocious resentment, forced to play the voyeur as his former sweetheart, Jessie, falls in love with his old pal Barney, who won the VC for rescuing him on the battlefield. Finally, he crushes the Silver Tassie, symbol of his glory, in despair and leaves for the twilight world of Wilfred Owen’s disabled figure.
This last act, tragic in its intention, also owed a great deal to Hinkemann, although in Toller’s play the eponymous hero, more explicitly impotent and unable to satisfy his wife sexually, undergoes a much more prolonged and Teutonic humiliation. O’Casey’s tragedy is still relieved by farcical touches, with flashes of Junoesque wit, although the ratio is far from the one Agate admired, of twenty minutes’ tragedy to two hours’ sheer comedy. O’Casey, in The Silver Tassie, dismissed such approval with contempt.
As well as exploring powerful models such as Hinkemann in his own idiosyncratic way, in The Silver Tassie O’Casey was also dramatising his relationship with Eileen — although why he should have turned the successful outcome of his rivalry with Ephraim into its obverse in the play, and why he should have presented Heegan, the character based on himself — or the one with whom he most identified — as a nihilistic vision of a defeated nationalist spirit, cannot be explained in any way other than that he had not really adapted to the new reality of his life. He was himself no longer the victim of the poverty, nationalism, religious bigotry, loneliness and literary failure that he had in his earlier plays so cunningly and self-mockingly projected, without any desire to preach a message or indulge a feeling of self-pity. Then he had been content to show the processes of life through living characters presented with love and without being judged. The people he created were always greater than their models.
But now the situation was reversed. The overall expressionist aim of intensifying character and making it more abstract removed the flesh from much of the characterisation of The Silver Tassie. The process had become reductive. Jessie, based on Eileen, is an enticing but cheap flirt, while Susie Monican’s abrupt transformation from religious hysteria to sexy nurse makes the accelerated development of Nora Clitheroe in The Plough and the Stars seem, by comparison, Ibsenesque in its preparation. Harry is a character whose emotions are overstated but who remains shallow and passionless: a cartoon character who betrays his creator’s propagandist intentions. In his avowed aim of not repeating himself, O’Casey, alas, mutilated his own talent, reducing his great capacity for humour, sympathy, and warmth into a bold abstract attempt to make a shocking impact.
But it was a precedent to be much followed by politically motivated playwrights in the latter, more affluent, decades of the century: to this extent The Silver Tassie was a prophetic work. The curiosity of its composition is that it was written at a time when O’Casey felt the greatest personal happiness and financial security, and was full of hope for the future. Perhaps some darkness was hovering at the back of his mind — guilt that success had come too late to be of help to his mother who had so faithfully supported him; apprehension, too, that he was too old to change and develop. Perhaps, too, he did not see that success would pose a greater threat to his identity and a challenge to his courage than ever failure had.
For the moment he was greatly ambitious: The Silver Tassie had the strengths and the weaknesses of a play written purely out of ambition. Far from the impotent Hinkemann, or the wheelchair-confined Heegan, he was active, a father-to-be, a welcome guest in great salons commanding the attention of prime ministers, famous authors and distinguished hostesses, a figure courted by the newspapers. The very last thing he could claim himself to be was a victim. Quite the reverse: he was about to embark on the second half of a long life, as rich as the first had been, but in a very different way. It would have roughly the same measure of trials, setbacks, joys and heartaches, with the one great difference that he was no longer an obscure would-be playwright, a penniless stay-at-home shielding himself under his mother’s skirts. He was out in the world.
Most of all he had found and succeeded in possessing a replacement for his mother, with a laugh to rival hers “at the gate of the grave”, but a laugh which pointed forward to the future. He was submitting himself to a new process of life, the starting of a family, an act more courageous than writing a new play. His wife-to-be was feeling sick and needed reassurance. Her mother was trying to create every kind of trouble, even to waylaying the priest and stopping the ceremony, when, on 23 September 1927, the guests assembled at the Chelsea church. Fortunately the priest, Father Perceval Howell, did not mind mixed marriages, nor, it seems, self-confessed atheists darkening the doors of his church.
Eileen wore an expensive blue chiffon dress given to her by Helen Elliott, Sean his plum-coloured suit. Billy McElroy was the best man, while another friend, Captain Corby, gave Eileen away. She noticed Ephraim flitting about at the back of the church, and anxiously suppressed a surge of emotion towards him. O’Casey, at ease when talking to the priest, wryly set his mouth at the ceremony, but could not conceal a mocking smile: he never mentioned the wedding in his autobiography and later referred to the marriage certificate “of my own wife” — never “of myself”.[455] On that piece of paper he displayed his contempt for temporal certainty — and perhaps ceremony, too — by boldly inscribing his age as forty.
Act Three
The Shape of a New World
1927-1964
Maybe he saw the shilling in th’ shape
of a new world.
13 — Slouching Towards Bethlehem
O’Casey took Eileen back to Ireland for their fortnight’s honeymoon following the wedding. Ireland he had rejected — yet to Ireland he returned in the triumphant role of husband, introducing his new wife to his old friends such as Oliver Gogarty, Gabriel Fallon, Barry Fitzgerald, and his eye doctor Joe Cummins. Proud of everything, according to Eileen, he even had her guided round Trinity College by Dr Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, son of his former pacifist hero and of his un-pacific adversary over The Plough and the Stars. The whole visit, otherwise unaccountably strange, must have proved immensely flattering: the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Alfred Byrne, asked to meet O’Casey, who granted the request. They visited Leinster House, then Charlemont House, where they saw Augustus John’s painting of his own son, and Epstein’s Aeschylean but unlifelike bust of Lady Gregory: the gallery attendants showed as great excitement at O’Casey’s presence as at visiting British royalty.
What O’Casey did not expose to Eileen was his own real background: 422 North Circular Road, the St Laurence O’Toole Club, the houses he had lived in as a child. Nor did he take her to see his brother Mick, or his nieces and nephews who lived in North and East Dublin. Probably he did not want anything to darken Eileen’s view of the city he still held in deep affection: he declared to her that nothing in the world was lovelier than the Silver Strands outside Dublin. And she found him a marvellous companion: “humorous, watchful, and content to be with you, never wishing to stray; later I would be the restless one, needing at times to be on my own.”[456]
At first they stayed in Howth, then moved to the Hotel Russell, on St Stephen’s Green, where it proved easier to run hot baths and visit the theatre, where Juno had been revived. Of Eileen’s love of baths, not shared by him, O’Casey would exclaim, “God, Eileen! These baths again! However often do you have to take one?” But the baths did not alleviate the morning sickness and one night, having fully intended to have Sean’s child, Eileen panicked and “took all and sundry to get rid of it”.
What with the pregnancy, and with confused feelings about her Catholic faith, her health began to suffer. She tried to alleviate her guilt by attending Mass but discovered her attachment to the Church on the wane: “I knew that I had been cheating for a long time: a Catholic is not meant to have love affairs.”
O’Casey, with his proselytising, and reassuring, manner, helped her loosen the bond, so that finally she lapsed wholly, to her mother’s horror. For the present he sought and found, through Cummins, a first-class gynaecologist who was “wonderfully soothing”,[457] and informed her that to have O’Casey as the child’s father would be perfect.
Apart from impending fatherhood O’Casey had plenty to occupy his mind, Juno having returned to the Abbey Theatre repertoire, and with an Abbey American tour planned for the late autumn (it was later called off). Back in London on 9 October he wrote to Fallon for the address of an actor to help in the casting of the first New York production, in November, of The Plough and the Stars. He was happy, he said, to be back among the “beeches, Larches, Willows, Oaks, & Chestnut trees of London”. Four days later he confessed a new difficulty to his old friend — that he was trying to “solve an Einstein problem of how to buy a £4,000 house for 25/-”.[458] Now again hard at work on The Tassie, about which Lady Gregory wooed him encouragingly in November — “I hope all goes well with you — and your bride — and that you won’t forsake us”,[459] he did not mention to the Abbey that he had already promised first sight of the script to Barry Jackson at the Court Theatre: Jackson’s Birmingham Repertory Company, with two theatres in the West End, one in Birmingham, and a touring company, had something of the prestige of a National Theatre.
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 29