When “A. E.” experimented with the dramatic form and wrote a play on Deirdre … the Directors did not tell him that his play was hopeless. They produced it. I remember “A. E.” telling me that it ought to have been done behind a gauze net. This was not, as you may suppose, for the protection of the company, but for the purpose of making the play appear remote.[474]
Yeats’s bloody-minded judgment was one thing; but the subsequent behaviour of the Abbey directors was something else altogether. In the past, as Robinson reminded Lady Gregory, with his first plays like The Crimson in the Tricolour, O’Casey had been handled with sensitivity. Robinson had edited Yeats’s harsher comments, only showing O’Casey the constructive or encouraging ones, while later he and others, such as Holloway, had acted as buffers, filtering criticism to (or from) O’Casey. It was the first important consequence of O’Casey’s physical severance from the Abbey that his haunting, characteristic presence and soft, instinctive vocal charm, which had often contradicted the effect of harsh and bitter utterances, were not there to impose caution and tactful handling in the directors’ dealings with him. Simply, they had forgotten what he was like.
Of course they should have sent for him, and Robinson, not Lady Gregory, should have edited Yeats’s criticism. But they were older, Robinson was more often drunk and Yeats more ill, Lady Gregory more dotty and idealistic. First impressions had lingered, or hardened with time, and they all somehow still expected O’Casey to be acting the poor supplicant, cap in hand, glad to serve and comply. Arrogant, Protestant, yet deeply spoilt and childish themselves, by virtue of the aristocratic, Ascendancy style of life they led, the directors forgot that “Casey” — as Yeats still called him — was also a Protestant, and now thought himself their equal, if not their superior (as a writer). He was finding a world-wide audience for his plays, which none of them had ever found.
Moreover the breakdown in communication was heightened by O’Casey’s now publicly stated disdain towards Dublin and his departure from Ireland, leaving behind him a lot of ill-feeling. Yeats, while spending most of his time elsewhere, had cannily pretended to remain in Dublin, Robinson and Lady Gregory perhaps had no choice — but so many others from the Abbey stable had fled. Why should they be kind and treat with kid gloves a favourite son who had too often bitten the hand that fed him, and was forever causing minor but irritating trouble about rights and royalty payments? Now once again, over his new play, they could assert their authority, sure that while they were in what was only a backwater, it was one that should command respect.
Lady Gregory may not have had these motives consciously in mind when, on 27 April 1928, she sent O’Casey the whole of Yeats’s two letters (the “opinion”, along with the confidential note to her about how “Casey” should be treated), plus Robinson’s, with a covering letter from her. She seems to have expected O’Casey to respond most untypically. Could there have been more than a touch of Job’s comforter in her assertion of friendly honesty?
I think I ought to mail it [Yeats’s letter] to you at once though I am afraid it might hurt you — or at least disappoint you — (as his criticism did me, on my first draft of “Sancho”). But it is right you should at once know what he — what we all — feel and think — I won’t make any more comment — I know you will prefer this to any attempt to “soften” things and will believe that I, that we all — feel you would rather have the exact truth than evasions.[475]
Expecting far too much from O’Casey, she was soon to become the victim of her own propaganda about artists. Some of her patronising words suggest that the unconscious contempt O’Casey had displayed towards her when lying about himself in the past might have been well founded. “My comfort is that you have such courage (far beyond mine!) and tenacity that I know you will, as of old, when the ‘Banner’ went back — set your teeth and ‘turn a defeat to a victory’ as you did then —” The reference to The Crimson in the Tricolour could not have been much comfort to O’Casey.
*
In the meantime O’Casey and Eileen were preparing for the birth of their child. Rich in theatrical personality even when young, Eileen was also superstitious and in awe of fortune-tellers, and when one of them predicted some great disaster for her, she naturally assumed it concerned her baby. They still dined out, and attended a performance of the marathon Back to Methuselah, at which Eileen lost her shoes. But she was now huge — too huge, warned her specialist, threatening to induce labour a month before the promised date (unless this was another example of O’Casey chronology).
They hurriedly ordered a cot: on its arrival at Woronzow Road Mrs Earle remarked that it looked like a coffin. Eileen was nervy and sought full-time medical attention; her mother, sipping tea round at the house, warned her to prepare herself, what with Sean, an eccentric, and her own unbalanced father, for the birth of a mad child. Eileen broke down; Sean, cocooned in his study, rushed downstairs, shouting at his mother-in-law, “What the hell are you up to, woman?”[476]
With the help of two doctors and an anaesthetist, Eileen gave birth during the night of 30 April to a healthy boy, whom they called Breon. It was a costly affair, O’Casey later remarked, “the doctor taking fifty pounds, plus the cost of a nurse who stayed with them for six weeks”.[477] Advised to spend the night of delivery elsewhere, he stayed with Billy McElroy, but when he arrived home next morning all joy in the wonderful event was crushed by the letter postmarked Dublin lying on the hall table. He tore it open, quickly absorbed its contents, then ran upstairs to Eileen, who was glowing with pride and happiness at the arrival of her son. O’Casey kept his bad news to himself.
In the weeks before the rejection of his play he had been keyed up with hope and excitement, even to the extent of picking F. J. McCormick to play Harry Heegan. But later, in retrospect, he sketched a scenario of gloom and expected disaster. He had anticipated the play’s being turned down, he told Bernard Shaw: it was a predetermined plot. The style of the play could not in any case have been a surprise to Yeats, because he had been told about it — even told that it was about the Great War. Yeats had not objected.
The Abbey guardians had committed evasion after evasion, the first being Robinson’s “‘I will read it as soon as possible. Very busy now with a new Murray (play) & a Borkman production.’ Though I knew he had read it, & could hardly read it quick enough,” said O’Casey. The second was Yeats’s statement “in his letter to me saying [he had dictated his letter before he opened the letters of the other directors], which is countered by a statement in a letter from L[ady] G[regory] ‘that she couldn’t remember writing this letter’ (though she recorded in her diary that she agreed with L. R[obinson]’s opinion).” There was a third, a fourth, a fifth grievance listed in the intense paranoia the rejected author was still suffering two months later.[478]
Yet even in his darkest moments, O’Casey, in the richness and many-sidedness of his character, never wholly became an obsessive case, and as he wrote out his numerous responses to this terrible disaster he relieved his feelings by drawing spirited caricatures.[479] The dialogue under this drawing reads:
YEATS: We decree that thou art a heretic.
ROBBIE: Cast out from the unity of the Abbey.
YEATS: Sundered from her body.
ROBBIE: Segregated & abandoned for evermore.
LADY GREGORY: Amen.
In another, the monocled Yeats leads a procession over a cliff (while gazing at the stars); Lady Gregory holds a banner reading “We’re all as God made us”, with Robinson’s obscene shape supporting it. A third caricature depicted the blighter and blaster O’Casey ready to defend his script.
He could also confirm that in spite of the Abbey’s rejection Macmillan would still publish The Silver Tassie. The text was already in the press, and they had commissioned a charcoal sketch of O’Casey by Evan Walters, a young Welsh artist liked by both O’Casey and Augustus John, for the frontispiece. O’Casey sent the Abbey directors’ letters, with his replies, to Daniel Macmillan, suggesting t
hat they should be published as an introduction to the play. Macmillan promptly declined, but knowing that the book-buying public like nothing better than a good row between distinguished writers, brought the play’s publication date forward. O’Casey was hurt that they would not publish the correspondence: “I have no intention of pressing for their publication in this way, for it would not be fair to bring Macmillans into the controversy against their wishes,” he declared huffily, adding, “I am satisfied that I have acted in a square way with your Firm.”[480]
By now it must have been clear that O’Casey intended to milk the rejection for all its potential publicity. Feelings that had been confined to art, ironically reflecting and mocking one another, were now about to spill out hideously into life. Intrepidly, and yet foolhardily, for it is possible to view the action as demonstrating two elements of his character which existed side by side, he posted the exchange of letters, once Macmillan returned it, to the Irish Statesman and, in London, to The Observer, without consulting his Abbey correspondents or seeking their permission.
In his replies to the three directors O’Casey had not pulled his punches: he had scrawled over Yeats’s letter, “Could anything equal the assumption of Zeusian infallibility.”[481] He told Robinson (on 2 May) that he had bet his wife (“curious word that for me to be using”) that the play would not “be fondled by the Abbey”. Of Yeats’s wounding and confidential advice to Lady Gregory, which she had quite unnecessarily sent him, he wrote to Robinson:
I am too big for this sort of mean and petty shuffling, this lousy perversion of the truth. There is going to be no damned secrecy with me surrounding the Abbey’s rejection of the play. Does he think that I would practise in my life the prevarication and wretchedness that I laugh at in my plays?[482]
He did not stop, in further correspondence, from taking every point of Yeats’s magisterial judgment and hotly arguing its opposite. Yeats was stirred at first to reply soothingly, and (apparently for the first time) placed a conciliatory “O’” before Casey: “Had my admiration for your genius been less, my criticism had been less severe.” This did little to calm O’Casey, who on 11 May produced his final word:
You seem Mr Yeats, to be getting beautifully worse; you astonish me more and more. There seem to be shallows in you of which no one ever dreamed.
What have packed houses, enthusiastic (cheering, says Mr Robinson) audiences for The Plough got to do with your contention that The Silver Tassie is a bad play?
Perhaps this thought is due, as a journalist might say, to your delightful sense of Irish humour. — Farewell.[483]
To Lady Gregory O’Casey was more kind, having already acknowledged to Robinson that she had written “in her kind way” and given him a “full, perfect and sufficient account” of the directors’ action, he did allow himself, to her, a further swipe at Yeats’s suggestion that he withdraw the play: “Does he take me to be such a dish of skimmed milk that I would do such a shuffling, lying thing as that?”[484]
*
George Russell, as editor, at first balked at publishing the correspondence in the Irish Statesman, but O’Casey assured him, “You can take it from me that neither Mr Robinson nor Mr Yeats will mind the publication of the letters … what really concerned them was the fear that the rejection of the play would be a very great blow to me. The realization that the blow wasn’t so great as they thought will be rather a relief to them, and they will welcome instead of objecting to the publication of the letters.”[485] But the appearance of the letters in The Observer on 3 June provoked Yeats’s ire and proved the opposite was true: he asked the Society of Authors to take action against The Observer.
Walter Starkie, the literary critic, now an Abbey director, had not been in Dublin during the earlier exchanges with the other directors: he had now read The Tassie, and Yeats had his opinion inserted in the Irish Statesman when it published the other correspondence on 9 June. Accepting that the suppression of the letters was impossible, Yeats now wanted the record to be complete. Starkie’s view at first echoed those of Yeats and Robinson:
In The Silver Tassie the characters seem to come from a shadow world … I feel that the author had a great idea at the back of his mind and fugitive symbols presented themselves to him … Many visions, many ideas crowd into his mind, but he is unable to make the synthesis and enclose them within the framework of drama. In spite of all this, I feel that the author is experimenting in a new world of drama; for this reason I feel strongly that the Abbey Theatre should produce the play.[486]
Starkie’s view, passionate and sensible, demonstrates ultimately how the Abbey bungled its decision and let down its audiences, as well as O’Casey: how frustrating that had a vote been taken, it would probably have been three to one for producing the play, with only Yeats dissenting. “A fight was the honest way out of it,” O’Casey later claimed, also pointing out that on a man with a wife and tiny baby, loss of expected revenue was a grave financial imposition. He now paid English taxes and kept a tally of expenses on taxis, typewriter repairs, and entertaining foreign visitors: one night in June 1927 he and Eileen sat up in bed trying to sort out their accounts. His eyes were paining him and he cancelled visits to The Dance of Death and The Way of the World: with all the uncertainty he was “hopping about like a gold finch on the rim of a bowl”.[487]
But the dispute with the Abbey hoisted his name higher than ever before in the world’s print, across America and Europe, and “tossed the names of Yeats and O’Casey into minds which had never bothered about them before”.[488] It was, as O’Casey had already shown in his unsent cartoons, a wonderful subject for caricature. The most celebrated appeared in the Irish Statesman on 9 June; Yeats, in spats and monocle, boots a hobnail-shod O’Casey out of the Abbey while telling him, “Of course, Mr O’Casey, you must on no account take this as being in the nature of a rejection. I would suggest that you simply tell the Press that my foot slipped.” The Catholic Bulletin found it ideal summer reading:
Mr S. O’Casey, dramatic writer and military historian, deals for our delectation with Dr William Butler Pollexfen Yeats, and eke with Professor Dr Don Gualtero Fitzwilliam Starkie. This follows on what, not so long ago, the Proud Pollexfen proclaimed in the Abbey Theatre (subsidised; Government Director, Prof. Dr Don Gualtero himself) to be “the Apotheosis of O’Casey”. The Apotheosis, like the German warships lifted at Scapa Flow, has been towed into harbour, keel upwards, to be broken up.[489]
O’Casey did also partly exult in this colour and stir, even upbraiding the Irish Times for not making enough of it.
But Yeats continued to view the dispute with distaste: he told Lady Gregory, “So far as Dublin is concerned I think we will gain … and elsewhere when the play is published. The tragedy is that O’Casey is now out of our saga.”[490] If he was on the defensive, Lady Gregory showed pure bewilderment, confiding to her journal that she had sent O’Casey Yeats’s letter to her, “that he might see there was nothing kept back and my own note of criticism in my diary. He had stayed here [at Coole] and I looked on him and treated him as a friend I could speak or write openly to. He had accepted our criticism in other cases …”[491] She did not admit that those “other cases” were minor by comparison and she was so upset that she continued for months afterwards to write conciliatory letters to O’Casey: he would reply but he would not forgive.
Nor would he stop raging. The balanced and generous Starkie became “a toff” who “wears a stole of authority from the literary apostolate and epistolate of Dublin, so that everything he writes is stamped with a scholarly image and superscription”.[492] Yeats underwent further comic and hyperbolic transformations: “Born into the proletariat, [he] would have made a magnificent docker.”[493]
Sir Barry Jackson’s rejection of The Silver Tassie, which came in June, did not make O’Casey more cautious: Jackson arrived in person at Woronzow Road to return the script, telling O’Casey that the play would be impossible for him to do and that an English audience could not stand it:
it would “lacerate our feelings … be unbearable”. He later added, “I am convinced that it is one of the greatest postwar plays and is certain to be widely read — and, although perhaps this is not the desired result of a work written for the public stage, it is at all events a very good stepping-stone.”[494]
O’Casey dispatched further lengthy letters to the Manchester Guardian, the Irish Times, and an even more discursive counterblast to the Irish Statesman, with his own and Starkie’s arguments set out in the form of a dialogue. Russell refused to publish this last contribution; cutting it down, O’Casey then sent it to the Irish Times, which also declined it.
He rejected the good advice he received from all sides, in particular from St John Ervine, who agreed with his “justifiable anger” at the Abbey’s “brilliant bungling” but appealed to O’Casey to stop being hurt.[495] He was, Ervine said, first and foremost a distinguished Irish dramatist, and “the life of the Abbey is more important to Ireland than the life of you or me or Yeats or any other individual. It has kept what mind there is in Dublin — Heaven knows there is not much to boast about — and it must therefore, not be hurt.”
O’Casey still took no heed. He had now resolved to wheel up the Big Berthas of literary controversy to escalate the bitterness, and even more than before to engulf in it his own pride and commitment. His atheism may have been in deep contradiction to his need for a father (and the constant need, stronger in him than in most, for an eternal father), but he now sought, in this controversy in particular, both an earthly father and an eternal arbiter.
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 31