Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  There was one man alive in England whose literary authority was unquestioned and whose image had not been assaulted in O’Casey’s passion for throwing down idols. To this man, and to submit to his fatherly judgment, O’Casey sent The Silver Tassie as soon as he had a finished copy in his hand.

  14 — A New Character

  George Bernard Shaw, asked in June 1928 to deliver a verdict in the divorce action of O’Casey v. O’Casey (O’Casey versus Ireland, or the new O’Casey versus the old), quickly ruled in favour of the former, granting a decree nisi — with a glowing testimonial calculated to serve O’Casey’s side in the controversy. From Passfield Corner in Hampshire, where he was staying with Beatrice and Sidney Webb, he wrote to O’Casey, “What a hell of a play! I wonder how it will hit the public.” After overthrowing Starkie’s and Robinson’s opinion (“the hitting gets harder and harder right through to the end”), he commended The Tassie’s nihilism:

  You really are a ruthless ironfisted blaster and blighter of your species; and in this play there is none righteous — no, not one. Your moral is always that the Irish ought not to exist; and you are suspected of opining, like Shakespear, that the human race ought not to exist — unless, indeed, you like them like that, which you can hardly expect Lady Gregory, with her kindness for Kiltartan, to do. Yeats himself, with all his extraordinary cleverness and subtlety … is not a man of this world; and when you hurl an enormous smashing chunk of it at him he dodges it, small blame to him.[496]

  Shaw followed this with a rebuke sent off to Lady Gregory in which he boldly stated that she and Yeats had been treating O’Casey “as a baby”, that Starkie was right, and that they should have done the play. Yeats, whatever he thought, should have submitted to it as to an act of God; on this occasion he had been “extraordinarily wrong”, although typically himself: “Give him a job with which you feel sure he will play Bunthorne and he will astonish you with his unique cleverness and subtlety. Give him one that any second-rater could manage with credit and as likely as not he will make an appalling mess of it.”[497] To Lady Gregory Shaw repeated his description of The Silver Tassie: “It is literally a hell of a play.”

  There were, however, one or two personal considerations which lead one to question the impartiality of the judge. Over seventy, and twenty-four years older than O’Casey, Shaw was tired of a dangerously undiscriminating England in which his reforming wit, his radicalism, his gentle gradualistic Fabian socialism had been absorbed, and nothing changed for the better. He had, since the rise of Lenin and the propaganda success of the Russian Revolution, and in particular since Ramsay MacDonald had so spectacularly failed to implement Fabian socialism by means of the democratic process, shifted to more brutal beliefs, as exemplified by the Liberal MP, Cecil L’Estrange Malone, who at an Albert Hall meeting to commemorate the Russian Revolution popped the question, “What are a few Churchills or Curzons on lamp-posts compared to the massacre of thousands of human beings?”[498]

  Further considerations: Shaw hated Irish nationalism as much as O’Casey. He had, as an aspiring writer, gone through much the same kind of rejection O’Casey had experienced. Over John Bull’s Other Island he had even received from the Abbey directors something of the same treatment. He and Yeats, although ostensibly friends, even allies — they were working together to set up an Irish literary academy — were temperamentally poles apart.

  Early failure had affected Shaw even more deeply than it had O’Casey, but he hid his inner vulnerability more successfully. As long as he could command attention it provided the artificial self-esteem which he felt, as much from family and personal reasons as from his early lack of success, he needed to sustain him in the face of his ultimate belief that he was unlovable. What, sadly, he found himself so sympathetic to in The Silver Tassie was the nihilism: “You are suspected of opining … that the human race ought not to exist.”[499] The play had exercised his feelings about war. No wonder he signed himself off to O’Casey, “Cheerio, Titan”. His approval of O’Casey’s ruthlessly expressionist drive revealed a shocking truth: his disenchantment with the human race. The old man may be suspected of having grown callous — did a bit more slaughter really matter?

  Shaw did not praise The Silver Tassie for being, as O’Casey intended, a great, warm-hearted attack on the horror of war; he lauded it for being “literally a hell of a play”. It was not the first time, nor the last, that O’Casey’s intentions had been misunderstood, but never was such a misunderstanding more crucial for his future. But O’Casey, too, put a false construction on Shaw’s remark. There were, in any case, several possible meanings to “a hell of a play!” (but only one to “literally a hell of a play”). O’Casey did not understand that Shaw liked The Tassie for reasons which, had he perceived their full import, would have horrified him. Being two-edged, playing the divine fool, was by now second nature to Shaw, while he had perfected, as no one else could, the disarming wit which ultimately made his deepest convictions less than serious. Nobody needed to believe that he meant what he said. Thus he had often found himself the unwitting supporter of much that he wished to destroy (what greater affirmation of religious faith is there than Saint Joan?). Disillusionment with himself and his methods made Shaw speak up for O’Casey.

  At a kindlier, and more mundane, level, he was also giving a leg up to a fellow Irishman in an alien land: he knew how difficult it was, so near and yet so far from Dublin, to settle down and become accepted. Possibly his sensitivity to O’Casey’s vulnerability was not in the long run helpful: the earlier rebuke he dealt him over his early collection of articles, Three Shouts on a Hill, may have had a more salutary effect.

  But the short-term effect of Shaw’s championing him was immensely gratifying to O’Casey, to Eileen, to Macmillans — who included an extract from Shaw’s rebuke of the Abbey in publicity for the published version of The Tassie — and to C. B. Cochran, who after lengthy consideration agreed to present the play in London. It refuelled the fires of O’Casey’s self-justification: he had lost a mother and father but won a new father figure. Yeats and Lady Gregory could be ditched. Victor over his past, he could trumpet Shaw’s approval in Ireland: a new confidence entered his polemical outbursts. He sent a copy of the published play to Lady Gregory, and she replied in an affectionate tone, trying to reweave the threads of friendship. He disposed of a review of the published Tassie by “Desmond”, in the Irish News, by sending a copy of Shaw’s approbation for the paper to print, ending, “And there I’ll leave you Desmond, peeping at the world beneath the legs of Shaw”.[500]

  It was a wasteful and unnecessary exercise: O’Casey did not recognise his true friends, nor see the limits he needed to place on his critics’ influence over his highly volatile art. But he could not ignore them. He had, possibly, some sense that he had not come up to his own expectations, any more than to theirs, in writing The Tassie. All too evident in the play was a dislocation of his talent caused by his move from Ireland, while his own exaggerated response to rejection possibly betrayed the fact that his energies had not been wholly engaged during the writing of the play: had they been, he might have trusted more in its quality, as he had trusted in that of his previous plays.

  But if the theme of The Tassie did not engage him at the deepest unconscious level, the effort he had put into the play had been stupendous. Yeats — “a bad scenario excites the most miserable toil” — knew much more about O’Casey’s unconscious creative processes than Shaw (who never commented on them). Shaw ministered to the conscious ego, Yeats tried to apply drastic medicine to the artist’s psyche: O’Casey, whether he was aware of it or not, chose between them. He chose Shaw.

  Some delicate balance between his negative capability and a fierce Irish independence of mind was seriously harmed. The controversy, this time, came before the production, the cart before the horse, and with a play as experimental as The Tassie O’Casey desperately needed to sit among an audience and experience their reactions. A lot of abstract opinions were useless to h
im and he should not have bothered with them. But he had abandoned his former patience, while transplanting his gift on to English soil, and neither he nor anyone else yet knew whether it would thrive.

  *

  Eileen and Sean lunched with Shaw and his wife Charlotte on 21 June 1928 in the Shaws’ second-floor flat in Whitehall Court. At the front door Shaw hurried forward to take both Eileen’s hands in his — “the same gesture”, she recalled, “the same warmth of feeling I remembered from my first meeting with Sean.”

  Over lunch Charlotte Shaw warned O’Casey not to be so angry with the press, but Eileen gently contradicted her, pointing out that if O’Casey felt resentful he must express his feelings. She had begun by supporting him in his individuality, his waywardness, and was never to stop. O’Casey recalled that GBS’s support was being deflected from his own still combative anger with the Abbey “towards the silencing of Sean; and towards soft persuasion to be used on Yeats”.[501] During an animated talk O’Casey reminded Shaw of his having written to ask him for a preface to Three Shouts on a Hill. Shaw had refused, but he had carried the letter round in his wallet till it creased and frayed. Now “eight years later, he was equally moved by the salute to The Silver Tassie”.[502] Was he establishing, without saying so openly, that he had got his way at last with Shaw? To all intents Shaw’s letter about The Tassie had become its preface. But neither writer appeared to notice the irony that in the case of the former letter it had been Shaw’s rejection which had been the spur to success, not his approval.

  The Shaws did put pressure on O’Casey to conform — for his own good: Shaw, for all his polemical impishness, was neither unkind nor irresponsible. Eileen, as far as can be judged, merely wanted Shaw to protect Sean: “Through the delicate fume of the conversation, Eileen’s silvery voice suggested the compromise of Sean submitting any further letters to Shaw, who, if he disapproved of a paragraph or sentence, would edit it into a more suitable and tactful expression.”[503] This sensible advice was applauded by Charlotte Shaw and GBS, but O’Casey said nothing, and the pair left with a return lunch date suggested but not confirmed.

  Shaw wrote on 3 July to O’Casey that he had heard from Lady Gregory that she had been on his side all through: he advised O’Casey not to run down Lennox Robinson or make conditions — it seemed in the curious slant of O’Casey’s mind that he was gradually transferring from Yeats to Robinson the blame for The Tassie’s rejection. “Say that he is the rottenest producer on God’s earth, and would kill a play even if St Luke and St Gabriel collaborated to write it. He won’t mind that; and the conditions will follow spontaneously.”[504]

  Shaw reminded O’Casey to be cautious: “Play writing is a desperate trade. £300 a week for just long enough to get you living at that rate, and then nothing for two years. Your wife must support you (what is she for?), and when she is out of work you must go into debt, and borrow, and pawn and so on — the usual routine.”

  But the cancer of rejection was spreading: there was no second lunch between the Shaws and the O’Caseys. O’Casey drafted a reply to Shaw in which discontent boiled over into malevolence and paranoia. He knew the play had been rejected before he sent it in: he was the victim of a huge plot which pursued convoluted twists and turns of secrecy as the three evil guardians of the Abbey, aided and abetted by Russell, tried

  to prevent the publication of the letters shown by AE writing & wiring to me to show his fright over the possibility of an action for breach of [copyright] against him by Yeats, & the only way I could reply to the stirring of his fourth dimensional conscience was to write saying, No AE, “don’t be trying to act the bloody Gaum!”

  Dr Starkie’s criticism, too, had been deliberately concealed from him (“the one criticism that was in any way favourable to me”).[505] “How do I know these things! Ah! how did I know that Yeats was coming to London, & coming to see you before he stepped on the ship in Dublin Bay.”

  These outbursts would have been hilarious and vital in the mouth of an O’Casey character on stage, but O’Casey was playing them for real, in his own life. He had lost objectivity, the self-mockery he once possessed. His draft reply finished with a resounding condemnation of the Abbey (“a silly little temple, darkened with figures past vitality”).[506]

  The Shaws now extricated themselves with alacrity from the complications looming — they must have received this letter in some form or other — Charlotte insisting that Yeats had not come to see Shaw about the play. She further told Eileen that she was all the more sorry they could not see the O’Caseys again for a while (the Shaws were just off abroad), as

  I do feel “Sean” wants a lot of looking after just now. He is going to be very naughty & fierce & resentful — & he is a terribly hard hitter!

  That idea of letting G.B.S. see his letters to his “friends” is a grand one. Do keep him up to it. Any letters addressed to 4 Whitehall Court, will be forwarded at once, and I will send you our address the moment we are settled, & he must write about all he is doing, & G.B.S. will answer quickly, & try to act as a lightning conductor![507]

  O’Casey would have none of it. “He had refused the counsel of Uncle Yeats, and he had no intention of taking the counsel of Auntie Shaw.” He would not submit to his own emasculation.

  He also thought “Mrs Shaw, in her heart, resented Sean’s independent critical outcry, and remembered it against him”.[508] When Russell reviewed the published Tassie in the Irish Statesman, O’Casey attacked him, rounding off his reply, “London with the sun out”; his attack on the “toff” Starkie’s report, in the September issue of Nineteenth Century, was equally unnecessary and carping. Russell reproached him, “Try to be a little good natured about our imperfections. There was something else out besides the sun when you wrote those letters.”

  Russell in a further editorial comment in the Statesman put his finger exactly on what had been happening to O’Casey since he left Dublin, “DEAR SEAN, — You are creating a new character, and when you have finished annihilating your critics the portrait of the annihilator will be as vivid in the consciousness of your readers as Joxer or the Paycock.”[509] The birth of this new character had been painful: moulded in his new life in London as a married man, it had been taking shape, unseen, alongside the crippled hero Harry Heegan, who had a little but not much to do with O’Casey himself, and had soon sucked all the energy from Heegan.

  The rejection of The Silver Tassie was this new character’s baptismal fire, but O’Casey would not, like Harry Heegan, become the victim of himself (having, before, been the victim of others’ blind hate). He would turn and fight: not for those causes which, expressed in his plays, had bound him to other men, but for himself, and for his work — especially if people attacked it, made it the object of their criticism. He no longer had need of motherly protection, or of idealised father-substitutes:

  He would fight alone; one alone and not a second. He would fence in his own sour way, thrust, parry, and cut with his own blade of argument … according to the measure of his own heart, the rhythm of his own mind, logical now, savage and sudden a moment after: in this fight, he would face any opponent, and thrust straight at the side where the heart lay.[510]

  While Maire Keating’s rejection of O’Casey had provided the basis of a wonderfully and comically distorted vision of a relationship in The Shadow of a Gunman, O’Casey’s fulfilled love for Eileen had led to a failure of representation in The Tassie: the portrait of Jessie Taite is tantalising, sexy and compelling, but unsatisfactory. Eileen, in reality, had embraced the self-mocking O’Casey and loved him, preferring him to his much richer and better-established rival Ephraim. As a result, the cynicism of Jessie Taite has a manufactured feel, the bitterness is too literary: it doesn’t reveal the pressure of unexpected passion, or heartbreak. O’Casey did not have to mock himself: he could take himself seriously.

  *

  In August 1928 Eileen took Breon away with her, for a rest, to Amersham Common: O’Casey stayed behind in Woronzow Road. Alo
ne for the first time for months, he felt curiously quiet, uneasy and restless. Nothing could remove this, he told Eileen, but the “clasping in my arms once again of my lovely little Eileen”.[511] He looked at the things “in your room & in my room, & they, too, seem to have gathered in them something of the patient resentment of your absence”. He longed to see her once more, he said in a further letter, in the black dress she had worn at Ottoline Morrell’s.

  While O’Casey negotiated the sale of rights in The Tassie to Cochran — wanting to “get as far away from the Irish Players as possible”,[512] as he told Fallon, “& to break the tradition that no ‘Irish’ play can be played without the ‘Irish’ players” — Eileen went on from Amersham to Angmering-on-Sea in Sussex. Here, in fine weather, she bathed in the sea and read Jude the Obscure, not perhaps the most heartening of stories for a nursing mother. “Isn’t Jude a tragic tale, all life is tragic to the imaginative type of person, to eat, drink and ‘live within the law’ is so difficult for them to do. I hope to get a letter soon.” O’Casey replied, on 20 September, gloomily, that she had to keep herself fit to battle for Breon if anything happened to him. “Even if nothing should happen, I’m not going to be, apparently, of very much use to you or him.”[513]

  He soon cheered up, inscribing the flyleaf of her copy of The Tassie — they had now been married one year — with tender and affectionate compliments, ending, “From Sean, with deep and intense love that has been wedded into a sweet and lovely companionship”. And at last, just before the end of the month, Cochran signed the option to present The Silver Tassie, which he was intending to back wholly himself. Costs would run as high as £5,000 — a sum inconceivable and awesome to the Dublin dramatist whose Abbey productions cost less than a tenth of that. Cochran wanted to do the play first in America, and seems to have paid O’Casey as much as £500 for the acting rights — much more than he could have hoped for out of an Abbey production. So he had only lukewarm interest in an Irish Times report which had Lennox Robinson saying that the Abbey would do The Tassie, “if I were willing & the Cochran production fell through”.