Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  Many years later he regretted this letter and his “grim mistake” in refusing to listen to Eileen, who begged him to let Lady Gregory visit. She had been eager to meet the woman “of whom he had so often spoken affectionately and well”.[535] Lady Gregory kept her word, saw The Tassie, and departed again for Dublin not only without a word from O’Casey, but without “a last affectionate handshake, for he never laid eyes on her again”.

  *

  Massey little expected Augustus John to arrive, even at the last moment, to paint the Madonna on the Act II stained-glass window: he had made alternative arrangements with a scene painter. At midnight on set-up day, John turned up drunk, “his great black hat cocked over his forehead”, and sauntered down the aisle, climbing unsteadily on to the stage, where he surveyed the scene in silence:

  In the harsh work lights it looked like a bone yard it was meant to. The artist slowly moved towards the window frame lying on the stage, took up Alick’s [the scene painter’s] stick of charcoal and made a firm stroke on the oiled silk. He worked as though possessed and for more than two hours he never looked up. Cochran, Sean, Alick and I and the crew watched in fascination. At last he was done. He moved to the side of the stage and stood waiting. Without a word, two stagehands lifted the window piece and braced it in position. The master electrician connected the cable and set the lights for act 2. And there shone the Madonna of The Silver Tassie … We cheered Augustus John. He did not hear us; he just stood there looking at his scene. He was pleased with it. He left, swaying slightly.[536]

  The first night also passed to everyone’s satisfaction. On the whole the critics were favourable, although, as Emlyn Williams noted, the Telegraph described the play as “puzzling”, The Times as “a great stumbling failure”. The first week’s receipts broke the record of the Apollo for the last three years. Shaw, there on the first night, still championed the play vigorously; he was joined by T. E. Lawrence, who told John (so John informed O’Casey) that he found it “the greatest thing of our time”.[537] Lady Gregory wrote to O’Casey that the second act was impressive, but that the Abbey would have done the other three acts better: she had written to Yeats saying they should have accepted the play in the first place. Well meant, this comfort was cold and misplaced at a moment when, as Williams noted sardonically, on the Monday night of week two, there were empty seats. “Cochran the infallible had been misled by Journey’s End; this was a war play that was not going to succeed.”[538]

  Yeats himself, worried and ill, a spectre at the feast, flitted in and out of London: he reported to Lady Gregory in early November a rumour that audiences were falling off: “I hear only of people who greatly dislike the play or greatly like it. I met Sally [Sara Allgood] at Lady Ottoline’s, she said we ought to have done it, but when I asked her how the audiences would have taken it said ‘there would have been a row of course’ and went on to explain why — general bad behaviour of everybody.” To Lennox Robinson Yeats wrote flatteringly — both men were on the defensive, cast as villains in the piece — “I had tea with Gerald Heard yesterday and praised Ever the Twain [Robinson’s 1924 play, Never the Time and the Place] to the rich young man. I said it was the greatest success we had ever had because though Juno and the Paycock had drawn as well Juno had the help of extraneous events.”[539] He didn’t see The Tassie: “Illness kept me from seeing it, though I had my seat taken.”

  Meanwhile, O’Casey concealed from everyone — most of all himself — his growing fear that The Tassie’s financial return would not be what he had hoped, namely a decent living allowance for one year. Bravely, on 3 December, he told Fallon that it was still playing to “fine houses”.[540] But it was now in its last week. The Wall Street stock market had crashed in the second week of the run and Cochran could not risk more capital in an already expensive production: “It’s the proudest failure I ever had,” he declared.

  In the following year Fallon tried to arrange a production in Dublin at the Gaiety, but it fell through because of vituperative denunciation by the Church, in particular from Father Michael Gaffney, who wrote in the Catholic Mind, “I fancy that Dublin is a little too wise … to put its lips to a cup that may possibly have been filled from a sewer. The play has been published in London, and is in our hands for cold inspection. It defies analysis. It is a vigorous medley of lust and hatred and vulgarity.”[541]

  True to his Flutherian code O’Casey fought his way out of failure. George Russell and his sundered psyches “AE” and “YO” (“one in three and three in one”) offered himself as a convenient target, with remarks in the Irish Statesman on Japanese art, Corot, and the photographer’s art. Fluther opened up, “Vox AEius non vox Dei — non by a long chalk”,[542] and bingo! they had a new literary scrap going. Russell pontificated on the contradictions of human nature, and, parodying himself, quoted Walt Whitman who relished contradictions: Allow, dear Sean, he said, “your many-sided and complicated nature intellectual nourishment for the various elements from which it is compounded … repeat every morning this sentence from Emerson: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’” O’Casey, tasting blood, waded in:

  I advise you to say three times every morning before you get up, and three times every night before you go to bed (murmur it, and it’ll do just the same), “If God hasn’t given a man something to say out of himself, why should he be permitted to acquire merit by saying again what some other artist has already said?” Keep at this hard enough, now, and it may save you from the bad habit of one day filling yourself, like a fattened goose, with Spengler, to spout Spengler; or, on another day … with Eddington, to spout Eddington. It may deliver you, too, from having to say what has already been said by Laotze or Li Hung Chang; Waldo Emerson or Billy Sunday; Signor Eddington or Monsieur Buffon …[543]

  It was all fairly good-natured knockabout, with Russell then unrepentantly quoting Blake’s “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression”. You ought to take up reading something simpler, he advised O’Casey, write another Juno but not worry about articles which “cause a red haze to form before your mind”.

  What turned sour a comically belligerent exchange was that Russell did not publish O’Casey’s next long-winded and repetitive letter. The rejection became a cause which O’Casey expanded, inflated, continued to fight for in other papers — An Poblacht, the New York Times, the Dublin Star — dragging in, of course, the Abbey Theatre directorate. “Any more strokes from the Titan would have pulverized you,” he wrote in a further letter which Russell also refused to publish.[544]

  O’Casey had the best of this row because only a couple of months later, in April 1930, the Irish Statesman itself folded, or, as O’Casey gleefully expressed it, “AE has been unhorsed too, arsed & unhorsed”.[545] No longer would the Statesman “like a little cuckoo clock in a soda-fountain parlour [hop] out at stated times”, sing its little song and bell its little chimes, then hop “back for rest and further meditation”.[546]

  One major moon of the great Irish literary revival was sinking below the horizon, and O’Casey had had his fun at its expense. He now wore outwardly, like a coat of armour, his disillusionment. Like a polemical journalist he could separate the private from the public, and had learned to control the public persona. Life and work were diverging fast, and rather than try to fuse them once again he was content to take the happier way out; so the art — or as it became, increasingly, the art of controversy — grew more abstract, rhetorical, or simply combative, like a hurling match, as he enjoyed more directly than before the processes of life. He and Yeats were moving, in strange symbiosis, in opposite directions.

  Russell had dubbed this new O’Casey “the annihilator”. Their preposterous tragi-comic fight had taken place offstage; The Silver Tassie, as O’Casey told George Bishop, was different “because the tragedy dominates the characters”. O’Casey’s characters, full of contradictions, at one minute kind and generous, at the next barging each other like angry fishwives, had fled the boards, and now roamed the
stage of life.

  15 — The Phantoms of Hyde Park

  Dislocation, sometimes provocative and productive, more often disruptive, even seriously destructive of both work and relationships, is the keynote of the next four years. Divorce from Ireland had now become permanent exile: the emotions informing O’Casey’s life and work became those of the displaced person, its logic the logic of the uprooted. Appropriately enough, it was during this period that he made his first and only visit to America. It may have been an affinity with dislocation that helped, in time, to establish his popularity in that country.

  From the moment he set foot in London, in 1926, O’Casey had expressed his determination “to write a play about London people”; more explicitly, he said to Beverley Nichols, “What are your dramatists doing to neglect Hyde Park?” The rough diamond would show them. He conceived the idea of Within the Gates first as a film, which would be “geometrical” and “emotional”, the emotion of the living characters to be projected against their own patterns and the patterns of the Park. The action was to begin at dawn, with the opening of the gates, and end at midnight as they closed again to the twelve chimes of Big Ben striking softly in the distance. He wrote to Alfred Hitchcock to come and have dinner with him and Eileen, so that they could talk it over, and Hitchcock agreed.

  Hitchcock had by now made his “all-talkie” version of Juno, having gone to Dublin in search of “local colour”. The film, released at the beginning of 1930, was not successful: it managed to lack both realism and suspense, two qualities in which Hitchcock later excelled, while instead of a comedy with Agate’s twenty-minute quota of tragedy the piece became more of a slow-paced, brooding melodrama with comic touches. There were endless scenes of eating and handing round cups of tea, while for the most part the playing was pedestrian. Sara Allgood, repeating her role of Juno, looked past her prime and showed little grasp of screen acting; Joxer was played by Sidney Morgan, Boyle by Edward Chapman; Barry Fitzgerald was relegated to playing an unnecessary Prologue figure called “The Orator”. Worst of all, Hitchcock insisted on changing the cunning little tailor, “Needle” Nugent, into a stage-Jew whom he called Kelly. Twenty years later two American Jews who saw a revival of the film wrote to O’Casey to complain of its anti-Semitism. “I never saw it,” replied O’Casey, and went on to condemn Hitchcock for his cheap trick.[547]

  But talking films were in their infancy, and the results did not yet measure up to the enthusiasm shown for them: O’Casey stuck in one of his exercise books clippings on the new medium and its superiority to the theatre. When Hitchcock had dinner at Woronzow Road O’Casey’s new idea excited him and he left after dinner having delivered a hearty return invitation to discuss the project further. No such invitation was forthcoming, however. O’Casey continued to enjoy the suggestiveness of his chosen setting: he described to Edith Londonderry his sense of life overpowering art as he sauntered through Hyde Park, “‘taking upon me the mystery of things, & acting as if I were one o’ God’s spies’”. He enjoyed the theatre of it:

  From the little cock’ey’d sparrow watching a crumb in the hand of a fellow full of pity for the bird, & destitute of pity for himself, to the red-coated, gorgeously braided Salvation Army officer thunder-voicing God’s love … [the] circles of people tossing troubles away into the singing of “Danny Boy”, or, “Oh God, our help in ages past”, led by conductors tense as steel moving their slender white wands as if from their tips flowed the energy that gave majestic & immortable motion to the planets and the stars … And here and there a lonely, static-faced preacher appealing piteously for someone to come along & shake the hand of Jesus.[548]

  The image of O’Casey, the gaunt exile, savouring these delights, is possibly a stronger one than any in the play itself. So fixed was he on Hyde Park he even wrote a preface to a book by the well-known Park orator, Bonar Thompson, claiming, in what was hardly a strong recommendation, that Thompson had not vividly observed the scene, and advising him, in a lofty Yeatsian manner, “Had he found the gathering of thoughts together a hard thing to do, he would have written a far, far better biography of himself.”[549] The preface also reflected that O’Casey was, at this time, gathering thoughts for his own autobiography. He tells Thompson to think less of himself and more of others.

  O’Casey was far from being absorbed into English ways. Hyde Park was a poor substitute, a tourists’ surrogate for the dark, sombre area of Abercorn Road, which occasionally surfaced again in news from Fallon in Ireland, as when he heard that his old friend, Father Brady, had been appointed Archdeacon of Dublin: “Sooner or later an Archdeaconship comes along to St Laurence O’Toole’s. How strange it would feel to me to walk slowly & pensively through that district now.”[550]

  Leslie Rees, an Australian visitor to Woronzow Road, confirmed how actively the past still fermented inside O’Casey, during a long chat held in his upstairs room; also that his claims about Shakespeare were a load of bluff: “he was all”, Rees wrote, “for quoting long passages from Hamlet and Julius Caesar but usually dried up after a few pentameters and turned to me with the words ‘What is it? What is it?’, an appeal that to my chagrin I never seemed able to gratify.”[551]

  O’Casey, now over fifty, had become thinner and balder than in his outdoor days: he peered with small brown eyes through his silver-rimmed glasses and spoke in a raw Dublin accent whose tone was thin and whining rather than rich: to his Antipodean visitor he looked frail and flat-chested. Eileen, still appearing in Bitter Sweet, struck the visitor as chic and dainty, “with her West End voice that was not quite West End”. Afternoon tea was brought in by a “wordless old duck of a servant”, Mrs Earle. It seemed that London and success had aged O’Casey quickly: he was starting to dread, as he later said, “its powers & its attractions”. He was even tiring of the art galleries: after visiting the Titians in the National Gallery one day he remarked that galleries were “imposing prisons for pictures … I never leave one without a sense of gloom”, and dismissing them further as “memorials to one fellow that has been made a baron”.

  *

  Yet happiness with Eileen was at its height, for although The Tassie’s failure still rankled, the loss of earnings had been made good to some extent by money from the Hitchcock picture, from royalties on his books and foreign rights on the earlier plays. Eileen, too, had a regular weekly salary, which she supplemented by modelling hats and stockings. Most evenings Sean would catch a bus from St John’s Wood to the Haymarket and meet her after her show; they would eat, and travel back by bus. He was extremely appreciative of her clothes, and of the colour of the hat she might be wearing — colour for him was always of paramount importance. Later, back at Woronzow Road, he would lead her to his room, “that I may talk in secret with you, & caress and fondle you in secret”.[552] Or they would stay in the big downstairs room, so that he could see her charms mingle with the browns, yellows, greens and blues of the room. “I’ll see to it you will be as helpless before me there as you would be in my own room …” His intimate letters to Eileen show his sexual gratification at its height.

  He had done what he said he would do, namely make her love him, but without being proprietorial. He rejoiced in her freedom, although there was little doubt, he told himself, he needed to be cautious in his joy. As he had teased her at an earlier time, when she had written while away on tour that she missed his companionship, his caresses, his gentleness and fierceness, “Do you miss anything else? Try to think & remember & then tell me, my little love. How many times have you fondled another hand & kissed another mouth since you went away from me? On your guard, Sean, fight & do not give too much liberty to the love for a beautiful face, desirable form and charming nature.”

  But the greatest danger to their happiness came from practical problems: difficulties with the house, or some previous flat, the meeting of bills. Neither of them, even having responsibility for a child they both loved, developed — or wanted to develop — less extravagant or aristocratic tastes. It was, O’Case
y remarked, a “pity these things should shove themselves in between the sweet exchanges of our love”.[553]

  Eileen deeply cherished his genius, and she sent, whenever absent from him, motherly exhortations to eat well, look after himself, take proper walks — in other words, to put his work before everything. The highest praise she could have from him was to be compared with his mother. But she herself remained giddy and impressionable.

  The summer of 1930 was exceptionally hot; she had booked rooms in a boarding house in Margate, but could only go at weekends. O’Casey took Breon and his nanny there. During the day O’Casey enjoyed the crowded beach, which was like a Hyde Park by the sea. At night the landlady gave him a coal fire. Eileen, who remained behind in Woronzow Road with Mrs Earle, picked up the threads of social life, responding once more to invitations to go out to supper after the show. One night, to her amazement, Ephraim turned up at the stage door of His Majesty’s: “something to do with casting … not especially to see me.” But, she remembered, “his mere presence was fatal”.

  Without Sean’s protective influence, she accepted his renewed invitations, and found old emotions reviving. Ephraim still felt resentment over the marriage and the way “his property” had been taken from him. O’Casey himself had no great respect for marriage, far from it; he often referred to it contemptuously as “a permissive chit from a cleric”. “Wife” — “strange word for me to be using”, he had written to Lennox Robinson. He approved of passion, people flinging themselves down on couches “without prim and purposeful preparation for the roistering-doistering deed of love”.[554] He approved of “Tristan and Iseult, Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet, Paolo and Francesca, Parnell and Kitty O’Shea, Jennifer and Dubedat. Let them rave: the musk of love will ever cling to the rose of life.”