Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  Alone with Ephraim after the performances of Bitter Sweet Eileen danced and kissed: it was like The Silver Tassie, but with the victim tied not to a wheelchair but to a nanny and small son. Was Eileen trying to test O’Casey’s love by hurting him? Perhaps there was no deeper reason than mutual attraction — and the freedom to act on it. But it became inevitable that she and Ephraim would go further, make love, and spend some nights together.

  She kept the secret for several weeks, but then discovered, to her horror, that she was pregnant and had no alternative but to own up. O’Casey had returned to Woronzow Road, while Ephraim had left for America. One afternoon before setting off for the performance of Bitter Sweet, she told O’Casey, “I’m going to have a child,” then admitted it wasn’t his. He turned white as a sheet, knowing at once who the father was. He asked her to leave him; and off she went to His Majesty’s for the evening show.

  Deeply hurt, he brooded all evening, but love and generosity towards Eileen in the end overcame bitterness. For the most part he blamed himself, believing he was not providing properly for her. Later he collected her from the theatre in a taxi: he had forgiven her. She sobbed in his arms; they had supper and she was ill all night.

  Next day O’Casey obtained from Billy McElroy, his “fixer”, the name of a Harley Street specialist. The following Saturday Eileen drove straight from His Majesty’s to the nursing home and to “an operation at midnight: a horrible and saddening psychological upset”.[555] O’Casey never spoke to her further about it, but she later found that the incident appeared to have fortified their marriage.

  *

  O’Casey kept knitting away, trying to join up the wild and wandering themes of Within the Gates, but, in the early months of 1931, both he and Eileen realised they could not go on living at the same standard and survive. O’Casey was not the only writer to feel the dissipating influence of living in London, but his experience of the concentrated, gossipy Dublin made it impossible for his imagination and mind to grasp the complexity of the huge metropolis in whose bewildering tangle, coldness and materialistic heartlessness he was trying to make a living.

  Billy McElroy advised that the O’Caseys should withdraw into the seductive loneliness of Buckinghamshire, a plan which Charlotte and Bernard Shaw enthusiastically endorsed, as a means of simplifying their lives and cutting down on expenses. Knowing now that Eileen recognised his full qualities both of persistence and love, O’Casey agreed to McElroy’s plan: he may have hoped country life might slow her down and that she might adopt a calmer rhythm in which he figured more. The parties at which she stayed out, sometimes till four or five, the constant attentions of admirers, irritated him, and it was with relief he anticipated the closing of Bitter Sweet in May 1931, and their move to a cottage owned by McElroy’s sister, Evelyn, in the village of Chalfont St Giles. Mrs Earle was now leaving them, so was Nanny Trim, and with a new girl, Tessa, they moved into 2 Misbourne Cottages, just outside the village, overlooking the Misbourne valley. They sold the remainder of their lease at Woronzow Road to release capital and pay off debts, and put their furniture in Harrods’ repository.

  A typical O’Casey Lord of Misrule presided over the financial arrangements. A sum of twenty pounds was demanded from them for the previous tenant’s arrears; when they sorted this out Eileen, arriving at the cottage first, found the telephone disconnected, with seven pounds owing: anxious to contact O’Casey, she signed a form, and O’Casey duly paid up. He didn’t blame McElroy, he said later, but admitted his friend’s “glorious irresponsibility” could, at times, be irritating.[556]

  In 1665, with the help of his Quaker friend, Thomas Ellwood, John Milton had fled the Plague in London to live in Chalfont St Giles: but from poverty, as O’Casey sourly pointed out, no flight was possible. London was not far anyway: a bus ran from nearby Amersham and the distance was nineteen miles, an hour by Green Line bus.

  No. 2, Misbourne was an ordinary workman’s cottage, two up, two down, dark, without electricity, with a bathroom but no inside lavatory. O’Casey was horrified: an Abercorn Road dwelling, de-pressingly damp, isolated in deep countryside without the compensating noise and companionship of city life. When “serious, thoughtful, and intent”, as Jonathan Swift described the process of being “at stool”, O’Casey faced slugs and snails on the wall beside the lavatory. “A mass of wriggling twisting slime … A Walpurgis night of vermin.”[557]

  Charlotte Shaw chirped in from Ayot St Lawrence with, “I rejoice to think of you both in your own home with the garden and peace and quiet,”[558] but said that they would have to wait for a visit from her and GBS: “he hates these lanes after dark, and meeting cars with blazing lights in fogs round corners.” They never visited. Sean reproved Mrs Shaw from Misbourne Cottages for a new friendly warning about his belligerence: “God be my judge that I hate fighting. If I be damned for anything, I shall be damned for keeping the two-edged sword of thought tight in its scabbard when it should be searching the bowels of knaves and fools.”[559]

  In the autumn of 1931 O’Casey — perhaps stimulated by the oil lamp near his head where he worked stretched on his belly, and having contracted “housemaid’s knee” in his elbow — began to recall his early life. He recounted episodes from it to Eileen while they rambled in the surrounding countryside or took tea on the lawn (which was mown by the gardener from nearby Misbourne House). He wrote some of these down, using the first person, though later abandoning this practice.

  The time at Misbourne Cottages passed slowly: O’Casey wrote, in a later stage of the autobiography he tentatively began there, that “after a year [my italics], they moved into a bungalow, which, though of no great shakes, at least was cleaner than the horrible cottage”.[560] They had stayed in the workman’s cottage (rent £1 per week) little more than a month.

  The new place was unfurnished, so they sent for their furniture from Harrods. An imposing brick bungalow on the other side of the village near Milton’s cottage, with a garden in front, an orchard behind, “Hillcrest” brought relief and good health, for as O’Casey told Fallon, “I have, at last, got a chance of again using the hack & shovel, & have worked hard here with these glorious tools every day in the garden … I worked today hacking out a path facing the setting sun, with a heavy frost falling …”[561] The lease, with three months’ notice on either side, promised not to strain their resources, so they could settle down once more. O’Casey took as his workroom a little room at the back; he was, said Eileen, “a stoic of stoics”. But there was little secretive love-making now.

  *

  Having made the mistake of talking about his new work, Within the Gates, on the radio, and regretting it, he began again, in November, to “get back to the play or film — or whatever it may turn out to be — & to the semi-biography to be called, A Child is Born”.[562] “Ireland was created by the Almighty to entertain the world, and Irishmen to lighten our darkness,” announced J. L. Hodson, who visited O’Casey at this time, alighting from a bus in Chalfont St Giles to find the playwright deeply contented, wearing a “wideawake hat, a brown guernsey to the throat like a fisherman, a Harris tweed suit, and strong boots”. He said O’Casey remarked that “England is lovely beyond his belief, that he likes the quiet, sober people …” Hodson had first met a very different O’Casey smouldering in his room in the North Circular Road: “I found he has kept an Irish and boyish love for being contrary and says a good many things for devilment,” and that he still works “very slowly, writing and re-writing — never pens even a letter without great care”.

  What emerged from Hodson’s vivid piece was how adept O’Casey had become at playing his greatest character, himself, and how Eileen could chime in as the perfect back-up and foil for this character. O’Casey repeated an assertion that he was soon to abandon: that he had finished with Dublin as a subject for plays, adding that he couldn’t be bothered to emend The Silver Tassie, which he admitted had its faults. With a final flourish he told Hodson his ambitions were “that the next may
be a great play — and not to send the boy to Oxford”.[563]

  But notwithstanding the confidence he radiated to outsiders, Chalfont St Giles was an unhappy period. Eileen was emotionally unsettled, still intent on working in London, but troubled by her conscience. In early 1932 she gained a small part in The Immortal Hour, Rutland Boughton’s fey exploration of the Celtic twilight with its winsome theme song, “How beautiful they are, the lordly ones” — O’Casey impishly referred to Barry Jackson, who revived this opera, as a “lordly amateur” (never forgetting he had turned down The Tassie) — and she took herself off to a room in London, commuting at weekends to Chalfont St Giles. By the fourth week of the run she had fallen in love with the conductor, Ernest Irving: she found life in the country lonely, informing Sean that it was all right for him, he always had his thoughts. “My thoughts, Eileen, my thoughts!” he expostulated. “They are in themselves an everspringing fountain of loneliness … my thoughts have made many Rate me, and some have tried even to injure me … They often divide me from the few that I dearly love.”[564]

  Her crisis now precipitated one in him, and he complained that when she had first hurried him down to the country — she had been eager to seize on McElroy’s offer — he had said very little to hinder her, punishing himself with hard work to “fence out” the feeling of dislike of the change of scene. Now she had dashed back to London he still hadn’t said anything. But didn’t they now need a complete and fundamental change?

  Both were confused and did not know what to do. Perhaps the desperate passion Eileen had conceived for Irving was a symptom of the insecurity of life with O’Casey: there was emotional security, yes, but compared with what she was used to, practical poverty and social dullness. On most evenings she supped with the conductor. At weekends she discussed the affair with Sean, who listened patiently, and responded, in quiet tones, “Eileen, dear, I don’t think this man would be any good to you. It doesn’t sound as though he has any steady money.”[565]

  O’Casey was sure she would forget the man, and his prediction soon proved true. A second time, by steadiness of love, he had overcome a threat. By March he and Eileen were sleeping together again, and he rejoiced once more in her “dear and lovely” body, with its white breasts and rosy nipples, but added ruefully that such a special treat “doesn’t happen very often”. He was wise enough to perceive that she needed rest more than “caresses”.[566]

  Guilt over money and over a sense that he was squashing her independence and curtailing her freedom weighed heavily on him, however — while she admitted that he, at fifty-two, looked much older than she, and a trifle grim sometimes. These factors may have made him more magnanimous in action than he felt inside.

  *

  Some unconscious resentment may have been expressed in Within the Gates. The Young Woman at the centre of the story turns to the elderly Atheist, whom she calls ‘dad’, and begs him to comfort her: “You crept into a father’s place when you took me away from the nuns who were moulding my life round the sin of my mother … Save me, Dad, oh, save me!” The character, although not outwardly based on Eileen, expresses continual fear and insecurity, not knowing who her real father was, forced to earn her living as a streetwalker (meaning, perhaps, the theatre?), constant prey to the advances of men. She voices sexual disgust:

  The other night I had a man with me, an’ when I was half stripped it came on me as he was coming over to paw me. In a mist I saw the fright in his eyes, saw him huddling his clothes on an’ hurrying away … How often have I told you that the swine of a manager brings good-looking girls, one at a time, to a silent storeroom to sort chemises, and then sends his slimy paw flickering around under their skirts …[567]

  Although a mood of hope dominates by the end, as the forces of poetic idealism overcome those of everyday reality.

  Everyday reality encroached with true O’Caseyan vigour on the real life of the playwright: with that wonderful sense of paradox which his whole life, sometimes consciously but mostly unconsciously, embraced, we find him writing one day to his neighbour Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister, at Chequers, inviting him over so that an Irishman and a Scotsman could sit down and have a quiet chat together; the next day to the Inland Revenue trying to stave off their claim on him for £236, with the cri de cœur that he had only twenty pounds in the world. He offered the inspector “Five pounds to keep the wolf from the door, leaving myself with Fifteen to keep myself, wife and kid, and help to promulgate the Gospel in foreign parts”.[568] He added best wishes for the Exchequer’s scheme to convert a five per cent war loan into a three and a half per cent loan — as if this would help to mollify the local taxman. Ramsay MacDonald wrote back an affectionate letter, promising to call, but never did.

  O’Casey had earned almost nothing in the previous tax year; so the £236 owed was on the sale of film rights in Juno to British International Pictures. Still, in that period of low taxation, £236 was a great deal of money, representing income in excess of £1,000, or nearly ten times the average annual wage of a British industrial worker. (O’Casey later said that one year he paid more than £1,000 in tax.) Short of money, he still refused to write articles, and turned down Shaw’s invitation later in 1932 to join the new Irish Academy of Letters, thus ranging himself alongside George Moore and James Joyce. Eileen, as always, respected his integrity: she could be unfaithful but she never opposed his will. Loyalty to his spirit and principles carried more weight than physical fidelity.

  Disintegration of two kinds was at work in the pair of one-act plays O’Casey wrote in Chalfont St Giles. The first, The End of the Beginning, has a vain and obstinate Paycock type, Darry Berrill, switching roles with his wife Lizzie, and launching into the domestic chores with his “buttie” Barry Derrill, who is so short-sighted that they soon turn the household into a “state of chassis”: a genuine escape from the domestic round that showed, albeit farcically, that O’Casey had not lost contact with the basic impulses of his dramatic talent. In the second play, A Pound on Demand, with another feckless pair, Sammy and Jerry, the disintegration is of the more familiar, intoxicated kind, as they go through farcical motions of withdrawing one pound from a suburban post office.

  If the reversal of roles with Eileen was what gave spontaneous life to the first play, what perhaps makes A Pound on Demand so light and hilarious was its basis in the serious financial problems besetting the O’Casey household, especially income tax. Good comedy is deadly serious: “That’s the last penny of our money the Government’ll ever get from us!” shouts Jerry at the end.[569] Instinctive comic energy had been kindled once more in O’Casey’s writing — one outcome of the move to the country, possibly, as well as a new “victory in defeat” over life. Samuel Beckett, in his review of the sketches on their publication the following year in Windfalls, applauded the “triumph of the principle of knockabout in situation, in all its elements, and in all its planes, from the furniture to the higher centres”.[570] Knockabout was the energy of O’Casey’s theatre, for he “discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities and activates it to their explosion”. If Juno was, “as seems likely”, his best play so far, it was because it communicated most fully “mind and world come asunder in irreparable dissociation”.

  Lady Gregory would no doubt have also loved the unforced hilarity, the absence of rhetoric and the delight in simple character of these two short plays. She was not to see them for, on 22 May 1932, she died at Coole from cancer of the breast:[571] “she an aristocrat and I a proletarian communist … I loved her and I think she was fond of me — why God only knows,” O’Casey said, as an atheist oblivious to his invocation of the Almighty.

  Her last visit to London had been in April 1931; she wrote beforehand to inform O’Casey of this and again expressed a hope that she might make the acquaintance of his wife and son. O’Casey did not take up the suggestion. In her last letter to him she described how she had been crippled by a rheumatic attack, but she sounded cheerful, still
showing her motherly possessiveness of Yeats, who had been with her most of the summer, and hopeful that O’Casey would one day bring Eileen to Coole. She died feeling she had so much still to give to O’Casey.

  Her death was followed by a further reminder — or so Eileen and O’Casey felt — of the financial harm the Abbey’s refusal of The Silver Tassie had inflicted on them. The “careless and incompetent” Curtis Brown agency, handling O’Casey’s rights abroad, failed to let them know of more than £350 which Samuel French of New York had collected on his behalf, as fees for amateur productions (the agents did not know about it themselves). O’Casey was then offered £300 by Samuel French in London for a half-share in the amateur rights during the term of copyright, i.e. throughout his own lifetime and for fifty years after his death. An “absurdly bad bargain”, Shaw called it; “My advice is to let wife and child perish, and lay bricks for your last crust, sooner than part with an iota of your rights.”[572] O’Casey, in spite of Shaw’s sensible warning, which included the offer of a £100 loan, accepted French’s money; the ignominy of it was increased by his having the chore of supplying, from memory, details of the Dublin productions for amateur prompt copies — work which kept him from finishing Within the Gates. Small payments, such as nineteen dollars for an article to the American Spectator (“Laurel Leaves and Silver Trumpets”), afforded some respite, but O’Casey always found the spiritual cost of journalism high. Yet he sent back fifteen guineas to Time and Tide for a short story, “I Wanna Woman”, which the magazine had accepted for publication but-which its printers refused to set up on account of its immoral subject — it contained the old favourite, an encounter with a prostitute.