Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  He is very emotional, and your attack, perhaps, made him lonely. Since we quarrelled with him years ago he has refused to speak to anybody belonging to the Abbey Theatre. Only two years ago he refused an invitation to lunch because he heard I was to be there. Though your defence of propaganda has had this admirable result do not let it come too much into your life. I have lived in the midst of it, I have been always a propagandist though I have kept it out of my poems and it will embitter your soul with hatred as it has mine.[614]

  His comment showed perhaps how by always speaking his mind O’Casey avoided the same polluting bitterness. — “You are doubly a woman”, Yeats continued to Mannin — and his remarks may have been as relevant to O’Casey’s creative process as to his own — “first because of yourself and secondly because of the muses, whereas I am but once a woman. Bitterness is more fatal to us than it is to lawyers and journalists who have nothing to do with the feminine muses.”

  Yeats thus displayed his need to make amends; the practical outcome of this was that in May 1935, having been in London for six weeks, and having for the second time recovered from an attack of congestion of the lungs, he invited O’Casey to dine alone with him in his Lancaster Gate flat. O’Casey’s later account of the occasion begins with an awful travesty: Mrs Yeats watching over her famous husband, “pushing death away” from him, as she set the dinner on the table for the two men to eat alone. (Yeats had stated quite baldly in his letter of invitation that his wife wasn’t at present staying at Lancaster Gate — there wasn’t room for her.)

  Yet — still — the whole scene as depicted by O’Casey is imbued with sympathy and love of the younger man for the pain-racked poet, culminating in his longing to lay a warm and sympathetic hand on his heaving shoulders: “to say silently so that Yeats could hear, God knows, if power were mine, you would be for ever young; no cough would ever come to warn you that the body withers.”

  It was a symbolic enactment of reconciliation, then, between O’Casey and his spiritual father Yeats, with its sonorous overtones of the son being forgiven by the father for his prodigality of beliefs and his headstrong temperament. It also fulfilled a need in O’Casey to believe again in Yeats, to believe in that side of himself Yeats had so potently activated in him as a young man: the integrity of the poet, which remained, O’Casey found, beneath the mask, under the “cabbalistic cloak”. He might be vain and childlike, fearful of humiliation, an actor “posing about in trismegistic mask on a painted stage”, but Yeats was a true rebel, a “truer rebel than truest politician; and eager, like the upsprung husband of Malfi’s duchess, to fashion the world right”.[615] No braver man was there “among the men of Éireann than W. B. Yeats”. In Lancaster Gate, O’Casey effected also some shadowy form of rapprochement with Lady Gregory, whose spirit he perceived to be always with Yeats.

  But O’Casey, reconstructing their last talk somewhat along the lines of Landor’s Conversations, still had to have the final word. He showed Yeats challenging him about his communism: what is it, the poet asked: “What is its divinity?”[616]

  *

  Harold Macmillan, grandson of the founder of the publishing firm, had taken over from his brother Daniel as O’Casey’s publisher in late 1933, during the negotiations over the publication of Within the Gates. He was a first-rate publisher, sensitive towards authors, with a great grasp of detail and an indifference to profit which made him warmly liked. “Publishers exist to satisfy their authors”, was his motto. He had handled, at various times, the work of Yeats, Kipling, Hugh Walpole, Oliver Gogarty, James Stephens and Charles Morgan. Of Yeats he said, “He used to come in unannounced to my room in St Martin’s Street: I can recall his splendid figure, his tie flowing through a fine ring, his somewhat dramatised appearance of the poet and dreamer. But he was a practical man and by no means despised the mundane problems of publishing.”[617] Unlike Yeats, Macmillan had read Dostoevsky at an early age.

  Perhaps the seeming unworldliness of Macmillans as a firm appealed to the Irish literary imagination. They had turned down Shaw’s early novels, and so did not publish him later, but none of the other Irish authors they published ever left them. H. G. Wells, by contrast, found them unadventurous, out of touch with the present day and not prepared to advertise (they sold 180 copies of Kipps in one year, but when Wells transferred the book to Nelsons, 43,000 copies of a cheaper edition were sold in a few months). Most of Macmillans’ Irish writers belonged to the Protestant Ascendancy, and the Macmillan family — in particular Harold, who was High Church and connected with the aristocracy through marriage and political ambition — consoled themselves with literary connections for what their list failed to realise in hard cash.

  Harold Macmillan particularly liked Irish writers. They amused him: of Gogarty, for instance, like him a member of the Beefsteak Club, he said, “rather lightweight. You’d ask him about another friend, someone it would be a privilege to know, and he’d say ‘Oh yes, I know old so-and-so’. ‘When did you last see him,’ you’d then ask. ‘Not for some time, perhaps a year ago, or was it five — it’s a kind of absentee friendship.’ That’s the kind of Irishman he was.”[618]

  But there were similarities in background, as well as the strong mutual attraction of dissimilarity in wealth, between him and O’Casey which made the friendship deepen. While O’Casey was an Irish Celt (at least partly, on his father’s side), Macmillan’s family came from the Scottish Celtic Isle of Arran, and had shared with O’Casey the instinct for emigration to England. The reason, according to Harold Macmillan, that O’Casey settled in England “was the reason all Irishmen settle — they’re comfortable here — all that Lake Isle of Innisfree stuff is just imagination”.[619] Both, too, had strong mothers, in Macmillan’s case one of American birth, a widow before she married Macmillan’s father, a sculptor in her own right and an amateur singer. Like O’Casey’s mother, she was loving, strongly protective, a tower of strength and a pillar to the developing youth.

  Although, of course, their circumstances were poles apart, the wounds Macmillan received in the Great War as an officer in France, his solitary convalescence, his natural shyness and intellectual reserve, gave him an awareness of social problems unusual in a man of his class: as his three early political books and his later The Middle Way showed, he was a Tory very much on the left of his party. As O’Casey told Nathan: “Harold Macmillan is one of the young Conservatives [he was then forty-one] — full of resolution to bring about a better state of things.”[620] “The dynamic of social change”, Macmillan himself warned, “resides in our discontent with things as they are. If that discontent is shared by the comfortable as well as the uncomfortable then these changes can be accomplished by a process of peaceful evolution through which we shall continue to preserve the heritage of our liberty.”[621] Discontent was, of course, the essence of O’Casey’s spirit.

  O’Casey was fourteen years older than Macmillan, who remembered him as a “fine character, who wore a polo neck sweater at all times of the day and night. He was very popular but he would never change — even for dinner.” (Unlike New York maids, the British aristocracy found such solecisms amusing.) “He was often with Lady Londonderry. He was a great favourite of hers, either at Londonderry House or the Berkeley, a big hotel where they used to entertain. Outwardly he was rather a severe man, but he wasn’t like other writers, not conceited: he had a very modest [sic] view of himself. He was a very simple man.”

  Macmillan always felt comfortable with him and found him a much more attractive character than Shaw, whom he didn’t like, and thought a great show-off. For him, O’Casey had “something of the greatness of Hardy, something of the strength of Hardy, which is to say that while both of them wrote a lot — some of it not very good — what they wrote came from a deep sincerity. That’s why they live, that’s why Hardy lives. O’Casey talked with sincerity, too, I would call him a saintly kind of man. In spite of the characters he created he was a sensible man au fond.”[622]

  The older, fa
mous author, and the younger, rising publisher and politician, who represented, as a radical Tory, the stricken North-East constituency of Stockton, shared an idealism, although Macmillan differed with O’Casey over his belief that the outcome would be communism. Macmillan told O’Casey on the telephone that he thought Within the Gates was the finest thing he had written. O’Casey sent on to him Nathan’s praise of the play. In 1934, when Macmillan published Reconstruction: A Plea for a National Policy, O’Casey wrote to Ramsay MacDonald, giving his younger MP friend a glowing report, combining this with an invitation to see Within the Gates. MacDonald replied: “My dear Sean … I have almost had to forget that there is such a thing as a theatre in existence …”[623] But he had read Macmillan’s book, and with masterly condescension declared that he found in it “many echoes of what I myself have been saying and writing for years”. He rather wrote off Macmillan as an ineffectual dreamer, pointing out the wide gap that existed between an idea and the working out of it in detail: this was where all the difficult problems were to be located, “as I am sure you know when you first get hold of an idea for a play and then sit down and work it out in its stage situations”.

  By the end of 1933 O’Casey and Macmillan had formed a close and friendly relationship, so that O’Casey could even secure his reading matter at discount prices through “Mr Harold”, at one point ordering George Russell’s The Avatars and Lennox Robinson’s Is Life Worth Living — pabulum for his literary hatred. O’Casey heard Macmillan give a radio talk on the trades unions and wrote approvingly, only cavilling at the name of Tolpuddle for the famous martyrs: how could such a name “juggle inspiration” into the hearts of the workers? Anyway, did they need to go back so far, when they had the much better example of a battle for collective bargaining in Ireland in 1913? — the strike and lock-out in which he himself had been involved. It was in this letter to Macmillan, of 28 June 1934, that he made his first mention of the subject of The Star Turns Red: it was indeed a paradox that the seed of O’Casey’s most committedly communist play should emerge from his contact with a future Tory Prime Minister.

  But political idealism was the heroin of the 1930s: it established a hold on the young of rich and privileged families even more dangerous than on those predisposed towards addiction of another kind. Intellectuals under the spell of G. E. Moore found it the very best kind of spiritual painkiller, destroying as it did all thoughts of God. Moore’s Principia Ethica attacked religious and patriotic absolutes, substituting the pleasure principle based on human relationships, and refined the political aspect of idealism until it became a delicious flavour attendant upon what Lytton Strachey called “the best feelings”, namely those that were “sodomitical”.[624] “It had become evident that the structure of Capitalist society in its old form had broken down,” wrote Macmillan; “… the whole system had to be reassessed. Perhaps it could not survive at all … Something like a revolutionary situation had developed, not only at home but overseas.” The Marxist writer, John Strachey, had maintained in The Menace of Fascism, published at the end of 1932, that “there is no force on earth which can long prevent the workers of the world from building a new and stable civilization for themselves on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production”.[625] With the prevalence of a general disillusionment, and not only with the old class and colonial structure, there was little to be surprised at in the build-up of a climate of national treachery, if not treason, which Rebecca West and Andrew Boyle were later to describe. Malcolm Muggeridge, who believed that the Russian Revolution quite surpassed in importance the Crucifixion of Christ, when he went to Moscow in 1932 as the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent found particular delight, on the eve of departure, in burning his marriage licence, along with his “ridiculous BA hood and certificate”.[626] O’Casey believed exactly as did Muggeridge, Strachey — and Shaw: that the old bourgeois order and certainties had broken down.

  Still, a great gulf separated those who had been to Russia from those who had not. Macmillan, who believed in the abolition of privilege in education, although himself a product of Summerfields, Eton and Balliol (he had left Eton under circumstances unconvincingly explained as ill-health and for a long period was tutored privately), visited Russia late in 1932, at a time when Stalin was tightening his grip on the country. He met Maxim Litvinoff, the then Foreign Minister; he travelled in the country, and was impressed by much that he saw; but his response displayed that ambiguity of which he became increasingly the master, afterwards declaring that when he left Russia he was “stepping back from a kind of nightmare world into the world of reality”.[627] Muggeridge was less equivocal: he returned to London in 1933, disillusioned by the “harshness and incompetence of the regime”, by the “cutting or softening” of the dispatches he sent to the Guardian, and by “the succession of western luminaries who came to Moscow to be gulled”. Shaw, however, was a most steadfast believer in Stalin, and nothing could shake his faith: he visited Russia in 1931 and met his hero. He had declared himself already a “born Communist and Iconoclast”,[628] himself adopting as rigid a position as those he spent a lifetime in mocking.

  O’Casey’s communism, like Shaw’s, was impervious to reality. Like Shaw he was at ease in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy; unlike Shaw he was, although highly selective, never above accepting loans and gifts (the herringbone tweed suit from Lady Astor, for example). When Karl Marx was told by a lady in Karlsbad, where he had gone to take the waters, that she could not imagine him in a classless society because of his aristocratic “preferences and habits”, Marx replied: “I cannot either. Those times will come, but we must be gone by then.” Lady Astor told O’Casey roughly the same thing: “I would like to take you to Russia — I don’t know anybody who would be less fitted to live under an autocracy than you, unless it is myself!”[629]

  *

  O’Casey was forever aware of being older than Eileen and unable to provide the style of life to which she had been accustomed before their marriage. He had even once heard Shaw at a party asking the Irish High Commissioner, John Dulanty, how it was “lovely Eileen Carey had come to marry such an ugly fellow as Sean”.[630] He stood at these parties often, like Harry Heegan in The Silver Tassie, watching Eileen talking excitedly with a young male guest, but unlike Heegan, with no bitterness in his heart.

  When O’Casey travelled to America in 1934 Eileen began seeing Harold Macmillan on her own. In an advanced stage of pregnancy, she was taken out to lunch by the tall, reserved publisher and MP who had a keen eye for a good-looking woman. O’Casey applauded. He was glad she was seeing “Mr Harold” as he always addressed him, and when she reported a week later how much she liked Macmillan, he echoed her: “He is, as you say, a fine fellow, indeed.”[631] Eileen and Macmillan began then a close friendship which was to last more than fifty years. Both of them loved and respected O’Casey, and Eileen always put Sean and her children first. As Macmillan, who spoke about her with great depth of feeling, said, “O’Casey lived very much in himself, didn’t need people, he had very poor eyesight, and then he had Eileen. She was his kind of ambassador … he was a kind of medieval saint.”[632]

  Eileen, not wanting to hurt O’Casey, by now kept quiet about relationships she pursued outside their marriage. She would, she admitted, not have told him about her renewed affair with Ephraim, but for the resulting pregnancy. By remaining silent now she was merely saving both of them pain and heartache.

  O’Casey received more gratification from his communism than from a straying eye; also from his continuing controversies with critics and the editors of journals. The massively prolonged row over Love on the Dole yielded him the distinction of being called an “Irish guttersnipe” by Kingsley Martin in Time and Tide. “Capitalism”, he proclaimed in a later issue of the same journal, “is the regimentation of life towards death, but Communism is the regimentation of life towards life.” He praised a book, W. H. Chamberlain’s The Russian Revolution, published by Macmillan, in which one would find, h
e said, that “soldiers of rotten cardboard under the Czar became soldiers of steel under Communism”, that “out of ruin, famine, bewildering disorder, and pitiful impotence, Communism has created one of the strongest, if not the greatest nation in the world.”[633] To Harold Macmillan himself he wrote, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, and with his typical ambiguity — a trait both men shared and enjoyed in one another — “I am praying to God that the Spanish Communists may win. I wish I could be with them. However, if I haven’t manned a tank, or fired a rifle for the cause of Communism, I have, at least, in my day, fired stones at the police.”[634]

  Macmillan did not take O’Casey’s communism too seriously: he said, “He wasn’t much of a thinker and he didn’t have an idea about what life was like in the Soviet Union, but then nor were the saints great thinkers. He thought that everyone ought to be equal out of kindness.”

  By now, with the death of his father, Macmillan had inherited the family house, Birch Grove, Chelwood Gate, in Sussex: the O’Caseys were invited to stay for weekends. Macmillan, prompted by Eileen, became positive on O’Casey’s behalf. He issued a collection of Five Irish Plays (the Dublin trilogy plus End of the Beginning and A Pound on Demand), which sold well. Noting that O’Casey did not talk a great deal, he listened to him reading after dinner “bits of his autobiography”, proud, later, that it was he who had first encouraged him to write it.[635] He suggested that a two shillings and sixpenny edition of The Plough and the Stars should be issued when the Hollywood film — every bit as bad as, if not worse than, Hitchcock’s Juno — directed by John Ford for RKO was ready to be screened. But he balked somewhat at publishing the volume O’Casey handed him in August of 1936: a collection of his various articles and letters, published and rejected, on the English theatre and its critics — O’Casey’s revenge on the editors who had turned down his long, vituperative articles or replies to criticism.