Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  We understand the English far better than they understand us. There is no use mentioning “Nazi tyranny” to an Irishman. English Government in Ireland, setting aside the Black and Tans, has often been soft-brained, but never soft-handed.

  In March 1940 Peter Newmark, O’Casey’s left-wing correspondent at Trinity College, Cambridge, one of whose tutors was Anthony Blunt, another F. R. Leavis, helped to set up a London production of The Star Turns Red at the communist-inspired Unity Theatre. The management at first refused the play on the grounds that it was too critical of trade union leaders, but Newmark persuaded them it was not. Tess Mayor, another left-wing student who later married Lord Rothschild, played Julia. James Agate, intimidated or overgenerous, called the play a “masterpiece”: “I find the piece to be a magnum opus of compassion and a revolutionary work,” he wrote in the Sunday Times. “I see in it a flame of propaganda tempered to the condition of dramatic art, as an Elizabethan understood that art.”[659] Other critics were less kind, reflecting more faithfully perhaps the degree to which the allegorical clash between communism and fascism had grown out of touch with the present-day reality. Even the great American “proletarian critic” and “revolutionary red” Nathan turned on O’Casey: “Incontrovertibly poor … the feeblest play O’Casey has written. Communism, one fears, has now adversely affected Sean O’Casey as a dramatic artist.”[660]

  Shaw, however, remained true to his devotee — or was at least still master of the side-stepping compliment. “I should have gone,” he wrote O’Casey on a card, “to the Red Star, black-out or no black-out, if I hadn’t read it. It shewed up the illiteracy of the critics who didn’t know that like a good Protestant you had brought the language of the Authorized Version back to life. Splendid.”[661] Just what did that mean? Shaw presumably had in mind language like Red Jim’s:

  Prating priest, peradventure my comrades are deaf and did not hear you. And, outside, there are many thousands as deaf as these. We have turned aside from you. The life we have lived is coming to an end: life rotten in the ear that it could not hear; life rotten in the eye that it could not see … Now we stand up, we turn, and go our own way, the bent back changing to the massed majesty of the Clenched Fist![662]

  And this was hardly a tribute to Larkin, all his life a faithful practising Catholic.

  Fortunately, The Star Turns Red marked the end of O’Casey’s attempt to infuse a positive message into the experimental expressionism born of post-First-World-War nihilism. In it, as in Within the Gates, he showed bravery in daring to be experimental, but as with the earlier play, the experiment turned out to be primarily with his own talent. He had no gift for successful experiment, while the poetical or emotional rhetoric with which he flooded both these plays was as dead as its most successful nineteenth-century practitioners, and appears simply over-sincere, quaint, even artful. Experiment had become for him by 1940 a narrowing-down mode of expression; only in the autobiography he was writing did the urban prose dialogue — parodic, earthy, more knowing and infinitely more suggestive, with its heightened realism — still appear, if only in snatches. Within the Gates did, however, have one saving grace which explains why so many writers of the day — Nathan and Charles Morgan, in particular; but also T. E. Lawrence and Eugene O’Neill — liked it. O’Casey, with his instinct for disorder and chaos, had taken the deliberate, austere, harsh and generalised methods of expressionism and reversed them. The dark theatrical machinery of Toller’s despair and nihilism (and O’Casey’s own in The Silver Tassie) had been transformed into an epiphany of love: with beautiful irony, it became a celebration of life.

  No such thing happened in The Star Turns Red: it concerned itself purely with changing the world. No play more completely ignored Lady Gregory’s sound advice to concentrate on character. Like many writers of the time who scoffed at the fate of the individual, O’Casey could not see the dangers of social collectivism, nor that his zeal to reform the world reflected an indifference, or callousness, towards facing himself — possibly even an escape from it. Scrapping with others relieved loneliness, belief in communism conquered an even greater fear, that of coming to grips with what Ibsen once called the devils that infest the head and heart: to be “objective”, in communist jargon, was to put as much distance as possible between yourself and your real problem. O’Casey had, alas, fallen into a lamentable self-deceit.

  The harsh and hollow voice amplified in the inner coldness and emptiness of The Star Turns Red was that of the defeated and now aged Shaw who had turned to the brutal Stalin and his methods to bring about change in an England that would not listen. For did not he and O’Casey have in common the lack of a strong and helpful father whose influence could fruitfully have interacted with their own developing personalities? Had not both, in turn, sought father-figures elsewhere, Shaw in his imagination and in himself (creating both himself and a host of wonderful fatherly seers and wits), O’Casey in a succession of existing heroes? Had not both, stopping short of final disillusionment, now turned to a God the Father whose manifestations of crude power they worshipped as gullibly and superstitiously as the most fundamental and slavish of Christians?

  Stalin was their answer. The true Protestantism both men believed they embodied — ever rebellious, ever protesting — had still to be satisfied in its need for unquestioning zeal and uncritical faith. Both men kept a photograph of Uncle Joe on the mantelpiece of his inner sanctum — like devout Irish peasants with their postcards of the Virgin Mary.

  Neither man was quite capable of honesty in facing himself — facing the gap, that is, between his ideals and the reality of life. Jonathan Swift, as another Irish Protestant, had been among the first to try to do that, and he could not bridge the gap between his ideal, sanitized notion of the rational being (the Houyhnhnms) and the reality of man. His high Tory politics were somewhat different from O’Casey’s and Shaw’s, and where they found Stalin he found madness. None of the trio, even the Anglican Dean it seemed, could truly find the God his soul hungered for, unblocked or uncontaminated by the social and personal problems life heaped on him.

  Fortunately for O’Casey, he had a greater hold on life than Shaw and a stronger hold on his sanity than Swift. Life caught him up in its humanising process, to which he always gave his first response. He describes a child as the “greatest, the loveliest, and the most delicate equipment we have for the development of life’s future”,[663] and Eileen bore him another, a daughter they named Shivaun. He, Eileen, and their two boys had fled London a second time, settling in the small Devon town of Totnes. Shaw, whose suggestion that they send their two boys to the private, fee-paying school of Dartington Hall, outside the town, had generated the move, gave them £50 for Shivaun, telling Eileen that it was important her boys have a sister: “Sisterless men are always afraid of women”.[664]

  Harold Macmillan, who had by then faithfully published The Star Turns Red, wrote to Eileen in 1940:

  I was so glad to get your letter and its very exciting news. I do congratulate you. If your daughter is born into a temporarily unhappy time, I am confident that she will grow up into a better age, which I believe will succeed these follies and horrors which now seem so terrible.[665]

  He and Dorothy had, he told Eileen, handed over Birch Grove to the infant children; their son Maurice had joined the Field Artillery and was stationed in Brighton: “quite nice for us, for he can get home alternate Sundays”. He himself was longing to get back into the Grenadier Guards.

  Macmillan later commented that although O’Casey “claimed to be a Communist and, I think, an atheist, his was a truly Christian nature: one of the kindest and most genuine men I have known”.[666] It was the same transference of meaning as O’Casey, in his letter of 1938, had used to claim Macmillan as being “in the Revolution”.

  17 — A Detrimental Temper

  “Stalin is becoming a household name in Totnes,” O’Casey remarked cheerfully in 1941.[667] By now the Russians had changed sides. “Stalin is right,” he told hi
s renewed and faithful correspondent Fallon, in a different context. To Time and Tide he had written, “In Russia it is the Russians who execute Russians, and (as Shaw said in another case) who has a better right to cut a Russian’s throat than another Russian?”[668]

  In moving to the small South Devon town of Totnes, O’Casey shed complexity and discomfort: he had hated the Battersea flat with its large rooms and the weary climb up the stairs to the third floor. He often complained of his loneliness there to Eileen; he could not bear roaming around in the silences of Eileen’s room and of the nursery when she took the children away. In Totnes, they rented a detached Victorian house from a humourless dentist who would not accept Charlotte Shaw as a financial guarantor — only GBS was good enough for him. Totnes allowed the ageing playwright full scope for his lovable and cantankerous image to grow without threat of bombs, theatres, or other writers.

  But how would the town itself have fared under Stalin in the 1930s? There could not have been a more Tory borough, with its hilltop castle ruins, dating from pre-Norman times and still under the ownership of the Duke of Somerset, and its sturdy Devon “kulaks” — “folk in the fine fair English sense of the word”, as O’Casey wrote.[669] With a brand-new police station over the road, the Conservative Club only a few hundred yards away, O’Casey found peace and tranquillity here. Totnes, with its freshwater moorings on the River Dart, where foreign vessels once added an exotic flavour, had for centuries maintained its quality as a gentle and lovely town, “like a grey-haired lady, with a young face, sitting calm, hands in lap, unmindful of time”.[670] Totnes even numbered a delightful Dublin priest among its dwellers, a Father Ned Russell after whom O’Casey named a later play, The Drums of Father Ned. He became a valued friend.

  The move to “Tingrith”, a fine white stuccoed and spacious villa, endowed with a delightful conservatory, walled garden and sizeable outbuildings, was the beginning of a truer exile than that from Ireland. For the remaining twenty-five years of his life, O’Casey left Devon scarcely half a dozen times. With The Star Turns Red he set a precedent of not attending a production of a new play of his, which he stuck to, saving much heartache. In his last volume of autobiography he remarked bitterly that all his plays had been betrayed by bad productions — except for those by Fagan’s Irish Players, and The Silver Tassie.[671]

  Harold Macmillan, before joining Churchill’s Government as Secretary to the Ministry of Supply and before leaving to become resident Minister in North Africa, had successfully launched O’Casey on a new course of writing which absorbed him from the late 1930s until the early ’50s, namely his six volumes of autobiography. It was a huge literary undertaking, running in the end to over half a million words, but it did not cost O’Casey the effort and soul-searching he put into his plays; neither did it achieve their concentration. In strong contrast, even the least successful of his plays was highly wrought, chipped into shapes which may have shown misapplied judgment but not niggardliness of effort. Nothing he wrote for the theatre was careless.

  Macmillan was justly proud of the first volume of autobiography, for not only was it, for all its faults, a striking memoir, but it had other and more wide-reaching effects on O’Casey’s work: it led him out of the wilderness of experiment and political commitment in which he had been lost for most of the ’30s. The mood and feeling of I Knock at the Door, which Macmillans published in early 1939, was centred on O’Casey’s mother; it is her figure and character which give the book its thrust, its shape, and its quality of celebration at his overcoming the rigours of his early life. He succeeds in bringing Susan Casey to life again, not this time through the defiant and vivid mother images of the Dublin plays, but more directly, and at the same time more expansively, through his memories of her. Susan Casey apart, the volume contains powerful description, and some moving intimate revelations, such as those concerning his eyes. Its publication was an achievement: I Knock at the Door was sold to a book club, serialised in a paper, reprinted several times, while O’Casey experienced a new lease of fame.

  Macmillan never had a closer relationship with an author than he had with O’Casey, and that relationship was at its closest when he wrote I Knock at the Door. O’Casey sent him the first batch of sketches in 1938 and the two men met and discussed them, Macmillan encouraging O’Casey to add further material until the book found its true length. Sometimes, weekending at Birch Grove, O’Casey would read the work in progress to his hosts.

  An incident at breakfast one of these weekends provided an insight into the family life of his publisher and the communication he had with his own children. Sean, Eileen and Maurice were alone in the dining room. Maurice, then in his teens, was dressed very smartly for riding. O’Casey, like all Dubliners whatever their class, loved horses, and he said, “You must be enjoying going out — what a delightful thing to be doing.”

  “Oh no,” Maurice told him, “I hate it. I can’t stand it.”[672] O’Casey then enquired why on earth he did it. “I have to,” Maurice told him. “It’s expected of me: not worth making the fuss not to.” “Well, why not say it to your father that you don’t like it?” “Oh no, I couldn’t do that.” “Well, I’ll tell him if you like,” said O’Casey: Maurice said, “Oh no, no, let’s leave the whole thing alone.” O’Casey could not understand the lack of communication between father and son.

  At one point in the discussions about I Knock at the Door Macmillan expressed anxiety over O’Casey’s intention to do away with inverted commas for direct speech: at another he worried about O’Casey’s frugal use of commas. Finally O’Casey allayed his fears by supplying more commas, and instead of quotation marks using dashes, as in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. Macmillan discussed illustrations with O’Casey, but they decided to have none. To ensure that the typography was satisfactory Macmillan sent four specimen pages for him and Eileen to choose from. O’Casey responded that he knew more about politics than about specimen pages.

  I Knock at the Door covered the first twelve years of Sean’s life — we have this on O’Casey’s word to “Mr Harold”, as he still deferentially addressed his publisher. But was it accurate autobiography? Hardly. Because O’Casey believed in “objectivity”, not “truth” or “fact” in the generally accepted sense of those words, he presented his whole life faithfully in accordance with his communist ideals. In other words, it was the “gospel” of young Sean Casside’s life as told in accordance with the faith and the attitudes he wished to instil in his reader. Others felt its truth differently, that it was “true” because O’Casey projected in it his own deep feelings about the characters he knew and loved: here the truth was emotional. One small by-product of writing this first volume was that he started sending his sole remaining brother, Mick, a quid at Christmas time to buy tobacco.

  After some experiments O’Casey had eschewed writing in the first person, and called his hero “Johnny”, then “Sean Casside” or “Cassidy”. Had he worked more at the first-person technique, he might have ended by removing many of the rhetorical flights of the omniscient narrator — as well as the latter’s often unnecessary and over-lengthy comments. It would have been nearer to the rigour of writing for the theatre, while he would have found it difficult — and therefore beneficial — to incorporate material outside the conscious grasp of the “I” figure: he could only have used what he had directly experienced.

  Yet he wanted the chance to make an appeal on behalf of other characters when they spoke up, he wanted to show their independence. In fact the writing is often at its best when, in dialogue, he shows another character wrong-footing the two-dimensional Sean Casside. In the absence of anything other than the stereotyped reflections of Casside — he, like O’Casey himself, has a wholly extrovert and non-self-questioning personality — this is the main form of complexity or psychological resonance I Knock at the Door possesses by virtue of its third person narrator. Otherwise, while being an uncompromising tract against authority, the book tenderly and movingly proclaims the vi
rtue of motherly protection, and pays off the huge debt O’Casey still owed his mother.

  *

  Dartington Hall, the leading progressive school of its time, and the favourite of such figures as Bertrand Russell and Shaw, was owned by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. Elmhirst was a collector of people and it was not long before he added the O’Caseys to his collection — in particular Eileen, now dubbed by Shaw “one of the beauties of Devon”. The school itself had a good or bad reputation, according to which ideology one embraced. It was co-educational, there were no formal lessons, no corporal punishment, no religious instruction. It encouraged the arts, which meant that, as well as acting and making pots, the children played poker at night, and bathed in the nude in the River Dart. Many of the avant-garde principles on which the school operated were expounded by Russell in his book on education. (“No Russell ever went to school,” commented Macmillan later. “They were always slightly odd. They never met other people.”[673]) William Curry, the headmaster, was described by one pupil, Claire Tomalin, as a hydrocephalic, gnome-like creature in a dirty mackintosh. She remembered his first words to her, on her being accepted as a sixth-form pupil, were, “Promise me one thing. Don’t go to bed with the boys.”