Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  He planted this visionary element in the first act, but gradually, while skilfully employing realistic dialogue, lifted the veil of grubby Dublin away to epiphanise it in Ayamonn’s imagination as the eternal city: “Oh, look! Look there! Th’ sky has thrown a gleaming green mantle over her bare shoulders, bordhered with crimson, an’ with a hood of gentle magenta over her handsome head — look! … Our city’s in th’ grip o’ God!” By the end, when Ayamonn dies, this unreality, while remaining convincing, dominates the play. It is as if, at last, and unconsciously, O’Casey has solved all the problems he set himself in The Silver Tassie. Characters are symbols at the same time as being characters.

  If Red Roses for Me significantly reversed the downward trend of O’Casey’s talent, it is still not without fault, because he had now hardened into a playwright without a theatre.

  Under this window, on a roughly made bench, stand three biscuit-tins. In the first grows a geranium, in the second, musk, and in the third, a fuchsia. The disks of the geranium are large and glowing; the tubular blooms of the golden musk, broad, gay, and rich; and the purple bells of the fuchsia, surrounded by their long, white, waxy sepals, seem to be as big as arum lilies. These crimson, gold, and purple flowers give a regal tint to the poor room.[689]

  As Sean O’Faolain noted of this elaborate stage direction, it was useless to anyone in the theatre: “That is not playwriting. It is a man fondling his material subjectively inside himself, as the literary novelist so often does — and safely can: as a dramatist never can.”[690] He might have added that O’Casey was repeating almost literally a description of his mother’s flowers in the autobiography.

  Each major piece of work O’Casey wrote shook up and sifted his admirers, purging some and promoting others: there were always casualties — to this extent he and Shaw, perhaps, aped the autocracy of their hero Stalin, although more gently. Red Roses for Me was no exception. Its main victim was Gabriel Fallon, O’Casey’s Dublin buttie who — according to O’Casey’s later and very one-sided version (when he fell out with friends he ruthlessly cancelled all affection) — had become increasingly pious over the years. With the enlargement of his family and with a wife, Rose, who resented his free-thinking, Fallon had taken, like a lay monk, or like Chesterton, to kneeling in his bedroom at a prie-dieu before a crucifix.

  The final split between the two old friends was delayed until just after the war. Fallon had first voiced his criticisms of Red Roses for Me when it was given its world première in Dublin, directed by Shelah Richards, at the Olympia Theatre in March 1943. As critic of an “ultra-montane” Catholic weekly, the Standard, and still faithful to the O’Casey of the trilogy, Fallon had written: “My own quarrel with the work lay in its excess of sentimentality and in the inclusion of one particular scene which attempted to brand Dublin’s Catholic poor as ignorant idolators, a scene in which the author is being as false to himself as he was to his characters.”

  O’Casey had ignored or not known of the criticism. Later, this time after a revival of Red Roses for Me at the Gaiety, directed by Ria Mooney, Fallon made his criticism more explicit. His main point was that, being both autobiographical and didactic, it was a play O’Casey “insisted on writing, rather than the play which Sean O’Casey could have written”: Yeats’s old criticism of The Silver Tassie in another form. Fallon went on in rather more detail about the hocus-pocus which O’Casey mocked concerning his “Our Lady of Eblana”: “Faced with it, I find myself forced to recall the kindliness and the understanding of the personality I once knew in order to assure myself that this is not a piece of coldly-calculated bigotry.”[691]

  Fallon defended himself against O’Casey’s expected onslaught by saying that O’Casey had always told him to be frank and truthful. Worried lest he should lose O’Casey’s friendship, he then carefully expanded his criticism in a further article in the Standard:

  In the action of the play the statue [of the Virgin] is removed from its niche in the hallway by the Protestant Mr Brennan Moore … Mr Moore has the statue re-painted and returned to its niche in the hallway. Then suddenly … we are informed by the Protestant Hero of the play, Ayamonn Breydon, that “th’ Blessed Virgin has come back again” … Men and women now appear at the door singing a hymn softly, “staring at the Image shining bright and gorgeous as Brennan made it for them.” After the singing of the hymn … EEADA tells us “She came back; of Her own accord.” DYMPNA declares that “From her window little Ursula looked, and saw Her come; in the moonlight, along the street. She came, stately” … This is followed by the FIRST MAN’S speech: “My eyes caught a glimpse of Her too, glidin’ back to where She came from. Regal and proud She was, an’ wondrous.”[692]

  The nub of Fallon’s criticism was that although O’Casey had dealt far from tenderly with Orange ignorance and bigotry in the persons of the Dowzard and Foster, taking care to provide a carefully dramatised corrective in the dignified Protestant rector, and in Ayamonn and Mrs Breydon, “What corrective,” he asked, “did you provide for the lying and the hypocrisy and the folly of your representatives of working-class Catholics?”

  O’Casey said no more from this time on but cut his friend dead: later he told the editor of his letters about “the poor pious and gutless Gaby … in his sanctimonious glory”: “All my life I’ve been attacked and vilified, but never for want of integrity. And I’ve been called a lot of nasty names, but never a coldly calculated bigot. One thing I am cold and calculated about is bigotry; and perjury, and cowardice.”[693]

  Yet another old Dublin friend, his eye specialist Cummins, wrote to O’Casey in a vein similar to Fallon’s, but escaped the accusation of calumny. Cummins said:

  I confess I do not like the incident of the missing statue and the attendant behaviour of the simple poor Catholics of the house. Is it possible to present fairly the religious aspects of contemporary Ireland? For centuries the Catholics were oppressed by a system that aimed at destroying their self-respect as well as their material prosperity; while, under the system, indeed as an essential part of it, the Protestants, a small minority, were protected and favoured and made the lawful receivers of the looted Catholic property.

  “Et tu Brute,” O’Casey at first wrote back to him, with a long and deeply emotional defence. He saw it happen, he told Cummins, below Drumcondra Bridge, with the statue of Our Lady of the Tolka in white gown and blue mantle, behind the poor cottages on a mud bank flooded in winter.

  I tell you the devotion to that statue was, in my opinion, nearer than next door to worship — and what the hell harm anyhow? She represented to them the colour and loveliness they craved for … their devotion was always a beautiful manifestation to me: they adored something above themselves. So do they in the play, and it is not to be condemned, or deprecated, by a fairly comfortable, safely-placed professional man. It strikes me, dear Joe, that it is you rather than I who are unjust to the simple Catholic poor.

  Cummins, like Fallon a devout Roman Catholic, graciously climbed down: O’Casey had successfully stirred his middle-class guilt. “Forgive me for imputing to you a lack of sympathy with those simple people. I am shocked at having done so. I have never known a man so free from bias, so white-hot in the face of injustice as you.”[694] Yet is the compassion so powerfully expressed in O’Casey’s letter there in the play? Clearly not.

  There were still traces of saving humour around the edges of O’Casey’s anti-Catholicism. Before he fell out with Fallon, he declared, “why in the name o’ God should the Catholics care a damn of what I may say about them?”[695] They were “a bit like”, he went on, “a man going about afraid that a touch of a butterfly’s wing would bring him concussion of the brain”.

  *

  But O’Casey carried his anti-Jesuit railings to gargantuan excess in the strange relationship he formed near the end of the war with a young Irish girl who later refused to be identified except as “Miss Sheila”. Sheila Edwards was the daughter of an Irish major killed on the North-West Frontier in India; li
ving in London, she worked in a factory, but had connections with a well-placed Catholic family and — most important of all, from the angle of O’Casey’s vituperation — the Jesuits of Farm Street. She appealed to him at once — “too wild to be educated”, he later called her — because when he attacked the Vatican in the Daily Worker in an article called “Clericalism Gone Looney” she lashed out at him in what he called “a violently abusive” personal letter, writing that it was “sad to think that the English public should be given such foul trash to read. If people administer poison causing death they are hanged, and when a person like you administers poison that kills the soul of the workers, nothing is said or done. The abuse in your letter shows you are a very low type.” She ended her letter: “I will not call you comrade; I think of you as my brother in Christ Jesus, and will pray for you. The talents God has given you are being abused.” [696]

  O’Casey found the attack not just appealing — with more than a frisson of sexuality, it was highly provocative. The sixty-five-year-old snatched up his battle lance, at first delicately pricked about with it — as usual not answering directly the points his correspondent made, then in a ramble of anecdotal detail and attractive self-defence (such as that he had been an unskilled labourer “for forty years”) tempting Miss Sheila to launch into a second attack. Sure enough she did, with dozens of questions, flattered in spite of her hostility that so famous a man should take her seriously.

  Agreeably combative to both of them, the correspondence expanded and soon, clearly to O’Casey’s pleasure, it diverged from the more arid meadows of communism and Catholicism to richer fields of Mars (or Venus) where they could continue their now friendly joust on the subject of sex and chastity. Words like “vigour”, “virility”, “lusty”, “sex”, “immorality” entered the lists like eager young heroes. In one long letter, well in excess of 5,000 words (surely a record even by O’Casey’s standards), he attacked Sheila’s religious adviser, a Jesuit, who had categorically claimed that it was impossible to be a Catholic and a communist — the perennial favourite. But Sheila confessed that the priest was attempting to get her to take a vow of chastity; what a “dastardly thing to coax, or seduce, a good-looking girl to pledge herself by a vow to life-long chastity”, O’Casey protested, then continuing, “And not only to herself does this mean torture, but it means the same thing to young men attracted towards her in a lovely and very human way. Don’t forget the beautiful story of Romeo and Juliet.”[697]

  He had intended when beginning this correspondence to make use of it in a collection of essays about the Irish called The Green Searchlight. But now it was his turn, on receiving her photograph from Sheila, to grow more personal. “A very lovely young girl,” he called her, but why wasn’t she married? The aura of Jesuit power which surrounded her and the weekends she spent “with big nobs”, as he chuckled to a communist friend, continued for some time to excite his imagination. He sent her a second 5,000-word letter, this time revealing that Stalin had pulled Lady Astor up short, on her visit to Russia, for beating her children. However the second outpouring must have struck even him as excessive, for he then contented himself with short, hasty replies, and the whole love affair by letter cooled rapidly.

  The relationship with Sheila, with its tutorial yet self-interestedly affectionate intentions, and with its touch of spirited wickedness as he irreverently tried to overturn the girl’s faith, had something of a Swiftian animation. It reflected too the physical distance and isolation, and yet mental closeness, Swift had enjoyed with “Vanessa” (Hester Van Homrigh) and then with “Stella” (Esther Johnson). Its end was terrifyingly Swiftian too, when one day, many years later, Miss Sheila set out to visit O’Casey in Totnes. Having written by now what O’Casey referred to as a suitcase full of letters, still apparently in love with this elderly man — or if not in love at least curious about him — yet in no way repenting the vow of chastity and total devotion to God she had finally taken, she arrived in the small Devon town and sought out his house, which was but two minutes’ walk from the station. O’Casey was expecting her. But when he saw her coming up the drive and heard her ring the bell, he would not come to the door. Later, in tears, she telephoned the house, and Eileen had to make some excuse for him.

  In 1954, when he wrote The Bishop’s Bonfire, he based one of its main characters, Foorawn, on Miss Sheila. “She has large blue eyes,” he wrote, “brown hair that shows reddish gleams within it … A thin gold chain encircles her neck, its two ends meeting to hold up a red enamel cross on her breast … The men, whenever they pass her, lift their hats respectfully in tribute to her reputation for piety, and in reverence for the vow of perpetual chastity with which she has burdened herself …”[698] In Act I he wrote an exchange between Foorawn and her boyfriend in which the girl wants to hide away — a reversal, as was often true in O’Casey’s plays, of the real situation.

  Fortunately for him he had no such disillusioning an encounter with another object of his now increasing passion for correspondence. As he edged towards seventy, every nook and crevice of his mind filled up with this correspondence, so that he soon had a cosy Dublin of the head full of the same endless chatter, gossip, chance encounters, vain boastings and endless disputatiousness, mingled with inexhaustible memory, to make up for the absence of the real place. The new correspondent’s name was Ingrid Burke, a nineteen-year-old aspiring actress who wrote him a fan letter in 1948; when he met her two years later, he found her, unlike Miss Sheila, a lot prettier than her letter. This time he warned that good looks were often a handicap because many men were so selfish!

  Ingrid appeared to like Virginia Woolf, provoking a typical O’Casey swipe: “a fine writer, but vague, & unacquainted with life; frightened by it, I’m afraid” — possibly one of his better literary judgments, and the stronger for being short. Stephen Spender, too, came in for some stick: “His own is the ‘skeleton walking in the wilderness of tinsel stars.’ I may be prejudiced, for I have an uncontrollable loathing for Cissies.” “Another of the Cissie philosophers, isn’t he?” he called W. H. Auden. “Afraid of life, as almost all of them are.” He was also forthcoming to Ingrid on the nature of marriage (she came from an unhappy family) in a paradoxically Catholic way:

  I am sorry to hear about your unhappy connection with divorce & the quarrels of your people. The worst of poverty isn’t as evil as that sort of thing. I have seen numerous children made so unhappy by the unselfishness of parents desiring a change for the better which is, as often as not, a change for the worse. Divorce should be made more difficult, as it is in the USSR, where every effort is made to keep couples together for the sake of the children.

  When Ingrid told him she was thinking of becoming a Catholic, with amazing restraint he praised English Catholics, whom he found tolerant and amiable in a “Protestant or pagan, if you like, country”. But he could not, even so, leave the subject without a thrust at “horrible” Francois Mauriac or Graham Greene. And then, of course, Hitler was a Catholic, while Cardinal Griffin, primate of England, was “a trite fellow with a trite mind”.[699]

  The same kind of intimacy developed with Ingrid as had with Sheila. Ingrid had a married man friend (Sheila had revealed no great rivals to the Church for her affections), who propositioned her with notions of free love. Contrary as ever, O’Casey adopted the reactionary position, defending what he had once deemed absurd — marriage — mindful, perhaps, that he and Eileen had been married for twenty-one years. Cold, heartless, and dangerous to his wife, he called the man. It could mean permanent injury: “If she has children already, it will mean she cannot give them the attention they need; &, if her psychological nature be injured, theirs will be hurt too …” He did not at all refrain from being personal.

  Your friend, knowing so much, seems to know nothing at all. “If a woman knows he loves her, she will not mind him having affairs with other women.” And how does she know, how does she get to know he loves her? Will he answer you that? Is a woman ever assured of a man’
s love for her?

  He definitely did not believe in the free love which a number of writers in the USSR had preached long ago, until the people got sick of it and a healthy outlook “banished” it. The land, he claimed once again, where divorce was hardest to come by was Russia — and “where the desire for it was least”. No, the pleasures of free love were illusory, and people who indulged themselves generally did so because, having money, they didn’t know what to do with themselves.

  There are, of course, instances of grand passion … of men loving women belonging (as the saying goes) to other men — Parnell, for instance — but these are rare, & often lovely; but the normal, healthy life is the man, the woman, & the child — three in one, & one in three. The millions live this way, & are useful, generally happy, & often great.

  The man, the woman and the three children: the O’Caseys, too, were generally happy, although there was still a suggestion of the Parnell syndrome in their lives, with Eileen slipping away to London from time to time.

  *

  Harold Macmillan had wanted to re-enlist in the Grenadier Guards at the beginning of the war, but, now in his mid-forties, held a government post instead, as resident Minister in North Africa. In early 1943, at Algiers airport, he escaped a fire in the plane he had boarded, but was badly burned; on recovering consciousness in hospital his first words were, “Tell my mother I’m alive and well.” She had been dead for more than five years. O’Casey had told Macmillan’s brother Daniel that he wished “Mr Harold” “wasn’t quite so diffident in the midst of his talents. Both of you, if I may say so as a friend, seem to pull back your intelligent desires. It’s hard for an intelligent mind to plunge forward. The duffers do allright.”[700]