Reviews of the first three books published in England produced significant casualties among erstwhile friends and champions. Gogarty, for example, wrote a deeply appreciative and perceptive review for The Observer, calling I Knock at the Door “powerful and unsparing”, “capable and terrible”, “strange and original writing”, but because he expressed some unease at the whole autobiographical procedure, and stated that it seemed O’Casey “has, after all the unsurpassable hilarity of his plays, a grudge against life”, O’Casey took umbrage — in the usual form of a letter, which The Observer refused to print.
St John Ervine, in The Spectator, called Drums Under the Windows manifestly fiction. “As a bitter invention, the book is entertaining. As an account of events, it is nonsense.”[721] As for its hero, during the troubled times of revolution and its aftermath, “we are left with the impression of very few good men on this earth, Mr O’Casey being about the best of the lot.” For the style, however, Ervine reserved his most damning stricture, calling it “a mixture of Jimmy O’Dea and Tommy Handley”. Far from professing himself flattered, as P. G. Wodehouse had once done when O’Casey tried to insult him by calling him “English Literature’s performing flea” (“all the performing fleas I have met have impressed me with their sterling artistry and that indefinable something which makes the good trouper”[722]), O’Casey defended at length, in a letter that was for once published, the factual content of Drums. This provoked Ervine’s retort: “One of Mr O’Casey’s most dangerous delusions is that he thinks. He does not think, he never has thought, cannot think: he can only splash about in his emotions.” O’Casey’s last word was calculated to make an Ulsterman twitch with rage: “The fact is, I think, that Mr Ervine hates the Irish.”[723]
All this was good knockabout stuff in the now hallowed tradition of a new O’Casey œuvre. But George Orwell’s celebrated review of Drums Under the Windows in The Observer hit a good deal harder and hurt much deeper. Orwell had little humour (least of all about himself); he had no taste for the emotional volatility of Irishmen; he could not see that O’Casey’s nationalism as expressed in the book was very much a two-edged sword — often not even cutting, just sending itself up. He addressed it with deadly seriousness. Pointing out that Drums contained “no reference to England which is not hostile or contemptuous”,[724] he proceeded to say that O’Casey sank to the “worst extremes of jingoism and racialism” when he wrote “Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan, walks firm now, a flush on her haughty cheek.” This passage, of course, was meant to be ironical.
Orwell expressed extreme dislike of O’Casey’s writing in the third person, “which gives an unbearable effect of narcissism”. Why are there, he asked — and he might have been putting the question as much to O’Casey’s publishers as to the public which in its postwar, anti-Empire frame of mind applauded the book — “Irishmen whose life-work is abusing England”, who are “able to look to the English public for support”? They even, “like Mr O’Casey himself, prefer to live in the country which is the object of their hatred”, where they remain “almost immune from criticism”.
O’Casey’s letter to The Observer in reply was once again refused publication. In it he heaped scorn on Orwell’s charge that Irish writers in England enjoyed special status; he paid his taxes, he said; moreover his Irish nationalism was completely misunderstood by Orwell. “Orwell’s freedom of thought!” he commented sourly upon hearing that his letter was not to appear.
Later, in the last volume of autobiography, published in 1954, four years after Orwell’s death, he took his revenge by putting the blame for the bad review on his own refusal to provide a puff for the jacket of Orwell’s novel The Clergyman’s Daughter in 1935. Orwell’s publishers, Gollancz, had then, according to O’Casey, compared one scene in the novel, set in Trafalgar Square, to Joyce: O’Casey retaliated at the time (or so he said) that Orwell “had as much chance of reaching the stature of Joyce as a tit has of reaching that of an eagle”. He also condemned Orwell’s “Doomsday Book”, 1984, as “the decay in himself … transmuted into the life of the whole world … self-pity, wrapped sourly up in yearned revenge”.[725]
Perhaps he resented in Orwell that capacity for honest disillusionment with causes which he had once possessed himself, but upon leaving Ireland had lost. Anyway, there was no reason to believe that Orwell even knew about O’Casey’s refusal to write a puff. O’Casey, and many critics and followers sharing his cast of mind, sometimes seemed unable to believe there was such a thing as a valid, honest judgment not tied to some ulterior purpose — unless, of course, that judgment was whole-hearted praise.
But paranoia, a symptom perhaps of something unfinished in the human personality trying to work itself out, never came to dominate O’Casey: as Eileen admonished R. M. Fox, who asked her, in 1955, out of his early knowledge of O’Casey in Dublin, “Is Sean as bitter as ever?”[726] — “How can a man with a soft voice like that, be bitter?” “Indeed,” O’Casey admitted to his Harvard friend, Horace Reynolds, in 1949, “it is the reviews that ‘go for me’ that I linger over, and love.”[727]
*
Paranoia was but one weapon in a large armoury at O’Casey’s disposal: he kept it in place, but always made sure that it did not grow rusty out of disuse, building up danger for himself and his family, as so often happened in the case of other writers, especially Irish. If Orwell thought his denunciation of England from the privileged position of a Macmillan author was unfair, this was nothing to the saeva indignatio towards Ireland expressed in the fourth volume of autobiography which he wrote during 1945 and 1946 and which was published in early 1948.
Innishfallen Fare Thee Well did not sell nearly as well as Drums; there was, O’Casey told his friends, a slump in the book business. But it also suffers, to an increased degree, from the faults of the three previous books. There are still magnificent set-pieces, coloured with the melodramatic tricks he had learned from Boucicault, such as his account of the raid on 35 Mountjoy Square. He chillingly depicts some of the more sinister episodes after the end of the civil war — re-using the material of the early Dublin plays, but vividly handled and with dialogue that has lost none of its earthiness or bite. The travelogue of his visit to Coole, with its affectionate character sketch of Lady Gregory, is also a highlight of this volume. But the most celebrated chapter, and justly so, is “Mrs Casside Takes a Holiday” (a play on the title Death Takes a Holiday, by Walter Ferris), an account of his mother’s last days when she was dying from Spanish flu towards the end of the First World War. That a man in his late sixties could write so simply and movingly of his mother, who had died nearly thirty years before, showed not only how the power of the love she gave him had lasted, but how central a force of literary inspiration it still was. This was a gift that few men or women in this world, for all their privilege and success, had ever received. But O’Casey alone, in his family, had received it; he did not acknowledge Susan Casey’s possible shortcomings where his brothers and sister were concerned. Had they been successful, would he have praised the system? More likely his mother.
Mick Casey died in Dublin in January 1947, at the age of eighty-one. The brothers had communicated once or twice before his death, and O’Casey still sent him the odd quid, but not the clothes he asked for: “Strange and all as it may sound,” he told him in 1945, “I am wearing the eldest boy’s coat and trousers which became too small for him — he’s just six feet two. Both the missus and I have to give all the clothing coupons to the children — three of them, and even then these aren’t enough.”[728]
In his last years Mick had become a well-known Dublin character, strutting around the cattleyards with a walking stick which he carried like a field marshal’s baton, or frequenting the North Wall pubs where he made sketches of customers and gave them the finished works. He had read the first three books of his brother’s autobiography: “The other fella,” he commented, “you have to hand it to him.”[729]
When Harold Macmillan (having now returned to
publishing during the postwar period when the Conservatives were in opposition) wrote to ask O’Casey if Mick would object to the passage in Innishfallen Fare Thee Well which showed him as a violent drunkard, O’Casey informed Macmillan of his death. Mick would not, anyway, have taken legal action, he said, because he would never have read the book. “He never read a line I wrote.”[730] But not only did Mick read his brother’s work, O’Casey’s other relatives subsequently and vehemently denied the truth of O’Casey’s portrait of him.
“To be fair to myself” (O’Casey went on to Macmillan), “I may say we were friendly after separation. When he was down and I was up (in a job), I helped him to many a bit of tobacco and many a drink; and when I came to Eng., I sent him many a quid, finally paying the funeral expenses.” The truth about the funeral is that O’Casey’s niece, Isabella Murphy, with whom Mick had lived in Beaumont during his last eight years, paid the expenses out of her own pocket. O’Casey as next of kin received the insurance Michael had taken out and reimbursed his niece.
The Irish, left behind to live their lives in Ireland, quite naturally did not approve of O’Casey’s valedictory volume: it is surprising that he should have expected them to. While one English critic, at least, approved — Desmond MacCarthy wrote that “Personally I love the superb but today despised Art of Rhetoric; and I can figure O’Casey even when he continues intoxicated with his own … I wait patiently for the phrase which will be final and quick as a blow — and I am seldom disappointed”[731] — Dublin responded much less kindly. Sean O’Faolain (in fact reviewing the published version of Red Roses for Me) caught exactly what departure from Dublin had meant to him:
It was not the beauty of Dublin but the filth of Dublin that nourished O’Casey. He had flourished on its poverty. His passion flamed in its damp and chill … He had got a lift, in some mysterious way, out of the dull exasperation of his native city. His gall-sac had fattened on its fungus … Gauguin, who went into exile among the yellow Polynesians in Tahiti, never got more excitation than O’Casey got out of the yellow tuberculars of North Dublin. Whatever disillusion came over us this did not cease. The more we rotted the more incense there was to our foetor. Mollser is always with us.[732]
More specifically with regard to Innishfallen Fare Thee Well, P. S. O’Hegarty wrote:
The four volumes have shown a progressive decline in interest … He can have Big Ben, and the lights of London, and the Red Flag — he is curiously irritated about the Red Flag and the refusal of Irishmen to adopt it as their flag — and we will keep the three plays. And we shall always have a corner in our hearts, not for the man he thinks he is, nor for the man he would like to be, but the man he was.[733]
*
Like the marooned city of Berlin which figured so largely in the news in the post Second World War period, O’Casey’s soul was now neatly divided between East and West. America held his undying allegiance, for, at a tolerable distance — and during the rest of his life — it made an increasing fuss of him. It was always the new land, the land of golden opportunity: of material opportunity as enshrined in its huge buildings of commerce and trade which dwarfed the stifling spiritual temples that suffocated his native Ireland.
At the same time Russia was the land of the future, because inevitably, as he constantly told his friends in Moscow, communism — in his own very loose and all-embracing definition of it — would win. O’Hegarty was right: he did recommend that Ireland should join the Soviet bloc. This optimism about the future, joined to a past full of privation and struggle — and he made sure that was never forgotten — endowed his rebelliousness with a saintly quality, and caused him to become an object of pilgrimage in his later years. It was yet another irony, or paradox, of his longevity that he should assume the miraculous attributes of the religious effigies he so knocked and despised in his plays.
But he did. The stream of visitors to the O’Casey house in Totnes thickened as postwar affluence grew. Ria Mooney, the Irish actress and director, noticed the “intangible middle-class atmosphere” as they sat down to high tea. It was hardly surprising that visitors from the States, which had forty million citizens of Irish descent and from which ninety per cent of O’Casey’s expanding income came in his old age, should outnumber the Russians. One could view them as a religious procession, to adopt the metaphor employed so frequently in the autobiography, with a saint-like Johnny Cassidy encountering persecutors and redeemers, oppressors and victims. These dignitaries from both East and West who journeyed to Totnes all reflected the new, non-spiritual culture that came increasingly to dominate the late 1950s and the 1960s. Joined as they were in the bond of utilitarian materialism, was there anything to choose between a CBS programme director and the Soviet cultural attaché?
Honours and accolades caught up with O’Casey, although he continued to spurn them as much as he could: offered an honorary doctorate by Trinity College, Dublin, he mused, “Sean O’Casey, Litt.D.! No, Sir, this would never do. I am a wandering minstrel singing his share of songs at the corners of occasional streets: such I was, such I am, and such I shall die!”[734] He refused a CBE from Harold Macmillan in November 1962 on the grounds that “such an honour would not be suitable for my nature or feeling”.[735]
Boris Izakov, the editor of Sovietskaya Kultura, on his visit to Devon, voiced the objection that the principal characters of O’Casey’s plays were depicted with too great a realism and were “unattractive and unheroic”.[736] “The Soviet theatre could not reconcile itself to something so contradictory.” O’Casey fixed him: “I like them just as they are.” But it did not occur to him that he might not have liked the Russian workers and soldiers of the Red Army whom he so often upheld as paragons just as they were. Later he told another visitor, the Indian Saros Cowasjee, “Russia is not Communist. It will take another 60 years before it goes Communist. Your India may take as much as 150 years.”[737] At another time he told the Life magazine photographer, Gjon Mili, that he had no illusions about his fate had he lived in Russia: “I should be put against the wall and shot.”[738] At still another time he boasted he was a “hero over in Russia, because they never stop tellin’ me, but I don’t go out of my way to say particularly nice things about them.”[739]
He embarrassed correspondents everywhere by stamping on the back of his envelopes “Friends of the Soviet Union”. Yet he exclaimed elsewhere, “I wish our Communists would write better than they do, or stop writing altogether.”[740] Like a great actor adept at playing himself, the largest character he ever created, he could now give many different performances of “Sean O’Casey”. He stuck to main themes, but within these there were rich variations — including complete contradictions.
In the last two volumes of his autobiography, Rose and Crown, published in 1952, and Sunset and Evening Star, 1954, he sank to his nadir of literary infighting. Sunset and Evening Star even included chunks of his correspondence refused publication in The Observer, in reply to a review by Louis MacNeice of Rose and Crown. Both volumes are marred by his increasing need to pay off old scores, and both lack the brilliant sketches that gave the earlier instalments their distinction. As he told Ria Mooney, “When I take a pen into my hand something comes over me and I can’t help being bitter, even when I write letters.”
Letters, typed copies of which he now kept, were also the basis of the last two volumes, and much of the heavily condemned Joycean fantasy had vanished. “When afterwards I read his letters I felt that he was very unhappy and that he seemed to have changed,” commented Dr John Larchet (“Larky”), who remembered O’Casey sitting in the Abbey stalls with Lady Gregory listening to the orchestral selections in order to choose the right ones to go with his plays. “Summing up I would say that he was unfair to those three, Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Robinson, to have forgotten what the Abbey did for him.”[741] A major chapter of Rose and Crown covered what the Abbey, by rejecting The Silver Tassie, didn’t do for him.
The freshest observation and the most entertaining chapters are th
ose covering his trip to America in 1934. In “Wild Life in New Amsterdam”, he describes a dinner party at which guests are shown a photograph of the spurious hunting exploit of a rich man’s son, who had, in the most expensively cosseted circumstances, killed a tiger. O’Casey reveals in this scene the sham at the centre of the American dream: an emotion of glory so much in excess of any real achievement: “Sick with ecstasy at others getting to know of his astonishing achievement. Hardly able to eat, so full of himself.”
O’Casey finds for this deception a rare and perfect image — true both for the boy’s mother and for the process which had resulted in the best of his own writing: “The mother seeing the sham in her heart, silvering it over, as the oyster iridescently nacres an irritation, with a sham of her own, accepting the myth, and decorating it with gravity and praise.”[742] In this chapter, and in those which precede and follow it, O’Casey is back doing what he is best at, showing the processes of life. He then concedes that “Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty.”[743]
In Sunset and Evening Star the immediacy, even that of a new trip, has cooled. A visit to Cambridge, undertaken to deliver a talk to undergraduates, is swamped in pontification about the shortcomings of a university education, highlighted by the starkness of living conditions at St John’s College. It seemed that O’Casey was appreciating more and more that the rich, and their children, were on the whole as much deprived as, if not more than, the poor, who had at least the compensation of family warmth and emotion.
Writing now more from memory than from observation and from the heart, O’Casey had become too much the victim of his own image, the “blaster and blighter”, the crow, “more intelligent than most birds” but raucous, and now, as he said, “old and hoarse”.[744] Easily stirred as a controversialist who trades on his own all too palpable scars to score points in a debate, yet will hit out mercilessly at deficiencies in his enemies, O’Casey in these last volumes shows little of the compassion that marks his plays. The rhetoric of politics settles in a highly coloured mist over everything he praises or blames.
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 44