Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  And, not unnaturally, given his own practice, he views the literary world — in particular the Irish literary world — as a nasty place: “In a society firmly based on the principle that ‘what goes up must come down’, everyone waits maliciously with beady eyes cocked for the collapse of the next victim.”[745]

  19 — Th’ Gentle Ripple of a Rose

  When the last volume of autobiography was being printed in 1954 O’Casey moved, for the last time, to hilltop St Marychurch, a blowy, upper-middle-class suburb of Torquay which faced directly down to Babbacombe beach.

  At first Eileen hoped that the landlord’s notice to quit, after sixteen years in Totnes, would mean they would move nearer to London, where Niall was to become a student at the LSE and Breon was already a pupil at the St Martin’s School of Art, having just finished his military service as a lance-bombardier in Germany. The winter before had been particularly hard; the cold-water tank on the roof burst and flooded the house, and Eileen had then broken her wrist. O’Casey confronted the disruption cheerfully, as an old man of seventy-four who had “no financial reserves, & so must try to keep going for there’s five and half of us — five of ourselves & Eileen’s mother”.[746]

  But Shivaun was still at Dartington Hall, and refused to become a full-time boarder, so they were forced to remain in the vicinity. They chose a second-floor — or first-floor, depending from which side one viewed the house — flat in the imposing Villa Rosa, in Trumlands Road, which meant, he said, “half our present space & three times the rent”.[747] He must anyway have fancied Torquay, writing in 1946 that she was hidden to the east of Totnes, “stretching herself languorously to be fondled by a soothing sea”; prophetically he continued, “A place where many are old, some sick and resentful, trying to hear the stirring sound of the Reveille in the mournful notes of the Last Post”.[748] He did not seem much perturbed by his continued exploitation by landlords. “Remember,” he told a friend when informing him of his change of address, “all the Bourgeoise [sic] aren’t villains; often a damn sight more charming & interesting than those who are no more than peripathetic Communist pamphlets.”[749] Two huge adjacent churches built in local stone dominated the skyline outside the walls and cedars of the Villa Rosa garden: the Protestant church of St Mary Virgin — like St Barnabas — and, slightly lower down, the O’Toole-like mass of the Catholic church of Our Lady of Help. Two sombre Dublin images side by side.

  Eileen has given a comprehensive picture of O’Casey’s routine at Torquay. He rose at nine a.m. and he and Eileen read their letters, settling together what to reply. He still received all the Dublin papers by post. During the morning he relaxed, maybe went for a walk; sometimes he might type — or, if working on a play, he would sing. After lunch he rested, mostly for the sake of his deteriorating eyesight — the threat of total blindness increased with old age, his right eye under added strain as his left eye lost virtually all its vision — then around five p.m. he would seriously start work at his typewriter and continue working all evening. Sometimes, however, he would watch TV — he liked sport most, or nature programmes — or listen to music (his preferences were Mozart, Mendelssohn and Haydn). He drank, according to Shivaun, enormous amounts of tea, sweetened with six or seven spoonfuls of sugar per cup.[750]

  His way of working, as always, was slow. He still wrote in school exercise books in minute handwriting, and would then copy on the typewriter, then revise — writing out drafts in longhand over and over again — finally making a fair copy on a typewriter. He might still, if the mood and inspiration held, work on well into the night. As in his youth in Abercorn Road, he was marvellously self-sufficient: to meet someone, “You’d never get him as far as the garden gate,” commented Eileen. He had one holiday during his last years, when he and Eileen went to Salisbury and put up at the Red Lion Hotel for a fortnight, although he no longer, according to his diary, found the cathedral awe-inspiring.[751] Hugh MacDiarmid persuaded him to visit Scotland in 1953 for Sam Wanamaker’s touring production of Purple Dust, which opened in Glasgow but disappointingly never came to London. During a rehearsal at the Princes Theatre, Edinburgh, O’Casey met Charles Chaplin and they discussed a possible film based on Purple Dust. The play had to wait until 1966 to have full justice done to its “joyous blarney”[752] — by the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin. A trip to Stratford was the only other recorded absence from Devon, and there he was most adamant about not visiting the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Breon said, “He didn’t really like the theatre or theatre people; he hated rehearsals of plays.” He boasted in one letter of not having been in a theatre for twenty-six years.[753] He was good at tying up parcels, but used to embarrass his family when they went out together for a meal by insisting on leaving a small, out-of-date tip like sixpence.

  During his reflective hours, sitting on the shallow concrete balcony outside his front door, he would watch the poplars, white and glistening, the dark cypresses, or the pod-laden laburnums at the end of the garden — a small one, “19 paces long, 10 wide”.[754] Next door were chestnut trees, while tall firs stood not far distant; to the north lay hills covered with thick woods, to the east a glimpse of the sea. Sometimes one of his children would join him, and if it was spring they would discuss the three or four purple crocuses flowering in the grass of the tiny lawn, or the clumps of saffron ones along the flower bed running to the gate. In summer he would sit among the flowers wearing one of his coloured caps from a collection begun by Shivaun, perhaps the fez from Persia, or “a gay sparkling one from India, a brilliant crimson cap with a big peak worn by the American lorry-driver”, or “a blue-black cap, red button on top, red peak, and a big red K to its front” sent him by the Chancellor of the University of Kansas.[755]

  His wonder at the flowers was kept so alive that with the sunflowers particularly in mind he thought of writing a play about Van Gogh. Twenty years earlier he had heard Irving Stone, at the New York Women’s Club, “fashioning Van Gogh into life again; that odd, strange man who gave an old chair an honoured place in the universe … gave to roses the whiteness of priestly hands breaking the sacred bread”.[756] Van Gogh had always been one of his preferred painters, he had argued his qualities, together with those of Goya, many years before in Dublin with Joe Cummins, who was more keen on Fragonard and Boucher. Then someone sent him a play called Vincent, and he abandoned the idea.

  But O’Casey wasn’t a countryman so much as a small-town man with a penchant for municipal gardens. Battersea and Totnes supplied this need, but St Marychurch not. Here, as in Chalfont St Giles, he had to make do with the churchyard — of St Mary Virgin — where he would think about those lying buried beneath their fading headstones, with no room for more; “the yard was fat with graves that had shut up the days” of their occupants.[757]

  Although, as he said, a slight sadness came over him in the graveyard, “but no chill”, he had a great deal of suffering to endure in 1956, when he had just turned seventy-five. The first New York production of Red Roses for Me, for which he had made revisions and added new scenes in the second half of the play, flopped at Broadway’s Booth Theatre after a month. Then he had to have two major operations, one for prostate and the other for a kidney stone, with only a month between them, followed by a post-operative infection, then pneumonia. A girl in Dublin sent him a “Miraculous Medal”, but the “dangling charm”, as she called it, was hardly his brand of cure.

  Just after their wedding anniversary, towards the end of September, when Eileen had left him to go to London to settle Niall in for a new term at LSE, O’Casey wrote to her, “I thought a lot of sending you a few flowers on the 23rd but was too shy to do anything about it, but you know how I love you.”[758] He added that Mrs Reynolds was telling Breon that “one of her heart valves is leaking”.

  Niall, who had turned twenty-one that January, had been a year at LSE. He had been demobbed from his national service in October 1955, after serving, like Breon, in the Royal Artillery in Germany. His subject was biology, but l
ike his father he was passionately interested in politics. He was also a keen jazz trombonist, but his playing was frowned on by the neighbours. Though he had been popular at school, Dartington Hall had not prepared him for life in the way it had Breon; and compared to his brother he was highly strung: “When in a cricket match or taking part in a play,” said his mother, “he’d get into a state of nerves and he also had migraines which the excitement made worse.”[759] “A brilliant mind, a sardonic if somewhat sarcastic sense of humour … a great talker,” commented his father. He had his father’s intellectual gifts, his mother’s instability.

  The tensions of 1956 put a strain on Niall. First there was his father’s serious illness, which forced him to travel back at weekends from London in his little emerald-green Ford van. In June came the Anglo-French invasion of Suez, a move to forestall the nationalisation of the canal by Nasser and in support of Israel, which aroused political passions everywhere — not least among students at LSE, who staged a demonstration which looked, at one stage, as if it might become violent.

  Hard on the heels of that debacle, over which father and son were united in opinion, there followed the Soviet invasion of Hungary. This caused deep divisions in the British Communist Party but also strife between father and son. Niall, as a committed left-winger, was miserably upset by the new, or imperialist, face of Russia suddenly revealed by this action. They argued hotly, O’Casey becoming “strangely stubborn and hard”,

  [760] insisting that anyone who was against Soviet authority should be shot. Meals at the Villa Rosa were eaten in stony silence. No one knew quite what went on in Niall’s heart, but there must have been a deep conflict between his love for his father, the man of gentle nature who had told him so many colourful stories when he was young, read him the whole of Moby Dick, acting out the parts in different voices, or drawn for him daily strip cartoons, and the authoritarian who defended what all but a handful of Soviet sympathisers saw as a deeply inhuman and murderous response.

  In cooler tones, when he was back in London, Niall wrote his father (16 November) about the “Old Guard” in the party who favoured the invasion:

  Dear Daddy

  I hope you find the enclosed press cuttings of interest from today’s Daily Worker. The Old Guard is having quite a tough time at present. Resignations on the staff [of the Worker] include Malcolm MacEwan, “Gabriel”, Philip Bolsover; on the verge are many others, including Sheila Lynd. The attitude of the executive over Hungary on many matters has been quite untenable. One can imagine the mistakes that have been made in Eastern Europe as being the same here, as if the Soviet Union had liberated us from Hitler, and had set up J. R. Campbell & his gang as Government. This isn’t Communism at all. The “double-think” reminds me of Captain Waterhouse.

  Love,

  NIALL[761]

  His father did not bend an inch towards him, no doubt noting with disfavour the use of his enemy Orwell’s coinage “double-think”, inconceivable in his view of communism. Even though — according to Breon — Niall was his “favourite”, O’Casey did not see that what distressed his son more than the invasion itself was his own support of it.

  “He hides the distress under the careless scorn of his letter-writing,” O’Casey wrote later in a comment at the foot of the letter. He consoled himself that the boy had little experience of war, at first hand or even second hand,

  while he over a long life had known the Boer War, the First World War, the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Black and Tan terror, the Irish Civil War, and then the terrible strife let loose by Hitler, not forgetting the Western refusal to open its eyes to what Hitler did in Spain, leading to the first growth of his gigantic egomania that finally slew five million Jews, and sent to the grave many millions of old and young in almost every country in Europe, in a vast and deep attempt to make himself the Lord of Creation and stamp out the power of Socialism, fully grown in the USSR and bud-ripening in many other countries.

  He [Niall] did not, and could not, see the implications of having such proud and ignorant and narrow-minded “gets” as Mindszenty, head of Hungary, Prince Primate; and Niall had never read what the Prince Primate had been in Hungary or what he could be as dictator of the country. But his hot and honest opinions, put out without hesitation, were at any rate a tribute to his home where, at all times, in every circumstance, free thought was the genre of our family life.[762]

  Clearly O’Casey suffered no guilt about the next argument they had when, two weeks later, the drawn and worried Niall came down from London to discuss it further. They ended, though disagreeing, said O’Casey, “by my putting my arms around him and looking at his face which was full of eagerness and honesty and sorrow”.[763] Neither his father nor mother — who was on Niall’s side — noticed that this face was full, too, of illness. But he returned a second time to London.

  Two weeks later Niall came home again for the Christmas holidays. He seemed unusually tired, and his mother thought he had, in addition to motoring home to Devon, been staying up too late playing in his band. Eileen called a doctor, and that doctor summoned a specialist, while Niall stayed in his room playing records. The specialist’s confirmation of the diagnosis was swift. Niall had leukaemia. The same night he was taken to Exeter Hospital.

  Christmas Day, 1956, was the last time O’Casey saw Niall:

  When I went to where he lay in bed, and kissed him with a kiss of love, I heard him murmur “It’s hellish” in answer to my cry of my dearest, my beloved boy; no more; never again did he murmur a simple complaint; no cry of resentment; but suffered all patiently: the blood transfusions; the choking up of the voice passage, the terrible periods of icy coldness and burning heats; talking calmly and rapidly when drugs released his voice; of Hungary; of friends; and the coming Youth Festival in Moscow, for he had planned to go there.[764]

  Eileen and Breon accompanied Niall on his last journey to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London for specialised treatment. Once a bitter word escaped him, when he tried to get out of bed and Breon told him not to: “It’s all very well for you. It is I who have to die and not you.” Shivaun stayed behind with her father to do the cooking, while O’Casey prepared the breakfast and did the washing up. “It is hardest on you,” he wrote to Eileen, staying at the Strand Palace Hotel. She did not leave her son’s side until, a few days later, it was all over. He was cremated at Golders Green Cemetery in North London, where both the Shaws had been cremated.

  “And the political bastards still go on with their atom-bomb tests, assuring the spread of this curse into every home, if their murderous madness isn’t stopped.” Childhood deaths from leukaemia had gone up by eighty-six per cent since 1938, while 2,224 had died of it in 1955, O’Casey found in a Times report. But this was little consolation. There was no consolation.

  O’Casey continued for years to mourn his son’s death. Daily he poured out his grief in words: religion was no help; a costume sewn with miraculous medals couldn’t keep his beloved boy alive another hour, he railed. He wished he could swap his young son’s vigorous life for his own stooped shoulders, bald head, dimming eyes and “gnarling” face. Where do the dead go? he asked at another time. “Does Mozart compose great melodies? Does Bernard Shaw write plays? Does Lady Gregory watch over her dear Willy Yeats?” He watched each spring pass into summer and wondered why his own son had not had the chance to make the same passage. He noted the date Niall would have become a full-fledged biologist — “and a handsome one, too”. He dreamed of him.

  He was lying in a sloping way in a bed, so that as one sat on the bed’s side, my face was close to his, without need of bending. Shivaun looking the age of 6 or 7, sat on the opposite side, eating an apple.

  Niall’s face was not the bright and eager face I knew so well; it was paler, and the eagerness had given way to a shadow of quietness.

  I clasped a hand of his in mine, and he enclosed it tightly and lovingly, I think, in both of his. He held his hands around mine so, and was silent.

  �
� Darling, your hand is cold, I said.

  — I am cold, he said, clasping my enclosed hand more closely, and said no more.[765]

  O’Casey compared himself to the Soviet Ambassador Jakob Malik whose twenty-four-hour-old infant son died in London in July 1958 and whom he took back to Mother Russia in a tiny coffin. He looked for Niall to be over his shoulder and give him advice when the Komsomolskaya Pravda asked for an article addressing the youth of the Soviet Union on the anniversary of the October Revolution. His grief hardly weakened for years, with every week surrounded by “a black border”, passing uninterrupted through Christmases when “a shoal of gay cards came floating in … most from friends in the U.S.A.”, through to his eightieth birthday celebrations when he was sent a beautiful bunch of eighty red roses (“Niall you went wearing a tiny nosegay of but 21”). He called out many a time, “Oh, God to think of it; I buried a Father when I was a little boy, and a Son when I was an old, old man.”[766]

  *

  He battled for a quiet eightieth, refusing to give interviews to The Observer, the New York Times, a lunch offer by Macmillans. In America Ed Sullivan had been going to include in his TV show on St Patrick’s Day night a portion of a filmed conversation between Barry Fitzgerald and O’Casey. It had originally been part of the film Cradle of Genius, directed by Paul Rotha, called by O’Casey “a very dull tribute to the Abbey Theatre which those who paid for it find it hard to get shown”. Eminent Irish-Americans, however, objected to O’Casey, so Sullivan ostentatiously announced that the conversation would be omitted, explaining that he had been told O’Casey “had been used by English communists”. O’Casey was happy to have been spared: “Thank God I escaped from appearing in the midst of such horrible bog of Irish sentimentality and inanity.”[767]