Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  Samuel Beckett sent birthday greetings to the Irish Times. “To my great compatriot, Sean O’Casey, from France where he is honoured, I send my enduring gratitude and homage”, although O’Casey had never overcome his antagonism to what he considered the younger writer’s dark view of humanity (“I have nothing to do with Beckett. He isn’t in me; nor am I in him”[768]). Beckett’s honouring of him was the greater by virtue of Beckett having declined to do something similar four years earlier for the centenary of Shaw’s birth:

  This is too tall an order for me …

  I wouldn’t suggest that G.B.S. is not a great playwright,

  Whatever that is when it’s at home.

  What I would do is give the whole unupsettable, apple-cart for a sup of the Hawk’s Well, or the Saints’, or a whiff of Juno, to go no further.

  In 1960 O’Casey was one of three likely candidates for the Nobel Prize, but it was awarded to the French poet Saint-John Perse.

  Somewhere inside O’Casey his creative powers were rising again during the last decade of his life. It was like the beginning of his marriage and the start of his family in reverse. At the moment of Breon’s birth his playwriting fortunes, with the rejection of The Silver Tassie, had declined. While Niall lay dying in Bart’s, he received from the New York publisher, George Braziller, $1,500 and a bunch of glowing reviews from the first American production of Purple Dust at the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre. It ran there for over a year, the longest for any O’Casey play. Dramatised versions of the first two volumes of his autobiography, by Paul Shyre, were also performed on Broadway in 1956-7; O’Casey listened several times to tapes of them sent from New York.[769] Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, the play he liked most of his later years, although written earlier, was at last staged professionally both in New York and London.

  In his last three full-length plays, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, The Bishop’s Bonfire and The Drums of Father Ned, and the three satires he published in his eighty-first year, in 1961, Behind the Green Curtains, Figuro in the Night and The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe, O’Casey returned to his chastisement of Ireland for refusing to join the modern world. Yet was he now of it himself? In these fantasies of mythical places like Ballybeedhust, Ballyoonagh, Doonavale, Kylenamoe and Nyadnanave, bizarre and miraculous events unfold — a human-size cock crows with sexual urgency, and challenges the Catholic barrenness, women sprout horns, a plaster saint blows blasts on a “buckineeno”, a Brussels “petit Pizzeur” sprays irreverence on a Dublin suburb. There is a huge discrepancy between these places and events and the actual reality of Ireland, a new and young country searching painfully, in tight circumstances, for a moral and material identity of her own. While critics found that this vision reduced her to a “narrow-minded”, “priest-ridden”, acquisitively materialistic society with bourgeois pretensions, and falsely and hollowly nationalistic, who was to say that the permissive virtues O’Casey and others preached would not have turned her, twenty years later, into the drug- and disease-ridden spiritually empty arcadias other more “liberated” countries have become?

  O’Casey, however, assuming the moral right to attack his native land, had for a long time been like the ex-husband laying down rules of behaviour to the wife he has deserted, yet whose interests he still claims to know better than anyone else, including herself. He justified this because his feelings towards Ireland were still strong: he had tried to form attachments elsewhere and failed. Was it any wonder, then, that Ireland continued to reject him? But wonder he did, and again the reality lacking in the plays was compensated for by the mud slung between O’Casey and those who proscribed them.

  But he had a lot of fun, both in the plays themselves, which are full of skittish humour — like the early one-act plays which punctuated the masterpieces at the Abbey — and on the hardly wider stage of Dublin life. The knockabout comedy of censorship culminated in 1958 with the Council of the Dublin Tóstal Festival, which had accepted The Drums of Father Ned for production, rejecting both it and a dramatisation of Joyce’s Ulysses.

  As in previous bannings it was not just the work, but the Flutherian figure of O’Casey himself, waving his fists and asking for a fight, that the authorities rejected. But O’Casey was challenging the paternal guardians, as it were, of his first wife: he provoked them to exercise their authority, and they responded by doing so. He retaliated by putting an embargo on all productions of his plays in Ireland until 1984: though different in detail, these exchanges were in essence replays of earlier quarrels. “Not quite tears,” as he said of the effects of all this, “for within me the laugh comes and goes and always comes back.”[770]

  Cock-a-Doodle Dandy was the best of the final pieces and the best piece of self-dramatisation since The Shadow of a Gunman. O’Casey refines the realistically portrayed Davoren into the beautiful and effective symbol of the cock who says nothing, only crows: the Lord of Misrule, the pagan Oisin, the jester, the dark prophet of the life force, all are suggested in this expressionistic device. The other characters take sides over real-life incidents — a dying girl’s futile departure for Lourdes; the apocalyptic blow of Father Domineer which strikes dead a workman “living in sin” with a woman of the parish — in an extravagantly theatrical mixture of dance-like action and wild humour. O’Casey thought of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy as a morality play, with battle lines different from the usual ones drawn between good and evil, and considered it “my best”.

  Certainly it was the work of a happy man, for as Breon and Eileen attested, no piece he wrote caused more laughter and song in him during its labour: Breon contrasted his mood while writing it with the depression he suffered when he had to write newspaper articles. But it had little success in the US: Macmillans there refused to publish an American edition, importing instead a mere 891 copies from London. O’Casey wanted to approach another publisher, but Daniel Macmillan dissuaded him.

  The play failed in New York when presented at the Carnegie Hall Playhouse at the end of 1958; O’Casey remarked poignantly to Brooks Atkinson, who had sent on the reviews, “somehow, someday, somewhere the characters will leap & laugh a way into life. Meanwhile they are safe in limbo.”[771]

  Since then, like many others of O’Casey’s plays, it has been widely translated (Cock-a-Doodle Dandy itself into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Japanese). A 1959 production, directed by George Devine, which came down from the Edinburgh Festival to play at the Royal Court, established O’Casey’s link (as “Angry Old Man”, a label which O’Casey resented) with John Osborne, whose plays contained a small element of the O’Casey revolt, but did not advance beyond the rhetorical self-pity and the repetitive music-hall routines used by O’Casey to command attention. Nor have later “angry” dramatists managed to achieve that special O’Casey quality of self-mockery: piling on vituperative ill-feeling and upping the stakes they have substituted obscenity for mockery, hatred for love, and have ignored the lovingly detailed processes of life or the volatile contradictions of character seen in the best of O’Casey’s work. Discontent is a hard act to follow, making us seek, as Goethe wrote, “the root of all evil outside ourselves instead of finding it in our own contrariness”.[772]

  The Bishop’s Bonfire and The Drums of Father Ned lack vitality, by comparison with Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, although in the second O’Casey was, or so G. Wilson Knight claimed, “tidying up” his private theology. There is something too composed, too pictorial about the writing: many scenes have a painterly quality, like a Stanley Spencer, full of colour and of a distinctive character — but too finished for actors to spring inside them and mould them to their own intentions. The plays perform themselves on the printed page, and the playwright orchestrates them completely.

  O’Casey described the subject of The Bishop’s Bonfire as “the ferocious chastity of the Irish” — making it sound quite attractive — and “a lament for the condition of Ireland which is an apathetic country now, losing all her energy, enthusiasm and resolution”. The expected counterbl
ast is by no means wholly ferocious, often the reverse. In fact O’Casey told the director, Tyrone Guthrie, that one character in the play, Rankin, was based on a stone mason of the same name and that he tried to reassure this guilt-obsessed Catholic that it wasn’t so hard to go through life giving little offence to God.[773] Rankin had wheeled to face him, brought his face close and hissed out, “There’s always concupiscence!” But sympathy for the enemy was something O’Casey shared with few of his doctrinaire colleagues.

  The Bishop’s Bonfire, when it opened in Guthrie’s production at the Gaiety, Dublin, in 1955, provoked denunciations from the pulpit, in the well-hallowed tradition of O’Casey first nights, although the Vatican’s ecumenical changes of the early 1960s were soon to alter Catholic thinking, even in Ireland. He and Guthrie enthusiastically fed each other with ideas and O’Casey even made a few suggestions for new dialogue, but he never attended a performance. Sidney Bernstein, who had remained friends with the O’Caseys since Eileen’s Cochran days and who had sent gifts to Tingrith of tobacco and clothing during and just after the war, wanted to take him and Eileen to the first night. Eileen accepted and went, accompanied by Shivaun. O’Casey never slipped over to Dublin “quietly and unnoticed”,[774] as he intended doing if the play was a success.

  The prologue of The Drums of Father Ned, dubbed “Prerumble”, is a marvellous brief flashback to the “Troubles” of the early 1920s: a party of Black and Tans capture two Republicans, whose enmity for each other — one supports the Irish Free State, the other is a Sinn Fein Diehard — far outstrips their hatred of the English. This so mystifies their captors that the officer in charge tries to intimidate them into shaking hands; having no success he leaves them to prolong their feud. But the rest of the play, unfolding in the same town some thirty-four years later, when the “two rats” are now Mayor and Deputy Mayor, but unchanged in what they feel towards each other, dissipates the explosive comi-tragic mood of the “Prerumble”. Father Ned, the revolutionary priest, never appears: he represents progress and we hear his drumming. O’Casey no doubt meant it as allegory but it slid into mere romp.

  “Figuro is an abounding joy everywhere at last,” says the Birdlike Lad in Figuro in the Night, “the instrument he was handling shows up and down in stretched dimensions.”[775] This, and The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe, which with its railway station setting revives ghosts of the GNR, display O’Casey’s last priapic defiance of Ireland’s hypocritical piety.

  In Behind the Green Curtains, a savage, three-scene satire on Dublin’s literati and their faint-heartedness before clerics, Michael Robartes, a famous Protestant playwright (based on Lennox Robinson, who died in 1951), causes with his death a moral dilemma: should his literary friends risk the Catholic bishop excommunicating them for attending his funeral? In the end those who are humiliated or refuse oppression leave for England — historically Ireland’s oppressor, now the haven for its oppressed. Having arrived on a short visit to publicise a first night O’Casey had now resided there for over thirty-three years: “Stay in England,” one of his voices had told him, “where, if there isn’t wisdom, there is sense, and some decency of manner.”[776]

  *

  Eileen, in her fifties, was a strikingly handsome woman, “of auburn beauty and fine proportions, an open-faced woman with a gentle manner and a quick smile,” wrote David Krause.[777] She was now O’Casey’s ambassador extraordinary to the world at large. In 1958 she visited New York to attend the first night of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. She had her own little flat in London, in the Cromwell Road, a two-roomed place at a controlled rent where she could be independent. “Ideal for me,” she said. O’Casey saw it only once, on his last visit to London to attend the performance of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy at the Royal Court.

  Their relationship had mellowed now, they had few arguments, and as his eyes worsened she read aloud to him and helped him with correspondence. “My arms aren’t long enough to stretch so far to hug you,” he wrote to her in 1958; “& your sweet mouth has to travel a long way before I can give it a long kiss; & I miss greatly that hug and that kiss.”[778] Filled with great love, theirs was now, of course, a celibate marriage. Eileen, on her own candid admission, had strong sexual needs which she fulfilled outside. “It’s a pity I’m so old,” O’Casey told her once; while of their sex life she said: “After a certain point there wasn’t much in that line. It all went into his writing.”

  O’Casey was conscious, even to the very end of his life, not only how precious Eileen had been to him personally, but how he had stolen her from her natural habitat among the rich and privileged. Her love, he wrote in the 1929 version of “Eileen most Fair”, he had “claimed and laid hold of in the Frowning Face of others”.[779] There was always in him a frisson of pleasure at the excitement she awoke in others: “I struck away the hands that were unloosening her girdle, and tightened it again, that I myself with my own hands might loosen it.”

  In the summer of 1962 he had to say farewell to the joy of reading: “My eyes have slumped as low as the low market price on Wall Street.” With Eileen reading the replies out to him he still remained as prolific a letter-writer as before. To Brooks Atkinson, now retired from the New York Times, who was writing a book on birds, he gave an impression from his window, of the “fainter beauties within my vision of life”.[780] He recalled seeing his first swallow when he was twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, working in a gang sinking big and small sewer pipes and building a septic tank in the country outside Dublin. With his reputation as a “scholar”, every Saturday he was sent to fetch the weekly wages from the cashier and carry the bag of thirty to forty pounds in sovereigns and glistening silver pieces to pay the men. Arriving at the works hut, he said, “I used to hold up the bag of money, & say, first in Irish, then in English, ‘May the blessing of God be on the way this money is spent for the good of those who earned it’.” The men would answer “Amen”.

  Leaving work one Saturday with a companion he looked into the sky at this “swarm of scimitar-winged birds”, and asked what they were; his companion couldn’t believe he didn’t know.

  — Swallas, Jack; just common swallas.

  — An’ what are they doin’, dartin’ about up there?

  — Eatin’ insects; swarms of them in the air; gorgin’ themselves while the goin’s good … Well, so long, Jack — I’ll leave you with your swallas.[781]

  Barry Fitzgerald died in 1961, leaving O’Casey a small legacy to attest to their long association and friendship. In his own will, written in late 1962, O’Casey bequeathed to Eileen “all my goods, estate valuation, and all else, to her in gratitude for many, many years of happy and fruitful companionship; and with all I bequeath to her my deep love, as deep now, deeper indeed, than the love I felt for her in our earlier years.” He was now growing more blind by the month, with the plague, as he called it, “that enfolded the germ of a divine gift”. After President Kennedy’s death, in 1963, he wrote to one correspondent that he and his wife felt the same way after Niall’s death:

  We were physically sick as well as emotionally upset; the belly heavy as lead caused by the distension of the bowels. No wonder in ancient times, these were thought to be the centre of the emotions; Gaelic mothers used to say to their babies “M’inne estigh thu”, “You are my bowels within”; and remember that passage of scripture which says “If a man seeth his brother in want, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion against him, how dwelleth the love of God in that man?”[782]

  One of the witnesses to O’Casey’s will was Geoffrey Dobbie, a nurseryman from Babbacombe. Dobbie, married and with an ailing wife, had been enlisted by Eileen and helped her in the garden and around the home — he sometimes, Eileen said, “remained overnight”. Dobbie moved into the Villa Rosa during the late summer of 1964 when O’Casey went down with acute bronchitis and on returning home from hospital showed increasing fatigue. Now eighty-four, he was not expected to live long.

  When Eileen’s mother died at this time, O’Casey sent Dobbie
along to the funeral. She had been fatally injured in a fall, and in a few moments of consciousness before the end Eileen gave her some brandy. Mrs Reynolds called for a priest, and Eileen told her she’d soon be with Edward, her husband. “Oh my God,” exploded Mrs Reynolds, “I don’t want to meet him again!”[783]

  Eileen declared, with a huge chuckle, “I upset her deathbed!”

  *

  When he was in the clinic at Torbay, anticipating his end, O’Casey began to write a long last letter in which he summarised, in a most eloquent and moving way, his and Eileen’s life together: “Here I am like a cooped-up cock, ragged in feather, drooping in comb, the crow gone off into a cough.”[784] He described her early loveliness, her laughter, how he had “failed as ‘a man of the world’” because he could not stop talking of serious things; then their marriage, their first son, little money, and all the subsequent tests and hardships they had to endure: the barrage of incoming bills without the money to meet them. “They were the necklace always twisting round your lovely neck.” He had no gift for finding a ready market for his plays while the English ignored him because of his “lamentable political judgments”. How she stood up to it was a mystery to him, especially when “at meal times, a silent and sullen da sat like a frozen image at the table”. She might have tried to break the tension, but “Many a time a gentle remark … was ignored, or a tender overture of affection was banished into a deeper silence.”

  Here he broke off, but finished the letter on his return to the flat in Torquay: “Wherever you are, Eileen darling, is home to me.” Without her the “great playwright” was “but a whimpering figure in a darkened doorway. The stalwart of the O’Casey home is not Sean, but Eileen.”