Sean O'Casey: A Life

by O'Connor, Garry

  A few weeks after completing this, on the morning of 17 September 1964, his nose began to bleed profusely. Eileen rushed about gathering towels and wiping up the mess. She drove him at once to the doctor’s surgery where the bleeding was plugged. Later, when he was resting at home, he expressed regret at having won her away from Ephraim: “I was selfish to take you away from him; you should have stayed with him for the security.” She made him an omelette — he liked omelettes — but as soon as he began to eat, the bleeding came on again. He told her what to do with the children, pointing out dangers, telling her to sell this and that. Eileen felt that he was suffering a premonition of death.

  At two a.m. on 18 September he had a thrombosis and suffered agony from a pain in his side. They drove him a little later to hospital, but on arrival found that he had died peacefully on the way. “I don’t believe I can settle anywhere,” he had told a friend some years earlier: “Probably I won’t even be able to settle serenely in Heaven if I get there.”[785]

  Eileen accepted his death with calm resignation, grateful that he had been spared both incapacity and pain. After a ten-minute Anglican service at Torquay crematorium his body, in a light oak coffin decked in family tokens of red roses, was committed to the fire. His ashes would go, as he wished, to be scattered on the same ground as those of Niall, between the Shelley and Tennyson rose beds at Golders Green.

  Epilogue — Saint or Gunman?

  I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active and sometimes

  a terrifying experience. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song

  in the other.[786]

  O’Casey believed in life before literature and gave politics more importance than aesthetics. He was a devoted father and husband, and had had the good fortune to marry a woman who possessed, in her way, gifts as strong as his own: “The best thing that ever happened to Sean O’Casey,” Brooks Atkinson wrote, “was to meet Eileen O’Casey.”[787]

  With equal generosity, given the way he and O’Casey had quarrelled, Lennox Robinson told Frank O’Connor one day when they were arguing over the value of the early O’Casey plays versus the late — a popular pastime of the Irish literati: “I don’t mind how many bad plays Sean writes for the rest of his life. Whatever they may be like they will be the plays of a happy man.”[788] This sudden outburst remained in O’Connor’s memory, he said, not only because of its profound relevance to O’Casey, but because it was a remark made by a man who would never himself be happy again.

  For all his waywardness O’Casey was a genuine seeker after goodness. He had overcome his personal inclinations towards activism, and some of his best work owes everything to the disillusionment he suffered, the depth of which revealed the enormity of his hopes for mankind and for himself. He never saw life in terms of Yeats’s “Perfection of the life, or of the work”. His pursuit was of the ordinary: the humble life, well-lived, without exploiting others, with decent civilised pleasures, nineteenth-century pastoral joys — and a dash of twentieth-century television sport and nature programmes thrown in. He was an Arcadian who liked doing the washing up:

  I know what a housewife has to face & has to do … I did chores before I became ill, to help my wife; & am beginning again — washing up, peeling spuds, carrying down the garbage, etc. It is partly good for us, for it is routine, & this checks the excitement of the mind, & gives us rest. We cannot always suffer ecstasy.[789]

  Daily life for him was as sacramental as for the poorest of housewives or seminarists, and he often compared himself to the modest early nineteenth-century poet and country clergyman, George Crabbe.

  “To me one thing alone is certain,” he had written to Harold Macmillan in 1951; “we are all one in the tremendous and glorious bond of humanity. Jew, Gentile, bond and free, Tory and Communist can never break away from this grand bond.”[790] O’Casey last saw his publisher when he visited Birch Grove in 1939, but kept in touch for the rest of his life, mostly through Eileen. Harold Macmillan, who held that publishers “exist to satisfy their authors”, had been an ideal choice: Edith Londonderry had introduced the two men socially just after Macmillans had published The Plough and the Stars. Harold had spoken to O’Casey, as he said in a letter, in two voices: “first as your friend and secondly as a publisher”. It could be argued that the older man had a strong influence on the younger, giving him a relationship with that early Irish period which he much valued, and certainly Macmillan tried, unsuccessfully, to influence O’Casey to drop, in his writing, “criticism in reply to criticisms of your own work”.

  Macmillan’s relationship with Eileen, too, had been a close one. Eileen made no bones about the fact that she “took a shine to Harold” the first time she saw him. His loyalty to his wife, Lady Dorothy, was absolute, but in 1929 she became involved with a close colleague of his, Robert Boothby — they too met at a Londonderry reception in Park Lane — by whom it was thought she had a child, Sarah, born in 1930. This caused great pain to Macmillan: as Edith Londonderry said at the time, “Harold is most upset. He spends most of his time in church. I don’t think that’s a good idea, do you?” Many years later, at dinner after a remembrance service at an Oxford college, he commented, rather unexpectedly, to those present on how good it had been at the service to hear the Ten Commandments read out in full: “Especially the seventh, because of course we’ve all had experience of it.”

  He did not, however, run to other women for consolation. But as time went on one of his consistent consolations was Eileen. Their relationship, a fragile and precious one, grew in strength so that over the years an understanding and affection built up between the pair which both reckoned to be unique.

  Daniel Macmillan, who was chairman of Macmillan Holdings, and dealt with the financial side of the firm’s relations with O’Casey, behaved with enormous generosity towards the family, guaranteeing Eileen’s bank loans and suggesting solutions to their money problems until O’Casey’s royalties made them more than comfortable. “Dan,” said Eileen, “stood by me all the time.” At one time Daniel wanted to propose O’Casey for a Civil List pension, but Eileen refused, knowing Sean would have none of it.

  After the death of both their spouses — Lady Dorothy died in 1966 — Harold Macmillan and Eileen saw much of one another, and there were rumours that the two might marry. Eileen was the first woman whom Macmillan asked to sit in Lady Dorothy’s place at table in Birch Grove; he also took her out frequently to dine at Buck’s Club. When her memoir of O’Casey, Sean, was published in 1971, Macmillan gave a big party for her at the home of his grandson Alexander. When Macmillan was offered a peerage in 1984, and was in a quandary over whether to accept, Eileen was present at dinner at Birch Grove when Lord Home tried to persuade him to take it. Harold said to her, “What do you think?” and she told him, to the dismay of the others present, “I think it’s better just to remain Mr Macmillan because peers are ten a penny.” O’Casey would have been even more scathing: “Now it’s Lord Willis,” he had commented on Ted Willis’s elevation in 1964, “wearing his ermine robes so that he can look like the rest of ’em. How can any self-respecting Socialist dress himself like that to parade about in a monkey-house?”[791]

  Eileen, without benefit of, as she herself admitted, “any political brain”, satisfied a different side of Macmillan’s nature. Both lonely, they were able to sit together for hours and be at ease: “melt into one another”, in Eileen’s words. Harold was not a demonstrative man, a perfunctory kiss was all he showed of his feelings, but there was great warmth in his personality. He once outlined to her his dream of living in a village in Scotland he knew well and of joining the old boys who stood together against the sea wall, quoting their own bards and swapping humorous stories till the local pub opened. “I think that would be the perfect life,” he told her.

  But when Eileen, by her own account, came to think seriously of becoming mistress of Birch Grove she knew she could never do it, and evaded the offer as gently and as indirectly as it had been broached. She
noted, on Macmillan’s part, a slight, if only temporary, cooling. But their affection continued as before, as “the best kind of love, an unfulfilled one”.

  As Macmillan grew into his late eighties Eileen was struck by his many affinities with O’Casey. He visited her at her ground-floor flat in Portland Place (“Don’t go back to Ireland, go to Paris or London”, was one of the last things Sean had told Eileen), delighted to find it so comfortable. They talked of the past, and she would hum or sing to him the old music-hall songs: he regretted never having got to see Me and My Girl. He told her that once when at Eton he had time off to visit his dentist but afterwards had gone with some friends to see Marie Lloyd, staying out late, for which he had been reprimanded on his return to college. The punishment was worth it.

  Once when he was very ill he called her to his bedside in the nursing home and explained how bits of shot from his First World War wounds had remained in his system, causing trouble from time to time. Later, at home again, with his sight badly failing, he remarked that he couldn’t really see the furniture but still had a vague idea of where everything was. Like O’Casey he would pick up a book, turn it lovingly from side to side, open it and bring it very close to his face to peer into its contents.

  She saw him last a fortnight before he died, at lunch at the Carlton Club; he was very frail, and had to be brought to the table in a wheelchair. He was worried because he had just fallen out of his chair and feared, not that he would break a limb, but that he might have done something to his head. He told her how weary his day was and that he missed not being able to read: “It’s amazing how much I sleep,” he said. But there was still the customary wit and fire. “What do you think about Reagan?” he asked Eileen, who replied, “I think he’s gaga.” “Yes,” he rejoined, “but gaga in a very elaborate manner.” Eileen told him she was writing about Shaw. “Why are you writing about him?” he said with palpable displeasure. His man arrived to wheel him off and they said goodbye for the last time.

  *

  During the last year of O’Casey’s life and at the prompting of two American friends, Robert Graff of NBC and Robert Emmett Ginna, a Life Magazine executive, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the screen rights to the first three volumes of the autobiographies for the film Young Cassidy. O’Casey earned £4,000 from the sale. Graff and Ginna were to co-produce and John Ford to direct. The English playwright John Whiting was commissioned to find, as Graff put it, “25 episodes of a true-to-life picture of Sean O’Casey”. Whiting was considered a terse and literate writer with an eye for tight scene construction. O’Casey did not like his script and said so, but was ignored; Whiting died before shooting began.

  Sean Connery, attracted by the photograph of O’Casey aged thirty and with his moustache, had almost said yes to playing “Johnny”, but withdrew. Rod Taylor was cast finally as the playwright. O’Casey would have preferred Donal Donnelly, advice which was also rejected.

  The million-dollar film was shot in Dublin in 1964-5 and released in 1965. John Ford, who had directed the disappointing Hollywood version of The Plough and the Stars in 1935, spent thousands of dollars dismantling aerials from the rooftops of old Dublin. The sixty-nine-year-old Ford, who had always wanted to make the O’Casey story, wept with nostalgia at being back in Dublin. He set up camp in the Shelbourne Hotel, started drinking heavily, stayed up all night, held levees, and finally collapsed, after shooting only a few scenes of the film, with viral pneumonia. His doctor was flown in from Los Angeles, and Ford was taken by private plane to London, and from there back to the USA. Jack Cardiff directed in his place.

  As “Johnny”, Rod Taylor, like some wild backwoodsman, fought all and sundry, kissed the girls and made them cry; but nowhere visible in his performance was the ascetic, self-mocking O’Casey. Michael Mullen was much upgraded from his actual importance in O’Casey’s life by being made into his best friend, as well as chorus figure. Taylor apart, there were superb performances in minor roles, among them Jack MacGowran as Archie (Isaac), Maggie Smith as a bookshop assistant (an episode not even in the autobiographies) and Sian Phillips as an extraordinary, red-headed version of Bella. Flora Robson played Susan Casey. Far from being cramped in Abercorn Road the Caseys looked as if they were living in a decayed palazzo.

  Michael Redgrave as the monocled Yeats, and Edith Evans impersonating a Lady Gregory as seen in the great Jack Yeats portrait, gave wonderful performances in these minor roles. As O’Casey’s one-night stand from the anti-Boer War demonstration, Julie Christie supplied a revealing foretaste of roles she would play in future, more permissive films. At two a.m. one morning during shooting, writhing in pain, she was rushed to St Michael’s Hospital, Dun Laoghaire, and hurriedly operated on for appendicitis: “Clean your hands and make an invisible incision,” her companion told the staff.

  *

  O’Casey wrote thousands of letters, and towards the end the writing of these had become his most pressing daily task. The American scholar, David Krause, of Brown University, who visited him in Devon in the last years of his life, subsequently collected more than 3,000 letters which he sorted, in some cases selected from, dated, annotated, and assembled in three volumes of 1,000 pages each. Volumes I and II were published in 1975 and 1980 respectively; Volume III is as yet unpublished.

  O’Casey and Krause discussed many aspects of his life and literary output, about which Krause asked him detailed questions. His moods, said the American, were “often mixed, and he could be an outraged comedian, a gentle genius, an insecure rebel”.[792] Sometimes, said Krause, there was a “craggy grandeur in his aquiline profile which … invested him with the magisterial dignity of a Renaissance Cardinal painted by El Greco, especially when he complemented his perennial red beanie by wearing his blood-red robe on chilly days”. When Krause taxed him with the extremes of his nature he replied: “Tact? Polite submission, that’s what tact really is, and it’s something I’ve never learned … The first thing a fella has to do if he wants to accomplish anything of value is to be tactless.” And then, later in their talk, “Christ was a tactless communist, God help him.” O’Casey’s epistolatory output increased rather than diminished towards the end: a “bloody big cargo” he called it on the telephone to Krause.

  “They’re very dull,” said Eileen about the first two volumes: “I’m afraid I’ve never read them through. I said to Breon once, come on, we’d better read Sean’s letters … but we couldn’t manage them, Breon no more than me!”

  O’Casey’s last testament as a playwright is an article entitled “The Bald Primaqueera”, which he had completed about three weeks before his death. This turbulent outburst lashes the Freudians of the theatre, from Antonin Artaud through Eugène Ionesco to Joe Orton, the “dare-devil Horrorhawks of the theatre of murder, rape, and cruelty … arm in arm with the theatre of the Absurd”.[793] What he hates about these playwrights is their inability to love and cherish mankind: “The present literary group … seem to revel in the rending of all men, mentally and physically. They get sport out of it all.” He attacks David Rudkin’s Afore Night Comes for showing farm workers as “ignorant, stupid, and given to ferocity”; Harold Pinter is contemptuous of life, of “a larger part of the loveliness around him”; as for Orton’s “basilisk pot of sexual distortions”, it is the latest example of the theatre’s sour and venomous condition of mind, the “loutish lust of Primaqueera”.

  Until his final days O’Casey the gunman — or what George Russell had called the annihilator, Beckett the dynamiter — kept Ireland firmly in his line of sight. Lorraine Beaver, his grand-niece, had started writing to him in 1962 when she was eighteen, telling him that he should lift the embargo on the performance of his plays at the Abbey. “What a bold and impudent letter to send to a world-famous writer!” he addressed her, going on, “There is no Abbey Theatre, young lady. That theatre died when the poet Yeats and the poet Fred Higgins died …”[794] In one of his last letters to Bella’s grand-daughter he told her that he was never homesick and did not miss Ire
land, but added, in the ex-husband’s tone: “She will have to make herself more attractive if she wishes to keep her people attached to her. If she is content to remain slovenly and shy, her people will continue to flee from her.”

  But after his death, when that flood of recrimination suddenly ceased, the writer and folklorist Catherine Rynne described the silence: “Nobody is scanning the papers now. No aged prophet in Devon is bothering about us any more. Loving us more than hating us through a lifetime of neglect and derision. There’s no one to look out for us now. Forgive us, O’Casey.”[795]

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  Notes

  List of Abbreviations

  PRINCIPAL SOURCES CITED

  By Sean O’Casey:

  A Autobiographies, 2 vols. [I: I Knock at the Door, Pictures in the Hallway, Drums under the Windows; II: Inishfallen Fare Thee Well, Rose and Crown, Sunset and Evening Star] (London: Macmillan, repr. 1963)

  L Letters, ed. David Krause, 2 vols. [I: 1910-41 (London: Cassell, 1975); II: 1942-1954 (New York: Macmillan, 1980)] Vol. III: 1955-l964, in preparation

  FIP Five Irish Plays [The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, The End of the Beginning, A Pound on Demand] (London: Macmillan, 1935)

  CP The Complete Plays, 5 vols. [I: Five Irish Plays (see above); II: The Silver Tassie, Within the Gates, The Star Turns Red; III: Purple Dust, Red Roses for Me, Hall of Healing; IV: Oak Leaves and Lavender, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, Bedtime Story, Time to Go; V: The Bishop’s Bonfire, The Drums of Father Ned, Behind the Green Curtains, Figuro in the Night, The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe, The Harvest Festival, Kathleen Listens In, Nannie’s Night Out] (London: Macmillan, 1984)