Sean O'Casey: Writer at Work - a Biography [1 ed.] 9780773586154, 9780773528895

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Sean O'Casey Writer at Work A Biography

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Sean O'Casey Writer at Work A Biography

Christopher Murray

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • Ithaca

© Christopher Murray 2004 ISBN 0-7735-2889-X Legal deposit fourth quarter 2004 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Published in the EU by Gill & Macmillan Ltd The paper used in this book comes from the wood pulp of managed forests. For every tree felled, at least one tree is planted, thereby renewing natural resources. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Murray, Christopher Sean O'Casey : writer at work : a biography / Christopher Murray. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-2889-X 1. O'Casey, Sean, 1880-1964. 2. Dramatists, Irish-20th centuryBiography. I. Title. PR6029.C33Z773 2004

822'.912

C2004-904113-4

For David Krause In framing an artist, art hath thus decreed: To make some good, but others to exceed; And you are her labour'd scholar. - Pericles 2.3.15-17

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Contents

List of illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

PRECONCEPTION(S)

1

PART 1 FIRST THINGS

9

1 Beginnings

11

2 Seeing Things

30

3 'Give Me That Old Style Religion!'

48

4 To Make Eternal Silence Speak'

61

5 Under Which Flag?

80

PART 2 THE DUBLIN PLAYS

99

6 Love Among the Ruins

101

7 Going Through the Mill

119

8 Telling It Like It Is

137

9 'I Banish You!'

159

PART 3 LONDON - NEW YORK - LONDON

181

10 London Lights and The Silver Tassie

183

11 Trapped Inside the Gates?

210

12 'Beside the Golden Door'

228

PART 4 TOUGHING IT OUT IN DEVON

253

13 O'Casey's Good War

255

14 Oak Leaves and Lavender

282

15 Cock-a-Doodle Dandy

304

16 The Road to Torquay

322

PART 5 LAST THINGS

345

17 The Writer's Not for Burning

347

18 A Death in the Family

371

19 The Drums of Archbishop McQuaid

386

20 Something of a Renaissance

405

21 Talking to God

422

AFTERLIFE

440

List of Abbreviations

451

Notes

452

Selected Bibliography

542

Index

553

List of Illustrations Between pages 176 and 177 1. Watercolour by John Casey, 1898 2. Headquarters of Irish Church Missions, where Michael Casey worked, Townsend Street, Dublin 3. Remains of baptismal font, St Mary's church, Dublin, where SOC was baptised 4. 9 Innisfallen Parade, where the Caseys lived 1882-88 5. Sketch on SLOT Pipers' Club notepaper by 'JKC' (SOC), secretary, 1911 6. 1911 census form for the Casey family, filled in by SOC in Irish 7. Title page, SOC's Songs of the Wren, 1918 8. Maire Keating, c. 1920 9. Maire Keating's transcription of a poem to her by SOC 10. Frank Cahill, SOC's early mentor 11. Plaque at St Laurence O'Toole's National School, Seville Place 12. Drawing by Mick Casey of a kestrel with his and SOC's two nieces 13. View from the Casey flat, 18 Abercorn Road, showing St Barnabas's church 14. 'Notice to Quit' issued to SOC while rooming with Michael Mullen in 1920 15. Lennox Robinson, by William Rothenstein, c. 1920 16. Caricature of W.B. Yeats by 'Mac' (Isa McNee), 1923 17. Bronze bust of Jim Larkin by Mina Carney, c. 1930 18. Promptbook of The Plough and the Stars showing SOC's early revisions, 1925-26 19. Pencil drawing of SOC, first portrait of him, by Patrick Tuohy, 1926 20. First production of the Plough, Abbey Theatre, February 1926 21. Sketch by SOC for set in act 2, The Silver Tassie, 1928-29 22. Sketch by SOC of Breon at play in Chalfont-St-Giles, c. 1933 23. Part of playbill for Within the Gates, New York, 1934 Between pages 336 and 337 24. Eileen O'Casey, by Evan Walters 25. George Jean Nathan and Eugene O'Neill 26. Portrait by Henry Kernoff which SOC refused to sit for, done from memory 27. Eddie Byrne as Brennan o' the Moor, in Red Roses for Me, Embassy Theatre, London, 1946

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28. 'Abbey Incident' over poor production standards in the Plough at the Abbey in 1947 29. Breon, Niall, Eileen, Shivaun and Sean in Totnes, c. 1948 30. Ernest Blythe 31. Letter from Joan Littlewood to SOC, 1949, asking for Cock-a-Doodle Dandy 32. Scene 2, first production of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, People's Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1949 33. SOC at work, 1950 34. Siobhan McKenna and SOC at rehearsal of Purple Dust, London, 1953 35. Portrait by Breon O'Casey of SOC after his illness in 1956 36. Premiere of The Bishop's Bonfire, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, 1955 37. Set design by Michael O'Herlihy, for act 1, The Bishop's Bonfire, 1955 38. Scenic design by Lester Polakov for Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, New York, 1958 39. Gabriel Fallon 40. Archbishop John Charles McQuaid 41. Programme cover for SOC Festival at Bernard Miles's Mermaid Theatre, London, 1962 42. David Krause and SOC, Torquay, c. 1960 43. Ernest Blythe, Fr Edward Daly and Brian Friel at the Abbey production of Juno in Derry, 1 November 1964 44. The Silver Tassie, Abbey Theatre, 1972, act 4 45. Programme for first production of Red Roses for Me, Abbey Theatre, 1967, dir. Tomas Mac Anna 46. Red Roses for Me, Abbey Theatre, 1980 (SOC centenary), the 'statue' scene, act 2 47. Act 2 of the Plough, 1964, which toured to the World Theatre season, London,1964 48. 'Villa Rosa' in Torquay, where the O'Caseys lived in the top-floor flat, 1954-64

Acknowledgements I here are a lot of people to whom I am indebted for help during the

T

writing of this book. Without the typing skills of Brian Prunty I can truly say it would not have got into print. Colleagues and friends rallied around with information and suggestions, and I would mention in particular John Barrett, John Brannigan, Kevin Brophy, Terence Brown, Fergus D'Arcy, John Devitt, Terence Dolan, Brian Donnelly, Nicky Grene, Tom Kilroy, Joseph Long, Michael McEvilly, James Murphy, Tony Roche and Norman White. Edward L. Shaughnessy, the O'Neill scholar, was most generous with his comments on O'Neill and O'Casey. Colin Smythe, who as a publisher has done so much for Irish studies, helped me trace O'Casey's home in Chalfont-St-Giles and supplied manuscript material for which I am very grateful. Richard Cave invited me to his home in Richmond to facilitate my work at the Public Record Office and in Basingstoke and allowed me to read in advance his entry on O'Casey for the New Oxford DNB. Ann Saddlemyer has long been an inspiration as well as a constant source of strength as friend, scholar, wonderful lecturer and watcher-out for one's best interests. I have been fortunate to have such friends. What I may call O'Caseyans deserve acknowledgement as a group. They are each marked by a sense of generosity instilled by a study of O'Casey's work. They have all answered my queries and helped in whatever ways they could. They are all special people: Ronald Ayling, Saros Cowasjee, Robert Emmett Ginna, Robert D. Graff, Peter Harris, Elizabeth Hazelhurst, Michael Kenneally Heinz Kosok, Ben Levitas, Robert G. Lowery, Sean McCann, Edward H. Mikhail, Michelle Paull and Katharine Worth. Martin Margulies gave me both help and friendship that I value very much, and David Krause, to whom this book is dedicated, while insisting that I must go my own way has always been on hand to encourage, offer advice, share his O'Casey materials and, God be praised, argue with me. I owe him an enormous debt. In a category of its own is the O'Casey family, Breon and Shivaun, and their children and grandchildren. I could not begin to describe their kindness and support while I was writing this book. Breon and Shivaun have been enormously helpful and have done everything to make my work easier although they cannot be blamed for any faults in the book. As curator of the estate after Eileen died in 1995 Shivaun put herself out to facilitate access to the O'Casey materials, manuscripts and books in her care.There is also the Beaver side of the family, into which SOC's sister Bella married, and I want to thank its representative Denis Horgan in particular for great kindness shown. Friends in IASIL (the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures) have provided encouragement when most needed, and I am

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grateful to Csilla Bertha and Donald Morse, to Carla de Petris, Barbara Brown, Pat Burke, Eamonn Cantwell, Albert De Giacomo, John Harrington, Maria Kurdi, Helen Lojek, Lucy McDiarmid, Mary Shine Thompson and Stanley Weintraub for their constant support. Marton Mesterhazi, a producer with Hungarian Radio in Budapest, went to great pains to provide me with a synopsis in English of his book on the history of O'Casey's reception in Hungary and has been a wise commentator. Joan Fitzgerald Dean was most generous in giving time to secure copies of material for me at the University of Kansas and has always been helpful. Other special people whose advice meant a lot to me and who helped with great kindness include Ben Barnes, Martin Drury, Christopher Fitz-Simon, Maurice and Maire Harmon, playwright Thomas Kilroy, the actor Pat Laffan, former Abbey actress Doreen Madden, Fred O'Donovan and Tomas Mac Anna, who probably knows more about O'Casey in production than anyone else living. Brian Friel was always sympathetic and kindly gave me copies of correspondence between O'Casey and Tyrone Guthrie. Jack Reading, Society for Theatre Research (London), always answered my queries from his fund of personal experience. Peggy Paterson, late of Faber and Faber, got me going on a short book on O'Casey which sharpened my wits for the big one. I want to mention here among the special people students and graduate students whose own work and whose enthusiasm for the subject of Irish drama have helped and encouraged me more than they could know, in particular Cathy Leeney, Terry McDonald, Mike Wilcock, Ciara O'Farrell, Eamonn Jordan, Jacinta Prunty, Richard Hayes and Cecelia Zeiss: all my friends at this stage. The late Dr Gearoid Crookes, also a former student, helped generously on ophthalmic questions. There are many other people who have helped a lot out of sheer kindness and/or out of regard for O'Casey. A list is less than adequate to thank these people in, but I cannot let the occasion go without recording my indebtedness to the following: Pauline Allen; the writer John Arden; William Bennett, late of the Totnes Museum, Devon; Kathleen Barrington (Abbey Theatre); Anna Broad; Mrs Sue Bethell, of Totnes, who allowed me access to Tingrith', where the O'Casey family lived for over fifteen years; the playwright Edward Bond; Conor Brady, former editor, Irish Times] the actress Catherine Byrne, who lent me valuable material inherited from her father, the actor Eddie Byrne, whom O'Casey greatly admired; Jack Byrne (the playwright 'Hugh Leonard'); Colin Chambers who helped with information on Unity Theatre; Steve Cleary, Sound Archives, British Library; Tim Pat Coogan; Scott Cummings (Boston College); Bernard Curson (Chalfont-St-Giles); Sinead Cusack, daughter of that great O'Casey actor Cyril; the labour historian Fergus D'Arcy (UCD); Bishop Edward Daly; Margaret Delaney (formerly of the AVC in UCD) who gave me great help early on with illustrations; Lorcan Doherty of the Derry Journal; Sean Donnelly (Pipers' Club); Brother Donal, C.B.S., Seville Place; Father Maurice Dooley, P.P., Loughmore; director Joe Dowling; Noeline Dowling; broadcaster and historian Myles Dungan; Frank Dunlop (the director who resurrected The Bishop's Bonfire at the Mermaid Theatre in 1961); Dr Madeline Epstein (Devon), friend

Acknowledgements

xiii

of the O'Casey family; film historian Scott Eyman; Mairead Fleming, ex N.T., former colleague of Maire Keating; Joe and Gabrielle Fallon and Anne Nolan, for information on their father Gabriel Fallon and for permission to quote from his writings; Professor Muiris X. Fitzgerald (Faculty of Medicine, UCD), for information on bronchitis and tuberculosis; Dan Ford, grandson of the film director; the historian R.F. Foster; Pamela and George French, who let me in to see 'Hillcrest', once O'Casey's home in Chalfont-St-Giles and now theirs; historian Tom Garvin; Patricia Goff; John 'Paddy' Grant, of Littlehampston, near Totnes; Lesley Grayburn and the Grayburn family; Bill Harpur (RTE); Alan Harrison (UCD); Rev. Thomas Haskin, one-time rector of StJohn Baptist Church, Clontarf; Tom Hayes, maker with Jim O'Connor of that wonderful piece of film in which O'Casey reminisces with Barry Fitzgerald, Cradle of Genius', Joe Head, reporter with the Totnes Times; Susan Hedigan of the Office for Funded Research at UCD for her big heart and timely encouragement; Ruairi Henderson for information on his father Frank, a friend of O'Casey; Virginia Hyvarinen, for her generous help with material on Jack Carney; Sean Hogan, Irish Times library; Micheal Johnston, for material on his parents Shelah Richards and Denis Johnston; Mrs C. Honeywill, Totnes; Maureen Hurley, formerly of RTE and the Irish Theatre Archive; Colbert Kearney (UCC); Larry Kearns, a true 'Dub' and an expert on drama; Tom Kenny of Kenny's Books (Galway), friend and encourager; Cecil Kilpatrick, archivist of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland; Joe Langtry for his help with records of Mount Jerome Cemetery; the artist Louis le Brocquy for information on Red Roses for Me in 1943; Ian Lee, Radio Archives, RTE; the director Louis Lentin; Mrs Philippa A. Lloyd, formerly of Totnes; the Lady Mairi Londonderry, Newtownards; Pauline McCulloch, once a pupil of Maire Keating in Seville Place N.S.; Patricia McHugh, for material her late husband Roger preserved on the 'Abbey Incident' of 1947; the actor T.P. McKenna; Joe McMinn (University of Ulster); Robert Mahony (Catholic University of America); Bob Mann, curator, Guildhall, Totnes; Sean Mac Mathuna, Ard-Runai, Conradh na Gaeilge; historian Arthur Mitchell; Theo Mortimer; Donal Nevin, who has been very helpful with his immense knowledge of labour history; Kevin O'Byrne, Saor-Ollscoil na hEireann, a fount of information on O'Casey and the East Wall area; Colman O'Carroll, who showed me the set of bagpipes which might once have been O'Casey's; historian Emmet O'Connor (Magee College); Fred O'Donovan; Kevin O'Doherty; Manus O'Riordan of SIPTU, generous with his own research; the historian Eunan O'Halpin (TCD); Philip Ormond; James Pethica; Richard Pine; Philip Roberts (Leeds); Sister Kevin Russell, Holy Cross Convent, Chalfont-St-Peter; the actress Phyllis Ryan; Linzi Simpson, architect, who showed me over St Mary's Church, Mary Street, where O'Casey was baptised and located the remains of the baptismal font; Mrs A. Shuttleworth, Totnes; Glenn Thompson, military historian; Philippa Thompson, South Hams Newspapers Ltd; Marcus Tyrell, friend of the late Niall O'Casey; Stephen Watt (Indiana); Yvonne Widger (Dartington) and the late Anne Yeats. Obviously, very many people in libraries have helped me enormously and supplied materials for which I am very appreciative. All the staff of the National

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Library of Ireland, whether in books or manuscripts, have helped me over the years, and I am very grateful to have found such kindness, courtesy and firstrate efficiency close to home, but I should like to single out Donall 6 Luanaigh, Noel Kissane, Gerard Lyne and Gerard Long in particular and to thank them for all they have done. Jenny Coyle, who catalogued the O'Casey Papers in 2002-03, was always obliging. I have worn out more than one Director of the NLI in my time, and I hope it will suffice if I name Brendan O'Donoghue as the Acting Director to whom I extend my heartfelt appreciation for the service I have received. Truly, without that service, this book could not have been written. I also wish to thank the librarians at the UCD library and the UCD Archive, naming in particular Sean Phillips, Norma Jessop, Monica Cullinan and Mairin Cassidy. At Earlsfort Terrace I want to thank Mary Riordan for help with research on the 1918 'flu epidemic. I want also to thank the photographic department at the UCD Audio-Visual Centre for all their help with the illustrations. Trinity College Library, which is a great national asset in being a UK copyright library, has been most hospitable over the years, and I would like to thank in particular Charles Benson, curator of Early English Books, and Dr Bernard Meehan, Keeper of Manuscripts. David Sheehy, archivist of the Dublin Diocesan Archives, helped me find my way through the Archbishop McQuaid Papers. Caitriona Crowe was very helpful at the National Archives; Sean Love, archivist of St Vincent's Hospital, Pauline Byrne, Faille Ireland librarian, and Mary Doherty, archivist of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland Library, gave information as needed. The Abbey Theatre archivist Mairead Delaney has provided a great deal of information and has always assured me of a welcome in using her collection; I should also like to thank Lucie McKeever and Orla Flanagan for many kindnesses. Other libraries which have been helpful include Pearse Street Public Library, Mercer's Hospital Library, Royal College of Surgeons, and the Allen Library, O'Connell Schools. The Irish Times library, though seriously impaired by a fire in 1950, has helped where it could. Pauline Duffy at the Garda Archives/Museum has been very helpful; likewise archivist Theresa Moriarty at the Labour History Museum, Beggar's Bush. Mary Clark, archivist for the Dublin Corporation and Irish Theatre Archive, has also invariably answered all queries. The Representative Church Body Library, Churchtown, has been of immense help and I should like to thank Dr Raymond Refausee for all his assistance. Rev. William Bridcott made available to me such records of the Irish Church Missions as now remain in Dublin, and helped with other sources. Kieran Hoare, archivist, NUI Galway, helped with queries over O'Casey manuscript sources. In Belfast, I should like to thank the Public Record Office, particularly the archivist A.M. McVeigh. The British Library has been a constant source for this book, and it is a pleasure to record my acknowledgements to Dr Kathryn Johnson and Dr Elizabeth James. At the London Theatre Museum Dr Janet Birkett has been a godsend, and I thank her most warmly for all her help. At the London Guildhall Library I should like to thank archivist Charlie Turpie, and at the Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke, I owe a great debt to archivists Robert Machesney and Alysoun Sanders. The Public Record Office, Kew, has been

A cknowledgemen ts

xv

helpful in answering queries and courteous in granting me a reader's ticket. I thank also the Marx Library for permission to work there. Martin Collins, archivist for People's Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, has been extraordinarily helpful with information, for which I am most grateful. Thanks go also to Dr Leslie Gordon, Special Collections, Robinson Library, University of Newcastle, to Yvonne Widger, Dartington Hall Trust Archive, and to the National Library of Wales for O'Casey's correspondence with Augustus John and permisssion to quote from it. Libraries in the United States of America hold much O'Casey manuscript materials. I am grateful to the curator of the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, for allowing me time to use that magnificent resource, and I wish to thank George Rodney Phillips, Stephen Crook and Philip Milito for making my time at the Berg so fruitful and enjoyable. I express my appreciation also to the John J. Burns Library, Boston College, for help and materials, and in particular to Dr Robert K. O'Neill and John Atteberry. I thank the Lilly Library, University of Indiana, for copies of manuscript materials, and a special word of appreciation to librarian Helena Walsh there. I am grateful too to the libraries of the University of Austin at Texas, University of California at Los Angeles, Cornell University, the Morris Library, University of Delaware, the library of New York University, the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas and the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, for providing me with materials from their Special Collections. I am grateful for help also from the library of the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, where the papers of O'Caseyan Saros Cowasjee are housed. I acknowledge the kindness of the estate of the late Harold Macmillan in allowing me to quote from his correspondence with O'Casey, to whom he was always supportive. Messrs Macmillan were O'Casey's life-long publishers. I am grateful to Palgrave/Macmillan for permission to quote from his published works and for permission to quote from the Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade, and the Variorum edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, ed. Kenneth Alspach. I wish to thank senator Michael Yeats for kindly allowing me to quote from his father's letters to O'Casey, including an unpublished letter from Yeats in 1935. Likewise I wish to thank Messrs Collier-Macmillan and the Catholic Press of America for permission to quote from O'Casey's Letters, ed. David Krause. Quotations from O'Casey's manuscript materials throughout and from Eileen O'Casey's letters are by kind permission of the Estate of Sean O'Casey, while quotations from Breon O'Casey's letters are by his kind permission. I am grateful to Faber and Faber for permission to quote from Samuel Beckett's Complete Dramatic Works, and the Shaw estate for permission to quote from the Complete Plays with Prefaces of George Bernard Shaw. I have to thank John Arden, Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker for permission to quote from correspondence. Also the Dartington Hall Trust Archive for permission to quote from the Elmhirsts' letters to O'Casey. I wish to acknowledge kind permission also from the following to publish illustrations: the Acting Director and Council of Trustees, National Library of Ireland; the Director, National Portrait Gallery, London; the Director and

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trustees of the National Gallery of Ireland; the Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork; the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Ireland; Brian Jackson, managing director, Abbey Theatre, and the board of directors; the curator and trustees, Berg Collection (New York Public Library); Michael J. O'Neill, librarian, Burns Library, Boston College; Dr C.J. Lane, permissions co-ordinator, Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library; David Sheehy, archivist, the Dublin Diocesan Archive; the director, National Archive; Seamus Helferty, director, UCD Archives; the Kilboy Estate; managing director, the People's Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne; Time-Life Inc. Also my thanks to the following individuals for illustrations provided: Pauline Allen, John Barrett, Catherine Byrne, Joe Fallon, Micheal Johnston, David Krause, Robert Mahony, Sean McCann, Martin Margulies, the O'Brien family, Theo Mortimer, Linzi Simpson, and Breon and Shivaun O'Casey. I wish also to acknowledge Moytura Press, Dublin, for permission to quote from Benedict Kiely's In a Harbour Green for one of the epigraphs. Every attempt has been made to trace the owners of copyright to seek permission to reproduce material and images and where this has not been possible I hope they will accept this acknowledgement as made in good faith. I am grateful to Professor Kevin B. Nowlan and the Committee of the School of Irish Studies Foundation for grants on two occasions which helped finance my research. I wish likewise to thank Dr Art Cosgrove, late president, and Professor Fergus D'Arcy, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, UCD, for a year's leave of absence under the President's Awards Scheme, which allowed me to finish the book, and to the Senate of the National University of Ireland for an award towards expenses. I wish to extend special thanks to Declan Kiberd for all his encouragement and for acting as supporter of my application for the President's Award. At Gill & Macmillan my special thanks go to Deirdre Rennison Kunz, Aoileann O'Donnell, Dearbhaile Curran, Cliona Lewis, and also to Helen Litton who did the index. My main indebtedness is to Fergal Tobin, a truly creative editor, whose faith in this book was from the outset so undeviating that after a time I too began to think maybe there was something in it. I hope he's right. Finally, I want to thank my wife Kathleen and our three children, Paul, Felicity and Chris, for support and understanding over the years in which I was pre-occupied with the making of this book. They know what it cost. I know what it cost them and appreciate the love that endured through it all. Christopher Murray Dublin July 2004

PRECONCEPTION (s)

i

am always struck when reading Antony and Cleopatra by a soaring passage in which Cleopatra, conscious of her audience, sees the dead Antony in mythic dimensions: His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck A sun and moon [...] His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear'd arm Crested the world: his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends: But when he meant to quail, and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, There was no winter in't: an autumn 'twas That grew the more by reaping [...] Think you there was, or might be such a man As this I dreamt of? (5.2.79-94)

With a shake of his head the worldly Dolabella answers, 'Gentle madam, no.' The hype of hagiography is just that: inflation which no sensible person, however sympathetic, can accept as real history. Yet Cleopatra's argument lets us see past the ordinary, rational view of greatness when she continues, 'But if there be, or ever were one such, / It's past the size of dreaming.' To imagine such an Antony would suggest the inadequacy of ordinary conceptions. Sean O'Casey was no Antony but there is a powerful sense in which ordinary conceptions of his life and work fall short of what he signifies. The present tense is warranted here before the 'life' itself begins because O'Casey has remained alive, especially for Dubliners, as commentator on living conditions. 'Just like O'Casey', or 'like a scene in O'Casey', are the sort of phrases still used as art and life merge to describe poor housing conditions in Dublin.1 A letter to the Irish Times on heroin addiction in the year 2000 contained the following observation: Coming out of the Gaiety on Saturday night after a poor Plough and the Stars, looking at young people spaced out of their minds, sitting in doorways begging for money for a meal or another fix, I wondered how Sean O'Casey would describe today's Dublin. In his plays he pointed out the futility of war.

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Sean O'Casey

Today he might write about the lost and forgotten generation that all can see but not enough care about.2 The forty years since the death of the author have allowed O'Casey's spirit to be realised more fully in people's consciousness and in Irish culture than was possible in his lifetime. Images on television of looting in Baghdad during the war in Iraq, April 2003, carried for some viewers reflections of O'Casey's representation of Dublin 1916, while for others President Bush should have been presented on St Patrick's Day with a copy of The Plough and the Stars and urged 'to have a look at the last act'.3 For decades before this, during the terrible conflict in the North of Ireland, only O'Casey's representations of urban guerrilla warfare seemed adequate commentary on a moral world turned upside down. O'Casey's presence, his humanistic deploring of waste and suffering, persisted as productions of the plays on stage and television, in Belfast, Dublin, London, flourished. A mythic biography might be envisaged from such a legacy. At the opposite pole from Shakespeare's mythmaking lies Brian Friel's comic but complex exploration of the difference between the circumstantial details of biography or social history accumulated by dull researchers and truly imaginative understanding. In Aristocrats (1979) there is an American historian rejoicing in the surname Hoffnung who fondly hopes to extract from the memory of a character like the gormless Casimir such details of those who visited Ballybeg Hall - from Daniel O'Connell to W.B. Yeats and beyond - as would allow him to construct a solid sociology of Ireland's catholic Big House. He is frustrated by poor Casimir's inability to discriminate picturesque imaginings from accurate memories. Another character, the somewhat cynical but clear-sighted Eamon, consoles Casimir when his fallaciousness is exposed with the remark that there are 'certain truths' that are beyond Hoffnung's 'kind of scrutiny'.4 Eamon goes beyond Casimir's procedures to recuperate a lost history when he fancifully inserts O'Casey into the Donegal landscape. He pretends that on a visit on one occasion O'Casey broke his spectacles,' plough term' after tennis balls' on the lawn where most of Aristocrats is set, 'and spoutin' about the workin'-man'.5 The story is deliberately calculated to insult Hoffnung ('What have you got against me, Eamon?') but it serves also to warn the biographer against the folly of the attempt to reach the truth solely by interviewing witnesses: subjectivity masquerading as objectivity. Eamon is a kind of Dolabella exploding a flowery obituary. In between the two possibilities of imagination or 'dream' of what was and the acceptance of the unknowability of history lies the question which one may call the question of O'Casey's teeth. Does biography concern itself with the sort of fact that in January 1929 O'Casey had all his teeth removed and struggled to master top and bottom dental plates? Seen as representative, as synecdoche, such a detail commits writer and reader to the totality of the subject's experience. To the degree that such details may be recovered one must begin to wonder what light they might throw on the man, the personality: it being pretty clear that they can throw precious little on the work, beyond cataloguing its interruption.

Preconception(s)

3

A lot depends, then, on what we think biography is, does, and is for. Ulick O'Connor is adamant that biography is not merely metaphorically portraiture. To O'Connor there are but two main types of biographer, the chronicler, like Richard Ellmann, and the biographer as artist, like Lytton Strachey: he favours the latter, and feels that Ellmann accumulates a mass of data without 'achieving a definitive portrait' (of Joyce or Wilde).6 One could argue the toss. O'Connor identifies the skills of the biographer with those of the novelist. He may be right. His own Brendan Behan was at least as large as life. Empathy is no doubt a prerequisite for any biography but so also is the provision of mundane facts. Perhaps a combination of both approaches would be best. Yet if a choice has to be made and a methodology disclosed I would opt for the objective, phenomenological approach as the least likely to lead one into distortion. A theatre historian tends to be suspicious of impressionistic responses. Accordingly, this biography favours the academic approach. O'Casey has yet to find his Cleopatra.

O'Casey was himself a biographer and autobiographer. One of his earliest publications was a brief account of the patriot Thomas Ashe. Yet he held no high opinion of biography in general: few think much about it; they are written, read, forgotten or used for looking up a date: unless it be the Life of the Fly or the Life of the Spider; which are always interesting, more so than most men; and, also, when you have read the life of one, you've read the life of all - a damned seductive reason; for if by reading one man's life, we should know all, then the Life of Man would be a great one; but damnably uninteresting.7 He did not distinguish biography from autobiography (or vice versa). He first conceived his own autobiography merely as 'incidents I had experienced'. A grand plan grew only as these incidents began to be published separately in the 1930s. At that point he introduced shape and design to the first volume and thereafter let art vie with history in his memoirs. It is a strange but characteristic concoction. He reserves the right, like a novelist, to invent where he feels inclined - dialogue, incident, situation - and to describe real-life characters - Douglas Hyde, Arthur Griffith, Jim Larkin - with the appraising artist's eye. In all of this, pursuit of truth is subjective. It cannot provide a model for O'Casey's own biographer, who would be cast in the role of the unfortunate Hoffnung in Friel's drama. What becomes apparent early on to the prospective biographer of O'Casey is the complexity of his gifts and the nice self-adjustment of his artistic manoeuvres. Yet as soon as one begins to establish O'Casey's credentials as artist, for whom life is raw material ('Nothing in life is uninteresting to me' 8 ), one is faced with the inexorable consequence that much of O'Casey's life is, as it were, invention. The 'as it were' is the crux of the matter. O'Casey is sometimes accused of falsifying his slum origins and, by extension, of creating a

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Sean O'Casey

myth of deprivation around himself.9 One would have to say it is a matter of: no hunger, no artist. Of course O'Casey exaggerated; of course he invented. Even his date of birth he constantly gave as 1884 instead of 1880, later inventing a little story about that too. He maintained he was the last of thirteen children. It seems it was not true, but equally it seems he believed it. Was he totally uneducated? Did he teach himself to read at age fourteen? Sixteen? School records have been found which show reading proficiency at age eight. And so on. All of this makes O'Casey the fabulist more and not less interesting. It is all an aspect, perhaps, of a real sense of deprivation, a need to invent in order to compensate for laziness, failures to seize opportunities, poor choices made. There was poverty in the O'Casey household after his father died when the boy was six but it was the poverty of the spoiled, youngest child in the family. The inventor and word-spinner grew out of these difficult conditions. Where did the gift for invention come from? In recent times a renewed debate has arisen on whether ability is natural, i.e. genetic, or socially supplied. In The Blank Slate the American neuroscientist Steven Pinker, while attempting to counter social Darwinism, elevates the brain itself as the ground of all development: 'every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely [sic] on physiological events in the tissues of the brain.' The self, even, is just another network of brain systems. In short, 'our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning.' Contrary to the tabula rasa or 'blank slate' notion of human growth, Pinker believes that 'both personality and intelligence show few or no effects of children's particular home environments within their culture': it is the shared genes that count.10 Genetically, O'Casey must have owed a great deal to his father, a scholarly clerk with a book collection to be emulated by his observant youngest son. It is a pity we know so little of Michael Casey or his forebears. The same may be said of his wife, Susan Archer, O'Casey's mother. Somewhere between them lies the secret of O'Casey's genome, in the dark backward and abysm of time now, alas, documentarily irrecoverable. Once, having come across a William Casey, bishop of Limerick in the sixteenth century, I thought I might have found the missing link: a protean figure who switched from protestant to catholic and back again, he was sufficiently controversial to qualify as progenitor. But the trail went cold with the death of this Bishop Casey in February 1591.11 In some such figure lay the roots of O'Casey's fascination with Roman Catholic theology. Whatever about that, O'Casey felt a sense of mission in his genes: The one who feels within a great gift, artist or scientist, will bear almost any discomfort or pain, any hunger, any indignity, rather than let the gift go; [...] Each artist and scientist carries out what he "is meant to do" out of his own means, and not out of any impulse given by an outside supernatural prod; the urge comes from chromosome or gene, or both.12 Though his social origins predictably threw his status as artist into question at Coole, Lady Gregory's maid refused to believe such a shabby figure could be a great playwright13- O'Casey defied all expectations. His life exhibits the

Preconception(s)

5

triumph of will over circumstance. Although his early plays show the damaging effects of environment on the under-privileged he himself, without surrendering accent or dress code, overcame his handicaps. No blank slate he, to be inscribed by bourgeois conformism. His vast self-confidence as writer, however insecure the man, indicates the aristocracy of the creative mind.14 His place was among his artistic equals though his class, so belligerently adhered to, confined him.

This biography is subtitled 'Writer at Work'. There are several emphases here. Primarily, O'Casey was a writer; he had from the 1920s no other professional avocation. The work he did as a manual labourer from about the age of twenty to his early forties left him time to read and write and develop into the scribe he was often called on to be in his community. When he lost his job at the railway in 1911 and became involved with Jim Larkin and trade-union matters he was always the secretary of some committee, fund-raiser, organiser of social events. He served tirelessly and without pay to help the families impoverished by the 1913 lock-out. What he wrote at this time was often propaganda. What he wrote after his brief success as secretary of the Irish Citizen Army was popular verse and popular Irish history. One could call him a hack writer at this stage of his life but a writer nonetheless. He was determined to be an Abbey playwright and finally became one in 1923. He still worked as a casual labourer but admitted that laziness made this work more casual than it might have been. His heart was only in his writing. And this, in a nutshell, is the story of O'Casey's life. His life was to write, and he demoted the socio-political mission after 1916. Indeed, his son Breon remembers that at home O'Casey, in a definite gesture of demarcation, deliberately avoided work that had about it a tradesman's skill: I never saw him hammer home a nail, or saw a piece of wood, which is odd. He chopped fire wood, and washed up [dishes], and was an expert at packing parcels; but he never [...] mended a fuse, or [...] put up a shelf. It was almost as if by becoming a writer, his hands lost their other crafts. Indeed, he would dissuade my brother or me from playing the working man. Not because he thought it beneath us, but because he thought it above us.15 A second sense in which 'writer at work' is a useful emphasis is the warning in its subtext. There used to be a road sign which read, 'Danger: Men at Work'; the age of Roland Barthes has banished the language in favour of the icon. Within the triangular yellow we now see a male figure bent over a shovel. Somehow the image makes the man look vulnerable: we are to look out for his welfare as much as our own as we steer past. In the older dispensation that message was more menacing. In that context O'Casey was from the outset a writer to be feared. He was aggressive as well as satirical, and with his copious memory could always turn an opponent's words back upon him into the ditch. God help those who thought to patronise him on account of his overalls or the

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Sean O'Casey

dust on his boots! He wore his poverty as a badge of his working-class identity, while he quoted Shakespeare or Whitman or Shaw to the confounding of any who dared cross him. In later years in London, when he was a celebrity, interviewers and established authors alike approached with due caution. No doubt O'Casey exploited his reputation as a rough diamond, where he was actually both refined and fastidious in manner and habits, but the fierceness was nevertheless rooted in an impatience with the traffic passing while he was 'at work'. He had a Victorian sense of high seriousness about the nature of art, in spite of his comic gifts and love of a good laugh, which made him despise all those whose interests extended to light literature and drivel in disguise. He was doomed, accordingly, to be often in a rage at public taste and at those who, as critics, failed to discriminate in favour of high standards. Moreover, he groomed himself to be something of a traditional satirist, to run amok, like Pope two hundred years before him, and tilt at all he met. His book of essays aimed at the London critics, The Flying Wasp (1937), was very much in that vein. It made him feared accordingly. A final emphasis of 'writer at work' has to do with O'Casey's success, at work on reader, audience and world. Here he is something of a special case. As said already, he was a complex man, sometimes regarded as an enigma.16 Clearly, he would not, could not, fit the stereotypical role of untutored genius as readily available to him in London as in Dublin. To some degree he played along but the role rather bored and angered him than satisfied his vanity. It also confused and rendered him antisocial. We find him apologising to AJ. Leventhal thirty years after his London acclaim for refusing to have lunch with him in the 1920s: I was then bewildered and annoyed by the ballyhoo raised about me, because of JUNO and the fact that I was a tenement-house dweller. I hated the publicity - almost all of it humbug and false - and wanted to get away from as much of it as I could. Besides, I was damned ignorant then; just unaware of many things; but proud and resentful: I had a lot to learn. I have learned a lot, and I thank England for a good deal of it.17 There was, to be sure, some vanity: with which writer is there not? But with O'Casey it was more the offended pride, the arrogance of the disadvantaged man of talent who knows his own worth: Julien Sorel might be near the mark. In Dublin they just thought O'Casey had gotten a swelled head. It can be said that when O'Casey turned away from the style of his first successful plays in order to delve into expressionism he went his own way in defiance of public opinion. He was perceived as one kind of writer; he wanted to become another. Mary Manning, the Irish playwright and critic, has remarked: 'he had talent - great talent - but success came too late, too late for passion, too late for real happiness.'18 She knew Eileen well after Sean died, but she also knew O'Casey's work from the beginning and once met him in the Abbey greenroom. Her view has something to do with what Faulkner calls 'gnawing the true, bitter irremediable bone of all [ . . .] dismatchment with time, being born too soon or late'.19 O'Casey was forty-six when he reached

Preconception(s)

7

London and was lionised. He was far from sclerotic then, whatever about later in his long life. But it was comparatively late for a new writer. In Shaw's Major Barbara the labourer Peter Shirley is just that age, forty-six, perceived as 'an old pauper on the scrap heap'.20 O'Casey knew very well, as an ex-labouring man, that time was against him. Then came Yeats's devastating rejection of his next play, written in London, The Silver Tassie. The effect is still incalculable. He was being treated as a beginner.21 From this point on, how this writer would register being 'at work' on the world, not to mention on the Abbey, is a story fraught with all kinds of misery. But it is a story too of glory, of heroic endeavour. During the war years in Devon he literally did not have a shirt to his back. Indeed, O'Casey's life as writer, as chronicled in what follows, was in its own very unorthodox way what Nietzsche called 'the exemplary life': The exemplary life consists of love and humility; in a fullness of heart that does not exclude even the lowliest; in a formal repudiation of maintaining one's rights, of self-defense, of victory in the sense of personal triumph; in faith in blessedness here on earth, in spite of distress, opposition and death; [...] a very proud life beneath the will to a life of poverty and service.22 For all that it was a hard life, with few conventional benefits to show for it, it was nevertheless a fulfilled one. For O'Casey was never happier than when at work. Then he would sing.

This biography is greatly enabled and to a considerable measure justified by the availability of certain materials since Garry O'Connor's study was published in 1988. David Krause, in 1960 the first biographer, has added two more volumes of O'Casey's Letters providing, as the first two necessarily did, much useful detail. Following the death of Eileen O'Casey in 1995 her daughter Shivaun assumed curatorship of O'Casey's remaining papers and books. These were made available to me in her London and New York homes. Towards the end of his life O'Casey was so embittered by what he felt as Dublin's enmity towards him that he wanted none of his manuscripts to go to Irish libraries after his death. His widow honoured this wish, and sold the bulk of his papers to the New York Public Library (the Berg Collection) in the 1960s. But as time passed and the editor of his letters felt a growing concern over the future of his own collection he indicated around 1997 that it was perhaps time to bury old differences and deposit the papers at the National Library of Ireland (NLI), first allowing me time to work through them. Krause's decision was followed by Shivaun O'Casey's selling of the papers and books in her possession to the NLI.23 The acting director of the NLI at the time, Brendan O'Donoghue, deserves much credit for negotiating these acquisitions. A considerable amount of new letters and memorabilia has thereby come to light which modified and expanded what was already known about O'Casey. As a result, this biography is the fullest account to date of the life and works. It is a sad fact that wherever one looks in Dublin, the city which O'Casey

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Sean O'Casey

celebrated on the world stage as memorably as Joyce did in his prose works, there is such scant notice of his literary contribution as to amount to insult. The room where he wrote all three of the Dublin plays, Gunman, Juno and Plough, in a tenement house at 422 North Circular Road, is now derelict, a scornful image of neglect in a house named after O'Casey though still an apartment house. In 1964, the year of O'Casey's death, the house was designated by Dublin Corporation as too dangerous for O'Casey's old friend and fellow-tenant Jim Kavanagh to occupy: he was given notice to quit.24 It is now a listed house but O'Casey's room, though preserved, remains in abject condition. In the Abbey Theatre, where so many portraits grace the walls, there is no painting of O'Casey. Admittedly, in 1964, Blythe had offered to have one (Patrick Tuohy's drawing in the Municipal Gallery, which he could get on loan) in the new Abbey but O'Casey refused to allow it, calling the picture an 'atrocity'.25 His attitude towards honours was usually negative and this no doubt partly explains the civic neglect. It does not excuse it today. It is surely high time now to dissolve old resentments and to honour O'Casey in Dublin in a manner commensurate with his genius.

Parti First Things 'An' why do they bear it! Even with the best docthor in its bosom, what kind of a kip is this place? I deny that this is all that God has got to give us! Even with the best music of a church organ, what betther could we do here but dance a dance of death! I won't do it; I won't do it!' - O'Casey, Hall of Healing (1951)

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1 BEGINNINGS

he first business of any subject of a biography is to get himself born. Although one may make a joke of it, as Laurence Sterne made an excellent one of it over countless chapters of his anti-novel Tristram Shandy, it is usually no laughing matter. At best we have Beckett's dry account, 'birth was the death of him.'1 More conventionally, Dickens makes David Copperfield start off his own story with the chapter, 'I am born'. To get the 'hero' out of the womb and onto the page seems the obvious course, then, but a moment's reflection will reveal the pitfalls. A child is born into a specific time, place and complex set of circumstances. To get the child born who is father to the man destined to make a noise in the world is no great difficulty, in spite of Sterne's elaboration of the relativity principle involved. The difficulty lies in the who, when, where and into what world. O'Casey himself identifies the problem after his own fashion in the way he opens the first book of his autobiography, / Knock at the Door (1939), with a chapter headed 'A Child is Born':

T

In Dublin, sometime in the early 'eighties, on the last day of the month of March, a mother in child-pain clenched her teeth, dug her knees home into the bed, sweated and panted and grunted, became a tense living mass of agony and effort, groaned and pressed and groaned and pressed, and pressed a little boy out of her womb into a world where white horses and black horses and brown horses and white-and-black horses and brown-andwhite horses trotted tap-tap-tap tap-tap-tappety-tap over cobble stones, conceitedly, in front of landau, brougham or vis-a-vis; lumberingly in front of tramcar; pantingly and patiently in front of laden lorry, dray, or float; and gaily in front of the merry and irresponsible jaunting-car. (A, 1, 3) Notoriously, this sentence continues for more than a page longer, defining the world into which the future Sean O'Casey was born as Victorian, colonial, poetically old-fashioned, religiously fraught, artistically quaint, commercially hypocritical and intellectually reactionary. The child born will have to contend

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Sean O'Casey

with all of these forces, live through and in spite of their vigour, and assume 'the ambition of man'. The woman, the mother, for her part is accorded supreme courage for bringing this particular child, her last, into the world, and for naming him John in memory of the two dead infants already so named. The chapter goes back in time to the death of the second John, and ends with the inclusion of the father, who comforts the distraught mother and tells her patriarchally that they will have another child who shall be a boy, and shall be called John. The origins of this third John Casey were at once auspicious in that they marked a victory over ill fortune courageously won by his parents (shown as battling alone, without benefit of midwife, servant, relative or friend) and exciting, in that he was born into a moment poised on the cusp of massive social, technological, national and cultural change. Birth was not the death of him so much as the death of the imperialist age in Ireland. The autobiographies, however, are a form of self-dramatisation. They represent the older O'Casey's look back in a variety of moods at a time long gone: he was almost fifty years of age when he first began to tell his story. They become, then, part of the world itself, the literary world which it is the biographer's job to see as context rather than as fact. In a more complicated way, the autobiographies do the two jobs: they sometimes supply details of O'Casey's life otherwise unknowable and they (demonstrably) exaggerate, distort, transpose, make mistakes over and invent details and events which leave the biographer on a cleft stick. It is as if O'Casey slyly anticipated the biographer's central problem by mixing 'fact' with 'fiction' in order to create an arresting narrative, the terms crying out for quotation marks because in the end the borders of each approach the other in a mocking, metaphysical dance. His was in every sense a literary life. He fictionalised his beginnings. The details of O'Casey's parentage are scanty and derive largely from his own account. Such are the annals of the poor: short and simple. Michael Casey, Sean's father, was born £.1838, a farmer's son from County Limerick. In the autobiographies, O'Casey's mother says to Johnny: Tf your poor father was alive, he'd show from documented histhory that the Cassides [Caseys] stretched back farther than the year of one' (A, 1, 161). Where that documented history is nobody now knows. All we know for certain is that the grandfather's name was John: that ill-fated forename which the playwright was to be the third attempt by Michael and his wife Susan to honour. He must, indeed, have been a precious link. Or was his memory something to be expiated? Though there is no other evidence than O'Casey's own account, it seems that John Casey the elder, a Roman Catholic, had married a Protestant. 'All the children had been reared up in the thick of the catholic religion; but the catholic father had died when Michael was an infant, so his mother had taken the chance to bring up her last-born in the true protestant faith once for all and once for ever delivered to the saints' (A, 1, 26). It is likely her surname was Harding, given to O'Casey's eldest brother Mick as second name. When Michael senior was grown up his mother died and a bitter religious dispute broke out in the family, giving him 'a pretty tough time of it'. So, 'one fine day,

Beginnings

13

without as much as a goodbye or a kiss me arse to the rest of them,' Michael left for Dublin, 'and turned his back on the city of Limerick forever.' He was to marry Susan Archer in Dublin in 1863. The account, lively though it is, is maddeningly unconvincing. On Michael's marriage certificate, his father John's occupation is given as 'farmer'. Why then does O'Casey refer to the city of Limerick as Michael's point of departure? But more puzzling is the neat account of religious difference and its dramatic effect. If Michael was indeed born in 1838 (as his death certificate for September 1886, giving his age as forty-eight, indicates) then he would have been eight or nine years old at the outbreak of the Great Famine, when religious difference really became a matter of life and death in the Irish countryside. There was no obligation on parents in a mixed marriage at this time to bring up the children as catholics, as O'Casey's story implies: he is perhaps thinking of the Ne Temere decree which dates only from 1908. But even if John's unnamed widow did, indeed, shortly after 1838 begin to bring up Michael as a protestant, why should religious disputes break out with such magnitude when he was 'a young man' that he cut himself off in anger from his family? The date would be, approximately, 1857. The 'souperism' and 'perversions' which had taken place during the famine years were well past their peak by 1857 and such divisive debate as O'Casey describes would hardly seem likely with older brothers or sisters unless some other factor was present. Or had the business to do with subdivision of the land? The famine, we are told, put a stop to the destructive subdivisions of small holdings.2 Can it be that Michael, being a younger son, simply had no option but to leave the land and seek his fortune? The answers to such questions are not available. O'Casey himself probably never knew the full facts of his father's early life. The story around Dublin in the 1950s was that the whole Casey family had turned 'soupers' at some point.3 In any event, it would appear that Michael Casey got caught up in the evangelical movement which swept through Ireland, and especially the west of Ireland, in the 1840s. Desmond Bowen refers to the movement as a 'Protestant Crusade'. One of its leaders was the Reverend Alexander Dallas (1791-1869), an English military man who had served against Napoleon and had fought at Waterloo in 1815. He then underwent a form of religious conversion, was 'born again' and became involved with a church mission to convert the Jews in London. Invited to Ireland to speak on the same theme in 1841 he saw that the mission in Ireland must be to convert Roman Catholics, not Jews. In his own account of his subsequent success in Ireland, The Story of the Irish Church Missions (1867), Dallas was at pains to emphasise that his movement began in January 1846, before the famine broke out: 'a change was creeping over the spirit of the Romish peasants in Ireland, the dawn of which had been discernible for some years before the famine began.'4 Conveniently, Dallas was able to see the famine itself as confirmation of his good work. The society (ICM) was not formally established until March 1849, when 'the need had been realised to give the Roman-taught people of Ireland the Gospel with its bearing on and rejection of Roman error.'5 Dublin became the headquarters,

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Sean O'Casey

but Connemara and south Mayo were the main centres of missionary activity in the west. Dallas divided Ireland into four routes and sent out his 'messengers', as they were called, two by two like the disciples of Christ through all the countryside. In the long run, we are told, this countrywide mission failed because 'it lacked understanding of the Irish people and true compassion for their needs.'6 Yet the ICM, like other similar evangelical societies, did have marked success in the 1840s, not least because they had the convincing argument that God had providentially punished Roman Catholics by means of the famine. Since Michael Casey was to become an employee of ICM in the Dublin headquarters, first as a teacher (presumably of the Bible) and then as a clerk, it is possible that he was one of those successes of the 1840s. O'Casey was to describe Irish evangelism as 'a waste of time unless preachers used Irish', here displaying insight into the failure of the so-called second reformation.7 But up to about 1856, when Cardinal Cullen began a vigorous counter campaign,8 the evangelists made very good progress in the west of Ireland. The Bible Societies had their own schools in County Limerick at the time of the famine, and had their own primer of Irish grammar, which notoriously contained the phrase cait breac (spotted cat) on the first page.9 Converts, or 'perverts', the term the Roman Catholic counter-reformation used, were popularly known by that phrase. They were usually children, egged on by their mothers. If this was the case, what are the implications? Converts sometimes attracted violent reprisals, no doubt fuelled by catholic priests fearful of wholesale apostasy. Bowen says that converts could find themselves 'de-tribalized and ostracized by their neighbours. Shelter was usually found for them on the land of some Protestant landowner, and there they lived a lonely and precarious existence. The Scripture Readers of the Irish Society, or whichever organization had encouraged their conversion, usually sought to find means for them to emigrate.'10 It is possible that young Michael Casey, if he became embroiled in a family or local row over his religion, took refuge with a clergyman and thereby benefited educationally, mainly in study and defence of the Bible. It is a social situation which the poet Yeats, for instance, contrived to disguise, because his literary constituency in Ireland was mostly catholic and nationalist. In The Countess Cathleen (1899) the starving people sell their souls not to evangelists but to merchants and are saved not by catholic action but by the non-denominational Countess who heretically trades her own soul for those of her tenantry. The real issue is further fudged by the distinctly catholic diction of the absolving angel at the end who speaks of 'Mary of the seven times wounded heart' receiving the dying Countess in heaven. Suddenly the champion of the people during famine times is an aristocratic catholic who sees off the trafficking, demonic evangelists buying the souls of the poor. The opposite was likely the case in the Irish countryside fifty years earlier. In Purgatory (1938), the Old Man says that, on account of his (protestant) mother from the Big House, when he was a child a gamekeeper's wife taught him to read and a catholic priest taught him Latin in a house where there were 'books

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15

by the ton'.11 Either this was evangelisation in reverse or Yeats was politically distorting the more usual pattern of the convert to protestantism finding refuge and cultural nourishment from the protestant community. It is pleasant to imagine Michael Casey enjoying 'books by the ton'. He certainly impressed his famous son with a love of books, and in the autobiographies O'Casey lists a fair weight of them: Marshalled tightly together, there they were, the books he used to read, pore, and ponder over: a regiment of theological controversial books, officered by d'Aubigne's History of the Reformation, Milner's End of Controversy, Chillingworth's Protestantism, holding forth that the Bible, and the Bible alone, is the religion of protestants [ . . . ] , Foxe's Book of Martyrs, full of fire and blood and brimstone, Popery Practical Paganism, Was St. Peter Ever in Rome? [...]. Like inspection officers, the English Bible, the Latin Vulgate, and the Douai Testament stood pompously together, and, to the right, Cruden i Concordance acting as orderly officer; a neatly uniformed company of Dickens', Scott's, George Eliot's, Meredith's, and Thackeray's novels; Shakespeare's Works; Burns', Keats', Milton's, Gray's, and Pope's poetry; on the top shelf, six or seven huge volumes, like podgy generals, of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire-, and leaning idly by their side was Locke's Essay on the [sic] Human Understanding, (A, 1, 27-28) The list, it has been said by a Dublin divine, includes the volumes to be expected from an associate of the Irish Church Missions.12 Yet O'Casey fails ever to mention that his father was in the ICM. The picture he offers is of a cultured, refined man, not your stereotypical farmer's son settled as a clerk in Dublin. The Douai (catholic) Bible, however, is a giveaway in the list of books: ammunition solely for the good fight. John Milner's book, The End of Religious Controversy, first published in 1818, was a famous attempt by a catholic bishop to counter the protestant argument and shows how seriously Michael Casey took the enemy. The household too, no doubt, learned to do likewise: O'Casey was clearly familiar with the inside of these combative texts. As to the surprising novels, not to mention Gibbon, O'Casey's recollection was of a man who every week visited the bookstalls on the quays and in the streets off the quays in Dublin, 'never coming home without a volume'.13 He was pleased rather to remember a bibliophile than a bigot. Michael Casey, then, it may be believed, was part of the 'protestant crusade' in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. But the profile is not yet complete. As was to befall his famous son, Michael's lack of formal education was to keep him imprisoned within the mid-to-lower ranks of the Victorian class system. He never rose above the position of clerk - at times the term used was 'mercantile clerk' - in the ICM, a position which was both secure and respectable but financially unrewarding at £5-16s. 8d. per month, or £70 per annum. A skilled tradesman would have received five shillings a day at this time, or £6 per month, fractionally more than O'Casey's father. In contrast, Louis MacNeice's

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Sean O'Casey

father, who was a schoolmaster with the ICM, having graduated from Trinity College Dublin earned £120 per annum upon ordination to the ministry: almost twice what Michael Casey earned.14 When exactly Michael settled in Dublin it is impossible to say. But on 27 January 1863 he married Susan Archer, daughter of Abraham Archer, auctioneer. The Archers' address was Chamber Street, the Coombe, described in 1853 as 'the poorest part of the most impoverished district of our city'.15 This was an old part of Dublin, in the Liberties, formerly the home of manufacturers of cotton, linen and starch and a place where many tradesmen resided, rapidly in decline: by 1878 when the land was purchased for redevelopment, 'there was not a single merchant, manufacturer or trader in the entire area.'16 In his essay on the bohemian poet James Clarence Mangan, Joyce said that the Liberties contained 'the choice flower of the city's low-life - petty thieves, bandits, fugitives, pimps and inexpensive harlots'.17 On the other hand the Coombe was a battlefield for the ICM: one of their seven 'ragged schools' was established there. Perhaps that was the prior attraction for Michael, 'making good hypocrites out of bad Catholics'.18 If so he soon had a second. His address was number 22 Chamber Street. Susan was virtually the girl next door. It may be that Michael lived in rooms rented out by Susan's father: could she have strayed into his room like Minnie Powell into Davoren's in The Shadow of a Gunman? Or did they meet at Sunday service and find they shared common religious ideas? However it came about, their marriage took place locally, in St Catherine's Church, Thomas Street, best known as marking the site of Robert Emmet's execution in 1803. In the church register, Michael Casey is described as a clerk, Susan as having no occupation. Yet he had not yet been taken on as clerk by the ICM, though he was soon to be an assistant teacher at one of their night schools in Grand Canal Street, which paid a pittance (fifteen shillings a month). He must also have worked as clerk elsewhere. He and Susan first lived in 22 Wellington Street, on the north side of the Liffey. Here their first two children were born, Isabella Charlotte (known as Bella, and in the autobiographies called 'Ella') on 6 February 1865, and Michael Harding (always called Mick) on 31 December 1866. In August of that year Casey senior was promoted to clerk in the ICM at 27-28 Townsend Street, where there were also 'ragged schools', a hostel and an orphanage. He then became part of the wider family of the Society in which every employee was known to catholics as a 'souper' or apostate. Not a lot is known about Susan Archer. She signed her name on the church register at a time when seven out of twelve other names (including witnesses) on the same page carried a 'mark' instead of a signature. (Michael signed with a proud flourish.) At twenty-eight, Susan was some three years older than Michael. She came of a strong protestant family, and it is plain from O'Casey's always sympathetic comments on her that she was strict, upright and godfearing. Her father Abraham Archer is first listed in the Dublin Post Office Directory for 1832, when his occupation was listed as 'auctioneer', with an auction room and public store at 22 Abbey Street. He had married a Wicklow

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woman named Isabella (surname unknown) in 1828, their first child, Abraham, being born on 6 August 1829 and baptised at St Catherine's on 8 September. Two other children, Hannah and a second Abraham, were baptised there by 6 January 1833, and then follows a gap until James Joseph, born 11 November 1839, was baptised on 5 January 1840. During those seven years Susan and her sisters Elizabeth and Isabella (who was to witness O'Casey's birth) were born. But they were not baptised in St Catherine's. A possible explanation lies in the outbreak of cholera in Dublin in the 1830s, which may have driven Abraham Archer out of the city for some years. O'Casey fancied his mother may have been born in Delgany, County Wicklow; he also said she spent some years in Galway as a child, but no record of birth has been found. In any case, the Archers were back in Dublin, living not in Chamber Street but at 10 Ormond Street, by the end of 1839. The Archer family was strictly protestant in a city (population, in 1871, 246,326) in which protestants were out-numbered by catholics by five to one. A William Archer was assistant secretary to the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, which had its headquarters at this time in Rutland (now Parnell) Square. He may have been some relation but there is no evidence of it. Indeed, whether old Abraham was himself a member of the Orange Order is not known. But one of Susan's brothers, whom O'Casey calls Uncle Tom, a soldier in the Crimean War, was a member of the so-called Purple Lodge, a 'great thing to be' in the child narrator's eyes in Pictures in the Hallway, and this suggests a staunch Orange family. Membership of the Orange Order was, no doubt, a statement of identity; O'Casey himself knew quite a few members in his youth, including the grand secretary Frank Donaldson. But he denied that he himself was ever a member.19 The question arises as to the class and housing conditions the Caseys enjoyed (or endured). Ideologically, O'Casey always insisted that the family lived in tenements and inferentially in dire poverty. The issue became controversial only after O'Casey's death in 1964 when the inevitable re-evaluation of his life and works took place. At that time, first in Sean McCann's edition of The World of Sean O'Casey (1966) and then in Martin Margulies's short but important book The Early Life of Sean O'Casey (1970), it was clearly shown that the Caseys were lower middle-class.20 Their housing - always rented accommodation - was never 'slum' housing in the common understanding of that emotive word: there was no ember of Angela's Ashes to spark off a proletarian revolution in this particular family. But, as Jacinta Prunty points out, the term 'slum' in geographical terms is 'an area of overcrowded and dilapidated, usually old housing, occupied by people who can afford only the cheapest dwellings available in the urban area, generally in or close to the inner city. The term usually implies both a poverty-ridden population, an unhealthy environment, and a district rife with crime and vice.'21 Of course, there were many such 'areas' in Dublin in the second half of the nineteenth century, targets for the ICM, which set up schools in underprivileged areas as part of its campaign. One must bear in mind that the Caseys' location was thus in some measure professionally strategic.

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Dublin was a city in decline ever since the Act of Union (1801) ensured the retreat to the 'mainland' of the English or Anglo-Irish nobility and professional classes which had provided the backbone of the Irish parliament and administration in the period 1660-1800. Of those who stayed, the rich gradually moved to the suburbs and left the city centre as 'a largely working-class ghetto'.22 'Ghetto', too, is an emotive word. Strictly speaking, people were not confined to certain areas, except by the iron laws of economics. The fact was that the labouring force in Dublin, those on subsistence wages, was increasing all through the later nineteenth century and represented almost twenty per cent of the total male workforce in 1911: this was to be the class O'Casey chose to belong to, although it was overwhelmingly catholic. For the majority of labourers, 'life was grim indeed. They lacked any job security, drifting from one type of employment to the next; pay was poor; many were lucky to average three working days in a week and unemployment was frequently prolonged by spells of bad weather, by injury, or by commercial depression.'23 What the Caseys experienced, if not dire poverty, was the threat of disease rife in Dublin in the nineteenth century. When the poet Hopkins arrived in 1884 he was shocked: 'Dublin itself is a joyless place and I think in my heart as smoky as London is; I had fancied it quite different.' It was not just that it was threadbare and run down; it was downright insanitary. The river Liffey was the city's major sewer, and house drains were in an appalling state, particularly those of properties on low-lying soil.'24 Poor Hopkins was to find out just how unhealthy Dublin could be: he died of typhoid fever at number 86 St Stephen's Green (the University) on 8 June 1889. It seems likely, his biographer says, 'that Hopkins had caught the fever from faulty sanitation or plumbing, contaminated water or food'.25 The hazards of living conditions in Dublin became legendary. The mortality rate has been put at 36 per 1,000, half as high again as London and double what in 1875 was established as 'natural'.26 Overcrowding was a major problem in accommodation; hence the altogether negative connotations of the term 'tenement', which simply means 'a large house in multi-family occupancy',27 and which comprised forty per cent of Dublin housing in 1880, the year of O'Casey's birth. The issues of public housing, overcrowding and insanitary conditions in Dublin were to take on crisis proportions after the workers' strike and employers' lock-out of 1913. In 1914, of the 5,330 tenement houses classified in Dublin, only 1,516 were defined as 'structurally sound, capable of being put in good repair', while the other two-thirds were either 'unfit for habitation' or 'unfit for habitation and incapable of being rendered fit'.28 It was from this date and this experience that O'Casey's whole attitude to working-class housing in Dublin derives. The family into which he himself was born did not experience the worst of those 'tenement' conditions and yet, for all that, the Caseys lost two and possibly three children in infancy. It is true that O'Casey claimed he was the youngest of thirteen children, eight of whom had died in infancy, inferentially from the appalling conditions just referred to. In fact, he was the youngest of seven, or possibly eight,

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children (although only seven in fact were baptised). After Bella and Mick, these were: Thomas (Tom), born 2 February 1869; John, born 31 August 1871, died in infancy; Isaac ('Archie' in the autobiographies), born 26 November 1873; a second John, born 16 May 1876, who also died in infancy; and finally John, later Sean O'Casey, born 30 March 1880. In the last volume of his autobiography, O'Casey mentions a baby Susan also lost in infancy, though no baptismal record appears: perhaps she was still-born. O'Casey here puzzles over the other five: 'Maybe she had forgotten the others' (A, 2, 515). Hardly likely. Somehow, O'Casey had got that story wrong. By 1880 the family had moved several times, from 22 to 57 Wellington Street, to 23 ]/2 Dorset Street, to 6 Upper Dorset Street, and then to 85 Upper Dorset Street, where O'Casey was born. This may have been a few small steps up in the world, although with four children soon to be five, the point is a moot one. O'Casey always said he was born in a tenement. In any event, Michael Casey was at this time the landlord of a three-storey above-basement Georgian house in an area known as a second-class 'shop street' rather than a residential one, a street 'with a long tradition of grocers, bakers, victuallers, vintners, innkeepers and provisions dealers of all sorts'.29 O'Casey was born on the same street as the eighteenth-century playwright R.B. Sheridan. In Sheridan's day, Dorset Street - named, like so many of Dublin's main streets, for a Lord Lieutenant - was a fashionable location, though probably not quite first-class since playwrights and actors (Sheridan's father was both) were not yet respectable enough to live adjacent to real quality: even Garrick, in London, did not so presume. But by 1880 the Georgian grandeur of Dorset Street had faded into mere commercial bustle. The house where O'Casey was born has long been demolished; it is now the site of a branch of the Bank of Ireland. But a few paces up the street towards town reveal a number of homes still standing which must have been part of the elegant terrace to which number 85 made an end-house, at what was then White's Lane. They are imposing Georgian structures, with steps up to the hall doors and railings to each side. In the mind's eye one can see the exterior setting for Act 3 of The Plough and the Stars. By the 1920s these houses 'had long since given up the pretence of being the relics of oul' dacency, and sadly and resignedly accepted their tenement status'. So wrote one of their occupants, journalist Bill Kelly, who continues: They've all been levelled now, but the people who lived in them, those who survived the consumption long enough to escape, will never forget them. For you can never forget the feel of a tenement. More, you never quite get the smell of a tenement out of your nostrils. It's a smell of damp and decay, of deep-rooted dust and poverty, of urine and red raddle, and above all of hopelessness. Hopelessness, just verging on despair.'30 O'Casey's birthplace remains problematic. How and why did Michael Casey come to lease it, if, indeed, he did lease it? He is listed in Thorn's Irish Almanac and Official Directory for 1878 as occupant and presumably rate-payer. The owner seems to have been William Lattimer, a coal merchant ('factor'). At this time, numbers 83 to 87 Upper Dorset Street were all listed as 'tenements',

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which can now be read as 'apartment houses for the poor'. The house valuations varied from £12 to £25: Michael Casey's was £20. (By Griffith's Valuation in 1854, £10 was the cut-off point for corporation franchise, i.e. to qualify to elect members to Dublin Corporation.) Next door, at number 86, was William McCrum (valuation £23) and Mrs Elizabeth McCrum, 'ladies' nurse tender'. She was Susan Casey's sister. In 1874 McCrum was listed at number 87, William Lattimer at number 86. Had the McCrums persuaded the Caseys to get in on the ground floor (perhaps literally) in what may have appeared (but were not) good economic times? It is a bit of a puzzle. On the one hand O'Casey was, indeed, literally born in a tenement; on the other he was born to the lessee. He once referred to it as 'an apartment house kept by me da which nearly ruined him'.31 So, it was an investment which backfired. In 1881 and 1882 Michael Casey was listed in Thorns under 'Nobility, Gentry, Merchants, and Traders', but in 1883 number 85 was again listed for William Lattimer and by 1884 number 86 (which in 1874 was listed as Lattimer's) was listed as vacant. Thus both the Caseys and the McCrums had found the rent business too much for them. It is likely that Michael found he could by no means traffic in the 'hopelessness just verging on despair' which his tenants inhabited. So one is inclined to think. It looks as if the row from 83 to 87 Upper Dorset Street was all investment properties. The Caseys moved around the corner to one of a row of twelve tiny new houses on Innisfalien Parade. Meanwhile the third John Casey, born in the house his father briefly leased, underwent his first major shock at the baptismal font at St Mary's Church, Mary Street. Although St George's Church is closer, and visible from 85 Upper Dorset Street, the Caseys were in the parish of St Mary's (which comprised St Paul's in North King Street and St Michan's in Church Street). All of the Casey children were baptised there, from Bella on 14 April 1865 to John (i.e. Sean O'Casey) on 28 July 1880. The rector (1865-94) was Rev. James Hunter Monahan, D.D., Canon and Treasurer of Christ Church Cathedral, but it was his curate, T.R.S. Collins, B.A., who baptised O'Casey. In the autobiographies, although the names form the composite T.R.S. Hunter the description, we are told on good authority, 'fits the curate, not the Rector'.32 The sponsors' names are not given, but one may have been Isabella Archer, another of Susan's sisters, who had already entered her 'mark' on the birth certificate as having been 'present at birth'. The church itself was a fine early eighteenth-century building designed by Sir William Robinson in the 'galleried' style modelled on St James's in Piccadilly designed by Wren: 'The church proved to be the most fashionable church in the area established first at the time when the northern suburb was beginning to be developed. When it was being set up there was no shortage of prominent wealthy families like the Jervis family, to donate to the church and buy their expensive "family pews". [...] The large graveyard, lying to the south, was also established at an early date.'33 Sheridan had been baptised here in 1751,34 Wolfe Tone in 1763. Swift was a frequent visitor; John Wesley preached there in the 1760s. St Mary's was closed in 1962, and only in 1999 began to be restored following commercial utilisation. In the course of

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the restoration work the pedestal of the original baptismal font was recovered (see illustration 3). In its way, it is a tenuous link with O'Casey, and from O'Casey back to Sheridan.

In the year of O'Casey's birth Parnell became leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster. A new and disruptive era had begun in Irish politics, ushering in the Home Rule movement bound up with the vexed question of land ownership. 1880 was an election year. During the month of O'Casey's birth the Irish newspapers were full of the Home Rule issue. According to the Freeman's Journal, both the Liberals and reigning Conservatives under Disraeli were against Home Rule. But the pending election would show, the paper assured its readers on 11 March, that the desire of Ireland for 'home government' was, in Isaac Butt's phrase, 'the settled passion of the Irish heart'. Meanwhile, in London, a manifesto was issued by the Home Rule Confederation asserting that Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) had virtually issued 'a proclamation of civil war against the Irish people, because they are a minority, because they are misgoverned and oppressed, because they are plunged in the miseries of famine which iniquitous land laws render inevitable, and which Earl Beaconsfield's administration neither knows nor cares how to relieve'. Later that month, on 27 March, which was the eve of Easter Sunday, Parnell made a triumphant tour of his home county, Wicklow, where he was welcomed and feted by catholic priests, who were major figures behind the organisation of his reception. Parnell said that 'the reason why Ireland was poor and wretched was because she was governed by England.' The story was a major one on O'Casey's birthday, Tuesday 30 March. How would it have been received in the Casey household? Vivian Mercier has pointed out that 'Irish Evangelicals, at every stage of the nineteenthcentury party struggles, were Tories, Conservatives, Unionists.' This, Mercier maintained, was one of the 'paradoxical facts of Irish life' because in England Evangelicals were Whigs, Radicals or Liberals, who tended to favour 'a conciliatory policy towards the Catholics'. Moreover, it had been Gladstone and the Liberals who had committed the 'ultimate atrocity' so far as Irish Evangelicals were concerned: the disestablishment in 1869 of the Church of Ireland.35 Accordingly, it seems most unlikely either that the Caseys took the Freeman's Journal or felt anything but apprehension over the rise of Parnell. The general election took place in Dublin within a week of John's birth. The 'Catholic spirit of Dublin was aroused', reported the Freeman's Journal on 7 April, and 'for the first time in its history Dublin has been completely rescued from the octopus-like grasp of the Tories and has risen to its natural place as leader of the Liberal Party in Ireland.' In short, what that newspaper was pleased to call 'that Orange ascendency which it was the object of O'Connell's life-work to banish from our midst' had been broken. Gladstone had won, and a strong Irish Parliamentary Party had been created. Few cheers would have gone up at the Casey breakfast table over this news. The ICM had best redouble their

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efforts to enlighten and convert the hapless Dublin catholic population from its truly benighted state. Irony apart, the point is an important one. O'Casey gives the impression in the autobiographies that his father was a Parnellite and that his mother supported Michael's view: 'his mother had told him his father had said that Parnell was a great protestant, a great Irishman, and a grand man; and it was a good thing there was someone, anyway, fit to hinder the English from walking over the Irish people' (A, 1, 76). In the episode where Johnny is brought to see Kilmainham jail by his uncle Tom (the Orangeman who had fought in the Crimean War) the child's talk turns to Parnell: 'Me Ma says me Da said that Parnell was anything but a wicked man, Uncle [...] for me Ma heard me Da sayin' once that Parnell paid no regard to the Queen; and would sooner rot in jail than obey any law made be [by] her' (A, 1, 200-01). It is hard to imagine a life-long employee of the ICM, with headquarters in London and dedicated to making good protestants out of the ignorant Irish catholics, uttering such disloyalisms. It sounds like invention. O'Casey likewise makes his brothers twice argue over Parnell, once on the way home from his father's funeral, in September 1886, and again in the 'Cat 'n Cage' episode, set £.1892. In the first of these episodes his brother Tom stoutly defends Parnell on the moral issue of his affair with a married woman. This discussion could not have taken place before Parnell's affair with Katharine O'Shea became public knowledge in 1890. In the other episode, Tom and Mick first join forces to attribute Parnell's downfall to those like the hurlers in the Cat and Cage, i.e. the Dublin nationalist catholics. There they stand in their English army uniforms lecturing the natives about throwing Parnell to 'the English wolves'. Then they form an alliance with the hurlers against the two constables, who end up on the floor while the allies escape together shouting 'Parnell for ever! An' Ireland, too!' (A, 1, 226-33). This has to be pure fantasy. Two explanations may be offered. When he began to write the autobiographies O'Casey was trying to reconstruct his life following the Silver Tassie debacle and to make sense of that life.36 He could not see himself - as was the case - as having arisen from a conventional unionist household. His own development into a fervent nationalist only made sense if he saw his father and his family in general as liberals and particularly as supporters of Parnell. Yet where was the logic in his brothers' enlisting in the army to fight for Queen and empire in 1887 if they supported Home Rule? O'Casey gives them the credentials necessary for his own transition into nationalism. One piece of surviving evidence seems to suggest that O'Casey himself retained unionist sympathies into his late teens at least. A page of a writing exercise in a good, adult hand has the intriguing title, 'Protestant Petition against Home Rule'. O'Casey kept it among his papers as evidence of his early penmanship, inscribing at the bottom of the page, 'MS of 60 years ago, when learning to write'.37 Because undated this note is less helpful than it might be, but it must be taken in conjunction with the whole question of his education, dealt with below. He could physically write before he was ten. In the MS note he may mean 'to write

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fluently' - for indeed the script is excellent - but even if that were all the fragment is, an exercise in transcription, it is noteworthy that of all topics he chose or agreed to copy it should be one so counter to the Parnellite views above espoused: It is re-assuring to find how sensible & how lively is the Protestant opposition to Home Rule. I was afforded the opportunity of reading a very formidable Petition to the "Honorable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Assembled," the other evening. It - the Petition, portrayed a vividly imaginative picture of poor Ireland under Home Rule being cast back into a state of chaos equal to that which troubled Nature before the World was Born, "the Rivers would run red with redundance of blood, The earth would rock beneath our tread, & flame wrap hill & wood." Listen - "The Bill will prove ruinous to the best interests of the Country by endangering the liberties & rights of His Majesty's loyal subjects . . . . by embittering social relations, by greatly encreasing taxation, by depreciating the value of all properties & securities causing [ms breaks off]. In the middle of this strange piece the reader may detect a quotation from Mangan's 'Dark Rosaleen' (1846) ,38 Can O'Casey have been ironic? Mangan had envisioned the Erne running red with redundance of blood before his visionary Dark Rosaleen would fade or die: in short she, Ireland, would never be abandoned by those who loved her, i.e. nationalists. Was the young O'Casey co-opting nationalist rhetoric in the unionist cause? Or was he actually subverting the unionist discourse by slyly intruding into the apocalyptic vision the totally contrary coding of revolution? If this piece is part of an ironic explosion of unionist fears (and the rhetorical 'Listen' does suggest a set-up) it would have to refer to a time well after O'Casey's childhood. In fact, as will be seen later on, his political development came only after he was twenty-one, and was at first a development into a staunch Gaelic Leaguer and enthusiast for the study of the Irish language (i.e. an enthusiasm for education) and subsequently into membership of the Irish Republican Brotherhood at a time when only his mother and Mick were at home and unlikely to be too alarmed at this latest piece of folly - that is, if they were ever aware of his actual involvement. The IRB was hardly more than a talking shop at this time (1906-11). So O'Casey did not have to confront his family with his new views or in any way acknowledge the split he was creating between the politics of his father and the politics of the period of transition to 1916. For that matter, O'Casey stayed close to the protestant church during this same period of his Gaelicisation, so that his alienation from his father's ways and creed would not have been readily apparent. Looking back, however, he may have felt the need to pave the way more credibly for his apostasy by painting his father and brothers in radical colours. The other factor is more simple and more literary in complexion: his admiration for James Joyce at the time when the autobiographies were being

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written. It is quite understandable, if not compelling, that any autobiography by a Dubliner who chameleon-like attained artistic status at more or less the same time as Joyce (born two years after O'Casey) must bear the influence of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The Christmas dinner scene at the very outset of Joyce's work dramatises a quarrel over 'poor Parnell', as seen through a child's eyes. O'Casey, who agreed wholly with Joyce's view of Parnell's betrayal, introduced comparable scenes set in and around his own family. But the Joyce family was catholic, a fact which renders the quarrel both bitter and meaningful. In O'Casey's account we are asked to accept that protestants would publicly condemn the priests for destroying Parnell. To make sense of his own genesis he could not choose but recreate his family background. This sort of invention is on a par with his 'innocent' discovery of his real date of birth, given as 1884.39 In 1882 the Casey family moved from Dorset Street around the corner to 9 Innisfallen Parade, where Michael Casey was to die prematurely four years later. The house, one of twelve in a terrace of single-storey artisans' dwellings recently built, was small but very neat and compact. A plaque on the house now says that O'Casey, 'poet and dramatist', lived there 1882-1888. Today, number 9 has been renovated, but number 11 offers a clear idea of the original design: a hall with a surprisingly high ceiling gave off right to a comparatively large room/parlour; further down the hall was a small kitchen with a bedroom off. A small yard outside the kitchen contained a privy. Either the kitchen or the parlour must have doubled up as bedroom for the growing Casey family, for Bella was now seventeen, Mick fifteen, Tom thirteen and Isaac nine. Here the family would have been rather crushed, but comfortable, in clean and neat surroundings. Yet, since Thorns lists number 9 as vacant for 1883 the Caseys may not have moved in immediately, and the reason may have been Bella. In the mornings, prior to 1883, Bella would probably organise the younger children for school while Susan looked after baby John. Bella was very bright and doing well at school, the Central Model School in Marlborough Street; soon she would qualify for its teacher-training college, where she would live in. In her love of learning and aptness as pupil, Bella took after her father and offered promise that the Caseys would rise in the world. Yet Bella's story was to be as dramatic as anything her infant brother was destined to invent. All of that promise, together with all of the social status which was part of it, were to come crashing about her ears and Bella was to experience a miserable life of poverty and hardship. Meantime, no doubt efficiently, she got her brothers out the door daily and safely down to Marlborough Street in good time. She knew the importance of regular attendance. Michael, whose destination in the ICM office in Townsend Street took him across the Liffey at Butt Bridge, may sometimes have had the habit of accompanying his children to Marlborough Street, which is on the way, but they were rather grown-up now for such attention. However, it is likely he ensured that they all said their morning prayers before leaving the house, and it would have been in character for him to set the tone with some daily reading from the Bible. After all, when he got to work, the first thing to meet his sight was the ICM motto across the facade at number 27 Townsend Street, 'Search the Scriptures'.

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In nineteenth-century Ireland education was taken very seriously indeed. The national school system, established in the 1830s, struggled manfully against sectarianism - for all such schools were meant to be non-denominational - but enforced a syllabus imperialist in its banishment of Gaelic and its inculcation of totally English texts, methods and values. 'I am a happy English boy', is the primer headline which has descended in folklore fashion to the present day as an illustration of the quality of indoctrination involved in learning to read. What were known as the three r's, reading, writing and 'rithmetic, formed the core curriculum, although some grammar and geography were also taught in the upper classes. Learning was by rote, and classes were large. Compulsory education was introduced in England only in 1880, for children between the ages of five and fifteen (with exemptions for children in 'beneficial employment'), but it was not until 1892 that compulsion was introduced in Ireland, and even then exemptions were allowed. This explains, to some degree, the scandal of O'Casey's poor attendance at school. Before the Education Act, which came fully into effect in 1900, schools enforced their own 'compulsion' through the payment-by-results system. That is, an average fee of six shillings per year was payable for each pupil; the fees went to the school, pending an oral examination of every pupil by a schools' inspector. To improve attendance, a minimum of a hundred days per pupil was required to qualify for examination. Although the system 'fostered a narrow approach to the curriculum', it at least laid down minimum standards for each grade which a pupil had to attain before progressing. 'During the period 1872 to 1900, when the [fee-for] results programme was abolished, the level of literacy in Ireland rose from 67% to 86%; the proportion of pupils in higher classes (class 3 or above) grew from 23% to 48%, and the average attendance of pupils at national schools increased from 37% to 65%.'40 The three older Casey boys rarely missed a day at the Central Model School. 'But they were poor students. Michael and Tom failed several subjects, doubtless from want of application rather than low intelligence.'41 In the adjoining girls' school Bella did far better, winning prizes along the way, and in 1882 was selected for teaching-training in the college which was part of the complex. This was a rare feat. She was now a Queen's Scholar, fees paid, and living accommodation provided within the college. Perhaps it was at this point that the Caseys moved into 9 Innisfallen Parade. Bella's progress in the two-year programme (the 'Long Course') at Marlborough Street College was satisfactory (her penmanship, arithmetic and spelling were her best marks, while she was rather weak in grammar, 28 out of 60, and geography, 25 out of 60). The sort of question she would have had to answer on her English paper was: 'Give the "argument" or subject of the Second Book of Paradise Lost, or, 'Sketch briefly Milton's delineation of Adam and Eve before their fall. How were they employed when first seen by Satan?'42 It is clearly material that would have required careful preparation and standard answering. Bella qualified with a Third Class, Grade 2, which was the grade attained by the majority of teachers. She got a job immediately, starting 23 August 1884, at St Mary's Infant

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School, Dominick Street, and was officially appointed on the first of the month when she turned twenty, February 1885. Soon her little brother John was to be one of her pupils in 'Mixed Infants' and First Class. Thus O'Casey never had the 'privilege' of attending the Model School like the rest of his siblings. Whether this was a great loss is to be doubted, for under Bella's tuition he surely progressed a great deal better than he might have if cast among total strangers. The Model Schools, however, with their reputation for rigorous discipline, were viewed from the Casey perspective as a cut above the other national schools. The actor Willie Fay, who attended Marlborough Street at around the same time as the Caseys, was the son of a teacher in the boys' school and was expected to do well there. The teaching there had been calculated to prepare us for the ordinary requirements of a commercial life.'43 On the other hand, Bernard Shaw had felt humiliated by being sent there as a boy. 'I was sent to Marlborough Street, and at once lost caste outside it and became a boy with whom no Protestant young gentleman would speak or play.'44 Shaw's biographer has pointed out that Shaw at the time suffered a sense of shame 'arising from his Catholic-infested home at Hatch Street' and later transferred his snobbery to the school.45 Yet it is doubtless ironic that O'Casey felt proud of his family's education in the Model Schools while Shaw felt humiliated by his own.46 Such is the relativity of poverty. Meanwhile, things were changing in the Casey family. Bella's entrance into training college made the occupation of the new little cottage more comfortable. Soon Mick would finish school and start work not at an architect's office as his father had hoped (for Mick was a talented sketch artist) but as clerk in the Post Office. He would be followed by Tom. A whole new regime entered the household, leaving baby John alone with his mother (and probably at least one aunt as regular visitor) for most of every day. He adored his mother and she, in turn, was very patient with him and probably over-indulged him. After all, she had passed fifty by now and could lavish more attention on John than she had on Isaac, for instance. Isaac ('Archie' in the autobiographies) was not doing as well at school even as his older brothers and was getting lost in the family, between Bella the star and John the ever-demanding baby. But he was good company for John, who later recalled several adventures they had together, such as the one down by the royal canal when they drowned the family dog, Boxer, who had bitten a child. 'He was no damn good, anyway, said Tom; he always crept away into a corner, if he got one faintest smell of a rat.'47 (The inference is that rats were commonplace.) The drowning of Boxer in a brick-laden sack was an incident that bound John to Isaac, for it was Isaac's dog and he did what had to be done with courage. But this was probably well after their world was turned upside down, when one day, towards the end of 1885 Michael Casey resigned his job. In the scanty minutes of the ICM monthly meetings in Dublin which survive, an item for 28 January 1886 lists 'Dublin Office Clerk' on the agenda: the index identifies the clerk as Michael Casey.48 At this meeting a recommendation to fill 'the vacancy in the Dublin office' was approved. One month later, the minutes

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for 25 February include discussion of 'An application from Michael Casey for a larger gratuity on his leaving the Society, than the three months' pay offered to him by the Clerical Secretary'. After 'full consideration of the whole case' whatever it was - 'the Committee felt that they could not give more than the £17 10s Od already offered, not as "compensation" but in recognition of his long period of service in the Dublin Office.' The Lay Secretary was instructed to pay Michael Casey this amount.49 The word 'compensation', so carefully placed within quotation marks, leaps out from this note. If Michael was resigning in his forty-eighth year and seeking compensation, he had some claim against the ICM. In the autobiographies, O'Casey says that Michael fell off a ladder. The sentence is carefully phrased: 'A ladder on which he stood, it was said, had slipped from under him, and, in falling, his back had struck a chair, and his spine had been injured.'50 The indirect speech indicates that O'Casey had no personal recollection of the incident. Presumably, the accident occurred in the office in Townsend Street; hence the claim for 'compensation'. But can a fall from a ladder be life-threatening over a period of close to a year? It is a bit of a puzzle. In the burial register for Michael Casey at Mount Jerome cemetery the cause of death is given as 'disease of the spine'. The entry is signed by one Thomas Scott, cousin (presumably to Michael), who is otherwise unknown. There seems to be a discrepancy between this cause of death and that given in the death certificate dated one day later: 'Bronchitis/ Anasurca [sic]\ The latter term, no longer in common medical use, according to Professor Muiris X. FitzGerald, Dean of the Medical Faculty at UCD, described the swelling of legs and trunk, analogous to dropsy, resulting from heart and kidney failure. As tuberculosis of the lung could not at this time be distinguished from bronchitis, it may be that Michael Casey actually had TB, which could have spread to the vertebrae as Pott's Disease. (Tuberculosis can have complications leading to amyloid, deposition in the kidney causing kidney failure; equally, TB can affect the lining of the abdominal cavity and cause massive fluid swelling or 'anasarca'.) So, in the end, it is possible there was no fall from a ladder. The death certificate oddly gave Michael Casey's occupation as 'Gardener', his age at last birthday as forty-eight, details supplied by Susan herself, described as 'present at death' at number 9 Innisfallen Parade. Can it have been that, diagnosed with serious lung problems which forced his resignation from his desk job with the ICM, Michael was advised to work in the open air, took a job as gardener and grew worse instead of better? Young John, turned six in March of the year his father died, cannot have had any clear idea what the matter was. The middle-aged Sean believed it had something to do with a fall, but he also describes his father wasting away at home. He remembers an invalid, not a cripple. He seems to remember his father no longer able to read Shakespeare but dependent on Bella to read aloud to him, and Bella's failure to comply because 'studying to be a teacher, [she] was too busy' (A, 1, 27). It is one of many such uncertainties in his recreated history. In fact, Bella had graduated two years before Michael died and at this time, no doubt to his great pride, lived in at the school where she taught. But

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perhaps O'Casey was trying to register the child's sense of a supine father seemingly neglected in the home. On the other hand the child was anxious though unable to relate to this figure, who frightened him so much through his impatience that in recollection he had to find an excuse: 'When he was old enough to know about things, his father was ill, and he [himself] was bad with his eyes; and his father hated the thought that, because of his eyes, Johnny would grow up to be a dunce, a thing that was an abomination in the sight of the lord, his father, so the two seldom came together' (A, 1, 28). But he recalls one time when his father sent him to the neighbourhood shop for tobacco, and how he, as child, repeated over and over 'ounce of Cavendish cut plug' lest he forget the message and be proved a 'dunce', and how his father praised him. 'Then the wasted sensitive hand left the arm of the chair, and Johnny felt it resting on his head, as his father said softly and sadly, No, he is a brave little fellow, and his father's son' (A, 1, 29). In memory, O'Casey saw his father anxious over O'Casey's education, as apparently he had always been over his children's schooling, and John should have been in school since his fifth birthday. But so, in fact, he was, in his sister Bella's class at St Mary's, 'in a huge room at the back of the house, once a ballroom it was said, or stables'.51 Records show that he took his first examination on 31 January 1886, two months before his sixth birthday.52 He got a 'Pass' and his reading was described as 'satisfactory'. No doubt, his result won praise at home from his father. Whether O'Casey's eye trouble began while his father was alive is impossible to say for certain. The hospital records have not survived. It may be that O'Casey's memory served him well when he says that 'When he was five, his mother noticed a look of torment in his eyes,' as conjunctivitis and subsequently trachoma set in. But in the next chapter of the autobiographies, which describes the first visit to St Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital, he says that the word 'orphan' was entered in the records 'to denote his father's occupation'. It would appear, then, that Michael Casey was dead before O'Casey first visited St Mark's, but that the boy was already in school. This death was to occur on Monday 6 September 1886. Dublin stood poised for massive changes which Michael Casey was destined never to see. Parnell's Land Bill was expected in Parliament soon. Although Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill had been defeated in April and the Tories had come back in to stop the nonsense, could they hold up? There are rumours afloat', muttered the Dublin Evening Mail on 6 September, 'that Mr. Gladstone has joined the Church of Rome, and will pay a visit to the Pope.' Where would it all end? In Hull the TUG Congress was discussing the eight-hour day and other impossibilities. Its president inflamed the editor of the Dublin Evening Mail with his dreams of a new dawn for the working man. 'His remedies are impracticable and his theology runs counter to the plainest facts.' He was probably, continued the editorial on page two, a follower of Gladstone or of Karl Marx or deep breath - 'of both at once'. Plenty there for the boy-child to dream upon, all in good time. Meanwhile his father lay still in the little front room at number 9, Innisfallen Parade, his stern theological books all around him, the

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portraits of Queen Victoria and Lord Nelson staring down in grim satisfaction. So O'Casey remembered the scene. But he was too young at the time to register the misery of this premature death. He was to remember better the street outside where he took refuge, the talk of the indifferent cab-men assembled for the funeral, the jibe of his school friend who claimed John's black suit was 'only dyed', and the call of the women imploring him to go inside and kiss his dead father goodbye. Susan was gentle with him when he was dragged in protesting and hysterically refused to 'kiss a dead man'. 'He felt a gentle, sympathetic pressure of an arm around him, and softened his sobbing,' as she released him from the dreaded ritual and asked him instead to touch the side of the coffin with the tip of his finger. She then gave Michael a kiss from John. 'She stepped back, and he felt her body shaking. He looked up and saw her lips quivering in a curious way, as she said quietly to the waiting hearsemen, You may put the lid down on top of him now' (A, 1, 39). As this was written some fifty years later it is largely fiction, and yet the word 'curious' suggests something noted and disturbing. The funeral was to Mount Jerome cemetery in Harold's Cross, a good distance away, on the south side of the city. As Susan laid Michael to rest, she must have wondered how she was going to manage from here on. At least Bella, Mick and Tom would be all right, and could help to pay the rent and put food on the table. But Isaac, nearly finished school and nothing to show for it - what would he do? And what about this purblind child, of whom Bella had her doubts, what would become of him at all without his Da to put manners on him?

2 SEEING THINGS

fter Michael Casey's death in September 1886 the family began a slow slide into poverty. Since the Caseys had immense pride it was a gradual descent into indigence matched by a fierce independence nurtured by the militant protestant strain which was to mould O'Casey into a man of fierce integrity on the one hand and of downright stubbornness on the other. The lump sum which Michael received from the ICM, three months' salary, was probably well spent before he died. Nevertheless, Susan insisted on purchasing the grave in Mount Jerome on 12 April 1887, at a cost of two pounds (equivalent to two months' rent). This was an unusual gesture, for even today less than one-sixth of the graves in Mount Jerome are 'in perpetuity'.1 In due course she had a monument erected (which no longer stands). Whether there existed an insurance policy to cover the costs of funeral, plot and monument is not known. If there was no insurance, Susan must have put pressure on Bella and the two working boys Mick and Tom to hand over a major portion of their wages in order to defray all these expenses. But the right thing was done. Michael was buried with dignity and with due memorial, whatever the cost. Young John Casey was obviously back in school in September 1886. When he took another examination on 31 January 1887, for Senior Infants, his age was given as six although he was almost seven. The overall result was once again 'pass', but as the reading was now divided into two parts he received a 'mere pass' as distinct from a 'satisfactory pass' in one part, and was debarred from moving up to First Class. His attendances during the Senior Infants' year amounted to 118 days, which was low in comparison with what Mick and Tom habitually achieved (over 200), but above the minimum. John's absences were probably through his eye trouble, to be discussed below. When he took the examination for a second time on 31 January 1888 he had attended on 179 days, a considerable improvement. He got an overall pass, although only on account of his age, for this time the first part of the reading test was not good. With Bella's blessing, however, he graduated to First Class, where he did well enough to achieve a pass result on 31 January 1889 having attended for a

A

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31

respectable 197 days. In his reading test he now obtained the requisite pass and satisfactory pass and in the new requirement of writing he attained a good/satisfactory pass, while in something known as 'anthology' (probably recitation) he scored a 'mere pass' plus a 'fair' grade.2 Whereas, at almost nine years of age John was a year behind Mick at this grade and almost two years behind Tom, he could both read and write satisfactorily, something he denied in later years. His comparative tardiness and his rather poor attendance in the infants' classes can be explained by the affliction which struck his eyes when O'Casey was about six years of age and which was to have enormous consequences for his development. He suffered from chronic trachoma, defined in layman's terms as 'a contagious form of conjunctivitis, characterized by the formation of inflammatory granulations on the inner eyelid and eyeball, and is usually caused by unsanitory conditions.'3 Trachoma was a virus prevalent in Ireland all through the nineteenth century which led to blindness. The Great Famine caused an epidemic from 1846 to 1852 because of the conditions in over-crowded workhouses. But there were dedicated men who fought hard to provide hospitals to deal with the problem centrally and to train specialists in the latest skills and remedies to cope with it nationwide insofar as that was possible. One such doctor was William Wilde, father of the playwright, who founded St Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital and Dispensary, the place O'Casey visited as a boy for treatment. From 1844 onwards Wilde researched and did practical work here and paved the way for the eventual control of trachoma in Ireland. But it was to be a long haul, and the child John Casey arrived in the middle of the fight, while trachoma was still endemic and symptomatic of conditions of poverty in Dublin. As late as 1904 the specialist H.R. Swanzy said that the inhabitants of Ireland were more liable than those 'of almost any other land' to trachoma, 'a terrible disease which is always prevalent and when neglected commonly leads to complete loss of sight'.4 According to Gearoid Crookes, trachoma lingered on until after World War Two, 'when improved hygiene and housing, together with chemotherapy, accomplished its ultimate extinction in Ireland'.5 It was really the arrival of penicillin which heralded the end of this problem; O'Casey had to live with it until then, and first refers to its use in October 1946.6 By that time one eye was blind and the other severely damaged. At first, the searing, blinding pain and messy signs of infection were dealt with by Susan Casey with popular remedies, 'Pennyworths of golden ointment, zinc ointment, zinc and rosewater', and so on.7 She may have been too busy with Michael's illness at this time to have strict care for John's hygiene. After all, the house was no workhouse; there was no obvious reason for the virus beyond the child's carelessness. Be that as it may, he suffered day and night from the pain of the infection and could only 'sit and moan restlessly in the darkest places he could find', his eyes bandaged by a large white handkerchief. Then Susan's sister in Dolphin's Barn, probably Isabella, directed her to St Mark's Hospital and to the prominent ophthalmologist J.B. Story. And there

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John and his mother went one morning, taking a tram to Westland Row and walking up around the corner to Lincoln Place. Since 1869 it had been decided that patients suffering from chronic ophthalmic and related complaints could not be admitted to the wards, for fear of infecting others, but had to be seen at the dispensary as outpatients. A timetable was established to treat these outpatients three mornings a week at a charge of sixpence per month; the pauper was always attended to free of charge, since the link between trachoma and poverty was recognised. Mrs Casey, however, insisted on paying her sixpence. O'Casey must have retained the ticket she was given, for he reproduces all details in the autobiographies. He was seen by the senior surgeon John Benjamin Story (1850-1926), a man of considerable reputation, a graduate of TCD and a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, of which he was to become President in 1918. He had studied at Zurich and Vienna, specialising in ophthalmology. Since he died on 19 February 1926, just before O'Casey left Dublin for London, it is not unlikely that the details carefully incorporated into The Hill of Healing' chapter in the autobiographies have some of their basis in the obituaries published at the time. In any case, the account of the first examination by Dr Story is both graphic and plausible. This 'tall thin man, with a sharp face and an elegantly-pointed reddish beard' brought John to the window, removed his bandage, sat down at his desk, and forcing the boy's head between his legs pressed his fingers below the eyes and commanded John to open them. When John, afraid of the light, refused, two students were called to apply force, stretching him on his back, 'froglike, on the floor', and holding his legs while nurses held his arms. The doctor then forced open the eyes and injected 'what looked like cold water, [but] which spread like a cooling balm over the burning ulcerated surface of his eyeballs'. There followed a fuller examination in a 'pitch-dark room' and in the end Story was able to tell Susan: The boy will not be blind [...] but getting him well's going to be a long job.' Then, because no cure for trachoma was available, he could only prescribe cleanliness and palliatives. 'Bathe the eyes regularly in water as hot as he can bear it, afterwards with a lotion they will give you at the dispensary.' She was also to insert ointment underneath the lids night and morning, possibly Golden Eye Ointment or yellow oxide of mercury, which was favoured at the time 'because gold signified brightness, therefore sight'.8 John would have to wear a bandage for a long time, and required nourishing food, together with a tonic. School was out of the question. 'His eyes must be given absolute rest. No school for a long, long time.' When his mother remonstrated, Dr Story laid out the stark choice: 'Better to be a dunce than to be a blind man.'John would have to visit the dispensary every Monday, Wednesday and Friday until such time as attendance could be reduced to a weekly visit. When Dr Story departed a nurse bandaged John's eyes. Susan collected the prescribed medicines and led the boy from the institution 'that was to know him so well in the future that the doors nearly opened of their own accord

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when they saw him coming' (A, 1, 24-25). Alongside Dr Story he was to be treated by the young Dr Robert Dwyer Joyce (1874-1959), son of P.W.Joyce and future Professor (in 1935) of Ophthalmology at UCD. Thus Wilde's hospital, soon to amalgamate with Dublin's other eye and ear hospital, the National, to form the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear in 1897, continued to make first-class treatment available to Dublin's underprivileged. The building itself, St Mark's, first designed as a Methodist chapel, survived until the late 1990s. Bearing in mind the records of school attendance cited above it is clear that O'Casey later exaggerated his lack of schooling. Yet it is nevertheless likely that his intermittent attendance early on held up his progress. Soon the'time would come for him to leave St Mary's Infant School and move on to a boys' school. By this time the family had moved from Innisfallen Parade down to the East Wall area. Attending school with a bandage over one eye (the left) is no recipe for popularity either with teachers or with other boys, and 'scabby eyes', as O'Casey was cruelly called, never settled into the harsh regime then in operation after First Class. The autodidact was born in the outpatients' at St Mark's. The long-term implications of O'Casey's trachoma were daunting. All his life long he followed Dr Story's prescription to bathe his eyes morning and night in hot water, and to apply the necessary ointment. But secondary infections occurred, one of which was ingrown eyelashes which exacerbated the pain from trachoma. It was necessary to have someone pluck out these eyelashes regularly with a tweezer. The trachoma recurred all through his life, and led in the 1920s to ulcerated cornea, requiring an operation. This happened just at the time when his playwriting career was taking off. As a disability it was a chronic cause of stress, though with periods of remission when he apparently experienced no difficulty at all and could read, as was his bent, voraciously. But light always bothered him. Hence the practice of wearing a peaked cap drawn down well over his eyes for protection, which he sometimes wore indoors also. Yet the paradox, if not the great miracle, of O'Casey's life is that he was a seer although visually impaired. As will appear, like his brother Mick he developed a skill in sketching and drawing and could dash off excellent cartoons (seen in his letters) based on close observation of life around him. He had a particularly good 'eye' for colour, extraordinary in the circumstances, and the stage directions in his plays are full of colourful descriptions of costumes, lighting effects, and settings. In addition, rather as Shaw described his own vision as abnormally normal because he could see what others preferred not to see,9 so too O'Casey, for all his eye problems, could see the world and see into the world with far greater clarity and precision than those gifted with naturally good eyesight. Never has there been, since olden times, so appropriate a metaphor for the Irish artist as O'Casey's eye-trouble. Joyce's eye problems came later, when he was in his forties and when he had his best work done; O'Casey's arrived just as he was starting out, and allowed him to see in pain, like the blinded Gloucester in King Lear, how the world goes. Through all this trauma, following the death of his father, the young O'Casey was very dependent on Bella, after his mother the most important

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person in his young life. She was a second mother to him, indeed, while he attended her class in St Mary's. As he saw it later, she did not have a minute to herself. Not only were her teaching duties onerous but the school manager Canon James Hunter Monahan insisted she sing in the church choir.10 She did well as a teacher, getting good reports annually from the inspector who reported on the Results Examination held. One inspector said: The teacher is attentive and has a very attractive manner with the children.' Other comments included, 'Spelling very well taught', 'Writing satisfactory for class', and Tupils orderly and intelligent'.11 By February 1887 she had been promoted to Third Class, Grade 1, which meant a slight increase in annual salary to £16 (plus fees). But some six months later at the start of a new school year a head inspector found fit to comment somewhat ominously: There are some omissions in the accounts, to which I have called Miss Casey's attention. The pages of the Report Book set apart for [illegible] of School Room etc. not filled - No entry of salaries and other grants. The amount of fees received from children should be entered in monthly folio - and the weekly total [...] should also be entered there, at the end of the Report Book.' Two weeks later the visiting inspector complained that the above remarks had not all been attended to: The Teacher should lose no time in remedying the defects noticed.' It was pointed out also that there were no desks in the school and insufficient 'objects and appliances for a regularly organised Infant School'. It is hard to see what Bella was supposed to do about these points, or the purchase of a small harmonium ' [to] make the singing exercises more attractive to the little ones'. Bella was thus under kinds of pressure she could not deal with. The inspectors continued to harry her through 1888, especially over her 'returns' in the school records. Following the examination at the end of January, when John formed one of thirty infants examined from 11.00 a.m. to 1.20 p.m., the inspector commented: Today, the error of calculating attendances for year ended 31.12.1887 instead of year ended 31.1.1888 rendered all the entries of attendances "incorrect". The first page of Daily Report Book should be filled up.' It was a difficult time, with Mrs Casey worried about making ends meet and talking of getting some place cheaper to rent than Innisfallen Parade, even staying in Bella's spartan rooms with John and Isaac for a time. John's eye troubles no doubt complicated Bella's attendance returns. His presence in class may even have affected her teaching performance. But there was one other factor in Bella's life which was causing distraction. She ,was in love. Nicholas Beaver was a soldier in the First Battalion, King's Liverpool Regiment, the one James Connolly had joined around the same time. Beaver, born in County Waterford in 1867, joined up in Clonmel at age fifteen. His father, James Beaver, was a colour sergeant in the 76th Regiment before him. As Connolly's biographer says, the First King's Liverpool counted as an Irish regiment.12 Normally stationed at Aldershot it was sometimes posted to Dublin, as happened in 1888.13 Here he met Bella. Since her brothers Mick and Tom had already joined up in 1887, for the Royal Engineering and the Dublin Fusiliers respectively, it may be that they met Beaver socially and

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brought him home to Innisfallen Parade. Bella fell for him immediately, though he was two years younger. A surviving photograph shows him to have been strikingly handsome, and the uniform, scarlet, with dark blue collars, cuffs and trousers, was given special splendour by the fancy 'wings' Beaver wore as drummer. These caught the eye of the young John also, though the older O'Casey must have done some research to provide the detail he enters into in the autobiographies (A, 1, 46-47): 'Johnny stared at the red-coated soldier who had a lovely epaulette, like a sickle moon, on each shoulder, covered with white braid, sprinkled with little red crowns [...] And over his back and shoulder there ran a cord which met just above his left breast and then fell down in two big lovely tassels of blue, yellow, and green plaited cords,' the famous 'swallow's nest'.14 Here he introduces Beaver (whom he always calls Benson) at Michael Casey's funeral, on 8 September 1886, an unlikely though powerfully charged encounter, featuring Bella's blushes and their mother's fixed disapproval. In spite of the inappropriateness of his flirting with Bella ['Ella'] in the graveyard, Beaver is invited to share the Casey coach on the pretext that they 'all go the same way home', to the grave or to the devil. O'Casey detested Beaver and depicted him as a no-good, vain individual, like 'a peacock turned into a moving man' (A, 1, 62). The way he is made to pop up in his thrilling red at the Casey funeral is like a scene from a Hardy novel: Sergeant Troy, perhaps, entering the life of little Fanny Robin. Of course, O'Casey's narrative is coloured by his knowledge of Bella's subsequent history. But even then, even looking back in the 1930s, O'Casey was unable to come to terms with Beaver as intruder in his own as much as in Bella's life. The draft versions of I Knock at the Door reveal some of his complex response to the love affair. 'When & how & where they courted I do not know. These things then I did not understand, & they did not exist for me. The idea of relationships stopped at father, mother, brother [,] sister, son & daughter, & after a good deal of thought included Aunt, Uncle & first cousin.' He was aware of a major row between Bella and Mrs Casey over Bella's impending marriage to Beaver: 'You will sup sorrow if you marry him.'15 What the grounds of Susan's objection were young John could not discern. He was like one of those child observers in a Henry James novel, alert, observant, but incapable through innocence of telling the story in full; the older narrator O'Casey sees corruption. What John knew, in the Jamesian sense, was that Bella was sullenly looking into the fire, night after night, while Mrs Casey kept knitting away in disapproval, and the boy sat wondering what the row was about. He could tell that his mother disliked Beaver's heavy drinking. He did not know that Bella was pregnant. Bella and Nicholas were married on 7 March 1889 at her parish church of St Mary's. Their first child, Susan Archer Beaver, was born less than six weeks later on 17 April. Though Mrs Casey did not attend the wedding she must have been sufficiently softened by the baby's name to make peace, since Bella moved in with her, Isaac and John at their new address, 25 Hawthorn Terrace, East Wall. Nicholas returned to his regiment at South Camp, Aldershot. He had almost five years to go before his discharge, during which Bella and

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offspring stayed with her mother and the resentful John. No doubt, where and how Bella proposed to live had formed part of the row with Susan but the extra-marital pregnancy would have been the primary cause. For a woman to be almost eight months pregnant before marriage was then a scandal; for a teacher of small children it was close to unforgivable. Bella knew this well. On the baby's birth certificate Bella's occupation is given as 'mother' and not 'teacher'. It was as well for Michael Casey that he was not alive to see his daughter's fall for, like Captain Boyle in a similar situation in Juno and the Paycock, he might not have been responsible for his actions. At this time, it was always the young woman who carried the blame for the scandal brought upon family and community, since it was firmly believed that 'respectability, once lost, can never be recovered.'16 A fictional example is recorded in Brinsley MacNamara's The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918). Here the clerical manager of the school where the young teacher has become pregnant makes clear the 'enormous offence' of which she is guilty: Listen to me, girl! You are to go from hence, but not, as you may imagine, to the place from whence you came. For this very evening I intend to warn your pastor of your lapse from virtue while in our midst, so that you may not return to your father's house and have no more hope of teaching in any National school within the four seas of Ireland.17 Bella's baby was not baptised in her parish church of St Mary's. Yet she somehow managed to continue teaching for the rest of 1889, resigning on 31 December. She never taught again, 'within the four seas of Ireland' or elsewhere. Although O'Casey implies in the autobiographies that a married teacher had to resign, this regulation was not introduced until the 1930s. The real cause of Bella's decision lay in the regulations enforced by the Education Commission. Among the 'Twelve Practical Rules for the Teachers of National Schools' was (no. 8): 'To pay the strictest attention to the morals and general conduct of their Pupils, and to omit no opportunity of inculcating the principles of truth and honesty: the duties of respect to superiors, and obedience to all persons placed in authority over them.' Hyland and Milne remark that the rules in general 'required a high moral code of conduct from teachers and they emphasised the importance of the example given by teachers to their pupils both inside and outside school.'18 Reading between the lines, one must believe that the Rector as school manager had to be told of Bella's situation and that, in effect, she had little choice but to resign. The resignation meant the loss of her accommodation in the teachers' residence at 20 Lower Dominick Street. O'Casey never referred to any of this scandal. It was very private. As a nineyear-old he would have known little about the affair, but he would have observed his mother's fury. In another unpublished draft of the autobiographies there are passages which show how difficult it was for the child to accept Bella's sexuality and her marrying Beaver. In one interesting episode referring to this

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time when Bella was living with the Caseys he describes a row between them. Bella was studying Geography Generalised, sipping tea and eating bread and butter; Jimmy [sic] annoys her by reading aloud Tennyson's The Brook'. His mother intervenes to tell him to read the poem quietly. When he does not, Bella snatches the book from him and sits on it. Mrs Casey tells them to stop fighting before father comes in for his 'breakfast'. Jimmy gets into a temper and attacks Bella. A baby sleeping in the corner of the couch awakens and adds to the row, which takes a nasty turn when Jimmy tilts Bella's chair back until her legs are kicking in the air. 'If your little drummer boy was here now, he'd see something worth while,' Jimmy shouts, referring to her underwear. But Bella retorts that the drummer boy will 'smash his face in, knock him down & jump on him, kick him [,] twist his arms till he roared & roared & batter him to bits'. Then, since Jimmy was twisting her legs and causing her pain, she flings his book across the room and calls him a 'dirty, savage stony-faced baboon'. She lies there - the chair, presumably having fallen - sobbing as if after a kind of rape: 'panting, exhausted, ashamed, angry, her leg muscles stiff, & painful with the strain they had met & the pressure they had so unexpected [ly] had to resist. She lay where she had rolled sobbing quietly.'Jimmy picks up his book, deplores a torn page, opens at 'The Brook', sits down again, and resumes his recitation.19 Although this draft account is partly self-consciously the portrait of an artist in embryo, seen as a lover and defender of books, the subtext is John's desire for Bella and his confusion over her revealed sexuality. A companion piece in the same draft goes back a year earlier. After Bella and Nicholas were married in St Mary's Church on 7 March 1889, Tom standing in as best man (which suggests that Mick was abroad at the time), the couple brought young John along with them on the honeymoon to Bray, a seaside resort some twelve miles south of Dublin. O'Casey reports that Beaver told him not to worry about anything, that he would be 'something in the way of a father' to him. As O'Casey remembered the event in later years it was a halcyon day in summer. It was Bella who insisted on their bringing her 'orphaned brother', and so off they went, taking a horse-drawn tram down to Harcourt Street station for the 1.30 train to Bray, third-class return. Bella was dressed in 'a tight-fitting brown dress [in spite of her eight-months' pregnancy?] with tiny white ruffs round neck & wrist, buttoned closely from throat to belly, wearing a black felt rock [?] hat with a single narrow white feather, & Nick was in his regimentals.' To match this grandeur, young John had to have a clean collar and his hair well tamed with what Beaver called 'a good shower of Gob-oil' (spittle), for it stood on end, Bella quipped, like quills upon the fretful porcupine, showing off her knowledge of Shakespeare. In the railway carriage the honeymooners sat at one window, young John, 'stiff & timid & wondering, & inwardly excited', at the other. They kissed and held hands & looked at each other. Whispered & smiled; he petted her thighs, she kissed him & I looked on, & then looked out the window. I felt lonely.' Writing here forty years after the event O'Casey pauses to reflect that most of

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our adult lives is spent in such loneliness and isolation, 'passing here & there, now & again through patches of companionship'. But the boy within the narrative is at odds with the man looking back on the horrors which were to face his happy sister, with Beaver's 'ignominious end in a lunatic asylum'. Neither could Beaver, seeing her now so radiant and so obviously proud of him, see her before him, pale, worn [,] harried, with the stare of a dead peace in her eyes [,] dirty, careless, clad in torn blouse & satin skirt, making stews for his dinner; or putting on steak, or an egg & a rasher on his plate; dry ey'd, because years of silent crying had wasted the flow of sorrow, & she was now palsied with resignation & a dead peace. Then the train glided into Bray & we hurried out of the carriage, walked down to the beach, & I looked for the first time & saw the sea. It was a painful day out. The lovers sat on a bench and proceeded to whisper and make love - rather more daringly than Jack and Nora in the privacy of their tenement room in The Plough and the Stars. Pruriently, the older O'Casey witnesses his sister's sexual invasion, Nicholas 'sometimes suddenly shooting his hand to her thing & pressing his fingers through her dress into her flesh, so that she winced, reddened & said Please Nick, don't; someone'll see us.' Bella, noting John's keen interest, orders him onto the beach to play; Nicholas helps him down the steps. Then I found myself down on the beach, standing on the sand, my head down so that the shining sun might not send his rays of pain through my good [eye] or on to the eye that shelters behind its flannel bandage & woolen [sic] swab. The pair of them wanted to be rid of me.' He had no idea how to play on a beach, and had neither bucket nor spade. He went down to the sea's edge and watched the sea come in to where he stood and tried counting the waves. But at 'five' the scorching pain from the dazzle of light hit him, making him grind his teeth and clench his nails until they cut into his hands, 'as I waited for the searing tears to gush out [. . .] carrying the agony away with them'. Having got his feet wet he runs up on some rocks and kills a crab. Sick of the sea, he wants to go home.

What the young O'Casey needed was something to believe in. His world, brittle enough from the outset, began to fall apart after his father's death and Bella's failure to fulfil her academic potential. The move to Hawthorn Terrace held its own excitements, however, for it meant totally new surroundings, in an area unequivocally working-class. Bounded by the northern railway line on one side - a kind of 'Berlin Wall'20 - and the docklands on the other, East Wall is a veritable world in itself, even today, with the development of the Spencer Dock area. Theatre director Alan Simpson, who was aware of how the topography permeated not only Act 1 of The Silver Tassie but the whole of Red Roses for Me, wrote in 1980: 'East Wall was, in some respects, not so much a part of Dublin as an actual microcosm of that part of the British colony of Ireland

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which was most intimately integrated with the about-to-collapse Empire.'21 After the railway began in 1843 the area combined its mainly seafaring trade with servicing the new railway system. Employment related to both callings was skilled and unskilled, and some of it attracted Ulster people to the area because of the Great Northern Railway, a typical Ascendancy employer. In 1900 the protestant population was put at eight hundred for the newly established District Parish of St Barnabas. Proportionately, this meant quite a protestant enclave, although as elsewhere in the city the majority of residents was catholic. The Rector of St Barnabas at this time, E.M. Griffin, who befriended O'Casey, offered a clear picture of his parishioners and their economic states: We have no resident Gentry or Merchants. Many of the Dublin Merchants, who have interests in the Parish subscribe to our Funds. [. . .] The bulk of our Church population is composed of Quay Labourers, Railway Porters, Ticket Collectors, Stokers, Fitters, Carters, Carpenters[,] Plumbers, Painters & such like, a large number of whom subscribe 6d a month to our Sustentation Fund. We have a considerable number of good Clerks in Railways, some Mercantile Shop Assistants, Compositors, Bookbinders &c many of whom have promised subscriptions.22 It was a strictly working-class area. As Simpson has emphasised, O'Casey spent twenty years of his life here before becoming a playwright - by which time he was back living close to the city centre - and it was here for the most part he grew up and formed his life-long convictions. Although the area was poor and the ways of life hard, the people were tough and buoyant. It was a place which did not change much until the 1930s, when Dublin Corporation moved in to build new houses and establish an inner city area. People born before that time comment in ways that relate directly to O'Casey's experience in the East Wall district. Thus Mrs Bridget Heffernan, nee Whitty, born 1910: The rooms were kept spotless clean. There were no carpets or lino on the people's floors, they only had bare floorboards. They scrubbed their floorboards every morning and even scrubbed outside the front door of the house right on to the footpath.'23 Jack Kelly, whose grandparents lived before him in Coburg Place (a most Victorian placename) comments: The houses on the left as you enter Coburg Place were the property of the Great Northern Railways and all the company employees lived in them. My grandfather and my own father both were engine drivers for the GNR. There were also about six North of Ireland families living in Coburg Place - they had been transferred from the North to Dublin by the GNR. At six o'clock in the morning the whole area would come alive with people going to work on the docks.24

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It was a great place for soccer, in spite of the rise of the Gaelic Athletic Association after 1884, with its links to nationalism. In O'Casey's time there were two soccer clubs, Strandville and St Barnabas, and the interest fuels the plot of The Silver Tassie. James Kavanagh, later Bishop Kavanagh, recalls his childhood in Coburg Place as one of freedom and security. 'We use[d] to play soccer too, of course - on the quiet. When we'd go down to Fairview Park we'd play soccer and when we saw the [Christian] Brother coming we'd switch to Gaelic. That's the way things were in those days.'25 Another priest from a later generation recalls the cattle coming down from the market on North Circular Road to the quays for shipping to England, just as in O'Casey's day, when he recorded in a chapter of the autobiographies entitled The Tired Cow': Johnny suddenly remembered that the day was Thursday, and all the cattle would be pouring down to the boats that carried them all to England [...]. As he turned into drowsy Dorset Street, he could hear the cries of the drovers, pitched high or pitched low, as he ran along till he came to the corner of North Circular Road [...]. Here he loved to stand to watch the passing beasts, holding his stick ready, shooing back any one of them that tried to turn aside from the straight road, running forward, when the animal turned with a low circular move of its horned head and a frightened look in its big eyes, to give it a parting swipe on the rump as hard as he could with the ashplant. (A, 1, 70-71) In 1998 Father Des MacNaboe recalled much the same scene, even if the market day was different: There was not much traffic then, but every Wednesday the cattle came down from the cattle market up on the North Circular Road. They were going down to the Band Boat on the Quay. So we used to see this sight of the cattle being driven, droves of cattle coming down. There was always one man to a bull going along. Sometimes a bull would get loose and we would be dead scared.'26 Between a bull and a tired cow, however, the artist intervenes to capture the sights, sounds, smells and atmosphere of Seville Place. The ten years spent at 25 Hawthorn Terrace were at least tolerable, even though money was always a problem. The street is quite attractive, with little gardens in front of small or what real estate lists might now call 'bijou' cottages but then were artisan dwellings on reduced rent. The Caseys had the house to themselves, unlike the situation later at Abercorn Road, where they would have to share. It was from Hawthorn Terrace that the nine-year-old O'Casey would have made his way to Upper Sheriff Street each morning for school, a bad experience which he transformed into vivid prose in I Knock at the Door. He was unfortunate in having a bad teacher in John Hogan, principal of St Barnabas's Boys' School, where there were no more than sixty (protestant) pupils. Appointed in July 1879, at age thirty-four, Hogan was an untrained teacher who had come up the ladder as monitor and assistant, and seems to have understood only one way of getting boys to learn: through force. It was a common if brutal method rampant in the Irish school system. Hogan was well

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respected in the community, and strongly committed to church affairs. It was simply that in John Casey he found a pupil who not only had eye problems but also needed far more progressive teaching methods than he possessed. Hogan was under pressure to keep up attendances, his salary (based on capitation) being threatened in 1891 when numbers fell off. He thus went after John Casey and, as the boy saw it, tyrannised him. In the circumstances, the boy fell further behind and, as he later insisted, learned next to nothing. But he did have available, contrary to the impression O'Casey later created in interviews, a basic national-school education. One of the results of Hogan's treatment was that O'Casey formed a life-long interest in education: having experienced some of the worst and most negative methods, he argued often for a more enlightened, child-centred approach, and when it came to his own three children he insisted on this. He was lucky, however, to have Bella at home, for she was a gifted teacher and was always described as gentle.27 But in due course, when Nicholas Beaver returned to Dublin for good, Bella moved to Rutland Place, some distance away, and John was educationally on his own. This was when he began to teach himself, using not only Bella's books (including the three volumes of Shakespeare she won as a school prize), but those which his father had left behind him, those Mick had not yet sold off for drink. John was about twelve or thirteen when he motivated himself to read well, spell almost impeccably by poring over Walker's Dictionary, and inform himself in an encyclopaedic fashion about the world and the nature of things via a book entitled The Comprehensive Survey. This sudden love of learning, born of frustration and unhappy schooldays, marked the beginning of 'the passionate autodidact'.28 His accounts of his schooldays, even their social side, reveal little but boredom, pain and humiliation. The friends he made were protestant allies, who in later life were to become rather bigoted pillars of the parish church. O'Casey was discovering how the freemasonry of street politics worked: regardless how obnoxious, a pal must always be protected and fought for. He learned loyalty early and lived by it thereafter. Yet always there was no place like home. He loved to be in his mother's company, even if that meant no more than sorties into or across town to do shopping or to visit St Mark's Hospital to have his eyes treated. Susan protected him from the world he dreaded, the visits from the teacher or the rector demanding his presence at school, or the exposure to ridicule in the streets. In the autobiographical play Red Roses for Me (1942), the mother who is based on Susan Casey says to her son: 'I did an' dared a lot for you, Ayamonn, my son, in my time, when jeerin' death hurried your father off to Heaven.' To which the O'Casey figure replies: 'It's I who know that well: when it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me; when you suffered me to starve rather than thrive towards death in an Institution, you gave me life to play with as a richer child is given a coloured ball.'29 The reference here is to the Blue-coat School in Blackball Place, an orphanage to which the rector wanted to send John at one point. In the draft version of the affair, Mick and Tom are present, which would put the date around 1887; in

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the version used in the autobiographies they are in the army and write home 'to say the idea was a grand one' (A, 1, 171), which suggests a later date. In the draft version in the New York Public Library the rector has made all arrangements when he calls to the Casey home and tries to convince Susan that the move would be altogether for the child's benefit physically and morally. Moreover, John would receive an education there 'suitable to his class so that he may make his way in the world later on as a sober, loyal & respectable citizen'. The word 'loyal' meant, of course, unionist. But Mrs Casey stood resolutely against the proposal, claiming that such schools took all the spirit out of the boys so that they seemed 'orphaned out of life'.30 Clearly, Susan made the right decision, and John was instinctively aware of this. Her support compensated for bad schooling. The terms on which he could enjoy Susan's approval, however, were primarily religious. He had to know and love the Bible. When he was seven he won a certificate for proficiency in Holy Scripture and Church Formularies, signed by no less a figure than Archbishop Plunket. The occasion was a diocesan examination held by the Board of Religious Education, Church of Ireland. The result was Second Class, 'not so bad for a half-blind little chiseller', as the older O'Casey acknowledged. He conceded that the Bible was 'the important book in our house'.31 In one corner of the certificate awarded there was the motto 'Search the Scriptures', which was identical with that of the Irish Church Missions. In effect, O'Casey was following in his father's footsteps, as his mother hoped he would. She was a stern churchgoer and so was he. Including the Reverend Edward Griffin of St Barnabas in his sense of loyalty O'Casey declared: T was a stubborn kid with a mind of my own, but I wouldn't have done anything to let them down.'32 Later on he was to tell another Biblelover, Lady Gregory, about his childhood achievement, adding that the prize was a book entitled Alone in Zulu Land. As this (late 1880s) was the time of exciting events in the Sudan the boy 'was delighted thinking it was a book of adventure but it was only about a missionary and the converts he made among the Zulus'.33 So, he was not any different from boys everywhere. Yet the Sunday School prize is an early indication of O'Casey's absorption by the Bible even before he could read properly. What he imbibed was an oral tradition, 'the word-music of Bible and Prayer-book, when I went to Sunday School and Church, which lingered on in my sub-conscious mind, though they bored me at the time - six years of age on to eleven or twelve'.34 The influence was deep and lasting. While Mick and Tom were in the army, the young O'Casey was dependent on Isaac, seven years his senior, for companionship. Isaac was an office boy for the Daily Express, working from 4 a.m. to 6 p.m. for a wage of fifteen shillings a week. If it were not for this income the family would have been in serious trouble; as it was they got a coal allowance from the parish, which could be withdrawn if John's school attendance was not kept up (A, 1, 115). 'Food was rare, though there was almost always a hunk of bread to be had.' Clothes were a different matter, and John had mainly to make do with cast-offs and

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much-mended garb. Later, he recalled having only two suits 'that had come fresh to his body: one, a blue sailor suit [. . .] and a soft tweed suit, fitted after many trials and finally accepted from a Jew for two shillings down, and a shilling a week after, till the full price was paid.' It too lived on to be 'patched and stitched till it was tired; coaxed with care to stay together a little longer' (A, 1, 153). Isaac's weekly wage financed a trip for John and his mother to Lipton's in Earl Street for tea and sugar. O'Casey found these trips agonising because they meant passing through streets crammed with good things to eat. Yielding to temptation, the hungry boy would steal when the opportunity arose. 'I always imagine', wrote Turgenev in Fathers and Sons, 'there must be something special, a certain sort of vanity, in a person who realizes and acknowledges that he is poor.'85 For all that, 'Hold them cheap/May who ne'er hung there', as Hopkins says of the lower depths. Those who have not experienced want in childhood are always quick to accuse those who have of self-dramatisation. In looking in contrast at another Russian autobiography, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory (1968), one sees in glaring detail the difference between rich and poor: luxurious surroundings, private tutors, the best of foreign delicacies imported from France and England, a world altogether as different from O'Casey's miserable youth as that of a foundling is from a royal palace. One must turn to Gorki instead to find an equivalence to O'Casey's harsh maturation. It is from Gorki one begins to appreciate how such a daily humiliation as John Casey had to suffer from routine privation could result in the generosity of spirit, the courage and the intellectual acuity which make the artist different in degree from the common man: 'Life is always surprising us - not by its rich, seething layer of bestial refuse - but by the bright, healthy and creative human powers of goodness that are for ever forcing their way up through it. It is those powers that awaken our indestructible hope that a brighter, better and more humane life will once again be reborn.'36 There is no glamour in deprivation. O'Casey describes his mother's scrubbing her little house as 'washing away the venom of poverty' (A, 1, 216). Indeed, as Shaw said, poverty is actually 'the greatest of our evils, and the worst of our crimes'.37 No doubt, it was through poverty, through feeling it as well as seeing it, that O'Casey came to be fired by that rage against injustice which infuses all of his writings. The stealing he confesses to, and attributes also to Tom and Isaac, is clearly part shame and part defiance: an assertion of those 'powers' Gorki speaks of. Isaac was the theatrical one in the family. He rigged up some kind of stage at Hawthorn Terrace and supplied scripts for little plays to be acted out by himself, John, the dog (in his glory days) and, as time went on, even Bella's offspring. Next came scenes from dramatic authors, with Isaac always in the lead, the Henry Irving of the dockside. Mrs Casey did not quite approve. She had never set foot in a theatre in her life - a circus, indeed, but never a theatre. Yet John had seen the posters with their attractive pictures advertising oldfashioned melodramas and longed to see a live performance. He saved a penny a week until he had eight, to which Isaac added four and announced he was taking John to the Queen's to see Boucicault's The Shaughraun. Having

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stood impatiently in line for twenty minutes outside the brightly lit theatre in Brunswick (later Pearse) Street they got into the pit, three rows from the stage. Looking around the typically Victorian auditorium John admired 'the gilded balcony & boxes, the red, covered ledges, the band before him playing "I'd Mourn the Hopes that Wail Me", & the gorgeous crimson curtain, veiling the stage, was heaven at home to him.'38 This was a rare occasion rather than prelude to regular playgoing at this venue, since financially theatre-going was out of the question for the likes of John. But many years later, when the Abbey Company moved to the Queen's in 1951, following the fire, the first production they played there was to be O'Casey's The Silver Tassie. So, the boy all agog at The Shaughraun in the 1890s was one day to 'keep the home fires burning' at this very venue. Looking back he saw that first experience as 'a wonderful revelation. Then, it seemed, the world was lit by footlights.'39 Isaac, meantime, fell head over heels in love with theatre. He befriended the actor Frank Dalton (1852-1936), referred to in the autobiographies as 'Tommy Talton', father of the playwright Louis D'Alton. Frank was regarded as 'the best character actor of his time'.40 His sister Marian was married to the noted exponent of Boucicault's plays, the actor-manager Charles Sullivan. After Sullivan died in 1887 Dalton joined his sister on tour with the Sullivan Irish Combination, which played at the Queen's from that year until 1890.41 Then they joined other troupes, one of which staged the production of The Shaughraun O'Casey saw with Isaac, who became a hanger-on. Isaac formed the Townsend Dramatic Society, rented disused stables in Hill Street and with scenery made of leftover canvases from the Queen's and costumes loaned by Frank Dalton, opened for business some time in the mid 1890s, attracting audiences of forty or fifty for the cut-rate admission of two pence. The name of the company derived from the street where Michael Casey had long toiled for the ICM. One wonders what he might have made of the spectacle of his two sons not merely entering the Temple of Dagon but actually running the show. On Townsend Street in the 1890s there was also a Coffee Palace or music hall where Willie Fay staged little farces and dramatic scenes. Here Isaac and John once performed the quarrel scene between Brutus (Isaac) and Cassius (John) to little or no applause, possibly from patrons expecting something rather different. In their own space in Hill Street Isaac and John played such Shakespearean scenes. As Norfolk in Henry VIII, John 'sported dark-blue tights, yellow buskins, black trunks, brown velvet coat, and rich green silk cape', while as Cardinal Wolsey Isaac strutted 'in a red gown, topped with a low-crowned, widebrimmed jerry hat that had been soaked for days in soda to remove the black colour, then dyed in crimson, with red curtain cords laced round the crown, the heavy tassels hanging down over his left shoulder.' After his parting shot as Norfolk (in 3.2), 'And so we'll leave you to your meditations/How to live better', John had to get offstage and come back again as Cromwell in less than a minute and stand amazed as Wolsey finished his twenty-two line soliloquy.42 Such moments engrained in the future playwright the importance of timing and the significance of making an entrance. The brothers also offered the

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scene between Henry VI and Richard, Duke of York, which O'Casey effectively introduced into Red Roses for Me in an autobiographical mode: a rehearsal at Abercorn Road, though with Isaac now dropped from the cast. This interest in Shakespeare also reflected an ardent admiration for the stars who visited Dublin. O'Casey said he saw Henry Irving among others at the Theatre Royal: that would have been in November 1894, about the same time as the venture at Hill Street.43 He and Isaac also played scenes from melodramas, using Dick's Standard Plays for texts, which sold then for a few pennies. They mainly acted Boucicault: O'Casey mentions The Octoroon and The Shaughraun. Dion Boucicault (1820-90) was himself a Dubliner, and once worked, briefly, as a clerk in Guinness's brewery, for he was reportedly related to Arthur Guinness on his mother's side.44 His plays, romantic melodramas with spectacular scenes of sensation, included three with Irish settings, of which The Shaughraun remains the best. But the earlier Octoroon, set in Louisiana, equally deserves its high reputation as radical drama. The play premiered in New York on 6 December 1859, 'only four days after the hanging of John Brown for his Abolitionist rebellion at Harper's Ferry'.45 In Isaac's little theatre, they played the scene in Act 4 where the villain Jacob M'Closky is confronted by the kindhearted overseer Salem Scudder, the leading role originally played by the great Joseph Jefferson but here (no doubt, for one night only, by public demand) by Isaac Archer Casey. O'Casey carried the thankless role of M'Closky, who has little to say in his defence beyond such disclaimers as, 'What court of law would receive such evidence?' It would have been impossible for the Casey brothers to create on their small stage the sensational ending to this scene, with the blowing up of a steamer. Thus here as with The Shaughraun, where the chosen scene was probably that between Corry Kinchela and Harvey Duff at the end of Act 1, spectacle, the core of a Boucicault melodrama, was avoided in favour of verbal exchange. The impact of Boucicault's plays on O'Casey's own work was nevertheless to be considerable.46 It was to come in the use of song, of comedy, and of colourful if somewhat stagey characters within a story-line invariably pitting light against dark, decency against villainy, high spirits against snivelling subordinates of powerful, corrupt forces in authority. On the other hand, O'Casey as playwright was to outstrip Boucicault by shifting from Victorian illusionism to twentieth-century social and political realism. One would not wish to exaggerate the degree of this theatrical activity.47 In all probability O'Casey's involvement was limited. While undoubtedly he was fired by the whole process of creation on the stage he preferred reading plays to attending the theatre. When Isaac had about a hundred of Dick's Standard Plays bound in one volume (getting the bookbinder to entitle it, misleadingly, Irish Plays) John was in his element: the book gave him 'an unappeasable desire for the reading of plays'.48 At the same time, it must have been important to him that Dublin was a theatre-going and theatre-loving city, with its many music halls as well as its 'legitimate' theatres: for sixpence or a shilling one could see any of the London popular successes on tour at the Gaiety, while

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at the Theatre Royal and Dan Lowrey's Music Hall (later the Olympia) one could see all the English popular entertainers from May Kendall to Dan Leno.49 The admission was always to be one problem, O'Casey's eyesight another, yet he could enter imaginatively, as Stephen Watt has shown, into fruitful 'negotiations' with popular forms.50 And who is to say how much the 'Irish political melodrama' on view may not have been consciousness-raising, helping to transform this member of a unionist family into the Gaelic Leaguer he became after 1900?51 There are ambiguities here, as in so much of O'Casey's life. If it were not for Isaac, however, the young O'Casey might never have experienced any of this theatrical excitement. In the autobiographies Archie is an endearing figure, whose stylish mediocrity was to be perfectly captured in Jack MacGowran's performance in the film based on the autobiographies, Young Cassidy (1965). To the later O'Casey, 'poor devil he [Isaac] was nearly drowned in the theatrical sea of one-night shows in Irish towns.'52 The best he could do for the moment was to stay close to Frank Dal ton and through him the Sullivan Irish Combination, now managed by Charles Junior. When the Combination played at the Mechanics' Theatre in Abbey Street Isaac got supporting roles and provided his young brother with free tickets for a front bench in the pit. Originally opened in 1820 as a 'minor' theatre or opera house, which burned down in 1839, this venue became the Mechanics' Institute later in the century. 'As well as a small concert-hall, there was a lending-library, a reading-room and a chemical laboratory.'53 Because of the patent laws then operating under the 1847 Theatres Act, the Institute failed to have the concert-hall converted into a 'legitimate' theatre and could only put on short sketches or vaudeville acts of twenty minutes or less. It subsequently became the New Princess Theatre of Varieties and following that the People's Music Hall, first managed by Dublin comedian Pat Langan. It continued, however, to be popularly known as 'the Mechanics'. The well-known picture by Jack B. Yeats, '"Willie Reilly" at the Old Mechanics Theatre', must refer to the 1880s, since the Yeats family left Dublin for London in 1887.54 In the picture one can see a small Victorian-style theatre, with gallery, stage boxes and a pit (admission threepence) inhabited altogether by men wearing hats and smoking pipes. On the small stage a melodrama featuring uniformed soldiers and an old, hunched woman with a stick is taking place. There is a row of footlights but no band; over the stage and to the right are blatantly Irish national insignia, one a woman with harp and torch representing Ireland ('Erin'), the other a large portrait of the romantic rebel Robert Emmet. Jack B. Yeats himself was delighted with this theatre.55 Had he returned a few years later on the right night (date unknown but perhaps in 1899) he would have seen O'Casey's only performance here, as Father Dolan in The Shaughraun, to Isaac's Harvey Duff (A, 1, 306). Taking his curtain call that night the teenage John Casey was elated and soaked up the applause and later the compliments of Dalton and Sullivan. But behind the scenes he overheard a couple of actors speak more frankly. 'Father Dolan, how are you! I've a pain in me arse lookin' at him. A sad sight I hope

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I'll never see again. Disasthrous, disasthrous!' (A, 1, 308). As quickly as it had fired, the 'fairy feeling' of the Mechanics' faded. He did not need Isaac to tell him, on the way home, that there was no cause for him to get a swelled head over his night's work. As fate would have it, however, this little theatre, converted once again and provided at last with a legal patent,56 was to be transformed in 1904 into the Abbey, where his name would be made in earnest. But that was some time away. O'Casey attended the wedding of actor Frank Dal ton to Catherine Lynch in Dublin on 5 July 1899: this is one of the few unequivocal dates surviving for O'Casey's activities in the 1890s.57 Frank Fay, then drama critic of the United Irishman, on 8 July faulted a production of Boucicault's Arrah-na-Pogue at the Theatre Royal and asked, 'Why is not that admirable and versatile actor, Mr Frank Dal ton, in the cast?'58 The answer is that he was elsewhere engaged. One may surmise that John Casey was a wedding guest (probably with Isaac) because his theatrical contributions just outlined had extended into 1899. But they stopped there for some considerable time, while he turned to other things.

3

'GIVE ME THAT OLD STYLE RELIGION!'

L

ike Shaw, O'Casey hardly distinguished between a church and a theatre. For both of them, the theatre which became their mainstay and their mode of communication was an extension and transformation of the church which they rejected. For Shaw, what the Christian churches believed and taught was both nonsensical and outmoded, but not their methodology or technique and not their use of a designated space in which to perform. He hoped to transform the theatres of the West End into temples in which a new gospel could be preached. Shaw emphasised the necessity of religion for the survival and fulfilment of the human race. Conventional religion had ossified and its replacement, science, 'claimed exemption from all decent and humane considerations'.1 It was time to find a religion which made sense, which inspired action for good rather than evil, and which could change the selfish and thoughtless ways of the vast majority of people. Drama was to be the means of inventing new parables to condense and render dynamic this new religion, which Shaw was disposed to call Creative Evolution. What he was after was 'the revival of religion on a scientific basis', and he maintained that such a purpose 'does not mean the death of art, but a glorious rebirth of it'.2 Although O'Casey was never fully to work out his position as philosophically or as coherently as Shaw in his preface to Back to Methuselah - that ridiculously long play which he had the nerve to call his masterpiece - he nevertheless ended up quite close to Shaw's ideas on religion. 'What then', asks Shaw, 'am I, an artist-biologist, to call myself when asked to define my religion? I am a Catholic because I am a Communist (the two words mean the same) intelligent enough to perceive that our civilization, such as it is, could not exist for a week without its vast Communist basis of policed roads and bridges, water supplies and street lamps, courts of justice, schools, churches.'3 It would be some time before this paradoxical self-definition applied to O'Casey. Also, a while even before he would describe his first success at the Abbey Theatre as 'the temple entered', 'where he was an acolyte now, in full canonical costume' (A, 2, 139).

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He would see himself, mockingly, to be sure, as some kind of priest and the theatre as the place where the congregation is transported by stories, myths, anti-myths, into some kind of critical awareness. One must first know religion before one can reject it. One must know the world, understand its nature in all its forms and purposes, before assuming 'full canonical costume' as artist. No writer thinks quite like that, probably. Looking back, O'Casey was being ironic. The writer, surely, is the sum of many parts, many false starts, many embarrassing affiliations, allegiances and even fanaticisms. The way towards truth, the truth of our own fulfilment as much as that of a biographical subject, as the poet almost said, is a high hill to be reached only through byways and circumnavigation.4 So, John Casey the man could become Sean O'Casey the playwright only through a series not so much of false starts as necessary pursuits which he in time abandoned but which never abandoned him. Along the way, in due course, Shaw would be his mentor and role model.

Nicholas Beaver returned to Dublin some time in 1893, his army service now completed, and taking a job as a parcels clerk with the Great Northern Railway he, Bella and daughter Susan moved to 14 North Rutland Place, Summerhill. O'Casey was thus deprived of his private tutor, and had to fend educationally for himself from here on. It would appear that he left St Barnabas's national school in 1894, but there are no records to support the date.5 Soon, however, Isaac found a job for him in the 'situations vacant' of the unionist Daily Express. Beckett's Willy in Happy Days could not have done better: 'A smart, respectable, and honest boy wanted.'6 The firm in question was Hampton and Leedom in Henry Street which sold hardware, delph and china. Bella wrote him a reference, Mrs Casey arranged for the loan of Georgie Middleton's top coat, his erstwhile school pal and protector, and John set off to present himself for the job. He was asked only one question: 'You are a protestant, young man, are you not?' To which, receiving an emphatic affirmative, the employer munificently agreed to employ the future genius at the rate of three shillings and sixpence per week - to rise annually if services were found to be satisfactory. O'Casey's protestantism put him 'on the staff, one cut above van-men and messengers. He stayed long enough, perhaps two years, to be promoted to dispatch clerk at six shillings per week, but then was fired for insubordination. At least, that is how the story is told in the autobiographies; what John told his mother is something we shall never know. What is most interesting in O'Casey's reminiscences of this experience, which unfortunately cannot be verified because the records of the firm were lost in the devastation of Henry Street during the 1916 Rising, is the evidence of his growing awareness that books were to be his lifeline out of the trap of serving Mammon. He read and showed off his reading; he bought and stole books; he gorged on facts, definitions and learning all the time he was employed as a lowly clerk. With his extraordinary memory he came to realise

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that he could do it, that he could acquire knowledge others around him did not have; that he could quote Shakespeare, Shelley, Whitman and lord it over those who considered themselves his betters. His pride came striding forth, and with it the ready phrase, the nicely turned insult, the well adjusted refusal to be anybody's slave. O'Casey makes it both clear and risible that the two men heading the firm of Hampton and Leedom were members of an evangelical sect, the Plymouth Brethren. He formed the impression that unless he was willing to attend a weekly service in Merrion Hall (a church off Merrion Square - the fashionable side, indeed beside Wilde's house) his hope of promotion would be quite exploded. Pressed, he said he would rather open a girl's bodice than a prayerbook any day (A, 1, 251). It is likely that the bosses knew well of his father's employment by the Irish Church Missions and expected John to conform to their own evangelical interests. It is not unlikely that he did, indeed, comply for a time. He once explained to an editor at Macmillans that the hymn 'Ninety and Nine' was a great favourite at Evangelical Missions: 'I must have sung it myself a hundred times.'7 The Plymouth Brethren, however, may have been too close to home. In a sense, then, in rebelling against these bosses, especially his immediate boss Anthony Deverell ('Dovergull'), O'Casey was rebelling against his father. This view is borne out to some degree by a passage in the autobiography prior to his final humiliation by the firm. He had, somewhat against his will, participated in a social visit to present Deverell with a clock to mark his recent marriage, and the occasion had not gone well. The venue was 69 Palmerston Road, Rathmines, a select area in Dublin's southside. Ill at ease in the strange, upper-middle-class surroundings and impatient with the formality of the discourse John had delivered himself, as was his wont, of some plain Dublin speech laced with a vulgarism or two. The effect on the other men as much as on the delicacy of the Deverell couple was more than disapproval: it was horror. Not seeing the implications, John believed a wage increase to be on its way after this heroic occasion and dreamed about the book he would buy with the extra shilling to add to the one-and-six carefully saved. It was to be Paradise Lost. 'He had extracts of it from a book on Elocution, left behind by his father; and, since the bits of it were so good, what must the whole of it be like?'8 He then quotes from Book 6 (lines 207-20), Satan's fury when the battle in heaven breaks out, 'Now storming furie rose;/ . . . and hath earth bin then, all earth/Had to her centre shook.' Satanic fury is, of course, a romantic stance against patriarchal authority; so far, so Freudian. But in the passage italicised something else is also going on. Milton imagines the impact on an earth yet to be created as a result of Satan's very revolt: a strange, mind-boggling shift in time and paradoxical consequence. Looking back from 1940, or thereabouts, O'Casey could see that his own primal revolt created the world of the artist for him. It was a non serviam more complex, in its way, than Joyce's, as mediated through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because for O'Casey rebellion was fantastical, its resultant expulsion real in time. Moreover, when his pay was reduced rather than increased it was

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for a misdemeanour other than the one in the boss's house. All was displaced, as injustice was exposed. In short, Joyce's prototype Stephen Dedalus could loftily say, 'Welcome, o life!', and neatly flying by the nets of nationality, language and religion set out in linear fashion eastward (ho?) to, well, forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. O'Casey's Johnny, his biographical self at this point in his history, must endure a less mythical, less exalted course. He is punished for 'impudence and disobedience' at work, rebels at the fine imposed, and is expelled from the 'paradise' of secure, bourgeois employment.9 But he wanted this. It was inevitable. And there was nowhere to go yet - no boat eastward - but back onto the streets to join the unemployed. Not having the money to buy Paradise Lost he stole it from the Dublin Book Shop, along the quays at 32 Bachelor's Walk.10 He was of the devil's party without knowing it. Where could he go from here? His brother Tom had returned from army service in 1894 and was working in the railway as shunter in the North Wall Goods Stores. Mick was unavoidably detained in England, having been awarded fourteen months in jail for assaulting an army sergeant who called him 'a good-for-nothing Irish bastard'.11 When he returned to Dublin, Mick resumed his job in the Post Office, where, with time out for army reserve work, he was to remain. Before Mick returned, however, the Caseys moved house to 4 Abercorn Road, East Wall. (The road was later renumbered, so that number 4 became number 18.) The move was to benefit Tom, so that he could be near his work. In fact, he could hardly be nearer, for the trains were virtually outside the back window. But the real reason for the move was probably financial, John being out of work and Isaac being absorbed in theatre matters and at times on the road, and the rent at Abercorn Road being much less than the six shillings per week for 25 Hawthorne Terrace. This was because the family had to share a small house, which O'Casey later described as a four-roomed cottage but which the 1901 census defined as a 'second-class house' of five to six rooms and two families. The Caseys were incorrectly said to have three rooms upstairs, the Shields family (with eight children) two rooms downstairs.12 Things remained unsettled. Mick was drinking heavily and on one occasion, having been released from overnight detention, asked John to appear in court on his behalf to pay the expected fine. John went to the Four Courts on the appointed day at nine o'clock on a cold morning, in thin clothing insufficient for the weather, and offered an apology for Mick and an assurance the misdemeanour would not recur. 'Huh! An exceedingly plausible young fellow, eh?', said the magistrate, a man in some pain who had to be carried into court on a stretcher. He fined Mick ten shillings, Mick having assured John the fine would be half-a-crown, or at worst five shillings. 'I wish I could make it more,' the judge added in his pain. John had obviously failed to impress, the mix of poverty and verbal skill sending the wrong signal. He paid in the five shillings he had with him and had to bring Mick the bad news that five more were outstanding. On the way home John met an acquaintance (the ubiquitous tram conductor) who invited him along to heckle Yeats's The Countess Cathleen that

52 Sean O]'Casey night, which dates the incident 8 May 1899.13 A few months later the Boer War broke up the Casey family once again, as O'Casey recalls in Pictures in the Hallway: Johnny's whole world was divided against itself. England was at war with the Boer Republics. His brother Tom [. . .] had been called up; had been dressed in khaki, helmet and all; had marched, with a contingent of his regiment, the Dublin Fusiliers, through the city, Johnny by his side, carrying his rifle, and had gone [. . .] to the front, after promising Johnny he'd bring home a bunch of hair from Kruger's whiskers. He had gone up to Natal under General Sir Redvers Buller [. . .]. Thousands of Irishmen were out there on the veldt, risking all for England; for her honour, and, Johnny thought bitterly, for the gold and diamond mines of Johannesburg. (A, 1, 361, italics added) The Boer War was to have 'a seismic effect on the Irish cultural and political landscape'.14 Irish nationalists tended to identify with the Boers, protestants though they were, in their fight against British control. Indeed 'most of Catholic Ireland was staunchly pro-Boer.'15 Despite this fact, no less than 28,000 Irishmen fought with the British army against the Boers, while only 400 volunteered to fight with them.16 The Caseys stood with the majority, and young John carried his brother's rifle with pride. The First Battalion, RDF, sailed out to the Cape on 10 November 1899,17 just two months after the first major anti-Boer rally in Dublin passed a resolution condemning 'all enlistment of Irishmen in the English army'.18 On 28 February 1900 Tom took part in the Relief of Ladysmith,19 which had been under siege by the Boers for one hundred and eighteen days. General Buller received a congratulatory telegram from Queen Victoria. But in Dublin the campaign roused huge controversy. O'Casey describes the riots which took place on 1 March 1900 when Trinity students attacked the Mansion House where nationalists, opposed alike to the war and to Queen Victoria's impending visit to Dublin (her first since 1861), were flying the Irish green flag and cheering Kruger. But in the telling, the mature O'Casey, determined to distance himself from the pro-British faction, presents himself as speaking Irish at the time, as though already a member of the Gaelic League, which he did not join until 1903. The Boer War, according to historian Roy Foster, was 'nearly as crucial an event for Irish nationalism as the death of Parnell', since it 'focused much moderate Irish opinion into an anti-imperial mould'.20 Clearly, O'Casey would have retrospectively deplored the Boer War, but at the time, with Tom's life at stake in Natal, it is unthinkable that he would have been on the side of James Connolly, Maud Gonne and Arthur Griffith. What, then, was he doing at this fracas? Was his 'whole world' really 'divided against itself? In an unpublished draft of the relevant chapter in Pictures in the Hallway ('I Strike a Blow for You, Dear Land') O'Casey does without Daisy Battles and the unconvincing but lively sexual encounter he describes in the autobiographies

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as following on from the Boer riots. Real battles took her place: 'Every man woman & child fought battles either for the British or the Boers. The freedom of Ireland took a second place to the Freedom of the S.A. Republics. The Transvaal flags, big & little, were waved fervently by man & child. The Volksleur, they called it, of red, white, blue & green.' He goes on to describe in detail the atmosphere during 1899-1900: At times spasmodic & spontaneous processions were formed, headed by the Boer colours & Irish & American coming into collision with the police & bashing every red-coat that happened to pass. All the newsagents [,] shops & fancy goods were filled with little Transvaal flags for sale, & every person [would] have one or two or more buttons in their coats bearing the portraits of Kruger, De Wet, Botha, or De la Rey.21 He is careful not to say he wore such a button. The first British troops returned to London at the end of October 1900, and among them, apparently, came Tom. Mick, too, had done his bit, although he was not shipped out to South Africa. Called up in the reserves he served in England. On St Patrick's Day 1900 he got seven days confined to barracks 'for wearing a disloyal emblem thro [sic] the streets of Chatham; even though Mick pleaded that what was worn wasn't shamrock, but watercress, the nearest thing he could find!'22 So O'Casey writes in a draft note in the New York Public Library. What he does not say is that Queen Victoria had ordered that all her Irish regiments should wear shamrock in their head-dress on 17 March 1900, 'as a mark of Her Majesty's appreciation of the daring display by her loyal Irish soldiers in the recent operations near Ladysmith'. (Soon afterwards the queen formed the Irish Guards, on 1 April 1900.23) It is likely Mick was actually scoffing at the order to honour the shamrock. Here again the older O'Casey is re-writing his family history in an attempt to reconcile loyalism and his own asyet-unconscious nationalism. On 29 April 1900 Isaac married, the first of Susan's sons to leave home permanently. Isaac married a catholic, Johanna Fairtlough, and converted to Catholicism himself, changing his name to Joseph.24 Susan Casey was not pleased even though Johanna was of a good Dublin family. In recent years Isaac had been property master in the Theatre Royal, but had failed to make a career in the theatre. Frank Dalton, the actor in Boucicault's plays, said that Isaac was stage manager at the Queen's 'for a time',25 but if this is correct the engagement must have been a brief one, because in the autobiographies O'Casey outlines Isaac's rapid exit from theatre business, the management of men (and women): After serving as a property master in Dublin's Theatre Royal, he had gone on a crazy fit-up tour in the West with a company playing Saved from the Sea. One of the nights he had been put to take the money at the door; had found that when no more came, he had taken just enough to pay a third-class fare

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to Dublin on the midnight train. Leaving the rest of the company to do their best to keep the people happy, he hurried to the station, flung himself into a carriage corner, and arrived home, covered with white Connemara dust, wearing an old narrow-caped long coat, used for the part of Myles na Coppaleen [in The Colleen Bawn], with three-ha'pence in one pocket and a hen egg in the other. (A, 1, 372-3) Subsequently, through a chance encounter, Isaac had secured a job as a clerk for Harms-worth Magazine in Dublin, where he did sufficiently well (a pound a week) to launch into marriage. Isaac, or Joseph as he was now to become, rather faded from view after his marriage, his wife being regarded as something of a snob. This was probably O'Casey's bias, because when 'Archie' got him a job in the Harms-worth office Johanna when visiting would affect not to know him. O'Casey never suffered a slight easily or failed to avenge it in good time. The newly-weds lived at 7 Lower Gloucester Street. Although this was not very far away from Abercorn Road, it is doubtful if much family visitation went on, and for a few years, until be became involved with Liberty Hall, Isaac disappears. As far as the protestant Caseys were concerned he had let the side down. Thus it happened that on the night when Susan Casey filled in the census form in her careful hand, on Sunday 31 March 1901, there were but four members of the family in residence at 4 Abercorn Road: Susan herself, who gave her age as sixty-six; Mick, aged thirty-four; Tom, aged thirty-two; and the baby of the family, John, just one day past his twenty-first birthday. It was a good night for stock-taking. Where exactly was John Casey situated at this time? Before attempting an answer it may be useful to look at the social context, the place itself, across the railway bridge from St Laurence O'Toole's grim-looking catholic church and the cosy streets immediately off Seville Place. Abercorn Road was a working-class road in a working-class district. Patrick Shields (downstairs) is described in the census form as a general labourer, his wife Jane a dressmaker. On one side, in number 3, were Michael Guilfoyle, a tailor, and John Hoey, a boiler maker; in 3A was William Coulter, a 'Packer in [a] Druggist'. Edward Hyland in number 5 was a sailor, William Leahy in 5A was a ship's watchman. Further down the road were a bricklayer, a horse trainer, a bagmaker, a mantle maker, a chemical plumber (whatever that was), a lithographic printer, a 'sailor in oil works', a sewerage contractor (a nice euphemism), two railway porters in number 11, a 'railway servant', a coal labourer, two more boiler workers, another labourer, and in number 16 an engine fitter and two sons who were apprentices.26 The Caseys were not out of place, except perhaps in their religious denomination. Surrounded by catholics, Susan Casey as head of a household defiantly described all of her family on the census form as Church of England, a very political statement. Only William Coulter in 3A and William Leahy in 5A were also protestant. The former entered 'St Barnabas Church' on his form, corrected by another hand to 'Church of Ireland', while Leahy wrote 'Irish Church'. Coulter became sexton of St Barnabas's in 1901 and must have been

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quite close to the Caseys. Out of seventeen families on the road, three were protestant. In other respects the Caseys were in their class: Mick was described as a telegraph labourer, Tom as a postman, and John as a 'Junior Delivery Clerk'. The move to Abercorn Road, besides being a move closer to the railway, was also closer to St Barnabas's Church, its tower clearly visible from the backwindow. O'Casey began to take a renewed interest in the church after the arrival of a young curate, Henry Arthur Fletcher, B.D., on 1 January 1897. He was the son of the rector, James Saul Fletcher, D.D., incumbent since 1872, a man whose unhappy task it had been to try to coax the young John Casey into school on a regular basis. The parish population at this time was around eight hundred, 'composed, for the most part, of a class that requires constant visiting', according to a letter from the Select Vestry to the Diocesan Councils in November 1900.27 Through visitation, young Fletcher came to know the Caseys well, and in particular found in John someone he could help. His first good deed was to write him a reference for a position in Eason's, the well-known Dublin wholesale newsagents and booksellers. The job as vanboy, which mainly entailed loading and unloading horsedrawn vans with bundles of newspapers to be delivered from Abbey Street to the railway stations, was an even greater disaster than O'Casey's first venture into employment at Hampton and Leedom's. This time he lasted, he says, but one week. For one thing, it meant a very early start, 4.15 a.m., and a long day until 6 p.m.28 A second reason was that the job was too physically demanding. In later years, O'Casey confessed to being lazy, without perhaps caring much about the implications. Physically, he was tall and apparently strong; he was to become much stronger when he took up manual labour with the Great Northern Railway. But he never accepted labour as such; work, he maintained, was for slaves. Therefore, it is likely that, although the working day at Eason's was indeed daunting for a beginner, he did not give it a chance. O'Casey recounts the story of his brief employment entirely in the heroic mode, however. It is unconvincing on at least two counts. In the autobiographies he makes his exit altogether in the same vein as his exit from Hampton and Leedom's, quixotically refusing to doff his cap when being paid. The second reason the account is unconvincing is its interfusion with details of O'Casey's initiation into the Irish language movement, which belongs to a period beginning several years later. The incident forms a set-piece in his life-story which has more symbolic than realistic value. Yet O'Casey's account of Eason's warehouse has been verified by a member of the Eason family: 'His description of the basement, ground floor and cashiers' office etc. of the premises destroyed in 1916 accord with my memory of the pre Larkin-strike period. I entered at 1908 but was in and out of the place for many years before that.'29 It is this combination of invention and fidelity that gives to the autobiographies their constant fascination. One must imagine considerable embarrassment in the Casey household following John's latest failure to hold on to the job for which the curate Mr

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Fletcher had kindly written him a reference. John ran a bit wild for a time. He came to know the lifestyle of his other two brothers, and inevitably this meant frequenting pubs. He was never to become much of a drinker, and in adult life was virtually a teetotaller and even hostile to drink (especially when he befriended Jim Larkin, who was strongly against alcohol). But in the later 1890s there was no escaping the example of Mick and Tom. Mick was a heavy drinker, who would pawn family items (including Bella's hard-won school prizes) for the price of a drink. Susan disliked Mick's excessive drinking and when on a batter he would stay with Bella and Nicholas rather than go home and face her. Susan, for all that, was fond of a beer herself, which John would fetch upon occasion. More often, he would run such messages for Mick and Tom (for it was then common practice for youngsters to carry home draught stout or ale in jugs). In that way he knew all the city-centre pubs and got to love and learn the songs, the talk, and the Dublin characters he found there. Being an observer rather than a participant he was lucky, unlike Brendan Behan in a later generation, not to have been drawn into the dissipation awaiting workingclass boys. Were he not very self-disciplined his programme to educate himself would have ended up a mere pipe-dream. It is a sobering thought, if the pun will pass, that had O'Casey taken Behan's path he would have been dead before a single play had been staged, at the age of forty-one. The Reverend Harry Fletcher played a significant part in keeping John's natural religious enthusiasm active. He was the kind of young man, bright, open-minded, interested in all the arts (and a special lover of Dickens's novels) sure to be able to counteract the lure of Dublin pub life. Fletcher prepared John for confirmation, conferred the day before his eighteenth birthday on 30 March 1898. At the time, Fletcher had just left the parish, because he wanted to go to London and not, as O'Casey believed, because he was ejected for High-Church tendencies.30 But he left behind him a profound influence on a somewhat confused young man. In 1898 confirmations were administered in the Church of St John Baptist in Clontarf, an affluent seaside suburb on Dublin's northside. How large a contingent came from St Barnabas's is not known, as the records have not survived. O'Casey mentions only Jenny Clitheroe, the first girl he had kissed, but now a cashier in Arnott's. She snubbed him: 'he was too poor for a nod from her' (A, 1, 326). The church itself still stands and thrives. Opened in 1866 it was described in glowing terms by the unionist paper Isaac Casey had worked for, the Daily Express: Church stands on an admirable site - one which commands a fine view of the city and of the picturesque mountain scenery on the South side of the bay, as well as of the bay itself. The interior of the church presents a neat, elegant and comfortable appearance. [. . .] The East window is of stained glass - the figures representing the twelve Apostles - and is a magnificent work of art. It was executed by O'Connor of London and was presented by Mr John E. Vernon [Clontarf Castle ...] The organ, which has

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been built by Mr Brown of Camden Street, appears to be a very fine one, if we may judge from the full, rich tones which it gave forth yesterday under the manipulation of Mr Philips, organist of Trinity Church.31 Confirmation day somehow lodged in O'Casey's memory as a rite of passage. As with his recollections of Eason's furniture and fittings, his detailed account of St John Baptist's is verifiably accurate; the stainglass, 'the big east window' depicting the twelve Apostles, particularly caught his eye. The final detail of this description is extraordinary, of the light streaming through the colours: 'Rays like tongues of fire, from their coloured cloaks, flooded and swept away the demure modesty of the lacy girlish caps' (A, 1,326-27). One wonders if O'Casey did not revisit the church during his return to Dublin in 1935 specifically to note such details. The only point he fails to comment on is the replacement of Judas by Mathias among the twelve apostles. He goes on to describe without mockery his actual confirmation: 'he knew that he had got his first great share in the priesthood and kingship of Christ.' Harry Fletcher later recalled this confirmation class and that 'some of the lads, if not most of them [,] were quite 17 or 18 years of age.' So O'Casey was not unique in his maturity. Fletcher remembered the schoolteacher Hogan, 'a very decent kind-hearted pedagogue', on the day marshalling the boys in St Barnabas's church (after returning from St John Baptist) and 'spouting Grattan Burke &c. after announcing each name - it must have been some duologue.' Can this have been a ballad about Edmund Burke and Henry Grattan, the eighteenth-century Irish parliamentarians? The occasion was not without its juvenile humour, Fletcher recalled. 'Hogan gave a loud nasal sniff - which in time set us giggling - one chap - was it Wylie, echoed each sniff,' but Hogan took no notice. Wylie was a divinity student at Trinity College who 'used to help at social & other gatherings'.32 Fletcher's account puts the villainous 'Slogan' (from I Knock at the Door) in a new light and again suggests O'Casey's dramatising of all he experienced. Fletcher presented each boy, O'Casey remembered, with a coloured certificate with a golden cross, 'which shocked a lot of people', because of its Papist suggestions, and a copy of Bishop Walsham How's Holy Communion, 'a small blue-covered book, with red edges. It told us first of all that the best preparation for Communion was a holy life. "Easier said than done," as one of the Confirmed, Nicholas Stitt, said to me when we were looking over the book together.'33 Yet O'Casey took it seriously. The seeds Harry Fletcher had sown were brought to full harvest by the new rector, Edward Morgan Griffin, nominated by the trustees of St Barnabas on 13 April 1899, less than one month after the resignation of Harry's father. The new Archbishop, Joseph Ferguson, certified Griffin's appointment on 21 May There now followed a period of intense religious and parish activity on O'Casey's part. David Krause says that Griffin became for O'Casey 'a second father'.34 Then forty-seven, roughly the age O'Casey's natural father was when he died, Morgan had taken a B.A. from Trinity College in 1880, and, unusually, an M.A. in 1884. He seems to have been a sensitive and compassionate man.

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In dedicating Pictures in the Hallway to him O'Casey describes him as 'a man of many-branched kindness, whose sensitive hand was the first [after Harry Fletcher?] to give the clasp of friendship to the author.' Within the text itself he is described as son of a Methodist minister and former secretary of the Hibernian Bible Society, which would make him somewhat evangelical. He was 'a man of middle height [with] a sweet face, bearded brown, now firmly streaked with silver [. . .] a warm, sensitive, and humorous mouth; a fine presence, gracefully rugged, that endorsed the confidence of a broad and scholarly mind' (A, 1, 389). He had four children whom O'Casey got to know, Robert, Jennie, Alice and Sonny, but a Mrs Griffin is never mentioned. Griffin caused a great stir in the parish. The Choir began to sing well, and Johnny sat with them, singing lustily when he was in the mood, the rector telling him not to be afraid to let himself go.' (The choir was being trained by one Mr Ashe, professor of medicine to the Pharmacy Society.) All his life long O'Casey was to be a singer, though not often of hymns, and whereas it was to be mainly through the Gaelic League and its social occasions that he developed his love of Irish ballads it was probably through the church that he first learned to enjoy as so many Dubliners of his generation did-contributing a song. But Griffin had more in mind than stirring music. Bible classes were renewed. Besides Sunday services at 11.30 a.m. there was evening service at 7 p.m. On Tuesday evenings the men's association met at 8 p.m. and on Thursdays a prayer meeting was held at the same hour. All this renewal was as good as a Jesuit mission in Gardiner Street. Likewise, poor though the parish was, every effort was made to keep up protestant morale by refusing to let the church physically deteriorate. During Griffin's incumbency (up to 1918), the church was renovated and decorated, the south window renewed with leaded lights and supplied with incandescent lighting.35 According to the Annual Report for 1899, the lighting was paid for by C.H. Griffin of Fairfield House, Rathgar, probably a relative of the rector. The Report also stated that Zion Church, Rathgar, had 'adopted' St Barnabas's and had sent not only £40 in financial aid but 'several ladies [who] gave help in our schools, and in visiting in the houses of the parish'.36 Recognition by such an affluent parish as Rathgar of such a working-class, dock-side parish as St Barnabas on the other side of the city indicates something like a concerted campaign to maintain waning protestant fervency in the post-Cullen era of Roman Catholic revivalism in Dublin. The Rathgar connection was further strengthened through the new curate, another Fletcher (Richard Edward), who entered St Barnabas's in May 1899 but who lived at 71 Grosvenor Road, Rathgar, instead of in the rectory in Great Charles Street. There was also the matter of a new organ, installed in the church in 1909 at much expense. By this time, symbol though the organ may have been of progress (as opposed to 'the buzz of the harmonium', which to Joyce was 'the asthmatic voice of protestantism',37) O'Casey was in his Gaelic League phase and inclined to take offence at a purchase made in England. But up to that time he pitched in enthusiastically in all of this parish renewal. One of Griffin's daughters later remembered him as very devout. At the weekday prayer

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meetings he would frequently volunteer to lead the final prayer: He sat behind us and we were afraid to turn round and look, but soon we heard his voice ringing out loud and clear, in that drawling, lilting way he had of speaking. He didn't read from the prayer-book as the others did, he just made up his prayer as he went along, using some biblical passages but mostly his own words about the glory of God. [. . .] He would have made a great preacher.38 Some would say he did make a great preacher. Yet it is surprising how orthdox he was in his piety at this time. Reverend Griffin's ambitious plans involved fund-raising. The Caseys are not listed as contributors to the Vestry Restoration Fund but Mrs Beaver gave sixpence. Strange to think that Bella, perhaps temporarily living with the Caseys at Abercorn Road, could afford to give away a day's rent from the pittance earned, like Juno, from scrubbing floors. Perhaps the ladies from Rathgar had got to her. Towards the end of 1900 the new young curate died suddenly, apart from the grief creating the problem of how to pay his successor (for Richard Fletcher had been paid only £50, or half the usual salary, obviously by agreement). A list of annual subscriptions for his replacement included the family names of O'Casey's schoolfriends Middleton and Rocliff ('Rocky'), his old schoolteacher John Hogan (who was a member of the Select Vestry) and Inspector Dowzard of the Quay Police, an Orangeman later to feature in Red Roses for Me. As a new curate, John Edward Tomlinson, arrived in July 1901 the fund-raising was clearly successful. O'Casey contributed halfa-crown the following year, and in addition is listed as a collector under 'Missionary Boxes': his total collection of £l-0s. 7 l/zd. was almost three times that of his hated schoolmaster Hogan who could only manage 7s. 6d.39 For the same year, 1902, O'Casey is listed among the one hundred and ninety registered vestrymen for St Barnabas's parish. As he describes in the final chapters of Pictures in the Hallway, he then attempted to get onto the Select Vestry, but was foiled by what he describes as an Orange conspiracy. The politics of this affair are surprising until one recalls that in his sermon in tribute to O'Casey after his death, the Dean of Christ Church commented on the 'colony of Ulster railway workers', in St Barnabas's Parish, 'who were members of the Orange Order'.40 But politics apart, the account in Pictures in the Hallway reveals and underlines how deeply O'Casey was involved spiritually in Rev. Griffin's mission. The Orangemen, he says, disliked the favour Griffin showed O'Casey, 'poverty-stricken and ill-kept; asking him to his house, discussing all kinds of questions with him, welcoming him every Sunday to the vestry before the service began when the rector was to preach, to sing a hymn with him, or recite a prayer that the rector's words might be blessed and bear fruit in the minds of his hearers' (A, 1, 399-400). The parish historian Arthur Garrett contents himself with the remark that O'Casey's activities 'were in direct contrast to the ideals of the majority of the

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Protestant community, at the time'.41 This can only mean that the Select Vestry were more than suspicious of O'Casey's fervour, though he himself puts it down to his Fenianism. In an early outline for this section of the autobiographies, perhaps drafted in 1930, O'Casey has these cryptic words: 'Rev. E.M. Griffin. Orangemen. I become devout & Catholic & Eager for Communion. Hating God Save the King.' It is all, or nearly all, there. O'Casey was so High Church as to be catholic (though not Roman Catholic), and at the same time he was turning nationalist to the point of upsetting the unionist community already ill-at-ease at the way the wind was currently blowing. Surrounded on all sides by miles of railway tracks leading in various directions, John Casey, soon to be Sean O Cathasaigh, was as yet caught in the middle, unsure either of who he was or where he was going. As he sat in number 4 Abercorn Road on the evening when Susan filled out the census form on that Sunday in March 1901, with his two brothers who had already been to and returned from fighting for Queen and country, and his devout mother who insisted on describing him as a 'Junior Delivery Clerk' - the job with Harmsworth Magazine - at age twenty-one, what was he thinking? Was he not, on all sides, on the wrong side of the tracks?

4

To MAKE ETERNAL SILENCE SPEAK'

i or the first few years of the century John Casey kept busy, reading,

F

attending church and Bible meetings, acting as secretary to the foreign missions committee the rector established and even teaching Sunday School. With his natural quickness of mind he became known locally as one who had 'the touch' for anything he took up, 'and it is likely he might have become a scholar, musician, actor, or painter.'1 All his life O'Casey never seemed to mind the lack of financial return for such voluntary work. This attitude of noblesse oblige sometimes served, of course, to disguise his real want, for he was willing to survive on very little food and copious cups of tea. The only comfort he and his mother alike insisted on was a good coal fire in the kitchen. Among his many early interests was painting. He was remembered as 'a young man very good at sketching' and he 'would go about drawing in chalk on walls and doors'.2 Whether or not these were what we would today call graffiti they were obviously clever. All through his life he maintained this ability to draw quick and accurate sketches, cartoons, usually satirical. Later he also painted scenes on postcards which he sent to friends. He had a good eye for art and read about it assiduously, starting with Ruskin's books. In the autobiographical Red Roses for Me Roory asks the labourer Ayamonn: 'What kid was it sketched th' angel on th' wall?' Ayamonn replies: 'Oh, I did that. I'd give anything to be a painter [...] like Angelico or Constable [...] to throw a whole world in colour on a canvas.'3 He was in his late teens when he went a bit further than chalking walls and doors and with his meagre savings bought a small box of paints. 'Colour had come to him, had bowed, laughing, and now ran dancing before him' and he longed to get it on paper or canvas. Speaking of himself in the third person, he describes in the autobiographies how he would look 'prayerfully' in the window of an arts supply shop in Dawson Street, 'his eyes ravished with the water-colours displayed there; at the brushes, thin and delicate; the piled-up boxes of paints of every sort and size; the pyramids of tubes filled with glowing colours; all so near, yet so far, so far away from the reach of his hand and the further reach of his longing soul'. He could not even mentally avail, as Shaw

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had availed twenty-five years earlier, of the riches of Dublin's National Gallery, for he was 'too ragged and too shy to venture a visit'. So, he did the next best thing and bought a couple of illustrated books: one on Fra Angelico, the other on Constable (A, 1, 387). The correspondence is thus confirmed between the young O'Casey and his idealised hero in Red Roses for Me. Recently, a watercolour has come to light, signed 'John Casey' and dated 1898 (see illustration 1). Could it be by the youth with the small box of paints? Its owner believes so, although as the provenance is unclear it is difficult to be sure. The scene is a landscape, with a placid enough river with 'sunny nooks making the green shades greener' (A, 1, 388). Could he have done it under the influence of Constable? It is possible. He would have been eighteen at the time. All he himself claims in the autobiographies is that as 'beauty of colour and form above and beside him came closer' through his reading he 'began to build a house of vision with them [. . .] eternal in his imagination' (A, 1, 388). As if in compensation for his trachoma he was gifted with a strong visual sense. The critic Ronald Ayling has described his excitement at finding evidence of this among O'Casey's papers: Once, browsing through the books in his Torquay study, I came across a large folded envelope which had evidently been used as a bookmark. On its reverse side was a fine drawing of a young man and woman - her skirts flying - engaged in a whirling dance. A man playing an accordion, street vendors with their baskets, and several men lounging on a parapet made up the middle distance of the picture, with a vague suggestion of tenement buildings and a steeple in the far distance. [. . .] The writer confirmed in subsequent conversation that a number of the ideas for scenes in his books started on paper, not as lines of dialogue or stage directions but as sketches. He first saw the action or setting in visual terms in his mind's eye, then made a sketch or series of sketches of it, and afterwards attempted to translate it into words.4 Formal training, however, was out of the question for the financially constrained Caseys, and the interest in art, passionate though it was, was destined to be subordinated to the interest in drama. However, it was to flower once more in the career of O'Casey's son Breon, who believed that this created 'a big bond' between them.5 Assuming from the description of John on the 1901 census form as a 'junior delivery clerk' that he was still working for the Harmsworth agency, distributors of magazines and comic books, he was out and about a lot, soaking up the sights and sounds of turn-of-century Dublin. In the evenings he would have had a certain amount of peace and quiet at Abercorn Road for his reading and sketching, in the main room (kitchen/living-room). He and Susan would mostly have the place to themselves, at least until Mick and Tom came in from the pub. In these quiet conditions John formed the habits of a lifetime: writing and studying at night, content with little sustenance, making

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his bed in the room which was also his study. The Caseys were comfortable enough during these years. In spite of the money Tom and Mick spent on drink, with all three men working there was always enough for the rent (four shillings a week) and for subsistence. Enough also for an insurance policy on John's life at a shilling a week, taken out in December 1899.6 Tom often brought home eatables from the railway station, where he was now a letter carrier or sorter for the Dublin-Belfast train, capable of earning up to thirty shillings a week as against the sixteen shillings earned before he went off to the Boer War. Besides tea, butter, eggs and bacon, smuggled home in his 'wide, clumsy railway uniform of black corduroy', Tom somehow managed to lay his hands on surplus clothing which in harder times Susan would pawn to buy food, cutlery and even a chair or two 'picked up cheap from people breaking up their houses because of marriages or of death'.7 Those halcyon days drew to a close when Tom got married on St Valentine's Day 1903 and moved out. Of all the in-laws and relatives O'Casey describes in his autobiographies none receives such a drubbing as the hapless Mary Kelly of 7 Lower Dominick Street. Indeed, his publisher Macmillan was worried about the possibly libellous nature of his description: 'an ignorant catholic girl who in some way had influenced him [Tom] towards a newer home [. . .] a yellow-skinned, stout woman, badly built in body, and mind-sly in a lot of ways, as so many toweringly ignorant persons are'. He implied she was stupid to the point of near illiteracy, slovenly to boot, and 'spoke in a voice from which a rough life had mobbed [sic] even the dimmest tinkle of music' (A, 1, 423). She was a cook-general, and daughter of a plumber from Blackrock. Looking back in 1945 O'Casey was angry because as he saw it Mary Kelly was the death of Tom: the marriage is described in a chapter headed 'Poor Tom's Acold' (after Shakespeare's King Lear) in which Tom dies. Why he should make the accusation ('he knew that this marriage would be the end of Tom') is not clear, since Tom's death did not take place until 1914. Mary was not good enough for Tom, and his mother had the rector in to pray about the impending marriage after she had seen the determined bride for herself. To Macmillans O'Casey replied there was not the slightest chance of 'Agatha's' (Mary's) reading his account of her and that in any case everything he said about her was true and 'the subject of gossip by the neighbours who lived around her'.8 Mary Kelly Casey was indeed then dead (since 1936) but her children (two boys and a girl) were not, and remembered how Uncle Jack (as O'Casey was always known to the next generation) held aloof from their parents' house.9 Clearly, John Casey sided with his mother in prim disapproval. In 1901 John started work on the railway. Georgie Middleton, a school pal who had once fought on his behalf, dropped into Abercorn Road to say the Great Northern Railway would give John a job as labourer, or to be more precise, a bricklayer's assistant. It must have offered some perquisites which are not obvious because up to this John had always done work with some clerkly qualities and Susan would hardly have approved unless John's lack of progress suggested that a new start was called for. Georgie was regarded now as an

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Orangeman, and he introduced his friend to the foreman as 'One of ourselves' and on that basis John got his first job as manual worker, a job that he was to keep for about nine years. At the time the Irish railways were expanding. New stations and extensions were being erected and John's job was pick-and-shovel work, including repairs, changing rails, and maintenance. It was a twelve-hour day and at first an exhausting one. As time went on John found the work physically manageable and the conditions far more congenial than clerking in an office. The pay, however, was poor at only eighteen shillings for a six-day week, which was about half what a skilled worker could claim.10 He grew strong and muscular, weighing around a hundred and eighty pounds, his height being about an inch short of six feet. He had at this time a shock of brown hair determined to encroach on his forehead above his small, piercing and sometimes red-rimmed eyes. To his fellow-workers he was an oddity, a man who read books, not a good mixer, a man apart. The life of a labourer, one might think, was monotonous and wasteful. But John found much to appreciate in both the types to be observed and the occasional exhilaration of outdoors activity: Whenever he travelled early Sean went on the footplate for he felt more important there than dozing in the corner of a carriage, with the medley of smock, sucking lips clinging to pipe-stands, & bald disjointed chat of his mates. Besides, he above of all of them would [not] be let within touching distance of an engine, for drivers & firemen were well above labourers, & mortal jealous of their precious dignity. But on account of his knowledge, his eloquent tongue, his Irish enthusiasm, nearly every footplate, every signal-cabin, every driver's lunch-room, from here to Dundalk, would welcome him as a visitor. And mostly, perhaps, because he cared little whether they would or not, possessing a knowledge & a dignity in himself that were high above their own. There on the footplate he was a living, throbbing part of the ordered recklessness of an engine flying along thro space, laughing thro its speed at the trees, cattle, houses, & people rushing by it, & the living [?] of the engine, & the rattle of the tender, sent his blood leaping as if he was a lusty rider taking a heady gallop on a spirited horse.11 Names of workmen are cited which were to re-appear in the plays, for example the Young Covey, Peter Flynn, Johnny Rankin (The Bishop's Bonfire), Jack Boyle, and many he was to remember with affection years later. Going out on the train to work brought John for the first time in his life into the countryside. 'It was the first time he had laid eyes on a field of growing corn, living and rippling before him, jaunty and elegant in its way of bending from one side to the other. [. . .] Leaving aside the glory of Constable's Cornfield, he had seen pictures of ripe corn on calendars [. . .] or the Rector, padding with sighs the reading of the parable of the wheat and the tares. Now he was face to face with it, lovelier than any picture' (A, 1, 443-44). At times

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he could reflect on the life-style of those above him, especially the engineers, whose education he envied. He thought of 'their life of active interest in the daytime, and the ease-trimmed life of the evening, in a pleasant home, away from the smoke or dirt, dipped in trees, fringed with flowers, any book they might like to read at their elbow, homes bright with colours, delicate ware to hold their meals, soft light to see by, and, he dared to say, a silky-bodied nightdress [for the woman each could] cuddle and disarray before sleep'.12 The word 'sleep' tolls him back to his sole self, and O'Casey reflects that he himself got only five hours from midnight until five in the morning, albeit 'a deep, drunken [sic], dreamless slumber', until his mother called him. He got so little sleep because of his night-time activities in the Gaelic League. He had thrown himself with such enthusiasm into classes for the learning of Irish that in a short time he was a bit of a star, an author, and even a teacher himself. Small wonder that, just as Behan was to regard his time in the Curragh Camp (in the early 1940s) as his 'university' years,13 O'Casey could later look back on the years from 1903 to 1912 as highly educational and intellectually formative, for he was among those with whom he could share a new purpose. In particular, apart from the language itself, in which he became moderately proficient, what John learned and loved from O'Growney's Simple Lessons in Irish (1894) was what he had failed to learn in school: the structure of grammar and philology. His mates began to call him 'Irish Jack'. Father Eugene O'Growney, who had died from tuberculosis as a young man in 1899, was co-founder with Douglas Hyde of the Gaelic League. It seems now, over one hundred years later, that these men were such good educationalists and so effective in spreading a love of Irish and an eagerness to learn it because neither of them was a native speaker and so came to the subject as keen amateurs and beginners. They approached the Irish language not as an esoteric subject, to be known only by an elite, but as a lost inheritance, a key to all the riches of Irish poetry, story-telling and folklore. It was the doorway to the Hidden Ireland. Douglas Hyde was, in his way, a genius, 'a maker of modern Ireland', as his recent biographers the Dunleavys have rightly described him. Even though O'Casey was eventually to tire of Hyde's lack of political animus, his failure to row in with Pearse and other extremists on the nationalist side, he could not but admire the energy and success with which Hyde organised the Gaelic League. By the year of O'Growney's death the League had established evening classes for 40,000 members, all using O'Growney's Simple Lessons in Irish,14 which went into its twentieth edition the next year. When O'Casey published the volume of his autobiography which deals with this period of his life, Drums Under the Windows, the year was 1945 and Douglas Hyde had just died. He had been President of Ireland since 1938. O'Casey's portrait is puzzlingly hostile, considering his personal indebtedness to the Gaelic League. It is a mocking, jeering account. He may have been influenced by George Moore's satiric comments in Hail and Farewell, for his copy (Heineman, 1920-21) is annotated for references to Hyde, but the hostility

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stems from something deeper than literary satire. The passion to be all things to all men is too strong in him [Hyde] to allow a leadership bringing the people to the promised land' (A, I, 542). From the vantage point of 1945 Ireland had patently not entered 'the promised land' on Casey's (socialist) terms. But the promised land after 1900, the year a royal commission recommended that the Irish language be introduced as an option in the schools' curriculum, was clearly one in which language and nationalism went hand-in-hand.15 Prionsias Mac Aonghusa, who has written the best article on O'Casey's involvement with the Gaelic League, considers that it might have been as early as 1898 or 1899 when the tram conductor Ayamonn or Eamon O'Farrell aroused his interest.16 Domestically, with Tom and Mick in the Fusiliers during the Boer War and Susan no doubt enthusiastic over Queen Victoria's visit to Dublin in April 1900, it seems unlikely young John plunged himself into the Gaelic League until after this date. Certainly it was several years before he joined a branch that met in Talbot Street, before moving on to the one in which he thrived, the Craobh Ldmh Dhearg in Drumcondra. With typical memory for detail he described the premises to an old colleague in 1953: I remember the premises in Carlingford Road well, for it was I who spent every Saturday half-holiday giving the rooms a coat of wallpamur [distemper] till they were finished, with Paddy Callan dropping in to see how the work was going. It was a shop front, ground floor, with a room up a small flight of stairs, unfinished, for the builder (a Councillor Dermott?) was prevented from completing it because of a neighbour's action against the house cutting away the light from the windows of the house next to it. Same neighbour complained of us lowering the caste of the Road, and so we had to get back to the old house in Seery's or Boylan's Lane.17 It would not be too much to say John Casey became a fanatic for all things Irish. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the secret militant association, about 1905, and was also a member of the Gaelic Athletic Association dedicated to the playing of exclusively Irish games. In all three, the Gaelic League, the IRB and the GAA, he was a wholehearted participant, as testified by Ernest Blythe, later the managing director of the Abbey Theatre. Blythe's memoir, Trasna na Boinne, was published in 1957. In the copy he sent O'Casey he wrote (30 October 1957), Do Shean 0 Cathasaigh le dochas nach gcuirfidh sefearg air ('to Sean O'Casey in the hope it will not anger him'). The reason for Blythe's unusual diffidence lies in his full and frank account of O'Casey's politics from 1906, when Blythe first met him in Dublin, until about 1912 when O'Casey dropped away and Blythe marched on to a modicum of glory in Ireland's fight for freedom. In short, as autobiographer Blythe beat O'Casey at his own game. So, what exactly did he say about him which was later to justify the harsh comments O'Casey made on Blythe? From this point on, John Casey mutates into Sean O Cathasaigh and will be referred to as Sean. He did not spend all of his Saturday afternoons splashing

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wallpamur on the walls of premises rented by the Gaelic League. Often he would go to Phoenix Park to play hurling, and it was there he first met Blythe. They were an unlikely pair of athletes, since hurling is a highly skilled game for which neither short-sighted man was suited. There is a frequently cited story describing their striking dead a hapless bird between them in the Park in the belief they were striking the sliotar.18 Blythe, a presbyterian from Lisburn, Co. Armagh, was nine years younger than Sean and was then a mere seventeen years old. However, as a clerk in the Department of Agriculture he had access to a better branch of the Gaelic League (the Ard-Craobh or number one branch), and was being taught by the extremely popular and effective Sinead Ni Fhlanagain, later Mrs Eamon de Valera. Blythe, earnest in nature as in name, was keen to fit into all aspects of nationalist cultural life. Sean took him under his wing and the two men became friendly through being left on the sidelines when the hurling teams were selected. Blythe grew to admire Sean's articulate, mocking descriptions of everything, and the unusual outlook he had on many questions. He was the one protestant who influenced Blythe profoundly before 1909. Yet they could not agree on religious matters, as Blythe was Northern low-church protestant and Sean, he recalls, leaned towards catholic practice. 'He told me one time that he said the rosary every night. From all that he said on religious questions, I thought it wouldn't be long before he turned Catholic.'19 Side by side with this crypto-catholicism, by whatever logic, Sean was an enthusiast for the IRB. It seems clear that the Gaelic League was a recruiting ground for the IRB. The practice was that a member might recommend somebody for acceptance who would then be secretly investigated, and if all were well he could be inducted by means of formal initiation. O'Casey, as usual, did things his own way. One Saturday, shortly after they first met, on the way home together by tram he broached with Blythe the question of the Fenians and expressed regret, now that the Irish Party had failed to secure Home Rule (in 1906), that the Fenians were no longer around. This was a deliberate lead. Blythe concurred, adding his regret that the churches had condemned the Fenians. With that, Sean asked him to step off the tram, as he had something to say to him. As they walked away from Hardwicke Street, in his best melodramatic manner Sean asked if Blythe would be surprised to learn that the Fenians had not, to coin a phrase, gone away. In fact, that they were again gathering strength. When Blythe expressed surprise at this intelligence Sean not only told him he was a member of the IRB but invited Blythe to join also. When Blythe, thinking of the Invincibles and the Phoenix Park murders of 1882, said that he could never be part of an association which believed in murder, 'Sean assured me that the Fenians would not have anything to do with murder because they existed and were preparing themselves for open war against England, and would be ready to strike a blow in a couple of years.'20 Blythe promised to think about the invitation and to give his answer within two weeks. He was very upset at what Sean had told him; after all, he was only seventeen. He prayed about the matter and went to Holy Communion next morning in the Black Church,

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Fontenoy Street. Then he decided. He would be a Fenian. But when he sought out his mentor on Monday night and told him that he was ready to give his all for Ireland Sean coolly replied that now Blythe could be put forward as a candidate to be vetted. He added, darkly, that the members who would be watching Blythe were everywhere, especially where he least expected. This news threw Blythe into complete panic, and he only afterwards realised that Sean had jumped the gun, if the phrase be permitted, and gone against regulations. In due course, after a series of delays because of Blythe's youth and his being unknown in Dublin, Sean gave him the all-clear and Blythe was summoned to take the oath of allegiance. It is apparent from Blythe's account of the IRB Circle (Teeling) that O'Casey was highly-thought-of in it. An interesting point which Blythe makes about the IRB is that although scrutiny of prospective members was intense, there was instant acceptance in 1907 of a man who had been fined forty shillings for opposition to The Play boy of the Western World at the Abbey.21 This explains (in part) not only why O'Casey never frequented the Abbey and could claim he had never seen a production of Synge until after 1924,22 but also why his account of the Playboy riots and the general uproar caused by the play is so second-hand and unconvincing in the chapter entitled 'Song of a Shift' in Drums Under the Windows. It must have been policy with Sean, as a true Gael, to avoid the Abbey (quite apart from the matter of affording the admission). When the Abbey toured America with the Playboy in 1911-12, and Irish-Americans vociferously made known their opposition, Douglas Hyde immediately distanced himself from the Abbey on behalf of the Gaelic League.23 In spite of his professed contempt for Hyde Sean supported this stand. Blythe, on the other hand, often went to the Abbey, and indeed saw Synge's Playboy there, but Sean never accepted his invitation to go along with him. So far as Blythe could see, Sean had no interest in the Abbey. He himself did theatre reviews under the pseudonym Cairbre, probably for the Irish Peasant, and reviewing the Abbey Players in Belfast in 1909 commented: "The Playboy" is acclaimed a masterpiece, and none is found to fault it. Nobody now considers it a libel on the Irish race. Indeed very few ever thought it was. That view was only dug up by the rioters in justification of their conduct. At the first performance [26 January 1907] the first and second act, both full of alleged libel, were heartily applauded -1 was there. During a good part of the third act no disapproval was manifested, and but for one unfortunate phrase the play would have gone off like any other. It is said that considerable changes have been made since then, but at this distance I could detect nothing but two slight verbal alterations, neither of which should have been made [including the fifty women in their 'shifts'].24 In addition to his studying Irish and recruiting for the IRB Sean wrote a serial for the Drumcondra branch of the Gaelic League. This was around 1907-8, when Blythe began to drop in on Sunday nights to support Sean, who was now becoming a significant figure in the branch. There was usually Irish dancing,

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but one Sunday in the month was devoted to Croidhe na h-Eigse, a hand-written magazine compiled by the members whose work was read aloud. One of the regular features was a comic short story by Sean, featuring the activities of a mythical brother, Adolphus O Cadhsai, a social climber doomed always to reveal his social origins just when he was about, for example, to gain the hand in marriage of a member of the moneyed set. People came to the meetings just to hear further adventures of Adolphus, and often the reader, Francis J. Kelly, who was also editor of the magazine, had to stop to let the laughter subside. Afterwards, most of the conversation was about the latest episode.25 O'Casey had thus begun to write creatively. None of these manuscript stories - cartoons in narrative form - has survived, but there is a poem dated November 1905 which indicates the beginning of a career as a 'minstrel' (a term O'Casey preferred) which was to culminate in a clutch of ballads, love songs, and political satire, The Songs of the Wren, in 1918. He had been reading extensively among the poets and the results are only moderately promising in The Soul of Man', which begins: Poor man, all human, half divine, With natures both absorbed in each, Stands on the top of Life's incline, And looks as far as thought can reach, And wonders if Death's ocean dark Shall quench his life's expiring spark. Not a good start, alas. The opening line, while echoing Pope's Essay on Man, is an absurdity, for how can something all human be at the same time half divine? Looking as far as human thought can reach is Wordsworth, and the final couplet carries the mark of much eighteenth-century poetry by Samuel Johnson, Cowper or even George Crabbe (of whose Poetical Works SOC had a copy). Five other stanzas follow, emphasising first how faith is no defence against the world's sorrows and how beleaguered man was constantly defeated throughout history by sheer lack of knowledge: 'For broadening powers of mind alone/Can climb upon God's highest throne'. Then in the final stanza O'Casey stresses how only willed intellectual endeavour will suffice: And man, unshaken still shall seek Ignoring all the gods' derision To make eternal silence speak, To look behind life's hidden vision, Till thought may weigh and sift and scatter, And mould again the life of matter.26 In spite of the stylistic uncertainties of the opening lines the poem is an extraordinary statement of the primacy of intellectual being over blind faith. To make eternal silence speak' is a declaration of artistic intent, in line with

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O'Casey's interests in art and in Gaelic culture. He signed this poem in English with his name in Irish, Sean O Cathasaigh, and this was the first time he openly signalled both his nationalism and his identity, at odds with his traditional, unionist family. The poem represented his 'first poor groping after expression, after I had gotten some knowledge of words; of spelling & grammar; so I was eager to show this grand Knowledge to the world and myself.'27 Yet neither The Soul of Man' nor another poem from this period which has survived in manuscript appears to have been published at this time. The other poem, The Sweet Little Town of Killwirra', is in an entirely different vein. Subtitled 'From the Irish Air "Cnochainin Aerach Chill Mhuire",' it is a conventional ballad in four eight-line stanzas, beginning: Thro' far foreign lands I have travell'd my share, Seeking genial and changeful employment; In cities and countries all wondrously grand I have danced thro' rich years of enjoyment. But now I would yield all their civilized dowers, Their pride and their pomp and their fruit-scented bowers, Their riches and joys for a few happy hours In the sweet little town of Killwirra! The second and third stanzas celebrate the pastoral scene, including birdsong, dancing boys and girls, the hunters and the fox and all the paraphernalia of the eighteenth-century picturesque. But the final stanza, once again, is a surprise: To those that oppression's wild, withering laws, In thought and in action are spurning, Remaining still faithful to Eire's dear Cause, With hope in my heart, I'm returning. And now fill a full, flowing bumper with me, Till we drink a deep health to the day that shall see A chance for a blow that shall make Ireland free, And one more to the Town of Killwirra!28 The complex syntax of the first sentence comprising the first four lines here defines the emigrant as returning to a resistance movement, to join those who are 'spurning' in thought, i.e. as intellectuals, as well as in action something quite abstract (and so, easily accepted as vile): 'oppression's wild, withering laws'. These, of course, were the laws of the land, the laws readily accepted by Susan Casey and her family. What would Mick's response have been, had he seen or heard these lines (for it is more likely O'Casey sang them at Gaelic League gatherings than that they were published anywhere)? Two comments by Mick on his youngest brother's latest affiliations are on record. On the Gaelic League: 'What good's Irish in a British country?' And on John's membership of the IRB: 'You're finished. You've lost your freedom.'29 The

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poem finally turns into a rebel song. In the last lines it anticipates a militant solution ('a blow') to the problem of emancipation from the aforesaid 'withering laws'. Clearly, the lines combine jovial camaraderie in a pub setting with the most deadly but euphemistic Fenianism, where no blood is to be shed, no bodies are to be tortured, no horrors are to be envisaged. That the O'Casey who was to write the great Dublin plays repudiating political violence should have started out a rabid IRB man is undoubtedly startling. Though there was to be much more along the same lines after 1910 and up to the time of the Dublin lock-out of 1913 (a major turning point in O'Casey's life), it was the rhetoric of a fanatic rather than of a poet. No argument with himself is on view. His commitment to the Gaelic League was such that he 'worked harder at night than I did in the daytime - teaching Irish, sweeping floors, and lighting fires before classes began; an all for love!'30 The teaching he found difficult, and had none of the knack of the much-admired Sinead Ni Fhlanagain: she taught in the Ard-Chraobh or elite branch of the Gaelic League, which Sean occasionally visited with Blythe but where he felt socially out of place. Here he probably tried too hard: in any event he seems to have annoyed his popular teacher. The people he taught in the Drumcondra branch (Craobh Ldmh Dhearg), of which he rose to be secretary, were working-class 'souls who couldn't be bothered [to learn], for minds and hands were forcibly dedicated to the task of winning a sparse living from a grudging world of senseless competition'.31 He taught there every second night and on Sundays taught at Moyvalley.32 He thoroughly enjoyed the social side of both the Gaelic League and GAA activities, however, was admired as a singer of Irish ballads and was a noted but somewhat feared exponent of Irish dancing. He retained fond, if romantic memories of these times, as a typical letter to an old friend indicates: The days when we hurled together and danced together [ . . . ] ! remember well a Ceilidh in St Margarets [North County Dublin] held in the old church, no longer used because there was a new one. We went in Brakes, the old lumbering wagonettes out of which we had to get when the horse met a hill; the many dances I had and the hearty supper we all ate afterwards; and then the long walk home - for the wagonettes couldnt wait till two in the morning - a lovely experience, for it was summer, and we travelled on foot under a full moon, singing as we went the road. Days never to come again.33 In 1907 Sean took up a cause he was to pursue for some time, namely the unlikely persuasion of protestant ministers to conduct some services through the medium of the Irish language. On this issue he teamed up with Blythe, Seamus Deakin and George Irvine, all men destined to make distinct contributions to Irish cultural and political life. Blythe, as noted earlier, was to fight in the war of independence, be elected a TD and be chosen the first Minister for Trade and Commerce in the Provisional Government, 1919. He was to be Minister for Finance in the Free State Government. Deakin (?1880-£.1953), a chemist who worked in Hoyt's pharmacy in O'Connell Street

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(and later had a shop in Phibsborough), was a member of the IRB Supreme Council. Deakin was something of a 'mystery man'. Nobody seemed to know where he was in Easter Week 1916; he was never arrested. He left Ireland later on and died, it seems, in America.34 Irvine (1877-1954) was a teacher from Fermanagh who had come to Dublin around 1900 and had joined the Gaelic League in 1902: he and Deakin were both members with O'Casey of the Drumcondra branch.35 He was to fight in 1916 under Eamon Ceannt, be sentenced to death, have his sentence commuted and be released from Lewes prison under the amnesty of June 1917, when it seems he became President (Priomhthimire) of the Supreme Council of the IRB and stayed active in the Anglo-Irish war. After 1922 he taught Irish in the Commercial School (VEC) in Parnell Square until 1942.36 After some preliminary work to gain the approval of the Gaelic League, these four men circulated a handbill, dated 22 April 1907, to all Dublin branches summoning those interested to a meeting on 4 May in the rooms of the Ard-Chraobh of the League at 24 Upper O'Connell Street.37 The result was the Committee of Protestant Gaelic Leaguers, known as the 'mission to protestants', with Deakin as chairman and Irvine as secretary. Three aims were defined: service in Irish at least once a month in one of the Dublin city churches; use of parochial halls for lectures and other cultural events; introduction of the Irish language and history into all protestant schools. While Sean wholly supported these aims and was an active committee member, he proved an awkward colleague. He took exception to what he regarded as the formality and elegance of the protestant representatives the committee met with, and in protest would dress inappropriately in his working clothes, wearing a muffler instead of a collar.38 He was also too outspoken. When the committee of four called on the Rev. Phineas Hunt, rector of St Kevin's, off Stephen's Green, seeking permission to have a service in Irish there, all was going well in the discussion until the moment was reached for Rev. Hunt to ask Mrs Hunt to bring in the tea. Then O'Casey launched into top gear, speaking of 'the priests' of the Church of Ireland in his best 'catholic' style. 'Phineas's face darkened with anger. To quieten him', says Blythe, 'the rest of us had to assure him that we had no sympathy with Sean O'Casey's "high" outlook.'39 The Blythe spirit prevailed and the use of the church was granted. Sean was unhappy with the 'low' nature of the service itself when the big day arrived and tried to persuade the minister to sing rather than deliver the liturgy. The other three committee members did not want to make such a condition, and to Blythe's alarm O'Casey walked out during the service, having first stood up as if about to make a protest. Blythe followed him home to make peace, met Susan Casey, who invited him in for tea, and was relieved to discover that Sean had merely felt ill, left the church for fresh air, and decided to go home. Whether this was a tantrum or not, the committee went on with its work. This year also saw O'Casey in print for the first time. The Irish Peasant-was founded in 1905 by James McCann, MP, 'an economist of the wealthier classes who had been for years as a voice crying in the wilderness' of the disadvantaged peasantry. He insisted 'as emphatically as [James] Connolly himself that at

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bottom and in its roots the Irish problem was material and economic. Everything conspired to crush and extirpate the peasantry, the basis of the nation.'40 Thus the radical ideas of Fin tan Lalor and Michael Davitt were being rejuvenated by intellectuals dissatisfied with Arthur Griffith's ideas in the United Irishman and elsewhere. Towards the end of 1906 the catholic church stepped in and opposed the Irish Peasant as anti-Catholic. 'As it is published on the borders of my archdiocese/ wrote Cardinal Logue, 'to guard the people for whom I am responsible from its poisonous influence I shall be obliged to denounce it publicly and to prohibit the reading of it in this archdiocese.'41 Instantly, the radical journalist William Patrick Ryan (1867-1942) jumped into the breach. He returned to Ireland from London to re-launch McCann's paper on 9 February 1907 under the new title The Peasant and Irish Ireland: A National Weekly Newspaper and Review. Published on Saturdays for a penny, it was a lively, diverse journal with challenging articles and reviews. O'Casey's first (of two) contributions was under the pen-name An Gall Fada, or The Tall Foreigner', on 25 May, and far from the land question it was on Augustine Birrell and education policy. Here was an issue which, like so many others from language to land, refocused the central question of Ireland's relation to England. On coming to Ireland as Chief Secretary in January 1907, Birrell, a Liberal and a Home Ruler, set about revolutionising Irish education. It was a contentious issue for two reasons. One was the language question, whether Irish should be a compulsory subject in the proposed National University of Ireland, and the other was whether the catholic church was to maintain denominational control of its schools. When Birrell introduced his Irish Council Bill to the House of Commons on 7 May, to give Ireland control over education, it was defeated through the efforts of the United Irish League and John Redmond's Irish Parliamentary Party. There was 'bewilderment all round' at the defeat.42 But O'Casey was not bewildered. His article was mainly jocose and concentrated on what he saw as Birrell's condescension. Later, he called it 'an ironical skit' and said it was first written for the Gaelic League journal and got such praise that he sent it to the Peasant. 'It was written in a laughing mocking rush.'43 It is to be doubted if Sean cared about the possibility of de-centralisation or devolution here: he was imbued with Douglas Hyde's concept of 'deAnglicisation of Ireland' as a whole. But his rhetoric was somewhat beside the point: And though our poor children - the Hope of the Nation - will have to herd together in dismal places, which a short-sighted, yet well-meaning Government calls schools - though their tender and quick-witted minds be de-Irished and stupefied by a system which a paternal Government calls education; though they are taught to admire and revere the things of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australia, and especially England; while their own country is to them bare of all useful and inspiring memories - her history unknown, her language unspoken, her music unheard, her achieve-

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ments despised, and her character unloved [. . .] yet, notwithstanding all these, we honour and revere the man who, when Ireland asks for bread, throws at her what he can - a stone.44 As an intervention in the cultural debate O'Casey's article was perfectly useless. What it did, however, was publicly to nail his republican colours to the mast. When he showed the pseudonymous piece to the rector E.M. Griffin the response was what would have been expected: The man who wrote that article, John, is a traitor, and ought to be in jail.'45 O'Casey says Sinead Ni Fhlanagain of the Gaelic League also disliked it and rebuked him for writing it.46 But he possibly confuses here his first with his second published article, The Gaelic League in Dublin: How to Make it a Great Power', which appeared in the same journal on 6 July. The work of the League here is to make Dublin Irish. Is it making Dublin Irish? If present conditions continue, will it ever do so? Never.' Finding the Gaelic League 'disorganised and weak', Sean proposed a detailed plan of re-organisation, which can hardly have endeared him to those who regarded themselves as his betters on many counts. Yet the article perhaps shows why he was to see Dr Michael O'Hickey in his fight against the bishops to include Irish as a compulsory subject for the NUI as a twin soul, a fellow rebel (though a priest) against a conservative institution.47

When 'Sound the Loud Trumpet' was published Sean rushed out and bought six copies and read his article in all six. There was fivepence wasted, his mother must have thought. He saw the piece as 'a great triumph' for him at the time, since it was regarded as 'a great slap at the British government'.48 But it is unlikely that either Mick or Tom applauded such sentiments, in the year when Dublin honoured those members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who had died fighting the Boers in 1899-1902. One of the few colonialist monuments in Dublin not blown up by the IRA, the magnificent Fusiliers' Arch still stands today commanding the north-west corner of St Stephen's Green. Built to the exact dimensions of the Arch of Titus in Rome,49 it was conceived as an imperialist statement. Dubliners of a non-imperialist stamp were to dub it Traitors' Gate'. In the era when Home Rule was a hotly contested issue the occasion of the unveiling of this arch marked a triumphalism now laden with foreboding; it was an arch which was to span the old Victorian world and the new one into modern Ireland. It was a rather splendid occasion nonetheless which took place on 19 August 1907. The Casey brothers would almost certainly have been present, and perhaps the proud mother Susan, as the Duke of Connaught, brother to Edward VII himself, formally opened the gate to the sound of 'God save the King', in the presence of the Lord Lieutenant and all his party in fine array. As the Duke was colonel of the Dublin Fusiliers he made a special point of honouring the men; just outside the gate (at the Grafton Street end of the Green) a line of Fusiliers in civilian dress and a line of veterans of the corps were drawn up, and

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on arrival from the Shelbourne Hotel where he was guest of honour at a luncheon the Duke in full regimentals inspected and shook hands with them before going inside the Green for the formalities. One of the Fusiliers called for 'three cheers for th' ould colonel' and as these were given the crowd, in spite of the rain that began to spill down, applauded. The mood was buoyant and there were no protesters. The Duke told the assembly that the arch commemorated the names of 11 officers and about 240 men who had done their duty. He included the living with the dead: 'Men of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, you have reason to be proud of the way Irishmen, and especially men from Dublin, have done their duty,' and he himself was proud to be associated with them as their Colonel-in-Chief.50 Four battalions had served, two of regular and two of militia. Tom and Mick would surely have known all eighty-one names inscribed for the First Battalion on the arch, the Second normally being quartered in India. Surely around them there would have been someone to translate the Latin inscription declaring that Dublin had gratefully dedicated this monument to her bravest soldiers?51 Surely they would have found their way soon after to toast themselves and their comrades, dead and alive, in some favourite pub? And perhaps, to mark the day, they would look into the Empire Palace or the Tivoli, where new variety shows were playing, or make their way to the Round Room in the Rotunda where the novelty of Living Pictures was ushering in the new century: visits to Mont Blanc, Japan, the Great Hamburg Zoo, Life among Cowboys and Indians, scenes of Life in Rhodesia and Spain, and the Lady Godiva Pageant (whatever that might have promised). Loyal songs would have been sung, including the popular 'Bravo! Dublin Fusiliers!' Did their youngest brother stay well clear of the occasion? He never mentions it. But since Isaac's old newspaper the Daily Express carried a glowing account next day it seems certain the event was well marked in the Casey household for days on end. And what of the Beavers? For Nicholas, too, might have had every reason to see the Fusiliers' Arch as something to celebrate. Poor Bella had other things on her mind besides memorial arches these times. For a good while, the marriage with Nicholas was happy and on Sundays she often had congenial family gatherings at Summerhill, which Martin Margulies, drawing on information supplied by the next generation of Beavers in the 1960s, happily describes: Tom and Mick would drift over several hours early [for dinner], so that they could stroll through the country with Beaver while Beaver - a bird fancier who kept a large parrot at home - flew his pigeons. When O'Casey arrived later with his mother, he would settle himself in the best armchair, take a book from the shelf, and read placidly through the evening as the conversation swirled around him. Sometimes he would pause to sip at his cup of cocoa, which he prepared himself from a packet of chocolate which he carried in his pocket.52 In the 1901 census form, neatly filled in by Nicholas, four children were listed, Susan, Isabella, James and Valentine, ranging in ages from eleven to two years.

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Nicholas's occupation was given as 'parcels clerk'; Bella merited but a dash for hers. Neither she nor any of the family acknowledged proficiency in the Irish language, and all were listed under religious denomination as Church of Ireland. When exactly Bella began to have trouble with Nicholas is not clear; it was a matter covered up later by the Beaver family. She and Nicholas lost a baby, aged two-and-a-half, in March 1904, from 'disease of the stomach', and it may have been in the following year when their last child Shaun was born (possibly named for O'Casey) that Nicholas began to display unmistakable signs of general paralysis of the insane (gpi). O'Casey noticed 'odd behaviour' at first: Nicholas 'trying to go through walls where there was no door; leaving bed to put on his red-banded cap in the middle of the night to hurry off to work in his shirt'. At other times he turned violent. When Beaver's eyes started bothering him O'Casey brought him to Dr Story at the Royal Victoria Hospital, who offered no solution. A medical doctor diagnosed the illness and told Bella to have Nicholas committed before he became dangerous. She did not immediately do this. She could not afford to. Beaver's employers 'put a brush in his hand to keep the front steps of the railway station clean, where he'd stand for hours leaning on his brush, and gazing ahead at all he couldn't see'.53 As he tells the story, O'Casey was faced with mastering him when Nicholas went berserk and attacked Bella. Beaver was committed to the Richmond Lunatic Asylum. Established in 1815, the Richmond, later the Grangegorman Mental Hospital, was mainly a custodial institution. Although architecturally respectable, having been designed by Francis Johnston, who had designed the GPO and Dublin Castle, and named for the Lord Lieutenant of the day, the Duke of Richmond, it was an 'overcrowded, insanitary and rat-infested place'.54 At one time, mongooses were kept to exterminate the rats, and typhoid was not unknown among nurses and patients alike. Although the population of Ireland was decreasing, the numbers confined to mental asylums grew from 280 per 100,000 in 1890 to 499 in 1902. The causes were a mystery and although the doctor in charge of the Richmond, Connolly Norman (died 1908), was highly regarded no useful research was done into them. In 1934 Samuel Beckett described Portrane, the sister hospital of the Richmond, as 'a land of sanctuary, [. . .] where much had been suffered secretly. Yes, the last ditch.'55 Nicholas Beaver would have been one of those Beckettian lost souls shuffling aimlessly around the last ditch, waiting for death. O'Casey described him as dressed in 'the rough tweed of the loony pauper [ . . . and] the red woollen neckerchief so tied that when one became restless a keeper could seize it, pull, and choke all movement, quench all fire out of the gurgling, foam-lipped madman' (A, 1, 450). Until 1917 gpi was regarded as incurable and so patients were, in the phrase of the time, 'left to rot in their box beds' from this progressively decaying disorder. Beaver's soldierly bearing brought him to this pass; O'Casey implies that the cause was a form of syphilis picked up as an occupational hazard. Death came as a mercy on 10 November 1907. He was forty years old.

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But for Bella it was to be a long, wretched decay until she joined him in the grave in 1918. She worked as a charwoman, scrubbing floors to keep bread in the mouths of her four children. She had to give up the tenement room in Fitzgibbon Street where she had moved when Nicholas was hospitalised in 1905 and for a time, perhaps three months, all five moved into the Casey flat. O'Casey frankly describes the awfulness of these times, when he was afraid to put a foot out of his make-shift bed for fear of standing on a sleeping child. Money would have been short. Still, Bella paid £2 in March 1908 to subdivide the Casey plot in Mount Jerome, her address still being Abercorn Road.56 Like her mother, she had her pride when it came to burial of the dead. In 1908 the Old Age Pensions Act was introduced, 'a sensational boon' to Ireland, since it provided five shillings a week to those over seventy, 'a lot of money in those days'.57 Ironically, it was a boon from Augustine Birrell. Susan Casey began to draw it on 1 January 1909. At least it helped subsidise Bella's grief.

In the years that followed, up to the time of his dismissal from his job with the GNR, Sean continued to drive himself on all fronts at once. His irascibility became notorious, and it must have had something to do with overwork. 'Ah, yes, I remember him all right,' mused a fellow-worker years later, 'a long, thin fella with a drop on the end of his nose, always complainin'. Always complainin'!'58 He went out of his way to be confrontational. As Ernest Blythe said of him, 'of course he was a crank, but he knew it.'59 We find him writing to Sinn Fein in March 1910 complaining about arrangements for a recent Emmet Commemoration Concert on St Patrick's Day in which too many songs were sung in English, too few in Irish. He denied he was picking on trifles to argue his case: after all, Michelangelo once told a student that 'the care of trifles ensures success, and success is no trifle.'60 Trifling or not, Sean collected money in the streets for the ongoing Wolfe Tone Memorial Fund; he was no mere armchair enthusiast. Bulmer Hobson, another Northern protestant who, like Blythe, turned fanatic nationalist and became active at the highest level in Dublin from 1908, said of Sean that he 'was guided by his emotions and never listened to reason. He poured violent abuse on everybody who did not agree with him.' But then Hobson disliked O'Casey as much, perhaps, as O'Casey positively detested him. One finds repeatedly in reconstructing the Dublin years that O'Casey made more enemies than friends. He was careless about maintaining friendship - Sam Johnson tells us that it is something which must be kept in good repair - and was inclined to blurt out his opinions regardless of offence. Hobson made the mistake of attempting to patronise him in 1909-10. He and Deakin, with whom he shared rooms, would invite Sean to supper on Saturday evenings, 'partly because he was an entertaining talker and partly because we thought he needed a meal'.61 But it was subsequent Irish politics which rendered Hobson's choice anathema to O'Casey.

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Politically, Sean was becoming rabidly republican, as Desmond Ryan found him on one occasion: Sean O'Casey sits in silence at the back of the hall during the lecture, a dour and fiery figure swathed in labourer's garb, for he works on the railways just then. His neck and throat are bound in the coils of a thick white muffler, and he looks a Jacobin of Jacobins as his small, sharp and red-rimmed eyes stab all the beauty and sorrow of the world. He speaks first, and very fluently and eloquently in Irish, then launches out into a violent Republican oration in English, stark and forceful, Biblical in diction with gorgeous tints of rhetoric and bursts of anti-English Nationalism of the most uncompromising style. He will have none of the Socialists who have turned in to heckle the lecturer [Edwards, an Englishman, according to O'Casey himself] and he rends them savagely and brushes their materialism aside. Ryan pointed to a strange contradiction between the public and private man: 'there was a force and character about him even if you thought he was a crank, a fanatic, a man whose mind had room for only one idea at a time. In private he had a courtesy and simplicity.'62 In clarifying that the chairman of this meeting was Arthur Griffith O'Casey later excused his crossness.63 He had no patience whatever with Griffith's politics. On another occasion, around 1911, when W.P. Ryan (Desmond's father) was the speaker ('Has Sinn Fein a serious social policy?') and Arthur Griffith was again chairing, O'Casey insisted on speaking altogether in Irish in spite of objections from the audience. His friends Sean O'Rourke and Kevin O'Loughlin never forgot that scene.64 It has to be remembered that the period before 1913 in Ireland was something of a political vacuum, in which a figure like O'Casey, fuming, idealistic and frustrated at the lack of spirit in the people, whirled ineffectually. Lennox Robinson captured this atmosphere well in his Abbey play Patriots (1912), in which James Nugent, out from prison after eighteen years for revolutionary activities, finds that people are no longer interested. 'Ireland is going to be very prosperous, very well-to-do one of these days, but she's never going to fight again. [. . .] She's got to fight her own self now.'65 All this was to change very soon, with the revival of the Home Rule issue in Westminster, but in the meantime men like O'Casey, intellectuals rather than old-style revolutionaries, had to fight for their 'own selves'. It was census time again on Sunday 2 April 1911. This time the form for 18 Abercorn Road (the street having been renumbered) was filled in not by Susan and not even by Mick as head of household but by the youngest member of the family. He filled it in in Irish throughout, signing himself Seaghan 6 Cathasaigh, Fear an Tighe (head of household). He gave the Casey religion as Eaglais Protastunach na hEireann (Protestant Church of Ireland), which must have caused a problem. Some other hand, probably that of the collector on 19 April, wrote in 'R. Catholic' over O'Casey's Irish, assuming the identity of Gaelic with Roman Catholicism; this is crossed out and underneath O'Casey's

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Irish is written instead, '3 Church of Ireland'. This clarification must have come from Susan, or from Mick, whose name appears as head of household on the verso of the form. If from Susan, she let go her insistence that they were Church of England. The wonder is she allowed Sean to fill in the form in the first place; it can only be that he was now recognised as the scholar in the family. For her first and no doubt her last time, Susan was identified as Siobhan O [sic] Cathasaigh. Her age was (wrongly) given as seventy-four. Mick ('Micheal O Cathasaigh') was described as 'Sclabhaidhe Ginearalta', which means 'general slave' but was translated beneath as 'general labourer', doubtless O'Casey'sjoke. He described himself as 'Schlabhaidhe do lucht an bhothair laranais' (Slave for the Railway company).66 He gave his age as thirty-one. This was making 'eternal silence speak' with a vengeance. The gesture of filling in the census in Irish probably emanated from the Gaelic League but O'Casey turned it into an ironic revision of his family's identity. It became a personal declaration. Among his books which have survived from this period is a copy of the New Testament in Irish, signed 'S.O Cathasaigh' and dated 22 November 1912. There is also a book of Irish songs by Padraig Breathnach, Fuinn na Smol, similarly inscribed and dated 4 October 1917. For the present, at any rate, religion and poetry were to remain parts of O'Casey's life and expression. So too were paintings. But the closest to his heart was the Irish language which had liberated him from the status of 'slave' to scholar and given him a new identity as writer.

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s 1911 wore on Sean decided that the 'Slave for the Railway company' would be slave no longer. A new militant class-consciousness was growing within him, fostered far less by the Irish Socialist Republican £ arty of James Connolly, whom O'Casey disliked, than by the man who was to become his next mentor, the man he dubbed the Irish Prometheus, Jim Larkin. The year 1911 was one of upheaval internationally. Workers sought to take advantage of boom conditions, but in Ireland employers increasingly thought that they were victims not of the trade cycle but [...] of "the malignant personality of Larkin".'1 James Larkin (1874-1947) is now regarded as the greatest moulder of Irish freedom in its broadest sense in the twentieth century. As orator, he was regarded as the best until Churchill spoke in June 1940.2 Of all the patriots and revolutionaries of this period in modern Irish history only Larkin has merited a public statue in O'Connell Street. There he stands in Oisin Kelly's bronze, strategically placed between O'Connell and Parnell, his arms dramatically thrown out in characteristic pose as if calling on the downtrodden of Ireland to rise from their knees and seize what is theirs by right. Inscribed on the pedestal are O'Casey's words describing the first time he heard Larkin, released from jail, on 1 October 1910: From a window in the building [Liberty Hall], leaning well forth, he talked to the workers, spoke as only Jim Larkin could speak, not for an assignation with peace, dark obedience, or placid resignation; but trumpet-tongued of resistance to wrong, discontent with leering poverty, and defiance of any power strutting out to stand in the way of their march onward. (A, 1, 573) Here was a man after his own heart, a man with a 'divine mission of discontent'. Larkin, who had arrived in Dublin from his native Liverpool in 1908, was founder of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in 1909. His aim was 'One Big Union' which would give power to the common man. It was said that he became mythological and legendary within a year of his arrival in

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Dublin; some even believed that Larkin was sent by God to save the Dublin worker from the condition Sean complained of - slavery.3 Sean joined the ITGWU. His employers in the GNR had their own ideas. In England in August 1911 the first national railway strike took place, gaining increases in pay from one to four shillings per week. But a sixty-hour minimum working week stayed in place for most unskilled railwaymen, still earning no more than one pound per week. 'Only with more complete unionization of the men and a policy of trade-union unity was this unsatisfactory state of affairs rectified.'4 In Dublin the GNR Company was not about to stand idly by and let the English example be followed when the Irish railway workers supported the strike. A complication set in when Dublin timber merchants locked out some five hundred men because of the disruption in rail service; railway goods porters then went on sympathetic strike and refused to handle 'tainted' timber. The result was a national strike in September, broken after a week when the engineers and firemen failed to support the unskilled labourers. Whereas the Great Southern and Western Railway Company agreed to reinstate ninety per cent of these men, the other railway companies, including the GNR, refused, 'and the resulting victimization was cruel.'5 Many years later this was the background to Red Roses for Me. As a member of the NUR, attached to the Engineering Department, Sean was let back to work only to be told soon afterwards that his services were no longer required. He was clearly identified as a troublemaker, although no formal charge was made. He was out of a job by 8 December and, presumably, without a reference would not find it easy to get more than casual work in Dublin thereafter. In a manoeuvre which was to become habitual in any controversy in which he embroiled himself O'Casey now published the correspondence between himself and the secretary of the GNRC board.6 It is clear that the only charge made against him was 'habitual neglect of work'; it is equally clear that this was a pretext. O'Casey was seen as a supporter of Larkin.7 His demand to be given the opportunity to defend himself before the board and refute the foreman's charge was also characteristic. In his final letter, on 18 December, he emphasised that he was not looking for reinstatement but rather reasons for his dismissal, plus the opportunity 'of clearing myself from any imputation these charges may attach to the way in which for nine years I have discharged my duties to the Company'. Was ever a manual labourer so literate and so literary? In the course of his two letters to the GNRC O'Casey used the following words: apprised, signify, dispense, intangible, indefinite, emphatically, assurance, unrefutation [sic}, ignominious, imputation and terminating. There is a delight in language here which is positively Elizabethan. That's some swank', as the response is to Mr Gallogher's letter in The Shadow of a Gunman. Impressed or not by this Mr Gallogher in real life, the GNRC, while conceding that the board was 'not cognizant of any charges against [SOC]', insisted that notice terminating his 'engagement' was given 'as your service was no longer required'. There was a contradiction here which O'Casey did his best to expose, for

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'dismissal' was the term used in his file in the Chief Engineer's Office, to which he had no access. He was not aware of the negative report on him by engineer HA.Whieldon, dated 11 December: He [SOC] had been warned that unless he joined the Pension Fund he could not be retained in the Company's Service, and he has repeatedly refused to join, in additon [sic] his eyesight is defective and it is doubtful if the Company's Doctor would pass him - further he is inclined to be idle and has been warned on various occasions. If Foreman Reid had not pleaded for him I should have discharged him before this - the man has been very fortunate to have been retained so long.8 Clearly, Whieldon meant to get rid of this difficult labourer long before the pretext of the Pension Fund arose. The subaltern spoke in no uncertain terms when O'Casey published the correspondence in Larkin's 7mA Worker in March 1912, concluding with a swipe at the Englishness of his superiors in the GNRC: the labourers were 'at the mercy of their foremen and managers', and in his department were 'at the feet of a sleeven [sic for 'sleeveen'] English engineer named Whielden [...] and a cold, wolfish-hearted foreman named Reid, in whom is neither truth, honour, nor candidness'.9 His sacking from the GNRC was a turning point in O'Casey's life. He was never again to have secure employment. The shock of dismissal radicalised him, confirming his admiration for Larkin's uncompromising view of the labour question. It shaped his own uncompromising nature. In Red Roses for Me Mrs Breydon says about her activist son (based on O'Casey himself): 'His mind, like his poor father's, hates what he sees as a sham; an' shams are powerful things, mustherin' at their broad backs guns that shoot, big jails that hide their foes, and high gallows to choke th' young cryin' out against them.'10 In one way O'Casey was happy never to work again at a steady job: all the hours in the day were hardly enough for the activities he already pursued and the others he was about to plunge into. But in another, more practical way, he was now dependent on his mother's tiny pension to keep body and soul together. Under the National Insurance Act (1911) he was entitled to unemployment benefit of ten shillings per week (based on an average of twenty-five shillings a week for an unskilled labourer). But this assistance was payable up to a maximum of six months only. Whether O'Casey availed of it is doubtful. He was a man of fierce pride. So he plunged fully into Dublin political, nationalist, and working-class debate. He wrote his pieces for Larkin's 7mA Worker, he continued with his Gaelic League interests; he attended meetings and debated public issues; and he joined the St Laurence O'Toole's club [SLOT], with its hurling team, pipers' band, and drama group. When 1913 arrived, and the lock-out burst into devastating confrontations between workers and employers, O'Casey was in the thick of it, organising a committee to help women and children and haunting Liberty Hall in attempts to be of public service. The writing he did

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was functional, bits and pieces of commentary or intemperate attack verging on libel.11 He had not yet found his major theme.

In 1910 Sean helped found the SLOT Pipers' Band in Seville Place, East Wall, and became its first secretary. At this point he left the Drumcondra branch of the Gaelic League, since St Laurence's had its own branch, and for the next ten years SLOT became his cultural centre. He had joined through the influence of a local school-teacher, Frank Cahill, who became a close friend and mentor. Two years younger than Sean, Cahill had been teaching in the Christian Brothers' national school for boys in Seville Place since he was fifteen. He was a lively, much-loved man, a good story-teller although he spoke with a slight stammer, a dedicated teacher, and a lover of Gaelic games, which he instilled in the boys after school. He was what one might call a community patriot, for, born in Seville Place Cahill spent all his life there and was eventually memorialised by a plaque erected outside the school by his friends and former pupils. After the founding of the Free State, he was elected to Bail Eireann for Cumann na nGaedheal (August 1923), though he resigned in less than six months. He was a member of Dublin Corporation for several years. Politically, Cahill and O'Casey were to find themselves poles apart by 1923 but for the present they shared the same nationalistic enthusiasms. The pipe band, part of a club in existence since 1901, was founded under the nominal presidency of the old Fenian Tom Clarke, newly returned from exile in America.12 Clarke kept a sweet-shop in Parnell Street which became a daily meeting place for the politically committed; O'Casey was a frequent, argumentative visitor. Thus the pipers' band was bound up with the Irish language and with IRB interests. Further, because the membership was local and working-class, O'Casey was happier, for he had become increasingly uneasy with the middle-class ethos of the Gaelic League's elite. As the life of the times tended to integrate social, political, cultural and educational interests, so too did Sean manage to combine affiliations. As secretary of the pipers' band he was characteristically active. He ensured that prominent figures such as the local parish priest, Archdeacon James Brady, his curate James Breen, the everuseful literary man Edward Martyn and such national figures as Douglas Hyde, Shane Leslie and Stephen Gwynn paid subscriptions. The list of subscribers shows that O'Casey 'even at that early stage was held in some respect'.13 He set about getting costumes made to a design he approved, green kilt, 'flowing crimson shawl', brooches at breast and knee, and 'jaunty balmoral cap'. The kilt was no skimpy affair but 'seven yards of material swinging from a man's hips'.14 The occasion when the club's banner, made by one Mrs Patrick Cahalan, was unfurled for the first time was an event O'Casey recalled as a 'great night' over forty years later.15 Pearse and Hyde, representing the Gaelic League, presented a special standard, 'a scarlet poplin banner with a lion rampant worked in silver thread', which was later confiscated by the British, together with the band's instruments.16

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The band's headed notepaper contained a logo of a fully-dressed piper, signed 'J.K.C.' [J. Casey], which displays O'Casey's skill as sketcher: even the tassels on the pipes are delicately drawn (see illustration 5). He took the learning of pipes seriously. Kit Casey, Tom's son, recalled the excruciating effect of his uncle's efforts during the customary Sunday-evening entertainments in Tom's house in Oxford Terrace: 'the sound of bagpipes in the house is disgusting. [. . .] Mick had got a gimlet and bored a hole in them, so that, as he said, he'd never play the blasted things again.'17 O'Casey's pipes, it is believed, have survived, though restored, and are quite beautiful.18 In full regalia he must have looked impressive. There were many like him who believed in the cultural values of SLOT, its interests in Irish history and the Irish language in particular. Such people were the rank and file of the movement which created a new Ireland. In their company O'Casey deepened his sense of Irishness. Frank Henderson was one of those. Born in 1886 in the Fairview area and educated to secondary level by the Christian Brothers (Marino), he came from a strong Fenian tradition which prompted an interest in cultural nationalism. He joined the SLOT pipe band more out of interest in Gaelic (which he taught) than in politics, though he was to join the Irish Volunteers and fight in the GPO in 1916. In 1912 he was by profession a book-keeper, and in that capacity helped with the accounts of the pipers' club. He was not treasurer, that position being held by Frank Cahill. For some reason, as secretary O'Casey wrote twice to deprive Henderson of his office on the committee,19 but then apologised himself (in Irish) for his personal use of bad language: Proinseas, dear friendThis is to let you know that I'm heartily sorry for often giving you annoyance listening to me pouring out lots of mighty oaths. I shall make a great effort to give up this bad habit for your sake, & for the sake of the other boys as well. This is what the old-Fenians would do, & I follow in the footsteps of their heroes. But! The committee - indeed, it's little I care about the committee - but I have great affection for you. Yours, Sean.20 The root of this matter is explained by another member, Paddy McDonnell: 'At the club we used to have mock battles at times, just for [military] training you know. Well one Sunday night we started a mock attack, boarded the room, barred the doors, and the lot and Sean was to try and gain entry.' They beat him back with sticks and brushes when he tried to get in the window, while Sean, who took such exercises very seriously, 'lost his temper and cursed us all. He was "brought up" for using bad language,' which might have led to expulsion, 'but eventually the thing was forgotten about.'21 Once trained and costumed, the band turned out for such patriotic occasions as the annual trip to Wolfe Tone's grave at Bodenstown: there is a

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well-known photograph, first published in An Phoblacht, 20 June 1931, with O'Casey walking beside the band in suit, collar and tie, like a master urging on his pupils. In The Plough and the Stars Fluther was to decry Uncle Peter's boast that he 'never missed a pilgrimage to Bodenstown', by linking those patriots with pious superstition. 'Sure, I don't care a damn if you slep' in Bodenstown! You can take your breakfast, dinner, an' tea on th' grave in Bodenstown, if you like, for Fluther!' (CP, 200). But there was a time when the author of these lines had a Vice versa' view. In the 7mA Worker for 21 June 1913, indeed, O'Casey called for a big turn-out for the annual pilgrimage, and announced with some pride: 'Dublin contingents will be headed by the O'Toole Pipers and St. James's Band'.22 This was the occasion recorded by the photograph. It was also an occasion marked by an ovation by Pearse, and every man 'who stands as a rebel against foreign rule' was asked to attend. O'Casey was secretary/fundraiser for the Tone Commemoration, to pay for a monument in Dublin. Besides the trip to Bodenstown, the pipers' band participated regularly in fundraising concerts and travelled to county towns for competitions. In the course of such an excursion to Lusk O'Casey met and became friends with Thomas Ashe, who was to die by forcible feeding while on hunger strike in Mountjoyjail in 1917.

If it is surprising to find O'Casey supporting Pearse in 1913 this is because the great Dublin lock-out had not yet occurred, when Pearse blotted his copybook. In general, O'Casey admired Pearse, and in later years was to give him much posthumous praise, for his 'awesome sincerity'.23 In personality the two men were not dissimilar. Each had an intense, uncompromising integrity which allowed him to combine multiple interests within a shifting political philosophy. O'Casey helped with one of the pageants in aid of St Enda's College more because he admired Pearse's ideas on education than because Pearse was an ambitious and militant republican.24 What mainly attracted him was the emphasis on individual creativity within a free and open environment. Pearse probably worried more about the definition of that freedom and its relation to the wider 'republic'.25 But both hated the 'murder machines' of unimaginative, enforced education which O'Casey had found completely discouraging at St Barnabas's. Writing in the autobiographies he cited Pearse: The word, said he, for education in Irish is the same as that for fosterage; the teacher was a fosterer, the pupil a foster-child.' The aim was not to prepare pupils for examinations but 'primarily to foster the elements of character already there'.26 But once the Dublin lock-out started all was changed. Jack Mitchell hardly put the matter too strongly when he claimed that 1913 marked 'the comingof-age not only of O'Casey (it remained the definitive experience of his life) but of the Irish workers as a class, conscious of itself'.27 The truth of this claim is borne out by all those reminiscent letters to O'Casey in the 1940s and 1950s, collected in Krause's edition, from O'Casey's comrades in 1913-14. All of them look upon the lock-out and Larkin's stand against it as 'day one' in a new

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socialist republic which, sadly, was never to have much of a calendar. It is always 1913, never 1916, which remains in their memories, always Larkin above Pearse. Fergus D'Arcy summarises the events of 1913-14 succinctly: The celebrated great strike and lock-out in Dublin in 1913 began in midmorning on Tuesday 26 August, in the midst of Horse Show week, when two hundred tram drivers and conductors left their vehicles and passengers stranded in the city centre. As members of the ITGWU they took this action in protest against the dismissal of two union members from the parcel department of the Tramway Company. They returned to work at the end of January 1914, bringing the strike and lock-out to a virtual end, although the last workers affected, women workers in Jacob's biscuit factory, did not go back till mid-March 1914.28 As the final sentence implies, the initial strike by the tramway workers spread to other sections of the Dublin workforce by means of Larkin's effective use of the sympathetic strike. This solidarity is what the whole affair was about, and what gives it historical significance. The employers, led by the powerful selfmade businessman William Martin Murphy (1845-1919), were determined to break the power of the unions before they should, as the employers saw it, control unskilled working conditions. As leader of the employers' federation, Murphy was a formidable opponent. Not only was he a major shareholder in the Dublin United Tramway Company but he also owned the Irish Independent (controller of middle-class catholic opinion), Clery's store and the Imperial Hotel in O'Connell Street. In addition he had been a member of parliament 1886-1892, a staunch anti-Parnellite alongside Tim Healy. He it was, too, who successfully opposed the plan to erect a new art gallery in Dublin in 1913 to house the Hugh Lane collection, winning the opprobrium of poets and artists (notably Yeats) for his philistinism. It is ironic that when Murphy forced the Dublin workers back the Chamber of Commerce rewarded him with of all things a painting, a portrait of himself (by Orpen). The workers had a different perspective, the one O'Casey shared. 'Who shall stop the onward march of the people?', he enquired in an article in the Irish Worker less than a month after Bloody Sunday.29 This was the event, O'Casey said later, which like the first shot fired at Bunker Hill, reverberated around the world. Certainly, it was the most graphic manifestation of oppression which the common people had yet experienced, 'the nearest thing Ireland has ever had to a socialist revolution'.30 In the build-up to this Sunday's banned meeting in O'Connell Street two civilians had died from injuries received in fierce opposition from the Dublin Metropolitan Police. A warrant was issued for Larkin's arrest. James Connolly had already been arrested for sedition and conspiracy. A huge crowd, many of them merely sightseers, turned up for the public meeting on 'Bloody Sunday', 31 August, wondering if Larkin would dare to appear. The atmosphere was tense and suitably theatrical as Larkin, disguised as an old deaf man with a beard, made his way on to the balcony of Murphy's

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Imperial Hotel to address the crowd below. 'It's Larkin!' the cry went up, but he had the opportunity to say only a few words before he was seized. The police moved in, as an eye-witness recorded, like men possessed: Some drove the crowd into side streets, to meet other batches of the Government's minions wildly striking with truncheons at every one within reach. In escaping many ran the gauntlet until the third or fourth blow knocked them senseless. The few roughs got away first; most respectable persons left their hats, and crawled away with bleeding heads. Kicking the victims while prostrate was a settled part of the police programme. Three such cases occurred in a direct line with our window.31 Over 400 civilians and 30 members of the police force were injured. The scene was 'like a battle field' strewn with the bodies of the injured, 'writhing in agony'.32 O'Casey was present, feeling uncomfortable even before anything happened, 'for he was not a hero, and he felt it was unwise to have come here.' Nervously, he checked his pockets for the strip of rag, his one handkerchief, in case he should need a bandage. Then Larkin appeared and the riots took place, with the police 'batoning everyone', and yet O'Casey saw an injured man shouting in defiance, 'Up the Dublin workers! Up Jim Larkin! And making Sean shudder at the thought of what they'd make him look like when they got him to the cell and no-one was there to see' (A, 1, 582, 584). Murphy's response on 3 September was, through the Employers' Federation, to lock out all employees who were members of Larkin's ITGWU. Soon, some 25,000 men were affected, and as winter approached their families faced starvation. The awful suffering which ensued is familiar to many still through the fictional account by James Plunkett in Strumpet City (1969), especially through its outstanding RTE television adaptation (by Hugh Leonard) in 1980. Larkin was sentenced to seven months' imprisonment, still determined that 'Christ shall not be crucified' by the employers. Thus he assured the Askwith Enquiry set up on 29 September 1913 in Dublin Castle. 'I, and those who think with me, want to show the employers that the workers will have to get the same opportunity of enjoying a civilised life as they themselves have.'33 Larkin's humane regard for the workers stands in stark contrast to the employers' intransigence, for they refused to accept the report of this court of enquiry as a basis for negotiations. They had a mission to crush Larkinism. As Connolly noted, the result was that for the first time the intellectuals then sided with Irish workers.34 The letter from & (George Russell) to the Irish Times on 6 October put the matter in morally irrefutable terms: I address this morning to you, the aristocracy of industry in this city, because, like all aristocracies, you tend to grow blind in long authority. [...] Your insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded to workers universally in the modern world were incredible, and as great as your inhumanity. [...] You reminded labour you could always have your three square meals a day

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while it went hungry. [. . .] You may succeed in your policy and ensure your own damnation by your victory.35 Even Yeats, a bit of an aristocrat himself, wrote to the Irish Worker to complain of the 'fanaticism' of the authorities.36 This was in response to Archbishop Walsh's sudden condemnation of the 'mischievous development' of the conflict which had led to catholic children being sent to England to be fed and sheltered at the risk of their religious faith. O'Casey must have taken comfort from ^E's and Yeats's support as he struggled to provide for the families of the strikers through the Women's and Children's Relief Fund (of which he was unpaid secretary). He spent long hours every day helping in Liberty Hall, where a soup kitchen was set up. At the same time, he himself, chronically unemployed as he was, suffered from malnutrition. Even so, with Patrick Lennon, co-secretary of the fund, he collected a sizeable sum of money, around £70 weekly, duly reported in the Irish Worker in December and January. When Larkin was released from prison on 13 November in response to public uproar and poor government results in by-elections, Connolly called for the formation of a citizen army. This was a crucial new development. A revolution was under way.37 When demoralisation set in following the collapse of the strike in January 1914 and the workers returned to work with no extra money though without penalty, it was O'Casey, according to Donal Nevin, who suggested a reorganisation of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA).38 Further, O'Casey drafted its constitution, adopted at Liberty Hall on 22 March. In pride of place among the five declarations comprising this constitution is this: That the first and last principle of the Irish Citizen Army is the avowal that the ownership of Ireland, moral and material, is vested of right in the people of Ireland.'39 It is interesting to note how this principle was to be assimilated into the proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916: 'We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.' It is usually understood that this emphasis in the proclamation derived from Connolly; it is instructive to consider that this might, after all, have derived from Connolly's fidelity to the constitution of the ICA, under whose banner he fought alongside Pearse. If O'Casey was part author, at one remove, of the 1916 proclamation The Plough and the Stars takes on an even more ironic colouring than has been usually recognised. O'Casey was now elected secretary of the ICA and, working alongside the flamboyant Captain Jack White, who was president, he took a major part in recruitment in Dublin county and in drilling exercises at Croydon Park, where Larkin had set up a leisure centre for union members.40 O'Casey had clarified for himself a fairly complex set of political choices and opted for militant workers' defence. The Irish Volunteers, founded in November 1913 to declare opposition to Carson's Ulster Volunteer Force in the North and to defend the Home Rule option, now threatened with rejection, attracted most of those men who had been members of the Gaelic League

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and/or the IRB whom O'Casey had known, Blythe, Henderson, Hobson, Sean Mac Diarmada, and, of course, Pearse. He was just as militaristic as they but he had now narrowed his sights to make, not England, but Irish capitalists his target. In his articles written in the Irish Worker for January 1914 he made a clear distinction between the cause of the Volunteers and that of the unskilled workers. These were polarised because the Volunteers had a bourgeois agenda: 'Workers, this movement is built on a re-actionary basis, that of Grattan's Tinsel Volunteers.'41 He had now turned against Pearse, calling him 'worse than all' because he had 'consistently used the trams on every possible occasion' while Murphy 'declared the workers could submit or starve'.42 O'Casey had left the IRB and this move put him on the wrong side of those for whom the Volunteers were the logical extension of its militarism. Tom Clarke threw him out of his shop for criticising Hobson, telling him he 'loved Bulmer as his own son'.43 Having isolated himself from the main-stream of Irish nationalism O'Casey proceeded to alienate himself from the ICA. At no point was Griffith's Sinn Fein movement seriously considered. Griffith was both anti-Larkin and proJohn Redmond and the increasingly discredited Irish Parliamentary Party.44 One sees here both an attempt on O'Casey's part to adhere to a class-based ideology and an unfortunate tendency to push matters to an extreme, refuse to compromise, and leave himself no alternative but to drop out. Diplomatic he was not. The bone of contention was Countess Markiewicz's dual membership of the women's auxiliary of the Volunteers (Cumann na nBari) and her position on the executive of the ICA (she was joint treasurer).45 O'Casey thought she should choose; further, he thought her a spy for the Volunteers. She had, in any case, quite an off-putting aristocratic manner unlikely to win him over. Blythe tells the story of his being brought to her house in Leinster Road, Rathmines, to meet her. At first she apparently thought he was a Russian exile (no doubt a combination of her lack of Gaelic and Blythe's somewhat Mongolian features), but when the penny dropped her manner changed abruptly and he was no longer worth her attention.46 O'Casey introduced a motion before the ICA Council around the end of August 1914, calling for the Countess's resignation. Not having done his homework on the support he had O'Casey found that the discussion went against his motion and a vote of confidence in the Countess was then carried. The meeting called upon him to apologise. He refused. At a second, general meeting he resigned.47 In another version of what took place, Larkin made a conciliatory speech from the platform, O'Casey rose clenching his fists and in a long speech proposed that Madame Markievicz be expelled for 'general bourgeois tendencies' and 'fraternisation with the enemy'. When he finished, he stood sideway to the platform and addressing both the platform and the meeting declared with outspread arms that he feared no man, physically or morally, 'not even the great Jim Larkin'. Taking offence at the introduction of his name, when he was in the chair, Larkin was on his feet instantly to break in on this continuing oration, and then O'Casey, with four or five supporters, walked out.48 This is a good story but it is likely that Robbins was here describing

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the second, general meeting of the members in which Larkin tried to get O'Casey to withdraw his charge against the Countess. What is undeniable is that O'Casey forced an issue which he failed to win and then resigned from the ICA tout court.49 Desmond Greaves thinks O'Casey was confused and unable to understand the alliances forming all around him in 1914.50 On the contrary, as things changed very rapidly after the gun-running at Howth on 20 July 1914 O'Casey's attempt to make an example of Countess Markievicz as a mark of resistance to the very alliance with the Volunteers which took place in January 1916 was quite justified, given the artist's prescience. But he had not bargained for her closeness to Connolly and she, in effect, did for him. As Padraig Yeates has wittily put it, 'the upshot of the faction-fighting was that the Citizen Army lost a clerk and Ireland gained a playwright.'51 It may have been just as well that O'Casey was not by her side in St Stephen's Green: with his poor eyesight for excuse he might well have mistaken her for the enemy. By walking out on the ICA Sean had cut himself off from all the exciting political developments gathering momentum in Ireland. He who had helped to design the flag, the plough and the stars on a blue background,52 was never to march behind it with his comrades into battle. The breach, following upon the loss of the battle against William Martin Murphy, must have been demoralising. He was soon to lose Larkin also, now himself broken and in need of rest. Before the end of the year the exhausted Larkin would be an exile, later a prisoner, in America. Somehow, Sean would have to pull himself together on his own.

The years after 1914 were to prove hard as he drifted aimlessly, unable to connect. On 6 February his brother Tom died of peritonitis at the age of fortyfour. Although Isaac ('Archie') would seem to have been more congenial and, indeed, more interested now in trade union affairs (having obtained a job in Liberty Hall), Tom was O'Casey's favourite among his three brothers. This can only be because Tom was his total opposite, gentle and inoffensive, and to some degree his childhood protector. Tom had always trailed after the adventurous Mick, especially to the pubs where his capacity and control drew equal admiration. Looking for a reason for Tom's collapse O'Casey conveniently found it in the woman Tom married, Mary Kelly, who left the housework to him and was guilty of much neglect. None of this detail, supplied in Drums under the Windows, gets to grips with the plain fact that some people die young. O'Casey found this tragic fact unbearable. When he lost his own son aged twenty-one, forty years after Tom, he still found it immensely difficult to accept the horror. 'I, personally, couldn't be happy or in any way content, to live again in any universe in which those I had loved here were absent.'53 He mentions Tom in that passage forty-two years on, linking him to his son Niall; Tom was special. But in the autobiographies he shifts the date of Tom's death back ten years to 1904. Why?

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It was a peculiar thing to do. It was also significant. It meant that Tom, who apparently had no share in the great lock-out or the various controversies surrounding it, could be plucked out of a period of ferment and placed at a time free of public unrest. What was it O'Casey was thereby hiding? Surely it had something to do with his own confusion. He says his mind was distracted with thoughts of a concert in which the SLOT band was to take part to raise funds for Dr O'Hickey in his fight against the bishops.54 This had to be after 1910, when O'Hickey was sacked and O'Casey had joined the pipers' club. Even if one assumes that O'Casey got the date wrong the problem does not disappear. He entitled the chapter in the autobiographies 'Poor Tom's Acold', after the line in King Lear. But in the play Mad Tom is a fake. He is really Edgar in disguise, very much at odds with his brother Edmund. Was O'Casey suppressing the thought that Tom Casey was a fake? Looking back was he unable to accept his own anger with him at the time of Tom's death just at the point when the workers of Dublin were totally demoralised and Larkin's cause was being siphoned off into bourgeois revolution? The autobiographies are no help in the matter. There are only two pieces of what may be called 'text' that we can draw on. One is the signature 'John Casey' in the register for Tom's burial at the cemetery, Mount Jerome. Why the reversion to his family name in English unless O'Casey felt that the Gaelic was irrelevant to Tom's unionism? The delicacy suggests unease. The other item is an inscription in a Bible which Rev. Griffin presented to O'Casey after Tom's death, To John Casey, from his Sincere Friend E.M. Griffin. April 1914.' This implies that O'Casey had resumed his religious interests. Both of these bits of evidence suggest that Tom's death brought O'Casey back into family matters with such a jolt after his public commitments that he reverted to old, consoling ways. He needed time to recuperate within his community. But there is in addition the uncomfortable fact that Tom's two sons 'flatly contradicted' O'Casey's account of Tom's death, and, as Margulies (who interviewed them) says, they had no reason to conceal the truth. 'He was not present at the deathbed, as he claimed to have been, nor do the children, who were, recall any visit by Rev. Griffin.'55 It is not, then, simply a matter of getting the date wrong. O'Casey's account is a story masking the turmoil he was in after the lock-out. It is clear he was in bad health generally from overwork. This work was all voluntary. 'I refused even to take a pair of boots or a top coat from the [Liberty Hall] store, though pressed to do so by the warm-hearted Jim,' he later recalled.56 About this time he was friendly with Batt O'Connor, a bricklayer, a member of the SLOT branch of the Gaelic League, and later a Collins supporter in the fight for Irish independence. In his memoir O'Connor recalls O'Casey's cleverness and 'his proud and independent spirit'. He met him one day in the office of Irish Freedom, Mac Dermott's paper, in Findlater Place, where O'Casey often dropped in for a chat: 'I noticed that his boots were broken and letting in the wet, and, putting my hand in my pocket, I offered to lend him a pound saying he could pay me back again when he got a job. But he refused to accept the loan though I pressed him hard. He excused himself,

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saying that he could not contract a debt which he had no certainty of being able to repay.'57 He had little to eat at this time. Meat was rarely on the menu. He told Joseph Holloway he used to live on a cup of tea morning and night,58 and was at one time so hungry that he could have killed to get food.59 He began to experience severe symptoms of malnutrition, including numbness in his legs. His friend Seumas Deakin paid for a doctor to visit Abercorn Road, and filled the prescription himself. The doctor may have suspected incipient general paralysis of the insane,60 but the condition was probably beriberi. Then Deakin paid a visit with a bundle of reading material, for O'Casey's appetite for this form of nourishment never flagged, and quietly left two sovereigns on the mantelpiece. For weeks O'Casey was house-bound, a rare condition for him, but he had quite collapsed. 'All the movement he made each day was from his bed to this old sofa, his mother's bed by night. [. . . ] The couch was hard; the springs, thick iron, stuck up through the worn-out horse-hair, and he marvelled how his mother could sink to sleep on it. Here was a woman enduring torments quietly that would send ecstasy to a saint.' He had time now to think about her and the hard life she had had. 'She was a brave woman; something of the stoic in her. Seldom he had seen her cry: once, a sudden gushing forth of tears when she saw her dead son Tom; her favourite' (A, 1, 592). There was nothing he could do for her. With all the selfishness of the artist he forced himself back into health and set forth again, leaning on a stick, to push fresh articles on the Irish Worker and on Irish Freedom and to visit SLOT to resume his activities at the club. Will powered him out of Abercorn Road and back into current affairs. He took to standing on the steps of Liberty Hall, for he was no longer welcome inside, gathering about him a group of dissidents, openly critical of Connolly and his plans for the ICA. His became a familiar figure, shabbily dressed, a muffler round his throat, walking with a slouching gait because of his weakened legs. He had also been having trouble with swollen, tubercular glands in his neck for some time,61 and surgery was now required to drain the 'cold' abscess. This diagnosis was made before 24 October 1914, the date Larkin left for America, for it was he who insisted O'Casey should visit the Charles Street Tubercular Clinic. It is quite possible that O'Casey held out for his operation for a further nine months, for he wanted to get into the protestant Adelaide hospital, where no bed was then available. For all his bold republicanism mixed with socialism - fed by a reading of Shaw - O'Casey was still protestant in affiliation; indeed Rev. Griffin's Bible suggests a renewed interest. Before going into St Vincent's Hospital, Stephen's Green, on 5 August 1915 on the referral of the ITGWU he had a little private communion service in the Vestry Room of St Barnabas's Church, officiated by R. Saunderson Griffin, son of the Rector.62 Thus going under ether doth make cowards of us all. St Vincent's, while in the hands of the Religious Sisters of Charity, had been founded (in 1834) for the service of the sick poor of Dublin regardless of denomination. It promised 'equal advantages and equal attention' to 'individuals

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of every sect and every creed', in line with the ideals of the foundress, Mary Aikenhead. There could be nothing 'derogatory' in a protestant seeking care in such a place. By 1915 it was being used as a field-hospital for Irish soldiers wounded in World War One: O'Casey later remembered a 'host of wounded soldiers' dressed in blue with red ties with whom he talked and sang as well as strolled in St Stephen's Green, for most were 'walking cases' like himself.63 O'Casey was to bring this rather surreal situation into The Silver Tassie (1929), where act 3 is set in a ward with Simon and Sylvester, the old Dublin codgers, cheek by jowl with the war-wounded Harry Heegan and Teddy Foran. O'Casey himself was known as Number Twenty-Three. As fate would have it, on the very day when O'Casey was admitted to Vincent's the war entered also in a particularly brutal way. His surgeon Richard Francis Tobin was about to lose his only son at Suvla Bay. On 15 August 1915 Captain Paddy Tobin of the 7th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, was pitched into the fatal assault on Kiretech Tepe Sirt, 'one of the sorriest chapters of Irish military history'.64 Out of 250 men in D Company, only 76 returned, and Paddy Tobin was not among them. When the news was brought it could not choose but penetrate the whole hospital, for the Tobins lived next door, at number 60 St Stephen's Green. Tobin's response was in the soldierly mode, for he had been army surgeon in the Sudan thirty years earlier. He was known for his combination of military discipline and genuine care for his patients (often the Dublin poor) and his students (for Vincent's was and remains a teaching hospital). His nick-name was 'Daddy Tobin'. Deafened from his war experiences he carried a large brass ear trumpet, 'which he wielded like a Field Marshal's baton'.65 O'Casey noted how Tobin would bend anxiously over the wounded soldiers on the ward in an effort to catch news of their overseas battlegrounds and link these up with where his son died. 'He seemed to think when he was close to them, he was closer to his son' (A, 1, 633). As surgeon, Tobin had a high reputation and his treatment of O'Casey's tubercular glands restored the slow-budding artist to health while bringing him into contact with a world of suffering which he was to transform into great art. Tobin would be called to minister to another member of the ICA in the following year, for it was he who tended James Connolly before the execution.66 Dublin was indeed a small world.

The actress Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh said in her memoirs that from 1912 to the time of the Rising Dublin was 'drama-mad'.67 O'Casey himself said he wrote his first play 'for my own Drama Club attached to National Movement - about 1911 or so'.68 It is impossible to know if he meant the Gaelic League or SLOT; no trace of such an early play survives. In fact it is doubtful whether O'Casey wrote a play before 1916, when he submitted Profit and Loss to the Abbey: it was returned to him in four days,69 which must be something of a record, and has not been found. What is more significant is O'Casey's growing interest in theatre, marking a return to the early enthusiasm of the 1890s.

The story of O'Casey's rediscovery of theatre begins with the foundation of Liberty Hall, headquarters of Larkin's ITGWU, in 1911-12. The premises, it seems, had been the Northumberland Hotel (one reason why it was a food shelter during the lock-out: the old kitchens were still usable in the basement). In its renovation, O'Casey worked with a group of labourers, dockers, carters, gas workers and a few women erecting iron girders to support a stage. The first play to go up on that stage within a year, according to Barney Conway, was Lady Gregory's Workhouse Ward}0 To put on such plays Delia Larkin, Jim's sister, started the Irish Workers' Dramatic Class in June 1912. A few months earlier, in February, she had formed a choir which had encouraged her to go further and open a dramatic class to give the workers something a bit more interesting than music-hall for entertainment. Membership was restricted to the trades unions. Delia, secretary of the IWWU, necessarily had a special interest in involving women. She literally brought girls in off the street to give them some chance of bettering themselves. At this time unskilled women were receiving wages as low as two and sixpence a week. Delia Larkin articulated the consequences clearly: 'Low wages mean that when girls get to the age of forty they are broken up. They don't get enough food to keep them healthy and well, and they are worn out before they have reached their prime.'71 (This was to be exactly Juno's situation in O'Casey's Abbey play: at age forty-five she is prematurely aged.) Delia trained the actors herself. The members of the class, now called the Irish Workers' Dramatic Company, made their debut in Liberty Hall on St Stephen's Night 1912. Four one-act plays were offered: The Troth, by Rutherford Mayne, The Bishop's Candlestick, by Norman McKinell, Victims, by A.P. Wilson, and The Matchmakers, by Seumas O'Kelly.72 Performances and musical entertainments were given on Sunday nights. Delia played in the first three of these plays, directed by A.P. Wilson, manager of the IWDC, which in 1913 was popularly known as the Liberty Players.73 When the lock-out began women were primary sufferers: 1,100 were locked out of their jobs and only one half were taken back in 1914. At this point Delia decided to take the players on tour to England to raise funds. They went to Liverpool (the New Pavilion) early in March, toured the area with T.C. Murray's Abbey success Birthright (1910) and Gregory's Workhouse Ward and ended in Manchester on St Patrick's night. Jack Carney, Larkin's friend and soon to be O'Casey's, was with the group as volunteer manager: it was he who secured the hall in Manchester.74 A little later the company went to London with Workhouse Ward and William Boyle's Abbey comedy The Building Fund (1905), appearing at King's Hall, Covent Garden. This venture was under the auspices of the International Women's Franchise Club. O'Casey was not on these tours, but since he was a friend of Delia and a co-worker in the Dublin Relief Committee for which the tours were undertaken it is impossible to believe he was not in some ways involved and a member of audiences at Liberty Hall. Moreover, as his brother Isaac (now called Joe) worked for the insurance section of the ITGWU in Liberty Hall, and took an interest in the players, it was a bit like old times. Necessarily this interest would have brought O'Casey

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into close contact with Abbey drama, which he later claimed not to know before he began to write plays himself. Likewise, there was the work of A.R Wilson, which undoubtedly influenced his own. Andrew Patrick Wilson, who had arrived in Dublin around 1911, possibly from Belfast,75 and became involved in Larkin's ITGWU, was a talented young manager, director and playwright. The interest he took in Liberty Hall and in labour issues is significant. His Victims was a one-act, agit-prop piece about an unemployed man and his starving family staged by the IWDC on 26 December 1912.76 It is a picture of unrelieved gloom. 'We are all victims, and as we cannot fight the profit-mongers, we fight each other, one victim tearing another victim. And all done in the sacred name of profit.'77 It was the first play set in a Dublin tenement. Since it was first published in the Irish Worker (21 Dec.) O'Casey must have seen it in print if not actually on stage. He was soon to cross swords with Wilson in the Irish Worker, for which Wilson wrote a column under the pseudonym 'Euchan'. That controversy merely serves to show how far ahead of him as socialist Wilson was at this time, when O'Casey took a conservative Gaelic point of view.78 But when he was stung, as he undoubtedly was by Wilson's superior powers of analysis, O'Casey invariably learned something: he might exit mumbling but he always built upon controversies. Wilson was thus a key figure in the growth of O'Casey's thinking. When the lock-out put paid to theatricals at Liberty Hall for the present, Wilson became involved with the Abbey Theatre, first as a student actor, then both as a member of the second company while the first company toured in America and as producer (i.e. director) and manager.79 Here the impact of Wilson's full-length play on slum conditions, The Slough, must be assessed. It was staged at the Abbey on 3 November 1914, by which time Wilson, aged twenty-six, was Lennox Robinson's successor as manager. Did O'Casey see The Slough? If he did he kept quiet about it. Robert Hogan calls it 'the first notable play about the Dublin working man'. Involving 'a labour dispute reminiscent of the Great Lockout' its plot shows 'a family resemblance' to Juno and the Paycock.80 Believing the text lost, Hogan reconstructed an outline of the play from the reviews. But Ben Levitas recently discovered the script among the Lord Chamberlain's Collection in the British Library.81 Because TheSloughhad a performance in England (Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 10 December 1914) it had to have a licence, for which a copy of the text had to be lodged in the Lord Chamberlain's office. The licence report gives a good summary: It shows how a Committee-meeting of Dockers expels from the Union a drunken old man, suspected of being a "scab", in spite of the protests of a fine young workman in love with his consumptive daughter. It shows also how another of his daughters, a shopgirl, throws up her Liverpool [sic] situation apparently to go on the streets, and how his son, an ambitious young clerk leaves the wretched home in disgust. The strike fails: and the strikers turn on the blacklegs, half-killing the old sot and getting his would-be sonin-law arrested for interfering in his defence. The realistic drama, which has

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no humourous [sic] or other relief, ends with the death of the consumptive daughter and the whole family [in] despair.82 In Dublin, however, The Slough was seen as a play about Jim Larkin, called Jake Allen, the fiery and somewhat manipulative general secretary of the union, played at the Abbey by Wilson himself. The odds are that O'Casey saw the play: how could he not, if only to ensure that Larkin, now gone to America, was not slandered?83 It may well have made its mark on his only surviving unstaged play, The Harvest Festival (1919), about a major Dublin strike which ends in violence.84 Wilson, incidentally, after a row with the Abbey, went to Scotland, where he had a distinguished career as playwright with the Scottish National Players. Meanwhile Delia Larkin's efforts at Liberty Hall were about to be brought to an end. She was away for three months in 1914 and on her return was embroiled in controversies, leading in September to her having to find new premises for her women's union. She was being eased out. When Jim left for the United States a month later Delia saw herself as his deputy or protector of his role as secretary of the ITGWU, although officially James Connolly was made acting secretary. Differences with Connolly and his faction led to her leaving Dublin for London for three years in July 1915. Being of her party O'Casey was now alienated from Liberty Hall. He had no time for Connolly. In reviving the Liberty Players Connolly now rather stole Delia's thunder. R.M. Fox describes him as a new broom. He implies that before Connolly the entertainments at Liberty Hall were non-Irish, 'cosmopolitan [...] with musichall songs that had no rebel or national significance'.85 The Liberty Hall Players are first listed in January 1916 as touring to Maryborough (Port Laoise) with two of Wilson's plays, Victims and Poached.86 At the end of July they were in the Queen's in Dublin, winning some praise for their acting.87 In between the IWDC was revived at the opening of a new theatre in Liberty Hall on 20 February, billed in the Workers' Republic as 'Next to the Revolution the Greatest Event of 1916'. On opening night two one-acts were performed, while a new Workers' Orchestra appeared alongside the Workers' Choir and some of the 'best Irish-Ireland Artistes', with 'Everything Bright, Clean, Inspiring - and Irish'.88 In this new venue the IWDC presented Connolly's only play for the stage, Under Which Flag? on 26 March 1916. As with The Slough it is a text once thought lost.89 With less force, it may also be said to have impacted on O'Casey. Under Which Flag? is a short history play in three scenes. The Abbey actor Sean Connolly (no relation) played the leading role of Dan McMahon, the blind old survivor of the 1848 Rising who stirs up patriotic feelings in the young men prior to the rising of 1867. In that sense, the play is straightforward allegory, pointing directly at the 1916 Rising. It also manages to incorporate a topical anti-recruitment theme regarding the British army. Frank O'Donnell, the younger son in the house where the play is set, is about to join the British army against his father's wishes and conviction that 'every bit of food that's bought with a soldier's money has blood on it, the blood of the people

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murdered to keep the bloody Empire going!'90 This sentiment has more to do with World War One than with Ireland in 1867. But Connolly, by this time converted to Pearse's idea, invokes national blood sacrifice as blind Dan announces that the young men have gone 'to give their heart's blood if need be that poor Mother Erin might be a nation among the nations of the earth' (p. 31). Indirectly, Dan gets Frank to change his mind and join 'the boys' (p. 32). Arrant propaganda though the piece is one has to bear in mind the context of production, a month before Easter 1916, and Connolly's recent pact with Pearse and the Irish Volunteers. In his review the pacifist Sheehy-Skeffington said the role of the blind patriot McMahon 'in the hands of Sean Connolly [. . .] produced a profound impression on the audience'.91 As drama, it may be said, the text is about on the level of Maud Gonne's Dawn (1904), and a long way behind Yeats and Gregory's Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), which it obviously echoes. It is nevertheless a clear statement of where Connolly was leading the ICA and under which flag. Ironically, 'history itself was about to become propaganda.'92 From his comment in Drums under the Windows it is clear that O'Casey saw Connolly's play. He says it 'blundered a sentimental way over a stage in the Hall in a green limelight, shot with tinsel stars'.93 This was not what he and his fellow labourers had built that stage for. With Jim Larkin in America, Delia in London, the labour movement was flying under false colours. 'Liberty Hall was now no longer the Headquarters of the Irish Labour movement, but the centre of Irish National disaffection.'94 As he left the hall, where the audience thundered its approval of Connolly's play, O'Casey was more isolated than ever, as events were to show. As Austen Morgan has put it, Connolly 'turned his back on the labour party' and went to his death 'an unapologetic Fenian'.95 Larkin's cause was dead. For, 'if 1913 marked the beginning, then 1916 marked the end of social revolution in Dublin.'96 Down from some future window of events came the strident tones of the unionist street-vendor in the Plough, including her author in her mockery, 'Yous are all nicely shanghaied now!'

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Part2

The Dublin Plays 'Unhappy the land that has no heroes!' 'No. Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.' - Brecht, The Life of Galileo

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6 LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

n Krause's edition of O'Casey's Letters there is one, tentatively dated October 1915, which is but a sketch, the letter itself not having survived. It is one of those cartoons O'Casey was adept at, showing a bearded man seated at a desk or table, pen in hand, ink bottle open nearby and a fixed look on his face as he meditates. A cock is perched incongruously on his head; an alarm clock with legs comes racing on to the table, and O'Casey appends the message, The clock advances, the cocks all loudly crow,/And I must hasten out [of] bed, you know!'1 O'Casey grew a beard for a time following his operation at St Vincent's in August 1915, and later wore a muffler or polo neck to hide the scarring. The sketch, ironic though it is in implying that the subject should be rising out of bed when in fact he is burning the post-midnight oil, is a clear enough self-portrait of the artist. It makes a statement. O'Casey would now do physical work only occasionally; his heart was in his studies. Mick, although now forty-six years old, volunteered for the British army and was accepted for re-enlistment in the Inland Water Corps of the Royal Engineers (his old regiment). Although this loyalty caused some embarrassment to Sean, Mick's action was in line with that of some 200,000 Irishmen who fought in the British forces during World War One.2 But it was not until mid-1916 that Mick actually enlisted, according to such records as survive.3 This may mean he was at home in Abercorn Road until 12 July and therefore contributing to household expenses, but it is not clear whether at first he stayed on at the Central Telegraph Office in Dublin and only reported to the appropriate army depot as required by his role as instructor. Mick's absence, whenever it occurred, threw the diminished Casey household into penury. O'Casey began to 'set down sad thoughts in bad verses' as consolation for the confinements of home, just as his mother's window boxes of geranium, fuchsia and musk somehow kept her cheerful (A, 1, 594). No money in that, however. He had to wait a couple of years before bad verse had a market in Dublin, as the political situation warranted it. Meanwhile, the flux which had entered his life following his resignation as secretary of the ICA continued. His self-exclusion both drove him to the

In

102 SednO'Casey periphery of the important events evolving and shaped his artistic attitude. He would write as a spectator. Thirty years later, in writing the blurb for Drums Under the Windows, he would say: 'We see all this excellent, fanciful and drab life move inexorably to one focus, to merge finally into the smoke and flame of revolt.' But for O'Casey in 1915-16 there was no such clarity of focus. He could not then accept that history was 'inexorably' moving towards violent revolt of the kind Pearse and Connolly brought about. Nor was he ever able to see the 1916 Rising having such logical, inevitable meaning. As perhaps to the majority of Dubliners at the time, to him the 1916 Rising meant nothing but confusion. 'This has taken every one by surprise': so James Stephens began his famous diary of the Rising.4 It took thousands of Volunteers by surprise, because the event had been cancelled on Easter Sunday and was, in effect, a minority revolt against official orders. The Dublin streets on Easter week were full of spectators and mystified nationalists from Douglas Hyde to Arthur Griffith, all in varying states of wonder, anxiety, resentment and frustration. No doubt O'Casey was among them. No more than 700 men had taken up arms on Easter Monday, a number which swelled to 1,500 by the close of the rebellion on Saturday.5 Of these, some 220 were members of the ICA under Connolly;6 the rest were Irish Volunteers under Pearse. Before leaving Liberty Hall for the GPO Connolly predicted that all his men would be slaughtered.7 The official casualty figures were not as bad as Connolly had feared and Pearse had hoped for: 300 killed and 997 wounded. Of the dead, only 75 were killed fighting for Ireland, including the 15 who were executed in May, while 105 were civilians.8 The first to be killed was well known to O'Casey, Sean Connolly, who was not only a member of the ICA but an actor who had appeared with the Liberty Hall Players.9 But O'Casey would probably have known all of the Citizen Army contingent, having trained with them in 1914, and must have made his way to St Stephen's Green which they held under the joint leadership of Michael Mallin and Constance Markievicz. For all his dislike of her she fought fearlessly and endured harsh prison conditions afterwards. To O'Casey as civilian the danger to life was as real as it was to the combatants. In one of his letters to a Citizen Army man interned in Knutsford Prison in England O'Casey wrote on 14 June 1916: 'We had a horrible time in our district; death was facing us back and front for days, but there must have been more righteous men amongst us than were found in Sodom and Gomorrah, for most of us came out safely, and could now listen to the "ping" of bullets as serenely as to the chirrup of "the little dickie birds sitting in the tree"!'10 An accompanying sketch depicted 'Dodging Bullets in Dublin during the Revolt'. With men shinning up lampposts or being bowled over as if by a hurricane it makes its point through comic-strip exaggeration. O'Casey was the first modern writer to point out that warfare in the twentieth century was as dangerous for non-combatants as for armed soldiers. Thus he makes Adolphus Grigson in The Shadow of a Gunman complain: 'You're sure of your life nowhere now; it's just as safe to go everywhere as it is to [go] anywhere.'11 Indeed, the eye of the future dramatist is evident in his response to the Rising. His account in The

Love Among the Ruins 103 Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919) cannot rival James Stephens's but there is on view the scruple of the writer who wishes his audience to know who's who on stage: "Those there", said someone, "dressed in the dark-green uniforms, with the slouch hats, are the Citizen Army, and the others in green-grey are Irish Volunteers."'12 On Wednesday of Easter Week the gun-boat Helga shelled Liberty Hall from the Liffey. The bombardment 'caused intense excitement in the district, where there is a large population of the poorer class of residents. With every shot the houses were shaken, and the people were almost panic stricken.'13 Susan Casey was among such people, for Abercorn Road lies nearby. Bella sent her daughter Babsie to stay with Susan, and the two of them slept under the bed for safety. 'John, there's some night when you won't come home,' Babsie recalled Susan telling O'Casey, who insisted on roaming the streets (although martial law was in force from Thursday 27 April).14 On the Thursday night, indeed, O'Casey was picked up along with other local men and detained overnight in St Barnabas's church; he was re-arrested on Friday night and detained in a large granary store overnight.15 Some of these details found their way into act four of The Plough and the Stars. But for all that he and his mother were endangered by the Rising, O'Casey felt uncomfortable about his non-participation. Many of his SLOT friends fought. One of them, Paddy McDonnell, told Margulies that it broke Sean's heart that he was not with 'the boys' in 1916; he would never openly show this grief, so the topic was never discussed.16 Instead, as he put it to Shiels in Frongoch, 'Just as you say, Seumas, I try to laugh at the world - nay, I do not laugh at the world, but with the world, for a cheerful spirit will serve a man [like Milton's Satan] in Heaven or in Hell.'17 It was natural for him to feel a modicum of guilt, even though he was 'under no obligation to take part in the Rising'.18 It has been well said also that the Rising would have happened without O'Casey but O'Casey the playwright would not have happened without the Rising.19 It shaped his imagination. 'O'Casey failed in the world of action and turned aside to justify himself in the world of art.'20 The country itself was in moral and political upheaval leading, one might say, to a major shift in national identity. O'Casey had to move with it or fall apart in confusion. After the executions of the leaders of the Rising, and of Roger Casement a few months later, and in particular after the release from prisons in England of most of the insurgents in December 1916 (plus the surviving leaders in June 1917), Ireland turned Sinn Fein. The term is as problematic as it is inaccurate, for what underlay the growing determination of the majority of Irish people had less to do with Arthur Griffith's rather eccentric ideas on the Hungarian model of dual monarchy than with a double conviction that Home Rule was dead and that separation from England was now imperative. In this regard, as Michael Laffan has put it, Sinn Fein, the political manifestation of the Irish revolution, was born in the aftermath of a doomed rebellion and died in the bitterness of a civil war. In most respects it was a new organization [...]. It was a coalition between two

104 SednO'Casey forms of nationalism, one committed to the establishment of an Irish republic by revolutionary measures, the other aiming at a more limited degree of independence which could be achieved through political organization and passive resistance.21 Although the majority had remained pro-British in 1916,22 now, in retrospect, the majority regarded the Rising as a Sinn Fein event. The by-elections in 1917 sent out a clear message that Redmond's Irish Party was finished. In East Clare, won by the major survivor of 1916, Eamon de Valera, Sinn Fein declared its aim as the achieving of the republic for which the 1916 leaders died.23 With this development Labour was sidelined. Towards the end of 1917 de Valera 'invited Labour to stand aside until national freedom was attained before claiming "its share of patrimony"'.24 O'Casey was quite concerned about this subordination of the cause of Labour. 'By all means let us all forget Sinn Fein when we discuss Labour problems, but when we discuss Sinn Fein, we should never forget that we are of the working class.'25 The death of Thomas Ashe on hunger strike in Mountjoyjail gave O'Casey his opportunity to propose a model for a policy uniting republicanism and labour. He had known Ashe from about 1913 mainly through their mutual involvement in Irish pipe bands (Ashe having founded the Black Raven Band in Lusk in 1910). Unlike many of the Irish Volunteers, Ashe was sympathetic towards Larkin and the ICA. He also 'thought the world' of O'Casey, his sister recalled; they would meet and walk along the quays in Dublin, discussing politics. They were united in feeling for the wrongs of the Dublin tenement dwellers.'26 Ashe commanded the 5th Battalion, Irish Volunteers, in north County Dublin, and in 1916 so distinguished himself at Ashbourne in the only significant victory of the Rising that he was sentenced to death after the general surrender. The sentence having been commuted, Ashe was released from Lewes in the general amnesty of June 1917 and resumed his political activities in Ireland. Following a 'treasonous' speech he was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Regulations Act on 18 August, was sentenced to two years' hard labour, and went on hunger strike against his classification as a 'criminal'. He was by this time president of the IRB and this fact may have influenced his harsh treatment: he and his fellow republican prisoners were assaulted, deprived of proper bedding, and Ashe was forcibly fed. As a result of this forcible feeding, as an official enquiry subsequently found, Ashe died on 25 September. O'Casey wrote several pieces in tribute to Ashe, including two quite different poems, and two versions in prose of Ashe's life and death. The latter, entitled The Story of Thomas Ashe (1917) and The Sacrifice of Thomas Ashe (1918), were short pamphlets - the second slightly expanded to include 'The Jury's Verdict' on the inquest - written in a fervent, patriotic style. O'Casey's republican anger burns through every line. Taken together, the poems make a more complex statement. The first, 'Lament for Thomas Ashe', was hastily written and was published before Ashe's funeral on 30 September (copies may have been

Love Among the Ruins 105 distributed outside Mountjoyjail27). In four stanzas of eight lines each, it is a conventional lament for a fallen hero, with three stanzas ending in the refrain, Thomas Ashe, Thomas Ashe, we are mourning for thee'. The final stanza, indeed, ends in the kind of stirring rhetoric O'Casey had not used for years: As you fought the good fight so we'll fight to be free, 'Gainst all the vain pomp of their princes and powers, Made strong by the thought of dear vengeance for thee!28 The other broadsheet, Thomas Ashe', is more polished, and seems to have been published early in October. In six stanzas of five lines each, it begins: The Children of Eireann are listening again To Death's sullen, sad, sombre beat of the Drum. Oppression has seized on a man amongst men, And an eloquent life's stricken senseless and dumb; While we, left behind, wait the life from your Death that shall come!29 While this version, too, is militantly republican, O'Casey smuggled in references to Ashe's sympathies with Labour, for example a reference to 'the plough and the stars', and another to Labour looking down in some puzzlement on Ashe's 'battle-scarred face'. In a letter to the Dublin Saturday Post at the same time O'Casey clarified what he meant: 'Labour has reason to mourn the loss of Tom Ashe: he was ever the workers' friend and would always have been their champion. [...] It would be well if every Sinn Feiner followed in his steps.'30 Ashe represented the fusion Connolly had failed to achieve. For a number of reasons, the new people in charge of the Labour Party did not want to know O'Casey. He was a Larkinite, they were Connollyites who wanted merely to rebuild the trade union membership and stay out of controversy. Over the next year or two O'Casey embarrassed the new leadership by his obvious affiliation with the radical opposition within Liberty Hall, led by Delia Larkin on her return from England and Micheal 6 Maolain (Michael Mullen), a clerk in the insurance section. Once when O'Casey went to Liberty Hall bearing his latest composition, The Call of the Tribe', for the resident expert Seumas Hughes to set to music, Hughes initially expressed great admiration for the verses and then, a week later, handed them back saying he had 'orders from above not to have anything to do with that fellow [O'Casey]' (A, 2, 5). Was it because the verses dealt with the current concern over conscription, or because O'Casey had dared to write of Irish Labour 'with red banners waving' as the 'hopes of the tribes of the Gael'?31 In the heady days following the Russian Revolution in October 1917 the Irish labour movement had no wish to draw down the wrath either of the church or good catholic republicans on their endeavours to consolidate.

106 Sean O'Casey

Not all of O'Casey's writing was quite as serious as his laments for Thomas Ashe. For some time he had been turning out satirical ballads in broadsheet form, anonymously or under a pseudonym. These link him to a very old Dublin tradition of street ballads, of which he was very fond and which he used in his plays. The culture he was most at home in was popular culture of every form but especially in musical form.32 He himself had countless Irish ballads by heart, and was well known as a singer in both Irish and English at Gaelic League and SLOT gatherings. One of his first and best-loved satirical ballads was The Grand Oul' Dame Britannia', published in the Workers'Republic on 15 January 1916 under his old, ironic penname An GallFada, 'the Tall Foreigner'. The context was the introduction of conscription in England, from which Ireland was for the present exempt but which was to reappear as a threat in March 1918, when the ballad was reprinted as one of the Songs of the Wren, under O'Casey's name (in Irish). The first verse (of eight) runs: Och! Ireland, sure I'm proud of you Ses the Grand Oul' Dame Britannia, To poor little Belgium tried and true, Ses the Grand Oul' Dame Britannia. Ye've closed your ear to the Sinn Fein lies, For you know each Gael that for England dies Will enjoy Home Rule in the clear blue skies, Ses the Grand Oul' Dame Britannia.33 Rather more Percy French than Bertolt Brecht, the ballad is nevertheless a good, topical attack on Redmond and his pro-British policy in the mistaken belief that cooperation would deliver Home Rule. There was plenty more where this came from - Tf the Germans Came to Ireland in the Mornin", The Demi-Semi Home Rule Bill', 'We Welcome the Aid of Japan', The Divil's Recruitin' Campaign', and one which deserves a little more attention, 'Private Cassidy, V.C.', which remained unpublished. This is reminiscent of OTlaherty, V.C., Shaw's one-act anti-conscription comedy, but it was based on a poster at the time celebrating the achievements of an actual Private Cassidy, who did, it seems, earn a Victoria Cross. Thus O'Casey's ballad was intended to subvert official propaganda: I've heard of great Cuchullian & Kingly Brian Boru, Of Dan O'Connell, Sarsfield, & brave O'Donnell Ruadh! But they couldn't hold a candle to the man I'll name to you That's Private Cassidy, V.C. Chorus: A hero bould - so I'm told - Private Cassidy, V.C!34 The point throughout is that Cassidy is such a fool - again, Brecht springs to mind, with his versions of 'Good Soldier Schweyk' - that he can always be relied upon to provide the heroics called for by his imperial bosses. Already, we see the preparation for The Silver Tassie?b

Love Among the Ruins 107 The passing of the Military Service Bill in Westminster in April 1918 united all the Irish political strands in opposition, supported for the first time by the Irish catholic bishops. De Valera drew up an anti-conscription pledge which was taken by huge numbers; resistance grew to such proportions that eventually the government backed down and the war ended without conscription being introduced in Ireland.36 The affair had a powerful impact on the results of the general election held in December 1918, when Sinn Fein emerged as the dominant party in Ireland. O'Casey's voice continued to be heard throughout this period, satirising and making fun of personalities and conditions. In fact, he entered the world of commercial publishing as a hack writer. Fergus O'Connor, who had his printing offices at 44 Eccles Street, not far from the Casey flat, was an astute businessman who knew exactly what would sell for one penny and what could stretch to twopence. The Grand Oul' Dame Britannia' was a good seller at a penny, and O'Connor agreed to a selection of O'Casey's pieces under the title Songs of the Wren early in 1918. The size of the first edition is not known, but the reprint published in April was for 10,000 copies.37 On 8 March O'Casey wrote to O'Connor: T have seen the proof- the cover of the reprint of No 1 Songs of the Wren, & it is most attractive & splendidly turned out. I really believe you ought to charge 2d. for it. It is really too good value for one Penny. When I compare it with the rubbish that sells for a penny the reflection is a painful one.'38 Painful or not, the market he had now entered was the only one open to him. He knew he had to watch O'Connor, because a friend, a bookseller, had written a few months earlier to say O'Connor had sent along the 'Grand Oul' Dame Britannia' to be retailed at a penny, but without O'Casey's name on it. The friend withheld it from sale pending O'Casey's consent, 'as I did not want the trick of last aonach [fair] repeated'.39 The Songs of the Wren, of which there were eventually three numbers, were simple, one-page broadsheets, each folding into eight pages with paper cover, nicely produced. O'Casey knew how to handle O'Connor, who was willing to give him extra work writing for and designing Christmas cards. These Christmas verses could be said to lack a certain something: Throughout your Life may Fortune smile, Each day with buoyant Hope surrounding; And Christmas thoughts of Peace and Love Link firm your heart with Joy abounding.40 He got one shilling for each verse, and contracted to do two dozen, 'Heart to Heart, personal, Irish, Sincere, Homely Greetings'. He soon tired: 'it is most difficult to write to order. However, I have ten good ones done, and I want you to send me on the price you are prepared to pay for thirty of them before I do any more, for I don't care a lot for the job.'41 He was not cut out to be a common Brian O'Higgins. He had bigger plans in mind for O'Connor to finance. T am working [at] home on the Poems of J[ohn] B[oyle[ O'Reilly - They are a revelation to me

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and are a wonderful production.'42 He suggests a sixpenny edition of O'Reilly's 'Democratic Poems and Recitations', plus an edition of Fin tan Lalor's prose works, and a series to be entitled 'Voices from the Dead', to include O'Reilly, Connolly and Ashe. Of these, Ashe was the only project completed. He got reasonable money from O'Connor, for example £2-10s. for Songs of the Wren, No. 1, and in addition £5 for the copyright of all songs.43 The money was a godsend, 'for it meant new boots for me & mother; new top-coat for me, warm skirt for her'.44 But he grew tired of what he called the 'mental sweat and blood' lost in hack-work and quarrelled with O'Connor when the latter objected to O'Casey's giving work to a rival publisher: 'any author who would bind himself to one publisher would be a fool, & I am egotistical enough to feel that I am not one of the world's fools.'45 He transferred to the prestigious firm of Maunsel's, publisher of Synge, Gregory, AL and others, when he wrote The Story of the Irish Citizen Army in 1918. O'Casey worked from home at this time, mainly because his mother was no longer able to manage by herself. Bella used to come from 9 Church Place, just around the corner, to do the housework, but Bella had died on New Year's Day, and with Mick away in the army there was nobody at home to mind Susan except Sean. Bella had contrived to make ends meet for herself and her five children during the years since Nicholas Beaver died in the lunatic asylum. She never taught school again, although she always maintained the teacher's 'practical rules' at home, especially what she had learned in the Central Model School as the great rule of regularity and order: 'a time and a place for every thing, and every thing in its proper time and place'.46 Her children remembered her quiet insistence on this dictum. They remembered too her gentleness, for she was a sweet person and patient in a way which irritated O'Casey because he had little time for the meek awaiting the inheritance of the earth. In his autobiographies O'Casey was to shift Bella's death back about ten years to a time when her children were young, whereas in fact the eldest was thirty. Whether the Beavers looked to him or not Sean more or less had to help, though he had little money. There was no other Casey around, apart from the elderly Susan, who probably could do little. Tom was dead, Mick was in the army, Isaac had got into trouble over accounts at Liberty Hall and had to leave Ireland in 1917 under a cloud.47 As over Tom's death, O'Casey later needed to dramatise in order somehow to diminish the pain of Bella's going. In this instance he created a Dickensian death scene, with poverty, shivering children, and a dramatic visit from the eldest girl to offer the effective line, 'Me Ma's dead [...] died in her bed in the night in the midst of us without lettin' us know' (A, 1, 483). But Bella died from 'pulmonary influenza', which must have had a history. Moreover, she had risen at seven in the morning to call Valentine for his work in a coal yard and died later that day in her sleep less dramatically than her brother was to record. She was fifty-two. If, as seems likely, Bella died from the Spanish 'flu which devastated Ireland in 1918 as badly as fever and cholera in the Great Famine,48 there was nothing in the least picturesque about it.

Love Among the Ruins 109 For all that in the autobiographies the context of Bella's death was altered and to some degree fictionalised, O'Casey kept imaginative faith on two important points. 'He recognised in the dead face his sister of the long ago [...]. There were the cleverly-chiselled features, tensed by death, the delicate nose and fine brow, the firm oval cheeks, the white throat [...] and the neatlymoulded hands, worn away now, resting confidently by her side' (A, 1, 485). He loved Bella in a way he was never able properly to express while she was alive. He could now restore her to the asexual second mother he had loved. It is to be doubted if they had ever really talked together as adults for there was a side of her life held secret from him which misled him into melodramatising her life with Nicholas. She was a woman who had willingly sacrificed status and reputation for love; O'Casey's sympathies never embraced that fact. The word 'confidently' in his description of her hands 'resting' in death indicates his determination as artist to elevate Bella into monumental repose. The other point which he got painfully right was who paid for the funeral. O'Casey states that Bella's insurance policy had been let lapse, which the Beaver family denied; it cannot be proved either way. But in claiming that the rector E.M. Griffin made the funeral arrangements and paid the bills O'Casey was correct. The undertakers Nichols, then in Lombard Street, Westland Row, recorded Griffin as ordering on Wednesday 2 January a hearse and pair, a carriage and a coffin for £2-1 Os. on behalf of Isabella Beaver.49 Judging from adjacent entries in the records this expenditure represented a decent funeral: on the same page there was one costing six shillings and another seven-and-sixpence; indeed, the only other funeral more expensive on the same page cost £4-6s., which paid for a carriage and four (including four men, against two for Bella) and a different style coffin. Bella was buried in the Beaver plot in Mount Jerome on 3 January, O'Casey signing the death register (as S. 6 Cathasaigh). Bella had paid for the subdivision of the Casey plot in 1908 so it was not strictly true, as implied in the autobiographies, that all the bodies were piled in on top of each other. But there was the humiliation of depending on the Rector to see to it that she was buried in decency. Thus it happened that from January 1918 on, with Susan ailing at home, Sean had to 'do all the washing, cooking & scrubbing in the house, unless I am prepared to reign in dirt, which I am not prepared to do'.50 He worked in spotlessness at his broadsides. There was also love poetry, to be discussed below, and prose articles which he submitted to Irish Opinion. This was a new weekly edited by Andrew E. Malone, subsequently a noted drama critic; it was left-wing and highly intelligent, at first very much after O'Casey's heart in welcoming the Bolshevik Revolution (15 December) and advocating a 'strong, democraticallycontrolled Labour Party'.51 On 12 January 1918 it gave front-page attention to a piece by O'Casey, 'Room for the Teachers', calling on teachers to join with Labour and abolish distinctions of 'status'. This was an intervention in a current debate about possible affiliation of the INTO to the Trades Congress. It was followed by two pieces, on 9 and 23 March, attacking the Gaelic League for its bourgeois attitudes.52 Not exactly stirring stuff, but indications that

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O'Casey was back wrestling for a position in Dublin as an intellectual. Likewise, there was the public lecture he gave on Sunday 24 March in the Trades Hall, Capel Street, on 'Labour, Bread and Sinn Fein', under the auspices of the Socialist Party of Ireland. A note in Irish Opinion for 30 March said that the attendance suffered from the good weather at the time, but that those who went 'participated in a keen discussion'. In short, nobody came. O'Casey was not liked and not encouraged in these circles. When Cathal O'Shannon took over from Malone as editor of Irish Opinion at the end of March editorials began to celebrate James Connolly as 'the embodiment of the Irish spirit'. No mention was made of Jim Larkin. This line must have alienated O'Casey, who saw Larkin as the greater leader of the labour movement. Some of the bitterness and disillusion with Irish politics he later displayed stem from this post-1916 period. With Delia's return to Ireland soon after this date he became identified with the Larkin faction hostile to the Connolly legacy in Liberty Hall. This finished him as a public commentator on labour questions. In a sense, he gained his revenge in The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, where he demoted Connolly and elevated Francis SheehySkeffington as the real hero of the 1916 Rising, 'the ripest ear of corn that fell in Easter Week'.53

During all this time after 1916, O'Casey continued his activities in the SLOT club in Seville Place. Indeed, many of his songs and satires originated there, in the social evenings (Wednesdays and Sundays) where he was an inveterate performer in Gaelic and in English. In January 1917 he and Paddy McDonnell organised the SLOT Dramatic Society, which made its debut in the Foresters' Hall, 41 Parnell Square, on 11 February. The title of the production is not known but the next one, staged in the same venue on 29 April, was Partition, a political skit in one act by Daniel C. Maher first produced at the Abbey in November 1916.54 As their friends returned to Dublin from internment in Frongoch and came again to the club there were upwards of twenty-five in the drama class.55 As usual, O'Casey became secretary. As with Delia Larkin's company a few years earlier the SLOT group were content to do Abbey successes, as O'Casey later recalled, 'simple one-act plays, such as The Coiner and The Rising of the Moon, and all that took part in them persisting in giving a wretched imitation of the known Abbey actors. This got on my nerves.'56 The Coiner was a farce by Bernard Duffy, first staged at the Abbey on 8 February 1916 and published that year in his Four Comedies. A contemporary reviewer noted its similarity to Yeats's Pot of Broth, with a 'vagabond [...] at the end hoist with his own petard', and providing 'a capital half-hour's entertainment'.57 It is not known if O'Casey himself acted in these plays, but it is likely, for in November 1917 he not only organised a fund-raising concert for the club but played in the farce which formed the centre-piece. It was something of an occasion, held in the Empire Palace of Varieties (now the Olympia), Dame Street, on Sunday 25 November. Proceeds were for

Love Among the Ruins 111 'Necessitous Children and the Poor'. An advertisement prominently displayed in the programme announced that O'Casey's The Story of Thomas Ashe was 'On Sale Everywhere', price twopence. The Naboclish, a comedy in two acts, by Thomas King-Moylan, featured O'Casey as George Herbert Chantilly-Smith, an English tourist who mistakes the village of Bandhaven, County Clare, for the seaside resort of Bundoran, County Donegal. His holiday thus aborted, he satisfies himself by his natural curiosity, taking notes feverishly of every 'quaint' expression used by the Irish peasantry. He is mischievously told that the eponymous phrase, nd bac leis ('don't mind it' or 'forget it'), refers to a secret organisation with a branch in the village. He is further tricked into believing he can eavesdrop on one of their meetings by pretending to be an Irishman. At the meeting Chantilly-Smith is seized as a spy and offered a sporting chance to flee from his executioners, who merely watch his hasty retreat into a field where a goat joins in the hunt. The mischief-maker (a kind of Tony Lumpkin out of She Stoops to Conquer) has the last line: There, boys, there goes another victim of his own imagination - another victim of the Naboclish!'58 In the leading role O'Casey was described as having struggled 'valiantly in a part that was altogether unsuited to him'.59 His friend McDonnell, who played the trickster Jerry, said O'Casey 'was a peculiar Englishman with the big boots on stage', i.e. hobnails. The second part of the concert comprised nine songs, dances and a recitation (Pearse's 'Oration at Bodenstown'). Here O'Casey featured again, in offering with Michael Smyth a satirical song he had written with Fergus O'Connor but not published, 'The Constitutional Movement Must Go On'.60 He and Smyth delivered it as Members of Parliament, in frock-coats, top hats, gloves and, of course, boots.61 It mocked John Redmond's Irish Party (the song title deriving from Redmond's declaration after the 1916 Rising), and concluded topically: But when Lloyd George will threaten Irish with conscription We'll stop him with our gas, led on by John And the Freeman will write a grand description For the Constitutional movement must go on Chorus: And on and on and on for ever more.62 Droll rather than hilarious, this was well received, and for an encore the duo offered another composition by O'Casey in a similar vein, 'I Don't Believe It, Do You?', which he later described as a satirical parody of a music-hall song.63 He and Smyth had rehearsed twice a week for six weeks, so it was a polished act. There is undoubtedly a clue here to the theatrical style which O'Casey found most interesting. The night was a success and the poor were provided for, though it is likely O'Casey and his mother needed the penny dinners more than most but were too proud to say so (A, 2, 8). The amateurs also performed The Naboclish at Foresters' Hall and 'later at the back of the houses in Leinster Avenue'.64 Shortly afterwards O'Casey paid

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what he insisted was his first visit to the Abbey Theatre. His reason for not going before now was partly financial - he could not afford the kind of seat he would need on account of his eyes - and possibly because as ill-dressed labourer he felt the venue unwelcoming. As stated earlier, it may also have been in part political, as the Gaelic League had called on members not to support the theatre which had staged Synge's Playboy. On this occasion in December 1917 O'Casey was the guest of some friends from the SLOT club, who with the changed times made it a policy to support the Abbey. In the little old theatre they saw Blight, written jointly and pseudonymously by Oliver St John Gogarty and Joseph O'Connor, a surgeon-poet and a journalist respectively. For the would-be writer of tragicomedy, Blight was a gloomy 'exposition in three acts' of Dublin poverty.65 A programme note provided a suitable preparation for the Zola-like conditions dealt with: of the 25,822 families inhabiting tenement houses in Dublin, 78 per cent or 21,000 families, adding up to about 90,000 persons, occupied only one room. 'No description can adequately convey to the mind the extreme wretchedness of such homes as these, where there can be no effectual separation of the sexes, where the parents, the adolescent, and the child must live, sleep, dress, cook, eat, wash body and clothes, read and study in one apartment.'66 The play itself is far superior to this journalistic grinding of axes. It resembles Wilson's Slough but far surpasses it in subtlety of characterisation. In particular, the wily Tully, a labouring man who through dint of clever manipulation becomes a tenement owner and corrupt exploiter of his own class, is a gem of a role worthy of Shaw (whose Widower's Houses is not far away). The opening of Blight must have stayed in O'Casey's mind when he sat down to write the first lines of The Shadow of a Gunman: 'TULLY (lying in bed). Eh, Mary, are ye awake yet? . . . Are ye awake Mary . . . ? Mary, surely yer not asleep at this hour.'67 Likewise, the issues that the play dealt with, unemployment, drunkenness, and even prostitution, must have interested O'Casey; not to speak of clever aphorisms such as, Tenement property in Dublin is like cheese that grows in value as it rots.' What would not have appealed was the stark realism. If one could have been present during the interval, in the old lobby beneath the pictures of the founders, one might have heard his undisguised groans and perhaps a 'holy God!' or two. He cared little for Ibsenist concentration on the horrors of life and always wanted to lighten a scene with comedy or song. There was also a line which crept virtually verbatim into The Plough and the Stars', 'many a good man was brought up in a tenement.'68 But O'Casey never acknowledged immediate influences on his own plays: it was as if, as writer, he instinctively blotted out indebtedness.69 Equally significantly, in seeing Blight and the curtain-raiser, Gregory's The Rising of the Moon, O'Casey experienced for the first time Abbey acting at a period of re-vitalisation: among the new stars he saw Barry Fitzgerald, Barry's brother Arthur Shields, Maureen Delany, May Craig and Eric Gorman, all of whom were to feature in his own plays in a few years' time. Already familiar with the skills of Arthur Sinclair and the Irish Players (who played at different venues around town in the farces imitated by the SLOT players), he recognised that, so far as acting was concerned, here was the real thing.

Love A mong the Ruins 113 The friendship of Frank Cahill now became valuable. As founder of the original club, not only was Cahill a leading force in SLOT but he was also a great storyteller, teacher and inspirer. In their discussion of drama he boosted O'Casey's confidence that he (Sean) could write a better play than Blight.70 They regularly met and talked for hours while walking the streets in the old Dublin style. Cahill groomed O'Casey and defended him in the club against the younger members who found him at times moody, sardonic and argumentative. Were it not for Cahill, O'Casey would soon have found himself without a theatre group to work with just at a time when he was ready to give up controversial journalism and political songs. They had a lot in common, including Cahill's interest in 'the uplift of Labour at the Port of Dublin' and his republican associations.71 Yet he is never mentioned in the autobiographies, another of those strange silences in O'Casey's debate with the world. They were to fall out politically after the Treaty in 1921, but the real cause of the rift came earlier because of a play O'Casey wrote for SLOT, The Frost in the Flower, early in 1918. As he remembered the matter, O'Casey, having tired of the SLOT players aping the Abbey's style, volunteered to write a play himself. From the start he had no compunction about putting those he knew personally into a play. Cahill and his family became his subject, and apparently (for the text has not survived) he showed Cahill as lacking the courage to win promotion in his teaching career. When he read the play to the committee 'they all laughed uproariously. They all enjoyed it. They all clapped. But when it was over they said, "We can't do it, Sean. No, no. You could feel it with a stick. The moment that play was produced in any hall in Dublin or any hall in the country, we'd lose the best supporters the club had."'72 O'Casey turned away, began to cut himself off from Cahill, who was deeply offended, and the club,73 and turned his attention to a new play intended for the Abbey. The Harvest Festival took him ten months to write.74 He submitted it to the Abbey on 29 October 1919 and a fortnight later submitted The Frost in the Flower.75 When the SLOT club obtained new premises at 100 Seville Place some time in 1918, a new generation began to take over and there was little place there for the writer O'Casey. He had shown an early dangerousness.

Then love walked in. Whether it stole his troubles away is another matter. O'Casey had had no steady relationship with a woman before this, though it was said that he was quite charming to the women who frequented the social evening at the club in Oriel Street.76 But when Maire Keating, a teacher at St Laurence O'Toole's girls' school, was introduced one evening (by Paddy McDonnell) O'Casey was overwhelmed. Then twenty-four, Maire lived with her parents and two sisters in First Avenue, Seville Place, just across the road from church and school. Her father was a retired RIG man, her mother a dressmaker. She was elegantly tall with rich brown hair and hazel eyes, striking in appearance rather than beautiful. Her cousin Sean McCann, who met her only late in her life but had access to her photograph album, comments also

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on her 'beautifully rounded chin, delicate white throat. A girl always meticulously dressed, wearing the large, big-brimmed hats of the time.'77 She had a forthright manner which must have impressed O'Casey; she was among the first women locally to smoke in public. She was a vegetarian. She was rather more than the demure figure played by Maggie Smith in the film version of O'Casey's autobiographies, Young Cassidy (1965). The story of Maire and Sean is a love story, in some respects commonplace and in other respects passionately felt. They walked out together, long rambling walks in what was then countryside up around Finglas, or to the seaside at Dollymount, or by tram to Howth or Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire). They would see each other almost every day, for he would wait for her after school, and he would write to her very often even though they lived in the same locality. He had seen and admired her some years before she left to do teacher training and now that she was back became entirely besotted. Strangely, his letters to her dating from May 1917 to January 1920 have survived because she kept them, but not hers to him. Perhaps she asked for them back. Perhaps the love was greater on his side than on hers, for he idolised her, writing, 'O Maire, my whole nature pants with the desire to be near you, to look upon you, to hold your hand in mine, to kiss your sweet lips with a love so ardent & so deep that it resembles the fabled tree of which it is said that its roots penetrated to the earth's centre, while its branches blossomed in the higher heavens.'78 Although he called her his 'Soul within me', by August 1917 he was thinking of her in physical terms too: 'My only joy now is when I am with you, intensified when I hold you in my arms, & when I press ardent kisses on your sweet little mouth.' Presumably, Maire did not resist. She did tell him to stop writing letters, no doubt afraid that someone in her staid household, which was ultra-catholic in outlook, would come across the smouldering prose of this Browning in overalls. To Maire, O'Casey 'was a very good companion to be out with. He had a fine - if often sarcastic - turn of humour. He was full of talk - interesting talk. And so very proud - a pride that could be a weakness.'79 She had to be careful not to appear to patronise him while paying her own way. She was happy to be his Muse. Of the seventeen poems he sent her, some of which were not love poems but nationalistic verse destined for Fergus O'Connor's commercial press, twelve have never been published, and perhaps do not merit publication. But when Maire eventually deposited these and the letters in the National Library in 1957 (with a stipulation that they should not be seen until 1980, a hundred years after O'Casey's birth) she carefully transcribed five of them into a school exercise book. There is something telling in that, widowed as she then was and about to re-marry. The titles include Thoughts of Thee', 'To Maire', 'The Summer Sun is Tightly Folding', and 'Life is Dear to Me', which begins: Life is dear to me And so is Maire Joy is dear to me And so is Maire

Love A mong the Ruins 115 and goes on for sixteen lines. She transcribed O'Casey's post-scripts also, for example to 'Life is Dear to Me': 'Possessing all these and losing Maire I would have nothing. Losing all - except life and truth - and having Maire, all are mine, for she is all to me. Even the truth of my soul and the life of my life.'80 He published a number of these poems to Maire in the Songs of the Wren series, the best-known being 'Since Mary [later changed to 'Maggie'] Went Away'. This, like most of the others, was a song. It is probably not fair to take the love poetry on any other level. They limp a fair way behind Robbie Burns or Tom Moore but they are in that tradition. Maire took part in the drama productions at the SLOT club, doing work back-stage. She may have helped with the concert on the big night in the Empire Theatre in November 1917. Likewise, she may be the 'friend' O'Casey said accompanied him on his second visit to the Abbey, when he saw Shaw's Androcles and the Lion,8} and for the first time saw the great FJ. McCormick on stage. Maire and Sean also exchanged books and discussed literature constantly, he educating her as much as she him, as he later insisted: Tt was I brought her to Shakespeare, to Keats, Shelley, even to Dickens and Jack London; not to mention G.B.S.'82 But in listening to his ideas and taking them seriously she 'first forced my feet in the way that led to a fuller understanding of Literature and Art'.83 Whatever about his feet, she gave him as a present his first fountain-pen, an expensive Waterman, to facilitate the hack-writing he was doing at this time. He refers to it in his negotiations with Fergus O'Connor, 'Excuse writing - first attempt with a Fountain Pen.'84 Maire says he used it all the time.85 So, they were very close, in this the most intense relationship that the thirty-seven-year-old O'Casey had yet had - except one, that with his mother. Susan had been ailing ever since Bella died. Sean continued to care for her but as already stated 1918 was the year of the influenza epidemic and Susan had no defence against that. Nor had much of Dublin. The schools were closed in July, and again in October-November. October was the worst month: in St Vincent's Hospital, for example, exactly fifty per cent of the one hundred and two female patients admitted suffered from influenza.86 Over 10,000 died of it in Ireland in 1918, a mortality rate of fourteen per cent. First Bella and now Susan; it was a hard year for O'Casey. Then Maire Keating fell ill, and nearly drove O'Casey mad. In a journal which he eventually sent Maire he catalogued his anxiety as for hours each day he hung around the roads leading to her home in the hope of meeting her sister Brid ('Birdie') or her formidable mother, and having to return home, 'sick at heart, cold, and wet with the heavy showers', having no news. 'How warm my cold heart would feel if I knew that my own sweet darling Maire was better.' News of the death of a friend, Jimmy Redmond, the next day, Wednesday 9 October, made him more anxious than ever. Hovering around Seville Place he saw Mrs Keating returning from the Food Depot and 'snatched at the hope that my darling could not be dangerously ill or Mrs Keating would not have attended to her usual duties: was sorely tempted to implore her to have pity on me & tell me how my sweet Maire was.' But he did not dare. The family did not

116 Sean O'Casey

approve of him, an impoverished, unemployed, and to catholic eyes unsuitable suitor. This ageing Romeo had to suffer like a teenager. He waited from three o'clock until five in the hope of seeing Birdie, who did not come (and may herself have been ill). 'Drank a cup of cocoa, & took the tram to the [Phoenix] Park, waited outside the Shell Factory from 5.45 to seven in the hope of seeing Maire's Aunt Katie: did not see her. Filled with heartbreaking visions of Maire's illness & its ultimate termination. Oh! Should Maire die, may God send death to me as well!' Did he then go home to see how Susan was faring? No. 'Stood at the corner of 1st Avenue 10.30 p.m. [and] tried to pierce the gloom and perceive with spiritual vision the sweet face of my beloveddarling; cried out, Maire, Maire, my own beloved Darling, I love you, I love you, I love you! Oh! why Should I be ashamed? shed bitter tears.' Thursday was no better. Having waited in vain from 2.30 until nearly 6 p.m. he decided Birdie must be ill too. 'No sign of Kathleen either. God have mercy upon me a miserable sinner, & bless my darling sweetheart & give her to me again.' On Friday he tried to write part of The Hill of Thought', presumably one of the Three Shouts on a Hill' which he later sent to Bernard Shaw for approval and a preface (he got neither87). He could manage only twelve lines before giving up in despair: 'can do nothing but think of my darling Maire.' He took up his vigil at the corner of her street, First Avenue, at eleven that night. Nowadays he would have been taken for a stalker. On Saturday he went with three friends in a cab, like Bloom in Ulysses, to Jimmy Redmond's funeral. 'Kept up a lively conversation [and] made them laugh frequendy, while I was near to tears myself and my heart was bursting with grief.' In the evening he went to William Kelly's newspaper and tobacco shop in Seville Place (Kelly being the friend who took him to see Blight at the Abbey), and while discussing 'events' there speculated to himself that if Mrs Keating came in Maire could hardly be worse: she came in 'carrying parcels; must have been shopping - a good sign. Heard Kelly asking her something; Heard Mrs Keating reply ... "had to send for the doctor on ... but she is better; oh she is better now." May Christ be thanked!' Sean was in a dream. He heard nothing his friend Russell was saying to him: 'everything swam around me.' When Mrs Keating left he suddenly turned to Kelly and Russell and began to talk so vehemently they thought he had been drinking. All he could think of was that Maire was better: 'she must be better. Oh, God be praised!' He expected a letter from her on Sunday morning but none came. Still, he spent 'a happier and more hopeful day'. And the next morning there was a letter, to say she would see him on Tuesday evening. He was ecstatic. 'Longing with my whole nature for a long sweet kiss. Went for a long walk and whistled most of the way, Nature and I were in harmony. Saw poor little Kathleen coming down the Avenue: was tempted to speak to her but was afraid. Waiting anxiously for Tuesday.'88 Three weeks later, on 9 November, Susan died. One woman in his life was spared, the other taken away. O'Casey was devastated. Old as Susan was - the burial register gave her age as eighty-five - he loved her deeply and would celebrate her courage again and again in his work, from the characterisation of

Love Among the Ruins 117 Juno to Mrs Breydon in Red Roses for Me, and would dedicate The Plough and the Stars to 'the gay laugh of my mother at the gate of the grave'. The funeral arrangements were shared between Sean and Bella's daughter Babsie Murphy, who called on the services of two local women, Polly Kinsella and Granny Short, to lay Susan out.89 Since 9 November was a Sunday a day was to pass before O'Casey could get to the undertakers, Messrs Nichols of Lombard Street, who had earlier in the year buried Bella. The bill came to exactly five pounds, twice that for Bella, and the difference was in the polished elm coffin O'Casey chose for Susan. Her life insurance would pay that. Whether he asked for them or they were simply assigned, the same two hearsemen, J. Manley and J. Walsh, were used as had looked after Bella.90 Babsie and her husband Mr Murphy sat up one night with Sean to 'wake' Susan. He was crying, and saying how he would miss her. He put a red cloth over the table beside the coffin and set flowers on it. It was the table he usually worked on. The cloth usually covered the box Susan sat on by the fire. Now, a secret between them, it would be her 'red flag' (A, 2, 25). The account of the funeral in the autobiographies, 'Mrs Casside Takes a Holiday', is both beautiful and moving but as with the accounts of the deaths of Tom and Bella is considerably embellished. It is clear there was a cheque from Maunsel's and O'Casey needed to get it cashed, .but it must have been the advance and not the payment due on publication of his book, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, which was not yet published. But the story of the heartless hearseman refusing to coffin Susan until his money was paid up-front is probably just that: a story to heighten the dramatic effect of the scene.91 It is true, however, that O'Casey was the one in charge of arrangements, for his signature is on the burial register at Mount Jerome's cemetery, and the undertakers' invoice is made out to 'Mr' Casey and not Mick, as has been suggested.92 Mick was unaccountably away at this time, and Babsie later said he was probably in hospital.93 He had been discharged from the army on 18 September as physically unfit. Isaac, the other remaining son, was now working in a factory in Liverpool. He was unable to obtain leave in time for the funeral on 12 November, the morning after the armistice. O'Casey took his absence amiss and would have nothing more to do with the formerly beloved 'Archie'. Maire did not attend Susan's funeral. A catholic did not attend protestant funerals. Besides, she had to teach school on Wednesday 12th. Still, it is likely that she visited 18 Abercorn Road on Monday or Tuesday to pay her respects. It must have been clear to her, as she looked around the tiny flat, so sparsely furnished, with Sean's books and papers tidied away into the little cupboard in a corner, and she drank strong tea from a cup already used by somebody else, that things were not going to be easy between Sean and herself from now on. He had relied on his mother's pension to pay the rent. Where among the pile of papers, including perhaps the proofs of a book for Maunsel's, was there assurance of an income in the future? And what of his religion? Nothing was more important to her and to her family than their deep religious faith. Sean, too, was religious, she knew that, knew it even from his letters and especially

118 Sean O'Casey

during her recent illness when she saw how fervently he prayed for her recovery. In spite of his daring blasphemies he was deeply Christian in outlook. Her eye caught the red cloth. In spite of this socialist business or whatever it was. But she was afraid. She caught Babsie, four years older than she was, staring at her and at the tea not drunk in her cup. It was time for her to be going.

7 GOING THROUGH THE MILL

the political maelstrom which was Ireland and specifically Dublin in 1919-1920 O'Casey's love affair granted him support and, in some measure, peace. Day by day he saw Maire, six days a week, never on Saturday, when she stayed home and made her confession in the church of St Laurence O'Toole. They would walk, they would talk, they would make love in the ardent but carefully limited way then regarded as respectable. They were as good as engaged to be married. Yet neither of them faced up to the implications. Would O'Casey take religious instruction and be converted to Roman Catholicism? Would Maire face down her hostile family and proclaim her determination to marry this penniless protestant? Such questions, it would appear, were avoided. O'Casey complained that Maire would never talk to him about religion. 'But I couldn't talk to him about it. [. . .] You'd need to be a theologian to do that successfully.'1 Mrs Keating made it her business to see the priest and sound the alarm, but knowing O'Casey, Canon James Brady (who was chairman of SLOT Pipers' Club) could see no harm in the relationship and simply urged Maire to bring O'Casey along to Benediction, which might help convert him. 'But I never got the chance,' was Maire's lame excuse years later.2 He would hardly have denied her; the smell of incense would hardly have come between them. Perhaps she did not invite him because she was, essentially, ashamed of him. She could not as it were show him off as her intended. Yet one who knew her has described O'Casey as 'the love of her life'.3 Perhaps she did not realise this at the time. Meantime, Maire was content to be adored, and to play the bluestocking within very firmly defined limitations. She let Sean do most of the letterwriting but when she went on holidays with her family, no further than Killiney or possibly Bray, she would send a postcard. In July 1919 she also sent a letter in which she must have expressed a scruple over seeing other men while away, for he hastened to reassure her:

In

My dear Maire I am not a bit uneasy because others of my own sex are sensible enough to see that you are as pretty as I know you to be. And why

hhh sean o casey

should you persist in giving them "an abrupt dismissal"? Be kind to them, and, since they desire it, allow them to enjoy the pleasure of your personality. When you cannot yield that joy to me why deny it to others? Do not allow your love for me to make a prim, precise puritan of you. You cannot help having a pretty face and a lovely figure and a charming manner, neither can the boys help admiring all these attributes which attract them irresistably [sic]. Do nothing to prevent Rosie going to the dance, and why not go yourself? If I may go to a Band in Croke Park, why not Maire to a dance in Wicklow? Go, dear Love, and dance, & let all who will admire you, for Sean will not be jealous, but proud of his dear love's charms. Indeed am very lonely.4 It is a generous letter, O'Casey at his ease. He takes care to mention Kathleen, staying with the family for a time, and Birdie, who apparently had 'clicked' with some local youth. O'Casey, in mock seriousness, demands 'the full Latin derivation of the word', to rid himself 'of the terrible possibilities'. He may consult 'some of the Sodality Dames [on] what sinister interpretation may be attached to the term'. On a more intimate level he tells Maire that he remembers quite well the question he asked in his last letter - presumably, 'do you love me?' - and will remember that the answer is 'yes'. But she must remember question and answer herself 'when we next know the joy of being together'. But some time in September 1919 Maire got him to agree to a separation, and also to a moratorium on letter writing. He could bear the separation, but not the ban on letter writing. 'When I reflect upon the circumstances in which I am placed I feel horror and detestation towards myself for thrusting myself in your way and forcing upon you a love that has filled your life with bitterness.'5 It would appear that Maire had insisted on the break: was it to be a trial period? Was he to think in the meantime of ways in which realistically they might continue? Was it, as he tells it in the autobiographies, that she gave him six months in which to make something of himself? (A, 2, 197). Many years later he was to put Maire into his autobiographical play Red Roses for Me as the priggish Sheila Moorneen: Sheila [desperately]. Oh, for goodness' sake, Ayamonn, be sensible! I'm getting a little tired of all this. I can't bear the strain the way we're going on much longer. [A short pause.] You will either have to make good, or - [She pauses.] Ayamonn [quietly]. Or what? Sheila [with a little catch in her voice]. Or lose me; and you wouldn't like that to happen. Ayamonn. I shouldn't like that to happen; but I could bear the sthrain.6 Yet Red Roses was written from quite a different perspective than faced O'Casey in 1919, when he could barely stand the 'strain'. When Maire went to see that play with a friend in the 1940s she 'burst into tears, saying O'Casey had

Going Through the Mill 121 portrayed her unkindly'.7 Arriving into school next day she was 'very disturbed' because Red Roses 'resurrected a lot of old memories'.8 So the play distorted the reality of their relationship. In 1919 O'Casey's pride was deeply injured by her rejection: 'when I measure my stature of mind with the mental stature of others I cannot help thinking that I am offering you the full love of my heart.' Though a bit of a non sequitur this was admitting that he was obsessed. 'I dont [sic] believe that I can or ever could succeed in quenching my love for you. I have learned to know you too well. You are the incarnation of the beautiful feminine spirit that my soul has ever hungered for.' To a cynic this could be Jerry Devine's gushing over Mary Boyle in Juno and the Paycock, needing somebody like Captain Boyle to explode the sentimentality with a line like, 'are you takin' leave o' your senses, man?'9 O'Casey himself denied the charge: 'my love for you is not sentimental - it is the very heart-beat of my body & the throb of my whole being.'10 It is hard to argue with that. All he could say just now, was, in fairness to Maire, he must agree 'to accept your declaration that you have given me up, & that you can have no further connection with me in person or by letter'. He concluded with this assessment, perhaps referring to terms she had used: 'It is not Fate neither is it the will of God that has separated us, but the tyranny of old fashioned thought that has come between us two.' Maire melted somewhat when she received this letter, for he sent her a poem, 'Mary Most Lovely', with a brief note, dated 19 January 1920. He asked her to write to him occasionally. They were to remain friends, and he would dedicate his first plays to her. If it is true that the tragedy of their break-up somehow enabled his career as playwright not even a cynic could claim this was without cost. He would never forget her.

One of the letters to Maire just quoted was written on paper headed The Writers' and Artists' Year Book: Suggestions'. That means that by this time O'Casey was taking the business of writing more professionally. In moving from Fergus O'Connor to Maunsel & Co. as his publisher he was taking a major step upward. Notoriously the publisher which had in bad faith refused to print Joyce's Dubliners, Maunsel's was nevertheless 'the most important publishing firm in Ireland' at this time.11 Before 1916, the biggest name on Maunsel's lists was Synge; after 1916 (during which the premises at 96 Middle Abbey Street was destroyed) the list was replete with names from the Irish literary and cultural renaissance, Yeats excepted. From May 1916 to December 1919 (the year The Story of the Irish Citizen Army was published) Maunsel's published 117 new books and pamphlets. It was the high-water mark of political publishing, for by 1920 the firm was in financial difficulty, having expanded to staff a London office, and five years later had to wind up. O'Casey submitted his text in long-hand to Maunsel's new Dublin office at 50 Lower Baggot Street some time in 1918. As was required at this time the text was sent to the official censor, the Competent Military Authority, on 13 September. Two days later it arrived back with many deletions. To O'Casey, the

122 SednO'Casey

text was now 'a creased and tangled mass, with [his] small, cramped longhand heavily underscored on every page with red, green, and blue pencil lines. With his eyes the way they were, it took him a week to get the sheets into orderly rotation.'12 The corrections involved some rewriting of chapter ten, in particular ('Jim Connolly Assumes the Leadership'), and the Afterword. Resubmitted to the censor on 24 October, these rewrites were passed four days later. Proofs were then submitted and passed next day.13 For O'Casey, the task of proofreading against a revised manuscript much interpolated by various censors' hands was such as to make him feel that the text published was not what he wrote.14 Since the original manuscript has not survived it is impossible to say how far this is true. Yet if the censors had really 'gutted' his text O'Casey would surely have withdrawn it from publication. It may be that he somewhat confused the labours involved in making necessary changes, and having to review these a second and third time in proofs, with the actual extensiveness of the censorship. If so, the pamphlet as published (72 pages, including afterword, appendix and back-page material) was substantially what he had written and Maunsel's had copy-edited.15 Ironically, the one page he did not proofread was the title page, where his name was mistakenly printed as P. O Cathasaigh. The book is surprisingly scholarly in style and approach. In his preface O'Casey, writing in the third person, says that the materials were 'carefully gathered together from original manuscripts in his possession, from notes recorded during the organising period of the Army, and from the contemplation of events in which the author participated'. Further, he claims, 'Incidents are generally recorded as they occur, and few attempts are made critically to consider the circumstances that evolve them.' In short, this is an objective history in which context and critical assessment are kept at a minimum. In so far as O'Casey allows his opinions to insert themselves in the text these relate to the 'socially superior tradesmen' in the Volunteers (disliked) and the brief attack on Connolly: 'The high creed of Irish Nationalism became his daily rosary, while the higher creed of international humanity that had so long bubbled from his eloquent lips was silent for ever, and Irish Labour lost a Leader.'16 This view is nowadays respected by historians of the period.17 But the core of what O'Casey had personally to say appears in his 'Afterword', censored though it may have been. Here is found a position on Irish politics which was to affect greatly the point of view in his three great Dublin plays. It shows that Irish history underpinned O'Casey's dramaturgy. All of his plays are in a sense history plays, because experience was real to him only after it was written down. Then it was incontrovertible and he could not see why anyone should object. Text was to him a kind of Holy Writ. O'Casey saw the aftermath of the 1916 Rising politically as the resurgence of Sinn Fein invigorated by what Labour had to contribute. He advanced the journalist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington over Connolly as the main inspiration of this new growth:

Going Through the Mill 123 He [Skeffington] was the living antithesis of the Easter Insurrection: a spirit of peace enveloped in the flame and rage and hatred of the contending elements,'absolutely free from all its terrifying madness; and yet he was the purified soul of revolt against not only one nation's injustice to another, but he was also the soul of revolt against man's inhumanity to man. And in this blazing pyre of national differences his beautiful nature, as far as this world is concerned, was consumed, leaving behind a hallowed and inspiring memory of the perfect love that casteth out fear, against which there can be no law.18 Skeffington, though a non-combatant, was executed in 1916 by a deranged British officer, Captain Bowen-Colthurst, who arrested him while Skeffington was attempting to stop the looting in O'Connell Street. It may be that O'Casey held an exaggerated view of Skeffington's lack of sympathy with Connolly: Conor Cruise O'Brien has argued that Skeffington had moved quite close to Connolly, who made him his literary executor.19 But the fact remains that Skeffington was a pacifist whose elevation over Connolly serves to define O'Casey's own perceptions as myth-making. His conclusion underlines his emerging belief in the superiority of humanitarian values over the use of force for political ends: 'In Sheehy-Skeffmgton, and not in Connolly, fell the first martyr to Irish Socialism, for he linked Ireland not only with the little nations struggling for self-expression, but with the world's Humanity struggling for a higher life.'20 O'Casey used this rather daring put-down of Connolly to introduce his final point. Sinn Fein must not be allowed to make militant nationalism the way forward. On the contrary, 'the ultimate destiny of Ireland will be in the hands of Labour.'21 Here O'Casey was in an ambivalent position, since he did not approve of the stand Labour had adopted in 1918 by yielding the field to Sinn Fein in the elections. (At the same time one cannot ignore the republican ardour of his writings on Thomas Ashe.) He opposed the views of the dominant figures in Labour, Cathal O'Shannon, William O'Brien and Thomas Johnson in particular, who were about to commit Labour to supporting Sinn Fein policy in the First Bail (from January 1919) and eventually, in the Third Bail (from 1922), to acting as malleable opposition in the face of Sinn Fein abstentionism. Thus O'Casey's prediction - his hope - was far wide of the mark: 'Labour will probably have to fight Sinn Fein [. . .] but the Labour leaders must become wiser and more broadminded than they at present seem to be.'22 One reviewer touched the nub of the matter in recognising that O'Casey believed that nationalism and socialism are one. 'In Mr O Cathasigh's view the nation exists for labour, not labour for the nation.'23 In tabulating what he isolates as 'the two main subcultures in the nationalist community' in the 1920s, Tom Garvin polarises 'Republican moralism' and 'Nationalist pragmatism'. He puts Sinn Fein into the former, Labour into the latter category. The republicans are characterised as romantic, neo-Gaelic, rural, with a social base in the unskilled worker; the nationalist pragmatists are

124 SednO'Casey seen as classical, neo-Gaelic, urban, with a social base in the skilled worker.24 It can be inferred that O'Casey blurred the categories and tried to re-fashion Labour so that it combined the two subcultures in the nationalist community. He wanted an urban, neo-Gaelic, romantic and unskilled concept for Labour, which was more 'Republican' than 'Labour' in Garvin's terms. Small wonder that ex-members of the ICA went around Dublin persuading the public not to buy the book.25 This was typical Dublin backbiting. In contrast, the outsider R.M. Fox, who came to Ireland only in 1922, was happy to build on O'Casey's text for his own The History of the Irish Citizen Army, published 1943, accepting its authoritative status. Towards the end of 1919 O'Casey sent to Shaw three essays on Irish nationalism, labour and language, under the general title Three Shouts on a Hill'. He wanted Shaw to write a preface. In refusing, Shaw made a couple of useful comments: Why do you not come out definitely on the side of Labor & the English language? I am afraid the National question will insist on getting settled before the Labor question. That is why the National question is a nuisance and a bore; but it can't be helped. [...] You ought to work out your position positively & definitely. This objecting to everyone else is Irish, but useless.26 Shaw was right. He saw immediately the self-conflict within O'Casey which made him dissatisfied with the way things were. The advice was expert: 'work out your position positively [and not negatively] & definitely [not tentatively or without loyalty].' This O'Casey found impossible to do. Had he been able to find his community and advocate without second thoughts a commitment to a reasoned set of beliefs likely to sustain and progress that community's participation in society (towards greater justice and greater power within society) he might have taken his place among the architects of the new Ireland. As it was, he was demonstrably unfair to Labour, which was able to influence Sinn Fein to accept 'almost verbatim, its version of advanced social and democratic policy drawn up by Tom Johnson. This so-called "Democratic Programme" was adopted at the first meeting of the First Dail on 21 January 1919.'27 Having refused to write the preface Shaw added: 'You must go through the mill like the rest and get published for your own sake, not for mine.' Before he destroyed the text of 'Three Shouts on a Hill' O'Casey brought it to Maunsel's, 'but they would have none of it; & so a year after I committed the MS to the flames - in plain English I burned it.'28 But the letter from Shaw he carried with him for years.

The fact that O'Casey got £15 for The Story of the Irish Citizen Army - the equivalent of ten weeks' wages - may have impressed Maire Keating at the

Going Through the Mill 125 time. We simply do not know. Perhaps not, since he spent one third of it on his mother's funeral. He would need a steady income. He was at work on a fulllength play which he intended sending to the Abbey. Writing to Maire when she was on her holidays in July 1919 O'Casey remarked: 'So far I have not even added one word to the "Harvest Festival".'29 This is the first mention of the play he was to submit to the Abbey on 29 October, the only one of the unperformed plays before The Shadow of a Gunman for which the manuscript has survived. Two things about this text make clear that a dramatist, a writer who thinks in terms of performance before an audience, had at last appeared on the horizon. The stage directions reveal a writer familiar with the way things appear on a stage. Usually, the primary and glaring fault of new drama is that the inexperienced writer has no idea how to set a scene, how to manage entrances and exits, or how to work within the limitations imposed by stage conditions. The Harvest Festival reveals none of these shortcomings. The opening stage direction calls for a middle-class sitting-room: 'Everything is as big, as vivid and as glaring as possible.'™ A lot of detail then follows to illustrate the vulgarity and pretentiousness O'Casey wanted to convey, but that phrase 'as possible' shows clearly his awareness that the stage manager (and designer if there is to be one) must create the effect within what resources are available. Or take the opening stage direction for act 3: 'Scene: Exterior of St. Brendan's [= St Barnabas's]. The background consists of a drop curtain depicting a street of ordinary houses in a poor locality. Before this is an iron railing stretching across the stage (p. 48). Knowledge of a drop curtain as a means of creating a sense of place, together with use of the phrase 'across the stage', are indicative of O'Casey's experience. All those years knocking about with Isaac and involvement with the Liberty Hall Players and the SLOT Dramatic Society left him with a sharp sense of theatre. Recently, in the spring of 1918, he had acted in one more farce for Delia Larkin. This was Bernard Duffy's Special Pleading: A Coincidence in One Act, in which O'Casey played a Cockney burglar who 'does' a house with an Irish burglar. When they are caught they engage in 'special pleading' with the proprietor to make peace with his married daughter, and they end up working for him.31 From playing such a role, and others earlier, O'Casey well knew his way around a stage. Therefore, even though The Harvest Festival is not much of a play it reveals theatrical know-how. A criticism can be made that this know-how was out-of-date by 1920, especially in the use of soliloquies O'Casey allowed characters alone on stage, which will do for Boucicault but not for the post-Ibsenist theatre. As not a trace of this oldfashioned convention appears in The Shadow of a Gunman, his first accomplished play, it is clear that O'Casey learned fast how to modernise his technique. The other major indicator of a dramatist in the making has to do with the dramatic imagination. Some have it, many do not. It has to do with the shaping principle, the control of narrative in tempo, rhythm and suspense, so that the play grows in interest and excitement until it has fulfilled its initial potential. To do that it must have what may be called a central dynamic image. The central idea or situation has to be crystallised for the audience. This O'Casey

126 Sean O'Casey

could always do. The theme of The Harvest Festival is proletarian revolution in Dublin £.1913. The workers are emerging, discovering class-consciousness and declaring that things can never be the same again after the first blow is struck for workers' rights. As the hero says, speaking for O'Casey post-1918: 'if the workers are content to remain slaves, then, as Emerson says, it is but the case of any other vermin - the more there are the worse for Labour.'32 Such a theme, outside of agit-prop theatre, could be a recipe for total boredom. But by framing the conflict within the church ritual of the annual harvest festival, Feast of Saint Pumpkin and all Vegetables (A, 2, 96), O'Casey worked with a set of universal symbols flexible enough to embrace both Christianity and social revolution. The idea of 'festival', rooted in vegetative ritual, is basic to all theatre. In O'Casey's play the working-class hero dies, his body is refused reception at the church, and his comrades take him off to an alternative 'church', the trade union hall, singing a new hymn, 'We'll keep the Red Flag Flying here': a new ritual, born of the October 1917 revolution, replaces the old. The way in which O'Casey uses anachronism, skilfully conflating 1913 with 1917, foreshadows his technique in the three Dublin plays where the mood is always of the time of production though recording an earlier one. Although the imagery and symbolism are vigorously employed to focus the main theme of the play, it has to be said that the characterisation is for the most part unconvincing. The reader for the Abbey Theatre whose report was sent to O'Casey condemned the characters as stereotypes, 'as unreal as the "Stage Irishman" of 20 years ago'.33 The main character, Jack Rocliffe, is autobiographical, and his mother is based on Susan Casey. Here O'Casey was dramatising his own evolution, from fervent church-goer to militant socialist, whereby the mother figure can lament her son's defection: An' he was such a regular churchgoer. How happy I used to be sittin' beside him in the pew, an' he gettin' out the hymns for me, for me sight isn't as good as it used to be - An' now, I always have to go by meself, but it's the readin' that has ruined him, the readin', the readin'; after a while when he began readin' I noticed a change in him; how quiet he would sit by the fire, thinkin', thinkin', thinkin'. (p. 39) O'Casey struggles to find a way between adherence to the truth and selfjustification, and in the process fills his play with idealised figures on the one side, stereotypical supporters of the status quo on the other. The form of the play, turning on the martyrdom of Jack Rocliffe, becomes melodramatic and even sentimental as Jack sinks into death surrounded by his wailing mother and tearful pal Bill. Apart from the indicators of theatrical techniques and dramatic imagination on view, The Harvest Festival to a limited extent displays a use of Dublin speech which O'Casey was subsequently to perfect. For example, in the opening scene the bricklayer working on stage, while a long way behind Fluther Good in the Plough, speaks a lively Dublinese. Commenting on the cabbages about to be

Going Through the Mill 127 sent to the church he says: 'You're jokin' ma'am; they'd look better smokin' on a dish makin' a fine collar for a pig's cheek. It's a curious look a church 'ud have with cabbages knockin' about in it' (p. 6). The rhythm here is natural, and the word 'curious' is pure Dublin. When, a few pages later, we hear him expressing less than enthusiasm for the impending strike we may feel, with some relief, that Seumas Shields cannot be too far away: 'I wish to God these agitators would leave well enough alone' (p. 9). Finally, although Mrs Rocliffe can hardly stand comparison with Juno Boyle, she manages in the end to find sympathy for the scab labourer who killed her son and was himself torn apart by Jack's comrades: 'I don't know Bill, I don't know; maybe he, too, was the only son of some poor, old, heartbroken mother' (p. 65). This is too selfconscious; the richness and depth of Juno's pity for Mrs Tancred are rather promised than delivered. That, in effect, is what The Harvest Festival is: a promissory note for treasures some distance away, after time, history, the experience of the terrible Anglo-Irish war in 1920, would refine O'Casey's sense of pity. Further, O'Casey was to recycle the play many years later in a more poetic style as Red Roses for Me. Instinctively, he knew he had struck a vein here. Meantime, the script was returned, rejected, from the Abbey on 24 January 1920. Two days later came the script of The Frost in the Flower. From a comment in the reader's report for Frost it seems that this was a revised version: 'We are afraid that we liked the first version better.'34 Since there is no record of an earlier submission it must have been very quickly turned around, revised, resubmitted, and returned between 10 November and 26 January 1920. Even if rejection was the outcome the reader's report offered some consolation: 'We are sorry to have to return these plays for the author's work interests us, but we don't think either would succeed on the stage.' Lurking behind this royal plural were the unwritten signatures of directors Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats and the manager Lennox Robinson.

When Delia Larkin returned to Dublin in 1918 and tried to resume her WWU activities at Liberty Hall she walked into a minefield.35 P.T. Daly, her chief supporter and loyal ally of Jim Larkin, had become embroiled in a powerstruggle within the union which eventually led to his dismissal as secretary of the insurance section where Delia worked. Daly's dispute and disgrace split the union into two factions, the Larkinites versus the new officers led by William O'Brien. Loyal as ever to Larkin, O'Casey involved himself in this sorry affair by writing letters to the press in support of Daly and by siding with Delia and the clerk Micheal 6 Maolain. O'Casey's brother Isaac had worked in this same insurance section but, as noted earlier, had recently left under suspicion and emigrated to Liverpool. The whole insurance department seems to have been mismanaged and Daly came under accusation. O'Casey's letter to the press in March 1918 sought to provide him with references, by associating his name with two of the 1916 martyrs, Clarke and Mac Diarmada.36 This probably did more harm than good. The following year, when union elections took place,

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the insurance section was such an embarrassment that the general president of the ITGWU Thomas Foran seized control. A blazing row resulted, with charges of corruption levelled at Daly, and at one meeting the Larkinites rushed the platform with revolvers to silence the charges against him. The upshot, if the pun be permitted, was that Daly, Delia, 6 Maolain and others were dubbed enemies of the union.37 Delia was outraged, since she saw the union as her brother's possession and Daly as his appointee. She withdrew the WWU to a new base in 10 Langrishe Place and offered O'Casey the job of caretaker. At thirty shillings a week it was an offer he could not refuse. Delia used the hall to put on shows to make money, and as O'Casey played in at least one of these, Special Pleading, already mentioned, it is likely his job for the first year or so - after which these entertainments were abandoned - included stage management. The hall formed a club with a subscription payable of sixpence a week, a possible headquarters for Jim when he returned from America, '& as a bridgehead from which to oppose the boyos who had served the Imperial throne after Connolly's execution'.38 The reference is to O'Brien and Johnson. As concerts, plays and even a 'home-made pantomime' failed to pay expenses a different idea was tried after a year: the game of House, or what we should call Bingo.39 O'Casey describes his new job: Sean spent the morning & evening in cleaning up the night's sport, & the afternoon preparing the hall & benches for the coming night. At thirty shillings a week now, he was very happy, though he guessed it wouldnt last long but he bought, cooked, & ate simple but nourishing food for the first time regularly in years, & in a few months began to feel the benefit of vitamins. [...] During the nights from 8 till one, he read, plays & poems, & set out to write a play himself for determined he was, sooner or later, to get a play on in the Abbey.40 The reference to a play is a little disingenuous, since he had already submitted two. The reference disappeared in the published version to be replaced by an emphasis on the books he bought second-hand, a complete set of Balzac and a new set of Shakespeare's Works, plus volumes on Goya's and Van Gogh's paintings. In addition he paid his first deposits for a typewriter costing the surprising sum of twenty guineas second-hand.41 Delia Larkin saw her task as protecting Jim's power base in Dublin. Having gone to America in October 1914 with the dual purpose of promoting the international labour movement and of countering the British war-effort against Germany he became dangerously implicated in both causes.42 When he helped found the American Communist Party in May 1918 he was a marked man. Towards the end of 1919 his return to Ireland, like a latter-day Bonnie Prince Charlie, was eagerly awaited. Instead, he was arrested for 'criminal anarchy', convicted, and on 3 May 1920 was sentenced to a term of five-to-ten years in Sing Sing.43 At home, Delia immediately established a Release James Larkin campaign,44 with O'Casey acting as secretary, to correspond with the

Going Through the Mill 129 Larkin Defence Council in America, organised by Jack Carney and his wife Mina, later close friends of O'Casey. The labour leaders in Liberty Hall tried to undermine this campaign for their own ends (A, 2, 61). O'Casey was given the impression that William O'Brien, acting general secretary of the ITGWU, was unwilling even to see him,45 though all he wanted was support for a Larkin Christmas greetings card he had designed. With a design of a scythe, a sledge hammer and a gun with fixed bayonet to symbolise militant labour, the card bore the awkward message 'Ireland which is I/And I who am Ireland/Have not Forgotten You.'46 Printed by Fergus O'Connor it went on sale at a penny, and as postage to the US was three halfpence O'Casey asked in his pitch, 'Will you neglect to write a few words or refuse to spend 2 Vzd. for the sake of Jim Larkin Who loved you, worked for you, and is now in Jail For You [?] ,'47 In what sense Larkin was in jail 'For You', the Irish worker, is a moot point and one O'Brien's office wished to question. It seems the necessary backing was not given.48 Thus the bitterness grew between the Larkinite and anti-Larkinite factions resulting in disastrous court cases when Larkin eventually returned to Dublin.

When Mick came back after the war to live again at 18 Abercorn Road he was drinking heavily. He was now fifty-two years old, somewhat arthritic, and no doubt confused with the world awaiting him in Dublin, where Sinn Fein was rampant and those Irishmen who had enlisted in the British Army were regarded as at best foolish, at worst traitors to the nation's true cause. It is not clear if Mick returned to his old job at the Central Telegraph Office, as would have been his prerogative. Margulies says he 'worked at odd jobs here and there', including street-cleaning.49 In a photograph showing him in his army uniform around 1918 he looks stiffer and more frail than his years would warrant, too small for the uniform. He was to receive a small disability pension from the army in 1920, pending a settlement for forty per cent disability, which meant for Mick sixteen shillings per week for the rest of his life. But this settlement was not reached until 1926, after it had been agreed that Mick's arthritis was 'aggravated but not due to [military] service'.50 It may be that Mick spent much of his time preoccupied with his claim and taking solace in drink. That might explain the particularly foul humour and excessive drinking described in the autobiographies for the years 1919-20. But it does not explain O'Casey's inability to understand. He himself had lived for years partly from Mick's contributions to household expenses at 18 Abercorn Road and Mick's 'weekly allowance' while recently in the army - the famous 'separation money' which keeps Mrs Heegan on edge lest her son Harry not return to the front in The Silver Tassie - also helped out after 1916. Among O'Casey's manuscript notes in the NYPL is a brief entry for Mick's account, 1917-18, including payments often shillings for Christmas 1917 and seven shillings for 'Bella's funeral'. There were two payments of three-and-sixpence each for tobacco and pipes in 1918 (the same event, perhaps?) and there was a balance

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'In Bank', probably a figure of speech, of almost two pounds.51 These are minor records of Mick's support. Yet O'Casey sums up his brother only as a sot and a bully: Michael had gone his own sour way, and had dwindled into a wreck before he had come to the end of it. He had treated his mother as a bully would treat an amiable fag in a second-hand [sic] public school. She had always dreaded his appearance in the house; and felt fully alert and all at ease whenever he happened to be far away [like Mrs Heegan, once again?]. His glittering gate had always been the door of a public-house, and drunkenness was to him an inward sign of outward majesty and strength. [...] Paint him as he was twenty golden years ago, and paint him as he is now, and one would have a horrifying picture of a worker Dorian Gray. (A, 2, 30) He was neither saying that he was traumatised by Mick nor that they were polar opposites: Mick as brute, himself as artist. What bothered him was the inference in Mick's collapse that art was unavailing. Mick would come home drunk at night when O'Casey was writing, and in his terrible anger demand, 'Who d'ye think y'are, eh?', his 'malice-wreathed face, blasted away from all humanity' thrust reeking into his brother's (A, 2, 32). What O'Casey felt was hate complicated by a fear that his fragile world, erected so that he could show not only Maire Keating and her prudish family what he was capable of but the bigshots around town, determined to keep him in his place. Disgust at Mick was coupled with recognition of what Mick once was, no Dorian Gray but a common enough example of wasted talents. For Mick was clever and in his own modest way artistic. The picture he sketched of two young girls and a kestrel, which has survived, may be sentimental in style but it is not cartoon-satiric. It depicts (probably) two nieces and one of their father Nicholas Beaver's pet birds.52 O'Casey could still see the vestiges of this artist in the ruined figure, a victim of poverty, robbed of his talents by the world into which he was pitched. Angry with Mick's dissipation and determined not to be ground down by it, O'Casey packed his few things and many books and left him to his deserts. The Anglo-Irish War was raging when O'Casey took this step and curfew had been introduced in Dublin in February 1920. The Black-and-Tans arrived to help the army strike terror into the civilian population in March and the betterthought-of because more civilised Auxiliaries came soon after to aid the police.53 O'Casey's flight from his past was thus framed in turbulence as fateful as any cues in drama. Ireland was entering a period of violence and bloodshed on an unprecedented scale, a guerrilla war waged through the country. Atrocities and outrages accumulated to November 1920, 'the most terrible month which the people had experienced since 1916'.54 But the assassinations and reprisals were now on a scale far beyond the figures for 1916: in the first two months of 1921 almost 500 people were killed in the Anglo-Irish War, 174 crown forces and 317 Irish Volunteers and civilians, while almost 600 people

Going Through the Mill 131 were wounded, 288 crown forces and 285 Irish Volunteers and civilians.55 In contrast, the total casualties caused by the 1916 Rising were 300 dead and 997 wounded.56 A whole new acceptability of violence was growing up, destined to escalate and alter the terms on which life was lived in Ireland well into the 1920s. P.S. O'Hegarty accurately captured this moment of change: . . . and as the shooting evolved until it became a guerilla war, the public conscience grew to accept it as the natural order of things. The public conscience as a whole was never easy about it, and would have been glad at any time to stop it. [...] The eventual result of that was a complete moral collapse here [...] personal security vanished and no man's life was safe. [Also . . .] social security vanished. With the vanishing of reason and principle and morality we became a mob, and a mob we remained. And for the mob there is only one law - gun law. So the gunman became supreme; and the only thing which counted in Ireland, in anything, was force.57 This moral upheaval was to be O'Casey's subject-matter as dramatist. But it was to take a couple of years for him to shake off the preachy, propagandist style of The Harvest Festival and to forge the complex skills of recording the horrors of the time in a mode at once truthful and entertaining. Meantime, he stuck with Shaw as his model. 'I think he aped Shaw to perfection,' a friend said of him. 'He always quoted him.'58 As noted, he had been to the Abbey in November 1919 to see Androdes and the Lion. Here Shaw says the powers that be always keep in reserve two sure weapons for use against revolutionaries, persecution and the inculcation of violence, 'by leading the herd to war, which immediately and infallibly makes them forget everything, even their most cherished and hard won public liberties and private interests, in the irresistible surge of their pugnacity and the tense pre-occupation of their terror'.59 In other words, Shaw foretold both the Easter Rising and World War One as inevitably contrived by imperial calculation. As disciple, O'Casey tried to make a statement in dramatic form on the struggle, as he saw it, between Sinn Fein and Labour. The play was called The Crimson in the Tricolour. He had tried, meantime, to write a debate play about Shaw himself under the title The Crimson Corncrakes', but got no further than a brief exchange between J., for O'Casey, and F, for Frank Cahill, perhaps, who dismissed Shaw as 'an ass'.60 The three-act The Crimson in the Tricolour was submitted to the Abbey on 6 January 1921. The address recorded in the Abbey logbook is c/o Mrs M. Mullins, 35 Mountjoy Square, a mistake for Michael Mullen, with whom O'Casey had been sharing a room since October 1920. This is the same Micheal O Maolain who was a clerk in Liberty Hall's insurance section, O'Casey's colleague in the ICA, a friend of Delia Larkin and a staunch supporter of Jim. Born in the Aran Islands in 1881, he has been described as one of the most forceful speakers of Irish ever to come to Dublin.61 It is likely that when O'Casey decided to abandon home his friendship with Delia, who also lived in Mountjoy Square at this time (though about to get married and move

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to nearby Gardiner Place), led to his getting lodgings in 6 Maolain's single room. O Maolain was in his way a cultured man, who had not only written many articles for Larkin's Irish Worker but was, according to O'Casey, 'a very well read lad, [had] a marvellous memory, [and] could recite Shakes., Shelley, Burns, etc., without effort'. He was a devout catholic, indeed a daily attender at Mass, 'desperately superstitious and afraid of hell; a fellow hard to get on with, but though he knew what I was and how I believed in no religion, he and I never quarrelled, for I respected his knowledge of literature, his sardonic wit, and his odd slouching appearance'.62 He was to provide the outline of Seumas Shields in The Shadow of a Gunman. When O Maolain later wrote about their brief sharing of the room in Mountjoy Square he mentioned The Crimson in the Tricolour, which O'Casey read to him: [It was] about the Nationalist movement and how Labour interacted with that movement that was there at the time. There was a very clever account of the lives of some of the well-off women who found out for the first time that they had a country to save and who would be hurrying on their men to take part in its management. [...] He asked me one day to leave it down to the Abbey Theatre, which I did.63 This comment suggests that the play was written towards the end of 1920. Perhaps it was this text which the other, drunken Mick intruded upon at Abercorn Road and favouring neither the Russian crimson nor the Irish tricolour derided. 6 Maolain would have left the script at the Abbey after attending his usual eleven o'clock Mass in the pro-Cathedral, which is on the same street. For whatever reason, it was lost. The manager Lennox Robinson confessed as much some months later when O'Casey enquired; he asked for another copy, but O'Casey had none, as he had sent in his only manuscript version. On 5 August he wrote to Robinson to say that the task of re-writing from memory terrified him, 'but I suppose there is no other alternative.' He would, however, wait 'another while' to see if the original script turned up.64 Sure enough, it did, some three months later. In her Journals for 5 November Lady Gregory recorded that she had read and written a long note on 'an interesting play The Crimson in the Tri-Colour, [on] the antagonism sure to break out between Labour and Sinn Fein, and sent it to Robinson'.65 In the actual report on the play she wrote: This is a puzzling play - extremely interesting - Mrs. Budrose is a jewel, & her husband a good setting for her - I don't see any plot in it, unless the Labour unrest culminating in the turning off of the lights at the meeting may be considered one. It is the expression of ideas that makes it interesting (besides feeling that the writer has something in him) & no doubt the point of interest for Dublin audiences - But we could not put it on while the Revolution is still unaccomplished - it might hasten the Labour attack on Sinn Fein, which ought to be kept back till the fight with England is over, & the new Government has had time to show what it can do - 66

Going Through the Mill 133 Even though the text of the play does not survive, this account confirms how radical O'Casey's views were at this time. The very rapprochement Lady Gregory, and most nationalists, wanted between Labour and Sinn Fein was exactly what O'Casey was against. In his play of ideas, 'moulded on Shaw's style', he used characters based on Arthur Griffith and William O'Brien.67 Robinson, in forwarding Lady Gregory's views in confidence to O'Casey, added that he himself liked 'a great deal' of the play 'but thought some of it not necessary and not very good', and invited him to visit the Abbey to talk about it on 11 November at 8.30, presumably after curtain up. O'Casey then must have agreed to do more work on it, in response to Lady Gregory's offer to have the play typed. Almost a whole year passed before he heard from Robinson again about the re-written version. This time Robinson enclosed the opinion of a second reader, no less than W.B. Yeats, though he did not disclose this fact. As was his wont, Yeats focused on the structural and formal shortcomings of the play. He had a neo-classical, one might even say Aristotelian, notion of dramatic action and 'the clean outline'. A favourite cry of his was, 'clear the decks for action.'68 In earlier years his 'Advice to Playwrights'69 was sent to promising new writers, but apparently not in O'Casey's day; now Yeats simply incorporated his dramaturgy into his reader's report. Time was to show the impassable gap that existed between the dramatic ideas of these two men. For the moment, O'Casey was forced to attend to the master's pronouncements. Luckily, Robinson clipped the first and last sentences, which would necessarily have invited dispute: 'I find this discursive play very hard to judge for it is a type of play I do not understand. [...] On the other hand it is so constructed that in every scene there is something for pit & stalls to cheer or boo. In fact it is the old Irish idea of a good play - Queens Melodrama brought up to date [and] would no doubt make a sensation - especially as everybody is as ill mannered as possible, & all truth considered as inseperable [sic] from spite and hatred. If Robinson wants to produce it let him do so by all means & be damned to him. My fashion has gone out.'70 Shaw had warned O'Casey that he must go through the mill and here it was now in yet another guise: the Abbey with the poet-in-residence as supreme arbiter. Lady Gregory was supportive; to win her alliance and be guided by her more usable advice was O'Casey's best prospect. A few years later, when Juno and the Paycock opened in triumph she said to him: 'You must feel now that we were right in not putting on that first one [sic, although it was his third] you sent in The Crimson in the Tricolour. I was inclined to put it on because some of it was so good and I thought you might learn by seeing it on the stage, though some of it was very poor, but Mr Yeats was firm.'71 Here it becomes clear that even if Yeats conceded that a play was outside his frame of reference and he appeared to be flinging it at the director (Robinson) with a challenge to stage it if he dare, there was no more to be said once he had signalled disapproval. Robinson was a skilled playwright himself, author of the ever-popular comedy The Whiteheaded Boy (1916) - a big hit in London in 1921 - but he was totally in awe of Yeats. So, in sending Yeats's critique topped and tailed he could only

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offer O'Casey mild encouragement: 'though I must agree with certain of these criticisms, I persist in finding the play very interesting. I have felt an attraction to all your work.'72 Robinson thought O'Casey had got the 'scenario' or shape of the play wrong and invited him to the Abbey to discuss it. In his reply O'Casey expressed great disappointment. Having re-read the play himself he found it 'in no way deserving the contemptuous dismissal' the critique implied.73 In this letter O'Casey acknowledged return of the text of The Crimson in the Tricolour. In later years when it could not be found he insisted that Robinson still had it, and even as late as 1958 poor Robinson was persuaded he had mislaid it.74 In fact, O'Casey also mentions re-reading the text in November 1924, at which point he saw 'no merit at all in it'.75 He nevertheless plundered it to create the Covey and Fluther in The Plough and the Stars.76 In his letter to Robinson on 9 October 1922 O'Casey added that he was well into another play entitled On the Run. This was to become The Shadow of a Gunman, his first success. Its roots lie in the unlikely setting of O Maolain's bed-sitting room in 35 Mountjoy ['Hilljoy'] Square, then a tenement.77 The two men got on very well. O'Casey's bed being 'a kind of stretcher which could easily be folded up by day and placed between the two windows in the room',78 he could clear a space for himself. He would rise early, 6 Maolain remembered, would tidy up and often sing a song by Burns, while making his breakfast. 'The soft, sweet voice he had would remind you of the song of a little robin.' 6 Maolain would lie in bed listening to the singing. 'One cold morning O'Casey called him and told him to get up and O Maolain retorted: Up in the morning's no for me, Up in the morning early; When a' the hills are covered wi' snaw, I'm sure it's winter fairly, (p. 3) 'And', says he, 'have you read Burns?' 'Do you think', says I back to him, 'that I never read anything?' Whereas 6 Maolain admired O'Casey and recognised his genius ('He knew Shakespeare by heart as well as he knew the Bible') he had the western peasant's suspicion of protestants, and saw O'Casey as 'once a black Orangeman'. On the other hand there is a story of O'Casey's washing his roommate's collection of holy statues, 'grimed and blackened by years of smoke from the open fire', and setting them out to dry in the yard. When he was seen doing this washing outside in the 'area' there were doubts among the neighbours about the 'propriety of submitting the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Virgin to a scrubbing in a basin of soapy water' and whether it was fitting that a protestant should do so.79 What O Maolain made of O'Casey the freethinker is hard to say, for he heard 'bits of Shaw out of his mouth more often than from any other "philosopher".' This 'odd couple' were doing fine until one night the Black-and-Tans arrived. Dorothy Macardle describes what a raid was like:

Going Through the Mill 135 The stopping of a lorry outside the house was the signal for the occupants hastily to throw on garments and rush to open the door, in the hope of being in time to prevent its being broken in. Then followed the rush of armed men upstairs and into every room, attic and cellar, swinging revolvers and shouting threats, the bursting open of cupboards, tearing up of floor boards and ripping of mattresses. If, as frequently happened, the raiders were drunk, or in a savage temper as the result of a recent ambush, shots would be fired through the walls and ceilings and breakables smashed. Any man found on the premises was in danger of being shot out of hand. Those taken away in lorries were sometimes shot dead and reported as "shot while attempting to escape." Articles looted from the raided houses were carried openly through the streets.80 35 Mountjoy Square was raided, O Maolain says, no less than eighteen times. He was somewhat used to raids. It was otherwise with O'Casey. Usually, he was gone all day, at work in the hall at 10 Langrishe Place, and when he came in, the two men would talk by the fire before going to bed. 'Because I had the reputation of being a native speaker [in the context, 'nationalist'] the neighbours around us thought that Sean was on the run and they would try to be gentle and kind to him. They would be happy to do any message for him so that he didn't have to go out too often in the streets. I don't know if he understood that at all, but that's how it was' (p. 4). 6 Maolain fails to report that on 21 March O'Casey received a 'notice to quit' from the landlord, one James Keegan: he was ordered to leave within a week.81 In The Shadow of a Gunman it is, of course, the O Maolain character Shields who receives the notice to quit, but Shields guesses it is because the landlord thinks Davoren is on the run: 'He's afraid of a raid, and that his lovely property'll be destroyed.'82 When the Black-and-Tans did arrive, then, in the early hours of Good Friday morning, 25 March 1921, there was every reason for O'Casey and O Maolain to be terrified. O Maolain, writing so many years later, and, who knows, perhaps with a score to settle, recalls O'Casey's terror but not his own when the paramilitaries broke down the front door with crowbars. They were actually after two Volunteers who lived in the house: again, everybody except O'Casey seemed to know about them and their being under surveillance. Now he was 'devastated [...] fear and trembling in human shape' (p. 6). He had the minutes of the ICA in the room, which Delia had given him for safe keeping. 6 Maolain saw what must be done. O'Casey must hide the book in a bag and in a quiet moment slip out of the house, get to Langrishe Hall (he would have had the key) and bury it under the floor boards there. It was now six o'clock, and the Black-and-Tans had been four-and-a-half hours in the house, having taken captive a resident who had enabled the escape of the two wanted men. His name was Fred Schweppe.83 Watching his chance, O'Casey got out of the house and later came back. O Maolain asked no questions. The raid ended with a surprise. The landlord, the said James Keegan, showed up and made all sorts of complaints about damage to his property. He steered the officer in charge into his adjoining

136 Sean O'Casey

carpentry shop to view the damage there and found his own son acting suspiciously. After a search five bombs were found. 'Oh, Lord! The tumult and commotion then! Soldiers being sent here and there. Sean O'Casey and I were in our room and three soldiers were put on the door' (p. 22). The landlord and his son were taken prisoner as 'guns, bombs, powder, everything', were found, "a regular awsenall", said a soldier carrying stuff out to another soldier (p. 24). The irony of the landlord's arrest was not something O'Casey chose to use either in his play or in the fanciful chapter in Irtish/alien, Fare Thee Well entitled The Raid'. The raid lasted fifteen or sixteen hours, throughout most of Good Friday. It is fascinating to think what comedy O'Casey made of the far-from-comic ordeal. 'Excitin' few moments, Mr. Davoren; Mrs. G. lost her head completely - panicstricken. But that's only natural, all women is very nervous.'84 So Adolphus Grigson swaggers his way past the humiliation of his own recent abasement, in the play that transforms O'Casey's experience. He left 6 Maolain's unsafe house within 'two or three weeks' (pp. 24-25), carrying with him the incipient writer's glorious dramatic store. Perhaps with one's landlord in Mountjoy a notice to quit may indeed be placed on the mantelpiece for a fortnight. Then the attraction of a room of one's own no doubt makes itself felt. In one of O'Casey's manuscript notes is the brief memo: 'Michael Mullen as a character in a play'.85 By 17 November 1922 he could write to Robinson at the Abbey: 'I have just completed "On the Run". It is a tragedy in two acts - at least I have called it so.'86 6 Maolain would not be invited to the opening night. The two men drifted apart. Like Mick, left at home, O Maolain must be left behind. Like Maire. Like Labour. O'Casey, a fiery gleam in his eye, was now about to re-invent himself. The long apprenticeship was at last over.

8

TELLING IT LIKE IT Is

n 10 April 1922 O'Casey submitted a new one-act play to the Abbey under the title The Seamless Coat of Cathleen. The fact that it was returned one week later suggests that Yeats did not need to be troubled this time, as Robinson spoke for him: The Directors and I have read your play and like a great deal of it - its humour and the element of phantasy in it. At the same time it is too definite a piece of propaganda for us to do it.'1 He should try Liberty Hall. Since leaving 6 Maolain's room at the end of March 1921, O'Casey was now living at 422 North Circular Road, a stone's throw from where he was born. The house, then a tenement, is still there and O'Casey's room much as it was.2 The room was let to him by one Mrs Kavanagh, who lived in the basement and whose son Jim was a friend. A ground-floor room in a run-down Georgian house with fine windows looking out onto a small front garden and the busy road beyond, this was where O'Casey was to settle for the next four years and where he was happily to write the three Dublin plays. In later times his study elsewhere was laid out in replica - a large, oval mahogany table (which travelled with him) littered with books and papers made room for his typewriter; shelves for more books; a good fireplace with an armchair to create a warm space for talk or meditation, and a stretcher bed were other essentials. It was 'a good nest, if it were not for the noise' (A, 2, 78). Yet if it were not for the noise, the constant interruption of neighbours and of the city just beyond the windows, the energy of the Dublin plays would be unthinkable. Delia Larkin had married on 8 February 1921 and with her husband Pat Colgan moved to a flat at 17 Gardiner Place. As she could not, for political reasons, renew her association with the Liberty Hall Players3 Robinson's hint that O'Casey should try them with The Seamless Coat of Cathleen was laughable, for O'Casey sided with Delia in all her differences with the ITGWU executive. It is not clear how long she continued with the workers' club in Langrishe Place, where O'Casey was caretaker, but it is unlikely she kept the project going after Jim's release from Sing Sing in January 1923. Then she founded another dramatic society, this time for Larkin's new Workers' Union of Ireland. By that

O

138 Sean O'Casey

time O'Casey had pledged himself to the Abbey and played no further part in Delia's plans. They remained friends, however, and he recalled with pleasure the meals he ate in her flat, 'cooked by her on a primus stove. She had a little library there, but the only book I can remember is Morris's "Songs for Socialists". The one fault of the flat she had (at the very top of the house) was that she kept the windows wide open, & the breeze would lift one's hair off one's head. [...] She had a mania for "fresh air" then - even though the "fresh air" flew first over the slums of Dublin.'4 The text of The Seamless Coat has not survived. O'Casey's story with the same title had already been published in Poblacht na h-Eireann, edited by Erskine Childers, with the tell-tale subtitle 'A Parable of the Ard Fheis'. This was a somewhat farcical account of the Sinn Fein convention held at the Mansion House on 22-23 February 1922 to discuss the Treaty recently passed by Dail Eireann but contested by de Valera and his republican supporters.5 O'Casey's text represented the debate on Irish unity. He uses the image in the Bible of the soldiers competing for Jesus' robe to explore the squabble to settle the division of Cathleen's 'Coat' likewise. The mode is allegory, the style Swiftian irony: the seamless coat 'has always been a little tight for the colleen. But it has been in the family now for a long time, and tradition has made it sacred. [...] Its close-fitting tightness hampers the free movement of her body, and the pressure of blood to the head makes original and independent thought impossible.'6 The joke is elaborated by the well-meaning interference of Cathleen's relatives, some of whom want the coat off while others want it on. She sits now in her little garden, lately the scene of much destruction [the Anglo-Irish War] but now peaceful, 'neater and newer and fresher, and ever so little bigger than before' (p. 246). In the new dispensation the republicans seeking to memorialise the 1916 martyrs are seen as 'vandals' who must be driven away by the police for carving names on the lovely (colonialist) trees in the garden. One voice encourages Cathleen to wear the coat even if it is too small for her, as it will stretch in time, while another voice reassures her she will feel a lot better when she gets her new under-skirt of Downing Street fabric with its 'alluring Canadian lace trimming' [Dominion status]. It might not be the right fit, 'but, sure, if you're not free, you'll feel free; and even if you don't feel free, you will be free: so it's all the same' (p. 246). Arthur Griffith in penetrable disguise urges young Cathleen to be of good cheer: 'I rocked you in your cradle, and if needs be I will lower you into your grave' (p. 247). In the end, left alone in the Celtic twilight Cathleen wonders what it might profit a nation 'to gain the shame of an Empire and lose its own soul'. And then she falls asleep. Published just a month after the convention, O'Casey's little fantasy clearly shows his republican sympathies. But it also reveals his satirical, fantasy-loving imagination. Presumably the play followed the same lines, developed from his early work for the Gaelic League magazine. When Robinson rejected the play O'Casey displayed his fixed determination not to be put down. He would be 'only too happy' to submit to the Abbey any further plays he might write, 'for that Theatre, the country, the National Gallery and the Botanic Gardens - with

Telling It Like It Is 139 certain Authors - are the only things I worship'.7 The Botanic Gardens come as a surprise. He was not worried because he knew by now that what was rejected could be recycled: this play was to reappear as Kathleen Listens In, updated for the Abbey stage in October 1923. It was a practice O'Casey became adept at. Around this time he wrote to Robinson: 'I am gathering together the material for "On the Run", and have actually started it.'8 There is a line in the finished text which supplies a key here to his procedures: 'I have no connection with the politics of the day, and I don't want to have any connection.'9 To O'Casey, such a position was untenable; to deny or seek to evade the point was to dwell in dangerous fantasy. He was undecided whether the better way to represent such a state of mind was by means of actual fantasy or by creating fantasising characters in a realistic environment. His sense of humour inclined him towards the former; the Abbey directors steered him towards the latter. It was a lucky steer for him. It allowed him to do justice to the reality around him. All that was currently happening in Dublin in 1922 was of crucial importance to O'Casey for his work. He listened when Jim Larkin spoke out against the Treaty in January, accusing the signatories of either self-interest or cowardice, in particular his old enemy Arthur Griffith.10 O'Casey moved through Dublin in exciting sympathy with the republicans gearing themselves to break the 'unholy compact', as Larkin called the Treaty. R.M. Fox, then a young Oxford student, visited Dublin in April 1922: I was a stranger to the city and Sean O'Casey quickly made himself my friend and guide. So I learned about Dublin and himself at the same time. He was generous with his time and help. My first impression was of a man in his thirties, of slight build, straight, with quick nervous movements, sensitive features and peering eyes. Very soon I noted his gift for incisive comment. [...] He suggested that we should go to the Fowler Hall in Parnell Square, then the headquarters of the Orange Lodge in Dublin. The city was in an angry, agitated mood, for the civil war was brewing and this dignified Georgian building had been seized by the Republicans to house Belfast refugees driven out of the shipyards and their homes during the "pogroms" of that period.11 O'Casey knew the Commandant and as Fox waited to be admitted to Fowler Hall addressed a man approaching, 'How are things shaping in your part of the country?' On hearing his doleful reply, O'Casey urged him to join the army and get arms. 'In a properly constituted state every man should be in the Army!' When they got inside the Hall O'Casey knew his way around and helped Fox interview the Belfast refugees. Then he told him the Commandant would need to see Fox's article before publication, because 'they have a store of ammunition in the basement and they are expecting attack at any moment. That's why we found it so hard to get in!'12 Continuing the grand tour, O'Casey took Fox to a Sinn Fein Court and thence to the Four Courts, taken over by

140 SednO'Casey the dissident IRA on that very day (13 April) as military headquarters. Here they had to be content with an outside view of the preparations for the siege which led to the open declaration of civil war in June. Fox formed the view that O'Casey was no pacifist. This was true but would soon change. The civil war began with the attack on the Four Courts on 28 June. Fowler Hall, where O'Casey had brought Fox, was burned down on the same day. The fighting in Dublin which cost Johnny Boyle (in Juno) his arm, 'in the fight in O'Connell Street', lasted eight days. Some 300 were wounded in reality, and 60 killed. The east side of O'Connell Street lay in ruins, wrecked, as the west side had been in 1916, by English guns.'13 Macardle here slyly refers to the fact that the Irish army was now being supplied by Britain. The term 'Irregulars', to refer to Republicans, first began to be used officially in July 1922, details which underpin the politics of Juno, set in that year. In the general election which had taken place on 16 June the Treaty was democratically endorsed, and the Labour Party, gaining seventeen seats, allied with Cumann na nGaedheal, the Treatyites. In a sense, that finished O'Casey's regard for Labour in Ireland. Hence the satirical portrait of Jerry Devine in Juno. Meanwhile he wrote On the Run while the civil war raged. What he observed began to alter his views. 'Every thinker', he wrote to Robinson in October, 'has a contempt - more or less for organised opinion; but he may have a decided regard for organised action. I know Republican philosophers who have a supreme contempt for the organised opinion of the Free State, but who have, when bullets are flying about, a wholesome regard for that opinion in action.'14 It is likely that the new revulsion from the violence growing by the day found its way into the new play, even though it was set in 1920, during the Anglo-Irish War. For example: Davoren: I remember the time when you yourself believed in nothing but the gun. Seumas: Ay, when there wasn't a gun in the country; I've a different opinion now when there's nothin' but guns in the country. (CP, 1, 131) He finished On the Run on 17 November and sent it to the Abbey on the 28th. This time the news was good, though delayed: Robinson announced Yeats's approval on 26 February 1923, later recalled as 'one of the most pleasant letters I ever got in my life: "We will be very pleased to produce your play in a month's time, and shall be very grateful if you would come down and assist in the rehearsals and on Wednesday night come down to the theatre to be introduced to Lady Gregory."'15 O'Casey's replied to Robinson: I am something of a Stoic - or think I am - but I rejoiced with exceeding great joy when I received your letter telling me that you liked "On the Run", that Mr Yeats liked it and that Lady Gregory would probably like it too. My joy should certainly be full if the play should be produced before the season ends. I have to thank you again for your great kindness to me; you are certainly democratic aristocrats in the Abbey.16

Telling It Like It Is 141 The play was to be staged at the end of the season on Thursday 12 April, for three nights only and a matinee on Saturday. It was a cautious decision by the directorate. The change of title to The Shadow of a Gunman (Robinson's decision) was a good idea, serving to underline the duplicitous, Playboy element in the play. The author's simultaneous decision to bill himself for the first time as 'Sean O'Casey' (he was known at the Abbey as 'Casey') was, likewise, a good omen.

The Shadow of a Gunman made a bigger impact than anything the Abbey directors could have expected. During 1922 Robinson as manager had been very actively pursuing a subsidy once the new government signalled in alarm its unwillingness actually to take over the preferred theatre. He drafted a lengthy appeal which he sent to Yeats on 24 April,17 and six months later sent to Lady Gregory for approval a lengthy statement to the government. This petition declared that the time had come 'when the responsibility of the Theatre should be borne by the State.'18 Robinson went on to ask for £2,000, including £500 for 'repairs and renewals', and asked further that the Abbey be publicly recognised by the Government as being the National Theatre of Ireland. In return 'the Directors would undertake to do everything in their power to foster the growth of a Gaelic Theatre.' No doubt this clause was directed at the Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe, known to favour the restoration of the national language. Less inspired was the agreement to 'accept any reasonable method of supervision by the Government that [it] might desire', which was an open invitation to appoint a censor. Nothing happened for a time. In the meantime the Northern playwright (and former manager of the Abbey) St John Ervine announced in his weekly column in the Observer that 'the collapse of the Irish Dramatic Renaissance is complete.'19 Cue for O'Casey to save the theatre on both grounds, the financial and the artistic. But there was still, and with as much fierceness and danger as ever, the political threat. Towards the end of March 1923 there was an attempt by the IRA to close the Abbey and all Dublin theatres in support of their declaration of a period of mourning for those republicans executed by the government (77 in 1922-23) and for those imprisoned (about 12,000) .20 Robinson - never good at these things - failed to take the order seriously until he found that other Dublin theatres were closing. Then he contacted Yeats, now a senator in the Free State government. That man of action saw to it that the army arrived, that the Abbey should stay open and that a military guard was provided at all entrances. As Yeats himself was considered a target, the guard on the theatre was thereafter maintained. When Lady Gregory journeyed up from Coole to see the Gunman she found that Yeats was even more under threat because he had refused Maud Gonne McBride's request to intervene on behalf of Mary MacSwiney (then on hungerstrike), resulting in the arrest of both Maud Gonne and Iseult and their imprisonment in Kilmainham. Thus had the civil war divided even mythical

142 Sean O'Casey

lovers. At the theatre Lady Gregory found an armed guard and in the green room a soldier helping the actor Tony Quinn with his Black-and-Tan costume and showing him how to hold his revolver. In the programme Robinson, who directed the play, had inserted a note: 'During the second act the sounds customary during a raid by the Auxiliaries are heard.' This was to allay audience fears at the noise of gunfire, still commonplace in the Dublin streets. In fact, there was a bomb scare in a nearby cinema on the morning following the premiere of the Gunman. The civil war was soon to end, but during the four performances of the play audiences were bowled over by O'Casey's removal of any barrier between reality and illusion. Billed as a tragedy, the Gunman was accompanied by a one-act comedy, Sovereign Love, an Abbey favourite by T.C. Murray. It was common practice at this time to have a full bill: even three-act plays had a curtain raiser or afterpiece. In spite of the billing the Gunman was skilfully played as a tragi-comedy. In production, everything depends on the balance sustained by the actors playing the two roles based on O Maolain and O'Casey himself as the lodger. Seumas Shields as the comic figure is likely to run away with the play unless the Davoren figure is strongly enough cast to inject (through his relationship with Minnie Powell) a genuinely tragic force into the action. With F.J. McCormick as Shields the Abbey production was tilted in the direction of comedy (for Arthur Shields was not his match as Davoren). The audience chose to view the play as some form of comic relief from the horror of civil war realities all around them daily, in the streets and the newspapers. The critic for the Evening Herald, Frank J. Hugh O'Donnell, himself a playwright, saw exactly what the play meant for the audience 'squirming with laughter and revelling boisterously in the satire' of the best play at the Abbey for some time. 'It was brilliant, truthful, decisive.' It was a 'revelation' also for its unconventional construction - which is actually Chekhovian in its downplaying of plot - but above all for the convincing characterisation. 'Out of small materials [O'Casey] pieced together the most genuine comedy [sic] that I think I have ever seen.'21 McCormick's 'amazing' performance established this view of the play, 'one of the greatest pieces of character acting that has ever been done upon the Abbey stage. Each gesture, each bewildered look, each inflection of his voice served to get out every atom of satire and wit that was compounded in his [Shields's] philosophy.'22 The 7mA Times concurred, and urged O'Casey to call the play a satire rather than a tragedy. Lady Gregory, commenting in her Journals, said 'all the political points [were] taken up with delight by a big audience.'23 It may be true that in the Gunman O'Casey 'brings his characters to life with a realism that amounts to libel',24 for Lennox Robinson was disturbed when O'Casey told him in rehearsal that all the characters were 'taken literally from life'. Would they, Robinson wondered, 'come to the back-pit, recognize themselves and wreck the theatre?' O'Casey assured him that this would not happen: his people did not frequent theatres. However, 'he named the pubs in which they would inevitably be found.'25 There was always an element of the cartoonist about his dramatic style, so that a real figure usually lurked behind

Telling It Like It Is 143 the fictional.26 But it is the life of the fictional figure which is significant, not the identity of the original. If Chekhov, whom he had lately discovered, showed him the way to put real life on stage with a subtext the Irish tradition of storytelling showed him how to present the absurdity of life through the comic duo. In June 1922 O'Casey's translation of an Irish short story was published under the tide 'The Corncrake'. It concerns two men who never stop quarrelling over ridiculous topics. They are contrasted physically, one being short and fat, the other tall and thin. They trade insults and conduct an irresolvable cath cainte, or war of words.27 The point of the story is that two fools are taken in by a delusion. O'Casey delighted in the farcical deceit of this duo, whose place in the community is tolerated and yet satirised.28 He found it so amusing that he made it the basic design not only of the Davoren-Shields quarrels, but also of the Mr Gallogher-Mrs Henderson and Adolphus Grigson-Mrs Grigson exchanges. Such figures could only be tolerated in the community for the delight their contradictions supply. O'Casey's subsequent plays make such characters the foolish chorus of a mad world. The addition of Minnie Powell adds the serious, potentially tragic dimension to the Gunman, once the political situation is established of a fierce guerilla war raging off-stage. The miracle lies in the shift from the blatantly propagandist action of The Harvest Festival, where scenes are constantly hampered for lack of a contrasting duo, to a naturalistic, easy and fluid dramatic action which provides a metaphor for the chaos that was Dublin. The fledgling poet Austin Clarke said at this time: 'It seems to me that a self-destructive period is beyond the expression of verse. [. . .] If one were purely a dramatist and sufficiently aloof one might be able to study the amazing maelstrom [. . .] that has swept the people of every shade of opinion and transformed quiet citizens into bloody-minded disciples of force.'29 It was this 'aloofness' which was O'Casey's greatest strength as writer of Ireland's tragicomedy. Overnight he had reinvigorated the declining Abbey drama. St John Ervine would have to eat his doomsday words. Yet on opening night the Abbey was less than half full. O'Casey himself saw the Gunman from the wings because of his eyesight. Called before the audience for the first time in his life as playwright he made his bow. Lady Gregory brought him into the stalls for the other two nights, and on the last night there was the largest audience since the first night of Shaw's Blanco Posnet in 1909 and many had to be turned away. Two seats had been kept for Yeats and me, but I put Casey in one of them and sat in the orchestra for the first act, and put Yeats in the orchestra for the second.'30 This was the first meeting O'Casey had with Yeats, whom he did not recognise when the great man took the seat vacated by Lady Gregory.31 As O'Casey was very pleased with the production perhaps they discussed the performances. He had much more to say to Lady Gregory, with whom he felt an immediate rapport. When she took him outside to show him the crowd waiting in vain to get in on Saturday night he told her about his father and his books and his own love of the Bible, although he had now 'lost belief in religious forms'. He appreciated her encouragement of his

144 Sean O'Casey

work, and added: 'All the thought in Ireland for years past has come through the Abbey. You have no idea what an education it has been to the country.' And this, together with the good audience for the last week of the Abbey's season, put her in 'great spirits'.32 But if O'Casey thought his fortune was made he had a rude awakening. The Abbey was two years away from obtaining a government subsidy; meantime, the wolves were at the door. The box office receipts for the brief run of the Gunman amounted to £120-9s. Id. of which O'Casey got £4-18s. 8d.33 There was no advance payment. Johnny Perrin, the secretary, told him that the Abbey had no money in the bank. When his cheque eventually arrived O'Casey, expecting £20, was bitterly disappointed. Because the season was now over the Gunman would have to wait until August before being shown again, a few days at a time within the repertory system. While sending in his earlier plays O'Casey had been on the dole, receiving two-and-sixpence a day;34 he was not much better off now as a success, even though his weekly rent was only five shillings. An Abbey writer received only five per cent of the weekly takings at the Abbey (£100 on average). Although he had told Perrin that no one ought to enter without paying,35 as an Abbey playwright O'Casey now received free passes and began to attend every production. The place became for him another sort of club like SLOT or, before that, the Gaelic League branch in Drumcondra. He would regularly linger in the vestibule to talk to writers and critics and then go backstage to the green room to talk to the actors, several of whom became close friends. In his mind he would cast them in his future plays. Dublin was then a closely-knit, gossipy community with a Restoration love of theatre, of which its Pepys was the Abbey's architect Joseph Holloway. This inveterate first-nighter and diarist noted seeing O'Casey at the Gunman on 14 April: The author is a thin-faced, sharp-profiled man with streaky hair, and wore a trench coat and a soft felt hat. He followed his play closely and laughed often, and I was told he was quietmannered almost to shyness, and very interesting in his views.'36 Holloway met him for the first time two weeks later, when O'Casey came in, met the actor M.J. Dolan, and began to discuss with him the manuscript of The Crimson in the Tricolour, in which Dolan was interested. Holloway knew nothing of these negotiations, and instead drew O'Casey out on his opinions and beliefs. There were to be many more such encounters, which Holloway carefully recorded in his monumental diary, which runs to 221 volumes in the NLI. O'Casey was eventually to call him 'the dung beetle of the literary world of Ireland',37 but Holloway is an invaluable guide to the theatre of his time. Soon after the Gunman's triumph Robinson invited O'Casey to dinner at the Arts Club and afterwards to meet Yeats at his new home in Merrion Square. Unaware that they had already met, Robinson added: 'You would like him, I think, and he wants to meet you.' O'Casey had previously promised to dine with Robinson, 'so please don't invent reasons for refusing!'38 Robinson was a kindly but wily man, intellectually O'Casey's inferior but superior in sophistication and knowledge of contemporary theatre. As playwright he had an international

Telling It Like It Is 145 reputation. He helped O'Casey a good deal, lent him books, encouraged him to attend the productions of the Dublin Drama League (which performed the latest foreign plays at the Abbey on Sunday and Monday nights), and coached him in dramaturgy. It may be that Robinson was too helpful, patronising in ways which were eventually to cause O'Casey to turn against him. Robinson found him, surprisingly, 'a gentle, charming man, loving country things, birds and flowers but forced to live in a wretched tenement' though 'in spite of his poverty he had managed to surround himself with books.'39 O'Casey accepted the dinner invitation, which was changed to the Moira Hotel, Trinity Street, at 7 p.m. Sympathising with O'Casey's dietary problems Robinson consoled: 'I hope to have another friend there [possibly George Russell] who also eats no meat so you'll have company in your abstinence!'40 O'Casey was not an habitual vegetarian but he never ate much meat and on going out he might eat only the vegetables on the menu. Alas, it is not known what was talked about at this interesting table. It is to be hoped that Robinson did not raise the subject of The Crimson in the Tricolour once again, as he had done in his letter of 30 April. He had heard that MJ. Dolan was interested (for there can be no secrets in theatrical Dublin) and had no objection to its production: 'if it has been re-written I would like to have had another chance at doing it officially at the Abbey.'41 A rebuke. In the event Dolan, a cautious man, having read the play to McCormick and Shields rejected it on 7 May as potentially damaging to O'Casey.42 But when O'Casey resubmitted the play to Robinson the gossipy Holloway recorded the complicated reaction to this apprentice work: 'As originally written, Dolan found it impossible. The first scene was outside a convent with people spouting socialism for no earthly reason. Dolan suggested if he [O'Casey] wanted his characters to spout such stuff, the bar of a pub would be the most likely setting. O'Casey has acted on his suggestions and made one of his scenes take place in a pub.' Dolan also told him to look to his construction, and recommended Robinson's The Whiteheaded Boy as a model. 'O'Casey takes kindly to advice,' the diarist concluded.43 They scarcely knew their man. He scarcely knew their malice. The Crimson in the Tricolour sank without trace in August, when Lady Gregory had a final look at it. She read it to Jack B. Yeats at Coole and he, like Dolan, found it impossible, 'a topical play that has missed its point'.44 A few days later on 6 August the Gunman opened the new season at the Abbey. It was now accompanied by Robinson's comedy in one act, Crabbed Youth and Age, and proved very popular, being revived in regular bursts. Yet the royalties amounted to less than £30 for 1923. But here was a topical play that had hit its target exactly. Writing in the Observer in February 1924 Robinson commented: I thought that much of its [initial] success might be due to the fact that the author was giving expression to the audience's feelings with regard to our civil war, which at that time was still being waged. But in days of peace the play has the same success - it filled the theatre all last week - which I must

146 Sean O'Casey

attribute to its veracity. It can hardly be classed as a realistic play, for it is so little arranged, so little "constructed" - and realistic plays seem always to depend for their effect so much on construction and selection of incident and character.45 The author of The Victory of Sinn Fein-went a little deeper into the same point. He saw the Gunman less as a topical than as a truly historical play, 'for Mr O'Casey records things as they were, but records them with that air of detachment and disillusionment which the historian aims at. [...] If he had written his play three years ago it would have been full of noble heroes and bloody ruffians, whereas now it is full of human beings, the only unnatural and unbelievable characters in it being those of the gunman hero and of the Auxiliary ruffian.' It was thus a play which 'gets back at the heroes [...] a play of disillusion for a people who have been disillusioned, and can take their disillusionment without bitterness'.46 The actuality of this contemporary mood is similarly commented on by Todd Andrews, who had fought his way through the civil war: 'The real damage to the nation was the intense bitterness and hatreds created by the split. The nation suffered a psychological wound which was largely unhealed until the second World War.'47 Thus O'Casey's play reached its first audiences less as a play about 1920 than one about current trauma. It was a kind of purgation, a form of healing applied to the 'psychological wound'. O'Casey's gift was for a telling of the tragic truth 'aslant' through comedy.

Before moving on to Juno, the play set in the civil war period, O'Casey submitted two one-act plays to the Abbey. The Cooing of Doves, submitted on 23 August, was rejected one month later. The text has disappeared, but it may be inferred that it was set in a public house, since O'Casey says it was later inserted undetected into the script of the Plough (act 2): 'It went in with but a few minor changes.'48 Therefore, it was a farcical debate on socialism versus nationalism. The format was clearly influenced by Dolan's suggestion to set The Crimson in the Tricolour in a bar.49 The Abbey thought less of The Cooing of Doves, however, than of Kathleen Listens In, submitted on 30 August and accepted for a triple bill on 1 October. This one-act was based on the story The Seamless Coat of Kathleen, described above, but with the inter-party conflict cast in the form of the wooing of Cathleen O'Houlihan by the Man in the Kilts (a Gaelic Leaguer), the Free Stater, the Republican, the Farmer and the Business Man. The title was updated, for '1923 fell within the exciting period of crystal sets, cats' whiskers, and headphones. It was the era of 2LO.'50 Fallon, who played in it, claimed it was 'Brecht before Brecht', as O'Casey attended rehearsals 'and sang the songs for us as he would like them to be sung; but try as we might we couldn't hope to reproduce the sting with which the author himself invested his lines.'51 Kathleen Listens In was poorly received, in spite of the outstanding cast (of fourteen!). The audience did not seem to 'get' the fantasy elements, or the droll humour; for example when the Doctor calls for 'peace and quietness' for Cathleen,

Telling It Like It Is 147 overwhelmed by suitors, he is told, 'Oh, be heavens, she's sure to get it too! If peace came we'd all die a sudden death!'52 The Irish Times found the play 'mystifying'.53 To other reviewers the satire was too obvious. Only Susan Mitchell in the Irish Statesman appreciated its fantastic and allegorical qualities, and concluded: 'Casey is not Shaw, but he has a lively mind and no bitterness, and though a guffaw so near tragedy as we are just now may offend the taste of some, others will find it salutary.'54 This came near to O'Casey's own Puck-like attitude towards the play 'written specifically to show what fools these mortals were in the quarrelling factions soaking Ireland in anxiety and irritation after the Civil War'.55 Insulted by the reception of the one-act in dead silence he left the Abbey quickly, the actor Fallon noticed, 'his cheeks burning with the shame of the play's reception, in no mood to meet anyone'.56 Gabriel Fallon, born in Dublin in 1898, was educated by the Christian Brothers in North Richmond Street, before entering the civil service. He joined the Abbey company as part-time actor early in 1921 and in due course appeared in The Shadow of a Gunman as Mr Gallogher. Tall and ruggedly handsome, Fallon had a very good voice, deep, vibrant and quintessentially Dublin in intonation: perfect for the plays of O'Casey. He was captivated by theatre, studied it intensely, and equipped himself to be a professional critic, an adjudicator at amateur drama festivals, and in the fulness of time a member of the Abbey Board. He and O'Casey were close friends from 1923 until 1946, when a serious falling-out took place. But even after they fell out, O'Casey's view of Fallon remained in some respects positive: 'when I knew him, he had a sharp mind, a hearty sense of humor, knew a great deal about literature, had a fine memory - in fact had many gifts, and I thought he would become a clever writer.'57 As friend and mentor Fallon replaced Frank Cahill, now a TD in the government and opposed to O'Casey's politics. Fallon and O'Casey would meet in the Abbey green room after a show, or for coffee in the Broadway Soda Fountain Parlour on O'Connell Street, a favourite haunt of Abbey folk. Then they would walk home together, continuing their discussions of theatre and drama, up Dorset Street to Whitworth Road and back to 422 North Circular Road, where O'Casey's room lay in a 'respectable' tenement, Fallon noted like a good Dubliner, with its hall door closed by landlord's orders.58 To prove himself to the Abbey audience which had scorned his Kathleen O'Casey now began work on Juno and thePaycock. He had been pondering the material, for he told Holloway on 10 September about recent raids by rogue elements in the Free State army with scores to settle. 'Last week he was awakened out of his sleep with hands pulling the sheet off him, and a light full in his eyes, and three revolvers pointed out. He was hauled out of bed and roughly handled, as they queried his name, etc.' They were after a young man who had shot one of their own. O'Casey was to describe his fate in the autobiographies as the Free State forces exacted swift revenge:

148 SednO'Casey

-Jesus! whimpered the half-dead lad, yous wouldn't shoot an old comrade, Mick! The Colonel's arm holding the gun shot forward suddenly, the muzzle of the gun, tilted slightly upwards, splitting the lad's lips and crashing through his shattering teeth. - Be Jasus! We would, he said, and then he pulled the trigger. (A, 2, 91) In his conversation with Holloway O'Casey described something more in the style of a 'punishment beating' which left the young man barely recognisable next day. What leaps out of this account is the detail of the young IRA man 'being taken in the middle of the night [...] and brought out towards Finglas'. Here was the germ of Juno and the Pay cock, which opens with Mary Boyle reading from a newspaper about Robbie Tancred's end: 'On a little bye-road, out beyant Finglas, he was found.' As O'Casey commented to Holloway, 'Such brutality demoralises a country.'59 It was out of that sense of moral outrage that the action of Juno was conceived. The idea of the Boyle legacy and all its melodramatic possibilities, although stemming from a real case O'Casey knew of in 1921, was grafted on later. As Fallon recalled: 'He had been telling me for some time about a play he had mapped out, a play which would deal with the tragedy of a crippled I.R.A. man, one Johnny Boyle. He mentioned this play many times and always it was the tragedy of Johnny. I cannot recall that he once spoke about Juno or Joxer or the Captain; always Johnny.'60 Indeed, as he wrote the play O'Casey included an off-stage scene in act 3 depicting Johnny's assassination which was cut in rehearsal. It is unlikely that he was 'aggrieved' at this, as Fallon claimed, since he never included the scene in the published text: (They go out leading Johnny) During the last few sentences, the room has been growing darker, and darker, till it disappears, to give place to a lonely, narrow boreen on the hip of one of the Dublin mountains. It is pitch dark; the hedge is scarcely perceptible, except for its darker silhouette. A few stars are faintly showing in a clouded sky. An hour has gone by. A motor is heard coming rapidly along, stopping some distance away. After a pause, some figures emerge from the darkness on left, and slowly cross to the right.

Voice of Johnny: Are yous goin' to do in a comrade - look at me arm, I lost it for Ireland. Voice of Irregular. Commandant Tancred lost his life for Ireland. Voice of Johnny: Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on me! Mother o' God, pray for me - be with me now in the agonies o' death! . . . Hail, Mary, full o' grace . . . the Lord is ... with Thee. (They pass out of sight [sic]) A pause; then several shots are heard, followed by a cry; then silence again. Figures cross the stage from right to left; the motor is heard starting, and moving away, the sound growing fainter in the distance. The scene gradually brightens, till the room of the Boyles is again revealed. The most of the furniture is gone. Mary and Mrs Boyle, one on each side, are sitting in a darkened room, by the fire: it is an hour later.61

Telling It Like It Is 149 Juno was submitted to the Abbey on 28 December. It was thus written inside three months, which is extraordinary. Ronald Ayling attests that there were three versions, now in private hands: a manuscript entitled 'Juno and the Peacock', with notes and full drafts for acts 1 and 2; a typescript of act 2, using the phonetic Taycock' in the title and the subtitle 'Rough Copy'; a typescript draft of the three acts. Johnny's final scene made it into the latter, while other possibilities, such as Captain Boyle's having an eye for one Julia Jennins', to Juno's annoyance, were cut and names of characters changed (the Captain was first Billy Kelly, Joxer was Andy Murphy). The remarkable thing is how quickly and surely O'Casey reshaped his original idea into a many-layered tragicomedy. He told the scribbler Holloway that the comedy of life appealed to him most. When he read Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilks he stayed awake all night crying. 'It had a surprising effect on him though he is not a sentimental fellow.'62 To a degree, he used the story of Tess in Juno, in part a tale of seduction and betrayal. (But he said nothing to Holloway of his sister Bella, whose real-life tragedy had for him been the equal of anything in Hardy's fiction.) He was temperamentally at odds with pure tragedy. Not for him the Yeatsian axiom, 'We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.'63 He had to have joy, colour, hope, laughter and song in his life and therefore in the lives of his imagined characters. Juno is the best-constructed of all of O'Casey's plays. Some of the credit must go to Robinson, a master craftsman who tried to get him trained in the writing of the so-called 'well-made play'. Following Dolan's advice O'Casey read The Whiteheaded Boy, describing it as 'a glorious work' and expressing envy for 'every word' of it.64 In turn, when Robinson wrote a short handbook on playmaking he invoked Juno as a model of a good opening: In five minutes or so, Sean O'Casey has "planted" four of the chief protagonists [sic] in his drama. Nothing they do or say is extraneous to the plot. We get his scene, a slum room (producer's business and wardrobe-mistress's and property-man's), we get that the scene is laid in Dublin by the accent of the players (players' business); we get Juno's character, worried over her thriftless husband but a good anxious mother; we get Mary, a little vain, a little selfish; we get Johnny, we suspect something from his nervousness, his reaction to the reading of the details of the assassination; we get vigorous young Jerry Devine; we have talk about the Paycock and his wastrel friend Joxer - though we have not yet seen them their shadows have already fallen quite distinctly across the play - and all this has been done in a few minutes of superb stage-craft. Most of the main ingredients which go to the making of the play are here [...]; in short, it is difficult to think of a better example of a theme being more perfectly and economically enunciated, there is not a superfluous word in the dialogue, everything is pregnant with meaning, even the sausages which Juno brings in for the Paycock's breakfast are going to play an important part later on.65

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Robinson's admiration shows us that Juno was the sort of play the Abbey preferred. There are three plots, all neatly dovetailed, while at the same time the impression is created of life drifting and unfolding. O'Casey's own interest, however, lay considerably less in structure than in characterisation, language and theme. He delighted in the Captain and Joxer, irresponsible though they are, and took a savage delight also in exposing on the one hand the pretensions of the socially respectable Bentham and on the other the limitations of Jerry Devine, 'a type, becoming very common now [sic] in the Labour Movement, of a mind knowing enough to make the mass of his associates, who know less, a power, and too little to broaden that powerfor the benefit ofal£.Q6 That 'now' indicates the force of O'Casey's dissatisfaction with the Labour movement. His article published in the Irish Statesman in December 1923 shows clearly his bitterness on this theme. There he deplored the ignorance of the 'present-day Trade Unionist' and his failure to learn that 'self-realisation is more important than class-consciousness'. To learn is the worker's greatest need, if the people of Ireland are going to be more than 'a race of fools during an election, and a race of madmen during a civil war'.67 The social apathy and parasitic natures of Captain Boyle and Joxer are illuminated by the inadequacies of the likes of Jerry Devine to alter them. In the vacuum created by the civil war and the failure of the workers' revolution there are only Juno's common sense and rich humanity. Her 'What can God do agen the stupidity o' men!' is an exclamation rather than a question, a gesture against the maledominated politics of the day.68 O'Casey was now able to embody such ideas in three-dimensional characters. The result was Chekhovian naturalism, marking his advance past Synge's style of realism, for to him 'Chekhov seems to let his characters speak as they please and get them into his play's scheme.'69 O'Casey's use of language raises a similar issue: art or nature? On the one hand, it is argued, the urban Dubliners' speech is (or was) particularly lively and characteristically peppered with malapropisms and puns, available for O'Casey to record; on the other hand, his successful stage speech drew, and to a lesser degree continues to draw, attention back to the similar strengths of actual Dublin dialect (if the speech can be so described). Thus when Kevin C. Kearns in his oral history allows several older folk to comment on the liveliness of Dublin speech in days gone by, each witness ends up relating the actual speech to O'Casey's humorous exploitation of it in his plays, e.g. T've absolutely no doubt that Sean O'Casey didn't invent a single thing. All he did was keep his ears open. Because when I go to the Abbey or the Gaiety and I see an O'Casey play I hear all the Americans and the Irish bursting their sides laughing at the way they [the characters] mangle the English language. Well, I was listening to it every day! It's totally authentic.'70 Flattering though such evidence is to the native wit of Dubliners it rather leaves out of account that O'Casey was a native Dubliner himself, not short of invention. Colbert Kearney has emphasised what he calls the 'the glamour of grammar', the interest of an oral culture in a literary one, as the Dublin working class formed a love of fine expression through public speeches, sermons and popular drama using some aristocratic

Telling It Like It Is 151 speech. The characters who possess this dangerous glamour, such as Donal Davoren in the Gunman, or Charles Bentham in Juno, speak a language admired by the less well educated, a language which also deceives and deludes. The wit, the 'vandalisation' of language by the ordinary Dublin people, derives from a comic aping of one's betters, as when Captain Boyle refers to his 'attackey case' and his 'dockyments'.71 In the Plough, all the working-class characters except the Covey fall captive to the rhetoric of the high-toned Figure in the Window. O'Casey's language is never as innocent as it looks on the page. It is shot through at all times with historical, cultural and political implications. In production, the language has to show (or expose) these registers and betrayals. It cannot be played straight. It engages ironically with its own origins. In the first production of Juno at the Abbey this authenticity was provided by an unsurpassable cast, who were themselves Dubliners capable of responding to the layers of tone and meaning to be found in O'Casey's mainly comic style. Sara Allgood, back from an ill-fated sojourn in Australia and New Zealand (where her husband died), triumphed in the role of Juno. She was to play it as the undisputed owner for twenty years. Barry Fitzgerald, likewise, the original Captain Boyle, was definitive; F.J. McCormick lent Joxer closely observed detail, while his fiancee Eileen Crowe was perfect casting as Mary Boyle. All the other roles were equally well cast - Arthur Shields as Johnny, Maureen Delany as Mrs Madigan, Gabriel Fallon as Charles Bentham. Even the small part of Needle Nugent was given to a major Dublin actor, Michael J. Dolan (who had recently succeeded Robinson as manager and who also directed Juno). There was not a weak spot in the acting,' said the 7mA Times. Tt probably attained the most level standard of good work that has been witnessed on the Abbey stage of late.'72 On opening night, the actors were called back so often 'that in the end the exhausted stage-hands left the curtain up for good'.73 On Friday 7 March Lady Gregory came up by train from Galway and went with Yeats to Juno, 'a wonderful and terrible play of futility, of irony, humour, tragedy'. The house was packed - the manager had to find a chair for James Stephens - with long queues outside. She met O'Casey in the green room. 'He is very happy. I asked him to come to tea after the next day['s] matinee as I had brought up a barmbrack for the players.' Maybe it was the thought of the barmbrack. O'Casey declined and elaborating his excuse said that he would be 'working with cement, and that takes such a long time to get off. He was useless at making excuses. For Lady Gregory immediately said, 'But after that?' Well, then, 'I have to cook my dinner. I have but one room and I cook for myself since my mother died.' All the more reason, one would have thought, to accept a free dinner or even high tea. But he disliked dining out, having 'a delicate palate'74 and also being naturally uncertain of the necessary social graces. In compensation he gushed outrageously. T owe a great deal to you and Mr. Yeats and Mr. Robinson, but to you above all. You gave me encouragement. And it was you who said to me upstairs in the office -1 could show you the very spot where you stood - "Mr. O'Casey [yet she always, like Yeats, called him 'Casey'], your gift is characterisation". And so I threw over my theories and

152 SednO'Casey worked at characters, and this is the result.'75 Little did he suspect that his every word would go straight into Lady Gregory's Journals the next day. Between Holloway on the one side and Lady Gregory on the other he was, in Dublin parlance, being nicely 'chronicled'. Yet he must have been pleased to hear Lady Gregory's remark to Yeats, This is one of the evenings at the Abbey that makes me glad to have been born.' He was obviously meant to hear it. Although he dodged the green-room party next afternoon he met Lady Gregory again at the (Saturday) evening performance - another full house and had to agree to attend Yeats's Monday evening on 10 March. Unlike Captain Boyle, he was unable to invent a job in Killester which might excuse him. Lady Gregory says both Russell (JE) and Gogarty were at Yeats's soiree, and this may have been the first time O'Casey met them. He had already contributed to the Irish Statesman and JE wanted him to do more articles like his 'Life and Literature' piece.76 (O'Casey was soon observed purchasing AL's Collected Poems in Webb's second-hand book store.77) The talk, Lady Gregory noted, was 'scattered', concerning events of the day. 'Casey, sheltering by me, interested me most. Yeats explained that the long debates and delay in the Fishery Bill in the Senate had all been caused by the incompetence of the Minister for Fisheries, who had given wrong statistics. Casey asked if he had been dismissed, and could not understand why not, when a labourer found incompetent would be turned out of his job.' No doubt, he silently recalled his sacking by the GNR. At the risk of annoying Yeats, he then insisted that no political reconciliation was possible until the present government was put out. It is not known what Yeats's reply was but he 'had a way of looking at you', O'Casey's friend Fallon noted, 'as if he did not see you. His glance seemed to penetrate and go beyond you as if he were intently examining your aura which had somehow slipped round to the back of your neck.'78 When Gogarty came in, 'he did not find a congenial audience and talk flagged' until Lady Gregory got him to tell once again, like Synge's Playboy, his oft-repeated story of his escape from IRA kidnappers by plunging into the Liffey and swimming to safety.79 'When the others were talking of Hashish, Casey told me he had been all but shot in the Rising.' Two could play at Gogarty's game, and O'Casey elaborated his story of a miraculous escape from certain execution by British soldiers. 'But someone fired a shot that just missed their Captain, and they ran to see where it came from, and I ran for my life through the fields and escaped.'80 He also told her he was studying art now and had bought some books on painting. She found it an interesting evening. On the strength of it and of her warming to O'Casey she would soon invite him to Coole. One of the more interesting comments to come from the reviewers of Juno was that 'Democracy has at last become articulate on both sides of the curtain.'81 In view of the riots which were to greet O'Casey's next major play the comment is ironic. What the reviewer William J. Lawrence82 had in mind was the defeat by popular acclaim of Yeats's lofty hopes for a poetic, elitist theatre and, by the same token, of Synge's peasant drama and Lady Gregory's historical drama. What 'the great public hungers after', he continued, is not

Telling It Like It Is 153 any of these but 'the drama of palpitating city life'. O'Casey's plays to date had proved the point. Lawrence was using O'Casey to counter Yeats's solemn case against modern realism. In the famous Open Letter to Lady Gregory in 1919 Yeats lamented the failure of the Abbey to form the anti-modernist theatre he had set out to establish, mournfully conceding that the result was 'a People's Theatre'.83 But now O'Casey was the acclaimed author of a new 'people's theatre', which, however financially important, could never altogether have Yeats's approval. He sent O'Casey an invitation to his Monday 'at-home' for 31 March, when there would be a production of At the Hawk's Well, 'with masks, costumes and music by Edmund Dulac'. The gathering was to be 'quite informal' though arty. Yeats added, 'No day passes without my hearing praise of your play.'84 The production of At the Hawk's Well was organised by the Dublin Drama League for two nights, Sunday and Monday. O'Casey found himself among an audience 'dressed in their evening best, the men immaculate in shiny sober black, the women gay and glittering in silk sonorous, and brilliant brocade' and felt that they 'were uncomfortable with a tenement-dweller in their midst' (A, 2, 232-33). Yeats at his most solicitous wheeled an armchair to the front of the drawing-room in deference to O'Casey's poor eyesight. No doubt this increased O'Casey's self-consciousness. He did not enjoy the occasion or think much of the play, which had famously been staged in Lady Cunard's drawing-room in London on 2 April 1916, directed by Dulac under the supervision of Yeats himself.85 The star of that particular show was the Japanese dancer Michio Ito as the Guardian of the Well, or Hawk Woman. Now the role was played by actress Eileen Magee. Lennox Robinson played the Chorus Leader, Frank Fay the Old Man, and Michael Dolan the hero Cuchulain.86 Yeats delivered an introduction, perhaps a summary of his essay published in 1916, 'Certain Noble Plays of Japan', claiming he had 'invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect, and symbolic [. . .] an aristocratic form'.87 O'Casey candidly confessed to Holloway that he did not understand the play which followed.88 He was dismissive of At the Hawk's Well and refuted Yeats's aristocratic notions in favour of his own: 'No, the people's theatre can never be successfully turned into a poetical conventicle.' What he had seen, he was convinced, 'wasn't even the ghost of the theatre', so far removed was it from popular vulgarity or 'the terror of TaRa-Ra-Boom-Dee-Ay' (A, 2, 233). As if to prove his point, O'Casey gave the Abbey a new one-act play which was almost all Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Dee-Ay', namely Nannie's Night Out, to be discussed below. On the other hand the drama critic for the Irish Statesman, Susan Mitchell, vindicated Yeats's claim of reconciling theatrical 'remoteness' with intimacy and found the experience enriching: 'only the initiate of beauty could meet it undismayed.'89 louche, perhaps. Juno returned to the Abbey stage for another two weeks on 28 April, with just one change of cast: the young Shelah Richards, destined for a brilliant career in Irish theatre, got her chance as Mary Boyle. Romantically attracted, O'Casey sent a note of congratulation: 'You were always good; frequently very good and sometimes really splendid. Frankly you were a surprise to me.'90

154 Sean O'Casey

Mary was Eileen Crowe's role, who reclaimed it in September, but Richards did play it several times again and inherited it when Crowe was elevated to Juno in March 1926 in place of Sara Allgood.91 By that time Richards had triumphed as Nora in The Plough and the Stars. At the end of May came Lady Gregory's invitation to spend two weeks with her at Coole. There are the woods to wander in, & there is quiet for writing. I am alone, & have no amusements to offer, but I think you would find the library an interest, it is a good one.'92 He accepted though he had, he told her, 'a few reasons for being half afraid to accept, & many for being wholly afraid to refuse'.93 Such frankness was very much in character. O'Casey told Holloway next day that he was 'not enamoured of the idea'.94 He was no doubt anxious of entry to the Big House - Lady Gregory's 'toothbrush' and all that95 - not realising that she herself was anxious at present over her campaign to have her nephew Sir Hugh Lane's art collection restored to Ireland. Yeats invited her to Dublin to discuss the campaign on Saturday 31 May; she stayed at 82 Merrion Square. Meeting O'Casey at the Abbey on Wednesday Lady Gregory heard from him that he had accepted her invitation to Coole and wanted to go down on Saturday. (His forwarded letter had not yet reached her in Dublin.) 'So, I have to go back to receive him.'96 Awkward. She left Dublin on the evening of Friday 6th, stayed overnight in Athenry, met O'Casey's train there, and accompanied him from Athenry to Gort and Coole without the least sign of discomfiture. Meanwhile the Abbey players had brought Juno to Cork this week as a 'private speculation', only to find that the manager of the Palace Theatre insisted on censoring the script. It had to be arranged that Bentham married Mary Boyle but deserted her afterwards because the money did not come through.97 O'Casey and his hostess must have talked about this fiasco and what it imported for new drama in Ireland. In other conversations, which she carefully recorded, O'Casey told Lady Gregory a lot about himself, his childhood, his eye disease, his mother, her funeral, and so on, nervous, confessional narrative, self-dramatising talk which he was shaping for the first time against the day when he might try to write his life. He would then describe Coole in telling detail: 'The House was a long, yellowish-white Georgian building, simply made, with many windows, while a manly-looking entrance [...] faced what was once a curving expanse of lawn' (A, 2,114). O'Casey, as Lady Gregory had expected, was impressed by the library.98 There, at night, she read aloud to him from Thomas Hardy's virtually unstageable poetic drama The Dynasts (in 19 acts). 'He is tremendously struck with it,' she recorded. 'The poem seemed to have been begun in the dark ages,' he recorded, feeling that 'it would roll on, till the light of the sun gave out.' Once through The Dynasts she tackled Moby Dick. In spite of her taste in block-busters, they got on well together. She could help him without offence. She respected his faith in Labour; he admired her courage and lack of pretentiousness. He conceded that the prospect of revolution, which was the way towards the workers' Utopia to be found in communism, was not inviting, as it inevitably meant bloodshed. Perhaps it was at this point in the conversation

Telling It Like It Is 155 that Lady Gregory's grandchild Anne, who with her sister Catherine could scarcely believe that this ill-clad, poorly spoken man had written a 'brilliant play', asked if they could be excused 'because it seemed such a dull conversation, and we had more exciting things to do'. In any case Grandma had just told this strange man - why couldn't he be more like GBS? - 'that it was useless - worse than useless to try to get better houses and better jobs with guns . . . "because only frightened people use guns, and no-one wants to live near frightened people, nor give them jobs, because they know that they may use guns again at any minute."'99 Nowadays, the visitor continued, after the children left, his hope was 'rather to lead the workers into a better life, an interest in reading, in drama especially' through the Abbey.100 This means that O'Casey had now adopted literature and the arts as agents of social transformation. In a way, he had begun to accept a bourgeois idea of culture, its humanising power. He said he was writing a new one-act, then called Penelope's Lovers, using 'a widow in the milkshop where he buys his eggs, who has three elderly admirers always hanging about, and who was once held up and robbed by a gunman'.101 This was to become Irish Nannie Passes when submitted to the Abbey on 8 August, and Nannie's Night Out when first staged on 29 September. As the original title suggests, O'Casey's imagination, as with the material of Juno, was playing with the ironies available in the relationship between mythic characters and contemporary working-class counterparts. Penelope, surrounded by bothersome suitors, is transferred to a shop on Dorset Street bearing the quaint but actual name of Horestone Dairy.102 The implications, when Ulysses turns out to be a common robber with a gun, are all ironic and parodic, in an Empsonian version of pastoral. As Lady Gregory had to go to London on 14 June in pursuit of Hugh Lane business O'Casey's visit was cut short. He travelled with her by train to Dublin, and Yeats met her at Broadstone station where O'Casey said his goodbyes. It had been a good trip, after all. He told Holloway he had spent most of his time 'wandering about the woods of Coole'. He claimed he had outdone Yeats by finding the source of Coole River.103 Also, that he found the country people 'much like anyone else, singing, "Yes, we have no bananas today!"'104 Lady Gregory sent on to him a first edition of her Poets and Dreamers (1903), cleverly inscribed, To Sean O'Casey - Poet & Dreamer - from the writer A Gregory', Coole, 15 June 1924. In reply O'Casey sent her some 'thoughts' on Coole which have not survived. She responded with a copy of her Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1919 reprint), signed 23 June. He had clearly made a good impression. They were now firm friends. An open invitation to visit Coole again soon followed. O'Casey was not then aware what this meant but he later wrote to Lady Gregory's biographer: 'I loved her, and I think she was very fond of me - why, God only knows. [...] I am certain jealousies were aroused because of her friendship with me. I never guessed it then, for I assumed that as I had gone to Coole, most of the others had been there as well . . . Unless one entered into friendly affinity with her, like Yeats and Sally Allgood, she remained courteous and calm, but no invitation came to visit Coole; and those

156 Sean O'Casey

bright eyes of hers saw through all pretence and false approaches.'105 Lennox was never a guest at Coole. While he was finishing Nannie's Night Out in July O'Casey tossed off a piece for the Irish Statesman entitled 'Gulls and Bobbin Testers'. It is a visionary little narrative about his trip to the Hill of Howth accompanied by two young women on holidays from Lancashire, where they worked in a cotton factory. One of the girls, aged nine, was his niece, Isaac's daughter. The story, or fantasy, turns on a dream the narrator Jack falls into after the girls have described the harsh working conditions they endure and he wonders if they would not be better off as seagulls. 'And suddenly I beheld a great flock of gulls, so great that no man could number them, and they slowly lighted on the cliff not very far away. And, like the penguins of Anatok France, they began to grow bigger and bigger, till they assumed the stature of living men and women. And over beyond them I saw thousands and thousands of Bobbin Testers growing smaller and smaller, 'till they assumed the proportions of birds.'106 The gulls become raucous protestors against injustice and, one of them unfurling a red flag, they sing a rousing song of freedom. Then Jack's niece wakes him up, to find all around as it was, the gulls having changed back again from people. 'And I could not find it in my heart to blame the gulls.' So much for allegory. In August the Tailteann Games were inaugurated, an attempt to inject some Graeco-Gaelic spirit into Free-State cultural life. Intended to take place every four years, the Games also included prestigious literary competitions. First prize for drama went to a short, melodramatic, one-act play by Kenneth Sarr [pseudonym for Reddin], a District Justice, called The Passing, not staged until December 1924. Second place went to T.C. Murray's Autumn Fire, to be staged in September. As the closing date was 1 February it must be that manuscripts were admissible. In that case, why was/imo not entered? Or if it was how can it not have won? The judges were Robinson and the London impresario J.B. Pagan.107 If it was O'Casey's responsibility to apply he slipped up, though he held Robinson responsible. He valued the Tailteann prize, for he wrote to congratulate James Stephens, who won in fiction: 'I am glad for two reasons: because you deserve it; and because you are such a lovable man.'108 In June Stephens was responsible for steering O'Casey ('the greatest dramatic find of modern times') in the direction of Macmillans, who were to be his life-long publishers. He signed an agreement on 21 August for the publication of The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and thePaycock in one volume, with the hope that Stephens would do a preface.109 Although he did not, Stephens went one better and recommended O'Casey for the Hawthornden Prize following the publication of Two Plays in February 1925. But O'Casey was not to forget the bad decision in the drama competition. Nannie's Night Out is an extraordinary and neglected one-act, which would probably work better as a short film than on the stage. Denis Johnston regarded it as 'a riot of a play in O'Casey's very best early style'.110 It hovers uneasily between the naturalistic and the metaphoric. Irish Nannie, played by Sara Allgood in the premiere on 29 September, is a young alcoholic, just released

Telling It Like It Is 157 from Mountjoy jail and hell-bent on a hasty re-commital. In the programme she is described as a 'spunker', and the word had to be explained in a footnote even for Dublin viewers: 'A Drinker of Methylated Spirit'. She is a raucous, disruptive force who bursts into the Laburnum Dairy where she interrupts the farcical ritual of three old men seeking the hand of the proprietress, Polly Fender (originally named Penelope). Nannie's outrageousness is like something out of Eugene O'Neill, as she sings, Tor the angels above taught th' way how to love, to that oul' fashion'd mother o' mine! [Slapping the Ballad Singer on the shoulder] A short life an' a merry wan, oul' cock?' Then collapsing in a fit of coughing she confesses that the 'spunk' has nearly done for her and screams that she will kill herself, Til make a hole in th' river, I'll make a hole in th' river!111 The play is built on a contrast between Nannie's crazed enthusiasm for life (as a demented Cathleen Ni Houlihan) and the tame self-interest of those in the shop, would-be fumblers in the greasy till. Ironically, Nannie's determination to dance ('What's the use o' bein' alive if you're not merry?') saves Polly Pender from being robbed, as Nannie grabs the gunman and waltzes around the shop with him ' like a whirlwind until he breaks away and runs off. In the version of the play O'Casey submitted Nannie dies ('I don't care, I don't care, I'll die game, I'll die game!') and is taken away to the morgue. But Robinson persuaded him to change the ending, and in the staged version three policemen carry her off to jail.112 This may be a better ending for what is essentially a farce but not for the social disillusion O'Casey was pinpointing. Nannie's mad alcoholism throws into question the complacencies of Free-State Ireland. He knew he had something here even if the play was not liked. To counter a statement which appeared in the New York Times that Nannie's Night Out was not revived because it was a flop, he took the trouble to reply, in italics: 'The Abbey Directors finally allowed the author to withdraw the work because he felt the character of Nannie deserved the richer picture of a three-act play.'n?> This was to have been The Red Lily. Gabriel Fallen thought the problem was that O'Casey's mind 'was blindly grappling with bigger things'.114 He was certainly sloughing off his earlier interests and taking a jaundiced view of cultural nationalism. A surprising shift was on the Irish language question. He now opposed compulsory Irish. There was a passage in Nannie's Night Out which got hisses from supporters of the language. O'Casey joined the debate in the Irish Statesman on this topic, and contributed a story, more a dialogue, set in a Labour Exchange, in which the main speaker Jack [O'Casey] rejects the nationalist Jim's appeal for a Gaelic Ireland: The problem of havin' enough food to eat is of more importance than that of havin' a little Irish to speak.'115 While they are arguing, the clerk closes the hatch for lunch and government bureaucracy is seen for what it is, unmindful of the real needs of the people. In this story O'Casey refers to James Joyce for the first time and argues that the much-invoked 'soul of Ireland' gleams as brilliantly from Joyce's realism as from Yeats's imagery. He does not directly mention Yeats's own entry into the debate with his 'Compulsory Gaelic: A Dialogue' in the same journal; he rebuts it. There Paul

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[Yeats] argues in favour of government support for Irish and of keeping artists at home by making them Irish speaking, while Peter disagrees: 'If we have no State Theatre or State Opera House, we have the Abbey Theatre, and have all commended Juno and the Pay cock.' To which Paul replies: 'We may keep the author of the play, but how long shall we keep the players that give it so great a part of its life?'116 Paul concludes that if government can enforce Latin it surely has the right to enforce Gaelic. But O'Casey was more interested in the rights of the underprivileged. Also, he may not have been best pleased to have himself and his play bandied about in this argument. From a remark O'Casey passed to Holloway it is clear that in his own mind Yeats's ignorance of the Labour Exchange about equalled his ignorance of the Irish language.117 Yeats's crack about the players' importance to Juno was elaborated in a letter to Ezra Pound in which he said he did not think the play read particularly well but that as acted by 'our people', who knew the slums, it was both powerful and amusing.118 In his view it was that strange hybrid, a tragic farce. He was proud of Juno's success, and told Pound that it was the greatest success the Abbey had had for years. This was the simple truth. Indeed, Holloway went further, claiming that the Gunman and Juno were the two most popular plays ever seen at the Abbey.119 Box-office receipts were now double what they had been. But Yeats's view of O'Casey was nevertheless patronising. O'Casey would go his own way. As the year approached when the 1916 Rising, seed of all else that had politically transpired, would be ten years old he felt the germ of a new play stirring on the subject which would hold up the nationalist spirit of 1915-16 as a lens to inspect the lives of the common people in 1925. He would once again strive to 'tell it like it is' by superimposing as in a history play a dramatisation of 'how it was'. Only this time it would work both ways. This time, working backwards from a mood of disillusion born in 1923, he would disturb many people by his revisionist interpretation of what 1916 was and could be held responsible for. He had not forgotten his Julius Caesar in which he and Isaac had played all those years ago and in which the common people are shown to be easily manipulated by those assuming leading roles, whether republican or imperialist, who pursue ideals and agendas until all are plunged into civil war and the original dream is lost forever. He had his title in mind as early as 20 May 1924, and had begun The Plough and the Stars by 23 October.120 It was to be his masterpiece.

9 'I BANISH You!'

aura, Maura, Jack, if th' baby's a girl; any name you like, if th' baby's a boy!' When she sat in the stalls at the Abbey Theatre arly in February 1926 Maire Keating would have recognised the compliment in those lines. To his family and those closest to him O'Casey was always 'Jack'. In many of his plays the protagonist - at least in first draft - was Jack. Just a month earlier he had inscribed a copy of Two Plays (the Gunman and Juno) for her rather formally: 'From Sean O Casey with Love, To the Lovely and Lovable Maura Keating in whom the Author found his first Inspiration'. When The Plough and the Stars was published in February 1926 he again inscribed her copy with feeling, There is none like unto thee in gentle loveliness, in kindness and in truth.'1 Two Plays had actually been published a year earlier on 10 February 1925, but without the formal dedication To Maire and the Abbey Theatre' which first appeared in the reprint published in December 1925. The inference is that he sent both books to Maire at roughly the same time, marking some kind of reconciliation. Over the years she probably attended the Abbey with him, as Holloway mentions a 'friend' being occasionally in O'Casey's company.2 She later said that the 'courtship' had endured for 'over six years', during which 'we were never formally engaged but it was believed that we would marry.' She mentions letters she wrote 'to finish off the affair'.3 As seen earlier, this would have been in 1920, only three years into the 'courtship'. But they must have continued to see each other and to discuss his work. Certainly she was familiar with how he researched Rosie Redmond for The Plough:

M

Eventually one evening he left off his collar and tie and put on a scarf instead - he said it made him look disreputable - and he went down to Burgh Quay. He hoped to meet the right sort of girl there. He didn't have long to wait before one came up to him. He asked her a lot of questions and when he had got most of his information he put on the poor mouth and pretended he had no money. She took pity on the poor starving writer and took him to a cafe and bought him a cup of coffee.4

160 SednO'Casey This sounds as if it came straight from O'Casey himself. But during this time there were other women in O'Casey's life. One was the actress Shelah Richards. Although there was no casting couch in the Abbey green room he pressed himself on Richards with suffficient notoriety for his future wife Eileen to retain a lasting hostility towards her.5 But Richards was destined to marry the playwright Denis Johnston, just then actively involved with the Dublin Drama League. He and O'Casey were to become friends, and Johnston was cheekily to include a caricature, the 'well-known dramatist' O'Cooney, in the soiree scene of The Old Lady Says 'No!' (1929). He wears a cloth cap, blue sweater and tweed coat (in place of a trenchcoat) and ejaculates 'Aw Holy God!' and 'Wasn't that bloody awful?' in response to the artistic pretentiousness of Lady Trimmer.6 It is a sharp piece of satire, clearly showing how O'Casey was then perceived, haughty, impatient, profane, and a praiser of his own glamorised past: 'D'ye remember that night, Liam, when the two of us hid in the chimbley from the Tans? [. . .] Aw, Jesus, and the evenings down in the old I.R.B. in Talbot Street, picking out the "Soldiers' Song" on the blackboard. [. . .] And that night waiting up on the North Circular for word of the executions. Ah, not for all the wealth of the world would I give up the maddenin' minglin' memories of the past'(p. 58). The last parodic phrase is a direct quotation from act 4 of The Plough and the Stars. Johnston had to show Shelah (who was from a prominent Anglo-Irish family) that behind O'Casey's extraordinary appeal lay doubtful marks of class. By the time Johnston's clever play was staged, at the newly founded Dublin Gate Theatre, O'Casey was gone from Dublin. Meanwhile he cast his eye upon a beautiful, part-time actress still in her teens, named Beatrice Toal, in later years Coogan, author of the best-selling novel The Big Wind (1969). She was waiting in the Abbey green room to go on at the end of Riders to the Sea when O'Casey addressed her and fell for her.7 As was his way, he followed up with close, flattering attention, bringing her a copy of Anatole France's The Gods are Athirst and waiting for her later at the stage door. She was much taken aback to find him there. 'I appreciated genius on the stage and in books, but for an escort, my unformed appreciation tended towards charm and glamour. I saw neither the one nor the other in this oldish looking man - as old as my own father - in the shabby trench-coat, maroon pullover, crumpled tie and workman's cloth cap.'8 And so began a classic relationship between January and May. Beatrice Toal had the sharp eye which was to equip her for journalism (she worked for the Evening Herald) and in retrospect she could describe O'Casey's fascinating side. He brought her for tea at the Broadway Soda Fountain in O'Connell Street, took off the trench-coat but, to her mortification, kept his cap on: 'I remember well I was wearing a French hat; sort of exotic. But in the presence of Sean's cap it became an incongruity. He started to talk and I forgot the cap. I forgot the ephemera of fashion. How he talked! Incessantly, unfalteringly' (p. 75). They talked of Hardy and he promised to bring her Under the Greenwood Tree. He told her of the hardships of his childhood. It was

7Banish You!' 161 Othello wooing his Desdemona with tales she swore were passing strange and wondrous pitiful. On the long walk to her home at 74 Kenilworth Square, Rathgar, he poured out all the miseries of his deprived youth, until she herself felt starved 'with the dint of walking and listening, and the sharp aperitif edge to the saga of his hunger'. The books he bought instead of food impressed her greatly, especially his voluble praise of Anatole France. 'He had devoured everything that author had ever written,' and envied Beatrice her knowledge of French, the key to a whole new field of literature, the lack of which doomed him 'to stand at the gates peering longingly through the bars!' After he later heaped half a dozen novels by this author upon her Beatrice formed the impression that 'O'Casey was almost a projection of Anatole France; the same religious bias, the socialism, the scepticism and all of these tinged by an unfailing quality of pity and of sympathy' (p. 76). This first date ended farcically, as Beatrice's father, cast as Brabantio in the scenario, thought the worst of this Othello when he saw a figure in a trench-coat watching the house when Beatrice was a-bed, and was with difficulty dissuaded from calling the police. O'Casey stayed outside all night, if not romantically standing outside her window at least sleeping behind a ditch some distance away near the Dublin mountains. After this introduction they met often. O'Casey would ply her with books and see her every day if she was in the Abbey cast: if not she would have a letter, perhaps two, every day, until T was beginning to feel hemmed in by his attentions' (p. 80). Todd Andrews, who in 1924 returned to UCD after his civil war exploits, describes an occasion when he showed O'Casey and a young woman, Beatrice presumably, around the college in Earlsfort Terrace. Andrews barely knew Beatrice but she apparently looked to him as chaperone as the three of them did the rounds of the building, which had been used as the first Bail Eireann from 1919 until the move to Leinster House in 1924. O'Casey seemed less interested in the building than in Beatrice, who 'took on the patronising air of one introducing a member of the working class to a seat of learning. He, in turn, seemed quite willing to be patronised.' Andrews, unaware at the time of O'Casey's former involvement with the ICA, described him unsympathetically, for die-hard republicans were never to forgive O'Casey his Plough and the Stars: To me he was an unimpressive little [sic] man and I found his constant references to his impoverished background and deprived upbringing in the slums of Dublin a source of irritation.'9 On some nights Sean would excuse himself to continue work on the Plough, which he said he would dedicate to Beatrice. He pointed out the plough in the sky to her one night and while she gazed upward planted a kiss on her cheek. He told her about Maire, intimating that his poverty was the cause of his failure with her. 'He had formed other romantic attachments. I knew one girl whom he had fallen for. She had found his preoccupation with the severities of life and its inequalities, and this business of retaining the aura of poverty and shabbiness, rather offsetting' (p. 82). Whether or not this was just Dublin snobbery O'Casey was later to generalise: They all seem to want to have a slap

162 Sean O'Casey

at me. They'll never forgive me for being made of common clay. And the commonest of common clay, too! Not even a bricklayer or a carpenter - only a tradesman's helper, an unskilled labourer, a fellow that muled with his hands.'10 To give her her due, Beatrice saw the Yeatsian difference between the man and the work. 'I realise that had I seen O'Casey's masterpiece before I had met him I would never have written in this vein. I recall how I sat in the Abbey enthralled at "The Plough and the Stars". Here was a different O'Casey from the man who had walked and talked with me under the stars; the strength and power of the language that he sent to the stage, compared to the primness of his words when he had snatched a kiss under the plough-shaped stars. "You are being coquettish! You must not play the coquette with me"' (p. 82). Beatrice's mother was concerned when O'Casey invited her daughter to tea in his room in North Circular Road. Gabriel Fallon, also an admirer, did nothing to assuage the mother's anxiety when he pointed out that another actress who had survived the ordeal of tea with O'Casey was a very athletic girl.11 Beatrice went with a chaperone and, obviously alert to her mother's fears, took notice of an iron bed which - to her imagination - dominated the room 'because it was covered with a palpably new pink satin eiderdown, with the price tag still blatantly peeping from one tufted corner' (p. 88). She saw the bed as seductive rather than face-saving and it is interesting that she perceived O'Casey as a lady killer. T knew two other girls whom he had been keen on before me and then I became for him love's embodiment' (p. 85). She had obviously been dipping into the Anatole France he had lent her. Or she may have been startled to find the bed, which a friend assured her would have been littered with books like every other surface of the room, so unexpectedly romantic in appearance. No orgy occurred and Beatrice passed the time agreeably eating iced cake and instructing the amused playwright in the genteeler rituals of making tea. They were to remain friends for another year or two.

While flashing his feathers romantically, O'Casey was brooding over The Plough and the Stars. He had begun it in October 1924, a crucial time for him politically. Jim Larkin had just come through a disastrous series of legal battles to re-establish his power and identity in Dublin union circles; O'Casey was fully in support, even though no longer a member of the ITGWU.12 The issues were crucial for anyone like O'Casey who had come through the militant period of Irish Labour since the lock-out of 1913 and who had felt as time went on that Sinn Fein had sidelined the workers' movement. Larkin's case against the current executive of the ITGWU led to his expulsion in March 1924 from the very union he had founded. One of O'Casey's friends, Barney Conway, was among those supporters who took over Liberty Hall in protest.13 Such gestures were vain. Larkin had been humiliated, for the court had directed him to pay all legal costs.14 His answer was to turn around and traduce Thomas Johnson, leader of the Labour Party in Bail Eireann: in the Irish Worker Larkin called him 'this English traitor', corrupt and 'bloody-minded', and asserted: 'had it

'IBanish You!' 163 not been for the pestiferous Englishman and his satellites we would never have had the great betrayal, and the massacre of our people by the Cosgravian jobvultures.'15 Larkin's rather crazed attack on a man respected on all sides showed more the fury of frustration than 'self-destructive egomania'.16 Johnson, of course, took a libel action, which he won: the damages amounted to some £17,500 in today's money.17 Larkin refused to pay and was declared bankrupt. O'Casey agreed with Larkin's notion of 'the great betrayal' of the workers, and this is what underlay his new play. For, as always with O'Casey, the present mood of the day informed the history play he was writing. There was also a general basis to this disenchanted mood, since 'whatever mild tinge of social revolution there had ever been to the nationalist revolt was washed out by the bitterness and exhaustion that followed the Civil War.'18 Thus the politics of the Plough have more to do with Dublin 1924 than with Dublin 1916. O'Casey told Lady Gregory in conversation on 10 March 1924 that the 1916 Rising was a 'terrible mistake'. This is the key to the theme of the Plough: 'and we lost such fine men. We should have won freedom by degrees with them.'19 His thinking, his growing disillusionment with Irish Labour and its 'great betrayal', was complicated by the spectacle of Larkin's futile rage. He avoided contact, 'because I love the man and am afraid he would bring me into the movement. And I do not believe it will succeed on his present lines, but through art and culture and the people of culture.'20 By January 1925 he had seen Larkin, lately returned from an official trip to Russia on behalf of the communist Irish Workers' League, an embarrassment at this stage. O'Casey had briefly joined the New Socialist Party of Ireland in 1917 but left it when William O'Brien and his faction took control in 1918; when Roddy Connolly founded the Communist Party of Ireland in 1921 O'Casey did not return.21 One would have to surmise that his reason for not joining was the company of Connollyites like Cathal O'Shannon he would have had to suffer. In 1924, when Larkin's Irish Workers' League took over from the defunct CPI it was too late for O'Casey to become involved. He now had his own fight to make, 'a big egotistical stand' as he self-deprecatingly phrased it, and could not once again throw in his lot with Larkin, though he did not swerve in his personal loyalty.22 As playwright, he needed to be able now to step back and reinstate Larkin into the politics of 1916. It remained true that Larkin was 'the only man he believe[d] in', as Lady Gregory noted in her Journals at the time of O'Casey's first visit to Coole in June 1924. How to relate this self-destructive Prometheus to the theme of 1916? In The Insurrection in Dublin, assuredly a source, Stephens had contrasted Larkin's magnetism with Pearse's lack of it. So, the way through could only be by dramatising an absence, a vacuum. Larkin was not in Dublin in 1916; he had left for New York in October 1914 and did not return for over eight years. If the Figure in the Window, The Voice of the Man, in act 2 of the Plough had been Larkin's then a wholly different play might have been possible. For this would have been a play where the Voice's rhetoric kept faith with Dublin's poor and underprivileged: it would have meant a socialist revolution. Strangely

164 Sean O'Casey

enough, as early as October 1922 O'Casey had considered 'writing a play around Jim Larkin - the Red Star - in which he would never appear though [be] responsible for all the action'.23 As an aborted idea it is paradoxically present in The Plough and the Stars. At what point he decided to make Pearse, Larkin's opposite, the Figure in the Window is not known but it was a master stroke. O'Casey had a copy of Pearse's Collected Works: Political Writings and Speeches, published in Dublin in 1924. Here he had access to the three speeches he puts into the mouth of the Figure in act 2 of the Plough, in this order: two excerpts from 'Peace and the Gael' (December 1915), and one each from The Coming Revolution' (November 1913) and 'O'Donovan Rossa - Graveside Oration' (August 1915). 'Peace and the Gael', the most bloodthirsty of the three speeches, actually postdates the time O'Casey applies to acts 1 and 2 of the play, November 1915, for he was loth to pass up such good material. Moreover O'Casey cut words from all the excerpts he quoted, thus making his speaker 'more dogmatic, aphoristic, and oracular'.24 James Connolly is also mentioned in the play but given no voice. Instead, a parody of Connolly's ideas is voiced repeatedly by the Covey, a cynic and would-be intellectual, whose invented source, Jenersky's Thesis, shows O'Casey's impatience with humourless and dogmatic Marxists. This characterisation has not made O'Casey popular with the left wing in Ireland: Peadar O'Donnell was to say O'Casey was 'a good man who wrote a bad play, a play that insulted the Rising and the Covey'.25 To O'Donnell, as to many other ideologues, O'Casey's 'insult' to the Covey weighs as heavily as his actual demythologising of the 1916 Rising. Yet the Covey is by no means a spokesman for Connolly. He is satirised as a loudmouth, whose recommendation to Rosie that she study the means of production, to go no further, marks him for a fool. The fact is that, in dramatising a situation marked by Larkin's absence in 1916 and overshadowed by the disgrace of Larkin in 1924, O'Casey wanted to ridicule the blinkered theorists. He put a sign over his work-table at 422 North Circular Road: 'Get On with the Bloody Play'.26 Finding the Plough hard to write he took longer over it than over either of the preceding plays. In self-excuse he described himself as lazy. Indeed, he said to Holloway and Dr Joseph Cummins, an ophthalmologist who had been treating O'Casey's cornea for some time and who became a close friend, 'If I were left about £2,000, I'd never work again.'27 But all the while, in 1924-25, he was working out his ideas and feelings vis-a-vis the 1915-16 period: this he had to do before the indifferent, amused tone which was the hallmark of victory over narrative material could seemingly effortlessly emerge. None of his plays was ever 'confused' in the sense that it gave the impression of uncertainty or lack of focus. There was always a sense of assurance once he established what Robinson, following William Archer, called 'the moment of attack'.28 Although O'Casey had little patience with Archer's conventional notions on the art of playwriting - 'I never read such rubbish in all my life'29 - he could hardly avoid these principles while writing for the Abbey, where Robinson instilled them.

'I Banish Your 165 When he came to act 2 of the Plough, however, O'Casey did depart from conventional playmaking. Having carefully set up act 1 to show a crisis happening in the lives of Nora and Jack Clitheroe he shifted the action to a public house where their story is ignored. When John Ford made a film of the Plough in 1936 he moved act 2 to the front, as it were, making the 'point of attack' Ireland's wrongs as registered by Fluther Good and Uncle Peter before cutting to the home of the Clitheroes and the crisis caused by the looming rebellion. This is not what O'Casey wanted. He wanted disconnection rather than connection, the arbitrary rather than the planned, uncertainty and multiplicity of event rather than logical development and unity of action. To that end he slipped in rejected material from another play. No wonder Robinson as director complained incessantly about the structure of the Plough, 'in some ways I thinks it's the worst written of his plays,' and O'Casey's unwillingness to change it.30 All through the play we are invited to reconcile contradictions and reappraise perceptions - of Fluther, of Bessie Burgess, of the ambivalent Covey, and of Nora herself, who is both right and wrong in her understanding of what Jack's commitment to the fighting means. It is this very ambivalence, pervasive in the play, which is totally absent from Ford's film, a straightforward story of good Irish stock done in by the dastardly Brits. If O'Casey could tell Lady Gregory that the labour movement depended now not on Larkin and his methods but 'through art and culture and the people of culture',31 he had in mind a dialectic drama along the lines drawn by Shaw. O'Casey had shown through the success of the Gunman and Juno that the theatre could be for and about the common people. He was naive enough to believe, as many educationalists at the time also did, that 'culture' in the sense of literary tradition could uplift and transform a people. Therefore he cannot but have felt justified in his cultural beliefs when the Abbey won its government subsidy in 1925. To celebrate, the Abbey invited Ernest Blythe and his wife to a supper on the Abbey stage on a Saturday night, 8 August 1925, following the performance. Yeats personally invited O'Casey. Though proud to be present he was the odd man out: a photograph of the occasion shows him the sole male guest at the supper not in evening dress.32 Well schooled by Lady Gregory, who gave him tips for his speech but who did not journey up from Coole, Yeats publicly thanked the government for their 'act of intelligent generosity'. He pointed out that the Abbey was now the first state-endowed theatre in the English-speaking world. Neither he nor Lady Gregory nor Synge had ever thought of the theatre, he said, as an educational theatre in the ordinary sense. Yet the Abbey had shaped the kind of space where a writer could involve audiences in debate 'on their own problems and the things of their own life', thereby creating, as Blythe put it in his speech, work 'of national importance' done 'for the country's betterment'.33 Ironically, this claim would be challenged by O'Casey's new play. He was not one to worry about such matters. He had seen Arms and the Man that night (Barry Fitzgerald as Bluntschi) as a familiar play, for it had already played alongside his own Nannie's Night Out. It was a play he would invoke when republicans attacked the Plough, for it was his view that 'if ever a

166 Sean O'Casey

man hated sham, it is Shaw.'34 He was to see Shaw's Man and Superman on the Monday following this celebration, and it was to prove ominous. Usually, while attending Abbey productions, frequenting the green room, and engaging in theatrical gossip with Holloway in the lobby, O'Casey was careful not to criticise the players.35 But when it came to Man and Superman he let rip. He had seen an excellent Saint Joan at the Gaiety at the end of June36 and was looking forward to the Abbey Shaw. He did not like the acting and went backstage to let the actors know. This was most unwise. Gabriel Fallon, who played in it and did not think the production was quite right, describes how O'Casey made his response known when he entered the green room: .

He sat on a couch in ominous silence, his head in his hands, always a bad sign. Barry Fitzgerald and I were there, and after preliminary greetings I broke the silence. "Well, Sean," I said, "what did you think of the show?" He replied with two very effective words: "Bloodly awful!" "Oh!" said Barry Fitzgerald, "I suppose I was awful too?" Sean soft-pedalled his reply: "Well, you were not good, Barry!" Barry said nothing, but simply went on looking uncomfortable. Then I noticed that Michael Dolan [the manager, who directed] had quietly entered the room. It was obvious that he had been there for some time and had heard much if not all of the conversation.37 Dolan sat and listened and then went upstairs. O'Casey followed the actors in that direction, continuing his critique. Dolan and FJ. McCormick entered the dressing room after them. McCormick, who had played Jack Tanner, was excited, challenging O'Casey to repeat his opinion, and, when O'Casey duly did so, demanded to know by what right he came 'barging around here' to deliver unsolicited criticism. Of course, this was to play into O'Casey's hands. The greater their unpopularity and likelihood to offend the more intent he always was to deliver his opinions. He could have played Alceste to the life, for tact was not in his vocabulary. Although McCormick was there as stage manager to defend the company O'Casey accused him of being 'egged on' by Dolan and of being concerned with his own reputation. The row came close to fisticuffs. Just two days before O'Casey submitted the text of the Plough for consideration (12 August) and six months before its production, this incident began a chain of events which led inexorably to his exile. O'Casey acted as his character dictated. He wrote a long letter to Dolan, some 1,200 words of unqualified damnation of Man and Superman, inviting him to broadcast it where he would.38 Furious, Dolan pinned it on the notice board and issued instructions that O'Casey was to be barred from the green room. To get there one had to cross the stage and O'Casey was soon stopped by the carpenter Sean Barlow. It is all very well for Denis Johnston to pooh-pooh this incident by saying that the only person who had not been barred from Barlow's stage from time to time was Lady Gregory, 'who usually carried a stick'.39 The point was that O'Casey, turned back in the name of the manager, felt so humiliated that in his autobiographies he placed the incident after the Plough riots as if it were the last straw.

'IBanish You!' 167 A theatre is like a family. While one member is resenting a slight its cause can be caring for one's interests. Soon a tangle of dependence and revenge can result. Dolan was busy with a revival of Juno which opened on 17 August to packed houses and could have run, 'even in Dublin, for six months to a full house'.40 O'Casey left Dublin for his second visit to Coole, arriving on the same day (22 August) as his script of the Plough reached Lady Gregory from the Abbey with a letter from Robinson to say he and Yeats both liked it. She went off after dinner to read the first act to herself, but found it so good that she brought it to the library to read it to her other guests, Jack B. Yeats and his wife Cottie, with O'Casey present. They liked it. Indeed, O'Casey and Jack became 'great butties'.41 Still, he held out against going with him and Lady Gregory to church just to keep up the numbers.42 The Yeatses left on 27 August but O'Casey stayed on, 'tired and glad of a rest' following the completion of the Plough, 'his delight in the country as great as ever'.43 He enjoyed the library and was especially honoured in having Robert Gregory's books placed 'at his disposal'.44 He was still at Coole when a letter arrived from Dolan objecting to The Plough and the Stars. Dolan was not an official reader at the Abbey, but he had made it his business to see the script of the Plough. Since the Abbey secretary had had a letter from Robinson instructing him to have the parts typed up immediately Dolan took this to mean the play was to be staged 'in its present form'. He now asked Lady Gregory to consider how dangerous this might be on account of the bad language and the 'unpardonable' song at the end of act 2. He had already 'consulted' the new appointee to the Board George O'Brien about the whole play. This was something Dolan had no authority to do. O'Brien, a staunch catholic and a lecturer in economics at UCD, was alarmed to hear from Dolan as if he were being invited to act as censor. He had already approved the play and was now thrown into a new attitude. In interfering, Dolan convinced O'Brien 'that there is a huge difference between reading a play at home and hearing it from a stage'. To Lady Gregory Dolan insisted that he had only the best interests of the Abbey at heart. He felt that the actors would not touch the text. 'You can rely on me not to try to influence them in any way. Let them judge and decide for themselves.'45 Presumably, Lady Gregory said nothing to O'Casey, who stayed on at Coole until 7 September, being happily entertained. She read him On the Racecourse, a revision of her Twenty-Five. On one evening he regaled her with his singing, of hymns and Irish airs. O'Brien now got on his high horse, writing to Yeats on 5 September a strange medley of would-be dramatic criticism and moral alarm. The inference was crystal clear. This new Director was going to insist on textual changes in O'Casey's play: 'it must be amended.'46 He was not slow to list his objections: in act 1, exchanges between Jack and Nora: 'You can; come on, put your leg against mine - there', and 'Little rogue of th' white breast'. But act 2 did most excite his spleen: 'the introduction of the prostitute is quite unnecessary to the action,' not because a prostitute in a play was objectionable but because 'the lady's professional side is unduly emphasised in her actions and conversation.'

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The song at the end of act 2, likewise, 'could not possibly be allowed to stand'. In addition 'Jesus', 'Jaysus' and 'Christ' on various pages all through the four acts must go, 'bitch', occurring three times, should be altered, and many low and blasphemous phrases omitted. O'Brien obviously saw himself as Ireland's Lord Chamberlain. Here was a major challenge to the Abbey. The question now was whether its Directors had sold the Abbey's birthright by accepting a censor along with a Free-State subsidy. Yeats went down to Coole for a council of war on 18 September, bringing the O'Brien correspondence with him. He had already written to placate O'Brien but had to plan a campaign to ensure the Abbey's artistic freedom. When Robinson edited Lady Gregory1 s Journals in 1946 he altered her entry to make it appear that O'Brien had a case. The inference is that O'Casey was very lucky that the Plough was not rejected.47 What actually happened is that Yeats cleverly soothed O'Brien and traded over cuts in the text while defending Rosie Redmond and holding out for Bessie's expletive 'bitch' delivered to Nora in act 4. O'Brien's response to Yeats, while oleaginous, still contained a threat of removal of the subsidy. To this Lady Gregory responded magnificently, telling Yeats, 'If we have to choose between the subsidy and our freedom, it is our freedom we choose.'48 Though placated by most of Yeats's concessions, O'Brien balked at the retention of Rosie Redmond in act 2. And there hovered the threat to the subsidy. A Directors' meeting was called for 22 September at Yeats's house in Dublin. Here Lady Gregory, in her frank way, said straight out that O'Brien was not cast in the role of a censor and that Blythe had made no condition whatever in granting the subsidy. There was nobody to match her in a crisis. Here she was at age seventy-three, by no means the faded figure Yeats conjured up in his description when making his Nobel Prize speech in Stockholm over a year earlier ('sinking into the infirmity of age'49), but vigorous, shrewd, dynamic and just the person to have on a committee. She and Yeats (Robinson was also present but kept quiet) now assured O'Brien that cuts would be made in rehearsal not because of anything O'Brien had said but because they would improve the play. They got O'Brien to 'confess' that he had mistaken his position. As a concession they agreed to cut Rosie's song at the end of act 2. A vote was passed, three to one (obviously, O'Brien), that the Plough should be accepted for production, 'any alterations in the play to be made by the producer'.50 Lady Gregory then proposed that as there were now four Directors, Yeats as chairman should in future have a casting vote. This pre-arranged proposal was then passed. Censorship was being held in check. They decided to meet again in two days' time. Lady Gregory went back to the Russell Hotel and O'Casey came to tea and 'a long talk, very little about his play, for though I told him of O'Brien I didn't tell him of Dolan having made the trouble'.51 O'Casey did not object to any of the cuts and was already re-writing the role of Nora Clitheroe. (On 1 November he was to assure her that he had altered the love scene in act 1.) They then talked, as usual, of other things - Larkin, the republicans and

'IBanish You!' 169 Father Michael O'Flanagan (Vice-President of Sinn Fein), suspended from his priestly duties and so a hero to O'Casey. They discussed communism. O'Casey said he was a communist, but was unable to define what it meant and hoped he would not be alive when it arrived, in thirty years or so, though he saw the terrible conditions in which the workers lived: 'we must try to change that at any cost.'52 Being ill with a cold he wrote to her a couple of days later apologising for not seeing her again before she returned to Coole. She was keenly interested in his living conditions and felt that he neglected to feed himself properly. His cooking, as Fallon noted, amounted to boiling eggs and brewing tea. In any case his appetite seemed to have lessened with his giving up manual labour.53 His income from the Abbey was both variable and intermittent; often, the cheque was very slow in issuing. A few months after this date, when he was about to go to London to see Juno there, O'Casey had to pawn his 'good' trousers for five shillings.54 At this time he was reluctant to demand money owed, though he was to develop a better business sense. But he always preferred to spend on books than on food. He now told Lady Gregory that a parcel of books had just arrived on Renoir, Monet, Cezanne and Puvis de Chavanne, together with six Balzac novels, and so, with Dostoievsky's The Idiot still to be read, 'there'll be rare company in the tenement for the next few weeks.'55 To help recovery she sent a big box of grapes, as well as a picture of herself. On 25 September the Abbey Directors held their second meeting with O'Brien on the Plough script. There was no trouble: 'O'Brien like a lamb', Lady Gregory confided in her Journals. But Robinson was annoyed to find that O'Brien had circulated the text of his new play The White Blackbird among friends in legal circles to see if the ending was improper. Lady Gregory shared Robinson's annoyance, and ordered the Abbey secretary to ensure that in future plays sent in should be marked 'private and confidential', thus ensuring that neither Dolan nor O'Brien could abuse access. The meeting then asked Robinson to resume production of plays, 'Dolan to remain as Manager'.56 This was Lady Gregory's way of paying Dolan back. The text O'Brien had read was O'Casey's original typescript, which has not survived. What has survived, and was resurrected by the Abbey archivist only in 1997, is the promptbook for the first productions of the Plough?1 It can be seen that the first act was partially rewritten, and corresponds to the text as published, but there are additions in O'Casey's hand, some notations by Robinson (who directed), and some cuts (both for the original and later productions, not always easy to distinguish). It would appear that many of the changes came about, as one would expect, in rehearsal. But some changes, involving retyping and pasting over existing material, must reflect O'Brien's recommendations accepted by O'Casey.58 The love scene is thus snipped and the original song from Clitheroe altered to the present ballad ('Th' violets were scenting th' woods, Nora'). The original song was one O'Casey had written for Maire Keating. In a useful analysis of the promptbook Nicholas Grene has shown how O'Casey, having conceived Jack Clitheroe as a clerk, rewrote him as bricklayer

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and tried to adjust his and Nora's language accordingly but left inconsistencies so that 'the class issues of the play [become] blurred and out of focus.'59 Yeats, of course, merely thought that O'Casey was out of his depth depicting clerks (ignoring that O'Casey's father was a clerk). As to casting, O'Casey had by now formed the practice of writing with individual actors in mind: Juno was written to suit the styles of Sara Algood, Barry Fitzgerald and FJ McCormick and a similar kind of tailoring marked the Plough.60 He had Allgood in mind for Bessie Burgess, McCormick for the Covey, Fallon for Uncle Peter, and could there be any doubt who should play Fluther Good? This rather Elizabethan arrangement emphasises how dependent O'Casey was on the Abbey as a community of players. He was dependent too on the bosses, even on Yeats, for his sense of security and this was something new in his life. He would not countenance anything resembling a conspiracy against Yeats, as Liam O'Flaherty tried to mount at this time through a new literary society. 'I think it would be very good for us and protect us against the old fogies, like Yeats and AE and the rest.'61 Though he attended the first meeting on 2 August O'Casey was suspicious and later saw it as a lasting undercurrent in Dublin. (Still, O'Flaherty's publisher Jonathan Cape invited O'Casey to write 'a personal narrative' or memoir.62 Although he declined, this invitation gave him the idea for the autobiographies begun towards the end of this decade.) In October there were overtures from the London actor-manager J.B. Fagan to open a new production of Juno there. The request caused a bit of friction. Normally, the Abbey preferred to send their own production, as they held the rights, but Robinson undertook to ask for permission. Through Lady Gregory's intervention Yeats agreed, though the Abbey would lose royalties, and Pagan's production opened at the Royalty Theatre on 16 November. O'Casey had told Holloway he was going over for opening night but he did not make the trip, which probably did not please Fagan. The cast included many old Abbey actors - Arthur Sinclair (Captain Boyle), Sara Allgood (Juno), Harry Hutchinson (Johnny), Sydney Morgan (Joxer) and Maire O'Neill (Mrs Madigan). This was a strong cast, and the production did very well. Reviews were glowing, none more so that James Agate's in the Sunday Times (16 November), in which he said Juno was as much a tragedy as Macbeth, 'but it is a tragedy taking place in the porter's family.' One important member of that audience was the eighteen-year-old Laurence Olivier, who could remember the production over forty years later when he revived Juno at the National Theatre in tribute to O'Casey, then recently dead. Olivier hired Harry Hutchinson from that 1925 production to be his assistant, but he himself retained vivid memories of how the original cast played. As a consummate man of the theatre his reading was spot-on: Juno was 'life-like' and at the same time tighly constructed: 'It is, in fact, closer to Osborne than to Chekhov. There is no playing about with it, it is all there and it is as clear as daylight what [O'Casey] wants done with it.'63 Pagan's terms were £50 in advance, 5% on up to £800 gross weekly receipts, 7.5% on £800 to £1,200, and 10% on all receipts over £1,200.64 O'Casey did well out of the run which (including a transfer in March 1926) totalled 202

'IBanish You!' Ill performances.65 Dublin, as usual, liked to believe O'Casey far richer than he was at this time, but Lady Gregory can be relied upon when she says that in December he was earning £60 a week from Juno,66 a huge sum in those days, when the best an Abbey actor could earn was about £5 a week. When he sent Lady Gregory a copy of the Royalty programme as a souvenir, 'of a success in which you had such a vital part', O'Casey told her he had bought a bookcase and more books, and asked for Jack B. Yeats's address to buy a picture. Unlike Captain Boyle he used his windfall prudently. Among the books to be bought were the plays of Congreve, Coward, Drinkwater and O'Neill, as well as a set of Theatre Arts Monthly costing £9-10s.67

On Sunday 27 December 1925 the Abbey celebrated its twenty-first jubilee. O'Casey was in the balcony as a capacity attendance first saw a play by each of the original directors, Yeats's The Hour-Glass, Synge's The Shadow of the Glen and Lady Gregory's Hyacinth Halvey, and then listened to speeches from Ernest Blythe, Thomas Johnson (the Labour leader), Gearoid O Lochlainn (in Irish), and Lady Gregory, whose speech was said by Kevin O'Higgins to be the most beautiful he had ever heard.68 Perhaps O'Casey remembered what he had written to her on Two Plays: that if she did add, as planned, another volume to Our Irish Theatre (1913) he would be proud to figure in it, 'for I am, honestly, a little jealous of the first book because I then hadn't then [sic] ever reached the horizon that gave me a distant glimpse of Ireland's Dramatic Pillar of Fire.'69 The casting of the Plough was now causing difficulty. Once Sara Allgood was engaged as Juno in London the part of Bessie Burgess, intended for her, was given to Maureen Delany. O'Casey saw the Figure in the Window as 'an important personage' to be played by an actor with 'a resonant voice'70: he favoured John Stephenson, but also thought of him for Clitheroe. Lennox wanted F.J. McCormick to play Clitheroe. Who then should play the Covey, written for McCormick? Robinson was clear: none other than Michael J. Dolan, the enemy. This infuriated Sean, but there was little he could do about it.'71 Fallon had to be satisfied with Captain Brennan while Uncle Peter went to Eric Gorman. The rest of the casting was mainly unproblematic - Shelah Richards as Nora, Ria Mooney as Rosie were particularly good choices, while no one could argue with Barry Fitzgerald as Fluther - but McCormick, no doubt still smarting over the letter O'Casey wrote denouncing his Jack Tanner, was out to make trouble. McCormick married Eileen Crowe in December 1925. Early in the new year O'Casey wrote to Robinson, then in rehearsal, expressing surprise over Crowe's problems with Mrs Gogan. Apparently, she regarded the role as 'low'. In particular, she objected to saying the line declaring to Bessie Burgess that any child she had 'was got between th' bordhers of th' Ten Commandments' (act 2). Her new husband objected to saying 'snotty' and as stage manager stood behind other objections made to O'Casey's language. Dolan had his supporters now. O'Casey pointed out that the text was already 'a deadly compromise with

172 SednO'Casey the actual; it has been further modified by the Directors but I draw the line at a Vigilance Committee of the Actors.' Robinson must have invoked the example of Synge, who was usually willing to make cuts to please the actors. O'Casey may not have seen Synge's Playboy on stage until December 1924 but he knew it well.72 Indeed, when he became a Maunsel author himself in 1919 one of their books he bought was Synge's Plays. But he was getting tired of being compared to Synge73 and now let fly: 'I am sorry, but I'm not Synge; not even, I'm afraid, a reincarnation.' Ireland had changed since Synge's day, and 'the U.S.S.R. has fixed a new star in the sky.' Under the circumstances he would prefer to withdraw the play.74 He knew the Abbey was not about to let this happen. He was the more confident now that he had sent Macmillan the Plough for publication,75 and Juno was doing so well in London that reporters were crossing to Dublin to interview him. Sniffing around the Abbey for bad news the diarist Holloway commented that O'Casey had become 'far more silent and solitary of late than he was before success came to him'.76 Thus there was a build-up to opening night during which a certain hostility to O'Casey entered the Abbey environment. The upshot of the actors' attempt to re-run Dolan's objections to the Plough was that Eileen Crowe gave up the part of Mrs Gogan, which went to May Craig (by no means O'Casey's preference), and played a role O'Casey wrote especially for her, the Woman from Rathmines,77 while McCormick succeeded in getting the cuts in the text he wanted. In later years, when Eileen Crowe played Bessie Burgess, she would always replace 'you bitch, you!' with 'you rip, you!' in her line to Nora in act 4, thus indicating how she and McCormick would have bowdlerised if allowed.78 Going into production, then, the Plough had shaky support from key members of the cast. There is even the charge that as director Robinson 'was out to damage O'Casey's play',79 although Blythe reported that Robinson was 'emphatic' that the Plough was a better play than/imo.80 On opening night, Monday 8 February, 'there was electricity in the air before and behind the curtain at the Abbey [...] thronged with distinguished people.'81 These included the Blythes, the Minister for Justice Kevin O'Higgins, the Lord Chief Justice Hugh Kennedy, Yeats with his 'party', Lennox Robinson, and the writers F.R. Higgins, O'Flaherty, Gogarty, T.C. Murray, and others. Up in the balcony, all unknown, sat the young Samuel Beckett. The play was loudly and enthusiastically received and O'Casey received an ovation when called on stage. It appears that the young republican Frank Ryan had looked for ten women from Cumann na mBan to help him stir up trouble on the night, but decided to postpone (too many state witnesses perhaps?).82 There was no trouble. Holloway, who had seen the Plough in rehearsal and taken exception to the character of Rosie Redmond and other 'nastiness', pressed some attenders for a negative response. The film censor James Montgomery obliged by declaring he was glad he was not 'on duty' that night, while District Justice Kenneth Reddin admitted that the Plough left a bad taste in his mouth. Kevin O'Higgins 'owned up' that he did not like the play either. But when Montgomery turned to Gogarty he was disappointed to find

'IBanish You!' 173 that Gogarty whose reputation for filthy limericks Holloway as fly-on-the-wall deplored, declared himself well-pleased: 'It will give the smug-minded something to think about.'83 O'Casey had been apprehensive about the effect Rosie Redmond might have on the audience. After the show, he met Ria Mooney, who had played the role, as he crossed the stage (with nobody to bar him now). There was a pale seriousness about our usually animated author,' Mooney recalled. "Thank you for saving my play," he said, and when I looked incredulously at him, he added, "I mean that". Then he walked away.' There is a well-known photograph (now in the Berg Collection) showing O'Casey in cap and trenchcoat on stage during rehearsal with Ria Mooney signed, 'Be clever, Maid, and let who will be good.' The fact was that Mooney, at age twenty-three, did not know at this time what a prostitute was! She merely felt sorry for the young girls she had seen in the lane at the back of the Abbey, and this, she later claimed, allowed her to give a totally sympathetic performance.84 O'Casey was equally grateful to Shelah Richards, who played Nora, and in due course sent her an inscribed copy of the published text.85 'For the rest of the week', one reviewer noted, 'the bookings have broken all Abbey records, a proof that one at least of our dramatic prophets does not lack honour in his own country.'86 The reviews on the day following the opening night were positive, the Irish Times being especially enthusiastic. The Dublin Evening Mail emphasised the truth of the play, 'woven from what anyone can realise was in keeping with events'. Easter Week had given O'Casey, this reviewer continued, 'an opportunity for indicating how futile are the hate and the bloodshed and the disturbing things, and that the real and lasting element through all time is the charity which shines through sordid lives'. In short, the politically unbiased saw the power and significance of the Plough. The production was clearly very good. But on Tuesday night there were signs of opposition from the audience, not because of Rosie Redmond but because of the Irish tricolour's being brought into the pub in act 2. The sister of Kevin Barry, hanged for IRA activities in 1920, was one of the protestors; the Republican and playwright Dorothy Macardle was another. It would appear that such Republicans then went away and helped organise the major opposition, resulting in riots, which took place on the fourth night, 11 February (the third night being relatively quiet). The Republican opposition was organised by UCD members of Cumann na mBan, on behalf of widows, sisters, daughters and supporters of the men who fought in the 1916 Rising.87 It is important to understand the nature of these women's sense of offence, or else the riots are in danger of being caricatured as so much typical Irish foolishness. They were really part of a class struggle, though not the one O'Casey was interested in. As Richard English has pointed out, the anti-Treatyites had failed to mobilise the masses: instead of a simple class division there had been 'a patchwork of essentially disparate struggles' during the civil war.88 The social composition of the revoutionary republican movement was reflective of an Irish Roman Catholic society, representing a broad social spectrum. Therefore,

174 Sean O'Casey

'anti-capitalist conflict was not the central dynamic of the Irish revolution.'89 It had lost its way and O'Casey's play did not show how but mocked the whole endeavour. Although the civil war was almost three years in the past the wounds were still fresh. Hopes of redress dwindled by the year, and the failure of the Boundary Commission, which many believed would indirectly result in an end of partition, meant that by 1926 the Republic was beyond reach. Soon de Valera would cut his losses, take the oath to the crown that was no oath and join Bail Eireann again. Most people wanted to forget all about the violence of recent years and get on with building a so-called decent life. Even Michael Collins was now being forgotten. In May 1926 Lady Gregory heard from a friend in the Abbey: 'I have tried in several shops for pictures of Michael Collins but have not so far been successful. It is quite tragic how he seems to have faded from favour with the public.'90 But Dorothy Macardle felt far more strongly the fact that, ten years on, the 1916 Rising seemed to have been almost forgotten.91 There was no special public celebration of 1916. On 4 May 1926 the annual Easter Week commemoration ceremonies were held at Arbour Hill Barracks, but the newspapers were more concerned with the miners' strike in England and riots in London than with editorialising on the Rising. It was a dead issue. O'Casey's play, by an ironic process of revisionism, made it a live one. When Republican women turned out in force at the Abbey on the fourth night of the Plough, then, they carried into the stalls with them the discontent of a failed revolution. The opposition was taken over from the balcony by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, a formidable feminist.92 In a double irony, she was neither a widow of a 1916 participant (as she implied) nor aware that O'Casey had lauded her husband in The Story of the Irish Citizen Army as the real hero of 1916: 'In Sheehy-Skeffington, and not in Connolly, fell the first martyr to Irish Socialism.'93 But she was an effective as well as a vocal disrupter of the production in act 2. Significantly, she was to be appointed to the executive of de Valera's new party, Fianna Fail, founded later in 1926.94 Her credentials, then, were Republican to the core. Also in the audience were Mrs Pearse, mother of Patrick and Willie, Mrs Tom Clarke, and other bereaved women. To the leader of the Abbey orchestra John Larchet (whom O'Casey fondly called 'Doctor Larkey') the protests were planned. Before act 2 began a young man (probably Frank Ryan) approached, praised the playing of the orchestra, and then advised Larchet to have the musical instruments moved. This was done, and Larchet locked the piano. When the attack upon the stage came, during act 2, the assailants climbed over the piano. Larchet later remembered: 'Before the curtain could be lowered two men and a girl got up. One man at all events tried to get through but he was struck through the curtain. I went onto the stage from behind and I saw a young lady being pinned to the floor, one man was sitting on her, two others held her arms. They let her go free later on. She was the niece of a well-known person.'95 When the lights went up at the end of act 2 the audience was in turmoil, mainly, it would appear, over the desecration of the national flag in a public house. Some got frightened and

7Banish You!' 175 left and those in the balcony came down and took vacated seats in the pit, the better to confront the stage. Holloway noticed that Yeats left his seat in the stalls (usually the third row) during the tumult. He was present only by accident, for he did not usually return to a play after opening night; it was lucky he was present, since Robinson was nowhere to be seen and Lady Gregory was not due up from Coole until next day. Even the secretary Johnnie Perrin was off duty and the telephone locked away in his office. Holloway claimed that Yeats left for the 7mA Times office, across the Liffey in D'Olier Street, 'to have the report of the row doctored'.96 What this, in effect, meant is that Yeats deposited in advance the speech he intended to deliver from the stage which he knew would be unheard but which he wanted recorded. When act 3 began, 'about a dozen women made their way from the pit on either side of the theatre and attempted to scramble on to the stage. After a time they succeeded, and there ensued on the stage a regular fight between the players and the invaders.'97 Gabriel Fallon, who as Captain Brennan was not due to re-enter until the end of act 3, got a good view of the proceedings from the wings. He saw Barry Fitzgerald (praised by the critics for a Talstaffian' performance as Fluther) deliver a hefty blow to the chin of a man while Shelah Richards pulled the hair of a woman with him.98 Tradition has it that Barry Fitzgerald took down the fire axe from the wings and held it 'against boarders'.99 Missiles, mainly women's shoes, were pelted at the players, who as vigorously pelted them back. Many a one-shoed lady must have hobbled home from the Abbey on that night.100 FJ. McCormick tried to address the audience and to say that it was not fair to attack the players for what the play itself was saying. This was as much as to pray that the women's shoes be directed instead at O'Casey, unhappily present. Yeats, returned from his quick trip to the Irish Times, had suggested to O'Casey that the police should be summoned. O'Casey resisted and then consented. Yeats took to the stage to address the mob. Naturally, the most authoritative version of his speech is the one published next day by the Irish Times: "Is this", he shouted, "going to be a recurring celebration of Irish genius? Synge first, and then O'Casey! The news of the happenings of the last few minutes here will flash from country to country. Dublin has once more rocked the cradle of a reputation. From such a scene in this theatre went forth the fame of Synge. Equally the fame of O'Casey is born here tonight. This is his apotheosis." The speech was 'quite inaudible to a large section of the audience who knew he was speaking only by the movement of his lips and the waving of his hands in dramatic gesture', according to the Manchester Guardian.101 Having occupied the front-row seats, the women began to sing the national anthem; the chorus was taken up in the balcony. Then the police arrived, ejected a number of the women and drove others back into the pit. Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington rose to make her grand exit. Before she left she rebuked the audience for forgetting

176 Sean O 'Casey

the men of Easter Week. 'All you need do now is to sing "God Save the King".'102 Fallon mistakenly refers to 'the second week of the play' but in fact it played for only one.103 There were just three more performances (including the Saturday matinee), and Lady Gregory attended all three. She witnessed only slight interruptions, and thought the play magnificent: 'I felt at the end of it as if I should never care to look at another; all others would seem so shadowy to the mind after this.'104 On the Saturday morning there was a threat to kidnap Barry Fitzgerald, a former member of the ICA.105 Although the idea seems bizarre, armed men raided his house in Dollymount, but Fitzgerald, having 'some little suspicion in his mind', had not gone home that night.106 As a precaution, the players were all ordered to stay within the Abbey between the Saturday matinee and evening performances. The pianist/composer Walter Rummel happened to be in Dublin for a concert, and George Yeats brought him along to the Abbey to entertain the captive players. During Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' Yeats fell asleep and awoke convinced he was in the middle of a storm. And so, 'with music and cold ham and tea the hours of incarceration passed quickly.'107 That night a huge audience responded loudly in favour of the play, called for O'Casey and cheered him as he took his place among the players. It had been an exhausting week. O'Casey was already unwell at the outset, being troubled with his eyes, and the excitement left him nervous and subdued. The abuse he had received on leaving the Abbey on Thursday night he found deeply disturbing, although he was to see the funny side later on. One of the women added as coup de grace that there wasn't a prostitute in Ireland from one end of it to the other (A, 2, 150).

Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington was not finished with O'Casey yet. She wrote to the Irish Independent to correct an editorial on the riots and pointed out that the outrage was directed against a 'supposedly national theatre' that had 'helped to make Easter Week, and that now in its subsidised, sleek old age jeers at its former enthusiasms'. She made much of the travesty of the tricolour. As for the Plough as a play, posterity was sure to rank it artistically far below O'Casey's other work.108 In his reply, O'Casey let fly at her: The heavy-hearted expression of Mrs. Sheehy-Skeffington about "The Ireland that remembers with tear-dimmed eyes all that Easter Week stands for" makes me sick. Some of the men can't even get a job. Mrs. Skeffmgton is certainly not dumb, but she appears to be both blind and deaf to all the things that are happening around her. Is the Ireland that is pouring to the picture houses, to the dance halls, to the football matches, remembering with tear-dimmed eyes all that Easter Week stands for? Tears may be in the eyes of the navvies working on the Shannon [electrification] scheme, but they are not for Ireland.109

1. Watercolour by John Casey, 1898 (courtesy Pauline Allen)

2. Headquarters of Irish Church Missions, where Michael Casey worked, Townsend Street, Dublin (from Lift Up A Standard by Rev. R.C.P. Hunt, p. 33, courtesy Irish Church Missions)

3. Remains of baptismal font, St Mary's church, Dublin, where SOC was baptised (courtesy Linzi Simpson)

4, 9 Innisfallen Parade, where the Caseys lived 1882-88 (private collection)

5. Sketch on SLOT Pipers'Club notepaper by 'JKC' (SOC), secretary, 1911 (courtesy National Library of Ireland, with the permission of the Estate of Sean O'Casey)

6. 1911 census form for the Casey family, filled in by SOC in Irish (Census 1911 Dublin, DED40/1/A18 (ii), courtesy National Archive)

7. Title page, SOC's Songs of the Wren, 1918 (courtesy Lorna Reynolds)

8. Mdire Keating, c. 1920 (photo by H.L. Lloyd, courtesy Sean McCann)

9. Mdire Keating'* transcription of a poem to her by SOC (courtesy Sean McCann)

10. Frank Cahitt, SOC's early mentor (courtesy Tkeo Mortimer)

11. Plaque at St Laurence OTook's National School, Sevilk Place (private collection)

12. Drawing by Mick Casey of a kestrel with his and SOC's two nieces (courtesy Martin Margulies and the Burns Library, Boston College)

13. View from the Casey flat, 18 Abercom Road, showing St Barnabas's church (Gjon Mili, courtesy Time-Life and Getty Images)

/4. Wbfo'c» to Qu^? issued to SOC while rooming with Michael Mullen in 1920 (Special Collections, Research Library, UCLA)

15. Lennox Robinson, by William Rothenstein, c. 1920 (Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork)

16. Caricature ofW.B. Yeats by 'Mac'(Isa McNee), 1923 (courtesy John Barrett)

17. Bronze bust of Jim Larkin by Mina Carney, c. 1930 (Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art)

18. Promptbook o/The Plough and the Stars showing SOC's early revisions, act 1, 1925-26 (courtesy Abbey Theatre)

19. Pencil drawing ofSOC, first portrait of him, by Patrick Tuohy, 1926, used as frontispiece of the first edition of the Plough and then withdrawn by SOC (Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and the O 'Brien family)

20. First production of the Plough, Abbey Theatre, February 1926: act 3: Gabriel Fallon (Captain Brennan), Arthur Shields (Lieut. Langon), FJ. McCormick (Jack Clitheroe), Shelah Richards (Nora) (courtesy Micheal Johnston)

21. Sketch by SOC for set in act 2, The Silver Tassie, 1928-29 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library, with the permission of the Estate if sSean O; Casey)

22. Sketch by SOC ofBreon at play in Chalfont-St-Giles, c. 1933 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library, with the permission of the Estate of Sean O'Casey)

23. Part of playbill for Within the Gates, New York, 1934 (courtesy Robert Mahony)

24. Eileen O'Casey, by Evan Walters (courtesy Shivaun O'Casey)

'IBanish You!' Ill She would not let him off with this, or, indeed, with any of his self-exculpation. The Ireland O'Casey referred to, she argued, 'is the Ireland that forgets - that never knew. It is the Ireland that sits comfortably in the Abbey stalls and applauds Mr. O'Casey's play.' As for his defence of Nora Clitheroe as representative ('A mother does not like her son to be killed - she doesn't like him even to get married'), she insisted that if O'Casey were not so blind [sic] he would see that it is the likes of Mrs Pearse, 'that valiant woman who gave both her sons for freedom', who was typical of Irish womanhood. 'Such breathe the spirit of Volumnia.'110 But where there is a Volumnia there is also her son Coriolanus, and this Shakespearean role O'Casey was now determined to play. His pride rose into a passion as he replied yet again, this time to defend his play as a dramatic representation of certain truths. His Parthian shot - for he always had one - was that people who go to football matches were just as much part of Ireland as those (republicans) who went to Bodenstown to honour Wolfe Tone: it would be wise for the Republican Party to recognise this, 'unless they are determined to make of Ireland the terrible place of a land fit only for heroes to live in'.111 Brecht could have gone to school to him. In addressing Mrs SheehySkeffington he was also addressing the Republican Party. He heard also from Cathal O'Shannon, editor of Voice of Labour, faulting him for his original quarrel with the ICA and asserting that his involvement should have made him 'the last person to have the impudence to stage what he did stage'.112 In short, O'Casey had politically alienated himself on all sides (for he was certainly not now, or ever, like Yeats, a follower of Cumann na nGaedheal). Juno had virtually said of the civil war, 'a plague on both your houses'. In that sense, Juno turned its back on viable politics. This is what \endsjuno its universality: it has no other agenda than a condemnation in the name of humanity of fanaticism and the self-destruction brought about by civil war. The Plough is quite different. Here the backward look is contextualised by Larkin's return, like Oisin after the Fianna, to an Ireland of weaklings and a spiritless labour movement. The play is thus an enraged lament for what might have been. All of his life hereafter O'Casey was to try to fill this vacuum, to rewrite history, and to assemble a Platonic myth capable of transforming reality through revolution - the right kind of revolution. Meanwhile, he was Coriolanus, surrounded on all sides by those whose 'voices' he was not prepared to supplicate for popularity. At the Abbey there was a clique forming against him;113 Holloway was already bad-mouthing him to all who would listen. O'Casey now refused to shake hands with him. In the Irish Statesman, run by a man O'Casey came more and more to despise, George Russell, Liam O'Flaherty threw in his lot with the Republicans: 'In my opinion The Plough and the Stars is a bad play.'114 One by one other poets and intellectuals sided with O'Flaherty - F.R. Higgins, Austin Clarke, A.E. Malone, tribunes all. Then came the invitation to speak publicly. It was from Frank Ryan, secretary of the Republican Club at UCD. The occasion was a lecture on the Plough 'controversy' by Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington at a meeting of the Republican Club

178 Sean O'Casey

(of which she was a member) on Monday 1 March at 7.30 p.m. The committee would be glad if O'Casey would consent to reply to the lecture.115 So, it was to be a debate in a formal sense. Yet, since the affair was organised by Ryan, a major figure behind the protests, O'Casey was actually set up. This was something he never realised. At J.B. Pagan's invitation O'Casey had already agreed to travel to London just as Juno was due to transfer to the Fortune Theatre on 8 March. There was a further invitation from the Hawthornden Prize Committee to attend the announcement of this year's award in the Aeolian Hall, London, on 23 March, at which Lady Gregory would speak. So the invitation to address the Republican Club would offer O'Casey the opportunity to say his piece before taking the boat to England. He put a lot into his preparation. His notes refer to the Connolly-Pearse differences; the Plough's not having been written for a London audience; the censorship issue; 'Henry V and his soldiers'.116 He drafted a speech which, instead of confronting Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington's arguments (familiar from her letters to the Irish Independent), tried to highlight the difference between her point of view as 'a political partisan' and his point of view as a dramatist. She could not understand his point of view: she had never sighed a sigh with Melpomene nor ever touched the hem of the garment of Thalia. (Here he put in the stresses on the names for oral delivery.) A dramatist should not have to explain or justify things as does a politician.117 There is a lot more. O'Casey had been particularly offended by the attitude of the Evening Herald to the play. In its initial review it faulted him for denigrating 'the courage of those who risked their lives during that struggle for an ideal'.118 Subsequently, the Herald published an anonymous piece, 'New Play Resented', in which a Fascist hostility to free expression was manifest. The second act would not be permitted by the government of any other country, 'certainly not in America, France, Germany, or under Mussolini at the present time'. Yeats ought to know this. 'There is an effort abroad to destroy Nationalism and supplant it by internationalism, and the desecration of the National flag of a country. I should imagine the play would come under the Treason Act.'119 Alongside this piece the Herald of the same day published an editorial deploring the riots of the night before. 'There is one way to stop a recurrence of those unfortunate protests, and that is to grant powers for a censor of plays as well as films.'120 O'Casey proposed to counter this by calling attention to the newspaper's publication of stories of rape, robbery, murder, gambling, gossip and suicide. He had clippings to support his argument, which was, essentially, that he was being censored. The freedom to speak out is doubtless a knotty issue, the 'heckler's veto issue' as it came to be called in the USA,121 related to ownership of the property on which a protest is made. The Abbey's receipt of government subsidy complicated the legal situation here, for the space in which the protesters made their protest was now publicly owned and conferred new freedom. Avoiding this point O'Casey proposed to widen the debate by confronting those critics who condemned the Plough on artistic grounds as 'plotless'. Here he hoped to stun his listeners with references

7 Banish You!' 179 to the plays of Shaw, Strindberg, Chekhov and Toller (many of which he had lately seen in Dublin). There follow further notes on Patrick Pearse and the Irish flag as symbol of the whole nation. This note is prolonged, a text for delivery peppered with rhetorical questions and the somewhat pedantic interjection, 'like Antony in Julius Caesar, I pause for a reply.'122 All of this preparation, typical of O'Casey's approach to his work and its defence, was rather in vain. On the night of the lecture Mills' Hall in Merrion Row was packed. Maud Gonne was there (and spoke, although she had not seen the play), the ubiquitous Holloway, numerous writers, and a contingent of actors from the Abbey but none of the Directors. In the chair was Arthur Clery, Professor of Commercial Law at UCD and a strong republican. He was not likely to be sympathetic to O'Casey; apart from everything else, 'there was a strong streak of class consciousness in him.'123 O'Casey was applauded as he walked through the hall to take his seat in the front row. After Mrs SheehySkeffington's well-delivered lecture he rose to propose the vote of thanks, got weak, failed to say anything, and sat down again. The young poet Lyle Donaghy stepped into the breach until O'Casey recovered. He then went through many of his prepared points. Although he 'spoke very effectively [. . .] and his case got a good hearing',124 the night belonged to Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington. In opposing her O'Casey, 'a little like Salman Rushdie later', had perhaps 'no idea of the fires he was kindling'.125 O'Casey had dedicated the Plough to 'the gay laugh of my mother at the gate of the grave', but now there was another sound, another woman's voice, if not a Voice in the Window, and it was not laughing but deadly serious. Strangely, O'Casey had not recognised her at first, Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington, Mother Ireland. She was about to banish her native son. Only, like Coriolanus banished from Rome, O'Casey could turn and cry to all of Dublin, 'I banish you!' All but a few, that is. His allies within the Abbey players were reduced to three at most.126 When he told Beatrice Toal he was leaving for London, understanding that he meant more than a trip of a few weeks she tried to argue him out of it for the sake of his writing. 'I won't go away if you marry me,' he replied.127 She refused, surmising that he was still in love with Maire Keating. He left Dublin on 4 March without another word to Beatrice. Thus are paradises, perhaps, lost. She married the Deputy Commissioner of the Garda Siochdna in November 1928.

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PartS

London - New York - London 'Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.' - Emerson, 'Self-Reliance'

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10 LONDON LIGHTS AND

THE SILVER

TASSIE

here can hardly ever have been an Irish writer who first took boat and train from Dublin to London whose heart has not risen at the earlymorning arrival in Euston Station, palatial as it once was up to the 1960s and exciting in spite of the grime and the fumes. To the middle-aged O'Casey, abroad for the first time in his forty-six years but with an unusual eye for railway stations (having worked on the GNR), Euston was 'a sprawling untidy place, dim and dark; tormented with many sounds - the clatter of trucks, the patter of hurrying, fussy feet; [...] the soothing, sickly scent of oil; porters hurrying, guards sauntering amid the rustle of paper and magazine' (A, 2, 251-52). Like so many Irish before him he had arrived where wonders and opportunities flung down their challenges, to be embraced and welcomed in a rush of adrenalin. Yet O'Casey's leaving Dublin on the passenger ship from Dun Laoghaire on the evening of Thursday 4 March cannot have been quite so romantic as he was later to make out, with his 'Sweet Inishfallen, fare thee well! Forever!' (A, 2, 247). After all, he fully intended to return, and retained his room at 422 North Circular Road to that end. Moreover, where the commonplace Irish emigrant from Ireland at this time, with battered suitcase by his side, having tasted his first English breakfast served with full Cockney accent, set off by bus or tube for his digs in some Irish enclave, O'Casey was being met by a prominent theatre manager and would ride in style by taxi to the West End. James B. Pagan recognised his new playwright by the pre-arranged token of O'Casey's red muffler and once the preliminaries were over brought him to the Kenilworth Hotel in Bloomsbury, informing him that he had tickets for Uncle Vanya at the Duke of York's next evening. Sean was bound to enjoy it. He would see the young Jean ForbesRobertson as Sonya. Meantime, Fagan would show him around. He took him first to Oxford where the Players were doing a Vanbrugh play and gave him a tour of the colleges. O'Casey was impressed with the students he met; he was always to find students more interesting than dons.

T

184 Sean O'Casey

If he had failed Fagan when Juno and the Paycock had its London premiere at the Royalty on 16 November he was about to make up for it now. Fagan, who once acted in the Frank Benson company which had inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin, was a theatre man to his fingertips, a playwright as well as a manager and director. He was determined that O'Casey should be seen everywhere around the West End, give interviews (there were four in the London papers on the day after his arrival), be photographed, meet the critics, and in general take his part in an extended round of publicity. Sean even spoke on the radio (2LO) on Irish plays on the Sunday evening after his arrival. The major occasion was, of course, the opening night on Monday 8 March, when Juno transferred to the Fortune, a newly opened theatre still standing beside Drury Lane, modestly describing itself as 'the prettiest and most comfortable' in London. It was O'Casey's London address until he moved to digs with one Mrs Spanner, 2 Trafalgar Square, Chelsea, at the end of April. He found moral support on opening night when Lady Gregory - over in London on Hugh Lane business - showed up and helped him through the ordeal. Two days later his picture was in the press in the company of the Allgood sisters (Sara played Juno, Molly Mrs Madigan). As he wrote plaintively to Gabriel Fallon in Dublin, 'shall I never know peace no more?'1 But his dismay was tempered by high spirits: 'Going tomorrow with Lady Londonderry to see [Rutland Boughton's] "The Immortal Hour". Saw "Uncle Vanya": bad acting; splendid production. Fine first night in The Fortune. Cheers and prolonged applause. Flowers flung at the members of the company. Spoke: more cheers & prolonged applause. Interviewers like the Breastplate of St Patrick [before, behind, above, below].'2 The man the interviewers saw at this time was slim, 'hatchet-faced with pointed nose and chin', and small penetrating eyes.3 It is extraordinary how many references there are to his eyes when one considers how damaged they were: at this time he suffered so much from pain that he had to telegraph home for his friend Dr Joe Cummins's prescription. In interviews, O'Casey spoke softly - some said inaudibly - with a pronounced Dublin accent at times insolently reproduced by the interviewer. Apart from working-class cap and trenchcoat his dress was conventional enough: collar and tie, sweater and a dark suit. Yet he now began some of the myth-making which served to create his international image as the last of thirteen children born into appalling poverty, and so forth, and deprived of education until he taught himself to read. Later, for American consumption, he was to dress up his political involvement so that it appeared he fought in 1916. All of this was doubtless in response to incessant questioning and journalists' appetite for good copy. Perhaps he was coping with what Philip Roth calls 'genealogical aggression the overpowering by origins'.4 O'Casey learned to embellish and even to invent details which proved adhesive when he began to write his autobiography a few years later. Further, he could be mischievous as well as economic with the truth, and enjoyed providing the occasional false trail. Asked about the work he had in hand, he gave three titles, The Signal ('about the railway'), The Red

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 185 Lily ('about a fallen woman'), and The Cock Crows ('on a Catholic's religious doubts'). The first was one he told Fallon about.5 Of The Cock Crows there is no other mention but The Red Lily was a more definite project.6 Indeed, all of Dublin thought The Red Lily was to be his next play. As O'Casey was fond of the novels of Anatole France, he may have borrowed the title of France's insufferable The Red Lily (translated by Winifred Stephens in 1925) but hardly with the intention to transfer France's demi-monde to the left bank of the Liffey. Significantly, he never mentioned The Silver Tassie at this time. Lady Gregory, who had seen Juno at the Royalty on 2 March, thought it went better at the Fortune, 'more like the Abbey with its smaller stage'. O'Casey had told the first-night audience how kind he thought London, 'and that as it had been hard to dig him out of Dublin so it would be to do the same in London'.7 He himself did not think the production as good as the Abbey's: one can only hope he did not share this view with the London cast. Further, Fagan had altered the tone of the ending by making Juno 'plaintive, almost whining, instead of supporting with a sort of joyful courage the poor daughter',8 while the drunkenness of Joxer and the Captain was magnified: Shaw was not alone in objecting to this emphasis. Within ten days of Juno's transfer, Lady Gregory saw it four times. Each time she brought friends. She drew O'Casey into her London circle and ensured that he met the 'right' people. She was very kind to him, for she knew how difficult the whole public relations exercise was for him. He did not care for hotel life, and because of his weak stomach found invitations to dinner difficult. But he went to lunch with Lady Gregory on 15 March to meet Alec Martin from Christie's and Ramsay McDonald, the future Prime Minister, both of whom were lending support over the Hugh Lane paintings.9 He got on well with both of these important men, his intelligence enabling easy conversation. Lady Gregory steered him through London society. She was also to speak at the Hawthornden Prize awards on 23 March for the best work of imaginative literature in prose or verse published during the year. O'Casey had been reluctant to submit Juno for the competition in 1925-26, and now he was unsure if he should accept the prize of £100. He knew he was over the age limit (forty). As one of the judges was afraid O'Casey might not turn up Lady Gregory volunteered to bring him herself, first inviting him to lunch and then paying for the taxi to the Aeolian Hall in new Bond Street. In its way the prize-giving ceremony was extraordinary. The opening speech was made by none other than Herbert Asquith, now Lord Oxford, the man who had thrown his weight behind the Home Rule movement all those years ago in 1885. Now he poured praise on Juno (which he had seen twice), and on the Abbey players. Then Lady Gregory spoke. She dwelt on O'Casey's development as a playwright, a topic with which the editor of the Daily News was so pleased that he asked her to submit it as an article. Luckily she agreed, as it is the first significant account of O'Casey's work. Here she quoted Asquith's view of Juno: 'In the delineation of character, in the rich variety and appropriateness of the dialogue, in the invention of situations, in pathos and in humour, it is in the truest and most adequate sense of the word, a great work of art.'

186 Sean O'Casey

Finding this a good summary of technique she wondered how much of this ability is innate in dramatists and how much acquired. None of the successful Abbey playwrights except Synge had had a university education; formal study of dramaturgy was thus not a factor in the creation of a playwright. Rather, 'the establishment of a small, a local theatre leads to the production of a fresher, a more original drama.' This point had been accepted when she made it during the early Abbey tours in America: subsequently, Eugene O'Neill and others had proved its validity. 'One gets a richness and variety in what I sometimes call parochial plays, belonging to one or another district. There is a different language.' She then went on to apply these points to O'Casey's plays. T do not think there can be a better example of the influence of a little theatre like ours than its having made a dramatist of Sean O'Casey.' Although this was true it was also ominous. 'We give advice sometimes to younger playwriters [. . .] not to look outside their own circumference, to choose an environment already known.'10 While celebrating O'Casey's Dublin plays she was clearly indicating the parameters of the Abbey's approval. In accepting the award O'Casey, dressed in a grey lounge suit 'with a varicoloured cardigan', spoke first 'fervently' in Irish and then, briefly, in English. He was given a 'great reception'.11 The business completed, he went with Lady Gregory, the Fagans and others to 'a very pleasant little meal in the nearest tea place'.12 The Hawthornden Prize may have been modest, monetarily speaking, but it was prestigious. The judges, apart from the founder Alice Warrender, were well-respected if minor writers - Laurence Binyon, Robert Lynd and J.C. Squire - with the patron of the arts Sir Edward Marsh as secretary. These were people influential in the arts in London. Though he said in his speech of thanks that he would keep the prize as a 'happy momento of his visit to England', O'Casey seemed now in no hurry home. In Dublin the ever-watchful Holloway heard from one of his gossips that 'O'Casey has taken a flat in London where he intends to reside for some time.'13 As O'Casey's correspondence remained addressed from the Fortune Theatre until 12 April it is likely he had decided to stay until the London production of the Plough, due to go into rehearsal soon, should open. In the interim he continued to enjoy himself, going to the theatre, meeting notables (O'Casey dearly loved a Lady), and appreciating London. But through his fellow-tenant Jim Kavanagh he kept up his rent in Dublin. After Lady Gregory went back to Ireland on 1 April the picture would look different. Indeed, the Lane Pictures would look different for she brought him to see them at the newly opened Tate Gallery on 30 March as part of his enlistment in her campaign. His response was instant: 'one felt the surge of hot blood, gazing upon these joys of colour and line raped from Dublin.'14 He was to remain a valiant supporter of the cause. In the same spirit she introduced him to the legendary T.P. O'Connor, so-called Father of the House of Commons, who was rather more impressed with O'Casey than O'Casey with him ('carrying the adulation of power to the very verge of the grave'15). In the Sunday Times on 4 April, O'Connor wrote:

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 187 [O'Casey] is shy until he gets to know you; tall, rather thin, with long stories of suffering, privation and [with a] profound and somewhat sombre reflection in his expression. [...] His experiences as one of the poor among the poor would make him lean to the side of poverty; and I rather think he is in politics, and [sic] adherent of the Labour Party. But he has too impartial and clear a mind to be a partisan; he is eminently fitted to be the dramatist of the times in which he lives. [...] He started late, but he has an immense future.16 The question was, where? To situate himself anew he would have to find himself again.

He would not find it easy to adjust to London's ways. 'How aimless, chaotic and feverish it all looks,' he mused.17 'What are your dramatists doing to neglect Hyde Park?' He startled interviewer Beverley Nichols with this question when the latter was supposed to be asking the questions.18 But if O'Casey's imagination was fuelling itself on the varied humanity to be found in the likes of Speakers' Corner his interviewer's was exercised by what this primitive thought of the Bright Young Things, 'the painted ladies, the crimped young men, the poisoned [sic] critics, the wilting hectic generation which we have now come to know so well'.19 This was the cue for O'Casey to open up on Noel Coward, then the darling of the West End. He had read The Vortex and Hay Fever in Dublin and had decided they were nothing more than 'codology'.20 Now he told Nichols that Coward's characters were 'absolutely artificial'. When Nichols argued that they were meant to be, for the people Coward wrote about were artificial, O'Casey was furious. 'I don't believe any human being is devoid of humanity. [...] That's the trouble about half the dramatists today. They're making life out of drama, instead of making drama out of life.' Nichols placed the sentence in italics, to emphasise how at odds O'Casey was with the real London. 'Be nice to him, for his articles are widely read.' O'Casey placed Pagan's advice to him in italics, since 'Nichols was educated at Marlborough School and Oxford University' (A, 2, 255). Pagan had established himself at the Oxford Playhouse and liked to retain old-school-tie links within the theatre. He saw to it that O'Casey was made honorary member of the Garrick Club for three months from 22 March. O'Casey hated it. He was more at home with the abstract and brief chronicles of his own time. Many of the cast of Juno were also in the Plough, which opened on 12 May, the Allgoods (Sara as Bessie Burgess, Molly as Mrs Gogan), Arthur Sinclair (Fluther Good) and Sydney Morgan (Young Covey). One detail stands out in James Agate's favourable review in the Sunday Times: 'Miss Eileen Carey, who played the immensely difficult part of Nora, is perhaps not a highly accomplished actress at present, though she may become one.' In the summer of 1926 when she and Sean first met Eileen was a kind of femmefatale, a glamorous chorus girl and model with exquisite taste and an expensive life-style. They had,

188 Sean O'Casey

nevertheless, a certain amount in common. She was born in Dublin on 27 December 1900, to Edward Reynolds, an accountant originally from Athlone, and Kathleen Carey, a trainee nurse from north-west Mayo.21 Soon after the family moved to London Eileen's father returned to South Africa, which they had left when the Boer War broke out. There had also been two boys born in South Africa who had died in infancy. Edward Reynolds was a restless and frail man, though he could be decisive. It was because Kathleen's parents objected to him as prospective son-in-law that he had emigrated to Johannesburg in the first place. She followed him out two years later, and they married in Cape Town on 24 April 1895.22 Now he had gone back to Johannesburg, leaving Kathleen and baby Eileen in furnished rooms in London. Kathleen seems to have worked as nurse-companion and about six years later Edward returned from South Africa a broken man. Hospitalised for depression, he lived on for several years before dying from pneumonia. After this Eileen's youth was one of genteel poverty. With her mother out at work she lived first in an orphanage and then in a convent school in Brentwood. Her poverty could not compare with O'Casey's from age six, but she too knew the humiliations of disguised want and the lack of a father figure. The major difference was that Eileen's mother, far from being the stoical, inspiring figure that Susan Casey was, always insisted that Eileen owed her everything. Eileen's stage career began in 1923 when she was engaged by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company to sing in the chorus. She was a mezzo soprano. Impatient with the lack of opportunities in that distinguished company she moved to light, popular musicals, took dancing lessons, and eventually was taken on for Rose Marie at Drury Lane. Because there was another Miss Reynolds in the cast she adopted her mother's maiden name and was known as Eileen Carey. As member of the large chorus in a hit show she was now a society girl, with a flat in Chelsea. She had various love affairs, the most passionate with Lee Ephraim, American manager of Rose Marie. Born in Kentucky in 1877 the dashing Ephraim was forty-eight, thriving in a profession in which accuracy about one's age is not to be looked for. 'A married man in his early forties', Eileen recalled, 'unassertive, kind, and husky-voiced, he attracted me more strongly than anybody I had yet known.'23 When she went to New York in the autumn of 1925 she befriended George M. Cohan. She was a high flyer. On her return to England in 1926 Ephraim met her at Southampton. She had read the script of Juno and he took her to see the production at the Fortune. She was bowled over. 'All these years later I think it must have been the pregnant girl that appealed to me so greatly. I might well have been in the same position. I understood Mary Boyle, and I was by no means far enough from the convent not to think as she did.'24 She wanted to understudy the role and Ephraim arranged a meeting with Fagan at the Fortune which O'Casey attended. This was the moment when their lives changed. She got the role and a few weeks later, with O'Casey's help, stood in as Nora in the Plough. He fussed over and advised her, yet it was Ephraim who took her out to supper after

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 189 opening night, telling her 'that for anyone so inexperienced I had done wonderfully and would improve every night'.25 In mid-August O'Casey began to invite her out. She continued to see both men, although she was actually dependent on Ephraim. He it was who paid the important bills. And he it was who cast her as the soubrette Violette in Frederick Lonsdale's The Street Singer, which meant twelve weeks' work in the autumn of 1926. Molly Allgood was in the London Plough alongside Eileen, playing Mrs Gogan. As she saw O'Casey's interest in Eileen grow she must have been reminded of Synge's passion for her twenty years earlier. There was a similar age difference, a religious difference, and a young actress's awareness that a playwright's romantic interest could be at once a benefit and a complication. History was somewhat repeating itself as O'Casey fell for 'the most adorable woman I ever met'.26 As Synge was with Molly, O'Casey was Eileen's tutor and prolific romantic correspondent. In turn, she was now the main reason for his staying on in London. There were contributory factors also. When the Plough was revived in Dublin on 3 May the republican protests started up again both outside and inside the Abbey. Stink bombs were set off during the performance. Once again the police were sent for and removed people from pit and balcony.27 News of this fresh disturbance must have reached O'Casey's ears. In such circumstances, why should he be in any hurry to return? Further, when T.C. Murray's Abbey success Autumn Fire proved a success in London in April 1926 the Irish Independent so edited the review comparing the two playwrights that Murray appeared to outshine O'Casey. This enraged him: There's a bit of Catholic Irish Journalism for you.'28 He never forgot this. Another kind of severance came when he insisted that Macmillans drop the portrait by Patrick Tuohy from the text of the Plough. Tuohy was a gifted painter whose most famous work was the portrait of Joyce's father in 1923, now in the Lockwood Memorial Library in Buffalo. In February 1926 O'Casey wrote to ask Macmillans to include what he called 'an excellent drawing of me' by Tuohy.29 He changed his mind when the Plough was published and Lady Gregory said the frontispiece made him 'look like a butcher'.30 She wrote to Augustus John and asked him to do an alternative, which he did, painting O'Casey in oils in a single day (14 May) and allowing him to use it in place of Tuohy's sketch, 'a splendid drawing of somebody else'.31 The replacement did not appear until 1927, however, and it was only then that O'Casey dared to send Yeats a copy of the Plough, inscribed with his 'great appreciation for the Poet & earnest admiration for the man'.32 O'Casey and Augustus John liked each other immediately. The ditching of Tuohy reflected O'Casey's rejection of Dublin. Yet the sketch revealed in O'Casey a deep, even haunted presence he preferred to disguise (see illustration 19). The miners' strike went on while the Plough flourished. O'Casey tried to donate the proceeds of a performance for the benefit of the wives and children but the management would not allow speeches.33 Jack Jones, who loved the play and rushed out to see if he could buy the text, wrote on behalf of the Miners' Federation to thank O'Casey for a cheque and a letter of support

190 Sean O'Casey

which would 'do as much good as two ordinary meetings and possibly more good'.34 With the Plough running alongside Juno O'Casey was the talk of London. Everybody went. Shaw, who had twice seen Juno, was delighted also with its successor. As Charlotte wrote to Lady Gregory: 'Wonderful! We were both worked up to a high pitch of excitement and admiration. O'Casey is a great man; how I hope he won't be spoiled!' She had seen O'Casey's piece in the Daily News in which he had praised the Albert Memorial at the expense of Epstein: 'He must be talked to.'35 That appointment soon came through Lady Lavery. Shaw and Augustus John - who had sat beside O'Casey on the opening night of the Plough - were invited to lunch at the Laverys' on 3 June. 'Please come,' Hazel had pleaded with Sean, 'apologetically but earnestly'.36 John wrote to Lady Gregory how well he and O'Casey were getting on ('an original and gifted fellow'), but we do not hear how the lunch itself went.37 Well enough, perhaps, since O'Casey and the Shaws became friends. It was a mark of O'Casey's standing that he was invited to speak at the Critics' Circle Annual Dinner at the Trocadero on 30 May. He pulled no punches when airing his views, and was not asked to return. He was shaping himself to become London's scourge and minister. Around the same time he got started on The Silver Tassie. Something sparked when he heard his new friend Billy McElroy, a coal merchant, sing the Burns song, 'Go fetch to me a pint o' wine/And fill it in a silver tassie'. The song is a farewell to a loved one as a young man leaves for war. In O'Casey's imagination the young man was a footballer from East Wall, the silver tassie at first the trophy he wins and then the priest's chalice at Mass, and the war the Great War. He knew there was a play in it when he had a tune to sing. 'He hummed it in his tiny flat in Kensington; he hummed it in the dead of night, strolling down the Cromwell Road' (A, 2, 270). The play went slowly, the material being complex, but when he first mentioned it in a letter to Fallon on 1 October he had the ideas for each act arranged in his head, plus 'a good opening for the first Act'.38 He hoped to have it written within a year, which was over-ambitious. Taking the flat at 32 Charleville Street in South Kensington at the beginning of July 1926 on a three-year lease determined O'Casey's future. In Dublin the news was received as one more sign that he had lost the run of himself. Having postponed the pleasure more than once he travelled over to Dublin in midJuly to surrender his room, auction off some of his possessions, and arrange the forwarding of his books, his print of The Sleeping Venus', the table on which he wrote, his chair, his sofa, and his typewriter. He wrote to Maire Keating asking her to meet him and declaring 'many have I tried to love, but none have I loved.' But she did not meet him when he arrived in Dublin, or ever again.39 He probably called on his brother Mick and the Beavers in East Wall, to say goodbye and distribute largesse - a role he was never comfortable in - while also seeing Gabriel Fallon and Dr Joe Cummins. No doubt those who knew him in the Dublin theatre looked askance. Thomas MacGreevy, a great gossip, having recently pleaded to meet O'Casey in London and then written blithely to Yeats's wife in Dublin, illustrates the attitude:

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 191

This evening I met Sean O'Casey on the King's Road. I think, quite seriously, that he's lost... He said Ireland was this & that. He is settling in London for good . . . Your country says he is wherever you get your bread and butter. Your country says I, Freudianwise, is wherever you get your emotions . . . But I daresay he'll rise from the dead in the third year or so ... And Augustus John is painting my portrait said he in tones that would be charming if he were 20, but that positively made me wretched in a man of over 40 who is not without some of the qualities of a great artist.40 George Yeats had just sent O'Casey notice that he had been elected to the committee of the Dublin Drama League. 'If you are to be still in London, please send a list of plays you would like to have read for possible production in the coming season.'41 O'Casey was to remark later: 'George Yeats never liked me, &, I believe, she had a big hand, & gave a big putsch to the rejection of "The Silver Tassie".'42 When he got back to London O'Casey kept his hand to the Plough, following its transfer to the New Theatre on 28 June (where it ran until 4 September), while Juno was on tour. Keeping close created friction with Fagan, who saw as interference what O'Casey regarded as legitimate complaints increasingly ignored.43 In time, this friction opened up differences, ruling out Fagan from doing The Silver Tassie.^ Billy McElroy, who had invested money in the London productions of both Juno and the Plough, replaced Fagan as O'Casey's minder. Aged fifty-three, with 'a broad, ruddy face', in O'Casey's description, 'like a big cheese turning rusty, with small, shrewd, beady eyes' (A, 2, 269), McElroy was a man about town. Denis Johnston, who lived intermittently in London through 1926, was shocked when on an outing with O'Casey to the theatre McElroy openly wrote down all that O'Casey said on the subject of the play (Kaiser's Gas) without any objection from O'Casey.45 There was some furnishing of the flat in Clareville Street to be done, but otherwise O'Casey was free to work on The Silver Tassie from mid-September. For him, the beginning was the word: here a few lines of dialogue came to him from the character who was to grow into Mrs Foran. Once he got the flow started the characters usually formed rapidly around the voices and the plot grew act by act - for essentially O'Casey wrote one-acts strung together. Like Shaw, he did not write from a scenario but allowed a play to evolve organically, with pages of lively dialogue, ideas suggesting themselves in the process. The various notes for and drafts of the Tassie which have survived reveal the sudden leaps O'Casey's imagination was capable of while piecing together fragments of scenes and dialogue. Thus in one of the drafts, where the footballer Harry Heegan is called Jack (yet again) and his sweetheart Jessie Taite is sometimes Sara and sometimes Jenny, O'Casey had broadly worked out three acts, but hardly anything for act 4, except the intriguing note, 'Make way for Ben Hur in his chariot.' This note suggests Harry Heegan the war victim in his wheelchair, and defines the whole ironic thrust of act 4. As the film version of the

192 SednO'Casey stage spectacle Ben Hur dates from 1925, the reference was topical. The irony, however, is the key to O'Casey's whole approach to this anti-war play. Harry loses everything, including Jessie, to his able friend Barney. Paul Fussell has made the point that irony, 'the dominating form of modern understanding', originated 'largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War'.46 To O'Casey irony came naturally: it coloured his vision of life and individualised his three Dublin plays. All of the materials which were used in The Silver Tame underwent this ironic recasting, from Burns's simple love song on. The 1914-18 war was the most serious, most ambitious theme he had yet addressed, and while he framed it within the comic commentary of two old codgers, Simon and Sylvester, to whom the war meant nothing, the core of the play has to do with the stupidity and blasphemy of the war to end wars. In order to show its enormity O'Casey had to flatten out his characters to two-dimensional proportions. Thus the women, in strong contrast to his style up to this point, were to be depicted as scheming, heartless and self-interested. The tassie itself, the football cup, is flattened under Harry's wheelchair to become a blasphemous image of a sacrificial shedding of blood. Act 1 is set in the East Wall area of Dublin where O'Casey himself had lived for twenty years. It was a working-class area, looking to the railway and the docks for employment. Soccer was a popular recreation, even after the GAA (founded 1884) had established its nationalistic opposition to so-called foreign games. When a Dublin 'die-hard' returned to UCD in 1924 after a violent career in the IRA he 'naturally rejoined the college soccer club' and captained it to victory in the Collingwood Cup in 1926.47 Such contradictions were rife in the tangled web of Irish social and political life. Thus Harry Heegan in the Tassie is a soccer hero (naturally) and an enlisted man and yet there is no inference that he is a West-Briton. The key stage direction is the one which, in fact, describes him as having no politics at all: he is twenty-three, a manual worker, physically strong and graceful, enthusiastic, instinctual rather than in any way intellectual. 'He has gone to the trenches as unthinkingly as he would go to the polling booth. He isn't naturally stupid; it is the stupidity of persons in high places that has stupefied him. He has given all to his masters.'^ As Keith Jeffery has pointed out, the economic factor was undoubtedly a strong motivation among the 45,000 men who joined the Dublin Fusiliers over the 1914-18 period, but so too was the energy which we see here in Harry Heegan. There is that sense of invulnerable enterprise which propels young men [...] almost lightheartedly to war.'49 The contrast is striking between Harry's Dionysiac disdain for order - neither policeman nor army authority intimidates him - and the tenement women's anxiety over money and army allowances. The 'separation allowance' was a very real thing, but not to Harry.50 The body, its strength, its pleasures and its beauty were all that concerned this athlete. Like his namesake Harry Hotspur, he is the perfect martial scapegoat, 'food for worms', as the cynical Hal puts it. The major difficulty lay with act 2, set behind the lines in France, after Harry and his fellow infantrymen leave Dublin for the front. There follows the

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 193 'illustration' of war Yeats was to object to. Here O'Casey forsook realism and made a headlong plunge into expressionism, a form initiated by Strindberg, who explained it as 'the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream. [. . .] Time and space do not exist; on a slight groundwork of reality, imagination spins and weaves new patterns made up of memories, experiences, unfettered fancies, absurdities and improvisations.' But while the characters 'are split, double and multiply' or come and go eerily 'a single consciousness holds sway over them all - that of the dreamer.'51 O'Casey called A Dream Play 'one of the loveliest plays written by man'.52 The Croucher in act 2 is his Dreamer, whose distorted vision is represented by his blasphemous reversal of the words of the prophet in Ezekiel 37. Post-war German expressionists were both revolutionary and visionary: they looked for the regeneration of modern mankind in a non-representational form.53 Although O'Casey pretended to ignorance of expressionism as a sophisticated form he was already familiar with it while in Dublin. He saw Toller's Masses and Man in January 1925 when Fallon played in the Drama League production. Fallon was never in any doubt that Toller's play lay behind act 2 of the Tassie.54 Though not a war play there was also the expressionist example of O'Neill's Hairy Ape?b In London in November 1926, not long after he had begun the Tassie, O'Casey went with Denis Johnston to see Kaiser's Gas, 'which Sean professed to like'.56 They discussed it and other such at the London Gate (of which O'Casey was a member). To Johnston, aware that the Plough was already moving towards expressionism,57 this was 'a very significant period in O'Casey's career' during which he moved away from realism.58 He also read and admired Huntly Carter's The New Spirit in the European Theatre, 1914-24. The frontispiece to this book depicts 'Hell on the Wartime Stage: Where War is Made', from Stephen Phillips's war play Armageddon, an entirely expressionistic depiction of modern warfare. O'Casey cannot but have been influenced when he wrote the detailed description of his war scene in act 2 of the Tassie: 'a scene of jagged and lacerated ruin of what was once a monastery. [...] Every feature of the scene seems a little distorted from its original appearance.'^ It is this 'distortion' of the setting - to suggest the point of view of a consciousness enduring a nightmare - which stamps the design as expressionistic. To say more on this subject would be tedious. It is laboured so far only to counteract O'Casey's later denial of any knowledge of expressionism. The point is important because in forsaking realism O'Casey was committing himself to the unpopular theatre, the theatre of art. His new play was to be an off-key love story blasted apart by war and rendered nightmarish by betrayals of many kinds.

The writing of the Tassie was hampered by O'Casey's success. He was constantly in demand for interview, soirees and contributions to newspapers. He and Johnston knocked out a good time, and O'Casey revealed new sides to his personality. There was the occasion when (on 28 October) he, Johnston, McElroy and young Rupert Croft-Cooke, a would-be playwright, ended up in O'Casey's

194 SednO'Casey flat after a night out. Johnston noted the decor: 'his bedroom is very seductive and chintz curtainy, his sitting room littered with surprisingly [un] expected bits of paper headed "Dialogue" and decorated with pictures of nude and flabby females in various convenient attitudes/ When the telephone rang O'Casey answered in 'the high falsetto voice he uses over the phone to give the illusion that it's really a lady secretary or something & that Mr O'Casey is out', but quickly switched to his natural voice upon discovering that his caller was one Lady Low, hoping he would see a Swedish friend. Having dismissed her with the excuse that he had begun a new play 'yesterday morning,' O'Casey treated his guests to his views on the Abbey and other matters before concluding with a performance even the waspish Johnston could not fault: 'with his back to the fireplace doing a Dublin Police Court scene with gestures and inflections including a basso Magistrate, prisoners baritone & soprano, chorus of other general public, constables from all counties - Kerry to Monaghan Ushers & even a couple of old sandwichmen taking shelter from the rain. That was the grand finale.'60 He 'do the policeman in different voices', indeed. What Johnston did not know was that Croft-Cooke was supposed to be interviewing O'Casey for Theatre World on this occasion and O'Casey was busy supplying copy. 'He can find something to say in defence of almost everything.'61 Through Augustus John O'Casey had made friends with the composer Herbert Hughes,62 and it is possible the idea for the chanting sections in act 2 flowered as a result. Music had always been an important part of O'Casey's plays and he had learned to appreciate 'the brave, meritorious tinkle of the Abbey Theatre orchestra' (A, 2, 260) with its classical repertoire. Indeed, Larchet himself thought highly of O'Casey's musical taste: 'I know that for certain plays of his he used to select pieces that would be in keeping and which would help the atmosphere. I remember himself and Lady Gregory sitting in the stalls, listening to the selections of the orchestra, choosing the most appropriate ones.'63 It is not all that surprising that in recent times The Silver Tassie has won new success as an opera.64 In working on acts 2 and 3 of The Silver Tassie O'Casey, as always, drew on personal experience. As described in an earlier chapter, when he had been hospitalised in Dublin in 1915 in the company of soldiers sent home for treatment his surgeon had lately lost his only son at Suvla Bay, a noted footballer who gave O'Casey the idea for Harry Heegan.65 The layout of St Laurence O'Toole's ward in St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, became the model for the ward in act 3. Besides the stories of the war gleaned from meeting wounded combatants and reading the newspapers O'Casey could well have seen the news film The Battle of the Somme', shown in Dublin 11-16 September 1916 at the Theatre Royal. When eventually the Tassie was staged many of the male members of the first cast were ex-servicemen: as artist O'Casey knew what they had gone through.66 He had prepared well for the writing of act 2, finished by mid-September. The 'idea'67 O'Casey got half-way through act 2 propelled the play into a highly original, post-Wagnerian combination of music (ironically employed) and drama. In turn, act 3 was to climax with the counterpoint of

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 195 the nuns' beautiful rendering of 'Salve Regina' in the background while in the foreground the crippled Harry howls forth his anguish. On Christmas Eve Sean told Lady Gregory he was living as quietly as in Dublin and the most exciting thing he had done was to buy a picture, 'Head of a Girl', from Augustus John for £70 which he would keep all his life.68 His dedication to the play necessarily kept him at some remove from the fastmoving Eileen Carey as the new year began. She got an off-stage part in Eden Phillpott's The Blue Comet at the Royal Court which lasted only a month. Serious drama was not a safe bet in London. She was still seeing Lee Ephraim. During the Christmas vacation (while Sean stayed at work on his play) she had made a trip to Nice where he was with his semi-invalid wife. 'Seeing them together forced me to think. I should have known then that our affair must end, though for all our tearful resolves to part we did see each other again in London.'69 Ephraim brought her to the last night of Rose Marie at Drury Lane on 26 March, two years after the London opening in which she had appeared. He was about to bring Romberg's The Desert Song to Drury Lane on 27 April and offered Eileen a chance to understudy the lead (Edith Day) if she would choose him over O'Casey. There was literally a job on offer from both contenders, since the Gunman was due to open in a new production by Barry Jackson at the Royal Court on 27 May, and Eileen was offered the part of Minnie Powell. This rivalry no doubt enlivened O'Casey's portrait of Jessie Taite, modelled on Eileen. If the portrait is of a beautiful, desirable woman it also depicts inconstancy, and the Tassie dramatises male anxiety and ultimately impotence. Harry Heegan in losing his sexuality incurs also the humiliation of losing Jessie to his rival Barney. Thus, one of the currents in the Tassie is anxiety over male ownership. Even on his deathbed O'Casey was to worry whether he was right to 'take Eileen away' from Lee Ephraim, for that is what he managed to do.70 She rejected the role in Desert Song. 'Sean's power of words, in his letters and in our talks, had won me.'71 In this reading, the Tassie records Ephraim's loss: he becomes the crippled Harry, O'Casey the victorious Barney. But the chameleon artist inhabits both men, for O'Casey could also, as Harry, give vent to the pain of loss, not of Eileen but of Maire. As he was never one to write much by day O'Casey would regularly meet Eileen, equally a night owl, for lunch. From her flat at 7 St Andrew's Mansions in the West End she would either travel by underground to Sloane Square and the Queen's restaurant or meet Sean half-way at Hyde Park as he travelled from South Kensington, and they would walk in the park. She would sometimes bring her wire-haired terrier Bobby. If she let Bobby off his lead he would run away and it might be hours before they retrieved him. 'Glancing up at me,' Eileen wrote, 'he would dart off again, with Sean far behind, laughing uncontrollably.'72 It is a vision of O'Casey not easy to reconcile with the muttering genius. Perhaps he saw the dog as Ephraim? At other times Eileen had to care for her troublesome mother, on one of Kathleen's sporadic trips from Brighton in search of support. She was an alcoholic and, disapproving of almost everything Eileen did, vehemently disapproved of Sean. The feeling

196 SednO'Casey was mutual. But although Eileen was Roman Catholic there was no hint of the kind of opposition which had destroyed O'Casey's relationship with Maire Keating. They were married on 23 September 1927 at the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer & St Thomas More in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. Built in 1895, this is a small, well-proportioned church, with a striking picture of the crucifixion behind the altar which must have distracted O'Casey as a reminder of the miseen-scene of act 2 of the Tassie. Since this was a 'mixed' marriage the main ceremony was over in four minutes. Yet such was the public interest in O'Casey that it was also a 'society' wedding, with journalists, photographers and even a film camera present. Subsequently, the event was covered by all the London and national newspapers, with brave efforts to create a story suggested by such headlines as 'Sean O'Casey weds in a Pullover' (Westminster Gazette), and the detail that Eileen's mother 'was a solitary figure in the church quite an hour before the time of the wedding' (Manchester Daily Dispatch). Eileen's friend Helen Elliott was bridesmaid while Billy McElroy was best man. As if to underline O'Casey's estrangement there was nobody present from Dublin. The terrier Bobby, however, was there in his best bow if not on his best behaviour. Lee Ephraim also turned up, and Eileen 'wanted to rush over and explain why this had to be'.73 The newlyweds took the boat train that evening for Holyhead to spend the honeymoon in Dublin. They were met in Dun Laoghaire by Oliver Gogarty, who drove them to their hotel (the Claremont) across the bay in Howth. Eileen was miserable at first, being unhappily pregnant and taking 'all and sundry to get rid of it'.74 However, a gynaecologist recommended by Sean's friend Joe Cummins persuaded her to keep the baby. After that early crisis, and a transfer to the more convenient Hotel Russell, on Stephen's Green, she and Sean enjoyed a busy two weeks. They had arrived at the end of Dublin Civic Week, a series of cultural events calculated to encourage Dubliners to take a greater pride in their city. On Saturday 24 September they might have attended either the Dublin Philharmonic Concert or a Historical Pageant at the Mansion House at 3 p.m., or a Military Tattoo and Fireworks at Lansdowne Road at 8 p.m. They could have read about Jim Larkin's alternative 'tattoo' the night before, a torch-light procession from his new union headquarters in Marlborough Street across the river to Burgh Quay where he addressed a large crowd with a speech promising to redress workers' grievances z/he was allowed to take his seat in the Dail.75 They went to the theatre every night. At the Abbey on Saturday night they could have seen Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, at the Gaiety the last performance of something called The Blue Train, at the Olympia something else called Our Lodger, and (last and surely least) at the Theatre Royal a twice nightly revue featuring Layton andjohnstone. On the whole, they'd be better off in Howth. From Monday 26th, depending on how indulgent Sean was prepared to be, they could have seen the musical comedy Lady Be Good! with Sydney Keith (Gaiety), or the musical burlesque revue No, No, Not Yet with Stan Annison and

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 197 George Clayton, or yet another comedy revue, Poor Papa, with the Scots comedian Sandy Daw. Then they probably did go to the Abbey, where this week Brinsley Macnamara's The Glorious Uncertainty (1923) would certainly have given Eileen the odour of Irish kitchen comedy. They would have seen a strong cast, including Sean's best friend in Dublin, 'Gaby' Fallen (in the role of Sylvester Seery). If they could take any more after this there was the Dublin premiere at the Metropole of the film version of Stanley Houghton's Hindle Wakes. Whatever about that, is it likely they missed Ben Hur with Ramon Novarro the following week at the Capitol? But that week, from 3 October, the main attraction was a new one-act by T.C. Murray at the Abbey, The Pipe in the Fields. It is strange that Eileen fails to mention this lovely piece in her account of the stay: in a double bill with Shaw's Fanny '5 First Play, it was something of an event at the Abbey and the Irish Times gave it a rave review (4 October). There is indeed something rather peculiar about this honeymoon in Dublin. How could Eileen possibly remember the stay as of six weeks' duration when it was only two? Why does she not mention meeting such people as Jim Larkin, Lennox Robinson or John Larchet (whom as composer of the music for The Pipe in the Fields Sean would surely have congratulated had they been at the production)? Did the O'Caseys not meet them? Did they, in fact, lie low a good deal of the time while Eileen was 'desperate' over her pregnancy?76 Sean must have walked alone around the Green to visit St Vincent's Hospital and refresh his memory of St Laurence's ward for use in act 3 of the Tassie. They saw the obvious sights, took Gaby and his wife Rose to lunch at Jammet's expensive restaurant - where Sean, Fallon says, 'was in his old boisterous form again'77 and toured the Liffey Valley and Glendalough. Yet the Gunman was revived at the Abbey on Monday 10 October and the O'Caseys did not stay for this. The day before, Sean wrote to Fallon from London casually asking for a minor actor's address at the Abbey. No hearty expression of a good time enjoyed, no evidence of debts of friendship recorded. It is all a bit strange. But it seems clear that Sean neither brought Eileen to meet Mick or his nephews and nieces in the East Wall area nor took her into Dublin society. It was a poor homecoming - no interviews, no fuss. O'Casey must have wanted it that way. He was not to return to Dublin for another eight years. In the autobiographies there is not a word about the honeymoon. When the couple got back to London Eileen sublet her flat and moved into 32 Clareville Street while they began househunting. For O'Casey this was a chastening experience, a matter of 'trying to solve an Einstein problem of how to buy a £4000 house for 25/-'.78 Meantime, his agent Curtis Brown wrote about a contract for the Folksbuhnen theatre in Berlin, interested in taking Juno. 'This theatre more nearly corresponds to the American Theatre Guild than to anything we have in England.'79 To the West, the American market was just opening up, and Arthur Sinclair, beating the Abbey to the punch, was about to take the Plough to New York with as many of the London cast as he could gather for his Irish Players. Sara Allgood (Bessie) at first demurred. She did not like the play as much as Juno and she wrote to Lady Gregory in ominous

198 Sean O'Casey

vein: Tadraic Colum called in to see me and he quite frankly said there is very great likelihood of great trouble with the Irish there [USA] if we produce it [Plough}, and honestly, dear, I don't feel I can bear another Playboy riot. O'Casey is a clever man but he hasn't Synge's greatness and I don't see why I should fight for his play.'80 Allgood did travel with the Irish Players after all, and although there were policemen outside the Hudson Theatre in New York anticipating trouble there was no disturbance, and the Plough ran for thirty-two performances from 28 November.81 It was to be a different matter a few years later when republican Irish-Americans would demand support from de Valera.

Once he got on to act 4 of the Tassie O'Casey was undoubtedly influenced by the work of a fellow-Dubliner, Frank J. Hugh O'Donnell, a talented journalist and Abbey playwright. A friend of O'Casey's in the early 1920s he was author of an anti-war play entitled Anti-Christ (1925). As it happened, it was due a London production at the 'Q' Theatre in November 1927. Anti-Christ was one of those plays to which O'Casey reacted by first disliking and then unconsciously imitating. When Anti-Christ was revived at the Abbey in August 1925, five months after its premiere, O'Casey found it 'compelling'.82 When it had a brief run in London he stayed away.83 Its theme was 'the post1918 world, which has not turned out fit for war heroes to live in'.84 Set in England, it is an attack on the war from the point of view of soldiers disabled and disillusioned. Led by John Boles, they see in the society for which they suffered nothing but the triumph of the Anti-Christ. Boles, blinded (like Teddy Foran) in the war, is sidelined by society and commited to a mental institution for his protestations. His voice is thus removed from the final scene, a party and a dance somewhat resembling act 4 of the Tassie.85 His friend Drysdale takes up the protest and emphasises how Boles has been scapegoated: Oh aye, dance around, dance to hell. Up in the Asylum John Boles can bawl and roar and shout himself deaf but what do you care? What does anyone care? [. . .] You don't give a damn. No, of course not - Nor anybody else doesn't give a damn. It's none of their business. You'll just keep jazzing about -jazzing about. [. . .] Keep jazzing on our bones. It's our look-out.86 Robert Hogan rightly sees this scene as seminal for the Tassie^ in the first edition of which the ending echoed O'Donnell's. Anti-Christ ended with Maudie, one of the bright young things at the party, rousing the spirits of the others after Drysdale's outburst: 'What's the use of worrying. Aren't we alive to-day and dead to-morrow [?]'. And the dance resumes cynically to the tune of 'If Winter Gomes' [can spring be far behind?]. In the original Tassie, after Harry exits, broken and bereft, Jessie utters a cry of sympathy which Susie, the volunteer nurse, brushes aside: 'Oh nonsense! If you'd passed as many through your hands as I, you'd hardly notice one,' and she pulls Jessie forward to dance with Barney to the tune of the tango 'Spain'. Then Susie and Maxwell

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 199 sing the chorus calling on all to forget Harry, Tor men shall just reap as they sow' (p. 131). Like O'Donnell, O'Casey wanted an ambivalent, ironic ending: sympathy for the disabled - very much as in Wilfred Owen's poem of that title88 - and at the same time an exposure of the point of view of the survivors who benefited from the sacrifices of the combatants. The line, Tor men shall just reap as they sow' is particularly harsh when applied to the war casualties, as if they were to blame for their condition. The complacent attitude is no less than an evasion of responsibility. Society stands condemned. As first written the ending is better than the 1949 version, more grating and disturbing.89 O'Donnell's play thus probably helped O'Casey to define his theme ironically. While finishing the Tassie it was necessary to find a new home, for Eileen was finding 32 Clareville Street to be 'decidedly a one-man flat. I had nowhere in it to hang my clothes, not even a mirror except a cracked thing in the bathroom.'90 Some thing Joycean in that. By the second week in November they had bought a house at 19 Woronzow Road, St John's Wood. It was on a lease of only seven-and-a-half years, but it was the first and only house the O'Caseys were to own. They were ominously short of money. Both lost on the sublet of their flats. Although the three Dublin plays had done well in Dublin during 1927 the total royalties due amounted to only £96-2s. 4d.91 There had been a revival of Juno at the Criterion (London) early in 1927, the provincial tours, and the Gunman at the Royal Court had played for 64 performances; Sinclair had brought the Plough to New York for a brief run (32 performances). O'Casey told Fallon in mid-December that he had a total of £150 in the world. Woronzow Road is a pleasant, Victorian, tree-lined street in a middle-class suburb. In years to come a victim to the bombing of London, number 19 was two-storeyed over a semi-basement, used as a dining room, Sean said, because close to the kitchen. 'It was a simple Georgian house, one of a long terrace, with two decent rooms, a tiny bathroom, and a huge kitchen, with an oldfashioned range in it big enough to do as an altar for Stonehenge' (A, 2, 297). The layout was to be the one the O'Caseys would ritualistically retain: a room for Sean upstairs, his study, with a good coal fire, a divan, and then his table, chair and typewriter from Dublin, with his pictures and books all around. This was his world. Eileen had her own room. They had a house-keeper, Mrs Earle, who had been Eileen's dresser in the theatre. As her old apartment was sub-let furnished they now had to improvise and Eileen's extravagance began to show: 'I had no damned sense of money at all, my taste being far beyond my means.'92 The lists of desirables she drew up would have needed the Nobel prize to pay for.93 Looking around the bare drawing-room after they moved in Eileen sank into the one chair they could afford and wept. She, the chorus girl, the glamorous model, was not going to have the house of her dreams. But showing the character she would later display in abundance she soon saw the funny side of all those unrealisable plans and burst out laughing.94 After all, they had two paintings by Augustus John - for he had generously given Sean his portrait in oils as a wedding present - and numerous prints to brighten the bare walls.

200 SednO'Casey There was a lot riding on the Tassie. O'Casey obviously hoped for a good London run following its presumed Abbey success. On 27 February he wrote to Fallon that he was finishing off the 'last few corrections' before sending the play 'to be properly typed for publication', and expected to send the Abbey the typescript in two weeks.95 In writing to Lady Gregory next day he added: 'I have certainly put my best into it, & have written the work solely because of love & a deep feeling that what I have written should have been written.'96 'Solely' means that money was not a factor. Indeed, he went on to mention that a film journal had offered him £500 for a short story and it might as well be £5,000, for he was not interested. Yet the common Dublin view was that O'Casey had sold out for English money. Shaw told him to make a mental note that £30,000 for five years would be 'not at all an impossible figure' for world film rights for the three Dublin plays. 'Never let a right go for ever. Five years is the limit. If the arrangement is satisfactory it can always be renewed. And be sure to have a clause that in the event of bankruptcy all rights revert to you.'97 Sean must join the Society of Authors, which had a film committee able to advise on the agreement. From these comments it seems there was an offer on the table. But a year was to pass before O'Casey actually sold the film rights of Juno to British International Pictures, with Alfred Hitchcock in mind. He was later forced to sell the world amateur rights of the three Dublin plays for a pittance to the publishers French's.98 Just as he was finishing the Tassie, Sean's eyes gave him much trouble, perhaps the first such crisis Eileen had to cope with, and she persuaded him to see the specialist in Harley Street recommended by Joe Cummins. Then Eileen herself had a crisis late in pregnancy during which she was to see ever more clearly the impossibility of having her mother and Sean under the same roof. Mrs Reynolds warned Eileen that the baby might be mentally deficient: the Reynolds grandfather 'had been unbalanced, and the child's father was an eccentric'. At this, Eileen went into hysterics and Sean exploded all over his mother-in-law.99

There were soon to be greater grounds for explosion. O'Casey sent the typescript of the Tassie to the Abbey on 20 March; Robinson acknowledged receipt next day and said he was very busy with productions of John Gabriel Borkman for the Ibsen centenary and a new T.C. Murray, The Blind Wolf, both due to go up in April. Still, Robinson had read the Tassie by the 23rd and sent it on to Lady Gregory, who received it on the 27th. Yeats was in Italy for health reasons. On 7 April Lennox wrote to O'Casey to say the script had now been sent on to Yeats, 'who is expected back next week'.100 But Yeats did not receive the script until it was sent after him from Rapallo^ which he had left on 30 March to spend Easter with his son Michael in Switzerland,101 to Dublin, where he arrived on 16 April. The dates are important because Lady Gregory was so aware that O'Casey had sent the typescript to Macmillans for publication that she injected a strong sense of urgency into his being informed as soon as

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 201 possible that there were problems with the text. Moreover, the new director Walker Starkie, appointed by the government in January 1927, in place of George O'Brien, who had resigned (even Holloway had discovered him to be 'a nonentity'102), was abroad. So was Robinson for three weeks at Easter time (18 April). Both Lady Gregory and Robinson had reservations about the Tassie, especially acts 3 and 4, which Robinson wanted brought together but set like act 1 in the Heegan household. Although they both backed Yeats once the damage was done by his letter of rejection (20 April), neither really had rejection in mind. They would have wanted changes in the script before doing it, that was certain.103 Robinson's position hardened as time went on - and O'Casey caused all kinds of trouble - so that in the end it was he above all who stood out against production.104 But not at first. Ironically, by forwarding Yeats's letter to O'Casey (which Yeats had cleverly sent to her), Lady Gregory in enclosing Robinson's and her own views gave an impression of Abbey solidarity.105 By 4 May Starkie had still read only part of the Tassie, which at that stage he did not like; when he got through the four acts he had changed his mind and was in favour of production. When it came to publishing all of the correspondence surrounding the rejection in the Irish Statesman on 9 June Yeats made sure Starkie wrote out his view of the play on 4 June and backdated it to 30 April.106 O'Casey never knew about this little bit of skulduggery, though he suspected quite a bit of conspiracy in the affair, and the more he sniffed the worse seemed the smell. Hence his own publication of the correspondence in the Observer on 3 June. The controversy over the rejection of the Tassie may seem now, three quarters of a century later, no more than a storm in a Hibernian teacup. There would have been no controversy had O'Casey himself not created it. But the rejection, presumably, was real, even if a personality other than O'Casey's might yet have salvaged the opportunity. Somehow, he needed to be scourged in public. He needed his outrage to be heard as dramatically as Lear's on the heath. It is instructive to enquire whether he was more sinned against than sinning. In his damning letter (20 April) Yeats said he had not yet read his fellowdirectors' reports on the Tassie, but would not post the letter he was writing 'unless their opinion concurs with mine'. His policy: write first, consult afterwards. Yeats knew that he was as much telling his fellow-directors what to think as he was putting down O'Casey. His view, especially when unequivocally expressed, was never contradicted. Therefore, this letter was afiat to his fellowdirectors. He had two main points to make. One was that O'Casey had no subject. 'You are not interested in the great war; you never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals, and so write out of your opinions.'107 In short, O'Casey was writing beyond his experience and lapsing into propaganda. Lurking here was Yeats's dislike of World War One as subject-matter for poetry: 'passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.'108 This point leads into his other main objection. The form of the Tassie was seriously flawed because it lacked 'action' in the sense of a dominating character carrying through 'a main

202 Sean O'Casey

impulse' from start to finish - as in O'Casey's earlier plays, according to Yeats. He showed no awareness of O'Casey's characteristic dramatic form, where the focus is rather on the group than on a single dominating figure.109 He was, in fact, seriously misreading O'Casey and promoting his own preferred style of heroic tragedy. Had Yeats left it at that the injury would have been minimal. He and O'Casey had different views on drama - one classical, the other modernist and that could be that. Moreover, as his edition of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse would show, through Yeats's calculated omission of Owen, Sassoon and others, Yeats had a blind spot about war as subject matter and that too was that. But when he went on in his letter to lecture O'Casey on dramaturgy as if Yeats's way were the only way to write his lack of flexibility became intolerable: The mere greatness of the world war has thwarted you; it has refused to become mere background, and obtrudes itself upon the stage as so much dead wood that will not burn with the dramatic fire.' A thing like a world war was not dramatically important. Indeed, 'the whole history of the world must be reduced to wallpaper in front of which the characters must pose and speak' (p. 741). At the same time, Yeats was unable to tell O'Casey how to patch up this flawed play. 'It is all [sic] too abstract, after the first act; the second act is an interesting technical experiment, but it is too long for the material; and after that there is nothing.' O'Casey quipped back, citing a line from Yeats's worst play, 'where there is nothing - there is God.'110 He answered Yeats point by point, easily refuting the claim that he was not 'interested' in the 1914-18 war and dismissing Yeats's insistence on a drama of pure aestheticism disinfected against all ideas or 'opinions'. O'Casey saw the Aristotelian dramatic ideal lurking behind Yeats's conservatism and, just as he had once insisted to Fallon that 'Aristotle was all balls' and that 'Shaw was the greatest genius in the British theatre',111 so he now dismissed Yeats's classical rules as 'glib, glib ghosts [.. .that] will continue to be spoken forever and ever by professors in schools for the culture and propagation of the drama (I was nearly saying the Gospel)'.112 O'Casey had the better of this argument, as Shaw himself was to declare.113 If anyone was not 'interested' in the Great War it was Yeats himself. Maud Gonne once accused him of having 'escaped the obsession of this war', and Richard Ellmann said Yeats 'had little to say about the first World War, its issues being too abstract and international for his mind'.114 The subject was one crying out for serious treatment by an Irish playwright, for, as James Stephens had declared in 1917, 'In Dublin alone there is scarcely a poor home in which a father, a brother, or a son is not serving in one of the many fronts which England is defending.'115 What lay behind Yeats's magisterial and unnecessary squashing of O'Casey's whole enterprise? He could have said, 'I see what you are trying to do, but I have a major problem with act 2 and worry about finding a unified production style: could we discuss this?' Not only did he not say anything of the kind but he actually told the Abbey's leading playwright he did not know how to write plays. The situation would be laughable if it was not catastrophic. It may have

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 203 set back Yeats's recovering health - he had to spend two days in bed after the correspondence was published116 - and enraged George Yeats accordingly, but as Eileen stated, the rejection of Sean's play 'became embedded in our lives', which it dominated thereafter.117 Yeats may have felt he had to put this upstart in his place.

Sean's first thought now, however, had to be for Eileen who, as fate would have it, gave birth to a baby boy at home on the very day, 30 April, Yeats's letter of rejection arrived, accompanied by the complicit criticisms of Robinson and Lady Gregory. Both Eileen and baby Breon were fine and O'Casey had much to be thankful for in this regard, since there were fears over the delivery. But rejoice as he did over Breon's safe arrival and dearly as he loved him,118 nothing could dissipate the dark cloud of Yeats's decision. Not even Lady Gregory, upset though she was on his behalf. The rejection stands alone in her career 'as an example of mismanagement and short-sightedness'.119 With the best intentions she had sent on to Sean Yeats's second thoughts, addressed to her and meant for her to mediate diplomatically.120 In cold print this second letter (25 April) was worse than the first, since it invited O'Casey to pretend publicly that he had withdrawn the Tassie for revision while the directors would remain mum. The indignity of this proposal sent O'Casey into a fury: 'Does he take me to be such a dish of skimmed milk that I would do such a shuffling, lying thing as that?'121 From this point on he became quite irrational about the whole affair. He was convinced that he had been led into a trap in order to humiliate him: that both Yeats and Robinson had decided in advance to reject the Tassie, out of jealousy, or spite, or unspecified determination to do him in.122 As time went on this conviction grew to include the guilt of the whole Dublin literary establishment. In London Shaw, not always diplomatically backed up by Charlotte Shaw, tried to smooth things over by gently suggesting that Sean make no conditions and indicate to Yeats his settled interest in having the Tassie staged at the Abbey.123 This Sean just could not bring himself to do. Charlotte was quite cross about this, and scolded Eileen: Sean must stop this angry attacking of everybody (i.e. his betters). He must submit his letters in advance to Shaw for careful scrutiny and learn to be temperate.124 For all his love and admiration for Shaw O'Casey could not stomach this fresh exercise in mind control. He held on, although he was close to a nervous breakdown during the summer and autumn of 1928. The text of the Tassie "was published on 12 June (with an attractive portrait by Evan Walters): a rather large edition, 3,000 copies, which sold well at 7s. 6d. each and was reprinted (2,000 copies) in 1929 and in 1930 (1,000 copies).125 When Macmillans saw no reason to drop publication O'Casey had wanted to include the controversial correspondence as a preface. Annoyed when they declined this offer he settled instead for a section of Shaw's letter of support quoted on the jacket. Publication led to very respectful reviews. Most praised the play for its daring, experimental qualities but looked to a stage production

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to settle its artistic merit. The Dublin Magazine noted that act 2 would have been impossible at the Abbey, 'though otherwise it seems a pity that Dublin people have been denied the opportunity of seeing it'.126 A.E. Malone, although an old socialist opponent of O'Casey, also believed that the Abbey should have staged the Tassie, 'infinitely finer' than O'Casey's two one-acts already staged.127 The prestigious Irish Statesman, however, damned with faint praise.128 O'Casey was now in a really strange state. He wanted to lash out and injure all who had done him harm. At the same time to friends he insisted he had expected the Abbey to turn him down. He had to blot out of his mind the humiliating fact that as lately as 5 April he had confidently written to Robinson with the Abbey cast he wanted. In desperate need of a scapegoat he found one in ;E, Dublin's cultural guru. For years O'Casey had been impatient with ^E's mysticism, satirised in Juno through Bentham's talk about theosophy, and mocked in a story he told Krause: One night in 1925 I was at an "at home" of [James] Stephens, and & was in the center of things, talking about the "Divine Afflatus" that it was his good fortune to possess, the state of spiritual grace that moved him. There he was blowing about the fact that everyone had a spiritual "aura" - red or blue or white. The Red Aura was materialistic, and it revealed a vulgar and totally unspiritual being. The Blue Aura was the sign of a sentient being, the receptive person with spiritual grace. The White Aura was the rare and real thing, the highest state of the spiritual afflatus. And don't you know & claimed that he had the White Aura, and it gave him the power to detect the proper Aura in anyone he could get a long look at. He came up to me and stared grandly in my face, pompous and popeyed, almost touching my nose, and finally he stepped back and announced that I had a Blue Aura. The blind bastard didn't even notice my blood-red Communist Aura! That night at Stephens', Tom MacGreevy was there, and he called on AL to read some of his poems. fiL said yes, but first he had to work himself into the pure mood of the "divine afflatus." And he began to breathe deeply with his eyes closed and his body heaving. At that point MacGreevy came out with a loud stage whisper that everyone heard, including JE - "He's blowing himself up for it." And with that M opened his eyes and saw Red, and he crashed madly out of the room. So that was the night M exploded. He blew himself up and right out of the room. The White humbug saw Red. No wonder Gogarty called him .Eolus, the Big Wind.129 By the mid-1920s AL the poet was past his best and was overrated.130 Nowadays, as Nicholas Allen has shown, he is rather to be honoured as cultural commentator than as poet.131 But O'Casey was not prepared so to honour him. In the Irish Statesman JE had criticised Larkin and favoured the Labour Party; he now tried to block O'Casey's publication of the Tassie correspondence. The

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 205 fact that he did publish eleven letters on 9 June mattered less to O'Casey than that M had been afraid at first to do so. Moreover JE had in his lofty way stated that the Tassie took O'Casey 'into regions of soul to which his art [was] unable to give adequate expression', i.e. Yeats was right.132 So far as Dublin was concerned it was in general a case of, to borrow a phrase, great hatred, little room. Sean's friend Jack Carney, working alongside Larkin in the WUI, wrote to say 'Everybody talks O'Casey now in Dublin. God how I despise them for their friendliness. All because they heard O'C was knocking down £200 per [week].'133 When on Carney's urging Sean sent Larkin a copy of the Tassie the word back was, 'He thinks it is great stuff but is somewhat sceptical of its being staged in London.'134 There were others given signed copies whom O'Casey could rely on as supporters, Fallon and Dr Cummins.135 Although Lady Gregory had handled the affair with 'staggering tactlessness'136 he sent her an inscribed copy also, which she acknowledged humbly as witness 'to an unbroken friendship that I value'.137 He continued to support her in the Lane controversy and even allowed one of his letters to be read aloud with one from de Valera at a meeting in the Theatre Royal on 17 June. But he would never agree to meet her again.

Production of the Tassie proved more difficult than O'Casey anticipated. Barry Jackson was asked but felt that the Royal Court was unsuitable.138 The real prospect was Charles B. Cochran, impresario and showman, of whom it was said that had he lived in imperial Rome he would have been the emperor's favourite, readily providing lavish entertainments for the mob.139 It may have been Shaw who recommended him. Cochran got going quickly, obtaining a licence from the Lord Chamberlain's office on 25 July, subject to the deletion of all profanities and so-called obscenities. These amounted to no more than sixteen cuts and changes in word or phrase;140 O'Casey had visited the office on 13 July to argue his case. On 12 September Cochran signed a contract with him, still hoping for a production in the coming season. Gaby Fallon and Barry Fitzgerald were both anxiously waiting for the call in Dublin - in Fallon's case it never came.141 It was all rather confusing for O'Casey. Whereas he wanted his friends involved he was so cross with the Abbey that he also wanted a non-Irish cast. In addition, he kept expecting, because of Shaw's intervention, a letter from the Abbey, 'asking for the play again, but they have remained silent & shy'.142 But Shaw had intended that O'Casey should offerthe Tassie again to the Abbey, and this he could never do. Meantime Cochran toyed with the idea of opening in America. Since he was putting up the money, some £5,000, it was his call. But nothing happened until 1929. As money was in short supply O'Casey took to recording all petty expenses - taxis, entertainments (for example, for Fallon, who arrived at Worozow Road for two weeks in October and was entered for £8143). These records were doubtless for the taxman, for in a diary entry on 21 November he noted a renewed request from the tax commissioners for £157; there were £217 in the

206 Sean O'Casey

bank and £260 owed to him - '& there you are!'144 He was to have life-long problems with such 'requests'. More worryingly, the Abbey was being difficult both over royalties, which were not forwarded, and over the rights to the three Dublin plays. It was galling to hear how well the Plough and Juno were still doing at the Abbey as this success seemed to support Yeats's position. The royalties due for the year 1928 were £l78-4s. 8d., a relatively good return in Dublin but hardly a living wage in London.145 Eileen was now constantly being warned against extravagance. She was not used to this. To her embarrassment, Sean's solution was to write a strong letter accusing a store of issuing invitations to view and buy expensive goods, 'though a large debt was still owing', and pronounced himself convinced 'that this practice should be publicly exposed, & that by the publicity, something will be done to put an end to this systematic business of encouraging young women of slender means to acquire expensive habits'.146 Eileen, urged on by C.B. Cochran, considered a return to the stage. But first she saw it as her wifely duty to help Sean in his career. She went with him into 'society', visiting the Shaws and flattering the old man (with whom she got on very well), and going to parties at Lady Londonderry's. The latter, whose seat, Mount Stewart, lay in Newtownards in County Down, had taken an interest in O'Casey ever since his arrival in London147 and supported him now during the Tassie controversy. Eileen enjoyed these occasions, which reminded her of the glittering spectacle of musical comedy,148 while to Sean Lady Edith (or Circe, as she was known socially) 'was a charming woman, and I was content with her friendship, without even seeming to agree with political affinities'.149 When Cochran asked Eileen to use her charm (singular) to get Augustus John to design the set for act 2 of the Tassie she did just that. Sean was taken aback and wrote to John as if to apologise for her 'good & impetuous nature', an instance of an angel rushing in 'where a devil feared to tread'.150 Having no experience in theatrical design John was unnervingly slow in producing any result, being intimidated by O'Casey's detailed stage directions. Help had to be sought elsewhere.151 In the event, it would have been better to go with O'Casey's own early sketch (see illustration 21). Nineteen-twenty-nine proved a year-in-waiting, until Eileen could wait no longer and auditioned for one of the six bridesmaids in Coward's romantic operetta Bitter Sweet. The tension was mounting at home as Sean grumbled away in his diary about how tight things were. On 11 May he records: 'Eileen arranging to get rooms by sea for Brian [sic] when we've no money. Estrangement with her over her thoughtlessness. Got that evening a demand for Tax up to £100.'152 Eileen had arranged a holiday the preceding September at Angmering-on-Sea in Sussex, from which Sean had fled after two days, only to flood Eileen with letters and telephone calls from London.153 His attempt to prevent a recurrence in 1929 failed, for Eileen could plead Breon's welfare; on Margate sands Sean would sit down and connect something with something, as Eileen left him for her role in Bitter Sweet. She had first left home for the Manchester try-out on 30 June. 'Her excitement and reluctance to go', recorded Sean. 'The loneliness of the day afterwards.'154 As the 'riotous' opening at the

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 207 Palace took place on 2 July, and the London opening at His Majesty's was not until the 18th, there was more than one day of loneliness.155 For Eileen this was a return to glamour, spectacle and publicity. There were no less than 450 dresses to be worn in Bitter Sweet, traversing every phase of fashion from 1870 to 1929, with Coward himself (who directed) as dress critic to the actresses. As one of the six bridesmaids Eileen got to wear twenty-five yards of material: a 'blue taffeta frock, the bustle skirt being pleated and caught up with green velvet and lace'.156 This was a world in which Sean had no place. The most enduring song in Bitter Sweet is, of course, Til See You Again'. With the show a major hit in London, Sean may well have wondered, 'when?' How did he feel, one cannot but wonder, when C.B. Cochran wrote to say he thought he would make enough money as producer of Bitter Sweet to enable him to produce The Silver Tassie? Life's bitter ironies were taking their place alongside the sweeter in O'Casey's career, for he could not abide Coward's musical drama.157 He could not bring himself to send a telegram wishing Coward success on the crucial opening night in Manchester. For her part, Eileen was happy. 'I was living a professional woman's life in my own sphere while Sean was safe in his.'158 Bitter Sweet was to run for almost two years.

O'Casey found that Cochran had his own ideas for casting the Tassie. He had not the power he had enjoyed over casting at the Abbey. In the event, Barry Fitzgerald was engaged and Gaby Fallon was not. He also found that unlike conditions at the Abbey in London one had to wait for the right theatre and director. It was only at the start of September 1929 that Cochran asked Raymond Massey to direct the Tassie, scheduled to open at the Apollo on 11 October, which by today's standards is unthinkable. Cochran engaged Charles Laughton to play the lead, Harry Heegan; the experienced Irish actor Sydney Morgan was chosen to play Simon Norton, opposite Fitzgerald's Sylvester Heegan; Beatrix Lehmann, well-known in London, was to play Susie Monican, and Una O'Connor was Mrs Foran. Jessie Taite proved hard to cast: Massey later chose an actress on impulse in the Ivy restaurant, singer Binnie Barnes. It is significant that another singer, Leonard Shepherd, was engaged to play the Croucher: the musical qualities of the Tassie were acknowledged from the outset. As Massey remarked, 'It was essential that the war scene be cast with careful regard to the musical capability of chanting plainsong in the Gregorian manner.'159 A Canadian by birth, Massey had been part of the London theatrical scene since the early 1920s, when he began as an actor at the Everyman and then played La Hire in Shaw's SaintJoan (1923). As a precocious twenty-seven-year-old he launched into directing, first with an anti-war play, Tunnel-Trench by Hubert Griffith, a man who having served two years in the infantry and two more in the RAF, 'knew the war and hated it'.160 Massey directed no less than ten plays about the 1914-18 war: 'Most of the cast were composed of ex-servicemen.' Clearly, in tackling the Tassie Massey looked for the same authenticity. In

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discussion he found that O'Casey 'had a knowledge of the war and the soldier that few civilians have had'.161 This was just as well, since many of the cast had served. Charles Laughton, for example, was sent straight to the front on being conscripted in 1918, where he was badly gassed serving in the ranks.162 Massey regarded act 2 as 'outright expressionism' and worked towards this nightmarish effect. O'Casey gave him notes for all four acts but for act 2 in particular he had ideas on lighting.163 Massey also introduced his own ideas, such as the carrying in of Harry shoulder-high on his first entrance and Harry's appearance in act 2.164 His effectiveness as director must, however, have been minimised by his also directing an Ivor Novello comedy, Symphony in Two Flats, which opened only one week before the Tassie. Opening night at the Apollo on Friday 11 October was a great occasion. Shaw was there, and sat with O'Casey in a box. 'He was ecstatic about the play,' according to Massey.165 Cochran grudgingly allowed Eileen to leave the cast of Bitter Sweet on the night, in order to be by Sean's side. Sean was very tense, and suffered from his eyes on opening night: at times of stress the chronic infection became violently painful. Reviews were, on the whole, favourable. Just a few were dismissive. The Morning Post (12 October) found the Tassie 'a disordered and pretentious piece of work'; The People dismissed it as 'chaotic'; the Daily News said the audience was a trifle bewildered and that act 2, while full of beautiful writing, was 'too much of the scream of misery'; the Spectator (19 October) called the Tassie 'a lugubrious blunder' and called for sympathy for the Abbey: 'It had a case.' The more thoughtful reviews grappled with the experimental ambitions of the play, which most saw as both worthwhile and yet finally unsatisfactory. Here act 2 was the main focus, because of the publicity over John's setting, and in turn act 2 became representative of the play as a whole. O'Casey attempted to show the war, said one reviewer not intending to be complimentary, 'through the spectacles usually worn by James Joyce'.166 The result: 'almost a masterpiece', according to the Times. Darlington in the Daily Telegraph and Agate in the Sunday Times (13 October) agreed. Where the 'almost' resided occupied columns of print in all the serious reviews. It had to do with the imbalance between literary and production values. More than one reviewer found the Tassie better than R.C. Sherriff s Journey's End, the war play which had premiered in the same theatre in December 1928 before becoming a smash hit. As to the production, the consensus was that Laughton, though effective, was miscast as Harry Heegan. Never for a moment, complained G.K. 's Weekly (19 October), did Laughton persuade he was either Irish or had been 'near a football ground or [had] lost his youth and manhood on the battlefield'. In act 4, however, Laughton showed great power, and like all great actors had one unforgettable moment which caught the essence of the play's meaning, 'when seething with envy and bitterness, he twirled his wheeled chair around the stage in a half mad imitation of a waltz'.167 In this frenzy the whole of O'Casey's anger at tragic existence came into focus, for the Tassie is not just about the horror of modern warfare but also if not primarily about the helplessness of

London Lights and The Silver Tassie 209 the individual in the face of the injustice of life itself. But the play, in O'Casey's characteristic manner, mingles comedy with tragedy, at times too blatantly, indeed, as if to stem the flow of empathy. As choric duo Barry Fitzgerald and Sydney Morgan delighted the audience, even in the much criticised telephone gag - pure music-hall - in act 4, with 'the quality of the clowning' (Saturday Review, 19 October). Massey was unreservedly praised for the direction, and was credited with making the text's mixture of styles simplify into 'grandeur, sweeping all our objections before it'.168 While the reviewers were happy to have a piece to get their teeth into they were under no illusions about its prospective popularity. As Ervine put it in the Observer, the Tassie was not a play to cause people to queue for thirty hours. Its artistic qualities and challenging experimentalism worked against its popularity. But there was comfort in the view that although the Tassie would never be as popular as All Quiet on the Western Front or Journey's End it would live longer, 'so long as there are men and women in the world who can read great literature in English'.169 While giving a rave review in the Sunday Times, Agate could not say that the Tassie would run, because it was difficult, though the work of a master. So, the Tassie was a succes d'estimebut a commercial failure. It ran until Saturday 7 December, a total of only eight weeks. Massey quoted Cochran as saying it was the proudest failure he ever had.170 In explanation it was said that Journey's End, with its old-fashioned structure, had exhausted the war play and made it impossible for O'Casey to succeed.171 It had been a lean year financially. Royalties for 1929 from the Abbey amounted to no more than £92-l7s. 2d., to be added to his percentage of the Apollo receipts.172 Lady Gregory came to see the Tassie and was pleased, though she felt the Abbey would have done it better. Robinson was pleased that the thing bore out his prejudices. Yeats kept his distance. So far as the Abbey went, for O'Casey it now was, to coin a phrase, goodbye to all that. The London lights were dimming, the 1920s were over, and the prospect for the challenging 1930s was bleak indeed.

11 TRAPPED INSIDE THE GATES?

ow that O'Casey had weathered two controversies, had married and fathered a son, it may be asked where the future lay for him. Some would argue already that his row with the Abbey was so damaging as to deprive him of the source of his inspiration. A.E. Malone was one such critic who commented in 1928:

N

Sean O'Casey is changing: changing from a local dramatist working in Dublin materials in the technique of the Abbey Theatre, to a dramatist who thinks he is taking all the world for his materials and moulding them in the manner approved by Mr. Huntly Carter and the "expressionists." It may be that he will overlook the fact that in dealing with Dublin workers he dealt with the workers of the world; and that in accepting a novel technique he is accepting something that is already outmoded. Wherever Sean O'Casey goes, and whatever he may do for drama in the future, he can no more escape from his youth in Dublin than can Bernard Shaw.1 This was prescient commentary. Angry as he was with Yeats and with Ireland O'Casey thought he could carve out an independent career in the English theatre. Time was to show that this was not possible, that his material was fundamentally in Ireland. But he would try first to go his own way. 'It is possible to do anything only in loneliness,' he told Gaby Fallon.2 In that loneliness he could be domestically content and yet be at odds with the world. If Byzantium was Yeats's holy city, he mused, his own was Moscow (A, 2, 309). Yet O'Casey never went to Moscow. Shaw went; O'Flaherty went; Larkin went; Jack Carney went, but O'Casey never. Though he was not as yet reclusive he was a lonely figure essentially homeless since his mother died. 'My dear Gaby there is no use asking me to go home -1 have no home - the foxes have holes & the birds of the air have nests, & I have just a place in which to rest my head.'3 The interesting thing about this latter statement - apart from O'Casey's identification with Jesus Christ as nomad (Luke 9: 58) - is his acceptance and perhaps embodiment of Ireland's plight following the civil war. Then

Trapped Inside the Gates? 211

began the modern Irish state, its authority barely sufficient to command allegiance, allowing the Roman Catholic church slowly but surely to exert an increasing degree of moral control. History became a structureless continuity.4 O'Casey, more than Joyce (who, after all had been out of Ireland since 1904), embodied the homelessness of the post-1922 Irish intellectual and lived out the role of wanderer and dreamer of a world made whole, a history reconstituted, a status quo purged of injustices and of various forms of failure. His role, his accepted mission - for he was his father's son in this as in so many other ways - was now to be evangelical.5 To this end he set about redefining and re-membering himself. As early as October 1929 he told an interviewer that he had 'also written part of an autobiography, which will be finished and published some time'.6 The shock over the rejection of the Tame mobilised him into self-justification.7 Yeats's assumed role of Mosaic authority undermined O'Casey's sense of his own identity as writer.8 The urge explicitly to narrativise oneself in an effort to "take stock" frequently occurs when people are in deep personal pain, often bereaved, and desperately seeking to re-assume control of their lives in order to start living satisfyingly again.'9 It was essential for O'Casey to return to his childhood and reconstruct this shattered identity. It was to take some time. What he needed to hear just now was the sort of unqualified adulation Carney sent from Dublin, describing an evening with Mick Mullen (O Maolain, O'Casey's former roommate) and other old friends from the trade union movement. 'I spoke to them of the beauty and power of "The Silver Tassie". Mullen was very much enthused and glad you had risen as high. Sean, I went to see "The Silver Tassie". Boy, you have done a great thing. Shaw did not exaggerate. Ervine was inclined to be hypercritical. I sat gripped by the second act. You stand alone. Such beauty & power has not been seen in any theatre for many a day; its return awaits your coming.'10 You stand alone. He would have to believe Carney, Larkin's right-hand man. Responding to a friendly letter about the Tassie production O'Casey rationalised that finances drove the play from the stage. 'It was a pity, but my disappointment has died.' But then he added: 'Perhaps it isn't fair to ask or to expect people to bring their little thoughts of life to the higher & more painful plane of how much it is.' To expect them, that is, to share in the playwright's seriousness. He was going to have to shift himself out of such an expectation - but when? And are such shifts at a writer's command? 'Whether economic circumstances may force me to enter an easier and more swiftly pleased market, I know not, but, so far, in spite of good offers, I have managed to do that only which I thought worthy of doing.'11 Whatever change there was to be would be dictated by this unyielding ethic. He would not bow to circumstances. There is an old Dublin saying, 'God never closed one door but He opened another.' But closing doors in reckless indifference to his own advantage was more in O'Casey's line. At the time of his dispute with the Abbey there was plenty of interest among other Dublin companies in staging the Tassie. The Dublin Drama League tried to persuade him but he refused to give that

212 SednO'Casey

experimental group the Tame so long as Robinson and Mrs Yeats were involved.12 The Dublin Gate Theatre, newly established by Edwards and Mac Liammoir, also offered to take it. Modelled to some extent on Peter Godfrey's Gate Theatre Studio in London, which O'Casey admired, the Dublin Gate was about to establish itself as the great alternative to the national theatre at the Abbey. As if to underline this future scenario, the first Gate productions, from October 1928 until opening at the Rotunda Buildings in February 1930, were housed in the Peacock, the Abbey's new annexe. Peer Gynt and The Hairy Ape paved the way in 1929 for Johnston's expressionist satire, The Old Lady Says 'No!', which had already been rejected by the Abbey.13 The immediate impact of this piece sharpened director Hilton Edwards' interest in the Tassie. He turned to Fallon as intermediary, who conveyed the enquiry in such a gossipy manner that O'Casey immediately let fly at Edwards: My very dear friend, Gaby Fallon, in a letter to me, recently, lets me know that you would like to secure an option on a Dublin production of "The Silver Tassie"; and that you "do not think that O'Casey brings it quite off, so to speak"; but that you "feel the play should be given a chance" and, frankly, that you "need money ["] and feel that the production of the play would create a great stir and be a safe financial speculation. This ominous prologue introduced an attack such as only O'Casey could unleash on a perfect stranger. He knew of the Gate's early success, through his reading of the Irish Statesman, and knew that Edwards and his 'comrades' had assumed 'the falling banner of the ideal' from the Abbey. But he was insulted by the inference that he had not quite succeeded with the Tassie. 'it is as stupid to say nothing in a lot - like Yeats - as it is to say nothing in a little - like you.' He assumes Edwards meant to say the Tassie is a bad play. So why would Edwards, with his 'sacramental love for the Drama', feel that this bad play deserved a chance of production on his stage? It can only be as Edwards had said [i.e. as Fallon had quoted him as saying] - to create a stir and make money. Contrasting this attitude with that of Cochran, 'risking the loss of money to put on what he believes to be a great play', O'Casey delivered his coup de grace: 'You are forcing me to believe that Cochrane [sic] has more genuine appreciation of Dramatic Art in his arse, than you have in either your heart or your head.'14 Well, after such knowledge, what forgiveness? The Gate would never again swing open to an O'Casey play until the historic production of Juno by Joe Dowling in 1986, after both Edwards and Mac Liammoir were in their (one) grave. Thus had O'Casey shut the door - indeed, the Gate - on his own face. For of all directors then living in Ireland Edwards was probably the one who would best have been able to bring out, through lighting techniques and abstract design, the experimental features of the Tassie. And had the play gone on at the Gate in 1930 it might well have led to a niche in Dublin for O'Casey's later plays. As it was, he no longer had an Irish theatre to work for. Fallon himself,

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now running a theatrical venture, The First National Players', tried to put on the Tassieat the Gaiety in 1930, but in the face of clerical opposition the Gaiety declined the booking.15

O'Casey's anger in part derived from the fact that the world did not conform to the measurements supplied by his comic proletarians. But it mainly issued from his damaged sense of self. This mood was to permeate his next major play, Within the Gates, begun in December 1930 and first entitled The Green Gates. It was his first 'state of the nation' play, i.e. with England as the nation in question, the most ambitious since Shaw's Heartbreak House (1921). The idea underlying Within the Gates derives from two distinct spheres, one Dublin and the other London. It is a play about a woman on the margins of society, an outcast in some respects, called the Young Whore, who has a bad heart and is dying. Her final days are spent in search of salvation. It is as if O'Casey took his 'Irish Nannie', the crazed alcoholic from his one-act Nannie's Night Out, and gave her fresh attributes to accompany her desperate determination to 'go game' and 'die dancing'. That one-act, set in Dublin, contrasted the doomed alcoholic with the Irish heroes of yesteryear: Nannie's wildness was made to appear somehow at odds with contemporary society through an affinity with greatness that has fled. The Young Whore in Within the Gates similarly offers a bitter denunciation of the pettiness of her critics in society, and her diseased state supplies a metaphor for the diseased state of society itself. So far so Nietzschean. An interviewer in 1929 noted Nietzsche among O'Casey's books in Woronzow Road,16 and it is likely that O'Casey shared Nietzsche's celebration of subversiveness and the 'will to power'. But the London source of the play put all of this in a new context. O'Casey loved Hyde Park, especially Speakers' Corner, which he saw as a kind of modern Vanity Fair, life in its most varied, most absurd, most Jonsonian manifestation of verbal energy mixed with fanaticism and pretension. The new play was a continuation of the Tassieby other means. By planting a war memorial in the background, O'Casey could suggest that the activities in Hyde Park, symbolising the swirl of contemporary pursuits, should be measured against the sacrifice of those who died fighting in the 1914-18 war. The decadence of post-war life is defined by the waste of young men's lives given for an unworthy generation, while 'Everything golden's gone into the bellies of the worms.'17 It was as if 'we are all "Within the Gates", talking, loving, living, but never finding even a small doorway into the soul of our neighbour.'18 Within the Gates, as critique of post-war society, scattered its shot far and wide, into the church, into the poor showing of the socialists, and into the 'masses' themselves, the spineless 'Down-and-Outs' (as he called those who despaired). O'Casey set the action over four seasons and four times of the day, from spring to winter and morning to night. Significantly, it was as a film that O'Casey at first conceived Within the Gates, even though he had no high opinion of film in general. The first film he saw - can it have been at the Volta? - 'in the first

214 Sean O'Casey

little cinema fixed up in Dublin, admission sixpence' - was Silas Marner. 'The book was far finer than the film.' Yet when he first arrived in London in 1926 he saw and admired Fritz Lang's Metropolis. 'Here was a gusty, excited effort of the camera to show, in an expressionistic way, the surge of an over-industrialized city, with its action as rapid as that in [Silas Marner] was slow.'19 He also came to admire the work of Sergei Eisenstein. Eileen and Sean's friend Sydney Bernstein arranged the showing of a number of Russian films towards the end of 1929, including Battleship Potemkin on 10 November; the O'Caseys met Eisenstein afterwards at a party Bernstein threw at 46 Albermarle Street.20 It may even be that the idea O'Casey had for Within the Gates was based on Eisenstein's montage technique. He next tried to interest Alfred Hitchcock in his idea. Hitchcock has just completed a film version of Juno, one of the first British 'talkies'. He had admired the play on stage - the Abbey-style of acting as much as O'Casey's style of writing - and arranged to meet on the set of Blackmail, which he was then filming at Elstree. A Hitchcock biographer comments: 'O'Casey, who had never set foot in a film studio before, arrived exotically dressed in a tweed knickerbocker suit, and after looking around uncomprehendingly for a few moments, delivered himself of the rather surprising observation, "There's no education like the education of life" - a curious reaction, Hitch thought, to the film world of illusion. O'Casey's only comment on the idea of filming Juno was "Why do you want to do the bloody thing?" However, Hitch and O'Casey immediately hit it off.'21 The result was a quite atrocious film interesting solely for its recording the talents of the Allgood sisters, Sydney Morgan and Barry Fitzgerald. The latter, surprisingly was not cast as Captain Boyle (played by the unknown Edward Chapman). Barry failed the screen-test and, to O'Casey's disappointment, was given a small part in an opening scene created by Hitchcock himself.22 The film was successful, though Hitchcock later led admirers to believe he was embarrassed by this.23 O'Casey, apparently not having seen the film, was not aware for decades that Hitchcock had omitted the final scene and had turned Needle Nugent into a Jewish caricature, renamed 'Mr Kelly'. O'Casey's thoughts being just now focused on his new play, envisaged 'as a film of Hyde Park', felt that Hitchcock was the man to do it. He invited Alfred and Alma to dinner at 19 Woronzow Road. These occasions in the O'Casey household were not usually altogether relaxed. O'Casey would maintain an ostentatious informality while at the same time expecting impeccable manners from his guests. One visitor describes his experience at Woronzow Road. In the small dining-room in the basement, 'the three of us sat to a meal of roast lamb and vegetables and a bottle of white wine. As soon as our plates were before us O'Casey bent over and began eating without ceremony. '"Go on," he signalled me. No passing of the wine clockwise here. I liked the homeliness of it all.'24 It may be that the Hitchcocks did not. Leading O'Casey to believe that they were so interested in the idea of a film set in Hyde Park that a return invitation would follow to plan the matter further, they left, never to contact him again. In his characteristic way, O'Casey later penned the pair of them grotesquely:

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Hitchcock was a hulk of a man, unwieldy in his gait, seeming as if he had to hoist himself into every movement. Like an over-blown seal, sidling from place to place, as if the hard earth beneath couldn't give him a grip. Seated at table, though quiet in his movements, he seemed to be continually expanding, while Mrs Hitchcock seemed to contract, a stilly mind sitting silent but attentive, registering every gesture and every word. His sober lounge suit, straining at the buttons, seemed to want to let itself go, while her gayer dress seemed to tighten around her body, imprisoning the impressions her mind formed from the experimental talk of the evening.25 At this slight, O'Casey says elsewhere, he 'turned [his] back on the film forever, leaving it to its own ridiculous gallantry and fulsome insignificance'.26 Forever is a long time, during which John Ford would, so to speak, come into the picture. Yet O'Casey was still thinking in film terms in January 1931, since his Dublin friend Joe Cummins wrote: 'So you are writing a scenario. Your work is so arresting and so dramatic, that, if you can use the film medium as you do that of the stage, you will be just as successful. [... But] you will have to make a new mould for yourself.'27 Perhaps under the influence of Eisenstein, he had been thinking of the film 'as geometrical and emotional, the emotion of the living characters to be shown against their own patterns and the patterns of the [Hyde] Park. It was to begin at dawn with the opening of the gates and end at midnight as they closed again to the twelve chimes of Big Ben striking softly in the distance' (A, 2, 352). Thus even though Hitchcock let him down, O'Casey pressed on with his scenario, using dialogue and letting the script grow into a stage play. At the same time, he made outlines for an autobiography, tried a few draft passages, and produced a first draft of a one-act farce, The End of the Beginning.

Domestically, the period after the production of the Tassiewas not an easy one. Money was a constant worry, though Eileen's earnings in Bitter Sweet kept the wolf from the door. It worried Sean that she had to be away from Breon; essentially, he wanted her at home in the conventional roles. A visitor to Woronzow Road saw her as an attractive young woman who screened off O'Casey from the world at his door and spoke in the rather business-like way 'of an important person's wife'. He noted, however, that she spoke with a West-End voice that was not quite West End.28 But Eileen had another life, as model and chorus girl. Her absence made her sexually more desirable, as his letters to her display. These are the private expressions of an insecure man demanding that she feel the same need for him as he for her; 'dont you, dont you, dont you, sweet darling?'29 He looked forward to their love making on her return from playing in Manchester with a fervency which lights up the page. No other woman he had ever met, he tells Eileen, could give him what she has given him. (She tries to cool his ardour with news of a nasty cold.) During Eileen's

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absence the menage was mainly in the hands of housekeeper Mrs Earle and child-minder Nanny Trim. In August 1930 O'Casey found himself again in lodgings in Margate so that Breon could benefit from the sea air Nanny Trim regarded as mandatory; Eileen came at weekends and stayed in a small hotel. Their first major marital crisis occurred at this time. Eileen had begun again to enjoy dinner dates after the performance at His Majesty's, and Lee Ephraim turned up at the stage door. Romance won over domestic bliss. After a brief resumption of their affair she found herself pregnant, and the standard remedies having failed she was forced to tell Sean. She felt 'trapped and appalled' by her situation but, needing the abortion, had to tell the truth, that Sean was not the father. The shock to one for whom betrayal was shattering may be imagined. He asked her to leave him alone. 'In my knowledge he had never been so upset; trembling, he was nearly in tears. I felt almost crazy.' She went to the theatre that evening without speaking further with him. At home, when he was upset and angry he usually lapsed into a stony silence which could last for days. On this occasion he brooded all evening and then reached a decision. When Eileen came out of the theatre after the show he was there in a taxi waiting for her. He embraced and consoled her. 'Mostly it's my fault,' he conceded.30 Life was challenging art. He who had imagined Jerry Devine's narrow-mindedness in judging Mary Boyle's pregnancy in Juno - 'My God, Mary, have you fallen as low as that?' - was now faced with his own wife's betrayal. It was not in him to have what Mary Boyle calls 'the bitter word of scorn for [her] after all'. He brought Eileen home and gave her supper and the next day, through the knowledgeable Billy McElroy, found the name of a Harley Street specialist. Sean did not castigate Eileen but apparently he was furious.31 Yet he visited her every day at the nursing-home and showed concern only for her health. When she came home on 25 October it was to a welcoming party. Ephraim had gone to New York about a show he was producing; Eileen told him nothing. She resumed her part in Bitter Sweet. Her role in Woronzow Road had deepened. Actress as she was Eileen played the scene as melodrama, but then melodrama often throws back an insistent image of reality. In short, the marriage was fortified by Sean's prompt and passionate acceptance of Eileen's honesty. For the first time, she recognised what she was to call his 'full qualities', pleased that 'he appeared to love me more than ever.'32

By the time Bitter Sweet finished its run in May 1931 it was clear that the O'Caseys could not possibly sustain a suburban London lifestyle any longer. Sean had nothing marketable ready for the stage. The dribble of royalties coming in hardly amounted to more than two pounds a week. True, the Plough had its German premiere at Osnabruck in January, yet this was but 'getting known'.33 The German stage was not to be hospitable to O'Casey until the early 1950s. As ever, in 1931 the taxman insisted that he was owed money. There was nothing for it but to sell the tail-end of the lease of 19 Woronzow

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Road and move to cheaper quarters. The redoubtable McElroy, that deus ex machina of the O'Casey drama, was on hand with the answer. Having just run off with Hugh MacDiarmid's wife Peggy, McElroy could well be described as adept at re-arranging other people's domestic affairs. His daughter Evelyn had a little cottage for sale, he said, in Chalfont-St-Giles, only some twenty miles from London: why should not the O'Caseys move there and see how they liked it? Best way to repair ruined finances. McElroy was a bit of a conman. The premises at 2 Misbourne Cottages were not only a disaster for the likes of O'Casey, being dark, dismal and without electricity, but, far from being owned by Evelyn McElroy, came encumbered with rent and telephone arrears. The O'Caseys, having put most of their furniture into storage at Harrod's, found themselves in July with the decision whether to have electricity installed.34 They moved in temporarily while looking around the area for a better place. On 12 August the sale of the Woronzow Road lease realised £385-12s. Od. after deductions,35 providing a reasonably good cushion for the move on 1 October, to 'Hillcrest', a secluded bungalow on Dean Way, on the opposite side of the road to Milton's Cottage. It is today a well-cared-for brick house on two or more acres, which in O'Casey's day included a thriving cherry orchard. It was the property of one of the best-known Chalfont names, builder Fred Lane, who moved into his joinery premises nearer the road when the O'Caseys moved in. As it was pleasant, bright and electrically lit O'Casey immediately took to it and settled into a room at the back, where he worked and slept.36 They had reluctantly let Nanny Trim and Mrs Earl go but had a girl, Tessa, to mind Breon. The furniture, carpets and curtains were released from Harrod's, and a reasonably happy period in O'Casey's life began. In a letter to Lady Gregory he confirmed this, although he was soon to have a different story: Stopping down here in a little cottage for a few weeks in the summer (such as it was) we liked the district very much, & decided, if possible, to settle down here for the next few years, if not for the rest of our natural lives. We hunted around continually [...] &, at last, Eileen ferreted out a compact, well-built roomy one floor house, hidden away in a lovely garden, filled with beautiful shrubs, garlanded with lovely trees - I know more about trees now than I knew when I was down in Coole - with fruit & vegetable gardens, & backed up by a very pretty cherry orchard. [...] We have been here now for three weeks, & so far, I like the place sincerely. I seem to have forgotten to wish for the speed & the noise & the stir of the City. [...] I believe the delay was worth bearing, for the place & the surroundings are so pretty & uncommon that a place having similar attractions would be hard to find.37 Sean now took the pick and shovel to the gardens and entered into the spirit of rural living.38 He found the local people shy and reticent, and surviving gossip suggests that they were somewhat in awe of the great dramatist.39 He is remembered

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walking around the village with his thick-lensed glasses and polo-necked pullover but he may have confined the wearing of a stetson hat, a gift from Augustus John, to the gardens. He stunned the local magnate, store owner and councillor Frank Nash, by asking if he read Milton and that gentleman avoided O'Casey after that. He liked to watch the local football team play (the Chalfont Wasps), and took an interest in cricket. It is remembered, too, that he liked to attend the Playhouse Cinema (now the ABC) in nearby Gerrards Cross, where he would sit in the front row. There was a public library in Chalfont-St-Giles which may have proved useful. The visitors' book for this period is missing from Milton's Cottage, but it is likely O'Casey visited more than once and probably led his own visitors there, since Milton was a writer he greatly admired. (He deplored the devaluation of Milton led by T.S. Eliot in the 1930s.) Close to 'Hillcrest' is Memorial Hall, with a sign reading 'Lest We Forget: August 4th 1914-November llth 1918', which must have attracted him. It was built by the servicemen who returned from the war and the money was raised by public subscription. There were many veterans' associations in the 1930s, and it is likely O'Casey met and discussed the war with some of the veterans, such as Hugo Groom, a local schoolmaster wounded at the Somme. There may have been fewer attractions for Eileen. A gardener and newsboy, Jocky Pearce, who knew the O'Caseys well, referred to Eileen's great beauty and called her 'a classy dame'.40 According to Mrs Pamela French, who now lives in 'Hillcrest' and has formed an interest in the O'Caseys, the washing was sent up the road where the ironing was done for two pence, and the son of the house would also receive a piece of cake when he brought the washing back. Eileen would accompany Sean on walks and on 19 August 1931 they both signed the visitors' book at the Quaker Meeting House some three miles away. Eileen gave her address as Chalfont-St-Giles while Sean proudly wrote 'Dublin'. Did Eileen feel she was inescapably a resident now? Soon she took steps to create an escape route by gaining a part in another London show. Then she took a small room in London and instead of the arduous daily journey by bus she would return only at weekends. But the Quaker Meeting House held a special interest because there was a Quaker school at nearby Long Dene to which Breon would soon go. In 'A Gate Clangs Shut' in Rose and Crown (1952) O'Casey was to make much of the alleged refusal of the nuns in Chalfont-St-Peter to take Breon as pupil. But in fact no official application was made to the Holy Cross Convent at Gold Hill East. Sister Kevin Russell explains: 'At that time (1932) our Sisters were running two schools - the Convent school and a parish school at St Joseph's. At the Convent school the fees were £2.00 per term. No fees were charged at St Joseph's so I do not understand how there could be a query re. fees.'41 In his account O'Casey said that Eileen wanted a Catholic education for Breon and felt sure the nuns would allow a reduced fee, 'when they heard the father was an author', until he had a new play on stage. On this basis Eileen went for interview and came out to Sean, sheltering in a telephone box from the rain, with the bad news. The nuns had thrown her out. He chose to see the

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nuns' attitude as mercenary if not hypocritical. In truth, the episode reveals how inclined Eileen was to risk dignity by confessions of poverty when she sought some favour. I am inclined to think this episode occurred after Breon was installed at the Quaker School, which possibly did have fees which the O'Caseys were now trying to escape. Besides, neither she nor Sean had considered how the penniless child was to get to and from Chalfont-St-Peter daily. In going to school at Long Dene Breon could walk across the fields from 'Hillcrest' with Tessa or Sean. No sooner had Eileen escaped to the London theatre scene than tensions grew at home. Sean resented her going and suspected her motives. She had apparently argued that she suffered from loneliness while he always had his thoughts for company. In refutation he claimed his thoughts were a fountain of loneliness: They have separated me from the Ken & Companionship of my fellows, a companionship & a Ken that I like and long for.' His thoughts had made many people hate and try to injure him. 'But my thoughts create around me a loneliness greater even than these things: they often divide me from the few I dearly love.' He pointed out that he had raised no objection to Eileen's idea of retreating to Chalfont but had flung himself dangerously into hard physical work after their arrival, 'to fence out the feeling of dislike to the change of scene & the change of life'. He would not have confessed so much had Eileen not forced him into defending himself. 'And when [she] hurried away to London' he had said little or nothing to hinder her, although her absence had added to the unhappiness in the home - quite apart, he added darkly, from the more serious side of the 'change' they had discussed the night before he wrote this heartfelt letter. He could see no way of adapting to Chalfont without a complete and drastic change: he hinted at the possibility of divorce.42 Eileen was not about to let the marriage go - indeed, how could she, since Sean had no money to support her independence? She replied immediately on 16 February to his emotional letter, although there may first have been a 'phone-call between them. She assured him there was only one Sean and asked him to meet her in two days' time at 3 p.m. outside a certain shop. There is then a gap of a whole month in this correspondence, during which a reconciliation took place and sexual relations were resumed. He refers to a 'special treat' when he made love, though this, he confessed, was neither delightful nor very acceptable or fair to her. It is difficult to be sure if this scruple refers to Eileen's fear, as a threat to her career, of pregnancy. This certainly was a dilemma for them both, especially as Sean's physical desire was very strong. Around this time O'Casey also shoved the door to Dublin favour more tightly shut. He had in his own way, the epistolary way, made his peace with Lady Gregory before death from cancer finally claimed her on 22 May 1932, but relations with Yeats and above all with Robinson remained sour. When the Abbey tours to America began in late September 1931 Barry Fitzgerald kept O'Casey abreast of gossip -Juno was among the plays chosen for the first major tour since 1914 - and pleased him with frequent disparagement of 'Robbie'

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and his alleged self-promotion in America. Other friends, notably Fallon, Jack Carney and Joe Cummins, regretted O'Casey's continuing exile. Cummins was probably the most outspoken: Why the deuce don't you live in the county of Wicklow, where the fields are greener, the landscape more beautiful, and humanity rawer, more naked (figuratively anyhow) than in the belly of Bucks?43 What you need, Sean, is a visit from the fairies, who would blot out (vide Grigson [in The Shadow of a Gunman}} the painful memories of the Abbey Directorate's mean, contemptible treatment of you. Damn it, man, there are no fairies in Bucks. I told you before that you and Yeats are quits. Some people think that the drubbing you gave Yeats, while provoked and deserved, was too vehement, too slashing to be administered to a leading figure in European literature. Forget the whole affair. I cannot imagine that the Abbey Directorate want to recall it.44 Continuing, Cummins urged O'Casey to compete for a new Abbey prize (£50) for best new play, and return to Ireland. 'You will find copy for satire, and it will do us all no end of good.' But O'Casey was not yet ready to forgive. In 1932 he was asked to become a member of the Irish Academy of Letters, which Yeats had long thought beneficial to found in the fight against censorship. The Academy was inaugurated in Dublin on 18 September 1932, with Shaw as president, Yeats as vice-president. Alongside Joyce, O'Casey was one of seven writers who refused to accept membership. Characteristically, he wrote to the Irish Times to explain. He argued that the censorship exerted by the academicians would be more dangerous than any the Irish state could exercise.45 (This was a couple of years before O'Casey was to taste the bitter effects of state censorship of his own work.) & replied to Yeats's puzzled enquiry over O'Casey's meaning: 'No one knows what O Casey refers to. [Frank] OConnor [sic] does not know & I think he knows every bit of gossip about his contemporaries.' Remembering O'Casey's earlier personal attacks, JE now showed surprising venom (though not publicly): 'I think with that temperament, OCasey [sic] is better out of the Academy. He is not a person to be met in ordinary controversy. He is like one of those fighters who keep to no rules, but bite, kick in the stomach and try to gouge out the eyes of the person they fight with. I know the kind of letters he writes.'46 There was a closing of ranks. O'Casey was instinctively aware of such hostility awaiting him in Dublin should he attempt to join its literary society again. But as he recorded in a note at this time, 'For good or for evil an artist must hew out his own way onward.' To Shaw alone he apologised, in a draft letter from the same source, as he understood that Shaw had personally forwarded the invitation to him to join the Academy. He knew the people involved too well, he said.47 A little later the playwright Mary Manning asked if he would write something about the Academy for Motley, the in-house magazine of the Gate Theatre: 'Have a heart. We do need an antidote to the election fever which is ravaging our un-fair land.'48 But O'Casey wisely resisted the bait.

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Characteristically, O'Casey hated any disruption of his routines. In particular his daily writing, especially when he had several irons in the fire, was sacrosanct. Invitations, no matter how prestigious, would receive blunt and obdurate refusal: he never did learn the gentle art of lying. His response to such an invitation from the actress Lilian McCarthy (Lady Keeble) in September 1932 offers a good example. The reception was to be at Blenheim Palace. Can it have been connected with her return to the stage as Iphigenia? In any case, famous though McCarthy was (for she had played the first Nora in John Bull's Other Island and was Granville Barker's first wife), O'Casey could not leave his work in hand, which in itself was but a distraction from his playwriting. Having sold a part share of his three Dublin plays to French's, he was constrained to prepare prompt copies for each, 'which will take me, on account of my weak eyes, at least a fortnight to do'. Also, he had written the pot-boiler The End of the Beginning for Arthur Sinclair to play on the Halls, rehearsals probably to start 'in a day or so'. (This last bit was too optimistic: Sinclair failed to get the one-act on.) O'Casey complained that he found it 'a trial' to be away from the unfinished Within the Gates, but hoped, 'when all the uncongenial, but necessary work has been done', to restart it and finish in a few months. It would be 'a strange play - music, song & dialogue - running through four acts [...] & will be something different to anything I have yet written.' Having wished the English Verse Speaking Association well, he ended by inviting McCarthy to come and see him, Eileen and Breon, instead 'some sunny day'. He could inject charm even into what should have been a conventional letter of regret.49 Within the Gates was, indeed, going slowly. He was still struggling with it in May 1933, when he described it as 'the hardest job that I have ever attempted'.50 Distraction came in the form of a number of articles for Time and Tide. On 24 February editor Lady Rhondda had appealed for a short story: he sent her three, including the over-long T Wanna Woman', which she decided to publish as a special supplement, offering the substantial sum of fifteen guineas in evidence. But if the courageous Lady Rhondda was keen the printers refused to touch the story, which became a cause celebre. Among the letters to the journal in support of O'Casey was a surprising one from Yeats: That public opinion should permit, or encourage, the censorship of printers is intolerable.' He urged Lady Rhondda to 'risk her popularity and the circulation of her paper' in order to give O'Casey space: 'he has moral earnestness and great dramatic genius.'51 There were letters of support also from Naomi Mitcheson, Sylvia Warner and Wyndham Lewis. Given the story to read, Lewis pronounced the 'scruples of the printer absurd' and declared the tone of T Wanna Woman' to be moral as well as explicitly realistic.52 But the story was not published in Time and Tide. O'Casey was sent a cheque for fifteen guineas for his trouble. He returned it with a dignified gesture. 'I Wanna Woman' has a Joycean quality, inasmuch as it records a stream of consciousness much occupied with sexual appetite. It concerns the frustrations

222 Sean O'Casey

of one Jack Avreen - yet another 'Jack' like himself among O'Casey's antiheroes - as he leads his life of a Don Juan in London's West End. Let down by one woman, who fails to turn up at his flat, Jack roams the streets, picks up a fashionable prostitute, goes to her flat, is provided with sex for an extravagant fee (including ten shillings for the maid), and wakes up in the horrors of spiritual nausea (rather than remorse). In his haste to escape from the sordid scene, he leaves behind the expensive bracelet watch with which he had earlier planned to seduce his lady friend. When she telephones to make her excuses for not keeping the date Jack cannot bear to talk to her.53 Thus 'I Wanna Woman' is essentially a moral tale in which the sadistic, misogynistic male is taught a lesson. The 'sex in the head' of which he is a walking emblem renders Jack ridiculous, whereas the prostitute emerges as lively, natural and sensual. Years later O'Casey was to re-cast the story as an excellent one-act, Bedtime Story, in which the woman's role eclipses the man's to the point of absurdity. But what 'I Wanna Woman' reveals is O'Casey's expansion of the positive view of woman, even of the prostitute Rosie Redmond in the Plough, celebrated in his earlier plays but definitely undermined in The Silver Tassie. It is therefore possible to see why the Young Whore had to occupy centre stage in Within the Gates. O'Casey was gradually developing a characterisation of women beyond the stereotypical mother/nurturer and towards the liberated, sexual superior of the over-intellectualised (and perhaps hypocritical) male. He was simultaneously dramatising his sexual desire for Eileen. Eileen continued her life in the theatre through most of 1933. Sean sent her small sums of money from time to time but it was bitter to him to realise that she needed so much and he could give so little. On their sixth wedding anniversary on 23 September he sent her a verse letter on the passing of time, signed with his love. Resentment aside - and O'Casey continued to remind Eileen how much Breon needed her - absence did make the hormones grow fonder and its joyful abolition his enthusiasm stronger for what he called 'the ride of love'. Eileen's sensual nature was precisely what energised the new play. Thus in Within the Gates Eileen is the Young Whore and Sean is the Dreamer, sharing a pursuit of personal fulfilment while separated by different goals. The Old Woman in the play is Eileen's mother, in as much as she crushes the spirit of the Young Whore with her constant blaming and complaints. But there is another major character, the Bishop, who serves to lift the play beyond autobiographical considerations and into the challenging terrain which now dangerously interested O'Casey. The Bishop and his sister are adrift in the Park without any shared purpose. So far as the melodramatic plot is concerned, the Bishop sowed his wild oats with the Old Woman and the Young Whore is the result: but this secret is never acknowledged. The Bishop, whose guilt draws him in sympathy to the Young Whore, is too refined and too protective to venture far in the Young Whore's path to destruction. He is the Established Church as liberal yet useless advocate. Not until David Hare's Racing Demon (1993) is there such an appraisal on the English stage of the failure of the Church of England to minister in society.

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Racing Demon, however, concentrates on the institutional church, and treats its political shortcomings in some depth. O'Casey was more interested in adjusting the figurative Bishop to a broader societal model to include the struggle for life, the rite of spring, the hunger for salvation, the desire of the flesh and (with the Chorus of Down-and-Outs in the background) the constant threat of unemployment and despair. In all of this plenitude there is an ambition for a new anthropological drama rooted in the ancient theatre of Dionysus but too large for the modern realistic stage. As the Bishop fits into the mythic pattern as the opponent of sexual freedom, the representative of winter in the struggle with spring, the Atheist, the Young Whore's stepfather, provides an ironic counterpoint. The battle in the end is for the soul of the Young Whore, who is dying. The Bishop succeeds in reconciling her to the sign of the cross as she dies, though the Dreamer dances with her in defiance. Nietzschean energy wins over conventional piety (as well as over the despair of the Down-and-Outs who encroach like avenging Furies). Something terrible is kept at bay. By 23 July the play was finished. O'Casey sent it to Macmillans for publication early in September before any production was arranged. The contract was signed on 6 October.54 This was probably a mistake, because, whatever about the practice today of publishing a play to coincide with the opening night on stage, a play published and reviewed well in advance of production may tie the hands of the director in rehearsal. And of all O'Casey's plays Within the Gates demands inspired directorial control. He sent the script to Cochran, who hastily returned it as too risky. 'You can't go on writing fine things, Sean [...] I suppose you are tired of people advising you to get back to the method of 'Juno". I wish you would.'55 If Sean was tired in 1933 of hearing this plea he was to hear it for the next thirty years. He knew that to return to the manner of Juno might be good for him but bad for his 'conception of the drama'. He next set about arranging the music. The pressure here was once again the publication date. The composer Herbert Hughes composed and adapted the ten songs published in the 1933 text, a costly commission for O'Casey56 which did not work out as he had hoped. He put pressure on Hughes to get the thirty pages done, persuaded that an American production, in particular, would depend on them. In the event, the American producers preferred to find their own music. Meantime, O'Casey became unnecessarily concerned over Hughes's possible royalties when Within the Gates should tour (which it never did). Having finished the play he was thus in a rather fussy, anxious state which gradually wore him down until he fell ill in September with 'nerve, heart attack [,] inflammation of the ears and other minor afflictions'.57 There was no heart attack, actually, but there was a breakdown, accentuated by O'Casey's smoking sixty to seventy cigarettes a day. Eileen's gynaecologist Harold Waller had become a friend to whom Sean could write when he was worried about his own general health, and Waller now came down to Chalfont to see him.58 Apparently rest was the prescription. A month later O'Casey had finished the proofs of Within the Gates, as he wrote Desmond MacCarthy.59 On Shaw's

224 SednO'Casey recommendation he sent the script to Norman MacDermott, a young director who had established a reputation for staging modern, unconventional plays at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead in the 1920s.60 He made his mark in theatre history: The impact and influence of the Everyman in the years between the wars has proved greater and longer-lasting than its own short career. An enterprise of innovation in its day, it has set a pattern for many later developments and practices now accepted as custom.'61 MacDermott had now taken over the Royalty Theatre in London. His policy, a copy of which he gave to O'Casey, was to avoid the search for long runs and instead 'to build around a particular Theatre a steady audience for plays of high standard, produced well but not extravagantly, for moderate "runs" and periodic revivals.'62 In short, the policy was as at the Everyman. MacDermott regarded it as the application of the continental repertory system to London habits of production and reception. Yet in taking on Within the Gates he was taking on more than he could chew, for admirable though his ideas for a repertory theatre were MacDermott was no Max Reinhardt. And O'Casey's was a big play with a huge cast. O'Casey was hoping also for a production in New York, where he had discovered a more than useful penfriend in the critic George Jean Nathan. Nathan had already published a couple of O'Casey's early pieces of autobiography in the American Spectator and now offered to help with the new play. Having received the script in October he described it as 'one of the most beautiful plays I have read in a very long, long time. I am thoroughly delighted with it. It has an overwhelming beauty.'63 Eugene O'Neill, a close friend of Nathan, suggested as agent Richard Madden, who immediately copyrighted the typescript in Washington and soon had three producers 'angling'.64 Nathan used his influence to secure a New York offer. Meantime, through Nathan O'Casey made contact with O'Neill and they exchanged mutually admiring letters. Aware of Mourning Becomes Electra while he was writing Within the Gates, O'Casey had avoided reading it;65 yet in the notes to the text he says he took the idea for a front curtain from O'Neill's 'great play'. The text of Within the Gates was published shortly before rehearsals began in London in January. There was no frontispiece this time. He had invited Harry Kernoff to Woronzow Road but had refused to sit for him. Kernoff did a portrait from memory, 'damn good' in his own opinion66 but not in O'Casey's, who was cross that Kernoff intended to exhibit without permission: 'My first impressions, against which I fought, have been abundantly justified: you are precisely the little tyke I first thought you were.'67 The reviews of the text were encouraging but qualified. Ivor Brown (Manchester Guardian, 22 Dec. 1933) admired O'Casey's rebellion against realism but stressed the difficulty of the new play, 'a libretto for a producer and his team to work upon'. The Times sniffed a little over O'Casey's 'occasional violence of phrase' and 'fragments of hysteria' and feared for its radical departure from realism, but resolutely praised its poetic grandeur: 'it emerges as a work of art more significant in its attainment and in its promise of dramatic liberation than any play written since Strindberg moved away from naturalism.'68 In the Observer Stjohn Ervine

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could not make up his mind. The play was not German expressionism, of that he was certain, yet felt that it had 'the passion of the prophets. It burns away insincerity and all flippancy.'69 To another reviewer this passion was O'Casey's 'hate of religion and all those who have taken morality for their mission: religion to O'Casey is the Great Deception.'70 These were not sentiments to swell any box-office advance, even if the TLSsaw the play as 'masterly' and 'a further development of that dramatic form in which [ The] Silver Tassie so brilliantly experimented'.71 But the lofty TLS, always favourable to O'Casey, also had its doubts: 'In a production anything may happen; and if Mr O'Casey insists upon every letter of his dialogue and every oddity [sic] of his stage directions, a masterpiece might conceivably go down in embarrassed and silly ridicule.' Such comments reveal on what a knife-edge the planned production rested. Knowing this, O'Casey went up to London for rehearsals when the supportive Lady Astor made her flat available in St James's Square. Rehearsals did not go well. O'Casey did not hit it off with MacDermott, a small, wiry, man, difficult to work with. As Jack Reading has said, 'He was someone everyone admired but never liked.'72 O'Casey was concerned to get the singing and the blocking and what he called stage pictures right, while MacDermott was mainly worried about getting the play across meaningfully. Towards the end of January O'Casey offended by walking out of rehearsal. MacDermott insisted that certain sections of the play could not be staged as written: 'as this end bit now stands it will kill your great play stone dead.' Indeed, having rehearsed the last scene of the play (after O'Casey had left) until 10.30 p.m., MacDermott had to announce that 'halfway through the bottom dropped clean out of the stage into an abysm.'73 In reply O'Casey blamed MacDermott for resenting intrusion and at the same time accusing him of leaving just when he was needed most.74 Things reached such a pass between them that just before the opening MacDermott had to write - and the fact that the communication was in writing is in itself revealing - to apologise for bumping into O'Casey in the aisle during dress rehearsal, causing Eileen to shout, 'Don't knock the Author over.'75 It cannot have helped that both Augustus John and St John Ervine had tactlessly written to say they disliked the Cockney dialect in the play.76 For all the forebodings, opening night on 7 February was a gala affair, the Shaws and many distinguished guests being present (the Prime Minister Ramsay Mac Donald declining in a personal letter to O'Casey77). Loud cries of 'author' at the end were met only by the Bishop (DouglasJefferies), who came forward to say that although in the house O'Casey never appeared on the stage on such occasions.78 This was hardly a good sign. It signified O'Casey's own disappointment. Afterwards, Lady Astor threw a supper party for the large cast (twenty-seven, including no stars as such), in the flat the O'Caseys were using. Even Eileen was not hopeful about the production. 'Though we did not believe the occasion had been a success, everybody tried to forget and to enjoy the rest of the evening.'79 Was it the production or the play itself that caused unease? James Agate, the leading critic of the day, was in no doubt. He dismissed Within the Gates as

226 SednO'Casey

'pretentious rubbish', Alice in Wonderland 'interleaved with Euclid'.80 The attack did damage and made O'Casey Agate's relentless enemy. The London Evening News, meantime, could only see in the play 'an Irishman's general grouse against everything'.81 Those who were rather shocked at O'Casey's material tended to find some consolation in the production: The play has been staged with rare skill by Mr. Norman Macdermott, and, whatever its fate may be, it provides a distinguished opening for his season at the [unfashionable] Royalty.'82 The Spectator (16 February) saw the production as equally experimental with the play itself. In this reading, the acting showed up the poverty and abstraction of the characterisation, although Marjorie Mars as the Young Whore gave a 'brilliant performance'.83 In the Observer, Ivor Brown thought MacDermott had done rather well but that the play so overawed audience and cast alike that laughter seemed outlawed, like 'brawling in church'.84 Such views left little hope. On the other hand, Darlington of the Telegraph, a critic who was to remain one of O'Casey's most loyal admirers, enthused over the play but found the production unsatisfactory: 'It was impressive, but not deeply moving; and I feel certain that a producer more experienced than Norman MacDermott, or with greater resources at command, could have made this play almost unbearably moving.'85 That seems closer to the mark. Referring to his earlier review of the text, Charles Morgan of the Times felt that in spite of the 'defects' of the production, including 'a naturalistic emphasis in many passages which cannot accept it', the play nevertheless restored to the theatre 'the compression and vitality of poetry'.86 Desmond MacCarthy properly noted that Within the Gates reads better than it plays. Though to him the production was to a large extent 'an utter travesty' O'Casey was partly to blame: 'What is peculiar about it is that [O'Casey] has endeavoured to use the technique of musical comedy to express philosophical tragedy.'87 Such a whirl of conflicting and complex responses to a play was entirely new to O'Casey. What did it all mean? This was not like Dublin where a writer knew when and why he was being applauded and when and why not. Even friends or friendly critics like MacCarthy seemed here to see two sides of everything. Time and Tide, which might have been expected to be supportive, saw Within the Gates as, 'for all its sincerity, bewildering and inconclusive'.88 Thank God, O'Casey must have felt, for the voice of another Celt like Hugh MacDiarmid's in the Scots Observer (17 February). Even though his review was of the text alone, the 'outstanding literary event' of many years, it was cheering. MacDiarmid saw O'Casey as 'a major poet' and the superior of Strindberg and Eliot. 'I know something of the difficulties of finding a means of orchestrating dramatic dialogue in the fashion in which O'Casey has now succeeded [...] and I know O'Casey personally and a little of what this terrific effort, a miracle of personal integrity, must have cost him.' And yet, supportive though such words were, when a writer gets that kind of passionate defence he knows he is being consoled. Having returned to Chalfont-St-Giles, O'Casey wrote to MacDermott. Eileen, who had remained up in London, had told him of a plan to raise

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money in order to keep the play going, in spite of poor houses. Sean was against the idea. The wisest and most dignified thing to do is to take the play off without further delay. The play has been a flop, and nothing can alter that fact.'89 It was taken off after twenty-eight performances. Outwardly, O'Casey was void of self-pity. The criticism of the play & the production isn't, I'm afraid, all stupidity,' he wrote to a sympathiser. There are many faults in the play, and, in my opinion, little else in the production.'90 After expenses, which, incidentally included £4 for twenty visits to Hyde Park,91 O'Casey was left with only £20 from this production. Three years' work and but twenty pounds to show: hardly more than an article in Time and Tide would have netted. It was a dismaying verdict. Was the wily old Cochran right after all? Was it but folly to abandon the entertainment values of Juno for the pursuit of experimental drama? The equally wily Shaw thought along similar lines, and yet was awed - if also slightly bemused - by the new play. As he wrote to Nancy Astor: 'Sean is all right now that his shift from the Dublin slums to Hyde Park has shewn [sic] that his genius is not limited by frontiers. His plays are wonderfully impressive and reproachful without being irritating like mine. People fall crying into one another's arms saying God forgive us all! instead of refusing to speak and going to their solicitors for a divorce.'92 Of course, Sean was not 'all right now'. He was angrier than ever with the world and especially with the literary world. Ironically, there was an inference in 1934 that Within the Gates would have been done better in Dublin. Tn a foreign country', said Ivor Brown in his Observer review (11 February), 'a new play by a dramatist of Mr. O'Casey's distinction would be produced at a State Theatre, with all its resources.' Dublin now seemed lost to him, while London seemed puzzled what to do with him. Within the Gates was a watershed. Had he a future as playwright? O'Casey's hopes were pinned on yet another world elsewhere. New York might perhaps grant him the recognition as experimental playwright he had not yet, in any practical way, been accorded. There was a door open to him yet.

12 'BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR'

he American production of Within the Gates was to be in autumn 1934. Meanwhile O'Casey was busy putting Windfalls into final order for publication. It was to include stories, poems and short plays, a clearing of the decks, and an opportunity for self-assessment. It was not destined to be a great book but it could perhaps be controversial. In particular, the short story 'I Wanna Woman' worried Macmillan, who relied for necessary changes on the advice of advance reader Desmond Mac Carthy, who unfortunately lost the typescript in May and had to trouble O'Casey for the original manuscript.1 That crisis weathered, because he liked him O'Casey was willing to make the changes Mac Carthy recommended, mainly tonings-down in sexual explicitness. There were two other stories just as risque, 'The StarJazzer', a rape within marriage in tenement conditions, and 'The Job', a sophisticated London tale of what today would be called sexual harassment. In his report Mac Carthy called all three 'lust stories',2 but they are rather morality tales. In his preface to the volume O'Casey said they were 'an effort to get rid of some of the bitterness that swept into me when the Abbey Theatre rejected The Silver Tassie ? The two plays included were, in contrast, harmless farces, The End of the Beginning and A Pound on Demand. In addition there were three sections of poetry, and these, despite artistic flaws, remain the most interesting pages of Windfalls today. The 'First Fall' represented poems written before marriage, 'Second Fall' poems written after 1926, while 'A Fall from an Irish Tree' contained only the once-popular political ballad, 'The Grand Oul' Dame Britannia'. Taken together with the short stories the poems make Windfalls an autobiographical text: indeed, this is probably the best way to read it. Here we see O'Casey looking back and inspecting his choices, the roads taken and not taken. Because the material relating to Eileen (which includes the short story 'A Job') related also to Within the Gates the book primarily describes O'Casey's struggle to make moral sense of his desires and to find some way out of his confusion. There was something at once brave and foolhardy about polarising the love poems to Maire Keating and to Eileen. Since 1926 his thoughts had

T

'Reside the Golden Door' 229

now and then strayed to Maire. Pencilled into an anthology of poetry, after Sassoon's 'Everyone Sang', we find: Oh life could begin, start anew, And how different it could be If I'd forgotten you, Or you'd remembered me. And, after ^E's The Unknown God', these lines: Grey eyes, grey eyes, what are you waiting for (where are you now [?]) High on the hill-side free With the spears of dawn on your brow As you gaze out over the sea, And I break my heart for thee.4 Assuming these two pieces were written in London in 1926 or after, one can surmise that he was not free of Maire's power over him then. He pays moving tribute to her as his Muse in the short preface to Windfalls. 'She was a child of Mary [i.e. member of a catholic women's sodality], gentle, patient, and generous.' She 'lured' him from his obsession with politics and 'forced' his feet towards 'a fuller understanding of Literature and Art'. Such remarks carefully suppress any physical attraction. 'A Walk with Eros', however, implies it. Yet it is hardly an erotic poem. It had already been filtered through The Shadow of a Gunman, where Donal recites from this long poem the lines which Minnie insists were penned for his 'sweetheart' but were actually Sean's for Maire (with slight alterations): One day, when morn's half-open'd eyes Were bright with Spring's sunshine My hand was clasp'd in yours, dear love, And yours were clasp'd in mine We bow'd as worshippers before The queenly celandine, (p. 7; cf. CP, 1, 107) In the original typescript there were eighty-three stanzas, fourteen of which O'Casey now cut out. One of these suggests that the love was unconsummated ('Ah, love is what we never knew'), though spiritually one; a stanza added in 1934 refers to the city (contrasted in the poem with the idyllic countryside) where 'creeds sell womanhood, and make/The marriage vows a rape'.5 The suggestion here is that natural sexual appetite is denied by the 'creeds' of fashionable London. Eileen, as fashionable model and chorus girl, is, presumably, under the sway of such creeds. So, the contrast now is between the lost

230 Sean O'Casey

innocent love and the sexual love which is not always biddable. Cut also from the original typescript are the lines used in Juno, which Mary quotes in act 3 to rebuke Jerry for his narrowness (Then we saw our globe of beauty/Was an ugly thing as well,/A hymn divine, whose chorus/Was an agonizin' yell;/Like the story of a demon,/That an angel had to tell'6), perhaps because they tend to remove the gap between idyll and sexual reality. The rest of the love poetry in this first section shares this idyllic quality. No longer personal - no names, no pack drill - it is lifeless. But in the second section, about Eileen, a certain rawness of emotion enters into the narrative in spite of the artificial style adopted. Here, 'I gazed into her blue eyes' (as opposed to Maire's grey eyes) is prelude to much unloosing of girdles and fondling of white breasts. The argument, if it can be so called, is that Eileen was surrounded by rich admirers ready to drop money in her lap and Sean had to come up with an alternative, if not a white horse. The short story The Job' can be called into service here to flesh out - the phrase is not inappropriate - the case. They were a mean crowd, these theatrical producers; wanted a hell of a lot for their money. Pretty face; well-shaped legs; good figure; clever dancing; fair voice, all the better if it was good; agility, stamina, patience, and personality' (p. 111). The producers also wanted sex, and in The Job' the young chorus girl calculates how she must cope with this price for a place in the chorus line. In the prose-poem 'Gold and Silver Will Not Do' - originally addressed to Eileen in 19297 - the speaker-artist (transparently Sean) challenges this value system by assuming the role of a 'dreamer' and speaking in the language of Solomon's Song of Songs: 'And the woman gave ear to the words of the others, and, turning, she questioned me, saying: where shall I find, O dreamer, colours outshining the colours they give me, or grandeur in bronze and in stone like the grandeur of silver and gold?' (p. 43). His answer is, in his love for her and in the children he will give her. And, in short, Sean triumphs over his rivals. It is easy to smile at his vulnerability in this scenario. He invariably falls back on the language of the Bible when, in fact, he wants to be at his most sincere. He was never to acquire a poetic voice because he was incapable of not dramatising his feelings and the voice he assumed was the one he - ironically, for an apostate - regarded as carrying irrefutable authority, the voice of an Old Testament prophet. Indeed, in The Dreamer Dreams of God' he sees his career as that of poet-prophet, 'beset by the laughter and malice of fools' but finding that God 'is one with the Dreamers for ever' (pp. 48-49). He looks to Eileen for protection in 'She Will Give Me Rest'. In a stanza clogged with resentment at London's lack of appreciation of his high dramatic ambitions he finds consolation in her embrace: Sick with the shame of the welcoming tumult Given the crowd-lov'd vendors of tinsel, Trying to fix their gilded dung-beads On the breast of a Muse giving suck to the poets;

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Tir'd of the dangerous peering into Flame-images deep in the eyes of God, I sink to rest for a breathless moment On the cool, white, sheltering breast of a woman, (p. 51) Windfalls is a book split between nostalgia and overwhelming anxiety. Its pain is relieved only by those two devil-may-care plays in one act, The End of the Beginning and A Pound on Demand, like farces appended to a bungled tragedy. It is as if they had been penned by Captain Boyle, impervious to the 'chassis' within and without. It is, perhaps, appropriate that Eileen was pregnant in the spring of 1934 as Windfalls was completed.8 Early in March Richard Madden (now his American agent) sent him a contract for the New York production of Within the Gates. O'Casey was both relieved and apprehensive, given Nathan's unqualified enthusiasm for the play and the indifference of Londoners. Though he always worried less about his own advantage in contracts for production than about the danger to those investing in his work he now comforted himself with the belief that were it not for MacDermott's timidity Within the Gates would have done better in London. Moreover, English theatre was entering a fallow period in which conventional realism dominated and 'the English actors have forgotten how to speak anything but newspaper English.'9 Things should be better in New York. He met the producers George Rusher Markell and John Tuerk in London in July and found them eager and generous. They wanted him over for rehearsals in September. The O'Caseys had decided to leave Chalfont-St-Giles, as Eileen wanted to be nearer her gynaecologist in London. Having found a flat at 49 Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, they could not move in until September, when the task would fall on Eileen's shoulders. Oddly enough, in the circumstances, O'Casey accepted an invitation to spend a week at Lady Londonderry's estate in Newtownards, in Northern Ireland. The hard work during the past year had taken its toll; he was depressed, and Eileen thought he needed a rest. He finished the proofs of Windfalls in mid-August with the usual distaste for the task and asked for £100 advance. He was worried about upcoming expenses. The American advance for Within the Gates came to just under £240;10 subsequently, the music cost him $250 plus a half per cent of profits. When it was obvious he would need new clothes for New York Nancy Astor sent a length of brown tweed which at least assured him of a decent suit.11 When the time arrived for the holiday in Mount Stewart, on 3 September, close to departure date for New York, O'Casey decided not to return home but to sail from Liverpool after his visit. Now the property of the National Trust, Mount Stewart is set in beautiful gardens developed by Lady Londonderry herself, and here, as at Coole, O'Casey must have found much to delight and amaze. He saw Circe go out to feed a golden pheasant, who flew down to eat corn from her hands; he tried the same, 'but the bugger stayed in the tree.'12 Lady Edith and he got on well, incongruous though his appearance was at this Big House, once the home of

232 Sean O'Casey

the infamous Castlereagh, chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant at the time of the 1798 Rising and hated in Irish memory for his engineering the Act of Union in 1800. The house has many proud reminders of Castlereagh; his seal is much in evidence, his study preserved, and his portrait given pride of place in milady's sitting room. There is a library, with a good collection of modern Irish authors, including O'Casey's own publications. He had inscribed Two Plays for her in May 1926, and the Plough rather fully soon after: 'Dear Lady Londonderry - a common humanity binds us all together. We cannot break its bonds asunder, nor cast away its cords from us. Differ as we may in degree of circumstance, we remain equally rich in the common human heritage of sorrow and of pain.'13 More recently he had inscribed Within the Gates to 'Circe' with warm regards, looking To the Time when all shall have life, & have it more abundantly' - here was the communist quoting Christ's mission from John: 10. Also, far from mocking her interest as a Scot in Celticism O'Casey respected it: 'I see few failings in the Celt, and many qualities, and you have almost all the qualities; may God preserve them and develop them in you forever!'14 In a similar religious vein, he wrote after his visit invoking the blessings of Brigid and Columcille 'with all the other Irish saints beside them' on her, on the Marquis, and on their 'charming household'. When he left from Belfast on 7 September Lady Edith wrote to Eileen that he seemed the better for his rest at Mount Stewart. 'He certainly was very tired. I do hope he will get on all right in America, he was simply dreading it.'15

O'Casey travelled first-class on the Britannic from Liverpool to New York with but a few pounds in his pocket and a few shirts and changes of underwear in his suitcase. The generous level of tipping abroad made him uneasy, for he had left Eileen whatever money there was. Once she moved to London she would have many expenses, including Breon's stay as boarder in the little Quaker school at Jordans, outside Chalfont-St-Giles. Still, Lady Londonderry had guaranteed £200 at the bank for O'Casey's trip and this would keep anxiety at bay in New York. He enjoyed the sea voyage, the longest he was ever to make, and was proud of his prowess in deck drill and resistance to sea-sickness. He wrote regularly to Eileen, now in London, and longed to be with her 'in the old fervid way'.16 She sent him a wireless message. As the ship drew into New York, past the famous landmarks, O'Casey grew apprehensive. He was here to boost his play, attend rehearsals, talk to reporters, and give all the publicity he might be called upon to offer. But how would he fare? He had met only four Americans in his life, two of them the producers of Within the Gates. He knew next to nothing about America, except what he had picked up as a child from The Comprehensive Summary, which he had learned by heart in his efforts to teach himself to read efficiently. He thought of New York as the land of Hoover and Whitman.17 An uneasy combination, one would have thought. He knew nothing of the New Deal, although, in a sense, he was on his way to America in search of a new deal himself. He landed on 17

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September. Nineteen-thirty-four was an interesting year to visit. Roosevelt was just beginning to put in place the social and economic policies destined to lift America out of the slough, though 'depression and intense suffering still haunted the land.'18 The welfare programme, introducing the Social Security Act, the Resettlement Administration, the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), was to begin in 1935. Only then was recovery established. So the New York and New England O'Casey saw was an America in transition, where anxiety and hope lay side by side. Unemployment was still high and money scarce: O'Casey could have got five dollars and eleven cents for a pound. The World Fair, to be held in New York in 1939, was as yet but a collective gleam in the eyes of a small group of businessmen; a year was to pass before they published the aims of The Fair of the Future in October 1935, primarily 'to show the way toward the improvement of all the factors contributing to human welfare'.19 In 1934 all was as yet in the balance. O'Casey could hardly have been aware of these impending changes. Nor could he have known the ferment into which the WPA was about to throw American theatre. He could not have realised, prior to the revolution introduced in 1935 by the Federal Theatre Project, to what an elite section of American society Within the Gates, settled into the National Theatre in the heart of Broadway, was meant to appeal. After 1935, it has been said, 'Music, painting, and the theater, usually frivolous sideshows of the wealthy, centered in a few large cities and priced beyond the common people, now merged with daily life, in murals on public buildings, in local symphonies, in amateur theaters.'20 When the Writers' Project published their own 'Comprehensive View of the Metropolis' in 1939, under the title New York Panorama, the comments offered on the theatre were inevitably inflected by their left-wing, agit-prop views. These views would probably have been endorsed by O'Casey had he only arrived a year or two later. Who knows, he might have rethought his own project, now dangerously middle-class. As it happened, he was caught up in the commercial conditions of the day: The New York theater belongs - when it does not belong to the real estate agent - to the showman, the entrepreneur, the director, the personality actor and actress, the promoter, the press agent, the dramatic critic and the high-priced box-office clientele. It rarely admits the independent thinker [. . . and] it cannot support dramatic literature.'21 Yet compared to London it seemed open to new ideas and new forms, as O'Casey had gleaned from the books of the drama critic waiting to greet him as he got off the Britannic. He took to Nathan immediately and a warm, lasting friendship took root. In January Nathan had described Within the Gates as a 'true masterpiece', re-emphasising his conviction that O'Casey was 'the one outstanding genius among the younger dramatists of Europe'.22 Here was the kind of unequivocal support he needed. Likewise he needed Richard Madden, his agent, who was by Nathan's side as O'Casey disembarked with his heart set on 'a New York hit' (A, 2, 404). But as the men sped uptown to Nathan's hotel, the Royalton, on West

234 Sean O'Casey

44th Street, O'Casey faced one other major problem of which he was dimly aware. The Irish play on the New York stage, as John Harrington has ably demonstrated, traditionally contained fairly predictable audience appeal.23 Ever since Boucicault's triumphs in the 1860s Irish plays were welcomed as images, perhaps even stereotypes, of diverting rebels against British authority. Since the advent of the Irish Free State in 1922 the representation of Ireland had changed, although audience expectations in New York had not. The Plough and the Stars, for instance, was not welcomed by the Irish-Americans. Indeed, once the Abbey tours to the US recommenced in 1931 there was vocal opposition to the inclusion of O'Casey's work in the programme. In 1932 the opposition was linked to de Valera's victory in the Irish elections and his emergence as Taoiseach. The United Irish-American Societies and Fianna Fail Inc., New York, who had helped finance de Valera's election campaign, protested against the maligning of the Irish people by the Abbey company touring in America and requested the Irish government to withdraw the subsidy. Yeats's view was, 'We have got to keep the Irish in America linked up with our nation, we must not lose them.'24 Nevertheless, de Valera reduced the Abbey subsidy in 1933. In the Bail he admitted that the government had no power to influence the choice of plays on tour but that 'certain representations' had been made indirectly to the Abbey company on this matter. This statement caused uproar in Dublin, and Robinson declared on behalf of the Abbey: 'What is good enough for Dublin ought to be good enough for New York,' and 'Synge and O'Casey plays are preferable to third-rate romantic plays written by third-rate people.'25 The row continued into the tours of 1934. Yeats stood firm though de Valera warned against causing 'shame and resentment to the Irish exiles'.26 Yeats was to win this battle.27 Right now, the Abbey had the Plough on American soil. Yet because of his own row with the Abbey and because his work had taken a different tack O'Casey was indifferent to Yeats's fight on his behalf. The issue did not concern him. In turn, the Abbey players were to 'spit venom' when they read that Within the Gates was a success in New York.28 As he motored through Manhattan O'Casey had other things to think about. He was being told how the casting had worked out so far and how the rehearsals were going. He must attend a reading of the first scene on the morrow, when he would meet the director, film star Melvyn Douglas, and the cast which included Lillian Gish (Young Whore), English Shakespearean actor Bramwell Fletcher (Dreamer), and Moffat Johnston (Bishop), a Scotsman who once played in Frank Benson's touring company. There were three new characters in the New York production, including the Symbol of the Seasons to keep the audience clued in on the time of day and year. There were thirty in the cast, plus the members of the choruses of Down-and-Outs and the Chorus of Young Men and Girls. It was all equivalent to one of O'Neill's mammoth shows, Lazarus Laughed (1928) or the like. Had their day come and gone? The Royalton, which still stands, is now part of a chain, ultra-modern in every way, with a twenty-four-hour fitness room and a tape library of over five hundred films. Things were simpler in Nathan's day, and the tab was doubtless

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somewhat less than the $600 a day a suite would cost in 2000. Just across the road is the Algonquin, oozing literary atmosphere. O'Casey was awed but not overcome by his surroundings. To Nathan's amusement he 'spent the first hours after his arrival testing all the electrical gadgets in his room and carefully distributing his few items of wardrobe among the drawers of his bureau'.29 Nathan introduced him to Eugene O'Neill, staying at the Madison Hotel, whom he pleased by telling him he wrote like an Irishman and not like an American.30 They met three times. In O'Neill he saw a tall, lean man 'with a warm, welcoming smile softening his sombre face, the deep-set eyes [...] burning with a light' (A, 2, 454). In spite of his reclusiveness O'Neill went to see Within the Gates and though his views are not recorded he had praised the play read in typescript. In some ways Gates resembles Mourning Becomes Electra, although O'Casey's ending is less pessimistic and O'Neill's play 'focuses [...] on perennial issues of familial discord and individual psychological calamities'.31 The two men had a certain sombreness in common, O'Neill's being the more depressive personality, but it was mutual sympathy which made them spiritual friends. After a few weeks O'Casey moved to the Devon Hotel, now no longer standing, located on West 55th Street. Tuerk and Markell were, it seems, a little peeved that Nathan had virtually kidnapped O'Casey, who wrote to Eileen: '[Nathan] told me he loved me, & is dedicating a book he is just finishing to me. Well, I can tell you, baby, I felt proud to be an Irishman.'32 The producers wanted him closer to them. The Devon, he wrote to Eileen, provided a sittingroom, bedroom and bathroom, untold luxury - 'and a man to wait on me hand and foot'.33 In his spare time, which was limited, O'Casey walked the streets in wonder. This was the decade in which New York was reborn. The 1930s, from the perspective of the 1990s, 'defined modern and built a good deal of the landscape we inhabit today.'34 From 1930 to 1931 the George Washington Bridge, the Chrysler Building, the General Electrical Building, the Waldorf-Astoria and the Empire State Building outlined modern, iconic Manhattan. But it was Rockefeller Centre, ten of its twelve buildings then completed, which dazzled O'Casey the most, 'as chill and as lovely as an Alpine glacier' (A, 2, 407). Its secular power seemed to him to render medieval architecture redundant. On the other hand, Radio City Music Hall, while 'a magnificent building' costing millions to erect, was hollow: 'the artistic life that goes on inside isn't worth the spending of a five-cent piece.'35 Typically, O'Casey admired the energy and material grandeur of the New York landscape but deplored the content which for him debased the form. A sketch of the skyscraping Devon Hotel which he sent his six-year-old son Breon (with an arrow to indicate his apartment) emphasised the scale of the problem. Adrift in Manhattan the individual, while awestruck, is robbed of the possibility of transcendence. As he took hold in New York, O'Casey created the terms on which he wanted to be understood. Perhaps with one eye on the autobiography which he had begun, he spread tales of his early life and his days as a so-called nationalist rebel.36 He was available to journalists but they had to respect his timetable. He

236 SednO'Casey was Irish but he could not easily be patronised. Parading around in his brown suit and cap, products of Lady Astor's generosity, in a rather formally dressed society, he might or might not wear a shirt and tie: as often as not he wore a turtle-neck sweater, less socially classifiable than a cloth cap. One of the results of this sartorial eccentricity was that Bramwell Fletcher, dressed in tweed jacket and turtle-neck sweater, appeared O'Casey-like as the Dreamer in Within the Gates (as two pictures in Time Magazine, 5 November, suggest). In any event, O'Casey saw Fletcher as 'conceited & inclined to show himself off as is invariably so with an Englishman' (i.e. actor).37 Another result was that O'Casey's dress created a trend in turtle-neck jerseys. O'Casey's innate dignity was found slightly puzzling by journalists expecting deference. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wanted an interview before Within the Gates was due to open on 22 October. His piece was couched in irony, derived from his astonishment at being informed that O'Casey 'preferred not to be disturbed - especially by strangers - during rehearsals'. There was mockery in Crowther's urbane response. 'It was a justifiable preference. He desired to be alone [like Garbo?] and unmolested, free to concentrate his senses upon the stage. Only by special dispensation was an inquisitive visitor granted permission to intrude upon his solitude.'38 But worse was to follow. O'Casey was not to be found when Crowther arrived at the National Theatre, presumably by appointment. Again the ironic note is sounded, in amazement at this insensitivity towards the almighty press. 'He had apparently impelled himself by some Celtic charm to vanish.' Crowther drifted into the auditorium where the chorus of Down-andOuts was rehearsing 'disconsolately': O'Casey, he noted cynically, was not among them. When O'Casey appeared from the wings, 'as casual as one might please' (where at least a show of penitence might have been exhibited) his dress was meticulously described (the tweed suit is now 'shaggy', the cap pulled down 'at a haphazard angle' over the left eye). Crowther was not impressed. 'One might have wished to ask him the score of the football match.' But as soon as O'Casey began to speak Crowther was so charmed that the interview went on for two hours. O'Casey firmly deflected the notion that Irishmen are never serious - the avenue clearly opened up to him to create good copy. Commenting on plays new and old and the lack of good writing, to Crowther's astonishment he broke into the opening lines of Richard III as he 'rose from his chair, dropped his cap on a table, took a turn of the room and sat down again'. Not too many interviewees like that in a day's work. On the day before the opening O'Casey submitted a characteristic piece entitled 'From Within the Gates' to the New York Times. It may have given some critics a stick with which to beat him when the curtain went up, as he took this opportunity to lambaste realism and call for a return to 'the music and song and dance of the Elizabethan plays and the austere ritual of the Greek drama, caught up and blended with the life around us'. This line of argument was to win him a place in American dramatic criticism twenty years on but just now, with the Group Theatre forging the way forward through realism, it was not what New Yorkers wanted to hear. He went on to give a full explication of the

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symbolism of Within the Gates, adding: 'It is a play written round life not from outside looking in, but from inside looking out.'39 O'Casey was committing himself to the avant-garde. Nathan was to say in the American Spectator that Within the Gates challenged not only the present-day stage but present-day dramatic criticism also. 'As the play is a test of the resources of the theatre, so it is, too, a test of the equipment of criticism.'40 In New York most critics made a big effort to see Within the Gates in the light of O'Casey's intentions. Most seemed familiar with the published text. The result was a respectful, sometimes worshipful but occasionally less than enthusiastic response. The Daily Worker's (27 October) was one of the few dissenting voices, finding the experience 'one of the dullest, emptiest, crudest, most pretentious evenings I have spent in the theatre'.41 Coming from such a source this attack indicates how bourgeois O'Casey's drama had become, and how in New York he 'cultivated the qualities of enigma and evasion'.42 But the New York Times (23 October) would hear of no dissent: 'Nothing so grand has risen in our impoverished theatre since this reporter first began writing of plays.' The reporter in question was Brooks Atkinson, who had had reservations43 which the production now dispelled: 'out of the dead [sic] print of the text a glorious drama rose last evening with songs and dances, with colors and lights, with magnificent lines that cried out for noble speaking.' He found the acting, for the most part, very good. Clearly, a lot depended on Lillian Gish, who certainly looked the part of the Young Whore as written, pathetic, frail and yet capable of fire, and in general as appealing as Gish's wonderful Lucy in D.W. Griffith's film Broken Blossoms (1919). But even Atkinson - careful here not to offend Nathan, who was Gish's friend and protector - could do no better than praise her 'performance instinct with the spirit of drama'. Others found her artificial. Atkinson returned to the play in the Sunday edition (28 October), where he praised O'Casey's courage and linked his name with that of Walt Whitman as a free spirit who could neither be intimidated nor overpowered.44 O'Casey declared that the review had restored in him 'the spirit that moved me as I wrote the play'.45 Although other reviewers saw the play as 'adolescent'46 production values were not disputed. Yet it was rather ominous when Time (5 November) reckoned that 'the average playgoer' might be disappointed with the play itself. O'Casey first wrote to Eileen as if all their troubles were over and then had to recalculate as attendances fell off. Within the Gates was not going to be a smash hit. O'Casey continued to do what he could to drum up business by addressing literary and not-so-literary gatherings with an increasing feeling that people were coming to hear him only because his name was in the papers (A, 2, 444-45). A trip by train to Cambridge on 15 November proved surprising. Horace Reynolds had assured him that an informal talk to his students at Harvard was all that was required, but when O'Casey arrived in Boston he found he would be facing several hundred in the Fogg Museum. Luckily not one to trust to the inspiration of the moment he had his talk prepared and spoke about the Elizabethan drama versus realism, subverting William Archer's

238 SednO'Casey The Old Drama and the New. In the student audience was David Greene, later professor of Irish studies at NYU. 'It was strictly an academic performance, in the best sense of the phrase, and its only novelty for us was that it was delivered earnestly and with feeling by a man who looked and spoke like what he was, a working-class Dublin man and not a university lecturer.' In talking about Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster instead of providing the expected personal reminiscences O'Casey was identifying 'the sources of his own inspiration as a writer and defining the influences which had moulded his style'.47 Ruefully, O'Casey had to tell Eileen that, after he had paid his expenses to and from Harvard, he had made but twenty dollars, or some four pounds, on the trip.48 But he had made a lasting impact on the students. A similar trip to Philadelphia and meetings and addresses to 'sell tickets'49 left little time before sailing home on 14 December. In particular, there seemed never a chance to see the ordinary New York people, whom O'Casey would presumably liked to have talked with. He never comments on the unemployment or the breadlines. He never mentions black people. Did he but know it, moreover, there were theatre people in New York who in a matter of months would present Clifford Odets's ground-breaking strike play Waiting for Lefty which he would surely have applauded and perhaps - who knows? - been encouraged by. But his mission was to boost his own new work, which had now reached a dead end. His Windfalls was simultaneously published in New York and London to coincide with Within the Gates, but whereas it probably aroused interest it hardly sold tickets. So, as doubts hung over the run of his play he decided to leave for home, where Eileen's baby was due towards the end of December. Counting his money Sean found he might have £500 out of the run, which ended on 12 January 1935 after 101 performances. The trip to America left an indelible impression on O'Casey. He made permanent friends in Nathan, Atkinson, Madden and O'Neill. Lillian Gish, too, Nathan's girlfriend, he warmed to and appreciated. Eileen says in her biography that he would hardly have returned to London if it was not for the baby: 'it was in his nature to stay where he was contented, and he could easily have remained in New York.'50 Her comment creates a strange 'what if. But there was Boston as well as New York. Boston, where the film of Juno was banned in 1931 because it appeared to glorify drunkenness. Boston, where Within the Gates was due to transfer following a week in Philadelphia until two high-minded Jesuits in Boston College mounted a campaign against it.51 There was an official Censor in Boston at this time, who, having attended the final performance of Within the Gates in New York, suggested certain changes which the producers accepted. (Primary among these would certainly have been the name of the main character, The Young Whore, which had already caused embarrassment to New York copyreaders: she was variously described in print as 'Young Harlot', The Young Prostitute', and 'A Young Girl Who Has Gone Astray'.) But two days later, on 14 January, as the tour began in Philadelphia, Mayor Mansfield of Boston requested that the Shubert Theatre on Tremont Street not accept

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Within the Gates on the 21st. The play could not legally be banned until there was a performance, but if the Shubert staged it the theatre would lose its licence. Mansfield was under pressure from Terence L. Connolly, SJ, and Russell M. Sullivan, SJ, respectively professors of literature and philosophy at Boston College. Connolly was a major force in the university, honoured today by the location of the Irish Studies Program in Connolly House on campus. In 1938 he was to object to Yeats's Purgatory at the Abbey as unorthodox and confused.52 Meanwhile he trained his sights on O'Casey. In an article published in the Catholic journal America he virtually held his nose from the stench arising from Within the Gates, but felt it his duty to correct the critics. His main point was that the critics were shockingly tolerant of the (unnamed) Young Whore's sinfulness, thereby creating a scandal. The whole thing was redolent of the 'blasphemies' of Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson (an interesting pairing). Connolly condemned O'Casey's 'impudence in his treatment of a theme that until his time was never portrayed upon the stage in his native country'.53 From Mary's pregnancy in Juno, through Rosie Redmond's 'actions' and song in the Plough, O'Casey had expanded his glorification of immorality. This was Connolly's charge when Boston's Board of Censorship allowed an appeal hearing on Within the Gates. As head of Boston's League of Decency Fr Sullivan was also present at the hearing. Connolly illustrated through reading aloud that Within the Gates was irreligious and immoral. The decision to deny production was upheld by two to one. The Mayor proclaimed that the play 'was nothing but a dirty book full of commonplace smut'.54 In view of the recent headline in the Boston Globe, 'Cambridge Police to Study "Within the Gates'", the Mayor's literary criticism must have been helpful. Police Commissioner Joseph J. Leonard, asked by the mayor to read the play, recommended to the District Attorney that sale of the text be forbidden.55 And so it was. It made no difference that the students at Harvard came out in support of O'Casey and sent hundreds of signatures in petition to the mayor, or that Brooks Atkinson penned a scathing protest ('Up there on Olympus the gods must be snickering to themselves'56). The Boston Irish had their way. O'Casey was officially censored. With Toronto following suit the tour to ten other cities had to be abandoned. It was some compensation that New York re-opened its doors and Within the Gates resumed its run at the National on 22 January for forty more performances. Meanwhile, the Abbey tour swept its way around the country, reaping rewards for The Plough and the Stars among others. Ironically, O'Casey was to make £700 from the Abbey tour, more than from Within the Gates.

Back home in London O'Casey had other things on his mind than Boston tea parties. His second son Niall was born on 15 January. O'Casey disliked the nursing home on Sloane Street so much that he wrote in complaint of its slovenliness to Time and Tide?1 This was the absurd side of O'Casey, who also complained uncomprehendingly to Nathan that 'the missus had to have some

240 SednO'Casey stitches in her.'58 Then he began to settle into the new apartment at number 49 Overstrand Mansions. His own room, which overlooked Battersea Park, was laid out as in Dublin, desk facing the window, within easy reach of a fire. 'Because it was a larger room than some,' Eileen recalled, 'he had far more in it, including a sofa from Dublin, a well-made piece if cumbersome to move, that he was proud of because he had known its maker.'59 Contact with London friends was resumed, including Shaw, who recommended a small school in Wimbledon for Breon to which he himself contributed. When he moved from Long Dean some time after this the eleven-year-old Breon therefore went to Beltane, later remembered as 'a crazy school staffed mainly by Austrians fleeing Hitler, but I was very happy there'.60 The reviews of Windfalls had appeared while O'Casey was in America, the most notable in retrospect being Samuel Beckett's in the Bookman. It is in Beckett's 'thirties style, peppered with pedantic allusions and obscure expressions, but nevertheless championing the two 'knockabout' farces, especially The End of the Beginning. As he fastened on comic chaos and collapse ('dehiscence') as the key to O'Casey's tragic vision Beckett's own future dramaturgy seems outlined. But O'Casey poetry was not to his taste.61 In ironic contrast - such is Irish literary history - Austin Clarke, soon the butt of Beckett's scorn in Murphy, was unusually understanding in the TLS: The poems reveal that latent idealism and indignation which inspired Mr. O'Casey's dramatic work.' The word 'idealism' comes as a surprise, and yet it well describes the frustrated mysticism of O'Casey's poetic attempts. His anger in the plays, too, may well stem from visionary roots. Further, Clarke astutely noted the moral depth of the stories: 'In his purpose Mr. O'Casey differs from many modernists and from the younger Irish realists. He is as unflinching in his realism, but his profound pity gives to what might have been a mere episode a universal significance.' The one-act plays, however, were a mere form of release or 'Irish capering'.62 O'Casey had told Gabriel Fallon not to buy Windfalls, that he would arrange for a copy to be sent while he was in New York. Little did he know that Fallon would have walked in vain the length and breadth of Dublin to buy a copy. On 3 December 1934 the Censorship Board ruled that Windfalls was 'in its general tendency indecent' and recommendation was thereby made to the Minister for Justice that it be prohibited 'in all its editions'.63 This order became effective next day. It was O'Casey's first experience of official, as opposed to mob, censorship. It was something he would have to get used to as defining his relationship to the emergent Roman Catholic Ireland for which de Valera was busily preparing a new constitution.64 Here, with a vengeance, was idealism made law and it would in time conflict sharply with his own. Boston was coming to Ireland. Following his return to London from New York O'Casey was in an aggressive mood. He was a bit of a lost soul now, adrift from Ireland and yet having shown in Within the Gates that England was not about to give him an enduring subject. When he wrote anything for the London press it was harsh, belligerent, and even insulting. This he thought was emulating the style of George Jean

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Nathan. He soon alienated the editor of the New Statesman with a perfectly brutal review of Love on the Dole, a working-class play by Ronald Gow and Walter Greenwood, delivered in a haughty and disdainful style (There isn't a character in it worth a curse, and there isn't a thought in it worth remembering'). When the authors responded in hurt fashion O'Casey, being refused further comment in the New Statesman, carried the attack over into Time and Tide. It was as if he were fighting £ all over again. He seemed to forget how sensitive he himself had proved to criticism. His point now was that dramatic criticism in England, in contrast to New York, was timid and polite to the point of dishonesty. Kingsley Martin's retort for the New Statesman was that O'Casey confused outspokenness with abuse.65 Some, like Yeats's friend Ethel Mannin, accused him of 'unfairness' and elitism. He swept her rebuke aside with a sneer at her concept of 'the great masses'.66 Then, as suddenly, he was reconciled with Yeats, for whom in the years since the Tassie affair he had expressed little but contempt. Having heard that Yeats was ill O'Casey wrote to him in Dublin saying he was 'grieved' at the news and wishing him 'still many days in which to write many more true and beautiful things'.67 Yeats was agreeably surprised. As he wrote to Ethel Mannin, '[O'Casey] is very emotional, and your attack, perhaps, made him lonely. [...] Only two years ago he refused an invitation to lunch because he heard I was to be there.'68 Perhaps Yeats's support for 'I Wanna Woman' was a factor. Whatever the motive, O'Casey had broken the ice between the two men. A meeting was soon to follow, with strange results for O'Casey. After Yeats arrived in London on 25 March he fell ill again for some six weeks. He wrote to O'Casey from 17 Lancaster Gate Terrace in mid-May. 'I wish I could see you. I cannot go out. I wonder if you would dine with me at my lodging (7pm) on Wednesday or Friday. I shall be alone as my wife is not staying here at present as there is no room.'69 Yeats had been staying in Mrs Foden's flat at number 19 Lancaster Gate, but when he fell ill and George arrived from Dublin, Mrs Foden having arrived back on 12 May, Yeats moved next door to number 17 and George stayed elsewhere. O'Casey described the meeting. George brought in dinner and left. Yeats was working on his edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse and asked for his advice, which O'Casey tactfully (for once) withheld. O'Casey's account in his autobiographies ('Black Oxen Passing By') is very moving, but as it was written ten years or more after Yeats's death it may be somewhat touched up. One of the topics they discussed on this occasion - for there were several visits70 - was the state of the Abbey. It had suffered greatly since the main company began the annual American tours in 1931, and had been closed for several months in 1935. To meet damaging competition from the Gate Theatre Yeats had decided to reform the Board of Directors and to invite Hugh Hunt over from England as director of plays.71 He now asked O'Casey to recommend good new plays which might help broaden the Abbey's repertory. On 19 May O'Casey wrote enclosing such a list, adding: Their production would mean a big change in the acting and general activities of the theatre, a change, I think, that is essential, if the

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theatre is to live. I am one with you in the thought that the theatre should give productions of Continental and American plays. The Irish plays are numerous enough, but few of them are much good.' These remarks indicate how far Yeats's policy had modernised. To design for the Abbey O'Casey suggested Cecil Salkeld and (in spite of his personal dislike) Harry Kernoff. It might be better, he added conspiratorially, if Yeats reported nothing of O'Casey's advice in case it should cause offence at the Abbey. He signed himself 'ever yours'.72 Yeats's mortality had suddenly revealed to O'Casey that he was, after all, a man he loved. He wrote again on 26 May urging Yeats to take as much fresh air as he could, 'and dont go often to places where people are gathered thickly together.' He might have been addressing an ailing father. He enclosed information on the British Drama League and advised Abbey membership as well as more modern publicity. He looked forward to seeing Yeats again 'some time this week'.73 During their conversations, Yeats asked O'Casey for permission to produce Within the Gates at the Abbey. Though pleased, O'Casey thought that play beyond the Abbey's capabilities and suggested the Tassie instead (A, 2, 282). He could not have known that in his diary for 1930 Yeats had said of the Tassie. Tt would seem from its failure [sic] in London that we were right.'74 It happened, however, that just then the Queen's University Dramatic Society asked to do the Tassie in Belfast. Sending Yeats the letter, O'Casey suggested that the Irish premiere properly belonged to the Abbey and asked for Yeats's agreement. Yeats agreed but said (2 June) that he had already written to Ernest Blythe, now a board member, telling him that O'Casey had given the two plays, but 'I have suggested putting "Within the Gates" into immediate rehearsal and including it in the programme for Horse-show week.'75 Contrary to O'Casey's account in the autobiographies Yeats thus got permission to do both plays, only one of which he really wanted to do. Soon the matter was decided for him. Brinsley MacNamara, now also a Director at the Abbey, took exception to Within the Gates and stopped it in its tracks. Finding that Yeats had committed himself to O'Casey, MacNamara, who took very seriously his position as Roman Catholic on the board, also tried to prevent the staging of the Tassie.76 Directed by Arthur Shields the Tassie nevertheless opened to a packed house on 12 August. It was well cast, with F.J. McCormick as Harry Heegan, Barry Fitzgerald as Sylvester and Eileen Crowe as Susie. Reviews, apart from that in the Irish Times, were mainly hostile. Most reviewers found it blasphemous, the Evening Mail (13 August) speaking for many: 'Cold-blooded obscenity and blasphemy on the stage before an audience of men and women takes on a vileness that is appalling.' A Dominican priest, Michael Gaffney, wrote to the Irish Press (14 August) prophesying riots at the Abbey which would make the Playboy riots of 1907 seem but 'a flash in the pan, a child's cracker'. Father RJ. Carton spoke from the pulpit of St Andrew's Church, Westland Row, crying shame upon the Abbey: 'at a moment when the enemies of the Church were assailing her in many lands a scandal had been tolerated in Catholic Dublin.'77 The Tassie, which was booked out in advance, closed after a week, to be hastily

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replaced by John Bull's Other Island. The 7mA Times was furious, declaring in an editorial on 28 August: 'Any work which does not show Ireland as a land of saints and scholars, any play which ventures to attack or to satirise an aspect of Irish life, is condemned at once as a treacherous onslaught on the national prestige.' When F.R. Higgins, another of the new Directors at the Abbey, officially voiced support for this editorial, Brinsley MacNamara noisily dissented and resigned from the board. All of this was dismaying to O'Casey, who intervened twice in the controversy. But Dublin had let him down once again, now ominously in sectarian style. Later in 1935 he sent to Yeats an article, 'A Stand on the Silver Tassie', a refutation of the charges of indecency and blasphemy, which Yeats was free to publish if he should wish. Yeats did not wish, and it remained unpublished until after O'Casey's death.78 It happened that Sean and Eileen visited Dublin during a two-week trip to Ireland in mid-September, their first since 1927. Eileen had family business to attend to which took them to Athlone to see about some property left her by her father. Later Sean visited friends in Dublin, including Yeats at Riversdale House, where for the first and last time he played croquet with the poet.79 He lost. He had lost the game with the Abbey also, and The Silver Tassie episode was now closed. O'Casey was never again in his lifetime to have a new play at the Abbey. Nor was he to return to Dublin, though invited for the Abbey Festival in 1938. It is ironic that it was Yeats's interest in Within the Gates which brought the Tassie to Dublin, only to have it demonstrated that O'Casey was persona non grata in his native city. His reception was to give him his theme for future plays: exposing the puritanism of the new Ireland.

In London, too, O'Casey was soon to make himself unloved. On 29 October 1935, Macmillans published Five Irish Plays by O'Casey, the three Dublin plays plus the one-acts The End of the Beginning and A Pound on Demand. It is not without significance that the volume was dedicated to Nathan, 'Dramatic Critic Without Fear and Without Reproach'. O'Casey was now devastatingly under Nathan's influence.80 The articles he wrote for Time and Tide during 1935-36 took for their theme the poor state of contemporary English drama criticism and the English theatre, on both of which he poured scorn. Soon he thought to collect these articles in a book, to be called The Flying Wasp, and set about adding eight pieces in similar vein. Ostensibly, his case was that English critics had 'built up a cosy protection by bringing into being a nice little code of laws which say that no one criticised by them should have the indecency or vulgarity to answer back'.81 Writing on 18 September 1936, Harold Macmillan warned him against publishing material which 'has somehow the effect of brawling in church'.82 He succeeded in getting O'Casey to drop pieces entitled 'A Few Boos' and 'In Defenso' - otherwise unknown - but failed to get him to rethink the book with a more positive theme, 'Towards a Living Theatre'. O'Casey rather frostily insisted on his original idea. 'Everything I have written, up to the present, has been "combative", and the sword I have swung so long is now stuck to my hand, and

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I cant let it go. [...] It is so easy to be nice.'83 The book went ahead, underpinned by the declaration: 'We haven't a critic like Nathan in the English Theatre, and it is time we had,' for the English theatre was now but 'a hen-house' (126-27). O'Casey's main targets were James Agate (1877-1947), drama critic for the Sunday Times since 1923, and Noel Coward (1900-1973), the most successful playwright of the day. Each was, presumably, singled out as representative but O'Casey's tone was personal and openly offensive. He referred to Agate's collection of BBC theatre reviews to illustrate the bare-faced prejudice in favour of middle-brow theatre. In one talk, The Critic and the Playgoer', Agate had expressed his utter contempt for 'this so-called intellectual drama' while championing West-End entertainment.84 In First Nights (1934) O'Casey found this (p. vi): 'For his readers' sake he [the critic] must have the arrogance to put himself in the position of the leading authority from which there can be no appeal' (emphasis added). In a piece headed 'Swat That Wasp' Agate defined his enemies: 'There is a nest of wasps which must be smoked out because it is doing the theatre infinite harm. [...] I refer to a small coterie of highbrows which makes a point of running down everything that does not happen to live at the top of their particular street'85 And he associates this 'waspishness' with the reception of Coward's Cavalcade (1931), a patriotic pageant drama. So, because Coward was Agate's pet (he attributed 'something like genius' to Cavalcade), O'Casey had to tackle both critic and playwright together. In The Flying Wasp Coward had three essays levelled at him under the title 'Coward Codology'. The first of these had been published in Time and Tide in January 1936, but Lady Rhondda refused the others. At that time, Agate had rebuked O'Casey in the Sunday Times: 'Were I a dramatist of genius like Mr. O'Casey I think I should try to say something more generous about Mr. Coward.' This sort of pressure was enough to fuel O'Casey's other two articles, which let fly also at Patrick Braybrooke, author of a biography, The Amazing Mr Noel Coward (1933). O'Casey's copy of this book is heavily marked, especially where Braybrooke gushes over the 'master dramatist'.86 Then there was C.B. Cochran, the London impresario who had taken a chance on the Tassie but whose heart really belonged to Coward. It was important for O'Casey to break up this cosy little admiration society. So the jingoistic Cavalcade is dismissed as 'tinselled triviality', and the gay Design for Living (published 1934 but not staged in London until 193987) is found to be despicable, its bisexual characters 'but worms in a wine cup' (FW, 146). Distracted by the fatuous praise of Coward's critics O'Casey avoided the best work, Hay Fever (1925) or Private Lives (1930). Resentment and righteous anger, fuelled also by homophobia, drove him into sterile mockery. Coward did not respond to these diatribes. Keeping up the pretence of heterosexuality, he was perhaps afraid that O'Casey guessed his secret and was on the brink of disclosing it ('not even . . . a mister dramatist'). For the homosexual in the 1930s who was a celebrity, 'Discretion was all-important, and Coward knew it.'88 There is not a word about O'Casey in Coward's published diaries or autobiography. Agate, of course, could be relied upon to look after himself. The Agates of this world are not to be disempowered by a flying wasp.89

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The general view on The Flying Wasp was that it was too bad-tempered to be a good book.90 Of Nathan, who appears as the ideal critic in The Flying Wasp, it was said that he may often have chosen to have bad manners but 'he seldom failed to have good taste.'91 In contrast O'Casey was found to have transgressed good form. Macmillan had warned about this. In Dublin Fallon prophesied that if The Flying Wasp forced the critics to think, the English theatre would 'compel Mr. O'Casey to pay (and to pay heavily) for its thinking'.92 Time would bear out this prophecy. As O'Casey said, he wished he could write like Nathan but 'I am altogether too vehement to be a good critic. I can't keep calm.'93 He never realised that Nathan's worldliness was a liability. Eugene O'Neill, who loved him as O'Casey did for his generous spirit, saw Nathan's limitations far more clearly. Refusing to let him be the arbiter of his best plays, O'Neill wrote to Random House in 1932: 'He is antipathetic to all plays with a religious feeling [...], all plays involving any tinge of social revolution [...]. I will say nothing about the many Nathan conceptions of life he has read into my plays and praised to my irritated amusement.'94 O'Casey's work was fundamentally no less spiritual than O'Neill's and, accordingly, Nathan could only serve to frustrate his idealism. It made him believe himself an intellectual terrorist. O'Casey had now reached the bottom of the cul-de-sac Within the Gates had drawn him into. He would have to move out soon. But where? Doors were beginning to close in his face. He had lost his way and alienated most of London's theatrical Establishment. Meanwhile, in January 1936 he was invited to give a talk at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. In his letter to the secretary of the Shirley Society settling the date (23 February), he summarised his theme, 'The Holy Ghost Leaves England', i.e. 'that He has abandoned the spirit of politics, the spirit of the Church, the spirit of Trades Unionism, and the spirit of Art and Literature'.95 It is a bleak view. His heart went out to the students he talked to as he discovered their privations, matching his own.96 Soon after this trip he heard from another privileged world. John Ford, fresh from his success with O'Flaherty's The Informer (1935), wanted to film The Plough and the Stars. His plan was to film Juno as a sequel, so completing a kind of trilogy on the Irish 'troubles'. O'Casey was guided by Nathan's approval of The Informer film, and his agent Madden secured payment of $10,750 for the film rights of the Plough,97 three times what O'Flaherty got.98 On 9 March 1936 Ford wrote about the script Dudley Nichols and he were preparing for production by RKO Studios. Ominously, Ford had his own ideas about how the Plough should end: We plan to bring Clitheroe back [from the dead] to go out with the coffin of Mollser at the close of the play. To give him an effective speech and to incorporate something in which I am interested could we allow him, as the funeral cortege is moving up the street through the lines of patrolling swaddies, to look back at the Plough and the Stars as it comes down over the blazing Four Courts and utter a prophetic speech to the effect that some day that flag will be hoisted again ... to the musical undercurrent of "Keep the Home Fires Burning".99

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This is exactly what happens in the film, distorting not only what O'Casey wrote but distorting history also, since the 'blazing Four Courts' belong to 1922 and not to 1916.100 It is clear that Ford viewed the Plough as a straightforward nationalist drama. It looked as if the Holy Ghost, if ever present, had left Hollywood as well as England. Ford's letter was forwarded by Nathan, whom O'Casey did not want to offend since he had interested himself in the possibility of the film from early 1935. But as he could not agree with Ford that Ireland was now 'free' thanks to the 'Irish fighters' of 1916 he set about exposing the absurdity of Ford's suggestions while making some of his own. These allowed for both Clitheroe and Langon to express heroic sentiments in act 3, when Clitheroe 'could make his little speech of faith in the future'.101 He wrote in rather a different vein to Robert F. Sisk of RKO protesting against cuts made by the Hollywood censors, including some of the words of Patrick Pearse.102 But Ford made his own changes 'without any further input from O'Casey'.103 With his distinctly romantic view of Ireland Ford misread O'Casey and glorified the stereotypical fightin' Irish. Taking advantage of the Abbey players' being on tour in the US in 1935-36, Ford cast five in major roles. He had wanted Spencer Tracy for Clitheroe but as MGM would not release him the part went to Preston Foster, who had played the IRA leader in The Informer. The role of Nora Clitheroe went to Barbara Stanwyck, who played it with her usual mix of tough doll and misty-eyed beauty. Only 78 minutes long, the film was a travesty. There was no question of moving on to film Juno. The only positive result of the Plough film was that Barry Fitzgerald built his Hollywood career on his personal success in it as Fluther. But FJ. McCormick was so disgusted that for ten years he consistently refused to appear before the film camera (until he at last agreed to appear in Odd Man Out).104

In May 1936 O'Casey confessed to Nathan that he had not yet started on a new play. He complained of feeling tired and uninspired.105 While in New York he had formed the view, perhaps fostered by Barry Fitzgerald, who had played in it, that Robinson's Church Street was written 'to show how I have been lost since I left Ireland'.106 First staged at the Abbey in May 1934, it concerns an Irish playwright home from London after seven years in despair over the flop of his play. He is rebuked for writing about London society, about which he knows nothing, instead of opening his eyes to the tragedies underlying the familiar, everyday conditions of Irish life. The play then enacts little plays-within-theplay to bring out the cogency of this observation. The usual interpretation of Church Street is that it marks Robinson's own awareness that he had strayed from his real subject-matter.107 But O'Casey believed it was directed at him. Enraged, he was also paralysed by the accusation. What would shake him out of this state was the Spanish Civil War, which coincided with his open declaration of communism and would enable the composition of The Star Turns Red.108 But for the present he turned to work on his autobiography. After he had a

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few episodes published in American journals he thought about gathering them into a book for Macmillan, eventually called I Knock at the Door, where use of the first person in the title underlines a rediscovered determination. It was in recreating his childhood in Dublin that he was able imaginatively to make his reply to Church Street. Within his own family history he found the means of articulating a discontinuous self, for the chapters shift about in time and unlike a memoir - do not attempt a continuous, coherent narrative. By this means he coped with his crisis better than Robinson himself, who, sinking into alcoholism, actually envied him: '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.'109 The autobiography returned O'Casey to 'happiness', inasmuch as it returned him to a version of his life he could command. He was far from 'happy' in the conventional sense. Financially, after the excellent year he had enjoyed in 1935, when, thanks to the Abbey tours in America and the dollars earned by Within the Gates he had earned around £2,700 after taxes, O'Casey's income sank to £517 in 1936 and the somewhat better £1,020 in 1937. The next year was to end up with around £750 gross.110 Renting a flat in Chelsea, paying a nanny, looking after (in some measure) Eileen's mother, and raising two boys, were difficult, given Eileen's expensive tastes. As she later wrote: Those evenings with the bank sheets I dreaded; everything I had attempted to hide came under the spotlight, and the bills from Peter Jones in Sloane Square were the worst.'111 At last a way out offered itself. In July 1936 Sean and Eileen paid a visit to Dartington Hall, near Totnes in Devon. This was an experimental educational project dreamed up by two exceptional people, Leonard Elmhirst, son of a Yorkshire clergyman, and his wife Dorothy, nee Payne Whitney, an American heiress. Married in 1925, they had the idea of combining a progressive school with rural reform and cultivation of all the arts. Leonard had worked in India with the poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose ideas he shared (they wrote a book together entitled Tagore: Pioneer in Education). Having purchased the Dartington estate in Devon the Elmhirsts opened their school in 1926 with the declaration: 'For us it is vital that education be conceived of as life, and not merely as a preparation for life.'112 Four main principles were announced: (1) the curriculum should flow from the children's own interests; (2) learning should be by doing; (3) adults should be friends and not authority figures for pupils (there was to be no corporal punishment); (4) the school was to be a self-governed commonwealth, with administrative decisions taken by the pupils. The revolutionary programme attracted much national attention, and among early interested visitors were two of O'Casey's friends, Shaw and Lady Astor. It seems that Shaw recommended the place to Eileen O'Casey.113 Sean may already have visited Dartington even before Shaw's recommendation. In addition to the school there was a Theatre School, which came into being in 1934. Dorothy Elmhirst took a special interest in this area (her daughter Beatrice Straight was an actress in New York), creating the Barn Theatre from a design by Walter Gropius. Already, Kurt Jooss's ballet company

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was installed nearby and the general idea was to attract professionals to the Theatre School also. Thus Michael Chekhov (1891-1955), the playwright's nephew and former student of Stanislavsky, arrived from New York in October 1935 to set up a studio in Dartington Hall. O'Casey was invited to make a preliminary visit which he subsequently described as 'an astonishing experience. The tour over the Estate dazed me a little.' Leonard Elmhirst had asked him to look into the possibility of attracting some of the younger Abbey players to Dartington. O'Casey now clarified that the actors would hardly be willing to go as students or without guarantees 'of playing parts in plays promoted by you'.114 Eileen wrote to Dorothy a rather gushing letter, as if afraid Sean had not sufficiently enthused at the prospects. Dorothy did not immediately reply but on 21 October wrote to Sean a very clear invitation: 'Mr Chekhov, as you can imagine, dreams of working in close collaboration with a playwright, and from what he knows of you he feels he would like to put the following suggestions to you.' Obviously, the two men had not yet met. After O'Casey had read Chekhov's note enclosed with Mrs Elmhirst's letter he was invited to go to Dartington to work with him. Here she conceded a difficulty, since Chekhov (who was director of the Theatre School) 'cannot always give you a free hand'. Nevertheless, Sean might go down for one term on a trial basis, all expenses paid plus £70, on the assumption he would come alone, preferably in midJanuary 1937, or, alternatively, during the summer term. The suggestions made by Chekhov (obviously with Dorothy's approval) were as follows: (1) Our ideal is to have in our school, and afterwards in our future theatre, our own playwrights. We mean by this that such playwrights must know the actors' and Director's work as well as literary work. We find that the theatre of today suffers from too much literature and too many words and too little action. The balance between literature and the theatre as theatre is uneven. The playwright, through his words, has too much power over the actors, and by not knowing the theatre he forces the actors to forget acting and to get accustomed more and more to speaking. Therefore, we have decided to make a series of experiments which will consist of the playwright writing a play, not in the solitude of his room, but among the actors and in closest contact with the Director, musician, scene painter, costume designer, etc., so that the author will appreciate the acting as well as the actors appreciate the writing. The play must be created together and it must not be forgotten that the theatre must have its rights as well as the playwright. The theatre has lost itself in literature and it must find itself again. (2) We want to create in our midst some plays which will be entirely modern, but which can be as deep as the greatest dramatic works of the past. We want to find together, first of all, a deep attitude towards modern life and the modern world. If we can be affected by such a point of view, and with an author in our midst, we can reflect our modern life which is too tragic to be left without expression in the theatre.

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(3) To approach these aims, we see no other way than to come together with a playwright who will give to the work as much time as we as actors must give to ours. A playwright who will be so near to the spirit of our work, and we to his, that we will establish a close spiritual brotherhood. We see no other way than to start our concrete work with some written and spoken words, sentences, sketches, etc. (4) We will not be able to realize our author's plays before three or four years but if we do not establish a connection with the author today we will not be able to realize our ideal when we are ready for it. (5) We understand that this experiment is to a certain extent a new one, and therefore we expect un-expected things to happen, and we will be very glad to have an author who is prepared for everything too.115 Perhaps hastily, O'Casey wrote that having given Chekhov's proposals 'some serious thought' - within a day or two of receiving the letter - 'for various reasons, I dont think it would be wise or prudent to accept your offer. I dont think that I should be quite so useful to you or to Mr Chekhov as you may think,' but he would write later at more length about this.116 Sean had made this decision without sufficiently considering Eileen's views. She had fallen in love with Dartington and was determined to go. She shared her frustrations at Sean's attitude with her friend, Mina Carney (the sculptor, and wife to Jack Carney). Mrs Carney wrote to Dorothy Elmhirst, who in turn wrote again to Sean on 10 November the kind of letter guaranteed to get his back up, citing Mina as suggesting that O'Casey might be willing to visit Dartington for a fortnight, 'to discuss plans with some of us here on the spot'. Would he and Eileen, therefore, come before Christmas? Eileen hastily replied to this two days later, leaping at the suggestion of a visit, angling for the invitation to include the boys, and bluntly asking for the fares from London to be paid. 'Sean would be quite upset if he thought I was asking you, but I know it is a great extravagance for us to spend money so, and I know he is thinking so.'117 She wrote on the same day as Sean refused, presumably without telling him. Mrs Elmhirst sent railway vouchers. Eileen wrote to acknowledge these on 18 November but had now to say Sean was unwell, 'with nerves & great depression': but she hoped they would make the visit soon. Obviously, he was fuming. But he was not the only prima donna in the scenario. On 19 November Michael Chekhov wrote to O'Casey in a strange mixture of avowed pleasure and ill-conceived alarm at the prospect of O'Casey's visit. He again used the royal plural, probably to include Mrs Elmhirst: 'we feel we must warn you in advance that at the present time we are working only on exercises and technique because our group is very young. After Christmas we plan to start on fresh exercises with authors among ourselves, and we feel that such experiments will tell you more than any theoretical explanations we can give you at this stage of our development.'118 O'Casey's reply, if there was one, is not preserved. The tale now took a strange turn. On 11 December Eileen wrote again, to say Sean was much better and had

250 Sean O'Casey

asked her to arrange the visit (to include Breon) in early January. He had been really ill, 'so mentally depressed and bad with nerves; seeing no one', and the trip would do him good. But, alas, this suggested time for the visit would not suit Chekhov as the school would not reopen until the end of January and he would prefer to have work ready for O'Casey to view later. As Chekhov would be working with playwrights (plural) it would probably mean Sean's 'watching classes for many hours a day for, let us say, a week; and then going in with the group to work up improvisations to the point where words and dialogue are created. I am afraid this kind of collaboration means long suffering and endless patience, but, at the same time, I am sure that the method of work will appeal to Mr. O'Casey and that he will be immensely interested in watching Mr Chekhov at work.'119 One wonders how Eileen proposed to relay the contents of this letter to Sean. Mrs Elmhirst did not know her man if she thought for one minute he would sit watching Chekhov play about with improvisations. On 28 December he wrote directly to Mrs Elmhirst. Chekhov's contention that 'the theatre of today suffers from too much literature and too many words and too little action', was, he insisted, 'the very opposite to what I believe. There can never be too many words in fine literature, poetic or dramatic - if there were it would not be fine.' (He was now in full flight and Eileen could kiss the visit goodbye.) There may be, there usually are, excisions made at a rehearsal of even a fine play, but these excisions are always unimportant, and in the end the play remains the play that was first written, or rather rehearsed, for, of course, it may undergo many changes as it is being written by the playwright.' In fact, the contemporary theatre, far from losing itself in literature, had 'lost itself in inanity and ignorance, and must find itself again in literature'. The experiment as outlined by Chekhov, of a playwright writing among the actors and in close contact with the director, musician and designer, was 'to me, an impossible experiment, and a waste of time. Most of the drivellers do this sort of thing. [...] Even Coward writes what he is able to write in the solitude of a room - his own or someone else's.' Mrs Elmhirst must now see, concluded the flying wasp, 'how foolish it might be for you to select me, and how unfair it would be for be [sic] to take advantage of your offer'.120 She thanked him for the 'clarity and honesty' of this letter and pointed out that only one experiment of the kind he had mentioned had been envisaged. Sean and Eileen would be welcome to make the visit as originally planned but unfortunately neither Dorothy nor Leonard Elmhirst would be satisfactory hosts, as Leonard was busy 'all day long' and Dorothy would be working eight hours a day herself with Chekhov (with whom she had become obsessed). That would seem to be that. Undaunted, Eileen wrote on 11 March asking to be allowed to visit without Sean but with the two boys for about a week during the coronation period (George VI) in May. Breon's school would then be let out to visitors to London and Eileen would dearly like to get away from the city. The ploy worked. She packed the two children, now nine and two-and-a-half-years old, and their nannie, Helen Hoover, into the train at Paddington and left O'Casey at number 49 Overstrand Mansions for ten days with the hired 'help' Ruth to

'Beside the Golden Door' 251

look after him. He sent a copy of The Flying Wasp for Mrs Elmhirst, inscribed: 'Wishing blessing and gay success to all that has been done and is to do at Da [rtington] Hall', which was hardly inspired (success to all that had been done?). At home he pretended he had lots to do, but mainly attended to the proofs of 'Dream School', one of the chapters of autobiography for Yale Review. Proofs always scared him; he always went into high anxiety until he had returned the corrections. This he managed to do on 11 May, a full week before Eileen was expected back. Nevertheless, he resisted following her to Dartington, preferring to complain to her of his loneliness. The coronation did not interest him. It was a miserably wet day and with 'nothing worth seeing' O'Casey had returned home in the evening to wait 'for Moscow to speak' on the radio.121 On Eileen's return she and Sean accepted an invitation to spend a weekend with Harold Macmillan and Lady Dorothy. There Eileen spoke loudly in favour of Dartington, as a school well suited to the three younger Macmillans (the elder son was at Eton). At Eileen's request Mrs Elmhirst sent an invitation to Lady Dorothy but nothing came of it. Eileen was trying hard to create the conditions for a move to Dartington so that, even if Sean was unwilling to work out some professional arrangement at the Chekhov Theatre Studio, Breon could begin at the school. When Eileen wanted a thing she usually got it. 'Disapproving of boarding-schools as we did,' she says in her autobiography, 'the only plan was to live in Devon ourselves.'122 A few months later O'Casey wrote to Shaw in terms indicating quite a different 'plan' from the one in Eileen's head: T am just considering an offer from America of a house & garden, a car, and all arrangements made for the education (I & Eileen have our own views on Education) of our two boys.'123 The offer had come via Lillian Gish but the benefactor was playwright Maxwell Anderson.124 The idea came to nothing: O'Casey felt he was too old. He had started on The Star Turns Red and everything else was subordinate. By turning down the American offer, closing the 'golden door' illuminated by the Statue of Liberty, he was at Eileen's mercy. She pursued the Dartington idea relentlessly, made another trip to the school and this time spoke to the distinguished headmaster, W.C. Curry, who subsequently agreed to accept both of the O'Casey children at the school in autumn 1938. Eileen made sure to get Shaw on her side. To Dorothy Elmhirst she reported on a lunch on 21 May 1938 at which the Shaws seemed very pleased with the decision to move beside Dartington.125 The rest was a matter of detail. O'Casey always believed it was Shaw who inspired the move to Devon but in fact it was Eileen's operating on Shaw which made it seem the right thing. Renting a house in Totnes, three miles from Dartington Hall, involved satisfying the landlord, a Mr Hawkins, with a reference. Who else could be thought of but Shaw? However jocosely, Shaw agreed to be guarantor.126 The O'Caseys left London for good on 12 September 1938.

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Part 4

Toughing It Out In Devon 'MacGowan was seeing the cold room as a stage. The monsignor was making a smiling, round-cheeked, cherry-faced appearance. . . . Says he at last "what plays have you in mind?" . . . Says I, at last, "The Plough and the Stars, Monsignor." And he looked at the floor for two full minutes and says: "That's by O'Casey, isn't it?" And when nobody answered says he: "The dog. If he wrote the Thirty Days' Prayer it would be a sin to say it."' - Benedict Kiely, In a Harbour Green (1949)

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13 O'CASEY'S GOOD WAR

'

elcome to Elizabethan To tries', says a tourist sign beside the time-worn Royal Seven Stars Hotel today. But Totnes goes back much further than Elizabeth I, for not only was it a walled medieval town but Brutus of Troy, great-grandson of Aeneas and legendary founder of Britain, fetched up here in 1170BC: the stone he stood on is still visible half-way up the winding main street. Or so it is claimed. Whatever about that, Totnes is one of Devon's oldest English boroughs and a market town of some note, situated at the mouth of the river Dart. To O'Casey it was reminiscent of Mullingar, 'but busier, wealthier, and much more lively' (A, 2, 523). The population in 1938 was around four thousand, half of what it is now, when Totnes houses a commuter and tourist-conscious population. Where the O'Caseys lived was Station (now Ashburton) Road, beside the terminus of the South Devon Railway line. The sound of the trains could be heard as clearly as the Dublin trains from O'Casey's house in Abercorn Road, which must have been cheering for him. For Eileen the sound meant the assurance of ventures to London (only three hours away) and her friends in the theatre. The move to Devon redefined O'Casey's career and must redefine his biography. The creative possibilities of the Dartington project had been aborted. With his refusal even to investigate the possibilities of Michael Chekhov's ideas in practice O'Casey never got further than the gate lodge, where the family spent the first few weeks1 before renting the house which was to become their home for fifteen years. Here, it was to turn out, O'Casey was to settle into new productivity, writing five new plays and six books of autobiography. Up to the end of the war the theme of O'Casey's new work could be summed up in a line from one of his plays at this time, 'the past has woven us into what we are.'2 He liked now to think of himself as blind Raftery the poet, his back to the wall, absorbed in his art, with empty pockets. At least the 'wall' of Devon was Celtic, and this was important to O'Casey. Built in 1882, Tingrith' was a large house, with five bedrooms, outhouses and gardens, together with a cellar which was to prove useful when the bombing began locally. Later O'Casey described it as 'a vulgar, pitifully-pretentious

w

256 Sean O'Casey

house [...] bursting itself to be what it can never become. All the granules of grandeur are here; the rooms for the fine people displayed; those for the maid obscure inside and out. Built by a show-off, cramming his mighty ambitions into the resistance of a small space.'3 It was draughty and Sean suffered always from the cold. It was no longer possible to draw on the friendship of Billy McElroy to ensure a full coal-cellar, for having run off with Hugh MacDiarmid's wife 'Mac' had rather dropped out of O'Casey's circle. Now O'Casey split logs from the Dartington estate to heat the range and placed oil-stoves in strategic locations upstairs. But once O'Casey's study (with daybed) was set up downstairs on the usual model of his room in Dublin he grew content enough. The country feels very curious after London,' he wrote to Gaby Fallon. The change is a gamble, & we must abide by the hazard of the die.'4 It was always difficult for O'Casey to accept the terms and conditions of renting his accommodation. Ever since the 'notice to quit' served on him in Mountjoy Square in 1920 he usually left a place in dispute with his landlord. Thus in surrendering the lease of number 49 Overstand Mansions in London he deliberately left a debt outstanding. He assumed the attitude that he had paid enough. This Marxist could regard rent as unearned income. The owners, however, backed by the best law London could buy, had no difficulty in hauling the Marxist back to the central point: even if O'Casey in breaking his lease was doing the owners (Clarendon Property Co.) a favour by handing back the keys nine months ahead of the expiry of the lease he was still liable for the balance due. O'Casey claimed he was cheated, that the landlords at first led him to believe that his leaving would be a good thing. He fought the case, the rent due being £114-15s., and lost in May 1939.5 He had to pay £50 down and £1 a week. As time went on he failed to keep up the payments, while ironically his new landlord in Totnes offered him the purchase of Tingrith' which he had to decline (14 October). Had O'Casey been a man of the world he should have begged or borrowed the sum to buy Tingrith' and his housing troubles would have been over for the rest of his days. But this was not his way. He happily went on with the game of stalling the solicitors for Clarendon Property Co. until they took a Judgment against him in July 1942 for the balance (about £23), which drew a response worthy of Dickens: Do what you like. Send writs by every post, if you will, I cant give what I havent got. [. . .] Is this just vindictiveness on your part? [ . . . ] ! thought Shylock was a legend but he evidently has come to life again. Anyway, do what you want to do. Go on with your gentle Shylockian methods, take proceedings, proceed to judgement, clap me in jail, lead me to the gallows, but for Christ's sake stop this God damned nagging. All I can try to do now is to live from day to day, and I'm too worried to sink myself into thought about you and your few quid.6 In July 1942 he tried to get the Lord Chancellor, Sir John Simon, to intervene, but he could find no basis in law to do so. The best he could recommend was

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that O'Casey might claim relief under the Courts (Emergency Powers) Acts, to see if 'war circumstances' might justify his inability to pay.7 His final thrust to the solicitors was to request them to tell the five directors of Clarendon Property Co. to 'do the goosestep into further proceedings. It will be but another episode in Finnegans Wake.'8 By such prolongation of argument over debts due (he did the same sort of thing over income tax) O'Casey, who enjoyed the tussle against humourless authority, wasted his time and sacrificed dignity. To be sure, his annual income was now quite low, falling to £524 for the year 1939.9 On his arrival in Totnes O'Casey had two projects under way, the communistic play The Star Turns Red, begun in 1937, and the first volume of the autobiographies. At first he looked on the latter as no more than a gathering of various childhood episodes and memories. It was his editor Harold Macmillan's attempt to make the book into a conventional memoir which forced O'Casey to consider the form more carefully. Macmillan wanted 15,000 more words, to make up the 75,000 he envisaged for a book to be entitled The Green Fields: Studies in Autobiography. The idea was too academic for O'Casey. Further, Macmillan disliked the punctuation conventions O'Casey had adopted and tried manfully to dissuade him from 'those dreadful blocks of solid type one sees in a Shaw volume, and I would plead with you not to ask us to imitate them. I would not try to curb your fancy in any other way.'10 The dreaded word 'Joycean' was not employed, and it was not until after Joyce's death in January 1941 that O'Casey began to cite him as an author he admired this side idolatry. Some of the typographical usages which irked Macmillan can be traced to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, while in the matter of punctuation in general O'Casey was by nature every bit as fussy as Joyce. He told Macmillan he had thought long and hard about the book he was determined to call 7 Knock at the Door- seeing now an architectural image, the house, for the ego's relationship to the world - and whereas he hewed to Skelton's Modern English Punctuation he 'must [also] allow the rhythm or lilt to flow free'.11 In short, O'Casey more and more viewed the incipient autobiographies as art works to be shaped for maximum effect. The full text of / Knock at the Door was ready before the move to Totnes, and there remained only its design to look to. To this area O'Casey also gave thought, and, skilled in sketching, in due course sent detailed suggestions for the jacket. This was the first time he took such an interest in design, pursued for all subsequent volumes. Early in 1939 Macmillan arranged for the New York office to create its own edition of I Knock at the Door, with good terms and the agreement of first offer of American rights to any later work. This was good for O'Casey but New York would soon begin to have second thoughts about the new plays. Replying, he invited Macmillan to Totnes, where a spare bed would be provided, a rare honour. He added, They say it's beautiful here in the Spring (I hope theyre right).'12 Meanwhile he wrote a few book reviews for the Sunday Times and began a correspondence with Timofei Rokotov, editor of International Literature in Moscow. It is no doubt odd that he should on the one hand admire the

258 Sean O'Casey

up-and-coming Tory Macmillan and on the other reach out to develop his interests in communist causes. He was always able to live with such contradictions. Perhaps as a result of events in the Spanish Civil War, he now openly praised communism. During the first half of 1938 he became embroiled in a controversy with Malcolm Muggeridge, who rebuked him for 'plump [ing] for Stalin' and for throwing in his lot 'with his Comintern sycophants inside and outside the U.S.S.R.' O'Casey's response was unequivocal: 'I have always stood for the U.S.S.R. and I stand for her now, and for Stalin, too: and it will be a wise day for England when she lines up beside this great country.'13 This was O'Casey in his reckless vein, arguing with a man who had been correspondent in Moscow for the Manchester Guardian in 1932-33. O'Casey had already elevated Stalin to the heroic status of Jim Larkin. A good deal of what he wrote in the 1930s coheres around his need for an authoritarian figure, a hero dedicated to justice for the underprivileged. He did not join the Communist Party. To him, its members too often appeared like so many Coveys, humourlessly extolling Marxist principles while ignoring the colour brought to life by art and literature. It was not that he hedged his bets but that, paradoxically, he valued his independence. It follows that The Star Turns Red was meant as a rhetorical attack on the Muggeridgean vision of modern life. In the blurb published on the jacket O'Casey brazenly announced: The voices of the workers proclaim that life must give an equal chance to all, that wasteful beggary must be replaced by fruitful labours, that leisure must be the lot of all, and that charity, great or small, must be strained away from the energies of man. The play says that if these things are not given they will be taken, for the Star will turn red and shine the world over.' In form it was to be a history play facing two ways: back to the working-class struggle in Dublin in 1913 (the traumatic episode in O'Casey's political life) and forward to the Fascist-Church alliance against communism in the 1930s. In effect, it tried the impossible, an analysis of labour's relations with church and state and a melodrama set 'tomorrow or the next day'. Yet the title is in the present tense: the metamorphosis was seen as at hand. The play was something of a call to arms. It was finished early in January 1939 and, as was to become his wont, O'Casey sent a manuscript copy to Nathan in New York hoping he might promote it there. 'As well as being something of a confession of faith,' he told him, 'it is, I think a play; &, possibly, the best of its kind which has been written - which isn't saying a lot.'14 He need not have troubled. Nathan hated The Star Turns Red and - a blow beneath the belt - reviewed it negatively before publication. Whether this influenced Macmillan's in New York or not the firm declined to publish. Eugene O'Neill, close friend of Nathan's as he was, shared his negative view: 'I was sorry to read your report on the new O'Casey play. I suppose these lousy times make it inevitable that many authors get caught in the sociological propaganda mill. With most of them it doesn't matter.' Their work was shallow anyway. But O'Casey was an artist 'and the soap box no place for his great talent. The hell of it seems to be, when an artist starts saving the

O'Casey's Good War 259

world, he starts losing himself.'15 As it was a play with no commercial interest whatsoever it had to be shelved until an amateur radical theatre asked for it in London in a few years' time. Towards the end of January Yeats died in the south of France. The BBC asked O'Casey to give a talk on the radio. He declined. He felt unable without criticising the man and this was not the time.16 He was to write about Yeats in glowing terms for his Moscow readers later in 1939, linking him to Thomas Davis: 'Yeats, too, was a fine and fearless fighter, raising himself against the intimidation, the stupid intolerance, the ignorant opposition of the religious societies, anxious to make sure that nothing outside of their own seedy, senseless, and lackalight lumber should be said or sung in the land. [...] He is gone now, and Ireland will miss him sorely, for he was Ireland's greatest poet, and a great warrior to boot.'17 Never again did O'Casey have anything but good to say of Yeats. But for the present he refused also an invitation to lecture on Yeats at Dartington Hall. The Chekhov Theatre Studio having moved out to New York before the outbreak of the war he had virtually nothing in common with the Elmhirsts. 'They and most Dartington residents were somewhat cliquey and inward-looking - the "them" and "us" syndrome' so far as the locals were concerned.18

When I Knock at the Door-was published on 3 March 1939 perhaps the most surprising result was that this story of a boy's origins in Victorian Dublin was banned in Ireland.19 That censorship in Ireland was tightening by the year is evidenced by some of the Irish titles prohibited since 1937: Yeats's The Herne's Egg, Kavanagh's The Green Fool, O'Flaherty's The Informer, and Gogarty's Tumbling in the Hay, besides virtually the entire modern novel from Graham Greene to Naomi Jacob. Such suspicion of modernism marks the emergence in the late 1930s of an ultra-catholic, reactionary state which had little time for the likes of O'Casey.20 Although the Prohibition Order for / Knock was not effective until 16 May 193921 few Irish reviews appeared. The Irish Book Lover risked one in May, conceding there were passages in the book 'which will disgust some' but still managing to describe it as 'a remarkable autobiography'. In the Dublin Magazine (April-June) Austin Clarke agreed: Tf [O'Casey] exposes some of the hidden sores of this nation he does so with an honesty which is now the last privilege left to our writers.' Citing the echoes of 'the masterful blarney and gab of Joyce', Clarke nevertheless justly asserted that O'Casey's language had 'a lyrical spontaneity of its own'.22 In England the review of I Knock at the Doorwhich irked O'Casey (most of the reviews being very complimentary) was Gogarty's in the Observer (12 March). The two friends had drifted apart since the early 1930s. Gogarty was what in Irish is known as Tadhg an da thaobh, with an eye towards his own reputation. In his letters after 1928 he could enjoy O'Casey's fulminations against Yeats and M and could even join in a snigger against the laureate himself. But once Yeats did him such honour in the Oxford Book of Modern Poetry in 1936 ('one of the great lyric poets of our age'), allowing him eleven pages, Gogarty ensured

260 SednO'Casey that his next volume Others to Adorn (1938) paid suitable homage to Yeats, as well as to IE, who had also praised Gogarty's work ('I sometimes think of Herrick after I have read one of Oliver Gogarty's lyrics'23). By 1937 O'Casey had seen through him. Commenting on As I Went Down Sackville Street, a much overrated memoir, he wrote: 'Gogarty's a lost soul. His book's a book about Gogarty, & a wail that Ireland didn't lose herself for his sake.'24 In his review of I Knock Gogarty frowned upon personal revelations as a breach of artistic decorum. 'Should a dramatist unlock his heart? The answer is, No. Nor anyone else for that matter. There is a decorum of Life which has to be observed, because within its bounds most of the world moves.'25 The inference is that O'Casey's ill breeding made him transgress some unwritten code. Gogarty also deplored O'Casey's realism and diagnosed a 'grudge against Life'. O'Casey was not slow to express his disagreement, in a letter refused publication by the Observer. This ended all contact between the two writers, one a would-be Renaissance man, extrovert, clever, superficial, more Regency than, as he believed, Restoration wit, the other a fiery plain-dealing Bunyan of a writer, whose passion placed him on a plane far above Gogarty.26 From Dublin O'Casey's old friend the ophthalmologist Joe Cummins sent warm support and a perceptive response, while rejecting Gogarty's 'impudence'. Cummins admired in I Knock 'the curious interweaving of fact and fancy, a sort of subconscious stream of words, [which] is a new literary device to me'.27 The observation uncannily chimes with Macmillan's response on the same day: You've created a fresh form of autobiography both in narrative form, & in the objectivity you've achieved by the third person. [...] You seem to have recaptured impressions with wonderful clearness: & the mystery of your memory (which has always intrigued me) seems here to be closely connected with your early blindness. There is revealed the sharpening of faculties which so often seems the result of invalidism in childhood.28 This Sunday (19 March) Macmillan declared, which he gave up to reading O'Casey's book, blotted Hitler out of his mind for hours on end, which he had not thought possible. He rejoiced in the effect, and ventured a guess (correct, as it was to happen) that there would be five more such volumes to come. In spite of the censorship issue, when the Abbey organised a festival of Irish theatre in 1938 O'Casey was given pride of place as the greatest living Irish playwright. Though invited he did not attend. The Plough was part of the twoweek-long programme and O'Casey's work formed the subject of one of the ten lectures given (at the Gresham Hotel) as part of the programme. It was a very positive assessment, given by Walter Starkie, the sole member of the Abbey board who had favoured production of the Tassie in 1928, and was reported in all three Dublin daily newspapers on 17 August. Yet there was a certain amount of hostility in the audience for the lecture, mumblings about damage to 'the prestige of the Irish race' in bringing the Plough to America,

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and so on. Further, in editing the lectures for publication Lennox Robinson cut a significant passage from Starkie's piece in which he said it was a tragedy that O'Casey had left Dublin and that the later plays were staged abroad in commercial theatres; that O'Casey was 'very necessary' to the national theatre, and a 'great force' therein; that his work had influenced the first act of Johnston's The Old Lady Says 'No! and the whole of his Moon in the Yellow River (also staged during the festival).29 Robinson would never want to acknowledge the value of any O'Casey play written after the Tassie controversy. He had the gall to ask O'Casey to contribute to a special issue of the old Abbey magazine The Arrow in 1939 to commemorate Yeats. O'Casey politely declined.

The O'Caseys were settling well into Totnes and Eileen was expecting her third child in September. As the country drifted inexorably towards war with Germany all manner of preparations impinged on the O'Casey household, including reception of evacuees. In Devon, the first band arrived as soon as the war broke out, and three young children from London's East End, each with a tin of condensed milk, an apple, a biscuit, and a gas mask, were delivered one day to Tingrith'. Although the O'Caseys had home help (Helen Hoover, who had come up from London, and a young local woman, Joy, soon to be called up for war duties) the evacuees could hardly have arrived at a worse time, with Eileen in confinement. Once she left for the hospital in Torquay Sean had to cope with a full house and his work suffered, a thing that always bothered him. He created an expedition out of visiting Eileen, planning the twenty-mile bus run for the afternoon, not wishing to stay overnight: 'I'd feel rotten in the morning with my eyes & unshaved face.' Although he missed her she was not to worry about him, Breon, now eleven, or Niall, not yet five. 'We'll crawl along till you get back.'30 Shivaun (or Siobhdn, named after O'Casey's mother, Susan) was born on 29 September but Eileen stayed on as the custom then was to gather her strength. Among her well-wishers were Shaw and Macmillan, the former rejoicing in a sister for the two boys ('Sisterless men are always afraid of women') and the latter indicating that besides his work in the business and the House of Commons he was trying to get back into the Grenadiers, 'but am not wanted at present.'31 Having taken Poland Hitler had just reassured Holland and Belgium of his friendship and was trying to placate Britain and France with a call for a conference. O'Casey remarked to Eileen: 'What the result of Hitler's speech may be, few can say. I still believe that a Conference is bound to come & the war pos[t]poned sine die.'32 People continued to hope. The following Wednesday, 12 October, saw Eileen still resting herself at Torbay Hospital, with Sean next due to visit on the following Sunday. The evacuees, meantime, enjoyed the run of the place at Tingrith'. They were not on O'Casey's agenda, as was the everpresent problem with his former landlord. The duns from Overstrand Mansions were threatening proceedings. 'Anyway, they can't murdher us. So goes on the age-long fight between property & life.' Bills, he ordered, should

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now be paid from his rather than Eileen's account (for she had paid some hospital bills from her own money), 'so that I'll have as little as possible to show'.33 Then a postscript: 'Don't let this note interfere with the feeding.' As the so-called phoney war went on the evacuees quickly began to drift back home and several more months passed before the second band arrived in Devon. At this point Eileen wrote to the authorities seeking exemption, describing the first experience as a disaster lasting ten weeks: 'when I returned from hospital with my new baby, we found it quite impossible to manage.' She went on to explain that her husband worked at home, and last time he had found it 'almost impossible to write a line, and got ill trying'. Also, Eileen would have to house her mother this time, if the war got worse, and so pleaded incapacity. She had done her best in 1939, 'but I realised I was sacrificing my husband's work, and our only means of existence.'34 Sean had developed bronchitis and Eileen had moved the evacuees to a neighbouring family, 'which really needed the money [3s. 6d. a week per child]'.35 It seems to have worked: Eileen's writing style was perhaps more effective than Sean's at times. During this second wave of evacuees, Dartington Hall was put to good use with two hundred children occupying the grand living quarters, some benefiting from the internment of Germans at the Ballet Jooss closed for the duration of the war. It was a topsy-turvy time. Towards the end of 1939 O'Casey wrote to Macmillan: 'I am buried down here, and I'm afraid I must remain buried.'36 It had begun to sink in that the war was likely to threaten his chances of theatre production. Macmillan wanted to postpone the publication of The Star Turns Red. With a view to more popular fare O'Casey began the breezy comedy Purple Dust and the second volume of his autobiography. He was never one to suffer long from writer's block. He also turned his mind to the contentious issue of Ireland's neutrality in the war. De Valera had so successfully negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1938 that the strategic ports of Berehaven, Cobh and Lough Swilly reverted to Irish possession; not even in wartime would the southern ports be available to the British navy. From Churchill's point of view, 'a more feckless act [could] hardly be imagined.'37 From de Valera's it was 'very difficult to remain neutral'.38 This was the moral dilemma facing the Irish from 1939 on, that while recognising the enormity of the world-war conflict they had for the first time the right to stand aside from it, although thereby throwing their defence into jeopardy. De Valera was even tempted diplomatically in June 1940 with the tantalising prize of ending partition by sacrificing neutrality; the spectre of 1914 and the promise of a united, independent Ireland returned. The issue had wide implications, as the young John F. Kennedy noted: 'if Ireland's present policy weakens Britain's chances, it naturally follows that we ourselves in America must be affected.' It was no local row but a matter 'of vital importance'.39 Especially after the American entry into the war the pressure on Ireland became more intense. As an Irishman in England O'Casey was very concerned with this issue. Surprisingly he was against neutrality. His pacifism had evaporated. Since the Spanish Civil War he had identified the modern enemy as

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Fascism and had no qualms about opposing it militarily. Of the Spanish Republicans he had said in November 1936: 'I wish I could be with them.'40 His new-found belligerence is clearly articulated in a letter to the P.E.N. Club early in 1939 declining an invitation to join the World's Congress of Writers: 'I have always, & always will fight, in my own way (a pretty vigorous way) for the right of all to speak, to publish [. . .] But fair-minded men & women are threatened now, not exactly with suppression, but actually with annihilation. So now it is not so much a fight for freedom of speech as it is a fight for our lives.'41 But if neutrality was wrong so was partition. Ulster was part of Ireland. 'Let England clear out of it. That is the only hope.'42 This attitude placed him in defence of those IRA men arrested in England for launching an armed campaign against partition. In January 1940 his appeal against the death sentence imposed on two IRA men sentenced for a bombing in Coventry was unavailing: 'I'm beginning to believe', he wrote to Jack Carney, 'that a lot of Englishmen still get a thrill at seeing Irishmen dangling at the end of a rope.'43 As time went on he openly protested against the treatment of IRA prisoners. Consequently, at the outbreak of the war he served no one master and lived, and wrote, as in the early days, amid confusion.

Early in 1939 the newly appointed managing director of the Abbey, F.R. Higgins, wrote to ask for new work.44 O'Casey, who liked Higgins's poetry and may have met the man in Dublin in 1935, was sufficiently touched by the courteous request to offer The Star Turns Red as soon as a copy was available. At the same time he doubted if 'it would go down [well]' in Dublin.45 He sent a script early in June but the play was ignored.46 His best bet now was the Unity Theatre Club in Goldington Street, London. Reformed in 1936 from the Rebel Players, Unity was an amateur agit-prop enterprise, a 'people's theatre' dedicated to plays of the consciousness-raising kind, such as Odets's Waiting for Lefty. It prided itself on involving tradesmen and labourers at all levels, from the building itself (seating 320) to the acting on stage.47 As a member of Unity's general council O'Casey gave the Star free of royalty; nevertheless there was much debate within Unity before it was agreed to stage it.48 The play was to be refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain in May 1940 when a 'public' production of act 3 was being planned: his Lordship considered the play 'subversive' and felt obliged to prevent 'anything of this nature in these dangerous times'.49 But Unity being an amateur theatre club was exempt from the licensing laws. It was still a brave venture, since the play is an uncompromising endorsement of communism. O'Casey did not himself attend rehearsals but deputised a young admirer: 'it will do you good; give you experience, & show you what a terrible place the Theatre is! What drab & hopeless things - apparently - rehearsals are. An actor, coming to the footlights, bending over, & asking, "how did I do that Sean?" And I saying, out loud, "not bad; not bad, at all" & to myself, 'Jasus, you couldn't be worse!"'50 The director was John Allen, late of the Old Vic, who had also won distinction for Unity with his 'Living Newspaper' techniques. The

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design was by Lawrence Cowing, who sent his sketches to Sean in advance for approval.51 'I have had the Set Designs under my eyes; & I find that Cowing was right, & I was wrong. With the whole conception of the play, the closed in coffin-room won't do.'52 A photograph accompanying the TLS review of the text shows what O'Casey meant: the avoidance of conventional realism in place of steps and drapes.53 The 'black box' idea would be fatal to an epic play like The Star Turns Red. When the production opened at the Unity (12 March) two different companies played on alternate nights, to give parts to as many members as possible. James Agate's famous review was based on the second night's performance. Agate called the Star'a masterpiece'. Was he being ironic or simply attempting to placate O'Casey? In one of his copious volumes of reminiscence, Agate, ruminating on the role of the critic, declared he must not be 'afraid of saying No to pretentious rubbish'.54 This last phrase is the one he had used in his review of Within the Gates in 1934 which had infuriated O'Casey. In the same diary entry Agate also confided that the critic's job is to encourage work that is new and genuine. Perhaps he felt like doing this at the Unity Theatre. But while justified in praising the 'verbal splendour' of the Star Agate went over the top in calling the play 'a magnum opus of compassion and a revolutionary work'.55 Even O'Casey could not believe all this. But the production was nevertheless regarded as the most impressive of all Unity's work.56 Although he did not travel up from Totnes to see the production Eileen and Breon did. They were accompanied to the performance by Dr Harold Waller, the obstetrician who had delivered Breon in 1928 and who had remained a good friend. He took Eileen and Breon to supper afterwards to the Cafe Royal where Breon fell asleep and Eileen was bemused by the appearance close by of Radclyffe Hall in male attire accompanied by a beautiful woman.57 Mother and son stayed three days at the Cumberland Hotel and went to see the play again, for the alternative cast. They all three thought the production good, and Waller wrote to O'Casey to say so. It ran at the Unity for 85 performances, closing on 23 June. The two casts wrote to say how much they enjoyed doing the play, 'a poetic masterpiece which represents a new step forward in the development of our drama, and which has widened our understanding and quickened our enthusiasm at a time when so many other means of expression are closed to us'.58 It remains a surprisingly effective play, as the belated Abbey production in 1978 proved. One can see why Macmillan was moved rather than convinced by the text, 'and therefore take refuge in considering you an artist - not a propagandist, which I suppose annoys you intensely'.59 A propos, O'Casey wrote to Dr Waller that in spite of his communism he never argued from Marx, Lenin or Stalin but used the language of his antagonists, 'an Irish habit'.60 When Churchill took over as Prime Minister on 10 May 1940 Macmillan left the publishing firm to accept the position of parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Supply, an unsettling matter for O'Casey.61 He worried about the possibility of loss of his manuscripts through bombing, even before the first attacks on nearby Plymouth on 6 July and sent copies to Dick Madden in New

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York for safe keeping. But when Shaw expressed admiration for The Star Turns Red and invited him to submit something new to the Malvern Festival O'Casey did not send the newly finished comedy Purple Dust. If it had won Shaw's endorsement O'Casey's popularity in England might have been re-established and who knows what the future might have held. Instead he told Shaw that Purple Dust-was to be staged in America. Nathan's enthusiasm for the play had led to an interest by the manager Eddie Bowling, but because of Bowling's involvement with Saroyan's The Time of Your Life this hope eventually came to nothing. One would have thought a premiere at the Malvern Festival could only have enhanced interest in New York.62 O'Casey's refusal of Shaw's invitation was partly through false delicacy. A related reason may have been sensitiveness that Purple Dust bears a resemblance to Shaw's own John Bull's Other Island.63 Both plays concern themselves with English-Irish relations viewed through the visit to rural Ireland of patronising Englishmen. Colonial and (in O'Casey's play) postcolonial issues are comically raised by the exposure of the gaps in understanding between the two cultures. He himself regarded Purple Dust as farcical, a joke in three acts, although the 'fantasy' ending puts the play on the plane of allegory or even, as Katharine Worth argues, of symbolism.64 O'Casey did not set out to imitate John Bull's Other Island', he had his own agenda and his own style. Indeed, Purple Dust originated in a visit to a local Tudor house, cold and lacking in comforts, where he found a ridiculous reverence for tradition.65 The interrogation of this absurdity became his theme. Had he adopted it for the Malvern Festival Shaw could have given Purple Dust the context, indeed the imprimatur, it needed. Though a well-structured farce, it is ultimately about the collapse of the British Empire: unless Shaw led the way who was going to laugh at that prospect in 1940? It was a lost opportunity. By July the O'Casey household was gearing up for the expected invasion. O'Casey found the black-out disturbing, for he wrote mainly at night. As time went on he managed very well in this regard, having the downstairs rooms of Tingrith' to himself after 9.30 p.m. Strangely, once the air raids began in the vicinity he was able to race ahead with the autobiographies, the excitement and danger somehow providing inspiration, as for Ellie Bunn at the end of Heartbreak House. O'Casey's manuscripts show page after page without hesitation or correction. At the same time, Eileen flung herself into the local war effort, qualifying in First Aid, working for the evacuees up at Bartington Hall, and learning to drive a car, an ancient Morris, for which she was able to get petrol in order to fulfil her duties, including driving Sean to Plymouth for eye treatment.66 She still attended Mass as a practising catholic, taking Breon with her every Sunday to the church close by on Station Road. The parish priest Father Edwin Russell was a Bubliner and became a frequent visitor to Tingrith', where O'Casey delighted in his company. After Mass on Sundays Breon would visit the presbytery for instruction.67 This devotion, though not sustained much beyond 1940, partially appeased Eileen's mother, now hovering between Torquay and Totnes in everlasting discontent.

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Perhaps because Totnes was in the flight path to Plymouth, as naval base an obvious German target, Dartington Hall considered moving the school to the United States (where Mrs Elmhirst's millions were made). The O'Caseys discussed the implications and decided to keep their three children with them, leaving another might-have-been to speculate on.68 When the Battle of Britain got under way a month later O'Casey mentioned to Carney in London that the German planes 'drone over our heads every night, & it isn't as sweet as the singing of the birdies.' He also mentioned the cellar 'dugout' at Tingrith', 'in case - God be with us, if the house falls'.69 This cellar, spacious but lowceilinged, was first accessible only from a set of seven steps at the far side of the house (the entrance to Tingrith' being from the right-hand side), but the O'Caseys made another entrance from the kitchen above it. It was to be much used in 1941 during the terrible bombing of Plymouth. Incidentally, the Carneys had now settled for good in London, where Jack worked for the Australian Associated Press, and childless themselves became close friends of the O'Casey family.70 When Purple Dust was published on 19 November it made little impact. It was a case of bad timing, not as momentous as governed Finnegans Wake but nevertheless an unfortunate time for Irish comedy. James Agate regarded it as a stab in the back to England.71 Several reviewers invoked John Bull's Other Island, never to O'Casey's advantage, but the TLSraised another question, 'Did Synge himself ever strike a more treacherous blow at the fame of Irish womanhood for chastity?'72 The word 'treacherous' is doubtless ironic but carries a sting. In Ireland Purple Dust gave offence mainly for its perceived stage-Irishry. The question now asked was, 'What's wrong with O'Casey?'73 Denis Johnston let loose in The Bell: Tn his early work there was real passion, and [...] Pity. Now there is spleen, there is tendentiousness, there is charade humour, which are no substitutes for what he left behind him in Ireland.'74 Just when he was refocusing on Ireland for his material O'Casey was being warned to back off. As the year came to a close it revealed that O'Casey's income, at just over £1,500, was heavily dependent on America. The success of the revival of Juno in New York (with Sara Allgood and Barry Fitzgerald), and the sales (some 1,800 copies) of I Knock at the Door in the United States accounted for a great proportion of this income, indeed he claimed ninety-five per cent, which seems exaggerated.75 Significantly, the following year, with both The Star and Purple Dust denied publication in the US and no new volume of the autobiographies ready for publication, O'Casey's income dropped to just over £350. The O'Caseys began to depend on gifts of clothes, tobacco, books, newspapers and items for the children. The war was beginning to bite hard.

Nineteen-forty-one was to bring many major changes in the world which impinged on O'Casey. Although he had never met him,76 O'Casey keenly felt Joyce's death on 13 January. Since the 1920s he had let his admiration for Joyce be known;77 not long after his arrival in London in 1926 O'Casey signed

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a letter protesting against the pirated edition of Ulysses. In May 1939 he was startled to receive a letter from Joyce drawing his attention to an entry in 'Publications Received' by the 7mA Times in which Finnegans Wake was attributed to O'Casey. 'I hope it may be prophetical and that we may some day meet.'78 He mentioned that he was about to see Juno in Paris, in a production by the English Stage Company, and if he found it attributed to Joyce he would send a programme. In his reply O'Casey said he was reading Finnegans Wake and wished he could acknowledge it as his own but its power was beyond him. 'It is an amazing book; and hardly to be understood in a year, much less than a day.' He felt he had had 'constant contact' with Joyce through Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, 'that great and amazing work', though as O'Casey was now far away in Devon it was, he said, unlikely they would meet. But, added the old communist, 'God is good, and we may meet some day, I sincerely hope so.' O'Casey did not, however, believe that the mix-up in the Irish Times was a mere misprint. 'I know many of Dublin's Literary Clique dislike me, and they hate you.' And he ended in humble tribute with 'A deep bow to James Joyce'.79 Some time later, in the course of a letter to Carney he enquired, 'Have you heard anything of James Joyce? I've written Faber & Faber, & got no reply. I hope to Jasus he's safe. I'll write, I think to Dulanty; he might have heard something. All the fuss the "artistic buggers" & political whores kicked up here about Wodehouse, author of 'Jeeves" [and] not a word about Joyce! Where your heart is there shall your treasure be also; Jeeves is their treasure. Culture & Enlightenment.'80 With the news of Joyce's death in Zurich some five months later O'Casey expressed disappointment with the inadequacy of English tributes: 'Why even "Dubliners" & "The [sic] Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" alone proclaimed Joyce a great man, heavens above Maupassant, whom [Desmond] McCarthy praises. But "Ulysses" just lifts him out of sight of the McCarthys league and "Finnegans Wake" takes Joyce out of hearing. "Finnegans Wake" is the greatest "Everyman" that has ever been written; or can ever be written. It is the Funeral March of the Civilization that we know; it is the flight of Gerontius downwords.'81 He was disgusted that Joyce was let die in 'abject poverty' and concluded: All I hope, and what I believe, is that I like Joyce, throughout a lesser, but as honest an achievement, will form my art in my own way, as every artist must; and set down in humour, imagination, and reality what I think I see and what I know I feel, without respect to God or man or superstitious custom.82

As the war worsened O'Casey found himself inescapably driven in upon himself. Dartington Hall had turned its back on him, took no interest in his new work and only rarely featured a performance in The Barn which might entice him from home.83 With the loss of home help to the war effort O'Casey assumed a domestic role in 'Tingrith' to help Eileen, and made much of this. His letters during this period often recorded his domestic duties as if washing

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dishes was somehow part of the daily battle of Britain. The O'Caseys rarely socialised. Eileen would occasionally go out by herself or with Breon and later the younger children to films or, when possible, the touring D'Oyly Carte Company but Sean's world shrank as routines became dominant and listening to the BBC a major evening pastime. In an article on the theatre in war-time, The Curtained World', he drew an interesting contrast between the first and second world wars: The last war carried the dramatist about, more or less at his ease, round and round the edge of it; this one has sucked him into its centre.'84 He was thinking, perhaps, of radio and how its bulletins drew him into the preoccupying daily news. 'Guarding England is the trinity of rent, interest, and profit,' he wrote in another piece on the Irish ports for Irish Freedom. Until socialism strangled those evils there would be war. In one way this was something he had tried to say in Purple Dust, where the two rich Englishmen are actually in flight to idyllic Ireland from the war. O'Casey's ending to that 'wayward comedy' was to imagine a mighty flood of biblical proportions sweeping house and false dream away in its fury. The image must have been born in Devon's winter landscape where rivers frequently burst their banks: the Dart was no exception. Thus the local landscape offered a symbol of retribution for foolish antiquarianism in time of war. 'It seems', he wrote to Fallon, 'I am still writing things to make people uncomfortable,' not out of spite or malice, 'but because I feel uncomfortable myself in the midst of things as they are.'85 When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941 his interest in the war became acute. He followed every development with the closest attention and wrote frequently to Jack Carney about the fortunes of the Red Army. Indeed, those letters, mostly unpublished, could serve as a commentary on the Russian entry into the war, her initial collapse and terrible sufferings, most notably at Stalingrad, and her heroic recovery and series of defeats of the German occupying forces in 1943 and 1944. All of that is now history and the stuff of best sellers such as Antony Beevor's Stalingrad. What is significant here is that for O'Casey it was the entrance of the Russians rather than the Americans into the war which was the defining moment, the moment that he was to make the turning point of Oak Leaves and Lavender, soon to be written but neither published nor staged until the war was well over. Meanwhile he spoke up for Russia on every possible occasion. After the Daily Wbrferwas suppressed by the government in January 1941 he wrote in protest to the New Statesman and later raised the matter with Churchill himself, to whom he sent a page from the Soviet Daily War News by way of urging a greater awareness of workers' participation, which might 'add another horse to your chariot of war'.86 This policy might roughly be described as hitching a plough to the stars and stripes. Significantly, once the British-Soviet pact was signed in May 1942 O'Casey could happily say 'we' in relation to the progress of the war and mean the British. He could also wear a red star on his coat in Totnes, while resenting the charge of 'remoteness' levelled at him by at least one Marxist.87 When Churchill and Roosevelt travelled to Teheran to meet Stalin O'Casey cried out

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to Carney, 'Oh, wouldn't I like to be there to listen to Stalin chatting to C. & R. To be there; oh, to be there!'88 Stalin, 'the triumphant genius',89 had been installed as hero in O'Casey's imagination, never to be dislodged. In his capacity as author, O'Casey worked hard to get London publishers to send copies of their works to Moscow, especially works with an anti-Fascist or left-wing theme. He found that English publishers were rather more concerned than O'Casey was about copyright, for the USSR was not a signatory to the Berne Convention and it was plain the intention was for Moscow's International Literature to make liberal use of material thus received. O'Casey's trust in Moscow was extreme. He could not do enough to help and apologised profusely on behalf of those slow to do likewise. Eileen, too, was prominent in the Totnes Council for British-Soviet Unity, holding flag days, sales of work, raffles and such fund-raising activities. In October 1943 she helped organise a concert at the local cinema to raise money for a bed in Stalingrad's British Hospital. The Totnes Council raised £103 on this occasion and by 13 November had amassed £400 altogether, more than enough for one bed.90 O'Casey was proud of Eileen's achievement and in a piece he wrote for Moscow expressed the hope that his children would one day see in Stalingrad the Totnes beds [sic] 'which their mother helped to provide for the heroic Soviets'.91 Under the pseudonym 'Green Searchlight' he also wrote for Moscow a number of newsy articles reminiscent of his propagandist work in the Irish Worker thirty years earlier. At times the language is extraordinary, but one must bear in mind both the times and the stakes; for example: 'We have not yet got the burning will of the united Soviet peoples shown by their gigantic and amazing resolution to utterly destroy that strange savage phenomenon called Nazism which is hiding the blue of the sky from our eyes, and blasting the good earth up from under our walking feet; that vile hell-engendered power', etc. O'Casey's new militarism comes out all too strongly as he chastises those who 'think too gently' about the horrors of Nazism. 'All these mealy-mouthed men and women [...] must be gently, at first, finally with a rougher hand, if nothing else can stir them, moved from the softer fringe to the firmer centre [and . . .] must be pressed by word and deed into the flame, the purifying flame of resistance and attack' on 'Hitler's horned swine'.92 Such passages indicate the depth of O'Casey's feeling but it has to be said that the war did little for his political prose. Happily, his autobiography was written under a different muse. The second volume, Pictures in the Hallway, was written during 1940-41. As with the first volume, while following a rough chronology (from 1892 to 1905) the chapters are discrete, each creating an individual scene. In each, narrative and description rival for supremacy and O'Casey's skills, lyrical and dramatic, are tautly controlled within the confines of the particular episode. Some might argue that the prose is loose and self-indulgent but it will stand the test of the strictest scrutiny.93 O'Casey had strong feelings about good writing (as he had about most subjects). He did not care for the new, sparse style of Hemingway, for instance. For O'Casey, the language of prose had to have the rhythm and

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variety of poetry. Not that he self-consciously wrote 'poetically', but he had a wonderful ear for word and phrase and - like Dickens, a perpetual touchstone - sought always the sentence which through its energy impresses the reader with a sense of life and colour. All is rendered dramatic: heteroglossia was O'Casey's natural technique. In Pictures he traces his growth from the death of Parnell to his immersion in things Celtic and Gaelic. The forces that shaped him, domestic, religious, literary and national are skilfully arranged to illuminate the growth and self-discovery of a combative personality. It is strange to think that he wrote these chapters up to fifty years afterwards, in Devon, while the war closed in around him. The bombing of Plymouth began in earnest on 6 July 1940, rising to terrible proportions from January 1941 to 16 November 1943.94 While he was writing Pictures one night O'Casey interrupted his manuscript narrative about his brother Isaac and the Queen's Theatre in Dublin, with the sudden entry, There's that cursed siren again. 11.30 & all asleep - wife, 2 boys, baby & their nannie - except myself. The siren wails, wan & woeful, cutting thru the chugging drone of the German planes.' Then he leaves down his pen and hurries up the stairs to wake the family. There follows a detailed description of moving the family down to the cellar one by one, the baby Shivaun last, 'heralding the night with a chorus of yells'. Then, 'Wrapped up in coats & jerseys, we sit around, hunched together, uneasy & uncertain; speaking of other things mechanically.'95 The manuscript then resumes the account of Isaac and the Queen's Theatre. There is a sense in which the carefully crafted autobiography was written in two times scales, with the present interrupting the flow of the past. This second time scale was eventually to take the form of historical narrative itself when, years later, O'Casey described Totnes during the war in the final volume of his autobiography, Sunset and Evening Star (1954). In shifting back and forth in time - and here his letters to Jack Carney in London stand as daylight commentary on the war96 - O'Casey attempted to order his experience by translating all into narrative form, like Othello recasting the story of his life before the senate, so that 'We are on the brink of a Borges-like narrative that is forever constituting itself out of the materials of the present instant, a narrative in which the storyteller is constantly swallowed up by the story.'97 On 26 July O'Casey recorded that he had just written the blurb for the dust jacket of Pictures in the Hallway: 'How I hate this job! No author should be called to praise his work; or, rather, recommend it. Defend it, yes; commend it, no. It is an indignity to his sensitiveness; but every effort must be made to get it [Pictures] to sell. I hate the job.'98 He enjoyed rather more offering advice on the design for the dust jacket, once again both colourful and striking. During the war all publications were delayed: Pictures did not appear until February 1942. This was disappointing, as O'Casey had already begun the sequel, Drums Under the Windows, one of the two best of the six volumes of autobiography, and was well into one of the best of his later plays, Red Roses for Me. Yet since Pictures was almost simultaneously published in New York and in London it meant that

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O'Casey got a fair amount of publicity. The TLSset the tone. 'No one who has tried to write English prose can help envying the confidence with which Mr O'Casey follows the lead of words.'99 In his drama column 'At the Play' in the Observer (1 March), Ivor Brown gave up more than half of the space to a rave review of Pictures. These books of [O'Casey's] are the work of a dramatist whose every character lives and abounds and turns the printed page into a clamorous street scene or a painted stage.' In Ireland, however, Pictures-was banned by the Censorship Board on 8 May although the text is in no way obscene. Perhaps the ban explains why Austin Clarke used a pseudonym (his alter ego 'Maurice Devane') to review it. He thought O'Casey was now 'dancing to a British tune' in supplying a 'prose poetry' of a spurious nature.100 Patrick Kavanagh, in contrast, enthused without any such begrudgery, seeing O'Casey's world as one where 'words are the only things plentiful [ . . . ] , his characters are drunk with verbiage, but it is gorgeous verbiage and an Irish weakness'.101 The Irish reviews were important to O'Casey since they kept him in touch with the local scene and the younger writers within it. Flann O'Brien would hardly have sent him a copy of his newly published An Beal Bocht were O'Casey not very much a live presence in Ireland still. O'Casey's Irish was sufficiently good for him to enjoy O'Brien's wicked satire immensely, seeing in it 'the swish of Swift's scorn' alongside 'the genial laughter of Mark Twain'.102 At the Abbey a production of The Plough and the Stars, directed by newcomer Frank Dermody, opened on 26 January 1942 and ran for six weeks in all, a spectacular achievement. Again, this production marked the arrival of a new theatrical generation, as Denis O'Dea and Phyllis Ryan played the Clitheroes, while F.J. McCormick, the first Jack Clitheroe, played Fluther. O'Casey confessed that he badly needed the royalties. 'I've missed the Abbey now for a long time - it used to send me anything from £100 to £150 a year, in comparison with the £3 or £5 or £9 I get here [in England] - not counting the requests to allow production for nix.'103 Another, smaller source of income came from the actormanager Louis D'Alton, who included O'Casey's plays in his repertory as he toured Ireland with his fit-up company (even in wartime).104 In England, Desmond MacCarthy's review of Pictures, while generous, aroused O'Casey's nationalistic hackles by its denigration of Ireland in the fight for human freedom. O'Casey took up the debate in a letter: 'Some time ago, I got a list of names signifying casualties in the merchant service; & surprised I was to see so many obviously Gaelic names among them. [. . .] Up to 60 Irish Airmen have already been decorated.'105 When MacCarthy wrote back O'Casey widened the dispute. He conceded he would like to see 'our [sic] planes hopping in & out of the [Irish] Ports' and that their loss had probably sent many an Irishman 'to a shivering death'. 'But one can't expect the feeling of many centuries to go in a minute.' There weren't many Quislings in Eire. They would, I think, be very few who would welcome the German soldiers. And this neutrality business is really more than a result of the feeling born & bred into us [sic] by what was done by England: it has, also, a politically religious reason. The Vatican foreign (or domestic) policy has something (a lot, I think) to

272 SednO'Casey do with it.' Here O'Casey outlined a theory which coloured his criticism of Catholic Ireland. He saw an inter-national clique, if not conspiracy. 'Eire & her Governors have been for a long time, now, looking to Salazar of Portugal as a fine way of doing things under the thumb of the Church, making all things, religiously political - even the Trades Unions.' He had seen this coming for years, and 'the collapse of France & Franco's victory over the Republicans (that England helped by her foolish neutrality) have strengthened it immensely.' To O'Casey, there was no doubt that the Foreign Curia of the Vatican was 'urgently aiming at a Catholic-political string of states in Petainised France, Francononian Spain, a Salazarian Portugal, & a Devalerian Vaticanised Eire, to be linked up, at a future date, with the Latin countries of S. America'.106 The use of 'us' in this letter now to mean 'us in England' and again 'us Irish' indicates O'Casey's self-division all through the war years. He was torn between revived Irish nationalism and the inescapable patriotism infused by the Battle of Britain and the subsequent aim to construct a second front on the European mainland.

In the letter to MacCarthy just quoted O'Casey mentioned that he was finishing Red Roses for Me, a four-act play the title of which derived from a ballad MacCarthy had admired in Pictures. The words were by O'Casey, the tune a traditional Irish air, Eamonn an Chnuich. Here is one key (no pun) to O'Casey's later plays: the wedding of traditional airs (of which he had a fund) and original ballad-like material. A teacher at Dartington Hall, Brigid Edwards (1888-1977), who also directed school plays, would visit O'Casey's home, listen to him singing the Irish airs, and play the notes on the piano in order to set them down in writing. She is credited for the music published with the text of Red Roses for Me. It grew out of Pictures in the Hallway, for it is highly autobiographical and closely related to the chapters describing young Johnny's love of Shakespeare and the turbulence of his initiation into labour conflict in Dublin. Once again, O'Casey looks back in order to reinvent his youth. As Brooks Atkinson put it in his review of Pictures for the New York Times, to O'Casey 'writing is not an end in itself but life transmuted into radiance.'107 The later plays from The Star Turns Red on are all about transformation, its possibilities and the conditions of its reception. Time is a major factor here, as O'Casey looks back and re-imagines revolution in an Irish context. He is not invoking real time, real history, but the way in which a time (and there is no time like the present) may be fused with visionary awareness of change. In Red Roses for Me it is clear that the change is to come by and through the vision and selfsacrifice of a hero. In returning to the subject-matter of The Harvest Festival (1919), the first full-length play O'Casey submitted to the Abbey, he now made the working-class hero not merely a sacrificial victim in the struggle against exploitation but also a common man with a love of art, poetry and music. Everything that was then penny-plain is now rendered tuppence-coloured. Though set during the railway dispute of 1911 which cost O'Casey his job with the

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GNR, the play is infused with the heroic/tragic atmosphere of the great lock-out. The new hero, Ayamonn Breydon, has a poetic vision of Dublin city in act 3 which he is able, like an ancient prophet or the inspired Second Workman in Purple Dust, to communicate to the lost ones around him and rouse them to action.108 This is the image of the artist's role as O'Casey saw it. The play stands or falls on this visionary scene where the familiar, drab landscape being transfigured is refigured into a fairy-tale setting in which the hidden dignity of the poor people of Dublin is revealed and resolution is mustered to 'build a great city,/The finest and fairest that ever was seen'.109 That resolution leads in act 4 to the militancy which brings about Ayamonn's death in the workers' cause. So far as the symbolism of the play extends, with its deliberate linking Ayamonn's self-sacrifice to spring rather than (as in The Harvest Festival) to autumn/tragic associations, the idea of rebirth is reinforced. Daffodils form a cross, and the red roses laid on Ayamonn's coffin suggest the endurance of beauty as the seed of political ideas. Thus O'Casey quoted Thomas Moore on the title page of the first edition (only): 'You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,/But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.'110 It is plain from the details supplied in Pictures in the Hallway that Ayamonn is an idealised portrait of O'Casey himself, with one significant difference. It might be summed up in something J.D. Salinger cites in Catcher in the Rye (p. 188): 'The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.' The opening stage directions of Red Roses describe the interior of the upstairs rooms of 18 Abercorn Road, and Ayamonn's fascination with Shakespeare and with painting replicates Johnny's in the autobiography just published.111 Mrs Breydon is firmly based on O'Casey's mother, and it is noteworthy that Ayamonn has no siblings to contend with for her affections. Another breach with actuality lies in the love affair with Sheila Moorneen, obviously based on Maire Keating. O'Casey did not meet Maire until 1917, some six years after the realisable date of the action. In the play this Maire figure never raises religious difference as a problem between the lovers, a major alteration, and she is decidedly more nag than Muse. In a draft of acts 1 and 2, when the play was unhappily entitled 'Asthray in a Gold Canoe', Sheila, named Mary Kinshella in the cast of characters, is an ardent catholic and Child of Mary who closes her ears to Sean's [sic] 'conceited insults warring with th' facts & mysteries of my religion!'112 O'Casey had a lot of trouble transmuting this raw material into art, which he did by suppressing much of the personal element in the love affair. Ayamonn, replacing Sean, can then become, as Jack Mitchell has remarked, 'the adequate hero, the missing link' in O'Casey's Dublin plays, where hope was in short supply. 'He is that other road, inherent in the situation, played through to its logical conclusion.'113 Ayamonn, released from O'Casey's actual history, creates a myth of possibility and in that way consoles the O'Casey of 1941 whose identity is reshaping itself. In sending the typescript of Red Roses to Daniel Macmillan on 29 April 1942 O'Casey commented on the continuing air attacks in the area. They had a 'hot

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night of it here last Thursday, the 23rd, when hundreds of incendiary bombs fell all around us, and a row of houses a little way up the road were [sic] demolished. We had damages to outhouses and a window was blown in; but, except for some tenseness, feel none the worse for it. I hope it doesn't come agin [sic], all the same - I'm not one of the world's heroes.'114 This last disclaimer makes definitive the difference between O'Casey himself and Ayamonn Breydon. Published on 17 November 1942 Red Roses for Me "was the best received of O'Casey's later plays but not one likely to secure a London production during the war years when theatre, as he saw it, was 'no more part of the life of England than are the penguins in the Zoo'.115 His attitude towards a possible production of Purple Dust at the Arts Theatre Club earlier in the year cannot have helped his prospects. He refused permission on the off-chance that Purple Dust might be done in New York in 1943. He further annoyed his old enemy James Agate of the Sunday Times on this matter, provoking him to dismiss Purple Dust as 'a witless lampoon at the expense of the English, too busy fighting for freedom to answer back'.116 This was not the time, Agate declared, to produce such unpatriotic material. But if London was not interested Dublin, for a change, was. Shelah Richards, now directing for a company she ran with Michael Walsh (whose real name was Nigel Hazeltine), was excited by the early review of Red Roses in the New Statesman on 14 November. Although as the first Nora Clitheroe she knew O'Casey well and thought he had had a romantic interest until Denis Johnston swept her off, she now made her approach through Gaby Fallon. Fallon mediated and Shelah had a world premiere. Dr Joe Cummins, O'Casey's Dublin ophthalmologist and friend of twenty years, to whom O'Casey dedicated Red Roses for Me, immediately on reading it thought O'Casey was mocking the catholic belief in miracles. The reference was to the statue of Our Lady stolen by Brennan o' the Moor and later restored. Cummins pointed out that catholics do not worship statues but use them 'to evoke a pious mood' and 'as an aid to religious zeal and fervour'.117 O'Casey's response was instant. 'Oh, God! am I in for another row over RED ROSES FOR ME! [.. .] such an implication in the incident of the missing statue never entered my mind.' But then, characteristically, he began to argue, and to assert that after forty years' living with the catholic poor he knew them 'to the bone', and that 'their devotion was always a beautiful manifestation to me: they adored something above themselves.' There is much more, about statues and miracles, about Matt Talbot and the Legion of Mary, before the confession that the staging of the play would also present difficulties: 'One would want to be able to rehearse, or experiment before publication; but where would I get that chance? So one has to use one's inner vision as well as one can.'118 Cummins, of course, was charmed, and even avowed that O'Casey was always the most forthright and honest of men he had ever met. What O'Casey did not know was that Gaby Fallon, too, was harbouring doubts over O'Casey's intentions in Red Roses for Me. That sore festered for a few months yet. Meanwhile, O'Casey was nervous that, once again, a new play had been published before production. He knew now that this could mean trouble. He

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turned down the chance of a world premiere in England when the People's Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne asked for Red Roses at just about the same time as Shelah Richards. Although an amateur company, the People's had earned a solid reputation doing Shaw and modern realism.119 The theatre had already staged Juno (1927), the Plough (1938) and The Gunman in a double bill with The End of the Beginning (1940). O'Casey wrote to the People's: T must first get a performance, if possible, over which I can have an influence on selection of Caste whose members are known to me by what they have done on the stage; & also, if possible, I must have a hand in the rehearsals so as to see if the script may need changes or additions. I'm sure you will understand the need of this attention.'120 Strangely, People's Theatre did present Red Roses on 25 March following, for three nights only, with O'Casey's correspondent in the leading role of Ayamonn Breydon; direction was by Marie Hopps. Did O'Casey let Shelah Richards know of this production, which a programme note called 'the first performance'?121 It seems not. Moreover, he attended rehearsals neither in Newcastle nor in Dublin. In addition, the Abbey expressed an interest, though this came to nothing.122 Richards's production was to be the first O'Casey premiere in Dublin since The Plough and the Stars. The Dublin reviews of the published text, however, hardly promised another Plough. The sober T.C. Murray frowningly equated it with Purple Dust and The Star Turns Red as to 'the strange dithyrambic note of much dialogue' (Irish Press, 3 December 1942). The Bell praised the text 'as literature' but ominously affirmed that 'no pains have been taken to make it possible for the Irish stage.'123 One oddity must be the review by Sheila May, seemingly the actress cast as Sheila Moorneen, a character she roundly condemns as 'the latest addition to that dreary procession of Mary Boyles and Norah [sic] Clitheroes [...], weak and clinging'.124 The language, too, she found over-indulgent. This was possibly the first case of feminist dramatic criticism in Ireland. Perhaps it was this very outspokenness which led to the reviewer's being cast in the play. Coincidentally, she was a sister of Freddie May, who had asked for the play on behalf of the Abbey. Shelah Richards had invited Gaby Fallon to appear in Red Roses, an offer he declined. She also invited him to check the cuts in the text, adding that O'Casey had warned her not to let Fallon touch it. He was both hurt and furious at this revelation, when all he wanted, as he complained to O'Casey, was the success of the play. Mischievously, he now suggested that the reason Shelah wanted him to look over her cuts was that she did not think Red Roses a good play. Fallon himself thought only one passage should be cut, which might be offensive to catholics, 'to Sheila's audiences in other words'.125 In his reply O'Casey unwisely flung out, 'Honestly, I'm a little tired of these "offences to Catholics". Who are they above anyone else to him who doesn't believe in the Catholic Faith?'126 This was to sting Fallon into an unfavourable review. For the Dublin production Richards assembled a good cast, many of them friends from the Abbey and Gate - Ann Clery as Mrs Breydon, John Stephenson as Brennan o' the Moor, Sheila May as Sheila Moorneen, Seamus

276 SednO'Casey Healy as Mulcanny, Austin Meldon as Inspector Finglas, and Dan O'Herlihy (later a Hollywood actor) as Ayamonn. To do the settings she had Ralph Cusack, assisted by Anne Yeats (the poet's daughter). Cusack was an eccentric, talented artist who was later to patronise Brendan Behan. Louis le Brocquy, who was working with Cusack at the Olympia at this time, was not available for Red Roses.1^ He took an interest in the show and did some sketches, including one with the shy traditional singer who sings the title song towards the end of act 1. Of the spectacular scenery for act 3, the bridge of vision, Anne Yeats remembered 'a lot of red sky',128 but here lighting is as important as scene design. Red Roses opened at the Olympia on 15 March 1943. O'Casey was surprised at the venue, which he remembered as Dan Lowry's music hall. 'When I was a kid, I saw Dan Leno doing his turn there, and a great one it was. I used to know all Dan's songs, and I still remember the Shopwalker.'129 From that standpoint the venue was quite appropriate, since Red Roses, like all of the later plays, was a collection of music-hall 'turns'. Because three ten-minute intervals were allowed for the scene changes curtain up was at 7.30 p.m., and 7 p.m. on Thursdays. David Sears in the Irish Independent found the production 'magnificent' and the sister paper the Evening Herald did not demur. The Irish Times, reviewing anonymously, felt compelled to compare Red Roses negatively to the three early Dublin plays and demanded: 'Is it that his ambitions are greater than his talents and must remain so?' Writing in the Standard, an overtly Roman Catholic weekly, Gaby Fallon savaged the play but found the production itself 'highly competent'.130 Because of Fallon's known friendship with O'Casey and his position as defender and ally, this post-mortem was to carry weight. The play did reasonably well, however (better than Saint Joan, which Shelah Richards did next, and starred in). Over the two-week run the box office receipts reached totals of £546 and £416 (capacity was over £700), leaving O'Casey £48 for the run and net profits for the producers of double that figure.131 This outcome might have been all right had it not been for Sean O'Faolain's article in The Bell. O'Faolain was Ireland's greatest mid-century intellectual commentator and cultural critic.132 He had taken a keen interest in O'Casey's career ever since reviewing (negatively) the Tassie for ^E's Irish Statesman in 1929. A cautious respect grew between the two writers, who never in fact met. O'Faolain's article expanded on a theme he had first sounded in 1935: exile and its dangers for the Irish writer.133 Red Roses was puzzling and confusing, as if 'some fog came between [O'Casey] and his people as he wrote'. The characters were too literary: 'they lack the simplicity of life: sharpness, edge, dramatic dimension [...] they are like dolls whom their owner loves to dress up and play with.'134 Even the stage directions, he accused, were literary, and quoted the description of Sheila Moorneen without, of course, realising that it accurately detailed Maire Keating. Although he faulted the language of the play, 'a medley of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Swinburne, Sam Goldwyn, and the Salvation Army', he sensed a genuine poetry coming through, 'simply and purely [...] in fits and starts', present 'because O'Casey believes in life and

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believes in men'. It is no exaggeration to claim that O'Faolain's magisterial article set a seal on O'Casey criticism in Ireland. Ominously, Irish critics of the O'Faolain school continued to hope O'Casey would reclaim himself and 'come back to Erin'. They could not cry with Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'Nevertheless, I back O'Casey's work. He knows what he is doing.'135 'Nevertheless' has to be the key word in O'Casey criticism. Much less could Irish reveiwers say with Charles Morgan, Times critic and playwright, that Red Roses 'would hold any theatre not abandoned to triviality'.136

As D-Day approached, 6 June 1944, O'Casey found himself warring on many fronts. In a piece written for Leslie Daiken's collection, They Go, The Irish: A Miscellany of War-Time Writing (1944), he defended Ireland against the continuing charge of failing to support England during the war. As he now read it, the charge was reversible. England's historic treatment of Ireland was to blame. Moreover, the 1922 Treaty, 'a half-hearted thing' causing 'a malicious separation' of north and south, would have to be addressed after the war, and a united Ireland worked out. He saw the problem as a recognition of the Celts, be they Scots, Welsh, Irish or Manx, 'equal as individuals; equal as nationalities'.137 In spite of this sympathy he was impatient with Ireland's current drift into conservatism. In one of his 'Green Searchlight' articles for Moscow in 1943, 'New Whine in Old Bottles', he lamented Irish censorship and deplored 'the false piety deluging Ireland' where de Valera was content 'to live out his life under the banner of a cardinal's cloak'.138 As regards his own treatment, he could not help comparing his treatment by Boston in 1935 over Within the Gates: 'The whole of Ireland has become a Boston, a Boston without any Americans.'139 He was also incensed at the demolition of Lady Gregory's house at Coole ('if it were Matt Talbot's!'140), and wrote a piece in her praise for the Saturday Book (1942). He heard from Lennox Robinson, who was then editing Lady Gregory's Journals, 'boiling down about 500,000 words to about 100,000'. He had a question for O'Casey concerning one of the early rejected plays, and commented in a very Lennox-ish way on how Lady Gregory thought of them both: ' You come out of it with flying colours, my colours are not so good.'141 On the domestic front things were peaceful. Sean the family man continued by day to do his share of household chores and by night to read and write. He took seriously the education of his three children and devoted a lot of his time to talking to them (encouraged always to use first-name terms for himself and Eileen), stimulating discussion at the kitchen table, and reading classic novels to them at bed-time. Around this time he crossed swords with the headmaster at Dartington Hall, William B. Curry. Originally from Philadelphia, Curry was a physicist with a keen interest in progressive education, particularly the childcentred ideas of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell (two of whose children attended Dartington). Curry was author of The School and a Changing Civilisation (1934), in which he argued that wars are directly related to the kind of education boys receive. His own philosophy was liberal, minimising rules and

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outlawing corporal punishment. 'Add co-education and an agnostic attitude to religion, and that was Dartington as he conceived it.'142 These were all attitudes both Sean and Eileen favoured (for in spite of Eileen's Catholicism the children were free to decide religious matters for themselves). But if Curry believed education was 'for peace' he needed to brace himself for an encounter with O'Casey. On this occasion, March/April 1944, Shivaun (now in her fifth year) having been rebuked at school was loth to return; to O'Casey, carrying memories of his own disastrous schooldays, this was ominous. Rebuked for intervening he denied the charge of parental bias: 'As a Communist, I am in favour of preferential treatment to all in all schools - that is the adapting of educational methods to each child according to its needs.'143 He referred Curry to the ideas on education of Patrick Pearse, who viewed the ruthlessness of the British system as a 'murder machine'. Not many headmasters are favoured with lectures of this kind; it was no more in O'Casey's nature to favour Curry than to curry favour. Yet the subject was vital to O'Casey: he loved children and would fight to the death for their welfare. Writing to Desmond MacCarthy not long after this he said something altogether characteristic: 'We're still in Devon - our three children go to day-school here, & where one's treasures are, there shall his house be also.'144 His son Breon considers Dartington a great success: 'all three of us had a great time there.'145 O'Casey, no doubt, continued to keep the teaching staff aware of his vigilance, though Eileen diplomatically kept the peace. When the Dublin writer Peter Sheridan taught at Dartington decades later and enquired - as he is an admirer - about O'Casey he found he was regarded as 'the parent from hell'.146 With the build-up of troops in Plymouth preparatory to D-Day O'Casey began to have occasional visits from Americans interested in his work, journalist Thomas Quinn Curtiss, for example, and academic David Greene from New York University. The latter had first met O'Casey at the end of 1934 in Harvard. Both were to visit him often as firm friends. Thus began the steady, enduring practice of visiting Americans, some of whom were to do television interviews, some to take photographs, and some to write books. O'Casey responded very well in spite of his love of privacy. He liked Americans and found their openness stimulating for all the family. (His one major regret here was that George Jean Nathan never made it to England to see him.) Military activity in the area was intense. In contrast to the notion conveyed by the film Saving Private Ryan in its splendid opening sequence, the American troops were well prepared for what they found on the Normandy beaches, having trained for the landings in the area south of Dartmouth since December 1943. To that end, a huge area was evacuated, causing a good deal of social upheaval. The contribution South Devon made to D-Day was thus considerable, and it is surprising that O'Casey nowhere refers to it, or to the hardship occasioned by the evacuations.147 Be that as it may, there were air-raids in the Totnes area from April through May. For many weeks before D-Day, O'Casey wrote to MacCarthy, 'one went to sleep with the house rumbling as the tanks went by' to Plymouth.148 O'Casey

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was trying to finish the third volume of his autobiography, Drums Under the Windows (dealing with the period 1906 to 1916), and the current 'drumming' of warfare in the vicinity sowed the seed of a new play about the war. As was usual with him, some past moment of crisis served to stand for the present national mood. Thus he went back to the Battle of Britain to fuel the belligerence of 1944, when the idea was also growing of post-war socialism. In short, the so-called 'people's war' was once again a theme with distinct possibilities. Over a year earlier O'Casey was turning over in his mind the force of change in British life. He thought of the Londonderrys, at whose Anglo-Irish demesne he had holidayed before his trip to New York. They knew then that change was coming. Twenty years ago, the life of the young in the big houses was changing. They no longer lingered within the smell of the lavender. The Lavender Lady was dead.'149 For the play forming in his mind he would use a Cornish legend in which death in an aristocratic family was heralded by the pervasive smell of lavender throughout the house. So O'Casey created Hatherleigh Hall, somewhere in Devon,150 overseen by a gracious lady destined to lose husband and son in the war, while her great house was surrendered to the war effort as munitions factory. Half Dorothy Elmhirst from Dartington Hall and half Lady Gregory from Coole Park, O'Casey's presiding genius loci would provide a symbol of the old world yielding to the new. The final title settled on for the play was to be Oak Leaves and Lavender, yoking together images of traditional English bravery and Celtic superstition. At first entitled Roll Out the Barrel until his two young sons 'laughed the idea to scorn',151 the new play came quickly. By mid-November O'Casey was writing to Daniel Macmillan asking about possible publication. By then, Bronson Albery - already committed to producing Red Roses for Me- had expressed an interest in the new play. At this time the title was A Warald on Wallpaper, O'Casey's double joke, where 'warald' was meant to syncopate 'world war' and to echo Yeats's phrase when rejecting the Tassie, 'the whole history of the world must be reduced to wallpaper in front of which the characters must pose and speak.'152 Thus this war play was to be a riposte to Yeats and his condemnation of a literature of war. The point is no doubt obscure. O'Casey was persuaded to demote the title to subtitle, where it is even less meaningful. Ironically, the war delayed both publication and production until the point of the play as a whole was obscured.

As the war drew to a close O'Casey began to do better financially. In 1944 his income totalled £950 and in 1945 it increased to £1,400, while in 1946 it shot up to £3,770. The success of the autobiographies, both in America and England, was the main cause of this sudden prosperity. When Drums Under the Windows was published in October 1945 the London edition of 8,300 copies was almost four times what the editions of the first two volumes each was. Moreover, these volumes soon were reprinted for book clubs on both sides of the Atlantic. Drums was not banned in Ireland. Things were definitely looking up.

280 SednO'Casey Moreover, the reviews of Drums were excellent, praising 'the tragedy and the farce of an unfulfilled nation as seen by a man who was himself in process of fulfillment'.153 To the New Statesman, 'O'Casey shares with Joyce the verbal intensity of the myopic.'154 Indeed, 1945 was a bit of an annus mirabilis for O'Casey. Nathan wrote from New York on receipt of the typescript of Oak Leaves and Lavender that it was 'far and away [. . .] the best play on war I have encountered in years', a view O'Casey quickly passed on to Macmillan for the dust jacket. In August the Old Vic decided to stage Purple Dust in Liverpool, Ria Mooney of the Abbey directing. In October the Plough was revived at the Abbey and ran for another six weeks. In the middle of all this the war came to an end in a manner O'Casey, always rooting for the Red Army, could approve, and he could say: 'Well, Hitler is caput. Fascism is destroyed everywhere, save at home by our ain fireside.'155 The only blow was George Orwell's review of Drums which irked because it went to the heart of O'Casey's precarious identity as Irish writer in England. What O'Casey, and everyone else, did not know at this time was that Orwell was working for MI6 and in that capacity regarded O'Casey as indeed procommunist but 'very stupid' and therefore harmless.156 Influenced also by his disdain for Irish neutrality during the war Orwell was offended by O'Casey's living in England and writing about England's so-called injuries to Ireland. At the same time, by admitting those injuries Orwell found himself frustrated at being complicit. 'So literary judgement is perverted by political sympathy [over the 1916 executions], and Mr. O'Casey and others like him are able to remain almost immune from criticism. It seems time to revise our attitude.'157 The menace in the tail of Orwell's review infuriated O'Casey, to whom of course, Orwell was but an apostate from the communist faith. (Animal Farm was published in 1945.) O'Casey's reply was denied publication by the Observer and he had to wait until 1954 and the publication of 'Rebel Orwell' in the final volume of his autobiography for his revenge. But he got it there and no mistake. It is rather a pity, however, that Orwell was by then dead for four years from tuberculosis. He might have been surprised at the venom of the counterattack, and to hear himself described as - like a figure out of Thomas Mann a diseased artist wishing the world to die with him. 'When he saw, when he felt, that the world wouldn't die with him, he turned the world's people into beasts [in Animal Farm]] Orwell's book of beasts' (A, 2, 542). Thus O'Casey's war with himself and his surroundings was destined to survive 1945. But the actual war left its toll, in spite of the joy shared at its successful conclusion. 'Eileen and I are feeling a little tired after it all.'158 But they roused themselves just the same to join in the VE Day celebrations in Totnes. Sean described the scene in a moving piece written for a local magazine: Band and banner heralded Victory Day, and at night, from the Market, began the torchlight procession, a great gathering of the Devon Clans, and a truly moving sight as it wended its sparkling way down the hill of the town to the level issues of a green field. In this array of light, our little girl of six

O'Casey's Good War 281

carried a torch, innocently honouring the gallant dead who had died that she might live and sleep unharmed, and grow confidently into a fuller knowledge of life, with all her other thousand sisters and brothers of Devon's red soil, and tor and sea and moorland.159 He and his family had settled well in Devon. The work had gone well, in the sense that in spite of the war he had written virtually non-stop. As Breon O'Casey was to put it: Totnes was a success in that he liked the people & the town. [. . .] Yes, war or no war, I think it was a wise choice. I think as an artist, he was beyond, or above, London, & like Cezanne, say, could now work best alone.'160 Time, of course, would tell.

14 OAK LEAVES AND LAVENDER

'

ow we had to make an entirely different life,' wrote Eileen in her biography of Sean, 'strange indeed to most people after the dayby-day turmoil of the war.' Like many, she missed the 'comradeship' of war-time: perhaps it reminded her of the theatre and the transitory closeness of playing in a production. The excitement was over. Though many of us still had this terrific urge to go on doing something constructive for the country, it had to die in us: a sad answer to the phrase, "When the war is over", that had often seemed so magical. We had gone back to concentrating on our homes. The former friendly "Good-morning" became just a polite and stilted greeting.'1 After the exultation came the let-down. Eileen felt it more than Sean, who had the capacity to endure monotonous routine: indeed, routine was essential to him and his study remained his citadel.2 He kept on with the work the same as ever. Yet Eileen found ways to adjust to post-war depression. Mobility became possible once again. In 1946 she bought a Ford 8 and drove the children here and there, to the seaside or on holidays to Cornwall and even, at times, to Stratford upon Avon for a week or more. Sean would usually accompany the family on holidays but when in Stratford he never went to the theatre with them. Indeed, he told Nathan in March 1947 that he had been in neither church nor theatre 'for many, many years'.3 Partly because of his eye problems he preferred to read than to see Shakespeare, but there was a bias there also. He enjoyed Eileen's outings to Salisbury Plain to visit Stonehenge and the cathedral but there were times he stayed miserable at home, missing her as he always did when they were separated. To be without her is to be without everything,' he noted; nothing, not even the time and privacy for his thoughts among his books, compensated for her loss.4 Though she found the nights in Totnes long when Sean was shut up in his room (now upstairs, next to Shivaun's) she found the strength to go on, in her mid-forties, in the old way. Shivaun would remember the tap-tap of Sean's hesitant typewriter deep into the night. If she woke she would come in, as the door between their rooms was left open and Sean never resented the intrusion any more than he

N

Oak Leaves and Lavender 283 minded a daytime visit ('would you like a piece of fudge?' was his usual welcoming invitation). The typewriter tapping was the laborious production of a new, fourth volume of the autobiographies, more laborious than ever since O'Casey's left eye was almost blind and the right was giving him pain. Yet he toiled on nightly at The Clock Strikes Twelve, eventually to be titled Inishfalkn, Fare Thee Well, among the best of the whole sequence, where O'Casey confronted the years from 1917 to 1926, the formative period not only of the Abbey playwright but also of the Irish Free State. Amidst all the significant episodes, the death of his mother, the first visit to Coole Park, the awfulness of the civil war, the debut years at the Abbey and the riots over the Plough, there is a curious chapter on Maire Keating, the 'Girl I Left Behind Me'. Did he know she had married a policeman, one Matthew McGuinness, in Dublin in January 1944? She was now principal at the same school where O'Casey used to wait for her every afternoon, St Laurence O'Toole's in Seville Place. Born in 1891 in Drumgowna in County Louth, Sergeant McGuinness had only one more year's service in the Garda Siochdna before retiring in May 1945. One of her ex-pupils remembers the 'beautiful blue chiffon dress' Maire wore on her wedding day.5 But why had she married this man? A friend of Maire's has testified that she was very upset by her portrait as Sheila Moorneen in Red Roses for Me, after she saw the premiere in Dublin in March 1943.6 After all, he was 'the love of her life'.7 Can it be that in 1945 Maire, shocked at Red Roses and not knowing what other portrait might be on its way, decided then to accept the protection of a father figure, a policeman like James Keating? If so, she was sadly disappointed. Poor McGuinness was fanatically religious and ended his days (in September 1951) in the care of St John of God's Hospital in Stillorgan. Maire only later discovered that he had willed their house to the catholic church. She could live there for her lifetime but it was not hers to sell. She may have been attracted to McGuinness on religious grounds, for she was a Child of Mary and after the war volunteered to assist invalids on diocesan pilgrimages to Lourdes.8 All of this information throws new light on the chapter on Maire in Inishfalkn, where she is called Nora Creena. The portrait is reminiscent of Shaw's Nora O'Reilly in John Bull's Other Island, 'a figure commonplace enough to Irish eyes' but 'an invalid without the excuse of disease, an incarnation of everything in Ireland that drove [Larry Doyle] out of it'.9 As he rewrote his own history O'Casey also saw Maire as a timid, down-trodden daughter of forbidding parents. Further, her religion 'chained her fast to where she wished to stay' and the catholic church 'had moulded the expanding universe into a doll's house for her' (A, 2, 191-92). He could scoff now at her attempt to tame the artist and place him in chains. In a passage cut from the manuscript draft he has Maire issue an ultimatum in biblical terms: 'If thou dost not do the work thou hast to do ere the cock crow, or the clock chime next, then will I cast thee out of my life (spue).'10 Here Maire becomes the savage God demanding fanatical commitment. Yet it was

284 Sean O'Casey

she he saw as 'lukewarm' in her personal commitment. The 'spue' added here echoes the biblical passage, 'So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth' (Revelation 3:16). Thus O'Casey, playing God, transfers to Maire the God-like absolutism which he then proceeds to reject as a modern rationalist. Here he suddenly goes off on a tangent, quoting from and debunking FJ. Sheed's Theology and Sanity, an orthodox piece of catholic Thomism, before saluting instead the protestant Lecky's Rise of Rationalism in Europe. These six pages seem like digression but they serve to put Maire in her place. He can now give her the coup de grace as the type of Irish womanhood destructive to the Life Force. As if continuing the portrait in Red Roses for Me he now awards Maire, 'Not the red rose with its agitating thorn, for her swan-white breast, but a black cross, nestling chill and steady there' (A, 2, 198). Thus Maire is exorcised as the frigid ('chill') religious type symptomatic of repression in Ireland.11 Refashioned, the love of his early life could now be given a role in the drama of Ireland's post-war 'age of innocence', to be vehemently opposed at every opportunity by the free-thinking O'Casey.12 Catholicism was to be the key to O'Casey's critique of Irish society. 'She [the Roman Catholic Church] is the biggest and most unscrupulous enemy confronting Communism, and, to me, the biggest enemy confronting all human freedom.'13 His work in the post-war years was to reflect this view from various angles.

Now that the war was over, the prospects for production of O'Casey's new plays improved. Bronson Albery, who managed the Criterion in London, was at last ready to go with both Red Roses for Me and Oak Leaves and Lavender. His wife, Una Gwynn Albery, who was Irish, liked O'Casey's work and backed it.14 Albery went to Dublin in August to decide on a director for Red Roses, fled from the Abbey, and among the freelances chose Ria Mooney over Shelah Richards. The London venue was one of the little theatres then becoming fashionable, the Embassy at Swiss Cottage. Seating six hundred and eighty it was a good size for an O'Casey play and it was supported by the newly founded Arts Council at a time when the West End was dominated by musicals, murder mysteries and revues, and the theatre industry, monopolised by business interests, was in a 'state of approaching chaos'.15 A subsidised theatre was the great new hope. Harold Macmillan, now back with the firm after the general election of 1945, sent his kind wishes for the success of Red Roses. Acknowledging, O'Casey complained of his health, especially his eyes, and seemed first to draw a line between himself and Macmillan - 'I didn't come out of the wars of long ago scot-free' - and then to erase it by seeing them as sharing certain feelings. The core of our hearts are, I think, very close together. It's a pity we're behind opposite barricades, but there's a closer understanding, I think, today between men of good-will than there was even before the bitter war that has swept us off our feet.'16 Just at this time there was growing opposition to the USSR (Churchill made his Iron Curtain speech on 5 March 1946) which O'Casey

Oak Leaves and Lavender 285 met with characteristic abandon. He took to wearing the badge of the Red Star with hammer and sickle publicly in To tries.17 Yet he could soften his heart towards 'Mr Harold' and feel no discomfort. Ria Mooney did her best to make cuts in Red Roses, which is at times overwritten but is essentially poetic in the elaborated style O'Casey favoured more and more. Defensive of his work as ever, he was not happy with her suggestions: 'If you want to produce the play,' he stormed, 'get out of your head all that nonsense of conventional production; and take the play as it is, without trying to force it into some little traditional mold that I have smashed long ago.'18 She made the journey down to Totnes and they worked things out. He was usually amenable once he met a person face-to-face. Though he did not go up to London for the rehearsals Eileen oversaw the last few and stayed for the opening. The players found her presence a great help. In spite of a snowstorm, opening night on 26 February 1946 was a triumph, and Albery was proud that the production beat all records to date at the Embassy. lied Roses was acclaimed by the London critics. There was a genuine glow to the reviews as if through a general desire to appreciate what O'Casey was trying to do in the later plays, to gain 'complete control of the difficult blend of realism with symbolism, prose with poetry'.19 The Times praised the dialogue for its 'superb Elizabethan energy, using the language of the English Bible', while in the News Chronicle Alan Dent stressed the Irishness: 'Not since Synge have we heard such floods of rapturous words.' The word 'masterpiece' cropped up with regularity, but for Lionel Hale in the Daily Mail this was because in Red Roses O'Casey had 'taken a step half-way back to the old prose - and how much a step in the right direction!' Only O'Casey's old enemy James Agate refused to be impressed. Heading his Sunday Times review (3 March) 'A Poet's Play', Agate confessed that he felt hostile and could not surrender himself to the play 'as the audience obviously did, and, according to next morning's pages, as my colleagues had obviously done'. Luckily Agate was in the minority. Others felt that if this production failed it would be a criticism of London playgoers, not of the play.20 Around St Patrick's Day O'Casey went up with Eileen to see the play, his first trip to London in seven years.21 Grudgingly, he pronounced the production three-quarters good considering 'no trouble was taken with it'.22 The cast was solid, with two outstanding performances from the young Kieron O'Hanrahan as Ayamonn and Eddie Byrne as Brennan. The former, born in Skibbereen in 1925, had acted mainly in plays in Irish at the Abbey before moving to London in 1944 to play in Desert Rats; in Liverpool he had played the dashing O'Killigain in the 1945 Old Vic production of Purple Dust. Destined to be a film star under the name Kieron Moore, he was tall, dark and handsome, the ideal Ayamonn Breydon.23 Eddie Byrne (1911-1981) was a versatile Dublin comedian who had played mainly in variety in recent years as compere of 'Double or Nothing', a quiz show at the Theatre Royal. He made a huge impact as the eccentric Brennan o' the Moor. The Irish Democrat for April 1946 noted that all the London critics except Agate praised his 'superlative acting'. Indeed

286 SednO'Casey Beverly Baxter of the Evening Standard was so impressed he called on the Home Secretary to make an order forbidding Byrne to return to Ireland. Byrne subsequently had a full career in Irish theatre and film. Of the two big successes in the play O'Casey was more impressed by Byrne, who, he told Nathan, gave an 'exquisite performance [. . .] I've never seen anything like it.'24 He wrote to thank Byrne, thinking him 'evidently, an "old stager", and quite at home on the stage'. Byrne was all of thirty-five years old. As Brennan was based on an old man O'Casey had met in Totnes he saw him as not just Irish but a complex and amusing mixture of contradictory motives and feelings, a miser with a generous heart, a capitalist and a man of the people, and so on. It has always been a star turn. So, the role, he told Byrne, was 'a wide way from the Music Hall stage (said in no derogatory way; for I have always been a lover of Music Hall, & venerate the names of Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd, & the other heroes of musichall comedy), and it was fine to see how you went through the more subtle points in the part.'25 Excited by Byrne's talent, he hoped to use him again in his new play (Oak Leaves) as he had used Barry Fitzgerald twenty years earlier. Albery thought the reception good enough to warrant a transfer to the West End. He had three theatres there but none was for the present available. So, Red Roses went first to the Cambridge Arts (25 March), and then for a month to the Lyric, Hammersmith - reopened in 1945 by the so-called Company of Four26 - before opening at the New Theatre (today named after Albery) on 28 May. It presented an excellent opportunity for O'Casey to re-launch his career. He did not attend the West End opening but once again Eileen stepped in on his behalf. The play continued to do well - one reviewer now describing Red Roses as 'one of the richest and most unruly plays of this century'27 - and the production transferred to another of Albery's theatres, Wyndham's, on 24 June, where it ran until 10 August. O'Casey now conceded to Albery that Ria Mooney, 'in face of many difficulties, including my absence, [did] a good job'.28 He had been a little suspicious, saying of her that she had worked with Eva La Gallienne in New York (in the 1920s), '& knows it!'29 Similarly, he had little time for Beatrice Straight (Mrs Elmhirst's daughter), who had applied to do Red Roses in New York. As she was a student of Michael Chekhov O'Casey refused to believe she knew 'even a thing or two about the Theatre'.30 For the moment, at least, he smiled on Ria. Soon she would apply for permission to do a fresh production of Red Roses at Dublin's Gaiety, where she freelanced since leaving the Abbey in 1944. On her return to Dublin she sent him a subscription to the 7mA Press, which was to prove useful to his writing from here on.

Meanwhile the O'Casey family felt its first disruption when Breon, now aged eighteen and six feet two inches tall, was called for National Service. Sean was proud when Breon passed his medical on 20 March, describing him in a notebook as broad-shouldered, handsome and alert, 'though often moody [ . . . ] , intelligent & imaginative, knowing loveliness in colour, line, & form'. Breon, however, was upset at not having passed the Higher Education test which

Oak Leaves and Lavender 287 would have admitted him to the London School of Economics after his national service. Eileen, too, was upset, and Sean wondered why. To him, 'a few certificates won't add to his possibilities.' He consoled himself that Breon would recover his spirits quickly when he realised that an examination lost was actually a gain, 'leaving him free for the all-important tests by which, in various ways of life, he examines himself.31 Thus spoke the autodidact. In the event Breon was to find his vocation as an artist. Meantime, his departure for the Royal Artillery was rendered less painful through his first posting at Taunton in Devon, where the family could visit him at weekends. Oak Leaves and Lavender was published by Macmillan in an edition of two thousand copies on 30 April. It was dedicated to 'little Johnny Grayburn who, in his sailor suit, played football with me on a Chalfont lawn and afterwards gallantly fell in the Battle of Arnhem'. O'Casey was to refer to Lieutenant Grayburn again in his next volume of autobiography, Inishfalien, Fare Thee Well (1949), where he commends the hero awarded the VC for his gallantry in holding the Rhine bridge at the cost of his life (A, 2, 10). There is a problem with this dedication, however. Although there was a Captain [sic] Jack Grayburn who did, indeed, gain a VC for his bravery at Arnhem, he was born 30 January 1918, which made him ten years older than Breon O'Casey. He would hardly have been decked in a little sailor suit playing football on O'Casey's lawn at the age of fifteen. The Grayburn family, who celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Captain Jack's death in September 1994, were unhappy at O'Casey's dedication. It seems likely that a cousin, also John Grayburn, born in the same year as Breon (1928), was the child O'Casey remembered and confused with the dead hero.32 This was a rare lapse, as his memory was superb. In any case he would have dedicated the play to a hero: his first idea was to nominate Cuchulainn. As soon as Ria Mooney read the positive review of Oak Leaves in the Irish Press - calling it 'pre-eminently a producer's play'33 - she wrote to O'Casey for permission to direct the play at the Gaiety in Dublin. In his point-blank refusal he implied she was not suitable: 'I believe this play to be the most imaginative one I've done for years.'34 Instead he allowed her to do Red Roses in Dublin. This production opened at the Gaiety on 17 June, while the London one was in full flight. There was considerable new interest in Dublin circles not only because of the London success but also because of the impact made by Drums Under the Windows, at the end of 1945, which sold out. The critical response to Drums in Dublin was so different from the London response that it put Red Roses on trial in an ominous way. The play which had already been seen in Dublin in 1943 was now about to be revisited in the light of this latest autobiographical success. The English reviewers of Drums, like the English critics of Irish plays then and now, took the writing at its face value. Here was something different, something in various ways outrageous and yet something exciting and to a degree exotic. English reviewers did not know enough to be ironic at O'Casey's expense. In his fulsome review of Drums ]ohn Betjeman called O'Casey 'the voice of the Irish people',35 a remark that would leave Dublin critics in stitches.

288 SednO'Casey Irish reviewers of Drums - which was not banned in Ireland - saw it as their duty to teach O'Casey better manners. As a protestant, he might have 'marched with the natives' in his time but he had never become 'one of their spiritual kinsmen: for Irish nationalism has its roots too deep in Catholic soil.' Drums, indeed, was 'a book which [. . .] no Irish Catholic could read without feelings of pity and disgust'.36 MJ. McManus, an important literary figure of the day, while conceding O'Casey's power as writer nevertheless shook his head regretfully over his unrestrained mockery not only of the follies and hypocrisies of the Dublin he had known but also at things 'which the majority of his countrymen hold sacred'.37 Then there was the question of O'Casey's style, on which the Dublin reviewers looked more in sorrow than in anger. To them it was self-indulgence where to English reviewers it was vitalistic. Padraic Colum, an exile himself, was more polite than most when he remarked that it was 'very good Joyce, but we prefer to read our "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" in the original'.38 Better 'the Joyce we knew' than the O'Casey nobody wanted to know. To Dublin's arbiter elegantium O'Faolain, O'Casey was now simply writing 'bad English'. In comparison with George Moore O'Casey was revealed as 'arrogant and presumptuous [...] creative and careless alike to the point of wantonness'.39 For his part Austin Clarke recoiled in sensitive horror from the 'language of Billingsgate' ('balls' and 'arse' on the very first page) and termed O'Casey an embarrassment to 'mental progress' in Ireland. Clarke added ironically that O'Casey might himself have been one of the martyrs of Easter Week which he impugned had not Fate 'frustrated the statesman and [given] us the dramatist'.40 One could contrast this sneer with the kindly remark of John Betjeman (in the review cited): 'O'Casey was a brand plucked from the burning.' The intellectuals, accordingly, were lying in wait in Dublin for Red Roses for M^even though many of them would have seen the 1943 premiere.41 To Roger McHugh in the Bell the mixture of styles 'betrayed some inner uncertainty'.42 O'Casey was unable to integrate the naturalistic and the symbolic with that simultaneity and immediacy achieved in his first work. It was left to Gabriel Fallon to attack the play tout court and to address O'Casey's so-called anticatholicism. While continuing to work in the Civil Service, Fallon had since the mid-1930s greatly expanded his activities as drama critic. He had begun writing a regular feature for the Irish Monthly in 1936, a Jesuit periodical of some standing, and in 1938 he was appointed drama critic for the Standard] he also wrote for the Capuchin Annual. His articles were invariably thoughtful and well-researched but displayed an increasing interest in the possibility of a specifically Roman Catholic drama and theatre.43 This development was of the times: after all, T.S. Eliot was then pursuing the possibility of creating a Christian culture and used the drama to promote the idea of conversion. It was a development entirely contrary to O'Casey's ideology. People change. Friends change, too, imperceptibly, and by 1946 Gaby and Sean had little left in common. Gaby was a dramatic Sir Oracle in Dublin and on the amateur drama circuits countrywide; when he joined the new Feature Magazine in 1946 the

Oak Leaves and Lavender 289 editor could describe him as 'the best-informed and the widest-read drama critic in the land'.44 He represented a new force in Irish cultural life, urbane, well-read and at the same time passsionately catholic. Fallon began his review of Red Roses with a quotation from Valentin Iremonger's recent review (very Fallonish, this quotation business) of Oak Leaves in the Irish Times. Iremonger had expressed both sorrow and anger, 'watching genius being squandered and frittered away upon ephemeral concepts such as Mr. O'Casey has elected to promulgate'.45 Though Iremonger was but a young poet still in his twenties, Fallon chimed in: 'Even middle-age may drown an eye unused to flow on being compelled to witness the incandescence of genius doused in an overflow of its own wilfulness.' He then continued in pseudo-Yeatsian style: 'Red Roses for Me is not a good play, and no amount of second-hand cheering can make it one. [...] Here is expressionism staggering with realism, realism reeling with expressionism; a heavy tide of sentimentality bearing against both. The result is that the work never rises.' The play also lacked necessary objectivity, being dominated by O'Casey's own 'conclusions' and didactic purpose. 'The result is ersatz, phoney, froth and bubble, shadows without substance, a tree lacking roots.' One of those 'conclusions', Fallon regretted to have to say, was that Catholicism was superstitious 'hocus-pocus'; he had to remind himself of the man he once knew 'in order to assure myself that this is not a piece of coldly-calculated bigotry'. O'Casey wrote immediately to correct Fallon's sectarian interpretation of the 1913 lock-out and the play's complicity in such sectarianism. The revolutionary vision of the time was proletarian, 'held by Catholic and Protestant worker alike'. He then challenged Fallon to identify the 'coldly-calculated bigotry' he saw in Red Roses.4& This Fallon unwisely attempted to do, using his theatre column as an open letter, closing 'with every good wish and all the old affection'.47 O'Casey did not reply. The old affection was at an end.48 This was a major loss of support for O'Casey in Dublin, as Fallon could now damage him.49 His condemnation of Red Roses reinforced what such catholic authors as T.C. Murray and Brinsley Macnamara had been saying for years.50 In the face of the encouraging reviews Red Roses had received in London and of the hostile reviews already granted its Dublin premiere in 1943, it is quite clear that O'Casey was now being witch-hunted in Ireland. Yet he lost no sleep over the reception of Red Roses in Dublin. He had his own way always of dealing with such matters. When David Marcus approached him in the summer of 1946 for a one-act play for his New Irish Writing, then being inaugurated, O'Casey at first refused and then offered an article, which turned out to be a blast against the Dublin critics. The opening sentence gives the flavour: 'It touches the heart to think of the deep and lasting affection in which the critics of Dublin hold O'Casey tight, and the big, round tears they shed so sadly over his present irresponsible playwrighting.'51 It is an amusing piece, not at all in his Flying Wasp style. Addressing himself to the young dramatists of Ireland, he urged them to ignore the critics. They are no use to you. They don't know their own minds. The most of them are influenced by their

290 Sean O'Casey

jobs. Wait till a good critic appears, and then stop awhile to listen.' New Irish Writingwas an exciting venture, daring in its ambitions and aimed at a younger readership. In the foreword to the first issue the editors declared that it was in the literature was to be found evidence just then of a youthful Eire and of 'the quickened pulse'.52 O'Casey's contribution in the second number must indeed have quickened some pulses. For him it was at least a minor revenge. As 1946 marked Shaw's ninetieth birthday (on 26 July) O'Casey was asked by more than one periodical for a tribute. The only invitation he accepted was to a British-Soviet magazine Our Ally on 7 May; he posted 'A Whisper about Bernard Shaw' five days later. Whenever he wrote for publications in Moscow O'Casey always went into rhetorical top gear. Thus Shaw is celebrated as exemplary socialist, thinker, dramatist and - God bless the mark - poet. As a thinker, Shaw took his place 'among the great men of the world'. Moreover, 'we Irish, when we think, and we often do this, are just as serious and sober as the Englishman; but we never hesitate to give a serious thought the benefit and halo of a laugh.'53 The commissioning editor reported Shaw's response: 'The article is superb; and the world rights - the "first serial" should be fully exploited through the Hearst Press in the U.S.A. and Reuters elsewhere; for Sean O'Casey is not a millionaire.' He had to correct a 'blunder' about Brahms: 'Ask Sean to rewrite it accordingly. But it will save him trouble to adopt my version.'54 Thus Shaw edited even his admirers' tributes. O'Casey was also asked to review Lennox Robinson's edition of Lady Gregory's Journals for the Bell and as he worked on the review it must have fed into the next volume of autobiography, well under way, in which she memorably features. The review was headed 'A Protestant Bridget' in order to emphasise a paradox: the woman whose 'magic' was close to the people but at the same time, like O'Casey himself, subversive in matters of class and religion. His gorge rose at her neglect in modern Ireland: 'The house where she was born is gone, and the house where she lived so long is gone too. The first [Roxborough House] burned down by the Republicans, in a time of passion and mad foolishness; the second [Coole] removed, calmly and quietly, stone by stone, by the god-fearing, highly-respectable, legally-formed de Valerian Government.' There was now 'not a sign of her left anywhere in the whole of Ireland, for, from all accounts, her spirit has departed even from the Abbey Theatre'.55 (This last reference was to the new regime under Ernest Blythe as managing director, for whom artistic standards were less important than the restoration of the Irish language and maintaining financial stability.) O'Casey viewed Gregory as having done too much for others and for Ireland. 'She hadn't time even to set down her journals properly. But they are valuable, containing the brief and abstract chronicles of the time.' He looked forward to the time when they would be published in full by the state, 'as the Journals of Chekhov and Stanislavsky have been published in the U.S.S.R., for they have an importance and a meaning quite as rare and valuable as many things delivered to the nation by the Irish Texts Society'. Significantly, the state never obliged. That responsibility was taken up by publisher Colin Smythe.56

Oak Leaves and Lavender 291

In the latter half of 1946 O'Casey kept busy with his growing correspondence. He heard from novelist Francis MacManus in Dublin, who sent him books in Irish which revived his interest in the language. He joined a book club and read the new novelists writing in Irish, such as Seosamh Mac Grianna. He was now also hearing regularly from would-be writers and editors of new magazines looking for advice and for contributions; he took this correspondence seriously and nurtured the talents he encountered. A young woman living in England, Sheila O'Neill, wrote often to him about religion and communism. She was a troubled soul, a Roman Catholic with a scrupulous conscience who had foolishly taken a life-long vow of chastity. O'Casey was fascinated enough to write her pages of advice, debate and risky defence of communism, a correspondence that went on for years. Side-by-side with his correspondence (sometimes three letters a day) O'Casey kept the red flag flying in his idiosyncratic style. He wrote a piece for the Irish Democrat in which he took up a favourite theme: that workers and theorising socialists read too little imaginative literature: 'remember always that the coming of Communism is not the end but the beginning of life. It is but the power and the way of life that will enable us to live.'57 A diet of Dickens, Morris, Pushkin and Tolstoy was recommended. In August he heard from Denis Johnston for the first time in years. Denis was now with BBC radio, where he had gained a reputation as war correspondent. He wanted an interview. Eileen and the three children were about to go on holiday without Sean, from 8th to 14th September, so hospitality was not on offer. On the other hand, London was out of the question.58 Not in the least put off Johnston wrote to say he would be passing through Totnes on 7 September and, testing O'Casey's excuse, would drop in for an hour or two that morning, so long as he would not be in the way of the packing for the seaside.59 Presumably, he got what he wanted for his radio programme. Yet he and O'Casey no longer liked each other, and the interview would have been a catand-mouse affair. Johnston had a somewhat lofty air offset by a disarming smile which came and went with unsettling rapidity. One never knew if the smile did not register a sudden recognition of folly hitherto unsuspected to be filed away for future use. He saw O'Casey as somewhat ludicrously 'buried in one of the more Arty-crafty corners of Merrie England - and liking it [although] ... about as relevant as crubeens [pigs' feet] at a Dainty Tea'.60 Johnston saw himself as far more the man of the world, especially on sexual matters. O'Casey had just read Mac Liammoir's All for Hecuba and was repelled. They're all the same these shadow-souled Cissies.'61 But Johnston shocked him further by telling him MacLiammoir often tried to corrupt boys.62 On 24 July Unity Theatre in London revived The Star Turns Red. The writer Ted Willis was at this time artistic director of a professional company at Unity, an unusual and short-lived venture. It may be recalled that in 1940 a licence for the play was refused by the Lord Chamberlain on the basis that it was 'somewhat subversive'. Times had changed and with the exception of the

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word 'bugger' (twice) he now gave his consent, not without observing that 'Communist propagandists should grow up. This jejune mixture of realism and bad blank verse can appeal to none but adolescent intellectuals.'63 Adolescent or not, the Daily Wbrferwelcomed it as 'a Play for Our Time'. Sheila Lynd, daughter of Belfast essayist Robert Lynd,64 found it 'bitter' to realise that The Star was 'as relevant to the situation in the world today, after all we have been through since it was first produced in 1940, as when it was written'. She thought the production excellent, but had one pertinent reservation. 'Must the Communists, Jack and Red Jim, play their parts looking so much like the worker of the cartoons - feet apart, fists ever clenched, chins out and grinding teeth?'65 A quieter and more natural style would have been more effective. The production ran for six weeks. O'Casey was not happy that Ted Willis, with whose politics he had some difference, was in charge and awaited an opportunity to attack. Willis rang him up to ask if he and his wife might make a visit, and when O'Casey bluntly remarked that he had heard from friends that the Star production was bad Willis indignantly referred to the box-office receipts. Because he had not been paid his royalties O'Casey found this 'a little ironical'.66 He was later to refuse Unity Cock-a-DoodleDandy because of his dislike of Willis.67 As the year drew to a close O'Casey was for the first time receiving penicillin for his infected eyes. Eileen would drive him to Plymouth to see ophthalmologist Dr Cecil Tivy, a Corkman, who equipped her with oculist's 'goggles' the better to remove the in-growing eyelashes.68 Unfortunately the penicillin could do little, for even O'Casey's 'good eye' was now only at one-third strength.69 He was nevertheless working away happily on Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, though disappointed with the lack of progress in getting Oak Leaves staged. Financially the year proved a good one. O'Casey's income amounted to £3,700, two-anda-half times what 1945 brought in and over twice what the last good year had netted in 1940.70 There was one large payment from Macmillans of £l,428-6s. 2d. in 1946, which probably reflected the best-seller status of Drums Under the Windows. The O'Caseys had never, to coin a phrase, had it so good. Yet he continued to put on the poor mouth, for example allowing Sydney Bernstein to send him a cast-off suit, which he passed on to Breon.71 He also allowed Jack Carney regularly to send tobacco, newspapers and books (although these he would return). He had come to rely on Carney's generosity ever since the outbreak of the war (not least for writing paper). T got used to going without a shirt,' he told Carney in May 1945, and did not feel the extended rationing too keenly.72 Even now, Christmas 1946, O'Casey accepted tobacco and a turkey, though the turkey was so long on the road it had gone off. 'A pity', he tells Carney, 'but no fault of yours.'73 Let it not trouble him. O'Casey had been poor too long to trust the good times, confessing chronic fear of 'the big bad wolf of poverty. For forty years the wolf was beside the bare Dublin table and growled beside an empty grate, 'so I know the kind of a damned dog he is.'74

Oak Leaves and Lavender 293 Nineteen-forty-seven dawned in England with the worst snow storm in living memory. O'Casey wrote on 1 February: 'We are snow-bound here. The frost is enveloping our very souls.'75 The harsh weather augured the changes overtaking Britain. As a major fuel crisis led to food shortages and a breakdown in electricity supplies put some four million men out of work, on the international scene the cold war deepened as Russia discovered the secrets of the atomic bomb and in an atmosphere of looming violence India prepared for independence presaging the break-up of the British Empire. Things certainly were never going to be the same again. If this was to be a year of personal crisis for O'Casey it was against a background of momentous change in the world around him. News came from Dublin that Mick, Sean's eldest brother and the only surviving member of his family, had died on 11 January. He was eighty-one. Sean had kept in touch over the years, writing a brief note at Christmas and enclosing a pound for tobacco. When Sean's fortunes rose again in 1946 Mick wrote to acknowledge these; Sean responded a little grudgingly as if to discourage possible misunderstanding. 'Here's a pound for you. I haven't got much out of the play [Red Roses] yet - it is performing in small theatres. If it continues to go, I'll send you more.'76 Mick made sure to follow up, sending a photograph of himself bearded after a bout of illness which pleased Sean by the resemblance to Shaw. 'I enclose cheque for a quid.'77 Ever fond of a drink, Mick would say to his niece, To hell with Sean. We'll blow it.'78 He had been living for some time with his niece 'Babsie', Bella's daughter, at 56 Ellenfield Road, Beaumont, on the north side of the city. The death notice in the Irish Press indicated that Mick had died in St Kevin's Hospital, the old South Dublin Union, seemingly of a stroke. Babsie wrote to Sean a detailed account, quietly corrective of any false notions he might have formed: I would like to tell you that Uncle Mick was delighted to be living with me here at Beaumont and led a quiet regular life. He used to take his walk very often in fact up to a few weeks prior to his death. He was not really feeling up to the mark just before his death, but had his senses to the end. The morning before he went to Hospital he developed a haemorrage [sic] and tried to get to his feet out of bed. He managed a little bit and I helped him back and sent for the doctor. He lasted only a couple of days in hospital, and, as he had wanted, Mick was buried in the Casey plot in Mount Jerome cemetery. Babsie went on: 'I really miss him very much as he was a great help in the house and was good company for me. My daughter, Mary died the following day. She died from the attacks of Diabetes. We had two funerals from the house the same week. I have not got over the shock of [it] all just yet and will not for a long time.'79 Her brother Shaun, a sergeant in the Irish army, and his three children visited her often, Babsie added, and Shaun had helped to manage the funeral. They had ensured that Mick saw a protestant clergyman in the hospital and that a protestant

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service was carried out at Mount Jerome. Her daughter Mary, Babsie explained, had met O'Casey in the Standard Hotel, where she worked as a page, when he was last in Dublin in September 1935. Mick was unmarried and the death notice pointedly declared that he was regretted by his 'sorrowing nephews and nieces'.80 There was no mention of Sean. He could not pretend to feel grief when Babsie wrote, though he expressed much concern over Mary and sympathised deeply with Babsie on her loss: 'It doesn't matter about Mick; he was an old man, and had his day. But Mary's death is quite different.' There was no mention of his going over to Dublin; nor is it clear whether O'Casey had been notified of Mick's death by telegram. Mick having died on a Saturday, the funeral was not until Tuesday 14 January, so there was time for O'Casey to attend had he wished. Instead he helped in a practical way by urging Babsie to settle Mick's insurance policy and by giving her clear instructions how to do this. 'I will either send you on the policy money, or tell you how to get it, as soon as I settle with the Agent. In the meantime, I enclose a cheque for £2 for immediate emergency.'81 Mick was O'Casey's last direct link with Dublin. Margulies says that the two brothers had 'much in common', but this is doubtful. 'Relatives still [1960s] insist that Mick was "the real brains of the family". Neighbors and drinking companions exclaim admiringly that he had "words at will" [. . .] never at a loss for a snappy rejoinder. [...] While both men had a gift for drawing, Mick was by far the more talented artist.'82 But for all his Falstaffian qualities Mick was a wastrel, something his brother never could abide. On the other hand, sociable and gregarious where Sean was private and reclusive, Mick was loved. In the years after O'Casey left Dublin Mick 'was a familiar sight in the streets and pubs of the North Wall area: a comic little figure in a cap and muffler, with a strutting gait and a walking stick which he carried like a field marshal's baton'.83 As late as the year 2001 he was remembered in his favourite pub, Campion's, now itself a victim of Dublin's East Wall developments.84 Although in general the Beavers and the Caseys of East Wall felt somewhat aggrieved at O'Casey's depiction of family affairs in the autobiographies Mick, apparently, admired what he read. 'The other fella', as he referred to Sean enfamille, 'You have to hand it to him.' But Mick did not live to read how his brother described him 'dwindled into a wreck [. ..] a horrifying picture of a worker Dorian Gray' (A, 2, 30). Perhaps he was writing the chapter about his climactic fight with Mick in 1920 just as the news of the death reached him; perhaps it was already written and let stand; perhaps, yet again, he sat down and wrote it after Mick died. Either way, the harsh account of the 'malice-wreathed face, blasted away from all humanity' (A, 2, 32) shows no mercy. Mick stands forever condemned as a 'sprawling castaway' from life (A, 2, 36). For whatever reason, O'Casey viewed his brother as a frightening 'other', an image of what he feared he might become if he did not get away from his ambit. Even yet he could not soften the picture, almost thirty years after they parted. Something unforgiven remained: something hated that was in his bones, Irish, fatal, desperate. Tm afraid I shall never go to Ireland again,' he declared.85 There was nothing there for him now but graveyards of unresolved conflicts.

Oak Leaves and Lavender 295 On 30 January came news of another death in Dublin. O'Casey could mourn Jim Larkin as he could not mourn Mick. His first of several tributes appeared in the Irish Times on 31 January: 'the life of this man, so great, so unselfish, so apostolic, will live for ever in the hearts and minds of those who knew him, and in the minds of those who will hear of the mission to men, and of all he did to bring security and decency and honour to a class that never knew of these things until Jim Larkin came.'86 In a lengthier tribute published in the Irish Democrat he concluded: 'It is up to us to finish the work that Jim began so mightily and well; to broaden the crimson strip in the Tricolour till the whole flag is red.'87 Yet O'Casey knew well enough that in the 1930s Larkin had dissociated himself from the communist movement - for it was Larkin's refusal to take a public stand on the Spanish Civil War which drove their mutual friend Jack Carney out of the WUI, out of Dublin, and into journalism in London.88 Larkin's abandonment of communism did not bother either Carney or O'Casey. Their loyalty remained unqualified, their friendship endured all change; he was always exempt from criticism. When in London Larkin would usually contact O'Casey and would even make the trip to Totnes to see him, arriving by train at mid-day and leaving again in the evening.89 The war put a stop to such visits, but Larkin came again early in January 1946.90 Carney, for his part, went over and back to Dublin and would always see Larkin on such occasions; moreover, he kept up a correspondence with him. So Carney would have known that in 1940 Larkin received the newly appointed Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, at the WUI headquarters in Marlborough Street.91 Early in 1940 Carney wrote to ask O'Casey if he would autograph a complete edition of his works for the well-known bishop of Galway, Michael Browne: 'He is very, very friendly with Jim and Jim has been trying to educate a Government commission, over which the Bishop presides, to the value of "Shakes" O'Casey. I think the brown priest [in The Star Turns Red] would be understood by Dr. Browne.'92 If this request did not give O'Casey a horse laugh it can only be because he knew nothing of the formidable 'Cross Michael', as Browne was known in Galway circles; he hoped Jim would make Browne pay for the books himself. But he must have been surprised. After Larkin's possibly last visit in January 1946 O'Casey introduced an unusual turn of phrase in his report to Carney: 'Of course, Jim was always religious - in the good sense of the word.' There must have been a discussion on this topic. Musing further, O'Casey, who had never before ventured to criticise Larkin or comment on his personal affairs, said: 'I don't think he acted quite justly to Mrs L. After all, it must have been a tough job to have been tied to Jim. He had very little time for any home-life. I think he made a mistake in not living with her when he came back [from the USA in 1923]. But I never said so to him - that sort of thing's too private to be discussed with anyone.'93 Elizabeth Larkin had died in December 1945. Long before, Larkin had moved in with his sister Delia and her husband Patrick Colgan on Wellington Road, Ballsbridge, on the opposite side of the city from his wife and four sons.

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When Larkin was last in Totnes O'Casey had urged him to undertake an autobiography. Jack Carney was very keen on this idea, went over to Dublin to follow it up, spent a lot of time going over the early days with Jim and volunteered to type the autobiography at his dictation.94 Larkin had agreed to go over to Jack and Mina's flat in London to do this, but his time ran out.95 Having suffered a serious fall at work, Jim had refused hospital treatment until the week before he died.96 Archbishop McQuaid went to visit him in the Meath Hospital and presented him with a set of rosary beads. 'Larkin's pious death was McQuaid's most treasured conversion/97 When his remains lay in state in Thomas Ashe Hall Carney was shocked at the sight of the rosary beads twined around Jim's fingers.98 At the funeral, McQuaid told none other than Gabriel Fallon that Larkin had received the sacraments before he died.99 Carney would not have known this, but O'Casey probably suspected the worst in referring to the Archbishop as 'the slimey McQuaid'.100 Like a rewritten version of The Star Turns Red the Archbishop had out-manoeuvred Red Jim. Ten years later he was to deal with O'Casey himself. Meanwhile, Larkin was immortalised as Dublin's Prometheus in Drums Under the Windows. O'Casey was now working on the final chapters of Inishfalien, Fare Thee Well, which did not have this final title until the typescript was ready to go to Macmillans on 18 April.101 Publication in these hard times was to be much delayed (until January 1949) but methodically O'Casey sent on with the typescript a photograph for frontispiece and sketches for the design of the jacket. He had planned to end the autobiographies at this point, as if his life's search was over, but by August he had decided to go on with the narrative covering his life in England.102 This pressure on himself may well be associated with the death of Larkin, only six years older than he; the work was yet incomplete. After influenza and a bout of depression he motivated himself into doing something about IRA prisoners in England. Meantime, Eileen had a fall on the ice, early in February, which O'Casey elaborated in his correspondence until it became 'a very narrow escape', Eileen's hair and blouse were 'soaked in blood', and she had to spend a week in bed.103 This was O'Casey dramatising the ordinary again as a means of evading uncomfortable realities: Mick was dead and his life a waste, Larkin was dead and had betrayed the faith. Eileen does not mention the fall in either of her memoirs, Sean and Eileen. Was it a projection of his own fears? The matter of IRA prisoners in England had long been on O'Casey's mind. Dartmoor prison, in Princetown, lies but a few miles north-east of Totnes, past Buckfast Abbey where the monks grow their lavender for honey production. Dartmoor is bleak and the prison looks grimly surreal in what is now a national park. O'Casey called it 'the criminal Christian's cathedral, where the devil prays [. . .] A strong palisade, built by the Christians to save the white Christ from insult and themselves from bother. A place where the bigger thieves and most unnatural murder [er] s, who wear rings on their fingers and bells on their toes, never enter.'104 Not too many oak leaves to mark ambiguous patriotism here. Dartmoor reminded him of Mountjoy jail in Dublin, 'and all I felt when

Oak Leaves and Lavender 297 it grew dark and venomous before my eyes in the dead of a frosty might on which I and Archie drowned the dog'. The reference is to a childhood incident involving his brother Isaac, the Royal Canal beside Mountjoy jail and a family dog which had bitten a child.105 The association was replicated Proustlike when O'Casey stood before the walls of Dartmoor prison and heard the cries of the warders. Memory of the dog, struggling and howling in the sack, reminded him of the prisoners, 'save that the dog was soon at rest, while the convicts had to howl on silently for years, or for life'.106 In 1947 thirty-two IRA prisoners remained in English jails - mainly Dartmoor and Parkhurst - since the violent campaign of 1939. The general liberal attitude was that these should now be released, but in view of Ireland's stubborn neutrality in the war Britain was in no mood to appease Ireland's republican opinion. O'Casey corresponded with some of the prisoners in Dartmoor, encouraged their spirits, and sent them books. He also joined the campaign for their release, making his own point of view very clear: A Socialist Government should not keep these political prisoners a single second longer in jail. They were moved by idealistic principles, had nothing to gain and all to lose. It is a shocking thing that they should have been treated as criminals. I think their policy was a mistaken one; I thought so all along; but there was nothing of self-interest in it anyway. If the Labour Government have any sense, they would go with bands and banners to the prisons where these men are, open the gates for them, and ask them to join in the fight for human political and economic freedom.107 O'Casey was not well enough, he said, to speak publicly for the prisoners ('these fine fellows') but was willing to lend his name to the campaign. He attacked the Irish government for failure to act: 'Is there a single one of Eire's Government, past and present, who hasn't avowed the very principles for which these men are in jail?'108 It was to be a long campaign, made difficult by the prisoners' refusal to give an undertaking not to resort to armed force again in England.109 By April 1949 the prisoners from Dartmoor were released and O'Casey had a telegram of thanks from them.110 By this time, however, the plight of fourteen similar prisoners in Crumlin jail, Belfast, had claimed his attention. It can be said that through all of this time O'Casey was, in the words of activist 'Pope' O'Mahony, 'a tower of strength'.111 The arrangements for a production of Oak Leaves and Lavender at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, were under way in February. The main role, Feelim O'Morrigun, an Irish butler in an English big house who is both a comic blusterer and a distant relative of Morrigdn, Celtic goddess of war and death, proved hard to cast. Albery first asked FJ. McCormick, who, no friend of O'Casey's, turned it down; Eddie Byrne then refused also. O'Casey was sure this was because McCormick, back in the limelight with the film Odd Man Out, was asked first.112 Noel Purcell was the next obvious choice but O'Casey did not

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think he would leave Dublin. Albery wanted to consult Ria Mooney but O'Casey now thought her ideas on theatre too definite and too limited: 'She is one of the big crowd who take the line of least resistance. That is fatal in the realm of imagination.'113 In the end, the role went to Fred Johnson, a former Abbey actor who had just returned from New York, where he had appeared in The Playboy of the Western World with Burgess Meredith. Eddie Golden, a Cork actor who had recently played in Carroll's The White Steed in London, was cast as Feelim's son, the 'thorny' socialist Drishogue. The leading English roles went to Mary Hinton (Dame Hatherleigh), Sheila Sim (Monica Penrhyn), and Alec Ross (Edgar Hatherleigh). In the cast also, in the small role of Pobjoy (a conscientious objector), was John Whiting, destined to become a highly distinguished playwright, 'one of the leading theatrical innovators of the early fifties'.114 He was also to write the screenplay for Young Cassidy (1965), the film based on O'Casey's autobiographies. In his review of the text of Oak Leaves in the Irish Press T.C. Murray was too kind, for the play has basic faults, such as an excess of farcical episodes, an irrelevant lampoon of the ex-Stalinist Freda Utley,115 and a too abrupt tragic outcome to the romantic interest. But he was right in describing Oak Leaves as a director's play, for it is that or it is nothing. The director settled upon was Ronald Kerr, of whom little is known except that he was an actor as well as a director, and a teacher at RADA.116 Apparently a man of limited talent, it was his misfortune to have potential greatness thrust upon him with his acceptance of Oak Leaves. He made a trip down to Totnes on 18 January which augured ill for the production. O'Casey took an instant dislike to him, as he found Kerr wedded to the 'well-made play' concept of drama which he despised. O'Casey's health was poor all through the early months of 1947. He had influenza three times, leaving him with 'a whoreson cough'. Shivaun, too, fell ill with pneumonia. 'She was very bad,' O'Casey told Albery, 'but Penicillin pulled her out of danger.'117 There was not much time to worry about what Kerr may have been doing with Oak Leaves, due to open in Cambridge and move to the Lyric, with hopes of a transfer to the West End. The Alberys having once more secured Arts Council support, Oak Leaves was to be presented as an experimental piece. Given the elaborate stage directions in the text, the play was bound to be difficult to get across: the setting had to suggest the transformation of a big house into a munitions factory. There was also the gallimaufry of styles now characteristic of O'Casey. Oak Leaves, with its prelude of Yeatsian eighteenth-century dancers ('the spooks', as A.J. Leventhal dubbed them118) and its extraordinary blend of Dad's Army and the film The Land Girlsm (to jump ahead fifty years) in the play itself, together with some earnest dialogue and a tragic ending, needed somebody like Joan Littlewood to bring it all to life. For there are fine things in this play, even if it is no Henry V. In some ways O'Casey was groping towards a musical 'theatre of the people' developed at the level of opera by Alan Bush, Michael Tippett, Benjamin Britten and others at this time. After all, J.B. Priestley said of Oak Leaves, 'What we have here is not drama in the ordinary sense but a kind of verbal opera.'120

Oak Leaves and Lavender 299 But working completely on his own O'Casey did not share in any sense of such new possibilities. It had to be ominous when the Lord Chamberlain's office in granting a licence could enthuse over an O'Casey work as 'a nice blend of humour, pathos and patriotism'.121 Oak Leaves opened not in Cambridge but in Eastbourne, at the Devonshire Park Theatre, on Monday 5 May, for one week. The local newspapers reviewed the production quite politely but thought that 'in these rather sombre times one gets the feeling that perhaps the theme is a little late in the day. It is not a production which will suit everybody's palate.'122 As Eileen remembered it, Eastbourne was a disaster. She and Sean were there for the final rehearsals: 'we stayed in a large hotel where Sean never went to the dining-room but had his meals upstairs. It was cold weather; he was depressed; both of us felt hopeless.' They were convinced that the director had failed and it was too late to mend matters for London on Tuesday 13th.123 When it opened its four-week run at the Lyric Oak Leaves was, according to Eileen, 'only a ghost of Sean's work'. The reviewers were by no means polite about this. 'Mr. O'Casey's revenge on Cromwell' was Lionel Hale's verdict in the Daily Mail (14 May), which concluded: 'this critic was first confused and finally crushed.' To the Times 'the emotional intention is quite clear: it is never carried into effect.' For Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times (18 May) the play was 'a reply to Burke [. . .] an assertion that the age of chivalry still lives.' Ivor Brown in the Observer simply damned it. O'Casey himself was not impressed by opening night. 'It was just a fine dream turned into a nightmare.'124 It was worse than the premiere of Within the Gates. O'Casey returned to Totnes the next day leaving Eileen to revisit the play with Breon, now based near London. They 'felt strange and embarrassed; during the intervals, not wishing to talk to anyone, we disappeared to our several cloakrooms until the curtain rose again.'125 The cast, however, were very sympathetic. Mary Hinton, the leading actress, while believing that the press was unfair, pinpointed O'Casey's own responsibility: 'I think the real tragedy lay in your not being able to be with us during rehearsal - or perhaps even then it would have been too late. Things were radically wrong from the beginning.'126 But O'Casey blamed the director,127 now identified as a 'Cissy'.128 With breathtaking indifference O'Casey later noted Kerr's suicide: 'The fellow's gone now, making his exit by way of a gas-oven, giving in a kitchen a better production than he ever gave on a stage.'129 O'Casey's fees for 23 performances totalled £27-14s. Id., only a quarter of what the Tassie netted for a two-week revival by Ria Mooney at the Gaiety in Dublin on 26 May.130 Oak Leaves was the greatest flop of O'Casey's life. Since he and Eileen had stayed with the Carneys during the run the blow to his pride was considerable. Back in Totnes he avoided the topic in writing to thank Jack and Mina.131 Never again was he to have a new play so near and yet so far from the West End.

O'Casey was amused that a son of his should be a soldier in the British Army. But he was proud, too. 'He looks a fine figure in uniform, with his white

300 Sean O'Casey

lanyard cord, his yellow flash, and the red and blue insignia of the Royal Artillery.'132 Sean corresponded regularly with Breon, sending him family news and pocket money. He missed him, especially with Niall boarding at Dartington; 'but Shivaun is left any way, & that's something.' At the end of January 1947 he moved into Breon's room while his should be cleaned up: Tm not going to think of the aftermath, or how I'm going to get my books back to their right places.'133 Eileen said that Sean had a horror of such intrusions, 'for he was convinced that dusting spread germs,' but this may have been the occasion when he moved his room upstairs because greenery outside the window darkened the room below.134 If so, the upheaval was total. In March Breon was transferred to Woolwich, and Sean did his best to cheer him up because of the distance from home: London should be pleasant in the spring, and there would be the art galleries to go to. He never spoke down to Breon - or to any of the children - but shared his thoughts and ideas with him. Thus in a cheering letter he told him about his latest reading, William Saroyan's new book, 'much better than Human Comedy'; they would talk of it when Breon came home.135 While at Woolwich Breon did not get home often. Instead, he would spend his leave at the Carney flat at 128 Cliffords Inn, in Fleet Street. The correspondence with Breon until he was demobbed in September 1948 makes clear what a closely-built family the O'Caseys were. Breon turned to Sean immediately no matter what the problem was - usually a request for information needed for his training or books to while away the idle hours. Sean would reply voluminously at times, as when he sent five pages on the communist party in the USSR, plus the Soviet Embassy's pamphlet copy of the Constitution, for a talk Breon was about to give.136 On another occasion Breon wanted Sean to look up in Nathan's books some information on Elizabethan words still in use in the USA. Having dutifully searched Nathan to no avail, Sean provided his own dictionary of usages, linked for good measure to Irish usage (Hiberno-English).137 The mature Breon, annotating this correspondence for the Berg, spoke for his siblings in commenting: 'Please note that we had no compunction about taking the old man away from his plays to help further our own educational ends.'138 Sometimes the relationship revealed a combination of close friend and wise parent. When Breon got home on leave one time, in May 1947, just after the Oak Leaves debacle, attention was deflected from him to another visitor, John Dulanty. The father felt for the son thus sidelined. 'Pity Dulanty came on Sunday, coming between you & me and a chat; but I could hardly refuse to see the kind and clever Dulanty.' There is no hint of Dulanty's importance as Irish High Commissioner in London. Sean went on to cheer Breon up. He must not worry about the result of a test; his potential will always remain; failure is not something to be anxious over but welcomed, 'for a good life is one of consistent trying, & to try always is to fail often; though such a life usually succeeds, somehow, someway, in the end.' He himself was well acquainted with failure, and cited Oak Leaves as only the most recent. 'Indeed, I hope it won't be the last "failure", for if it should be, it would mean I'd try

Oak Leaves and Lavender 301 nothing else again. It is nothing - relatively - than the occasional failure of a match to strike. We just strike another one.'139

Following the ill-health O'Casey suffered in the spring of 1947, the family doctor George Varian sent him for x-ray. The result was evidence of scarrings of the lungs through silicosis and of some damage to the heart, or as O'Casey put it: The scars have wrenched the heart a little from its right place, so I have to go easier. Farewell to the axe & chopping of wood. Well, I have the marks of the proletariat on me anyway.'140 Once a diagnosis was made it was his practice to take courage rather than turn hypochondriac. So, towards the end of August he plunged into a new play, for which the working title was Cockadoodledoo!, and pressed Daniel Macmillan to bring out a new volume of his plays which would include Within the Gates, The Silver Tassie and The Star Turns Red. This idea was to grow into the edition of the Collected Plays in four volumes (1949-51). All of this promised a fair deal of work. In the same letter to Daniel on 29 August he indicated he would like to do a further volume of autobiography.141 In September he heard from the American film director William Wyler who wanted him to do a film script. After O'Casey refused Wyler rang him up, 'a soft, attractive American voice', and appealed for a change of mind. To get out of it, I said I wouldn't be free for a year. He replied he'd willingly wait a year, if I'd promise! I liked his voice, but I had to refuse, for I've more work of my own than I can do.'142 In general, O'Casey sided with Nathan, incensed at the film version of O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) - 'dreadful garbage' - that even at their best films were 'tenth-rate theatre'.143 O'Casey wrote Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, as the title was to become, with unusual speed in about four months. It was a play he enjoyed hugely and it became his favourite. On 10 September he told Nathan it would 'hit at the present tendency of Eire to return to primitive beliefs, & Eire's pre-occupation with Puritanism'.144 Nathan led him to believe that not only was he impatiently waiting for the script but that Eddie Dowling, fresh from his directorial success with The Iceman Cometh, was eager to read it. While O'Casey was writing the play Nathan's Theatre Book of the Year, 1946-47 arrived in which, comparing O'Neill with Shaw and O'Casey, Nathan found that O'Neill had 'plumbed depths deeper than either' and was 'greatly the superior of both in dramaturgy'.145 O'Casey now conceded that O'Neill went deeper: 'I've often envied him this gift. I've pondered his plays, & tried to discover how he came by it, &, of course, never could; for the man doesn't know himself.'146 In that acceptance lies an awareness of his later role, to be more commentator than O'Neill-like embodiment of the world's sorrow. The commentator laughs. Oak Leaves points the way forward because there comedy takes up residence in a serious setting and will not yield the stage. Recovering the mood which makes Purple Dust such a joyous farce, O'Casey made comedy his 'primary dramatic strategy'.147 As he later told Cowasjee, the Cock also marked a return to his 'first principle of phantasy'.148 But the news that O'Neill was suffering from Parkinson's disease

302 SednO'Casey and would never write again moved him more than any literary question. By the end of October he had almost finished the Cock. Tm afraid it's a kind of morality play', he told Nathan, 'with Evil & Good contending with each other; but, I think, on different lines.'149 This refers to the dialectic, the two worlds which conflict in the play, the priest-ridden world of the men and the liberated world of the women. Although the character of the Cock, a lifesize dancing figure of fertility and sexual temptation, was at first kept in the background his crowing could be heard off-stage.150 His appearance on stage, in full costume, transforms the play. He is always the unifying life force and the major opponent of the overblown Father Domineer. The latter controls the minds and hearts of the people of Nyadnaneeve ('Nest of Saints'), but the Cock represents their natural sexual impulses, a latter-day Dionysus to the puritanical Pentheus in a dog-collar: 'His face has the look of a cynical jester.'151

As the year drew to a close word reached O'Casey of the so-called 'Abbey incident'. A four-week revival of the Plough was reaching the end of its run when two Dublin writers, Valentin Iremonger and Roger McHugh, stood up in the theatre on Saturday 8 November and denounced the production and the Abbey directorate for appalling standards. Having read out this statement the two men walked out in protest.152 The incident caused a huge uproar in the press lasting into December. In a sense, the O'Casey play was but a pretext for a public debate on the decline of the Abbey. But it was an important pretext in that the Plough was accepted as a yardstick of artistic standards. Among the main reasons advanced in the press for the Abbey's decline was the recent drain of first-class performers, Cyril Cusack, Denis O'Dea, Siobhan McKenna and others, who sought more challenging work in films or alternative theatres, and the sudden death of FJ. McCormick in April.153 Moreover, Frank Dermody, a director of considerable talent who worked both in Irish and English, had left in February 1947 to join Gabriel Pascal's Irish film company.154 Another charge against the Abbey was commercialism, involving choice of plays, treatment of writers, and the state subsidy. Here the main target was Ernest Blythe,155 described by Ronnie Walsh in a private letter to McHugh: 'He is a gangsterish theatrical parasite, a maladministrator of public funds [...] directly responsible for the poor standard of shows presented recently, because he prefers a yes man producer to a competent one, and because of repeated miscasting and personal interference at rehearsals.'156 O'Casey was simply annoyed by the Abbey incident. 'The phone here was ringing hour after hour, day after day, asking me what I thought about it,' he grumbled to Frank MacManus. This intrusion was something new in the postwar era. Eileen usually answered the telephone in Tingrith', but when O'Casey was caught he 'did a girlish voice, saying [he] was the maid, & informing the inquirer that Mister O'Casey had gone to Bristol, & no-one knew when he'd be back.'157 Fallon pointedly noted in his theatre column that O'Casey's only response when asked about the 'incident' was to take refuge 'in the neutrality

Oak Leaves and Lavender 303 of "Leave it to the audience".'158 One mundane reason was that O'Casey was again getting about £150 a year in royalties from the Abbey and rightly feared their loss.159 It was ironic that having been sent packing in London over Oak Leaves O'Casey should find the Irish national theatre moribund just as he determined to write only about Irish society. For as the poet Donagh MacDonagh commented, it did not seem likely that under present conditions 'any renaissance may be expected at the Abbey in the near future'.160 Tm not a rich man,' O'Casey complained when asked at year's end to subscribe to a testimonial to honour his old friend Frank Cahill on his retirement after fifty years teaching.161 A plaque would be placed on the outside wall of the boys' school in Seville Place. O'Casey sent a guinea. Cahill had changed since the days when he was O'Casey's mentor. 'He has become more childish than ever, pious and devout. He is only aroused at the mention of Stalin, communism, or some oily Jew such as [Harold J.] Laski and a few other local ones.'162 O'Casey's poor mouth was but an excuse. To be sure, his income for 1947 was, at £1,840, but half that for the bumper year 1946, yet the days of awful poverty were over. Breon came home for Christmas, which Sean and Eileen were now at last able to enjoy. 'We would get an enormous tree,' Eileen recorded in her memoir, 'and I would go simply wild buying far too many presents for the children and putting myself in debt for another full year.' She would buy Sean a book; he would give the children money to buy her something extravagant: he never bought presents himself. He particularly loved Christmas Eve now, 'wrapping the children's parcels and doing funny little sketches on the labels'.163 'He was careful with money,' Breon has said, 'and yet he was the most generous of men.'164 A tightly-knit family, the O'Caseys were finding their way out of the post-war depression.

15 COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY

ick Madden, O'Casey's agent in New York, was to all appearances as concerned as was Nathan about the lack of productions of the new plays. There was no interest whatever in Oak Leaves, while interest in Red Roses tantalisingly remained always at a remove. O'Casey wrote to the actor Eddie Byrne in Dublin on 4 January 1948: 'A contract for "Red Roses" is about to be signed in New York. I have strongly written about you, & how you played in London. [...] Another play of mine - a new one - has some characters which could, I believe, suit you well. It was a disgrace that you should have been let go away from London. Maybe it was because you were too good. Fearful envy plays a big part in the life of mediocre acting.'1 O'Casey sent Byrne's reply on to Madden who told O'Casey on 26 January that the producer Al Tamarin, who had the licence for the play in America, was making a special effort to get a 'top director', and that the Dramatists' Guild had certified the contracts.2 Nothing came of Madden's hopes. Red Roses - the best prospect of all the later plays - was not professionally staged in New York until 1955. As for the 'new play' mentioned to Byrne, the Cock, which O'Casey may well have written with him in mind, Madden found that Eddie Dowling balked at the anti-catholic features. Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild, while admiring the Cock, also backed off in fear of a certain 'onslaught' from the catholic church.3 Nathan as Madden's adjunct asked O'Casey: 'What do you wish me to do next with the script? I'd like to let Billy Rose read it, though I fear that the Catholic note will frighten him, even though he is to the synagogue born. The theatre here seems to tread gingerly in the Holy Roman direction.'4 Remembering the Boston fate of Within the Gates in 1935, O'Casey knew well what Nathan meant but was doubtless surprised that the 'direction' was now also pointing towards Broadway. Things were changing in the USA. As the cold war intensified the influence of the catholic church grew. In California the legislature anticipated Joe McCarthy by establishing a fact-finding Committee on Un-American activities which denounced O'Casey's plays. The Cock was particularly vulnerable. Throughout, the stranglehold of the catholic church on men's consciences is broadly, farcically mocked, while

D

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy 305 women are brazenly represented as demonised occasions of sin. The priest, suitably named Father Domineer, terrorises his flock and in one scene performs an exorcism against the Cock and his influence (bad books in particular), a parody of a scene in the Abbey hit The Righteous Are Bold (1946) which O'Casey called 'pietistic hokum'.5 The other malicious touches in the Cock include the brutish priest's striking a rebellious worker dead, a bonfire of books (including Ulysses), and the journey to Lourdes of a young girl whose return uncured provides the occasion for complaint against this 'Coney Island of misery, agony, and woe': T've come back, without even a gloamin' thought of hope.'6 So far as the USA was concerned, intent on the sentimentalities of The Song of Bernadette, The Bells ofSt Mary's, or Going My Way, O'Casey's Cock-aDoodle Dandy - in spite of its Americanised title - was just now null and void. Macmillans, indeed, refused to publish it in New York. To be sure, O'Neill had won the Pulitzer Prize for The Iceman Cometh in 1947, but not without his blasting American society in an interview: 'instead of being the most successful country in the world, [America] was its greatest failure.'7 His young colleague Arthur Miller, whose All My Sons premiered during the same season as the Iceman, was destined to take over O'Neill's role as denouncer of moral and social corruption. Miller was soon to see O'Casey's Cock-a-Doodle Dandy as a litmus test. Miller probably got interested in the Cock as a play which exposed a theocratic community driven to hysteria by puritanical leadership. But he had not yet written The Crucible (1953) when there was an abortive attempt to stage the Cock in New York. This incident in 1950 fuelled his feelings of anxiety when the American Legion threatened to picket the theatre. Consequently, the chief backer, who had recently converted to Catholicism, 'after reading the script, [...] decided it was anti-Catholic and withdrew her money'. Miller thought the play anticlerical but not anti-catholic and suspected that O'Casey's communism was the real problem. 'He sounded like no other Communist I had ever heard of, and I rather suspected he was putting on the conservatives.' So Miller suggested to the board of the Dramatists' Guild that the playwrights should mount a counter-picket line in support of the Cock and the freedom of the theatre. 'An embarrassed shock went round the table,' and Arthur Schwarz, producer and composer of numerous hit musicals, angrily warned the meeting that 'if one penny of Guild money was spent to defend a Communist' he would split the organisation. The motion died on the spot. The production never materialised. Miller reflected: T now had no reason to doubt that should the Legion decide to picket my next play to death, I could look for no meaningful defense from my fellow playwrights, for these were the most powerful names in the theatre and they were either scared or bewildered about how to act. Such were the times.'8 These times were to endure through the 1950s. They allowed O'Casey little comfort except the production of his farcical one-act plays and, of course, his lucrative autobiographies. The ignoring of the Cock in America is all the more surprising when one recalls its dystopian theme: American literature is

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enduringly preoccupied with versions of pastoral and of paradise lost. O'Casey's play, while it has Irish roots and features, deals with a 'malignant sickness' at the heart of modern society.9 In his Irish take on Paradise Lost, so to speak, O'Casey was unequivocally of the devil's party, and in the 1950s this was not the side to be on.

Early in 1948 Breon began to form the idea of becoming a painter. On 10 February Mina Carney wrote with information on the London art schools: both the Slade and Chelsea were already full for the October term. The AngloFrench, the Heatherley and Byam Shaw's were other possibilities. Mina could recommend the Anglo-French, although it might lack discipline. On the other hand, the Slade offered scholarships and she did not despair of entrance there. She would contact Professor Borenius of the Slade, editor of the Burlington Art Magazine and a close friend of Oskar Kokoshka, whom Mina had known for some time. If Breon would send his portfolio she would have Kokoshka go through it and make 'final selections' for the Slade application. She further suggested that Breon get Augustus John as well as Kokoshka to act as referees.10 Having no children themselves the Carneys had encouraged Breon's interest in art from the outset and sent him art books when he was a child.11 But now was not a good time for Jack, as he had just lost his job with the Sydney Daily Mirror, following a dispute with editor Eric Baume. O'Casey was alarmed. 'That's definitely bad news about your resignation. I hope you haven't acted too quick. You have a hasty streak in you, you know.' The pot calls the kettle black. 'I flung [a job] to hell once - after near knocking the foreman silly -, & felt proud as Lucifer after doing the good deed; but I often looked back on it all, to come to the conclusion I was a god-damned fool.'12 Carney had, however, made up his mind and remained out of a job for over a year. Yet he and Mina found time for Breon, who applied for and got a scholarship to the Anglo-French School. As before, O'Casey kept up a regular, cheery correspondence with Breon. He consoled him as any Shropshire lad when Breon chafed at the postponement of demobilisation until September: 'You're only on the threshold of life, & have a lot of time to spare. Twenty at the end of this month is but a step and a half into life: you still have time to take thousands.' He added that he had just started the fifth volume of the autobiographies, Rose and Crown, although the page proofs of the fourth had not yet arrived, and managed to point the moral: 'so, you see, I have to stick postponements too.'13 A little later, while Breon was stationed at Barby Camp, near Rugby, and so rather isolated, O'Casey sent him reproductions of pictures by John Nash with an article from the Saturday Post. T can't understand Herbert Read. He seems to see fine things in every picture.' To Sean's eye, Nash seemed cold. Here, Breon's critical abilities were being encouraged. He hoped Breon could get home soon: 'I'm feeling damned lonely here.' But he had 'old Gregory' the gardener to talk to,

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy 307 busy with hedge-cutting or the like, 'letting the daylight in y'ere!'14 This must be the man who had fought, like O'Casey's brother Tom, in the Boer War and still had the red chocolate box presented by Queen Victoria. 'He & I sometimes have lunch together.'15 A letter from Augustus John was opportune for Breon's future. It was in response to O'Casey's letter to the Manchester Guardian about the Hugh Lane controversy which had rekindled after the publication of Lady Gregory's Journals.16 John approved of O'Casey's stance on the Lane pictures, that their retention was 'no less than legal theft [...] from the whole people of Ireland'.17 Acknowledging, O'Casey referred to Breon: 'I enclose a photo - a big fellow, like yourself. He is bent on being a painter,' starting at the Anglo-French School in September. T've never encouraged him, but he must take his own way; &, of course, I'll help him any way I can.'18 But, as he told Nathan, Thank God, he didn't choose the role of dramatist.'19 For his part, Breon appreciated Sean's 'instinctive understanding' of painting, 'a difficult friend for a shy man'. To Breon, though Sean did not have the knowledge of music that either Shaw or Joyce had, 'he knew more about painting than the two of them put together.'20 Having been transferred to Stoneleight Park Camp, near Coventry, Breon went to ground for a time - perhaps he was busy preparing a portfolio - and O'Casey wrote in some anxiety, 'You haven't rung us up for quite a time.' Breon was on the switchboard and could avail of the service. 'Every time the phone tinkled after Six o'Clock', O'Casey told him, 'we have said "That's Breon", & have galloped down, only to be disappointed. We are afraid you might be ill, though we say you are probably on manoeuvres. If you can, give us a ring to let us know how you are.' He went on to say he had been busy with the page proofs of Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, but not busy enough to prevent the worry. He had not, however, heard from Augustus John again: 'another year or so, before he bursts his bonds to write a note.'21 Breon obviously rang soon afterwards. Expected home at the end of July he should find all well, 'bar that bloody crock, Sean, who has a very stiff neck, so that when the head turns East, West, North, or South, the whole man has to turn with it.'22 Perhaps it was the dreaded proof-reading. He returned the page proofs of Inishfallen to Lovat Dickson at Macmillan on 21 July. Around this time Breon went to visit Augustus John at his home in Fryern Court, near Fordingbridge, finding him old and very deaf (he was two years older than Sean). 'It was rather like visiting Rubens ... I noticed various goats and people dotted about in the sun. I noticed too, as we stepped into his surprisingly small and cluttered studio at the end of the garden, that he came alive, his rambling memory returned and he moved about the canvases with the agility of youth.'23 Already, Breon had his father's eye for detail. But the army was not ready to let him go until the second week of September. Early in that month O'Casey heard from Harold Macmillan about arrangements for printing Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. These related to the New York refusal to have the usual American edition. The Macmillan Company (NY) had nevertheless offered to purchase copies of the English edition to be sold in the

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USA. O'Casey expressed relief, adding as once before that if Mr Harold ever made a 'pilgrimage' to Totnes Eileen and himself would be glad to put him up and share whatever they had with him.24 A little later he sent on a rave preview by Nathan of the unpublished Cock which recommended it in rather contorted syntax as 'one of the finest plays of its kind to have come hopefully to the attention of the modern theatre'.25 O'Casey suggested the three paragraphs as the blurb for the jacket, and most of it was so used. But Nathan's odd use of 'hopefully' was nothing if not ominous. O'Casey decided to dedicate the Cock to James Stephens, 'the jesting poet with a radiant star in's coxcomb'. He may have seen the story 'A Rhinoceros, Some Ladies, and a Horse', published in the first issue of Irish Writing in 1946, and from its drollery decided that a dedication was appropriate. He would surely have known The Crock of Gold (1912), the work of the jesting poet' par excellence, though he never mentioned it. It was Stephens who had introduced him to Macmillans and O'Casey never forgot a favour or an injury. Also, Stephens 'never, like the great little man he was, pretended to be what he wasn't; indeed, Stephens's weakness was [...] that he never fully realised the grace and grandeur of the delightful and dignified gifts he possessed' (A, 2, 163). The two writers had last met in New York, during the run of Within the Gates, when Stephens was on a lecture tour to the US.26 Soon after, in 1937, Stephens lost his only son James Naoise following an accident. O'Casey was aware of the 'bad effect' the death had on Stephens27 and to it attributed Stephens's inability to write. In this surmise he was right.28 The Cock dedication was meant to encourage Stephens 'to start again. It didnt work. Perhaps, he was too financially sound. I was surprised to find that he died leaving more than 9000 behind him.'29 In the Daily Worker in 1948 O'Casey made a strong attack on the catholic church. For a man interested in having his anti-clerical play staged this was hardly wise. But when fellow-communist Douglas Arnold Hyde defected to Catholicism in March O'Casey felt obliged to speak out. A native of Bristol, Hyde was originally a methodist lay preacher who turned to communism in the 1930s and joined the Daily Worker in January 1940. He was a typical convert to the cause in that all through the war, while that paper was officially banned, he worked unstintingly underground for an information/propaganda agency and never wavered in his dedication to the Stalinist line. The catholic church was officially seen as pro-fascist and Hyde's role was to blacken it and the fascists with the one flexible brush. The ban being lifted, Hyde rose to be news editor of the Daily Worker. At this time he would have seen eye-to-eye with O'Casey, who was a member of the editorial board. But after the war Hyde began to change, a reversion, perhaps, to Dr Jekyll respectability. Like many others Hyde slowly became disillusioned with the Marxist dream. If Orwell offers the best example of such apostates Hyde represents a humbler, more commonplace instance. He could no longer deal patiently with shifting policies towards Czechoslovakia and other Soviet-dominated countries. The putsch in February 1948 proved the last straw: what he was expected to write in the Daily

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy 309 Worker was cynical in the extreme.30 He resigned. But in doing so he unwisely told editor Bill Rust that he was converting to Catholicism. Although Hyde had deeply personal reasons for this move it suited Rust to stamp him as a Vatican agent who had been actively proselytising in the office. The intellectuals, O'Casey, Harry McShane and Professor J.B.S. Haldane, moved into the attack. Actually, O'Casey had written his piece spontaneously, before Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the Communist Party, asked him to respond to Hyde's articles. In any public debate O'Casey personalised an issue and showed no quarter to his victim. 'His name is Douglas Hyde, and he is now a sergeant-minor in the Vatican Army.' The purpose was to show Hyde as self-deceiver and fool, one who knew little about the real nature and purposes of the church he had adopted, which O'Casey scoured history to illustrate.31 Together with McShane's 'Can Catholics Work for Socialism?' and Haldane's 'A Girl With No Nervous System', O'Casey's article was reprinted as a pamphlet, The Pope, the People, and Politics, to expose 'some of the propaganda and policies behind the anti-Communist campaign of the Catholic Church'.32 As O'Casey saw it, the fight against what he termed the 'Vatican Church' must be undertaken 'by anyone seeking freedom of thought and expression'.33 When Hyde tried to reply O'Casey gave him both barrels in an article of some 5,000 words, too long for the Daily Worker to publish. Here he dipped again into a favourite text, The Reminiscences of a Maynooth Professor (1925), by rebel priest Walter McDonald, 'a man beside whom Hyde is but a bewildered, blundering pigmy'.34 Hyde's withers remained unwrung. T knew how Sean is often brought in to spin fine-sounding phrases when the Party leaders have no solid facts to support a campaign.'35 He now saw the typical communist as one for whom: there are no spiritual values, no moral or ethical considerations. No human compassion influences his Marxist judgment, neither love nor pity nor patriotism has any room in his make-up, nor has truth nor honour, except within his immediate circle of comrades. Conscience has become something which prompts him to lie, to deceive, to betray. Communism has become an end in itself and that end will always justify the means.36 It is a description which ill fits O'Casey, the soul of 'honour'. But it does expose his folly in imagining that, even though not a member of the CP, he could sup with its members and not be counted as one. The artist and the polemicist were at odds: 'O'Casey, himself divided, always divides.'37 Hyde's articles, gathered into pamphlets published by the Catholic Truth Society, were certain to attract attention in Dublin, and O'Casey's piece in the countervailing pamphlet was likewise reviewed. In the Jesuit 7mA Monthly O'Casey was accused of seeing the rulers of the church as a caste determined to preserve the status quo, 'not because it is morally sound but because it enables them to hold on to the wealth and influence they have acquired by pandering to the ruling classes in every country and throughout the ages'.38 As author of plays and autobiographies O'Casey was thus well chronicled. Also, in

310 Sean O}'Casey a two-part series under the title 'Communism in Britain', the Irish Monthly advanced Douglas Hyde as hero. What his example showed was that 'there is no political answer to Communism and that only Catholics have got an answer'. This point, the Jesuit emphasised, had already been underlined by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical.39 The battle lines were well and truly being drawn for the time when O'Casey should dare ply his trade again in Dublin. The church under the archbishop was already digging in for a prolonged siege against alien influences. 'In every sphere Dr McQuaid saw the need for a Catholic infrastructure. In 1948 he launched the Irish Catholic Book week. The web was well nigh complete.'40 It was a web which was, in time, to ensnare O'Casey himself.

Nevertheless, as 1949 opened O'Casey could look forward to an active year. Both Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well and Cock-a-Doodle Dandy would be published and the Cock would have its premiere. Macmillan would issue the first two volumes of Collected Plays. His reputation, in spite of his controversial views, stood as high as it ever did or was likely to. Visitors to Totnes were on the increase. O'Casey counted between twenty-five and thirty visitors from the USA in 1949.41 Among the American visitors that summer was a young New York director named Alan Schneider. After some time with the Actors' Studio Schneider was undecided about his future and gladly accepted an offer from the Arts department at Dartington Hall to teach for six months. He was impressed by the locale: 'Dartington was exquisite, beautifully set in a curve of the gently meandering Dart River, a series of fourteenth-century Gothic buildings nestled together among Devon's lush green hills and dales. If ever there was a ShangriLa west of the Himalayas, this was it.'42 These months in England, Schneider said, were to shape his theatrical tastes and thinking. From Totnes he would travel to Exeter to see the Young Vic perform As You Like It and venture into the midlands and over to London to see the latest productions. At Dartington he was expected to mount a production and he chose William Saroyan's My Heart's in the Highlands (1939), casting staff members and local farmers but not, apparently, pupils. The audience was disappointing. 'Very few people came from Totnes, and no one from Exeter some twenty miles away. The Elmhirsts' dream of civilized urban comforts in a rural community simply did not apply to the theater.'43 O'Casey would have entirely agreed. Having first written, Schneider sought out O'Casey in Totnes and met a 'short, slight figure, wearing dark baggy pants, turtleneck, faded tweed jacket, and a workman's cap, sitting cross-legged on a stone wall'. When Schneider asked if he knew where Sean O'Casey lived the figure 'pointed silently to the house behind him'. This was one of O'Casey's practical jokes; he sometimes posed as the gardener at Tingrith'. But he and Eileen made the stranger welcome. Schneider met the three children, and returned often on Sunday mornings for breakfast, bringing American 'goodies' with him: his mother's weekly shipment of rations. The house was always full of warmth and

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy 311 welcome, in contrast to the cool correctness at the top of the hill' at Dartington. In his conversations with O'Casey the young director gathered that for him the Elmhirsts 'simply did not exist'; his plans were all for a return to the London stage. Schneider saw O'Casey as 'an early victim' of Dartington. Perhaps that was how O'Casey talked. O'Casey had been 'extolled and regaled by Mrs. Elmhirst. He was obviously the logical choice for playwright-in-residence honors. Promises were made, hopes aroused. His work, unaccepted in London's theaters, was going to find its home in Dartington.' But then 'Sean's openly left-wingish social philosophy did not entirely accord with the Dartington Establishment. No sooner had he been set up on his pedestal than he fell out of favor with the Elmhirsts.' As if paraphrasing O'Casey Schneider concludes: 'When he left, by his lights both abandoned and betrayed, he swore never to set foot on Dartington's acres again. Mrs. Elmhirst never acknowledged his nearby presence.'44 As an account of O'Casey's relationship with the Elmhirsts this is shockingly distorted. What is remarkable is that O'Casey should have spoken in this way to a total stranger resident at Dartington. After all, he had not scrupled to ask Dorothy Elmhirst to sign Breon's application form for a grant to attend art school in 1948.45 Moreover, as recently as April 1949 O'Casey was in friendly correspondence with Leonard Elmhirst over India, Indonesia and independence. The two men differed politically, Leonard being a Labour supporter and a dedicated follower of Tagore's ideas on land reform, yet O'Casey could always advance his own anti-colonialism without offence, e.g. 'The Indonesians will fight on with tooth & nail', given heart by the successes of the Chinese People. 'The European domination of Asia has ended. It will end in Africa next.'46 Either Schneider failed to understand O'Casey's position or else O'Casey was reshaping past history to show himself aggrieved. Either way he drew no benefit. Schneider was not professionally attracted to O'Casey's work and went on instead to make his reputation with Beckett. Before the reviews of Inishfalien started to appear in January 1949, Padraic Colum annoyed O'Casey with an assessment of the three preceding autobiographical volumes. Colum was the gentlest of men but an astute critic. His understanding of what O'Casey was doing in the autobiographies is in marked contrast to the impatience of most contemporary Irish critics. He saw the memoirs as a 'counterpart' to George Moore's Hail and Farewell.*1 Where Moore's descriptions were pictorial and two-dimensional O'Casey's were sculptural, three-dimensional, dynamic: a telling distinction, since the prevailing effect of O'Casey's autobiographies is of an epic peopled by vividly drawn characters. Colum also likened O'Casey to the tenth-century Irish satirist Anier Mac Conglinne, who dared to defy ecclesiastical authority. But if O'Casey was 'the Mac Conglinne of our day' he was also guilty of 'wilfulness' (a charge O'Faolain had also made) and too inclined to malign those for whom he had little respect, notably Arthur Griffith. In reply, O'Casey insisted he had adhered to 'facts' and Colum must retract.48 Of course, Colum did no such thing. It was as if in O'Casey's view his texts were inspired in the biblical sense and therefore true.

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Of Inishfallen other Irish reviewers were less kindly than Colum. One blatantly put forward the notion that because Dublin was Roman Catholic and O'Casey was not he had to direct his spleen not only against Dublin but against Dublin's [one, true] church.49 But to Fallon O'Casey was now a would-be Joyce, a 'deracinated man' who actually loved Dublin 'in the puritan marrow of his bones'.50 To another reviewer O'Casey would yet reap the whirlwind: 'The attack on the Roman Catholic Church and its clergy is one that will injure O'Casey in Ireland; and it is deliberately written to give offence.'51 O'Casey was a somewhat ridiculous exile, 'where there are many Red Flags but no Red Hats', living 'surrounded by ghosts'.52 Another criticised O'Casey's view of himself as 'a sort of Admirable Crichton - sage in counsel, a born leader of men, a dramatist of genius', a view almost totally unfounded since 'he was made a dramatist by the ruthless pains of Yeats and Lady Gregory, who sent his plays back until he was sick of the sight of them.'53 So, he was a fraud. Further, he had run into the artistic dilemma whereby he could not 'dramatise himself effectively as a dramatist' and so the creative faculty had taken its own revenge.54 Only the tolerant Seumas O'Sullivan could sympathetically remark: 'at least his is the testimony of one who has been seared by his youthful experiences.'55 Louis MacNeice, in his review of Inishfalkn for the New Statesman, referred to 'the well-known malice of the Dublin intelligentsia'.56 Where then was O'Casey's readership? The English reviewers found all the Irish history too complex to understand and so skipped on to other matters - style, mostly only to find that there was little to summarise or discuss: O'Casey's 'passionate moral outrage' tended to clog up the sense.57 Rather outrageously, the Spectator saw O'Casey's arrival in London in 1926 as a kind of happy ending: 'in London he was destined to win the appreciation that his genius as a playwright merits.'58 Nothing could be further from a just assessment. It was because O'Casey failed to create a rapport with London critics and London taste that his art remained passionately at odds with convention. The reviewer in the TLS tried to depoliticise O'Casey. He cited a passage from Inishfallen where Sean, absorbed in a scene between a man and a woman in a pub, was reluctant to leave when his friends made a move to attend James Stephens's weekly soiree. The passage reads: 'He longed to stay where he was, watching common life unfolding on the bench opposite; smoky life, catching the breath with a cough at times, but lit with the red flare of reckless vigour' (A, 2, 175). 'There was his material,' pronounced the TLS.59 It may be so. Common life always got his vote. One sees that even in so weak a play as Oak Leaves. Yet in the autobiographies, one might add, duty always calls Sean to gather himself up and be about his father's business. Inishfallen stands or falls by its evocation of national types, idioms and manners, for O'Casey's Irishness was of the kind which would not leave him alone. For all his loathing of the landscape - 'a waste land lit up by holy candles'60 - Ireland was his subject-matter and theme. Yet Irish critics resented his vision; it was of secondary interest to the English critics. He was caught in an artistic bind. A 'refusal to compromise', to cite MacNeice's review, was at once his 'strength and his weakness'.

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy 313 It is more difficult to characterise the American response. The only O'Casey which cold-war America wanted to know was the one Americans could patronise as poor Irish boy who made good: the Frank McCourt syndrome before Angela's Ashes burst on the scene as if O'Casey had never been. In his review of Inishfalien in the New York Times Brooks Atkinson declared: 'the lack of interest in the O'Casey series is remarkable.' He must have meant critical interest, for sales were by no means disgraceful. Atkinson's view was that O'Casey 'ha[d] not forgiven the world for the misery and starvation of the life in the slums which destroyed most of his brothers and sisters and constantly harried his mother'. At which view the Dublin critics would possibly have sighed disbelievingly and MacNeice have breathed: 'sentimentality'. Atkinson was on surer ground when he said that O'Casey the rebel only imagined he was a communist. As a journalist who had served in Moscow and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in 1947 Atkinson was entitled to say that 'life there has little of the convivial companionship' O'Casey advanced as ideal. 'Mr O'Casey is a romantic at heart. There is no physical refuge anywhere for people like him.'61 He would not, in short, be welcome in the USA, where the FBI now held a file on him.62 Atkinson sent his review to O'Casey with a letter in which he spoke more frankly. As a critic he understood well that the theological disputes and protestations in favour of Russian communism in Inishf alien-were 'out of key': 'Ideas are important, but they rate below human beings as a subject for art, for they derive from human beings. [...] I really don't give a damn whether you are a communist or not; and, in fact, I am fatuous enough to regard your communism as a romantic folly.' To Atkinson, 'Russian communism and Roman Catholicism seem to be virtually identical, and I'm opposed to both of them. They stifle my sense of spiritual freedom in just the same way.'63 To which O'Casey replied: 'My one complaint against the Creator is that He hasn't given me a mind ample enough to understand most things; that He lets me know so little.'64 Here we have the pugnacious atheist calling upon a capitalised deity in saintly humility. All we can infer, perhaps, is that Atkinson was able to synthesise the responses of Irish and English critics while insisting that a flaw in O'Casey's autobiographies now lay in its coercive mode. O'Casey had to tell people what to think.

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy is a play about sex, marriage, temptation, and male fantasies brought to life on stage. If it has a plot it is that a mysterious cock invades a small town and plays havoc with the inhabitants while a priest does his utmost to drive him out. After the women are maltreated as occasions of sin they leave with the cock in contempt. The text was published on 8 April 1949 in an edition of two thousand copies. It was a sober-looking book for such a lively play, a plain grey jacket carrying blue lettering with no imagery whatever, with plain blue boards beneath. Inside the jacket was a sizeable quotation from Nathan's review (of the script) in the New York Journal-American. There was no other blurb. Nathan's comments, in part, read:

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The theme here is the rightful joy of life and the proper dismissal from all consideration of those who would fetter it. Employing a gay mixture of symbolism and wild humour, some of it as rich in laughs as anything I've read in a long time, O'Casey filters through his natural cynicism as lively and amusing a slice of fantastic drama as one can imagine. The embodiment of his central idea in the figure of a rooster, his two boozy counterparts of the memorable Fluther and Joxer, his fancy in such scenes as those in which the fairest and most delicate of his females suddenly sprouts devil's horns [...] combine to provide the kind of evening we too seldom are privileged to enjoy in the theatre of today. The final lines imply a production Nathan had seen, which was fantasy in his own style. He was never to see a production, for he was dead before the Cock reached New York in 1958. His resume may be accepted as fair, though 'rooster' is not quite right, given the folkloric qualities embedded in the word O'Casey had chosen, thinking first of Yeats's 'Red bird of March'.65 The black cock of March traditionally kept away demons, whereas in the play he is ignorantly taken to be himself demonic in the manner of Dionysus in The Bacchae. Nathan's general description helps to open up the international dimension to a play otherwise in danger of being understood solely as too narrowly focused on Irish society. As Heinz Kosok has rightly emphasised, 'only if an interpretation can show that the play, in contrast to the mass of Irish drama of the forties and fifties, is relevant beyond Ireland, can it make a case for its being among the most significant works of this century.'66 It might be noted that the Cock not only has echoes of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel^ and Fokine's Le Coq d'or in which Tatiana Riabouschinska starred in the Ballet Russe but also glances at the award-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). It even had hints for The Witches ofEastwick in its stage musical version (Drury Lane, 2000). For all that, the TLS was probably right in indicating that with the Cock O'Casey had returned to Ireland in spirit and had 'found again the magic well'.68 Unity Theatre, both in Glasgow and in London, had to be refused permission to stage the Cock because of the so-called American option on the play. Then Joan Littlewood, whose Theatre Workshop was based in Manchester at this time but toured from that base, took an interest. Littlewood later claimed that O'Casey at first agreed to let her have the play and then changed his mind.69 What she meant is that O'Casey told her, as he told just about everybody else who applied for the rights to the Cock, that the play was under option in America and that this included English rights, and then he allowed the People's Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne to give the world premiere. This is true. The incident is worth a little elaboration because it illustrates how O'Casey made the kind of choices which isolated him in the English theatre. O'Casey had a soft spot for the People's, which had already premiered Purple Dust and Red Roses for Me in 1943, besides staging the three Dublin plays. Although it was an amateur outfit its standards were high. When asked to contribute a piece on the state of contemporary theatre to the new in-house

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy 315 magazine Phoenix in spring 1947 O'Casey could only express awe at the amount of work People's had already done and praise the new expansions undertaken into art exhibitions, concerts and a film society. His non-article was published anyway even if the gist of it was: 'You may have something yet to learn about the theatre, but I have nothing to teach you.'70 Then in May or June 1949 the director Peter Trower wrote to ask for the Cock. By this time O'Casey had become protective of the play, which was rapidly becoming his own favourite. If Trower's ideas seemed good to him, 'then I shall probably let you have the play; but this shall be no sign that other Rep. Theatres can have it.'71 By 28 June O'Casey was confident Trower had passed the test, could handle the 'mechanicals', the whiskey bottle that turns red-hot, the horns that suddenly stand up on Loreleen's head, and so on: 'Your method with bulbs and rubber tubing seems complicated, and might irritate the actress; but I'm sure you'll solve these things.' Some of the tricks might even be left out (a surprising concession). 'Dont trouble to try to shake the house [for the exorcism scene]. That can be left out. It might be dangerous. No, no; dont cover the Cock with feathers. A Black costume, yellow boots to come above anckles [sic]; these can be done by ordinary light boots painted yellow, with the upper parts of yellow cloth. A hood of black with a pointed beak yellow, not covering the face of the actor, with the crimson crest attached. This crest to be always erect.' He repeated: no feathers or even papier mache, 'just the well-fitting costume with - as they say about a woman's clothes - accessories.' But the acting was the main challenge: 'all the rest is but an aid; and if some of it be too difficult, abandon it.'72 On 9 July he suddenly remembered the censor. 'I'd forgotten about this blaguard. You'll have to send the play to him to be licensed.' The licence came in due course, the reader betraying how ill-equipped the Lord Chamberlain's office was to read experimental drama: 'I do not pretend to be able to understand this play. My guess is that it is a complicated satire on the failure of the Church in Ireland which has slipped into superstition in the hands of women.'73 At least, no cuts were demanded. One month later O'Casey heard from Joan Littlewood. She and Gerry Raffles had just read the Cock and were very excited. 'For myself, I have not felt so delighted with a play for many years and would be honoured if you would allow us to produce it.'74 (See illustration 31.) Raffles wrote in similar vein, enclosing press cuttings for reference. On the prepaid telegraph form O'Casey said, 'Very sorry can't give play. Negotiating for American and British production.' He carefully copied his reply on the verso of Littlewood's letter. Littlewood's company, founded a few years earlier in Kendal, visited People's and made a big impression. A note in the programme proclaimed: 'Our admiration for this group of brilliant experimentalists and our sympathy with their aims made us proud to have promoted this, their first [sic] visit to the North East.'75 Trower obviously told Littlewood that he was about to direct the Cock. She wrote again to O'Casey asking him to reconsider. Here she made a strong pitch:

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Theatre Workshop is now acknowledged to be the only group theatre in Europe which has an international standard. On the other hand, the present West End theatre cannot compete with the standards of post-war Poland, Germany, or France. The play [Cock] is written for a company with a style which can encompass poetry and movement; we are the only people in England who have evolved such a method.76 She would not usually write a second time, 'but we were deeply moved by your play.' She asked if it was essential that only 'London people' should produce it. 'Can its value and appeal be lessened by having two quite separate treatments running concurrently?' O'Casey did not like to be challenged in this way. 'Evidently, you know next to nothing about the methods of theatrical contracting in the U.S.A.' It was sixteen years since he had had 'a chance' in New York, and he was not about to jeopardise it now. There are five of us not counting Mrs O'C's mother - to keep, and a tough job it has been to do it.' Then a sudden dart to another matter: 'I notice you dont mention the satirical humour of the play. This humour is the banner of the play; the movement and poetry but the tassels and the fringe.'77 Ten days later he wrote in a rage to Trower at the news that the Library Theatre (Manchester) was apparently mounting a production of the Cock: he associated Littlewood with this venture and insisted she had no permission. Trower was to warn Theatre Workshop that O'Casey intended to prevent the production.78 From all this it appears Littlewood had intended to go ahead anyway, perhaps on the basis that the play was now in the public domain. O'Casey's anger at Theatre Workshop was to endure for his lifetime. There never was a 'change of mind' on his part over the Cock. It seems a great pity because his work might well have benefited from a Theatre Workshop production at this crucial time in his career. But he feared becoming captive to such a group. Cock-a-Doodle Dandy opened at People's on 10 December and ran until the 19th. A message from O'Casey, who did not attend, appeared in the programme, praising the theatre and wishing it well in face of 'the lizard-like sprawl of the Cinema'. An unsigned note on the play annoyed O'Casey as 'all wrong'. 'I never warn anyone "not to take me too seriously." Christ knows I can't be more serious, though I may wrap it in a laugh. The play isn't a "phantasmagoria", but largely actual. The killing of a man by the priest for reasons given in the play is actual; & only a year or so ago, it happened; & it cannot be denied.' He listed a number of other incidents in the play which were based on events before concluding: 'My play simply makes fun of this dangerous, ignorant, codology.'79 O'Casey had told none of this to Trower in advance, which was perhaps unfortunate as it affects the balance in the play between fantasy and realism. The only hint he gave which might help with the ironic style needed was the postscript when sending on his programme note: 'No-one has asked about the odd name given to the place of action - Nyadnanave. It is Irish for "The Nest of the Saints". Naomh in Irish meaning a saint, is pronounced like the Eng. word knave.'80 Yet such a hint would need a lot of

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy 317 teasing out in rehearsal before it might begin to influence the design and mood. In the event, the production was enjoyed but there were some protests. The reviews were positive, especially about the acting. Trower's production never faltered in pace and never put 'a foot wrong in movement', while the stage management, 'which is full of the trickiest kind of pitfalls', was pronounced 'flawless'.81 A more knowing commentary on these matters came from the Phoenix. Adopting the tone of an adjudicator at a drama festival, the reviewer commented: Lighting was imaginative and the magical effects good: it was not the fault of the back-room boys that they did not all create quite the sensation they should have done. The business with the red-hot whisky-bottle was particularly ingenious [an electric bulb inserted, controlled from the wings by bellpush wiring]. On the debit side were the flag in perpetual motion whilst a group of sunflowers a few paces away maintained a deathly stillness throughout. It must have been the Cock. We were also shewn a pair of collapsable chairs that could never have been identified as anything else: even the hinges grinned at you. Noises off were authentic though not sufficiently sustained in places where this would have helped the atmosphere a lot. In general, make-up and costuming were good (the People's has a remarkable wardrobe), and the design for the Cock's outfit was most impressive.82 The local newspaper, in a short notice, said that the cast, 'after a limping first act, swung into the spirit of the play with a speed that matched the many flashes of racy Irish humour'. Those who played the comic duo, Marathraun and Sailor Mahan, stole the show.83 Further afield, the Stage faulted Trower for being 'too painstaking' over special effects. But the reviewer still found the production 'always alive and intriguing'.84 The Cock, for all that it is knockabout farce, is a provocative play. In Newcastle it caused some offence for what was seen as scandalous maligning of the catholic church, its beliefs and ministers. Seamus Kelly, over from Dublin for the Irish Times, sensed anger and pity directed at O'Casey himself for 'a blindly and bitterly destructive blast against an Ireland that never existed outside the imagination of a lonely and homesick man in Devonshire'. O'Casey sent off a stiff letter to the Irish Times alerting Kelly to the 'facts' underpinning the play's anti-clericalism and demonic material;85 he had written a thirty-page article on these 'facts'.86 People's was rather pleased at this whiff of controversy and the editor of Phoenix "wrote to O'Casey for more fuel.87 Before this publication came out O'Casey wrote to Trower denouncing statements made by the local bishop on the schools question as 'a pack of lies', and enclosing a booklet proving that the Rome 'authorities' were 'a bunch of liars and cheats'.88 He wanted the play to open up debate. When Phoenix was published it contained the editor's foreword reporting 'a volume of protest such as even the People's seldom receives', followed by three letters and O'Casey's own blast. The letters were well-written and well-

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informed. One made the point that as O'Casey was not and never had been a catholic he was not qualified 'to preach upon the Catholic Philosophy, which he manifestly does not understand. [...] Father Domineer is not typical of Catholic Clergy and it is not a commendable thing to perpetuate the myth that Catholics are priest-ridden.' Another letter, also by a woman, a teacher, opened her attack by drawing on a recent article by Sean O'Faolain in The Month (July 1949) to argue that the mixture of styles O'Casey used 'destroys the illusion and reduces the play to propaganda'. This letter, however, was a second attempt. The author had written a far better, unpublished one in white heat over a month earlier on 16 December, in which she declared, 'A Fantasy should not break into realism, a great dramatist should not stoop to bitter invective and falsehood, and the "People's" should not break their unwritten law of "no Religion, No Polities'". She also said that there was trouble in the theatre when the catholic members 'faithful for many years' were 'wantonly insulted'.89 This is the only suggestion of a disturbance during the production at Newcastle. The other letter, clearly from a loyal supporter of People's, praised the production and rubbished O'Casey. The portrait of Fr Domineer was 'born not of ignorance but of venom. It takes us back two hundred years.' As voices, literally, of the people, these expressions of dissatisfaction are quite impressive. They show clearly that it was not just Dublin which was getting at O'Casey but any well-informed bourgeois audience with a dash of Roman Catholics in its membership. There was, surely, something here for O'Casey to ponder. Failing to grasp the opportunity he went into personal attack as the best method of defence, adding in deadly detail his well-rehearsed proofs of the folly and hypocrisy of the catholic church. This was a mistake. It was to concede that in some measure the Cock is a tract. Let stand for what it might be in production, a naughty, somewhat surrealistic satirical farce, the Cock needs neither epilogue nor excuse. As Theseus puts it to Bottom, 'No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse.'90

A couple of years earlier, reviewing the text of Oak Leaves and Lavender, J.B. Priestley had argued that O'Casey was 'lost in England' and should 'open the trap he sprang on himself by returning to 'his old method'.91 But whatever else should befall O'Casey was like Caesar constant as the northern star. He felt in his bones he was right to continue with experimentalism although the theatrical times were not propitious. Richard Findlater was one of the more enlightened commentators at this time who would seem to say that O'Casey was right. Findlater said that the drama of the 1940s was 'one of a steady movement away from the fetters of stage naturalism, and of a cautious experiment in style, speech and form'.92 The poetic drama, Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1949) and Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning (1950), pointed in the new direction the 'post-Shavian drama' was to take. Why then was O'Casey outside the loop? Perhaps Findlater's word 'cautious' gives a clue. O'Casey despised caution; managements could not afford to do so.

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy 319 But there was more to it than that. 'Socialism has failed to create a dramatic literature,' Findlater continued (p. 126), whereas Eliot, the personification of caution, was busy creating a Christian counterpart in the theatre. Eliot's credentials, conservative, Church of England, royalist, were just what the doctor ordered for the ailing English theatre. O'Casey, in contrast, was 'writing for a working class audience that does not exist, for a people's theatre that lives only in his mind, and moreoever he is blowing his trumpet outside a Jericho whose walls have long collapsed'(p. 182). Written in 1951 this comment was somewhat premature, for it was not until 1959 that Harold Macmillan would say to the people, 'You've never had it so good.' Yet the contrast Findlater made carries the ring of truth: 'Just as Mr Eliot addresses an audience of infidels and non-believers, Mr. O'Casey addresses, in fact, an audience of reactionaries: but Mr Eliot, unlike Mr O'Casey, realises the nature of the audience and takes steps to meet it halfway' (p. 183). As Findlater saw it, for O'Casey the game was already up. If he was right then the pathos of O'Casey's fifteen remaining years of life and work is simply overwhelming. In Ireland in mid-century he had respect but not support. The admiration of the young writers was inhibited by dismay. The poet Robert Greacen, for example, could say of the Cock: 'One regrets that O'Casey insists on flogging certain horses that in this mid-century of ours are dead or dying, even in rural Ireland.'93 Only Austin Clarke, who shared some of O'Casey's skills in fantasy and satire, could see a future for the Cock at the Abbey. It would need months of rehearsal, he said, but 'this Irish comedy might be a lesson to our younger dramatists,' for O'Casey's 'rapid technique is as brilliant as that of Saroyan and other up-to-date playwrights'. To be sure, the play would cause trouble. There might be a few unholy scuffles in the pit, but the risk would be worth taking.'94 But who would take that risk? Not Ernest Blythe. The choice facing O'Casey was thus between Findlater's 'unholy trade' in the English commercial theatre and Clarke's 'unholy scuffles' at the moribund Abbey. That matter was put beyond choice when the Abbey burned down in July 1951. There were, in the meantime, consolations. The young Arnold Wesker was one of England's post-war writers destined to challenge Findlater's thesis that socialism in the theatre was dead. Tn 1949 I was one of Stalin's younger idiots rearing to join the thousands converging on Paris and hold hands with my huge-hearted brothers and sisters from the world over.' To fund the trip he wrote to O'Casey who sent him a cheque for ten shillings, 'all I can afford', and the cheery valediction, 'All the best to you cock.'95 A little later, when Wesker was working in a bookshop the owner allowed him to choose his Christmas present from the bookshelves. He chose two volumes of O'Casey's plays, presumably the Collected published by Macmillans in November. A little bit of the history of English drama was created by this choice, for Wesker's trilogy, especially Chicken Soup with Barley (1960) clearly shows the imprint of O'Casey. In New York no less a figure than Clifford Odets, another disciple one might say, reviewed Collected Plays. Odets's great work of the 1930s, especially Awake

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and Sing! and Paradise Lost, staged by the Group Theatre, reveal the influence of Juno and the Pay cock, which Odets regarded in 1926 as the best play he had seen yet.96 In his review Odets pitted volume 1 (early O'Casey) against volume 2 (later O'Casey). Instead of taking the line habitually taken by Irish critics who set up this contrast with a lament, 'what a falling-off was there!', Odets saw two different sensibilities at work, each with its own power. He did not presume to judge O'Casey's later work even if he preferred the early plays but concluded: 'O'Casey's way has never been an easy or pretty one; what he seems today he may not seem tomorrow, for, like all creative talents, he is constantly "becoming".'97 In the US also Nathan kept up O'Casey's hopes for a production of the Cock. Mike Todd was considering it and Nathan had suggested Harpo Marx as the Cock.98 It hardly matters that in 1955 Nathan was still making the same suggestion - this time to director Bobby Lewis. It was a wonderful idea never to be fulfilled. In January 1950, however, Margo Jones staged the play in her Theatre-in-the-Round in Dallas. To O'Casey's dismay Nathan vetoed a New York transfer, saying he had 'grave doubts about her abilities, and her notion of the Cock seems to me all wrong.'99 Since Nathan advised Dick Madden the result was a foregone conclusion: no New York production. It was as if Nathan knew, instinctively, that much as he admired the play it needed Irish accents and a director who fully understood O'Casey's style. Again, it was probably a good thing that it was Austin Clarke who reviewed the Collected Plays in the TLS. His review of the two volumes was positive, though Clarke did not trouble to look into the revisions O'Casey had introduced, especially in volume 2 (containing The Silver Tassie, Within the Gates and The Star Turns Red). His main point was that O'Casey had 'never really departed from the literary aims of the Irish dramatic movement', with its emphasis on poetic drama. Riskily, but anonymously, he could also say that O'Casey the literary dramatist had never escaped, even in volume 2, 'from the disintegrating tradition of Synge', as well as 'the amusing but tyrannical volubility of Dublin tenement life'. Here 'disintegrating' and 'tyrannical' hit the target, one invisible to the English critic Findlater. While it is clear Clarke did not think much of the plays in volume 2 he did say that in his attempt to 'fashion a new Poetry of the People' O'Casey's honourable failure ranked with that of Walt Whitman and William Morris.100 It was not bad company to be in.

On the domestic front, Breon was doing well at art school and had sent home one painting his father particularly liked, 'Races at Newtown Abbot', adjudged 'a fine attempt [...] colourful & showing the spurt of speed'.101 But Breon's intention to leave the Carneys and move into a flat filled O'Casey with trepidation. He could not get out of his head the awful trouble he had had over the flat in Overstrand Mansions, Chelsea, in the late 1930s. In the same letter cited, 21 June, he warns Breon as any parent might a student son adrift like Laertes among city sharks:

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy 321 About this flat you mentioned, it were best for you to go very warily. Be sure to bear these things in mind, & have the questions answered satisfactorily, before you think of doing anything. 1. Is the flat to be furnished or unfurnished? You could hardly get a furnished one for £1.10.0 weekly, even plus a "premium" of £200; unless the lease lasted only for a year, or at longest, two years. Then of course the £200 would be added to the rent. 2. If the flat be unfurnished, then how about the furniture? To furnish it for yourself might cost another £50. 3. Above all, don't sign any document. 4. Supposing you [were] lent the £50. The flat was got, then it became known that the lease did not allow any sub-letting, where would you be? 5. I strongly advise you to go to T. Cannon Brookes (or his son, Victor) Norfolk House, Norfolk Strand, W.C.2. [who had handled SOC's Overstrand Mansions case] He is an old friend of mine, & would be eager to advise. He is an Irishman from Kildare & Dublin. 6. I suggest Mr. Curtis [presumably Breon's roommate] should go to him, too, & show him the lease before signing; for there often is in these leases lurking points, overlooked, which bring many difficulties later on, as I know to my own cost. Clearly Sean and Eileen were staking Breon to the tune of fifty pounds, a lot to them both, he emphasised, '& if anything went amiss with the scheme, it would be a great worry to all of us, after all the care we took.' The flat was in a house in St John's Wood bombed in the war and so offering reduced rent. Neither Sean nor Breon mentions that this was the area where Breon was born. In spite of Sean's anxieties Breon went ahead and took the flat with a friend at two pounds a week. It was off Abbey Road. As it had no bath (and but an outside toilet) the two lads would journey once a week to the public baths at Bryanston Square, which struck them as most luxurious.102 They stayed in the flat for about three years, supported, inevitably, from home, whither Breon made frequent replenishing visits. In short, he was developing independence in the normal way. His being settled and happy in the art world was a great boon to Sean and Eileen. Finally, though he was saddened to learn on 26 October of the death of Delia Larkin, who 'certainly did more for the workers than was ever done by the "Countess"' [Markievicz], O'Casey was not disheartened. All 'the old links with the gallant days of yesterday' may be going: 'we can but look forward to gallant days in the future. They are here now in China; but I fear are far from Eireann still. But one never knows.'103 Indeed. The Cock might crow in Dublin and pigs might fly.

16 THE ROAD TO TORQUAY

lready by September 1949 O'Casey had begun Rose and Crown, the fifth volume of the autobiographies, set in England. Was the theme to be 'England Made Me?' Chapter titles such as 'London Apprentice' and 'Feathering his Nest' imply integration into a community which claimed him as its own. Such did not eventually happen, or if it happened on the private, domestic level suggested for instance by the cosy chapter title 'A Friar by the Fireside', it did not happen on the social or intellectual levels, for which the chapter title 'A Gate Clangs Shut' seems appropriate. The more O'Casey wrote about his life in England the less it clarified about himself, his development, his relationship with the world around him. Instead, he inhabited mainly a world of the mind, well barricaded against emotional trauma, a bunker lined with books, pamphlets and assorted newspaper clippings which constituted the ideas flung about like sneezing powder in the faces of any and all who differed with him. The writing of the plays came from the same bunker. He was happy there. He could shape a mood or a response to a topical event into fantasy and sell it on as quasi-documentary. Here he was constantly running into the same problem. It was a question of searching for the mode which allowed, even sanctioned, contradiction. It is clear enough that O'Casey wanted the later plays to provide social critique under the guise of farce and/or fantasy. This is nothing unusual; comedy habitually supplies a dynamic contrast 'between a frivolous manner and a grim meaning'.1 The Cock incorporates such diverse social matter as Ireland's post-war shift from traditional agrarian to entrepreneurial capitalism, signified by the development of the bogs for energy (undertaken in 1946 by Todd Andrews2), the cultural implications of an Abbey play such as The Righteous Are Bold, clerical domination, and Lourdes as a major confidence trick. Yet the whole thing is unified as farce and fantasy. O'Casey's irony is complex, for although the Cock comically dramatises dystopia it ends up gesturing towards Utopia. When the women begin to trail away 'to a place where life resembles life more than it does here',3 they leave behind only the old and the variously disabled. The exit of the women as scapegoats ('a woman's always a menace to

A

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a man's soul') politicises the issue. It is not like the romantic exit in a comedy by Synge to unknown parts where nature will provide. In O'Casey the route is plainer. Loreleen came from England and back to pagan England she will go, accompanied by Lorna and Marion. What awaits them in England is not disclosed in the play beyond the assertion that it will resemble life 'more than it does here'. In short, they will find freedom, moral space, to construct their own futures. One of the men left behind, Michael Marathraun, Lorna's husband, feeds the Messenger the question: 'What, Messenger, would you advise me to do?' To which the reply comes from O'Casey's spokesman, 'Die. There is little else left useful for the likes of you to do.' There is literally no future available to Michael. Thus O'Casey passed judgement on a moribund society. But in doing so he flattered England as a destination of enlightenment when in fact he had, as communist, many reservations about social justice there. In contrast, in writing Rose and Crown O'Casey was sketching a kind of English tragedy. It was one in which he played no part but that of spectator. More properly, he was witness for the prosecution. The image conjured up by the title decided on, Rose and Crown, is of an English tavern, traditional, picturesque and in a sense a tied house. England as public house is a metaphor one peg below Napoleon's scornful remark, 'a nation of shopkeepers'. For the first time O'Casey did not himself design the jacket for a volume of his autobiography but handed the task over to Breon, whose design, avoiding the public house theme, solidly endorses England's royal tradition by featuring a realistic crown which vine-like roses penetrate and elegantly circumscribe. The roses and background form patterns of green as if to declare an Irish coloration of an English relationship, though quite what that relationship is is left undisclosed. The design is beautiful but politically vacuous. More meaningfully, the realistic design of the 1971 Pan edition - using colour photographs front and back of cover of a Young's tavern - highlights O'Casey's metaphor for England. But how can a 'tied house' be a symbol of freedom? It is to the title chapter in Rose and Crown that one naturally turns for O'Casey's witness to England's decline as a nation. One finds a setting not in a public house at all but on the contrary in Londonderry House, the great centre of London social entertainment in the 1930s, the period covered by the volume. In this setting O'Casey features himself as literary lion prowling among the political leaders of the day, Baldwin, Churchill and Mac Donald. The chapter focuses on Mac Donald, the Labour Prime Minister who, in O'Casey's reading of his career, sold out his working-class principles for power mistakenly perceived as the greater good. Citing Churchill, whom he did not like,4 on Mac Donald, whom he liked very much, O'Casey refers to the position the latter had placed himself in by throwing in his hand with the conservatives. Churchill described Mac Donald as brooding 'supinely' over an administration which was ideologically alien. 'Supinely brooding!' O'Casey marvels. 'Churchill didn't know, probably didn't care, how a man might feel having viciously abandoned what had been his life-work to create. How pitifully a soul may suffer when it has betrayed its heart's desire' (A, 2, 333). That final

324 SednO'Casey sentence is worth all the rest of the chapter, if not the volume. For O'Casey, himself doggedly loyal to his 'heart's desire', well understood what it must be like to suffer for the wrong reason. Yet this was not his subject matter. The main preoccupation of the chapter is with British-Irish relations. Musing on the topic in the midst of this generalised social occasion (one of many O'Casey attended with Eileen - who is elided from this account at Londonderry House), the central consciousness 'Sean' sees all English politicians as insultingly ignorant of Irish affairs and of Irish history. From the postcolonial point of view 'Sean' sees this ignorance as imperial weakness. With a sudden leap from the 1930s to the present time of writing, 1949-50, O'Casey extends the charge to the current Labour regime and to ignorance of Wales likewise: 'Only today, the Labour Prime Minister [Attlee], speaking to a meeting in Llandudno, was asked to receive a Welsh national deputation to discuss the question of an independent parliament for Wales.'5 This was an issue O'Casey passionately believed in, ever since spending summer holidays in Wales in the late 1930s and encountering the songs and the enthusiasm of a movement reminiscent of his days in the Gaelic League. But Attlee was totally indifferent to Welsh culture, 'Sean' muses, in the same way Churchill showed his ignorance of Scots tradition by praising Harry Lauder (who died just then, February 1950). Likewise, official ignorance of commonwealth countries was 'like a child brought into a gilded drawing-room to display a childish gift, and then hurried back to the hidden haunt of the nursery.' And yet - and this was O'Casey's point - it was the people born of and enlivened by various regional and commonwealth cultures who had 'made England in the past, and will remake England in the future' (A, 2, 326-27). This neglect of the multiculturalism of the Empire would lead to its destruction. 'The Crown is crushed, the Rose is withering. England's golden day is going' (328). This being the case, what was the point of imagining England as Ireland's escape hatch, the sanctuary for its rebels? How could it perform as Utopia to Ireland's dystopia? Here was the major contradiction in his thinking which O'Casey had to live with if not live by. It was one reason why he continued to support IRA prisoners on English soil.

Does every writer, every artist, have in the background the kind of ghostlypresence which haunted O'Casey in the shape of the afflicted Sheila O'Neill, who wrote so often for advice? The relationship was strongly obsessive on both sides. She, an ardent, perhaps hysterical Irish catholic, bombarded this hardened communist with questions of faith and morals. He could have thrown her letters in the bin. He could have devised one of those postcards Shaw used to freeze unwanted pests into silence. O'Casey did neither. He wrote back lengthy, teasing replies to her naive religious concerns, shaking the graven images on her altar of unease. Garry O'Connor sees the correspondence as a 'love affair by letter'.6 This seems untenable. Though he liked a good-looking woman O'Casey did not flirt bloodlessly like Shaw with his female correspondents.

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Unlike Shaw again, there was an insecurity in O'Casey which made him bend to listen to neurotic whisperings memorialising youthful innocence. Perhaps there wan erotic charge to such relationships. What else is lonesco's The Lesson about? What else was happening to the ageing Ibsen when he fell for the Hilda Wangel types who marched into his life and challenged his sense of himself as master builder? Mostly, O'Casey wanted to browbeat Sheila out of her religious loyalties into free thinking. In that sense she to him was catholic Ireland. But occasionally he would find himself carefully explaining to her what it is a writer does: 'He must be able to see things no-one else sees, & hear things no-one else hears; & he must be able to put them in front of readers so that they see & hear them clearly - whether they like them or not.'7 The final phrase had a deliberate sting in it. He liked to outrage Sheila while she, for her part, fascinated him by her earnest orthodoxy. Possibly she reminded him of Maire Keating, his long-lost Muse. Obsessed, or possibly just dependent on her guru, she tried to visit him in September 1950, but when she arrived at Tingrith' O'Casey was safely away on holiday with the family.8 They never met. Her story would help a later play. Eileen, as usual, drove the car on this holiday to Salisbury and environs. All of the pressure on her as mater familiae was beginning to show; had Sheila turned up on her doorstep before they left who knows what might have been said. For 'it was quite a business' getting Sean ready for a holiday. 'First he would make a list for fear anything might be forgotten, especially his medicines; he had eye drops and ear drops; tweezers, and the glasses I used for taking out his [ingrown] lashes; socks, shirts, pyjamas, jerseys, slippers. [...] It was an odd quirk, for he would probably wear the same jersey during the entire trip.'9 Eileen coped with this as with all of his quirks. On the trip they passed by Fordingbridge and Breon pointed out the road leading to Augustus John's house. Sean was longing to turn off and see him but felt that 'the whole O'Casey clan' might have been 'too much to inflict' on the artist. Instead, the great non-believer 'prayed a blessing in your home's direction', and Eileen drove on.10 But after the holiday she began to display symptoms of stress. T was feeling run down just then', she commented later, 'and inclined to have the odd weep about nothing at all.' Her face swelled up. Niall, the scientific one, must have used the word allergy and urged her to see a doctor. Eileen, sometimes guilty of malapropisms, must have told Sean she thought she had an allegory, because his observation is otherwise a little odd: 'It's a terrible thing to have happened. But it's a strangely interesting face, rather like some of those in Aesop's fables.'11 The problem proved more serious. Eileen saw a specialist in Torquay who said she had had a nervous breakdown. No doubt it was a mid-life crisis. She felt she had 'no sort of outlet, no external life,' and yet was told she needed more gaiety.12 She enjoyed the company of some of Sean's visitors, such as Thomas Quinn Curtiss, the American drama critic for the Herald-Tribune, who had been stationed in London during the war and who in summer 1950 turned up from his base in Paris. This may have been a love affair. She had to be careful to invite to the house only those whom Sean

326 SednO'Casey liked, and so her social life was limited. Sean's exclusion clause extended even to Eileen's mother, Mrs Reynolds, now living not far away in Paignton. She and Sean still detested each other. On her side, O'Casey's lack of commercial success and his anti-catholicism were grounds for complaint, although Mrs Reynolds was the kind of woman who needed few grounds for that. On O'Casey's side, as he was no mean exponent of complaint himself he was always made irritable by her interfering ways. So poor was this relationship that he never even created a mother-in-law joke. She just got his back up. Matters had come to a head when O'Casey once opened a letter from her to Eileen why it is difficult to say - and was so incensed at the contents that he wrote a furious attack on her selfishness and underhand attempts to come between Eileen and himself, often using her own so-called ill-health as a means of controlling Eileen's sympathies.13 With him it was always necessary to put things in writing; everything was text; even relationships were textual. Perhaps the habit stemmed from his early Bible reading: reality and the word being indistinguishable the truth had to be inscribed. Subsequently, he typed a tenpage rebuke to Eileen's cousin, who was a Reverend Mother in Maynooth and who sided with Mrs Reynolds. It does not make pleasant reading and must surely have confused Eileen.14 Sean was never one for the extended family or for the belief that communism begins at home. Although it is difficult to be certain of the sequence of events here it appears that towards the end of October 1950 Eileen went off to London for a rest cure. She may have been worrying about her health, as in a letter Sean, glad she was feeling better, admonished her for keeping her 'fear' a secret. 'It does one good to tell someone else about it.'15 Shivaun had gone up to see her and stayed with Breon. From London Eileen paid a visit to the dying Bernard Shaw. There may have been two visits. In her letter to Leonard Elmhirst about a month after Shaw's death the account begins equivocally: I went down to Ayot St Lawrence to see Shaw last once or twice [when] I was in London, and he chatted laughed and joked and gave great advice to me about the children. I loved Shaw's speaking voice & his laugh, also and most his smile. The last time I saw him was the Saturday [28 October] before he died. I was with him for a long while; he was conscious & his brain as clear and bright; he was very weak and spoke very softly, I had to get very close to hear what he said. I shall be richer until I die, for that hour, he was quite ready to die, and said he wished to. "I am finished now, you must tell Sean to carry on", he spoke of the boys & Shivaun, and many things. [H]e was very tired and I felt lonely; he asked me to stroke his forehead; he was in pain & seemed to me so like a child for all his years; he dropped to sleep and I stayed on until he was quite quiet he woke again. Goodbye & God Bless you, I said; and with his lovely smile and even the twinkle in his eye he said, "Goodbye, he has blest you already", an Irishman to the end.16 This account is as beautiful as the death of Falstaff. The phrase 'once or twice' is a little puzzling, however. Which was it? Eileen had been down to Ayot St

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Lawrence in February 1950, when she had tea with Shaw: could she have conflated the periods before and after Shaw's final accident, which happened on 10 September?17 The point is not a pedantic one. It relates to Eileen's own identity as distinct from the one O'Casey created for her. He appropriated her final interview with Shaw immediately, and told Leonard Elmhirst on 6 December: 'Eileen was with G.B.S. a day before he sank into unconsciousness, & had a chat with him. He had requested her to come down through J. Dulanty, the Irish Ambassador.'18 In his chapter 'Shaw's Corner' in Sunset and Evening Star (finished in May 1952) O'Casey embroidered Eileen's account into three dramatic pages.19 And when Eileen herself came to write her memoir Sean almost twenty years after that she was inevitably influenced by his graphic, literary account. This described two visits to Shaw quite close together, on 28 October and 'a few days later', when, 'calling at Dulanty's, I had a compelling urge to go down to Ayot again.'20 'Once or twice' seems to mean that one of those visits could be discounted, perhaps because Eileen did not actually get to see the dying Shaw on the second occasion or because the account offered above was the second occasion, the first being in February. In that case, why should the February visit be downplayed, reduced to a hesitancy? Because it was about money and this was something Eileen was ashamed of. Dulanty had told her that if Shaw asked about her financial situation she should say the O'Caseys were not well off. When he did ask her she felt obliged to say they were all right and Shaw was relieved. 'He said he had heard we were in clover.'21 It is likely this was on 28 October. In her heart Eileen wanted the money but this was something not even Sean should know, bent as he was on myth making. In fact, before taxes, O'Casey was making £1,800 a year at this time,22 approximately £40,000 in today's money. How much of this 'clover' was available to Eileen, who had not lost her expensive tastes (only learned to suppress them), is another matter. But she had her own bank account, into which Sean would lodge some of his earnings out of the clutches of the taxman. She could get away from time to time. Yet she was not financially secure and felt guilt over that anxiety. How long more would Sean survive Shaw? Rather a better omen at this time was the arrival on the scene of a young American scholar named David Krause, who was to enrich the O'Caseys in other ways. In due course he would bring ratification of the value of Sean's life, work by becoming the leading scholar in O'Casey studies. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, 'a working-class city known for its militant textile strikes', Krause was himself working-class, a typesetter, and grandson of Polish-Jewish immigrants. His father was an active trade unionist in Newark and David was early introduced to the tough conditions of American urban life. His discovery of O'Casey was a 'necessary revelation', and O'Casey became for him 'a strong light in a dark world'.23 He saw parallels between O'Casey's early life and that of his parents, who were involved before he was born in the 1913 Paterson textile strike, which, like the Dublin lock-out, was a heroic failure. With the entry of America to World War Two Krause was sent overseas to England where

328 Sean O'Casey

he served in a bomber maintenance unit in Norwich. By the sort of bizarre military logic which Joseph Heller was to dramatise in Catch 22 he was considered a useful sheetmetal worker because he had been trained as a typesetter. After the war, under the GI Bill he attended college in New York and went on to the University of Minnesota where he did his MA on O'Casey. He had specifically gone to Minnesota to study under Eric Bentley only to find that he was on leave and the English Department was opposed to a dissertation on a living author. Fortunately, Robert Penn Warren accepted the challenge and Krause began work in 1949.24 When he first wrote to O'Casey that summer, nervously outlining his project and seeking advice, he addressed him as 'Mr O'Casey', which drew a rebuke: no 'misters' for him: in Irish, he explained, one says 'a dhuine uasal' or 'noble person', but for O'Casey 'mister' implied a social superiority he could accept in addressing someone like Harold or Daniel Macmillan but never with respect to himself. That apart, he liked Krause's ideas and rejoiced when he received a copy of the dissertation the following year, the third to appear so far. 'You mustn't ask me to analyze it, or to give you my opinion about it,' O'Casey said cautiously, and yet being O'Casey added a postscript: 'I've just had time to read your Thesis. It's fine from my point of view. [...] I enjoyed it immensely.' As Krause was now enrolled at New York University to do a doctorate O'Casey bade him good fortune in terms that echoed the terms of his own autobiography: 'Good knocking at the door of life to you; and a quick opening; and brave things done in the House.'25 Krause was soon to be an annual visitor, a loved disciple and defender, one who might, perhaps, be able to make sense of the O'Caseyan contradictions.

Although suffering from repeated bouts of influenza O'Casey managed in the spring of 1950 to complete three one-act plays, Hall of Healing, Time to Go, and Bedtime Story, to keep his hand and heart in, as he put it.26 The one-act was a form O'Casey could handle with dexterity. These three were farcical like the two written in the early 1930s, but each also had a point to make. The Hall of Healing, based on O'Casey's childhood experience of attending a public (Poor Law) dispensary, exposes the officiousness and essential heartlessness of the old-style medical system. One of the patients, Red Muffler, upbraids the drunken doctor and indifferent apothecary after his daughter dies of neglect, and when he exits the Apothecary comments: 'Cheeky boyo, that! Not a grain of gratitude in one of them for all we thry to do for them. [...] It would almost make a man despair of humanity!' The irony is neatly offset by the music-hall style of the caretaker Aloysius, known as Alleluia, who closes the play with the stage to himself singing The Rose of Tralee' as he tidies up. As a play about the poor let suffer by the inadequate medical system it was quite topical in 1950 when tuberculosis was a major problem in Ireland, the target of O'Casey's restrained attack. Time to Go and Bedtime Story are likewise comic and satiric. Each is very eventempered and controlled, exhibiting O'Casey entirely at his ease. Bedtime Story,

The Road to Torquay 329

the tale of a would-be seducer who wants also to protect his reputation as the soul of respectability, was a risque piece for its day. The characterisation of the 'gay lass' who relieves John Joe Mulligan of virtue, sanity and bankroll together recalls the prostitute in the early dark story 'I Wanna Woman', and Angela Nightingale is one of O'Casey's liveliest of female roles. Time to Go, subtitled 'a morality comedy in one act', is a more complex piece and the one O'Casey liked best of the three. This time the setting is rural, 'on the edge of a country town, 'a day or so after a fair'. The whole thing is allegorical of contemporary Irish gombeenism and betrayal of older values.27 To O'Casey it was 'realism touched with fancy'.28 As in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy fantasy is used to expose the crassness of the ordinary. Two half-mythical figures, Widda Machree (the older Ireland, one might say) and Kelly from the Isle of Mananaun (aversion of the Celtic god Mananan Mac Lir) by their honesty reduce to chaos the country of rip-offs and exploitation. The magical powers of the honest couple create what the peasantry can only interpret as miracle (the contrary also to be inferred): as the parodic tune Jingle Coins' is heard in the air all stand rooted to listen. ' The two barren trees in the background suddenly flush with blossom, foliage, and illuminated /rial'29 The religious awe resulting from this 'miracle' is instantly quenched when the sharpnosed Mrs Flagonson prods her kneeling husband in the back with the reminder that it is time to tot up the takings. Without a word, Flagonson follows her into the public house, 'and the glowing trees fade away utterly, becoming dead and barren again.' If Beckett, in his fondness for O'Casey, read Time to Go on its publication in 1951 he may have seen here in the dead trees which flourish and go dead again something of his own theatrical idea in Waiting for Godot (1953). But it might be added that if for O'Casey it was definitely - on the day after the fair - time to go, for Beckett it might indeed be time to go but (a) there was nowhere to go to, and (b) it was impossible to move. O'Casey sent the typescripts of Bedtime Story and Time to Go to Nathan in New York, who was too ill at the time to read them. When he was well enough to write, on 10 April, he liked the one-acts sufficiently to pass them on to Dick Madden for placing. (The young Joe Papp would direct the premiere of all three one-acts in New York in May 1952.) Nathan sounded depressed. 'You are still in good trim, my boy, and I can only wish I were the same, but I seem to be unable to get back my old health and have been pretty miserable.'30 These were ominous groans from a dear friend. O'Casey planned to make a book of his one-acts but Daniel Macmillan preferred to include them in the next two volumes of Collected Plays. This was agreed in April 1950 and so Hall of Healing went into volume 3 with Purple Dust and Red Roses for Me while Bedtime Story and Time to Go went into volume 4 with Oak Leaves and Lavender and Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. This was a good arrangement. Since he had sent in the copy for Rose and Crown, volume 5 of the autobiographies, on 15 February it was clear that some sort of prioritisation had to be decided on, especially since O'Casey wanted to revise the full-length plays for the collected edition. The result was a postponement of Rose and Crown until October 1952

330 Sean O'Casey

with the Collected Plays given precedence and planned for publication in July 1951. This left O'Casey with quite a bit of work to do over the next couple of years, leaving aside the articles and book reviews he undertook, and his daily correspondence with strangers as well as with friends. Even as he approached his seventieth birthday in March 1950, his work rate was extraordinary.

Among the articles O'Casey wrote in spring 1950 was a contribution requested by Kingsley Martin to the debate on the 'play of ideas' running in the New Statesman. The debate was opened on 4 March by playwright Terence Rattigan, author of French Without Tears and other pieces suited to Aunt Edna's taste, with a strong attack upon what he saw as a 'heresy' deriving from Shaw. He himself upheld 'the play of character and situation' or 'people and stories'.31 When his turn came, O'Casey, surprisingly enough, did not argue altogether in favour of Shaw. He saw, of course, that Shaw and Ibsen had revitalised the modern drama with their startling and radical ideas but for O'Casey ideas, life and characterisation formed a seamless garment: ideas as such were not a priority. He could concede that 'the thinker, the playwright, and the poet have shared in the struggle for the rights of man; and [. . .] have helped to immortalise man's fight against intolerance, cod custom, ignorance, and fear.'32 In short, he could never conceive of the playwright as thinker in Eric Bentley's sense, even though Bentley described O'Casey as 'the directest critic and the most simply effective playwright' the Abbey had produced.33 It is what O'Casey does not say in his article that is more interesting. He does not say that because a social revolution is under way the drama must adopt social revolutionary tactics. Rather, it must reflect the 'new kind of life' coming in, and if that is proletarian the characters shown should be played for what they are and not 'as lecturers in an academy hall, preachers in a pulpit, or speakers from a political platform'. This brought him closer to Rattigan than to Shaw, although the point went unnoticed in the general trouncing Rattigan received.34 Among the other pieces O'Casey wrote around this time, also for the New Statesman, was a poem on Walt Whitman. While an admirer of Whitman's Leaves of Grass for many years O'Casey must have been drawn to write these lines because of the Korean war and the threat it posed to world security. He was now a supporter of the growing peace movement and ardently opposed to atomic warfare. The poem is a kind of 'Milton! thou shouldest be living at this hour', for it begins 'Walt Whitman, one of the world's good wishes/Is the one that wishes you here today/To sing.' The paradoxical title, however, provides a sharp difference from Wordsworth's straight-forward patriotic appeal: 'Saintly Sinner, Sing for Us'. O'Casey is indifferent to Whitman's message: he can lead opinion one way or its opposite, Tor either is goodness with God, and gay,' and can be invoked in the contemporary crisis to 'soften the snout of the menacing cannon/With the scent and bloom of a lilac spray'.35 It may not be great verse but it gives a sense of O'Casey's 'play of ideas' well enough. In March 1950 the name, or at any rate the initials, of JE came back to haunt

The Road to Torquay 331

though not to terrify O'Casey. A Russell scholar, Alan Benson, came to O'Casey when Stjohn Ervine told him: The single Irish author of repute who could not endure A.E. was that puling ass, Sean O'Casey, who spits venom over A.E.'s dead body: a typical example of the slum Communist.'36 Benson then tried to persuade O'Casey into a better view of & by asserting that he had grieviously wronged him in Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well. When he went so far as to suggest that O'Casey had not dared to print nasty things while M was alive he was given an earful.37 O'Casey insisted: 'as far as the Young are concerned, AE is indeed dead.'38 Time has upheld O'Casey's harsh verdict on the poems and paintings. On the other hand, Ervine's biography of Shaw in 1956 was to offend O'Casey himself by the inference that he had never been a friend of Shaw's. Though he did not care about & O'Casey held firmly on to Shaw as father figure. He was to receive a mixture of tribute and criticism himself in 7mA Writing in 1950. This was the number in which Benis Johnston's article appeared together with a chapter from the forthcoming Rose and Crown. The editors seized the opportunity to air the topic of O'Casey and the catholic church: 'For that institution he has nothing but contumely, and his attitude here is noticeably less Red than Black: that is to say, his vituperation of Catholicism, as well as his leaning towards other sects, resembles nothing so much as the "Black Protestant" pamphlet.'39 The phrase emphasised is startling in its suggestion that O'Casey was sectarian. It was perceptive, on another level, if it implied that O'Casey's emotive attacks on Catholicism derived from ninteenth-century Irish evangelism. At the same time, given Bavid Marcus's Jewishness and given the post-war cultural climate in Ireland, this editorial makes strange reading. The so-called Mother-and-Child controversy was about to explode in Ireland,40 involving church-state relations at their most sensitive since 1922, and in that context the caution O'Casey detested in Irish intellectual life is all too visible. Noteworthy likewise was Johnston's piece, Joxer in Totnes: A Study in Sean O'Casey', included in this issue.41 As discussed in an earlier chapter, Johnston viewed with amusement 'this odd spectacle' of O'Casey buried in 'one of the more Arty-crafty corners of Merrie England - and liking it'. This sentence no doubt inspired O'Casey's declaration on the dust-jacket of Rose and Crown that the book 'brings O'Casey to England to stand among the alien corn, and like it'.42 The defiance in the last three words makes sense as a riposte to Johnston; otherwise it again raises the question how it was that O'Casey could see England as the Utopian 'other' to Ireland's dystopia. Playing the popular game of guessing what was O'Casey's problem Johnston first established him as out of place in Totnes, where the 'housewives' in the street 'are inclined to stare after him', but had to concede he could not pigeon-hole O'Casey, who seemed to him Anglo-Irish in some respects. Known in Ireland as 'a typical AngloIrishman with a view from the top of Mahomet's coffin',43 Johnston recognised the gap that existed between himself and O'Casey. He saw that O'Casey's grand narrative, his abiding theme, was 'the world social problem that is either going to create a new order, or is going to end us all in a holocaust of hydrogen

332 SednO'Casey

bombs'. But he could not say the word 'communism' here and be done with it. As 'an uncompromising isolationist' Johnston committed himself to the status quo. He even found it possible to say - again on the cusp of the Motherand-Child controversy - that 'if clerical influence can preserve her [Ireland] as a last remaining haven for the middle classes' he was not the one to object. As he would certainly object, Johnston added, O'Casey was right to stay away from Ireland. O'Casey found the article amusing and ignorant, though not in equal measure.44 He would make his reply in Sunset and Evening Star (1954).

From the Playhouse, Houston, came the news that in its American premiere in April Red Roses was seen as a communist play which priests were urging people to boycott, so all was normal there. The director John O'Shaughnessy believed so much in the play that he fought on until Red Roses reached Broadway a few years later. But O'Casey was saddened to hear in May of the death of Dick Madden, aged seventy-one; hereafter his New York business affairs would be handled by Jane Rubin in Madden's office. Around the same time he had a visit from Bobby Lewis, who wanted to direct the Cock in New York. By whatever pressure Eileen managed to exert, Sean agreed they take Lewis out to dinner at the local hotel, the historical Royal Seven Stars. O'Casey hated eating out and probably mystified the staff by calling for a boiled egg and a cup of tea, although on rare occasions he could be persuaded to take a small sherry, if only he could decide whether he preferred dry or sweet. He is not remembered as a literary gourmet. When Collected Plays were published on 17 July the edition was for 5,000 copies, which is surprisingly high and must include the American market. There were to be reprints in 1957 and 1962, each of 1,500 copies, while the more popular first two volumes had reprinted twice by 1952. These are extraordinary figures for plays, which do not usually sell. It raises the question why they were not therefore being staged more often. In a major review-article Anthony Cookman asked, 'Should the blame for the long neglect of Mr Sean O'Casey fall on the theatrical managers and the public or on the dramatist himself?' No other dramatist had known 'such cavalier treatment' in recent years, yet Cookman (also drama critic for the Times) wondered if the claim of 'neglected genius' could be sustained. With the changes in theatrical taste and conventions favouring theatricalism over realism the puzzle increased. The success of Christopher Fry with The Lady's Not for Burning suggested that it could not be O'Casey's flamboyant language which had rendered him unfashionable; Cookman complained that O'Casey had been out of fashion for the best part of twenty years, i.e. ever since the failure of Within the Gates in 1934. But there had been serious misunderstanding between O'Casey and the (British) public from the beginning, Cookman continued; he had been applauded for the wrong reasons, since his intent was always to create 'plays of a poetic nature'. Here O'Casey was guilty of a fatal error: 'It is his judgment, not his genius, that has separated him from the intelligent playgoing public.

The Road to Torquay 333

As a serious artist and a man of enormous integrity, he has insisted on the right to go his own way, whether we liked it or not; and the public have exercised their equal right not to like it.'45 This was a crucial review, which Harold Macmillan sent to O'Casey on 24 September.46 He puzzled over the charge impugning his 'judgment'. He took Cookman to mean content, theme, his opinions, which he now defended before Macmillan: these opinions were 'honest ones, taken after thought and long and wide experience of men and things'.47 He saw the criticism as declaring that the British public was unsympathetic to his politics. This may well have been a factor in his so-called neglect but it is not what Cookman meant. He referred, surely, to O'Casey's determination to combine quite broad farce in an inconsequential style with serious moments of action; to artistic judgment, in fact, where O'Casey was vulnerable. Whatever about that, the TLS critique gave O'Casey pause. He was to remember it literally until he was on his deathbed. He worried about it in an essay published in New York, where he asked the question, 'How often is Art, in all its forms and fancies, going to make friends with the multitude?' Any kind of elitism or attempt to control public access to the arts met with his scorn, for 'No one can bind the Muses,' not the critics who accuse O'Casey of 'lamentable judgments' or Picasso of incompetence, or who refuse Thomas Mann and Ezra Pound a hearing, and not even Zhdanov with his social realism in the USSR, for all artists were 'on the side of humanity'. So, the inference is, his own attempts to bring art to the multitude must be received as they were conceived, without bias.48 But here, precisely, is the paradox Cookman defined. The audience was free to stay away. Strangely enough, O'Casey was disappointed that there was no review in Dublin of these volumes of Collected Plays. So he grumbled to Brooks Atkinson, to whom he sent Cookman's piece to be chewed over. As Nathan was ill he did not bother him. A new addition to his circle of American champions in 1951 was John Gassner, then teaching at Columbia and later at Yale. He had written for New Theatre in 1949, a magazine associated with Unity Theatre and therefore sympathetic to O'Casey. His three-part article on 'The Prodigality of Sean O'Casey' now appeared in Theatre Arts from June to August. It began with the premise that O'Casey, alongside Shaw and O'Neill, was one of the three greatest playwrights of 'the new English-speaking theatre', and with the death of Shaw and the disabling illness of O'Neill the sole standard-bearer. The text of the Cock revealed 'more dramatic sinew and vitality' than anything O'Casey had written since The Plough and the Stars. But in the Cock as elsewhere O'Casey was signalling that he was to be received only on his own terms. This unusual independence was part of the reason for his neglect. In short, quite by coincidence Gassner was sifting O'Casey's reputation in much the same way as Cookman in the TLS. Except that Gassner, a drama rather than a theatre critic, was more enthusiastic, and being American, saw virtue in O'Casey's self-reliance. Indeed, O'Casey's spirit, according to Gassner, was too great for the contemporary theatre. Playwrights such as Fry and Eliot were perfectly acceptable to Broadway and West End audiences because they suited the 'drawingroom

334 Sean O'Casey

mentality' of a 'desiccated intelligentsia' in love with obscurity. 'In such suave company as Fry's and Eliot's, O'Casey seems graceless and devoid of manners - a lumbering giant on whom a dress suit would look like armor'. Neither the New Critics (whose remit was to explicate poetic texts) nor the so-called liberals (did Gassner have his colleague Lionel Trilling in mind?) could have anything to do with O'Casey. Gassner balked at defining O'Casey's politics as communist or even Marxist, for this would be to throw him to the American wolves. Instead he said no more than that in the face of these liberals 'O'Casey would rather be naive than dead.' Swerving away from politics (at the height of the McCarthy era) Gassner searched for a niche in which to place the 'naive' O'Casey. Thus he created for him a set of credentials as 'a baroque dramatic poet in a largely trivial and constricted theatre', one who belonged to the spacious days of the Elizabethans: 'the theatre will simply have to be made larger if O'Casey is to have his rightful place.' His work could not be confined within the petty restraints of the proscenium stage. His language, his rhetoric, his 'prodigal creativity' and tendencies towards excess, his theatricalism, his love of music as structural and philosophical bases, all characterised O'Casey as a writer who could not be played except as Shakespeare or Marlowe or Jonson are played. Above all, Gassner stressed in conclusion, O'Casey as public 'minstrel' sang a 'song of human love and of reaching out to the beauty in the world and in the human soul', altogether in contrast to the pessimists and timid optimists serving the contemporary scene.49 He thus constructed an O'Casey fit to meet all objections. It was a very important re-evaluation. Around New York it would give O'Casey renewed cultural respectability which would in time attract directors like Sam Wanamaker and Tyrone Guthrie to look at the later plays afresh.

In the meantime O'Casey's career continued in ill-omened fashion. On the very day when volumes 2 and 3 of Collected Plays were published the Abbey Theatre burned down. By further coincidence, the play on stage that evening was The Plough and the Stars.50 However, ironically, these coincidences serve to link O'Casey with the demise of the original Abbey, opened in 1904, and with its temporary successor the Queen's. In spite of his mixed feelings about the Abbey O'Casey sent a telegram of sympathy when the place went up in flames. He also expressed publicly his conviction that the Abbey was not finished.51 The secretary, Eric Gorman (the original Uncle Peter, just back from filming in The Quiet Man), gave him full details a few days later.52 In the best theatrical tradition, the show went on that evening (18 July), in the Peacock annexe. The public rallied round with uniforms and props and Arnott's delivered a new hat for Nora. After a week Lord Moyne offered, free of rent, the use of the new Rupert Guinness Hall in Watling Street and the Plough moved in there on 30 July 'Guinness is good TO you,' Blythe quipped in his thank-you speech from the stage.53 But this could only be a temporary measure as Blythe negotiated the lease of the Queen's in Pearse Street. Astute though he was he could not

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have known that the lease would last for fifteen years. He signed for five.54 Having directed the Tassie at the Gaiety in May-June 1947 before her recapture by the Abbey (after the row over standards), Ria Mooney now wanted to do it at the equally large Queen's. Though it played for two weeks from 24 September the critics gave it little chance and Blythe was embarrassed. Dublin was not yet ready for the Tassie. Among those who laid into the play from a Roman-Catholic standpoint was none other than Flann O'Brien.55 The Poor Mouth of Irish begrudgery was agape still, showing all its teeth. O'Casey sent O'Brien's comments to the astonished Nathan in New York, to whom it was plain that the Irish now hated O'Casey.56 Though he feigned indifference this hatred puzzled and hurt him. It was as if the new Ireland saw him as a dangerous virus to be fought with all vigilance. Saying to an American correspondent that he had too much to do at home to write half what he would like O'Casey busied himself with other things. 'Our three children take up a lot of thought and time, for I'm very interested in the young, and chat about things with them - from biology to cricket - when I should be working.'57 The biology talk would be with Niall, now sixteen and showing signs of the career he wished to follow. Favouring more Eileen in appearance and personality than Sean, whom Breon resembled, Niall was gregarious, lively and fond of music. In October 1951 he made a trip to Dublin and while there stayed with George Gilmore, a well-known republican and socialist whom Eileen and Sean both liked. During the run of Red Roses for Me in London Gilmore befriended the O'Casey children and would take them to the theatre. Niall also met Seamus Scully, another of Sean's correspondents. In spite of Ireland's attitude towards him O'Casey's children were all Irish citizens. Niall's visit was followed by Breon's in 1952, though he preferred the remoteness of Cork and Kerry, and did not visit much among Sean's Dublin friends. Breon was now committed to the life of a painter. Having graduated from the Anglo-French School he was doing odd jobs such as helping to clean four large, high murals at the Old Bailey.58 Early in 1952 O'Casey sat for a portrait and Breon was to do six altogether. Macmillans were worrying over legal implications of certain passages in Rose and Crown, which delayed publication. As usual, O'Casey saw the matter as one of honest record and was not inclined to cut, alter names, or disguise his targets. He had to do so, nevertheless, or libel actions might have followed. He also reluctantly cut remarks linking Lennox Robinson directly with the Abbey's original rejection of the Tassie in 1928, though he added an account of the latest hostility in Dublin.59 The legal doubts having been assuaged, Rose and Crown was published in an edition of 5,000 copies on 4 July 1952. The American edition of 4,000 copies followed three months later and was licensed to the Liberty Book Club in New York.60 O'Casey was always puzzled by this arrangement. Would it not be better if people chose for themselves the books they wanted to read? Yet he could see the financial benefit as the autobiographies kept him and the family 'out of the workhouse'.61 Among the reviews was one from the Daily Worker which was as predictable

336 Sean O'Casey

as it was flatteringly early, within a week of publication. The headline said it all: 'A Great Man, Sean, and a Great Book'.62 Louis MacNeice in the Observer was not so positive, daring to say 'many will be bored by these pages upon pages of complaints about the directors of the Abbey Theatre and the dramatic critics in London.'63 Here was a sign that O'Casey's judgment' was once again in question, as it was not in the USA, where Brooks Atkinson characterised him as 'our most conspicuously unemployed dramatist for a couple of decades [...] left, like a hibernating bear, to suck his own claws in a cave in Devon'. Back home Gabriel Fallon came to Rose and Crown with his mind firmly made up. As O'Casey had gone badly astray as a dramatist it followed he was 'wrongshipped' too in the autobiographies, 'bitter, biassed, bigoted, foolish books [. . .] in which a mouse of reality is entombed in a mountain of rhetoric and rancour'.64 A friend sent a copy of the review to O'Casey. There are always such friends in Dublin.

In October 1952 O'Casey heard from the American actor-director Sam Wanamaker, who wanted to stage Purple Dust in London. Kermit Bloomgarden had finally abandoned his option on the play and so it was available. Margaret Webster, who presumably had been the intended director, visited Totnes to tell Sean of Bloomgarden's decision, which was a bit of a blow, for Broadway is Broadway when all is said. Yet from the start O'Casey liked what Wanamaker had to say. A native of Chicago, Wanamaker had trained at the Goodman Theatre and had directing experience, interrupted by service in the armed forces, in New York as well as Chicago. Aged thirty-three, he was currently finishing his first acting assignment in England, playing in Clifford Odets's Winter Journey (called The Country Girl in New York) at St James's Theatre. Introducing himself as 'a long standing admirer of yours', Wanamaker expressed disappointment over Bloomgarden's failure to get Purple Dust on in New York. He thought a London opening was the 'more practical and more possible' way to secure New York and so he was applying for the American rights to the play also. To impress O'Casey he had suggestions for casting the play, as if he had lain awake nights worrying over whether Miles Malleson or Alistair Sim would be best for Poges, Cyril Ritchard or George Cole for Stokes, Terence Morgan, 'a young virile and honest actor', for O'Killigain. For Avril he had in mind Joan Greenwood, 'or some such young voluptuous and vital actress capable of suggesting the hope and vivacity of this character'.65 O'Casey was impressed. He himself had a few more names to suggest, Eddie Byrne, Siobhan McKenna, Milo O'Shea, but he nevertheless rose to Wanamaker's bait. The supremely confident Wanamaker - who knew nothing about how English theatre production works - envisaged an 'out-of-town' opening, preferably in the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, where it might play for three weeks before heading south. Here he stalled. Bronson Albery had told him he was extremely sceptical about a London production. What did O'Casey think? Albery be damned, was

25. George Jean Nathan and Eugene O'Neill (GeorgeJean Nathan Collection, 1913-58. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library)

26. Portrait by Harry Kernoff which SOC refused to sit for, done from memory (National Gallery of Ireland)

27. Eddie Byrne as Brennan o' the Moor, in Red Roses for Me, Embassy Theatre, London, 1946 (photo by A.E. Bunyard, London, courtesy Catherine Byrne)

28. 'Abbey Incident' over poor production standards in the Plough at the Abbey in 1947 (from Dublin Opinion, courtesy Frank Kelly and Tomds Mac Anna)

29. Breon, Mail, Eileen, Shivaun and Sean in Totnes, c. 1948 (by Alfred Eris, Burns Library, Boston College)

30. Ernest Blythe (UCD Archives, University College Dublin)

THEATRE

WORKSHOP ENGLAND

ALL COMMUNICATIONS SHOULD BE ADOKESSiO TO THE GENERAL MANAGER: GERALD C RAFFLES

120 High Street, HanchesterlJ Sean O'Casey esq., Tingrith,

Station Road,

Totnes, Devon.

8-9-49

pear Sean 0*Casey, We have just read "Cock-a-doodle-dandy" and it was an exciting experience. For myself,! have not felt so delighted with a play for many years and would feel honoured If you would allow us to produce It* We are greatly attracted by the style and the theme and would give our very best to the production.I know you do not know our work, but I "am enclosing a few oplnlns on It.I think you do know that we have worked for, joaany years before and since the war, to create a theatre of poetry and movement - Ewan MacColl's work has largely been our mainstay. It is Impossible for me to expre&B my admiration for your play, ana I feel it is Important that It is played now. We are returning to the new democracies of'Easten* Europe and playing In the Soviet zone of Germany at Xmaa and If you were agreeable we should love to take your play with us. We are a company with a sprinkling of Irish and Scots actors, and of course we would pay particular attention to the language problem* Swan sends his love and very best wishes and the whole company eagerly await your decision. yours sincerely,

31. Letter from Joan Littlewood to SOC, 1949, asking for Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (by permission of Peter Rankin, courtesy National Library of Ireland)

32. Scene 2, first production o/Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, People's Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1949: Marion, Loreleen and Lorna sprout horns as they celebrate (courtesy People's Theatre Archive)

33. SOC at work, 1950 (by Alfred Eris,

Theatre Arts magazine)

34. Siobhdn McKenna and SOC at rehearsal of Purple Dust, London, 1953 (The Press Association)

35. Portrait by Breon O'Casey of SOC after his illness in 1956 (courtesy Kilboy Estate)

36. Premiere o/The Bishop's Bonfire, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, 1955 (Cyril Cusack Papers, National Library of Ireland)

3T. Set design by Michael O'HerUhy, for act 1, The Bishop's Bonfire, 1955 (private collection)

38. scenic design by Lester Polakov jor Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, New York, 1958 (courtesy Burns Library, Boston Louege)

39. Gabriel Fallon (courtesy JoeFallon and the Catholic Photographic Bureau, London)

40. Archbishop John Charles McQuaid (courtesy Dublin Diocesan Archives)

A Sean O' Casey Festival

4L Programme cover for SOC Festival at Bernard Miles's Mermaid Theatre, London, 1962 (courtesy National Library of Ireland and Guildhall Library, Corporation of London)

42. David Krause and SOC, Torquay, c. 1960 (courtesy David Krause)

43. Ernest Blythe, Fr Edward Daly and Brian Friel at the Abbey production of Juno inDerry, 1 November 1964 (courtesy Derry Journal)

44. The Silver Tassie, Abbey Theatre, 1972, act 4: Bernadette McKenna (Susie Monican), Patrick Laffan (Harry Heegan), May Cluskey (Mrs Heegan) and John Kavanagh (Dr Maxwell) (courtesy Abbey Theatre)

RED ROSES FOR ME An Epic Play by SEAN O'CASEY CAST MRS. BREYDON

EILEEN CROWE

AYAMONN BREYDON

JIM NORTON

BRENNAN 0' THE MOOR, owner of a few out' houses.

PEADAR 6 LUAIN

SHEILA MOORNEEN

MAIRE 6 NCILL

RORY 6 BALLACHAIN

ARCHIE O'SULLIVAN

MULCANNY

DESMOND CAVE

EEADA

JOAN O'HARA

women in

DYMPHNA FIONNUALA

Cartoon drawing of "Plough and the Stars" by Micheal Mac Liammdir.

The time of the play in the words of O'Casey is "a little

the house

PEGGY HAYES AIDEEN HAYES

REV. E. CLINTON, Rector of St. Burnupus

MICHEAL 6 h-AONGHUSA

SAMUEL, verger to the church

BILL FOLEY

INSPECTOR FINGLAS, of the mounted police

GEOFFREY GOLDEN

DOWZARD i Select Vestrymen

PATRICK LAYDE

FOSTER

) of St. Burnupus

RAILWAYMEN

HARRY BROGAN

Cartoon drawing of "Juno and the Paycock" by Micheal Mac Liammdir.

The setting of the play is an upstairs room in a tenement house

Patrick Dawson, Seamus Newham, Sean Mac Philip

in a poor quarter of Dublin.

Niall Buggy

Also the streets of Dublin, a

while ago." In this production

THE SINGER

it is the days before Easter 1913.

LOUNGERS, WOMEN and POLICE etc.

Chris O'Neill, John Byrne, David Byrne, Biddy McGrath, Maire Nf Grainne, Sindad Woods, Marie McGuire

outside the Protestant Church

LAMPLIGHTER

Alec Doran

of St. Burnupus.

bridge over the river Liffey and

45. Programme for first production o/Red Roses for Me, Abbey Theatre, 1967, dir. Tomds Mac Anna (private collection)

46. Red Roses for Me, Abbey Theatre, 1980 (SOC centenary), the 'statue' scene, act 2: cast includes May Cluskey (Mrs Breydon), Maureen Tool (Eeda), Pat Leavy (Dympna) and Fiona Mac Anna (Finnoola) (courtesy Abbey Theatre)

47. Act 2 of the Plough, 1964, which toured to the World Theatre season, London, 1964: Eric Gorman (Uncle Peter), Philip O'Flynn (Fluther Good), Patrick Laffan (Langon), Geoffrey Golden (Brennan), BillFoley (Clitheroe), Michedl 6 hAonghusa (The Figure in the Window), Sean 0 Briain (Barman), Angela Newman (Rosie Redmond), Vincent Dowling (the Covey), Eileen Crowe (Mrs Burgess) (courtesy Abbey Theatre)

48. 'Villa Rosa' in Torquay, where the O 'Casey s lived in the top-floor flat, 1954—64 (private collection)

The Road to Torquay 337

O'Casey's reaction: he would show Albery.66 Wanamaker's enthusiasm and American energy had won him over. The show must conquer London (which for Wanamaker was out-of-town to New York). After Winter Journey closed and released Wanamaker to his O'Casey 'project' he went down to Totnes on 16 November, charming all before him and (rare privilege) being put up in Tingrith'. In his bread-and-butter letter Wanamaker wrote: 'I must say I still feel twinges of guilt at having dispossessed Eileen from her bed and taken you from your work, but the pleasure I received from my visit far o'erweighed my conscience.' That delightful Elizabethanism closing the sentence reveals the courtier in Wanamaker. He was now all business. He saw Malcolm Arnold about composing the music for Purple Dust. He sent the script to Peggy Cummins after Joan Greenwood rejected the role of Avril. He would see if Miles Malleson might be persuaded to swap roles with George Relph. He darted off to France for a rest in the sun. If Eileen planned to go up to London during Christmas she should let him know. Much ado about nothing. Suddenly, Mrs Elmhirst's daughter Beatrice Straight gave him a fright by announcing that the New York City Centre Theatre wanted to include Purple Dust immediately in its new season. This new theatre, operating for five or six years, was well backed financially and with Maurice Evans as artistic director had had some successes, including transfers to Broadway. It looked a promising prospect. But Wanamaker appealed to O'Casey for 'the just reward of having the faith and the energy to put the thing on first over here. I want the honour of presenting you and breaking the barriers which have kept your plays off the major stages of London and New York for such a long time.'67 It was no contest. Better Wanamaker bluffing than Beatrice Straight. O'Casey sent a telegram to Jane Rubin in Madden's office in New York to say the American offer had arrived too late. But hold! Wanamaker was already committed to playing the lead in a melodrama, The Shrike, by Joseph Kramm. This made all arrangements for Purple Dust haphazard for the moment and Wanamaker was limited to firing off occasional letters to O'Casey asking him to tick names in a possible cast list, seeing one or two of these, such as Cyril Cusack ('too old and too puny'68), and forming impressive plans. After The Shrike opened in London on 20 February (until 21 March) he got the bright idea of turning Purple Dust into a musical comedy, Malcolm Arnold to arrange a little orchestra and O'Casey commandeered to write more songs. Still charmed, O'Casey complied but reached breaking point when Wanamaker wished to bill Purple Dust as a 'charade'. This term had too many reminders of Noel Coward. His play was a comedy, he insisted; it must not be robbed of its dignity.69 The casting was settled for rehearsals to begin 23 March. Eddie Byrne had declined to appear, as had Noel Purcell, but Siobhan McKenna, like the great trouper she was, not only agreed to play Avril (a role which Wanamaker had tried to persuade Diana Dors to take) but also to help Wanamaker with the Irish features of the play. As Purple Dust requires, most of the cast were Irish, old Abbey stalwarts Eithne Dunne, Liam Redmond, Seamus Locke and Harry

338 Sean O'Casey

Hutchinson. Miles Malleson was the only reasonably big name apart from McKenna (fresh from her triumph as Saint Joan and currently in a season in Stratford). Malleson had made his name playing Shakespeare and Restoration comedy and was currently adapting Moliere with some success. Such a cast might have made an impact had it secured the Arts or the Lyric and pulled out all the stops for a London opening. O'Casey bestirred himself and went up to London twice for rehearsals, once at the end of March and again for a week in early April.70 This rare move indicates the high stakes involved: he knew his reputation was on the line. He stayed with Sam and Charlotte Wanamaker while Eileen and Shivaun stayed in a small hotel.71 Brooks Atkinson was in town and went along to the rehearsal hall in Kingsway as did the critic J.C. Trewin, and even at one point Charlie Chaplin - no one quite knew why, though a rumour circulated that Chaplin was interested in a possible film version.72 Rehearsals went well, although Siobhan McKenna was puzzled and a little irritated at O'Casey's off-stage conversation. He teased her about catholic authority, praising Maria Duce (a right-wing confraternity) as the only true catholics in Ireland. 'He admired Archbishop McQuaid immensely,' McKenna wrote to her husband Denis O'Dea. 'If I printed two of the things he said, he'd be a liquidated communist in earnest.' She found it difficult to cope with his ironic, baiting manner, and got cross when he said the great FJ. McCormick was 'no actor at all because he was too conscientious'. She concluded: 'He is really a very self-conscious man, and contradicts himself all the time by saying things just for effect.'73 At this stage Wanamaker was edgy over the play. From his perspective it needed alterations. In the US it was usual to have 'rewrites' while a play was on its way to New York. O'Casey was always sensitive to the idea of rewrites and did not regard Purple Dust as on a 'try-out'. Wanamaker stressed that what seems to work in the author's imagination and on the page 'is not necessarily workable when dealing with live actors making entrances and exits, opening doors, etc.'74 But O'Casey was too old to listen to such advice.75 Wannamker did his best with the text as published. Purple Dust opened in Glasgow on 27 April and was not well received. Edinburgh the following week proved no better. Sean and Eileen travelled up to see it on 4 May, an unusual honour; Eileen was shocked at the falling-off from the rehearsals she had seen earlier in the month. Malleson had apparently lost faith in the play and was acting half-heartedly, dragging others in the cast down with him. The King's was a big theatre (capacity 1,530), but audiences were disappointing,76 and Wanamaker was now worried. Meantime, the O'Caseys enjoyed themselves in Edinburgh. They met Hugh MacDiarmid for the first time in twenty years and spent a great night singing, reading poetry and - most unusually for Sean - drinking. He discovered the wonders of drambuie and let what was left of his hair down. Although according to Eileen the character of Poges in Purple Dust, 'had a hint of Billy McElroy,77 O'Casey's first friend and patron when he arrived in London, MacDiarmid did not seem to notice that Poges' mistress Souhaun might therefore be his wife Peggy.78 MacDiarmid had written a fulsome review of

The Road to Torquay 339

Irtish/alien, Fare Thee Well a few years earlier, in which he claimed O'Casey's prose had 'all the graphic vigour English had in Elizabethan days'.79 O'Casey was much moved by the review, and also by MacDiarmid's making the journey with Valda to see his play now. The two men had a fair amount in common as romantic socialists. O'Casey was to dedicate his final volume of autobiography to MacDiarmid, 'Alba's Poet and one of Alba's first men', and in one chapter paid particular tribute: 'Lord God, this fellow is a poet, singing a song even when pain seizes him, or the woe of the world murmurs in his heart' (A, 2, 529). He saw MacDiarmid's poetry as more significant than Eliot's because closer to the people. MacDiarmid was to return the compliment by devoting a chapter to O'Casey in his own autobiography.80 But all this curtseying and bowing to each other by like-minded Celts had nothing to do with the sorrowful trickle south of Purple Dust towards London. The loss of £500 in Glasgow was repeated in Edinburgh; Blackpool was slightly kinder in causing a loss of only £365; in Brighton the loss climbed again to £500. When costs of £3,000 are added before Glasgow a total of some £5,000 was lost even before the assault on London could be contemplated. A further £1,500 to £2,000 would be necessary for the three weeks' rent in advance, advertising and other costs that would be necessary. Wanamaker had lost £3,400 of his own money already, over £130,000 in today's money. He had imagined a journeying north of producers, directors and journalists which might have smoothed the path to London. No angels appeared and when Wanamaker, helped by Siobhan McKenna, tried to drum up the necessary finance in London the task became too much: it would be autumn before a theatre could be found, and the cast might not then be available. Morale plummeted. Malleson and Walter Hudd, playing the two English leads, were in the sulks since Glasgow because of the reviews and were openly delighted that the play did not reach London. Hope vanished. 'There you have the whole sad tragic story,' the crushed Wanamaker wrote to O'Casey. T tried and failed. Forgive me.'81 The fate of Purple Dust was a product of the times. In the 'unholy trade' of which Richard Findlater had written finances were more and more governing theatrical taste. Wanamaker was outside more than one magic circle controlling such finances, and one of these was the Arts Council, which he never mentioned. The whole debacle left O'Casey aggrieved and a little confused. He felt for Wanamaker, whom he liked, and he always hated to see anyone lose or even endanger money on his behalf: in fact, he had signed an agreement on the understanding that Wanamaker should not risk his own money in this production.82 But Wanamaker had apologised and in O'Casey's world this was to admit blame (something he himself always resisted). He now responded badly to what he considered Wanamaker's incompetence in raising money for a London production. He was particularly furious because Wanamaker had asked Mrs Elmhirst and Sydney Bernstein for money without checking with him first. O'Casey would have died before asking Mrs Elmhirst for a penny, while Bernstein was too good a friend to be approached in this way. 'It would

340 SednO'Casey be almost unbearable for me to be under an obligation to them.'83 A few days later O'Casey cruelly implied that Wanamaker had not told the full truth over the money-raising.84 Siobhan McKenna stepped in and rebuked the master for getting his facts wrong and for implying that the Irish people in the cast gave less than full support to the play. She herself had turned down an offer made in Brighton because she still hoped Purple Dust would go to London. 'Don't ever let me hear you say the Irish don't love you again!'85

After the bruising experience of Purple Dust it was a minor pleasure that the three one-act plays, Time to Go, The End of the Beginning and Hall of Healing had a short run at the Unity Theatre in St Pancras from 22 May 1953. The Daily Worker, at least, could be relied upon to honour 'our greatest living playwright' though who exactly the 'our' referred to was left in the air. 'Among the people he retains his grip and maintains his productions,' claimed the reviewer, who had travelled to Glasgow to see Purple Dust. The three one-acts were far from trifles and 'not to be missed'.86 The cast included one Jim Fitzgerald, the same man who was later to have directed the ill-fated Drums of Father Ned in Dublin. While trying to complete Sunset and Evening Star, the final volume of the autobiographies, O'Casey had an alarming visit from the Income-Tax people. He had a running battle with this relentless body and usually enjoyed arguing his case on paper, but in June 1952 a collector and his bailiff had descended in person on 'Tingrith', and now a year later the invasion was repeated. Only a small sum, £47, was due which O'Casey paid by cheque. But being mightily offended by the bailiff's distraining order threatening the removal of all his books, typewriters (for he had two) and manuscripts, to be sold in defray of outstanding debts, O'Casey fell into such a fury that Winnie the home help had to charge up town and drag Eileen home to deal with the bailiff.87 Convinced that the local tax collector had a spite against him O'Casey wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, R.A.B. Butler, to complain. This was rather typical, though not far from Mr Gallogher's letter to the IRA in the Gunman in which the author presented himself as persecuted beyond endurance. 'Certainly, if this Bailiff comes again, I shall not permit his paws to roam over the books so precious to me; and, if he carries away anything, he'll have to carry me away with them, a job that wont be quite so easy as he may think it to be.'88 Butler sent a man down to Totnes who looked over the accounts and, diplomatically finding that O'Casey had overpaid by £100, invited him to dinner in the Royal Seven Stars Hotel. Sean let Eileen go instead. Brinkmanship of another kind came over passages in Sunset and Evening Star which might be deemed libellous. The typescript was read by Harold Macmillan with these in mind in September and delays in production ensued. The reader's report, by Sir J.C. Squire, poet and critic, was frank:

The Road to Torquay 341

I suppose he is too old now to cease to be exasperating; but what an improvement excision would make, and modification as well; the book is an extraordinary mixture, parts of it charming, parts glowing, full of human sympathy and generous enthusiasm, and parts the work of a swaggering ignoramus, a prejudiced adolescent, a vulgarian and even a cad - some bits might even be libellous. [. . .] He is, in fact, an ass. Even though the book 'might cause a shindy' if published as it stood, and the poorer passages blind readers to the power and humour of other parts, Squire was in favour of publication. Yet it should be cut, if O'Casey would allow 'his Holy Writ to be tampered with', and Squire recommended that cutting be made a condition of acceptance.89 Such a balanced assessment weighed heavily with Macmillans, who held off publication for a year. On the other hand, O'Casey in the early 1950s was at times made to feel as if he were 'developing into a minor Prospero'.90 He was constantly being sought out by figures less menacing than bailiffs and income-tax inspectors. What may be termed 'Sean's First Tape', made by W.R. Rodgers at 'Tingrith' for a radio programme on Shaw in September 1952, led to a recording of his own works by the newly established Caedmon Records, followed now by a second volume on the autobiographies in December 1953.91 During July an American journalist, Robert Emmett Ginna, and a photographer, Gjon Mili, arrived at Tingrith' to collect materials for a Life feature on O'Casey. Ginna had hoped to do a different project, related to a production of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy in Ireland, which fell through.92 Now he planned a biographical study of O'Casey which would lead him from Totnes to Dublin. They spent three weeks in and out of 'Tingrith', where they got to know the family well and to appreciate Sean's kindlier, nobler side. Mili made a short film of O'Casey in his domestic setting, including the household chores he both loved and loathed, such as washing and peeling potatoes in the large scullery sink. Ginna was later to make a documentary for NBC. Then armed with advice and introductions, the two Americans crossed over to Dublin in August. For his research Ginna was steered towards Owen SheehySheffington and Roger McHugh, 'two of the few brave men left in Ireland'.93 Ginna should also see Jim Larkin Jr at the Workers' Union of Ireland to counterbalance a necessary visit to Liberty Hall. They penetrated into O'Casey's East Wall terrain to talk to Katie Kenna, long-time resident downstairs at 18 Abercorn Road, and even descended on Micheal 6 Maolain at 35 Mountjoy Square where they found O'Casey's old roommate living just as he had in 1920, with no electricity, books piled on the floor, an orange crate for furniture, a chipped mug from O'Casey's day. O Maolain was obviously flattered by the attention, and possibly the dollars, of the two men from Life magazine, for he talked volubly of O'Casey's stay in the room (which became the setting for The Shadow of a Gunman) and outlined the story of the 'raid' 6 Maolain was yet to write about. The journalists had struck gold. In the same building they met Mrs Schweppe, fictionalised as Mrs Ballinoy in Irtish/alien, careful to clarify that

342 Sean O'Casey

on the night of the raid she was actually in her room with a gun under her pillow and not between O'Casey's sheets. From here they found their way to 422 North Circular Road, where the room in which O'Casey wrote the three Dublin plays was unchanged and where they met Jim Kavanagh, whose mother had rented the room to O'Casey in 1920. Kavanagh had some books O'Casey gave him when he left, e.g. Michael Davitt's history of the Land League. None other than Brendan Behan acted as guide to these O'Casey locations in Dublin.94 The itinerary also took in a number of public houses, with opportunities for photographs of drinkers and singers, not excluding Behan himself. About to burst on the Dublin scene with a novel, The Scarperer, serialised in the Irish Times for thirty days from 13 October 1953, Behan was nothing if not inventive. The name he chose to disguise authorship of The Scarperer was Emmet Street. He must have been interested, to say the least, in Ginna's forenames Robert Emmett [sic] while his regard for O'Casey would have been sufficient impetus to build on local mythology: 'O'Casey's a great man. I mean for me to praise [him...] would be a piece of impertinence. It would be like praising the lakes of Killarney [...] saying that they were rather nice looking.'95 Ginna, who had a year's leave of absence, stayed in Dublin for three months and researched the article which eventually was published in Life in August 1954. Because it was entirely sympathetic it presented a striking counter-view to the portrait of O'Casey established by his Irish critics. It may even have helped thaw out some of the cold-war suspicion of O'Casey in America, for it was only after the publication of this profile that productions of Red Roses, the Cock and Purple Dust were seen in New York.

In the quiet lives of the O'Caseys in Totnes, however, changes were taking place. Eileen, who had in recent years met Lee Ephraim again in London, now as a friend and generous supplier of theatre tickets to the children as well as to herself, was shocked to hear of his death in September. Tor a moment I could only stand there quietly, remembering a man I had loved, thinking of my strangely different life and hoping that his own had been happy.'96 Niall, who had completed his studies at Dartington Hall in the summer, was about to leave home to do his military service. Academically bright, though somewhat lazy (his school reports declared), Niall seemed destined for university and Eileen discussed with his headmaster whether Niall should attend university before or after his service. It was decided he should do his service first but, awkwardly, could not apply to university when he sat his A Levels since places could not be deferred. To study biology he would have to apply after military service. Niall hoped (in August) to be accepted by the Air Force; when this bid fell through he enlisted in the Royal Artillery, as Breon had done, and in October was posted to Park Hall Camp at Oswestry in Shropshire. In January 1954 he was selected to train as an officer but declined the offer. 'He prefers the noise of a trombone to the bang of a gun,' commented his father, '& I think he's wise.'97 Rather like Jimmy Porter in Osborne's play, yet to appear,

The Road to Torquay 343

Niall was somewhat disillusioned by the world situation.98 With his love of jazz and interest in politics he was a rather typical young man of his time. It would be two years - partly spent in Germany - before he could register at London University. Meanwhile Sean and Eileen had the consolation of Breon's return to Totnes in mid-October 1953, where he pursued his art career rent-free. Then as 1953 drew to a close came the bombshell: a letter from the owner of Tingrith' giving notice to quit." What does a 'minor Prospero' do in such a situation? The fact was, of course, that O'Casey possessed not even a rough kind of magic. He was at the mercy of circumstances. He and Eileen had hoped to stay at Tingrith' another two years at least while Shivaun was at Dartington and then perhaps move to Salisbury (which Sean liked a lot) or to Stratford (which Eileen fancied). If they had to move now it could not be far from Dartington. But Sean felt he had first to fight with the landlady, or more directly with her son, R.S. Hawkins, a solicitor, acting on her behalf. Acknowledging O'Casey's quarterly payment of rent, due on 25 December, Hawkins said the notice to quit would expire on 29 September 1954. Ever since his eviction from 35 Mountjoy Square in 1920 O'Casey had enjoyed such contests. He relished the present crisis momentarily, but having taken legal advice he realised that Mrs Hawkins was within her rights. Since 1938 the O'Caseys had enjoyed an annual rent of £85, almost half that of the apartment in Overstrand Mansions, Chelsea. So annoyed was he now at the inevitable dislocation that O'Casey determined not to pay the final quarter's rent. He became convinced that Mrs Hawkins had no intention of living in 'Tingrith' and merely wanted to make a capitalist's profit on sale of the house regardless of the O'Caseys' inconvenience. Such people must be taught a lesson. But where was Prospero to find refuge? Possibly in Torquay or nearby Paignton, where Eileen's mother lived, but certainly a place 'with a through train to London; so, from that point of view, it will be no worse' [than Totnes].'100 Meantime, the last Christmas in 'Tingrith' was joyous enough. Niall came home and there was a full house once again. Financially, the year had been reasonably good, with O'Casey's income totally about £2,600.101 The proofs of Sunset and Evening Star had arrived. An idea for a new play was germinating. The only real shadows across the end of 1953 were Nathan's failing health and the death of Eugene O'Neill, who had always sent his regards through Nathan. His death on 27 November at age sixty-five was a blow. 'He certainly died too young,' he wrote Nathan. 'God help us when such as he go. They leave us lonely.'102 Nathan himself was hospitalised with an arterial condition which, he wrote O'Casey mournfully, 'the doctors kindly assure me, will in all probability end my days within a year'.103 But at least Nathan was now no longer alone, being cared for in New York by the actress Julie Haydon, whom he married in 1955. When Prospero moved house to Milan every third thought was to be of his grave. Was this to be the condition of O'Casey's retirement likewise? Or would that March cock yet crow and bring omens of new magic, new change, strange transformations? As artist, he was prisoner of his time. In the new year Eileen

344 Sean O'Casey

would find a new place for them to live, close to Torquay. In spite of the failure of Purple Dust even to get into London, a notice from life to quit was not something O'Casey could ever easily accept.

Part 5 Last Things With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow, And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow; And this was all the Harvest that I reaped "I came like Water, and like Wind I go." - Fitzgerald, The Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam

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17 THE WRITER'S NOT FOR BURNING

here is a passage in one of Denis Donoghue's reviews which comments on the issue of O'Casey's diminishing returns: 'A man who writes The Shadow of a Gunman in 1923, Juno and the Paycock in 1924, The Plough and the Stars in 1926, and The Silver Tassie in 1928 should have the luck to continue writing good plays or the prudence to withdraw into dignity and silence while the going is so good.'1 There is an irony playing around the phrasing here which does little to explicate the pain of O'Casey's extended career. To say 'should have the luck' echoes the locution 'he should be so lucky', meaning 'he hasn't a chance.' To present this writer's career in terms of a choice between luck and prudence verges on the callous. In the 1930s and after, prudent retreat from the marketplace may have been an option for the likes of E.M. Forster or T.S. Eliot but for writers without private means, alternative employment, or rich patrons, it was not to be considered. This was especially the case when a writer was middle-aged starting out and unqualified for any other kind of work except manual labour. Nor is prudence to be weighed against the frustrations induced by contemporary taste. Investments of time and passion run too deep for talk of the cutting of losses. For a writer of O'Casey's stamp there could be no retreat, no acceptance of rejection, no prudence. On the other hand, Yeats himself, in some respects and for a crucial time O'Casey's bete noire, could in his successful later years pose the writerly question, 'Are You Content?' It is addressed to himself by non-literary ancestors he admired and partly envied. The answer, however poignant, would appear to be 'no'. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise. The man who had all the luck is an unlikely candidate, one would have thought, for happiness. When Lennox Robinson wailed to Frank O'Connor about his personal failures he deflected criticism of the later O'Casey with the remark, 'I don't mind how many bad plays Sean writes for the rest of his life. What^^r they may be like, they will be the plays of a happy man.'2 What this amounts to, it may be, is what another writer had claimed over a hundred years earlier: 'Poetry [i.e. all literature] is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.'3 'Happy' in this sense has little to do with conventional contentment.

T

348 SednO'Casey It has more to do with such imperatives as labour exacts in releasing the skylark's song, the spirit's joy outside of time, the fruits of attention paid. O'Casey's pursuit may have been a fool's errand but he was vocationally committed to it. It was his life. The rest was not his business.

He wrote The Bishop's Bonfire very quickly, as if the necessity to move house applied unwonted pressure. He seemed depressed. To Eileen 'he was by no means well; his nerves were bad.'4 Nevertheless he had completed the Bonfire by 5 April 1954,5 by which time Eileen had almost secured a flat for them to move to in June. The sombre mood which gave life to the new play, which was to be subtitled A Sad Play Within the Tune of a Polka, derived in part from O'Casey's response to the depressed state of Ireland. The play was an attempt 'to picture Ireland's present condition, social, economic and political'.6 The epigraph he eventually chose for the title page casts further light on this current national/cultural condition: the opening lines of the Irish poem Cill Chais, 'Cad a dheanfaimid feasta gan adhmad?/Ta deireadh na gcoilte ar lar'7 ['O what shall we do without timber?/The last of the woods are laid low']. This eighteenth-century anonymous poem laments the decline of a house of the Butlers and the flight abroad of 'the good lady' to join 'the prince of the Gael' in exile. In her absence the 'big house' has decayed, its grandeur destroyed, and its fame as a catholic country seat lost without its generous and saintly mistress. If one thinks of The Cherry Orchard as counterpart the elegiac tone may to some degree accord. But O'Casey's habit was so to weigh the present against a heroicised past as to enlist less pity than ironic laughter. The predominant feeling in The Bishop's Bonfire is fear. As they await the arrival to his native town of the newly appointed bishop the members of the community fear all will not be right for his lordship, or fear their own weaknesses, or simply fear the unknown. The beggars on horseback live in a new unease. The 'big house' motif, so strong in Irish literature as to constitute a genre,8 is here barely discernible underneath O'Casey's topsoil of farce, comedy and melodrama. But faint as the outline is it appears in such lines as those the unconventional Father Boheroe (a kind of left-wing Father Ted of the 'fifties) addresses to the timid lovers, Keelin and Daniel: 'Get to yourselves the courage to last it out. You've escaped from the dominion of the big house with the lion and the unicorn [symbols of British imperialism] on its front; don't let yourselves sink beneath the meaner dominion of the big shop with the cross and shamrock on its gable. Whatever comes, refuse to be frightened.'9 But too many of the inhabitants of Ballyoonagh are, like these young lovers, demoralised. The woman who faintly corresponds to the deighbhean or 'good woman' in the poem Cill Chais is actually a travesty of this lofty type. She is the daughter of Councillor Reiligan, 'the big man who owns all the body and half the soul of the little town of Ballyoonagh'. O'Casey calls her Foorawn, literally 'the Cold One', Keelin's sister.10 '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

The Writer's Not for Burning 349 chastity with which she has burdened herself (p. 39). The character was partly based on O'Casey's correspondent Sheila O'Neill, who had made such a vow and who stopped writing to O'Casey when he sent her a copy of the text, and partly based on Maire Keating, whose copious brown hair is once again recalled in this extended stage direction. Foorawn is also 'tall and handsome' (rather than 'pretty'), twenty-seven (the age Maire was when she rejected Sean), with her long, thick hair arranged in a bun (as in the songs Sean wrote to her). However, 'a red enamel cross' hangs ominously on her breast like the 'black cross, nestling chill and steady' on the breast of Nora Creena, Maire's counterpart, in Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well. In the course of the play Foorawn's rejected lover Manus shoots her dead. Once and for all, perhaps, O'Casey was here able to exorcise his feelings of anger, bitterness and frustration for Maire. The personal and the cultural coincided. As will be obvious from this account the play presents serious problems, which O'Casey only partially solved by some very funny minor characters and stage business. These problems were to emerge during production one year later. Though they can be softened by playing up the comedy and playing down the melodramatic element it has to be said that The Bishop's Bonfire mil always be a major challenge to director and actors. It is not a satisfactory play, perhaps because the landscape it mines, as much psychological as sociological, is dangerously brittle: there are great hollows here. Heinz Kosok has made the point that The Bishop's Bonfire, forming part of a trilogy beginning with the Cock, is set in autumn and takes its coloration from the dying season.11 Kenneth Tynan saw the Bonfire as 'manic-depressive', two plays in rivalry, 'one ghastly, one gorgeous, in unhappy juxtaposition'.12 The 'ghastly' one, supposedly, was the darker story O'Casey felt impelled to tell of stagnancy and moral oppression in contemporary Ireland. This was a topic for the Irish diaspora. As O'Casey wrote to an emigrant in New York: 'The noble causes have ceased to breathe, & the dead remains are too small to be embalmed in anyone's memory. Yet Dev. goes along, head up; confident as ever. Is it blindness or vanity; or blindness brought on by vanity?'13 He was also in correspondence with the editor of a particularly pessimistic book, The Vanishing Irish (1953), John A. O'Brien, a priest teaching at Notre Dame in Indiana. O'Brien's thesis was a stark one: because of mass emigration and declining rates of marriage the Irish native population was in danger of extinction. He actually quoted O'Casey in support of his doomsday argument.14 He also reprinted an essay by O'Faolain, 'Love among the Irish', first published in Life (March 1953), which O'Casey admired and agreed with. O'Faolain made two important points about the decline in population. One was the lack of courage: The young people are angry: there is no denying that. But it is a transferred anger. I am satisfied that these young people are dying to throw their arms around one another, human nature being the same the world over. But because [.. .] they cannot make the grade they foolishly turn on one another

350 SednO'Casey all the anger and frustration that - if they had more courage- they would turn on the conditions that are denying them a natural sex life.15 Here was an argument dear to O'Casey's heart, and the clause italicised highlights a major theme in the play he subsequently wrote. The other, related, point O'Faolain made concerned the lack of love among the Irish, meaning sexual love that then dared not speak its name. His conclusion was inescapable: The whole question of sex in Ireland is dominated also by profound psychological repressions.' The stage was set not only for dangerous conflict but for 'impasse', as the clergy thundered against the dangers of sex and the young men, 'obedient up to the point of marriage', at which they balked, were 'inevitably conditioned into a frustrated terror of woman'. O'Faolain's argument agrees wholly with O'Casey's in Cock-a-doodle Dandy: if there is not a healthier attitude towards sex, 'the more spiritual will go on emigrating to get out from under the cloud.'16 The difference in the new play was that instead of emigrating the young stay captive and stay repressed. Hence the implosion leading to Manus's murder of Foorawn: an exaggerated outcome but in the context one which is psychologically by no means ridiculous. O'Brien sent a copy of The Vanishing Irish in February 1954 while O'Casey was in the middle of the Bonfire. He regarded it as 'the loudest and clearest and wisest' wake-up call Ireland had ever received: T have been trying to say something similar myself for a long time now.'17 Another area he brooded upon and made part of his cultural discourse was the related one of church politics. Like Joyce's hero in Exiles, O'Casey was one of those artists who do not take their ideas from other people.18 Rather, he shared in a current of ideas - in Matthew Arnold's sense - circulating at a given time. Thus he found himself to some extent in line with the American sociologist Paul Blanshard, then writing about the insidious politics of the catholic church. O'Casey found much to support his views in American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949), which he had in his library, and David Krause sent him a copy of Blanshard's latest polemic, The Irish and Catholic Power (1954). Although this was not until after Krause had made his first visit in July nevertheless it so to speak flicks a brand backwards onto the Bonfire, sent to Macmillans on 21 June.19 Blanshard's argument was narrower than O'Brien's, while considering the same 'puzzling failure of Irish marriage as a social institution'. He levelled the charge that the church kept the people 'in moral childhood', a 'logical consequence of the Catholic theory of controlled culture'. This control had resulted in a whole nation's accepting in a unique fashion 'the entire sexual code' advocated by the clergy. Indeed, the priests had achieved embarrassing success by exalting virginity 'to the point where it is almost a national catastrophe: they have surrounded the sins of the flesh with such a poignant sense of guilt that they have weakened the Irish mating instinct.'20 O'Casey's Foorawn, with her vow of virginity, is a manifestation of this excess. Manus, for his part, in the end explodes into an attack on 'the fraud of clericals' and the extended fraud of Councillor Reiligan's small-town capitalism. All seems

The Writer's Not for Burning 351 cheerless, dark and above all deadly: Reiligan's name derives from reilig, a graveyard. Yet the Bonfire is not a 'problem play' and while it indirectly demonstrates the awfulness of a superstitious, oppressed society the play carries no Shavian thesis.21 Against a background of anti-modernisation the power of comedy challenges the power of puritanism. All is not cheerless, then; O'Casey could never bear to think so. The eighty-four-year-old Codger Sleehaun, a fine comic creation, presides over the Bonfire, upholding the power of laughter. In ending the play with the song 'My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean' the Codger signals, however ironically, that in the midst of loss there is always the hope of a return of some 'Bonny Prince Charlie' to rebuild Cill Chais out of Irish defeat.

At the end of February Eileen broke her right wrist after a fall, which interfered with but did not explode her plans to find a new flat. Instead of driving around the area she had to take buses. These expeditions did not, of course, include Sean, who coped with the inevitable fact of having to move partly by visiting upon the landlord all blame for the inconvenience and partly by retreating further into reclusion. With Eileen handicapped he found himself with more housework to attend to, 'which muddles my mind a little'.22 Being a woman fully capable of seizing the bull of necessity by the horns, even with one hand, Eileen, in spite of Sean's grumbles, kept looking for a flat or small house until she hit upon a place in St Marychurch, a suburb of Torquay. Torquay then prided itself on being 'the health metropolis of Great Britain and a modern holiday resort second to none'. On the face of it, it would appear to be not O'Casey's kind of place ('for the tired business man or woman in need of a rest'23). Wigan Pier it was not. But St Marychurch, as O'Casey liked to emphasise once he settled into the new place, was not Torquay, '& the local people still call it "The Village". Torquay is a parvenu, an upstart; for when Marychurch was chief Priory of Tor Abbey, Torquay was an insignificant fishing-village.'24 Indeed, warming to the place, O'Casey found it 'prettier than Totnes; something like an Utrillo aspect in the "village", and it is a good way from Torquay and all its bourgeois fuss.'25 Niall, on leave from the army, accompanied Eileen to see the flat, the top floor of an imposing house, 'Villa Rosa', on steeply rising Trumlands Road. Always sensitive, Niall said to her: 'I do hope you're going to like it here, Eileen. You like the sea so much.'26 He was doubtless remembering the holidays spent by the sea all through his childhood. Though a lot smaller than 'Tingrith', flat number 3, then reached by twenty-two steps to a front door at the right-hand side of the house, was a substantial living space. Sean's room had to be chosen first: in front, looking across the Downs, and flanked by a large livingroom. Apart from 'well-equipped' kitchen and large bathroom there were two other bedrooms (Sean's room doubling as usual as his bedroom). When she first took the flat Eileen found it 'sombre', so she and Breon set to and painted it, driving over daily from Totnes. The move itself, on 18

352 Sean O'Casey

June, was as all such moves must be, difficult,27 especially with Sean's books and papers to be transferred with something like precision. As he and Eileen sat in the taxi which took them to Torquay, between them sat his two typewriters. 'We might have been travelling with the Crown Jewels,' Eileen reflected.28 Inside the new flat Eileen's taste was everywhere on view. She favoured white walls, woodwork and ceilings, with the parquet floors brightened by Indian and Mexican rugs. The Augustus John portrait of Sean given as a wedding present (now in the National Gallery of Ireland) presided over the lounge, the portrait of Eileen and the watercolours by Evan Walters, the prints of Gauguin and Matisse, Giorgione's The Sleeping Venus' which so shocked Mrs Gogan in the Plough, and soon the paintings by Breon lent the flat distinction. One frequent visitor commented: 'Only Sean's room remained as he wished it - a bed - table & chair - old typewriter - books everywhere - a fire in the grate summer and winter. It was a small room; the windows seemed always closed; [...] I got the impression that it defeated time & place.'29 On fine days he liked to sit out on the balcony at the front door. Looking straight out he could see the cliffs guarding Babbacombe Bay, as Hopkins had noted almost a hundred years earlier, 'glowing with red', though not 'the sea in-shore chlore green above these same white pebbles, the outer blue purpled by fringed cat'spaws'.30 The balcony was itself a small garden, with hydrangea, petunias, heliotrope and fuchsia, making for a man beginning to feel his age 'a right pleasant bower in which to spend a calm, quiet hour or two' during the day. At night, looking north, he could see the lights 'rising in stages along the hill' in the village of Barton, where he was one day to be cremated, and incongruous though the thought was the scene would remind him of New York, 'a city I love, and shall never see again'. To the south, two or three miles off, lay 'complacent Torquay [...] like an old goose fattened for Christmas; a ramshackle town, scattered over many beautiful hills, and brimmed delightfully by a lovely sea'.31 Sean was content again. The small garden below was 'in a wild state' until the O'Caseys found a handyman, Harry, seventy-one-years of age and blind in one eye, who somehow managed to make it habitable. O'Casey liked to potter there, Voltaire style, as his horizons diminished, and there he entertained those American visitors who came usually with the summer season.32 Tending the roses resulted in injury to O'Casey's right hand and an infection which laid him low for six weeks, delaying the delivery of the text of the Bonfire.^ The eccentric Harry was probably the same man Eileen got on her side in Totnes: when he overheard her say she was short of money for a trip to London he offered to lend her some, and so became her banker, a dangerous occupation. But he probably helped the creation of Codger Sleehaun in the Bonfire.^ There was not much artistically for the O'Caseys in Torquay. As time went on Sean noted a museum, a fine library, the Pavilion Theatre showing 'plays of vast nonsense', but no art exhibitions.35 Eileen, too, expressed disappointment: 'concerts occasionally, sometimes the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra; popular films (not often a foreign one). Sybil Thorndike came down to the

The Writer's Not for Burning 353 Pavilion with Lewis Casson and I was ashamed to see so small a house.'36 Trying to manage her mother, who followed the O'Caseys about in a mixture of pitiable dependency and defiant independence, increased Eileen's responsibilities. From lodgings in Paignton Mrs Reynolds now moved into Torquay. Her health was, as ever, questionable and her drinking was becoming a serious problem. In addition, Eileen would fetch the reluctant boarder Shivaun from Dartington Hall on Fridays to spend weekends in the new home although, finding herself a stranger in Torquay, Shivaun sometimes opted to remain with her friends at Dartington. With Niall serving in Germany from September and Breon back in London painting, Sean and Eileen now began to find themselves alone.

O'Casey did the design himself for the jacket of his last autobiographical volume, Sunset and Evening Star. His original title, Goodbye at the Door, was meant to echo that of the first book, I Knock at the Door, and now the design made that connection. A man stands outside an open door, a glass in one hand, a walking stick in the other to indicate old age, and looks up at a large star in a dark sky. He is flanked by natural symbols: a tree shedding its leaves, tall autumn flowers, and behind the door stands a large Celtic Cross bearing the title. The first book, by contrast, showed a boy in short trousers knocking on a door set into the same Celtic Cross, flanked by symbols of Dublin, Nelson's Pillar and a Victorian Church.37 The final design thus emphasised the unity O'Casey aimed at in this series, begun over fifteen years earlier. He was satisfied with Macmillans's interpretation of his ideas for Sunset and called the design produced 'a striking jacket'.38 And so it is. In sending the page proofs of the text on 5 April, however, Macmillans had several queries. One was a matter of spellings, as it was not clear whether O'Casey was creating new words, making allusions, or genuinely misspelling. He insisted on retaining his idiosyncrasies: 'A good many of marked passages [neologisms] are to remain, as you will see.'39 But as to possibly libellous passages (seven in number), another familiar anxiety for the editors, he was willing to change names at a push but drew the line at softening the portrait of someone no longer alive. If Macmillans thought the reference in 'bad taste' then he was glad to be in the good company of Shakespeare and Jesus Christ. 'I'm too much of a tough to care a damn about "good taste" in morals.'40 Macmillans failed to persuade him to be cautious and there were two possible libel cases after Sunset was published on 29 October 1954.41 The fact that it was the concluding volume in a six-volume autobiography gained Sunset special regard. It had better sales than any of the preceding volumes.42 That apart, there was plenty to criticise, as in the recent volumes, regarding content, tone and style. But nobody wanted to take on O'Casey publicly now that the autobiography was complete. So, many reviews were magnanimous. The Irish, as before, were more likely to take offence. Austin Clarke, for example, objected to being included among Irish writers incapable

354 Sean O'Casey

of commitment and bridled at the reference to his Yeatsian poetic plays, 'arch pranks among pierrots and ancient Irish monks'.43 Clarke also pointed to the attack on George Orwell as a sign of insecurity. Younger critics, such as John Jordan, free of internecine battle scars, took a more sympathetic line. To Jordan, O'Casey's much-commented-on bitterness revealed the natural idealist: 'He saw daily the betrayal of Christ, and has never got over it.'44 But it was the Americans, once again, who took this final volume of the autobiographies most to their hearts. There was a sense of rallying around and much talk of 'masterpiece', though the word was reserved for the achievement as a whole.45 The blurb for the American edition, not written by O'Casey, called the autobiography 'one of the greatest creative works of our time'. As if to put the money where the mouth is, in American style, Sunset was taken up by the Book Find Club in New York as an upcoming selection. In swerving from a critique of the final volume, which he, like others, found 'quarrelsome',46 to an assessment of the autobiography as a whole ('a masterpiece of writing') Brooks Atkinson isolated 'joy' and 'freedom' as O'Casey's enduring themes: 'He hates anything or anyone who does not contribute to the joy of being alive or who impinges on personal freedom.' Citing, as many reviewers did, the upbeat passage of O'Casey's final salute to life in Sunset Atkinson gave the accolade, 'He's a man.'47 The autobiographies, taken as a whole, are indeed less a portrait of the artist than the portrait of a man who recreated himself as a complete, sometimes predictable, personality. In that regard O'Casey added one more memorable character to his larger-than-life dramatis personae, namely the mythical 'Sean', the outspoken, outrageous and eloquent rebel.48 It was to this character Americans responded with such enthusiasm as was unknown in England or Ireland. It was from America, too, that O'Casey's annual income now mainly came. The division between the London and New York offices of Macmillan at this time meant better terms for O'Casey in New York. The American edition of Sunset was three times that of the London, and was followed by double that figure again by the Book Find Club. In addition, the publisher for the Club, George Braziller, was quick off the mark in publishing Selected Plays of Sean O'Casey (1955), with an introduction by John Gassner, who considered the plays, selected by O'Casey himself but not including the Cock, 'the most exciting dramatic writing in the English language' since Saint Joan (p. xi). Terms were arranged granting $1,365 for this volume.49 Braziller, an O'Casey enthusiast, was also interested in a new edition of the critical essays, The Flying Wasp, while Macmillans in London rejected the idea, and eventually (1956) refused to import the book, much expanded, as unlikely to 'prove acceptable to the public today'.50 The American public thought differently and Braziller's edition of The Green Crow went through several re-printings. O'Casey was offended by the Macmillan response. It was clear to him that Americans were better judges of the value of his work.

fhe Writer's Not for Burning 355 The first theatre person to display an interest in The Bishop's Bonfire was actor Cyril Cusack. Having recently formed Cyril Cusack Productions he had staged Arms and the Man and The Playboy of the Western World at the Gaiety, Dublin, and had brought Playboy to Paris in June 1954. He had a good company, which included Walter Macken, better known as playwright and novelist, Siobhan McKenna, and Cusack's wife Maureen, an actress of considerable power and versatility.51 Just before the Paris trip Cyril wrote requesting the script of the new play. O'Casey put him off with the odd excuse that he always liked to wait and give the Abbey first opportunity to ask for one of his new plays.52 The Bonfire-was only then being professionally typed and there still remained the business of setting down the airs of the songs. As usual, Brigid Edwards, the teacher in Dartington Hall, visited Tingrith' for this purpose. In that way, O'Casey explained to Macmillans, the copyright of all the songs in his plays was his.53 After the move to Torquay he sent the text to Macmillans, London, informing them that he was also sending it to the New York office.54 Not having heard a whisper from the Abbey and having heard Cusack as Dubedat in The Doctor's Dilemma on BBC radio O'Casey wrote to ask him if he was still interested and then sent on the Bonfire on 1 September. Since Cyril had repeated a Benedictine monk's saying that 'there was very little love left in Ireland' and had just returned from a penitential pilgrimage to Lough Derg in County Donegal, O'Casey mused: 'Cut & bleeding feet [at Lough Derg], but no love. Oh, Eire, Eire, where in the name of God are you going [?]'55 Cusack was a many-sided man. An artist to his fingertips he had also a strong religious strain. He was President of the Catholic Stage Guild at this time and was busy re-activating its library, an idea which won the sympathy of Archbishop McQuaid.56 This Guild was a club with quarters in Marlborough Street; members could dine, associate, and even stay here. Every year the Guild put on a fund-raising show at the Adelphi cinema and brought in film stars from abroad to grace the occasion. Once, the stars included Ronald Reagan. When the organisers rang Wynne's Hotel (then noted mainly for its patronage by priests and members of religious orders) the manageress refused to have Reagan and his entourage because of his supposed liberalism - 'what do we want that crowd for?' - and sent them up to the Gresham.57 On the other hand Cusack was a man of amazing courage and artistic commitment. He was anything but a prude. He knew from the first reading that the Bonfire "was in every sense hot stuff, and yet he never flinched from the ^flames. In addition, he knew how to handle O'Casey, as witness his response on 9 September: 'I feel Dublin needs this play [...]; the modern craftsmanship is, of course, a delight; the characterisation immense; the language glorious; humour abounding; and finally and over all it tells most movingly a tale of national tragedy.'58 When he added a few reservations O'Casey, warmed by the flattery, was not offended: Tt wouldn't be surprising if one of 74 nodded occasionally.'59 Cyril suggested a visit to Torquay, accompanied by Maureen; he knew O'Casey's gentlemanly softness towards women. Slightly alarmed, O'Casey assented and as Cusack later put it he and Maureen arrived at the door of no. 3, 'Villa Rosa', fortified by

356 Sean O'Casey

'dutiful orisons at Mass in a church nearby', for it was a Sunday. 'Quizically, courteously we were greeted at the door by the great man himself. After the first peering look we fell into friendship with a taste of sherry and happy agreement on the Dublin production.'60 The sherry was an innovation. Before leaving Totnes O'Casey was found to have low blood pressure and Dr Varian prescribed a glass of sherry a day.61 O'Casey was particularly pleased that Cusack was going to do the play because he had heard from Nathan. Clearly well enough again under the loving care of Julie Haydon to take an interest in O'Casey's American career, Nathan qualified his praise of the Bonfire which O'Casey had sent for appraisal. Frankly, Nathan preferred the Cock, 'which is thematically similar but which is flavored with a richer wit and fancy'.62 Responding immediately O'Casey expressed joy at seeing Nathan's handwriting again and agreed ruefully that the new play was inferior to the Cock. 'That play, possibly by accident, came out in a very colorful way, and it is damned hard to get up to its standard.' Nevertheless, the Bonfire was the best he could do 'in the mood of the moment': a common O'Caseyan phraseology.63 He always spoke of the 'mood' out of which each of his plays arose. Nathan also said that the catholic clergy in the USA was on the whole 'a jolly sort' and was so regarded by the public. Bishops and Monsignors shared in this regard. Therefore, 'a local audience would experience difficulty in believing the Irish situation.' In short, he was warning O'Casey off. Nathan was himself moving towards Catholicism, though he breathed not a word of this to O'Casey. Neither did he say he was now engaged to marry Julie Haydon; the two matters were not unrelated. The immediate point was that the Bonfire was unwanted in New York. During the lull before casting got under way in Dublin O'Casey, working on galley-proofs for Macmillans, tightened up the play a little but, as usual now, had no real way of gauging its theatricality. Micheal 6 hAodha wrote from Radio Eireann about a series of productions (the three Dublin plays plus Red Roses for Me) planned for May-June 1955: would O'Casey record four talks to accompany the plays? Agreeing, he said he would only talk on general matters, with songs interspersed. The payment offered, £25 per fifteen-minute talk, impressed him as 'a fine sum'.64 The recordings were to be made in Torquay in March. As soon as he was finished with a film located in Morocco Cusack began work on the production of the Bonfire. His inspired casting for Foorawn, Siobhan McKenna, was lost as she was now starring in Saint Joan at the Arts Theatre. Her emotional range would have brought that role to magnificent life. While fancying for himself the juicy role of Codger Sleehaun Cusack was afraid he was playing too many character roles: a fear that persisted into his old age when success as Uncle Peter in the RTE soap Glenroe troubled him. He toyed with the possibility of Manus, the spoiled priest in love with and eventually the killer of Foorawn, but Manus appears only in acts 1 and 3.65 That would be scanned. Cusack chose the Codger. Manus went to the ingenue Denis Brennan. Eddie Byrne, who had made such an impact in Red Roses for Me in

The Writer's Not for Burning 357 London, was cast as Councillor Reiligan, father of Foorawn and Keelin and owner of the big house preparing to host the bishop. Cusack wanted Walter Macken as the liberal Father Boheroe but O'Casey feared Macken would be too strong for the role, which went to the young Pat Layde, a brilliant but flawed actor. Maureen Cusack was to play Keelin. Other roles were by old Abbey reliables and a couple of beginners. It was not exactly a stellar cast. Cyril decided to ask Tyrone Guthrie to direct. This was a surprising move for this actor-manager notoriously difficult to direct, but Cusack had seemingly accepted - for the moment - the need in the modern theatre for the director.66 In Guthrie Cusack was choosing an international star who might lift the play onto the world stage. Moreover, the play would not then be Cyril's sole responsibility. For he had his doubts about the Bonfire even if Guthrie was 'very excited' by it.67 Publicly, Cusack claimed that the Bonfire was 'Sean's masterpiece';68 privately, he sent the script to a Dominican priest in London for his opinion. Father Hilary was not enthusiastic: My immediate reaction is one of regret that you have decided to put it on. Of course it is good theatre; anything of Sean O'Casey would be that. But the bitterness that runs through all his plays and his scorn of the Church and of religious practice vitiate his art. [... ] Is all prayer to be sneered at and the intercession of the Saints a thing for mockery? I hate hypocrisy, as I know you do. I gladly see it exposed, as I know you do. But in this play there is not a hint of the existence of anything else in the Church or in Catholic life. Again, knowing Cyril, his integrity and his understanding of his religion, the priest applied as much pressure as he could to get him to drop the play. 'I should be sorry to see your own great artistry applied to the presentation of this product of a desperately unhappy and cankered soul.'69 Sub rosa and unknown to 'Villa Rosa' Cusack was looking for clearance for his conscience. But he was not about to capitulate: 'I am committed to presenting the play, having agreed to do so.' He went on to defend O'Casey. Tf he is a tormented soul may not this be an encouraging sign? May he not hate what he believes to be evil? I sometimes think that O'Casey's egomania - which, may I add, is better vented than sequestered, left lurking in the secret places of the soul comes from an identification of himself with Ireland.'70 But it is doubtful if Cusack shared this insight with Guthrie when they met to discuss the Bonfire at the end of December. Guthrie, a no-nonsense man and like O'Casey an Irish protestant, would not likely have followed Cusack's tortuous catholic train of thought. The two men, indeed, did not get on very well during the production. Guthrie was now all in favour of theatre as ritual:71 his production before the Bonfire was another Hamlet in Berlin, while after Bonfire he would go to Stratford, Ontario, to look after his pet project, the new quasi-Shakespearean theatre there. O'Casey's Bonfire seemed a little outside his range.72 Also, psychologically Guthrie was not equal to the sexual-spiritual neuroses in the Foorawn-Manus

358 Sean O'Casey

relationship. The paradox of Guthrie is that while in rehearsal he carefully shied away from scenes of passion or sexuality, as his career gathered momentum he was increasingly drawn to plays in which these qualities were inherent.'73 Leaving God out of it the key figure in the Bonfire in the context of desire and denial is Foorawn's father, Councillor Reiligan, a man in whom there is a great deal of violence, exemplified in the passage where he expresses his dissatisfaction with his other daughter: 'gripping Keelin roughly, swinging her around, and giving her a pushing fling that sends her, almost spinning, to the other end of the room where she subsides into the half throne, half chair', this latter-day Polonius shouts, 'Disgrace to your father, disgrace to your sister, you jade, shameless an' shockin'! I'll deal with you later' (p. 78). It is to be noted there is no mother in the play. Foorawn's sexlessness defends her from her father's abuse, but it does not defend her from Manus's. Male violence against women was one of O'Casey's themes, bound up with repressed sexual desire: in the Cock women were literally demonised through the male gaze. Instead of digging into such areas, where O'Casey was grappling with the effects of repression in Irish society, Guthrie worked on the theatricality. He and Cusack differed in emphasis. 'I think the play should be done in a highcoloured, exaggerated, dashing style - abrupt changes of tempo, pitch [,] volume of feeling - all extreme. [Cusack] wants it more "natural", more gentle, more go as you please, with smaller, more delicate nuances.'74 Cyril put the matter a little differently: 'what I set out to eliminate were some of the juvenile obviousities, amateur intrusions, and a little of the vulgarity - rather of the English music-hall variety [...] from what was otherwise a joyous production.'75 There were differences, too, on financial matters. Cusack put up the money for the production and used Guthrie's fee as excuse for not paying actors the Equity rate (£5-10s). Guthrie turned this into an issue at rehearsals, held, incongrously enough, at the Catholic Stage Guild's premises. Thereafter, the relationship between the two was 'rather chilly',76 and the production a job of journeywork. Meanwhile, O'Casey was assured that all was going well. It was to Cusack he sent the final text of the play on 4 January 1955, having already sent two scene designs by Breon. O'Casey had to prompt Cyril to meet Guthrie in his manorial house in Annagh-ma-Kerrig, County Monaghan, so he may have sensed the tension between them. After that it was Guthrie who wrote to O'Casey for possible changes and to give a progress report. He did not like the designs made by Breon, who had no stage experience, and rejected them.77 (The designer chosen was Michael O'Herlihy.) Instead, Breon did a portrait of Sean which was included as frontispiece of the text of the Bonfire. O'Casey was unusually cooperative in making changes in the text, especially in act 2.78 But act 3 was the real problem, especially the melodramatic and violent scene between Foorawn and Manus. Fred O'Donovan, who was ASM for the production, sent the script with many suggestions Guthrie wanted but which Fred was to say came from the cast. The script came back inscribed, 'Fred/"No change"/Sean', and that was that.79 According to O'Donovan, Guthrie, awaiting

The Writer's Not for Burning 359 the changes by O'Casey, under-rehearsed the third act; but the other two acts O'Donovan thought among the best work O'Casey had done. Never before or since did such public excitement attend the premiere of an Irish play as was whipped up before the opening of the Bonfire on 28 February 1955. There is a clear sense that so far as the Roman Catholic establishment was concerned this was pay-back time. One of the catholic organs of the time was the Standard newspaper, which was so anti-communist as to be virtually a Vatican mouthpiece. Its recent tabloid-style attack was on a trip to Moscow by a 'delegation' of seven Irish journalists and trade unionists invited by the Soviet Cultural Society. On 21 January Archbishop McQuaid quashed the rumour that this delegation had his permission: it was not even sought. The inference was clear. Nobody from Dublin had the right to enter the home of communism without the Archbishop's say-so, which even if sought would not be granted. (His usual method of control was to announce that such-and-such a choice was a grave sin and that silenced all debate.)The Standard vilified the delegation, which included the writer James Plunkett, then branch secretary of the WUI, who felt obliged to resign. The Standard quoted McQuaid: 'Communism is an unprincipled, ruthless creed, which had for unchanging purpose in every land, without exception, our own included, the utter destruction of our Faith. Under the pretext of peace and social justice, by any and every means, it is endeavouring to establish the tyranny of materialism that men may forget the existence of God and of eternity.'80 Against this background, the splash across page one of an attack on O'Casey ten days before the opening of the Bonfire was ominous. 'Mr. O'Casey flays all manner of Catholic Ecclesiastics, Irish religious organisations, and Catholic writers,' praises Shaw, makes a pun on the name of the Papal Nuncio, and pours scorn on Matt Talbot. Indeed, it was easily demonstrable that O'Casey had 'drawn himself up against both Church and State in Ireland' (emphasis added): 'his bishop's bonfire is shortly to be ignited. Is it inflammable material?' A caption under an excerpt from Sunset and Evening Star supplied the answer: 'Sean O'Casey's hatred of the Catholic Church permeates all his writings.' Inside, an article on catholic action urged readers to be active: 'It is the boasted aim of Communism to "tear God from his Heaven". Where do you stand?' (p. 5) One week later the editor referred to the 'shock' caused by his comments. The point, he argued, was not whether The Bishop's Bonfire is a 'great work of art' but 'simply that O'Casey has prostituted his undoubted ability in the cause of anti-God and anti-Clericalism. [...] It is one of the contradictions of our modern life that he should be offered a stage in the capital city of the country most steadfastly ranged against the enemies who are his friends.' The time had come to make a stand. 'Where is the nation's self-respect?' Moreover, in italics, and in the knowledge of Cyril Cusack's involvement and his use of the hall for rehearsals: 'where stands the Catholic Stage GuildT81 Bookings at the Gaiety shot up and soon not a ticket was available for opening night. It was a case of double 'standards' perhaps, your Dublin man-

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in-the-street responding to pulpit thumping rather as Fluther to The Sleeping Venus' ('Oh, that's a terrible picture; oh, that's a shockin' picture!') while enjoying every lineament. More serious were the threatened demonstrations. Maria Duce, an extremist catholic-action association, was rumoured to be mustering forces; journalists began gleefully to recall the riots over the Plough. Flann O'Brien rang up Cusack to gloat, 'You're going to have a spot of bother tonight!'82 He referred to MariaDuce. For weeks the Dublin newspapers had speculated over the possibility of Sean's travelling. But he never had any real intention of it. Through the generosity of Sydney Bernstein, the London film and television producer and close friend of the O'Caseys, Eileen and Shivaun went instead. With them also was Dr Madeline Epstein, formerly from Sandymount but now living in Torquay. After a two-hour delay in Bristol because of snow the flight was met at Dublin airport on Saturday 26 February by Cusack, Ria Mooney and a crowd of journalists clamouring for the latest news. The accomplished Eileen said Sean had chest trouble but was braving it out in Torquay; said hopeful things about the Bonfire:, and mentioned the Radio Eireann talks coming up.83 If she glanced at the newspapers that day she would have noted that theatrical Dublin was simmering - 'perhaps boiling would be a better word' - with excitement over the premiere on Monday, and that Guthrie believed O'Casey's experimental plays were so far ahead of their time that they might have to wait twenty years 'to be properly appreciated'.84 A 'veritable army of visiting theatre critics' had been invited from England, with one or two from America, named in the Evening Herald, while in the newly founded Evening Press its drama critic Gabriel Fallon put the question, 'What Will Mr Guthrie do to O'Casey?' Not much, he opined.85 But on all sides there was, as the term was, 'ballyhoo'. A clever cartoon on the front page on the Irish Times showed a man pointing to an Abbey poster advertising Joseph Tomelty's Is the Priest at Home? and being told, 'No - he's gone out to book for the Bonfire.' The story grew over the weekend. On Monday, opening day, one of the visiting critics stirred the pot with the headline, 'Police called to stand by at O'Casey's new play'.86 The rumour circulated that O'Casey was afraid to come to Dublin. From 2 p.m. a queue formed outside the Gaiety for the 300 unbookable seats in the 'gods'; by 7 p.m. close to 2,000 people jammed South King Street and around the corner to Mercer's Hospital. Clearly, for most of these no seats were to be had, for even members of the diplomatic corps could not get tickets.87 The gardaiwere called to maintain order but not, as Guthrie later maintained, mounted police; he had been spending too much time in Canada.88 The street was then not pedestrianised and traffic proved the main problem. Most of the huge crowds were students, who when patrons of the dress circle arrived made some typical protests and burst into cheering and singing (to the air of 'Come Back to Erin') 'Go Back to Moscow, the Hammer, the Sickle!', to keep themselves in the sort of good humour more usual at Lansdowne Road.89 There were some members of Maria Duce with banners denouncing O'Casey.90 By 8.30 p.m., half an hour

The Writer's Not for Burning 361 after curtain up, the crowds outside had dispersed, to return later in smaller numbers to light bonfires and heckle the posh people leaving the theatre. Inside the packed house (capacity 1,200) there was tension, there was noise, and as the Irish Independent put it (1 March) a 'very mixed' audience, 'representative of all classes'. Among the notables were politicians (Tanaiste William Norton and Mrs Norton, Frank and Mrs Aiken), writers (Kate O'Brien, Donagh MacDonagh), and theatre people (Anew McMaster, Hilton Edwards, Lennox Robinson, Shelah Richards). Eileen, Shivaun and Dr Epstein were in the dress circle, where they met Fallon, who was with Douglas Gageby, editor of the Evening Press. Fallon was embarrassed at the meeting, especially when as he left to return to his seat Eileen flung after him, 'Don't be too hard on the old man!'91 Though she later denied saying this it is in character; she was Sean's great protector. There was also a small number from Maria Duce. These held their fire until act 2, when the play has flashes of outrageousness. Cusack later described the disruption: Came a clattering of up-turned seats and shouting voices - "This is blasphemy!"... "This is sacrilege!" and other cries of protest. In the tradition of the stage the play went on, while the demonstrators, a small right-wing Roman Catholic group, waving programmes and showering pamphlets on the stunned audience, made for the exit-door, at which point, out of the bewildered silence, from the gallery the little Dublin voice was heard - "Get out, ye dirty Protestants!"92 To Madeleine Epstein in the dress circle the incident was far from amusing. Recalling the pamphlets thrown from the gallery accompanied by jeers and shouting she felt a planned opposition was under way.93 There was certainly more widespread abuse hurled at Cusack when he made his curtain speech in his best histrionic style, mock innocence combined with arch humour. He first arranged a pause while he laced his boot to collect his thoughts. Then he began in Irish and as cries of 'speak English' drowned his words he turned to English. In ever-so-polite tones, punctuated by ambiguous sniffs, he thanked the audience for holding their 'heretical hisses' to the end. He then defended O'Casey as 'a playwright of deeply religious feeling'. When shouts of derision greeted this claim Cusack commented on the presence of 'self-appointed defenders of God in the Manger [...] But I think their attitude is rather that of dog in the manger.'94 This sort of baiting and heckling alarmed those unused to it, especially since noise outside the theatre and the smell of bonfires lit by students calling for O'Casey (presumed to be inside) penetrated the auditorium. Dr Epstein continues her recollections: There was panic and people got the impression that the Theatre was on fire. Eileen, Shivy and myself were escorted out by the back of the Theatre - we went through long narrow corridors to a small stage door into a taxi.'95 Yet next morning none of the Dublin papers regarded the reception of the play as in any way violent. A cartoon in the Irish Times showed the manager of the Gaiety answering his phone, 'No, Mr.

362 SednO'Casey O'Casey - no chassis.' But the British see these matters differently. Elizabeth Frank (News Chronicle) referred to 'pandemonium' in the Gaiety; Cyril Wilson (Daily Mail) witnessed 'a storm of protest' and even 'bedlam'. A similar difference in perception opened up between Irish and British critics of the play itself. With over a year to go before Look Back in Anger burst onto the London stage English reviewers seemed grateful for anything out of the ordinary. They were also quite generous. The Times even saw the play as O'Casey's best since the Tassie. The Sunday reviews, of course, were yet to come: Hobson kicking for touch with talk of 'some fine moments', Tynan enjoying himself with such remarks as, 'there were more stage Irishmen in the house than in the cast.'96 But it was the dailies which starkly contrasted. No Irish reviewer could, like the Daily Mail, see in O'Casey 'a compassion for the weakness of the common man which is as deep as his contempt for the power of the Church.'97 Gerard Fay probably best sums up the response of critics from English papers when he said of the Bonfire in the Manchester Guardian (2 March): 'It succeeds beyond the hopes of its enemies. It fails a little more than O'Casey's friends would have wished. But it remains one of the best of his works for several years.' For the most part, the Irish reviewers dismissed the play. One even felt he now had proof that Lady Gregory wrote O'Casey's early plays.98 For the Standard, the cause of such disturbance as there was,99 the reviewer was now the playwright Seamus Byrne, since Fallon had left that post in 1954. Byrne was hard but actually quite fair.100 Equally unimpressed, Conor Cruise O'Brien said the action of the Bonfire 'consists of a revolver shot in the third act', while Cusack had delivered his curtain speech 'with the air of Ajax defending a damp Monday evening'.101 Something about O'Casey, like Falstaff, brings out the witty phrase in any company. The three Dublin dailies all expressed disappointment. Finegan in the Evening Herald, no admirer, accused O'Casey of writing about an Ireland fifty or sixty years in the past: an ironic putdown when according to Studies Ireland's 'special neurosis is an almost pathological reluctance to face facts.'102 Gabriel Fallon, promising more in his regular Saturday column, had not a good word to say for the play.103 In his Saturday piece (5 March) he went so far as to declare that Yeats had got it right when he condemned the Tassie for its errors, repeated in the Bonfire. The former friends were now irreconcilable enemies.104 Among the younger reviewers, Valentin Iremonger, Ulick O'Connor, and especially Hugh Leonard saw interesting and good things in the play. The latter (not yet, in fact, 'Hugh Leonard') pertinently asked, T wonder why we hate O'Casey?' He thought it might be because O'Casey 'has refused to take us at our own valuation'.105 There is something in that. The most intelligent review was from Beckett's friend AJ. Levanthal, who saw the Bonfire not on the opening but on the eighth night, when 'cuts and speeding of tempo may explain the enthusiasm of the audience' as well as his own enjoyment. O'Casey was 'burning with reforming zeal. Ireland appears to him to be held in intellectual bondage.' The language was out of line with modern verse drama and belonged to balladry and 'the natural song of the people'.106

The Writer's Not for Burning 363 Eileen and Shivaun stayed on in Dublin for a week. A mutual friend of Barry Fitzgerald, J.J. O'Leary, took them touring during the day, Ria Mooney took them shopping, and they ate out at night. Eileen went back to see the Bonfire several times and found improvements each time; on Friday night it went 'splendidly'.107 For fifteen-year-old Shivaun, her first time in Ireland was exciting, and destined for the stage she gave her first interview without a stumble. She was full of enthusiasm for the Dublin people, the architecture, and all there was to see. She praised O'Casey as a family man: 'Daddy is a real father [...] helps with the washing up, goes to football matches with us, and brings mother and me breakfast in bed on Sunday mornings.'108 Meanwhile, O'Casey was working away at his Radio Eireann talks in Torquay. He had recorded all four by 10 March. He was constantly interrupted by reporters, whom he teased mercilessly, letting one believe he was dancing a jig for joy at the other end of the telephone at the news that audiences were cheering his play in Dublin, and letting the Torquay Herald and Express know he had dozens of telegrams as yet unopened: 'maybe when I'm feeling a bit sleepy I'll have a look at what they say.'109 Eileen had rung him from Dublin, so he knew how to take the criticism. Cusack tried hard to persuade him to Dublin even after Eileen and Shivaun arrived home but he pleaded ill health. This hardly pleased Cyril, who was looking forward to a new lease of life for the play once Guthrie left for Canada in the second week of March. From board ship Guthrie wrote to O'Casey: 'Dublin drives me mad - so much pretension about being A Capital, having A Culture, such a lot of self-appointed Guardians of this, Protectors of that, so much fucking Holiness ... & what is it really? Bolton or Wakefield in a more enervating climate.'110 With apologies for his inadequate production - 'too much decoration, too little spine' - and at not being present for the 'after-life' of the play,111 Guthrie sailed out of O'Casey's life and on to higher things, leaving Cyril to cope with Dublin's enervating climate. As to the 'after-life' of the Bonfire, bookings were good enough to extend the run from three to five weeks, netting O'Casey almost £400 in royalties. Then it yielded the Gaiety stage to Show Boat. Cyril's hopes for a transfer to London declined, for although Albery offered the Embassy Cusack disliked it as a venue for Irish plays.112 To the Sunday Times O'Casey was 'a prophet honoured once more in his own country, but no longer in the West End'.113 The first half of this claim was ludicrous, the second only too true. O'Casey's material was now too localised to interest Londoners. Neither was Broadway interested.114 Nathan was right about that, and O'Casey's comments to Time magazine on the theme of the Bonfire, 'the ferocious chastity of the Irish, a lament for the condition of Ireland [. . .] with the lowest birth and marriage rates in the world',115 would attract few angels and fewer directors. Thus Cusack's ambition, to 'repatriate' O'Casey, 'to return Dublin's dramatist to Dublin, to his roots',116 came to nothing. With the proceeds from the Dublin production he bought an Epstein bust of Shaw which in 1977 he presented to the Abbey. So, some lasting good survived the short-lived Bonfire.

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O'Casey himself survived the flames, to say his piece another day: 'When we lose, we must just go at it again.'117 There were the four broadcasts on Radio Eireann to look forward to; there was Niall's return from his base in Ostnabriick in April to attend an interview for admission to University College London (Eileen would go up to London to be with him for a couple of days); there was the publication of the Bonfire. Who knew what the end of the year might bring? He had an idea for a new play. He was nervous about making the four fifteen-minutes recordings, though he had already recorded readings for Caedmon. Lecturing or public speaking he found difficult. 'I used to be fine on a platform or in a hall; but that is over 40 years ago, & at times, when I'm asked to do even a "five-minute" gab, I imagine I must have dreamed the successes of the long ago.'118 Two of the recordings were faulty and had to be done again, but otherwise all went well for the time being. They were scheduled to go out on air to precede the four plays: 15 May, Shadow of a Gunman] 22 May, ]uno\ 29 May, the Plough, 5 June, Red Roses for Me. Each talk had its own tempo as well as theme. In the first, O'Casey, who had never broadcast before on Irish radio, was rather reluctant to put himself forward except in the guise of a 'green crow' sending a few caws 'over the roofs of Dublin'.119 The theme he focused on was the possibility and horror of another war. Looking at both the romance and the loss associated with war O'Casey startlingly broke into song three times, 'At Erin on the Rhine', 'Her Lad in the Scots Brigade', and 'Domhnall Dubh'. Such was his style. War was always deadly for the young but a nuclear war would destroy the planet. There must be dialogue with the Russians: 'we must coexist if we are to exist at all.' He ended: 'Let us send the big bully war home to hell. If we don't, we're done for.' The second talk focused on the human spirit and the need to cope with natural disasters. Recent floods and storms, however bad, were no reason for despair. Our whole history was one of enduring and of healing. After World War Two, 'Europe was in ruins, and man was tired in body and bewildered in mind'; but after the darkness had come light. The march of mankind was ever forward. 'Life cannot retreat from itself without meeting death.' Ireland was exhausted after the struggle for independence and its aftermath; looking back only sapped energy further. It was time for Ireland to be gayer and more hopeful, in short, to modernise more. With that, he burst into 'Ireland Boys Hurray!' and finished with a blessing in Irish. In the third talk he moved from an expression of age, as he approached his 75th birthday (30 March) at time of recording, to a consideration of Ireland as the greatest nation in the world. Tf we're not the greatest now we can be, if we let wisdom be our guide.' Going down a pathway of Irish nationalist verse and song he arrived at Parnell, and sang a ballad heard as a boy on the Dublin streets, The Late Lamented Charles Stewart Parnell'. Another song, from the Bonfire, ending on the line 'Youth's just a tale that shall never be told', allowed him to caw louder, 'We

The Writer's Not for Burning 365 must change that.' There must be a life of useful fulfilment for all, so that each person would have an individual story to tell. The fourth talk was cancelled, or 'liquidated', as O'Casey termed it.120 The tape survives, recording his response to the Dublin critics to the Bonfire. Philip Rooney, Head of Scriptwriting, explained that it was because of possible libel. It is more likely that the talk was adjudged uninteresting once the Bonfire controversy had come and gone.121 For although O'Casey tilted at Gabriel Fallon he was mainly concerned because the professional Irish critics (his preferred phrase) acted as one, a 'phalanx', a band of 'undertakers' uttering an 'incantation of derision'. This line of talk might only confuse an audience waiting to hear Red Roses for Me on the radio. Besides, the tone was acerbic and O'Casey grew angry and too personal. But there were two things, at least, which it was a pity for audiences not to have heard: O'Casey singing in his frail, slightly slurred voice a song he had written in 1942 called The Green Bushes', which ends with the betrayed lover's verse: I'll not shed a tear an' I'll not make a moan, Tho' she's left me forsaken an' standin' alone; I'll seek out a girl better-manner'd than she, To seek th' green bushes an' wait there for me.122 The other item was O'Casey's dexterous avoidance of a definition of what constitutes a great play: Tf a play expands the heart with feeling and the mind with excited thought, it is enough for the moment.'123 The rest is up to time. The three talks broadcast won O'Casey many admirers. 'Here was the old O'Casey of St Laurence O'Toole days, chatting as naturally and entertainingly as if he were still resting on Newcomen Bridge or at the Five Lamps.'124 In Torquay the reception from Radio Eireann was irritatingly intermittent but O'Casey gamely listened to all four productions of the plays. He liked Red Roses best, adapted and directed by P.J. O'Connor, in which John Stephenson (the original Figure in the Window in the Plough) played Brennan o' the Moor, a role he had created in Shelah Richards's premiere of Red Roses at the Olympia in 1943. O'Casey liked the Plough broadcast least, finding it 'all confused'.125 This is odd, for in contrast to the other three plays recorded this was the Abbey stage production which some still say was one of the best ever. Directed by Ria Mooney, it was the first Plough since the burning of the Abbey in 1951 and had many new, highly talented members in the cast, including Philip O'Flynn as Fluther - a role he made his own for many years - his wife Angela Newman as Rosie Redmond, Marie Kean as Mrs Gogan, Eddie Golden as Brennan, Pat Layde as the Covey, Peadar Lamb as Langan and Doreen Madden as Mollser. As in 1951 the Clitheroes were played by Micheal 6 hAonghusa and Maire Ni Dhomhnaill. The radio recording was made between the stage opening (at the Queen's) on 25 April and the triumphant participation in mid-May at the second Paris Festival of Dramatic Art. O'Casey was curiously unexcited by the Abbey's trip to Paris, the company's first official visit outside Ireland since 1937 and its first-ever visit to the

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continent.126 In the Sarah Bernhardt theatre, where Cusack and McKenna had brought The Playboy a year earlier, the Abbey players, opening the Festival des Nations, got an outstanding reception for both the curtain-raiser, Hyde's An P6sadhn\ directed by Tomas Mac Anna, and Ria Mooney's production of the Plough. Michael O'Herlihy's sets for the Plough were applauded at the opening of each act and at the end there were twelve curtain calls. The company played for three nights (18-20 May) and won rave reviews. The visit was a cultural and even diplomatic triumph, for ambassadors from no less than twenty-one countries graced the opening performance. Ernest Blythe must have smiled for once when at a farewell party the Irish ambassador to France, William P. Fay, publicly honoured 'those who defended so well the prestige of Ireland abroad'.128O'Casey's (and Eileen's) friend Tom Curtiss, critic for the HeraldTribune, sent the reviews. Blind to the whole cultural triumph of the production, O'Casey could only muse sardonically, 'Is the Abbey becoming respectable? Has the kitchen poker [his nickname for Gabriel Fallon] raked out the flaming embers?'129 Although he was concerned with the here and now and not with fame and glory his lack of response to this major event is curious.130

The here and now included entertaining Brooks and Oriana Atkinson at Torquay, who were accompanied by Alan Dent, critic for the News Chronicle. Eileen booked them into a local hotel and they visited 'Villa Rosa' on 14-15 May. Dent wanted O'Casey to agree to a recording of Juno by Cyril Cusack Productions (Siobhan McKenna to play Juno, Cyril to play Joxer, Seamus Kavanagh as the Captain, and O'Casey himself to provide a 'preamble'). All i June - good omen - and was was settled, the record was made in Dublin131 in highly successful. Indeed nine months after it appeared \hejuno recording was outstripping sales in Dublin for Shakespeare and Wilde and equalled those for Mario Lanza and Glenn Miller.132 Unfortunately, the final scene in the play, between Joxer and the Captain, was omitted in this recording, for which Dent was responsible. O'Casey did not learn of this until May 1956, when he was justly furious since the final irony was thereby jettisoned.133 There was also unfinished business arising from the Dublin Bonfire. The Irish Times had asked him to write a piece answering the Dublin critics, which he refused to do but hinted he might later write a book about it. This was a joke, but became the article 'Bonfire under a Black Sun', a veritable Dunciad exposing the reviewers high and low by means of quotation and mock alarm at chastisement.134 At the same time Alan Simpson, founder with Carolyn Simpson of the tiny Pike Theatre in Dublin, wrote saying he had for some time been considering asking for Cock-A-Doodle Dandy: 'In view of all the excitement over "The Bishop's Bonfire" I felt that this would be a suitable time. I myself consider it [the Cock] an even better play than the "Bonfire" (which I much enjoyed) and I gather from a newspaper report of an interview with you that this is your own view.'135 He would like to stage the Cock towards the end of April 1955. O'Casey was blunt in his reply. The Cock, being contracted to a New

The Writer's Not for Burning 367 York producer, was out of the question. Moreover, he was not interested in any 'suitability of time' for any play of his to be staged. 'If a play isnt worth doing any time, it isnt worth doing at all.'136 Simpson then found it a suitable time to do Waiting for Godot instead.137 It was a huge success. O'Casey missed a valuable opportunity here to turn the tables on the so-called Irish establishment through the most radical alternative theatre Dublin had available. He was also dealing with his publisher over the text of the Bonfire. For once in a long time publication was following upon production. The script had been with Macmillans since June 1954, yet though he had admitted to Cusack that the ending was weak and intimated that he might alter it for the London production138 (which did not happen) the only change O'Casey wanted was the inclusion of the cast list. Had he seen the production perhaps he would have appreciated the need to revise the last Foorawn-Manus scene, which is risibly crude. When people wrote to him from Dublin saying the Bonfire was far better than some critics made it out to be they did him ill-service,139 reinforcing his determination to stand by what he had originally written. Thus once again he betrayed his own best interests as playwright in not incorporating valuable stage experience. Ironically, he was unaware that the reader for Macmillans considered the Bonfire a. 'very odd play', likely in production to be 'lively but incomprehensible' and in the reading 'confusing and somewhat unfinished'.140 And so the Bonfire was published on 24 June 1955 as it was first written, in a modest edition of 2,000 copies. It was dedicated to his mother and his daughter, 'To Susan Gone, and Susan [Shivaun] Here.' As frontispiece O'Casey chose a black-and-white reproduction of an oil portrait by Breon. When the Book Society nominated the play as its recommendation for June a reprinting of 1,000 copies was made in July.141 Reviews were few. The TLS reviewer (Anthony Cookman) had already reviewed the Dublin production kindly and was equally kind now.142 In Ireland John Jordan's review in Irish Writing was a sole exception: the newspapers and magazines steered clear. Jordan called the Bonfire a 'problem play' and O'Casey 'our only great tragic dramatist'; in spite of its faults the total effect was greater than anything O'Casey had written since Within the Gates.143 The New York edition was published on 30 August. Brooks Atkinson, reviewing in the New York Times, referred to Breon's frontispiece showing a face 'thin and stern, like that of a bishop disapproving of his flock'. The irony escaped the reviewer. Bishops and cardinals - with the exception of Cardinal Newman, whom he admired and whose works he had read as a young man144 - were anathema to O'Casey. It has to be remembered that the 'bishop's bonfire' is, like the bonfire lit by the priest in the Cock, a Bonfire of the Vanities, 'piles of bad books an' evil pictures'.145 Moreover, O'Casey was soon to engage in a major row sparked off by an archbishop. Atkinson did not like the play. To him the characters were unreal. 'They come out of O'Casey's mind.'146 It was a frank assessment from a friend.

368 SednO'Casey In August O'Casey was approached by George Devine about plans for the English Stage Company at the bombed-out Kingsway Theatre. A very determined man, Devine forced his way past O'Casey's correspondence to arrive at 'Villa Rosa' on a Sunday (21 August), and somehow got permission to do the Cock. On his return to London next day it was to Eileen that Devine wrote his thanks, sensing that she recognised more clearly than Sean the exciting prospects the new stage company promised. For Sean's attention he enclosed a letter-head listing the council.147 The subtext was that Devine would have to fight for the production. By 3 September he was outlining the programme for the first season at the renovated Royal Court, instead of for the Kingsway: the Cock would open on 12 February 1956, perhaps after a week's tour, to be followed by Miller's The Crucible, Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan, Ronald Duncan's Don Juan, and 'a play by a young dramatist, John Osborne'.148 This arrangement, Devine accepted, depended on whether Bobby Lewis was willing to surrender the rights to the Cock which he had held for years. It also depended on the ESC's council, which temporarily ruled out the Cock as 'a mad Irish play'.149 There everything stopped for the present. It is intriguing to think that an O'Casey play might have shared in the revolution in English theatre inaugurated at the Royal Court in 1956 by Look Back in Anger. But it would happen in 1959. A consolation arrived in the decision in early August to produce Red Roses for Me in New York in December 1955. O'Casey was more liberal than usual in allowing director John O'Shaughnessy to make changes in the text. Even more important, he later introduced some of these changes into a new edition of Red Roses.150 In New York he could expect the design and production values he treasured. In replying on 5 August to producer Gordon W. Pollock's outline, O'Casey stressed his own notion of Wagnerian gesamtkunswerk as it affected the spectacular act 3, 'I have always thought that the Theater should be a combination of all the arts; but each of them modified so as to suit a drama.'151 He had told as much to O'Shaughnessy, who agreed, six months earlier: 'no play should be without song, without music, without architecture and painting in the scenic designs; just as they mingle with life.'152 The difficulty lay with the casting. Only two Irish actors were used, Eileen Crowe as Mrs Breydon and Seamus Locke as Superintendent Finglas. The film star E.G. Marshall, who played Brennan, was finally matched by Kevin McCarthy as Ayamonn when the latter was flown in from the West Coast ten days before the opening in New Haven on 8 December.153 Beset by problems in securing a theatre on Broadway at short notice the production opened in the Booth after two weeks in Boston and received - dire phrase - mixed reviews. Brooks Atkinson raved; Walter Kerr demurred. Word-of-mouth was 'excellent', however, according to the director, and box-office 'healthy'.154 Though it had to vacate the Booth on 21 January, Red Roses ran elsewhere until mid-March and attracted a lot of attention. Indeed, an indication of how Red Roses endeared itself comes from the recent memoirs of the publisher John Calder. As the show was closing and no tickets were to be had Calder rang Arthur Miller, whom he had recently met

The Writer's Not for Burning 369 and who had expressed interest in the play. Miller used his influence and got two seats. Afterwards they discussed Red Roses: "I don't know what it is about that play that appeals to me so much, that makes it different", [Miller] said hesitantly. At that point he and similar playwrights were having to deal with political subjects through metaphor. "Could it be that it simply says what it has to say directly without looking over its shoulder?" I ventured. He nodded his head. "That's it. None of us dares to be direct any more."155 O'Casey, in turn, greatly admired Miller's work. Indeed, he saw Miller as second only to O'Neill.156 Of the two new plays, A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays, he wrote to George Braziller in September: 'I do hope Miller's plays may be a great success. He's a lad with a vision; and a very powerful dramatist: I send him a lay Bishop's blessing.'157 On a more speculative note, when Marilyn Monroe declared in 1956 before setting off with Miller for the Royal Court production of The Crucible that the person she wanted most to meet in England was O'Casey,158 it may be that she too had seen and been captivated by Red Roses for Me. Was she especially struck by the character of Sheila and her attempts to drag her man away from politics and into the safety of domestic bliss?

On the domestic front, Eileen started to learn French and with that in mind in September went off to Paris with Shivaun for a week. Their guide and escort was Tom Curtiss, the drama critic.159 Breon was appointed to be in Torquay to keep Sean company; Eileen would from now on not leave him alone. As Niall was due home soon from Germany, his national service completed, Eileen was on hand to get him ready for his new life at University College London on 3 October. He used Breon's place in StJohn's Wood to stay in, 'the London ramshackle flat', as Sean called it.160 At home, Breon was working on a full-length portrait of his father. The family are the cheapest models,' Eileen noted.161 In early October, NBC Television visited Totnes to make a short film of O'Casey at home.162 It was to be a thirty-minute recording, as O'Casey put it, 'of me talking a lot of nonsense, and trying to keep things calm'.163 It became quite an undertaking. Originally, when Robert Emmett Ginna (interviewer) and Robert D. Graff (producer/director) discussed the idea, they hoped to shoot the film in a hotel room but both Sean and Eileen preferred to do it at home, not realising the disruption it would cause. Eileen herself had to take a room at the Links hotel nearby (where the O'Caseys usually sent overnight guests). O'Casey dramatised the occasion fully, saying it took up a month: 'House upside down; rooms full of cameras; sleeping in wife's bed; wife & son in hotel; I here with other son & daughter. Television crew of ten between producer, cameramen, & sound men.'164 He got on well with 'the two Bobs' and warmed to the camera man, the gifted Wolfgang Suschitzky, who took many

370 Sean O'Casey

photographs which became icons of the ageing playwright. The film was part of a series entitled 'Wisdom' in which 'the elder wise men of our day' - Robert Frost, Bertrand Russell, Nehru, Stravinsky, de Valera, etc. - were interviewed. The format was conversational, the 'invisible camera' technique, aiming at a spiritual biography.165 Ginna understood O'Casey well enough to put the right questions about his early days and about his regard for Lady Gregory. He then asked about 'the big things', life and beliefs. With a little hesitation O'Casey offered, 'to me life is simply an invitation to live,' as much wisdom as he was prepared to impart. An advance from Macmillans in New York for a two-volume edition of the autobiographies under the title Mirror in My House arrived in mid-November: a nice sum of $2,500. The times were certainly a-changing. He had several projects stirring. He sent Braziller the text for The Green Crow. He heard with interest of a dramatisation of I Knock at the Door awaiting production in New York. Red Roses was at year's end just opening; the Cock had a one-week production at Yale University. 'However old we grow,' O'Casey wrote to Nathan recovering from an operation, 'I don't believe either of us can ever become an old fogey. Thank God!'166 Asked to write something on Beckett for Encore soon after this O'Casey refused, saying: 'I have nothing to do with Beckett. He isnt in me nor am I in him. I amnt waiting for Godot to bring me life; I am out after life myself, even at the age I've reached.'167 The letter was published in Encore anyway, under the title 'Not Waiting for Godot'.168 The actor E.G. Marshall, who had arrived at 'Villa Rosa' one day to discuss his role in Red Roses, went on to play Vladimir in the Broadway production of Godot in New York. When it closed he wrote to O'Casey on the experience of appearing in two plays by Irishmen in the one season. 'Godot has a lot of theatrical adventure, I like, but it does not have the "hurrah for life" that I love.'169 The citation is from Ginna's article of 1954 in - what else? - Life magazine. Skylark or Green Crow, what's the difference? Each has its joy, and is happy.

18 A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

n the interview O'Casey made with Bob Ginna for NBC television in October 1955, he had, as usual, articulated a stoic vision. 'I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometimes a terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.'1 The time had come to test this equilibrium once again. Early in 1956 when Eileen was returning from her French class one night she could hear alarming groans from inside the flat, where she found Sean in agony.2 He was brought to Torbay Hospital, Torquay, where he spent fourteen weeks, and had two operations at either end of February on prostate and kidney. Bronchial pneumonia held up the second operation. This was the first serious illness O'Casey had incurred for many years. He was slow to convalesce. During his time in hospital Breon and Eileen looked after his regular correspondence: a rare instance where Krause's edition of the Letters shows a gap. Breon answered the business letters, Eileen the more personal mail. Thus Breon dealt with reports from John O'Shaughnessy in New York on how well Red Roses for Me was doing. With a dash of his father's style Breon ended his first acknowledgement: Tt sounds as if you have given the play a marvelous production: I only wish I could see it myself.'3 Two months later Breon's task was to ask for a script of Red Roses, then finished its curtailed run, to send to a German company in Berlin. The news of O'Casey was at this point cautious: 'Sean is coming home here tomorrow & although he is still weak, [and] the 2 operations took a great deal out of him, he is technically better. We can only hope that this summer will put a great deal back in him.'4 For her part, Eileen wrote to Nathan and Sean's special friends. Nathan had just seen the NBC interview and had written (24 January) to say how it had delighted him. 'It seemed to bring you extremely near to me. I am slowly emerging from the agonies of the hospitals and able at least to get out a bit. (I had been reviewing plays from the scripts rather than the actual production).' Shame on him. Eileen's letter crossed with Nathan's, for he wrote again on 28 January expressing his distress at the news of Sean's hospitalisation. At such times there is little to be said but Nathan, never as nimble a letter

In

372 Sean O'Casey

writer as O'Casey, conjured up a risible picture of one miserable sufferer depressing the other in his awkward good wishes: Though I myself am still in pretty poor shape, I wish I might be near his bedside to cheer him a bit.'5 Eileen wrote separately to Julie Haydon, then performing out of town, and had a gushing reply on 31 January, ending with an 'everness of affection' heaped on top of gratitude and love. Who knows, perhaps such sentiments served to strengthen Eileen for her thrice daily visits to the hospital, though what really made her such a diligent attendant at Sean's bedside was her infatuation for the young surgeon: 'a gentle flirtation brightened things, and I would rush to get there whenever he was due to visit Sean.'6 This was Eileen, honest and amatory in equal measure. Earlier she had admitted that on her trips to London which were her safety valve she would 'carry on with a romance or two which meant nothing', for 'there was no doubt at all that Sean was the one person I really needed.'7 He knew her needs and understood. Eileen was still a very attractive woman in her mid-fifties with more than one admirer - Tom Curtiss was rivalled by Geoffrey Dobbie, a local nurseryman who fell in love with her and became the O'Casey gardener. For his part, O'Casey was so touched by Eileen's close attentions while he was in hospital that he penned her a poem, 'The Scent of the Blossoming May'. Never published, this comprised three rather uninspired stanzas beginning, The first day I saw her - when first she came to me/I stood & I wondered at loveliness coming to me.'8 It was not until his seventy-sixth birthday had passed on 30 March that O'Casey got back to his desk and resumed his addictive letter writing. He was feeling 'dawny'9 or delicate, beginning to realise that he had been ill for a year before his 'resistant will broke'.10 With post-operative infection he took the rest of the year to regain his strength, but in his usual manner he had to dramatise his condition. By July his term in hospital had swelled Falstaff-fashion from fourteen weeks to four months, then six months, and ultimately (February 1957) ten months, equating 'bed-ridden' with 'hospitalised'. Yet so frail and thin was he on his return home that to Eileen, 'he now resembled a child' who 'never seemed to be without discomfort or pain'.11 Breon did a painting, for practice, one supposes, which turned out to be his best of Sean even though in it his father 'looks very gaunt',12 like an El-Greco figure in tweeds and cloth cap. (See illustration 35.) Though he roused himself, for he could never bear idleness, O'Casey could do little this year. After The Green Crow collection, which included his new piece on the Bonfire in Dublin, was published in New York in March, he had to do something about the English edition. Pressed by the New York Times to honour Shaw's centenary he provided 'An Appreciation of a Fighting Idealist' and included this under a different title in the British Green Crow. Macmillans refused to do the book and it was taken by W.H. Allen for publication in February 1957.13 At that time fully recovered, O'Casey was outraged by the publisher's request that he attend a bookstore in Torquay to sign copies and boost sales. The very idea fuelled his correspondence for days to come. He thought it sufficient to write the book.

A Death in the Family 373 His letters, when he resumed his worldwide correspondence at the end of March, reveal a new side of the ageing writer. Over and over he would supply an account of his 'sufferin's', a la Adolphus Grigson in the Gunman, the sort of thing he would formerly have found laughable. It was the incipient selfpreoccupation of the old. The repetitiousness, however tiresome, merely marks the shock of serious illness, 'for a man's history is largely written in his health'.14 As Eileen noted, he never recovered his full vitality.15 Consequently, from this time pathos is a dominant mode in the O'Casey narrative. But he clung to his ethic: 'All one can do is to try to make the world a more sensible and sane and safe place to live in.'16 He still protested against the atomic bomb and called for the abolition of war. He still believed in Stalin in spite of the reported version of speeches by Bulganin and Krushchev condemning him: 'The denunciations made of the man's mistakes are, to me, but an implied idea that he should have been infallible. [...] To connect his name with Hitler is wrong, for Hitler, for instance, when he died, left his land a desolation, while Stalin, when he died, left his land one of the strongest in the world.'17 For the first time, too, O'Casey found himself comfortably off financially. He had emphatically to let Americans know he was not on the breadline. In his kindly review of the Green Crow in the New York Times (18 March) Brooks Atkinson had painted a somewhat stereotypical picture of the writer as 'a skinny, warm-hearted, near-sighted, pipe-smoking Irishman of 76 years who lives on next to nothing with an affectionate family in an upstairs flat in Torquay by the sea [. . .] a profoundly religious man'.18 At first O'Casey played along, in search of sympathy, but after someone from Atkinson's office sent a gift of wine and canned goods he conceded that for the past four years or so, 'our income has been enough for most of our needs (thanks mainly to the U.S.A.). We as a household are mightily beholden to American generosity, and God forbid we should abuse it.'19 But he hardly sent the stuff back. A mark of the new affluence was Eileen's purchase early in 1956 of a new Hillman Minx car. A deft set of trade-in manoeuvres then led to the purchase by Breon and Niall of a little red van for running to and from London and, in Niall's case, piling in musical instruments to attend various jazz sessions. Towards the end of the year Breon found a studio in Torquay, and no doubt Eileen looked after the payments. Shivaun had suddenly decided to enrol in the Central Arts School in London. This meant looking for a room, found in St John's Wood, close to Breon's old place where Niall now lived. Eileen went up to London to see her settled in. Shivaun was only seventeen and her leaving Dartington came as a shock. After three months she transferred to RADA and set her mind on a career in the theatre. Sean would miss her, but just now he missed Eileen more, especially on their anniversary on 23 September; he had thought of sending flowers but in a note said he was too shy to follow up the idea, 'but you know how I love you.'20 His illness had brought this home to him more than ever.

374 Sean O'Casey

Nineteen-fifty-six marked a great shift in modern cultural history. In popular music the old world was overturned to greet the arrival of rock-and-roll and the youth movement. On another level the civil rights movement in the USA and the nuclear disarmament movement in Britain and France opened up new avenues of thought and social protest. In theatre, England began to throw off decades of sedate, conventional drama to respond to a post-war generation hungering for expression of their real lives.21 The loudest dramatic voice of this generation, though not necessarily the most authentic, was that of Jimmy Porter, the trumpet-playing, articulate and sex-charged anti-hero of Osborne's Look Back in Anger, 'the completest young pup in our literature since Hamlet', in Tynan's memorable phrase.22 The play made such an impact because the English theatre had for decades been the quintessence of gentility. Indeed, Brendan Behan said Osborne's play was about as angry as Mrs Dale's Diary, a popular BBC radio serial at the time.23 To Arthur Miller, over in England for the production of his own play The Crucible at the same venue, the Royal Court, Osborne's play 'suggested a very American kind of realism' reminiscent of Clifford Odets in the 1930s.24 This is a polite way of saying Osborne was oldfashioned. The importance of Look Back is mainly historical: it ushered in the work of finer, more radical artists, John Arden, Arnold Wesker and Edward Bond among them, and gave courage to directors to thumb their noses at censorship. There was an attempt in the press to link O'Casey and Osborne as equally entitled to the rather silly 'angry young man' sobriquet. O'Casey stood rather as he had done to Odets, as father-figure or master. Even if Walter Kerr could claim at this time that in Red Roses O'Casey's ambitious form remained a dream,25 nevertheless at seventy-six he was ahead of Osborne, fifty years his junior, and consequently ahead of the so-called revolution Osborne inaugurated in the theatre. Some of the young writers, but not Osborne, saw O'Casey as having paved the way for them and their left-wing drama. John Arden, for example, as author of that angular and emblematic anti-war play Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959) - for which O'Casey had 'an aggressive admiration'26 - instinctively understood O'Casey's art. Arden saw it as 'a combination of mediaeval moralityplay, Shakespeare, Bunyan, and Victorian popular melodrama', a combination which he admired but which had little place in the commercial theatre.27 What he himself tried to emulate was O'Casey's ability 'to discern the contradictions between the aspiration towards perfection [...] and the awkward human reality'.28 The task was to discern and to find the essentially poetic form through which to make that gap at once humorous and tragic. Equally, Edward Bond saw that O'Casey, unlike Shaw - who was always more of a 'model' for English playwrights29 - was committed to justice: At that time it was all Shaw, Shaw, Shaw - but I realised that O'Casey could enter a theatrical world which Shaw couldn't. Shaw could argue for justice, O'Casey could invoke, make present, our need for justice. That means that O'Casey could write tragedy-which is the expression of our need for justice.30

A Death in the Family 375 One can see that fervour in Wesker's work also, from The Kitchen (1959) on. There has to be a connection, in turn, between O'Casey's alienation from mainstream British theatre and the disgraceful ignoring as trouble makers of Arden, Bond and Wesker by the establishment theatre since the 1970s. To be sure, 1956 was also the year of the 'outsider', as indicated by the extraordinary success of Colin Wilson's book so entitled, published in that year. A best-seller in England and America, The Outsider was translated into fourteen languages within eighteen months. The tendency was, among media commentators, to categorise Wilson and all the young writers of the day as 'outsiders'. But, as Wilson confessed, 'nothing could have been more grotesquely inappropriate. I was aggressively Non-political. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things.'31 This would easily be enough to show that whatever kind of 'outsider' O'Casey was he was not Wilson's type were it not that Wilson openly detested O'Casey's work. He could not get past page ten of The Plough and the Stars and its 'shallow theatrics, sentimental Irishisms'.32 Refusing to answer Wilson (or Kingsley Amis who belittled O'Casey in the same issue of Encore) O'Casey said he was now too old to mould himself into the shape of one looking back in anger: 'I rather prefer to look forward in anger at sham and hypocrisy,' in order to attack and try to destroy these.33 More in sorrow than in anger, however, he read Vivian Mercier's attack in Commonwealth on O'Casey's sad decline. This was an old theme. A Dubliner and friend (indeed fellow Royal Portorian) of Beckett, Mercier got down off his Anglo-Irish horse for long enough to peer at the puzzle of a poor protestant, 'equivalent to "poor white" in the Southern United States'. Such a figure, Mercier argued, could never be at home with his catholic fellow workers any more than he could avoid envy of the middle classes, where he properly belonged. In short, declasse O'Casey was once again an 'outsider'. The chip on his shoulder made him a satirist, albeit a great one. At the same time he exhibited a deep compassion for the victims of his satire. 'Yet it is partly this very compassion which has undone him as an artist.'34 Mercier's analysis no more solved the 'riddle' of O'Casey than had Denis Johnston, for where is the artist whose work has ever been 'undone' by compassion? O'Casey did not trouble to answer Mercier. For the first time his defence was taken up by a disciple, the young Robert Hogan from Missouri, who had just completed his doctorate on O'Casey's 'Experiments in Dramatic Form'. Only when it is recognised, he wrote in Commonwealth, that the later plays cannot be evaluated in the same terms as the earlier will O'Casey be accepted 'not as the lucky primitive who once had a flash of genius, but as the conscious artist and the exciting innovator that he is'.35 O'Casey was grateful for the defence.36

Nineteen-fifty-six was also the year of the Hungarian Revolution and the Suez crisis. Both issues exercised Niall O'Casey, then in his second year studying Botany at University College London.37 Accounts of the uprising in Budapest

376 Sean O'Casey

in mid-October, especially on the 23rd, were confusing. Was it a counterrevolution or the real thing? Students in Budapest were making demands for civil rights and political reforms but were also expressing anti-Russian sentiments; Stalin's statue was toppled, leaving only a pair of bronze boots; the disgraced Imre Nagy was rehabilitated as prime minister. Was all this good or bad? For the son of an avowed communist it was impossible to say. But when the Soviet tanks moved onto the Budapest streets on 25 October it was becoming clear that the communists were the bad guys. The end of the single-party system was announced on the 30th; Cardinal Mindszenty was triumphantly released from house arrest on the same day; Nagy declared Hungary's neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact set up in 1955.38 How to interpret these events, the details of which were only known in England much later, was difficult in itself: Mindszenty, to select but one figure, was a hero to Roman Catholics but an opportunist and dangerous enemy to communists such as O'Casey.39 But when the Soviet troops crushed the revolution without mercy on 4 November, forcing Nagy into hiding and leading to his replacement as prime minister by Janos Kadar, nobody in London seemed to be able to make head or tail of what was going on. For many on the left, the Daily Worker was now a huge disappointment. Following the hard line of the Communist Party it insisted that a dangerous counter-revolution had been successfully dealt with, but as soon as the Suez crisis burst into open war, when British and French forces attacked Egypt on 31 October, the Hungarian story was dropped with an audible sigh of relief.40 The headline in the Daily Worker for 5 November, after the Red Army started a reign of terror in Budapest, read 'New Hungarian AntiFascist Government in Action', welcoming the defeat of the so-called counterrevolutionaries. The truth of what then happened was obscured for decades.41 Of the three O'Casey children Niall was 'the most like Sean in temperament & was a political animal & as such was my father's favorite'.42 He drove down to Torquay in the little red van to talk over the Hungarian question. There was also a twenty-first birthday party he wanted to attend at Dartington, but what left its mark was the row with Sean. He went into Sean's room and sat in the desk chair while Sean sat in the other chair by the fire. They had often talked openly and frankly before, not always on politics, but on music, perhaps, or football: Niall supported Charlton Athletic while Sean fancied Tottenham Hotspur. They had discussed the Hungarian situation already, perhaps on the telephone, and Niall had sent a letter about the Daily Worker and the plethora of resignations among the staff, adding: The attitude of the executive over Hungary on many matters has been quite untenable. [. . .] This isn't Communism at all. The double-think reminds me of Captain Waterhouse.'43 Now with all the fervour of his youth he tried to shake O'Casey's rigid belief in Stalinism. The scene is reminiscent of one in the last act of Wesker's Chicken Soup with Barley, set in December 1956, as Ronnie, clearly based on Wesker (who was just three years older than Niall), and his mother argue:

A Death in the Family 377 SARAH: Hungary? RONNIE: Look at me, Mother. Talk to me. Take me by the hand and show me who was right and who was wrong. Point them out. Do it for me. I stand here and a thousand different voices are murdering my mind. Do you know, I couldn't wait to come home and accuse you. SARAH: Accuse me? RONNIE: You didn't tell me there were any doubts.44 There were many young men like Ronnie and like Niall O'Casey for whom the official line was no longer any good. It was a generational thing. It was youth confronting the authority of age. Niall was right. It was friend against friend in the Daily Worker, the gospel of the working classes. 'It is now clear', said one of the staff who resigned on 3 November, 'that what took place [in Hungary] was a national uprising against an infamous police dictatorship.'45 But it was not quite clear to O'Casey or to any of the old guard for whom the 1917 Revolution was a lifetime pledge of Russia's integrity. Eric Hobsbawn was a lot younger than O'Casey but for him, too, as a communist since the early 1930s, defending the Soviet Union was still the priority: 'So we swallowed our doubts and mental reservations and defended it.'46 What O'Casey believed, and what he probably relayed to Niall, he wrote to another thrown into confusion, Kay O'Riordan, wife of the Irish communist Michael O'Riordan: I'm afraid that I agree with Michael. To me there isnt a shadow of a doubt that those who hate, and always hated, Communism (Socialism, if you like) tried to seize hold of the popular discontent in Hungary, and use it to overthrow all signs of Socialism there, and set up the old regime of landlord, clerical and lay, and fascist boss, so that in the future Hungary might be changed from a socialist country into an armed camp and arsenal for a possible attack on the USSR, if ever the glorious chance came.47 All of this loyalty meant there was no room for the doubts Niall felt. O'Casey's commitment to Stalin was akin to his commitment earlier to Larkin: indeed he drew Moscow and Dublin together in a compulsive way when he wrote in 1950: 'In all its activities, the U.S.S.R. brings to life the grand creed of the great Jim Larkin - Each for All, and All for Each.'48 Psychologically it was not possible for O'Casey now to line up with the intellectual bosses and decry Russia; on the contrary, the apostasy of others steeled him in his political beliefs. To return to the scene in O'Casey's room in St Marychurch, some time towards the end of November 1956. The argument was to haunt him and he polished it afterwards until it came out right. He stuck to his guns and told Niall what he told Kay O'Riordan, that Kadar and the Red Army 'did what was terribly necessary to save Socialism for the Hungarian People'. He spoke very gently, Niall, who could not accept his father's argument, very vehemently. When they could not agree, and Sean could see how distressed Niall was, he

378 Sean O'Casey

rose from his seat and went to him. 'I put my arm around him and pressed him warmly to my side, saying, 'You must cling to your own opinions, and not be influenced by mine" [...] and, bending down, kissed his bushy head of hair as he smiled up at me.'49 Eileen remembered a more tense atmosphere, outside of Sean's room: 'we would sit absolutely silent round the table at meals,' as Sean 'grew strangely stubborn and hard'.50 Some two weeks later, as term ended at the university, Niall returned home for the Christmas vacation. Shivaun was with him. He had looked after her like a good brother during her first few months in London. Fired by an interest in politics like Niall she had determinedly attended a mass rally at Trafalgar Square on the Suez issue, when some thousands of protesters demanded 'law, not war'; Niall made her leave before the protest broke up.51 The Suez crisis, which deepened after English and French forces invaded Egypt on 31 October to keep the canal open to international traffic, now absorbed the immediate attention of London's student population. Hungary was briefly sidelined. When John Osborne wrote The Entertainer in 1957, in which England is represented as a ramshackle and outdated music-hall, he made the Suez issue of December 1956 the real and tragic background of England's perceived decline. After the British government under pressure from the USA had agreed on 23 November to withdraw from Egypt the suspicion hardened in the public mind that in the midst of Britain's humiliation over this affair lay a great deception. It seemed clear now that the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden (mocked by Osborne as someone who 'went to the West Indies to get Noel Coward to write a play for him'52), was lying when he denied collusion with the Israelis, who had started the conflict by crossing into Egypt on 29 October.53 The whole affair was as much a moral as a political crisis for Britain and somebody like Niall O'Casey, typical of his generation, could not but have been just as confused and disheartened by Suez as by the lies over Hungary. He was exhausted when he arrived home. Eileen thought he had just been overdoing things. She sent him next day to see their general practitioner, Dr Hugh Doran, a Belfastman who had taken good care of Sean all through his illnesses earlier in the year. Doran was alarmed enough at the results of the blood test to bring a specialist, Dr Haddon, to the house that evening, 18 December. Niall was in bed. When they came out from seeing him Eileen was alone in the front room. Sean was in his own room. The flat was desperately still. It was the specialist who said, as if he must get the awful sentence over, "Niall has not got long to live. He has leukaemia."' She asked if Niall knew. Dr Doran said 'yes'. Eileen froze and then dashed to see Niall. 'He sat there at the side of the bed, looking so young and handsome - life, I thought, must be before him. In a way he tried to help me. He actually said, "Poor you!"'54 Then she had to go and tell Sean. Dr Doran called an ambulance and there was a half-hour wait. Sean went in to see Niall. 'He looked up at me, no tear in his eye, but a wistful look asking me something silently. I took his hand in mine and felt the pressure of his. [...] "It's hellish," he murmured, very lowly. He said no more.'55 Too soon the

A Death in the Family 379 ambulance arrived and Niall was taken down. Eileen went with him in the ambulance to the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, 'a terrible journey on a cold and rainy night'.56 The specialist followed on to Exeter. Niall was put into a small ward cheerily decorated with a Christmas tree. Eileen was told to come back next day. She took a room at the Clarence Hotel. The next few days may be imagined. There was not much that could be done for Niall. Breon and Shivaun drove up to see him and to support Eileen, leaving Sean at home feeling confused by it all.57 They brought Sean with them on the Sunday, 23rd. As he sat with Eileen in the corridor, while Breon and Shivaun made their visit, they both knew in the silence between them that death was near. Eileen's mother was already fussing about Mail's seeing a priest, though he had not been raised as a Roman Catholic. Although Mrs Reynolds persisted and Niall was willing to appease her Eileen felt he was fighting the illness in his own way. There was to be no priest. When Sean came again on Christmas Day Niall was too ill to be seen.58 The talk now was of moving him to St Bartholomew's in London. Breon drove Sean and Shivaun back on the road to Torquay in a fierce storm, ran into heavy floods and had to return to Exeter where they put up overnight at Eileen's hotel. The exchange of Christmas gifts was a miserable affair on that day. In the afternoon of the 26th Sean and Shivaun returned home by train. Sean was never to see Niall again. The 27th was a strange day. Purple Dust opened at last in New York on this day, off Broadway in the tiny Cherry Lane Theatre, a major breakthrough for Sean, as it would play for over a year. Directed by Philip Burton, it had no less than Alvin Epstein in the cast (as O'Killigain) and striking designs by Lester Polakov. Writing to the producer Paul Shyre O'Casey apologised for being unable to send a cable of good wishes, explained about Niall, and asked him not to upset the company with the news. At the same time he could not resist asking for a copy of the amended script for future reference.59 Such is life. His son may be in his death throes but the playwright is curious about his own text. Niall was transferred to Bart's on this day, Breon and Eileen going up to London in the train with him. Eileen put up at the Strand Palace Hotel while Breon went to his (and Mall's) old flat in Abbey Gardens. Shivaun had the job of looking after Sean in Torquay, 'the hardest task of us all', as Eileen saw it.60 But of course that was wrong. Eileen herself, spending as much of each day and night as she was allowed with Niall, had the hardest task. Like Juno, she had seen the first of her son and would see the last of him. Breon rang Sean and Shivaun on the 28th to say Niall was no better but able to drink a little now (for his throat gave him great pain). He rang again the next evening to report no change but that Niall was cheerful. Sean and Shivaun went on with the difficult business of hoping against hope. All Sean could think of doing was to write to Eileen a letter dated 30 December, not knowing all was over, acknowledging her devotion to Niall: 'May God be with you, my dear and beloved lass.' If she would like him to go up to London to take her place with Niall for a day or so he would. Should he write a note to Niall? Would Eileen give him Sean's 'dear love' and say he is never absent from

380 Sean O'Casey

Sean's thoughts? If Eileen is rested enough could she ring and saw a few words to Shivaun? She was due to visit Dr Doran on 1 January for her check-up for RADA.61 Meanwhile, on the evening of the 29th, Eileen left Bart's to have dinner with Breon in the Strand Palace, but feeling restless went back again without dining and found Niall suddenly worse. He began to rave about going to New York to see Purple Dust and in the next breath wanted to go off in the Hillman Minx. Eileen rang Breon, who came quickly, and at about nine o'clock Niall died.62 Cause of death was recorded as acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. His age was given as twenty-one; he was just two weeks away from his twenty-second birthday. Eileen waited until the following morning to tell Sean and Shivaun. She and Breon walked from the hospital in West Smithfield down to the Embankment and along by the river, dazed and saying little. They parted and Eileen went to her hotel. Early next day Sunday 30th she went back for one last look at Niall, finding him in the Chapel of Rest. 'I laid my flowers beside his face; I was glad I had come, and I drank in every moment of that last glance.'63 Soon it was time to make that call. It was Shivaun who answered. A quick word and she knew. She passed the telephone to Sean, who wanted to know all the details of the past twenty-four hours. He and Eileen decided that Niall should be cremated; the hospital authorities had asked if they could have the body for a day for research purposes. Breon would make all arrangements. The cremation would be on Wednesday 3 January in Golders Green. That was all. The telephone has huge limitations. During the days which followed Sean was lost in a deepening pit of grief. 'We go about the flat, Shivaun and I, trying to hide our feelings from one another.'64 He took refuge in writing letters to American friends, the first of very many in which he detailed over and over Mall's illness and death and cheered himself up with false stoicism - 'just another Golden Lad gone to Dust'.65 Memories of Niall came crowding in, his brilliance, his humour, his thoughtfulness. Shivaun, who was very close to Niall, to distract herself tidied every drawer and every corner of the flat. Presumably, she got her medical examination from Dr Doran, for there was no change of plan concerning RADA. Eileen, meanwhile, had her own grief to cope with. By coincidence, a friend of Mall's from Dartington days who had played in a jazz band with him, was working as a porter at Bart's and he was some consolation. Like many others, he recalled Mall's laughter, which Eileen loved to share. Breon commented, T don't think you will ever laugh in the same way again, Eileen.'66 She knew he was right. Soon it was time for Sean and Shivaun, strained with the waiting, to take the train for Paddington. They were met by Breon and Eileen and went on for their appointment at the crematorium in Golders Green at 2 p.m. It must have been a horrible experience, but none of the family has written or spoken of it. The cremation was something Eileen's mother disapproved of, and there were to be letters from her catholic relatives in Ireland accusing Eileen of wickedness.

A Death in the Family 381 The four O'Caseys scattered Mall's ashes in the Garden of Remembrance and then set off together for home. When they arrived Eileen put her arms around Sean and said, 'what a terrible thing has happened to us.'67 As Shivaun was later to say, it was as if a major branch of a tree had been lopped off.68 What was left was damaged beyond repair.

O'Casey's own life was thinning out. As Breon put it, Mail's death 'knocked him for six'.69 Almost immediately, he began to write a memorial eventually entitled 'Under a Greenwood Tree He Died', the ironic reference being to the Christmas tree in the hospital ward. Its writerliness is revealed even in the title, with its allusions to As You Like It and Hardy's pastoral novel. In addition, the title disguises in the indefinite article the fact that O'Casey did not see the tree, if there was one, under which Niall actually died in London; the 'greenwood tree' he converted into an ironic comment on death rather than love was in the Exeter hospital. The writer was now at work, picking up the pieces, slipping into metonymy, imagining what he had not directly experienced, coping with grief by transmuting into narrative Eileen's comments and descriptions as well as his own feelings. Such was habitually his way, to blend together two kinds of time and space, but it is evidenced here more clearly than usual under the sign of a dislocated tree. Moreover, as he wrote, at the same time as he told friends about Mall's death, he fought off guilt at the memory of the final row between them by dramatising the strength of Mall's resistance, though wrong. In such ways the prose memorial acts as a key to the writer's process. Unpublished until 1964, 'Under a Greenwood Tree He Died' was written in January 1957, a pained, painful and desolate chronicle. Twice in the course of it O'Casey referred to Mall's distress at the 'tragedy' of Hungary: not a word about Suez. For Sean the bitter argument over Hungary was what endured and stung. It was what put him on trial.70 'Why do I write like this? Before God, I don't know. The impulse moves me.'71 It was as if he was testing the whole raison-d'etre of his writing career, knowing it, somehow, to be concerned with addressing death but searching for the form to triumph over it. At times the present tense bursts through, as if time had stopped: 'Mall's body was cremated today, the third of January [...] However hard I try to quench remembrance, a flash of agony sweeps through me, the tears fall, and I hear myself crying, My boy, my darling, gallant lad.' The crux of the matter was that he was 'ashamed' that it was not he who had died in 1956 but the boy whose anxiety had been palpable in visiting Sean himself when in hospital.72 Eileen found those first few days at home virtually unbearable. Sean would shut himself up in his room working on his chronicle of Mall's death or attending to business as usual, but the sound of his keening would break through the whole flat. He literally sobbed and howled as if all the Celtic ancestral voices were bursting through his exiled body. Eileen remonstrated, pointing out how he was upsetting Breon and Shivaun, and he stifled his grief for the moment. Shivaun got ready for her move to RADA; Eileen went with her to London,

382 Sean O'Casey

hoping also to recover a little on her own. Sean wrote to her on 14 January, glad she could say, on the telephone presumably, she felt better. He did also, and felt a little braver too. He admitted the loss was harder on Eileen, but he was trying to share his sorrow with her; he adopted her refrain, they must think of Breon and Shivaun. He hoped it would not be too difficult for Shivaun, this new life without Mall's friendship and protection.73 But when Eileen returned things were no better, and now they were mostly alone, for Breon was daily at his attic studio in Torquay. Sean continued to work on 'Under a Greenwood Tree', finishing it by 21 February.74 During the same time he resumed his correspondence, compulsively telling friends and strangers alike Niall's story with the theme, 'part of my life left with him.'75 Usually, in contrast with the mood of 'Under a Greenwood Tree', where desolation reigns, the letters kept a brave face, for example stressing that 'life must go on, and we must, if we're wise, make it as effective and as bright as we can in another way and to another rhythm.'76 This is the writer in command once again, searching for 'another way [...] another rhythm'. He was franker to David Krause: Tt is the severest blow my life has known, but it must be borne, even though it be through many tears.'77 Writing such letters was a kind of therapy, as another side of O'Casey well knew: To me, the best psychiatrist is oneself.'78 So, he mingled his grief with business. The reviews of Purple Dust were excellent, Richard Watts Jr asserting in the New York Post that 'all the old zest, vitality, rich humor and comic sense of character mingle with sheer lyric loveliness to make another O'Casey triumph.'79 Philip Burton's direction, emphasising the farce, caught the public taste. As Atkinson put it in the New York Times, 'Everything has been arranged for a ludicrous rumpus.'80 Newsweek said it all: 'O'Casey's distilled Anglophobia' ended 'in a cloud of blarney', so that the whole thing - in the post-Suez atmosphere, no doubt - was 'grand, irreverent fun'.81 To Nathan, who had tried so hard to have Purple Dust accepted in New York years earlier, O'Casey indicated his qualified satisfaction at the play's success, 'for I'm too old now to throw up my cap, and go out to cheer in the streets,' though he valued it financially for Eileen's sake.82 Similarly, he dismissed with characteristic indifference to awards Nathan's efforts to persuade the Swedish Academy to give O'Casey the Nobel Prize. The Strindberg scholar Arvid Paulson was also told to lay off this scheme.83 O'Casey's attitude always was that since the prize was not given to Joyce it was tainted. Eileen, meantime, was going through a rough time. Sean had slipped back into his old routines. Her mother was more difficult than ever, loading Eileen with guilt over Niall's not seeing a priest before death. Mrs Reynolds's drinking created problems with her landlady and Eileen was drawn into these, knowing it was impossible to bring her mother under the same roof as Sean. Instead, Eileen engaged a man with a car to take Mrs Reynolds shopping and also, alas, to the pub for yet more brandy. It became too much for Eileen. She started to drink heavily herself and there was a suicide attempt with sleeping pills.84 Perhaps it is this incident, or its sequel, O'Casey refers to in one of his

A Death in the Family 383 letters to the many strangers in whom he confided family business: 'Eileen [...] has had a physical shock; has had to have special treatment, but, brave lass as she is, she is rallying out of it, which is well, for our two other children need her very much still.'85 This was Sean putting the best face on things. At least Eileen had the Hillman Minx to get her out and about, although, as ever, there seemed little for her to do. She could go up to London to see Shivaun and meet old friends, but then Shivaun stayed at RADA for only one term. She now joined a company of young actors intent on touring the United States. Having attended some of their rehearsals in London Eileen was less anxious about the project. But her loneliness could not be dispelled. There is a line in Beckett's Endgame (1957) where Clov, prompted by Hamm, who like most Beckett protagonists is a bit of an author but no more, exclaims on cue (admiringly), 'Well I never! In spite of everything you were able to get on with it!'[his 'chronicle'].86 It is hard not to view O'Casey's self-conscious persistence with his writing as, so to speak, Hamm-fisted. Even after he finished his 'chronicle' on Niall he went on with a weekly diary for almost four more years. The first entry, as coincidence will have it, was on Beckett's birthday, 13 April: '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.'87 But the Beckett comparison will not entirely do. Niall was a private diary (unpublished until 1991) in which raw grief was recorded together with emotion recollected in anguish. It would be an obscenity to intrude too far upon such a text not written for publication. And yet, the bareness of the text, its simple expression of grief and loss, has a classical simplicity which even its repetitiveness cannot undermine. More than anything, however, this record shows the lonely O'Casey, possibly the guilty O'Casey, at times when he was not putting a brave face on things, at times when he sat in silence at the window in that room where he and Niall had argued. Or when he moved restlessly to the balcony on a fine day or down the outside stairs to the little garden below, so neat now, so sheltered, and he sat so still a robin came right up and sat on the arm of his chair,88 and thoughts crowded the recesses of his mind. It was clear now that the whole Suez affair was a sham. Eden was gone, disgraced. Mr Harold was in charge. Order, one might say, was restored. Or could it not be said everything had changed? No more Rule Britannia. But Niall's confusion? Bringing the two issues together like that, Suez and Hungary, and saying there were lies on both sides? If Eden, why not Stalin? No, no, keep Suez out of it, nothing to do with it. Keep Hungary the theme, yes, that was it. The young are easily misled. Keep it down. Hysterica passio, down! Down, little robin. 'Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren'... how did Webster's lines go? Since o'er shady groves they hover And with leaves and flowers do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men.89 Unburied men. At least his father had been buried. Niall was but a handful of purple dust - yes! - scattered over a garden ... of remembrance. Such may have been his thoughts in his garden retreat.

384 SednO'Casey The question why O'Casey persisted with the diary entries, when he had, like Macduff, already given sorrow utterance in 'Under a Greenwood Tree', is worth considering. Part of the impulse was clearly to keep the intensity of the loss alive. For instance: He seems to come close to me at times in the morning, in the day when I sit still, when I walk quick through St Marychurch, glancing at the foliage gushing or trickling over the Garden wall as I go by; then my breast heaves and the useless tears fall. (p. 19) Or the plangent entry for 17 August: Oh, your going away was terrible, is terrible still, and is slowly wrecking my heart; that you should have had to give up so soon the life you loved, and the life in you that I loved. [...] My beloved lad is now an undying longingache in my whole nature, (pp. 20-22) But part of the impulse also was the need to probe the mystery of Niall's death and his own survival: 'is it God who sends so many of the young to sleep so soon?' (p. 33) Gradually, the diary becomes something like a loosely-formed prose version of Tennyson's In Memoriam, in which anniversaries are charted and the great questions of faith and life after death are posed. In time, Sean came to accept that Niall, at first associated with all that breathed in nature, was gone forever. There is a particularly beautiful and moving entry, over a year after Niall's death, which marks this acceptance. It begins, 'For some reason or another, the musical sounds of Handel never came to my ear with the same feeling and pleasure that those of Mozart, Beethoven or Haydn do; and this puzzled Niall, who was fond of a lot that Handel had composed' (p. 42). But once, when Niall played Isabel Baillie singing 'I know that my Redeemer liveth' in his room Sean went in and was captivated. He got to love the aria. The passage continues: Often afterwards - for the song and melody haunted my mind - I sang the song as Isabel Baillie sang it; and many's the time I noticed Niall's sides shaking with silent laughter at the raucous aging voice trying to honour Handel's musical genius. I wonder does Niall listen now with a keener ear to the music he loved, classical and jazz? Is the keen ear keener now? It would be a solacing thing to even hope; but that ear, so delicate, like his graceful hands, is gone to ashes; and the intellectual mind that accepted the lovely sounds, and gave delight to his whole nature, is but ashes too. Our lovely lad has vanished, (p. 43) Death was a physical dissolution, no more. It was simply that 'the going away of Niall has left an everlasting shiver in a warm heart' (p. 56). In the end he decided that the weekly tributes to Niall were 'trifling and useless', neither bringing him nearer nor easing the ache of the loss (p. 96). Sean

A Death in the Family 385 was himself again. It was time to abandon the exercise. He did it with an ironic sweep of the hand, accompanying one last, exasperated question: 'You lost a brilliant son in his youth, said a voice in my ear, once; now can't you see, understand, the arrogant futility of life?' He was close to Beckett here again, close to Hamm's sardonic acceptance of what being on earth means. But he had to add, 'No, I can't' (pp. 94-95); he had to pull back from the void. He was closer, after all, to the Victorian solution, the faith in 'one far-off divine event,/To which the whole creation moves'.90 But this faith was not, could not, be religious. There was only the memory of Niall which the recorded word neither assuaged nor enhanced. The material world took all the rest.

19 THE DRUMS OF

ARCHBISHOP McQuAiD

o

'Casey's response to trouble was always to summon courage: 'we must [. . .] never, never cease to fight the good fight till we finish the course.'1 This good old-fashioned protestant doctrine, ethical individualism for the pilgrim's progress, was but a radical and eccentric extension of his communism. He would probably have endorsed that virtually untranslatable Irish proverb, with its internals puns, ni h-uasal nd h-iseal ach thuas seal agus thios seal, roughly, 'it's not a matter of being a prince or a pauper but of inescapable ups and downs.' The graph of his own career zig-zagged like a scary cardiograph. The causes of these ups and downs were partly personal, partly determined by fate, and partly the result of social opposition. Sometimes O'Casey's personality caused or interlocked with the other two factors. Sometimes fate, for want of a better word, laid him low, as Niall's death did, and sometimes, as was about to happen over the new play he was writing, social opposition, in this case a complex time-bomb carrying a long sectarian fuse. Endurance, however, was for him paradoxically linked to comedy: not in the sense of its frivolity but in the sense of its defiance. Comedy was for him the other side of despair. This stance now stood him in good stead. Early in 1957 the American editor Sylvan Barnet asked him to contribute an essay on comedy alongside the text Purple Dust which he was including in an anthology The Genius of the Irish Theatre.2 Answering, O'Casey said he was then writing a new comedy which might serve as well as an essay. In any event, he added sardonically, 'a host of us are living Essays on Comedy, from Prime Minister [Macmillan], Presidents [Sean McEntee, Dwight D. Eisenhower], down to Peasants.'3 Generally speaking, he believed, 'it's harder to be comic than tragic; Comedy is the most difficult Muse to serve.'4 He would have agreed with Susanne Langer that 'the pure sense of life is the underlying feeling of comedy,' which is essentially the 'life rhythm', corresponding to 'the basic biological pattern which all living things share'.5

The Drums of Archbishop McQuaid 387 Some such view allowed O'Casey to see Niall's death as part of life's biological pattern. Commenting on Beckett at this time, he saw him as 'very clever, very sincere, & compassionate', but insisted that he himself could not see life as a never-ending Tenebrae of despair: 'I have had a hard life, many trials, many sorrows, but my eyes insist on seeing the lilac bloom [. . .] and my mind frequents the active thoughts of life.'6 These 'active thought' are creative. The moral challenge would be met by another comedy, this time more joyous than anything he had written since Purple Dust (1940). Ironically, it would immerse him in one more controversy, one which in its way re-enacted the timeless comic agon, the struggle between spring and winter, freedom and oppression, as he came into direct conflict with the legendary Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid, the 'druid of Drumcondra' himself.7 O'Casey wrote The Drums of Father Ned fairly quickly. He began it in March 1957 and by 25 May had finished a draft of what was then entitled The Night is Whispering', a title he dropped in deference to M.J. Molloy's established Abbey play, The Wood of the Whispering (1953). His play would go down a different path from Molloy's moving elegy for rural Ireland. In Molloy, the 'whispering' was that of young lovers who used to frequent the copious woods until emigration drove them away and modernisation destroyed the landscape: the image is perhaps closer to The Bishop's Bonfire than to the more optimistic play O'Casey now wanted to write. Although he created one more reactionary parish priest in Father Fillifogue, the main emphasis was on the triumphant Father Ned, within a scheme which, as has been pointed out, followed the ageold pattern of pastoral drama.8 A play set in the spring, Father Ned selfconsciously reinforces what in folk-drama is invariably a celebration of youth over age, fertility over repression. In traditional Irish terms, as David Krause suggests, it marks once more the wished-for victory of the poet Oisin over the priest Patrick.9 In spite of the satire evident in the play that O'Casey was to subtitle 'A Mickrocosm [sic] of Ireland', his bent now was less for outright mockery than for good-humoured high spirits. Yet in its notion of the revolution Father Ned is introducing it openly accepts Utopian reconciliation, after the dystopia of the Cock. And Utopia, as Richard Kearney remarks, 'refers to the deployment of myths and images to challenge and transform the status quo'.10 O'Casey uses mythic comedy to make that radical move, clothing his manoeuvres in farce and absurdities. Ironically, farce and absurdities were lying in wait to ambush his play before ever it saw a stage. A darker comedy was about to unfold. The antagonists in this broader social drama, a struggle for power and for artistic freedom, were O'Casey, the self-confessed communist and vehement upholder of modernism, and McQuaid, the supremacist Roman Catholic 'bigot'11 and a Machiavellian figure obsessed with an exclusively Roman Catholic public order.12 His biographer argues that McQuaid's high regard for J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the American FBI, provides 'one of the most revealing insights into his complex character. McQuaid had little to learn from Hoover in regard to the home-spun intelligence system which he operated.'13

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Because of the moral climate McQuaid had established in Dublin since the early 1940s an unequal battle with Dublin's communist playwright was inevitable, though its pretext was unforeseen. In his annual Lenten address McQuaid always warned against the 'menace' of communism, seen as 'a blasphemous doctrine and a perverse way of life'. Anyone in his archdiocese who even supported communist organisations was guilty of mortal sin, while those who professed or defended communism were excommunicated.14 While O'Casey sat in his room in Torquay, working out the comic action of The Drums of Father Ned, McQuaid sat in his Drumcondra palace pulling the strings that made the whole of Dublin hop to his will. The two men were opposites and yet ominously alike. Each was scholarly, fastidious, strong-willed; each had a vision of order and freedom; each wanted passionately to expose and condemn evil. Yet they were so much opposites that, a bit like Stanley and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, they had this date with each other from the beginning. It is significant that McQuaid wrote a Master's thesis on Seneca, the Roman philosopher and playwright, when he was twenty-three. There is nothing in it about Seneca's plays, which, no doubt, McQuaid nevertheless would have read. But there is something about biography which is apposite: 'Biography is the story not only of the unfolding of the ideal to the mind, but also of the will's straining towards its realisation against forces, internal and external, which may so hinder as to make one deviate or desist from the good desired, the ideal.'15 If the present biography is attempting to unfold the 'ideal' O'Casey to the mind what happens to the real O'Casey, brooding in his study, remembering Niall one moment, lighting his pipe and looking out at the Devon hills the next? And what are the forces, internal as well as external, which McQuaid fears may make the biographer 'deviate or desist' from the (necessary) ideal? Since the tightlipped classicist expands no further let us then take it that by 'ideal' is meant 'the truth'. In what follows the aim is to describe in fuller detail than has up to now been possible the truth about what happened in Dublin over The Drums of Father Ned.

Before Father Ned there was The Rose Tattoo. A good deal of ink has been spilled on the controversy surrounding the arrest and charging of the director Alan Simpson in May 1957 with the staging at the Pike Theatre, Dublin, of 'an indecent and profane performance'.16 It is one of the most notorious cases in the history of Irish censorship. Until quite recently, however, it remained a mystery why exactly Simpson was the target of the Garda Siochdna, without warning or precedent. It was always assumed that Archbishop McQuaid was somehow behind the move to suppress the Tennessee Williams play but neither evidence nor motive was apparent.17 With the publication in 2002 of Spiked: Church-State Intrigue and the Rose Tattoo' a good deal of light has been admitted on both of these issues, placed in a wider and more disturbing framework. The authors, conceding that the McQuaid papers are 'a sort of goldmine for conspiracy theorists',18 nevertheless found evidence indirectly linking the

The Drums of Archbishop McQuaid 389 attack on Simpson - which led to a costly defence all the way to the Supreme Court, with ruination to follow - to the machinations of McQuaid. Their main case, however, is against the Minister for Justice, who, it is argued, was asserting himself and the newly re-established Fianna Fail government over the matter of censorship. The story is well told and the victimisation of Simpson is clearer now than it was before. There is only one snag, which also relates to the ensnaring of O'Casey's Father Ned. If the attack on Simpson was down to the Minister for Justice, flexing his new-found powers, why, later this same year did McQuaid record, as the row over O'Casey's play was about to break, the savage remark, The "Rose Tattoo" ought to have been a lesson to the Tostal'?19 It is all there in that final word. Inaugurated in 1953, An Tosta/was an annual attempt at local and national levels to resuscitate Irish culture while also making a few pounds for the tourist industry. Some might argue that the reverse was the case.20 Sean Lemass, then Minister for Industry and Commerce, outlined the aims in the Official Souvenir Handbook (1953): During Easter Week and the two following weeks of April, Ireland is keeping "open door" to men and women of Irish birth and origin from all parts of the world who have come home to renew their contacts with our country, and also to every stranger who may wish to join us in this great National Festival. [...] An Tostal (Ireland at home) is intended to be something more than a national festival in the ordinary sense or an opportunity for the display of hospitality. The programme of cultural, social and sporting events which has been prepared has been designed to express the Irish way of life and to revive the spirit which animated the traditional Gaelic festivals for which Ireland was famous when Europe was young.21 The whole venture could have been Dionysian were it not also slightly embarrassing. There was a kind of awkward self-consciousness about the open-air festivals of singing, recitations and dancing in traditional Irish costume which went on in selected venues throughout the country. There were currach races and aeriochta in Galway. In Dublin An Tostal was a grander affair. Mac Liammoir describes the city, 'waving with flags, blooming with flowers, festooned with lamps, and [...] bristling with very odd-looking structures in concrete, the most striking of which, described as the Fountain of Light, was seized upon by some tastefully minded iconoclasts and hurled into the Liffey. This gave many Dubliners a momentary thrill, but there was nothing particularly exciting to do, and many theatrical individuals and groups remained sarcastically aloof.'22 But work is work, and the actors were soon drafted into the huge national pageant held in Croke Park. From here the idea grew of incorporating an annual theatre festival into the Tostal celebrations. Brendan Smith, who ran an acting school in Dublin, was the brainchild of the Dublin Theatre Festival, which had its inauguration in May 1957. Unhappily, the Rose Tattoo affair cast a shadow over its first year.

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Strange to say, because as Mac Liammoir intimated many theatre people thought it a bit of a joke, O'Casey viewed An Tostal with some admiration. 'I am of the opinion that this Festival could be a Bringer of new life and activity to Ireland, replacing the lost enthusiasm of the old National Movement, which, in many ways, is now old-fashioned and outworn.'23 In fact, he built his new play around the whole idea of the Tostal, making its festivities the expression of the off-stage Father Ned, a revolutionary priest who breathes a new spirit into the community, particularly into the young people O'Casey now saw as the best hope for the future.24 He has them rehearse a play in honour of the Tostal: this play-within-the-play being a historical melodrama in the style of Boucicault allows O'Casey to co-opt the 1798 Rising as an image of modernisation. The whole concept of Father Ned thus evolved as a self-conscious theatrical exploration of the Tostal as a moment of change and of Bakhtinian carnival. Keeping Father Ned off-stage at all times as a presence felt by the pounding of drums suggesting battle meant a return to the idea of the Cock in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, except that now, instead of being demonic, the mysterious revolutionary force is himself a priest, a figure already within the stagnant imagined community. There is a continuity here also with the figure of Father Boheroe, the enlightened but much restricted priest in The Bishop's Bonfire. O'Casey's belief in the 'good priest' as revolutionary is partly a fantasy and partly, as the dedication to the published text was to announce, founded on his admiration for such liberals as Canon Hayes, founder of Muintir na Tire, a cooperative movement, and Dr Walter McDonald, a maverick theologian in Maynooth early in the century whose Reminiscences are quoted in O'Casey's letters and autobiographies at least as often as Jenersky's Thesis is by the Covey in The Plough and the Stars. Three other priests make up the full dedication.25 Although he had for years championed the young, it was Niall's death which made O'Casey fanatic about the idea. Niall had planned to attend a Youth Festival in Moscow in July 1957. O'Casey wrote a piece, published in Novy Mir in that month, celebrating the Festival: Though unable to be there, I shall be there in the spirit, singing with the young people, dancing with them [...], my hope as bright as theirs.'26 As always in these upbeat pieces he associates the young with communism and with bringing the season of spring back to the earth. In another such essay, Touth is the Bugler', addressed to Russian students, he says: Tt is the common people who have made history in the past, who make it now, instead of king, earl or knight banneret' [sic].27 Thus his 'rude mechanicals', as it were, who rehearse the 1798 history play in Father Ned, illustrate how youth must take over not only the arts but the thing in itself, the construction of history. Ironically, this spirit was just then beginning to stir in Ireland, where sclerotic age was slowly yielding place to youthful new ideas, as witness the rise to power of the visionary Sean Lemass and the inspiring economic programme proposed in 1958 by T.K. Whitaker.28 O'Casey now found himself unequivocally in tune with the mood of incipient change in Ireland, which in a sense he had called for in The Bishop's Bonfire. But there was another issue which also preoccupied O'Casey. Towards the

The Drums of Archbishop McQuaid 391 end of 1956 the IRA launched a violent campaign in Northern Ireland, opening old wounds. O'Casey agreed to write a review of a book by Sean O'Callaghan, The Easter Lily: The Story ofthel.RA. (1956), which was later used as a preface for a reprint. Published in February 1957 the review sketched the history of the 'realist' and the 'romantic' involved in the fight for freedom: We read of the horrors that Irishmen, and Catholics, too, inflicted upon themselves and upon the people; cruelties as blatant and bleak as any that the Black-and-Tans had gloried in before the Free State came to power. [...] The book is a revelation of one mad moment after another, showing such a frenzy for destruction and death as to make any self-righteous Irishman pointing a Christian finger at another in reproof to stand out as a hypocrite and a liar.29 The view consorts with the prefatory scene or Trerumble' which O'Casey went on to write for Father Ned. Set in 1920, that scene, introduced in the expressionist style as 'like a sudden vision of an experience long past conjured up within the mind of one who had gone through if™ shows the Black-and-Tans destroying a small town. The cruelty of the times is graphically displayed but so also is the absurdity of a division between two Irish captives who refuse to shake hands even in the face of execution. The joke on which the play rests begins here. The officer in charge of the Black-and-Tans forbids their execution on the grounds that these mutual enemies 'will do more harm to Ireland living than they'll ever do to Ireland dead'. The play then begins in the 1950s with feverish preparations for the Tostal in the reconstructed town, now governed by the same two men, still at odds. It is as if the 1956 IRA campaign took O'Casey back to the roots of violence in Ireland once again, to the absurdity behind the horror. Sometimes this Trerumble' is mistakenly described as a 'flashback'. As it is actually the mechanism which projects the play into orbit it resembles more the eighteenth-century prologue to Oak Leaves and Lavender. We view the comedy which arises from the Trerumble' in the light of the fight for independence. An absurd situation, the sparing of the two townsmen, becomes the Aristophanic basis of a contemporary comic crisis: the intransigence of middle age in the face of youth determined to answer the call of the invisible, Puckish Father Ned. If history is thus the lever of change for O'Casey fantasy is the imaginative agency making that change appear, however implausibly, just and right. In the course of the play, moreover, the subject of the partition of Northern Ireland is aired through the caricaturish Northerner Skerighan, who is forced into the same reactionary camp as the two absurd townsmen, and his orange sash is seized by the young people to join the green as the drums of Father Ned literally steal a march, Lillibulero. Thus differences disappear as if by magic. As O'Casey himself put it, thinking of Shaw's/o/m Bull's Other Island, the play was, 'if not the dream of a madman, [at least] the day-dream of desire in Ireland'.31 In short, it proposed solutions by means of fantasy.

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As he wrote Father Ned in spring-summer 1957 O'Casey would have known about the Rose Tattoo affair. Shivaun was in Dublin, in preparation for a tour of America with the Ronald Ibbs Company, and met Simpson there. O'Casey mentioned Simpson's arrest in a letter to Brooks Atkinson on 25 May. Further, on 1 June O'Casey signed a letter published in the New Statesman setting up a fund to assist Simpson with his legal costs, and later sent Simpson a second cheque.32 He was only sorry the play Simpson was going to the stake for was not a better one.33 But in June-July O'Casey was ill from an eye infection and overwork and was ordered to do much less writing and reading. Even the diary on Niall was abandoned for eight weeks, and the play had to be left aside which, he told Nathan, he was writing to keep his mind from brooding about Niall.34 Then The Rose Tattoo case went into limbo awaiting Simpson's challenge in the High Court in October. Meanwhile, in February 1957 in an unusual move all copies of The Green Crow were seized by the Irish Customs under an old Act of 1876 and withheld from sale for a year. At the time the censorship board was suspended because of an internal row.35 Under the legislation establishing the Appeals Board in 1946 came a shifting of responsibility from the Minister for Justice to the Board which after this date became increasingly conservative, being dominated by Knights of Columbanus answerable to Archbishop McQuaid. Almost ten times as many books were being banned in 1954 as annually before 1946.36 The crisis within the Board in 1957 occurred because two newly appointed members routinely opposed decisions to ban. It seems someone then became determined to do the Board's work for it. O'Casey intervened in the Irish Times in May-June over censorship without understanding this background. Remarks like 'I see the Pike has been blunted, whereas it should have been sharpened,' would have raised an episcopal eyebrow in Drumcondra.37 His last word in the debate, 'The banning of bombs is more to the point than the banning of books, and Christians should know this better than anyone else,'38 would scarcely have dissuaded McQuaid from his notorious Campaign against Evil Literature, due to be launched in December.39 The Irish League of Decency was established in 1955. There was no direct theatre censorship, for historically the Lord Chamberlain's office bore no responsibility for Irish theatres. In effect, censorship of Irish drama was indirect. Being insidious, it was all the more powerful. What, then, happened in 1957 leading to Alan Simpson's arrest and the demand that he take off The Rose Tattoo? The Minister for Justice, Oscar Traynor, eccentrically based the state's charge against Simpson on a twohundred-year-old British law.40 Whelan and Swift argue that the Minister was anxious to get censorship into some kind of order before McQuaid forced his hand to re-constitute the Censorship Board. But they also say that at this time in Ireland 'Everything was about something else.'41 They further show, from evidence in the National Archives, that Simpson was first to be threatened with a public demand for action 'by one or more of several sources, including the Archbishop'.42 But they fail, in my view, to see the wood for the trees here in exonerating McQuaid from direct influence. The point is this. The Rose Tattoo

The Drums of Archbishop McQuaid 393 was staged under the aegis of the Tostal Council and hence under the aegis of Bord Fdilte and the Minister for Industry and Commerce. The Tostal Council had successfully requested Archbishop McQuaid to inaugurate the Theatre Festival as its main event in May 1957. As soon as word reached McQuaid's ears of the Simpson case he was implicated: he had been gulled into giving his elaborate blessing to a festival which harboured obscene literature. His anger would have been sufficient to inspire the Minister for Justice to get his act together, especially if McQuaid had let de Valera know his displeasure. Let it be remembered what a friend at court told Simpson at the time: 'Dev himself wants action taken against you.'43 Why should de Valera, no great theatregoer, care what went on in the Pike if it were not that the whole incident was an immense embarrassment? Here was an international event, in its first year of presentation, launched by the Archbishop and the Tanaiste Sean Lemass on 12 May. The Festival was now known to be promoting a sexy play in which contraception, God bless the mark, was openly (if rather confusedly) represented. So, it was a somewhat straight-forward matter: an injured response from Archbishop's House enquiring what the Taoiseach intended to do. There was one other possible factor, never, perhaps to their credit, raised by Whelan and Swift and never raised by Alan Simpson himself in his book on the Pike: the sectarian issue. Simpson was protestant, son of a Church of Ireland clergyman; his wife Carolyn Swift (nee Samuel) was a London Jew. McQuaid was notoriously zealous for Roman Catholic supremacy in post-Treaty Ireland and he was 'not short of initiatives'.44 He did not suffer other denominations gladly. Indeed, his attitude towards other Christian communities has been described as favouring that of Pius XFs in the 1930s: 'Come in slowly with your hands above your heads.'45 He was also tinged with anti-Semitism.46 In short, he would not have been disposed to sympathise with either Simpson or Swift as, in Dublin parlance, 'one of our own'. Some two hundred miles away, as the green crow flies, that other Dublin protestant soon to come between McQuaid's sights 'got on with the bloody play', as he had disciplined himself to do ever since his days at 422 North Circular Road. He was also, off and on, working on various essays, which he thought of under the collective title 'Words, Words, Words', Hamlet's reply to Polonius's question on his reading matter. The idea was to write commentaries on pieces published in Irish newspapers. One such target was a letter from Archbishop McQuaid published in November 1956 to be read out in all churches in Dublin calling for prayer for Hungary, so that the outcome might not be 'merely an exchange of Communist tyrants, who will continue to persecute the Church and suppress the most fundamental rights'. The conditions prevailing in Hungary and Poland, McQuaid continued, 'teach our own people what we must expect from those, in our midst, who call themselves Socialists and who are afraid to call themselves Communists'. This latter phrase generated a spate of O'Caseyan 'Words':

394 SednO'Casey Where is the delight of freedom of thought, if Christ [ians] are allowed to profess and call them [selves] christ [ians], others arent allowed to profess or even call themselves Commun[ists]. Is there danger to life, or limb, or employment, if such a name be used? Of course, one cant blame the Prelates for being a [bit] cautious. Isnt it a fact that Communism has declared that No Catholic is to enter into Trinity College on pain of being automatically expelled from the Party Line? And didnt these same tantalising tyrants prevent Brendan Behan, the Irish playwright, from acting as Chairman at a meeting arranged by the Catholic Students of University College, Dublin? Didnt the same boyos eject Hubert Butler from the Honorary Secretaryship of Kilkenny's Archaeological Society because of a brief infringement of the same Party Line? [...] Didnt they pulverise the whole arrangement of the meeting and send the then Catholic Papal Nuncio running out, top speed gear, wrapping his crimson cloak around him, away in shame and medieval amazement [ . . . ] ? These clerical communists have infiltrated into public life everywhere, dictating to the free individual from the cradle to the grave.47 Though unpublished, such ironic opinions were 'well chronicled', to borrow Jennie Gogan's phrase, in and around Archbishop's House. They would be dealt with in the usual manner, behind the scenes. On 17 April 1957 O'Casey wrote to JJ. O'Leary in Dublin asking him for certain details on the Tostal for use in Father Ned. A prominent Dublin businessman, O'Leary was a friend of Barry Fitzgerald, who stayed with him whenever he returned to Dublin. He had been very kind to Eileen and Shivaun when they were in Dublin in 1955 for The Bishop's Bonfire. By profession O'Leary was managing director of CahiU's publishing house, but, more to the point, he was a member of the Theatre Festival committee in 1957. O'Casey liked and trusted him. O'Leary told Brendan Smith about the new play and on 1 July Smith wrote to ask O'Casey if he would consider giving it to the Festival for production. O'Casey agreed, though not without compunction. He felt sensitive to the plight of younger Irish playwrights who might with reason feel resentful of his being privileged by the Festival committee, for, after all it was an international festival and something of a showcase for Irish talent. His Juno had been the Abbey's showcase in May. Moreover, he was reluctant to expose himself once again to the biases of the Dublin critics. Yet he consented to send Smith a copy of the text as soon as it was professionally typed. On reflection, he decided to send this via O'Leary who was to be his go-between. Meantime, Eileen, Breon and Shivaun took a fortnight's holiday in Cornwall at the end of July, leaving Sean 'alone with the multitudinous bees and birds'.48 Eileen had had a difficult time of it, with what O'Casey called 'numbed nerves' and indigestion, and was x-rayed in April with no clear results. Just before her holiday she somehow cracked a rib, possibly through a fall. O'Casey is silent about her sufferings, probably because Eileen kept the causes to herself. The old grooves of writing, routine and the scent of controversy over

The Drums of Archbishop McQuaid 395 The Green Crow (seized in Dublin by Customs officers) kept him buoyed up in the spring and early summer while Eileen floundered rather helplessly. Yet she was strong. She had her own dark side, her loneliness, but she had, too, her ability to take action, to get away and to enjoy life when the opportunity offered itself. Nothing is known of this trip to Cornwall. Presumably Eileen and the children went back to Treyarnon, where they used to go during the war years, to a camp site owned by the mother of Niall's friend, Marcus Tyrell: They were very happy times.'49 Did Lady Tyrell invite her down now, so that they could talk of Niall and the old days? In any case, the Cornish landscape may have helped Eileen to grieve for Niall, who loved to surf all day in this area. It may be, too, that Breon seized the opportunity to drive to St Ives to take a look around, for he was to leave Torquay soon to pursue his artistic career there. The holiday over, Shivaun packed her bags again in September for Dublin, in preparation for the tour to America. Eileen went over to her in mid-September, and Shivaun sailed for New York with Ibbs's Dramatic Company in October. Eileen and Sean were again on their own.

When O'Casey sent the script of Father Ned to O'Leary on 10 September he confessed to feeling depressed, a state he later defined as 'a sense of being Godforsaken and man-forsaken too'.50 He does not say 'woman-forsaken'; Eileen was there to offer honest criticism of the play, which she liked except for a scene between Skerighan and the saucy maid Bernadette. Eileen thought Bernadette's exploitation of the harassing Skerighan a bit too 'sophisticated' and O'Casey toned down the scene accordingly.51 O'Leary, too, had his criticisms to make, much to O'Casey's surprise. 'Lord, J.J., I cant try to write it all over again [...] for the mood is gone, the whole continuing impulse disappated [sic], and it must stand (bar maybe, a few minor changes in dialogue) for better or for worse.'52 This characteristic reluctance to revise was to prove fatal to Father Ned. Soon afterwards O'Casey heard from Brendan Smith, to whom O'Leary had passed on the script. Delighted at the prospect of an O'Casey world premiere for his next Theatre Festival, Smith was diplomatically uncritical and on 11 October O'Casey agreed to let him have the play. That was the last O'Casey was to hear of it for some time. In the nature of forward planning there was no reason for Smith to do more than look around him and decide that the best company to do Father Ned was the Globe, founded in 1954 by actor Godfrey Quigley and others. Jim Fitzgerald, who had successfully directed a production of Juno for the Globe in 1956 which toured to Liverpool and who had directed seven Yeats plays in the recent Dublin Theatre Festival, seemed the ideal man for the job. Later Head of Drama in the newly founded Telefis Eireann, Fitzgerald (d. 2003) was 'a wiry agile man with a tough grainy intelligence. A natural dissident. A born teller of tales. And probably the sharpest mind in the Irish theatre.'53 Apart from everything else, Fitzgerald had once acted in a Unity production of an O'Casey one-act (Hall of Healing) in London and could be presumed to have the right (or left) politics if such were needed for this

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new play.54 All of that could be happily left to one side until after Christmas. The Theatre Festival was not independent. It was under the control of the Dublin Tostal Council, which, being manned by business people and chaired by the Lord Mayor, looked ahead rather more keenly than Smith and the theatre people. On 21 October the secretary of the Council, T.A. Boyle, wrote to Archbishop McQuaid to request permission to have a Solemn Mass said to initiate the proceedings of the Dublin Tostalin 1958. A similar request had been made and granted for 1957; it was acceded to again on 22 October. Then something happened which remains obscure. Brendan Smith said later that there was 'a great deal of trouble' on the Council, 'and this led to jealousy. Some members of the Council thought that the theatre end was receiving more support than the other activities.'55 For whatever motive somebody sent the Archbishop a Festival programme and drew to his attention the inclusion of an adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses and a play (unnamed) by O'Casey. There were also to be three mime plays by Samuel Beckett but these were not adverted to. On 7 November the Archbishop wrote to Boyle, secretary of Dublin Tostal Council, asking if it was true that the Joyce and O'Casey plays were part of the drama programme. When Boyle confirmed the point dead silence emanated from Archbishop's House. It was not until 28 December that McQuaid sent a curt note in response, withdrawing permission for the celebration of Mass as requested. A modern reader might well shrug and ask, 'so what?' What did it matter if a Mass was or was not said before a Theatre Festival opened? It has to be understood that this was to be a Mass in the pro-cathedral to which upwards of seven hundred invitations would be sent, to the president, members of the government, the hierarchy, and representatives of all tourist, sporting and cultural associations connected to the Tostal activities. The cost would be borne by the Archbishop. So, it was a major social, political and religious event, a grand gesture of Roman Catholic patronage.56 Cancellation of such a gesture was redolent of some great disturbance in the social order. Therefore, once Boyle received this bombshell at the Tostal office in Westmoreland Street panic ensued. To understand why, it is necessary briefly to explain what happened behind the scenes between Boyle's confirmation on 15 November that Joyce and O'Casey were in the programme and McQuaid's letter of withdrawal on 28 December. McQuaid had hoped that 'better counsels would prevail' in the meantime. What happened was this. The Lord Mayor (James Carroll, TD) as chairman of the Dublin Tostal Council rang up Archbishop's House to say he 'did not wish to have in the City any plays that would reflect discredit on it'. His deputy chairman, Charles J. Brennan, a lawyer, felt so strongly that 'he was prepared to resign from the Council if these two plays were sanctioned.' He was advised to get Father Patrick Tuohy, chaplain at UCD, to read the two plays and provide a judgment. Tuohy found no difficulty with the adaptation of Ulysses but needed a day to read the O'Casey play (the script apparently having been copied without permission). Then McQuaid sent this strong letter, marked 'Personal', to the hapless Father Tuohy on 13 November:

The Drums oj Archbishop McQuaid 397

I fear that the opinion expressed by you in regard to the choice of "Ulysses" by the Dublin Tostal is being regarded as an opinion of Archbishop's House, because Father Martin [secretary] recommended the Lord Mayor to consult you, without my knowledge. I would like you to take means to remove any such misunderstanding, for I shall be obliged to take very definite action if either Ulysses or O'Casey's play be chosen by the Tostal. The "Rose Tattoo" ought to have been a lesson to the Tostal. Tuohy sent an abject reply the next day. It was only then McQuaid sent his 'innocent' query to Boyle asking if the Tostal Council was including Joyce and O'Casey, and then took his 'definite action'. Further, he took note of Fr Tuohy's error and later removed him from the chaplaincy at UCD, blighting his career. Fast-forward now to early January 1958. The Tostal Council did not know whether it was coming or going. At a meeting on 2 January it decided to withdraw sponsorship of the two plays because of the likely bad publicity if the Council went ahead. Then the Council backtracked, hoping yet to save the (holy) day by sweeping everything under the carpet. On 6 January deputy chairman Brennan failed to get a statement from Archbishop's House saying either that the dramatisation of Ulysses by Allan McClelland (now named for the first time) and The Drums of Father Ned (also cited for the first time) was the cause of his displeasure or that permission to say the Tosto/Mass was withdrawn 'because the circumstances were not appropriate'. McQuaid was too clever to commit himself either way. The first option would have drawn him directly into a public controversy from which the Council would emerge unscathed and consequently might leave it to the law, as in 1957, to deal with the matter. The second option would allow the Council to say there was no real significance in the cancellation of the Mass this year. But McQuaid merely reiterated the wording of his letter of withdrawal on 28 December. As O'Casey had said in an essay in 1956, 'a Bishop can make himself felt without showing himself.'57 Brennan, stonewalled by McQuaid, then said (6 January) he felt that the O'Casey play might in the end be 'held up' by O'Casey himself, 'especially if Mr Smith controlled strictly as he said he would, the text and presentation'. Brennan, acting for the Lord Mayor who was afraid to get too involved, indicated that he was at the Archbishop's service. So, what it comes down to is this. By the time the story reached the press on 8 January the Tostal Council had already decided if need be to ditch both O'Casey and McClelland (adaptor of Ulysses). A further complication arose on 14 January when the Jesuit Provincial, Father O'Grady, rang Archbishop's House to ask that McQuaid be informed that he, O'Grady, had 'directed' the Rector of Gardiner Street to refuse the application of the Theatre Festival Committee for permission to stage the Beckett plays in the new St Francis Xavier Hall (popularly known as the SFX). So now there were three authors on the index and not one of them realised it.

398 Sean O'Casey

The Council, probably for window dressing, continued to give the impression that no surrender was taking place. On 10 January the Council put out a press notice stating no change in the announced Theatre Festival programme. The Director of BordFaille, Brendan O'Regan, worried over the bad publicity which would damage Irish tourism if the plays were cancelled, got the Bishop of Killaloe on his side to suggest to McQuaid on 20 January a possible way out. O'Regan would submit the two plays to a panel of three judges, Gabriel Fallon, Roger McHugh and Seamus Wilmot (playwright and member of the Abbey's Board of Directors). These should be asked three questions: (1) Are the proposed plays offensive to Catholics, or do they contravene Catholic doctrine or belittle Catholic morals? (2) Are the plays likely to cause public controversy or even disturbance? (3) What is their literary value? Are they "good theatre" in the real meaning of the term, and can they be regarded as truly representing Irish life and Irish cultural and social conditions? If the answer should be 'no' to the final question and 'yes' to the first two, O'Regan would then pull the plug on the Festival by withdrawing the grant, 'as it is the stated policy of the Board [Bord Fdilte] that all matters likely to cause public controversy be avoided'. O'Regan himself, Bishop Rogers went on in his letter to McQuaid (20 January), 'as an excellent Catholic [...] is totally opposed to the proposed production of those plays'. McQuaid's response (21 January) was predictable: 'No matter what questions may be put to a panel of dramatic experts, no matter what answers are given, the Holy Sacrifice [of the Mass] may not be linked with Joyce or O Casey [sic].9 That would seem to be that. How much of all this did Brendan Smith know? Of course, to borrow Joxer's phraseology when Captain Boyle's credit begins to dry up in act 3 and Needle Nugent retrieves his unpaid suit, he 'must ha' heard somethin'.' In his own account of the whole affair in A Paler Shade of Green (1972) Smith states firmly that if the Tostal Council was divided the Theatre Festival committee was not and wanted to go ahead with the original programme.58 One is inclined to believe Smith, a decent man, although his facts are here a little confused. He says that O'Casey withdrew his play as soon as the British press first leaked the news, which was on 7 January. Not so. It is time now to pursue O'Casey's side of the story.

Following the agreement with Brendan Smith in early October over the production of Father Ned O'Casey had no reason to trouble himself further at present. Other things pressed for attention. Shivaun's absence in America was filled by letters and souvenirs such as an addition to O'Casey's collection of caps begun a few years earlier. Before she left from Cobh Shivaun with family pride sent a postcard showing the autograph tree in Lady Gregory's garden in

The Drums of Archbishop McQuaid 399 Coole, the 'SOC' initials clearly visible below 'W.B.Y' O'Casey primed friends in New York to expect her and set aside two hundred dollars from his American royalties for her use. Sean and Eileen were rather dreading the arrival of Christmas without her, as Niall's first anniversary would coincide. Eileen, in particular, could not bear to remain in the flat over the period and reluctantly Sean agreed to accept an invitation from Madeline Epstein and Louis Solomon to spend Christmas with them in Paignton. Another jolt came with news of the death of Frank Cahill in Dublin, the teacher who had befriended and encouraged O'Casey in St Laurence O'Toole's club. 'Another final break with the past; one more link gone.'59 In the new year O'Casey busied himself with correspondence and started work on a long, interesting essay on faith and immortality entitled 'Immanuel'. Here he continued the theme of Niall's death on another level, less anguished, more philosophical. He would spend another year working on this piece, not published until 1962; he would conclude that belief in immortality was but 'the tantalising shimmer of a pious pipe-dream'.60 There were offers to televise the early plays, which he quickly rejected. He disliked the way television cut and edited plays. He also refused Emmet Dalton, the Irish film-maker, who wanted to film Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars.61 All of these offers would have meant good money (Dalton offered £3,000 for the Gunman) but O'Casey was not to be tempted. However, the New York production of Purple Dust, which finished on 5 January after a year's run, netted him some $250 a week, or something over $12,000 for the year. Before Christmas he heard again from Brendan Smith recommending Jim Fitzgerald as one of the two best directors in Ireland at present, the other being Hilton Edwards. On balance, Fitzgerald was adjudged more suitable for O'Casey; Edwards was to direct the adaptation of Ulysses. Smith also said either he or Fitzgerald would be in touch about some 'suggestions' they might have.62 O'Casey did not bridle at the word. Fitzgerald arrived in Torquay around 12 January to talk over the play. By this time the press had leaked the news of the Archbishop's opposition. Though details were lacking, in Gabriel Fallon's laughable words, 'Dublin seethed with rumour and bristled with opinions, some publicly expressed but most of them whispered under the counter.'63 O'Casey's hope at this stage was that Father Ned-would go on: he told Nathan he was tired of controversy.64 In Torquay Fitzgerald brought him up to date on the Archbishop's naming of Joyce and O'Casey. Sean's response was at this stage (17 January) no more than mild impatience: Tt is all very tedious.'65 He was soon to change his tune and malign Fitzgerald. How far Fitzgerald's discussions with O'Casey delved into problems with the play itself is not known but one can guess not very far. O'Casey later said Fitzgerald seemed frightened by the play, which does not ring true although he was certainly worried about the stageability of parts of it. That point became clear when, after Fitzgerald's return to Dublin he, Quigley and the actor Norman Rodway (a director of the Dublin Globe Theatre

400 SednO'Casey Company) met to discuss the play. Then Quigley and Rodway jointly wrote to O'Casey a most unfortunate letter (24 January). It was one so annoying it could not but have put O'Casey into a rage; it was even wrongly addressed to Totnes. Was the letter calculated to get his back up? It began with a clear inference that Fitzgerald had at least raised with O'Casey the issue of changes in the text. The directors thanked O'Casey for his 'very reasonable appreciation of our point of view regarding "The Drums of Father Ned"'. They went on: 'In spite of this very helpful discussion however, we find certain problems still unsolved.' Smith was pressing them 'for a definite decision' but while 'most eager and proud' to have the opportunity to stage the play they were 'still not at all happy with its present structural state, which does not, in our opinion, make it produceable'. Louis Elliman of the Gaiety Theatre felt the same way. [Who asked him?] Fitzgerald had reported that while O'Casey was 'quite agreeable to changes being made "on the floor" [in rehearsal], you are chary of allowing any basic structural re-shaping in advance.' To leave such alterations until the last moment would be 'disastrous', while if made now 'the serious point of the play could be more effectively realised.' So, they were writing to ask O'Casey to give Fitzgerald 'the necessary authority to make such alterations as he requires, before committing ourselves to any definite action with the Tostal authorities'.66 O'Casey took this letter very badly. Was it sheer coincidence that they asked for changes in the play at a time when the secretary of the Tostal Council was assuring Archbishop's House that a request to O'Casey to revise his play would surely result in his withdrawing it? O'Casey leaped to the conclusion that Fitzgerald and the Globe were afraid of the archbishop and simply wanted a way out. He saw the whole thing as a set-up.67 With barely disguised rage he demanded the return of his script. Writing to Smith on the same day (29 January) he took umbrage at the assumption that he had given the play to the Globe Theatre when he had given it only to Smith. Tt is but necessary for me to say that it was I, and not Fitzgerald, who wrote the play; and it is I who shall stand or fall by the writing.' He was withdrawing the play from the Festival forthwith.68 It is quite clear that his reason for withdrawing Father Ned had to do with his long-held attitude towards his texts in general and had nothing directly to do with McQuaid. Almost immediately, however, it suited him to claim publicly that his play had been banned by the Archbishop. Psychologically, this was his way of saving face. The Tostal Council was now thrown into panic. They had not, of course, read O'Casey's play and were unsure whether it was a good or a bad thing that it was withdrawn. Some had hopes that if it were 'expurgated', to use the word employed by deputy chairman Brennan, it could pass muster. They thought the same about the adaptation of Ulysses. Their ignorance is astonishing and was outweighed only by their pusillanimity. The members were hampered, if not compromised, by the controlling presence of Bord Fdilte, hovering over all arrangements. As Ernest Blythe said at the time, the whole thing was about money.69 The Tourist Board wanted to ensure the attraction of visitors to Ireland. At the same time, as good catholics, they did not want to attract

The Drums of Archbishop McQuaid 401 people for the wrong reasons. Rather helplessly, they looked to the Archbishop for guidance. The amazing thing is that in the Archbishop's archives are notes based on meetings held both by the Festival Committee and the Tostal Council at this time.70 Somebody obviously leaked this information, and it was typed up on a single sheet, dated 5 February 1958, for McQuaid's attention. From this source it can be learned that the Festival Committee met on Saturday 1 February, only four of the nine members being present: Lord Killanin, Michael Scott, Dermot Doolan (Equity), and John O'Brien (chairman), 'with an official named Smith'. This last, quaint phrase indicates the nature of this report: the amanuensis did not even know who Brendan Smith was. He notes the result of the script readers' reports on the two contentious plays: these were not the readers suggested by Brendan O'Regan for his own moral satisfaction but readers no doubt found by Brendan Smith. The names would be all-important to his Grace, so they were carefully noted. The voting was recorded as follows: ULYSSES:

Fr. E.J. Coyne, SJ., for Judge C[earbhall] O Dalaigh, for, with amendments requested: [Micheal] Mac Liammoir, for, "admirable", G[abriel] Fallon, Against.

O'CASEYS PLAY:

Father Coyne, Seamus O'Kelly [sic, for Kelly, drama critic Irish Times], Judge O Dalaigh, G Fallon . . . [ellipsis in original] all [the above] against. Producer, a Mr. Fitzgerald, opinion not known.

The final reference to Jim Fitzgerald is disturbing. Presumably, J.J. O'Leary stayed out of the controversy. The Festival Committee passed on this report to the meeting on Monday 3 February of the Tostal Committee. The amanuensis notes quite a bit of manoeuvring in the process, adding exclamation marks to draw McQuaid's attention to this. The report passed on was a summary, saying that the readers included two priests and a judge (unnamed) and claiming that all three had approved of both plays. This was manifestly untrue. The report added that it had been decided to ask O'Casey 'to permit some alterations on technical grounds': the word 'permit' suggests that this decision was engineered by Brendan Smith. The amanuensis then gave the result of the voting by the Tostal Council - thus furnished with the false report from the Festival Committee. It was eight to six in favour of producing both plays. The names are supplied. It is noted that Killanin was not present but had written to state his vote in favour. The eighth name in favour was, somehow, not available. At this meeting it was once again stated that O'Casey 'was being approached to allow technical corrections'. Now an addendum appeared: 'he would probably refuse, it was thought, and thus his play would go out of the programme.'

402 SednO'Casey

Smith is not mentioned as being present. Perhaps he was the eighth man 'for' both plays. But if he was present and heard the cynical reasoning behind the agreement to contact O'Casey he must have hidden from the meeting the fact that O'Casey had already withdrawn his play. As a last throw of the dice, Smith wrote next day, 4 February, having first spoken by telephone to Eileen, to suggest O'Casey's giving Father Ned to a different director.71 Still angry, O'Casey refused to change his mind.72 Exactly the result the Tostal Council expected. Smith would not necessarily have been aware of what McQuaid's informant notes at the end of his report: that in the preceding week the Irish Tourist Board (i.e. BordFdilte) had met under the chairmanship of Brendan O'Regan. O'Regan had given nothing less than 'a triple directive' to director-general Tim O'Driscoll 'to have the two plays examined by three experts and submit a report on whether they were in any way offensive to religion, to any section, or to nationality'. This was clearly the report McQuaid had already dismissed as irrelevant. So it was, since the Festival Committee, as above, had found its own, more open-minded 'experts'. But what is significant is the tailpiece to that piece of irrelevant news: 'Mr O'Driscoll stated later that an emissary was going to London [sic] to get O'Casey to allow amendments, that O'Casey would certainly refuse and so that his play would go out.' This is therefore the source of the cynical reasoning which underlay the Tostal Council's decision on 3 February to contact O'Casey. It came right from the top. McQuaid could rest easy. The problem was that it implicated the Globe Theatre, which had asked for 'amendments' and been roundly refused. It would look as if the Globe was part of the cynical ploy of Bord Fdilte. The dates prove that this was not so. Smith must have held his counsel. Brendan Smith did his best to retain hold of Father Ned. O'Casey certainly believed either he or Fitzgerald was doing his best to hold on to, that is steal, the script. He fussed and fumed over a second copy given to Fitzgerald in Torquay. Returning it, Fitzgerald, humbled, enclosed an affecting letter (5 February) in which he said he thought the script was a personal gift. 'As you said, I might be able to sell it sometime if I were flat [broke]. I felt more like framing it.' The badgering by the Tostal people' he had interpreted as 'some craven manoeuvre of theirs to get out of doing the play'. Then had come a cruel telegram from O'Casey. So. 'Here's the script. I am puzzled and more hurt than I can say by this business. Presumably your exalted position allows you to do this sort of thing. I have been involved in quite a few indignities on behalf of your play. Here goes the last indignity.'73 The rest of the story can be quickly summarised. The Archbishop now held control over the whole outcome. The files in Archbishop's House show that his method was to control the ways in which information was published. A press release issued by the Tostal Council was first sent to McQuaid for approval. An Irish newspaper which created a story out of the Archbishop's displeasure and the prospect of a boycott of the Theatre Festival to be organised by catholic organisations was reprimanded and an explanation (i.e. apology) demanded and instantly proffered. The Dublin Council of Irish Unions, a donor to An

The Drums of Archbishop McQuaid 403

Tostal, asked guidance of the Archbishop how to proceed and then published an account of its dissatisfaction with the Festival (meaning withdrawal of subsidy). When the Irish Times (15 February) deplored on page one the dropping by the Council of Ulysses and in a strong editorial advised it to submit next year's programme to the Archbishop in advance,74 McQuaid called in the chairman Sir Lauriston Arnott to explain himself. Arnott duly came to Canossa (24 February) and heard of McQuaid's 'disgust' at things printed in the Irish Times for the past fifteen years. (McQuaid refused to talk to the editor, Alec Newman.) Arnott promised to do all he could to have the controversy stopped. The editor wrote (28 February) to 'clarify his position'. On 3 March McQuaid replied with a pat on the head. He understood. He was not angry. Lord Killanin, a Roman Catholic, was asked to come and explain remarks reported in the Sunday Independent (23 February) that he hung his head in shame at the Tostal debacle. Killanin duly did so. McQuaid wanted to know if his letter refusing a Mass was not discussed at meetings, that is, if it was not realised what the impediment was. Crestfallen, Killanin checked minutes and correspondence to confirm that the letter had not been discussed. The inference is that it should have been and that Killanin was wrong in voting against the Archbishop's clear wishes.75 On 18 February the Dublin Tostal Council announced that the Theatre Festival was now 'postponed'. When the Irish Association of Civil Liberties, of which Sean O'Faolain was president, decided to hold a public meeting in the Mansion House to discuss 'Freedom in the Theatre' they felt it necessary to write first to McQuaid to ask permission to invite a priest, Father O'Donoghue of the pro-cathedral, to be one of the speakers. The other speakers, he was notified, would be Professor Pigott, later chairman of the Censorship Board and a McQuaid man, Allan McClelland, adaptor of Ulysses, and Brendan Smith. Pigott, predictably, wrote to McQuaid for advice, which he got: stay out of it. McQuaid then replied to the LACL refusing permission to any priest in his diocese to speak at the public meeting being planned. The meeting was cancelled.76 Far and wide now O'Casey spread the word that his play had been 'rejected' and 'banned', when in fact he withdrew it after criticism by those asked to stage it. But in a wider sense of course O'Casey was right. Beckett withdrew his three mime plays in support of Joyce, which pleased O'Casey: hereafter his attitude to Beckett became warmer and less critical. With Father Ned withdrawn and the adaptation of Ulysses kicked out, Beckett's decision and attendant publicity left the Tostal Council stranded. The Theatre Festival was cancelled. O'Casey was back where he stood after The Silver Tassie controversy. He waited for the Irish writers and intellectuals to speak out on his behalf but they did not. Alan Simpson, at least, wrote to O'Casey in support and asked for Hall of Healing for the Pike. When O'Casey refused Simpson argued rather recklessly. 'What we feel is that there is a body of sycophants here that want to prevent your plays being seen. Why pander to them?' If the plays were banned in the Festival they should be put on elsewhere, in the Pheonix Park if necessary. There is a

404 Sean O'Casey

strong body of liberal opinion (growing, in my view) that will flock to your plays. Don't let them down by supporting the banners. That is why we went on with the Rose Tattoo.'77 Only the new young admirers, notably Robert Hogan, David Krause and Ronald Ayling, spoke up publicly, thus indicating that O'Casey's literary reputation was now in the hands of young academics.78 When the looked-for support did not emerge O'Casey decided to hit back in July by placing a ban in Ireland on professional productions of all of his plays. He protected his wounds by striking a heroic pose: 'I am not standing up, or protesting, for myself alone; I am standing up for the great dead Joyce, and for the integrity and honesty of Samuel Beckett, who withdrew his Mime Plays as a protest against the clerical ban on Joyce and me.'79 But there was no Yeats now to attack and expose in literary argument. All was quiet around Archbishop's House in Drumcondra. The drums were silent. The unequal battle was over. There was no doubt about who had won or who had the last laugh.

20 SOMETHING OF A RENAISSANCE

t is said that Henrik Ibsen kept a scorpion in an empty glass on his desk as he wrote. If the scorpion sickened Ibsen would toss in a piece of ripe fruit, 'on which it would cast itself in a rage and eject its poison into it; then it was well again'.1 This was an image of the dramatist in his relationship to society. After the Norwegian critics assailed his masterpiece Ghosts in 1881 Ibsen, in a rage against their hypocrisy, ejected his poison into An Enemy of the People and so healed himself. O'Casey was similarly impassioned: for him, writing was something resembling an act of revenge. But now, following what he insisted on regarding as the 'rejection' of the Drums of Father Ned, he was confused, unsure of where to direct his anger. A letter meant for the Irish Times (17 February 1958) was unsent and passed on instead to Robert Hogan, one of the young academics who had recently taken up his cause. This was one way O'Casey's rage was now to be expressed: indirectly, by such supporters as Hogan, Ayling and Krause. More in Lear's than in Coriolanus's vein now he fulminated against his underlings, as who should say, 'I will do such things,/ What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be/The terrors of the earth.' Eventually, he would transform the bitterness into satiric comedy. But for the present he retreated to his eyrie in Torquay. Or, changing the metaphor, while others travelled the world and had multiple experiences he and his likes, he said, 'stayed rooted where they land, like spiders having floated about a little on the end of a gossamer-thread, spin a web where they alight, & spend their life in a little circle.'2 Spider or scorpion, O'Casey was now dormant. He let things happen around him. In a letter to Nathan in New York - a rarer undertaking since Nathan's stroke - O'Casey conceded that he did not even go out for his daily walk in St Marychurch now. He listened to music on the radio and found it calming. With Breon living on his own and Shivaun still in America the flat was eerily quiet, '& full of echoes'.3 Soon word arrived that Nathan had died on 8 April, at the age of seventy-six. O'Casey sent a telegram to Julie but did not write again, 'having nothing to say'.4 Nathan's conversion to Catholicism (revealed after his death) left O'Casey speechless and disturbed; he did not want to upset

I

406 Sean O'Casey

Julie with his response. It shocked him to think how little he knew Nathan after all. Julie had announced that she planned to enter a convent. Was the world going mad? When Shivaun returned and was met by Eileen at Southampton she came laden with gifts and greetings from many American friends. The gifts included a coloured cap for Sean's collection from Paul Shyre, the actor-director who had successfully adapted the first two volumes of the autobiographies in New York in 1956 and was the main driving force behind the highly successful production of Purple Dust in 1957-58. O'Casey sent him the script of Father Ned in February 1958. Shyre's talent comes across in the recording made of Pictures in the Hallway, which played well rather than simply read well.5 On stage Shyre used six actors who sat on stools and read from scripts on lecterns, while the flautist in the wings bridged the flowing passages in the narrative. There was a narrator (Staats Cotsworth) and changes of scene were punctuated by blackouts.6 The whole idea, resembling Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood (1953), worked extremely well. Shyre was a complete O'Casey devote. He spent a week in Torquay in August 1957 discussing possible productions during the next New York season. When the Dublin Theatre Festival collapsed in March 1958 he pondered the idea of holding a mini-festival in New York, with Father Ned, Bloomsday (McClelland's adaptation, which Shyre probably wished to direct), and Beckett's mime plays.7 The idea came to nothing. Instead, Shyre pushed ahead with plans to stage Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. He had taken up where Nathan left off. At length, the plan to let the Cock crow in New York became feasible. Shyre had hoped to direct the play himself, but being one of the three producers and also cast as Shanaar he wisely handed over direction to Philip Burton. He hoped to persuade O'Casey to travel out for the opening in an off-Broadway theatre in November. Brooks Atkinson also pressed O'Casey, whose health throughout 1958 was so marred by sustained attacks of bronchitis that by midSeptember he had definitely decided: 'the old body is too outworn to make the journey.'8Though it was not what the Americans wanted he let Eileen go in his place, while Shivaun stayed behind to take care of him. So it came to pass that on 10 November Eileen flew to New York, where she had a great time meeting Sean's producers, giving interviews, and officiating at the opening not only of the Cock (12 November) at the Carnegie Hall Playhouse but also of Cheryl Crawford's production of The Shadow of a Gunman for the Actors' Studio (20 November) at the Bijou. The Cock, although strikingly designed by Lester Polakov, disappointed. As Eileen put it, 'it is an uncommonly demanding play and perhaps I was expecting too much.'9 It is worth while considering why this Cock failed to crow. It closed after thirtyone performances. During the tryout in Toronto in October the production had caused some opposition from Maria Duce, last heard of denouncing The Bishop's Bonfire in Dublin. An old Abbey acquaintance, Walter Starkie, wrote: 'Their protests were pathetic but they filled me with despair.'10 Starkie enjoyed the Cock but it probably mystified New Yorkers. In a piece written for the New

Something of a Renaissance 407

York Times O'Casey called it his favourite and best play.11 Many must have found this misleading. Similarly, the director Philip Burton's piece in Theatre Arts (November 1958) set up high expectations: In this play O'Casey has succeeded in a brilliant fusion of all the elements that make up the special magic of the theatre; he even calls for conjuring tricks, as did Shakespeare in The Tempest. Though it is true that no good play can really exist until it has been transferred from the page to the stage, it is especially true of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. It has to be seen to be believed. What may be puzzling and confusing in print can become gloriously alive and clear in the theatre. Cock-a-Doodle Dandy is potentially one of the great treasures of the English [sic] theatre, and it is high time it was displayed for all to see and enjoy and admire.12 The reviewers for the most part classed the play as inferior O'Casey and the production as ponderous.13 To Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times (13 November) the non-Irish cast was the main fault. The actors simply did not understand what they were about.14 To Richard Watts Jr., another friend, the fault was not simply with the production: the play itself had 'something desultory about its dramatic structure that keeps either its fun or its sadness from achieving complete effectiveness'.15 Reading between the lines, one would have to conclude that the seasoned Broadway cast was not right for this play and that the director did not speed up the production sufficiently in the vaudeville style required. In the event, the Cock was found inferior to the Gunman, thus raising acutely the enduring question whether the later plays represent an advance or a falling-off in O'Casey's genius. Atkinson's conclusion seems sound: 'It is the same man - the dedication still high, the heat cooled a good deal by humor and experience.'16 'Cooled' is ominous though perhaps apposite. In spite of O'Casey's own view, the Cock is far from his best play: it is too much in the satiric vein. In a reversal of roles since 1934 Eileen now wrote home to tell Sean her adventures in New York. She was twice interviewed on radio and once on morning television. She met many of his surviving friends, including his agent Jane Rubin, Bob Ginna, Dickie Watts, and, of course, Brooks and Oriana Atkinson, whom she had met more than once in Devon. She visited the Museum of Modern Art twice, noting that they had 'some beautiful pictures' which she wished Breon could see.17 As the guest of one of the producers, Lucille Lortel, she lived in luxury close to Central Park and was free to telephone Sean whenever she liked. She sent him copies only of Atkinson's and Watts's reviews. For her part, she felt that the Gunman was a superior production, directed by Lee Strasberg and rehearsed by the Actors' Studio for three months.18 It was what the American theatre did best, this scrupulous attention to realistic detail. She also met on business with Joe Stein, who with Marc Blitzstein planned a musical version of Juno on Broadway in 1959. In all of these activities Eileen showed what an excellent public representative she was

408 SednO'Casey for Sean, and how good a manager of his affairs she promised to be when he was gone. She loved New York as he had done, and would go to live there in later years.

In September 1958 two young Irish film makers, Tom Hayes and Jim O'Connor, succeeded in interesting O'Casey in a documentary they were planning on the Abbey. These two actors, as they were then, first met at a performance of The Bishop's Bonfire in 1955 and became friends. They admired Cyril Cusack's style and managed to interest him in their idea, which at first was to create dramatisations on film. When Ardmore Studios were established in Dublin soon after, the idea began to seem feasible. But the concept altered to that of a documentary as soon as they went in search of a director. Lindsay Anderson was interested in the notion of an interview between O'Casey and Barry Fitzgerald but not in a whole history of the Abbey. Paul Rotha, however, saw the film as the kind of thing he preferred: 'the expression of the individual mind in film-making'.19 The script was laid aside and a series of interviews within the damaged body of the old Abbey was planned instead. Hayes and O'Connor founded Plough Productions for the purpose and in 1958 the writer Frank O'Connor (no relation) agreed to be narrator. With Cusack's backing the producers met Blythe and got access to the Abbey. In spite of the full title decided on for the film, Cradle of Genius: Salute to the Abbey Theatre!, Blythe did not like it nor the producers Blythe: they dropped an interview with him as too boring.20 More important, Frank O'Connor's linking script was amusingly sceptical, since he saw his role as 'a watching brief on behalf of Yeats'.21 Consequently, there was current in the film, whatever the contributors might say, a cynical voice arguing that the Abbey was dead even before it burned down in 1951. Blythe could not be expected to applaud; indeed he thought the film 'mostly punk'.22 The culmination of the film was to be a meeting after twenty-five years or so between Barry Fitzgerald and the creator of his greatest roles at the Abbey, Captain Boyle and Fluther Good. J.J. O'Leary, ever the go-between, agreed to ask Fitzgerald when he arrived to stay with him in Dublin on his annual vacation from Hollywood. Barry was willing, though, being in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease, not without apprehension, for his memory was badly affected. The next step was to get O'Casey's agreement. This was not going to be easy. For one thing, O'Casey had fallen out with Barry over the latter's selling himself to Hollywood, as O'Casey saw it. He might fear that this interview was another publicity stunt to help Barry's career. For another, O'Casey's distaste for film and television interviews was well known. Indeed, asked by the BBC in February 1958 to take part in a television programme on Fitzgerald's life he was emphatic in his refusal. He thought such interviews 'fake, in no way showing or even indicating the life of any soul'.23 He had more important things to do. Hayes and O'Connor decided not to write but to travel to Torquay and, if possible, meet O'Casey face to face. When they arrived one day in September,

Something of a Renaissance 409 Jim O'Connor telephoned O'Casey from a cafe.24 At first very opposed to the film, O'Casey suddenly asked where O'Connor was and when told Torquay' with his partner beside him he invited them up to meet him; but there was to be no further mention of the film. When they arrived at the top of the steps at the side of 'Villa Rosa' Eileen opened the door, 'a vastly handsome woman in her late fifties'. She brought them into a spacious sitting room with lots of paintings and a Mexican rug on the floor. There on the sofa was the legendary figure of Sean, dressed in an Aran sweater and wearing one of his skull caps. In Hayes's recollection, 'immediately, the minute I saw him I could see he was as Irish as be damned, completely, physically Celtic looking, like some men I used to know down the country, a great long face, absolutely sensitive looking: you could see the sensitivity. For everybody goes on about O'Casey that he was a bit rough, but I think it was with the pen rather than with the tongue. He was absolutely genteel.' The two visitors rattled away for forty-five minutes before Eileen interjected to prompt them about the film.25 They were in. O'Casey liked them, found them naive and vulnerable in ways that invited his protectiveness. Doubtless, it helped that Cusack was involved and that O'Casey knew Paul Rotha, who was an admirer.26 O'Casey agreed to the project. The only outstanding question was the fee. O'Casey played cat-and-mouse, saying NBC had offered him $5,000 for an interview. O'Connor said the most they could manage was £100. Leaning back in the sofa, puffing his pipe, O'Casey said this was too much. It would have to be £50.27 After this visit, there was a lull in arrangements while Barry recovered from a collapse. Then O'Casey insisted that Eileen must first return from New York. A date in early January 1959 was agreed. The other scenes were filmed inside the old Abbey in the first days of January - featuring Siobhan McKenna, Padraic Colum, Cyril Cusack and nine or ten other players past and present reminiscing individually or in pairs. In the viewing, nothing original emerges from these short presentations, but the camera work, by Wolf Suschitzky, is superb. There are also cameos of F.J. McCormick, with a clip from Odd Man Out (1946), and Lady Gregory, affectionately mimicked by Maureen Delaney and in a voice-over praised by O'Casey, who was annoyed that his words on the Lane controversy were cut in the editing process. The documentary value of these contributions, offset by Frank O'Connor's muttering about mourners at Finnegan's wake, is now historically sizeable. But it is when the scene shifts to Torquay that one sees the difference between uncoordinated impressions and a powerfully imagined recreation. Here O'Casey steals the show. When J.J. O'Leary shepherded Barry Fitzgerald into no. 3 flat at 40 Trumlands Road on 7 January O'Casey was shocked at Barry's appearance. All disaffection vanished. 'He looked so old, so worn, and I was then told that he had no memory, so couldn't be given any questions - no more than two, and that most of the talking would have to be left to me.'28 In the film which resulted Barry sits like the jarvey in The Quiet Man, stonily reticent and twinkling his eyes while O'Casey is excitedly reliving the Plough riots and Barry's first entrance in/tmo.29 Occasionally, in his animation, O'Casey seems

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about to give Barry a hearty slap of comradeship, perhaps calculated to awaken him from torpor, but arrests the gesture and touches him delicately on the sleeve instead. As Jim O'Connor, who directed the scene, noted, O'Casey was very nervous and very sensitive with Barry. Bill Harpur, who was assistant director, emphasises that the meeting between the old friends was filmed without rehearsal and that it was done in one day.30 Harpur, like Hayes and O'Connor, was very moved by O'Casey's gentleness of manner. He found him to be a deeply spiritual person. In India, for example, Harpur contends, O'Casey would have been recognised instantly as a 'holy man'.31 He warmed to everyone. When he heard that Harpur knew Russian he began to call him 'Bolshevik Bill' and pressed on him a signed copy of I Knock at the Door in Russian translation. Part of the arrangement was that Hayes and O'Connor would send O'Casey a copy of the film. He must have had the use of a projector because on 6 August he wrote to say the family had seen the film 'here' the night before. His view is now the common one. The film did not work in the format Rotha had imposed: 'it was a requiem rather than a celebration.'32 Once the film was made, however, all that concerned O'Casey was whether the two 'lads' Hayes and O'Connor would lose their money in trying to market it. He took a fatherly interest in their welfare and as late as 1963 was enquiring about their financial position.33 In the meantime, it had proved difficult to market Cradle of Genius, which premiered at the Carlton Cinema in Dublin in April 1959. For a time it looked as if an airing on American television would create real interest. Ed Sullivan was in Dublin in 1959 and undertook to show the O'Casey scene on his CBS-TV show for St Patrick's Day 1960. But the Irish-American lobby got after Sullivan and persuaded him that O'Casey was a 'rather shabby expression of Ireland'. Sullivan dropped the Cradle, baby and all. The producers lost the agreed fee of $3,000 and although they took legal proceedings never recouped it. On the other hand, after Fitzgerald died on 4 January 1961 O'Casey found, to his astonishment, that Barry had left him $15,000 in his will.34 The will was made over a year before the reunion.

While Eileen was in New York in November 1958 O'Casey started on a one-act play, Figaro in the Night. This slightly risque little fantasy grew out of his anger over the Dublin Father Ned affair. Towards the end of a long, unpublished diatribe, dated August 1958, O'Casey's imagination suddenly fastened on the Manneken Pis, seen on a postage stamp someone had sent on a letter, and began to consider what might happen if this obscene statue should take flight from Brussels and set itself down in Dublin: 'O'Connell Street would die; shops shut, cinemas empty, not a soul seen from one end to t'other; trees bare, birds gone: all silent, dull, icy, dead.' The idea germinated around this 'what if of exhibiting the puritanism and absurd sexual timidity of latter-day Ireland. Delighted, O'Casey seized on the idea which was to begin the process of healing the scorpion's sting delivered by Archbishop McQuaid. A piece of dialogue flowed:

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- What's happened, Mick? You look outa your mind, an' youre all tattered an' torn - youre a spectacle! - I'm near vanished. Caught in the crowd, an' decorated for death, Jim. - What crowd, what death, man? - Th' one stormin' round the statue, killin' one another to be th' first to get a decko at it. - Didya see it, Mick? See it clear, I mean? - I did that, Jim. Shockin'! There the laddo was makin' a fountain out of a way that was a menace to all morality. It struck me like a battherin' ram of indecency. Faintin', I fought me way out. - Looka, Mick, it's th' price o' you getting' torn untendherly for runnin' to see in stone what youve often seen an' felt be th' periodical employment of your own thransactions. It's God's will, an' we're wise to welcome it. - Afther th' crowd battherin' me body, are you goin' now to batther me soul with your blasphemy?35 At least he could still laugh at Irish double standards. He did not want to be disturbed now. He had to beg his good friends Dr Hugh and Mary Doran to forgive his refusal to spend an evening with them in Eileen's absence. An elaborate set of excuses followed - how he hated going out at night; how he was completely blind in the dark, having to be guided 'hither & thither, into a car & out of it, etc. I hate and loathe this, always anxious to be able to do all for myself; to walk free everywhere I go. That's why I dread illness.' So he loves his own 'habitat' where he can move about freely and independently. Then came the core of the matter: 'Besides, I'm in the middle of a chapter-fantasy called "Figuro in the Night", & want to give all the time I can to it, for a "Fantasy" is a slow & though [t]ful thing to try to write. Why not come here instead some night? Then you won't have to lug me back, & so save a journey.'36 The little play gave him a fair amount of trouble and was not finished until the end of March 1959. In two scenes, it is a carnivalesque farce, perhaps a little obvious in its satirical intentions.37 Its main function was to liberate O'Casey's imagination cathartically. Tt won't make me any richer, but I felt like doing it, & couldn't escape.'38 More flea than scorpion, it nevertheless helped to heal him of his Dublin injuries. Thus he could now dash off an essay for the New York Time Magazine in January, The Lark in the Clear Air Still Sings', an attack on contemporary pessimism as 'this angry rejection of the greatness of life; its stresses and its joys'.39 In this mood he began his last full-length play, Behind the Green Curtains. His working title was 'Dark Kaleidoscope', implying the moral fragmentation of modern Irish culture.40 The germ of the play was supplied by the funeral in Dublin of Lennox Robinson, who had died on 14 October. O'Casey was amused to learn that Roman Catholic fellow-writers and Abbey players alike felt unable to attend the funeral service, since Robinson was a protestant.41 As it might be thought O'Casey was here exaggerating, it is worth citing Austin Clarke's poem on the funeral of Douglas Hyde, with the Taoiseach and his

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cabinet, 'In Government cars, hiding/Around the corner', wishing to pay respect but not to 'risk eternal doom' by assisting at a protestant service.42 Moral cowardice then offered itself as the theme of a satirical comedy, with as main theme a failure of nerve by those in society who should speak out. Behind the Green Curtains is not a good play. The problem is the very topicality which lends authenticity to such work. The world depicted has nowadays disappeared, its pietisms a matter of total indifference to modern society. Still, it offers a record of the absurdities of a so-called 'chosen people', the archaeological remains of a society into which moral consensus has vanished as into a black hole.43 John Jordan offered the term 'significant distortion' as a means of conveying O'Casey's use of exaggerated comic types after the manner of the Elizabethan writer Ben Jonson. This suggestion offers the possibility of a positive response to the play, with its gross caricatures of Irish literary and cultural life. There is an amount of farce and energy in these portraits, but without an adequate plot they remain mere illustrations of laughable hypocrisy on the one hand and incredible doggedness on the other. The only resolution O'Casey provides is the one he had already provided more persuasively in Cocka-Doodle Dandy, namely, the exit to England of the dissenting minority for whom repression is no longer to be borne. Jordan argues that the comic distraction leads O'Casey 'into aesthetic and imaginative falsity',44 i.e. that O'Casey lays it on too thickly. This is certainly true, as was plainly seen in the Dublin premiere of the play in 1975.45 But even by that stage the pre-ecumenical world depicted was only a curiosity. Dryden said of Jonson's later plays that they were products of his 'dotage'46 and yet in recent years some of them have been staged with great success. Even if Behind the Green Curtains 'remains O'Casey's weakest play'47 its energies are undeniable. It simply needs to be seen for what it is: a Jonsonian morality play in farcical mode. At the time, it served its therapeutic purpose in giving its author his revenge. On the final draft of the play, he cited the provocative confession of a newspaper editor: 'The business of a Journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feast of Mammon, and to sell himself, his country, and his race, for his daily bread. We are the tools of rich men behind the scenes.'48 O'Casey understood the savage irony of this. He saw himself as a journalist-interpreter. He was now able to shake off the effects of- as he saw it - the failure of Irish journalists and authors to defend him over the Father Ned affair. The consequence was a serenity which allowed him to shape his final years at peace with himself. The horror of Mall's death was now accepted, the pain lasting but bearable. He tried translating Yeats's epitaph, and got the last line right: nd bac, ach teidh ar aghaidh.49 As adapted, it spelt out his own resolution: Take no notice, but keep right on.' Breon was well on his way to fulfilling a career as artist: from the O'Casey flat in the spring of 1959 he organised an Arts Council exhibition of Romantic and Abstract art, Shivaun helping with posters and planning. Soon Breon would marry and move to St Ives. Shivaun left at the end of January, to take up the job of assistant designer at Bristol Old Vic. Family matters were solving

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themselves in ways O'Casey, who never tried to force his children in any particular direction, could approve. His own last play, a one-act written to flesh out the volume containing Behind the Green Curtains and Figaro in the Night, sent to Macmillans in October 1959, was a happy one-act farce set in a rural railway station. Though written as filler material, and of little consequence as social commentary The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe, finished in February 1960, shows an easy-going O'Casey, content with life's absurdities and yet compassionate towards life's fools. It was to be the only one of his final plays seen in Ireland in his lifetime: he waived his ban to allow RTE to screen it on 4 November 1962.50

In April 1959 The Drums of Father Ned had its low-profile premiere in La Fayette, Indiana. O'Casey had had several indications of interest from professional theatres, including a strong possibility from the Group Theatre in Belfast, but he chose instead to reward an American academic with an amateur performance of a world premiere. Although he did not altogether approve Robert Hogan's book, The Experiments of Sean O'Casey, when it appeared in 1960, he liked the young man's cheek.51 The book is an attempt to apply the tenets of new criticism to O'Casey's plays, i.e. concentrating exclusively on form at the expense of content and ignoring historical and social, not to mention biographical, context. Yet once Hogan began to consider Father Ned for the stage he saw values to which he had been blind in the reading. As a result he could testify that O'Casey's last plays are 'flamboyantly theatrical'.52 It is a useful discovery. At around the same time, a far more ambitious project was aimed at Broadway. This was a musical version of Juno, adapted by Joseph Stein (future author of Fiddler on the Roof, 1964), with music by Marc Blitzstein and choreography by the great Agnes de Mille.53 Stein had been working on the adaptation since 1956, had visited O'Casey to discuss it, and had sent him a recording of the music to comment on. O'Casey mainly kept Stein at arm's length by claiming he himself knew nothing about the mechanics of the musical, and that the play itself was 'too old for me to have a living interest in it'.54 The one thing he insisted on was that the ending must remain, i.e. the final scene between Joxer and Captain Boyle. In the event the scene was played in a pub, while Juno and Mary went off to a farm to recuperate. There were, of course, many other compromises to Broadway taste.55 As to casting, O'Casey recommended Jack MacGowran over Cyril Cusack as Joxer. MacGowran had begun visiting him in Torquay in 1956, and impressed O'Casey as 'a born comedian'.56 He also approved Melvyn Douglas as Captain Boyle, for he had directed Within the Gates in New York in 1934. But of the star singer Shirley Booth, who played Juno, he would have known nothing. Juno the musical opened shakily in Washington B.C., in January 1959 and after a further three weeks in Boston, where the film star Jose Ferrar was brought in to direct, the show opened at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York, on 9 March.57 Eileen was invited out again for the opening but pleaded O'Casey's uncertain health as excuse.

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Perhaps it was just as well. The production was a flop, and closed after sixteen performances.58 O'Casey was rather ashamed that he had ventured into this production for money. But the more noteworthy production in 1959 was George Devine's at the Royal Court. Ever since 1955, as was discussed in an earlier chapter, Devine was keen to include O'Casey in his new 'writer's theatre'. Now that the New York production had fizzled out O'Casey could give him Cock-a-Doodle Dandy.59 As before, Devine found it more fruitful to talk to Eileen. He made sure she was invited on to the committee to celebrate the third anniversary of the ESC on 2 April with the film premiere of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court.60 He told her that he hoped to get the Cock to the Berlin Festival after Edinburgh but as a fallback position wondered about the Dublin Theatre Festival: would Sean agree? The very question revealed how little English directors understood O'Casey. After a lengthy history lesson Devine was told, 'I am not prepared to scab it on Samuel Beckett the poet, or Joyce the other poet just to have a play of mine done in Dublin that rejected the three of us.' He could only allow the Cock in Dublin if the other authors were presented also. But Devine should bear in mind that the Cock, 'being a criticism of Lourdes', would be certain to raise a fiercer storm than the 1958 one, 'and I am positively sick of these uproars.'61 Devine quietly laid aside off-shore plans and groomed the Cock for the Edinburgh Festival and a run around the Royal Court. Devine held the view that the Cock could be played only by first-class Irish actors equal to those who first made successes of Gunman, Juno and the Plough,^ a view of the later plays rapidly gaining credence. He took great care with the cast, turning to Sean and Eileen (at this stage more up-to-date) for advice on Irish players. Sean wanted Patrick Magee and J.G. Devlin, two stalwarts (the one then famous for his work in Beckett's plays, the other as an Ulster character actor). Devine made two casting trips to Dublin,63 where he engaged Colin Blakely, Eamon Keane, Pauline Flanagan, Joan O'Hara and Norman Rodway. Then he booked a Parisian dancer, Berto Pasuka, to play the Cock. The only weak link was Wilfred Lawson, a very experienced English actor miscast as Sailor Mahan. On 22 July O'Casey pronounced the cast as good as Devine could hope to get. For the first time he sensed the honour being accorded: 'it will feel odd to me to have a big production like this in Britain.'64 At Eileen's instigation he provided Devine with a programme note, 'O'Casey's Liking for Life'. This was a short sermon on the Life Force, yoked up to the youth movement of the 1950s: 'Healthy youth wants to do great things, and the wild prance of Rock 'n' Roll is a sign of the animation they wish to bring into all the things they do.'65 A few years later O'Casey would doubtless have referred to those four grand lads from Liverpool. Devine asked Eileen to attend the play's preliminary week in Newcastle's Theatre Royal, where she found Lawson decidedly inarticulate as Sailor Mahan (probably through a misguided attempt at an Irish accent). Though this flaw was not eliminated for the opening in Edinburgh on 7 September66 the Cock created much interest.67 Presumably, Eileen went to both the Edinburgh and the

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London openings. Sean waited until the following week when he also had an appointment with his eye specialist (who gave him no good news, as one eye was blind and the other deteriorating). They stayed in Eileen's little flat off the Cromwell Road, where Eileen organised a party one day, to which rising stars Peter Hall and Peter O'Toole came and paid obeisance.68 She was thus a major figure behind this production of the Cock On the night of O'Casey's visit to the Royal Court, 23 September, he met John Osborne. One journalist, rather forcing the kinship between the so-called angry 'young' men, described O'Casey as 'wearing a gaudy off-brown fisherman's sweater and cloth cap' while Osborne was 'just as gaudily attired in pillarbox red jersey and tight-fitting trousers'.69 Devine threw a party on stage in O'Casey's honour after the show, during which the two writers were introduced. 'A grand, modest laddo,' was O'Casey's verdict, 'a clever lad, sincere, & has courage - three fine qualities', even though, 'his dramatic philosophy isn't mine - very far from it.'70 Osborne, for his part, does not deign to mention the meeting in his autobiographies, but elsewhere he comments on 'the purple blarney of poesies by O'Casey', which indicates where he stood.71 Osborne's attitude serves to raise the broader question: where did O'Casey himself stand in the English theatre in 1959? The reviews of the Cod were what one might expect, divided but on the whole very respectful and at times highly laudatory.72 After all, as John Arden saw it, the Cock's satire 'did not mean very much to a Sloane Square audience'. Moreover, Arden considered, 'as an Aristophanic fertility comedy' the Cock was not well suited to Devine's 'rather heavy directorial style': he was more suited to Shaw and Beckett.73 If the reviews did not quite amount to 'a united Press chorus of approval', as O'Casey himself claimed,74 it pleased him for once to think so, and in that mood he wrote the one-act The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe. Plays and Players chose O'Casey as 'personality of the month' for October and in a kind of editorial described him as 'still the greatest living dramatist in the English language'. The editor, EG. Barker, who also reviewed the play enthusiastically in this issue ('What a breath of fresh air!'), continued: 'It is to be hoped that the presentation of Cock-aDoodle Dandy will cause managements and playgoers to give new thought to Sean O'Casey, to bring his neglected plays to the London stage at long last, and to allow his genius to be seen in its proper light. The time is certainly ripe.'75 It was in this spirit, as his biographer Irving Wardle emphasises, that Devine had doggedly sought to stage the Cock. Wardle was probably not alone in considering the play 'a bog-Irish Bacchae but he understood that Devine was the sort of man who 'wanted to challenge the conventional belittlement of O'Casey as a two-play author whose talent had withered in his self-imposed exile'.76

If Devine saw O'Casey as some kind of scar on the English national conscience Bernard Miles, founder of the Mermaid Theatre in 1959, saw him more in the light of buried treasure. Miles was one of the most colourful and capable figures to challenge the dominance of West End theatre in post-war England.77

416 Sean O'Casey

A great book yet remains to be written about Lord Miles of Blackfriars. In one sense he was a typical English actor-manager and impresario, keen for a show at all costs. In another sense he was a visionary, a believer in a theatre of outrageousness, be it Elizabethan, eighteenth-century or contemporary. He recognised no limits, no restrictions to his dream of bringing a new, robust, rip-roaring theatre to London's Puddle Dock, the first, he boasted, since the Blackfriars of Shakepeare's day.78 He raised some £62,000 in public money to renovate this old, bombed warehouse by the river designed on quasi-Elizabethan lines by the well-known scholar C. Walter Hodges.79 Miles always seemed to know the right people and to be able to get them to join his crusade. Seating 500, the Mermaid offered a strange repertory of high and low art, from the adaptation of Treasure Island in which Miles himself played Long John Silver to the life, to Shakespeare's Henry V (no holds barred) and Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman (another star role for Miles). The repertory played twice-nightly (6 and 8.30 p.m.) as in music-hall (to which Miles was addicted), and the whole ethos was explosively populist. As Miles put it in interview: I am, taste-wise, a very mixed-up kid. I love farce, revue, Crazy Gang, Shakespeare, Shaw, the modern social-conscious drama, the Greeks, the Russians, and Ibsen at his blackest, and intend to have a go at all sorts [...] I see the theatre as a palace of delight, as a relief from the every-day battle, not as a social and political instrument.80 Such a man, with such a theatre, inevitably contacted O'Casey in search of a play to stage. This, however, was not until 1961. In the meantime O'Casey was beginning to receive with more regularity those tributes which, as Macbeth has it, should accompany old age, as 'honour, love, obedience, troops of friends'. Well, perhaps not 'obedience' so much; this was never in O'Casey's line one way or the other. The 'honour' he found difficult to cope with; praise always embarrassed him. So, early in 1960 he was named among the three finalists for the Nobel Prize (which went to the poet St John Persse) and on 17 March refused the first offer to him of an honorary doctorate (from the University of Durham). The terms of his refusal formed what was to become a refrain: 'Neither Nature nor God ever meant such an honour for me [...] but a poor wandering minstrel, like [Sir Walter] Scott's, gay, not desolate, playing a few tunes on a harp which has never been polished.'81 In succession he turned down honorary doctorates from Exeter and Trinity College, Dublin. This latter offer was one which made him reflect on his Dublin youth: Tt would be an odd thing for me who as a youngster used to admire the clock on the fagade [of TCD], with its blue face and golden hands, but wouldnt venture within the railings, and should now go in, and come out wearing the hood of a fine and honoring Degree.' It could not be. T have always fought against any privilege of class or wealth [...]. Sean O'Casey, Litt.D.! No, Sir, this would never do.'82 Turned aside, too, were a Fellowship at Brandeis University, memberships of the German Academy of Art (Berlin) and of the American Academy and

Something of a Renaissance 417 Institute of Arts and Letters, and an OBE which Harold Macmillan arranged for him in 1962. This last refusal was a bit awkward, for Macmillan would hardly have issued the invitation had he not reason to think O'Casey would accept. Perhaps Eileen, a close friend, was a factor. But the terms of the letter from the prime minister's office were such that the old republican and 'born communist' could hardly allow Macmillan 'to submit [his] name to The Queen with a recommendation that Her Majesty may be graciously pleased to approve that [he] be appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire'.83 Asked for his response at his earliest convenience O'Casey wrote back next day: 'I imagine that such an honour would not be suitable for my nature or feeling, or any honour of this kind, so I regret that I have to refuse the offered decoration.'84 In return, with a polite bow, while the prime minister was 'sorry not to be able to include' O'Casey's name in his list of recommendations to the queen, he would, of course, respect O'Casey's wishes.85 By the same token, O'Casey wanted no public recognition of his eightieth birthday on 30 March 1960. He assured Connolly Cole, a young features editor with the Irish Times, that his refusal had 'nothing whatever to do with anti-Abbey, anti-Dublin, or anti-IRISH TIMES feeling. It is simply because I never liked any effort of personal publicity on my part.'86 Cole, however, foolishly went ahead. He broke in upon Beckett's rehearsals in Paris of La Derniere bande to request an article on O'Casey: on 15 March Beckett wrote to say that although he could not do this he would very much like to be associated with Cole's tribute and would send 'a few lines of homage'. These followed on 18 March: 'To my great compatriot Sean O'Casey, from France where he is honoured, I send my enduring gratitude and homage.'87 Cole, clearly a forceful man, thought this a bit skimpy and asked Beckett to expand. Beckett politely declined, while conceding the inadequacy of his contribution: 'I am sorry.'88 The result was a half-page feature on Wednesday 30 March, with Beckett's tribute enlarged into a centre panel by the inclusion of a pointless facsimile of his apology for inability to enlarge his text. The main piece was inappropriately by Mac Liammoir, no friend of O'Casey. Entitled 'Always the Giant' it described O'Casey as 'not only a darling man but a dangerous one'. To take away the bare look a book review was pinched from the Saturday page of David Krause's book on O'Casey. The whole tribute looked inadequate. But a few friends, led by writer James Plunkett and Cyril Cusack, determined to mark the occasion, tried at first to dedicate a child's bed in a Dublin hospital to O'Casey and when he rejected the idea sent him willy-nilly a silver tankard inscribed with the names of eighteen subscribers. It was meant as another 'silver tassie' for him to reject at his peril.89 This put O'Casey in a quandary (for he liked always to have the one refusal for all). But Eileen admired the tankard so much that O'Casey decided to keep the first piece of silver he ever had.90 In general, his attitude towards his eightieth is summed up in his dismissal of the Daily Workers kind intentions: 'Look, I never had a birthday in my life, &, if I had one now, I shouldnt know what to do with it.'91 Nevertheless he was pestered by messages of good will, sweetened by eighty red roses from Mary

418 SednO'Casey O'Malley and the Lyric Theatre, Belfast.92 Lovat Dickson, senior editor with Macmillans, tried in vain to get O'Casey to London as guest at a celebratory luncheon. In his reply, declining, O'Casey trotted out once again the story that he never knew his real age until a few years earlier when, having to supply a birth certificate for the French Society of Authors, he discovered the year was 1880 and not 1884.93 As always, he elided the memory of the census form he had filled out in 1911 in which he clearly had given his year of birth as 1880.94 In any event, Dickson included in his invitation the news that The Drums of Father Ned would be published, in paperback only, in June. This was to lead almost immediately to its first professional production, not, alas, at the Mermaid Theatre but at a little-known repertory theatre in Hornchurch, Essex. It is safe to say that this production would not have taken place were it not for the publicity aroused by the Cock at Edinburgh and the Royal Court. In England, O'Casey's stock was up at the moment. In America, on the other hand, the tide was turning the other way, and after the ill-fated Cock the other later plays were deemed unsuitable for repertory theatre. There was a second amateur/college production of Father Ned in 1961.95 Now David Phethean, director of a small civic theatre in Essex, sat in O'Casey's living-room in Torquay looking for permission to stage Father Ned. Just a few months previously Ernest Blythe had sat on that same couch hoping to find O'Casey more kindly disposed towards the Abbey. On that occasion Eileen had suggested that the Abbey might do the Cock, but Blythe, knowing it would cause trouble in Dublin, hedged by saying the production problems were enormous.96 Blythe only wanted the ban lifted on the early plays but was afraid to ask outright. As a bargaining counter, bearing in mind how Yeats had appeased O'Casey in 1935, he offered to do Within the Gates at the Queen's.97 O'Casey was not impressed and Blythe's trip was in vain. Phethean was a different matter. He brought with him no historical baggage, no intimations of Dublin doubledealing and trade-offs. In his interview with Phethean O'Casey himself put on the line his whole theatrical credo: all his listener had to do was to indicate his willingness to put that credo into practice. This included avoidance of pure realism and acceptance of the theatre as a place of magic. 'It should be full of colour and excitement and gaiety. That's what it's there for! To bring colour into people's lives!'98 Cleverly, diplomatically, Phethean got O'Casey's blessing. The Hornchurch production, which opened on 8 November 1960, got good reviews. Silently, Phethean changed parts of the text for the benefit of English audiences - for there is a certain amount of Irish history in the Prerumble and emphasised the farcical elements. He himself admitted, however, that Hornchurch was puzzled by the play. And this remains the difficulty not only with Father Ned but with several of the later plays, including the Cock: to identify and find correspondences in general experience for the very specific, topical, and localised Irish situations and issues O'Casey, however amusingly, dramatised. Fed with the news that the Archbishop of Dublin found Father Ned anathema in his diocese English audiences could not but be confused by the

Something of a Renaissance 419

harmless script concerning an obscure village festival. The New Statesman reviewer puzzled over the problem of discovering 'a proper later-O'Casey style of production' which would allow the plays to be seen in their full theatrical power. By inference, Phethean's Father Ned, while competent, had not solved this problem. O'Casey, said the reviewer with some justice, 'must be played at a whirl, and all the neglected trick-work of the stage, trap-door and vamp-trap, thunder and lightning, must be brought back to give [him] elbow room. Then we will have a night to crow about; then we will see O'Casey clear.'99 This is where Bernard Miles and his Mermaid theatre come in at last. In the year since its much-publicised opening at Puddle Dock the Mermaid had shown its music-hall-cum-strong-drama capabilities. The opening production, enticingly called Lock Up Your Daughters, was a musical adapted from an eighteenth-century collection, Rape Upon Rape, by Henry Fielding. For the era when John Osborne's politically incorrect adaptation of Tom Jones for film was to prove a hit, Miles's bawdy musical (with lyrics by Lionel Bart, on his way to Oliver!) paved the way. In February 1961 he broached O'Casey and asked, 'with profound greetings, and a thousand forelock-touchings', for The Bishop's Bonfire.m It was Eileen who replied, initiating a correspondence which got on a better footing once Miles established who exactly she was. Like Devine, Miles charmed and was charmed by Eileen, while Sean stayed in the background. The original idea was to involve Cyril Cusack to provide the English premiere of The Bishop s Bonfire. But because Miles suddenly decided to do the play in July, having told Cyril it would be 1962, he of course lost a disgruntled Cyril. By this time Miles had beaten down O'Casey to agree to five per cent of the house - what he had just paid the Brecht estate, he said, for Galileo. Why, with full houses O'Casey could still net a hundred pounds a week. Miles had a gifted young man from the Bristol Old Vic, Frank Dunlop, to step into Cyril's shoes.101 No worries. Except that Eileen - having explained who she was thought Miles should do Father Ned instead, in view of the 'very good production' it had earned in Hornchurch.102 Sidestepping, Miles asked her help in putting on an O'Casey exhibition to accompany the Bonfire and in making available signed copies of the plays for special customers. Not a trick was missed in creating maximum publicity. O'Casey was putty in the hands of this showman. He even agreed to cuts in the text to suit the 'twice nightly' arrangement. For the casting Miles and Dunlop went to Dublin and enlisting the unlikely aid of Seamus Kelly of the Irish Times made a good trawl. But they failed to find a Codger Sleehaun, the role Cyril had created and MacGowran was supposed to play. Then Miles had one of his brainwaves. He engaged a tiny music-hall artist called Davy Kaye. 'I have', he assured O'Casey, ' worked with him on a number of occasions in music hall, and have the greatest admiration for him. [...]! thought you'd just like to know this.'103 By the merest coincidence the electrician at the Mermaid was called Davy Kaye. Could Eileen come along to a rehearsal and check on the rhythm and timing? What about a programme note? Who should give the pre-performance talk on O'Casey? Anyone for choc-ices?

420 Sean O'Casey

In all of these preparations something quite significant was taking place. Miles was well aware of his role as cultural producer: he had a text to mediate through popular performance, copies of the text on sale in the lobby, a free programme to tell patrons of the author's background and work, a speaker to mediate further between author, text and performance, and a restaurant to reinforce the notion that consumers were being pleasured on an economic basis at the Mermaid. The whole package was a complex effort to create theatre as community enjoyment and learning, an attractive alternative to West-End commercialisation. As for the Bonfire- which, appropriately if ironically, is a text culminating in the burning of books by a repressed community - it was all right on the night. 'Clearly the first night audience came out feeling that they had been well entertained by a not very good play,' conceded one reviewer.104 Frank Dunlop did the needful in the best Mr Crummies style the play requires; he had gone down to Torquay to go through the play with Sean. 'Don't play the poetry,' Sean told Dunlop; 'I wrote it and it doesn't need playing up.'105 The final scene, where Manus shoots his loved one Foorawn, was played quietly and sincerely and audiences accepted it. The reviews did not really matter. The show was a popular success. O'Casey did not see it, and yet, through Eileen's positive response was prepared to say it had 'a roaring welcome for 4 weeks'.106 Rubbing his hands, the redoubtable Bernard Miles called out, 'let's do a whole O'Casey season next year.' There were difficulties with this 1962 season. As before, Miles had a package in mind: three productions would be coordinated by director Peter Duguid into an O'Casey 'festival'; Irish actors would be used, though Leonard Rossiter was the real surprise; a free programme with lots of information would (as usual) be supplied; and copies of the Colkcted Plays would be on sale. In addition, Macmillan brought out a new edition of the Bonfire, a little belatedly in Milesian terms, in November 1961 plus a paperback format for the new age. But it was hard to decide on the three plays to be staged - the Tassie proved too challenging, Father Ned was postponed until 1963 (but never staged) - and the choice of Purple Dust to start off on 15 August, however brave, was a mistake.107 In the community atmosphere Miles was trying to cultivate, where Irish expatriates were conspicuous by their absence,108 this play would be offensively anti-British unless played as outright farce, which was the choice taken. Reviews were damning.109 As usual, and as fruitlessly, O'Casey's response was to supply more text: an essay inserted at proof stage into his book of essays, Under a Colored Cap. Entitled 'Purple Dust in their Eyes', the essay tried to refute Harold Hobson (Sunday Times) and Kenneth Tynan (Observer) in their condemnation of his political theme. He tried to make a distinction, no doubt meant to extend to all of his plays, between politics and art: 'A dramatist is one thing, a revolutionist is quite another; one looking at life in the form of individuals, the other [as] part of the collective urge and forward thrust of man.'110 But this essay merely shows the impossibility of O'Casey's attempt always to interpose between critic and performance. Such interposition lay outside the

Something of a Renaissance 421

remit of the Mermaid where the project was live theatre to be consumed on the premises. Of the other shows in the festival, Red Roses for Me (4 September) with Donal Donnelly in the lead was by far the most admired, and the Plough (25 September) was, by contrast, lost on the big stage.111 George Devine and Bernard Miles made strenuous efforts to reintegrate O'Casey's work, especially the later plays, into the English repertory. It was a bright moment of hope for the physically ailing writer. The venture failed in the sense that it made no difference. There were too many problems in the way of audience acceptance beyond the moment. What remained was a persistent sense of guilt on behalf of liberal critics and conscientious managements. As W.J. Weatherby put it in a programme note for Miles's 1962 festival: The truth is - and now is the time to face our guilt - that we have shamefully neglected Mr O'Casey. What is the good of labelling a dramatist "Great" if you don't produce his plays? All we usually do - when we do anything - are revivals of his early works.'112 But where now was the renaissance to come from?

21 TALKING TO GOD

rom 1960 on there were various attempts to rehabilitate O'Casey as man of letters and to reconstruct him along fresh lines. With some of these efforts he cooperated, from others stood aloof. In some ways he was as determined as ever to extend the republic of his thought in text and production; in others, indifferent. The business of 'constructing Sean O'Casey' was undertaken at one level by a number of young academics. Settling the biography seemed important, since it was only when the details of the life were authoritatively laid down that a definitive assessment of the works was deemed possible. Yet with O'Casey very much alive, and continuing to write, this interactive procedure was bound to prove problematic. When David Krause published his study, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, in March 1960 it was immediately recognised as definitive. It has remained a pioneering study. But it embalmed O'Casey in his eightieth year as embattled hero of a largely uncomprehending world. When Krause reprinted the book in 1975 he merely changed the tense of the final page from present to past and added a fresh chapter, 'A Final Knock at O'Casey's Door'. The new chapter is, like the book as a whole, divided between man and work, both kept rigorously apart. If the man is represented as warm, human, courageous and deeply spiritual then the works, especially the plays (for Krause does not have a great deal to say about the autobiographies), may be approached as the unconventional, highly individual products of genius. Krause called O'Casey 'Prometheus' in his first chapter, 'for he had created the fire of his plays from similar motives.'1 Is it a coincidence that for O'Casey himself it was Jim Larkin who was Prometheus? Whether or no, we are into myth making. To O'Casey himself the book was biblically 'a spear and buckler against mine enemies'.2 Robert Hogan's The Experiments of Sean O'Casey was also published in 1960. Hogan ignored the life to concentrate on the plays (the autobiographies, once again, getting short shrift). As mentioned in an earlier chapter, Hogan applied 'new' criticism to the plays in rigorous fashion and the result, for the most part, was unhappy. What is significant, however, is that Hogan's approach elevated the plays to a level worthy of academic scrutiny. Even where found

F

Talking to God 423 wanting (Hogan was severe on act 2 of the Tassie, act 3 of Red Roses, and altogether hostile to A Star Turns Red) the plays could decently be admitted to formalist literary analysis. A third book, however, was less agreeable to O'Casey. This was the first nonAmerican study, by a Leeds University student, Saros Cowasjee, under the title Sean 0 'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays (1963). The underlying idea was basic, but one fostered by O'Casey himself from the first time he commented on his plays, namely that his characters were based on real Dublin people of his acquaintance. Cowasjee went to Dublin in 1958 where his research unearthed many such 'originals' willing to speak freely of O'Casey. Cowasjee paid a research visit to O'Casey himself in April 1959, which he instantly wrote up as an article,3 and corresponded to good effect with him, Cusack, Blythe and many others in Dublin. Direct contact thus became text. When the book was published O'Casey was enraged at what to him were errors, inaccuracies and falsifications. In fact, Cowasjee's book was in part what is now called 'oral history', the versions by those who lived through them of exciting times and situations. The basis of this approach is that the historian trusts the speakers and gives them their voices without annotation. Cowasjee trusted the witnesses he found in Dublin and recorded their testimony. At times this was unflattering to O'Casey. Far more distressing to O'Casey, Cowasjee quoted what to O'Casey was malicious gossip. Predictably, too, Cowasjee, according to O'Casey, confused one Jack Boyle with another when interviewing the supposed prototype of the Captain in Juno. The image that inevitably emerged from the study was of a writer who was no Prometheus and no worthy subject for formalist analysis (for how could a text so reliant on biographical glossing support objective analysis?). The book had seemed to have O'Casey's imprimatur: Eileen even wrote as preface a description of his daily routine in 1961. To O'Casey's complaints of inaccuracies Cowasjee responded that he wrote down what he was told, including what O'Casey had told him. It is a perfect example of the author literally brought to book. O'Casey's poor eyesight prevented him from reading it through for himself, so he was ill-equipped to criticise. Another young O'Casey scholar, however, came to his rescue. When Ronald Ayling wrote a lengthy review of Cowasjee's book and sent it for approval O'Casey encouraged the attack.4 Here was the man who could put him to rights. The hard-hitting review, first published in the Kilkenny Magazine and somewhat edited afterwards in the American Drama Survey,6 attempted to rescue O'Casey by deconstructing Cowasjee, who fought back gamely. The dispute is important solely because it records a struggle for the representation of O'Casey in the modern critical arena. Cowasjee's book stands up, especially after the opening chapters which annoyed O'Casey, as useful secondary material, while the criticism of the plays is unexceptionable. Its weakness lies in the naive assumption that to identify the sources of artistic composition provides a definitive interpretation. Ayling's attempt to discredit Cowasjee was essentially protective of the O'Casey myth. Hogan's compilation of early O'Caseyana was another matter. Published in

424 SednO'Casey the USA in 1962 and in England in 1963, Feathers from the Green Crow was a piece of literary archaeology which extended the biography in significant ways. Specifically, the recovered early writings, articles, essays, poems, and one-act plays, reveal a young O'Casey for whom politics and polemics meant more than art, as yet only dimly understood. Most reviews of Feathers were but respectful notices, honouring the octogenarian. Valentin Iremonger was one of the few who engaged with the book as O'Casey's juvenilia, rightly finding these 'all useful material for the future definitive biography but, presented like this, a tedious raking of old fires'.6 The veteran Desmond Ryan, who knew O'Casey in his early days and who had been pupil and disciple of Patrick Pearse, used his review in the 7mA Times (3 August) to offer a fine appreciation of O'Casey the man and the artist. He clearly had no difficulty in making the necessary transition in imagination between O'Casey the early republican and O'Casey the Abbey playwright. Austin Clarke, reviewing in the TLS (6 September), pulled all this together by seeing evidence in Feathers for the view that O'Casey, 'much more than Joyce', had become in exile the 'conscience' of Ireland 'and the incessant critic of its indifference to social justice'. What is noteworthy about the three academics who clustered protectively around O'Casey at this time, Krause, Hogan and Ayling, is that each regarded him as something of a father figure. They regularly leaped to his defence in the press when his work or reputation was thrown into question. One or other of them could be relied upon to cross swords with Gabriel Fallon if he dared once again to minimise O'Casey's abilities.7 The fact is, to borrow Arthur Miller's phrase, 'they were all his sons,' all adopted to replace the one O'Casey had lost to death.

In addition, O'Casey sustained his public image by all he did and said. In a sense he played up to the broth-of-a-boy Irishness which made him resemble an aged member of the Clancy Brothers. On a more serious level, when Under a Colored Co/? was published in January 1963 it included scraps of autobiography as well as long, meditative essays: everything now turned into text, into reinforcement of a basic belief that books are life in heightened form. Books are burned in two plays, the Cock and the Bonfire, each time maliciously, fascistically. But of course the futility of the attempt is in each case comically emphasised. It is the opposite of that moment in the final scene of Ben Jonson's Everyman in His Humour when Justice Clement makes a bonfire on stage of a bad poet's verses, for good writers 'are not born every year, as an alderman. There goes more to the making of a good poet, than a sheriff And as the bonfire blazes on stage Old Knowell comments: 'There's an emblem for you, son, and your studies!'8 The 'emblem' O'Casey put on stage, on the contrary, was of authority's blindness to the durability of culture. For himself, he was his own emblem, self-advertised, self-displayed, not in need of public honours. In the age of F.R. Leavis and Richard Hoggart O'Casey could pronounce, in one of his essays here, 'There is no one can tell what culture is, no

Talking to God 425

one, except me.'9 Culture was always 'the life we live [...] far more than books on our shelves and pictures in our galleries. It is all that is within us, all without, colouring all our activities.'10 It is both material product and a design for living. In a review, John Wain said O'Casey had 'the Irish gift of seeing human life in the perspective of myth'.11 By now, O'Casey had also created the myth of himself. The persona of 'the Green Crow' was but a minor manifestation of this Swiftian polymorphousness, a public voice self-consciously pronouncing on human folly. Its characteristic tone is ironic-satiric; its mode deeply humanist. The essay in Under a Colored Cap on 'Culture, Inc.' ends with a shudder before the threat of the nuclear bomb not just 'to the bit of civilisation we have' but to 'a whole beautiful world of living peoples'.12 To his old adversary Fallon, still doggedly in pursuit of O'Casey's salvation, he was now a complex man 'whose likeness lies obscured beneath the waves of self-pity and the pebbles of multitudinous words in his four volume autobiography'.13 Although he had clearly lost count of the volumes Fallon could see, in disapproval, how identity was being 'obscured' there. The autobiographies present a series of masks whereby a mythic figure, shaping simultaneously the origins of self and nation, reinvents himself as the psychological landscape requires. The 'real' O'Casey was a composite of fact and fiction. He was Proteus Irish style. The idea of a film based on the autobiographies was something he was therefore wary of. It was the brainchild of Bob Ginna, the American editor who had first visited O'Casey in Totnes in 1953 to write him up for Life magazine. They had remained friends and correspondents; Ginna did the television interview in 1955 for the NBC Wisdom series. His dream of writing O'Casey's biography faded but after Krause's book came out in 1960 Ginna put forward the plan to create what would now be called a bio-pic. With his associate and co-admirer of O'Casey, Bob Graff, he founded a film company, Sextant Inc.14 The two producers got the rights to the autobiographies and towards the end of 1961 commissioned the British playwright John Whiting to do the filmscript. Not much happened for some time while Sextant pursued other projects, including a successful series on Churchill, The Valiant Years, for ABC and BBC television. There was also a rather nasty moment when Paul Shyre, creator of stage readings of three of the volumes of autobiographies, claimed copyright and entered a claim against the film production.15 O'Casey found the ensuing quarrel very disturbing, as he formed the suspicion that Shyre, with the help of O'Casey's New York agent Jane Rubin, had somehow contrived to cheat him of his full royalties for the stage readings. His anger was sufficient to cause a vicious attack, signed 'disrespectfully yours', on Shyre, who was very hurt, and their friendship was shattered. O'Casey maintained Rubin as agent but only after challenging her, with mounting suspicion, to provide him with copies of contracts legalising Shyre's arrangements. It is clear that O'Casey had not sufficiently understood the terms on which New York producers are paid, but he refused to believe he had not been the victim of sharp practice. Once the rights question was settled, Ginna and Graff made progress with the plans for Young Cassidy, as the film was to be called. Knowing he would get

426 Sean O'Casey

it produced if John Ford directed, Ginna sent him the script. Ford thought it the best scenario offered him in his forty-five years of movie making.16 He told O'Casey he would move heaven and earth to do the film.17 He wanted to make amends for the botched job on the ending of the The Plough and the Stars in 1937.18 MGM accepted the film in September 1963 on Ford's recommendation, as a low-budget feature to follow Cheyenne Autumn. Ford accepted a fee of $50,000 from Graff and Ginna, a fraction of what he usually commanded. In contrast, O'Casey's contract was for half that sum, the largest amount he earned in his whole career.19 Embarrassed by the thought of such riches, he calculated the sum owing to him in September 1963 as much less, £4,000, and protested that his 'one ambition' was that Eileen might be able to buy a small house after he was gone. Riches were a 'sad and dangerous delusion', and all he himself ever wanted was to be able to live a full life: 'Getting ready for heaven in the only right way, as one might say'.20 At this stage the 'script' of Young Cassidy meant Whiting's finished text, followed by Graff's revisions, plus O'Casey's rewrites. Whiting unfortunately died from cancer in June 1963, aged only forty-six. Of his screenplay O'Casey remarked: 'He took some liberties in rearranging some of the incidents to compress many events into a short period. He had talent as a playwright and his script is faithful in spirit.'21 Since O'Casey himself did not live to see the actual film it is impossible to say how far he would have approved it. In what follows, I trace the evolution of text into film.22

From the time Whiting set out for Dublin in October 1961 to do his own personal research for the film script, it took him a year to get a text to O'Casey. Initially, O'Casey was not pleased.23 In alarm, Graff and Ginna - who had been distracted by another television series - called a summit meeting in Torquay for 10-12 November. With Whiting present, quite a lot of suggestions were openly made which Graff, the coordinator, ensured were turned by O'Casey into fresh writing. The rewrites are now in the National Library of Ireland and, with one new scene (en route to Coole), they cover four scenes plus the ending. They are short pieces of dialogue, no scene being more than three typed pages (Eileen clearly helping out). Among the scenes revised are the Daisy Battles scenes, which are excellent. The ending, too, needed tweaking. As Johnny goes aboard the passenger ship for England he tips a young boy who takes his bag: BOY: Half a crown! You must be rich. JOHNNY: Yes... yes, I am.24 The final line as O'Casey actually wrote it was: 'A little richer than you are just now, Sean. Goodbye, lad.'25 Graff rightly cut it to the ironic assent which closes the film, 'Yes ... yes, I am' [rich]. A similar tautness marks the dialogue throughout.

Talking to God 427 Casting the lead proved difficult. After he agreed to direct, the producers Graff and Ginna went out to Hollywood to meet Ford. Normally, Ford himself looked after the casting once he accepted a film but in this instance the only name he insisted on was Flora Robson (as Mrs Cassidy), and he was to use her again for Seven Women. Ginna and Graff had with them a number of photographs, alongside one of O'Casey as a young man with a moustache. They were looking for a likeness. 'And here's a photograph of Sean Connery' [then making Dr No], prompted Ginna. 'You think he can act?' queried Ford, and having decided he looked all right for the part, signed him up.26 In the event, Dr No opened to rave reviews. As his contract had a clause about sequel rights for GoMfinger and the contract for Young Cassidy had fixed dates Connery backed out of the Ford film. It seems the producers would lose Maggie Smith, cast to play Nora Creena (the character based on Maire Keating), if they waited for Connery. As he had been brought up in poverty in Glasgow and had left school at age thirteen, he would have made a likely Johnny but the world might have lost its best James Bond. Attempts to get Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton or Richard Harris failed. The final choice was the Australian Rod Taylor, who had starred in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). Eileen had wanted Tom Courtenay, who had made a name for himself on stage in Billy Liar (1960). His co-star Julie Christie was cast as Daisy Battles, a great stroke of luck for her as she captivated Ford, who recommended her to David Lean for Lara in Dr Zhivago (1965). The rest of the cast was made up from Irish and English stalwards and there was a cameo appearance for Shivaun O'Casey as Lady Gregory's maid.27 According to Ford's grandson, Cheyenne Autumn gave Ford so much trouble that, depressed afterwards, he thought to make Young Cassidy his last picture.28 He arrived in Dublin for a 'survey trip' in March 1964 and reeled drunkenly off the plane to be met in dismay by Ginna, Graff and Lord Killanin, associate producer. He had only one week to look at locations before returning to California. It was an ominous start; not altogether because of alcohol problems, Ford could not see eye to eye with the producers.29 On Ford's return, accompanied by Rod Taylor, things were no better, as Ford, aged 70, competed in drinking binges with Taylor, aged 32. After only thirteen working days Ford collapsed with viral pneumonia and within a few more days was back in Los Angeles. O'Casey would not have been impressed. Ford wanted Rod Taylor to take over the film, which was absurd. The English cinematographer Jack Cardiff, respected for his direction of Sons and Lovers (1960), was brought in to direct. He was preparing to film Ulysses in Dublin when Graff called him. He flew to London from Lausanne (where he lived), read the script of Young Cassidy in an hour, had a discussion with the producers over lunch, flew on to Dublin and was shooting within thirty-six hours.30 Cardiff never did, of course, make Ulysses. Of the scenes Ford shot some 20-25 minutes remain in the film.31 These included the Daisy Battles scenes and the stereotypical fight in the Cat-andCage public house (shot in Johnnie Fox's in Glencullen). He was so impressed

428 SednO'Casey by Julie Christie as Daisy (in those scenes rewritten by O'Casey) that he wanted her in again (she disappears from O'Casey's autobiographies after the riot scenes of 1913), especially at the end (set after the Plough riots in 1926) ,32 But whatever about Christie's 'smouldering sensuality', as Ford called her power ('the camera eats her' 33 ), Ginna was obviously right to hold firm to O'Casey's story-line, where Nora Creena is the main love interest. Cardiff concentrated more on a strong, realistic style, as in the superb 1913 street-battle scenes, in contrast to Ford's florid romanticism. Ford was happy for the result to be labelled 'ajohn Ford film'. Cardiff was not.34 Although Eileen O'Casey did not like it, Young Cassidy is by no means a bad film. Indeed, Scott Eyman thinks it among the best of Ford's later work, better than Cheyenne Autumn or Seven Women?b It is interesting for a number of reasons. Whiting streamlined the storyline, placing the kind of emphasis on Johnny's socialism which gives greater coherence to his anger, his desire to change the world, and his idea of dramatic art.36 Johnny seems a 1950s contemporary, an angry young man as conceived by a Royal Court playwright. Much simplification thereby occurs: there is no Gaelic League, no Jim Larkin, no sectarian complexity between Johnny and Nora, and the 1916 Rising is made appear a straight political development from the brutality visited on the people during the start of the 1913 lock-out. Johnny is made a supporter of the Rising. Thus the film makes sense in the way O'Casey's own life, real life, in Dublin up to 1926, did not. As film this simplification is effective; as metabiography it is as misleading as a biblical Hollywood epic usually is about the Bible. But the locations, Dublin scenography - all television masts removed at enormous expense37 - have realistic sharpness and interest, for with the exception of the scenes in Mrs Cassidy's kitchen (done in the MGM studios in Gorham Wood, London, because of a clause in the contract) all of the scenes were filmed in Dublin between July and September 1964.38 In addition, the music, composed and arranged by Sean 6 Riada, lends an authentic Irish quality to the film, even while the Ford bits are at times like bits of The Quiet Man given an encore. Macmillans opportunely brought out a paperback edition of the autobiographies while Young Cassidy was being conceived. The edition was huge: two volumes, each of 20,000 copies. The counterpart was the two-volume, hard-back edition, Mirror in My House, published in New York in 1956 in 3,900 copies,39 the text used as base for Young Cassidy. The new edition, published 8 August 1963, would make a bridge between memoir and movie. In his review in the Irish Times, which O'Casey thought 'caustic,'40 the poet Padraic Fallon asked serious questions about O'Casey which remain unanswered to this day: 'Does the public and private face correspond? And do all those dithyrambic pronouncements [in the later books] reveal him, or does he cloak, even from himself, the person he isT41 Tentative answers would now read 'no' to the first question and 'yes' to the last question in certain key areas. One of these areas relates to Maire Keating, the teacher whom O'Casey loved but who refused to marry him. MGM's legal advisers were worried about the portrait of Nora Creena, originally based on Maire, in the script for Young Cassidy. The assurance the

Talking to God 429

lawyers wanted was that Nora was not a 'replica of any living person, and that no-one can claim to be she'.42 This was not the only worry they had, but O'Casey dealt with them all as he had dealt formerly with Macmillans' legal advisers, by dismissal of any basis for libel. As to Nora in the screenplay, he made the point that Whiting had altered the autobiographical portrait anyway by making her not a schoolteacher but a shop assistant in Maunsel's and by transferring an erotic moment from an earlier chapter and character to the bookshop [Johnny looking up Maggie Smith's skirt in the film]. Surprisingly, his broad comment on Maire Keating at this time was: 'I understand from Dr [David] Krause that she is now an old, dignified and courteous lady, who would not be likely to make or attempt any trouble.'43 In fact, Krause never got past Maire's doorstep when he tried to interview her at her home, 15 Arran Road, Drumcondra.44 Cowasjee was the first to trace her, in June 1958, but she refused to see him also, and thereafter maintained her privacy regarding her 'friendship' with O'Casey.45 Maire had passed over the love letters and poems written to her by O'Casey to the National Library in April 1957, with direction that they be kept sealed until 1980, the centenary of O'Casey's birth.46 On 11 June 1958 Maire remarried.47 Her second husband, John Dargan, was a widower who lived across the road from her. His only son, a priest, had been killed in a motorcycle accident in December 1955, and his wife survived her son a bare nine months. Maire and John ('Jack') settled into her house rather than his. They were both religious in outlook and travelled abroad together a good deal on pilgrimages and elsewhere. He lived until 1975, Maire until 2 February 1982. As if to underline that Whiting's Nora was a different person from the reallife Maire, O'Casey now added some comments on the scene where Nora comes to Johnny outside the Abbey, after the Plough riots. Maire never came near him through 'the stress and strain', he insisted. Apart from Yeats he stood alone. Maire did not even write a line: She stayed hidden. I never saw her from 1922, and left Ireland without a glimpse of her. She had no courage; unlike my Eileen who stood by me in the matter of "The Silver Tassie", and all through; representing me in your Country [USA], and facing the Irish when the "Bishop's Bonfire" went on there; a brave and undaunted lass.48 Nobody asked O'Casey to fashion this contrast in his defence. Its existence suggests a need on his part, as before, to denigrate Maire. For this fiery declaration does not square with those dedications O'Casey wrote on the copies of his plays presented to Maire in 1926. On a copy of Two Plays he inscribed, it will be recalled: 'From Sean O Casey/With Love,/To the Lovely and Lovable /Maura Keating/in whom the Author found/his first Inspiration/Jan. 1926.' This was one month before the Plough riots. Perhaps she did avoid the Plough, perhaps her sympathies lay with the women protesters; if so, O'Casey still sent her a copy of the text with an inscription betraying no hostility: 'Dear Maura,/

430 Sean O'Casey

There is none/like unto thee in gentle loveliness,/in kindness and in truth./ Sean.' Some months later, settled for the present in London, he prevailed upon Shaw to sign a copy of Saint Joan, 'to Sean O'Casey's friend', 6 December 1926, under which O'Casey wrote: 'to Maire Keating/in Remembrance of/her lovely Charm/and charming loveliness.'49 She told her cousin that the friendship with O'Casey lasted until 1927. 'Then suddenly the letters stopped. O'Casey had married Eileen in London.'50 The inference is that O'Casey married Eileen on the rebound. It is clear that Maire was a kind of Muse figure which, as indicated in an earlier chapter, he violently demolished in Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949). Now as her youthful self had returned to haunt him he repeated the earlier gesture of repudiation through denigration. But this time, as never before, he set her over against Eileen and justified his choice accordingly. Thus the film, at two removes from reality, at once exempted O'Casey from the possibility of libel and, removing the religious issue, created a hero for whom exile meant artistic fulfilment. Or, as the MGM press release put it - so much better - The rebel, Johnny Cassidy, born in poverty and raised in violence, takes ship alone, sailing forward into the turbulence of a great career.51 Cue for O Riada's music and fade into Hollywood myth.

'He has moved into the world of words.' Little did Padraic Fallon know how literally accurate his comment was on O'Casey's later work.52 For, with eyesight deteriorating month by month O'Casey could barely read or write and relied on Eileen or the all-purpose Geoffrey Bobbie to type things for him. He still had ideas demanding expression, on contemporary drama, on Arnold Wesker's plans for a workers' theatre, of which he was critical,53 and as 1964 approached, on Shakespeare. These would be written in due course. Then Eileen hit upon the notion of a tape-recorder. As Sean had to have a project, and could not, Behan-style, consider composing over a machine, the idea grew of his annotating and recording the songs used in the plays and autobiographies. Four tapes were made in this way and are now in the British Library Sound Archives.54 They are delightful, if raw, for Eileen is heard from time to time vainly attempting to arrest the machine with kindly concern for Sean's patience. She is also heard beautifully singing The Rose of Tralee' and a song O'Casey's mother used to sing, 'Where is Now the Merry Party?'55 The material is in need of editing, but O'Casey's commentary is full of the kind of information which would interestjoyceans and all Irish historians of popular culture. He never completed the project, but what is covered, including commentary on the airs of forgotten melodies, is as moving as it is archival. In spite of his failing eyesight, O'Casey's correspondence went on apace at this time. Krause had begun in 1960 to collect the letters for publication and O'Casey reluctantly consented when the Macmillan Co., New York, asked him formally in February 1961.56 It was to be an American project. O'Casey did what he could to help, allowing Krause to visit the flat every summer to sift

Talking to God 431 through the correspondence, ask questions, and annotate the letters, though he himself had no taste for the editorial work: 'it would lead me into an asylum.'57 Two years later he was shocked to learn that Krause had already collected a thousand letters, 'a herculean orgy of words'.58 The eventual total would be over twice that number. Writing and receiving letters formed 'a vital and compulsive ritual' in his life.59 Because he kept carbon copies and always dated his letters, the collection proved enormously informative, forming his clearest self-portrait even though O'Casey believed he displayed himself 'before no one, except God, and Him only because I can't escape'.60 Through this project, he heard again from Tyrone Guthrie in July 1963. He and Eileen had liked A Life in the Theatre (1960), but found it 'sad to think of you going off to Minneapolis to do what you should be doing here, showing some of our elegant young fellows how things are done. It sometimes seems to me that they [directors] often coffin even Shakespeare in fantastic rigulorum.'61 (He was not aware that playwright Brian Friel was at this time with Guthrie in Minneapolis to see just 'how things are done'.) As to Shakespeare, what O'Casey remarked on here was to lead to 'Ode to an "Impudent Upstart"', published in the New York Times Magazine on 19 April, just four days before the 1964 quater-centenary. Here O'Casey sides with Shakespeare as an underdog among 'university wits' and identifies compassion as central to his greatness: 'He loved all things; he missed nothing, for nothing was too lowly for him to touch with a beautiful phrase.'62 He had a modicum of it himself perhaps. In another unpublished letter to a youngster eager for copy for a student thesis the ailing O'Casey reveals the combination of human weakness and moral strength which made him, in his letters, seem the one everybody must write to for counsel: I'm ashamed of this poor letter of help - but Ah, here's an excuse! I am really very tired. God, I'm tired! Only a half-written letter to Helga, for I felt too bad with a dull tormenting ache in the belly, & weariness everywhere in bone, muscle, & brain. Gastric flue? [sic] Caught a chill from the warm May winds! This morning all complained of the freezing cold, but I felt I had to write a few words to Helga, entering on her life's Pilgrimage.63 Slightly different was his correspondence with a grandniece, Lorraine Beaver. Bella's granddaughter, aged eighteen, wrote to him out of the blue in August 1962 to berate him for banning his plays from the Abbey stage: 'You are Irish, but you don't seem to be very proud of it the way you are treating your comrades. Where has the once leader of the [SLOT] Pipe Band gone? The proud patriotic Irishman? In his place is an old stubborn man, truly Irish in his way of bearing a grudge, but thinking only of himself.' Her father (Shaun) always had the greatest respect for O'Casey, 'but I am beginning to think he was wrong.' Nevertheless, Lorraine concluded her lesson, 'It's your life and I can't change it but I'm still hoping (although not praying, I've no time for that) that you will change your mind.'64 O'Casey found himself at a loss for words at this

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impertinence. 'You teenagers take one's breath away at times,' he wrote back in surprise.65 It was as if Shaw's Saint Joan had come to life and breezily told him what he should do. He sent her books and money. Coincidentally he heard from Ernest Blythe that the foundations of the new Abbey would be laid soon by de Valera, that the theatre would open in two years and that as the Plough had been on at the old Abbey when it burned down it would be 'wonderful' if it could begin the life of the new: would O'Casey consider lifting his ban for a week?66 Although the timetable was delayed for the opening of the new Abbey until 1966, the jubilee of the 1916 Rising, O'Casey relented in 1964. No doubt the talented Lorraine Beaver left her mark (she was to die prematurely in 1975): O'Casey was at any rate softened. It was not because of Blythe he lifted the ban towards the end of 1963, for he held Blythe in contempt at this stage.67 Blythe had humiliated himself by his begging trip to Torquay in September 1959.68 O'Casey refused his overtures again in 196169but by autumn 1963 he saw things differently. The Abbey had been invited to participate in Peter Daubeny's World Theatre season in London in honour of Shakespeare's quater-centenary and wanted to do Juno and the Plough. O'Casey lifted the ban on the three Dublin plays to allow trial runs at the Queen's. As one unused to the melting mood, O'Casey was acting out of character; he also wrote to the Abbey to ask that two free tickets for both Juno and the Plough be sent to Lorraine Beaver of 13 Church Road, East Wall.70 Eileen wrote to Daubeny indicating O'Casey's admiration as the reason for his lifting the ban,71 but who is to say his grandniece had not made him? In the event, the Abbey productions disappointed the London critics and annoyed O'Casey. In Dublin in early February the running order at the Queen's was the Plough first and (a month later) Juno, which augured well enough, as the Plough was the better cast; in London, on 20 April, at the Aldwych, Juno led off, to be followed a week later by the Plough. The poor reviews for Juno, seen as weak and subdued,72 sapped confidence for the Plough production. Had Ria Mooney been available perhaps a different tale would be told, but she was now a broken figure. Both productions were directed by Frank Dermody in a ponderous, old-fashioned style, about which the London reviewers were rather scathing.73 The six years' ban had done great damage to the company's acting style.74 In addition, a threatened players' strike just before the London trip unsettled all, not least Dermody, who lacked confidence.75 At such times, the blame finally falls on the director.76 Eileen, who saw both productions, was diplomatic; Sean, who saw neither, was not. The fact that the Aldwych was booked out for the two weeks, marking the Abbey's first visit to London since 1913, cut no ice with O'Casey when the notices were bad. He was as unforgiving as ever in his comments, sourced in the reports of Aidan Hennigan, London editor for the Irish Press.17 O'Casey said: 'Everybody was agog about these presentations. It was a glorious opportunity for Ireland. The houses were filled, but the company failed lamentably. [...] there was no direction, no direction whatsoever. What a blasted waste.'

Talking to God 433 The Abbey board should be dismissed.78 This was below the belt. A row ensued, during which O'Casey attacked Blythe for knowing nothing about acting or drama.79 He knew too well Blythe's philosophy: The Abbey is not an art theatre but an instrument of national defence!'80 Feeling insulted by the Abbey's failure to rise to the occasion O'Casey was indifferent to the damage done to the Abbey's national prestige.81

The playwright Edward Bond has said that writers' deaths are usually the short story they never got round to writing.82 So it was with O'Casey. His health gave way in August 1964 and Dr Doran sent him to the Torbay Clinic suffering from acute bronchitis. While there he could not help thinking of the time, over eight years earlier, he had been hospitalised for months and had returned home to months of further infections and invalidism. He knew now it could not be long; for Eileen's sake he would like a little more time, if time still meant money. There was that article to finish on contemporary drama. He could picture it, in draft, lying on the table overlooking the Devon hills. A few more kicks to the ailing body of current drama, like Snobby Price's kicks to his dear old mother in Major Barbara, might get the collection box a few extra shillings. And then, maybe, to see about selling his papers. The curator of the Berg Collection in New York had written some time ago to ask about purchasing the manuscripts.83 He remembered discussing the business with Eileen. They had decided not to do anything just then. What's this he had said to the curator? Eager that she should have a 'reserve outstanding' when he went, yes, 'when I am flying about on high watching what fools these mortals are'.84 But at least since that time he had made his will, leaving all to Eileen. And the next day he had had the bright idea of a codicil.85 No sense in having a Hugh Lane controversy in the O'Casey household. Eileen would be appointed sole executor and allowed to select the literary editor of his 'works'. He had made sure to have it signed by witnesses Geoffrey Bobbie and Ronald Ayling.86 'And I desire', he had written, 'to record my gratitude to her for many years of happy and fruitful companionship and love as deep now deeper indeed than the love I felt for her in our earlier years.' There were other things he wanted to say to Eileen now. Almost blind, he searched out his pen and writing paper and began the last letter he would write to her: 'here I am like a cooped-up Cock, ragged in feather, drooping in comb, the crow gone off into a cough.' He recalled their first meeting, 'I thought you the loveliest lass I had ever seen.'87 Discharged from hospital he settled in his room again, the purple robe Shivaun had made for him wrapped around him even in late August, a colourful skullcap on his head, an ecclesiastical portrait to the life. Like his dying father, he had his pipe and tobacco in despite bronchitis. The electric fire cheered him and kept the cough at bay. Visitors returned and, carefully screened by Eileen, were admitted. Father Edwin Russell from Totnes had kept in touch over the years. O'Casey had sent him an inscribed copy of The Drums of Father Ned in 1961; in his letter of acknowledgement Father Russell signed

434 Sean O'Casey

himself 'Father Ned'.88 The camera man Gjon Mili, hearing he might, came over from Dublin, where he was filming Young Cassidy. They had not met for eleven years. Mili took some final pictures, one of which, now in the Berg Collection, shows how close to death the almost-blind O'Casey was. Eileen did not want that picture ever to be published. A little later David Krause would arrive, on invitation, back from Dublin, to talk some more about the letters and to keep Sean company before returning to his teaching in Rhode Island. Shivaun arrived back from Dublin, her film-acting over, and, assured that Sean was on the mend, went on to London to plan another American tour.89 O'Casey determined to finish the article on modern drama, feeling the anger rise again over the absurdists and the so-called Theatre of Cruelty. 'Such writers blaspheme against humanity.'90 He would finish on a positive note by excepting John Arden from this pack of naysayers. Forcing himself to the table he would note the neat pile of pages by the typewriter, left by Eileen. When he finished, he went back to page one and wrote in the title with a grim smile, 'The Bald Primaqueera'; that would keep them guessing, if they had not read lonesco. He dated the manuscript 21 August.91 Having heard from Peter Trower in Newcastle that the People's Theatre was at last about to move into a fine new building he felt he had to write. It is among the last letters he wrote, in a surprisingly bold hand. It is dated 25 August: 'Vouchsafe good morrow from a feeble tongue. I have had a bad time from lung trouble, and am now recovering from the toxic effects the ghastly virus left behind it; but I have enough kick left in me to greet you, your artists, & your Theater in a warm embrace.' He went on to praise the People's Theatre (which had premiered the Cock in 1949), and to wish it more future glory than Coventry, Chichester or the Bristol Old Vic. 'Here from the deep South, I send you all an old Irish playwright's thanks for what you have done for the Theater; and a warm blessing wraps up the thanks to keep them fresh.'92 Meanwhile, the Abbey, having shrugged off O'Casey's frank criticism, staged The Shadow of a Gunman (17 August) in Dublin to good reviews. The company was beginning to find its way back into the idiom and tempo once again. They now wanted to take Juno to Derry for a few performances, on an invitation from a younger Father 'Ned', Edward Daly, in years to come the famous priest bearing the white handkerchief during Bloody Sunday in Derry, 1972. Would Sean consent? Here was another challenge, to lift the ban further, to make a gesture of some sort in the direction of cross-border relations. As lately as 1963 O'Casey, warmed by a review of Under a Colored Cap from BBC Northern Ireland, expressed his wish that the North would join the South, 'to stiffen our weakening spine'.93 This time, on 1 September, he could assent with enthusiasm to a request from Blythe, and he added, in indication of his life-long opposition to partition: Ts this the beginning of the end of the stupid Apartheid in Ireland? I hope so, for Derry is as Irish as Cork or Cahirciveen.' His wish was that the orange and green should fly over the hall while the play was on.94 The short story was in the making. During that first weekend of September, if a reporter telephoned in search of a comment from O'Casey on some topic or other he would relay the

Talking to God 435

message that he was now only talking to God.95 He had told Lorraine Beaver he was 'an Agnostic'96: he did not say 'atheist', the word he would usually have chosen.97 His friends had long decided that O'Casey's communism was largely a humane commitment to justice and were not surprised to find him also adhering to Christian beliefs. Under his coloured cap lay layers of spirituality. He was never, like Beckett, 'a dogmatic atheist'.98 He was drawn to religious controversy because doctrine mattered to him. The catholic church, to which he had been attracted as a young man, was like Maire Keating on another level: O'Casey had moved on to a better, more humanised embodiment of truth in communism, but he would always look back in a mixture of fury and longing at that early, romantic promise of deep, spiritual love. Unlike Joyce also he could not live in the twilight of relativism but preferred the biblical maxim, 'No servant can serve two masters [or mistresses?]: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other' (Luke 13:13). 'What does God say when you talk to Him?', Krause asked. 'He tells me the world is full of fools but He loves them anyway.'99 But there was to be no weakening, now or ever, no death-bed conversion like George Jean Nathan's; nothing of that kind. After Krause had left O'Casey got the drama article ready for posting to the New York Times Magazine. He wrote the accompanying letter on 12 September, the last in Krause's collection.100 He would not live to know of the rejection of the article, which would have hurt; it was probably too long for such a publication. That done he looked over his letter to Eileen again, for their anniversary was coming up, on the 23rd. He saw where he had left off and went on with the tribute, stressing Eileen's strength and confessing his own obstinacy. He regretted his inability to 'write anything that would have a ready market' and recalling that TLS review of 1951 - his 'lamentable political judgements'. He conjured up the scene during the lean years, 'when, at mealtimes, a silent and sullen da sat like a frozen image at the table' and Eileen's attempts to break the tension resulted only in 'a deeper silence'. He was sorry for his obstinacy. He praised Eileen's bravery, but 'there can be no forgiveness for an ill deed done.' She must take care of herself and of her 'really glorious personality' for her own sake and for those she loved. She was the pulse of his heart, 'and this heart of mine loves you, & will love you unto the last.' The last was not long in coming. On Friday 18 September he began to have nose bleeds early in the morning, followed later in the day by a great pain in his side. Dr Doran was on holidays and Sean was placed in the care of a young newcomer to the practice, Dr H.W. Haskins, who stopped the bleeding but did not suspect the coronary thrombosis which caused O'Casey's death.101 He died in the ambulance which took him to Torbay Clinic that afternoon. Eileen was with him but did not realise he had died while holding her hand.102

It hardly needs to be said that tributes poured into the flat in Trumlands Road. De Valera, as president, Lemass as Taoiseach, sent messages of sympathy from

436 Sean O'Casey

Ireland. O'Casey would have been amused at the grief which suddenly struck Dublin newspaper reporters. It was rather like Captain Boyle's response to the passing of that 'prognosticator an' procrastinator' Mr Ellison of Santry, once he hears about the legacy: 'we'll have to go into mournin' at wanst' Even so fair-minded a man as Micheal O hAodha, who gave a moving and memorable tribute on Radio Eireann, felt it necessary later to clarify the distance from O'Casey's death it was thought appropriate to maintain: 'There was some talk in Radio Telefis Eireann of bringing O'Casey's body home for burial in Saint Patrick's. But I had no part in this. By then, I had come to realise that we had enough graves already.'103 There was to be room for the bones of Roger Casement in 1965; for O'Casey, never. But at least the Abbey Theatre closed 'as a mark of respect', on Saturday night, 19 September: a rare tribute. In fact, O'Casey has no grave. His body was cremated on 22 September at Hele Road, Torquay.104 On that day Brooks Atkinson's obituary appeared in the New York Times, a worthwhile tribute from a critic who was also a friend: "Joyous" may not be too radiant a word to describe [O'Casey's] inner spirit in his last years. He was an optimist about the future of mankind. Despite the many hardships of his life (he once remarked that he regarded himself as a failure) he always enjoyed the experience of being alive: "Tired, but joyous, praising God for His brightness and the will towards joy in the breasts of men" - to quote a line he once wrote about himself as a tenement boy in Dublin. Although O'Casey aged, he never changed.105 Though she kept the funeral very quiet, as Sean would have wished, Eileen gave an interview to Irish journalist Michael Hand five days later. She, too, stressed O'Casey's gentle, spiritual character: 'Sean, although an atheist, was a deeply religious man. He was religious in his thoughts and in his life and to other people. He was a kind, gentle person who sought goodness for everybody.'106 Among the condolences Eileen received was a handwritten letter from Harold Macmillan (who had already sent a formal telegram from Dorothy and himself). It was a nice personal tribute. He also regretted that he and O'Casey had not met in recent years, 'but I shall always remember with pride & pleasure his friendship.'107 The awkwardness of the syntax betrays Macmillan's difficulty in being at ease with Eileen. In contrast she, like O'Casey himself, had a natural ease with people. In her reply she agreed she was bound to miss Sean: 'he always said "Eileen" with great warmth in his voice.'108 In this letter she also referred to the unwitting anxiety caused Macmillan and his brother Daniel by a well-meaning friend who had asked them to buy the house containing the O'Casey flat, which the O'Caseys would have had to surrender in April 1965. Eileen had been greatly worried about moving Sean, whom she never told of this final 'notice to quit'. At the same time, she did not like the house and had stayed in it only for Sean's sake; so, in short, she was glad Macmillan did not buy the place. Her plan, she told him, was to leave Torquay in April and settle in London, where she hoped to see him sometime. (When Sean's will was

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proved at the District Probate Registry at Exeter on 17 November, Eileen as sole Executrix inherited £l,575-6s. Od., not a fortune but presumably she had her own account also besides all the rights to his works.) In fact, she called on Macmillan for a reference for the estate agents when she leased a flat in Drayton Gardens, Kensington.109 How far the relationship between them developed is not entirely clear; there was talk of marriage after Dorothy died in 1966.110 They certainly remained friends until Macmillan's death in 1986,111 as the correspondence preserved in the Macmillan archive testifies. A couple of weeks after Sean's death Eileen went up to London with his ashes. She was joined by Shivaun, then living in London; Breon had to return to work in St Ives. Sydney Bernstein, loyal friend to the O'Caseys over the years, lent his car and chauffeur and they drove out in style to Golders Green on Saturday 3 October. The crematorium at Hoop Lane is a congregation of lowsized brick buildings which wear the air of a modest secondary school. To the rear are surprising cloisters in splendid extension before a variety of chapels, small memorial areas and a columbarium. Here the sad reality of what the place is, neither a retreat house nor a setting for youngsters soon to whoop out over recreational meadows, impresses through little knots of people standing quietly about, before granite flags covered in bouquets and floral displays. One resists the urge to read the display cards or the panels listing the services of the day: so many names, so many strangers. In front stretch the fields and gardens with bordering paths, like a fat T upside down. Seventy beds make up the crocus 'dispersal lawn', a beautiful sight in spring, less distracting in autumn. Here Jack Carney's ashes were dispersed in April 1956. There was a breach between the friends in 1949, when O'Casey refused Carney's request to sign a book for the American Transport Union boss Mike Quill.112 After that there were no more letters between them.113 Ahead of the crocus lawn lies Cedar Lawn, an open area fringed by rose beds named after seven English poets and one American (Longfellow). On the west side of this lawn, in front of Tennyson and Blake, the ashes of Sean O'Casey were dispersed. It was the same spot where Niall's ashes were scattered on 3 January 1957. Eileen and Shivaun, now the only mourners, had both also been present then. Now, expecting the little ceremony to be painless, they harboured no fears. But it was more of a shock than Eileen expected: We reached some open ground and stood aside while one man held the casket and the other took the ashes from it and scattered them to the wind. I felt myself going faint; Shivaun was just as white. We had to step back to a bench and recover ourselves before walking away slowly and in silence.114 So there he was, at last, blowing around in a vacancy between Blake and Shelley, and facing, could he but know it, another North Circular Road. There is no monument to O'Casey here, or anywhere, but as one looks out over the startlingly small space where his ashes were scattered it is hard not to remember Shelley's 'breath of Autumn's being', the west wind, and his prayer that it might

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drive his dead thoughts over the universe 'Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!'115 The short story was almost over. The performance of Juno in Derry was like a farewell testimonial. St Columb's Hall, with its combination of bingo, concerts and occasional productions of plays, would have amazed O'Casey. It was a long way from the hall in Langrishe Place in Dublin which he had cleaned up every day in 1920 in preparation for the 'house night' later on. He would have envied as well as admired what the administrator, Father Edward Daly, had achieved since 1962, when first he arrived as curate in St Eugene's Cathedral, overlooking the kind of workingclass area in the Bogside where O'Casey would have felt at home. The large auditorium, seating about a thousand, had been used as a cinema, but Fr Daly so revitalised it for live entertainment that as the 1960s went on it attracted to the Sunday concerts the best of Irish and international popular and classical singers. Indeed, such was the success of St Columb's Hall that the concerts were regarded as providing a regional 'Sunday Night at the London [derry] Palladium'.116 Among the first plays Fr Daly staged was Brian Friel's An Enemy Within, with the Abbey company performing for the first time in Derry, in October 1962. Here the contact at the Abbey was Ray McAnally, who played St Columba in this play about Derry's native saint. Early in August, two years later, Fr Daly wrote to Ernest Blythe inviting the Abbey company back for five nights with Juno. Blythe cautiously suggested three nights instead, and made much fuss about having to arrange an undemanding play for performance at home in the Queen's on those nights.117 The company travelled on 31 October, and performed on the three nights following. The cast was as it had been for the London and Paris performances, with Philip O'Flynn as Captain Boyle, Maire Ni Dhomhnaill as Juno and Pat Laffan as Johnny. Harry Brogan (Joxer) was in doubt up to the last minute because of illness but went on and was much enjoyed.118 Blythe was hesitant about travelling with the company. 'I do not want to present myself in Derry if my being there would do any harm,' he hinted darkly.119 It seems he was afraid that his middle political life (in the 1920s, when he favoured the execution of 'Irregulars') might still be remembered by republicans in Derry. In the event he travelled, and made a speech from the stage of St Columb's in which he paraphrased O'Casey's letter of 1 September expressing his pleasure that Juno should visit Derry and hoping that the orange and green would fly side-by-side on this occasion. Throwing caution to the winds Blythe then confided in the audience that it was O'Casey who had inducted him into the IRB 'a very long time ago', and whatever O'Casey may have said in criticism of Irish conditions 'his heart was in Ireland and his plays did a great deal to assuage bitter feeling at the time they were written.' They were 'great national documents', and/tmowas 'one of the treasures of the national literature'.120 This was well said. Thus and only thus was O'Casey's epitaph written: on the Londonderry air.

Talking to God 439 This was appropriate, as for some time he had regarded himself as a follower of St Columkille, destined as exile never to see or walk upon the soil of Ireland again.121 Just above the report in the Derry Journal of this historic production was a photograph of Blythe, Fr Daly and Brian Friel, who was in the audience (see illustration 43). It may be seen as a portrait of the old guard handing over to the new, or youth taking over from age, exactly as O'Casey would have wished. That the central figure was a priest, in ten years to be the youngest bishop in Ireland, would not have worried him at all. He would have seen in that a new roll of the drums of Father Ned, a promising response to whatever the dark future might bring. It would give him something new to talk to God about now that the end had come.

AFTERLIFE

n November 2002 the Abbey Theatre yet again revived The Plough and the Stars in advance of its centenary celebrations. It was to be the main, leading representation of the Abbey's glory. The honour reflects the fact that the Plough is by far the most frequently performed play in the Abbey's history, in spite of the gap in continuity created by O'Casey's ban in 1958. Indeed, as artistic director Ben Barnes has it, * The Plough and the Stars is to the Abbey what The Cherry Orchard is to the Moscow Art Theatre. It's our touchstone play.'1 In 2004, accordingly, O'Casey was given his full due in the centenary: here at last, and not when Yeats proclaimed it in 1926 from the stage of the old Abbey, was his apotheosis. This, however, is the new and bland Ireland, in which O'Casey, one side only on view, can easily be accommodated. In 1966, the jubilee year of the Easter Rising, things were a little different. The idea to open the new Abbey in this year was a declaration of its revolutionary status, however shaky. There would have been a certain symmetry in opening the new building with a performance of the same play as had closed the old fifteen years to the day in 1951, The Plough and the Stars. But in the year when the men of 1916 were fully honoured and the IRA blew up Nelson's Pillar only a grenade's throw from the theatre it might be thought foolhardy.2 Besides, it was decided to invite President de Valera officially to open the new building on 18 July: his old enemy Ernest Blythe could hardly ask him to stay on for a play which called his comrades 'cowards'. So Dev was treated to a harmless compilation by Walter Macken entitled Recall the Years, and the right speeches could be made by all sides.3 The Plough was postponed for a month. The better part of valour, even in revolutionary theatre, is still discretion. Gabriel Fallon, now a director on the board, was credited in the programme for Recall the Years as one of the Voices', presumably commenting in the O'Casey scene. His book, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, had been published in 1965, a major commentary by an Irish critic. It included a final chapter added after O'Casey's death, where Fallon characteristically made his peace with the man he never entirely knew. What seems clearer now, forty years on, is that O'Casey was an unfinished man, an artist in search of completion ever denied. His was an illusory life. Fallon could not accept the fragmentary quality of O'Casey's achievement, though it was as sublime as a damaged Greek statue. Resentment tempered Fallon's assessment, which was as generous as his time

In

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and place could permit. From this time forward, until his own death in 1980, Fallon never said a bad word about O'Casey. In the end, he saw him as 'nothing less than a dyed-in-the-wool spectator of a mad and foolish world', which is close enough to the mark. He added, with the insight gained since 1964: 'If his own countrymen seem at times to have forgotten him, it is due to the fact that they never completely understood him. But, then, who ever completely understood any of the great ones of this world?'4 Recalling the years now, so to speak, one would have to say that the failure of this friendship damaged both men. Its failure also highlights O'Casey's self-sufficiency: all through his life friendship was hard for him to maintain. The irony inherent in his reception just two years after his death provides a means of introducing a final assessment. O'Casey's radicalism being largely ignored, his plays were now available as spectacular entertainment. In the same month as the Abbey's Plough, the Gaiety Theatre presented Juno in a major production by Eamonn Andrews and Peter O'Toole, starring Siobhan McKenna, O'Toole, Jack MacGowran and other notables. In June The Drums of Father Ned had had its premiere at last, but not at the Abbey: Blythe dismissed the script as truflais (rubbish) and Tomas Mac Anna directed it at the Olympia Theatre instead.5 The later plays fared better after Blythe retired as managing director in 1967, when, starting with Red Roses for Me, Mac Anna made a brave effort to include them in the Abbey repertory.6 Hugh Hunt's production of The Silver Tassie in 1972 marked a further advance. But by 1980, O'Casey's centenary, it had become clear that as experimentalist he was not welcome at the national theatre.7 (RTE television, likewise, was more dutiful than adventurous in 1980, although Lelia Doolan's splendid production of the Plough in 1966 will always stand in evidence of what can be done with O'Casey on television.) Indeed, the indefatigable Mary O'Malley probably succeeded better in her Lyric Theatre in Belfast, and it was there that Within the Gates had its Irish premiere in 1974.8 Only the three Dublin plays and the Tassie (revived 1990) have continued to stand the test of time at the Abbey. Even the Dublin plays began to slip away from this officialdom after 1985 when Joe Dowling, having resigned as artistic director at the Abbey, walked off with them to stage a magnificent/wno at the rival Gate in 1986 and a slightly less powerful Plough at the Gaiety a few years later. Other directors, Lynne Parker and Peter Sheridan, also showed that the Abbey held no monopoly on O'Casey by presenting the Tassie and the Plough respectively at alternative venues.9 It was not until the 1990s, with the arrival of Garry Hynes and Patrick Mason as artistic directors, that the Abbey was able to reclaim lost possessions. Ben Barnes has ably recap tared Juno and the Plough. But there is now no longer any talk of anything later than the Tassie.10 A similar pattern, from fewer productions and without the complication of the Abbey's struggle to appropriate and retain O'Casey as resource, emerged in Britain. Here the attempt by Laurence Olivier in 1966 to present Juno at the Old Vic as if it were a classic not necessarily dependent on Irish performers stands out as exceptional. Olivier cast but two Irish actors, Colin Blakely

442 SednO'Casey (Captain Boyle) and Michael Gambon (Jerry Devine), both well established in the English theatre. The harsh experience during O'Casey's lifetime had been that, in the main, only Irish actors could properly be cast in his plays. The Mermaid production of The Shadow of a Gunman in 1967 seemed to underline this axiom. Directed by Jack MacGowran the cast was almost all Irish, with Shivaun O'Casey as Minnie Powell. The 1977 Plough at the National (Olivier), directed by Bill Bryden, had an all-Irish cast. Only the Tassie, directed by David Jones for the RSC in 1969 and by Clare Venables for Theatre Workshop in 1977, seemed amenable to an all-English cast. To date, there have been no major productions of the other later plays since O'Casey's death. (It is to France and especially to Germany (GDR) that one must look for these.) In New York, a production of the Cock by the Phoenix Company at the Lyceum in January 1969 marked the last time Broadway showed an interest. Therefore, a comment made in O'Casey's obituary in the Times now stands in need of revision: 'his professional life was threaded with misunderstandings that brought about a neglect of his plays which never ceased to trouble the theatrical conscience.'11 That conscience is troubled no more, one would have to say now. A new stage has been reached in the post-colonial reception of O'Casey.

The life itself is another matter. Born a unionist in an embattled time, catching the nationalist bug, followed by the trades union and socialist varieties, O'Casey could never be said to have had a settled identity. He was thus a born writer, the inventor of his own place in the world.12 While his personal loyalties were fierce to the point of hero-worship his affiliations were short-lived: an habitual skepticism invariably put an end to membership of any society. It may be true to say, with Tobias Wolff, that the life that produces writing cannot be written about, so subterranean is it and so unconscious.13 Certainly, the life O'Casey led, the daily routines of a labouring man, offer few clues to the man of imagination. He was not one self but many contradictory selves. There was a lot in him of Johnny Boyle, bearing the wounds of senseless battles and always on the run, though it would be excessive to say he 'could rest nowhere, nowhere, nowhere' (GP, 1, 41), for he settled well enough in Devon. Even in Devon there is no dyer's hand on view, no social fabric he set about redesigning, no fingerprints on the levers of cultural change. His preferred stance was the one strangers found: the ill-dressed observer quick to complain but watchful for the moment when he might switch to princely graciousness. He was an actor and could assume more than one role at a time. He liked to make a story of everything, especially his life. In looking more broadly at O'Casey's life and works forty years after his death one sees plainly enough the heroic nature of his commitment. He may have been a difficult, even contrary figure within the theatre and in civil society but his dedication to art was exemplary. It took a good while before he was taken seriously as a supreme artist, not perhaps until his arrival in London. After that there could be no doubt about the boldness of his imagination. He

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took on big, ambitious themes. The Silver Tassie, seen as a fusion of disparate styles, marked the stubborn hybridity of his genius just as the resulting controversy marked the major turning point in his life. The modernism he cultivated from here on displayed the assimilation of working-class and bourgeois cultural forms, football and plain chant, realism and expressionism. He was now a man with something to prove. It was Yeats's view that O'Casey had 'no constructive power, nothing but curiosity about life, and that is the last thing a London manager values'.14 In fact, O'Casey's considerable constructive power lies in the ability to fuse disparate material together on a scale outside Yeats's appreciation. But Yeats was right about the managers. In London there was considerable intermittent sympathy for O'Casey and his going against the grain but increasingly a reluctance to take risks in producing his later plays. Apart from Red Roses for Me, acclaimed in 1946, none of the later work made an impact. While New York always seemed more interested, after Within the Gates in 1934 producers shied away until the mid 1950s. By that time O'Casey had made a second reputation with his autobiographies. But the years between the London production of The Silver Tassiein 1929 and the renewed interest in his plays after 1956 were very hard. Turning to Ireland for his audience proved disastrous. Yet he never threw in the towel but moved from one unwelcomed play on to the next attempt. To what extent he was himself to blame for the lack of appreciation in England will always be a subject for debate. In seeking a 'world elsewhere' outside of Dublin he found a literary world in London which he did his best to subdue. But in London critics and writers alike were professionals, possibly university educated, an elite, in fact, and though he struggled hard to have his own standards adopted he failed. His personality, especially his scorn for the mediocre, compounded his problems. His critical essays in The Flying Wasp won him no friends. Noel Coward was always going to be the touchstone of English dramatic taste no matter how loudly O'Casey cried him down, and James Agate as critic was never going to swerve from his influential endorsements of conventional realism. By 1939 O'Casey had no alternative but to retreat from London to Devon, where the last twenty-five year of his life were spent tilting against the windmills of contemporary theatrical fashion. Looking back now one can see that O'Casey was right to challenge as he did. Even if he did not change a thing his stand was for new vigour in the theatre through an end to facile realism and to the kind of criticism which complacently accepted it. Today, in the post-Beckett theatre, O'Casey's attacks seem obvious. But in the world of popular entertainment, especially in television, his argument would still be radical, for there unexamined realism and indulgent criticism biased in favour of fashion and so-called celebrities remain dominant. Thus O'Casey may have been right but as W.A. Darlington put it, 'he had to fight a losing battle.'15 Asked once what is the most necessary quality for an author O'Casey replied, 'an irresistible desire to write'.16 For him this desire was cognate with the parable of the talents: he felt impelled to cultivate Milton's 'that one talent which is death to hide'. He put it less grandly to Nathan: 'one has a gift, one

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has to keep going. It is a plague; but, on the whole, a pleasant plague.'17 At times he was less up-beat about this plague. To Leslie Daiken, a minor poet who was one of these bright young sparks who never seem to settle long enough to ignite anything, he said in 1951, when Daiken had reached fifty: 'I hope you may get a job soon. Life's not worth a lot without a job. As for writing -1 prefer pick & shovel any day.'18 He lived 'Adam's Curse' knowing what it was to break stones. What the purpose was is another matter. Why write? In an ironic speech by a poet in his last full-length play O'Casey mocked the purely aesthetic option: Our place is in no rabblement, no crowd, senses blurred be blarin' bands [...]. Th' writer's place is th' cool contentment of quiet, in a corner where no voice comes; no car drives by; no child's laugh disturbs; no touch from a woman to ruffle th' stillness of thought; only birdsong and th' gentle ripple of a rose on its own bush.19 Coming from a recluse this critique is a bit rich, but it emphasises nevertheless that with O'Casey just about everything is symbolic. He means here less the place itself, the artist's retreat, than the attitude adopted against the world. For O'Casey this could only be one of dissent. Being untouched by the world was never an option. In Behind the Green Curtains, when the spineless Chatastray wails that he just wants to be left alone Reena rebukes him: 'No one and nothing can be left alone in this world' (p. 60). This pretty well sums up O'Casey's outlook. From the start, in The Shadow of a Gunman, he had exposed the inadequacy and self-deceit of the artist unwilling or unable to take responsibility for being in the world. Whether or not one agrees with Seumas Shields, the pedlar as literary theorist, when he asserts in the play that it is the purpose of the poet to put passion in the common people, it is not possible to overlook in his sidekick Davoren the bankruptcy of mere aestheticism. From this analysis it follows that for O'Casey the issue was primarily moral: being in the world demanded engagement, if authenticity was not to be jettisoned. This predicament was the human one; the artist could evade it no more than the most foolish or the most selfish. On the artist, however, O'Casey was more severe, both in this play and ever afterwards in and out of fiction. Decadence was not an option; frivolity was not an option; timidity, however masked, was to be regarded as a serious flaw. Thus of the poet Austin Clarke, whom he came to admire somewhat in the 1950s, O'Casey said that he lacked 'the aggressive spirit, that of the fighter, so essential if one believes one has a mission, be it politics, poetry, painting, or playwrighting'.20 The pretty alliteration here cannot disguise the flinty judgment. Neither riches nor fame could be the writer's goal, for each corroded the soul. Fame was perhaps the more seductive temptation, 'for if we seek it, and it comes, unhappiness comes with it: the fame that comes breeds an appetite for further fame, and that often destroys the soul who pursues it. And we must be content to use the one talent to the full.'21 Coping with failure was to him more important than achieving fame. He rarely allowed himself, as he

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put it, 'to be free from the uncertainty of not having enough to pay a simple way forward for all [the family]'.22 The purpose is thus to keep going in necessary uncertainty, to borrow Brian Friel's phrase. As a young man O'Casey attended Evangelical Missions.23 The notion of a 'mission' in the world derived from his father, whose participation in an evangelical project O'Casey transformed into an artist's political creed. Brooks Atkinson probably got it right: The Silver Tassie forcefully stated 'the evangelical point of view that became the basic theme of the rest of O'Casey's life'.24 In a draft for a centenary essay on Shaw O'Casey wrote characteristically: 'Each of us, the moment one is born, sets out on a mission - the mission to live; to use the talents, natural & acquired we have within us; &, borrowing a catechetical phrase, to do our duty in that state of life it shall please God to call us.'25 As a father-figure, Shaw was an enduring example of the artist's role in society. They made two cap-and-bells missioners, two blacks girls in their search for God. What to write about "was yet another matter. In spite of his handicaps and disappointments O'Casey delighted in the world in all its plenitude, colour and absurdity. He first wrote about human vanity in sketches for the Gaelic League classroom, and this remained an enduring theme. But his main theme was to be the horror of modern warfare and the waste of young life it brought about. The three Dublin plays are developments of this theme; The Silver Tassie is its magnificent apogee. Then bitterness and uncertainty entered his soul, following Yeats's shocking rejection of that play. His theme then increasingly became blame of whatever crushes initiative and represses the natural joys of living. He fell into the demonstrative mood, forcing the topical into the significant. Ireland's shortcomings formed an easy target; he often fired at will, only to shoot himself in the foot while scattering his enemies. Nobody has pinpointed this shift in O'Casey's mood and theme so well as the American playwright Clifford Odets. In reviewing the first two volumes of Collected Plays in 1950 Odets defined a clear, damaging division between the writing about 'the parish' in the first volume and the writing about 'the world' in the second. As his sensibility changed O'Casey forgot, Odets argued, that the parochial, 'seen and lived deeply enough, is the world'.26 Experience had hurt O'Casey into self-consciousness, but Odets did not seem aware that already O'Casey had learned (as seen in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy) that he must forget Hyde Park and see a rural Irish scene as microcosm. He mischievously subtitled his 1957 comedy, intended for the Dublin Theatre Festival, A Mickrocosm of Ireland. Whether he succeeded with his new 'parish' is still debatable, though it must appear in the new millennium that social change and modernisation have necessarily swept the base from O'Casey's topicality. What may be more important is his insistence that he spoke as the poet of his tribe or community: 'I know the mind of Ireland because I am within it; I know the heart of Ireland because I am one of its corners; I know the five senses of Ireland because I am within them and they are within me.'27 This startling, mystical assumption is reminiscent of de Valera's notorious looking into his own heart to know what the people of Ireland are thinking. It is a strange

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correspondence. Is the artist always the flipside of the politician? Although from a distance, and not on behalf of any diaspora, O'Casey wrote with authority because, as Peter Kavanagh testified, 'He was Ireland himself. When he wrote sincerely out of his own life and its emotions, he was expressing the inner spirit of Ireland.'28 This then, was finally O'Casey's subject: the inner spirit of Ireland. It was his legacy to the next generation of Irish playwrights, from Denis Johnston to Brian Friel.29 He had extended his parish accordingly.

The afterlife of O'Casey necessarily confronts his communist beliefs, especially in the light of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. That Marxism ended up screening and bolstering a deadly totalitarianism which O'Casey had never acknowledged is undeniable. Simon Montefiore's biography of Stalin has exposed the horrors for all to see.30 O'Casey naively refused to believe in Stalin's evil. He took the will for the deed; he favoured modernisation while turning a blind eye to Stalinism. As Terry Eagleton has emphasised, postmodernism has now rendered Marxism 'untrue'; Marxism is less disproved thereby than discredited. Insofar as a society beyond injustice is still something to be striven for, Eagleton claims, we are all Marxists now that the theory has been liberated from totalitarianism.31 Even if this is the telos wagging the dog, in the age of globalisation it is an inescapable ethical imperative. Consequently, with the cold war out of the equation it is possible to view O'Casey's communism, as espoused in A Star Turns Red (written, it must be remembered, in the face of Hitler's Fascist threat to liberty) and in his letters of the period, with considerably less dismay than his friends and admirers felt in the 1950s. Nowadays, in Ireland, it is possible for a prominent playwright to call himself a socialist on the basis that 'any sensible fair-minded person is a socialist,' since socialism is no more than 'equity, fair play for people'.32 If it be replied that democratic socialism is exactly what toppled the Soviet bureaucracy then it must be clear that in spite of his deluded opposition to the Hungarian revolution of 1956 O'Casey was always passionately in favour of 'equity, fair play for people'. In hindsight, it can be said that his communism was a form of misplaced loyalty to an imagined ideal. The fierceness of that loyalty is a key to O'Casey's character. In flight from all that was mean and destructive in his own family history and the brutal side of Ireland's class system he erected Larkin as hero-deliverer and after Larkin Stalin. He could no other. The ethic on which that idealism was based was, all along, the timeworn protestant ethic. This major irony repeatedly draws O'Casey closer to the Anglo-Irish tradition than is usually recognised.33 It is necessary also to appreciate that side-by-side with O'Casey's communism lay his opposition to the hegemony of Roman Catholicism. The weakening of this hegemony in Ireland may not be as dramatic a development as the disgrace of communism worldwide but there is an equal and opposite relationship. It is now possible for the editor of the Irish Theological Quarterly to publish a book entitled The End of Irish Catholicism?^ O'Casey had been calling

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for this 'end' for years. Baldly, if he was wrong about Soviet communism he was right about Irish Catholicism. Thirty years after Archbishop McQuaid's death his biographer could declare in terms which go far now to justify O'Casey's splenetic attacks: In the McQuaid story lies the awesome power exercised by the Catholic Church in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. McQuaid represents both the high point of Catholic power and an index by which to measure the subsequent decline of the Catholic Church's influence in society.35 Since the 1980s, and particularly since the kind of sex-scandals which shamed the church in Ireland from the 1990s as they did worldwide, the arguments O'Casey frequently advanced in the last two volumes of the autobiographies and in the plays from the Cock onwards have taken on fresh meaning. What sociologist Tom Inglis calls the church's 'moral monopoly' in Ireland has now been broken: The days of the unquestioned moral power of the priest are over. [... ] The media have driven a stake into the heart of the institutional Church from which it will recover, but never fully. It is unlikely that we will ever see the likes of the Catholic Church's moral monopoly again.'36 Here, perhaps in contrast to his identification with Stalinism, O'Casey stands vindicated. His anti-clericalism was a kind of prophecy. Inversely, also, through his representations of obscurantism in such plays as the Cock and The Bishop's Bonfire, O'Casey called for modernisation. He put the point poetically in lines written to preface The Drums of Father Ned: the comedy was about 'the things encumbering Ireland's way' and an attempt 'to snatch from Erin's back the sable shawl,/And clothe her as she was before her /a//.'37 The works italicised indicate his sense of a culture immobilised and morally stagnant, though capable of regeneration. The Ireland he by inference imagined, free of repression, has now come about. This is not to say O'Casey would be pleased with all that Irish society offers in the millennium. As revolutionary or as he put it at age eighty-two, 'a rebel still [...] a rebel till the world becomes an open oyster for all to share',38 he would always wish to mock, debunk and reimagine the existing social formation. In short, whereas modernity was achieved in O'Casey's afterlife it was achieved at the expense of moral coherence. In the rudderless new Ireland O'Casey's passion for justice seems conspicuously absent. By extension, in a globalised world O'Casey's anger is still justified.

In the area of critical assessment, O'Casey was downgraded by the neo-nationalist and post-colonialist commentators in Irish Studies in the 1980s and 1990s, Seamus Deane (Celtic Revivals, 1985), George Watson (7mA Identity and the Literary Revival, 1994), Declan Kiberd (Inventing Ireland, 1995), and their disciples. They looked at the three Dublin plays and found them intellectually disappointing. They looked for political coherence and found it wanting. They

448 Sean O'Casey

looked back to some comments made by Marxist cultural historian Raymond Williams (Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, 1968) to the effect that O'Casey's language ('verbal inflation') was a rhetorical cover-up ('evasion') for paucity of content, and they decided that there was something bogus about O'Casey's plays, particularly The Plough and the Stars. Despite the fine work done by Robert Lowery and others in the Sean O'Casey Review and the O'Casey Annual, and by other O'Casey scholars such as Ronald Ayling, Heinz Kosok, Bernice Schrank and Michael Kenneally, in the age of critical theory O'Casey's ranking plummeted. If it is to be restored it can only be through a greater understanding of O'Casey's endeavour seen in its wider theatrical and cultural contexts. Then it might be seen that this latest downgrading (denigration) of O'Casey's art is unjustified, in a way but a return to some of the earliest criticism of O'Casey's work by those, like A.E. Malone, impatient with his use of music-hall techniques. In the final analysis, however, and bearing in mind his exclusion from the Abbey's cultural project in the 1920s, what O'Casey attempted in his life's work was probably impossible. He felt driven after each play, each volume of autobiography, to proceed always to the next unrealisable possibility. Completion was never in prospect, for even when his life story stretched to six volumes it arrived at a point ten years from his death. Perhaps something David Hare said in reviewing The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan sums it up: 'Nearly all artists fail for the same reason and for that one reason only: because the thing they are trying to do is so clearly so difficult.'39 The pervading vision in O'Casey's work relates to this perdurability in the face of nullity. In the early plays closure comes always on the brink of disintegration, just this side of darkness visible. In the later work apocalypse is rendered comic, as in Purple Dust, and an escape hatch to a world elsewhere is provided. Is this progress? Or does it mark a series of attempts to characterise tragedy as marginal to the sweep of history? The abrupt violent moments, where a blow or a shot suddenly kills, or as in the Oak Leaves and Lavender where two lovers are burned alive off-stage, their ends somehow incidental, are always puzzling, unsatisfactory, faintly ridiculous. Is it simply crude artistry? These moments are always smothered in extended comic business of the lifegoes-on variety. Another playwright, one feels, would surely have dwelt on the tragic moment, arrested by the awfulness, and rebuilt the play to make that moment climactic. In O'Casey it never is. Death is random, casual. Even in the exceptional case where death is signalled as heroic, as in Red Roses for Me, its value is contested. The Inspector's sneer, 'It wasn't a very noble thing to die for a single shilling,' attempts to degrade Ayamonn's death in the workers' strike. It falls to the awakened girlfriend to reply, 'Maybe he saw the shilling in th' shape of a new world.'40 Usually there is no such choric figure handy. Usually all ends in vacancy for those left in possession of the stage, though for those who make the gesture of leaving there is the company of some visionary. This at least is a constant O'Caseyan emphasis. Among the subjects for plays O'Casey never wrote but was interested in were

Afterlifefe 449

Vincent Van Gogh41 and Everyman. After he had complained once of a bad production of Everyman, the medieval morality play, Leonard Elmhirst wrote to him to ask why he did not do a version of it himself, 'as you suggest, and lift its face a little?'42 He never did rewrite Everyman, possibly because he had been doing it all his life. To refer again to Red Roses for Me, when Sheila tries to dissuade Ayamonn from the engaged life, the world of trade-union strife, and to prefer the quiet life with her, his response is sharp but to the point: 'Go to hell, girl, I have a soul to save as well as you.'43 Always in O'Casey, while the world laughs or distracts, the individual is making a very secular attempt at salvation, some kind of realisable afterlife. In a significant way, the recent operatic version of The Silver Tassie both clarifies what O'Casey was after and points the way forward for the possible reclamation of the later plays. For the English National Opera premiere in February 2000 the librettist Amanda Holden cut O'Casey's text to shape a tighter framework for Mark Antony Turnage's powerful score. Much was lost, one of the pair of comic entertainers, for example, and many of O'Casey's characteristic scenes of farce. But the individual tragedy of Harry Heegan was given sharper definition as the Everyman of modern warfare. Doubtless, similar re-shapings of Red Roses, the Cock, especially Within the Gates and perhaps even the troublesome Oak Leaves, would reveal their rich potential. One problem is that they were of their moment; they are now history plays; they stand in need of contextualisation, if not rehabilitation. Another problem is the superficial treatment of relationships in the later plays. A modern production would need to work out the emotional and psychological details which are but lightly sketched while farcical scenes are elaborated. The Bishop's Bonfire is a case in point. Maybe it is that there is too much material, though often it seems more like not enough action. These are all 'big' plays, too big for the contemporary stage wedded to minimalism. But they are not too big for opera and they are not too big for the less ambitious musical form in which Juno more than once braved Broadway. As Katharine Worth has emphasised, 'O'Casey's is above all a musical theatre and a theatre of exuberant physical movement and dance.'44 Shivaun O'Casey has said there is one reason why the later plays are not staged today: T don't think people know quite how to do them [...] but they are both a challenge and a reward.'45 To do these plays now would above all require the freedom to experiment and adapt. There are objections to such a project. As with the argument over Beckett's texts one would have to respect the author's wishes. O'Casey himself insisted on this. As late as July 1963 he declared: To me a dramatist should stand by his play for better or for worse; and when he is dead, others should try to prevent alteration and mutilation of his work.'46 In retrospect now it seems a pity that he did not allow Joan Littlewood to direct Cock-a-Doodle Dandy and yet his commitment to textual integrity is commanding. Any debate thus has to be nuanced in tune with the man's testing self-belief. His loyalties interrogate ours. It is a dilemma, this question of fidelity. Perhaps we need to begin with the conviction that there is something imperishable in these later plays before

450 Sean O'Casey

searching for new ways to release it into the idiom of modern staging. Yet without editing they stand little chance of revival in the twenty-first century.47 O'Casey as writer still remains at work in the world: his words, his characters, his situations are reflected wherever poverty and laughter and urban warfare exist, his vivid ashes in the Shelleyan wind forever. Ernest Blythe described him after his death as the greatest playwright Ireland has produced.48 His afterlife is assured. How it is to be interpreted and extended, however, is still an open question.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

A Abbey Berg Bible BL Burns CP DBA DKP GNRC ICA ICM ILS IRA IRB IT ITGWU Letters LTM NA NLI NYPL PTA Shakespeare SLOT SOC

SOCP SOCR TCD TLS UCD

Sean O'Casey, Autobiographies. 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1963) National Theatre Society Ltd (Abbey Theatre) Berg Collections of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations The edition cited is the Authorised King James Version British Library (London) University Archives, John J. Burns Library, Boston College Complete Plays of Sean O'Casey with Introduction by Ronald Ayling, 5 vols (London: Macmillan, 1984) Dublin Diocesan Archives David Krause Papers, uncatalogued, National Library of Ireland Great Northern Railway Company Irish Citizen Army Irish Church Missions Irish Literary Supplement Irish Republican Army Irish Republican Brotherhood Irish Times Irish Transport and General Workers' Union The Letters of Sean O'Casey, ed. David Krause. 4 vols, 1975-1992 London Theatre Museum National Archives, Dublin National Library of Ireland New York Public Library People's Theatre Archive, Newcastle upon Tyne The edition used throughout is the Arden, general editor Richard Proudfoot (London and New York: Methuen, University Paperbacks, 1963-82) Saint Laurence O'Toole's [Club] Sean O'Casey. He himself did not use the accented 'a' and it never appears on his title pages. However, its usage helps us to distinguish the writer from his creation 'Sean' in the autobiographies. The Sean O'Casey Papers, Collection List 75, MSS 37, 807-38,173, National Library of Ireland Sean O'Casey Review, ed. Robert Lowery Trinity College Dublin Times Literary Supplement University College Dublin

NOTES

Preconception (s) 1. See Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life. 2. John Gallagher to Irish Times, 12 June 2000. 3. Fintan O'Toole, 'O'Casey's hard lesson on war', Irish Times, 1 April 2003, p. 16. 4. Brian Friel, Selected Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 309-10. 5. Ibid., p. 295. 6. O'Connor, Biographers and the Art of Biography, p. 18. 7. SOC to William]. Maroldo, 10 Aug. 1962, in Letters, 4, 319. Maroldo was writing a doctoral dissertation on SOC's autobiographies. 8. SOC, Letters, 4, 401. The notion is strangely reminiscent of the Latin author Terence. But SOC knew no Latin and rather despised it. 9. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, was the first to query SOC's own version of his childhood poverty. 10. Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 102. The two preceding quotations are from pp. 41 and 72. 11. See John Canon Begley, The Diocese of Limerick in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1927; repr. Limerick: O'Brien-Toomey, 1993), pp. 184-87. 12. SOC, Under a Colored Cap, p. 159. 13. Anne Gregory, Me andNu: Childhood at Cook (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978), p. 84. 14. Although it might appear that Vladimir Nabokov was entirely at the opposite pole from SOC, as indeed he was socially and politically, his autobiography Speak, Memory (Harmsworth: Penguin 1969) shows in its processes and techniques a number of correspondences with O'Casey, whose cast of mind was haughty. 15. Breon O'Casey, 'Sean O'Casey: A Portrait', pp. 55-56. 16. Micheal O hAodha, The Enigma of Sean O'Casey', in The O'Casey Enigma, ed. O hAodha, pp. 112-24. 17. SOC to Levanthal, 10 Dec. 1955, in Letters, 3, 222-23. 18. Mary Manning Adams to CM, 29 Oct. 1997. As editor of the Gate Theatre magazine Motley in the 1930s she kept in touch with SOC. 19. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 129. 20. Shaw, Complete Plays with Prefaces, 1, 374. 21. This was the view of Ernest Blythe, who had nothing to do with the Abbey at the time, recorded on John Bowman's 'Saturday 8.30', RTE sound archives, 12 April 2003, programme celebrating 80th anniversary of The Shadow of a Gunman. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.T Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), p. 102. 23. The SOC Papers, Collection List 75, were acquired towards the end of 2001 and catalogued in 2003 as MS 37,807-38,173. The books, acquired in 2002, have not been catalogued at time of writing.

Notes to pages 1-17 453 24. 'My Friend O'Casey: Told by Jim Kavanagh to Anthony Coughlan', SOCR, 2.1 (Fall 1975), 58-61. Cf. Laura Smith, 'Literary Landmarks: Territory of trams and tenements', IT, 13 July 2002. 25. SOC to Ernest Blythe, 1 March 1964, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. This was the picture first included in and subsequently dropped from the first edition of The Plough and the Stars (1926). Chapter 1 1. Samuel Beckett, A Piece of Monologue, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber andFaber, 1986), p. 425. 2. W.R. Le Fanu, Seventy Years of Irish Life, Being Anecdotes and Reminiscences (2nd edn, London: Edward Arnold, 1893), p. 296. 3. So David Krause was told when he first visited Dublin in 1954; also that there had been no mixed marriage. Krause in conversation with CM, 29 July 1998. 4. Dallas, The Story of the Irish Church Missions, Part I, p. 60. 5. A.E. Hughes, Lift Up a Standard: The Centenary Story of the Society for Irish Church Missions (London: Irish Church Missions, 1948), p. 21. 6. Desmond Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800-70: A Study of Protestant-Catholic Relations Between the Act of Union and Disestablishment (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan; Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1978), p. 220. 7. SOC, Letters, 3, 637. 8. See Paschal A.E. Majerus, The Second Reformation in West-Galway: Alexander R. Dallas and the Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics, 1849-1859', MA Dissertation, UCD, 1991. 9. Dom Mark Tierney, Murroe and Boher: The History of an Irish Country Parish (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1965), p. 154. 10. Desmond Bowen, Souperism: Myth or Reality (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1970), p. 109. 11. The Variorum Edition of the Plays ofW.B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach and Catherine C. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 1044. The quotation from The Countess Cathleen is on p. 167. 12. N.D. Emerson, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, 'Notes on a Sermon' [on O'Casey, 15 November 1964], in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. S. McCann, p. 160. 13. SOC, Letters, 2, 1092. 14. Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, p. 8. 15. Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800-1925, p. 253, citing Second Annual Report of the Catholic Ragged Schools, May 1853. 16. Ibid., p. 125. 17. The Critical Writings of fames Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber 1959), p. 178. 18. 'Making good hypocrites out of bad Catholics' was a saying of Archbishop Daniel Murray (d. 1852), in his opposition to the work of the ICM. I owe this quotation to David Sheehy, archivist, DDA. 19. See Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey, p. 10. See also SOC, Letters, 4, 470. Unluckily, perhaps as a joke, he told the diarist Joseph Holloway at the Abbey in 1923 that he was once an Orangeman and a member of the Purple Lodge: see Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, ed. Hogan and O'Neill, p. 217. 20. At first reluctant to accept the point, David Krause was by 1977 willing to describe O'Casey as 'the child of lower middle-class parents', in SOCR, 3.2 (spring 1977), 131.

454 Chapters 1-2 21. Prunty, Dublin Slums, p. 2, emphasis added. Prunty is here quoting from the Dictionary of Human Geography (Oxford, 1994). See also Deirdre Henchy, 'Dublin in the Age of O'Casey: 1880-1910', in Essays on Sean 0'Casey's Autobiographies, ed. Lowery, pp. 35-61. 22. Mary Daly, 'A Tale of Two Cities', in Dublin Through the Ages, ed. Art Cosgrove (Dublin: College Press, 1988), p. 113. 23. Ibid., p. 116. 24. Norman White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 364-65. 25. Ibid., p. 455. 26. Prunty, Dublin Slums, p. 74. 27. Mary Daly, Dublin: The Deposed Capital, p. 277. See also Jacinta Prunty, 'From City Slums to City Sprawl: Dublin from 1800 to the Present', in Irish Cities, ed. Howard B. Clarke (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1995), pp. 109-21. A bad sewage system and the single-room tenement system were two main sources of malaise. 28. Daly, Dublin, p. 301. See also F.H.A. Aalen, 'Health and Housing in Dublin c.1850 to 1921', in Dublin City and County: From Prehistory to Present: Studies in Honour ofJ.H. Andrews, ed. F.H.A. Aalen and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1992), pp. 279-304. 29. Prunty, Dublin Slums, p. 45. 30. Bill Kelly, MeDarlinDublin's Dead and Gone (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1987), p. 2. 31. SOC, Letters, 1, 696. 32. Emerson, 'Notes on a Sermon', in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 159. 33. Linzi Simpson, 'An Architectural and Historical Appraisal of St Mary's Church, Mary Street, Dublin 1' (unpublished typescript, Dublin, 1998), p. 4. 34. Fin tan O'Toole, A Traitor's Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: Granta Books, 1998), p. 17. 35. Vivian Mercier, 'Victorian Evangelism and the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival', in Literature and the Changing Ireland, ed. Peter Connolly (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982), p. 87. 36. See Kenneally, Portraying the Self, pp. 69-73, 216. 37. SOCP in NLI. 38. Selected Poems of James Clarence Mangan: Bicentenary Edition, ed. Jacques Chuto et al (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003), pp. 238-39. 39. By way of excusing his error he later constructed a story of a French production of one of his plays necessitating membership of the French Society of Authors; in turn, he explained, he had to provide a copy of his birth certificate, which then revealed the true date. SOC, Letters, 3, 533. It was when SOC was claiming rebate of income tax in March 1955 and the Controleur General required official notice of his date of birth that he 'found' the documentary evidence. But in 1911 he had filled in the Casey census form giving his age correctly. 40. Aine Hyland and Kenneth Milne, eds, Irish Educational Documents, vol. 1 (Dublin: Church of Ireland College of Education, 1987), p. 128. See also John Coolahan, Irish Education: Its History and Structure (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1981), pp. 28-29. 41. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, p. 14. Compare SOC, 'R.I.P.', in A, 1, 56. 42. The Fiftieth Report of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland (for the Year 1889) (Dublin: Alexander Thorn, 1890), p. 326. For Bella's examination results I am indebted to Martin Margulies: these results are no longer available from the Department of Education.

Notes to pages 17-36 455 43. W.G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre (London: Rich and Cowan, 1935), p. 29. 44. Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches, p. 22. 45. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: Volume 1: 1856-1898: The Search for Love (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), p. 36. 46. See Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, pp. 112-13. 47. SOC, unpublished MS, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 15, Berg. Cf. The Dog', in SOC, Blasts and Benedictions, ed. Ayling, pp. 302-08. 48. Minutes, Irish Church Missions, item 7254, dated 28 Jan. 1886, Bachelor's Walk, Dublin. I am indebted to Rev. William Bridcott for his assistance. His comment was: 'to get into the Minute Books you would nearly have had to do something wrong,' for even the founder Alexander Dallas got but a few lines when he died. 49. Minutes, item 7278, 25 Feb. 1886, Bachelor's Walk. This item was signed by General Lawder, presumably the Dublin Director of ICM. 50. SOC, 'His Da, His Poor Da', A, 1, 27, italics added. 51. SOC, Unpublished MS, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 15, Berg. See also A, 1, 62. 52. SOC's school records were transcribed by Martin Margulies in 1965 at the Department of Education, Marlborough Street. I am grateful to him for copies. Chapter 2 1. Information supplied by Joe Langtry, coordinator, Mount Jerome Historical Project, Jan. 1998. The perpetuity no. was 7166 for the Casey plot, A247, grave 35. The plot is now unmarked. 2. Details of John Casey's school records copied in 1965 from the Department of Education files on Examination Rolls and Promotion Sheets. Copies courtesy Martin Margulies. 3. Krause, ed., The Letters of Sean O'Casey, 1, xiii. 4. Quoted by Gearoid Crookes, Dublin's Eye & Ear: The Making of a Monument (Dublin: Town House, 1993), pp. 18-19. 5. Crookes, Dublin's Eye & Ear, p. 19. 6. SOC, Letters, 2, 404. 7. SOC, A, 1, 12. 8. Gearoid Crookes to CM, 12 Dec. 1997. 9. 'My mind's eye, like my body's, was "normal": it saw things differently from other people's eyes, and saw them better.' Bernard Shaw, preface to Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, in Complete Plays with Prefaces, 3, x. 10. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 15, Berg. A different version appears in Autobiographies, 'Hail Smiling Morn', where Ella soliloquises over the issue a la Molly Bloom, 1,63. 11. These and the following details of Bella Casey's teaching career derive from Department of Education records, copies of which were supplied by Martin Margulies. 12. Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly, p. 16. Greaves mistakenly describes the uniform as dark green: it was scarlet. 13. The New Army List, Militia List, Yeomanry Cavalry List, and Indian Civil Service List (London: John Murray, 1888), p. 244. 14. I am grateful to Glenn Thompson, army archivist, Dublin, for this detail and for other details of Irish regiments. 15. SOC, draft MS of I Knock at the Door, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 9, Berg. 16. James Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 32. Although Murphy is discussing the perception of

456 Chapters 2-3 respectability from the viewpoint of Roman Catholic authors there is no reason to believe that the protestant point of view was any more lenient in Victorian times in Dublin. 17. Brinsley MacNamara, The Valley of the Squinting Windows (Tralee: Anvil Books, 1964), p. 169. 18. Aine Hyland and Kenneth Milne, eds, Irish Educational Documents, vol. 1 (Dublin: Church of Ireland College of Education, 1987), pp. 119-20, italics in original. 19. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, dated April 1929, vol. 9, Berg. The subsequent quotations are also from this source. 20. Arthur Garrett, From Age to Age: History of the Parish of Drumcondra North Strand St Barnabas (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Blackrock Printers, 1970), p. 127. 21. Simpson, 'O'Casey and the East Wall Area in Dublin', 41. 22. E.M. Griffin, 'Analysis of Church Population of St Barnabas' Parish', MS, dated 24 November 1900, Representative Church Body Library, Dublin. 23. Bridget Heffernan ['Reminiscences'], Larriers, Newssheet project for St Laurence O'Toole's Parish, ed. Terry Fagan and Diarmuid G. Hiney (1998), p. 16. 'Larriers' is Dublinese for St Laurence's. 24. Jack Kelly, Larriers, p. 20. 25. James Kavanagh, Larriers, p. 18. 26. Des MacNaboe, Larriers, p. 26. 27. 'Teacher's manner is gentle, and seems to suit the young children well.' District Inspector Sullivan's report on Isabella Casey, 3 February 1888, 'District Inspector's Observation Book, St Mary's N.S., (Dublin, 1883)', copy supplied by Martin Margulies. 28. John Jordan, The Passionate Autodidact'. 29. SOC, Three More Plays (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. 232. This edition, corrected from earlier editions, is the most authoritative for Red Roses for Me. 30. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 9, Berg. 31. Cited by David Krause, 'Towards the End', in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 148. See also Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, p. 296. 32. Krause, 'Towards the End', p. 149; Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, p. 296. 33. Lady Gregory's Journals, vol. 1, ed. Daniel J. Murphy (1978 edn), pp. 548-49. SOC went on to tell Lady Gregory that a second such book, Little Crowns and How to Win Them, 'gave him a turn against books'. 34. SOC to William J. Maroldo, 9 April 1962, in Letters, 4, 298. 35. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 198. 36. Maxim Gorky, My Childhood, trans. Ronald Wilks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 217. 37. Shaw, preface to Major Barbara, in Complete Plays and Prefaces, 1, 305. 38. SOC, Draft MS of Pictures in the Hallway, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 16, Berg. 39. SOC to Eric Gorman, 30 Aug. 1951, in Letters, 2, 822. 40. W.G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre (London: Rich and Cowan, 1935), p. 52. 41. Ciara A. O'Farrell, 'A Playwright's Journey: A Critical Biography of Louis D'Alton (1900-1951)', PhD Dissertation, UCD, 1998, p. 18. 42. SOC, A, 1, 298. Wolsey's lines of warning to Cromwell against ambition were already familiar from the anthology (probably Bella's) which became one of John's mainstays in his self-education. See SOC, Letters, 4, 298-99. 43. SOC to Anne Elistratrova, 19 March 1958, in Letters, 3, 567. See also Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (2 vols, London: Heinemann, 1906), 2, 208. SOC also saw Frank Benson's company in Shakespeare at the Theatre Royal, when Isaac worked there: see Letters, 4, 467.

Notes to pages 36-51 457 44. Richard Fawkes, Dion Boucicault: A Biography (London: Quartet Books, 1979), p. 29. 45. Andrew Parkin, ed., Selected Plays of Dion Boucicault (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987), p. 18. 46. See David Krause, ed., The Dolmen Boucicault (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1964), pp. 43-46. Krause dedicated this anthology to SOC. 47. In an unpublished article SOC says he acted not only in The Shaughraun (both Corry Kinchela and Father Dolan) but also in The Colleen Bawn (Danny Mann and Myles na Copaleen). SOC, 'Articles: Ireland: 7 Typescripts: Abbey Theatre', p. 6, Berg. 48. SOC, 'Articles: Ireland: 7 Typescripts: The Abbey Theatre', p. 12, Berg. 49. See Eugene Waiters and Matthew Murtagh, Infinite Variety: Dan Lowrey's Music Hall 1879-97 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1975), pp. 112-74. Cf. p. 286 below. 50. Walt, Joyce, O'Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater, pp. 143-87. 51. See Cheryl Herr, For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890-1925 (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1991), pp. 3-74. See also Seamus de Burca, The Queen's Theatre Royal, Dublin, 1829-1969 (Dublin: Seamus de Burca, 1983). 52. SOC, Letters, 4, 53-54. 53. Robinson, Ireland's Abbey Theatre, p. 42. See also Peter Kavanagh, The Irish Theatre (Tralee: The Kerryman, 1946), pp. 388, 391. 54. R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, 1: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1997), p. 59. Jack Yeats's picture is in the Abbey Theatre. 55. Cited in Robinson, Ireland's Abbey Theatre, p. 42. For a reproduction of Jack Yeats's picture of the Mechanics' Theatre see O hAodha, Pictures at the Abbey, p.15. 56. See Kavanagh, The Story of the Abbey Theatre (1984 edn), Appendix D, pp. 213-22. 57. Ciara A. O'Farrell, 'A Playwright's Journey: A Critical Biography of Louis D'Alton', PhD Dissertation, UCD, 1998, p. 21. Dalton's marriage certificate gives this precise date and location (St Joseph's Church, Berkeley Road). In later years Dal ton showed no friendliness towards O'Casey, although his son Louis, the playwright and travelling player, was a correspondent. 58. Frank Fay, Towards a National Theatre: The Dramatic Criticism of Frank J. Fay, ed. Robert Hogan (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970), p. 18. Chapter 3 1. Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches, p. 76. 2. Shaw, preface, Back to Methuselah, in Complete Plays with Prefaces, 2, Ixxxi. 3. Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches, p. 76. 4. John Donne, 'On a huge hill,/Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will/Reach her, about must, and about must goe;'. In John Donne: A Selection of His Poetry, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 107. 5. When St Barnabas's church was closed £.1962 it seems all records were dumped. 6. SOC, A, 1, 234. Cf. Samuel Beckett, The Compete Dramatic Works (London, Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 143, 'Wanted bright boy.' 7. SOC to Harry Cowdell, 22 July 1949, in Letters, 2, 625. 8. SOC, A, 1, 288. The book was possibly Sheridan Knowles's anthology The Elocutionist, first published in 1821 but reissued all through the nineteenth century. SOC had used some such anthology for his study of key speeches in Shakespeare. 9. SOC, To Him That Shall Be Given', in Pictures in the Hallway. 10. Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 5. 11. SOC, draft MS of autobiograpies, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 16, Berg. 12. On the 1901 census night only one of the Shields children was present at 4 Abercorn

458 Chapters 3-4 Road: Denis, 17, a general labourer like his father Patrick. National Archives, Dublin. Cf. SOC, A, 1, 310. 13. SOC, draft MS of autobiographies, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 16, Berg. 14. PJ. Mathews, Revival, p. 66. 15. Donal P. McCracken, The Irish Pro-Boers 1877-1902 (Johannesburg: Peskor, 1989), p. 155. 16. James H. Murphy, Abject Loyalty, p. 276. 17. C.F. Romer and A.E. Mainwaring, The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War, with a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland (London: A.L. Humphreys, 1908), p. vii. See also Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, p. 33. 18. Cited by Mathews, Revival, p. 69. 19. Garry O'Connor, Sean O'Casey: A Life, p. 37. 20. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972, pp. 448, 433. 21. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 16, Berg. 22. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 20, Berg. 23. Verney, The Micks, p. 2. See also Leonard Condren, 'Marching Irish Guards', letter to Irish Times, 17 March 2000, p. 15. I am grateful to Dr Condren for assistance on this point. 24. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, p. 34. 25. See Joseph Holloway's Irish Theatre, vol. 1 (1926-1931), ed. Hogan and O'Neill, p. 37. 26. Census forms, Abercorn Road, Dublin, 1901, NA. SOC added that three doors down was a pub owned by a Mr Nolan, who owned the houses. Nolan went bankrupt and the houses passed to a Mr Crowe, who lived in Church Street: he was an ex-constabulary man. At the back of Abercorn Road, on Church Street, was Brady's, a pub which was also a general store: here the Caseys bought their milk. SOC to Robert Emmett Ginna, 17 Aug. 1953, in Letters, 2, 985. 27. MS, 'St Barnabas", Representative Church Body Library, Dublin, Box D/6. 28. SOC, Letters, 4, 340. 29. E. Keith Eason to Saros Cowasjee, 26 May 1958, Cowasjee/O'Casey Papers, University of Regina, Saskatchewan. 30. SOC to Fletcher, 1 Dec. 1941, in Letters, 1, 911-12. Also Fletcher to SOC, 18 Dec. 1941, SOCP in NLI. Margulies testifies that the (lost) Vestry minute books for St Barnabas's contained no record of the supposed struggle between Fletcher and the members of the Orange Order in the parish, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, p. 32. 31. Quoted in Stjohn Baptist, Clontarf, Centenary Record 1866-1966, pp. 9-10.1 am grateful to Rev. Thomas Haskin for providing a copy of this Record and for showing me around his church. 32. Canon Arthur Henry Fletcher to SOC, 18 Dec. 1941, SOCP in NLI. 33. SOC to Canon Fletcher, 1 Dec. 1941, in Letters, 1, 911. 34. Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, p. 21. 35. Arthur Garrett, From Age to Age: History of the Parish of Drumcondra North Strand St Barnabas (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Blackrock Printers, 1970), p. 134. 36. Parish of St Barnabas Annual Report, 31 December 1899, in Representative Church Body Library, Dublin. 37. James Joyce, Exiles (London: New English Library, 1952), p. 31. 38. Cited by Krause, 'Towards the End', in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 149. 39. Parish of St Barnabas Annual Report [31 Dec.] 1902, in Representative Church Body Library. Among the 33 collectors, SOC's collection was high but was beaten by Rev. Griffin's elder daughter, who made £3-2s. 9d.

Notes to pages 51-69 459 40. Very Rev. N.D. Emerson, 'Notes on a Sermon', in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 161, emphasis added. 41. Garrett, From Age to Age, p. 130. Chapter 4 1. Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, p. 21. 2. Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 182. 3. SOC, Three More Plays (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. 251. 4. Ayling, Continuity and Innovation in Sean O'Casey's Drama, p. 175. 5. Breon O'Casey to CM, 5 Jan. 1998. Breon also said in this letter that SOC had 'a better eye' than any other major Irish writer, 'with the exception of George Moore'. 6. Insurance Policy for John Casey, 4 Abercorn Road, Prudential Assurance Cop., 26 Dec. 1899, no. 54515119, SOCP in NLI. The policy was worth £8-6s. in 1-5 years. It was never encashed, and in Jan. 1955 SOC was informed that the bonus additions were worth £3-16s. 6d. 7. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 16, Berg. 8. SOC to Lovat Dickson, 8 July 1945, in Letters, 2, 276. 9. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, pp. 38-39. 10. Fergus A. D'Arcy, 'Wages of Skilled Workers in the Dublin Building Industry, 1667-1918', Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society, 15 (1990), 35. 11. SOC, untitled MS, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 10, Berg. 12. SOC, 'Nation-builders of Babylon', Articles. Autobiographical: four typescripts, unsigned and undated, no. 4, Berg. 13. Ulick O'Connor, Brendan Behan, p. 79; Colbert Kearney, The Writings of Brendan Behan (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1977), pp. 46-49. 14. Dunleavy and Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde, p. 209. 15. Ibid., p. 210. 16. Proinsias Mac Aonghusa, 'Sean O'Casey and the Gaelic League', Zozimus, 3 (1994), 16. 17. SOC to Leo Keogh, 12 Oct. 1953, Letters, 2, 1,000. 18. This is the version Micheal O hAodha handed down to Tomas Mac Anna at the Abbey Theatre, as relayed to CM 30 June 1998. Another version credits SOC alone with killing the bird (a sparrow): see Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, ed. Hogan and O'Neill, p. 228. On the other hand, one of his old companions remembered SOC as 'a slow slogging hurler', which may be a compliment. Eamon O'Connor to SOC, 15 Jan. 1945, SOCP in NLI. 19. De Blaghd, Trasna na Boinne, p. 132 (my translation). Both men took instruction in catholic doctrine but 'fell apart on Transubstantiation' according to Patrick Laffan, Abbey actor, quoting Blythe, in conversation, 20 Feb. 1998. 20. De Blaghd, Trasna na Boinne, p. 106 (my translation). 21. Ibid., p. 113. 22. SOC to David Krause, 24 Sept. 1949, unpublished, courtesy Prof. Krause. 23. Dunleavy and Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde, pp. 319-20. 24. Newspaper clipping, 'The Abbey Players in Belfast', Blythe Papers, Archives Dept, UCD, P24/2528. 25. De Blaghd, Trasna na Boinne, p. 133, with additional details from Blythe Papers, Archives Dept, UCD, P24/2051, pp. 8-10. Also, Francis J. Kelly to SOC, 16 May 1946, SOCP in NLI. 26. SOC, MS, Collection 325, Box 1, Folder 16, Special Collections, UCLA. Published in Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, pp. 78-79, and in Letters, 4, 93-94.

460 Chapters 4-5 27. SOC to Franklin D. Murphy, 14Jan. 1960, in Letters, 4, 93. Murphy, president of UCLA, was a collector. 28. SOC, MS, Collection 325, Box 1, Folder 16, Dept of Special Collections, UCLA. The poem is reproduced in full in Letters, 4, 94-95. 29. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, pp. 41, 37. Yet the IRB was a secret organisation. 30. SOC to David Krause, 2 Nov. 1954, in Letters, 2, 1103. 31. SOC to David Krause, 7 Oct. 1957, in Letters, 3, 473. 32. SOC to John H. Hutchinson, 10 Sept. 1953, in Letters, 2, 989. 33. SOC to Tom Sutton, 10 Jan. 1958, in Letters, 3, 521. 34. John H. Hutchinson to SOC, 15 Sept. 1953, SOCP in NLI. Hutchinson had been in the IRB. 35. See SOC, Letters, 2, 129, 991, 995. 36. Risteard O Glaisne, 'Seoirse O h-Eireamhoin', unpublished typescript. I am grateful to 6 Glaisne for loaning this typescript and for discussing with me in Dec. 1997 the issue of protestants in the Gaelic League in SOC's time. 37. Following Blythe's death in 1975 the president of the Gaelic League released the details of this circular, Irish Times, 25 Feb. 1975, p. 6. 38. De Blaghd, Trasna na Boinne, p. 128. Also SOC to Irish Times, 25 Nov. 1941, in Letters, 1,909. 39. De Blaghd, Trasna na Boinne, p. 130 (my translation). 40. W.P. Ryan, The Irish Labour Movement from the 'Twenties to Our Own Day (Dublin: Talbot Press, n.d. [1919]), p. 139. 41. Cited in the first issue of the new publication, The Peasant and Irish Ireland, 9 Feb. 1907, p. 1. See also Brian Inglis, 'Moran of the Leader and Ryan of the Irish Peasant', in The Shaping of Modern Ireland, ed. Cruise O'Brien, pp. 116-18. 42. Leon O Broin, The Chief Secretary: Augustine Birrell in Ireland (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 15. 43. SOC to Gabriel Fallen, 23 May 1942, in Letters, 2, 59. 44. SOC, 'Sound the Loud Trumpet,' repr. in Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, p. 5. 45. SOC, 'Preface', Windfalls: Stories, Poems, and Plays, p. v. 46. SOC to Rex MacGall, 25 May 1955, in Letters, 3, 144. 47. See Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, pp. 23-25. O'Casey took an active interest in Dr O'Hickey's controversial career, dedicating Drums under the Windows to him with ten lines of encomium. See also Lucy McDiarmid, The Man Who Died for the Language'. 48. SOC, 'A Conversation with Robert Emmett Ginna', NBC Television, 29 Dec. 1955, Berg. 49. Donal P. McCracken, The Irish Pro-Boers 1877-1902 (Johannesburg: Peskor, 1989), p. 167. At the time it was described as 'an unusually effective design', Irish Builder and Engineer, 20 April 1907, p. 280. The architect was J. Howard Pentland, RHA. 50. Freeman's Journal, 20 Aug. 1907, p. 5. 51. 'Fortissimis suis militibus hoc monumentum Eblana dedicavit.' The lines were cited with enthusiasm by the Irish Times next day, 20 Aug. 1907, p. 6, stressing that the monument was erected 'by the gratitude of loyal Dublin to the splendid valour of the city's own regiment in the late South African War'. In short, the funds were raised by public subscription. 52. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, p. 39. 53. SOC, A, 1, 449; prior quotation, p. 448. 54. Joseph Reynolds, Grangegorman: Psychiatric Care in Dublin since 1815 (Dublin: IPA/ Eastern Health Board, 1992), p. 198.

Notes to pages 70-83 461 55. Samuel Beckett, More Pncks Than Kicks [1934] (London: Calder, 1993), p. 34. 56. Records of Mount Jerome Cemetery. Nicholas Beaver was buried on 12 Nov. 1907, his age given as 35, the cause of death as 'paralysis of brain'. The register was signed by Michael Casey. 57. 6 Broin, The Chief Secretary, p. 33. 58. McHugh, '"Always Complainin"", 91. 59. I owe this anecdote to Tomas Mac Anna, who knew Blythe well at the Abbey Theatre. 60. SOC to Sinn Fein, 2 April 1910, in Letters, 1, 921. 61. Bulmer Hobson to Martin Margulies, 11 March 1968, courtesy Prof. Margulies. 62. Desmond Ryan, Remembering Sion: A Chronicle of Storm and Quiet (London: Arthur Barker, 1934), pp. 82, 84. 63. SOC to Robert Hogan, 9 Nov. 1962, in Letters, 4, 336. 64. Sean O'Rourke to SOC, 1 Jan. 1948, SOCP in NLI. 65. Robinson, Selected Plays, p. 56. 66. 'Census of Ireland, 1911', 18 Abercorn Road, Dublin, NA. This census return makes clear that the Caseys had only two rooms. The 1901 census ascribed three. Chapter 5 1. Francis Devine, 'Larkin and the ITGWU, 1909-1912', in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 33. 2. Leon O Broin, The Chief Secretary: Augustine Birrell in Ireland (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 73. 3. James Plunkett, 'Big Jim: A Loaf on the Table, a Flower in the Vase', in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 115. Cf. W.P. Ryan, The Irish Labour Movement: From the 'Twenties to Our Own Day (Dublin: Talbot Press, n.d. [1919]), p. 170. 'He was a legend in less than a year.' 4. Philip S. Bagwell, The Railwaymen: The History of the National Union of Railwaymen (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), p. 305. 5. Emmet Larkin, James Larkin, p. 81. 6. SOC, Letters, 1, 10-13. This correspondence was published in the Irish Worker (ed. Larkin), 9 March 1912. The original letters are in Berg. 7. SOC, Letters, 1, 10, n. 2. Krause here says that SOC had been 'overheard attacking the working conditions [. . .] and praising Jim Larkin' (my emphasis). 8. Engineer H.A. Whieldon's report on SOC, files of GNRC. I am indebted to Martin Margulies for a copy of this file. See also Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, pp. 52-54. 9. SOC, 5 Jan. 1912, in Letters, 1, 12, emphasis added. A sleeveen is 'a sly person; a trickster; a smooth-tongued rogue; a toady; a crooked person', Dolan, A Dictionary of Hiberno-English. 10. SOC, Three More Plays, p. 297, italics added. 11. One piece, 'Dowzard: The Hector of the Quays', Irish Worker, 20 Dec. 1913, p. 1, actually carried a disclaimer from Larkin: 'it is written by a valued contributor, who assures us he takes full responsibility for the statements and tone of this article.' It was a settling of an old score with an Orangeman in St Barnabas's parish. Years later, when Robert Hogan was collecting pieces for Feathers from the Green Crow, SOC asked him not to reprint this article, Letters, 4, 215. 12. See Wren, Saint Laurence OToole's G.A.C. 1901-2001 for an excellent account of the club. See also SOC, Letters, 2, 990. 13. Proinsias Mac Aonghusa, 'Sean O'Casey and the Gaelic League', Zozimus, 3 (1994), 25. See also his Ar Son na Gaeilge: Conradh na Gaeilge 1893-1993: Stair Seanchas (Dublin: Conradh na Gaeilge, 1993).

462 Chapter 5 14. SOC, A, 1, 427. The band's first outing in full costume was for the O'Toole's Club annual ceilidhe in Clontarf Town Hall on 16 March 1911. SOC contributed to the singing on this occasion. Wren, Saint Laurence OToole G.A.C., p. 9. 15. SOC to Sean O'Rourke, 12 Dec. 1955, SOCP in NLI. O'Rourke was to join the Volunteers, as did many of the St Laurence O'Toole men, and fight in the 1916 Rising. 16. Terry Fagan and Diarmuid G. Hiney, Landers, Newssheet project for St Laurence O'Toole's Parish, 1998, p. 38. 17. Quoted in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 166. 18. What is believed to be the set of bagpipes owned or at any rate used by SOC was bought at auction in Dublin in 1952-53 and is now in the possession of Colman O'Carroll, Manor Street. Made by Simms, a Scotsman, in the 1890s, the pipes are of cocus [caulked?] wood and walnut, with 'chalice' drones fashionable in Ireland two hundred years earlier but uncommon at this time. The bag was in a poor state in 1953 and had to be remade. 19. SOC to Frank Henderson, 19 Aug. 1912, courtesy Mr Ruairi Henderson. SOC had written also on 11 Aug. See also Michael Hopkinson, ed., Frank Henderson's Easter Rising: Recollections of a Dublin Volunteer (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998). SOC's attempt to induct Henderson into the IRB failed, p. 25. 20. SOC to Frank Henderson, in Irish (my translation), undated, presumably 1912, courtesy Mr Ruairi Henderson. 21. The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 171. 22. The column, headed Tone's Grave' (p. 2), is signed in one of SOC's pseudonyms, Craobh na nDealg, 'the Thorny Branch', a parody of Douglas Hyde's penname. SOC's ardent republicanism is clear from this short piece. See also Irish Worker, 24 May 1913, p. 3, for a similarly passionate display. 23. Edwards, Patrick Pearse, p. 161. SOC said later (in 1936) that he had helped organise the meeting at which Pearse delivered one of the famous speeches used in The Plough and the Stars. See Letters, 1, 619. 24. In a plug he gave to Pearse's pageant, 'The Defence of the Ford', in the Irish Worker, 7 June 1913, p. 2, SOC concluded: 'We bow to you, A Phadraig, but we will not pass on. Our hopes are your hopes; your work shall be our work; we shall stand or fall together. Scoil Enna for Ireland, Ireland for Scoil Enna, amen, a Thighearna!' 25. Pat Cooke, Sceal Scoil Eanna: The Story of an Educational Adventure (Dublin: Office of Public Works, 1986), pp. 35-40. 26. SOC, A, 1, 617. See also Patrick Pearse, The Murder Machine', in Collected Works of PddraicH. Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches (Dublin: Phoenix Publishing, 1924), p. 21. 27. Mitchell, The Essential O'Casey, p. 19. 28. Fergus D'Arcy, 'Larkin and the Dublin Lock-Out', in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 38. 29. SOC, The Gathering', Irish Worker, 27 Sept. 1913, p. 4. This piece, and a number of others from the Irish Worker, may be found in Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan (pp. 47-50). 30. Padraig Yeates, Lockout, p. x. 31. Handel Booth, MP, cited in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 186. It was Casimir Markievicz who termed the occasion 'Bloody Sunday', Yeates, Lockout, p. 69. 32. Arnold Wright, cited in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 184. 33. Larkin's address, The Askwith Enquiry', in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 196. 34. Connolly, Labour in Ireland, p. 329. 35. jE's open letter To the Masters of Dublin' was reprinted in the Irish Worker, 11 Oct. 1913, p. 1.

Notes to pages 83-91 463 36. W.B. Yeats, 'Dublin Fanaticism', Irish Worker, I Nov. 1913, p. 2. The poet James Stephens also wrote to the Irish Worker, 'Come Off That Fence!', 13 Dec. 1913, p. 1. 37. Connolly, speaking at the demonstration to support Larkin on his release, told the workers they were now 'in a state of war'. See Yeates, Lockout, p. 394. 38. James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 259. See also Fox, The History of the Irish Citizen Army, pp. 63-64. 39. SOC, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, p. 71. 40. In the Irish Worker, SOC had two columns on ICA activities, sometimes signed and sometimes not. See Robert G. Lowery, 'Sean O'Casey and the Irish Worker (with an index, 1911-14)', in O'Casey Annual, 3 (1984), 33-114. It is clear from these columns that SOC was active every week on official business of the ICA. 41. S. O Cathasaigh, 'An Open Letter to Workers in the Volunteers', Irish Worker, 24 Jan. 1914, p. 2. Reprinted in Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, pp. 101-03. 42. Sean O'Cathasaigh, 'Volunteers and Workers', Irish Worker, 21 Feb. 1914, p. 1; repr. in Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, pp. 103-08 (p. 107). 43. SOC to Horace Reynolds, 6 Feb. 1938, in Letters, 1, 697. 44. During the lock-out Griffith and Sinn Fein sided with the Dublin bourgeois press. Socialists and republicans could see this, as Ben Levitas has remarked in The Theatre of Nation, p. 209: 'They could look from Murphy to Griffith and from Griffith back to Murphy and see small distinction.' See also Yeates, Lockout, pp. 352-57. 45. See O'Faolain, Constance Markievicz, pp. 197-98; Marreco, The Rebel Countess, pp. 180-82; Anne Haverty, Constance Markievicz: An Independent Life (London: Pandora Press, 1988), pp. 120-21. For an excellent contextual account of O'Casey's politics at this time see John Newsinger, '"In the Hunger-Cry of the Nation's Poor is Heard the Voice of Ireland": Sean O'Casey and Politics 1908-1916', Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985), 221-40. 46. De Blaghd, Sldn le hUltaibh, p. 9. It should be noted that Markievicz did not at first (14 July) accuse SOC but Mick Mullen of calling her 'a spy & an informer' when she wrote, presumably to Larkin ('Dear Sir'), to complain and to offer to answer the charges. William O'Brien Papers, MS 15,673(2), NLI. Presumably, she knew well enough who her main enemy was. 47. P. O'Cathasaigh [SOC], The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, p. 46. Also, Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, p. 221. 48. Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, pp. 19-20. 49. Fox, The History of the Irish Citizen Army, p. 73. It may have been as simple as William O'Brien claimed: SOC lost the vote 8 - 7 at the first meeting and a general meeting then 'upheld' Markievicz. MS 15,673 (Part 9), NLI. 50. Greaves, Sean O'Casey: Politics and Art, p. 70. 51. Yeates, Lockout, p. 626, n. 15. 52. SOC to G.A. Hayes-McCoy, 31 Oct. 1954, in Letters, 2,1099-1101. SOC insisted that the original design of the flag was on a blue background, whereas the surviving flag, now in the Collins Barracks Museum, has a green background. Greaves, Sean O'Casey: Politics and Art, p. 74, supports SOC's recollection. 53. SOC, Niall: A Lament, p. 55. 54. O'Hickey, a professor of Irish in Maynooth, was elected vice-president of the Gaelic League in 1903 and took a particular interest in the question of compulsory Irish in the new university system then evolving. In favour of compulsory Irish he was collectively opposed by the bishops and sacked from his job, took his case to Rome and spent fruitless years trying to vindicate himself. He became a hero to O'Casey, who fulsomely

464 Chapters 5-6 dedicated Drums Under the Windows to him, 'Gael of Gaels'. See Padraig Eric Mac Fhinn, An tAthair Michedl R 6 hlceadha (Dublin: Sairseal agus Dill, 1974). For an excellent account of the controversy see Lucy McDiarmid, The Man Who Died for the Language'. 55. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean 0'Casey, p. 61. 56. SOC to Gerard Fay, 23 Jan. 1959, in Letters, 4, 13. 57. Batt O'Connor, TD, With Michael Collins in the Fight for Irish Independence (London: Peter Davies, 1929), pp. 17-18. 58. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, ed. Hogan and O'Neill, p. 247. 59. Holloway, cited by Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 18. 60. Ronald Ayling, 'Portrait of the Artist as a Slum Guttersnipe', O'Casey Annual, 1 (1982), 10-11. 61. O'Connor, Sean O'Casey: A Life, pp. 86-87. The cause may have been bovine TB from infected milk. 62. Rev. R. Saunderson Griffin (son of E.M. Griffin) to SOC, 5 June 1946, SOCP in NLI. 63. SOC, Letters, 4, 255. 64. Dungan, Irish Voices from the Great War, p. 51. 65. Meenan, St Vincent's Hospital 1834-1994, p. 77. For a full account of Richard Francis Tobin (1843-1919) see T.T. O'Farrell's memoir in A Century of Service: The Record of One Hundred Years [...] ofSt Vincent's Hospital (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1934), pp. 88-95. 66. Brian Barton, From Behind a Closed Door: Secret Court Martial Records of the 1916 Easter Rising (Belfast: Blackstaff, 2002), p. 290. 67. Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, The Splendid Years (Dublin: James Duffy, 1955), p. 140. 68. SOC to Saros Cowasjee, 23 Oct. 1958, courtesy of Prof. Cowasjee, University of Regina. 69. Abbey Theatre Archive, courtesy Mairead Delaney. Profit and Loss is mentioned in a letter from SOC to writer Arnold Perl, 12 Oct. 1956, whom SOC was trying to dissuade from adapting / Knock at the Door. 'A lot of work is done by all writers that goes for nothing. I myself wrote FROST IN THE FLOWER, HARVEST FESTIVAL, CRIMSON IN THE TRI-COLOR, and PROFIT AND LOSS, years and years of work, yet none of these plays ever saw a glimpse of any stage. We all go through this sort of thing.' Krause Papers, NLI. 70. Barney Conway (a fellow labourer) to SOC, 24 May 1962, SOCP in NLI. Lady Gregory's Workhouse Ward had its premiere at the Abbey 20 April 1908. 71. Delia Larkin in interview, 'A Woman's Way', Irish Worker, 21 March 1914, p. 2. 72. Information supplied by Theresa Moriarty, archivist, Irish Labour History Museum, Dublin. Also, Delia Larkin in interview, 'A Woman's Way', Irish Worker, 21 March 1914, p. 2. 73. Theresa Moriarty, 'Delia Larkin: Relative Obscurity', in James Larkin, ed. Nevin (pp. 428-38), p. 432. The official name remained the Irish Workers' Dramatic Company, or Club. See also O'Riordan, Next to the Revolution, pp. 19-20. 74. Unsigned, 'English Tour of the Irish Workers' Dramatic Company and Concert Party', Irish Worker, 7 March 1914, p. 2. Delia Larkin wrote the report on Manchester the following week, Irish Worker, 14 March 1914, p. 2. 75. Yeats said Wilson had a Belfast background. See Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, 2, 8. 76. Levitas, The Theatre of Nation, p. 202. 77. A. Patrick Wilson, Victims and Poached: Liberty Hall Plays No. 1 (Dublin: Liberty Hall, n.d. [c.!916]),p. 15. 78. See Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, pp. 88-100. 79. Robert Hogan et al, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (revised edn, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 1253.

Notes to pages 91-102 465 80. Hogan and Burnham, The Rise of the Realists 1910-1915, p. 342. 81. Levitas, The Theatre of Nation, p. 218. The Slough: A Play in Three Acts, by A. Patrick Wilson', Add. MS 1914/35, LC 3059, British Library. 82. Ernest A. Bendall, report on The Slough', Lord Chamberlain's Office, 30 Nov. 1914, LC 3059, British Library. The licence was granted on 7 Dec. 83. Ben Levitas considers that SOC's 'elision' of the Slough from his memoirs was likely to be a result of 'anxieties of influence', in 'Plumbing the Depths', 145. 84. SOC, The Harvest Festival (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980). This play will be examined in the next chapter. On the question of setting, it is to be noted that one of the Dublin reviewers of The Slough said the only other play before Wilson's to use a tenement setting was 'a little propagandist play' by Susanne Rouvier Day staged by the I.R.L. in 1914. See Hogan and Burnham, The Rise of the Realists, p. 345. Nothing is known of this play, and Day remains one of the many neglected women playwrights of the Irish theatre. 85. Fox, The History of the Irish Citizen Army, p. 107. 86. Hogan and Burnham, The Art of the Amateur 1916-1920, p. 275. 87. Ibid., p. 276. 88. The Workers'Republic, 19 Feb. 1916, cited by O'Riordan, Next to the Revolution, p. 29. 89. See Ritschel, 'James Connolly's Under Which Flag, 1916'. 90. James Connolly, Under Which Flag?, MS 13, 945, NLI. In what follows quotations are followed by page references to this text. 91. Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, 'Under Which Flag? -James Connolly's Patriotic Play', Workers' Republic, 8 April 1916, repr. in O'Riordan, Next to the Revolution, p. 30. 92. Levitas, The Theatre of Nation, p. 225. 93. SOC, A, 1, 646. See also Letters, 2, 438, where SOC dismisses Connolly's play as 'a terrible, silly, sentimental thing'. 94. P. O Cathasaigh [SOC], The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, p. 55. 95. Morgan, James Connolly, pp. 197, 199. 96. E. Rumpf and A.C. Hepburn, Nationalism and Socialism in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1977), p. 20. Chapter 6 1. SOC, Letters, 1, 57. 2. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972, p. 471; Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War, pp. 5-36. About 30,000 men born in Ireland died in the war. 3. [British] Army Records Centre, Hayes, MX., 7 April 1965, concerning No. WR/316987 Sapper Michael Casey, Royal Engineers. Copy courtesy Martin Margulies. 4. Stephens, The Insurrection in Dublin, p. 1. Throughout, Stephens mistakenly describes the insurgents in St Stephen's Green as 'Volunteers' when they were members of the ICA. 5. Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland, p. 44. 6. Fox, The History of the Irish Citizen Army, p. 144. According to the William O'Brien papers, MS 15,673(2), NLI, however, no more than 147 of the 341 ICA members participated in 1916.1 am grateful to Professor Arthur Mitchell for this reference. See also Brian Barton, From Behind a Closed Door: Secret Court Martial Records of the 1916 Easter Rising (Belfast: Blackstaff, 2002), p. 286. 7. Edwards, Patrick Pearse, p. 284. 8. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 49. See also Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland, p. 46. 9. 'Who was the first man shot that day?/The player Connolly.' W.B. Yeats, Three Songs to the One Burden', in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 371. Connolly

466 Chapter 6

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

was shot in the attack on Dublin Castle. He had made his first appearance at the Abbey Theatre in April 1913. See Scully, The Dublin Rover, pp. 101-03. See also Fox, The History of the Irish Citizen Army, pp. 149-50, and Hogan and Burnham, The Rise of the Realists, pp. 249 et seq. SOC to James Shiels, in Letters, 1, 58. The sketch is on p. 61. SOC told Lady Gregory in 1924 that he had been 'all but shot' during the Rising. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 514. No fewer than 250 civilians were killed in 1916, and 187 were accused and court martialled. See Barton, From Behind a Closed Door, pp. 18-32. SOC, CP, 1, 142. Here the setting is the Anglo-Irish war, 1920. SOC, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, p. 59. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 20. Interview between Martin Margulies and Mrs Isabella Murphy (nee Beaver), Bella's daughter, 1965. Notes courtesy Prof. Margulies. O'Connor, Sean O'Casey: A Life, pp. 91-92. See also Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 18: 'After the Rising he discovered that he was no longer welcomed by his associates.' SOC, Letters, 1, 60. Greaves, Sean O'Casey: Politics and Art, p. 79. A saying of Jeremiah Murphy, Professor of English, NUI Galway, 1935-66. Thompson, The Imagination of an Insurrection, p. 207. Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland, p. 4. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, p. 1. Sean 6 Luing, I Die in a Good Cause (Tralee: Anvil Books, 1970), p. 132. Brian Farrell, 'Labour and the Political Revolution', in Trade Union Century, ed. Nevin, p. 45. See also Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics 1890-1930, pp. 78-103. SOC to Dublin Saturday Post, 17 Sept. 1917, in Letters, 1, 62. 6 Luing, I Die in a Good Cause, pp. 42, 70. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 5. SOC, 'Lament for Thomas Ashe', MS, in 14 A.L. to Fergus O'Connor, 13 Feb.-22 Nov. 1918, Berg. Cf. Hogan, ed., Feathers from the Green Crow, pp. 158-59. Ibid., MS. As usual, SOC's capitalisation is difficult to decide from his manuscript. A printed copy of Thomas Ashe' is in the Special Collections, UCD Library. SOC, 6 October 1917, in Letters, 1, 64. SOC, The Call of the Tribe', in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 36, emphasis added. See Watt, Joyce, O'Casey and the Irish Popular Theatre, pp. 143-87. See also Maik Hamburger, 'Anti-Illusionism and the Use of Song in the Early Plays of Sean O'Casey', SOC Annual, 2 (1983), 3-26; and Robert G. Lowery, 'Music in the Autobiographies: An Index', in SOC Annual, 2 (1983), 27-69. SOC, Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, p. 132. SOC, 'Private Cassidy, V.C.', typescript, Berg. There is another version, in MS, entitled 'Private Gwynn, M.P.' also in Berg. See Patrick Callan, The Political War Ballads of Sean O'Casey, 1916-18', Irish University Review, 13.2 (autumn 1983), 168-79. Thomas Morrissey, William Martin Murphy (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1997), pp. 72-74; Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland, pp. 128-68. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 9. Fergus O'Connor had published SOC's material on Ashe in 1917-18. SOC, Letters, 1, 74. On 17 Feb. O'Connor had acknowledged that the Songs should be

Notes to pages 102-112 467 a twopenny line, 'but the public would look upon me as a wholesale robber to charge 2d for a little thing like that.' O'Connor to SOC, in 14 A.L. to Fergus O'Connor, Berg. 39. S. 6 Faolaing to SOC, 6 Nov. 1917, SOCP, NLI. Presumably, O'Connor had cheated SOC already. 40. SOC, Letters, 1, 77. 41. SOC, Letters, 1,75. 42. SOC, Letters, 1,71. 43. SOC, Letters, 1, 72. See also Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 20. In Letters, 4, 199, SOC said he received £6 altogether. 44. SOC to Franklin D. Murphy, 10 Feb. 1961, in Letters, 4, 199. 45. SOC, Letters, 1,81. 46. 'Twelve Practical Rules for the Teachers of National Schools', rule no. 6, cited in Irish Educational Documents, vol. 1, ed. Aine Hyland and Kenneth Milne (Dublin: Church of Ireland College of Education, 1987), p. 119. 47. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, pp. 73-74. Isaac was a clerk in the Health Insurance section. 48. Sir William J. Thompson, 'Mortality from Influenza in Ireland', Dublin Journal of Medical Science, 1920, pp. 174-86 (p. 174). For Bella's death see Margulies, p. 76. 49. J. and C. Nichols, Records, DUB/19/1/11, entry no. CB 343, p. 483, NA. 50. SOC to Fergus O'Connor, 17 Feb. 1918, in Letters, 1, 71. 51. Editorial, Irish Opinion, 8 Dec. 1917, p. 19. Malone's real name was Laurence Patrick Byrne (1888-1939). 52. These articles were reprinted in Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, pp. 35-39. 'Room for the Teachers' is also included in Feathers, pp. 7-10, but the date is wrongly given as 12June (recteJanuary). 53. SOC, The Story of the Citizen Army, p. 64. See also Conor Cruise O'Brien, Memoir, pp. 9-26, where it is pointed out that Sheehy-Skeffington and Connolly became friends and that the former, asked to be literary executor in 1916, actually sympathised with Connolly's new-found nationalism and became his 'disciple' (p. 26). 54. Wren, Saint Laurence O'Toole G.A.C., p. 32. For Maher's Partition see Hogan and Burnham, The Art of the Amateur 1916-1920, pp. 41-42. 55. SOC, Letters , 3, 444. 56. SOC, 'Articles. Ireland. 7 Typescripts, No. 1, "Abbey Theatre"', Berg. 57. Hogan and Burnham, The Art of the Amateur 1916-1920, p. 11. 58. Thomas King-Moylan, The Naboclish: A Comedy in Two Acts and Uncle Pat: A Comedy in One Act (Dublin: James Duffy, n.d.), p. 31. 59. Dublin Saturday Post, 1 Dec. 1917, in Letters, 1, 65-66 (p. 66). 60. SOC to Horace Reynolds, 17 April 1936, said O'Connor wrote the first two stanzas and he himself the remaining four. See Letters, 1, 621. 61. See SOC to David Krause, 10 March 1963, in Letters, 4, 375. The details of the 'boots' come from Martin Margulies' interview with Michael Smyth in 1965; notes courtesy Prof. Margulies. 62. The text of The Constitutional Movement Must Go On' is quoted from the SOCR, 5.2 (1979), 180. 63. SOC, Letters, 1,621. 64. The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 171. They rehearsed in Oriel Hall, Sheriff Street. See Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 19. 65. This phrase was part of the play's subtitle: Blight: The Tragedy of Dublin: An Exposition in Three Acts (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1917). The text is available in The Poems & Plays of

468 Chapters 6-7 Oliver St John Gogarty, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2001). 66. Programme note for Blight, attributed to the Evening Herald, 3 Nov. 1917, Abbey. Blight opened on 11 Dec. 67. The Poems and Plays of Oliver Stjohn Gogarty, p. 511. The following quotation is from p. 543. 68. The Poems and Plays of Oliver Stjohn Gogarty, p. 526. Mrs Gogan says in The Plough and the Stars, 'Many a good one [. . .] was reared in a tenement house', CP, 1, 165. 69. SOC to Horace Reynolds, 7 April 1949, averred Blight 'had no influence whatever on me'. Letters, 2, 605. 70. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Kneiv, pp. 37-38. 71. Obituary for Frank Cahill, Irish Independent, 24 Oct. 1957, p. 5. Two years younger than SOC, Cahill could well have been out in 1916 were it not for a lame leg. In any event he befriended and helped many Volunteers around that time. 72. 'A Conversation with Sean O'Casey and Robert Emmett Ginna', typescript, pp. 9-10, Berg. The date was Oct. 1955. 73. See Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, p. 82. The story even reached the ears of diarist Joseph Holloway. See Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, ed. Hogan and O'Neill, p. 215. 74. SOC, 'Articles. Ireland. 7 Typescripts, "Abbey Theatre"', p. 13, Berg. 75. Records of receipt and return of scripts, Abbey. 76. Yet Mrs Liam Daly, Frank Cahill's niece, told Margulies in 1965 that SOC was rather awkward with girls and paid them embarrassing compliments. Notes, courtesy Prof. Margulies. 77. Sean McCann, in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 32. Cf. SOC, A, 2,186. 78. SOC to Maire Keating, 2 May 1917, MS 26,775, NLI. Subsequent quotations from the correspondence refer to this source. Incidentally, SOC sent her a copy of his poem 'Thomas Ashe', inscribed 'to his beloved Maire', 12 Oct. 1917. 79. In The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 32. 80. I am indebted to Sean McCann for allowing me to see this exercise book and for sharing with me his memories of Maire Keating. 81. Androcles played at the Abbey for one week from 4 Nov. 1919. Saros Cowasjee claims that Maire had accompanied SOC to Blight in Dec. 1917, but since SOC's friends William and Anne Kelly of Seville Place were his patrons on that occasion this seems unlikely. See Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 95, and SOC, Letters, 1, 69, n.l. There may have been a third visit to the Abbey in Aug. 1920 to see James Stephens's The Wooing of Julia Elizabeth. See Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 36. 82. SOC to Krause, 23 Aug. 1956, in Letters, 3, 296-97. See also Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, pp. 92-93. In Holograph Notebooks, vol. 1, Berg, SOC notes some books lent to Maire: Bacon's Essays, Emerson's Essays, Ruskin's Notes on Drawing and The Ethics of the Dust, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Goethe's Faust, and Keats's Poems. 83. SOC, Preface, Windfalls, pp. vi-vii. 84. SOC, Letters, 1, 68. The MS correspondence between SOC and O'Connor in the Berg suggests a date after April 1918. 85. In The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 33. 86. Meenan, St Vincent's Hospital 1834-1994, p. 93. 87. On 3 Dec. 1919 Shaw responded negatively to SOC's manuscript of Three Shouts on a Hill' (now lost), pronouncing it 'prodigiously overwritten' and flatly refusing to write a preface. See SOC, Letters, 1, 87-88. 88. SOC MS, 6-15 Oct. 1918, MS 26,775, NLI.

Notes to pages 112-122 469 89. Information supplied by Kevin O'Byrne, 13 Aug. 1997. Mr O'Byrne grew up in Seville Place and Granny Short was his grandmother. On the other hand, SOC said that it was Mrs Brady, of Brady's pub and store in Church Street, who provided sheets and a candlestick for his mother's wake. See Letters, 2, 985-86. 90. J. and C. Nichols, Records, DUB/19/1/11, entry no. CB 396, p. 718, NA. 91. SOC, A, 2,12-30. When SOC told Lady Gregory a similar story in 1924 there were two errors in the first line: 'She was 89, died in 1919.' The Story of the Irish Citizen Army was not published until March 1919; only then would SOC get the £15 he mentions. See Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 546. By 1930 SOC had the story of the heartless undertaker well polished, and gave him the line, 'No bloody money, no bloody funeral.' See The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, pp. 50-51. 92. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, p. 77. See also O'Connor, Sean O'Casey: A Life, p. 108. 93. Note taken by Martin Margulies in interview with Mrs Murphy ('Babsie'), in 1965, courtesy Prof. Margulies. Chapter 7 1. Sean McCann, 'The Girl He Left Behind', in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 41. Note P.L. Dickinson's comment about mixed marriages at this time: 'In Ireland a marriage between Catholic and Protestant is most difficult—indeed, it is almost impossible, and where possible the conditions imposed are such as to make it highly repugnant to one of the contracting parties.' The Dublin of Yesterday (London: Methuen, 1929), pp. 171-72. 2. McCann, in The World of Sean O'Casey, p. 41. It is assumed here that the reference to Father Flood is an error for Canon Brady, PP of St Laurence O'Toole's from 1908 to 1924. Cf. the testimony of Paddy McDonnell, The World of Sean O'Casey, p. 171: 'He [SOC] had an old friend, Canon Brady. The canon was very fond of Sean. He thought that he'd convert him but he hadn't a ghost of a chance. O'Casey would quote the Koran to him.' 3. According to Pauline McCullough, once a pupil of Maire Keating's in the 1930s; telephone conversation, 7 June 1998. 4. SOC to Maire Keating, 23 July 1919, MS 26,775, NLI. Subsequent quotations from this correspondence are from the same source. 5. SOC to Maire Keating, 22 Dec. 1919, NLI. 6. SOC, Three More Plays (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. 264. This is the definitive edition of Red Roses for Me. Cf. CP, 3, 172. 7. Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 183, n. 42. 8. Mairead Fleming, NT, in telephone conversation, 9 March 1999. 9. SOC, CP, 1, 20. 10. Undated letter, SOC to MK, probably late 1919, NLI. 11. Richard Burnham, entry on Maunsel and Co. (later Maunsel and Roberts), in Dictionary of Irish Literature, ed. Robert Hogan et al., revised edition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 833. 12. SOC, 'Mrs Casside Takes a Holiday', A, 2, 12. 13. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 17, citing Frances-Jane French. 14. SOC to Robert Hogan, 28 March 1961, in Letters, 4, 204. Cf. SOC to Horace Reynolds, 5 Jan. 1937: 'The bowels were cut out of the effort,' Letters, 1, 645. 15. Thus I cannot agree with Robert Hogan that the shortcomings of the book can be attributed to the censor. One's confidence in Hogan's view here is not increased by his

470 Chapter 7

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

bald and mistaken assertion that SOC was in hospital during the 1916 Rising. See Hogan, ed., Feathers from the Green Crow, p. 178. SOC, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, pp. 9, 52. See also Feathers from the Green Crow, where the text is reprinted, pp. 189, 226. For example see Richard English, Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free State 1925-1937 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 18; Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics 1890-1930, pp. 68-71. SOC, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, p. 64; Feathers, p. 236. Cruise O'Brien, Memoir, pp. 9-19. Sheehy-Skeffmgton's enthusiastic review of Connolly's propagandist play Under Which Flag? in Workers' Republic, 8 April 1916, was noted in ch. 5. 'It breathes the true spirit of patriotism; and at the present time nothing could be healthier for the youth of Ireland than the lesson it teaches.' Louie Bennett, who worked with him on the Irish Citizen in 1914, said pacifism kept him out of the Volunteers although he was 'as passionate a patriot as any of the other men who met death in Easter Week, 1916'. 'Francis Sheehy Skeffmgton as I Knew Him', Irish Press, 1 May 1946, p. 4. SOC, The Story of the Citizen Army, p. 64; Feathers, p. 236. Ibid., p. 66; Feathers, p. 238. Ibid., p. 67; Feathers, p. 239. Review of The Story of the Irish Citizen Army by E. O'D [Eimear O'Duffy] in Irish Statesman, 12 July 1919, p. 72. Garvin, 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy, pp. 146-47. Cowasjee, Sean 0'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 21. Bernard Shaw to SOC, 3 Dec. 1919, in SOC, Letters, 1, 88. Brian Farrell, 'Labour and the Political Revolution', in Trade Union Century, ed. Nevin, p. 47. SOC to Horace Reynolds, 17 April 1936, in Letters, 1, 620. SOC to MK, 23 July 1919, NLI. SOC, The Harvest Festival (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980), p. 3. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be indicated by page numbers in parentheses. The text is reprinted in CP, 5, 41, ff. The MS is in Berg. Bernard Duffy, Four Comedies (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1916). See also SOC, A, 2, 60. In the original production of Special Pleading, Empire Theatre, 23 April 1917, the part of the burglar was played by none other than Barry Fitzgerald. See Hogan and Burnham, The Art of the Amateur 1916-1920, p. 72.

32. SOC, The Harvest Festival, p. 10. 33. Abbey Report, 26 Jan. 1920, in SOC, Letters, 1, 91.

34. SOC, Letters, 1,92. See also Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, pp. 24-25. 35. See Theresa Moriarty, 'Delia Larkin: Relative Obscurity', in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, pp. 435-37. 36. See SOC, Letters, 1, 73-74 and 78-79. See also Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics 1890-1930, pp. 93-94. 37. Irish Opinion/Voice of Labour, 2 Aug. 1919, pp. 2-6. See also J. Anthony Gaughan, Thomas Johnson 1872-1963: First Leader of the Labour Party in Ddil Eireann (Dublin: Kingdom Books, 1980), pp. 261-62, n. 5. 38. SOC, MS draft of Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well ['Drifting'], Holograph Notebooks, vol. 6, Berg. 39. SOC gives a full acount of the game in A, 2, 60-61. 40. SOC, draft of 'Drifting', Holograph Notebooks, vol. 6, Berg.

Notes to pages 122-133 471 41. SOC, A, 2, 61.This seems like an inordinate price to pay for a second-hand typewriter at this time. But this machine, a Royal, was to last SOC for over twenty-five years, after which he bought a Continental. Both survive, the Royal being at present rather incongruously in the James Joyce Museum, the other in the NLI. 42. See Nevin, ed., James Larkin, pp. 64-73 and 298-312. A more basic reason may have been to avoid the charge of misappropriating insurance funds in 1913. See Emmet O'Connor, James Larkin, p. 53. 43. Emmet Larkin, James Larkin, pp. 214-20. See also Manus O'Riordan, 'Larkin in America: The Road to Sing Sing', in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, pp. 69-71. 44. Theresa Moriarty, 'Delia Larkin: Relative Obscurity', in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 437. 45. SOC to William O'Brien, 10 Nov. 1921, in Letters, 1, 98. 46. See SOC, Letters, 1, 99. 47. Ibid., p. 100. 48. Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 24, n. 71. 49. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, p. 76. 50. Ministry of Pensions, Southern Awards section, Acton, details of correspondence courtesy Martin Margulies. 51. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 1, Berg. 52. The Kestrel. By MHC', see illustration 12. 53. Macardle, The Irish Republic (1968 edn), p. 315. See also Richard Bennett, The Black and Tans (London: Hulton, 1959). 54. Macardle, The Irish Republic, p. 360. 55. Ibid., p. 394. 56. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 49. 57. O'Hegarty, The Victory ofSinnFein (1998 edn), p. 38. 58. Paddy McDonnell, fellow-member of SLOT Pipers' Club, in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 171. 59. Shaw, postscript, Androcles and the Lion, in Complete Plays, 5, 471. 60. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 1, Berg. 61. Risteard 6 Glaisne, 'Sean O'Casey', unpublished typescript in Irish, p. 19, courtesy an tUasal 6 Glaisne. 62. SOC to Ronald Ayling, 26 Jan. 1960, in Letters, 4, 105. 63. Micheal 6 Maolain, 'An Ruathar Ud agus a nDeachaigh Leis', Feasta, May 1955, p. 3, my translation. See also Maureen Murphy, That Raid and What Went With It', in Essays on Sean 0'Casey's Autobiographies, ed. Lowery, pp. 103-22. 64. SOC to Lennox Robinson, 5 Aug. 1921, in Letters, 1, 93-94. 65. Lady Gregory's Journals, ed. Daniel J. Murphy, vol. 1, p. 307. 66. In SOC, Letters, 1,95. 67. SOC to Jack Carney, 28 March 1942, in Letters, 2, 33. See also Stanley Weintraub's useful article, 'Shaw's Other Keegan: Sean O'Casey and G.B.S.', in Weintraub, Shaw's People, pp. 178-94 (p. 179). 68. Cited by Padraic Colum, in The Yeats We Knew, ed. Francis MacManus (Cork: Mercier Press, 1965), p. 14. 69. For the text of 'Advice to Playwrights' see Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972), pp. 62-63. 70. 'Play Critique by W.B. Yeats', 19 June 1922, in SOC, Letters, 1, 102-3. The interpolated 'and' is in the original MS in the Southern Illinois University library, Special Collection. 71. Lady Gregory's Journals, 8 March 1924, 1, 512.

472 Chapters 7-8 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

86.

Lennox Robinson to SOC, 28 Sept. 1922, in SOC, Letters, 1, 103. SOC to Robinson, 9 Oct. 1922, in Letters, 1, 104. Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 25 and n. 80. Cited in Lady Gregory's Journals, 27 Nov. 1924, 1, 609. SOC to Jack Carney, 28 Mar. 1942, in Letters, 2, 33. See also Cowasjee, p. 25. Mountjoy Square has now reclaimed much of its former elegance, but in 1920 it was an area inexorably sinking into squalor. See Louis M. Cullen, The Growth of Dublin 1600-1900: Character and Heritage', in Dublin City and County: From Prehistory to Present, Studies in Honour of J.H. Andrews, ed. F.H.A. Aalen and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1992), pp. 272-73. Cullen points out that tenements first appeared in Mountjoy Square in 1910, and out of 69 houses totalled 18 by 1920, and 33 by 1940. Garry O'Connor has suggested that, describing 6 Maolain's dwelling, O'Casey once again gave a false impression of Dublin tenement life, Sean O'Casey: A Life, p. 126. 6 Maolain, 'An Ruathar Ud agus a nDeachaigh Leis', Feasta, May 1955, p. 2, my translation. Subsequent citations are referenced by page numbers in parentheses. This story has its source in Stephen Murphy, who fought in Jacob's in 1916, and relayed it to my informant Noeline Dowling. The story has a bearing on a central event in Red Roses for Me (1943). Macardle, The Irish Republic, p. 328. O'Faolain gives a similarly vivid account, in Constance Markievicz, pp. 273-74. 'Notice to Quit', Department of Special Collections, Research Library, UCLA. See illustration 14. O'Casey sold the item to the collector Franklin D. Murphy, Chancellor of the University. See SOC to Walter Starkie, 14 Oct. 1958, in Letters, 3, 637. SOC, CP, 1, 104. O Maolain supplies only the first name. The late Micheal O hAodha told me in Jan. 1998 that the surname was Schweppe. I met Schweppe's granddaughter in Dublin, 15 May 2002, who told me that he was born in America of German extraction and had been interned in Frongoch after the 1916 Rising. SOC, CP, 1, 154. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 1, Berg. It is interesting to note that the novelist Liam O'Flaherty also began a play, The Yellow Beard, in which O Maolain and Delia Larkin featured. See O'Flaherty, Letters, ed. A.A. Kelly (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1996), p. 32. SOC to Robinson, 17 Nov. 1922, in Letters, 1, 105.

Chapter 8 1. Lennox Robinson to SOC, 15 April 1922, in Letters, 1, 101. 2. Now called O'Casey House, 422 North Circular Road is owned by the Eastwood family and comprises 7 modernised flats, with SOC's room maintained unrented. 3. Theresa Moriarty, 'Delia Larkin: Relative Obscurity', in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 437. 4. SOC to Jim Larkin Jr, 20 Nov. 1949, following Delia's death. Courtesy Labour History Museum, Dublin. 5. See Macardle, The Irish Republic, p. 605. 6. SOC, The Seamless Coat of Kathleen, A Parable of the Ard-Fheis', Poblacht na hEireann, 29 March 1922, repr. in Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, p. 244. Subsequent quotations are referenced in the text in parentheses. 7. SOC to Robinson, 23 April 1922, in Letters, 1, 102. 8. SOC to Robinson, 10 April 1922, in Letters, 1, 101. 9. A line spoken by Donal Davoren in act 1, CP, 1, 112.

Notes to pages 134-144 473 10. Emmet Larkin, James Larkin, pp. 229-30, citing Jim Larkin's article in the Voice of Labour, 7 Jan. 1922. Cf. Brian Maye, Arthur Griffith (Dublin: Griffith College Publications, 1997), p. 352. 11. R.M. Fox, 'Civil War and Peace', in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, pp. 43-44. 12. Ibid., p. 45. 13. Macardle, The Irish Republic, p. 687. See also Hopkinson, Green against Green, pp. 123-26; Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland, pp. 412-13; Joost Augusteijn, ed., The Irish Revolution, 1913-1923 (Basingstoke and New York; Palgrave, 2002). C.S. Andrews, who fought on the anti-treaty side in the battle of O'Connell Street, offers a good description in Dublin Made Me, pp. 231-34. In hospital Andrews found himself beside men who had lost a leg or an eye or, like SOC's Johnny Boyle, an arm in the fighting (p. 235). 14. SOC to Robinson, 9 Oct. 1922, in Letters, 1, 104. 15. 'A Conversation with Sean O'Casey and Robert Emmett Ginna', typescript, p. 12, Berg. Cf. Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day, ed. James Nelson (New York: Norton, 1958), pp. 25-33. For Robinson's letter to SOC, 26 April 1923, and further details, see Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, pp. 25-26. 16. SOC to Robinson, 27 Feb. 1923, typed, Berg. 17. Cited by Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, p. 94. 18. Ibid., p. 97, The Abbey Theatre: A Statement made by its Directors to the Irish Provisional Government'. The following quotations are from p. 98. 19. Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, p. 136. 20. Macardle, The Irish Republic, pp. 913-14, 763. Thirty-four executions took place in Jan. 1923: see Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland, p. 435. Cf. Hopkinson, Green against Green, p. 273. 21. Frank Hugh O'Donnell, Treat at the Abbey', Evening Herald, 13 April 1923, cited in Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, p. 145. 22. Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, p. 146. 23. Lady Gregory, Journals, ed. Daniel J. Murphy, 1, 445. 24. Cowasjee, 'O'Casey Seen through Holloway's Diary', p. 65. 25. Robinson, Curtain Up, pp. 139-40. 26. As late as 1963 SOC told an American scholar that Donal Davoren was based on a tubercular insurance agent who called for his weekly premium to his room at 422 North Circular Road. See Letters, 4, 368. 27. An Seabhac, 'An Traona', in An Baile Seo Againne (Dublin: Conradh na Gaeilge, n.d.), p. 70. 28. See The Corncrake (Translated from the Irish by Sean O Cathasaigh)', in Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, pp. 248-56. 29. Mary Shine Thompson, 'Austin Clarke; A Literary Life-Chronology', PhD Dissertation, UCD, 1997, p. 292, emphasis added. Cited by Terence Brown, The Life ofW.B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1999), p. 287. 30. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 445-46. Yeats's favourite seat was in the third row, according to Michael Yeats, Cast a Cold Eye, p. 36. 31. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, ed. Hogan and O'Neill, p. 216. 32. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 446. 33. Accounts Book, Abbey Theatre Archive. 34. The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 27. SOC attended the Labour Exchange in Gardiner Street, a former protestant church, he noted wryly, and found it 'a shocking experience; such hard work to secure half-a-crown', Letters, 3, 450.

474 Chapters 35. As reported by Lady Gregory on 15 April 1923,/oirnmfo, 1, 446. Gabriel Fallon confirms that after the opening of the Gunman SOC was 'seldom out of the theatre', Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 38. 36. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 216. 37. SOC to Robert Hogan, 15 Feb. 1963, in Letters, 4, 361. 38. Robinson to SOC, 30 April 1923, SOCP in NLI. 39. Robinson, Curtain Up, p. 140. 40. Robinson to SOC, 4 May 1923, SOCP in NLI. 41. Robinson to SOC, 30 April 1923, SOCP in NLI. 42. Michael J. Dolan to SOC, 7 May 1923, in Letters, 1, 107. 43. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 219. 44. Lady Gregory to Robinson, 2 Aug. 1923, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Special Collections. 45. Lennox Robinson, Observer, 10 February 1924, reprinted in O'Casey: The Dublin Trilogy, ed. Ayling, p. 52, emphasis added. 46. P.S. O'Hegarty, 'A Drama of Disillusionment', Irish Statesman, 7 June 1924, in Ayling, ed., O'Casey: The Dublin Trilogy, pp. 52-53. 47. Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p. 306.

48. SOC, 'ThePlough and the Stars in Retrospect', in Blasts and Benedictions, ed. Ayling, p. 98. 49. 'O'Casey has acted on his [Dolan's] suggestions and made one of his scenes take place in a pub.' Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre [21 July 1923], p. 219, emphasis added. 50. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 13. For the history of Irish radio see Richard Pine, 2 EN and the Origins of Irish Radio (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002). 51. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 14. 52. SOC, CP, 5, 495. The text was first published in the Tulane Drama Review, 5.4 (1960-61), 36-50, accompanied by an article by Robert Hethmon (pp. 51-55) in which he claimed to have found the text in the Abbey script room in the late 1950s and transcribed it. Robert Hogan did not refer to this text when he included Kathleen Listens In in Feathers from the Green Crow, pp. 277-97. From Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography (p. 129) it is clear that Hogan's version (which is the one reprinted in CP) was a revised one. 53. Irish Times, 4 Oct. 1923, cited by Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926 p. 149. 54. S.L.M., 'Dramatic Notes', Irish Statesman, 6 Oct. 1923, cited by Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, p. 150. 55. SOC to Robert H. Hethmon, 1 Jan. 1961, in Letters, 4, 191. 56. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 16. But since a second typescript (Berg) is dated 3 March 1925 for a revival Kathleen Listens In cannot have been a complete flop. 57. SOC to Ronald Ayling, 31 March 1964, in Letters, 4, 487. 58. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 1.1 am indebted to Profesor Kevin B. Nowlan (conversation, 20 Nov. 1998) for the assurance that a constantly open hall door was a distinguishing feature of a tenement house in Dublin c. 1920s. 59. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, pp. 220-21. Garry O'Connor assumes that this young man was killed, and identifies him as one Captain Hogan in Sean O'Casey: A Life, p. 148. 60. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 17. 61. Ronald Ayling, 'Juno and the Pay cock: A Textual Study', Modernist Studies: Literature & Culture 1920-1940, 2.1 (1976), 24. 62. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 220. 63. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 189.

Notes to pages 144-153 475 64. 65. 66. 67.

SOC to Robinson, 29 Dec. 1923, in Letters, 1, 108. Robinson, Towards an Appreciation of the Theatre, 1945), pp. 18-19. Stage direction, Juno and the Pay cock, act 1, SOC, CP, 1, 8. SOC, 'Literature and Life: Life and Literature', Irish Statesman, 22 Dec. 1923, pp. 467-68. See also Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, pp. 10-15, for the full text. 68. SOC, CP, I , 86. 69. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 224. The diary entry is for 3 Jan. 1924, shortly after SOC had submitted Juno to the Abbey. 70. Patrick O'Leary, in Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life, p. 143. Italics in original. 71. Colbert Kearney, 'Sean O'Casey and the Glamour of Grammar', in Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature: Aspects of Language and Culture, ed. Birgit Bramsback and Martin Croghan, vol. 2 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1988), pp. 63-70. See also Kearney, The Glamour of Grammar, pp. 75-96. 72. Irish Times, 4 March 1924, cited by Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, p. 192. 73. Elizabeth Coxhead, 'Sally and Molly: Sara Allgood and Maire O'Neill', in Daughters of Erin: Five Women of the Irish Renascence (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1965), p. 211. Holloway also testified that 'the acting all round [in Juno] was of the highest quality, not one in the long cast being misplaced or for a moment out of the picture,' Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 226. 74. SOC, Letters, 2, 1023. In this letter (26 Jan. 1954), SOC outlined the menu he had when living at 422 NCR: boiled eggs, raw tomatoes, cooked prunes and figs or apple rings with tea, bread and butter. He ate meat only once a week, preferably roast pork. 75. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 511-12. 76. SOC told Holloway (3 June 1924) that he had 'notes for fifty articles by him, but [was] too lazy to write them'. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 234. 77. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 232. 78. Gabriel Fallen, The Abbey Theatre - A History', p. 47, unpub. typescript, Abbey Theatre Archive, cited by permission of the widow of James Nolan and the Fallon family. 79. Ulick O'Connor, Oliver Stjohn Gogarty: A Poet and His Times (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), pp. 194-98; Welch, The Abbey Theatre 1899-1999, p. 83. 80. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 514-15. When Yeats relayed the story to Ezra Pound, 18 May 1924, he substituted the Black and Tans for the British troops in 1916 as SOC's wouldbe assassins and went on to say that this event affected SOC as a similar experience had affected Dostoievsky. (Can he have been at the hashish?) Pound MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. 81. W.J. Lawrence, Irish Statesman, 15 May 1924, cited in Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, p. 193. 82. A noted theatre historian, W.J. Lawrence was author of The Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies, 2 vols (1912), and Old TheatreDays and Ways (1935). 83. W.B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 250. 84. W.B. Yeats to SOC, 26 March 1924, in SOC, Letters, 1, 108. 85. Liam Miller, The Noble Drama of W.B. Yeats (Dublin: Dolmen Press; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977), p. 227. 86. Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, p. 365. 87. W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 221. 88. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 229. SOC later bought a copy of Yeats's Four Plays fo Dancers (1921). See SOC to Gabriel Fallon, 30 Aug. 1925, in Letters, 1, 143. For a general introduction to this drama, see Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray, Yeats

476 Chapters 8-9 and theNoh:A Comparative Study (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990); Reg Skene, The Cuchulain Plays ofW.B. Yeats: A Study (New York: Columbia UP, 1974); Richard Taylor, The Drama ofW.B. Yeats: Irish Myth and the Japanese No (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1976). 89. S.L.M., 'At the Hawk's Well', Irish Statesman, 12 April 1924, p. 142. 90. SOC to Shiela [sic] Richards, 1 May 1924, courtesy Micheal Johnston. 91. See Bernice Schrank, Sean O'Casey, pp. 232-33. Allgood had moved to London with Juno. 92. Lady Gregory to SOC, 26 May 1924, in SOC, Letters, 1, 109. 93. SOC, Letters, 1, 109. 94. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, 3June 1924, p. 233. 95. She distinguished between those guests who had and used a toothbrush and those who did not. See Colm Toibin, Lady Gregory's Toothbrush. 96. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 545. SOC's letter, postmarked 4 June, Berg, was forwarded from Coole to Yeats's address in Dublin. 97. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 541. The play had already been cut to play twice nightly, and Sara Allgood, greeted with laughter when she improvised a line to describe Mary's 'condition', lost her nerve and switched to hints of tuberculosis. Gabriel Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 29. 98. The manuscript catalogue of the library is in the possession of Colin Smythe, who kindly allowed me to study it. It might be called a typical colonialist library, with much travel literature, holdings on the classics, and much eighteenth-century material. 99. Anne Gregory, Me and Nu: Childhood at Coole (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978), p. 85. Yet Anne also records how intrigued SOC was with the trees at Coole, especially with the two catalpas: 'He stroked the enormous leaves as if they were alive.' See interview with Aodhan Madden, 'Yeats's girl with the yellow hair', Irish Times, 7 Jan. 2003, p. 10. 100. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 547. 101. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 546. The editor of the Journals, Daniel J. Murphy, mistakenly says (p. 670, n. 16) that the play was not completed. In fact, the first typed copy retained the title Penelope's Lovers on pp. 4-7 of the script, Berg. 102. I am indebted to John Devitt for this information. See also Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 31, where the original dairy is placed but not named. 103. SOC, Under a Colored Cap, pp. 84-86. 104. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 234. Sparing him an account of The Dynasts, SOC told Holloway he had read Saint Joan at Coole, 'and thought the dialogue fine and chockful of raps at England'. 105. Coxhead, Lady Gregory, p. 192, ellipses in original. SOC provided a foreword to her edition of Lady Gregory's Selected Plays (London: Putnam, 1962). 106. SOC, 'Gulls and Bobbin Testers', Irish Statesman, 6 Sept. 1924, pp. 816-17. Reprinted in Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, pp. 257-61, quotation pp. 259-60, emphasis added. The reference is to Penguin Island, trans. B.W. Evans (1909). 107. Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, p. 184. Note that David Krause assumes that SOC had entered the competition: see SOC, Letters, 1, 32, n. 1. The evidence he cites only indicates SOC's disgust at the result. 108. SOC to James Stephens, 12 Aug. 1924, in Letters, 1, 114. 109. Correspondence between SOC and Macmillans, July-Aug. 1924, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. Also, Daniel Macmillan to James Stephens, 27 Aug. 1924, in SOC, Letters, 1,114-15. In view of SOC's later dislike of him it is interesting to note that^E also usefully advised him about publication: see Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 241.

aNotes to page 153-163 477 110. DenisJohnston, 'Sean O'Casey in the Twenties', in The 0'Casey Enigma, ed. 6 hAodha, p. 27. 111. SOC, Complete Plays, 5, 508-09. The text of Nannie's Night Out was first published in Feathers from the Green Crow, ed. Hogan, pp. 303-35. 112. Hogan, ed., Feathers from the Green Crow, p. 322. In the Complete Plays editor Ronald Ayling decided to print SOC's original ending; Hogan supplies both. See also Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, pp. 210 and 402-03, n. 76; also Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, pp. 316-17. 113. SOC to New York Times, 27 Dec. 1925, in Letters, 1, 160. It may be noted that SOC also used the character of Irish Nannie as a symbolic street figure, Mild Millie, in Drums under the Windows (A, 1, 462-73). 114. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 41. 115. SOC, 'Irish in the Schools', Irish Statesman, 29 Nov. 1924, repr. in Feathers from the Green Crow, pp. 261-66 (p. 264). SOC's attitude involved him in a minor row with the Irish Irelander himself, D.P. Moran. See Letters, 1, 121. 116. W.B. Yeats, 'Compulsory Gaelic: A Dialogue', Irish Statesman, 2 Aug. 1924, pp. 649-52. 117. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 237. The date was 23 Aug. 1924, just after the appearance of Yeats's article. 118. W.B. Yeats to Ezra Pound, 18 May 1924, Pound MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University. 119. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 236. The date was 14 Aug. 1924. 120. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 232; Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 593. Chapter 9 1. Copies in the possession of Sean McCann; inscriptions cited by his permission. 2. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, pp. 226, 253. 3. Sean McCann, 'The Girl He Left Behind Him', in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 41. 4. Ibid., p. 35. 5. Conversation with Christopher Fitz-Simon, 25 May 1999, who believes that SOC proposed to Richards twice. 6. Denis Johnston, Dramatic Works, vol. 1, p. 50. Subsequent quotations are referenced by page numbers in parentheses. 7. The date was possibly during the short run of Kathleen Listens In, which opened in a triple bill with Shaw's Man of Destiny and Synge's Riders on 1 Oct. 1923. 8. Beatrice Coogan, 'Pink Icing', in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 74. Subsequent quotations from this source are referenced by page numerals given in parentheses. See also, 'Memoirs of a glamour girl [. . .] Beatrice Coogan talks to Victoria White', Irish Times, 31 Mar. 1993, p. 11. 9. C.S. Andrews, Man of No Property, p. 54. Perhaps Andrews was too discreet to supply the name. 10. SOC to Jack Carney, 20 March 1942, in Letters, 2, 34. 11. Anecdote supplied in conversation by Beatrice's son T.P. Coogan, 21 Aug. 1998. 12. See ¥ox,Jim Larkin, pp. 156-63; Emmet Larkin, James Larkin, pp. 227-58; Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics 1890-1930, pp. 171-216; Mark Farmer, 'James Larkin and the Workers' Union of Ireland', Etudes Irlandaises, 26.1 (spring 2001), 101-15; Emmet O'Connor, James Larkin, pp. 80-93. 13. Nevin, ed., James Larkin, p. 80. 14. Ibid., p. 323. 15. Irish Worker, 24 May and 7 June 1924, cited in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, pp. 332-33, emphasis added.

478 Chapter 9 16. O'Connor, James Larkin, p. 116. 17. James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 333. 18. O'Toole, The Irish Times Book of the Century, p. 114. See also Hopkinson, Green against Green, p. 274. 19. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 515. 20. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 584. 21. Arthur Mitchell, 'Sean O'Casey and the Irish Labour Movement', unpublished lecture delivered at the IASIL conference, Leyden, July 1991, copy courtesy Prof. Mitchell. 22. Ronald Ayling, 'Sean O'Casey and Jim Larkin after 1923', SOCR, 3.2 (spring 1977), 103. Cf. SOC, Letters, 4, 104. 23. SOC to Robinson, 9 Oct. 1922, in Letters, 1, 105. 24. See W.A. Armstrong, 'The Sources and Themes of The Plough and the Stars , in Modern Drama, 4.3 (Dec. 1961), 234-42 (p. 236). 25. Cited by David Krause, 'The Plough and the Stars: Socialism (1913) and Nationalism (1916)', New Hibernia Review/IrisEireannach Nua, 1.4 (winter 1997), 35, emphasis added. 26. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 46. 27. Joseph Hollo-way's Abbey Theatre, pp. 242, 247, 17 April and 12 Nov. 1925. 28. Robinson, Towards an Appreciation of the Theatre, p. 13. Cf. William Archer, Playmaking: A Manual of Craftsmanship (London: Chapman & Hall, 1912). 29. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 53. 30. Robinson to Lady Gregory, 28 Nov. 1925, cited by Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, 2, 728, n. 68. 31. Lady Gregory, Journals, 1, 584, 24 Sept. 1924. 32. See SOCR, 4.2 (spring 1978), opposite p. 192. The photograph is mistakenly dated 1922 and the occasion stated to be the awarding to Yeats of the Nobel Prize. 33. 'Abbey Theatre: A Government Grant: Act of Intelligent Generosity', IT, 10 Aug. 1925, p. 5. See also Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, pp. 243-44. 34. SOC to Irish Independent, 20 Feb. 1926, in Letters, 1, 170. 35. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 242, 4 April 1925. 36. Shaw's Saint Joan, first staged in London in March 1924, had its Irish premiere on 22 June 1925, staged at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, by the Charles MacDona Company. See SOC, Letters, 1, 137 and n. 2. 37. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 75. 38. SOC to Michael J. Dolan, 13 Aug. 1925, in Letters, 1, 138-40. Cf., A, 2, 156. 39. Denis Johnston, 'Sean O'Casey in the Twenties', in The O'Casey Enigma, ed. 6 hAodha, p. 27. 40. Liam O'Flaherty to Edward Garnett, 6 Sept. 1925, in Letters ofLiam OFlaherty, ed. A.A. Kelly (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1996), p. 130. Among the enthusiastic audience at this time was Padraic Colum, whom SOC met on 20 Aug. See Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 245. 41. SOC to Gabriel Fallon, 26 Aug. 1925, in Letters, I , 141. 42. SOC to Jack Carney, 11 Dec. 1941, DKP in NLI. 43. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 32, 23 Aug. 1925. 44. SOC, Letters, 1, 152. Lady Gregory's only child was shot down in Italy in Jan. 1918 during World War One. See Coxhead, Lady Gregory, pp. 160-62, and Kohfeldt, Lady Gregory, pp. 252-56. 45. Michael J. Dolan to Lady Gregory, 1 Sept. 1925, cited in Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey 1921-1926, pp. 281-82. See also Lady Gregory Journals, 2, 35, 40. 46. George O'Brien to W.B. Yeats, cited in Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey 1921-1926, pp. 282-83. The following quotations are also from this source. See also

Notes to pages 163-172 479 Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 41. 47. Hogan and Burnham point out this discrepancy between the opening of O'Brien's letter in the NLI and as it is quoted in Lady Gregory'$ Journals. But as they seem ignorant of the later edition of the Journals by Daniel J. Murphy they conclude that it is impossible to determine whether the error was Robinson's or Lady Gregory's. See Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey 1921-1926, p. 414, n. 3. 48. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 42. 49. W.B. Yeats, The Irish Dramatic Movement', in Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 571. 50. Abbey Theatre Minute Book, minutes of Directors' meeting 22 Sept. 1925, Abbey Theatre Archive. 51. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 43. 52. Ibid. 53. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 78. 54. The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 28; Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 73. 55. SOC to Lady Gregory, 25 Sept. 1925, in Letters, 1, 151. 56. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 45. 57. SOC, The Plough and the Stars, Promptbook, 1926, Abbey Theatre Archive. 58. On 13 September 1925 O'Casey was invited to Yeats's house to discuss cuts and agreed to all made by Yeats, Lady Gregory and Robinson. 59. Nicholas Grene, The Class of the Clitheroes: O'Casey's Revisions to The Plough and the Stars Promptbook', Bulldn, 4.2 (winter 1999/spring 2000), p. 63. I am indebted to Prof. Grene for sharing his notes on this topic. 60. Ronald Ayling, 'Sean O'Casey and the Abbey Theatre Company', Irish University Review, 3 (spring 1973), 5-16. 61. Letters ofLiam OTlaherty, ed. A.A. Kelly (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1996), p.125. 62. Jonathan Cape to SOC, 7 Dec. 1925, SOCP in NLI. Cape had just seenjunoin London. Edward Garnett, who had met SOC in Dublin, had alerted Cape to SOC's work. 63. Laurence Olivier, 'Meditations on Juno and the Paycock', in O'Casey: The Dublin Trilogy, ed. Ayling, p. 91. 64. James B. Fagan to SOC, 27 Oct. 1925, SOCP in NLI. 65. Ayling, 'Sean O'Casey and the Abbey Theatre Company', p. 11. 66. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 56. 67. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 4, Berg. Gabriel Fallon noted the Theatre Arts Monthly in SOC's newly furnished room, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 83. 68. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 56, 197. 69. SOC to Lady Gregory, 15 Sept. 1925, in Letters, 1, 150. 70. SOC to Fallon, 30 Aug. 1925, in Letters, 1, 143. 71. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 87. 72. SOC to David Krause, 24 Sept. 1949, unpublished, courtesy Prof. Krause. On 20 Dec. 1924 Lady Gregory noted in Journals, 1, 613. 'Casey writes 'The Playboy is going well; it seems as if, at last, we had decided to call him comrade." There is no opposition at all this time.' 73. Macmillans insisted on advertising O'Casey's own Two Plays with a quotation averring that They are the finest things of their kind that have come out of Ireland since Synge.' 74. SOC to Lennox Robinson, 10 Jan. 1926, in Letters, 1, 166. 75. SOC sent act 4 for printing on 7 Jan. 1926 and returned the proofs on 26 Jan., Macmillan Archives, Basingstoke. 76. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 250, 4 Feb. 1926, emphasis added.

480 Chapters 9-10 77. SOC may have been influenced by M.M. Brennan, The Young Man from Rathmines: A Play in One Act (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1923), which he had seen at the Abbey. 78. Tomas Mac Anna to CM, 25 June 1998. 79. Fallen, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 88. 80. Ernest Blythe to SOC, 17 Jan. 1926, SOCP in NLI. See also Lennox Robinson to Lady Gregory, 9 Feb. 1926, cited by Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey 1921-1926, p. 294. 81. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 251. 82. Sean Cronin, Frank Ryan: The Search for the Republic (Dublin: Repsol Publishing, 1980), p. 23.

83. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, pp. 252-53. 84. Ria Mooney, 'Playing Rosie Redmond, An Autobiographical Essay', Journal of Irish Literature, 6.2 (May 1977), p. 24. The picture is reproduced on p. 23. See also Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey 1921-1926, p. 288. 85. The inscription reads: 'From Sean O'Casey to Sheila [sic] Richards in the first place because of herself, and in the second, because of her fine playing of "Nora" in the First Production of the play in The Abbey Theatre. Chelsea 1926.' Details courtesy Micheal Johnston. 86. J.W.G., 'Sean O'Casey's New Play: "The Plough and the Stars'", Irish Independent, 9 Feb. 1926. See also Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey 1921-1926, p. 290. 87. C.S. Andrews, Man of No Property, p. 54. See also Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000, pp. 166-67. 88. Richard English, Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free State 1925-1937 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), pp. 58-65 (p. 60). 89. Richard English, 'Socialism: Socialist Intellectuals and the Irish Revolution', in The Irish Revolution 1913-1923, ed. Joost Augusteijn (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 203-23 (p. 206). 90. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 100. 91. Macardle, The Irish Republic, p. 817. 92. Cruise O'Brien, Memoir, pp. 9, 27-30. C.S. Andrews, whose fiancee was one of the organisers of the republican protest, said that Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington spoke from the balcony but 'had not otherwise taken part in the demonstration'. Man of No Property, p. 54. 93. SOC, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, p. 64. 94. Leah Levenson and Jerry H. Nattersad, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington: Irish Feminist (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986), p. 151. 95. John Larchet, in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 177. From the account of one Nurse Maguire on the front page of An Phoblacht, 19 Feb., it is clear that Dr Larchet was right and that the protest was pre-arranged. Nurse Maguire was asked to attend and support the protest. 96. Joseph Holloway 's Abbey Theatre, p. 253. 97. Irish Times, 12 Feb. 1926, cited by Lowery, A Whirlwind in Dublin, p. 33. Lowery's is the most complete account of the riots. 98. Fallen, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 91. 99. Tomas Mac Anna, citing Eileen Crowe, to CM, 30 June 1998. 100. Michael B. Yeats records that at least one demonstrator threw a shoe at the rioters which missed and landed on the stage. She had to limp around at the next interval to retrieve it. See Cast a Cold Eye, pp. 36-37. Micheal Johnston, Shelah Richards' son, identifies the woman as Marjorie Wilson in Theatre Ireland, 9-10 (spring/summer 1985), 120.

Notes to pages 172-184 481 101. Cited by Lowery, A Whirlwind in Dublin, p. 31. 102. Ibid., p. 31. 103. Fallen, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 95. This is just one of numerous contradictions with which accounts of the original Plough production are riddled. Another example: whether Yeats spoke before or after the arrival of the police. 104. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 64. 105. Peter Kavanagh said it was because Fitzgerald had knocked a republican protester into the stall 'with a punch to the chin'. The Story of the Abbey Theatre, p. 137. See also RJ.P. Mortished, letter to Irish Times, 19 Aug. 1938. 106. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 64. 107. Robinson, Curtain Up, p. 141. Robinson's account differs from Lady Gregory's Journals, 2, 64. See also Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man 1 Knew, pp. 94-95. 108. Hanna Sheehy-Skeffmgton to Irish Independent, 15 Feb. 1926, in SOC, Letters, 1,167-68. 109. SOC to Irish Independent, 20 Feb. 1926, in Letters, 1, 170-71. 110. Hanna Sheehy-Skeffmgton to Irish Independent, 23 Feb., in SOC, Letters, 1, 173. 111. SOC to Irish Independent, 26 Feb., in Letters, 1, 175. 112. 'Notes of the Week', Voice of Labour, 20 Feb. 1926, p. 4. In this issue the critic Andrew E. Malone faulted the Plough as 'a series of tableaux vivants (p. 1). 113. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 88. 114. Irish Statesman, 20 Feb. 1926, p. 739; also Liam O'Flaherty, Letters, p. 142. He was mainly offended by Yeats's speech. 115. Proinsias 6 Riain to SOC, 20 Feb. 1926, SOCP in NLI. 116. This must refer to the passage Fallon says SOC was 'strangely moved by' and was to influence The Silver Tassie, the passage where the disguised Henry debates with his soldiers about war and responsibility, and Williams says: 'But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make; when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, "We died at such a place"' (Henry V, 4.1.135-39). See Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 51. 117. Details in SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 3, Berg. 118. 'Plough and the Stars', Evening Herald, 9 Feb. 1926, cited by Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey 1921-1926, p. 290. 119. Evening Herald, 12 Feb. 1926, cited by Hogan and Burnham, p. 303. 120. Cited by Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey 1921-1926, p. 304. 121. The 'heckler's veto' is a concept of free speech articulated in the USA in the 1960s in relation to black civil rights. See Harry Kalven, Jr, The Negro and the First Amendment (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1965), p. 141. At the debate Gabriel Fallon spoke against 'mob censorship'. 122. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 3, Berg. It is Brutus and not Antony who says this, 3.2.35: an interesting slip. 123. C.S. Andrews, Man of No Property, p. 43. 124. Ibid., p. 51. Andrews' fiancee was involved in organising the Plough riots. 125. Cruise O'Brien, Memoir, p. 27. 126. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 99. 127. Beatrice Coogan, 'Pink Icing', in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 85. Chapter 10 1. SOC to Fallon, 5 March 1926, in Letters, 1, 181. 2. SOC to Fallon, 9 March 1926, in Letters, 1, 181-82.

482 Chapter 10 3. The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, pp. 22, 27, 38, 47, 55. 4. Philip Roth, American Pastoral (London: Vintage, 1998), pp. 382-83. 5. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 44. It was many years before SOC was to write a one-act set in a railway station, The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe (1961). 6. The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, pp. 56-57, and cf. p. 22. There is a one-page outline in SOC's papers in Holograph Notebooks, vol. 6, Berg. See also New York Times, 28 Jan. 1927, p. 15. 7. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 72. 8. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 73. Sara Allgood played Juno, Arthur Sinclair Captain Boyle, Sydney Morgan Joxer, Molly Allgood Mrs Madigan, and Kathleen O'Regan Mary. 9. Lady Gregory was lobbying for a government decision in favour of her nephew Hugh Lane's codicil to his will and hence for the return of the disputed paintings to Dublin. 10. Lady Gregory, 'How Great Plays Are Born: The Coming of Mr O'Casey', Daily News, 27 March 1926.1 am grateful to James Pethica for a copy of this article. 11. 'London Honours Mr O'Casey: Award of Hawthornden Prize', Irish Times, 26 March 1926, in Letters, 1,183-85. 12. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 80. 13. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 267. The date of the diary entry was 23 March 1926. 14. SOC, Blasts and Benedictions, p. 239. 15. SOC, A, 2, 475. This section of the autobiographies, in Sunset and Evening Star (1954), is out of chronological sequence. 16. Robert Lowery, T.P. O'Connor, Lady Gregory and Sean O'Casey', SOCR, 5.2 (spring 1979), 186. 17. SOC, 'London Passes By: Impressions of Five Weeks', Daily News, 24 May 1926, repr. in SOC, Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 237-40 (p. 238). 18. The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 38. 19. The Sting and the Twinkle, p. 39. 20. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 50. 21. I have not been able to find Eileen O'Casey's birth certificate, and must here rely on Eileen O'Casey's two memoirs, Sean and Eileen. 22. Marriage certificate, SOCP in NLI. 23. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen p. 71. See also 'Ephraim Lee', in Who's Who in Theatre, llth edn (London, 1952), p. 585, and obituary, New York Times, 27 Sept. 1953, p. 86. 24. Eileen, p. 82. 25. Eileen, p. 84. 26. SOC to Fallon, 1 Oct. 1926, in Letters, 1, 206. 27. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 268. Holloway noted the presence outside the Abbey of women with placards of protest, led by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and including Maud Gonne MacBride. It is clear that Cumann na mBan and the IRA cooperated in this protest, which continued through the week. See Sighle Humphries Papers, UCD Archives, P 106/1107, minutes for 6 May 1926. 28. SOC, Letters, I , 192. 29. SOC to Macmillan and Co., 12 Feb. 1926, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. SOC had his last sitting for Tuohy on 17 Feb., after which Tuohy was to forward the drawing to Macmillans. 30. Cited by SOC in InishfaUen, Fare Thee Well', see A, 2, 158. For an account of Tuohy, see John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce's Father (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), pp. 386-87. In a television portrait, RTE, 3 Jan. 2000, Bruce Arnold rated Tuohy very high among modern Irish

Notes to pages 184-193 483 artists and saw him as a victim of the 1920s. A biography by Patrick Murphy is forthcoming. 31. Cited by SOC, A, 2, 158. 32. Yeats library, Yeats family, Dublin. I am grateful to the late Anne Yeats for allowing me to see the O'Casey inscription. 33. Chairman of Entertainments Sub-Committee to SOC, June 1926, SOCP in NLI. 34. Jack Jones to SOC, 10 March 1927, SOCP in NLI. Jones also said how he loved Two Plays. 35. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 101. Cf. 'Epstein should be driven out, driven out with a fool's bladder,' SOC, 'London Passes By', in Blasts and Benedictions, p. 240. 36. Lady Lavery to SOC, undated but probably 31 May 1926, SOCP in NLI. 37. Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 109. 38. SOC, Letters, 1, 207. 39. The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 42. 40. Thomas MacGreevy to George Yeats, 20 May 1926, MS 30,859, NLI. At the same time MacGreevy had written to SOC, wishing to see him but nervous of approaching him: 'I know no one in London, and couldn't push up anybody likely to interest you, but you won't mind that.' SOCP in NLI, 12 or 16 May 1926. 41. George Yeats to SOC, 3 May 1926, MS 27,027, NLI. 42. SOC to Jack Carney, 12 March 1943, in Letters, 2, 126. 43. By July 1926 SOC had a list of such complaints about Fagan, e.g. 'He will permit me to interfere in the production only as far as the legal interpretation allows. He ordered me to keep away from the Theatre.' SOC notebook, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. 44. Fagan did well out of Juno and The Plough, netting £25 a week plus fifty per cent of the profits. SOC, Holograph Notebook, vol. 5, Berg. 45. Denis Johnston, 3rd Omnibus Book 1924-1934, MS 10,066/181, TCD. 46. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, p. 35. 47. C.S. Andrews, Man of No Property, pp. 39, 46, emphasis added. 48. SOC, The Silver Tassie: A Tragi-Comedy in Four Acts (London: Macmillan, 1928). All subsequent quotations are from this edition, referred to by page numbers in parentheses. 49. Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War, p. 20. See also Myles Dungan, Distant Drums, p. 54. 50. The separation allowance or 'maintenance money', payable to enlisted men's wives or mothers, 'was often the difference between mere poverty and virtual starvation for thousands of working-class families in Dublin'. Dungan, Distant Drums, p. 54. During the 1916 Rising, women whose separation allowance was threatened were furious at the insurgents. 51. August Strindberg, 'Author's Note to A Dream Play (1902)', trans. Elizabeth Sprigge, in Theatre and Drama in the Making, ed. John Gassner and Ralph G. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), p. 781. 52. SOC, Topics', Holograph Notebook, vol. 18, Berg. 53. See Ernst Schurer, 'Introduction', German Expressionist Plays (New York: Continuum, 1997), pp. vii-xxi. 54. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, pp. 47-48. He may have lent SOC his copy of the text of Masses and Men, trans. Vera Mendel (1924). I am grateful to Fallon's son Joe for allowing me to see this text copy and other Fallon memorabilia. 55. SOC, Letters 1, 118-19. It was Jim Larkin, home from the USA, who recommended O'Neill's play; O'Casey became captivated by O'Neill's work. 56. Denis Johnston, 3rd Omnibus Book 1924-1934, MS 10,066/181, p. 83, TCD Library. Johnston, who was in London to further his legal career, was also at work on his first

484 Chapter 10

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

play, then called 'Shadowdance' and later The Old Lady Says 'Nof He was thus particularly interested in expressionism. See Bernard Adams, Denis Johnston: A Life (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002), pp. 75-90. Denis Johnston, 'Sean O'Casey: An Appreciation', Daily Telegraph, 11 March 1926, reprinted in Sean O'Casey: Modern Judgements, ed. Ayling, p. 85. Denis Johnston, 'Sean O'Casey in the Twenties', in The O'Casey Enigma, ed. 6 hAodha, p. 31. SOC, The Silver Tassie, pp. 41-43. Denis Johnston, REG 154, MS 10,066/165, TCD. Rupert Croft-Cooke, The Real O'Casey', Theatre World, Oct. 1926, repr. in Stewart, About O'Casey, p. 26. Herbert Hughes to SOC, 17 June 1926, SOCP in NLI. In The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 177. Mark Antony Turnage's operatic version was first staged by the English National Opera in London, 16 Feb. 2000. The Irish premiere, directed by Patrick Mason for Opera Ireland, was staged in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on 31 Mar. 2001. See Dungan, Irish Voices from the Great War, pp. 61-75. Massey, A Hundred Different Lives, p. 86. SOC to Fallen, 14 Sept. 1927, Letters, 1, 218. Cheque dated 17 Dec. 1926, SOCP in NLI; SOC to Lady Gregory, 24 Dec. 1926, in Letters, I , 210-11. See also Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 159. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 103. O'Connor, Sean O'Casey, pp. 373-74. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 54. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 91. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, pp. 96-97. For full details of the wedding, widely covered by the newspapers, see scrapbook, SOCP in NLI. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 65. Larkin had been elected to the new Dail, due to open on 11 October, but was legally excluded because, having refused to pay the costs in the action he had lost in his dispute with the Transport Union executive in 1924, he was an undischarged bankrupt. See Emmet Larkin, James Larkin, p. 261. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 98. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 107. SOC to Fallon, 9 Oct. 1927, in Letters, 1, 221. Curtis Brown to SOC, 4 Oct. 1927, Berg. Quoted by Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 209, 28 Oct. 1927. Bernice Schrank, Sean O'Casey, pp. 106, 250-51. Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, p. 270. Earlier he had said he 'didn't care a lot for the play'. SOC to Lady Gregory, 18 Mar. 1925, in Letters, 1, 133. SOC, Letters, 1, 224. Anti-Christ played at the 'Q' Theatre (Richmond) for a week from 21 Nov. 1927. It is clear that SOC did not see it; he complained of O'Donnell's failure to visit him. Contrary to SOC's account Anti-Christ was reviewed by the Morning Post, the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard: the idea was found extremely interesting but the play itself undramatic and, ominously for the Tassie, pejoratively 'expressionist'. Reviews, London Theatre Museum. '"Anti-Christ": New Play at the Abbey Theatre', Irish Times, 18 Mar. 1925, p. 6. Susan Mitchell said in her review that O'Donnell was incapable of realising the idea contained in the play that revolution is the inevitable outcome. 'Drama Notes', Irish

aNotes to page 193-202 485 Statesman, 28 Mar. 1925, p. 84. 86. Frank J. Hugh O'Donnell, Anti-Christ: A Play in Seven Scenes, British Library, MS, LC 7840, p. 77. The script of the Abbey production (1925) is in the NLI, MS 21, 428. The only major change in the London script is the addition of a scene depicting Boles's trial (scene 6). 87. Hogan, 'O'Casey, Influence and Impact', 153-54. See also Hogan and Burnham, The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926, pp. 266-70. 88. Town, in the poem, is the prototype on whom O'Casey modelled his hero Harry Heegan.' Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 114. 89. See Kosok, 'O'Casey's Revisions', in Plays and Playwrights from Ireland in International Perspective, p. 157. In the revised version (1949) Susie is given a far longer speech, perhaps on behalf of O'Casey. SOC, Complete Plays, 2, 103. 90. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 101. 91. Account Book, Abbey Theatre. 92. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 79. 93. For the lists of furnishings, see SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 4, Berg. 94. SOC, draft version of 'Feathering His Nest' [Rose and Crown], Holograph Notebooks, vol. 18, Berg. 95. SOC, Letters, 1,229. 96. SOC to Lady Gregory, 28 Feb. 1928, in Letters, 1, 230. 97. Bernard Shaw to SOC, 3 Mar. 1928, SOCP in NLI. 98. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 125. The sum agreed was £300 plus a half share of royalties in perpetuo. 99. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, pp. 81-82. 100. Robinson to SOC, 7 April 1928, NLI, MS 27,024. 101. Saddlemyer, Becoming George, p. 399. 102. Joseph Holloway's Irish Theatre: Volume 1: 1926-1931, ed. Hogan and O'Neill, p. 20. 103. See Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, 2, 366. 104. It must be borne in mind that Lennox knew that it would fall to him to direct the Tassie and he could not do it in its present form. When he saw it on stage in London he was relieved to see it was badly acted and just as bad a play as I always thought it'. Robinson to MacGreevy, 7 Nov. 1929, TCD MS 8103/183, cited by Susan Schreibman, The Thomas MacGreevy Chronology: A Documentary Life', PhD Dissertation, UCD, 1997, 2, 496. 105. Of the whole Tassie affair Lady Gregory's view was: 'it was great ill-luck', Journals, 2, 271, meaning there was no malice against O'Casey. Curiously, Samuel Beckett believed to the end of his life that Lady Gregory was mainly to blame for the 'shocking' rejection of the Tassie, which 'couldn't have been rejected without her'. See Worth, Samuel Beckett's Theatre, p. 132. 106. Yeats to Lady Gregory, 4 June 1928, in SOC, Letters, 1, 259-60. See also Lady Gregory, Journals, 2, 253, 271,273. 107. Yeats to SOC, 20 April 1928, Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (London: Hart-Davis, 1954), pp. 741-43 (p. 741). Subsequent quotations are referenced by page number. 108. W.B. Yeats, Introduction, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935, p. xxxiv. The terms on which Yeats excluded the war poets may be taken as definitive of Yeats's hostility to the Tassie: Tf war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever' (p. xxxv). 109. The point would appear obvious. O'Casey's art is closer to Chekhov's than to Yeats's dramatic ideal. See Hogan, The Experiments of Sean O'Casey, pp. 29-54. One of the first

486 Chapter 10

110.

111.

112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117. 118.

119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129. 130.

reviews of the Plough, byJ.W. G[ood], clearly stated that SOC 'does not deal in heroes or heroines' but 'with individuals as members of a group' and it is the skill with which SOC 'translates into dramatic form the interplay of emotions inside the group that makes him unique among Irish dramatists'. See Irish Independent, 9 Feb. 1926. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 1164. Yeats's Where There is Nothing, his only full-length play, was staged at the Royal Court in 1904. A notorious failure, it was revised with Lady Gregory's help as The Unicorn from the Stars (1907). Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, pp. 24, 49. SOC once heard Professor William Magennis lecture on the Poetics in Dublin and was not converted to Aristotelianism. See Letters, 1,348. SOC to Yeats, in Letters, 1, 273. Bernard Shaw to SOC, 19 June 1928, in SOC, Letters, 1, 284-85. See David Pierce, Yeats's Worlds: Ireland, England and the Poetic Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1995), pp. 177, 175. Yeats was out of Ireland between 1914 and 1919. In 1915 he said of the war, 'I give it as little of my thought as I can,' cited in Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, 2, 5. Stephens, The Insurrection in Dublin, p. 87. See alsojeffery, Ireland and the Great War, pp. 43-44. Saddlemyer, Becoming George, p. 401. Mrs Yeats referred to the publication of the letters as 'the O'Casey stunt'. Eileen O'Casey, Cheerio, Titan, p. 25. In a letter to Lady Gregory, 8 Jan. 1929, SOC displayed all the pride of a loving father in noting that, while Breon was sturdy and growing rapidly, 'most important of all, he has a gleaming eye, a vivid mind & laughs a lot.' Unpublished, copy courtesy Colin Smythe. Toibin, Lady Gregory's Toothbrush, p. 114. This was a 'serious mistake', as George Yeats told Cowasjee in 1958. See Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 111. SOC to Lady Gregory, 5 May 1928, in Letters, 1, 270 (undated): the original is in the Hoblitzelle Library, University of Texas at Austin. SOC to Fallon, 16 May 1928, in Letters, 1, 247. Also SOC to Shaw, July 1928, in Eileen O'Casey, Cheerio, Titan, p. 48. SOC to Shaw, 29 June and 5(?)July 1928, Letters, 1, 293, 296-97. See also Eileen O'Casey, Cheerio, Titan, pp. 41-49. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, pp. 87-88; Charlotte Shaw to Eileen, 8 July 1928, in SOC, Letters, 1, 298. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 31. M.S.P., review of The Silver Tassie, in Dublin Magazine, 3.4 (Oct.-Dec. 1928), 72. A.E. M[alone], review of the Tassie in Irish Book Lover XVI (1928), 109-11. He also found it 'infinitely greater' than any other Irish play staged at the Abbey since the Plough (p. 111). &, review of text of Tassie, 21 July 1928, p. 391. Notes taken by David Krause in conversation with SOC, summer 1962, copy courtesy Prof. Krause. See the review, possibly by Seumas O'Sullivan, of ^E's Collected Poems in Dublin Magazine, 2.1 (NS, Jan.-Mar. 1927), 61: 'His work is a heritage and a possession that I fear we do not fully value. It rises to a height that our generation is almost incapable of recognising. It lives in the eternities.' Stephen Gwynn considered vE a saint in his generosity to other writers, Irish Literature and Drama in the English Language: A Short History

Notes to pages 202-206 487 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1936), p. 120. See also Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man, p. 156. 131. Nicholas Allen, George Russell (J£) and the New Ireland, 1905-30 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003). 132. Irish Statesman, 21 July 1928, p. 391. 133. Jack Carney to SOC, 9 June 1928, SOCP in NLI. 134. Carney to SOC, 27 June 1928, SOCP in NLI. 135. In his acknowledgment, Cummins to SOC, 8 Sept. 1928, referred to the new Censorship Bill: The seven deadly sins, my dear Sean, can be reduced to one, patriotism.' SOCP in NLI. 136. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, 2, 369. 137. Lady Gregory to SOC, 1 July 1928, in SOC, Letters, 1, 294. 138. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, pp. 83-84. 139. Carter, The New Spirit in the European Theatre 1914-1924, p. 21. Who's Who in the Theatre (1933) credits Cochran with introducing Houdini into England, roller-skating into France, Belgium and Germany. He had a major involvement in London theatrical management. 140. Licence for The Silver Tassie granted by Austin Hertslet, Lord Chamberlain's Office. Index cards, LC Plays 8400, British Library. The theatre entered on the licence was the London Pavilion, whereas the venue where the Tassie was staged was the Apollo. 141. Fallon left the Abbey in the spring of 1928 and thereafter championed SOC in every way possible for many years. Billy McElroy, who was acting as SOC's unofficial agent, led Fallon to believe that Cochran would employ him as assistant director for the Tassie. Nothing came of this or of kindred plans. McElroy shamelessly made use of Fallon, at one time involving him in the possible purchase of the Phoenix Park racecourse. Correspondence between Fallon and McElroy, courtesy Gabrielle Fallon, TCD. 142. SOC to Lady Londonderry, 24 Sept. 1928, in Letters, 1, 312. Fallon had been urging SOC to be vindictive against the Abbey and not to give the Tassie unless the directors said publicly that they had made a mistake. 143. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 7, Berg. A taxi to see Shaw to discuss the Tassie and the Abbey on 27 June is listed for 8s.6d. 144. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 9, Berg. Calculating his tax on 14 July 1928 SOC totalled a figure of £161-1 Is. Od., Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. In the autobiographies he describes a visit of a taxman looking for £50 whom SOC amusingly deflected with information about the habits of bees, A, 2, 301. 145. Account Book, Abbey Theatre. Difficulties over Irish rights to Juno and the Plough began before the Tassie controversy and continued for several years. The Abbey claimed rights for Belfast which SOC disputed when Sinclair and his Irish Players wished to tour there with Juno in June 1927. The legal dispute dragged on into 1929. See SOC, Letters, 1, 351-53, and Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, pp. 98-100. The full correspondence between SOC and the Abbey solicitors is in the Saros Cowasjee Papers, University of Regina Library Archives, Saskatchewan. 146. Draft letter by SOC, undated, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 7, Berg. 147. In the library at Mountstewart there are signed copies of SOC's Two Plays inscribed to Lady Edith Londonderry, May 1926, and of the Plough, also dated 1926, inscribed more fully. The Tassie, wrongly dated 16/6/26 for 1928, is inscribed 'With Warm Regards & Sincere Wishes'. I am grateful to the Lady Mairi Bury for details. 148. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 75. 149. SOC to David Krause, 20 Nov. 1963, in Letters, 4, 445. See also H. Montgomery Hyde,

488 Chapters 10-11 The Londonderrys: A Family Portrait (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979). 150. SOC to John, 15 Jan. 1929, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 151. The programme for the Tassie at the Apollo Theatre indicates that Frank Dobson designed the crucifix for act 2 and Evan Walters painted the Madonna and Child in act 3, while G.E. Calthrop is credited with the design of acts 1, 3 and 4. Augustus John was involved only with act 2. See Holroyd, Augustus John, p. 682, n. 74. 152. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 9, Berg. 153. For her part, Eileen could enjoy playing the anxious wife as she hoped the housekeeper was seeing to his meals, 'Or is it, Oh dont trouble at all Mrs Earle, just a cup of tea Be maybe a piece of tart[?]'. Eileen to SOC, 24 Aug. 1928, SOCP in NLI. 154. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 2, Berg. 155. Noel Coward, Present Indicative (New York: Doubleday, 1937), p. 302. Coward used the word 'riotous' in a far different sense than was used for The Plough and the Stars in Dublin in Feb. 1926. 156. Preview of Bitter-Sweet, in Daily Dispatch, Manchester, 26 June 1929. 157. Eileen records her anxiety in Manchester over a lack of a contract during her first week. Cochran told her this was because in 1926 Coward had written to SOC for an opinion on his work and was given dismaying advice; he was thus wary of having Eileen in the company. See Eileen, p. 112. He was right to be anxious. As time went on, SOC became dangerously hostile. 158. Eileen O'Casey, Eiken, p. 115. 159. Massey, A Hundred Different Lives, p. 85.

160. Ibid., p. 38. 161. Ibid., p. 86. Incidentally, Robert Graves would appear to validate the punishment SOC metes out to the soldier visible at the opening of act 2: Graves describes a 'Crucifixion' for drunkenness, whereby the soldier 'stood spread-eagled to the wheel of a company limber, tied by the ankles and wrists in the form of an X'. Goodbye to All That (London: Cassell, 1957 [1929]), p. 156. 162. Elsa Lanchester, Charles Laughton and I (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), p. 39. 163. SOC, two pages of typed notes for the Tassie, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 18, Berg. 164. Kleiman, Sean O'Casey's Bridge of Vision, pp. 28 and 34-35. Kleiman points out that in an earlier version of the Tassie, now in the Berg, SOC himself had introduced Harry into act 2. In the text he is conspicuously absent.

165. Massey, A Hundred Different Lives, p. 42. 166. T.H., Theatre World, Nov. 1929, p. 14. 167. Harris Deans, The Stage of the Day', The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, Oct. 1929. Agate said in the Sunday Times that in acts 3 and 4 Laughton 'laid bare the heart of the play'.

168. John o'London's Weekly, 2 Nov. 1929. 169. H.N. Brailsford, "This Was the War": The Ruthless Courage of O'Casey's Great Play of Revolt', New Leader, 1 Nov. 1929, p. 8. 170. Massey, A Hundred Different Lives, p. 91. Likewise The Era (16 Oct. 1929), very enthusiastic over the experimental features of the Tassie, called it 'a superb failure'. See also James Lansdale Hodson, No Phantoms Here (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), p. 144. 171. Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama 1900-1930: The Beginnings of the Modern Period (Cambridge: CUP, 1973), p. 440. 172. Account Book, Abbey Theatre. SOC told Fallon that the Tassie was taking in £1,400 per week, 3 Dec. 1929, in Letters, 1, 384.

Notes to pages 206-215 489 Chapter 11 1. A.E. Malone, review of The Silver Tassie, Irish Book Lover, 16 (1928), 110. Malone refers to Huntly Carter's warning to SOC in The New Spirit in the European Theatre 1914-1924 to escape from 'middle-class conventional technique'. 2. SOC to Fallen, 28 Feb. 1929, in Letters, 1, 342. 3. SOC to Fallen, 25 April 1927, in Letters, 1, 215. 4. I am indebted to Luke Gibbons for this phrase, in his lecture at 'Ireland's Modernity: A Public Symposium', UCD, 1 Dec. 1997. 5. Ronald Ayling has made the point that in becoming a 'formidable polemicist in theological as well as political controversy' in his letters SOC 'was to follow in his father's evangelical footsteps'. See 'An Almighty Epistolary Performer', ILS, Fall 1993, p. 16. 6. SOC, in interview with George Walter Bishop, The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 44. 7. Kenneally, Portraying the Self, p. 233. 8. I am indebted to the novelist Kevin Brophy for discussing this point with me. 9. Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self, p. 48. 10. Jack Carney to SOC, 17 Jan. 1930, SOCP in NLI. 11. SOC to Annehe Tall, 29 Jan. 1930, copy in DKP, NLI. 12. Saddlemyer, Becoming George, p. 357. 13. Fitz-Simon, The Boys, pp. 52-60. See also The Gate Theatre Dublin, ed. Bulmer Hobson (Dublin: Gate Theatre, 1934), pp. 11-15, 29; Harold Ferrar, Denis Johnston's Irish Theatre (Dublin: Dolmen, 1973), pp. 19-40; Bernard Adams, Denis Johnston: A Life (Dublin: Lilliput, 2002), pp. 91-105. 14. SOC to Hilton Edwards, 6 July 1929, MS Library, TCD. Cited courtesy Mrs Ann Nolan. 15. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: TheManIKnew, pp. 129-30. See also SOC, Letters, 1, 412, 418-20. 16. See The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 43. 17. SOC, Within the Gates (London: Macmillan, 1933), p. 137. Because SOC later revised this play for the Collected edition all quotations are here from this first edition. 18. Prince Nicolas Galitzine, Saturday Review, 24 Feb. 1934, p. 219. 19. SOC, 'No Flowers for Films', in The Green Crow (New York: George Braziller, 1956), p. 191. The preceding quotation is also from this page. 20. A note with these details is in SOCP in NLI. The O'Caseys may also have met Komisarjevsky on this occasion. For a fuller list of the films SOC saw in the 1920s see Letters, 2, 1106. 21. John Russell Taylor, Hitch (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 104. There seems something false about this description of SOC as 'exotically dressed', etc. It may be that Hitchcock, wounded by SOC's brilliant pen-picture of him in Rose and Crown (1952), cited below, took revenge in his own description of the playwright. 22. See Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 134; and Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 105, where Fitzgerald's rejection as Captain Boyle is called 'an unpardonable Hitchcock blunder'. 23. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (rev. edn, London: Paladin, 1986), p. 84. See also Jack Morgan, 'Alfred Hitchcock's Juno and the Pay cock' in Irish University Review, 24 (1994), 212-16. 24. Leslie Rees, 'Remembrance of Things Past: On Meeting Sean O'Casey', in The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, pp. 51-52. 25. SOC, A, 2, 353. In turn, Hitchcock depicted SOC as the bum announcing the end of the world in The Birds (1963), as he told Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 84. 26. SOC, The Green Crow, p. 195.

490 Chapter 11 27. Joe Cummins to SOC, 24 Jan. 1931, SOCP in NLI. 28. The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 48. 29. SOC to Eileen, 9 July 1929, SOCP in NLI. 30. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 110. 31. Mary Manning Howe to CM, 29 Oct. 1997. Manning said SOC made Eileen abort the child. 32. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 111. 33. Among SOC's papers was a review of the Plough in the Osnabrucker Volkszeitung, 9 Jan. 1931, translated into English and concluding: 'It was regrettable that a section of the audience obviously did not fully appreciate the Tragedy of the piece and started laughing at most inopportune times.' DKP in NLI. 34. John M.W. Taylor to SOC, 9 July 1931, verso typescript of End of the Beginning, in Holograph Notebooks, Berg. 35. H.A. Castledine (solicitor) to SOC, 12 Aug. 1931, verso typescript of Within the Gates, Berg. 36. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 115. I am grateful to the present owners for showing me around. 37. SOC to Lady Gregory, 25 Oct. 1931, courtesy Colin Smythe. See also Letters, 4, 527-28. In her reply, 30 Oct., Lady Gregory concluded: 'Perhaps one day you will bring your wife here [to Coole],' Letters, 1, 440. It was not to be. 38. J.L. Hodson, 'O'Casey in Buckinghamshire', in The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 56. 39. For this detail and for many which follow here I am indebted to Bernard Curson of Chalfont-St-Giles. 40. Cited by Bernard Curson, letter to CM, 31 July 1997. 41. Sister Kevin Russell, Holy Cross Convent, Chalfont-St-Peter, to CM, 10 May 1999. 42. SOC to Eileen, 15 Feb. 1932, SOCP in NLI. 43. The phrase 'the belly of Bucks' was SOC's, chosen perhaps for the alliteration but also implying Jonah's plight in the whale's belly. 44. Dr Joe Cummins to SOC, 14 Nov. 1931, SOCP in NLI. 45. SOC to IT, 11 Oct. 1932, in Letters, I , 451-52. 46. George W. Russell (&) to Yeats, 17 Oct. 1932, in Letters to W.B. Yeats, ed. Richard Finneran et al., vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 546-47. 47. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 13, Berg. 48. Mary Manning [Howe] to SOC, 15 Jan. [1933], verso typescript of Within the Gates, Berg. De Valera won the election by a majority of one. 49. SOC to Lilian McCarthy, undated, DKP in NLI. The acting editions of Gunman, Juno and Plough were published by French's in Oct. 1932. 50. SOC to George Jean Nathan, 30 May 1933, in Letters, 1, 457. 51. Yeats to Time and Tide, 27 May 1933, in SOC, Letters, I , 456. 52. Wyndham Lewis to Time and Tide, 3 June 1933, in SOC, Letters, 1, 457. 53. SOC, 'I Wanna Woman', in Windfalls: Stories, Poems and Plays (London and New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 61-93. 54. Macmillam Archive, BL. The royalty payable was a generous 17.5%. At the same time, the Macmillan Company, NY, also agreed terms (10% to 1500 copies and 15% there after). Harold Macmillan thought it right to publish Gates 'as soon as we can', Macmillan Letterbooks 55,744, letter no. 227, 20 Sept. 1933, BL. 55. Charles B. Cochran to SOC, 1 Aug. 1933, in SOC, Letters, 1, 460. 56. Macmillans suggested a straight payment of £25 but Hughes wanted a fixed royalty on

Notes to pages 215-226 491 all copies sold, and got 2.5%, Macmillan Letterbooks 55,744, letter no. 461, 29 Sept. 1933, BL. 57. SOC to Fallon, 24 Sept. 1933, in Letters, 1, 465. In the autobiographies SOC describes his 'heart attack' and a visit to a cardiologist, Bertram Nisse, who prescribed rest, freedom from worry, and a diet of green herbs and water (A, 2, 353-56). 58. Harold Waller to SOC, 10 Nov. 1934, SOCP in NLI. 59. SOC to Desmond MacCarthy, 22 Oct. 1933, Lilly Library, Indiana University. He dissuaded McCarthy from his attempts to get 'I Wanna Woman' published in Life and Letters. 60. At the Everyman MacDermott established a repertory of mainly modern international classics from Ibsen to O'Neill, including no fewer than eight Shaw plays. There were occasional new plays, such as C.K. Munro's At Mrs Beam's and Noel Coward's The Vortex, which transferred to the West End. In general, MacDermott was one of those highminded enthusiasts in the theatre who care more for cultural than financial success. 61. Jack Reading, 'Foreword' to Norman MacDermott, Everymania: The History of the Everyman Theatre Hampstead 1920-1926 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1975), p. vii. 62. Norman MacDermott, 'Production Policy', typed draft, undated, SOCP in NLI. 63. Nathan to SOC, 19 Oct. 1933, in My Very Dear Sean, p. 32. 64. Nathan to SOC, 28 Nov. 1933, in My Very Dear Sean, p. 34. 65. SOC to Nathan, 5 Oct. 1932, in Letters, 1, 450; also 27 July 1933, p. 459. 66. SOC to Harry Kernoff, quoting Kernoff, 13 Feb. 1931, SOCP in NLI. 67. SOC to Harry Kernoff (copy), 20 Feb. 1931, SOCP in NLI. Lady Gregory bought the portrait, and after her collection was sold in 1932 it was acquired by the NGI. See illustration 26. 68. Anon. [Charles Morgan], 'Mr Sean O'Casey's New Play: "Within the Gates": Return of Poetry to the Theatre', Times, 28 Nov. 1933, p. 12. 69. Stjohn Ervine, 'At the Play: Mr O'Casey's Apocalypse', Observer, 7 Jan. 1934, p. 15. 70. Horace Reynolds, 'Sean O'Casey's Symbolic Drama', Saturday Review of Literature, 3 March 1934, p. 519. 71. [Charles Langbridge Morgan], 'Within the Gates', TLS, 7 Dec. 1933, p. 872. 72. Jack Reading to CM, 2 July 2000. Reading saw the first production of Gates and admired MacDermott for staging the play. Later he edited MacDermott's memoir, Everymania (above). 73. MacDermott to SOC, 27 Jan. 1934, SOCP in NLI. 74. SOC to MacDermott, 28 Jan. 1934, in Letters, 1, 490-91. 75. MacDermott to SOC, 6 Feb. 1934, SOCP in NLI. 76. John to SOC, 11 Jan. 1934, copy, DKP in NLI. In his reply to Ervine, 22 Jan., SOC conceded the difficulty of trying to render dialect phonetically. 77. J. Ramsay MacDonald to SOC, 10 Jan. 1934, in SOC, Letters, I , 487-88. On opening night Shaw sat with SOC in a box close to the stage. 78. The Stage, 15 Feb. 1934. 79. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 134. 80. James Agate, review of Within the Gates, in Sunday Times, 11 Feb. 1934, repr. in SOC, Letters, I , 492-96. 81. J.G.B., 'An Irishman's General Grouse: Sean O'Casey's Play on a London Park Theme', London Evening News, 8 Feb. 1934, p. 8. 82. [Anon.], '"Within the Gates" at the Royalty', Illustrated London News, 17 Feb. 1934. 83. For a description of Marjorie Mars, see James Lansdale Hodson, No Phantoms Here (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), pp. 121 ff. 84. Ivor Brown, 'Royalty: "Within the Gates'", Observer, 11 Feb. 1934, p. 15.

492 Chapters 11-12 85. W.A. Darlington, 'Sean O'Casey's New Play: Prose Poem on the Stage: "Within the Gates'", Daily Telegraph, 8 Feb. 1934, p. 8. 86. Anon. [Charles Morgan], 'Royalty Theatre: "Within the Gates'", Times, 8 Feb. 1934, p. 12. 87. Desmond MacCarthy, review in New Statesman and Nation, 17 Feb. 1934, repr. in MacCarthy, Drama (London and New York: Putnam, 1940), pp. 349-54. Italics in original. 88. Theodora Bosanquet, The Theatre', Time and Tide, 17 Feb. 1934, p. 222. 89. SOC to MacDermott, 14 Feb. 1934, SOCP in NLI. 90. SOC to Mr Kyllmann, 21 Feb. 1934, Spencer Library, University of Kansas. 91. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 13, Berg. 92. Shaw to Nancy Astor, 9 Feb. 1934, in Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1988), p. 365. Chapter 12 1. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, pp. 124-25. 2. Readers' Reports, June 1934, pp. 257-58, Macmillan Archive, BL. 3. SOC, preface, Windfalls (London and New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. vii. Subsequent quotations will be indicated in the text by numerals in parentheses. 4. Anthology of modern poetry from Abercrombie to Yeats, title page missing, in SOC Library, NLI. This was probably an edition of Poems of To-day (London: English Association, 1915-51).The pencilled poems in SOC's hand are on pp. 218 and 216. 5. SOC, Windfalls, p. 20. The typescript is in the Berg. 6. SOC, CP, 1,82. 7. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 99. 8. SOC tried to insert a dedication but Windfalls was already in press. Harold Macmillan to SOC, 9 Aug. 1934, Macmillan Letterbooks, no. 79, BL. 9. SOC to Motley [Gate Theatre, Dublin], in response to an appreciative review from G.E. Hetherington, 'London Letter', Motley, 3.3 (April 1934), p. 3. 10. Note on agreement with Dick Madden, 28 March 1934, SOCP in NLI. 11. SOC to Lady Astor, 17 Aug. 1934, in Letters, 1, 517. 12. SOC, Letters, 2, 830. He was struck by the strangely semi-tropical climate of the Ards peninsula which allows the growth of orange and olive trees so far north. SOC to Eileen O'Casey, 4 Sept. 1934, SOCP in NLI. 13. SOC, inscription to the Plough, library, Mount Stewart, courtesy the Lady Mairi Bury. 14. SOC to Lady Londonderry, 7 Nov. 1933, cited in H. Montgomery Hyde, The Londonderrys: A Family Portrait (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979), p. 248. 15. Lady Londonderry to Eileen O'Casey, 30 Sept. 1934, SOCP in NLI. 16. SOC to Eileen, 8 and 13 Sept. 1934, SOCP in NLI. Eileen had moved to Battersea by 13 Sept. 17. SOC, Letters, 1,517. 18. Paul H. Conkin, The New Deal, 2nd edn (Arlington Heights: AHM Publishers, 1975), p. 48. 19. New York Panorama: A Comprehensive View of the Metropolis Prepared by the Federal Writers' Project and Presented in a Series of Articles by Various Hands (London: Constable, 1939), p. 630. See also David Gelerntner, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (New York and London: The Free Press, 1995), passim. 20. Conkin, The New Deal, p. 57, emphases added. 21. New York Panorama, p. 282. 22. George Jean Nathan, 'O'Casey in the Offing', Vanity Fair, Jan. 1934, in Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, pp. 140-41.

Notes to pages 226-237 493 23. 24. , 25. 26. 27.

Harrington, The Irish Play on the New York Stage 1874-1966. W.B. Yeats, interview, Irish Press, 31 Jan. 1933, cited by Kavanagh, The Story of the Abbey Theatre (1984 edn), p. 159. Cited by Kavanagh, The Story of the Abbey Theatre, p. 160. Cited by Kavanagh, p. 161. See Tim Pat Coogan, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow (London: Hutchinson, 1993), pp. 501-05. 28. SOC to Eileen, 13 Nov. 1934, SOCP in NLI. SOC's informant was Barry Fitzgerald, whom he met in New York on 12 Nov. 29. Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), pp. 787-88. 30. Gelb, O'Neill, p. 788. See also SOC to Eileen, 13 Oct. 1934: Nathan, 'another kid', was about to buy O'Neill a few things out of Woolworth's for his birthday, SOCP in NLI. 31. Edward L. Shaughnessy, Down the Nights and Down the Days: Eugene O'NeiU's Catholic Sensibility (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 103. I am indebted to Professor Shaughnessy, an O'Neill expert, for answering my queries. 32. SOC to Eileen, 2 Oct. 1934, SOCP in NLI. He did not leave Nathan's hotel until some time after 4 Oct., more than two weeks after his arrival. 33. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 137. 34. Gelerntner, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, p. 276. 35. SOC to Lady Londonderry, 5 Oct. 1934, in Letters, 1, 521. 36. For example, Ernest Boyd, 'From Dublin's Slums to Fame: Sean O'Casey's Swift TenYear Rise as a Dramatist', Baltimore Sun, 14 Oct. 1934, p. 6; also Joseph Alsop, Jr, 'Sean O'Casey, Irish Patriot', Vanity Fair, 43 (Dec. 1934), 35, 76, and the biographical sketch in Twentieth-Century Authors, ed. Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft (New York, 1942), p. 1039, according to which SOC 'took an active part in the Sinn Fein movement and the Easter Rebellion'. 37. SOC to Eileen, undated but clearly Oct. 1934, SOC in NLI. 38. Bosley Crowther, '"Who is Then the Gentleman?" A Few Notes on Sean O'Casey, the Irish Dramatist, who is here with his play, Within the Gates , New York Times, 14 Oct. 1934, in The Sting and the Twinkle, p. 59. The quotations which follow are from this source (pp. 59-62). 39. SOC, 'From Within the Gates', New York Times, 21 Oct. 1934, repr. Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 111-17 (p. 114). See also SOC to Marilyn Bernstein, 14 May 1952, in Letters, 4, 569: The Down & Outs represent - not the "Unemployed" as so many thought - but the morally and intellectually down & out, who pander to anything, any power, they think to be higher than themselves; afraid to think, to resist [...]. These are they whom the Bishop leads; his pets, his preparation for heaven.' 40. Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, p. 141. 41. Leon Alexander, 'Sean O'Casey Tilts a Dull Lance against Puritanism in Play "Within the Gates",' Daily Worker, 27 Oct. 1934. 42. Harrington, The Irish Play on the New York Stage, p. 114. See also Gelb, O'Neill (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), p. 788. 43. Brooks Atkinson, 'Projector for a Fantasy: O'Casey's Within the Gates', New York Times, 31 Dec. 1933, in Atkinson, Sean O'Casey: From, Times Past, ed. Lowery, pp. 57-60 (p. 60). 44. Brooks Atkinson, in Sean O'Casey: From Times Past, pp. 64-65. 45. SOC to Atkinson, 4 Nov. 1934, in Letters, 1, 523. 46. For example, Stark Young, 'Theatre Gates: Within the Gates, by Sean O'Casey. National Theatre, October 22,1934', in the New Republic, 7 Nov., p. 369. An admirer of O'Neill's work, Young struggled with his sense of the deficiencies within American theatre and

494 Chapter 12

47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

a felt need for O'Casey 'exploration and variety', but in the end found the play disappointingly banal in spite of the lavish production. See also Joseph Wood Krutch, 'Mr. O'Casey's Charade', The Nation, 7 Nov. 1934. David Greene, 'A Recollection of the Green Crow', typescript, 18 March 1963, MS 96-25, Box 17, Lowery-O'Casey Collection, Burns Library, Boston College. Greene mistakenly dates SOC's lecture Jan. 1935. SOC to Eileen, 21 Nov. 1934, SOCP in NLI. Cf. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 139. SOC to Eileen, 26 Nov. 1934, SOCP in NLI. In his autobiographies SOC describes a visit to the Temple of Rudolph Sholem, where he addressed a Jewish audience on the resemblances between Jewish and Irish cultures (A, 2, 420-21). Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 136. Cf. SOC, A, 2, 453. For the following account of the Boston banning of Within the Gates I am indebted to Bernice Schrank, Memorial University of Newfoundland, for sharing her research with me. 'Dr Yeats' Reply to Play Query: "Let it Die" Says U.S. Priest', Irish Press, 13 Aug. 1938, p. 8. See also Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats 1865-1939 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 476, and Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, 2, 628. Terence L. Connolly, SJ, 'Critics, Interviews, and Sean O'Casey', America, 19 Jan. 1935, pp. 357-58. Boston Globe, 21 Jan. 1935. See also John Tuerk to SOC, 5 March 1935, in Letters, 1, 547-48. C.B., 'Baltimore to Miss Sean O'Casey's Play', Baltimore Sun, 23 Jan. 1935, May Craig Collection, UCD Archives, LA 28. Craig was on tour with the Abbey Players. Atkinson, 'Thundering in the Index: In Banning Within the Gates Boston Withdraws from Universe Again', New York Times, 27 Jan. 1935, repr. in From Times Past, ed. Lowery, pp. 67-70 (p. 67). SOC to Time and Tide, 6 July 1935, in Letters, 1, 572-74. SOC to Nathan, 30 Jan. 1935, in Letters, 1, 536. As the opening of I Knock at the Door (1939) reveals, SOC had a rather hazy notion of the actual birth process. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 145. Breon O'Casey to CM, 5 Jan. 1998. Samuel Beckett, The Essential and the Incidental: Windfalls, by Sean O'Casey', Bookman, 86 (1934), repr. in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), pp. 82-3. Beckett's fastidious taste in poetry is seen in 'Recent Irish Poetry', Disjecta, pp. 70-76. Anon.[Austin Clarke], review of Windfalls, TLS, 8 Nov. 1934, p. 770. Entry no. 852, 'Minute Book', and entry no. 489, 'Register of Prohibited Publications', Office of Censorship of Publication, Dublin. See F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, rev. edn (London: Collins/Fontana, 1973), pp. 536-50. Kingsley Martin to Time and Tide, 20 April 1935, in SOC, Letters, 1, 564. SOC confessed to using 'phrases of a Nathanesque manner' in his review, Letters, 1, 550. SOC, 'Notes on the Way', Time and Tide, 13 April 1935, in Letters, 1, 561. SOC to Yeats, 25 Feb. 1935, courtesy Michael Yeats. See SOC, Letters, 4, 536. Yeats to Ethel Mannin, 4 March 1935, in The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Wade (London: Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 831. Yeats to SOC, dictated to Mrs George Yeats, undated but datable c. 13 May 1935, Berg, courtesy Michael Yeats. I am grateful to Rodney Phillips for help in dating and obtaining a copy of this letter. See also Saddlemyer, Becoming George, pp. 486-87. SOC, Letters, 1,571.

Notes to pages 238-245 495 71. Attacks on the Abbey in Feb.-March 1935 had much to do with Yeats's change of policy. See Sean O'Faolain's 'Open Letter to Dr. W.B. Yeats', Irish Times, 2 March; editorials Irish Times, 20 and 26 March. See also O'Connor, My Father's Son, pp. 147ff and Hunt, The Abbey Theatre 1904-1979, pp. 145-56. 72. SOC to Yeats, 19 May 1935, microfilm, reel 1, Yeats Collection, SUNYat Stonybrook. I am grateful to Ann Saddlemyer for drawing this and the following letter to my attention. 73. SOC to Yeats, 26 May 1935, enclosing a letter from Geoffrey Whitworth to SOC (24 May) concerning the British Drama League, microfilm, reel 1, Yeats Collection, SUNY, Stonybrook. 74. W.B. Yeats, Explorations (London and New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 339. The notion that the Tassiewas a 'failure' in London may have come from Lennox Robinson. 75. Yeats to SOC, in SOC, Letters, 1, 571. 76. Brinsley MacNamara to Irish Times, 7 Sept. 1935. 77. Undated clipping, Abbey Theatre Archives. 78. SOC, 'Blasphemy and The Silver Tassie (1935)', in Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 108-10. See also Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, pp. 130-34; SOC to Yeats, 23 Nov. 1935, in Letters, 1, 594-97. See also SOC, The Friggin' Frogs' in A, 2, 281-91. 79. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, pp. 147-52. She does not mention Yeats here, but see SOC, A, 2, 281-82. However, the late Anne Yeats told me in 1998 that she was not present when SOC called, though he included her in the croquet scene. See also Saddlemyer, Becoming George, p. 487. 80. In Jan. 1935 Nathan had published a piece in Vanity Fair in which he chastised the New York critics for their inability to appreciate the merits of Within the Gates, 'the one reputable play' of the season. See My Very Dear Sean, pp. 142-45 (p. 143). SOC took his cue from Nathan and berated the London critics. But Nathan could write amusingly. 81. SOC, 'Overture', The Flying Wasp (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. viii. All quotations are from this edition, hereafter cited as FWwith a page number.. 82. Macmillan to SOC, Macmillan Letterbooks 11 Sept.-27 Oct. 1936, letter no. 177, ref. MHM/TM/MFE, British Library. Yet Macmillan deferred to SOC's determination, having visited him on 7 Oct. to discuss the matter (letter no. 459). 83. SOC to Macmillan, 25 Sept. 1936, in Letters, 1, 637. 84. Agate, My Theatre Talks, p. 146. SOC called this kind of discrimination 'censorship' and set out to 'shatter it'. SOC to Brooks Atkinson, 16 June 1937, in Letters, 1, 674. 85. James Agate, First Nights (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1934), p. 181. 86. SOC library, now in the NLI. The phrase quoted is on p. vii of Braybrooke. Cf. 'he is all the time a master of his own genius' (p. 9). 87. Design for Living was staged in New York in 1933. John Lahr, Coward the Playwright (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 85, says the London production was delayed because of the Lord Chamberlain's objections to the script. 88. Fisher, Noel Coward, p. 69. See also Philip Hoare, Noel Coward: A Biography (London: Mandarin, 1996), p. 417; John Lahr, Coward the Playwright, pp. 154-58. 89. Agate reviewed The Flying Wasp in John o'London's Weekly, 19 March 1937, and gave as good as he got. 90. The TLS, usually favourable to SOC, declared with regret that The Flying Wasp 'errs through an excess of censoriousness', 13 March 1937, p. 184. Even Brooks Atkinson called /Wpetty in attitude' in the New York Times, 6 June. 91. John Mason Brown, in Nathan, A George Jean Nathan Reader, p. 10. 92. Gabriel Fallon, 'Stage Wasps and Stinging Irishmen', Irish Monthly, May 1937, pp. 336-43 (p. 343). T.C. Murray, Irish Press, 23 March, in deploring SOC's touches of

496 Chapters 12-13 anti-catholicism, paved the way for a post-Tassie line of attack on him. 93. SOC, Letters, 1, 709. For an assessment of SOC as critic see my article in the CJIS, 18.1 (Dec. 1992), 58-67. 94. Eugene O'Neill to Saxe Commins, c.12 Oct. 1932, in Nathan, A George Jean Nathan Reader, p. 220. 95. SOC to Alfred A.K. Arnold, 22 Jan. 1936, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast, D/1886/3, courtesy Deputy Keeper of Records. 96. SOC to Arnold, 14 Feb. 1936, PRONI, Belfast, D/1886/2. For information on the Shirley Society see T.R. Henn, The College, 1919-70', in St Catharine's College Cambridge 1473-1973: A Volume of Essays, ed. E.E. Rich (Leeds: W.S. Maney, 1973), pp. 266-302. For SOC's account of his visit, see A, 2, 490-512. 97. SOC, 'Accounts', Holograph Notebooks, vol. 4, Berg. 98. Eyman, Print the Legend, p. 154. Ford had asked SOC to write the screen adaptation of the Informer, but he declined. See Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford: A Life (New York: St Martin's Press, 2001; London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 242. 99. John Ford to SOC, 9 March 1936, Lilly Library, Indiana University, ellipsis in original. Quoted courtesy Mr Dan Ford. Scott Eyman mistakenly dates this letter 27 Jan. 1936 and gives the source as University of Southern California, Print the Legend, pp. 175, 594. 100. Joseph McBride points out that RKO used documentary footage of the Anglo-Irish War 1919-21 and not 1916, Searching for John Ford, p. 243. 101. SOC to Ford, 29 March 1936, in Letters, 1, 617. 102. SOC to Fisk, 29 March 1936, in Letters, I , 618. 103. Eyman, Print the Legend, p. 178. 104. J.J. Hayes, 'Theatre Notes' [on the death of McCormick], Baltimore Sun, 25 May 1947. Holloway gave what was probably the common Dublin reaction to the film: 'a sentimentalised rendering of the "Clitheroes"' story.' Joseph Holloway's Irish Theatre, vol. 2, 1932-37, ed. Hogan and O'Neill, p. 63. 105. SOC, Letters, 1, 623-24. 106. SOC to Eileen, 21 Nov. 1934, SOCP in NLI. Since the text of Robinson's Church Street was not published until 1935, in More Plays (London: Macmillan), SOC knew it only by hearsay in 1934. He ordered a copy from Macmillans on 5 April 1935: Letters, 1, 555. 107. O'Neill, Lennox Robinson, pp. 129-32. But Curtis Canfield called Church Street 'a declaration of Abbey Street's dramatic principles', Plays of Changing Ireland (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 104. 108. Greaves, Sean O'Casey: Politics and Art, pp. 142-44. For his declaration see SOC to Time and Tide, 23 May 1936, in Letters, 1, 628, and 6 June, pp. 631-32. 109. Cited by O'Connor, My Father's Son, p. 140. 110. These figures are based on SOC's 'Accounts 1935-1948', Holograph Notebooks, vol. 4, Berg. 111. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 138. 112. Young, The Elmhirsts of Darlington, p. 136. The aims were published in Outline of an Educational Experiment (Totnes: Dartington Hall, 1926). 113. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, pp. 158-59. Eileen liked to have Shaw's endorsement on everything educational. 114. SOC to Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, 22 July 1936, Dartington Hall Records, LKE, General 24. It quickly became apparent that Dorothy and not Leonard was the dominant figure. 115. 'Suggestions made by Mr. Chekhov in connection with the proposed letter to be written to Mr. Sean O'Casey', enclosed with letter from Dorothy Elmhirst to SOC, 21

Notes to pages 245-259 497

116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126.

Oct. 1936, SOCP in NLI. For a full account of Chekhov's theories see Chekhov, To the Actor. See also Young, TheElmhirsts of Dartington, pp. 230-34. SOC to Dorothy Elmhirst, 24 Oct. 1936, cc, SOCP in NLI. Eileen O'Casey to Dorothy Elmhirst, 24 Oct. 1936, Dartington Hall Records. Michael Chekhov to SOC, 19 Nov. 1936, SOCP in NLI. Dorothy Elmhirst to Eileen O'Casey, 21 Dec. 1936, Dartington Hall Records. SOC to Dorothy Elmhirst, 28 Dec. 1936, Dartington Hall Records. SOC to Eileen, 15 May 1937 [misdated 1939], SOCP in NLI. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 142. SOC to Bernard Shaw, 24 Nov. 1937, in Letters, 1, 685. SOC, Letters, 1, 702. SOC did not decide against this idea until Feb. 1938. Eileen O'Casey to Dorothy Elmhirst, 22 May 1938, Dartington Hall Records. Mrs Shaw said they had spent a lovely day at Dartington once and had lunched with the Head of Arts, Christopher Martin. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 161. Cf. SOC, Letters, 1, 752.

Chapter 13 1. Yvonne Widger, ed., Dartington Hall Trust: Estate Newsletter, no. 46 (Oct.-Nov. 2002). Les and Yvonne Markham were the O'Casey hosts at the lodge. 2. SOC, Oak Leaves and Lavender or a Warld on Wallpaper (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 32. 3. SOC, 'Red Thoughts in a Green Shade', Articles Miscellaneous, 10 Typescripts, no. 1, Berg. 4. SOC to Gabriel Fallen, 5 Oct. 1938, in Letters, 1, 745. 5. PRO ref. J 54/2360. The action was tried by Justice Singleton at the High Court, King's Bench Division (Short Cause List) on 25 May 1939 and went against SOC (defendant), made liable for costs. 6. SOC to Saunders, Sobell and Greenbury, Solrs, 1 Sept. 1942, cc in SOCP in NLI. 7. SOC, Letters, 2, 69. Cf. Letters, 1, 812. 8. SOC to Saunders, Sobell and Greenbury, 14 Oct. 1942, cc in SOCP in NLI. 9. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 4, Berg. All subsequent figures for annual accounts are from this source, which details receipts meticulously (in SOC's hand) from 1935 to Jan. 1948. 10. Harold Macmillan to SOC, 23 June 1938, SOCP in NLI. 11. SOC, Letters, 1, 727-28. 12. SOC to Harold Macmillan, £.5 Jan. 1939, SOCP in NLI. 13. SOC to Time and Tide, 11 June 1938, in Utters, 1, 727. 14. SOC to Nathan, 8 Feb. 1939, in Letters, 1, 775. 15. O'Neill to Nathan, 13 May 1939, in Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988), p. 486. 16. SOC to BBC, 30 Jan. 1939, SOCP in NLI. Maurice Browne, the director, had persuaded O'Casey to join him for a discussion on the BBC on 25 June 1938 but SOC usually turned down such invitations. SOC to Maurice Browne, 2 June 1938, University of Michigan Library. A brief extract from this radio talk is in the Sound Archive, BL. 17. SOC, 'Literature in Ireland (1939)', published in International Literature, Dec. 1939, repr. in Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 170-81 (p. 178). 18. James 'Paddy' Grant to CM, 8 Nov. 2001. Mr Grant was a pupil at the senior school ('Foxhole') in Dartington 1935-39. See also Young, TheElmhirsts of Dartington, pp. 234-35. 19. At this time the Censorship Board members were entirely academic and highly conservative: Patrick Canon Boylan (Chairman); Senator Professor William Magennis;

498 Chapter 13 W.R. Fearon, Fellow of TCD; Denis J. Coffey, President of UCD; WJ. Williams, MA. 20. Also, on 31 March 1938 the IT (The Hidden Hand') complained of unauthorised censors operating in Dublin Corporation libraries, whereby certain volumes were withdrawn 'for inspection'. See also Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, pp. 148-50. 21. Register of Prohibited Publications, no. 113, Censorship Office, Dublin. 22. In similar terms, Clarke also reviewed I Knock for the TLS, The making of a dramatist', 4 March 1939, p. 131. 23. &, preface to Oliver Stjohn Gogarty, Selected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1933). 24. SOC to Jack Carney, 13 Nov. 1937, copy DKP in NLI. 25. Oliver Stjohn Gogarty, 'Books of the Day: "The Unlocked Heart"', Observer, 12 March 1939, repr. SOC, Letters, 1, 782-84 (p. 782), emphasis added. 26. In A.N. Jeffares, ed., The Poems & Plays of Oliver St John Gogarty (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2001) the formerly unpublished obscene poetic material goes far to reveal Gogarty's limitations. 27. Dr Joe Cummins to SOC, 19 March 1939, SOCP in NLI. 28. Harold Macmillan to SOC, 19 March 1939, SOCP in NLI. 29. This passage, reported in the Irish Times's account of Starkie's lecture, 17 Aug. 1938, was omitted from his essay, 'Sean O'Casey', in The Irish Theatre: Lectures Delivered during the Abbey Theatre Festival Held in Dublin in August 1938, ed. Lennox Robinson (London: Macmillan, 1939), pp. 149-76. 30. SOC to Eileen O'Casey, 22 Sept. 1939, SOCP in NLI. 31. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 171. 32. SOC to Eileen O'Casey, 7 Oct. 1939, SOCP in NLI. 33. SOC to Eileen, 12 Oct. 1939, SOCP in NLI. 34. Eileen O'Casey to George E. Windcatt, Town Clerk's Office, 24 May 1940, SOCP in NLI. 35. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 173. 36. SOC to Macmillan, 22 Oct. 1939, in Letters, 1, 819. 37. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: The Gathering Storm (London: Reprint Society, 1950), p. 232. 38. Cited in Nowlan and Williams, eds, Ireland in the War Years and After, p. 5. On the neutrality issue see pp. 14-27. See also T. Ryle Dwyer, De Valera's Finest Hour: In Search of National Independence 1932-1959 (Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1982), pp. 78-144. 39. John F. Kennedy, Trish Bases Vital to Britain', in Arthur Mitchell, JFK and His Irish Heritage (Dublin: Moytura Press, 1993), pp. 100-01. See also 'New evidence reveals British plan to persuade Taoiseach to abandon policy of neutrality', Irish Times, 15 Feb. 2001, p. 10. 40. SOC to Harold Macmillan, 13 Nov. 1936, in Letters, 1, 642. 41. SOC to Bessie Beatty, PEN Club, 7 April 1939, DKP in NLI. 42. SOC, 'Ireland - A Dramatist's View', letter to Picture Post, 24 Feb. 1940, in Letters, 1, 847. See also Jim Phelan, Churchill Can Unite Ireland (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940), pp. 112-13, 119. 43. SOC to Jack Carney, 9 Feb. 1940, DKP in NLI. The two men, Peter Barnes and James McCormack, were hanged in Birmingham on 5 Feb. 44. F.R. Higgins to SOC, 17 Feb. 1939, MS 27,029, NLI. 45. SOC to F.R. Higgins, 19 Feb. 1939, in Letters, 1, 779. 46. The Star Turns Red was eventually staged at the Abbey in 1978, directed by Tomas Mac Anna. In the Evening Herald (3 Feb.) John Finegan said Nathan would not have called the Star 'feeble' had he seen this production. 47. See Marshall, The Other Theatre, pp. 99-103.

Notes to pages 259-266 499 48. Chambers, The Story of Unity Theatre, p. 206. 49. 'Reader's Report', and Lord Chamberlain's decision on The Star Turns Red, List 1/26, BL. 50. SOC to Peter Newmark, 24Jan. 1940, in Letters, I , 837. 51. R. Vernon Beste to SOC, 1 Feb. 1940, in SOC, 'Articles Autobiographical', Berg. 52. SOC to Peter Newmark, 7 Feb. 1940, in Letters, 1, 843. This comment throws light on the opening s.d. for a domestic interior in the text of The Star Turns Red (London: Macmillan, 1940), p. 3: ' The walls are a vivid black, contrasting with the dark blue of the sky outside.' 53. [Harold S. Child], 'Forty Years of Irish Drama', TLS, 13 April 1940, p. 186. 54. From Ego IV, Dec. 1939, in James Agate, ed. Herbert Van Thai, p. 176. 55. James Agate, review of The Star Turns Red, Sunday Times, 17 March 1940. 56. Other good reviews came from Ivor Brown, 'At the Play', Observer, 17 March, andJ.E., 'Sean O'Casey Sees Red: Flays Fascism, Church', New Leader, 21 March 1940. 57. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 176. Can the companion have been Lady Troubridge? 58. Quoted in Chambers, The Story of Unity Theatre, p. 209. 59. Harold Macmillan to SOC, 27 March 1940, SOCP in NLI. 60. SOC to Waller, 22 March 1940, University of Delaware Library. Shaw claimed that the language SOC used in the Storwas, 'like a good Protestant', that of the authorized version of the Bible. See Eileen O'Casey, Cheerio, Titan, p. 106. 61. Macmillan to SOC, 21 May 1940, SOCP in NLL 62. Eddie Dowling had an option on the English rights of Purple Dust but one imagines this arrangement might have been readily renegotiated in the light of Shaw's invitation. 63. See Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, pp. 156-66; Kosok, O'Casey the Dramatist, pp. 166-68; Rollins, Sean 0'Casey'sDrama, pp. 65-77. 64. Worth, 'O'Casey's Dramatic Symbolism', (esp. p. 267). See also Kosok, O'Casey the Dramatist, pp. 168-74. 65. SOC to Nathan, 14 Feb. 1940, in Letters, 1, 844. SOC went up to Dartington Hall to copy a picture of a Tudor room to get the details right. SOC to Dorothy Elmhirst, 2 May 1941, Dartington Hall Trust Archive. 66. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 155. 67. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 178. 68. SOC to Jack Carney, 18 July 1940, NYU Library, copy DKP in NLI. In the event, Dartington school stayed put. 69. SOC to Jack Carney, 24 Aug. 1940, NYU Library, copy DKP in NLI. 70. The biography of Jack Carney, a neglected minor figure in Irish labour history, has yet to be written. To date the best that is in print is the brief account in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, pp. 350-52. See also Emmet Larkin, James Larkin, pp. 194-95; Richard Hudelson, 'Document Studies: Jack Carney and The Truth in Duluth', Saothar, 19 (1994), 129-39. Mina, nee Schoeneman, a sculptor, may have married Jack in Chicago in 1918.1 am grateful to Virginia Hyvarinen for information. 71. SOC, Under a Colored Cap (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 53. 72. [H.H. Child], 'English and Irish: New O'Casey Comedy', TLS, 23 Nov. 1940, p. 594. 73. T.C. Murray to Irish Press, 20 Jan. 1941, responding to SOC's letter 17 Jan. Murray's review had appeared on 20 Dec. See also Joseph Holloway's Irish Theatre, ed. Hogan and O'Neill, vol. 3, 1938-1944, p. 55. 74. Denis Johnston, review of Purple Dust, in The Bell, 1.4 (Jan. 1941), 93. 75. SOC to Herbert Marshall, 19 Oct. 1940, in Letters, 1, 868. 76. SOC was once invited by John Dulanty, High Commissioner for Eire, to join him at dinner with Joyce in London £.1930 but he had a prior engagement with Hugh

500 Chapter 13 MacDiarmid. SOC to Patricia Hutchins, 14 Jan. 1955, MS 430, Hutchins-Joyce Papers, TCD. 77. In Dublin in 1926 he tried in vain to obtain a copy of Ulysses. Joyce's friend Tom Pugh told him he would have to ask Kevin O'Higgins, Minister for Justice, who warned SOC against prosecution. Seamus de Burca to CM, 23 Dec. 1998 and 7 Jan. 1999. Later, SOC owned a copy of the fifth printing (Sept. 1924), in plain brown boards without author's name or title. It is now in the NLI. SOC also owned second edns of Dubliners (1922) and Exiles (1921), both Egoist Press. 78. James Joyce to SOC, 26 May 1939, referring to Irish Times 6 May, in SOC, Letters, 1, 799. In response to the editor of Books Abroad, requesting his nomination for the author of the most distinguished book(s) written since 1918, SOC emphatically named Joyce for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. They are unique, and, I think, tremendous. There can be no question of the artistry of this man, of his strange originality, and of the rich tragic and comic poetry that blossoms in all that he has written.' SOC to R.T. House, 15 Aug. 1939, copy DKP in NLI. 79. SOC to Joyce, 30 May 1939, in Letters, 1, 800. In the original letter, now in SUNYat Buffalo, SOC wrote 'illusions' for 'allusions', according to the copy in TCD, MS 429, Hutchins-Joyce Papers. 80. SOC to Jack Carney, NYU, copy DKP in NLI. 81. SOC to Carney, 23 Feb. 1941, NYU, copy DKP in NLI. 82. SOC, 'How the War Hits O'Casey', typescript, 'Articles. World War IF, m.b., Berg. 83. SOC attended Arms and the Man offered by the Travelling Repertory Company in June 1941 and found it excellent. This company, headed by Basil and Louise Langton, was very popular but Dorothy Elmhirst apparently opposed its retention at the Barn. SOC was a signatory to a letter of protest at this decision. See Young, The Elmhirsts of Darlington, pp. 311-12. 84. SOC, The Curtained World', in The Saturday Book (1943), p. 140. Cf. Blasts and Benedictions, p. 11. 85. SOC to Fallen, 29 March 1941, in Letters, 1, 882. 86. SOC to Churchill, 4 July 1942, in Letters, 2, 68. 87. See SOC to John Burns, 10 Dec. 1941, in Letters, 1, 914-15. 88. SOC to Carney, 23 Nov. 1943, in Letters, 2, 151. 89. Montefiore, Stalin, pp. 410-31. 90. The Totnes Times (30 October) reported the appearance at this 'first-class concert' of BBC artistes Denis O'Neil and Brian Lymbery, together with the trombonist Jack Armstrong, all assisted by the generosity of Mrs Isabel Cottle. Eileen O'Casey was mentioned as one who had worked very hard to promote the success of the concert. I am indebted to Bob Mann, curator Guidhall, Totnes, for this information. Cf. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 180. 91. SOC, 'Anglo-Soviet Unity - Hurrah!', in 'Green Searchlight' typescripts, file 2, p. 12, Berg. 92. SOC, 'Green Searchlight' typescripts, no. 1, Berg. 93. Brooks Atkinson, reviewing I Knock at the Door in the New York Times on 9 April 1939, commented: 'Every man kills the thing he loves; and Mr O'Casey, who can write dialogue like a man inspired, can supernaturalize like an amateur poseur.' Reprinted in Atkinson, Sean O'Casey: From Times Past, p. 118. SOC denied 'posing'. See Letters, 1, 793. 94. Twyford, It Came to Our Door, pp. 8-14, 99-140. 95. SOC, draft, Pictures in the Hallway, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 16, Berg. 96. For example, SOC to Carney 28 March 1941 about the bombing of Plymouth: 'our house shook the whole time the guns were going.' NYU, copy DKP in NLI.

Notes to pages 266-275 501 97. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 238. 98. SOC, diary note, 26 July 1941, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 7, Berg. 99. [H.H. Child], Johnny Casside Grows Up', TLS, 7 March 1942, p. 118. 100. [Austin Clarke], review of Pictures, in Dublin Magazine, NS, 17.3 (July-Sept. 1942), 44-45. 101. Patrick Kavanagh, 'Sean O'Casey Grows Up', Irish Times, 14 March 1942, p. 5. 102. SOC to Brian O'Nolan [Flann O'Brien], 2 April 1942, in Letters, 2, 37. 103. SOC to Carney, 6 Feb. 1942, in Letters, 2, 10. 104. Ciara O'Farrell, 'A Playwright's Journey: A Critical Biography of Louis D'Alton (1900-1951)', PhD Dissertation, UCD, 1998. D'Alton's tours were under the aegis of the Abbey at this time. 105. SOC to Desmond MacCarthy, 18 March 1942, Lilly Library, Indiana University. 106. SOC to MacCarthy, 28 March 1942, Lilly Library, Indiana University. 107. Atkinson, 'O'Casey Keeps His Life Moving', New York Times, 5 April 1942, repr. in Sean O'Casey: From Times Past, p. 119. 108. In what may be called the source of this visionary scene, 'All Heaven and Harmsworth Too', in Pictures, Johnny experiences the transformation alone. It is there closer to a Joycean epiphany. 109. SOC, Red Roses for Me: A Play in Four Acts (London: Macmillan, 1942),p. 117.Ayamonn, the working-class martyr, while a version of the rebel Eamonn a' Chnuich, may also derive from James Nolan, killed by the Dublin police during the 1913 Lock-out and given a massive funeral, and, although SOC would have denied it, from ^E's vision of the workers as the descendants of Celtic heroes. See Yeates, Lockout, pp. 111-12, 346-47. 110. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 67. 111. See Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, pp. 180-94. 112. SOC, draft of Red Roses for Me, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 7, Berg. 113. Mitchell, The Essential O'Casey, p. 229. 114. SOC to Daniel Macmillan, 29 April 1942, Macmillan Archive, copy DKP in NLI. 115. SOC, 'The Curtained World', Saturday Book 3, ed. Leonard Russell (London: Hutchinson, 1943), p. 141. Cf. SOC, Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 11-12. 116. James Agate, 'Mr. O'Casey: A Reply', Sunday Times, 3 May 1942, repr. in SOC, Letters, 2, 49. See also SOC, Sunset and Evening Star, published after Agate's death in 1947, where SOC accuses him of sabotaging Purple Dust, in A, 2, 557. 117. Joe Cummins to SOC, 22 Nov'1942, SOCP in NLI. SOC later said the inspiration for the statue business came from the incongruity of a statue of the Blessed Virgin erected beside appalling housing, the Tolka cottages, in north Dublin, Letters, 2, 585, 623. But there is also a story that when SOC stayed with O Maolain at 35 Mountjoy Square in 1920 he was seen washing 6 Maolain's statues in the back yard. See p. 134 above. 118. SOC to Joe Cummins, 26 Nov. 1942, Letters, 2, 97. 119. Goulding, The Story of the People's, pp. 15-16. 120. SOC to James Gate, 17 Dec. 1942, University of Newcastle upon Tyne Library, copy courtesy Katharine Worth. 121. Programme for Red Roses for Me, People's Theatre Archive, RED 02, JPG. The Daily Mail reporter referred to this production as a premiere. 122. On 7 December musical director Frederick May arrived at O'Casey's door to ask if he would give the play to the Abbey should they ask for it. SOC, diary entry 7 Dec. 1942, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 10, Berg. It would appear that, holidaying in the area, May was deputed by Blythe to put the question to SOC. 123. M.M., review of Red Roses for Me, in The Bell, 5 (Feb. 1943), 410.

502 Chapters 13-14 124. Sheila May, review of Red Proses for Me, in Dublin Magazine, 18.2 (NS, Apr-June 1943), 73. It can be pointed out that Moorneen is derived from muirnin ('darling'), and that SOC was in fact equivocal about his character. 125. Fallon to SOC, 9 Feb. 1943, SOCP in NLI. 126. SOC to Fallon, 20 Feb. 1943, in Letters, 2, 124. 127. I am indebted to Louis le Brocquy for his recollections of this time, telephone conversation, 16 June 2001. I am also grateful to Catherine Leeney for a copy of le Brocquy's sketch of Red Roses. 128. Anne Yeats to CM, telephone conversation, 18 July 1999. In a programme note to a revival of Red Roses at the Abbey, 10 April 1980, Shelah Richards quoted Anne Yeats as recalling the bridge scene in act 3 as 'warm and colourful, rich and redolent of the Dublin of those days'. 129. SOC to Louis D'Alton, 21 March 1943, copy courtesy Ciara O'Farrell. 130. Gabriel Fallon, Theatre: Red, Red, Roses!', An t-Iolar: The Standard, 26 March 1943, p. 3. Fallon made it clear in his opening paragraph that he was attempting here to speak for the Dublin public at large: 'few presentations have aroused with the ordinary playgoer such feelings of general dissatisfaction.' 131. Shelah Richards Collection, Irish Theatre Archive, Dublin Corporation. 132. See Maurice Harmon, Sean O'Faolain: A Life (London: Constable, 1994), pp. 127-64, and Marie Arndt, A Critical Study of Sean O'Faoldin's Life and Work (New York and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), pp. 75-140. 133. Sean O'Faolain, The Case of O'Casey', The Commonweal, 11 Oct. 1935, p. 578. 134. Sean O'Faolain, The Strange Case of Sean O'Casey', The Bell, 6.2 (May 1943), 118. 135. Sylvia Townsend Warner, 'Red Roses for Me', Our Time, April 1943, p. 23. This review was of the published text. 136. [Charles L. Morgan], 'Mr. Sean O'Casey's World: Poetry and the Drama', TLS, 9 Jan. 1943, p. 22. 137. SOC, Blasts and Bendictions, pp. 260-61. 138. SOC, 'Green Searchlight: 5 Typescripts of Articles', no. 3, p. 6, Berg. 139. SOC to Nathan, 8 Feb. 1944, in Letters, 2, 159. 140. SOC to Lennox Robinson, 25 Oct. 1943, in Letters, 2, 149. See also SOC's letter to 'Quidnunc', IT, 6 March 1942. 141. Robinson to SOC, 22 Oct. 1943, MS 27,024, NLI. 142. Young, TheElmhirsts of Dartington, p. 167. 143. SOC to William B. Curry, 22 April 1944, in Letters, 2, 166. Shivaun's teacher was Mrs Nora Grout, whose report Currie had sent to Eileen on 30 March. She and Sean then went up to Dartington Hall to discuss the matter. Eventually, Curry invited Eileen (alone) to see him again. Sean as fond parent was too much for him. 144. SOC to MacCarthy, 12 June 1944, Lilly Library, Indiana University. 145. Breon O'Casey to CM, 5 Jan. 1998. 146. Peter Sheridan to CM, telephone conversation, 27 July 1999. Sheridan is author of 44: A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1999), which pays tribute to SOC as fellow-East-Wall writer. 147. See Grace Bradbeer, The Land Changed its Face: The Evacuation of the South Hams 1943-44 (Tiverton, Devon: Devon Books, 1997). 148. SOC to MacCarthy, 12 June 1944, Lilly Library, Indiana University. 149. SOC to Jack Carney, 26 March 1943, in Letters, 2, 127-28. 150. Contrary to what most commentators say, Oak Leaves and Lavender is not set in Cornwall but in Devon. Shivaun O'Casey (15 Feb. 2002) confirmed that both setting and dialect are Devonish.

Notes to pages 275-285 503 151. Breon O'Casey to CM, 5 Jan. 1998. 152. Yeats to SOC, 20 April 1928, rejecting The Silver Tassie, in The Letters ofW.B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (London: Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 741, emphasis added. 153. [Anthony V. Cookman], 'The Unfulfilled Nation', in the TLS, 17 Nov. 1945, p. 548. To SOC himself, Drums under the Windows was as good a book as could be made. 154. G.W. Stonier, 'Mr. O'Casey's Autobiography', New Statesman and Nation, 27 Oct. 1945, p. 284. Stonier, however, regretted the lack of detail on SOC's inner thoughts as artist. There is next to nothing in the autobiographies on the writing process. 155. SOC to Peter Newmark, 23 April 1945, in Letters, 2, 231. 156. Arthur Mitchell, 'George Orwell & Sean O'Casey: Two Prickly Characters Intersect', History Ireland, autumn 1998, pp. 44-46. Orwell was working for the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office. 157. George Orwell, The Green Flag', Observer, 28 Oct. 1945. 158. SOC to Guy Boas, 12 June 1945, in Letters, 2, 261. 159. SOC, Totnes of Gentle Mien', in The West Country Magazine, ed. J.C. Trewin, 3.1 (winter 1946), 154. 160. Breon O'Casey to CM, 5 Jan. 1998. Chapter 14 1. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 190. 2. But SOC defended monotony, claiming that it was out of monotony that the artist or engineer creates great things. 'If all we did was all exhilaration, we'd soon be dead.' SOC, 'Exmout[h] Ship, Ahoy!' [1946], in Articles, Miscellaneous, 10 Typescripts, Berg. 3. SOC to Nathan, 14 March 1947, in Letters, 2, 456. 4. SOC, notebook, entry dated 15 March 1948, when Eileen took the children to Oxford. Copy, SOCP in NLI. 5. Pauline McCulloch, telephone conversation, 13 March 1999. 6. Mairead Fleming, NT, telephone conversation, 9 March 1999. See also Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 183, n. 42. 7. Pauline McCulloch, telephone conversation, 7 June 1998. 8. Details on McGuinness from Garda Museum Archives; NA (last will and testament); marriage certificate McGuinness and Maire Keating, 3 Jan. 1944. Details on Maire from conversation with her cousin Sean McCann, 26 June 1998, and memorabilia in his possession. 9. Shaw, Complete Plays with Prefaces, 2, 531. 10. SOC, Uncatalogued Items, Box S2, 'Girl I Left Behind Me', Berg. 11. Maire was now just a piece of text, and in time, in Letters, 2, 1035, SOC could dismiss as worthless the love poetry (more text) he had written to her and published in Windfalls (1934). 12. See Brian Fallon, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930-1960. My point is that Fallon disarms the problem where SOC challenges it. 13. SOC to Mikhail Apletin, 10 Feb. 1950, in Letters, 2, 678. 14. She was a daughter of the poet T.W. Rolleston. She and her husband co-produced plays. 15. Elsom, Post-War British Theatre, p. 7. See also Marshall, The Other Theatre, pp. 226-35. 16. SOC to Macmillan, 5 March 1946, copy DKP in NLI. 17. 'There was no use wearing it [the Red Star] when every one waved the red Flag - but now -'. SOC to Leslie Daiken, 17 May 1946, Berg. 18. SOC to Ria Mooney, 22 Dec. 1945, in Letters, 2, 324.

504 Chapter 14 19. W.A. Darlingon, 'Sean O'Casey's Fine Play: Realism with Symbolism', Daily Telegraph, 27 Feb. 1946, p. 5. In the Observer J.C. Trewin placed O'Casey 'among the quiring Elizabethans'. 20. Ernest Betts, Tlay or Vision? Bravest of the new worlds - in Dublin', Daily Express, 27 Feb. 1946. 21. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 163. 22. SOC to Nathan, 20 March 1946, in Letters, 2, 354. 23. Eric Forde, 'Korda's Kieron Moore', Feature Magazine, April 1947, pp. 18-19. 24. SOC to Nathan, 5 May 1946, in Letters, 2, 366. 25. SOC to Eddie Byrne, 23 March 1946, courtesy Catherine Byrne. I am also grateful to Ms Byrne for allowing me to see her father's scrapbook. 26. Marshall, The Other Theatre, p. 222. See also Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 195, and Elsom, Post-War British Theatre, pp. 12-14. The Company of Four comprised Tennent Plays Ltd, Glyndebourne Opera, the Arts Theatre Cambridge, and Tyrone Guthrie working in association with the Arts Council. 27. Lionel Birch, Picture Post, 1 June 1946, pp. 20-21. 28. SOC to Bronson Albery, 10 June 1946, in Letters, 2, 372. 29. SOC to Horace Reynolds, 17 Jan. 1946, in Letters, 2, 343. For Ria's American career see McGlone, Ria Mooney, pp. 30-47. 30. SOC to Nathan, 11 June 1946, in Letters, 2, 374. 31. SOC, diary entries dated 19 Sept. 1946, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 13, Berg. 32. This John Robson Grayburn, known as 'China John', has no recollection of either a sailor suit or of the O'Caseys. Grayburn to CM, 25 April 1998. It seems clear nevertheless that this cousin to Captain Jack was SOC's original, as the Grayburn family agrees. I am grateful to the family and to Mrs Robin Johnson, Chalfont-St-Giles, author of a pamphlet on Captain Jack Grayburn, VC; also to Mr Bernard Curson, who first helped me to trace the real boy in the sailor suit. 33. T.C. Murray, review of Oak Leaves and Lavender [text], Irish Press, 25 April 1946, in MS 23,511,NLI. 34. SOC to Ria Mooney, 27 April 1946, in Letters, 2, 364. It should be noted that the first request from Dublin to stage Oak Leaves came from Leo McCabe of Illsley-McCabe Productions on 3 April; SOC refused on 5 April. Correspondence in SOCP in NLI. 35. John Betjeman, 'Poet of the Very Poor', Daily Herald, 25 Oct. 1945, p. 2. Desmond MacCarthy, who knew O'Casey well, could blandly describe him as 'an implacable enemy of the Church of Rome' and turn this into a neat argument about the selfcontradictory Celt, Sunday Times, 4 Nov. 1945, p. 3. In the TLSAnthony Cookman, who was also now the drama critic for the Times, while conceding O'Casey's 'flaming hatred of the Catholic hierarchy', quickly insisted that the central character in Drums was not to be identified with O'Casey, 17 Nov. 1945, p. 548. 36. M.M., 'Mr O'Casey's Memoirs', Irish Independent, 12 Nov. 1945, p. 4. 37. M.J. McManus, 'Sean O'Casey Remembers - Bitterly', Irish Press, 1 Nov. 1945, p. 2. McManus was literary editor of the Irish Press and biographer of de Valera. 38. Padraic Colum, 'O'Casey: A Third Instalment', Yale Review, 36.1 (Sept. 1946), 155. 39. Sean O'Faolain, 'Too Many Drums', TheBett, 11 (Dec. 1945), 815-21. When SOC sent Nathan this review his response was that it was 'a fascinating study in confused nonsense', personally prejudiced. See My Very Dear Sean, p. 75. 40. Austin Clarke, review of Drums in Dublin Magazine, 26.1 (NS, Jan. - Mar. 1946), 56-58. 41. They would have been encouraged to some extent by St John Ervine's acerbic review of Drums in the Spectator on 2 Nov. 1945. By this time Ervine had become hostile to SOC.

Notes to pages 285-292 505 42. Roger McHugh, 'Dublin Theatre', The Bell 12.6 (Sept. 1946), 522. 43. Gabriel Fallon, in This Catholic Theatre Business', Irish Monthly, 64 (1936), 77-80, marked his initial interest in this topic. But he was far too sophisticated openly to advocate a 'Catholic' theatre. Fallon's great strength was always his duplicity in the art vs. morality debate. 44. Feature Magazine, 1.8 (Sept. 1946), p. 4. Fallon's title was associate editor for theatre. 45. Gabriel Fallon, Theatre: Roses with Thorns', Standard, 28 June 1946, quoting Valentin Iremonger, 'Rude Mechanicals', IT, 18 May 1946, p. 4. See also SOC, Letters, 2, 376-78. Iremonger had in 1941 tried to get SOC to subscribe to New Theatre Group, a workers' theatre in Dublin. See correspondence SOC-Iremonger, SOCP in NLI. 46. SOC to editor of the Standard, 26 July 1946, p. 5. 47. Fallon, Theatre: Calling Mr. O'Casey', Standard, 9 Aug. 1946, p. 5. 48. Some years later SOC told David Krause that Fallon had been indoctrinated by the Standard, 'the poor, pious and gudess Gaby'. Letters, 2, 386, n. 1. 49. See Fallon, 'Dublin's Sean O'Casey', Feature Magazine, 1.8 (Sept. 1946), 8. Cf. Irish Digest, Nov. 1946, pp. 33-36. 50. In his review of the text of The Star Turns Red in the Irish Press, 5 March 1940, Murray saw SOC's communist vision as 'absurdly impossible for anyone who understands even vaguely the psychology of the Irish Catholic people'. The inference here is that the entire Irish nation was catholic. As catholic, Brinsley MacNamara had noisily resigned from the Abbey board in 1935 when The Silver Tassiewas accepted for production. See SOC, Letters, 1,582-89. 51. SOC, Tender Tears for Poor O'Casey', New Irish Writing, 2 (1947), 68-77. Reprinted with some changes in The Green Crow, pp. 177-90. 52. David Marcus and Terence Smith, eds, Irish Writing, 1 (1946), 7. 53. SOC, 'A Whisper about Bernard Shaw', repr. in The Green Crow, pp. 197-204. 54. Raymond Broad to SOC, 20 May 1946, SOCP in NLI. Shaw's note was initialled with the date 16.5.46. 55. SOC, 'A Protestant Bridget', The Bell, 13.5 (Feb. 1947), 64-72; repr. in Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 205-12 (p. 206). 56. Colin Smythe later included two volumes of Lady Gregory's complete Journals, ed. Daniel J. Murphy, in his Coole edition of her works, vol. 1 appearing in 1978 and vol. 2 in 1987. 57. SOC, 'Don't Be Afraid of Books', Irish Democrat, Oct. 1946, repr. in SOCR, 5.2 (spring 1979), 181-83. 58. SOC to Denis Johnston, 31 Aug. 1946, TCD MS 10,066/287/2,255. 59. Johnston to SOC, 2 Sept. 1946, copy, TCD MS 10,066/287/2,255. 60. Denis Johnston, Joxer in Totnes: A Study of Sean O'Casey', Irish Writing, 13 (1950), 50. 61. SOC, Letters, 2, 390. 62. SOC to Dr John V. Simcox, 11 March 1950, in Letters, 2, 689. 63. C.D. Heriot, 'Reader's Report', Lord Chamberlain's Office, 13 June 1945, BL WB/1945/1. 64. SOC had met Robert Lynd during his years in London and liked him for helping any Irishman he could to a job in Fleet Street. 'He wasn't a deep writer; but clever and always interesting.' SOC to Mai McCarthy, 24 Nov. 1955, courtesy Shivaun O'Casey. 65. Sheila Lynd, This is a Play for Our Time', Daily Worker, 26 July 1946, p. 2. 66. SOC to William Rust, 23 Sept. 1946, in Letters, 2, 398-99. According to Colin Chambers, Willis [later Lord Willis] and SOC would not have got on. 'Rust would probably have tried to accommodate both of them' but would have favoured SOC,

506 Chapter 14 'who was an important figure for the Daily Worker'. Chambers to CM, 30 Sept. 2002. 67. Chambers, The Story of Unity Theatre, p. 272. For some general comments on Unity see also Ted Willis, Evening All: Fifty Years Over a Hot Typewriter (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 45-46. 68. SOC to Jack Carney, 12 Oct. 1946, in Letters, 2, 401. 69. SOC to Jack Daly, 26 Nov. 1946, in Letters, 2, 416. 70. SOC, 'Accounts', Holograph Notebooks, vol. 4, Berg. 71. SOC to Sydney Bernstein, 29 Sept. 1946, in Letters, 4, 548. 72. SOC to Carney, 27 May 1945, in Letters, 2, 248. For Christmas 1941 Carney sent SOC a turtle-neck jersey. 73. SOC to Carney, 8 Jan. 1947, in Letters, 2, 434. 74. SOC, 'How the War Hits O'Casey', Articles, World War Two, m.b., Berg. 75. SOC, Letters, 2, 443. 76. SOC to Mick Casey, 10 April 1946, in Letters, 2, 363. 77. SOC to Mick, 27 July 1946, in Letters, 2, 381. SOC sent another pound on 14 Sept. 78. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, p. 87. 79. Isabella ('Babsie') Murphy to SOC, 5 Feb. 1947, SOCP in NLI. 80. Irish Press, 13 Jan. 1947. 81. SOC to Babsie Murphy, 20 Jan. 1947, in Letters, 2, 439. 82. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O'Casey, p. 83. 83. Ibid., p. 86. The quotation below (The other fella') is from p. 87. 84. Campion's, formerly Nick Welch's, an old-fashioned dockside pub, was closed in 2002 to make way for high-rises. The present writer met a man in Campion's in 2001 who could remember Mick Casey. 85. SOC to Cecil Tivy, 26 April 1947, MS 5204, TCD. 86. "Jim" Larkin Dies: Sean O'Casey Tribute', IT, 31 Jan. 1947, repr. in Letters, 2, 442-43 (p. 443). 87. SOC, James Larkin: The Lion of Irish Labour', Irish Democrat, March 1947, repr. SOCR, 1.2 (spring 1975), 26-29 (p. 29). 88. Emmet Larkin, James Larkin, p. 269. See also Jim Larkin [grandson], In the Footsteps of Big Jim, pp. 117, 119; Emmet O'Connor, James Larkin, p. 100. 89. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 167. 90. SOC to Carney, 10 Jan. 1946, in Letters, 2, 339. Larkin refused SOC's invitation to stay overnight on this occasion but he may have returned for 'a few days' in the autumn of 1946. See Letters, 2, 449. 91. Cooney,/o/m Charles McQuaid, p. 123. Cooney mistakenly says the meeting took place in Liberty Hall. 92. Carney to SOC, 21 Feb. 1940, SOCP in NLI. He agreed, and decided to send Larkin a copy of The Star Turns Red. SOC to Carney, 23 Feb. 1940, copy DKP in NLI. 93. SOC to Carney, 10 Jan. 1946, in Letters, 2, 339. 94. Carney to SOC, 10 Sept. 1946, SOCP in NLI. In this letter Carney wrote out six pages of his own history, the basis of the narrative offered to an American friend in 1948: see James Larkin, ed. Nevin, pp. 395-400. See also Emmet Larkin, James Larkin, p. 194, n. 2, for the 'Carney Memoir' written at his request in May 1953, which would appear to have had its origin in this 10 Sept. 1946 letter to SOC. Carney's 1946 account appears in Donal Nevin's forthcoming book on James Connolly. 95. Carney to SOC, 27 July 1948, SOCP in NLI. After Larkin's death Delia rejected Carney's offer to write his biography. 96. Jim Larkin, In the Footsteps of Big Jim, p. 128. It may be noted that the WUI headquar-

Notes to pages 292-299 507 ters had moved in 1942 to Thomas Ashe Hall in College Street, which was undergoing repairs in 1946 when Larkin fell through the floor. 97. Cooney, John Charles McQuaid, p. 211. Emmet O'Connor records that in hospital Larkin was attended by the same priest as had attended Pearse and Connolly in Kilmainham, James Larkin, p. 113. 98. Carney to SOC, 5 Feb. 1947, SOCP in NLL 99. Cooney, John Charles McQuaid, p. 211. The Archbishop presided at the requiem Mass in St Mary's, Haddington Road, on 2 Feb. See Emmet O'Connor, James Larkin, p. 114. 100. SOC to Carney, 8 Feb. 1947, in Letters, 2, 447. 101. In Feb. 1947 the working title was The Long Day Over, in March Goodbye at the Door, a title he reserved for the final volume. SOC finished the typescript on 15 April. 102. SOC to Daniel Macmillan, 29 Aug. 1947, in Letters, 2, 475; see also 2, 482. 103. See SOC, Letters, 2, 447, 453, 555. 104. SOC, 'Red Thoughts in a Green Shade' in Articles, Miscellaneous: 10 Typescripts, Berg. 105. SOC published an account of the incident in 1943, repr. as The Dog' in Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 302-08. 106. SOC, 'Red Thoughts in a Green Shade', Berg. 107. SOC to Eoin ('Pope') O'Mahony, 24 Sept. 1947, in Letters, 2, 478. Mimeographed for publication; copy SOCP in NLI. 108. SOC, undated letter in mimeograph form, SOCP in NLI. It was published in IT, 2 Dec. 1947 and reprinted in Letters, 2, 484-85. 109. Emrys Hughes to SOC, 14 Dec. 1947, SOCP in NLI. 110. SOC, Letters, 2, 605. 111. O'Mahony to SOC, 13 Dec. 1947, SOCP in NLI. 112. In the event, McCormick [Peter Judge] died 24 April 1947 before Oak Leaves opened. 113. SOC to Bronson Albery, 27 Feb. 1947, in Letters, 2, 452. 114. Innes, Modern British Drama 1890-1990, p. 417. John Elsom called Whiting 'the exceptional dramatist of his time', Post-War British Theatre, p. 47. 115. The socialist Feeda Utley, who had lived in Moscow and whose husband Arcadi Berdichevsky disappeared into a concentration camp, became a dedicated campaigner against the USSR. When she visited SOC some time in 1940 he treated her as an apostate and subsequently satirised her as Mrs Deeda Tutting in act 1 of Oak Leaves. He mocked her again as Creda Stern in the chapter The Dree Dames' in Sunset and Evening Star (1954). Freda Utley published a memoir, Lost Illusion, in 1949. 116. SOC to Nathan, 14 March 1947, in Letters, 2, 456 and 458, n. 2. 117. SOC to Albery, 27 March 1947, in Letters, 2, 459. 118. A.J. Leventhal, 'Dramatic Commentary', Dublin Magazine, July-Sept. 1946, p. 39. 119. The Land Girls (1998), directed by David Leland, was based on the novel by Angela Huth. It is interesting also to compare SOC's representation with Anne Hall, Land Girl: Her Story of Six Years in the Women's Land Army} 1940-46 (Bradford on Avon, Wilts.: Ex Libris Press, 1993). In Hall's account, the rugged outdoor life was disciplined and unromantic, the opposite of SOC's depiction. 120. J.B. Priestley, 'O'Casey's Predicament: How Can One Dramatise the English?', Our Time, 5-6 (Aug. 1945-July 1947), 238. 121. G. Dearmer, 'Reader's Report,' Lord Chamberlain's Office, 18 April 1947, BL. 122. Review of Oak Leaves and Lavender in Eastbourne Chronicle, 9 May 1947, p. 13. See also J.D., 'Fine Play at Park Theatre', Eastbourne Gazette, 7 May 1947, p. 4. 123. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 198.

508 Chapters 14-15 124. SOC to Jill Howard, 5 June 1947, in Letters, 2, 466. She and her husband Harry, a war veteran, had seen the play twice, liked it but thought the production poor. Jill Howard to SOC, 3 June, SOCP in NLL 125. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 198. 126. Mary Hinton to SOC, 15 May 1947, SOCP in NLI. 127. SOC to Mary Hinton, 19 May 1947, in Letters, 2, 463. 128. SOC to Nathan, [June] 1947, in Letters, 2, 471. As Nathan's reply is dated 17 July and refers to the article SOC had included, Tender Tears', pub. June 1947, one may date SOC's letter end of June. See Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, p. 76, and n. 2. 129. SOC, A, 2, 655. Kerr died in New York, 20 March 1951. According to SOC, to Nathan 15 Aug. 1952, Kerr was accused of assaulting a boy and, 'unable to face the charge', committed suicide. See Letters, 2, 895. 130. Figures from SOC's 'Accounts 1935-1948', Holograph Notebooks, vol. 4, Berg. 131. SOC to Carney, 24 May 1947, in Letters, 2, 464. 132. SOC to Albery, 27 Feb. 1947, in Letters, 2, 452. 133. SOC to Breon O'Casey, 23 Jan. 1947, Folder 1, Berg. 134. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, pp. 164-65. But cf. Letters, 2, 480. 135. SOC to Breon, 26 March 1947, Folder 1, Berg. 136. SOC to Breon, 17 Nov. 1947, Folder 2, Berg. 137. SOC to Breon 27 Nov. 1947, Folder 2, Berg. 138. Breon O'Casey, 'Letters from Sean O'Casey to Breon O'Casey', Berg, typed notes dated 26 Feb. 1975. 139. SOC to Breon, 28 May 1947, copy DKP in NLI. 140. SOC to Carney, 17 July 1947, in Letters, 2, 472. 141. SOC, Letters, 2, 474-75. 142. SOC to Carney, 10 Sept. 1947, in Letters, 2, 476. Later, SOC explained that Wyler owned the rights to two plays by Marcel Pagnol set in Marseilles which he now wanted to set in Ireland with Irish characters. He would make the film in Hollywood with some members of the Abbey company. See SOC, The Green Crow, pp. 195-96. 143. Nathan to SOC, 19 Nov. 1947, My Very Dear Sean, p. 78. 144. SOC to Nathan, 10 Sept. 1947, in Letters, 2, 477. The title was suggested by George M. Cohan's song, 'Yankee Doodle Dandy', SOC, Letters, 4, 332. 145. George Jean Nathan, The Theatre Book of the Year, 1946-1947: A Record and an Interpretation (New York: Knopf, 1947), p. 105. 146. SOC to Nathan, 31 Oct. 1947, in Letters, 2, 483. Acknowledging, Nathan promised to send Breon his own copy of each Theatre Book of the Year (the series ran 1943-51). See Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, p. 78; for O'Neill's comment, see p. 73. 147. Krause, ed., Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991), Introduction, p. 1. 148. Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 205. 149. SOC, Letters, 2, 483. 150. Krause, ed., 'Note on the Text', Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, pp. 34-35. 151. SOC, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (London: Macmillan, 1949), p. 2. Subsequent quotations are from this edition. See also GP, 4, 122. 152. See 'Poet Leads Protest in Abbey Theatre', Irish Times, 10 Nov. 1947, p. 4; also 'Quidnunc' [Patrick Campbell], 'Irishman's Diary, Irish Times, p. 5. For a good summary see Gabriel Fallon, 'The Abbey Theatre Speaks', Irish Monthly, Feb. 1948, pp. 88-92. See also Hunt, The Abbey, pp. 173-74; and Mac Anna, Fallaing Aonghusa, pp. 102-06.

Notes to pages 299-307 509 153. From London Cyril Cusack insisted that actors had not left the Abbey solely for mercenary reasons: 'on artistic grounds alone' few could be content to remain under the present management or could be induced to return. Letter to Irish Times, 12 Nov. 1947. 154. Hunt, The Abbey, p. 172. 155. See the letter from McHugh and Iremonger to Irish Times, 18 Nov. 1947, refuting the defence of the Abbey made by P.S. O'Hegarty: 'we wish to fix responsibility upon Mr. Blythe.' 156. Raghnall Breathnach [who played Brennan in the Plough] to Roger McHugh, 11 Nov. 1947, courtesy Mrs Pat McHugh. The director of this Plough was MJ. Dolan. 157. SOC to Francis MacManus, 21 Jan. 1948, in Letters, 2, 501. 158. Gabriel Fallon, 'Theatre: The Abbey Incident', Standard, 22 Nov. 1947. 159. SOC to Nathan, 9 March 1948, Letters, 2, 510. 160. Donagh MacDonagh, 'The Death-Watch Beetle', Drama, spring 1949, repr. in The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Mikhail, p. 187. Cf. Hunt, The Abbey, p. 174. 161. SOC to Sean O'Rourke, 24 Dec. 1947, in Letters, 2, 494. 162. Seumas Moore to SOC, 9 Jan. 1948, SOCP in NLI. 163. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 191. 164. Breon O'Casey, 'Sean O'Casey: A Portrait', SOCR, 3.1 (Fall 1976), 55. Chapter 15 1. SOC to Eddie Byrne, 4 Jan. 1948, courtesy Catherine Byrne. 2. Richard J. Madden to SOC, 26 Jan. 1948, private collection. 3. SOC to Nathan, 9 March 1948, in Letters, 2, 509. 4. Nathan to SOC, 2 Jan. 1948, in My Very Dear Sean, p. 80. 5. SOC to Nathan, in Letters, 2, 514. Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold: A Play in Three Acts (Dublin: James Duffy, 1951), premiered at the Abbey 29 July 1946 and was one of its longest-running successes. For SOC's use of it, see CM, 'Two More Allusions in Cocka-DoodleDandy', SOCR, 4.1 (Fall 1977), 6-18. 6. SOC, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (London: Macmillan, 1949), p. 100. Subsequent quotations are from this edition. The preceding quotation is A, 2, 239. Lourdes was much on his mind in 1949: 'God's gift of penicillin is worth ten thousand Lourdes,' A, 2, 205. 7. Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son an Artist (London: Paul Elek, 1974), p. 577. 8. Arthur Miller, Timebends (London: Methuen, 1978), pp. 321-22. In a letter to CM, 30 Dec. 2002, Mr Miller confirmed that a production of the Cock c. 1950 'never materialized because potential backers got scared off by the threat of attacks'. For an article anticipating the production of the Cock 'this season', see Thomas Quinn Curtiss, 'O'Casey in Good Company: His Plays Are Hard to Do', New York Herald Tribune, 22 Oct. 1950. 9. Smith, O'Casey's Satiric Vision, p. 124. 10. Mina Carney to SOC, 10 Feb. 1948, SOCP in NLI. 11. Conversation with Shivaun O'Casey, Indiana University, 26 May 1999. 12. SOC to Jack Carney, 7 Feb. 1948, in Letters, 2, 507. 13. SOC to Breon O'Casey, 4 April 1948, Berg. 14. SOC to Breon, 19 April 1948, Berg. 15. SOC to Frank McCarthy, 12 May 1948, in Letters, 2, 522. 16. See Thomas Bodkin, Hugh Lane and His Pictures (Dublin: Arts Council, 1956), pp. 78-87. 17. SOC to Manchester Guardian, 30 March 1948, in Letters, 2, 513. On 12 April O'Casey wrote again, attacking the aged Dugald Mac Coll, former Keeper of the Tate Gallery, whose renewed claim to the pictures O'Casey emphatically refuted. 18. SOC to Augustus John, 10 June 1948, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

510 Chapter 15 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

SOC to Nathan, 9 March 1948, in Letters, 2, 510. Breon O'Casey, 'Sean O'Casey: A Portrait', SOCR, 3.1 (Fall 1976), 55. SOC to Breon, 11 July 1948, Berg. SOC to Breon, 19 July 1948, Berg. Cited in Holroyd, AugustusJohn, p. 580. Cf. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, pp. 202-03. John was then considered by the younger generation of painters as a has-been, and I went as a sort of statement of support, as I thought, & still do, he was as modern a painter as Modigliani.' Breon O'Casey to CM, 21 Nov. 2002. 24. SOC to Harold Macmillan, 6 Sept. 1948, copy DKP in NLI. For details of the New York situation see Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 84. 25. Nathan's notice, published in the New York Journal-American on 9 Aug. 1948, is reprinted in SOC, Letters, 2, 550-51. SOC enclosed a copy in a proud letter to Macmillan, 1 Nov. 1948, DKP in NLI. 26. SOC to Nathan, 13 Jan. 1939, in Letters, 1, 769. 27. SOC to Frank McCarthy, 12 May 1948, in Letters, 2, 522. In Drums Under the Windows (1945) SOC refers to Stephens as 'the poet and graceful satirical jester' (A, 1, 575). 28. See Patricia McFate, The Writings of James Stephens: Variations on a Theme of Love (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 9. 29. SOC to Francis Mac Manus, 1 June 1954, in Letters, 2, 1059. 30. Douglas Hyde, / Believed: The Autobiography of a Former British Communist (London: Heinemann, 1950), p. 242. 31. SOC, 'Study Course for a Vatican Recruit', Daily Worker, 4 May 1948. 32. The Pope, the People, and Politics: Three Articles on the Catholic Church (London: People's Press Printing Society Ltd., n.d.), n.p. [p. 8]. 33. SOC to William Rust, 16 April 1948, in Letters, 2, 519. 34. SOC to Daily Worker, 31 May 1948, in Letters, 2, 535. 35. Hyde, I Believed, p. 284. 36. Ibid., pp. 290-91. 37. [Anon.], 'Profile - Sean O'Casey', Observer, 10 March 1946, p. 6. 38. Alexander Boyle, 'Religion from Rome: Politics from Moscow', Irish Monthly, 77 (Jan. 1949), 5. 39. Francis Somerville, SJ, 'Communism in Britain', Irish Monthly, 77 (1949), 162. 40. John Feeney, John Charles McQuaid: The Man and the Mask (Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1974), p. 23. 41. SOC, Letters, 2, 721. 42. Alan Schneider, Entrances: An American Director's Journey (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), p. 128. See also Young, The Elmhirsts, pp. 245-48. 43. Schneider, Entrances, p. 133. Although SOC did not mention Schneider by name in his letters he does refer to the production of Saroyan's play and its director, Letters, 2, 626. 44. Schneider, Entrances, pp. 133-34, emphasis added. 45. SOC wrote to thank Mrs Elmhirst after Breon obtained a scholarship, 8 Sept. 1948, Dartington Hall Trust. In due course Mrs Elmhirst invited Eileen up to have tea. 46. SOC to Leonard Elmhirst, 25 April 1949, Dartington Hall Trust. 47. Padraic Colum, The Narrative Writings of Sean O'Casey', Irish Wriring, 6 (Nov. 1948), 60-69. 48. Irish Writing, 7-9 (Feb. 1949), 87. 49. N.N., 'O'Casey's Latest', Irish Independent, 26 Feb. 1949, p. 4. 50. Gabriel Fallen, Irish Monthly, 77 (1949), 119-20. 51. Robert Greacen, 'Auf Wiedersehn But Not Goodbye', Irish Writing, 8 (July 1949), 88.

Notes to pages 307-316 511 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

MJ. Mac[Manus], 'Sean O'Casey Says Farewell', Irish Press, 27 Jan. 1949, p. 6. P.S. O'Hegarty, Irish Book Lover, June 1949, p. 44. Austin Clarke, '"Och, Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye!"', Irish Times, 29 Jan. 1949, p. 6. O'Sullivan, Dublin Magazine, 24 (1949), 49. MacNeice, 'An Irish Proletarian', New Statesman and Nation, 19 Feb. 1949, p. 184. Annabel Farjeon, 'Sean O'Casey', Time and Tide, 5 Feb. 1949, p. 130. Una Pope-Hennessy, 'O'Casey at Coole', Spectator, 4 Feb. 1949, p. 160. [Anthony Cookman], 'Ave atque Vale', Times Literary Supplement, 19 May 1949, p. 115. SOC, Letters, 2, 514. Brooks Atkinson, 'O'Casey at Bat', New York Times, 27 Feb. 1949, in Atkinson, Sean O'Casey: From Times Past, pp. 124-27. 62. J.J. McGuire, 'Memorandum for Mr. Nichols, 24 March 1942, Federal Bureau of Investigation: 'O'Casey is an Irish writer who from the few references in the files is apparently quite radical.' Some lines in this letter, released under the Freedom of Information Act, have been censored. A second Memorandum, signed only 'C', to the Director, J. Edgar Hoover, is dated 14 July 1959 from the New York Office and refers to SOC's article, The Day the Worker Blows a Bugle', pub. in Mainstream, May 1959 [repr. in SOC, Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 268-74]. It is added: 'Inasmuch as SEAN O'CASEY resides in England and is openly a believer in Socialism and Communism, no further action will be taken by the NYO.' The logic seems a little cloudy. I am grateful to Joan Dean for help in obtaining this material. 63. Brooks Atkinson to SOC, 27 Feb. 1949, DKP in NLI. 64. SOC to Atkinson, 5 March 1949, in Letters, 2, 593. 65. SOC quoted Yeats's lines in the play, 'Red bird of March, begin to crow!/Up with the neck and clap the wing', from The Dreaming of the Bones, which refer to the red cock. SOC altered the colour to black, there being a fund of folklore about the black cock and demonism. See Sean 6 Suilleabhain, 'Glaodh an Choiligh um Nodlaig', Feilscnbhinn Torna (Cork: C16 Ollscoil Chorcai, 1947), pp. 56-59; Geraldine Lynch, 'Folk Beliefs about the March Cock', unpub. essay, Dept of Irish Folklore, UCD, copies courtesy Prof. Bo Almqvist. 66. Kosok, O'Casey the Dramatist, p. 242. 67. John O'Riordan, A Guide to O'Casey's Plays, p. 312. 68. [Anthony Cookman], 'Unanswered Questions', 77.5, 27 May 1949, p. 340. 69. Littlewood, Joan's Book, p. 390. Clive Barker indicates that Littlewood's memoirs were not always accurate, 'Closing Joan's Book: Some Personal Footnotes', New Theatre Quarterly, 74 (May 2003), 99-107. 70. 'A Message from Sean O'Casey', Phoenix, spring 1947, People's Theatre Archive, Newcastle upon Tyne. I have to thank archivist Martin Collins for his assistance. 71. SOC to Peter Trower, 20 June 1949, Special Collections, Robinson Library, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. I am also indebted to Katharine Worth for sharing with me her research into the People's Theatre production of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. 72. SOC to Peter Trower, 28 June 1949, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 73. C.D. Heriot, 'Reader's Report', Lord Chamberlain's Office, 10 Dec. 1949, BL, LC 934. 74. Joan Littlewood to SOC, 9 Aug. 1949, SOCP in NLI. See n.76 for her style of dating. 75. Goulding, The Story of the People's [Theatre], p. 29. The first visit was actually 18-23 Feb. 1946, People's Theatre Archive; cf. Littlewood, Joan's Book, p. 190. 76. Joan Littlewood to SOC, 9 Sept. 1949, SOCP in NLI. Littlewood wrote the date as 9/12/49, but the internal reference to the Edinburgh Festival as well as SOC's reply dated 12 Sept. clarify it.

512 Chapters 15-16 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

SOC to Littlewood, 12 Sept. 1949, in Letters, 2, 630-31. SOC to Peter Trower, 22 Sept. 1949, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. SOC to Peter Trower, 15 Dec. 1949, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. SOC to Peter Trower, 1 Dec. 1949, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. K. [Seamus Kelly], 'Play to Arouse Both Anger and Pity', Irish Times, 14 Dec. 1949. Frank Holloway, review of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy in Phoenix, spring 1950, pp. 9-10. D.N., '"People's" scores a success', Evening Chronicle, 12 Dec. 1949. 'Newcastle Premiere: "Cock-a-doodle Dandy"', The Stage, 15 Dec. 1949. Incidentally, the top hat which was required to move about was operated by a mouse trap wired to and released from the wings. I am indebted to Katharine Worth for this detail. 85. SOC, Letters, 2, 662-64. 86. SOC, 'A Crow for Cockadoodle Dandy', Berg. Unfinished at 20 pages this piece is dated 1947-49. See Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 332, no. 21. 87. W.W. Bennett to SOC, 10 Jan. 1950, SOCP in NLI. 88. SOC to Peter Trower, 7 Feb. 1950, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. The booklet was written by the controversial Dr John Simcox, Is the Church a Secret Society? A former professor of Canon Law, Simcox had been silenced in 1944. 89. Adah Brown, to Peter Trower, 16 Dec. 1949, SOCP in NLI. 90. A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.341-42. 91. J.B. Priestley, 'O'Casey's Predicament: How Can One Dramatise the English?', Our Time, 5-6 (Aug. 1945-July 1947), 238. 92. Findlater, The Unholy Trade, p. 123. Subsequent quotations will be referenced in the text by page numbers in parentheses. 93. Robert Greacen, review of text of Cock in Irish Writing, 7-13 (1949-50), 69-70. 94. Austin Clarke, The Riotous Are Bold', Irish Times, 15 Be 16 April 1949, p. 6. 95. Wesker, As Much As I Dare, p. 210. 96. 'Wonderful play . . . beautiful humor and revengeful pathos. Best play I've seen yet.' See Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940 (New York: Athenaeum, 1981, repr. Applause, 2002), p. 92. By 1940 Odets was being described as a 'combination' of O'Neill, Chekhov and O'Casey (p. 343). 97. Clifford Odets, The Parish and the World of O'Casey', New York Times Book Review, 5 Feb. 1950, p. 5. 98. Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, p. 87. See also p. 116. 99. Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, p. 88. The date of Nathan's letter is 25 Sept. 1949. See also pp. 90-91. 100. [Austin Clarke], 'Stars and Paycocks', TLS, 9 Dec. 1949, p. 806. 101. SOC to Breon O'Casey, 21 June 1949, Berg. 102. Breon O'Casey to CM, 21 Nov. 2002. 103. SOC to Jim Larkin Jr, 2 Nov. 1949, Labour History Museum, Dublin. Chapter 16 1. EricBentley, The Lifeofthe Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 312. 2. Andrews, Man of No Property, entities a crucial chapter, The Bogs - A Crusade'. The mechanisation of the bogs introduced industry to the Irish countryside. 3. SOC, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (London: Macmillan, 1949), p. 100. The following quotations are from p. 98 and p. 101. See also CP, 4, 220, 218, 221. 4. In draft notes for Rose and Crown SOC described Churchill as 'like a pouting pigeon with the eyes & beak of a hawk, the head sunk down towards the shoulders & throat [thrust?] for ward like a goat preparing to park.' Holograph Notebooks, vol. 19, Berg.

Notes to pages 316-331 513 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

SOC, A, 2, 326. For his interest in Welsh nationalism see Letters, 1, 677-78, 680-81. O'Connor, Sean O'Casey: A Life, p. 340. SOC to Sheila [O'Neill], 7Jan. 1950, in Letters, 2, 671. SOC, Letters, 2, 743-44. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 226. SOC to Augustus John, 10 Aug. 1951, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 204. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 167. SOC to Mrs Reynolds, undated, SOCP in NLI. SOC to Sister Catherine, 14 Feb. 1945, copy SOCP in NLI. See also O'Connor, Sean O'Casey: A Life, pp. 346-47. 15. SOC to Eileen, 26 Oct. 1950, SOCP in NLI. 16. Eileen O'Casey to Leonard Elmhirst, undated but early Dec. 1950, Dartington Trust, emphasis added. Her letter was in response to one he had sent to SOC on the death of Shaw. 17. Shaw was thereafter 24 days in Luton and Dunstable Hospital, returning home on 4 Oct; he died on 2 Nov. See Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, Volume III 1918-1950: The Lure of Fantasy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991), pp. 509-13. 18. O'Casey file, Dartington Trust. 19. SOC, A, 2, 618-21. 20. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 209. It may be noted that in Cheerio, Titan, pp. 125-28, Eileen elaborated the account of her last visit(s) to Shaw even further. 21. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 209. 22. SOC, 'Accounts', Holograph Notebooks, vol. 1, Berg. 23. David Krause, 'Remembering Liam: An Epiphany of Friendship', ILS, Fall 1992, p. 26. 24. Information supplied by David Krause in conversation, Dublin, 20 Aug. 2002. 25. SOC to Krause, 29 Oct. 1950, in Letters, 2, 748-49. 26. SOC to Nathan, 11 Dec. 1949, in Letters, 2, 653-54. Hall of Healingwzs finished in Nov., Time to Go was in MS by 11 Dec., and Bedtime Story then 'simmering in [his] mind' and written in Feb. 1950. 27. For a recent exploration see Bernice Schrank, 'Sean O'Casey's Time to Go and the Theory of a Just Price', Irish University Review, 30.2 (autumn/winter 2000), 232-43. 28. SOC to Nathan, 1 March 1950, in Letters, 2, 684. 29. SOC, Complete Plays, 4, 291. 30. Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, p. 93. 31. Terence Rattigan, 'Concerning the Play of Ideas', New Statesman and Nation, 39 (1950), 241. In succession, James Bridie, Benn W. Levy, Peter Ustinov, SOC, Ted Willis and Shaw contributed articles until 6 May. For Shaw's contribution see also 'The Play of Ideas', in Shaw on Theatre, ed. E.J. West (New York: Hill & Wang, 1959), pp. 289-94. 32. SOC, The Play of Ideas', New Statesman and Nation, 8 April 1950, pp. 397-98, repr. in Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 24-26 (p. 26). 33. Eric Bentley, 'Heroic Wantonness' (1951), in Bentley, In Search of Theatre, p. 318. 34. Rattigan wound up the debate with a letter to the New Statesman, 13 May 1950, pp. 545-46, smarting from Shaw's rebukes but claiming some justification. The controversy had 'a profoundly damaging effect on his reputation and career', Michael Darlow, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work (London: Quartet, 2000), p. 251. 35. SOC, 'Saintly Sinner, Sing for Us', New Statesman and Nation, 16 Dec. 1950, p. 628. 36. Ervine to Alan Denson, 25 Feb. 1950, Lilly Library, University of Indiana. 37. SOC to Denson, 18 March 1950, in Letters, 2, 697-98.

514 Chapter 16 38. SOC to Denson, 4 March 1950, Lilly Library. SOC told him that Yeats's To a Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine' referred to &. When Denson asked Joseph Hone about this Hone said the 'you' of the first line of Yeats's poem 'was undoubtedly O'Casey'. Hone to Denson, Lilly Library. This is impossible, since the poem was published in 1910. 39. [David Marcus and Terence Smith], 'O'Casey's Court', Irish Writing, 13 (Dec. 1950), 5, emphasis added. 40. Keogh, Twentieth-Century Ireland, pp. 208-13. 41. Irish Writing, 13, 50-53. 42. SOC sent the blurb for Rose and Crown to Macmillans 24 March 1951, correspondence with Lovat Dickson, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. Although shortened after this the blurb retained the sentence quoted. 43. Roger McHugh, 'Dreams and Dialectic', TLS, 2 Sept. 1977, p. 1051. 44. SOC to David Marcus, 21 Dec. 1950, in Letters, 2, 761. 45. [Anthony Cookman], The Paradox of Mr. O'Casey', TLS, 21 Sept. 1951, p. 596. 46. SOCPinNLI. 47. SOC to Macmillan, 29 Sept. 1951, in Letters, 2, 828. 48. SOC, The Arts Among the Multitude', 7 Arts, no. 2 (Jan. 1954), repr. in The Green Crow, pp. 163-69. 49. John Gassner, The Prodigality of Sean O'Casey', Theatre Arts, 35 (1951), repr. Ayling, ed., Sean O'Casey: Modern Judgements, pp. 110-19. SOC acknowledged the first two parts, 21 Aug. 1951, Letters, 2, 820. 50. Lennox Robinson, 'Postscript', Ireland's Abbey Theatre, p. 183. Robinson says the alarm was raised at 12.30 a.m. on 18 July. 51. 'If a man breaks his leg that is not the end of him. It's a very bad misfortune, but surely the spirit of Synge, Gregory and Yeats is not lost. The Irish people will build another and better theatre.' SOC to London correspondent of Irish Press, cited in Ireland: Weekly Bulletin of the Department of External Affairs, 23 July 1951, p. 5. He was quoted in the IT, 19 July, p. 3, as saying that if the government did not build a new theatre, 'we'll build it ourselves.' 52. Eric Gorman to SOC, 23 July 1951, SOCP in NLI. The stage was intact but roof and grid, the roof of the green room, the dressing rooms, paint room, wardrobe rooms and scene dock were all destroyed, as much by water damage as by fire. The seats in the parterre were undamaged but those in the balcony were; the vestibule and the offices over it were undamaged (and were to stay in use) and all the paintings were saved. A lot of the costumes were salvaged, but an inventory was yet to be made. The paint-work throughout the theatre was badly damaged. According to Francis Mac Manus, up to £1,000 worth of props was lost, Bell, 17.5 (Aug. 1951), 6. See also Irish Times, 18 July 1951, p. 1. Although the script press in the green room was burned a lot of scripts were salvaged and deposited at Cahill's Publishers, awaiting inventory by Ronnie Masterson. Papers of Ernest Blythe, P/24/750 (8), UCD Archives. 53. Cited by Mac Anna, Fallaing Aonghusa, p. 142. 54. Hunt, The Abbey, p. 177. In his manager's report for 24 Aug. 1951, Blythe amended maximum years of lease from five to six, P/24/750 (8), UCD Archives. 55. Myles na gCopaleen, 'Cruiskeen Lawn', IT, 3 Oct. 1951, p. 4. He said the Tassiewas 'as loathsome and offensive a "play" that [sic] has ever disgraced Dublin boards. The second act of this affair is a perfectly plain, straightforward travesty of Catholic Church ritual. The rest is bunkum and drool.' Indeed, O'Casey's work was 'phoney' and 'strictly for export'.

Notes to pages 331-341 515 56. Nathan to SOC, 24 Feb. 1952, in My Very Dear Sean, p. 100. 57. SOC to Shaemas O'Sheel, 27 July 1951, in Letters, 2, 815. 58. Breon O'Casey to Augustus John, n.d. [Sept. 1951], and 4 Oct. 1951, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 59. SOC to H.F. Rubinstein, 25 Nov. 1951, in Letters, 2, 838. See also Rose and Crown, in A, 2, 290. 60. In 1951 Macmillan & Company in London disposed of their interest in the Macmillan Company, New York, which continued to act as agent for distribution in the USA until July 1952, when London set up St Martin's Press in New York to do its own distribution. In effect, Rose and Crown was distributed via the Liberty Book Club. What remained to be looked after was the return of the rights of O'Casey's books, a problem which took some time to solve. 61. SOC, Letters, 2, 868. 62. T.A. Jackson, Daily Worker, 10 July 1952, p. 2. 63. MacNeice stung SOC with the charge of ignorance of Latin and of the Middle Ages. His reply (15 July) was refused publication by the Observer, see SOC, Letters, 2, 890-92. He returned to the subject of Latin, seen as a class issue, in A, 2, 628-37. Strangely, SOC's attitude to Latin was borne out by time. 64. Gabriel Fallon, 'Ashes of Exile', Irish Monthly, 80 (1952), 354-59. 65. Sam Wanamaker to SOC, 31 Oct. 1952, SOCP in NLI. 66. SOC, Letters, 2, 916. Ever since Oak Leaves and Lavender SOC had his doubts about Albery. 67. Wanamaker to SOC, 21 Dec. 1952, SOCP in NLI. 68. Wanamaker to SOC, 7 Feb. 1953, SOCP in NLI. 69. SOC, Letters, 2, 960-62. 70. SOC told Nathan he spent five weeks rehearsing and making the trip to Edinburgh, Letters, 2, 966. 71. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 214. 72. SOC, Letters, 2, 968. 73. 6 hAodha, Siobhdn, p. 48. 74. Wanamaker to SOC, 6 April 1953, SOCP in NLI. 75. See Letters, 2, 956-60. 76. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 215. 77. Ibid., p. 214. 78. Alan Bold, MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve: A Critical Biography (London: Paladin/Grafton, 1990), p. 461. 79. Hugh MacDiarmid, 'O'Casey's Farewell to Ireland', New Theatre, 5.10 (April 1949), 22. 80. Hugh MacDiarmid, The Company I've Kept (London: Hutchinson, 1966), pp. 161-69. 81. Wanamaker to SOC, 26 May 1953, SOCP in NLI. The financial details cited above are from this letter. 82. SOC to Wanamaker, 29 Dec. 1952, SOCP in NLI. 83. SOC to Wanamaker, 26 May 1953, in Letters, 2, 970. 84. SOC to Wanamaker, 30 May 1953, copy SOCP in NLI. 85. Siobhan McKenna to SOC, undated [June 1953], SOCP in NLI. 86. Donald Douglas, 'O'Casey Smashes his Targets', Daily Worker, 29 May 1953, p. 2. 87. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 217. 88. SOC to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 28 June 1953, in Letters, 2, 979. 89. J.C. Squire, 'Reader's Report' on Sunset and Evening Star, undated, quoted with permission from the Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. Squire, knighted for his services to

516 Chapters 16-17

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103.

literature in the late 1930s, was 'an undisputed authority on the division of books into good and bad'. Lovat Dickson, The House of Words (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 211. SOC, Letters, 2, 1015. These recordings were Caedmon TC 1012 and TC 1198. Robert Emmett Ginna in conversation with CM, Dublin, 18 Sept. 1999. His first visit to SOC was in mid-July 1953. See SOC correspondence with Ginna, Berg. SOC to Ginna, 18 Aug. 1953, Berg. Ginna in conversation with CM, 18 Sept. 1999. See E.H. Mikhail, ed., Brendan Behan: Interviews and Recollections (2 vols, London: Macmillan; Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1982), 1, 145. See also The Letters of Brendan Behan, ed. E.H. Mikhail (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 27, 45, 54, 70, 174. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 223. Cf. the obituaries of Lee Ephraim in the New York Times, 27 Sept. 1953, p. 86, and the Times, 28 Sept. 1953, p. 8. SOC, Letters, 2, 1015. Niall O'Casey's school reports reveal not only his proficiency in the trombone but his demoralisation over world problems, Archives, Dartington Hall. R.S. Hawkins, to SOC, 30 Dec. 1953: 'My Mother has decided it has now become necessary for her to obtain possession of "Tingrith".' He enclosed a formal notice to quit. SOCP in NLI. SOC to Ginna, 20 Jan. 1954, Berg. SOC, 'Accounts', Holograph Notebooks, vol. 1, Berg. SOC to Nathan, 9 Dec. 1953, in Letters, 2, 1007. Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, p. 109.

Chapter 17 1. Donoghue, 'O'Casey in his Letters', We Irish, p. 227. 2. O'Connor, My Father's Son, p. 149. 3. Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'A Defence of Poetry', in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M.H. Abrams et al., 5th edn (New York: Norton, 1986), vol. 1, p. 789. 4. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 229. 5. SOC, Letters, 2, 1038. 6. SOC, 'O'Casey's Drama-Bonfire (1957)', in Blasts and Benedictions, p. 140. 7. 'Gill Chais', in An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed, ed. Sean O Tuama (Mountrath: Dolmen Press/Bord na Gaeilge, 1981), p. 328. 8. See The Big House in Ireland: Reality and Representation, ed. Jacqueline Genet (Dingle: Brandon Books; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1991); and Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature: A Collection of Interpretations, ed. Otto Rauchbauer (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1992). 9. SOC, The Bishop's Bonfire: A Sad Play within the Tune of a Polka (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 77. All subsequent quotations from The Bishop's Bonfire are from this edition, to which the page numbers will be given in parentheses in the text. Also, CP, 5, 81. 10. 'Foorawn was dead as the play began; she began to live only when she was dying. Cold & dead: Fuar - pronounced Foor; Irish for cold.' SOC to David Krause, 11 Nov. 1955, in Letters, 3, 202. To Frank O'Connor, the sisters Keelin and Foorawn represented 'the women of Ireland', Holiday, Jan. 1956, p. 110. The description of Councillor Reiligan is from SOC's blurb to the 1955 edition. 11. Kosok, O'Casey the Dramatist, p. 233. 12. Kenneth Tynan, 'At the Theatre: Irish Stew', Observer, 6 March 1955. 13. SOC to Shaemas O'Sheel, 12 Jan. 1954, in Letters, 2, 1019.

Notes to pages 341-354 517 14. O'Brien, ed., The Vanishing Irish, p. 10. 15. Sean O'Faolain, 'Love among the Irish', in The Vanishing Irish, ed. O'Brien, p. 112, emphasis added. The following quotations are from the same source. 16. O'Faolain, 'Love among the Irish', p. 115. 17. SOC to John A. O'Brien, 8 March 1954, in Letters, 2, 1032. 18. James Joyce, Exiles (London: New English Library, 1962), p. 66. 19. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 103. SOC to Krause, 24 June 1954, DKP in NLI. See also Letters, 2, 1104 for SOC's initial response to Blanshard's book. 20. Blanshard, The Irish and Catholic Power, p. 149. The preceding quotations are from p. 152 and p. 174. 21. Nevertheless, SOC said that the Bonfire 'punches home' statements made in The Vanishing Irish. See SOC to Mai McCarthy, 1 May 1954, SOCP in NLI. 22. SOC to Thomas Mark at Macmillans, 5 March 1954, SOCP in NLI. 23. Devon: Official County Handbook, 15th edn (London: County Associations, n.d. [fc!954]),p. 75. 24. SOC, Letters, 3, 251. 25. SOC, Letters, 3, 269. 26. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 229. 27. SOC to R.L. de Wilton, 7 May 1954, likened the state of 'Tingrith' to 'an Embassy ordered to leave an affronted country', SOCP in NLI. 28. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 231. 29. Madeleine Epstein to CM, 13 Oct. 2000. 30. Cited in Norman White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 152. 31. SOC, Under a Colored Cap, pp. 33-34. 32. This year visitors included David Krause for the first time, who had just completed his doctorate on O'Casey at NYU, and the drama critics Richard Watts, Jr, from New York and Tom Curtiss from Paris. 33. SOC to R.L. de Wilton, Macmillans, NY, 14 Aug. 1954, SOCP in NLI. 34. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, pp. 220-23. Cf. SOC, Blasts and Benedictions, p. 263. 35. SOC, Letters, 3, 212. 36. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 182. 37. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 97. 38. SOC to H. Cowdell, 7 May 1954, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. 39. SOC to Macmillan & Co., 20 April 1954, SOCP in NLI. 40. SOC to Macmillan & Co., 12 April 1954, SOCP in NLI. 41. T.C. Murray, the Irish playwright, instantly took offence at his being cited for a damning review he did not write. Thomas Mark, editor at Macmillans, wanted SOC to apologise - 'our general practice is to avoid any unpleasantness' - but O'Casey refused. Murray did not take action. SOC correspondence, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke, Oct. - Nov. 1954. Patrick Galvin, a Cork writer then living in London, was determined to take legal action over SOC's use of a letter of his in criticism of The Hall of Healing and as late as 1963 Macmillans were still worried about the passages on Galvin appearing in the two-volume reprint of the autobiographies. 42. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 98. 43. Austin Clarke, 'Cock-a-Doodle Dandy', Irish Times, 6 Nov. 1954, p. 6. Cf. SOC, A, 2, 640. 44. John Jordan, The Indignation of Sean O'Casey', Irish Writing, 29 (Dec. 1954), 59. 45. See Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, p. 115: The autobiography in toto is surely a masterwork of our times.'

518 Chapter 17 46. An amusing in-house example is recorded in a memo, dated 6 Dec. 1954, in the Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. 'Did you see this well-merited rebuke?' [an attached review] 'I did, and it pleased me. The book annoyed me gready. The reams he writes about the most trivial contretemps or discomforts make one think that his early sufferings can't really have been very severe.' 47. Atkinson, 'Himself and Things that Happened', New York Times, 11 Nov. 1954, repr. in Atkinson, Sean 0'Casey: From Times Past, pp. 130-33. 48. Frank O'Connor, who regarded the autobiographies as 'a most remarkable book', said the author revealed himself as 'a pure O'Casey character'. See 'O'Casey and the Ghosts', Holiday, Jan. 1956, p. 109. 49. Correspondence, SOC file, 14 July 1954, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. 50. Lovat Dickson to SOC, 20 July 1956, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. 51. Seamus Kelly described Maureen Cusack as 'the best Desdemona I have yet seen on a Dublin stage', Irish Times, 23 March 1954. Gabriel Fallon agreed, Times Pictorial, 27 March. The occasion was the Edwards-Mac Liammoir Othello at the Olympia, Dublin. She played equally well in comedy, e.g. Raina in Arms and the Man, July 1953, Gaiety. 52. SOC to Cyril Cusack, 30 April 1954, in Letters, 2,1047. The Abbey never did ask, except that in 1951 Tomas Mac Anna wrote to ask for translations into Irish of SOC's new oneacts, which SOC had 'neither the knowledge nor the time' to do. SOC to Mac Anna, 1 Feb. 1951, courtesy Mr Mac Anna. 53. SOC to Macmillans, 15 May 1954, in answer to a query over copyright of a song in Red Roses for Me, SOCP in NLI. Brigid Edwards visited about the songs for the Bonfire on or around 10 May. 54. SOC to Lovat Dickson, 21 June 1954, SOCP in NLI. 55. SOC to Richard Watts, Jr, 5 Sept. 1954, in Letters, 2, 1087. 56. 'Cyril Cusack Re-Forming Catholic Stage Guild Library', Irish Press, 6 March 1954. 57. Anecdote related 21 Oct. 2002 by Larry Kearns, who worked in Wynne's Hotel c.1950. 58. Cusack to SOC, quoted by Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 225. 59. SOC to Cusack, in Letters, 2, 1088. 60. Cyril Cusack, Tn the Beginning was O'Casey', Irish University Review, 10.1 (1980), 22. 61. SOC, Letters, 2, 1060. 62. Nathan to SOC, 12 Sept. 1954, in My Very Dear Sean, p. 112. 63. SOC to Nathan, 18 Sept. 1954, in Letters, 2, 1089. 64. SOC to 6 hAodha, 19 Nov. 1954, in Letters, 2, 1117. 65. Cusack to SOC, 15 Nov. 1954, SOCP in NLI. 66. In establishing his own company in 1953 Cusack announced the need for 'the perspective of a non-actor's eye' lest the actor-producer (his term), in his preoccupation with 'actor's problems' be inclined to forget 'that the audience's viewpoint is to be considered too'. Maeve Barrington, 'The Cusack Company at the Gaiety Theatre', Assisi, 18.8 (Aug. 1953), 257, in Cyril Cusack Collection, vol. 2, Tress Cuttings 1946-55', MS 32,831, NLI. 67. Irish Times, 29 Dec. 1954, in Cyril Cusack Collection, 'Productions 1955', vol. XI, MS 32,840, NLI. This volume is the source of much of what follows. 68. Desmond Fisher, 'Britain to-day', Irish Press, 30 Dec. 1954. 69. Letter dated 4Jan. 1955, cited in Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 226. 70. Letter dated 5 Jan. 1955, in Cowasjee, pp. 226-27. Cf. Peter Kavanagh, The Story of the Abbey Theatre, p. 129: 'He [SOC] was Ireland himself.' 71. See Samuel L. Leiter, The Great Stage Directors: 100 Distinguished Careers of the Theater (New York: Facts on File, 1994), pp. 129-33. It is to be noted that in Guthrie's biography there

Notes to pages 354-362 519 is no mention of either O'Casey or Cusack. See James Forsyth, Tyrone Guthrie: A Biography (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976). 72. Tomas Mac Anna to CM, 11 Nov. 2002. Comedy was not Guthrie's forte. 73. Mike Wilcock, Hamlet: The Shakespearean Director (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2002), p. 137. 74. Guthrie to SOC, 12 March 1955, SOCP in NLI. 75. Cusack, 'In the Beginning was O'Casey', p. 23. 76. Tyrone Guthrie, A Life in the Theatre (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960), p. 267. 77. Guthrie to SOC, 9 Feb. 1955, SOCP in NLI. Neither design (for acts 1 or 2) was thought practical. 78. SOC to Guthrie, 12 Feb. 1955, in Letters, 3, 43-44. 79. Fred O'Donovan, in conversation with CM, 5 May and 23 June 2000. Mr O'Donovan kindly loaned me the script of act 3 with SOC's cryptic message and no other markings. 80. The Standard, 21 Jan. 1955, p. 3. Incidentally, in the McQuaid Archive at Archbishop's House, Drumcondra (DDA), the file for 1955 has gone missing. I remain convinced that it would include a good deal of opposition to O'Casey. 81. 'Sean O'Casey's Play: Art - For Whose Sake?' Standard, 25 Feb. 1955, p. 1. 82. Cyril Cusack, 'O'Casey and the Actor', in The O'Casey Enigma, ed. O hAodha, p. 46. 83. 'O'Casey plans broadcast of four plays', Irish Times, 28 Feb. 1955. 84. 'Portrait Gallery: Tyrone Guthrie', Irish Times, 26 Feb. 1955, p. 8. The preceding quotation is from 'Irishman's Diary'. 85. Evening Press, 26 Feb. 1955, p. 5. 86. John Barber, Daily Express, 28 Feb. 1955. He indicated that trouble was expected at the theatre. 87. Irish Press, 1 March 1955, p. 1. It was said that this was the first occasion in Dublin's theatre history when 'touting' for tickets took place. SOC said, Letters, 3, 73, that those unable to get tickets included the American ambassador and Mrs Pandit Nehru. 88. Guthrie, A Life in the Theatre, p. 268. Tomas Mac Anna, who was present, denies that mounted police were used, letter to CM, 11 Nov. 2002. Gabriel Fallon concurs, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 170. 89. Irish Times, 1 March 1955, p. 1. 90. Maurice Harmon to CM, 15 Oct. 2002. He and Maire Harmon were present on opening night. 91. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 171. 92. Cusack, 'In the Beginning was O'Casey', pp. 23-24. Elsewhere Cusack adds, referring to the voice from the gallery, 'Could have been another Fluther'. See 'O'Casey and the Actor', in The O'Casey Enigma, ed. 6 hAodha, p. 46. 93. Madeleine Epstein to CM, 2 Oct. 2000. Cf. 'Like Any Other First Night', Irish Independent, I March 1955, which noted a number of 'interruptions' but 'no evidence of an organised demonstration either inside or outside the theatre'. This seems a little complacent. 94. Irish Press, 1 March 1955, p. 1. The playwright Thomas Kilroy to CM, 22 Jan. 2003, recalled a voice from the gods warning Cusack, 'Don't speak to them Cyril! Don't speak to them!' 95. Epstein to CM, 2 Oct. 2000. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 239, says that they were asked back stage to meet the cast 'and stayed fairly late'. As the Shelbourne is quite close to the Gaiety perhaps the O'Caseys returned. 96. Harold Hobson, 'Dublin Double', Sunday Times, 6 March 1955; Kenneth Tynan, 'At the Theatre: Irish Stew', Observer, 6 March 1955.

520 Chapter 17 97. Cecil Wilson, 'O'Casey explodes a stick of dramatic dynamite', Daily Mail, 1 March 1955. 98. Thersites, 'Private Views', Irish Times, 12 March 1955. On 5 Feb. Thersites displayed such a strong bias against O'Casey, on the basis of a reading of Sunset and Evening Star, that SOC could not get a fair hearing. Seamus Kelly, who reviewed Bonfire, dismissed it as 'merely boring', IT, 1 March; I.M. in the Irish Independent said it was more farce than drama. 99. The editor adorned page 1 with the story, 'Sean O'Casey's Play: The "Gods" Can't be Fooled', Standard, 4 March 1955. The review was inside, p. 8. 100. Seamus Byrne, 'The Shadow of an O'Casey', Standard, 4 March 1955, p. 8. His Design for a Headstone was itself controversial at the Abbey in 1950. 101. Donat O'Donnell [Conor Cruise O'Brien], 'The Arts and Entertainment: No Bishop, No Bonfire', New Statesman and Nation, 5 March 1955. 102. J.J.F., 'Sean O'Casey Out of Touch', Evening Herald, 1 March 1955. Other Irish critics concurred. Denis Donoghue, Studies, 1955, p. 113. 103. Gabriel Fallon, 'The "Bonfire" never did really blaze up at all', Evening Press, 1 March 1955. 104. Eileen rang up Fallon to complain about his review; Fallon and his wife Rose were just about to invite her and Shivaun to a meal! The call ended any further contact. See Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, pp. 176-77. 105. John Keyes Byrne [Hugh Leonard], Theatre Notes', The Civil Servant Official Organ of the Civil Service Clerical Association, April 1955, n.p. See also X [Valentin Iremonger], 'Sean O'Casey', The Leader, 12 March 1955, pp. 17-18; Ulick O'Connor, review of Bonfire in Dublin Magazine, April 1955. In an earlier review in Time and Tide, 5 March, O'Connor was less sympathetic. 106. A.J. Leventhal, 'Dramatic Commentary', Dublin Magazine, 21.2, ns (April-June 1955), pp. 28-29. 107. SOC, Letters, 3, 62; also Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 240. 108. Patricia O'Connell, 'It was a big week for Shivaun', Evening Press, 3 March 1955. 109. 'O'Casey on New Play: "I Ignore Critics'". [Torquay] Herald and Express, 1 March 1955. 110. Guthrie's response to Dublin uncannily subverts Robert Greacen, 'Report from Dublin', Irish Harvest: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, ed. Greacen (Dublin: New Frontiers Press, 1946): 'Holiness scents the atmosphere with that cloistral repose that is found in only a few of the smaller English towns like Winchester and Canterbury itself (p. 10). 111. Tyrone Guthrie to SOC, 12 March 1955, SOCP in NLI. 112. Cusack had a two-year option on the Bonfire, one of the conditions made by Guthrie in undertaking direction. SOC to Hedgerow Repertory Theatre (Moylan, PA), 1 April 1955, SOCP in NLI. But Cusack failed to exercise his option. 113. 'Portrait Gallery: Come-Back in Erin: Sean O'Casey', Sunday Times, 6 March 1955. 114. Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, pp. 230-31. 115. The Theater: New Play in Dublin', Time Magazine, 14 March 1955, p. 30. 116. Cusack, 'O'Casey and the Actor', in The O'Casey Enigma, p. 46. 117. SOC, Letters, 3, 149. 118. SOC to Robert Emmett Ginna, 24 Dec. 1954, Berg. 119. All quotations here, unless otherwise stated, are from the RTE sound archives, Dublin. 120. SOC to Philip Rooney, 29 April 1955, in Letters, 3, 127. 121. SOC, Letters, 3,133. Later, SOC told Cusack that the talk 'had a technical breach of the rules and had to be dropped', Letters, 3, 150. 122. The Green Bushes: A Song', published in Under a Colored Cap (1962), pp. 56-57, was

Notes to pages 362-367 521 one of SOC's own favourites. In the lines just quoted is there another veiled reference to Maire Keating, and hence to Eileen? 123. Dated 7 April 1955, the text of this talk (alone) is in Berg, where it is headed, 'Essay 3. R Eireann.' It was, of course, no. 4. 124. 6 hAodha, 'O'Casey on the Air', Irish University Review, 10.1 (1980), 119. 125. SOC, Letters, 3, 150. 126. J.J. Finegan, 'Abbey Players Fly to Paris - Without the Gong', Evening Herald, 16 May 1955, p. 1.1 am indebted to Doreen Madden for information on this trip. The reference to the Abbey gong related to the French alternative of striking the stage with a wooden boule to announce the start of the play. See also Bowling, Astride the Moon, p. 186. 127. See Mac Anna, Fallaing Aonghusa, p. 160. 128. Special correspondent, Irish Independent, 21 May 1955. Frank O'Connor, on the other hand, saw the Plough in Paris and thought it only the 'ghost' of the play he had seen in 1926. See Holiday, Jan. 1956, pp. 110-11. 129. SOC to Cyril Cusack, 9 June 1955, in Letters, 3, 150. 130. He complained to Mai McCarthy, 22 July 1955, that the Abbey had not invited him to Paris, SOCP in NLI. On the other hand, he told Nathan he was 'getting too old to go places', Letters, 3, 192. He also harboured resentment that the Abbey, in failing to find a prizewinner for a new play in 1955, had not considered the Bonfire. 131. SOC's part was done in Torquay on 10 Oct. 1955, SOC to Mai McCarthy, 8 Oct., SOCP in NLI. 132. 'Sean Breaks into the Hit Parade', Times Pictorial, 11 Jan. 1957. The record was Angel 3540B, and in the UK it was EMI/HMV. 133. SOC, Letters, 3, 265. 134. SOC, 'Bonfire Under a Black Sun', in The Green Crow (New York: George Braziller, 1956), pp. 130-59. 135. Alan Simpson to SOC, 20 March 1955, Pike Theatre Collection, MS 395/127, TCD. 136. SOC to Simpson, 22 March 1955, MS 395/128, TCD. 137. See Alan Simpson, Beckett and Behan and a Theatre in Dublin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 62-97; also Carolyn Swift, Stage by Stage (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1985), pp. 176-201. 138. SOC, Letters, 3, 67. 139. In particular, see SOC to Peter Lennon, 22 March 1955, in Letters, 3, 87. SOC used Lennox Robinson's opinion that the Bonfire was 'far better than the Dublin critics made it out to be' to bolster his case. 140. Phyllis Hartnoll, 'Reader's Report' on The Bishop's Bonfire, 24 Aug. 1954, quoted by permission of Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. Emphasis added. 141. SOC to A.D. Maclean, Macmillan & Co., 19 May 1955, SOCP in NLI. See also Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 102. 142. 'Comedy and Tragedy in Ballyoonagh', TLS, 8 July 1955, p. 378. 143. John Jordan, review of The Bishop's Bonfire in Irish Writing, 31 (summer 1955), 59-60. In his blurb for the jacket SOC himself stressed the serious side: 'Through all the busy hilarity there runs a steady undercurrent of revolt against what the President of Dublin's University College called "The strange fog of unreality which seems at the moment to have penetrated every corner of Ireland's national consciousness."' The reference was to Michael Tierney, a frequent commentator on Irish cultural affairs. 144. SOC to Mai McCarthy, 24 Nov. 1955, SOCP in NLI. He mentions Newman's sermons, The Grammar of Assent (1870) and Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). 145. SOC, The Bishop's Bonfire, p. 29.

522 Chapters 17-18 146. Atkinson, Sean O'Casey: From Times Past, p. 88. 147. George Devine to Eileen O'Casey, 22 Aug. 1955, SOCP in NLL See also Irving Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), pp. 162-75. 148. Devine to SOC, 3 Sept. 1955, SOCP in NLL 149. Roberts, The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage, p. 35; see also p. 38. 150. In Three More Plays (London: Macmillan, 1965). See Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 134. SOC to Gordon W. Pollock, 5 April 1955, Berg, said the text to be used was that in Collected Plays (1951), which differed 'quite a bit' from that published in 1942 and that O'Shaughnessy probably realised this. 151. SOC, Letters, 3, 175-76. 152. SOC to John O'Shaughnessy, 3 Feb. 1955, Burns Library, Special Collections, Boston College. 153. John O'Shaughnessy to SOC, 23 Nov. 1955, SOCP in NLL McCarthy had already played Ayamonn in O'Shaughnessy's production in Houston in 1951. 154. O'Shaughnessy to SOC, 8 Jan. 1956, SOCP in NLL See also Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 193. 155. John Calder, Pursuit: The Uncensored Memoirs (London: Calder, 2001), p. 89. Presumably, the date was during the final week of Red Roses at the Booth Theatre, ending 21 Jan. 1956, playing 'to absolute capacity'. Lewis Funke, 'News and Gossip of the Rialto', New York Times, 22 Jan. 1956, Section 2, p. 1. Eric Bentley, on the other hand, saw this production of Red Roses as an 'anti-climax', setting back 'the cause of O'Casey, if it is a cause' for years, 'perhaps decades'. See 'A Funny Sort of Red', in Bentley, What is Theatre?, pp. 265-68 (p. 265). 156. SOC, Letters, 3, 208. 157. SOC, Letters, 3, 200. SOC always rated O'Neill as the greatest American playwright, but after 1953 he allowed Miller to be the greatest living American playwright. 158. See SOC, Letters, 3, 285, n. 1. SOC declined an invitation to Laurence Olivier's 'At Home', where he might have met Marilyn Monroe, Letters, 3, 385. After her death he remarked, 'That was a tragedy that affected me very much,' and wished he had met her. 'Perhaps you could have helped her, dear,' Eileen said. Mikhail and O'Riordan, ed., The Sting and the Twinkle, p. 129. 159. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, pp. 169-72. 160. SOC, Letters, 3, 202-03. 161. Eileen O'Casey to Mrs Elmhirst, 4 May 1955, Dartington Trust. 162. SOC to Robert E. Ginna, 18 July 1955, Berg. The filming was arranged to coincide with Mall's return home. 163. SOC to Mai McCarthy, 8 Oct. 1955, SOCP in NLL Transmission on NBC-TV was on 22 Jan. 1956. 164. SOC to Peter Trower, 14 Oct. 1955, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 165. Robert D. Graff, in introduction, Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day, ed. James Nelson (New York: Norton, 1958), pp. ix-x. The text of the SOC interview is on pp. 25-33. 166. SOC, Letters, 3, 215. Nathan had a second operation for prostate on 12 Dec. 167. SOC to Anthony Perry, 21 Dec. 1955, in Letters, 3, 230. 168. Encore, VI (Easter 1956), repr. in Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 51-52. 169. E.G. Marshall to SOC, 14 June 1956, SOCP in NLL

Notes to pages 367-374 523 Chapter 18 1. 'A Conversation with Sean O'Casey and Robert Emmett Ginna', Berg. In Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day, ed. James Nelson, p. 33. 2. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 244. 3. Breon O'Casey to O'Shaughnessy, 19 Jan. 1956, Burns Library, Boston College. Red Roses had to vacate the Booth Theatre on 21 Jan. because of a so-called 'theatre shortage' although there was standing-room only in the final week. Daily Worker (NY), 25 Jan. 1956, p. 6. 4. Breon O'Casey to O'Shaughnessy, 18 March 1956, Burns Library. Red Roses for Me/ Rote Rosen fur mich, trans. R. Schnorr, was staged at the Schlosspark Theater, Berlin, on 15 Feb. 1957. 5. Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, pp. 119-20. 6. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 177. 7. Eileen, p. 173. A few years later she was thinking: 'He needed me so much that / lost any desire to go away,' p. 187, emphasis added. 8. SOCP in NLI. Cf. SOC, Letters, 3, 253. 9. SOC to Mai McCarthy, 15 April 1956, SOCP in NLI. (Tommy Owens's father in the Gunman is described as 'a weeshy, dawny, bit of a man'.) 10. SOC, Liters, 3,251. 11. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 245. 12. Breon O'Casey to CM, 21 Nov. 2002. 13. There was one other piece not included in the American edition of Green Crow, 'Playwright in Exile', first published in New York Times, 25 Dec. 1955, X3, 4X. SOC argued that exile was a good thing for Irish emigrants, while the exiled playwright 'finds material wherever he may go'. 14. SOC to David H. Greene, 11 Sept. 1956, in Letters, 3, 302. 15. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 177. 16. SOC to Mai McCarthy, 21 Nov. 1956, SOCP in NLI. 17. SOC, Letters, 3, 291. 18. Atkinson, Sean O'Casey: From Times Past, p. 138. 19. SOC to Atkinson, 20 July 1956, in Letters, 3, 285-86. From this time, also, some slight income began to come from the USSR, though none of his plays had yet been staged in Moscow. 20. SOC to Eileen, 28 Sept. 1956, SOCP in NLI. 21. See Taylor, Anger and After, Robert Hewison, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York: Oxford UP, 1981); Harry Ritchie, Success Stones: Literature and the Media in England, 1950-1959 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988). 22. Kenneth Tynan, 'Look Back in Anger, by John Osborne, at the Royal Court', in Tynan on Theatre (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 41. 23. Cited by Littlewood, Joan's Book, p. 538. 24. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 416-17. 25. Walter F. Kerr, Theater: "Red Roses for Me"', New York Herald-Tribune, 29 Dec. 1955, p. 11.

26. Cited by Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, p. 299. 27. John Arden, 'Ecce Hobo Sapiens: O'Casey's Theatre', in Sean O'Casey, ed. Kilroy, p. 76. 28. John Arden to CM, 28 March 2001. 29. See Innes, Modern British Drama 1890-1990, p. 5. 'Shaw's central position [. ..] and his continuing influence, mean that any study of modern English dramatists has to begin

524 Chapter 18 with his work.' See also Innes, pp. 15-65. 30. Edward Bond to CM, 13 June 1998. Cf. Bond, 'We imagine, therefore we are', Observer, 31 May 1998, p. 29. 31. Colin Wilson, 'Postscript', The Outsider, 2nd edn (London: Pan Books, 1967), p. 311. 32. Colin Wilson, 'In Touch with Reality', Encore, 3-5 (June-July 1957), 7. 33. SOC to Ronald Ayling, 29 Sept. 1957, in Letters, 3, 468. 34. Vivian Mercier, 'Decline of a Playwright: The Riddle of Sean O'Casey', Commonweal, 13 July 1956, pp. 366-68. Mercier may have been attempting to answer Eric Bentley's The Case of O'Casey' in New Republic, 13 Oct. 1952, repr. in Bentley, The Dramatic Event (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956). 35. Robert Hogan, 'Riddle of Sean O'Casey', Commonweal, 24 Aug. 1956, p. 517. 36. SOC to Robert Hogan, 14 Oct. 1956, in Letters, 3, 317. 37. Niall O'Casey was registered at UCL for the BSc (Special) in Botany, with Geology and Zoology as ancillary subjects. Garry O'Connor mistakenly states that Niall was a student at the London School of Economics, Sean O'Casey: A Life, pp. 359, 362. 38. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, ed. Litvan, pp. 50-78. 39. In the Irish Press, for instance, which SOC received every day, reportage emphasised the treatment of Mindszenty and published the Irish church's point of view on the events as they unfolded. But SOC also took in the Daily Worker and the Irish Times. 40. On 25 Oct. the Daily Worker in an editorial (p. 1) tried to argue that the workers rallied round the party and government in Budapest to smash 'this attempt to put the clock back'. On 26 Oct. (p. 1) it cited Nagy as declaring that counter-revolutionaries and anarchists were responsible for the Revolution. By 31 Oct. Eden's ordering of the Suez invasion pushed the Hungarian story on to p. 3 of a four-page paper. 41. Marton Lovas, What Happened Between October 23 and November 4?, the Soviet-approved history published in Feb. 1957, was quickly denounced as a new revisionist line was constructed. See 'The Hungarian Rising: Communists Revise their History', PRO, FO 975/111, B 456 (R), dated May 1957. Full details of Nagy's execution in 1958 did not emerge until 1989. 42. Breon O'Casey to CM, 5 Jan. 1998. 43. Niall O'Casey to SOC, undated, in Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 250. 44. The Wesker Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 71. 45. Cited by Macleod, TheDeath of Uncle Joe, p. 177. In Dec. 1956 Peter Fryer, a Daily Worker reporter whose dispatches were suppressed, published them as Hungarian Tragedy (repr. London: New Park Publications, 1986), and was expelled from the British CP. 46. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 195. 47. SOC to Kay O'Riordan, 27 Nov. 1956, in Letters, 3, 341-42. 48. SOC, preface to Hilda E. Allberry, Approach Pattern (Dublin: Irish-U.S.S.R. Society, 1951), n.p. Allberry's pamphlet reported on a fact-finding visit by 16 women to Moscow. She was publicised at the time as 'the most dangerous woman in Ireland'. 49. SOC, 'Under a Greenwood Tree He Died', in Under a Colored Cap, p. 123. 50. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 251. 51. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 249. 52. John Osborne, The Entertainer (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 39. The reference was to Eden's rest cure in Jamaica from 23 Nov. until 14 Dec. 1956. 53. 'Eden had sought to deceive the British people on a scale rarely seen.' Tony Shaw, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion during the Suez Crisis (London and New York: I.E. Tauris, 1996), p. 92. See also Anthony Gorst and Lewis Johnman, The Suez Crisis (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 90-92, 147 and passim;

Notes to pages 374-382 525 also W. Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (London: Hodder and Stoughton/Sceptre, 1996). 54. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 252. 55. SOC, 'Under a Greenwood Tree He Died', p. 101. In her introduction to Niall: A Lament (New York and London: Calder/Riverrun Press, 1991), Eileen says she delayed telling SOC and just said Niall was very ill. In that case, this conversation between Niall and SOC took place in hospital and the writer reshaped actuality. 56. Eileen O'Casey, introduction to Niall: A Lament, p. 12. 57. SOC, Letters, 3, 354. 58. SOC, 'Under a Greenwood Tree He Died', p. 113. Eileen gives a different account in Sean, p. 253. 59. SOC, Letters, 3, 356. 60. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 255. 61. SOC to Eileen, 30 Dec. 1956, SOCP in NLI. 62. SOC, Letters, 3, 358. In her introduction to Niall: A Lament, p. 12, Eileen put the time at 'about midnight'. 63. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 257. 64. SOC, 'Under a Greenwood Tree He Died', p. 120. 65. SOC, Letters, 3, 357. The reference is to the dirge in Cymbeline, 4.2.262-63, 'Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.' But SOC could not avoid a grim recollection also of his own imagery of evanescence in his play, 'a little heap o' purple dust', CP, 3, 118. 66. Introduction, Niall: A Lament, p. 11. 67. SOC, 'Under a Greenwood Tree He Died', p. 132. 68. Shivaun O'Casey, lecture on 'O'Casey, the Man and His Works', Indiana University, 28 May 1999. 69. Breon O'Casey, 'Sean O'Casey: A Portrait', p. 56. 70. Later in 1957 he wrote a short foreword for a translation into Hungarian of Juno and the Paycock, 'O'Casey in Hungarian Costume', repr. in Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 135-37. In the accompanying letter he expressed the hope that after the 'troubles', 'an anxious time for all of us Socialists', a 'renewed Socialism will go forward' in Hungary. In this letter he is hard-line once more: 'It is almost unforgivable for a Communist to do a stupid thing.' SOC to the editor, Tdjekoztato, 19 Oct. 1957, unpublished, copy DKP in NLI. 71. SOC, 'Under a Greenwood Tree He Died', p. 123. 72. T am ashamed that it was not I but you who had first to make the journey into night.' SOC, 'Under a Greenwood Tree He Died', p. 129. 73. SOC to Eileen 14 Jan. 1957, SOCP in NLI. 74. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 330. The original title was 'Dear Son of Memory'. 75. SOC, Letters, 3, 388. 76. SOC to Hilda Pollak, 11 Jan. 1957, in Letters, 3, 369. This was an old theme of his, perhaps shaped by his mother's death in 1918. Similarly, in consoling Sheila [O'Neill] after a bereavement he remarked (11 June 1952): The change all have to bear, when one we know & love well dies, is the real inconvenience of death. The life left has to learn a new rhythm.' Letters, 2, 887. 77. SOC to David Krause, 6 Feb. 1957, in Letters, 3, 384. 78. SOC, Lettm, 3, 369. 79. Richard Watts, Jr, Two on the Aisle', New York Post, 13 Jan. 1957, p. 24. 80. Brooks Atkinson, Theatre: The O'Casey', New York Times, 28 Dec. 1956, in Atkinson,

526 Chapters 18-19 Sean O'Casey: From Times Past, p. 97. Atkinson returned to Purple Dust in a second review, 6 Jan. 1957. 81. Theater: O'Casey at Play', Newsweek, 21 Jan. 1957. 82. SOC to Nathan, 26 Jan. 1957, in Letters, 3, 375. Cf. Nathan, My Very Dear Sean, p. 125. 83. SOC, Letters, 3, 394. 84. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, pp. 258-59. 85. SOC to Mai McCarthy, 6 Feb. 1957, in Letters, 3, 384. 86. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 121. 87. SOC, Niall: A Lament, p. 15. Subsequent quotations are referenced parenthetically by page numbers in the text. 88. SOC, Blasts and Benedictions, p. 141. Cf. Letters, 3, 443. 89. John Webster, The White Devil, 5.4.100-04. These were favourite lines for SOC. 90. In Memoriam, final lines, in Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Charles Tennyson (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1954), p. 374. Chapter 19 1. SOC to Kay Carney, 15 Feb. 1958, in Letters, 3, 538. 2. SOC to Sylvan Barnet, 18 Feb. 1957, copy DKP in NLI. SOC wanted the text to be that of the New York production, 1956-57. The anthology was published by Mentor (New York, 1960). 3. SOC to Sylvan Barnet, 10 May 1957, DKP in NLI. 4. SOC, Letters, 3, 615. See also SOC, The Power of Laughter: Weapon against Evil', in The Green Crow, pp. 226-32. 5. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from 'Philosophy in a New Key' (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), pp. 327 - 29. 6. SOC, Letters, 3, 592. 7. SOC, Letters, 3, 258, 'the Dread Drood of Drumcondra'. 8. Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, pp. 247-49. See also Jack Lindsay, 'Sean O'Casey as a Socialist Artist', in Ayling, ed., Sean O'Casey: Modern Judgments, p. 201. 9. Krause, The Rageous Ossean', pp. 290-91. 10. Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London Be New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 123. 11. Cited by John Feeney,/o/m Charles McQuaid: The Man and the Mask (Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1974), p. 80. 12. Tim Pat Coogan, speaking on RTE radio after McQuaid's death in April 1973: 'Here is a man who would have been at home with Machiavelli.' Aired on RTE Sound Archives, 'Bowman's Saturday 8.30', 4 April 1998, marking McQuaid's 25th anniversary. Notoriously, McQuaid had broken the spirit (and political career) of Health Minister Browne during the Mother-and-Child controversy in 1951. See John Horgan, Noel Browne: Passionate Outsider (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2000), pp. 128-35. 13. Cooney, John Charles McQuaid, p. 327. For a more positive view see Noel Barber, SJ, 'Editorial: A Remarkable Figure in Post-Independence Ireland', Studies, 87, no. 348 (winter 1998), pp. 335-36, and other articles in this issue. 14. Fuller, Irish Catholicism Since 1950, p. 68. 15. John Charles McQuaid, 'A Roman of the Early Empire: Lucius Annaeus Seneca', MA Dissertation, NUI (UCD), 1918, p. 1. 16. See Alan Simpson, Beckett and Behan and a Theatre in Dublin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 138-67; Carolyn Swift, Stage by Stage (Dublin: Poolbeg Press,

Notes to pages 382-393 527

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

1985), pp. 240-304; Joan Dean, 'Irish Stage Censorship in the 1950s', Theatre Survey, 42.2 (Nov. 2001), 137-64. On 25 Feb. 2003 RTF television screened a documentary on the Pike, Nights of Glory, Days of Trial To date the most comprehensive study is Whelan and Swift, Spiked (2002), discussed below. Anna Manahan, who played Serafma in The Rose Tattoo at the Pike, has commented: 'People said that a friend of somebody who was powerful in high places had brought pressure to bear, but the true story has never come out.' See A Paler Shade of Green, ed. Hickey and Smith, p. 131. Whelan and Swift, Spiked, p. 355, n. 4. McQuaid to Father Tuohy, 13 Nov. 1957, Dublin Diocesan Archives: McQuaid papers: 'An Tostal 1953-1960', hereafter cited as McQuaid Papers. Thus Ernest Blythe, writing under the pseudonym Bean Mhadagdin, in Inniu, 28 Feb. 1958, p. 2. An Tostal: Official Souvenir Handbook (Dublin: Fogra Failte, 1953), n.p. Micheal Mac Liammoir, Theatre in Ireland (Dublin: Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland, 1964), pp. 72-73. SOC to Brendan Smith, 19 July 1957, in Letters, 3, 446. See also pp. 409, 433. Remarking on the newly founded Wexford Festival SOC wrote: The Boys (and Girls) of Wexford are beginning another Rising,' The Green Crow, p. 158. SOC, The Memory be Green', The Drums of Father Ned (London: Macmillan, 1960), n.p.; CP, 5, 130. Of the five rebellious priests named, SOC says: 'Each in his time was a Drummer for Father Ned, and the echoes of their drumming sound in Ireland still.' SOC, The Rose of Youth', Articles: Youth, no. 4, Berg. There are six articles here, all directed at a Russian readership. SOC, Articles: Youth, no. 6, Berg. See Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, pp. 341-408; John Morgan, Sean Lemass: The Enigmatic Patriot (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1997), pp. 174-80. SOC, 'Poor Puzzled Ireland', Tribune, 22 Feb. 1957, repr. in Sean O'Callaghan, The Easter Lily: The Story oftheLKA., 2nd edn (London: Four Square, 1967), p. 9. SOC, The Drums of Father Ned, p. 2; CP, 5, 136. SOC, Letters, 3, 491. Cf. Keegan in JBOI re his vision for Ireland, 'It is, in short, the dream of a madman.' Shaw, Complete Plays, 2, 611. Alan Simpson to SOC, 14 March 1958, copy, MS 396/22, TCD. He called The Rose Tattoo 'a poor play, indeed. T. Williams never seems to see God smiling, nor a woman or man bending to admire a full-blown rose.' Letters, 3, 443. SOC, Letters, 3, 425. See Tim Pat Coogan, De Valera: LongFellow, Long Shadow (London: Hutchinson, 1993), pp. 654-55. Whelan and Swift, Spiked, p. 209. See also Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, pp. 234-36; Cooney,/o/m Charles McQuaid, pp. 242-43. SOC to IT, 30 May 1957, in Letters, 3, 438. SOC to IT, 8 June 1957, in Letters, 3, 442. Whelan and Swift, Spiked, pp. 270-74; Cooney, John Charles McQuaid, pp. 328-29; Coogan, De Valera, pp. 654-55. Whelan and Swift, Spiked, p. 72, n. 8, and p. 345. Spiked, p. 269. Spiked, p. 150. Carolyn Swift, Stage by Stage, p. 254; Whelan and Swift, Spiked, p. 67. Cooney, John Charles McQuaid, p. 201. See also leeeney, John Charles McQuaid: The Man

528 Chapters 19-20

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

and the Mask, p. 23: 'In every sphere Dr McQuaid saw the need for a Catholic infrastructure.' [Noel Barber, SJ], 'Editorial: A Remarkable Figure in Post-Independent Ireland', Studies (1998), p. 335. Cooney,/o/m Charles McQuaid, pp. 69, 70, 72. SOC, Articles. Miscellaneous. 10 Typescripts, no.10, 'Words', p. 9A, Berg. The Papal Nuncio incident occurred in 1952, described by Blanshard, The Irish and Catholic Power, pp. 190-95. Cf. Harmon, Sean OTaoldin, p. 183. SOC, Letters, 3, 448. Eileen O'Casey, Introduction, Niall: A Lament, p. 9. SOC, Letters, 3, 499. SOC, Letters, 3, 476. The scene is in act 2, CP, 5, 191-95, where SOC restored the original emphasis. See Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 121. Note the similarity with a scene in the one-act Bedtime Story, which Eileen probably bore in mind. SOC to O'Leary, 5 Oct. 1957, in Letters, 3, 470. 'Jim Fitzgerald: A Profile', RTV Guide, 25 Feb. 1966, p. 9. Fitzgerald died 9 September 2003. 'He was at the cutting edge of Irish theatre in the 1950s and 1960s', Obituary, IT, 20 Sept. 2003, p. 12. [Brendan Smith], ' The Drums of Father Ned: O'Casey and the Archbishop', in A Paler Shade of Green, ed. Hickey and Smith, p. 137. It was a rule that no protestants were to be on the invitation list. All details which follow, unless otherwise referenced, derive from the McQuaid Papers, 'An Tostal 1953-1960', DBA. SOC, 'Bonfire under a Black Sun', The Green Crow, p. 140. Cf. Dean, 'Irish Stage Censorship in the 1950s', p. 143. But even a stranger to Dublin in 1958, the Indian scholar Saros Cowasjee, could see that 'in Dublin city, to alienate the Archbishop would be the height of rashness.' Cowasjee: Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 233. Smith, 'The Drums of Father Ned: O'Casey and the Archbishop', p. 138. SOC to Sean O'Rourke, 24 Oct. 1957, in Letters, 3, 482. Cahill died on 21 Oct. An appreciation appeared in the Irish Independent, 29 Oct., p. 8. SOC, Under a Colored Cap, p. 177. SOC to Emmet Dalton, 3 Jan. 1958, DKP in NLI. Brendan Smith to SOC, 9 Dec. 1957, DKP in NLI. Fallon, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew, p. 185. SOC to Nathan, 11 Jan. 1958, in Letters, 3, 523. Nathan was now unable to reply. SOC, Letters, 3, 525. Quigley and Rodway to SOC, 24 Jan. 1958, DKP in NLI, emphasis added. Of course, it is impossible to know for certain the motives of Quigley and Rodway (now both deceased). Carolyn Swift reports with horror Quigley's response to Alan Simpson's arrest in May 1957: 'I hope he gets two years. [. . .] Thanks to you and your dirty play we'll have censorship in the Irish theatre and we'll all suffer.' Swift, Stage by Stage, p. 261. SOC to Smith, 29 Jan. 1958, in Letters, 3, 530-31. Beann Mhadagain [Ernest Blythe], 'An Bord Failte agus an Fheile Dramaiochta', Inniu, 28 Feb. 1958, p. 2: 'Si fadhb an airgid fadhb na Feile.' BordFdilte, Blythe claimed, was interested only in the commercial aspect. Typed report, unsigned, dated 5/2/1958, in McQuaid Papers: 'An Tostal 1953-1960', DDA.

Notes to pages 393-407 529 71. Smith to SOC, 4 Feb. 1958, DKP in NLL 72. SOC to Smith, 5 Feb. 1958, in Letters, 3, 531-32. Smith had apparently mentioned Tyrone Guthrie as a possible alternative director. SOC: 'I am not willing that he should suffer for my sake.' 73. Jim Fitzgerald to SOC, 5 Feb. 1958, DKP in NLI. 74. See 'Final Curtain?', editorial, IT, 15 Feb. 1958. Also, 'Stage Version of "Ulysses" dropped', pp. 1, 9. 75. All preceding details from the McQuaid Papers: 'An Tostal 1953-1960', DBA. 76. Correspondence 27-28 Feb. 1958, McQuaid Papers, DBA. What McQuaid wrote to Pigott (28 Feb.) was: 'I should think it a mistake to gratify the Association in its desire to debate the Tostal Theatre Festival.' 77. Simpson to SOC, 14 March 1958, copy, MS 396/22, TCB. On 26 Feb. Simpson had asked for the one-act Hall of Healing, assuring SOC that the request had 'nothing whatever to do with recent excitements' when obviously it had. Same source. 78. Robert Hogan, The Experiments of Sean O'Casey', Dublin Magazine, Jan.-March 1958, pp. 4-12. This article sparked off an editorial, 'Riches Scorned', in the TLS, 31 Jan. 1958, p. 61. While unrelated to the Father Ned affair this commentary shows the new interest in the later plays. In The Experiments of Sean O'Casey, Hogan included correspondence from SOC illustrating the 'forced withdrawal' of Father Ned. See also Hogan, 'O'Casey and the Archbishop', New Republic, 19 May 1958, pp. 29-30. Bavid Krause started his lifelong defence of SOC with 'The Playwright's Not for Burning', Virginia Quarterly Review, 34 (winter 1958), 60-76. Ronald Ayling published a defence of SOC in a Nottingham journal, Enquiry, 2 (June 1958), 36-39, emphasising clerical censorship as the reason for the withdrawal of the play. He sent a copy to the Standard in Bublin, which took it upon itself (22 Aug., p.l) to refute Ayling's accusation of 'a Church ban'. It also provided the 'facts' of the whole affair. The inference is that the Standard spoke for the Archbishop. 79. SOC to Bavid Krause, 14 Sept. 1958, in Letters, 3, 624. Chapter 20 1. Cited by Michael Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 258. 2. SOC to Bon Burke, 22 March 1958, MS 86-37, Burns Library, Boston College. 3. SOC, Letters, 3, 554. 4. SOC, Letters, 3, 592. 5. The Riverside recording of Pictures in the Hallway, RLP 705607, Modern Voices Series, recorded 14 and 29 March 1957. The sleeve notes are quite detailed. Copy in the Sound Archives, BL. 6. Reviewing this Pictures in the Hallway, New York Times, 28 May 1956, Brooks Atkinson said all was thoroughly planned and rehearsed, and the actors, reading scripts from lecterns, were lit dramatically in front of a glowing cyclorama. 7. SOC, Letters, 3, 576. 8. SOC to Brooks Atkinson, 15 Sept. 1958, in Letters, 3, 625. 9. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 265. 10. Walter Starkie to SOC, 20 Feb. 1959, SOCP in NLI. 11. SOC, 'O'Casey's Credo', New York Times, 9 Nov. 1958. See also Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 142-45 (p. 143). 12. Philip Burton, 'Something to Crow About: An Approach to Cock-a-Doodk Dandy', in Theatre Arts, 42 (Nov. 1958), 22-24. Reprinted in SOCR, 5.2 (spring 1979), 147-51 (p. 148). 13. For example, Robert Coleman, 'O'Casey Play Not Up to Par', New York Mirror, 13 Nov. 1958; Whitney Bolton, 'O'Casey's Murky View of His People', Morning Telegraph, 14

530 Chapter 20 Nov. 1958; Walter Kerr, '"Cock-a-Doodle Dandy" at Carnegie Hall Playhouse', New York Herald-Tribune, 13 Nov.; Variety, 19 Nov.; Village Voice, 19 Nov.; Time Magazine, 24 Nov. I am grateful to Bernice Schrank for help with copies of reviews. 14. Atkinson, Sean O'Casey: From Times Past, pp. 101-02. 15. Watts, 'O'Casey's "Cock-a-doodle Dandy"', New York Post, 13 Nov. 1958. 16. Atkinson, Two By O'Casey', New York Times, 23 Nov. 1958, in Atkinson, Sean O'Casey: From Times Past, p. 108. 17. Eileen O'Casey to SOC, undated, from Hampshire House, NYC, SOCP in NLI. 18. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 266. 19. Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema, new edn (London: Vision Press, 1963), p. 49. 20. Interview with Jim O'Connor, Dublin, 10 June 1998. Tom Hayes remembered this, and other details, differently: Blythe was not 'on the list' and was not filmed. For his part Blythe came to hate both men and described them to the Abbey Board as 'a pair of lousy liars', Blythe Papers, P24/758 (7), UCD Archives. 21. Deliberately, following Rotha's style, there was no script for the film, and each contributor created his or her own. Frank O'Connor is heard as sly commentator and chorus throughout. I have not been able to trace O'Connor's text. See Cradle of Genius (Plough Productions of Ireland, 1959), a 35 mm film. 22. Blythe Papers, P24/758 (2), UCD Archives, dated 8 April 1959, after Blythe had seen the film. He excepted the scene between SOC and Fitzgerald: 'Sean is absolutely uninhibited and appears as if he were unaware that he was facing a camera.' 23. SOC to Ray Marler, BBC Television Studio, 1 March 1958, DKP in NLI. 24. The details which follow are based on interviews with Tom Hayes, 29 April 1998 and Jim O'Connor, 10 June 1998. 25. So Tom Hayes recalls. Jim O'Connor remembers it differently: it was Sean who suddenly prompted them about the film. The point really refers to Eileen's role on such occasions. She was usually to the fore. 26. Rotha and SOC had met before The Bishop's Bonfire was staged. Rotha thought the production a success. 'I am so very glad for your sake. Your wonderful courage and integrity is [sic] rewarded.' Rotha to SOC, 1 March 1955, SOCP in NLI. 27. Hayes, interview, 29 April 1998. Although O'Connor remembers the figure offered as £500, SOC supports Hayes's account, Letters, 4, 126. SOC added that they sent him £100 anyway. 28. SOC to Brooks Atkinson, 20 Jan. 1959, in Letters, 4,11. In a scene filmed in Dublin with Maureen Delaney, Barry had to have a cue board in front of him. 29. For a transcript of the conversation between SOC and Barry Fitzgerald see The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, pp. 96-97. 30. Interview with Bill Harpur, Dublin, 13 Oct. 1998. As Harpur recalls the visit, JJ. O'Leary was not present and he himself drove Barry from Bristol airport to Torquay. SOC, however, states clearly that O'Leary, Barry's 'mortal guardian angel', was indeed present, Letters, 4, 12. 31. Interview, 13 Oct. 1998. 32. SOC, Letters, 4, 61. Note that here the editor, David Krause, confuses Jim O'Connor with P.J. O'Connor in RTE. 33. SOC in telephone conversation with John Ross [pseud, of James Shields, nephew of Barry Fitzgerald], tape 4, SOC talks (1955), RTE Sound Archives. 34. Last Will and Testament of William Joseph Shields [Barry Fitzgerald], NA, Dublin. 35. SOC, 'O'Casey v. Abbey', Articles/Ireland/Seven Transcripts, subtitled, 'Green Crow

Notes to pages 407-414 531 on the Wing,' p. 37, Berg. Cf. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, pp. 334-35, no. 69. 36. SOC to Hugh and Mary Doran, 18 Nov. 1958, DKP in NLI. 37. To Heinz Kosok, Figaro 'has less dramatic qualities than any other play of O'CaseyY, in O'Casey the Dramatist, p. 300. 38. SOC, Letters, 4, 24. 39. SOC, Under a Colored Cap, p. 136. 40. The idea may be traced to the letter SOC wrote to the Irish Times 17 Feb. 1958, but did not send, Letters, 3, 540. The early drafts of Behind the Green Curtains are in the Berg. 41. 'When Lennox Robinson died, the Abbey Players wished to be at the Funeral Service in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Before entering, they phoned to the Archbishop for permission.They got back word that any Catholic entering, or even setting foot into the Graveyard, would be guilty of a mortal sin. Only one ventured.' SOC, Letters, 4, 8-9. 42. Austin Clarke, 'Burial of an Irish President', in Flight to Africa (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963), p. 18. 43. Twomey, The End of Irish Catholicism'?, p. 18. Twomey quite seriously treats of Catholic Ireland as a 'chosen people', pp. 21-41. 44. John Jordan, 'The Irish Theatre: Retrospect and Premonition', in Contemporary Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 4, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, rev. edn, 1968), pp. 165-83. 45. Behind the Green Curtains, directed by Frank Murphy, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 22 July 1975. For an intelligent assessment see Augustine Martin, 'Play Reviews', SOCR, 2.1 (Fall 1975), 80-81. 46. John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668). See The Works of John Dry den, vol. XVII, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1971), p. 57. 47. Kosok, O'Casey the Dramatist, p. 296. 48. SOC, citing John Swinton, editor of the New York Times, on his retirement, title page, typescript of final draft of Behind the Green Curtains, Berg. 49. 'Horseman, pass by? W.B. Yeats, 'Under Ben Bulben'. See SOC, Letters, 4, 24. 50. The reason SOC allowed it was because the director-general of RTF Edward J. Roth came to see him in Torquay on 2 June 1962. See Letters, 4, 312-13. 51. 'Your book was very disappointing to me,' SOC to Hogan, 11 July 1960, in Letters, 4, 154. 52. Hogan, The Experiments of Sean O'Casey, p. 144. 53. Joseph Stein, adap./imo (New York: Playwrights Co., 1959). 54. SOC to Jane Rubin, 6 July 1957; also SOC to Joe Stein, 7 Aug. 1957, both DKP in NLI. 55. See Julia M. Furay, 'Broadway and the Paycock', MA Dissertation, UCD, 2002. 56. SOC, Letters, 3, 654. 57. Jane Rubin to Eileen O'Casey, undated, and 25 Feb. 1959, SOCP in NLI. 58. See Richard Watts, Jr, The Musical Adaptation of Sean O'Casey's 'Juno",' New York Post, 10 March 1959. Cf. SOC, Letters, 4, 24, n. 2. Jim O'Connor, being in New York about the Cradle of Genius business, was at the opening and thought the show needed an all-Irish cast but that 'the jigs were good!' Interview, 10 June 1998. 59. SOC to Jane Rubin, 8 July and 22 Dec. 1958, DKP in NLI. 60. Marion Harewood, chair Film Premiere Committee, to Eileen O'Casey, 21 Jan. 1959, SOCP in NLI. 61. SOC to George Devine, 19 March 1959, in Letters, 4, 27. 62. See Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 213.

532 Chapter 20 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Irving Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), p. 218. SOC to Devine, 22 July 1959, cited by Roberts, The Royal Court and the Modern Stage, p. 72. For the text of this note see SOC, Letters, 4, 63. Alan Pryce-Jones, 'Genius and Wind', Observer, 13 Sept. 1959, p. 23. Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays, p. 213. Subsequently, at Eileen's request, Macmillans sent Hall an uncorrected proof of Behind the Green Curtains, in which he had expressed interest. Nothing came of it. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 274. 69. [Cecil Wilson], 'Old Anger and New', Daily Mail, 24 Sept. 1959. 70. SOC, Letters, 4, 68, 69. 71. John Osborne, Damn You, England: Collected Prose (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 45. 72. For example, W.A. Darlington, 'Royal Court goes Irish: Enjoyable O'Casey', Daily Telegraph, 18 Sept. 1959, was very positive, while Philip Hope-Wallace in the Manchester Guardian (19 Sept.) expressed disappointment. 73. John Arden to CM, 28 March 2001. Cf. A. Alvarez, 'If you don't happen to be a Catholic from rural Ireland, the whole thing is no more meaningful than the usual Xmas panto,' New Statesman, 26 Sept. 1959, p. 388. The critic J.W. Lambert astutely noted that the major deficiency at the Royal Court was lack of a loyal audience, Drama in Britain 1964-1973 (London: Longman, 1974), p. 33. 74. SOC, Letters, 4, 75. 75. [Frank Granvile Barker], 'Personality of the Month', Plays and Players, Oct. 1959, p. 5. Cf. Barker's review, p. 15. 76. Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, p. 219. 77. See obituary of Bernard Miles, Times, 15 June 1991. See also Lambert, Drama in Britain 1964-1973, pp. 38-40. 78. Monica Furlong, 'Interview: Bernard Miles', Tatter & Bystander, 4 March 1959, p. 410. 79. See The Mermaid Theatre Review, 1959, p. 13. C.Walter Hodges was author of The Globe Restored (London: Ernest Benn, 1953). 80. 'Mr Miles and the Mermaid', The Director, Jan. 1961, p. 92. Copy courtesy Guildhall Library. 81. SOC, Letters, 4, 124. 82. SOC to G.F. Mitchell, Registrar TCD, 4 Feb. 1961, in Letters, 4, 198-99. 83. TJ. Bligh to SOC, 27 Nov. 1962, SOCP in NLI. 84. SOC to Bligh, 28 Nov. 1962, SOCP in NLI. 85. Bligh to SOC, 29 Nov. 1962, SOCP in NLI. 86. SOC to Connolly Cole, 21 March 1960, Berg. 87. Samuel Beckett to Connolly Cole, 18 March 1960, Berg. 88. Beckett to Cole, 23 March 1960, Berg. 89. James Plunkett to David Krause, undated, DKP in NLI. 90. SOC to James Plunkett, 27 May 1960, in Letters, 4, 144. 91. SOC to George Mathews, Daily Worker, 17 March 1960, DKP in NLI. 92. Conor O'Malley, 'Sean O'Casey at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast', SOCR, 6 (1980), 34. 93. SOC to Lovat Dickson, 9 March 1960, DKP inNLI. 94. National Archives, Dublin. See p. 79 above, and see illustration 6. 95. Joseph W. Donohue directed Father Ned at the Theatre Lobby, Washington, DC, 14-18 June 1961. 96. Ernest Blythe Papers, 'Report on a visit to Sean O'Casey', P24/758 (15), 23 Sept. 1959. See also P24/1779 and 1780 for further details.

Notes to pages 414-421 533 97. In his manager's report to the Abbey Board, 8 April 1959, Blythe had said Within the Gates was considered for production c.1950 but Ria Mooney was against it because the Abbey stage was inadequate. Blythe now (incredibly) wanted to do the Gates for the Dublin Theatre Festival in Sept. 1959, Blythe Papers P24/758 (7). Note that he paid two visits to Torquay in 1959, one in June and the other in September. During the June visit, being on the defensive, he was careful not to suggest any of the later plays. In September, encouraged by something Saros Cowasjee had said to him in Dublin, he asked for Gates in order to bring about a 'reconciliation' which might 'give us back the major plays'. Manager's report for 2 Sept. 1959, P24/758 (14), p. 4. In a longer report, P24/1780, Blythe said that after his visit he wrote from his hotel to ask for Gates plus the three Dublin plays. Nothing came of this approach. 98. David Phethean, 'Drumming with Father Ned', in The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 112. 99. HAL. Craig, 'Red Roses for O'Casey', New Statesman, 19 Nov. 1960, p. 782. In Plays and Players, however, Peter Roberts said Phethean's production 'rarely got off the ground', Jan. 1961, p. 11. 100. Bernard Miles to SOC, 2 Feb. 1961, Mermaid Theatre Archive: Bernard Miles Correspondence, Bishop's Bonfire file, Guildhall Library, London. For the following account I draw on the correspondence in this file. 101. Frank Dunlop, later founder of the Young Vic and director of the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, was associate director at Bristol. In time he was known as 'the popular theatre's little volcano', profile, Sunday Times, 12 Aug. 1990. Miles spotted his talent early. 102. Eileen O'Casey to Bernard Miles, undated [April 1961], Guildhall Library. 103. Miles to SOC, 28 June 1961, Guidhall. 104. Anthony Cookman, 'Bonfire fizzles at the Mermaid', Tatler, 9 Aug. 1961. 105. Interview with Frank Dunlop, Dublin, 13 April 2001. 106. SOC to David Krause, 19 Sept. 1961, DKP in NLI. 107. This was the London premiere of Purple Dust, Wannamaker's production in 1953 having failed to reach the capital. 108. Peadar Mac Maghnais, review of SOC festival, Focus [Dublin], Oct. 1962, copy courtesy Risteard O Glaisne, editor. Focus was an attempt by protestants to foster the Gaelic language. 109. Most reviewers referred to the large, open stage of the Mermaid as unsuitable for Purple Dust. It 'exposed mercilessly' the unsatisfactory handling of farcical business by actors and director. See Mark Taylor, 'Purple Dust', Plays and Players, Oct. 1962, p. 47. Also Philip Hope-Wallace, 'Purple Dust', Guardian, 16 Aug. 1962, p. 5; David Nathan, 'Sad Time for Sean O'Casey', Daily Herald, 16 Aug., p. 3; Herbert Kretzner, 'A bitter joke behind the laughter', Daily Express, 16 Aug., p. 8. 110. SOC, Under a Colored Cap, p. 261. 111. See John Russell Taylor, 'Red Roses for Me', Plays and Players, Nov. 1962, pp. 66-67; Martin Esslin, The Plough and the Stars', Plays and Players, Dec. 1962, p. 58. Esslin interestingly wrestled with the problems created by the open stage at the Mermaid and concluded that the reason the Plough was not effective was the lack of a suitable stage and lighting design. For further details of these productions, cast lists, etc, see Schrank, Sean O'Casey: A Research and Production Sourcebook. 112. Programme note, Sean O'Casey Festival 1962, copy in Guildhall Library. WJ. Weatherby, drama critic for the Manchester Guardian, interviewed SOC as part of the pre-publicity. See The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, pp. 127-31.

534 Chapter 21 Chapter 21 1. Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, p. 40. 2. SOC, Letters, 4, 132. The biblical language, as always, predominates. 3. Saros Cowasjee, 'An Evening with Sean O'Casey', Illustrated Weekly of India, 17 May 1959; Irish Times, 25 July 1959; repr. in The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, pp. 98-102. The date of Cowasjee's visit to SOC was 6 April 1959: SOC, Letters, 4, 33. 4. Photocopy of Ayling's typescript review sent on to Cowasjee to note, Aug. 1964, courtesy Saros Cowasjee. SOC wrote on the typescript, 'Approved of, signed it, and added 'Attaboy!' 5. Ronald Ayling, 'Sean O'Casey: The Writer Behind His Critics', Kilkenny Magazine, 2 (spring-summer 1964), 69-92; repr. Drama Survey, 3.4 (Fall 1964), 582-91. 6. Valentin Iremonger, Spectator, 27 Sept. 1963. 7. For example, when Fallon wrote a review article, 'How Green Are Our Curtains?', Kilkenny Magazine, 5 (autumn-winter 1961), 34-41, Hogan instantly shot back with 'How Green Are Our Critics?', KM, spring 1962. 8. Five Plays by Benjonson (London: Oxford UP, 1953), p. 93, emphasis in original. 9. SOC, 'Culture, Inc.', Under a Colored Cap, p. 225. 10. SOC, 'Art is the Song of Life (I960)', Blasts and Benedictions, p. 77. 11. John Wain, review of Autobiographies, Feathers, and Under a Colored Cap, in Observer, 11 Aug. 1963. 12. SOC, Under a Colored Cap, p. 253. 13. Gabriel Fallon, 'First, Last and All the Time', review of Feathers and Under a Colored Cap, in Kilkenny Magazine, 10 (autumn-winter 1963), 65-73 (p. 65). SOC was now persuaded that Fallon was obsessed with him, 'spitting away at the image of O'Casey fixed on a pedestal in his own mind', Letters, 4, 308. 14. Robert D. Graff was the administrator of Sextant Inc. He had worked with Ginna on the NBC television interview with SOC. He and his wife Marjorie were among SOC's visitors from the USA. 15. SOC, correspondence with Jane Rubin, 28 Jan.-l Sept. 1961, SOCP in NLI. Shyre had set up the Torquay Company specifically to stage the autobiographies, with a possible television option. The production of Drums Under the Windows at the Cherry Lane Theatre, New York, on 13 Oct. 1960, had probably alerted SOC's suspicions. 16. Thomas Quinn Curtiss, 'O'Casey at 84, is Pleased by Movie on His Life: But "Young Cassidy" Puzzles the Playwright, Too,' New York Times, 21 Aug. 1964, p. 16. 17. Robert Emmett Ginna in interview with CM, Dublin, 18 Sept. 1999. 18. Curtiss, 'O'Casey at 84.' See also Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford: A Life (New York: St Martin's Press, 2001), p. 660. 19. SOC had a contract with Graff and Ginna for $25,000, of which he had received $5,000 in option fees by 1962. The balance was payable, $10,000 in Dec. 1963 and $10,000 in April 1964. Jean Rubin to SOC, 9 Dec. 1963, SOCP in NLI. Scott Eyman, Print the Legend, p. 513, puts the figure SOC earned at £4,000. 20. SOC to Teresa Sacco (at Macmillans), 30 Sept. 1963, in Letters, 4, 436-37. 21. Cited by Curtiss, 'O'Casey at 84.' 22. The details which follow derive from correspondence between Graff, Ginna and SOC in the SOCP in NLI. 23. Brooks Atkinson reported that SOC was unhappy with Whiting's text at first because it did not use the original dialogue of the autobiographies yet did not like to tamper with it 'out of professional respect for another writer's work'. Atkinson, "Visit with

Notes to pages 422-430 535 Sean O'Casey: Despite Infirmities, Green Crow Still in Good Form', New York Times, 31 Dec. 1962; repr. in Atkinson, Sean O'Casey: From Times Past, p. 154. 24. Script of Young Cassidy (vault copy dated 14 Jan. 1965), kindly supplied by Bill Harpur. Copy also consulted in London Theatre Museum, filed under John Whiting's plays. 25. 'Young Cassidy: Rewrites by SOC', SOCP in NLI. 26. Ginna in interview with CM, 18 Sept. 1999. Scott Eyman states that the producers had hoped to get Peter O'Toole or Richard Harris to play Johnny, Print the Legend, p. 513. 27. In 1961 Shivaun left Bristol Old Vic to do further training in acting in London. 28. Dan Ford, Pappy: The Life of John Ford (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1979; entitled The Unquiet Man, London: William Kimber, 1982), pp. 303-07 (p. 303). 29. Joseph McBride calls the relationship 'touchy', Searching for John Ford, p. 661. 30. Stephen Watts, 'O'Casey in a Movie Mirror', New York Times, 27 Sept. 1964, 'Movies', X, 11,13. 31. Ginna, interview, 18 Sept. 1999. See also Dan Ford, Pappy/The Unquiet Man, p. 305; Eyman, Print the Legend, p. 516; McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 662. Jack Cardiff says only four and a half minutes of Ford's work was included, Magic Hour (London: Faber andFaber, 1996), p. 236. 32. Eyman, Print the Legend, pp. 516-17. 33. Ginna, citing Ford, interview, 18 Sept. 1999. 34. McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 663; Cardiff, Magic Hour, p. 236. 35. Eyman in telephone conversation with CM, 14 Dec. 1999. See also Eyman, Print the Legend, p. 517. McBride, however, sees Young Cassidy as mostly 'a parade of cliches', Searching for John Ford, p. 662. 36. Although unaware of Whiting's socialist bias, Graff comments: 'Whiting produced a script we were proud to produce and that earned Sean's approval with only modest reservations. We made virtually no changes at all to Whiting's finished script. He was our choice for the work and we were pleased with the outcome.' Robert D. Graff to CM, 16 May 2003. 37. Gjon Mili, who was camera man, told SOC the cost was $50,000. See The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 144. 38. Begun on 14 July, filming finished on 25 Sept. 1964, one week after SOC's death. It was released in London in Feb. 1965 and in the USA in March. 39. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, pp. 109-12. 40. SOC, Letters, 4, 433. 41. Padraic Fallen, The World that Sean Made', IT, 17 Aug. 1963, emphasis added. 42. MGM lawyers to Sextant Films, Inc., which Robert Graff passed on to SOC for attention on 27 Feb. 1964, SOCP in NLI. 43. SOC to Robert Graff, 9 March 1964, carbon copy, SOCP in NLI. 44. David Krause in conversation with CM, Dublin, 29 July 1998. Krause met Maire in summer 1962. She was very determined to protect her privacy and took fright when he said he would be seeing SOC. 45. This was the term Maire used of SOC in her refusal to see Cowasjee, letter 8 July 1958, Saros Cowasjee Papers, University of Regina Archives. 46. RJ. Hayes, director NLI, to Mrs [Maire] McGuinness, 9 April 1957, copy courtesy Sean McCann. 47. Marriage registers of St Mary's Metropolitan Church, pro-cathedral, Dublin. 48. SOC, "Young Cassidy rewrites', SOCP in NLI. Although undated, from the correspondence with Graff these rewrites date from end 1962 to early 1963. 49. I am grateful to Sean McCann for allowing me to copy these inscriptions.

536 Chapter 21 50. [Sean McCann], 'Girl O'Casey Left Behind', Evening Press, 3 Feb. 1982, p. 3. Cf. p. 190 above. 51. Press release, Young Cassidy, copy in London Theatre Museum, emphasis added. 52. Fallon, The World that Sean Made', IT, 17 Aug. 1963. 53. SOC, 'Mr Wesker's March Past (1963)', in Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 53-62. SOC took a rather perverse line against culture for the 'masses' and was begrudging of Wesker's efforts. Cf. Clive Barker, 'Vision and Reality: Their Very Own and Golden City and Centre 42', in Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights, ed. Kimball King (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 361-67. 54. British Library SA, C1013/4. In the first tape SOC gives the date as 2 June 1963. 55. SOC defended the sentimentality of this and other Victorian ballads in Under a Colored Cap, pp. 76-83. 56. SOC to R.L. de Wilton, 28 Feb. 1961, DKP in NLI. 57. SOC to Krause, 11 June 1961, in Letters, 4, 224. 58. SOC, Letters, 4, 433. 59. David Krause, A Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Man: Sean 0'Casey's Letters ([Dublin]: Dolmen Press, 1968), p. 5, emphasis added. 60. SOC to Patrick Donegan, president, Dublin Council of Trade Unions, 30 Aug. 1963, displayed at Jim Larkin Exhibition, NLI, Nov. 1997. Copy courtesy Donal Nevin. 61. SOC to Tyrone Guthrie, 4 July 1963, copy courtesy Brian Friel. 62. SOC, 'Shakespeare Among the Flags (1964)', in Blasts and Benedictions, pp. 30-34 (p. 32). 63. MS postscript to typed letter, SOC to Helga Maiwald, 30 May 1963, DKP in NLI. 64. Lorraine Beaver to SOC, 8 Aug. 1962, SOCP in NLI. Lorraine's father, Shaun, possibly named for SOC, was a soldier. He wrote to SOC in 1955 after the Bonfire production in Dublin. He died in 1960, aged 55. 65. SOC to Lorraine Beaver, 11 Aug. 1962, in Letters, 4, 324. 66. Ernest Blythe to SOC, 27 Aug. 1962, SOCP in NLI. The letter is in Irish. 67. See SOC, Letters, 4, 297. 68. As described in ch. 20, Blythe travelled twice to Torquay in 1959 to try to get SOC to lift the ban on his plays, using as bait the possible production by the Abbey of Within the Gates. See Blythe Papers, UCD Archives P24/1779, 1780, and 758 (15). 69. SOC to Blythe, 6 March 1961, UCD Archives, P24/1129. 70. SOC to Eric Gorman [sec., Abbey Theatre] 27 Nov. 1963, SOCP in NLI. 71. Peter Daubeny, My World of Theatre (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), excerpted in The Abbey Theatre, ed. Mikhail, p. 195. 72. Times, 21 April 1964, p. 14; Evening Standard, 21 April, p. 5; Irish Times, 21 April, p. 1. 73. Whereas many critics saw the Plough as making amends for Juno the consensus was an unexciting, uneven production. See R.B. Marriott, Stage and Television Today, 28 April 1964, p. 17. Of Juno Marriott said (23 April): 'Nothing has altered since thirty odd years ago.' 74. Kathleen Barrington, who played Nora in the Plough, testifies that the production was old-fashioned. When a door shut onstage the canvas shook visibly. Blythe had replaced the dashing Eoin 6 Suilleabhain as Clitheroe with Bill Foley, who was more experienced but miscast. In conversation with CM, 16 Feb. 2000.1 am also grateful to Patrick Laffan, who played in both Juno and the Plough, for similar evidence and for use of his scrapbooks. 75. Mac Anna, Fallaing Aonghusa, p. 165. Mac Anna had designed the settings for both Juno and the Plough but in his absence in Iceland with The Hostage these were altered or abandoned by Dermody. Mac Anna to CM, 22 June 1998. SOC was enraged at the

Notes to pages 430-435 537 threatened actors' strike and wrote a furious letter to Equity, Letters, 4, 489-90. 76. See Bowling, Astride the Moon, p. 248. Dermody was regarded as a wonderful teacher of acting but with no sense of the overall shape of a play. 'Each individual scene was to him a precious mosaic. What he lacked was a concept of the play.' T.P. McKenna in telephone conversation with CM, 26 March 2001. 77. SOC had asked Hennigan to see the two plays and report back to him. See McCann, ed., The World of Sean O'Casey, p. 180. Hennigan reported a 'Cool view of the Abbey' from the London critics, Irish Press, 21 April 1964. 78. Aidan Hennigan, 'The Abbey Failed in London: O'Casey', Irish Press, 30 June 1964. See also SOC, Letters, 4, 503-04. 79. John Howard, 'Abbey Has Been Deteriorating for Years, Says Sean O'Casey', Irish Times, 4 July 1964, p. 11. 80. Bowling, Astride the Moon, p. 247; cf. p. 147. 81. Hunt, The Abbey, pp. 186-89. 82. Edward Bond to CM, 27 June 1998. 83. John B. Gordon to SOC, 8 Sept. 1961, SOCP in NLI. 84. SOC to John Gordon, 7 Nov. 1961, SOCP in NLI. 85. SOC made his will out in longhand, 14 Sept. 1962, witnessed by Geoffrey Youngman Bobbie and Ronald Ayling, and then inserted a codicil on 15 Sept. to make Eileen his sole executor; the codicil was also signed by Bobbie and Ayling. SOCP in NLI. Cf. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 285. The probate copy was typed up and signed again on 26 Sept., Probate Registry, York. 86. Bobbie, a local nurseryman, did odd jobs including keeping the garden for the O'Caseys. Ronald Ayling was then home on leave from his teaching post in South Africa. 87. SOC to Eileen, 12 Aug. 1964. This seven-page letter is in the SOCP in NLI. See also Eileen O'Casey, Sean, pp. 289-92; SOC, Letters, 4, 505-07. 88. Rev. Edwin J. Russell, PP, to SOC, 21 March 1961, SOCP in NLI. In a notebook, SOC recorded a visit from Fr Russell on 19 Feb. 1964, 'a close friend & constant visitor all the 17 years the O'Caseys lived in [Totnes]'. Copy of notebook, SOCP in NLI. 89. Shivaun O'Casey to John Ford, 2 Sept. 1964, Lilly Library, Indiana University. 90. SOC, The Bald Primaqueera (1964)', in Blasts and Benedictions, p. 66. 91. Ayling and Burkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 265. 92. SOC to Peter Trower, 25 Aug. 1964, Robinson Library, University of Newcastle. 93. SOC to John Boyd, 31 May 1963, BKP in NLI. 94. SOC, Letters, 4, 508. 95. Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work (1975 edn), p. 285. See also The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 145, and The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 137. 96. SOC, Letters, 4, 341. 97. On the other hand, Robert Emmett Ginna, who knew SOC from 1953 on, told me in interview, 18 Sept. 1999, that 'although against religion O'Casey never used the word "atheist" of himself, spoke of God frequently, had a picture of the Annunciation over his mantelpiece, and often signed his letters wishing God's blessing'. 98. John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder; Edison, NJ: Riverrun Press, 2001), p. 122. 99. Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work (1975 edn), p. 290; The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, p. 150; The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. McCann, p. 142. 100. SOC, Letters, 4, 509.

538 Chapter 21-Afterlife 101. Death certificate of SOC, Newton Abbot, Devon, registered 21 Sept. 1964. A second cause of death listed by Dr Haskins was Epistaxis. 102. Eileen O'Casey, Sean, p. 296. 103. Micheal 6 hAodha, 'O'Casey on the Air', Irish University Review, 10 (1980), 122. 104. Ian Handford, 'Bygones: Theatre greats visited O'Casey in Torquay', Torquay Herald Express, 6 Nov. 2001, p. 22. The register no. at Torquay Crematorium is 16,644. 105. Reprinted in The Sting and the Twinkk, ed. Mikhail and O'Riordan, pp. 168-70 (p. 169). 106. Eileen O'Casey in interview with Michael Hand, 'Sean never mentioned ban in will', Sunday Press, 27 Sept. 1964, pp. 1, 6. 107. Harold Macmillan to Eileen, 22 Sept. 1964, SOCP in NLI. 108. Eileen O'Casey to Macmillan, 11 Oct. 1964, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. 109. Eileen O'Casey to Macmillan, 2 Dec. 1964, Macmillan Archive, Basingstoke. 110. O'Connor, Sean O'Casey: A Life, p. 377. 111. Obituary, 'Eileen O'Casey', Times, 11 April 1995. 112. SOC was enraged when in a labour dispute in New York in 1949 Quill ousted the Communist Party members from leadership of his Transport Union and agreed to employers' demands. 'Notes towards a study of Jack Carney by Virginia Hyvarinen', copy courtesy Donal Nevin. 113. Apparently Eileen contacted Mina Carney early in 1955, following Jack's illness, possibly a heart attack. 'Jack is all right again, but naturally has to take things easy.' Mina to Eileen, dated Easter Sunday 1955, SOCP in NLI. Jack died in London 21 March 1956. Mina survived him and died 12 Sept. 1974. In 1966 David Greene bought 126 Carney letters from Mina for the library at NYU but because of a falling-out with SOC a few years earlier he refused to allow Krause to copy them for the Letters. 114. Eileen O'Casey, Eileen, p. 194. 115. Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'Ode to the West Wind', Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th edn, vol. 2, ed. M.H. Abrams (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 698. 116. Edward Daly, Mister, Are You a Priest?, pp. 113-15.1 am indebted to Bishop Daly also for copies of correspondence concerning the 1964 Juno. 117. Ernest Blythe to Edward Daly, 17 Aug. 1964, courtesy Bishop Daly. The play chosen for the remaining company at the Queen's was The Big Long Bender, by Stewart Love. 118. Pat Layde, who had played Joxer when Juno opened at the Queen's on 17 March 1964, was stand-in. Brogan was a much-admired Joxer, a role he first played in 1947. Other members of the 1964 cast in Derry included: Aideen O'Kelly (Mary Boyle), Eileen Crowe (Mrs Madigan), May Craig (Mrs Tancred), Vincent Dowling (Jerry Devine), and Bill Foley (Bentham). 119. Blythe to Edward Daly, 14 Oct. 1964, courtesy Bishop Daly. 120. 'Sean O'Casey Was Enthusiastic About Abbey Players' Derry Visit', Derry Journal, 3 Nov. 1964, p. 1. 121. Thus on 25 April 1959 he replied to Mary O'Malley's invitation to visit the Belfast Lyric Theatre, Lyric correspondence, Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. Afterlife 1. The Page and the Stage, ed. Martin Drury, p. 49. 2. A brief note, unsigned, in the Abbey programme for the Plough (15 Aug. 1966) declared: The Directors long ago determined that O'Casey's masterpiece should be the first play to be staged in the new theatre, and they do not regard that resolve as having been nullified by the subsequent decision to open the new Abbey with the historical miscellany entitled Recall the Years.'

Notes to pages 435-445 539 3. See Seamus Kelly, 'New Abbey "recalls the years",' IT, 19 July 1966, p. 1; Hunt, The Abbey, pp. 194-96; Mac Anna, Fallaing Aonghusa, pp. 177-79. It is to be noted that of the twelve scenes in Recall one was devoted to SOC, the only Abbey playwright to be given a solo scene. 4. Gabriel Fallon, 'Afterword', Irish University Review [SOC centenary issue], 10 (1980), 161. 5. 6 June 1966. See Tomas Mac Anna, The Old Man Said "Truflais!",' SOCR, 5.1 (Fall 1978), 51-54. Mac Anna also directed the Irish premiere of The Hall of Healing, Queen's Theatre, 8 Feb. 1966. 6. Mac Anna also directed Purple Dust (1975), Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1977) and The Star Turns Red (1978) on the Abbey's main stage. The major surprise was the success of the Star. 7. A competent Red Roses for Me, directed by Hugh Hunt, was dismissed by the critics. 8. In a programme note the playwright John Boyd called Within the Gates 'a beautifully conceived and structured drama and one of the outstanding achievements of O'Casey's long career'. The play ran at the Lyric 6-30 March 1974, directed by Jim Sheridan. See also Conor O'Malley, 'Sean O'Casey at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast', SOCR, 6 (1980), 33-41. 9. Lynne Parker directed the Tassie for Rough Magic at the Project during the Dublin Theatre Festival, Sept. 1987. Peter Sheridan directed the Plough for Second Age at the Riverbank in Feb. 1993. Some regard Sheridan's production, in the round, as the best of this time. 10. A production of Purple Dust, directed by Shivaun O'Casey at the Peacock in May 1989, was damned by the critics; this necessarily discouraged subsequent experiments. Patrick Mason directed the Tassie on the Abbey's main stage in 1990; Garry Hynes staged a controversial Plough there in 1991. 11. Obituary: Sean O'Casey, The Times, 21 Sept. 1964, in Frank C. Roberts, Obituaries from the Times 1961-1970 (Reading: Newspaper Archive Developments Ltd, 1975), p. 597. There were productions of Purple Dust (1994) and the Cock (1996) in Glasgow, directed by Andy Arnold. See Stewart, About O'Casey, pp. 121-27. 12. I have in mind here what Ciaran Benson calls 'the cultural psychology of self, in which autobiography is a key factor. See The Cultural Psychology of Self, pp. 45-58. 13. Tobias Wolff, Old School (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 156. 14. Yeats to Lady Gregory, 1 May 1930, Berg, cited by Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, 2, 734, n. 16. 15. 'Sean O'Casey', Dictionary of National Biography 1961-1970, ed. E.T Williams and C.S. Nicholls (Oxford: OUP, 1981), p. 804. 16. SOC, Letters, 3, 481. 17. SOC, Liters, 3, 509. 18. SOC to Daiken, 4 Oct. 1951, Berg. 19. SOC, Behind the Green Curtains (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 41-42; also CP, 5, 285-86. 20. SOC to Ronald Ayling, 3 Nov. 1957, in Letters, 3, 486. 21. SOC, Letters, 3, 270. 22. SOC to Krause, 30 Sept. 1954, in Letters, 2,1096. The resemblance to Brian Friel's Give Me Your Answer, Do! (Loughcrew, Oldcastle; Gallery Press, 1997), is uncanny: the writer 'must live with that uncertainty, that necessary uncertainty' (p. 79). 23. SOC to Harry Cowdell, 22 July 1949, in Letters, 2, 625. 24. Brooks Atkinson, ed., The Sean O'Casey Reader: Plays, Autobiographies, Opinions (New York: St Martin's Press; London: Macmillan, 1968), p. xv.

540

Afterlife

25. SOC, Holograph Notebooks, vol. 21, Berg. Ayling and Durkan, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography, p. 314, say these notes were written in hospital in 1956. 26. Odets, 'The Parish and the World of O'Casey', New York Times Book Review, 5 Feb. 1950, p. 5, emphasis added. 27. SOC, The Green Crow, p. 150. 28. Kavanagh, The Story of the Abbey Theatre, p. 129. 29. As a programme note to a production of Juno celebrating the Abbey's 75th anniversary, 27 Dec. 1979, Denis Johnston, Brian Friel, Hugh Leonard, Thomas Kilroy and Eugene McCabe all paid tribute to SOC. Elsewhere, Friel said: 'We all came out from under his overcoat', SOCR, 4.2 (spring 1978), 87. Beckett's admiration is well known; it may be added that certain of his plays, including All That Fall and Rough for Theatre 1, are indebted to SOC, especially to the one-acts. John B. Keane and Frank McGuinness are others who have praised SOC as predecessor. 30. Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. 31. Terry Eagleton, 'Marxist Criticism Today', lecture at ESSE conference, Debrecen, Hungary, 5 Sept. 1997. See also The Eagleton Reader, ed. Stephen Regan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 246-59. 32. Tom Murphy, in interview with Michael Billington, 7 Oct. 2001, in Talking about Tom Murphy, ed. Nicholas Grene (Dublin: Carfysfort Press, 2002), p. 103. 33. Alan Simpson said O'Casey's anti-catholicism was less atheistic communism than 'tinged slightly and I am sure subconsciously with Orangism'. Beckett and Behan and a Theatre in Dublin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 172. 34. Twomey, The End of Irish Catholicism?. See also Fuller, Irish Catholicism Since 1950, pp. 225-54. 35. John Cooney, 'Archbishop's career represents both high point of Catholic dominance and a measure of its subsequent decline,' Irish Times, 7 April 2003, p. 14. This summary is in line with the findings of Cooney's biography, John Charles McQuaid. 36. Inglis, Moral Monopoly, pp. 256-57. 37. SOC, The Drums of Father Ned (London: Macmillan, 1960), p. x.; also CP, 5,134, emphasis added. 38. SOC to Chris Love, 11 Dec. 1962, in Letters, 4, 342. 39. David Hare, 'All passion spent: Kenneth Tynan's diaries lack the brilliance of his criticism, but they are compelling, harrowing reading', Observer, 7 Oct. 2001, 'Review', p. 15. See also Hare, 'All back to the canteen', Guardian, 'Review', 24 May 2003, p. 18: 'After all, those of us who have spent our lives on the British left have been saturated, soused, drowned in failure. Failure is our element.' 40. SOC, Three More Plays, p. 310. 41. O'Connor, Sean O'Casey: A Life, p. 361. Breon O'Casey recalls 'several scenes at least' written when SOC dropped the project, letter to CM, 5 Jan. 1998. 42. Leonard D. Elmhirst to SOC, 28 Dec. 1943, SOCP in NLI. 43. SOC, Three More Plays, p. 264. 44. Worth, Revolutions in Modern English Drama, p. 112. 45. Shivaun O'Casey in interview with Victoria Stewart, in About O'Casey, p. 133. Thus Micheal 6 hAodha rightly described SOC's genius as 'baroque and romantic', belonging to 'more spacious days of theatre', in The O'Casey Enigma, p. 123. 46. SOC to T.M. Farmiloe (Macmillans), 17 July 1963, copy DKP in NLI. See also SOC to Alan Simpson, 17 July 1961, in Letters, 4, 231. For a debate on this issue see David Krause, 'Sean O'Casey and Alan Simpson: Two Dubliners in Search of a Theatre', O'Casey Annual, 4 (1985), 3-33.

Notes to pages 445-450 541 47. For a less radical point of view see Tomas Mac Anna in interview, Irish University Review, 10 (1980), 135-36. 48. 'Last of the torchbearers mourned by the Abbey', Sunday Press, 20 Sept. 1964, p. 4.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES The main repositories of SOC's papers are The Berg Collection, NYPL and the National Library of Ireland, Collection List 75, MS 37,807-38,173

ADDITIONAL SOURCES Cyril Cusack Press Cuttings, NLI, MS 32,830 Joseph Holloway Papers, NLI, MS 25,250-25,252

PRIMARY TEXTS: WORKS BY SEAN O'CASEY (Unless otherwise stated, all first published by Macmillan, London) Plays Two Plays: Juno and the Pay cock [and] The Shadow of a Gunman (1925) The Plough and the Stars: A Tragedy in Four Acts (1926) The Silver Tassie: A Tragi-Comedy in Four Acts (1928) Within the Gates: A Play in Four Scenes in a London Park (1933) Windfalls: Stories, Poems and Plays [includes The End of the Beginning and A Pound on Demand] (1934) The Star Turns Red (1940) Purple Dust: A Wayward Comedy in Three Acts (1940) Red Roses for Me: A Play in Four Acts (1942) Oak Leaves and Lavender Or a World on Wallpaper (1946) Cock-a-Doodk Dandy (1949) Collected Plays. 2 vols (1949) Collected Plays. 2 vols [3 and 4] (1951) The Bishop's Bonfire: A Sad Play Within the Tune of a Polka (1955) Five One-Act Plays: The End of the Beginningl,] A Pound on Demand[J Hall ofHealing[J Bedtime Story[,]TimetoGo(1958) The Drums of Father Ned: A Mickrocosm of Ireland (1960) Behind the Green Curtains [J Figaro in the Night [J The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe (1961) The Harvest Festival: A Play in Three Acts. Foreword by Eileen O'Casey & Introduction by John O'Riordan. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980. Complete Plays. 5 vols (1984)

Selected Bibliography 543

Autobiographies I Knock at the Door: Swift Glances Back at Things That Made Me (1939) Pictures in the Hallway (1942) Drums under the Windoius (1945) Inishfalkn, Fare Thee Well (1949) Rose and Crown (1952) Sunset and Evening Star (1954) Mirror in My House: The Autobiographies of Sean O'Casey. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1956. Autobiographies. 2 vols (1963). Cited in the text as A.

Other The Story of the Irish Citizen Army. Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1919. Windfalls: Stories, Poems and Plays (1934) The Flying Wasp: A Laughing Look-Over of What Has Been Said about the Things of the Theatre (1937) The Green Crow. New York: George Braziller, 1956. Feathers from the Green Crow: Sean O'Casey, 1905-1925. Ed. Robert Hogan. Columbus, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1962; London: Macmillan, 1963. Under a Colored Cap: Articles Merry and Mournful with Comments and a Song (1963) Blasts and Benedictions: Articles and Stories. Selected and Introduced by Ronald Ayling (1967) The Sting and the Twinkle: Conversations with Sean O'Casey. Ed. E.H. Mikhail and John O'Riordan (1974) The Letters of Sean O'Casey. Ed. David Krause. 4 vols. Vol. 1 1910-41. New York: Macmillan, 1975. Vol. 2 1942-54. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Vol. 3 1955-58. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1989. Vol. 4 1959-64. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1992. Niall: A Lament. London and New York: Calder/River run, 1991.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Ayling, Ronald and Michael J. Durkan. Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography. London: Macmillan, 1978. Mikhail, E.H. Sean O'Casey and His Critics: An Annotated Bibliography, 1916-1982. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985. . An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Anglo-Irish Drama. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing, 1981. . 'Sean O'Casey: An Annual Bibliography'. O'Casey Annual, ed. Robert G. Lowery. Vols 1-4. London: Macmillan, 1982-85.

SECONDARY TEXTS Agate, James. James Agate: An Anthology. Ed. Herbert Van Thai. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961. . My Theatre Talks. London: Arthur Barker, 1933. . The Selective Ego: The Diaries of James Agate. Newly edited by Tim Beaumont. London: Harrap, 1976. Allen, Nicholas. George Russell (d?) and the New Ireland, 1905-30. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003.

544 SednO'Casey Andrews, C.S. Dublin Made Me: An Autobiography. Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1979. . Man of No Property: An Autobiography (Volume Two). Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1982. Arden, John. 'Ecce Hobo Sapiens: O'Casey's Theatre'. In Sean O'Casey: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas Kilroy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Armstrong, W.A. The Sources and Themes of The Plough and the Stars'. Modern Drama 4.3. (1961): 234-42. Atkinson, Brooks. Sean O'Casey: From Times Past. Ed. Robert G. Lowery. London: Macmillan, 1982. Ayling, Ronald. Continuity and Innovation in Sean O'Casey's Drama: A Critical Monograph. Salzburg Studies in English Literature 23. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1976. . 'Sean O'Casey'. In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 10, Modern British Dramatists, 1900-1945, Part 2: M-Z, ed. Stanley Weintraub. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. _. 'Seeds for Future Harvest: Propaganda and Art in O'Casey's Earliest Play'. Irish University Review, 10 (1980): 25-40. __. 'Portrait of the Artist as a Slum Guttersnipe'. O'Casey Annual No.l, ed. Robert G. Lowery. London and Dublin: Macmillan and Gill & Macmillan, 1982. . 'Sean O'Casey and Jim Larkin after 1923'. Sean O'Casey Review 3.2 (1977): 99-104. ., ed. Sean O'Casey: Modern Judgements. London: Macmillan, 1969; Nashville: Aurora, 1970. _., ed. O'Casey: The Dublin Trilogy: The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and The Pay cock, The Plough and the Stars: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1985. Benson, Ciaran. The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Benstock, Bernard. Paycocks and Others: Sean O'Casey's World. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976. Bentley, Eric. In Search of Theater. New York: Vintage Books, 1954. . What is Theatre? Incorporating 'The Dramatic Event' and Other Reviews 1944-1967. London: Methuen, 1969. Blanshard, Paul. The Irish and Catholic Power: An American Interpretation. London: Derek Verschoyle, 1954. Brown, Terence. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-1985. London: Fontana, 1985. Carter, Huntly. The New Spirit in the European Theatre 1914-1924: A Comparative Study of the Changes Effected by the War and Revolution. London: Ernest Benn, 1925. Chambers, Colin. The Story of Unity Theatre. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989. Chekhov, Michael. To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting. New York: Harper and Row, 1953. Connolly, James. Labour in Ireland: Labour in Irish History: The Re-Conquest of Ireland. Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1917. Cooney, John. John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland. Dublin: O'Brien Press, 1999. Cowasjee, Saros. Sean O'Casey: The Man Behind the Plays. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1963. . 'O'Casey Seen through Holloway's Diary'. A Review of English Literature 6.3 (1965): 58-69. Coxhead, Elizabeth. Lady Gregory: A Literary Portrait. 2nd edition. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1966. Dallas, Rev. Alexander. The Story of the Irish Church Missions, Part 1, An Account of the Providential Preparation which Led to the Establishment of the Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics in 1849. London: The Society for Irish Church Missions, n.d. [1867]. Daly, Edward. Mister, Are You a Priest? Jottings by Bishop Edward Daly. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000.

Selected Bibliography 545 Daly, Mary. Dublin: The Deposed Capital Cork: Cork University Press, 1984. Davis, Ronald L.John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick. 'Irish Stage Censorship in the 1950s'. Theatre Survey 42.2 (2001): 137-64. . Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Deane, Seamus. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985. De Blaghd, Ear nan. Trasna na Boinne: Imleabhar 1 de Chuimhni Cinn. Dublin: Sairseal agus Dill, 1957. . Sldn k hUltaibh: Imleabhar 2 de Chiumhni Cinn. Dublin: Sairseal agus Dill, 1970. . Gaeil a Muscailt: Imleabhar 3 de Chuimhni Cinn. Dublin: Sairseal agus Dill, 1973. Denvir, Gearoid. 'One Hundred Years of Conradh na Gaeilge'. Eire-Ireland 30.1 (1995): 105-29. Dolan, Terence Patrick. A Dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish Use of English. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998. Donoghue, Denis. We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1986. Dowling, Vincent. Astride the Moon: A Theatrical Life. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2000. Drury, Martin, ed. The Page and the Stage: The Plough and the Stars. Dublin: Abbey Theatre, 2003. Dungan, Myles. Distant Drums: Irish Soldiers in Foreign Armies. Belfast: Appletree Press, 1993. . Irish Voices from the Great War. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995. Dunleavy, Janet Egleson and Gareth W. Dunleavy. Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Edwards, Ruth Dudley. Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979. Elsom,John. Post-War British Theatre. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, rev. edn, 1979. Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. Fallon, Brian. An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930-1960. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998. Fallon, Gabriel, Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Fay, Gerard. The Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius. Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds, 1958. Findlater, Richard. The Unholy Trade. London: Victor Gollancz, 1952. Fisher, Clive. Noel Coward. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992. Fitz-Simon, Christopher. The Boys: A Double Biography. London: Nick Hern Books, 1994. . The Abbey Theatre: The First Hundred Years. London: Thames and Hudson, 2003. Foster, R.F. Modern Ireland 1600-1972. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1988. . W.B. Yeats: A Life: 2: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Fox, R.M. The History of the Irish Citizen Army. Dublin: James Duffy, 1943. .James Connolly: The Forerunner. Tralee: Kerryman, 1946. .Jim Larkin: The Rise of the Underman. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957. Fuller, Louise. Irish Catholicism Since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2002. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Garvin, Tom. 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996. Goldstone, Herbert. In Search of Community: The Achievement of Sean O'Casey. Cork and Dublin: Mercier Press, 1972.

546 Sean O'Casey Goulding, Christopher. The Story of the People's. Newcastle upon Tyne: City Libraries and Arts, 1991. Greaves, C. Desmond. The Life and Times of James Connolly. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1961. . Sean O'Casey: Politics and Art. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979. Gregory, Augusta, Lady. Lady Gregory's Journals. 2 vols. Ed. Daniel J. Murphy. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978, 1987. Grene, Nicholas. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault toFriel Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. . 'The Class of the Clitheroes: O'Casey's Revisions to The Plough and the Stars Promptbook'. Buildup (1999/2000): 57-66. Harmon, Maurice. Sean OTaolain. London: Constable, 1994. Harrington, John. The Irish Play on the New York Stage 1874-1966. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Harris, Peter James. Sean O'Casey's Letters and Autobiographies: Reflections of a Radical Ambivalence. Trier: Wissenschlaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004. Hazelhurst, Elizabeth. 'A Dubliner in Devon; Sean O'Casey (1880-1964)'. Reports and Transactions, Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and the Arts, 130 (1998): 209-27. Hewison, Robert. In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Hickey, Des and Gus Smith, eds. A Paler Shade of Green. London: Leslie Frewin, 1972, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill [as Flight from the Celtic Twilight], 1973. Hobsbawm, Eric. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2002. Hogan, Robert. The Experiments of Sean O'Casey. New York: St Martin's Press, 1960. . After the Irish Renaissance: A Critical History of the Irish Drama since 'The Plough and the Stars'. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967; London: Macmillan, 1968. . 'O'Casey, Influence and Impact'. In Irish University Review 10 (1980): 146-58. and Richard Burnham. The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History IV: The Rise of the Realists 1910-1915. Dublin: Dolmen Press; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979. and Richard Burnham. The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History V: The Art of the Amateur 1916-1920. Mountrath: Dolmen Press; Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1984. and Richard Burnham. The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History VI: The Years of O'Casey, 1921-1926. Newark: University of Delaware Press; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992. Holloway, Joseph. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre: A Selection from his Unpublished Journal. Ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O'Neill. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. .Joseph Holloway's Irish Theatre. Ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O'Neill. 3 vols. Dixon, CA: Proscenium Press, 1968-70. Holroyd, Michael. Augustus John: The New Biography. London: Vintage, 1997. . Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition. London: Chatto and Windus, 1997. Hopkinson, Michael. Green against Green: The Irish Civil War. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1988. Hunt, Hugh. The Abbey: Ireland's National Theatre 1904-1979. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979. . Sean O'Casey. Gill's Irish Lives. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1980. Inglis, Tom. Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland. 2nd edn. Dublin: UCD Press, 1998.

Selected Bibliography 547 Innes, Christopher. Modern British Drama 1890-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Jeffery, Keith. Ireland and the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Johnston, Denis. The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston. Vol. 1. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1977. Jones, Nesta. File on O'Casey. London and New York: Methuen, 1986. Jordan, John. The Indignation of Sean O'Casey'. In Irish Writing, 29 (1954): 57-63. . The Passionate Autodidact: The Importance of Litera Scripta for O'Casey'. In Irish University Review, 10 (1980): 59-76. Kavanagh, Peter. The Story of the Abbey Theatre. New York, Devin-Adair, 1950; Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation/University of Maine at Orono, 1984. Kearns, Kevin C. Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994. Kearney, Colbert. The Glamour of Grammar: Orality and Politics and the Emergence of Sean O'Casey. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Kenneally, Michael. Portraying the Self: Sean O'Casey & the Art of Autobiography. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988. Keogh, Dermot. Twentieth-Century Ireland: Nation and State. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. London: Cape, 1995. Kilroy, Thomas, ed. Sean O'Casey: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1975. Kleiman, Carol. Sean O'Casey's Bridge of Vision: Four Essays on Structure and Perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Kohfeldt, Mary Lou. Lady Gregory: The Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance. New York: Athenaeum; London: Andre Deutsch, 1985. Kosok, Heinz. O'Casey the Dramatist. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985. . Plays and Playwrights from Ireland in International Perspective. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1995. Krause, David. "The Rageous Ossean": Patron-Hero of Synge and O'Casey'. Modern Drama, 4 (1961): 268-91. . Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work [I960]. Enlarged edn. New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1975. . Sean O'Casey and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. . 'ThePlough and the Stars: Socialism (1913) and Nationalism (1916)'. In New Hibernia Review/Iris Eireannach Nua, 1.4 (1997): 28-40. ., ed. The Letters of Sean O'Casey. 4 vols. See Primary Texts for details. _., ed. Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991. and Robert G. Lowery, eds. Sean O'Casey: Centenary Essays. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980. Laffan, Michael. The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Fein Party, 1916-1923. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Larkin, Emmet. James Larkin: Irish Labour Leader 1876-1947. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965, New English Library, 1968. Larkin, Jim [Jr]. In the Footsteps of Big Jim: A Family Biography. Dublin: Blackwater Press, n.d. [1996]. Lee, JJ. Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Levitas, Ben. The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890-1916. Oxford: Clarendon, 2002.

548 Sean O'Casey . 'Plumbing the Depths: Irish Realism and the Working Class from Shaw to O'Casey'. In Irish University Review, 33 (2003): 133-49. Littlewood, Joan. Joan's Book: Joan Littlewood's Peculiar History As She Tells It. London: Methuen, 1994. Litvan, Gyorgy, ed. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt and Repression 1953-1963. London and New York: Longman, 1996. Lowery, Robert G. Sean O'Casey's Autobiographies: An Annotated Index. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. . A Whirlwind in Dublin: 'The Plough and the Stars'Riots. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. _., ed. Essays on Sean 0'Casey's Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1981. Mac Anna, Tomas. Fallaing Aonghusa: Saol Amharclainne. Dublin: An Clocomhar, 2000. Macardle, Dorothy. The Irish Republic: A Documented Chronicle of the Anglo-Irish Conflict. London: Gollancz, 1937; Corgi Books, 1968. McCann, Sean, ed. The World of Sean O'Casey. London: New English Library, 1966. McDiarmid, Lucy. 'The Man Who Died for the Language: The Reverend Dr. O'Hickey and the "Essential Irish" Controversy of 1909'. In Eire-Ireland, 35. 1&2 (2000): 188-218. McDonald, Walter. Reminiscences of a Maynooth Professor. Ed. with a memoir by Denis Gwynn. London: Cape, 1925; Cork: Mercier Press, 1967. McGlone, James P. Ria Mooney, The Life and Times of the Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre, 1948-1963. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2002. McHugh, Roger. '"Always Complainin'": The Politics of Young Sean'. Irish University Review, 10 (1980): 91-97. Macleod, Alison. The Death of Uncle Joe. Rendlesham, Suffolk: Merlin Press, 1997. Malone, Maureen. The Plays of Sean O'Casey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. Margulies, Martin. The Early Life of Sean O'Casey. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970. . 'Sean O'Casey Revisited'. In University of Bridgeport Quarterly, 12.3 (1980): 4-5. Marreco, Anne. The Rebel Countess: The Life and Times of Countess Markieviecz. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967. Marshall, Norman. The Other Theatre. London: John Lehmann, 1947. Massey, Raymond. A Hundred Different Lives: An Autobiography. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979. Mathews, P.J. Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League and the Co-Operative Movement. Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 2003. Maye, Brian. Arthur Griffith. Dublin: Griffith College Publications, 1997. Meenan, F.O.C. St Vincent's Hospital 1834-1994: An Historical and Social Portrait. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1995. Mercer, Derrik, ed. Chronicle of the 20th Century. Farnborough, Hampshire: JOL International Publications, 1988. Mercier, Vivian.'Victorian Evangelicanism and the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival'. Literature and the Changing Ireland, ed. Peter Connolly. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982. . 'Decline of a Playwright: The Riddle of Sean O'Casey'. In Commonweal, LXIV.15 (1956): 366-68. Mikhail, E.H., ed. The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections. London: Macmillan, 1988. Mitchell, Arthur. Labour in Irish Politics 1890-1930: The Irish Labour Movement in an Age of Revolution. Dublin: Irish University Press, 1974. . 'George Orwell and Sean O'Casey: Two Prickly Characters Intersect'. In History

Selected Bibliography 549 Ireland, Autumn 1998: 44-46. Mitchell, Jack. The Essential O'Casey: A Study of the Twelve Major Plays of Sean O'Casey. Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1980. Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003. Morash, Christopher. A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Morgan, Austen. James Connolly: A Political Biography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Morgan, Jack. 'Alfred Hitchcock's Juno and the Paycock'. In Irish University Review, 24.2 (1994): 212-16. Murphy, James H. Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland During the Reign of Queen Victoria. Cork: Cork University Press, 2001. Murray, Christopher. Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. . A Faber Critical Guide: Sean O'Casey. London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2000. Nathan, George Jean. My Very Dear Sean: GeorgeJean Nathan to Sean O'Casey, Letters and Articles. Ed. Robert G. Lowery and Patricia Angelin. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985. . A George Jean Nathan Reader. Selected and edited by A.L. Lazarus. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990. Nevin, Donal, ed. Trade Union Century. Cork and Dublin: Mercier Press, in association with ICTU and RTE, 1994. ., ed. James Larkin: Lion of the Fold. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, in association with RTE and SIPTU, 1998. Newsinger, John. '"In the Hunger-Cry of the Nation's Poor is Heard the Voice of Ireland": Sean O'Casey and Politics 1908-1916'. In Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985): 221-40. 1916 Rebellion Handbook [Weekly Irish Times, Dublin, 1916]. Introduction by Declan Kiberd. N.p.: Mourne River Press, 1998. Nowlan, Kevin B. and T. Desmond Williams, eds. Ireland in the War Years and After: 1939-51. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1969. O'Brien, Conor Cruise, ed. The Shaping of Modern Ireland. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. . Memoir: My Life and Themes. Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1999. O'Brien, John A., ed. The Vanishing Irish: The Enigma of the Modern World. London: W.H. Allen, 1953. O'Casey, Breon. 'Sean O'Casey: A Portrait'. Sean O'Casey Review, 3.1 (Fall 1976): 53 - 57. O'Casey, Eileen. Sean. Edited with Introduction by J.C. Trewin. London: Macmillan, 1971; New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972. . Eileen. New York: St Martin's Press, 1976.

. Cheerio, Titan: The Friendship between George Bernard Shaw and Eileen and Sean O'Casey. New York: Scribner's, 1989; London: Macmillan, 1991. _. Introduction, Niall: A Lament [by SOC]. London and New York: Calder, 1991. O'Connor, Emmet. James Larkin. Radical Irish Lives Series. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. O'Connor, Frank. My Father's Son. London: Macmillan, 1968; Pan, 1971. O'Connor, Garry. Sean O'Casey: A Life. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988; Paladin Graf ton, 1989.

550 Sean O'Casey O'Connor, Ulick. Brendan Behan. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970. . Biographers and the Art of Biography. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1991. O'Faolain, Sean. Constance Markievicz or The Average Revolutionary: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934. 6 hAodha, Micheal. Pictures at the Abbey: The Collection of the Irish National Theatre. Dublin: Dolmen Press, in association with the INTS, 1983. . Siobhdn: A Memoir of an Actress. Dingle: Brandon Books, 1994. ., ed. The O'Casey Enigma. Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press, 1980. O'Hegarty, P.S. The Victory of Sinn Fein: How It Won It and How It Used It. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1924; reprint, Dublin: UCD Press, 1998. O'Neill, Michael J. Lennox Robinson. New York: Grossart and Dunlap, 1964. O'Riordan, John. A Guide to O'Casey's Plays: From the Plough to the Stars. London: Macmillan, 1984. O'Riordan, Manus. Next to the Revolution - The Greatest Event of 1916: Liberty Hall as a Cultural Centre. Dublin SIPTU Publications, 2002. O'Sullivan, Jack. A Celtic Artist: Breon O'Casey. Introduction by Breon O'Casey. Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2003. O'Toole, Fin tan. The Irish Times Book of the Century. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1999. Pilkington, Lionel. Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2002. Prunty,Jacinta. Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998. Ritchie, Harry. Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950-1959. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988. Ritschel, Nelson O Ceallaigh. 'James Connolly's Under Which Flag, 1916.' New Hibernia Review/Irish Eireannach Nua, 2.4 (1998): 54-68. Robbins, Frank. Under the Starry Plough: Recollections of the Irish Citizen Army. Dublin: Academy Press, 1977. Roberts, Philip. The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Robinson, Lennox. Curtain Up: An Autobiography. London: Michael Joseph, 1942. . Towards an Appreciation of the Theatre. Dublin: Metropolitan Publishing, 1945. . Ireland's Abbey Theatre: A History 1899-1951. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1951. . Selected Plays. Ed. Christopher Murray. Gerrards Cross; Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982. Roche, Anthony. Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994. Rollins, Ronald. Sean 0'Casey's Drama: Verisimilitude and Vision. N.p.: University of Alabama Press, 1979. Saddlemyer, Ann. Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Schrank, Bernice. Sean O'Casey: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Tastoralism and Progress in O'Casey's Purple Dust'. In Irish University Review, 23.2 (1993): 236-49. _. 'Performing Political Opposition: Sean O'Casey's Late Plays and the Demise of Eamon de Valera'. In BELLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies, 11, Acta

Selected Bibliography 551 IASIL 1999. Ed. Mireia Aragay and Jacqueline A. Hurtley, Barcelona: University of Barcelona, 2000. _. 'Reception, Close Reading and Re-Production: The Case of Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie\ In Canadian Journal of Irish Studies/Revue canadienne d'etudes irlandaises, 26.2/27.1 (2002): 35-48. Scrimgeour, James R. Sean O'Casey. Boston: Twayne, 1978; London: George Prior, 1979. Scully, Seamus. The Dublin Rover. Dublin: Tara Books, 1991. Shaw, Bernard. Complete Plays with Prefaces. 6 vols, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963. . Sixteen Self Sketches. London: Constable, 1949. . The Matter with Ireland. Ed. David H. Greene and Dan H. Laurence [and dedicated to SOC]. London: Hart-Davis, 1962. Simmons, James. Sean O'Casey. London: Macmillan, 1983; New York: Grove Press, 1984. Simpson, Alan. 'O'Casey and the East Wall Area in Dublin'. In Irish University Review, 10 (1980): 41-51. Smith, B.L. O'Casey's Satiric Vision. N.p.: Kent State University Press, 1978. Stallworthy, Jon. Louis MacNeice. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Starkie, Walter. 'Sean O'Casey'. In The Irish Theatre, ed. Lennox Robinson. London: Macmillan, 1939. Stephens, James. The Insurrection in Dublin. A New Edition. Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1917. Stewart, Victoria. About O'Casey: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Summerfield, Henry. That Myriad-Minded Man: A Biography of George William Russell "A.E." 1867-1935. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1975. Taylor, John Russell. Anger and After: A Guide to the New Drama. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Thompson, William Irwin. The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916: A Study of an Ideological Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Toibin, Colm. Lady Gregory's Toothbrush. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002; London: Picador, 2003. Trotter, Mary. Ireland's National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Twomey, D. Vincent, SVD. The End of Irish Catholicism? Dublin: Veritas, 2003. Twyford, H.P. It Came to Our Door: Plymouth in the World War. Plymouth: Underbill, 1945. Utley, Freda. Lost Illusion. London: Allen and Unwin, 1949. Verney, Peter. The Micks: The Story of the Irish Guards. London: Peter Davies, 1970. Watson, G.J. Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O'Casey. 2nd edition. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994. Watt, Stephen. Joyce, O'Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Walters, Eugene and Matthew Murtagh. Infinite Variety: Dan Lowrey's Music Hall 1879-97. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1975. Weintraub, Stanley. 'Shaw's Other Keegan: Sean O'Casey and G.B.S.' In Weintraub, Shaw's People: Victoria to Churchill. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Welch, Robert. The Abbey Theatre 1899-1999: Form and Pressure. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Wesker, Arnold. As Much As I Dare: An Autobiography (1932-1959). London: Century, 1994. Wheal, Elizabeth-Anne and Stephen Pope. The Macmillan Dictionary of the Second World War. 2nd edition. London: Macmillan, 1989. Whelan, Gerard, with Carolyn Swift. Spiked: Church-State Intrigue and the Rose Tattoo. Dublin: New Island, 2002.

552 Sean O'Casey Whyte, J.H. Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923-1979. 2nd edition. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1980. Whiting, John. The Art of the Dramatist. Ed. Ronald Hayman. London: London Magazine Editions, 1970. Williams, Raymond. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968. Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. 2nd edition. London: Pan Books, 1967. Worth, Katharine]. 'O'Casey's Dramatic Symbolism'. In Modern Drama 4.3 (1961): 260-67. . Revolutions in Modern English Drama. London: Bell, 1973. . Samuel Beckett's Theatre: Life Journeys. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999. Wren, Jimmy. Saint Laurence O'Toole G.A.C 1901-2001: A Centenary History. Dublin: Gaelic Athletic Association, 2001. Yeates, Padraig. Lockout: Dublin 1913. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2000. Yeats, Michael B. Cast a Cold Eye: Memories of a Poet's Son and Politician. Dublin: Blackwater Press, n.d [1999]. Yeats, W.B. The Letters of William Butler Yeats. Ed. Allan Wade. London: Hart-Davis, 1954. ., ed. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Young, Michael. TheElmhirsts of Dartington. Totnes, Devon: Dartington Hall Trust, 1996.

INDEX

AL. see Russell, George Abbey Festival, 1938, 243, 260-61 Abbey Players, 248, 298, 337-8, 357 Abbey Theatre, 78, 110, 161, 196, 197, 246, 322, 387, 406 Board of, 147, 260 Blythe in charge, 290 Blythe retires, 441 and censorship, 167-8 centenary, 440, 441 decline in standards, 241-2, 302-3 documentary on, 1958, 408-10 dramatic principles, 164 and Dublin Theatre Festival, 398 financial problems, 144 government subsidy, 141, 165, 168, 178 IRA threat to, 141-2 jubilee, 1925, 171 T.C. Murray plays, 189, 197 and O'Casey, 5, 7, 47, 48, 93, 95, 194, 330, 363 in autobiographies, 283, 335, 336 closes in tribute to death of, 436 first visit, 111 his dependence on, 170 lack of memorial, 8 O'Casey and Yeats reconciled, 241-2 second visit, 115 and O'Casey plays, 48, 137, 263, 280, 284, 394 (see also under Juno and the Pay cock; O'Casey, Sean: The Shadow of a Gunman; The Plough and the Stars) 'Abbey incident', 1947, 302-3 Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, 319 The Crimson in the Tricolour, 131-4 The Harvest Festival, 125-7, 272-3 internal opposition to, 177, 179 O'Casey bans productions, 418, 431 one-act plays, 146-7 productions criticised, 166

production rights, 170 Red Roses, 275 royalties, 158, 169, 206, 209, 271, 303 Seamless Coat rejected, 138-9 The Silver Tassie production, 242-3 rejection of, 200-205, 208, 210-11, 213, 228 The Star, 264 orchestra, 194 Playboy riots, 68, 175, 198, 242 premises burnt down, 319, 334-5 move to Queen's, 44 re-opened, 1966, 432-3, 440-41 prizes, 220 Purgatory (Yeats), 158, 239 The Slough (Wilson), 95-6 tours Derry, 438 Paris, 365-6 USA, 68, 186, 219-20, 234, 239, 241, 246, 247, 260 ABC Television, 425 Abercorn Road, Dublin, 40, 45, 55, 59, 62-3, 101, 341 Beaver family in, 77 census, 1901, 54, 60 census, 1911,78-9 doctor visits, 92 Easter Rising, 103 Maire Keating visits, 117-18 Mick returns to, 51, 129-30 in Red Roses for Me, 273 Abraham, Isabella, 17, 31 Abraham family, 16-17 Act of Union, 1800, 18,232 Actors' Studio, 310, 406, 407 Adelaide hospital, Dublin, 92 Adelphi cinema, Dublin, 355

554 Sean O'Casey Agate, James, 170, 187, 244, 443 on Gates, 225-6 on Purple Dust, 266, 274 on Red Roses, 285 on The Star, 264 on Tassie, 208, 209 Agriculture, Department of, 67 Aiken, Frank and Mrs, 361 Aikenhead, Mary, 93 Albert Memorial, 190 Albery, Bronson, 279, 336, 363 and Oak Leaves, 297-9 and Red Roses, 284-6 Albery, Una Gwynn, 284 Aldwych Theatre, London, 432 Allen, John, 263-4 Allen, Nicholas, 204 Allgood, Molly, 189 in>no, 184, 214 in Plough, 187 Allgood, Sara, 155, 156, 266 in>no, 151, 154, 171, 184 in Juno film, 214 in Plough, 170, 187, 197-8 America, 239 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 416-17 American Communist Party, 128 American Legion, 305 American Spectator, 224, 237 American Theatre Guild, 197 American Transport Union, 437 Amis, Kingsley, 375 Anderson, Lindsay, 408 Anderson, Maxwell, 251 Andrews, Eamonn, 441 Andrews, Todd, 146, 161,322 Angelico, Fra, 62 Anglo-French Art School, 306, 307, 335 Anglo-Irish Treaty, 1921, 113, 139, 262,

277

election, 140 Sinn Fein convention, 138 Anglo-Irish war, 72, 127, 130-31, 140 house raids, 135-6 Annagh-ma-Kerrig, County Monaghan, 358 Annison, Stan, 196 anti-Semitism, 303, 393 Apollo Theatre, London, 207-9 Archer, Abraham, 16-17

Archer, Isabella, 20 Archer, Susan, 13. see also Casey, Susan (mother) marriage, 15-17 Archer, Thomas, 17 Archer, William, 17, 164, 237-8 Arden, John, 374-5, 415, 434 Ardmore Studios, 408 Aristotle, 202 Arnold, Malcolm, 337 Arnold, Matthew, 239, 350 Arnott, Sir Lauriston, 403 Arnott's, 56, 334 Arrow, The, 261 Arts Club, 144 Arts Council, 284, 298, 339, 412 Arts Theatre Club, 274, 356 Ashe, Mr, 58 Ashe, Thomas, 3, 85, 106, 108 and O'Casey, 104-5, 123 Askwith Inquiry, 87 Asquith, Herbert, Lord Oxford, 185 Astor, Nancy Lady, 225, 227, 231, 247 Athlone, Co. Westmeath, 243 Atkinson, Brooks, 238, 333, 338, 366, 392 on Bonfire, 367 on Cock, 407 on Gates, 237, 239 on The Green Crow, 373 on Inishf alien, 313 on O'Casey, 336, 436, 445 on Pictures, 272 on Purple Dust, 382 on Red Roses, 368 on Sunset, 354 Atkinson, Oriana, 366, 407 atomic warfare, 330, 331-2, 364, 373 disarmament, 374 Attlee, Clement, 324 Australian Association Press, 266 Ayling, Ronald, 62, 404, 405, 423, 433, 448 defence of O'Casey, 424 bagpipes, 84 Baillie, Isabel, 384 Bakhtin, L., 390 Baldwin, Stanley, 323 Ballet Jooss, 262 Ballet Russe, 314 Balzac, Honore, 128, 169

Index 555 Barby Camp, Rugby, 307 Barker, EG., 415 Barker, Granville, 221 Barlow, Sean, 166 Barn Theatre, 247 Barnes, Ben, 440 Barnes, Binnie, 207 Barnet, Sylvan, 386 Barry, Kevin, 173 Bart, Lionel, 419 Barthes, Roland, 5 Battle of Britain, 266, 272, 279 Baume, Eric, 306 Baxter, Beverly, 286 BBC, 259, 268, 291, 408, 425 BBC Northern Ireland, 434 Beaver, Bella (sister), 27, 49, 56, 75, 117, 149 birth, 16, 19 Easter Rising, 103 education, 24-6 funeral, 129 granddaughter, 431-2 marriage, 34-8, 59, 76-7 and O'Casey, 33-4, 41 teacher, 28, 29, 30, 34 death of, 108-9 Beaver, Isabella (niece), see Murphy, Babsie Beaver, James, 34, 75 Beaver, Lorraine, 431-2, 435 Beaver, Nicholas, 34-8, 41, 49, 56, 75, 108, 109, 130 illness and death, 76-7 Beaver, Shaun, 76, 293-4, 431 Beaver, Susan Archer, 35-6, 49, 75 Beaver, Valentine, 75, 108 Beaver family, 190, 197, 294 Beckett, Samuel, 11, 172, 311, 362, 375, 415, 443, 449 atheism, 435 and Dublin Theatre Festival, 396, 397, 403, 404, 406, 414 Endgame, 383, 385 Happy Days, 49 on O'Casey, 417 O'Casey on, 370, 387 on Portrane, 76 review of Windfalls, 240 Waiting for Godot, 329, 370 Beevor, Antony, 268

Behan, Brendan, 3, 56, 65, 276, 342, 374, 394 Belfast, 413 IRA prisoners, 297 pogrom refugees, 139 Belgium, 261 Bell, The, 266, 275, 288, 290 on Red Roses, 276-7 Beltane, 240 Ben Hur (film), 192, 197 Benson, Frank, 184, 234 Bentley, Eric, 328, 330 Berg Collection, New York, 7, 173, 300, 433, 434 Berne Convention, 269 Bernstein, Sydney, 214, 292, 339-40, 360, 437 Betjemanjohn, 287, 288 Bible, 15, 42, 58, 134 language of, 230 Bible Societies, 14 Bijou Theatre, New York, 406 Binyon, Laurence, 186 Birrell, Augustine, 73, 77 Black-and-Tans, 130, 134-5, 391 Black Raven pipe band, 104 Blackpool, 339 Blake, William, 437 Blakely, Colin, 414, 441-2 Blanshard, Paul, 350 Blenheim Palace, 221 Blitzstein, Marc, 407, 413 Bloody Sunday, 1913, 86-7 Bloody Sunday, 1972, 434 Bloomgarden, Kermit, 336 Blue-coat School, Blackball Place, 41-2 Blythe, Ernest, 8, 171, 366, 400 and Abbey Theatre, 242 Derry visit, 438-9 documentary, 408 leases Queen's, 334-5 as managing director, 290, 302, 319 retires from, 441 subsidy, 165, 168 Gaelic League, 71 IRB, 89 Minister for Finance, 141 and O'Casey, 66, 67-8, 77, 418, 450 and Plough, 172, 432-3 Bodenstown commemoration, 84-5, 111, 177

556 Sean O'Casey Boer War, 52-3, 63, 66, 74-5, 188, 307 Bond, Edward, 374-5, 433 book clubs, 279, 335, 354 Book Find Club, 354 Book Society, 367 Bookman, 240

Booth, Shirley, 413 Booth Theatre, New York, 368-9 Bord Faille, 393, 398

and An Toslal, 400-401, 402 Borenius, Professor, 306 Boston, 240, 368, 413 Gates banned, 238-9, 277, 304 Boston College, 239 Boston Globe, 239

Botanic Gardens, Dublin, 138-9 Boucicault, Dion, 43-4, 45, 53, 125, 234, 390 O' Casey in Shaughraun, 46-7 Bough ton, Rutland, 184 Boundary Commission, 174 Bowen, Desmond, 13, 14 Bowen-Colthurst, Captain, 123 Boyle, T.A., 396 Boyle, William, 94 Brady, Canon James, 83, 119 Brahms,]., 290 Brandeis University, 416 Braybrook, Patrick, 244 Braziller, George, 354, 369, 370 Breathnach, Padraig, 79 Brecht, Bertolt, 97, 106, 177, 368, 419 Breen, Fr James, 83 Brennan, Charles J., 396, 397, 400 Brennan, Denis, 356 Brighton, 339 Bristol Old Vic, 412, 419, 434 British Army, 74-5, 101, 129 Casey brothers in, 22, 34-5, 52-3, 66 British Drama League, 242 British International Pictures, 200 British Library, 95 British Library Sound Archives, 430 Britten, Benjamin, 298 Broadway Soda Fountain Parlour, 147 Brogan, Harry, 438 Brookes, T. Cannon, 321 Brookes, Victor, 321 Brown, Curtis, 197 Brown, Ivor, 224, 226, 227

on Oak Leaves, 299 on Pictures, 271

Brown, John, 45 Browne, Michael, Bishop of Galway, 295 Bryden, Bill, 442 Buckfast Abbey, 296 Bulganin, N., 373 Buller, General, 52 Bunyanjohn, 374 Burlington Art Magazine, 306

Burns, Robert, 115, 132, 134, 190 Burton, Philip, 379, 382, 406, 407 Burton, Richard, 427 Bush, Alan, 298 Bush, G.W., 2 Butler, Hubert, 394 Butler, R.A.B., 340 Butt, Isaac, 21 Byrne, Eddie, 285-6, 297, 304, 336, 337, 356-7 Byrne, Seamus, 362 Caedmon Records, 341, 364 Cahalan, Mrs Patrick, 83 Cahill, Frank, 83, 84, 113, 131, 147, 303, 399 Cahill's publishing house, 394 Calderjohn, 368-9 Callan, Paddy, 66 Cambridge Arts Theatre, 286, 298 Campaign Against Evil Literature, 392 Campion's pub, 294 Cape, Jonathan, 170 Capitol Cinema, 197 Capuchin Annual, 288 Cardiff, Jack, 427, 428 Carey, Eileen, see O' Casey, Eileen (wife) Carlton Cinema, Dublin, 410 Carnegie Hall Playhouse, 406 Carney, Jack, 94, 129, 249, 299, 300, 320 correspondence, 211, 220, 263, 266, 267, 268-9, 270 Tassie, 205

death of, 437 and Larkin autobiography, 296 moves to London, 295 presents from, 292 visits Moscow, 210 Carney, Mina, 129, 249, 266, 296, 299, 300, 320 art schools, 306

Index 557 Carroll, Paul Vincent, 298 Carroll, James, TD, 396 Carson, Sir Edward, 88 Carter, Huntly, 193, 210 Carton, Father P.J., 242 Casement, Roger, 103, 436 Casey, Isaac (Joe) (brother), 19, 24, 29,

34, 35, 56, 75, 94, 270

childhood theatricals, 43-7, 125, 158 dog drowned, 26, 297 financial trouble, 53-4, 90, 108, 127 marriage, 53 mother's death, 117 theatre career, 51, 53-4 theft, 42 Casey, Isabella Charlotte (Bella) (sister). see Beaver, Bella Casey, John, see O'Casey, Sean Casey, Kit, 84 Casey, Mary (nee Kelly), 63, 90 Casey, Michael (father), 4, 12-16, 31, 36, 41,211,445 employment, 14-15, 24 housing, 17-20 landlord, 19-20 love of books, 14 marriage, 15-17 politics of, 21-4 rebellion against, 50 resigns job, 26-7 death of, 24, 33, 35, 38 grave, 30 Casey, Michael Harding (Mick) (brother), 12, 23, 24, 29, 37, 41-2, 62, 84, 108, 190, 197 in army, 22, 34-5, 52-3, 66, 101, 117 Fusilier's Arch, 74-5 artistic, 33, 130, 294 birth, 16, 19 census, 1911,78-9 and drinking, 41,51,56, 90 education, 25 employment, 55 and family income, 30, 63 on nationalism, 70 O'Casey on, 130 First World War, 101, 129-30 death of, 293-4, 295 Casey, Susan (mother), 12, 49, 61, 62-3, 72, 74, 261 and alcohol, 56

and Bella's marriage, 35 census forms, 54-5, 60, 78-9 death of Michael, 27-9 death of Tom, 92 declining health, 108 dedication to, 367 finances, 34, 42-3, 77, 101, 108, 111 housing, 51 Isaac's marriage, 53 number of children, 18-19 and O'Casey, 26, 82, 126 education, 41-2 eye problems, 31-3 in Irtish/alien, 283 Plough dedicated to, 179 in Red Roses, 273 politics of, 22-4, 66, 70-71, 103 and theatre, 43 death of, 115, 116-18 funeral, 125 Casey, Thomas (Tom) (brother), 19, 24,

29, 41-2, 62, 84, 307

in army, 22, 34-5, 52-3, 66 Fusiliers' Arch, 74-5 Bella's wedding, 37 and drinking, 56, 90 education, 25 employment, 51, 55 and family income, 30 marriage, 63 theft, 43 death of, 90-91,92, 108 Casey, William, bishop of Limerick, 4 Casson, Lewis, 353 Castlereagh, Viscount, 232 catholic church, 211, 240, 258, 272, 278. see also McQuaid, Dr John Charles Blanshard on, 350 censorship, 243 control of education, 73-4 Nathan's conversion, 405-6 O'Casey's attitude to, 308-10, 435, 446-7 in O'Casey's work Bonfire, 357, 359-62 Cock, 302, 304-5, 317-18, 322-3 Inishf alien, 283-4, 312 Red Roses, 274, 275, 288-9 Rose and Crown, 331-2 opposes Insh Peasant, 73 and protestant funerals, 411-12

558 Sean O'Casey catholic church continued revivalism, 58 scandals, 447 in USA, 356 Catholic Stage Guild, 355, 358, 359 Catholic Truth Society, 309 Catholic University, 18 CBS Television, 410 Ceannt, Eamon, 72 censorship, 172, 304-6, 374 by Abbey, 141, 167-8, 242, 243 and Abbey subsidy, 168 O'Casey on, 277 of O' Casey's work Cock, 315 Father Ned, 396-7, 398-404 Gates banned in Boston, 238-9 Green Crow banned, 392, 395 / Knock at the Door banned, 259-60 T Wanna Woman', 221 Juno, 154 Plough, 167-8, 178 The Story of the ICA, 121-2 Tassie, 242-3 Windfalls banned, 240 opposition to, 220 Rose Tattoo controversy, 388-9, 392-3, 397, 404 wartime, 268 Censorship Appeals Board, 392 Censorship Board, 240, 271 census, 1901, 54-5, 60, 75-6 census, 1911,78-9, 418 Central Arts School, London, 373 Central Model School, Marlborough Street, 24-5, 26, 108 Central Telegraph Office, 101, 129 Cezanne, Paul, 169, 281 Chalfont-St-Giles, 217-20, 226 O'Caseys leave, 231 Chamber Street, Dublin, 16, 17 Chaplin, Charlie, 338 Chapman, Edward, 214 Charles Street Tubercular Clinic, 92 Charleville St, South Kensington, 190 Chekhov, Anton, 170, 179, 290, 348 influence of, 142, 143, 150, 170 Chekhov, Michael, 248-9, 251, 255, 259,

286

Chelsea School of Art, 306 Cherry Lane Theatre, New York, 379

Childers, Erskine, 138 Children of Mary, 283 Christian Brothers, Irish, 40, 84, 147 Seville Place school, 83 Christie, Julie, 427, 428 Christmas cards, 107, 129 Church of England, 222, 319 Church of Ireland, 78-9 disestablishment, 21 religious exam, 42 Churchill, Winston, 80, 262, 264, 268-9, 284, 323, 324, 425 cinema, 75, 197, 268, 399 film rights, 200 O'Casey interest, 213-15, 218 scripts sought, 301 use of actors, 302 Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, 336 civil rights movement, 374 civil war, 140, 146, 147, 161, 174, 210-11 in Inishfallen, 283 in Juno, 177 postwar raids, 147-8 Clancy Brothers, 424 Claremont Hotel, Howth, 196 Clarendon Property Co., 256-7 Clareville Street, London, 191, 197, 199 Clarke, Austin, 143, 177 on Collected Plays, 319, 320 on Drums, 288 on Feathers, 424 on I Knock, 259 O'Casey on, 353-4, 444 on Pictures, 271 poem on Hyde funeral, 411-12 on Sunset, 353-4 on Windfalls, 240 Clarke, Mrs Thomas, 174 Clarke, Thomas, 83, 89, 127 Clayton, George, 196 Clery, Ann, 275 Clery, Arthur, 179 Clery's, 86 Clitheroe, Jenny, 56 Coburg Place, East Wall, 39, 40 Cochran, Charles B., 205, 206, 212, 223, 227, 244 and Tassie, 207-9 Cohan, George M., 188 Cole, Connolly, 417

Index 559 Cole, George, 336 Colgan, Patrick, 137, 295 Collins, Michael, 174 Collins, T.R.S., 20 Colum, Padraic, 198, 288, 409 on Inishfallen, 311-12 Commercial School, Parnell Square, 72 Committee on Un-American Activities, 304 Commonwealth, 375 communism, 300, 303, 326, 331 in Inishfallen, 284, 313 and Larkin, 295 McCarthyism, 304, 334 McQuaid on, 359, 388, 393 O'Casey's commitment to, 154, 169, 258, 278, 291, 308-9, 323, 386, 446-7 in The Star, 263, 264, 292 Second World War, 268-9 Communist Party, 309, 376 Communist Party of Ireland, 163 Company of Four, 286 Competent Military Authority, 121-2 Comprehensive Summary, The, 232 Congreve, William, 171 Connaught, Duke of, 74-5 Connery, Sean, 427 Connolly, James, 34, 52, 72-3, 105, 108 and Delia Larkin, 96 Easter Rising, 93, 102, 174 ICA, 88, 90 lock-out, 1913, 86, 87 and O'Casey, 80, 92, 110 in Plough, 164 O'Casey on, 122, 123 andPearse, 178 writes Under Which Flag?, 96-7 Connolly, Roddy, 163 Connolly, Sean, 96, 97, 102 Connolly, Terence L., SJ, 239 conscription, 106, 107 Constable, John, 62, 64 Conway, Barney, 94, 162 Coogan, Beatrice, see Toal, Beatrice Cookman, Anthony, 332-3, 367 Coole Park, 152, 165, 168, 169, 217, 231, 279, 290 autograph tree, 398-9 in Inishfallen, 283 O'Casey visits, 4, 154-6, 163, 167 demolished, 277

copyright, 269 Cornwall, 282, 394-5 Cotsworth, Staats, 406 Coulter, William, 54-5 Courtenay, Tom, 427 Courts (Emergency Powers) Acts, 257 Coward, Noel, 171, 250, 337, 378, 443 Bitter Sweet, 206-7, 208, 215 O'Casey on, 187, 244 Cowasjee, Saros, 301, 423, 429 Cowper, William, 69 Coxhead, Elizabeth, 155 Coyne, Fr E.J., SJ, 401 Crabbe, George, 69 Cradle of Genius: Salute to the Abbey Theatre!, 408-10 Craig, May, 112, 172 Crawford, Cheryl, 406 Crimean War, 17 Criterion Theatre, London, 199, 284 Critics' Circle Annual Dinner, 190 Croft-Cooke, Rupert, 193-4 Croidhe na h-Eigse, 69 Crookes, Gearoid, 31 Crowe, Eileen, 242, 368 in Juno, 151, 154 in Plough, 171-2 Crowther, Bosley, 236 Crumlin jail, Belfast, 297 Cullen, Cardinal, 14, 58 Cumann na mBan, 89 Plough riots, 172-6 Cumann na nGaedheal, 83, 140, 177 Cumberland Hotel, London, 264 Cummins, Dr Joseph, 164, 184, 190, 196, 200 O'Casey correspondence, 205, 215, 220, 260, 274 Cummins, Peggy, 337 Cunard, Lady, 153 Curry, W.C., 251 Curry, William B., 277-8 Curtis, Mr, 321 Curtiss, Thomas Quinn, 278, 325, 366, 369, 372 Cusack, Cyril, 302, 337, 366, 413, 417, 423 Abbey documentary, 408, 409 and Bonfire, 355-63, 367, 419 Cusack, Maureen, 355, 357 Cusack, Ralph, 276 Czechoslovakia, 308

560 SednO'Casey Daiken, Leslie, 277, 444 Bail Eireann, 83, 161, 162, 174, 196 first Bail, 123, 124 Labour in, 123 Treaty debates, 138 Daily Express, 42, 49, 56-7, 75 Daily Mail, 285, 299, 362 Daily News, 185, 190, 208 Daily Telegraph, 208, 226

Daily Worker, 237, 268, 292, 335-6, 340 and Hungarian revolt, 376-7 O'Casey on catholic church, 308-10 O'Casey's eightieth birthday, 417 Ballas, Reverend Alexander, 13 Dallas, Texas, 320 Balton, Emmet, 399 Balton, Frank, 44, 46, 47, 53 B'Alton, Louis, 44, 271 Baly, Father Edward, 434, 438, 439 Baly, P.T., 127-8 Ban Lowrey's Music Hall, 46 B'Arcy, Fergus, 86 Bargan, John, 429 Barlington, W.A., 208, 226, 443 Bartington Hall, 255, 259, 272, 310-11, 355, 376 O'Casey as parent, 277-8 O'Casey children in, 342, 343, 353, 373, 380 Second World War, 262, 266, 267 Theatre School negotiations, 247-51, 255 Bartmoor prison, 296-7 Baubeny, Peter, 432 Bavis, Thomas, 259 Bavitt, Michael, 73, 342 Baw, Sandy, 197 de Mille, Agnes, 413 de Valera, Eamon, 67, 104, 107, 174, 205, 277, 370, 445 Abbey re-opening, 432, 440 appeal to Irish-Americans, 198 Constitution, 240 and Rose Tattoo, 393

Taoiseach, 234 and Treaty, 138, 262 tribute to O'Casey, 435-6 Beakin, Seamus, 71-2, 77, 92 Beane, Seamus, 447 Befence of the Realm Regulations Act, 104

Belany, Maureen, 112, 151, 171, 409 Belgany, County Wicklow, 17 Benson, Alan, 331 Bent, Alan, 285, 366 Bermody, Frank, 271, 302, 432 Berry, 434 Juno, 438-9 Deny Journal, 439

Deverell, Anthony, 50 Bevine, George, 368, 414, 415, 419, 421 Devlin, J.G., 414 Bevon. see Torquay, Bevon; Totnes, Bevon Bevon Hotel, New York, 235 Bevonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne, 299 Bewey, John, 277 Bickens, Charles, 11, 56, 115, 256, 270, 291

Dick's Standard Plays, 45

Bickson, Lovat, 307, 418 disease, 18 Bisraeli, Benjamin, 21 Bobbie, Geoffrey, 372, 430, 433 Bolan, Michael J., 144, 145, 149, 151, 153, 166, 169 and Plough, 167, 171-2 Bominican Order, 242 Bominick Street, Bublin, 36, 63 Bonaghy, Lyle, 179 Bonaldson, Frank, 17 Bonnelly, Bonal, 421 Bonoghue, Benis, 347 Boolan, Bermot, 401 Boolan, Lelia, 441 Boran, Br Hugh, 378, 380, 411, 433, 435 Boran, Mary, 411 Bors, Biana, 337 Borset Street, Bublin, 19-20, 24 Bostoievsky, F.M., 169 Bouglas, Melvyn, 234, 413 Bowling, Eddie, 265, 301, 304 Bowling, Joe, 212, 441 Bowzard, Inspector, 59 B'Oyly Carte Opera Company, 188, 268 Drama Survey, 423

Bramatists' Guild, 304, 305 Brayton Gardens, Kensington, 437 Brinkwater,John, 171 Brury Lane Theatre, London, 188, 195, 314

Index 561 Dryden,John, 412 Dublin, see also lock-out, 1913 Belfast refugees, 139 Boer War riots, 52-3 Bonfire production, 355-63, 394 curfew, 130 housing, 17-18, 112, 199 and O'Casey, 190, 219-20 honeymoon, 196-7 lack of memorials, 7-8 theatres, 45-6, 93, 196-7 Dublin Book Shop, 51 Dublin Civic Week, 196 Dublin Corporation, 8, 20, 39, 83 Dublin Council of Irish Unions, 402-3 Dublin Drama League, 145, 153, 160, 191, 193 seeks Tassie, 211-12 Dublin Evening Mail, 28, 173, 242 Dublin Gate Theatre, see Gate Theatre Dublin Globe Theatre Company, 395, 399-400, 402 Dublin Magazine, 203, 259 Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), 86 Dublin Relief Committee, 94 Dublin Saturday Post, 105 Dublin Theatre Festival, 389, 394, 395, 406, 414, 445. see also Rose Tattoo controversy Committee meeting, 401-2 controlled by Tostal council, 396 Father Ned withdrawn, 396-8 Dublin United Tramway Company (DUTC),86 Duffy, Bernard, 110, 125 Duguid, Peter, 420 Dulac, Edmund, 153 Dulanty, John, 267, 300, 327 Duncan, Ronald, 368 Dunleavys, 65 Dunlop, Frank, 419, 420 Dunne, Eithne, 337-8 Eagleton, Terry, 446 Earle, Mrs, 199, 216 Eason's, 55-6 East Wall, Dublin, 33, 38-41 Easter Rising, 1916, 49, 72, 84, 93, 111, 152, 246 casualties, 102, 131 Connolly play, 97

jubilee, 1966, 432, 440 lack of commemoration, 174, 175-6 and O'Casey, 102-4, 184, 288 O'Caseyon, 110, 122-3, 163 in Plough, 158, 164, 173 in Young Cassidy, 428 Eden, Anthony, 378, 383 Edinburgh, 338-9, 414-15, 418 education, 22-3, 24-6 and Irish language, 66 O'Casey on, 73-4 Education Act, 1900, 25 Education Commission, 36 Edward VII, King, 74 Edwards, Brigid, 272, 355 Edwards, Hilton, 212, 361, 399 Edwards, Mr, 78 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 386 Eisenstein, Sergei, 214, 215 Eliot, T.S., 218, 226, 288, 318, 319, 333-4, 347 Elliman, Louis, 400 Elliott, Helen, 196 Ellmann, Richard, 3, 202 Elmhirst, Dorothy, 259, 266, 279, 286, 310,311,337,339-40 and O'Caseys, 247-51 Elmhirst, Leonard, 247, 248, 250, 259,

310,311,326,327,449

Elstree Studios, 214 Embassy Theatre, London, 363 Red Roses, 284-6 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 239 emigration, 349-50 Emmet, Robert, 16, 46 Emmet Commemoration Concert, 77 Empire Theatre, 75, 115 SLOT concert, 110-11 Employers' Federation, 87 Encore, 370, 375 England O'Casey in, 332-3 O'Casey's attitude to, 322-3, 331 in Rose and Crown, 323-4 O'Casey's plays, 332-3 O'Casey's plays in, 415, 419-21, 441-2. 443 post-war drama, 374-5 Second World War, 261 English, Richard, 173 English National Opera, 449

562 SednO'Casey English Stage Company (ESC), 267, 368, 414 English Verse Speaking Association, 221 Ephraim, Lee, 188-9, 195, 196 affair with Eileen, 216 death of, 342 Epstein, Alvin, 379 Epstein, Dr Madeline, 360, 361, 399 Epstein, Jacob, 190,363 Equity, 358, 401 Ervine, Stjohn, 141, 143, 209, 211, 331 on Gates, 224-6 evangelicalism, 13-15, 24-5, 50, 58, 445 conservatism, 21-2 Evans, Maurice, 337 Evening Herald, 142, 160, 178, 276, 360, 362 Evening Press, 360, 361 Evening Standard, 286 Everyman, 449

Everyman Theatre, London, 224 Exeter University, 416 Eyman, Scott, 428 Fagan, James B., 156, 170-71, 178, 183-4, 186, 187 Juno production, 185 and O'Casey, 191 Fair tlough, Johanna, 53, 54 Fallon, Gabriel, 146, 151, 166, 184, 210, 296, 424 and 'Abbey incident', 302-3 on Bonfire, 360, 362, 365 and Dublin Theatre Festival, 398, 399, 401 on The Flying Wasp, 245 on Inishf alien, 312

meets Eileen, 361 and O'Casey, 147, 148, 197 book, 440-41 on O'Casey, 157, 162, 169, 425 O'Casey correspondence, 199, 220, 256, 268 Tassie, 200

O'Casey on, 366 and Plough, 170, 171, 175 and Red Roses, 274, 275, 276, 288-9 on Rose and Crown, 336

and Tassie, 190, 200, 205, 207, 212-13 on Tassie, 193 and Windfalls, 240

on Yeats, 152

Fallon, Padraic, 428, 430 Fallon, Rose, 197 Fascism, 178, 263, 280, 446 Faulkner, William, 6 Fay, Frank, 47, 153 Fay, Gerard, 362 Fay, William P., 366 Fay, Willie, 26, 44 Feathers from the Green Crow (Hogan),

423-4

Feature Magazine, 288-9

Federal Bureau of Information (FBI), 313, 387 Federal Theatre Project, 233 Fenianism, 60, 67-8, 71, 83, 97 Ferguson, Archbishop Joseph, 57 Ferrar,Jose, 413 FiannaFail, 174 censorship, 389 Fianna Fail Inc., New York, 234 Fielding, Henry, 419 films, see cinema Findlater, Richard, 318-19, 320, 339 Findlater Place, Dublin, 91-2 FineganJ.J., 362 First National Players, 213 First World War, 93, 97, 101, 106, 129, 131, 268 armistice, 117 in Gates, 213

in Tassie, 190, 192-3, 201-2, 207-8 veterans' associations, 218 Fishery Bill, 152 Fitzgerald, Barry, 112, 165, 166, 205, 286, 394 in Juno, 151,170,214,266 O'Casey correspondence, 219-20 O'Casey interview, 408-10 m Plough, 171, 175, 176 film, 246 and Tassie, 207, 209, 242 will of, 410 Fitzgerald, Edward, 345 Fitzgerald, Jim, 340, 395 and Father Ned, 399, 400, 401, 402 FitzGerald, Muiris X., 27 Fitzgibbon Street, Dublin, 77 Flanagan, Pauline, 414 Fletcher, Bramwell, 234, 236 Fletcher, Rev. Henry Arthur, 55-7 Fletcher, Rev. James Saul, 55, 57

Index 563 Fletcher, Rev. Richard Edward, 58, 59 Fogg Museum, 237-8 Fokine, M., 314 Folksbuhnen theatre, Berlin, 197 Foran, Thomas, 128 Forbes-Robertson, Jean, 183 Ford, John, 165,215 Plough film, 245-6 Young Cassidy, 426-8 Forester's Hall, Parnell Square, 110 Forster, E.M., 347 Fortune Theatre, London Juno production, 178, 184, 185, 188 Foster, Preston, 246 Foster, Roy, 52 Four Courts, Dublin, 139-40 Fowler Hall, Dublin, 139, 140 Fox, R.M., 124, 139-40 France, 261 France, Anatole, 160, 161, 162, 185 Franco, General Francisco, 272 Frank, Elizabeth, 362 Free State Army, 147-8 Freeman's Journal, 21 French, Mrs Pamela, 218 French, Percy, 106 French Society of Authors, 418 French's publishers, 200, 221 Friel, Brian, 2, 431, 438, 439, 446 Frongoch camp, 103, 110 Frost, Robert, 370 Fry, Christopher, 318, 333-4 Fusiliers' Arch, St Stephen's Green, 74-5 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), 40, 66, 67, 71, 192 Gaelic League, 79, 88-9, 91, 93, 428. see also St Laurence O'Toole (SLOT) club Drumcondra branch, 71, 72, 83 entertainment, 106 entertainments, 58, 68-9 and IRB, 67 O'Casey in, 23, 46, 52, 65-9, 71, 82, 144, 324 O'Casey on, 74, 109 opposes Abbey, 112 Gageby, Douglas, 361 Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, 46, 166, 196, 400 Bonfire, 359-63 Juno, 441

Plough, 441 Red Roses, 286, 287, 288-9 Tassie, 213, 335 Gambon, Michael, 442 Garda Siochana, 179, 283, 360 and Rose Tattoo, 388-9 Gardiner Place, Dublin, 132, 137 Gardiner Street, Dublin, 58 Garrett, Arthur, 59-60 Garrick Club, 187 Garvin, Tom, 123 Gassner, John, 333-4, 354 Gate Theatre, Dublin, 160, 220, 241, 275 Juno, 441 seeks Tassie, 212-13 Gate Theatre Studio, London, 212 Gauguin, Paul, 352 general paralysis of the insane (gpi), 76 George VI, coronation of, 250, 251 German Academy of Art, Berlin, 416 Germany, 197, 268 Plough in, 216 Gibbon, Edward, 15 Gilmore, George, 335 Ginna, Robert Emmett, 341-2, 369-70, 371, 407 Young Cassidy, 425-30 Giorgione, 352 Gish, Lillian, 234, 237, 238, 251 G.K's Weekly, 208 Gladstone, W.E., 21,28 Glasgow, 314, 336, 338, 339, 340 Glenroe, 356 Godfrey, Peter, 212 Gogan, Jennie, 394 Gogarty, Oliver Stjohn, 112, 152, 196, 204 As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, 260 Plough opening night, 172-3 Tumbling in the Hay, 259 Golden, Eddie, 298, 365 Goldwyn, Sam, 276 Gonne, Maud (MacBride), 52, 97, 141-2, 179, 202 Goodman Theatre, 336 Gorki, Maxim, 43 Gorman, Eric, 112, 171,334 Gow, Ronald, 241 Gowing, Laurence, 264 Goya, F.J. de, 128

564 Sean O'Casey Graff, Robert D., 369-70 Young Cassidy, 425-30 Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, 17 Grangegorman Mental Hospital, 76 Grattan, Henry, 89 Grayburnjohn, 287 Greacen, Robert, 319 Great Famine, 13,31, 108 Great Northern Railway (GNR), 39, 49, 55, 77, 152 employs O' Casey, 63-5 sacks O'Casey, 81-2 Great Southern and Western Railway (GSWR),81 Greaves, Desmond, 90 Greene, David, 238, 278 Greene, Graham, 259 Greenwood, Joan, 336, 337 Greenwood, Walter, 241 Gregory, gardener, 306 Gregory, Lady, 4, 108, 166, 167, 174, 178, 312, 398-9, 427 and Abbey documentary, 409 and Abbey subsidy, 141, 165 Allgood correspondence, 197-8 choice of music, 194 Hawthornden Prize ceremony, 185-6 house demolished, 277 and IRA threat, 141-2 Journals published, 290, 307 and O'Casey, 42, 143-4, 145, 151-2, 165, 167, 168-9, 190, 195, 362, 370 Coole invitations, 154-6, 167 correspondence, 217, 219 on earnings, 171 in Oak Leaves, 279 on Tuohy sketch, 189 and O'Casey plays, 127 Crimson in the Tricolour, 132, 133 Gunman, 140 London Juno, 184, 185 Plough, 163, 167, 168-9, 175, 176 Tassie, 200-201, 203, 205, 209 plays of, 94, 97, 112, 152, 171 production rights, 170 death of, 219 Gregory, Robert, 167 Grene, Nicholas, 169-70 Gresham Hotel, Dublin, 260, 355 Griffin, C.H., 58

Griffin, Rev. Edward Morgan, 39, 41-2, 57-60, 74, 91, 109 Griffin, R. Saunderson, 92 Griffith, Arthur, 3, 52, 73, 78, 89, 103, 311 in Crimson in the Tricolour, 133 and Easter Rising, 102 and Treaty, 138, 139 Griffith, D.W., 237 Griffith, Hubert, 207 Griffith's Valuation, 20 Groom, Hugo, 218 Gropius, Walter, 247 Group Theatre, Belfast, 236, 320, 413 Guilfoyle, Michael, 54 Guinness, Arthur, 45 Guthrie, Tyrone, 334, 357-9, 360, 363, 431 Gwynn, Stephen, 83 Haddon, Dr, 378 Haldane, Professor J.B.S., 309 Hale, Lionel, 285, 299 Hall, Peter, 415 Hall, Radclyffe, 264 Hampton and Leedom's, 49-50, 55 Hand, Michael, 436 Hardy, Thomas, 35, 149, 154, 160, 381 Hare, David, 222-3, 448 Harmsworth agency, 62 Harmsworth Magazine, 54, 60 Harpur, Bill, 410 Harrington, John, 234 Harris, Richard, 427 Harrod's, 217 Harvard University, 239, 278 O'Casey talk, 237-8 Haskins, Dr H.W., 435 Hawkins, Mr (landlord), 251 Hawkins, R.S., 343 Hawthorn Terrace, East Wall, 35-6, 38-41 Hawthornden Prize, 156, 178 Juno wins, 185-6 Haydon, Julie, 343, 356, 372, 405-6 Hayes, Canon, 390 Hayes, Tom, 408-10 Hazeltine, Nigel ('Michael Walsh'), 274 Healy, Seamus, 275-6 Healy, Tim, 86 Hearst Press, 290

Index 565 Heatherley art school, 306 Heffernan, Mrs Bridget, 39 Heller, Joseph, 328 Hemingway, Ernest, 269 Henderson, Frank, 84, 89 Hennigan, Aidan, 432 Herald-Tribune, 325, 366 Hibernian Bible Society, 58 Higgins, F.R., 172, 177, 243, 263 Hilary, Father, OP, 357 Hinton, Mary, 298, 299 His Majesty's Theatre, London, 207, 216 Hitchcock, Alfred, 200, 214-15 Hitchcock, Alma, 214-15 Hitler, Adolf, 260, 261, 269, 280, 373, 446 Hobsbawn, Eric, 377 Hobson, Bulmer, 77, 89, 362 Hobson, Harold, 299, 420 Hodges, C. Walter, 416 Hoey, John, 54 Hogan, John, 40-41,57 Hogan, Robert, 95, 198-9, 375, 404, 405, 413 The Experiments of Sean 0' Casey, 422-3 Feathers from the Green Crow, 423-4 Hoggart, Richard, 424 Holden, Amanda, 449 Holloway, Joseph, 152, 166, 170 and O'Brien, 201 on O'Casey, 92, 144, 145, 147-8, 149, 155, 158, 159, 164 description of, 144, 186 opposes O'Casey, 177 and Plough, 172-3, 175, 179 Holy Cross Convent, Gold Hill East, 218-19 Home Rule Confederation, 21 Home Rule movement, 21-4, 67, 74, 78, 88, 103-4, 106, 185 Bill, 1886, 28 homosexuality, 244 honorary degrees, refusal of, 416-17 Hoop Lane Crematorium, London, 437-8 Hoover, Helen, 250 Hoover, J. Edgar, 232, 387 Hopkins, G.M., 18, 43, 352 Hopps, Marie, 275 Horestone Dairy, Dorset St, 155 Hornchurch theatre, Essex, 418-19

Hotel Russell, St Stephen's Green, 196 Houghton, Stanley, 197 How, Bishop Walsham, 57 Howth gun-running, 90 Hoyt's pharmacy, 71-2 Hudd, Walter, 339 Hudson Theatre, New York, 198 Hughes, Herbert, 194, 223 Hughes, Seumas, 105 Hungarian revolution, 375-6, 381, 383, 393, 446 hunger strikes, 85 Ashe, 104-5 Mary MacSwiney, 141 Hunt, Hugh, 241,441 Hunt, Rev. Phineas, 72 Hutchinson, Harry, 170, 337-8 Hyde, Douglas, 3, 65-6, 68, 83, 366 and 1916, 102 de-Anglicisation, 73 funeral, 411-12 Hyde, Douglas Arnold, 308-10 Hyde Park, London, 187, 213 Hyland, Edward, 54 Hyland and Milne, 36 Hynes, Garry, 441 Ibbs, Ronald, Dramatic Company, 392, 395 Ibsen, Henrik, 112, 125, 200, 325, 330, 405, 416 illegitimacy, 36 Imperial Hotel, O'Connell St, 86-7 India, 293, 311,410 Indonesia, 311 Inglis, Tom, 447 Innisfallen Parade, Dublin, 20, 24, 27, 33, 34 International Literature, 257 International Women's Franchise Club, 94 lonesco, Eugene, 325, 434 Ireland, 211,234 catholic church in, 446-7 economic revival, 390 failures of, 349-50 modernism sought, 447 neutrality, 262-3, 271-2, 277, 280, 297 and O' Casey, 445-6 in Cock, 322 in Inishfallen, 283

566 Sean O'Casey Ireland, and O' Casey continued plays banned by, 404 Windfalls banned, 240 puritanism, 243 Iremonger, Valentin, 289, 302, 362, 424 Irish Academy of Letters, 220 Irish Association of Civil Liberties, 403 Irish Book Lover, The, 259 Irish Catholic Book Week, 310 Irish Church Missions (ICM), 13-16, 17, 21-2, 24, 30, 42, 44, 50 Casey resigns, 26-7 Irish Citizen Army (ICA), 92, 93, 97, 101 104, 131, 161, 176 constitution, 88 Easter Rising, 102 minutes, 135 O'Casey history of, 102-3, 108, 110, 117, 121-4 O'Casey in, 5, 88-90, 177 Irish Council Bill, 1907, 73 Irish Democrat, 285, 291, 295 Irish Freedom, 91, 92, 268 Irish Guards, 53 Irish Independent, 86, 176, 178, 189, 276, 361 Irish language, 14, 23, 52, 55, 67, 83, 131, 291 and Abbey Theatre, 141 campaign for protestant use, 71-2 in curriculum, 66 new identity through, 79 O'Casey insists on using, 78 O'Casey learns, 65 O'Casey opposes compulsion, 157-8 and university education, 73-4 Irish League of Decency, 392 Irish Literary Theatre, 184 Irish Monthly, 288, 309-10 Irish National Teachers' Organization (INTO), 109 Irish Opinion, 109, 110 Irish Parliamentary Party, 21, 67, 73, 89, 104, 111 Irish Peasant, The, 68, 72-3 Irish Players, 112 Irish Press, 242, 275, 286, 287, 432 on Oak Leaves, 298 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 148, 192, 246, 340, 440 Civil War, 140

closes theatres, 141 NI campaign, 391 O'Casey supports prisoners, 263, 296-7, 324 Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), 23, 72, 89, 104, 438 Clarke, 83 O'Casey in, 66-8, 70, 71 Irish Socialist Republican Party, 80 Irish Society, 14 Irish Statesman, 147, 153, 212 compulsory Irish debate, 157-8 O'Casey contributions, 150, 152 'Gulls and Bobbin Testers', 156 on Plough, 177 and Tassie, 201, 204, 276 Irish Studies Program, Harvard, 239 Irish Texts Society, 290 Irish Theological Quarterly, 446 Irish Times, 1-2, 147, 197, 267, 342, 401, 419, 424, 428 ^E on lock-out, 87-8 on Bonfire, 360, 361-2 on Cock, 317 on Dublin Theatre Festival, 403 on Gunman, 142 on Juno, 151 on Oak Leaves, 289 O'Casey articles 'Bonfire under a Black Sun', 366 censorship, 392 Larkin, 295 O'Casey letters to, 220, 405 O'Casey's eightieth birthday, 417 on Plough, 173, 175 on Red Roses, 276 on Tassie, 242, 243 Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU), 80-81, 86, 87, 92, 94-6 and Larkin imprisonment, 129 split, 127-9, 137, 162 Irish Volunteers, 84, 88-9, 90, 97, 102, 135 Anglo-Irish War, 130 Easter Rising, 103, 104 O'Casey on, 122 Irish Women Workers' Union (IWWU), 94, 128 Irish Worker, 85, 132 GNR correspondence, 82

Index 567 Larkin on Johnson, 162-3 O'Casey contributions, 86, 89, 92, 95,

269

Yeats letter, 88 Irish Workers' Dramatic Company (IWDC),94,95,96-7 Irish Workers' League, 163 Irish Writing, 308, 331, 367 Irvine, George, 71-2 Irving, Henry, 43, 45 Ito, Michio, 153 Jackson, Barry, 195, 205 Jacob, Naomi, 259 James, Henry, 35 Japan, 153 Jefferies, Douglas, 225 Jefferson, Joseph, 45 Jeffery, Keith, 192 Jesuit Order, 58, 238, 239, 288, 309, 397 John, Augustus, 190, 194, 325 and Breon, 306, 307 and Gates, 225 gift of hat, 218 O'Casey portrait, 189, 191, 352 paintings owned by O'Casey, 195, 199 Tassie sets, 206, 208 Johnnie Fox's pub, Glencullen, 427 Johnson, Fred, 298 Johnson, Samuel, 69, 77 Johnson, Thomas, 124, 162-3, 171 Johnston, Denis, 156, 191, 274, 375, 446 on O'Casey, 193-4, 331-2 O'Casey interview, 291 The Old Lady Says (No!\ 160, 212, 261 on Purple Dust, 266 Johnston, Francis, 76 Johnston, Moffat, 234 Johnston, Thomas, 123 Jones, David, 442 Jones, Jack, 189-90 Jones, Margo, 320 Jonson, Ben, 334, 412, 424 Jooss, Kurt, 247-8 Jordan, John, 354, 367,412 Joyce, Dr Robert Dwyer, 33 Joyce, James, 3, 8, 16, 33, 58, 189, 211, 220, 430, 435 Dubliners, 121 Exiles, 350 Finnegans Wake, 266, 267

influence on O'Casey, 23-4, 221 and music, 307 O'Casey compared with, 208, 259, 280, 288, 312, 424 O'Casey on, 157, 266-7, 382 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 50 Ulysses, U6,m Ulysses adaptation, 396, 397, 398, 399, 401, 403, 404, 406, 414 death of, 257, 266-7 Joyce, John, 189 Kadar,Jan6s, 376, 377 Kaiser, Georg, 191, 193 Kavanagh, Bishop James, 40 Kavanagh, Jim, 8, 137, 186, 342 Kavanagh, Mrs, 137, 342 Kavanagh, Patrick, 259, 271 Kavanagh, Peter, 446 Kavanagh, Seamus, 366 Kaye, Davy, 419 Kean, Marie, 365 Keane, Eamon, 414 Kearney, Colbert, 150-51 Kearney, Richard, 387 Kearns, Kevin C., 150 Keating, Brid (Birdie), 115, 116, 120 Keating, James, 283 Keating, Maire, 113-18, 136, 325, 435 and O'Casey in Bonfire, 349 family opposition, 196 in Inishfallen, 283-4 love affair, 119-21 as 'Muse', 229 pain of loss, 195 and Plough, 159-60 poems to, 228-9 in Red Roses, 120-21, 273, 276, 283,

284

songs for, 169 in Young Cassidy, 427, 428-30 Keating, Mrs, 115, 116, 119 Keats, John, 115 Keeble, Lady, 221 Keegan, James, 135-6 Keith, Sydney, 196 Kelly, Bill, 19 Kelly, Francis J., 69 Kelly, Jack, 39 Kelly, Mary, see Casey, Mary

568 Sean O'Casey Kelly, Oisin, 80 Kelly, Seamus, 317, 401, 419 Kelly, William, 116 Kendall, May, 46 Kenilworth Hotel, London, 183 Kenna, Katie, 341 Kenneally, Michael, 448 Kennedy, John E, 262 Kernoff, Harry, 224, 242 Kerr, Ronald, 298 Kerr, Walter, 368, 374 Khrushchev, N.S., 373 Kiberd, Declan, 447 Kiely, Benedict, 253 Kilkenny Archaeological Society, 394 Kilkenny Magazine, 423 Killanin, Lord, 401, 403, 427 Kilmainham gaol, 141 King-Moylan, Thomas, 111 King's Liverpool Regiment, 34 King's Theatre, Edinburgh, 338 Kingsway Theatre, London, 368 Kinsella, Polly, 117 Knights of Columbanus, 392 Knutsford Prison, 102 Kokoshka, Oskar, 306 Korean war, 330 Kosok, Heinz, 314, 349, 448 Kramm, Joseph, 337 Krause, David, 7, 204, 350 defence of O'Casey, 404, 405, 424 on Father Ned, 587 last visit, 434 and Maire Keating, 429 meets O'Casey, 327-8 publication of letters, 85, 101, 371, 430-31, 435 Sean O'Casey: The Man and his Work, 57, 417, 422, 425 La Fayette, Indiana, 413 La Gallienne, Eva, 286 labour movement, 150, 154, 162, 177 and arts, 165 in Red Roses, 272 support for O'Casey, 211 Labour Party, Irish, 104, 105, 109, 136, 140, 162-3, 171, 187, 204 O'Casey on, 122, 123-4 and Sinn Fein in plays, 131-4 Labour Party, UK, 297, 311, 324

labourers, 18 Laffan, Michael, 103-4 Laffan, Pat, 438 Lalor, James Fintan, 73, 108 Lamb, Peadar, 365 Land Bill, 1886, 28 Lane, Fred, 217 Lane, Sir Hugh, 86, 154, 155, 184, 185, 433 gallery dispute, 186, 205, 307, 409 Lang, Fritz, 214 Langan, Pat, 46 Langer, Susanne, 386 Langner, Lawrence, 304 Langrishe Place, Dublin, 135, 438 Lanza, Mario, 366 Larchetjohn, 174, 194, 197 Larkin, Delia, 97, 105, 125, 131-2, 135, 295 brother's imprisonment, 128-9 IWDC, 94, 96, 110 Liberty Hall split, 96, 105, 127-8 WUI drama group, 137-8 death of, 321 Larkin, Elizabeth, 295 Larkin, Jim, 3, 5, 56, 89-90, 91, 95, 104, 168, 196, 197,204,211,428 as character, 163-4 in Drums, 296 ITGWU split, 127, 162 lock-out, 1913, 85-8 Moscow visit, 210 and 6 Maolain, 131-2 O'Casey's commitment to, 56, 80-81, 82, 258, 377, 422, 446 in The Slough, 96 on Treaty, 139 in USA, 92, 97, 110, 128-9, 177 and WUI, 137,205 death of, 295-6 Larkin, Jim Jr, 341 Larkin Defence Council, 129 Laski, Harold J., 303 Lattimer, William, 19, 20 Lauder, Harry, 324 Laughton, Charles, 207-9 Lavery, Hazel Lady, 190 Lawrence, William J., 152-3 Lawson, Wilfred, 414 Layde, Pat, 357, 365 Layton and Johnstone, 196

Index 569 le Brocquy, Louis, 276 Leahy, William, 54 Lean, David, 427 Leavis, F.R., 424 Lecky, W.E.H., 284 Legion of Mary, 274 Lehmann, Beatrix, 207 Lemass, Sean, 389, 390, 393, 435-6 Lenin, V.I., 264 Lennon, Patrick, 88 Leno, Dan, 46, 276, 286 Leonard, Hugh, 87, 362 Leonard, Joseph J., 239 Leslie, Shane, 83 Leventhal, AJ., 6, 298, 362 Levitas, Ben, 95 Lewes prison, 72, 104 Lewis, Bobby, 320, 332, 368 Lewis, Wyndham, 221 Liberties, Dublin, 16 Liberty Book Club, New York, 335 Liberty Hall, 91, 105,341 Easter Rising, 102 Isaac Casey in, 54, 108 Larkin imprisonment, 129 lock-out, 1913, 82, 88, 94 6 Maolain in, 131 plays performed in, 93-7 split, 90, 97, 105, 110, 127-9, 162 Liberty Hall Players, 94-5, 96, 102, 125, 137 Library Theatre, Manchester, 316 Life magazine, 341-2, 349, 370, 425 Limerick, County, 12, 13, 14 Lipton's, Earl Street, 43 Littlewood, Joan, 298, 314, 315-16, 449 Liverpool, 280, 285 Lloyd, Marie, 286 lock-out, 1913, 5, 18, 71, 91, 94, 95, 162, 289, 327 effects on O'Casey, 82, 85-9 in Harvest, 273 in The Star, 258 women workers, 94 in Young Cassidy, 428 Locke, Seamus, 337-8, 368 Logue, Cardinal, 73 London, 281, 314, 363, 379. see also Woronzow Road Breon's flat, 320-21 Charleville St flat, 190

costs of living, 247 Eileen in, 326-7 Eileen moves to, 436-7 O'Casey articles, 240-41 O'Casey in, 179, 183-209, 312, 338, 415 quarrels, 243-5 social success, 193-5 O'Casey productions Cock, 414-15 Gates, 224-7, 231 Gunman, 442 Juno, 169, 170-71, 178, 190, 432, 441-2 Plough, 187-90, 191, 432 Purple Dust fails, 336, 338, 339 7M#05^, 285-6, 335, 356 The Star, 263-4 Tassie, 443 O'Caseys leave, 216-17, 251 Trafalgar Square (Chelsea) digs, 184 London, Jack, 115 London Evening News, 226 London Gate Theatre, 193 London School of Economics, 287 London University, 343 Londonderry, Lady, 184, 206, 231-2, 279 Londonderry House, 323, 324 Longfellow, H.W., 437 Lonsdale, Frederick, 189 Lord Chamberlain's office, 95, 205, 263, 291-2, 299, 315, 392 Lortel, Lucille, 407 Lough Derg, 355 Lourdes, 305, 322, 414 Lowery, Robert, 448 Lowrey, Dan, 46 Lowry, Dan, 276 Lyceum Theatre, New York, 442 Lynch, Catherine, 47 Lynd, Robert, 186, 292 Lynd, Sheila, 292 Lyric Theatre, Belfast, 418, 441 Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 286 ' Oak Leaves, 297-9 Mac Anna, Tomas, 366, 441 Mac Aonghusa, Proinsias, 66 Mac Carthy, Desmond, 223, 226, 228-31, 267, 271-2,278 Mac Conglinne, Anier, 311

570 SednO'Casey Mac Mac Mac Mac

Diarmada, Sean, 89, 91, 127 Donald, Ramsay, 225, 323 Grianna, Seosamh, 291 Liammoir, Micheal, 212, 291, 389, 390, 401, 417 McAnally, Ray, 438 Macardle, Dorothy, 134-5, 140, 173, 174 McBride, Iseult, 141 McBride, Maud Gonne. see Gonne, Maud McCann, James, 72-3 McCann, Sean, 17, 113-14 McCarthy, Joe, 304 McCarthy, Kevin, 368 McCarthy, Lillah, 221 McCarthyism, 334 McClelland, Allan, 397, 406 McCormick, FJ., 115, 145, 166, 297 Abbey documentary, 409 in Gunman, 142 in Juno, 151 O'Casey on, 338 in Plough, 170, 171, 175, 271 film, 246 and Tassie, 242 death of, 302 McCourt, Frank, 313 McCrum, Elizabeth (nee Archer), 20 McCrum, William, 20 MacDermott, Norman, 224, 225-6, 231 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 217, 226, 256, 338-9 MacDiarmid, Peggy, 217, 338 MacDonagh, Donagh, 303, 361 McDonald, Ramsay, 185 McDonald, Dr Walter, 309, 390 McDonnell, Paddy, 84, 103, 111, 113 McElroy, Billy, 191, 193-4, 196, 216, 217, 256, 338 McElroy, Evelyn, 217 McEntee, Sean, 386 MacGowran, Jack, 46, 413, 419, 441,

442

MacGreevy, Thomas, 190-91, 204 McGuinness, Matthew, 283 McHugh, Roger, 288, 302, 341 and Theatre Festival, 398 Macken, Walter, 355, 357, 440 McKenna, Siobhan, 302, 336, 355, 366 Abbey documentary, 409 and Bonfire, 356 fund-raising, 339, 340

in Juno, 441 on O'Casey, 338 in Purple Dust, 337-S McKinell, Norman, 94 MacManus, Francis, 291 McManus, M.J., 288 McMaster, Anew, 361 Macmillan, Daniel, 273, 279, 301, 328, 329, 436 Macmillan, Lady Dorothy, 251, 436, 437 Macmillan, Sir Harold, 243, 251, 257, 261, 319, 328, 333 and Cock, 307-8 and Eileen O'Casey, 437

and I knock, 260

libel risks, 340 O'Casey refuses OBE, 417 parliamentary secretary, 264 PM, 383, 386 and Red Roses, 284-5 and The Star, 262, 264 tribute to O'Casey, 436 Macmillan publishers, 50, 189, 355, 418, 428, 437 legal concerns, 63, 429 NY offices, 305, 307-8, 354, 430-31 O'Casey joins, 156 O'Casey texts Bonfire, 350, 356, 367, 420 Collected Plays, 310, 319, 329-30 Drums, 307 Five Irish Plays, 243 The Flying Wasp, 245 Gates, 223 Green Crow refused, 372 / Knock at the Door, 247 Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 296 Mirror in My House, 370 Oak Leaves, 280, 287 Rose and Crown, 335 The Star, 258 Sunset, 341, 353 Tassie, 200, 203 Windfalls, 228-31 Plough, 172 royalties, 292 MacNaboe, Father Des, 40 MacNamara, Brinsley, 36, 197, 289 censorship by, 242, 243 MacNeice, Louis, 15-16, 312, 313, 336

Index 571 McQuaid, Dr John Charles, archbishop of Dublin, 310, 338, 355, 410, 447 on communism, 359 and Father Ned, 387-8 and Larkin, 295, 296 refuses Theatre Festival Mass, 396-8, 399, 447 and Rose Tattoo, 388-9, 392-3 McShane, Harry, 309 MacSwiney, Mary, 141 Madden, Doreen, 365 Madden, Richard, 224, 231, 264-5, 304, 320, 329 film rights of Plough, 245 O'Casey's NY visit, 233-4, 238 death of, 332 Magee, Eileen, 153 Magee, Patrick, 414 Maher, Daniel C., 110 Malleson, Miles, 336, 337, 338, 339 Mallin, Michael, 102 Malone, Andrew E., 109, 110, 177, 204, 448 on O'Casey, 210 Malvern Festival, 265 Manchester, 314, 316 Manchester Daily Dispatch, 196 Manchester Guardian, 175, 224, 258, 307, 362 Mangan, James Clarence, 16, 23 ManleyJ., 117 Mann, Thomas, 280, 333 Manneken Pis, 410-11 Mannin, Ethel, 241 Manning, Mary, 6, 220 Mansfield, Mayor, 238-9 Marcus, David, 289-90, 331 Margulies, Martin, 75, 91, 103, 129, 294 Maria Duce, 338, 360, 361, 406 Markell, George Rusher, 231, 235 Markievicz, Countess, 102, 321 O'Casey on, 89-90 Marlborough Street schools, 24-5, 26 Marlowe, Christopher, 238, 334 Mars, Marjorie, 226 Marsh, Sir Edward, 186 Marshall, E.G., 368, 370 Martin, Alec, 185 Martin, Father, 397 Martin, Kingsley, 241, 330 Martyn, Edward, 83

Marx, Harpo, 320 Marx, Karl, 28, 264 Marxism, 164, 268, 308-10, 334, 446 Mason, Patrick, 441 Massey, Raymond, 207-9 Matisse, Henri, 352 Maunsel & Co., 108, 117, 121, 124, 172, 429 Maupassant, Guy de, 267 May, Freddie, 275 May, Sheila, 275 Mayne, Rutherford, 94 Maynooth College, 390 Mechanics' Institute, Abbey Street, 46-7 Meldon, Austin, 276 Mercier, Vivian, 21,375 Meredith, Burgess, 298 Mermaid Theatre, London, 415-16, 418, 419-21, 442 Merrion Hall, Dublin, 50 Merrion Square, Dublin, 144-5 Metropole Cinema, Dublin, 197 MGM, 426, 428, 430 Michelangelo, 77 Middleton, Georgie, 49, 59, 63-4 Miles, Bernard, 415-16, 419-21 Mili, Gjon, 341-2, 434 Military Service Bill, 1918, 107 Miller, Arthur, 305, 368-9, 374, 424 Miller, Glenn, 366 Milner,John, 15 Milton, John, 50, 51, 217, 218, 443 Mindszenty, Cardinal, 376 Miners' Federation, 189-90 Misbourne Cottages, see Chalfont-St-Giles Mitchell, Jack, 85, 273 Mitchell, Susan, 147, 153 Mitcheson, Naomi, 221 Moira Hotel, Trinity St, 145 Moliere, 338 Molloy, MJ., 387 Monaghan, Canon James Hunter, 20, 34 Monet, Claude, 169 Monroe, Marilyn, 369 Montefiore, Simon, 446 Montgomery, James, 172-3 Month, 318 Mooney, Ria, 298, 360, 365, 432 directs Purple Dust, 280 directs Red Roses, 284-6, 287 directs lassie, 299, 335

572 Sean O'Casey Mooney, Ria continued in Plough, 171, 173 produces Plough, 366 Moore, George, 65-6, 288, 311 Moore, Kieron, 285 Moore, Thomas, 115, 273 Morgan, Austen, 97 Morgan, Charles, 226, 277 Morgan, Sydney, 170, 207, 209 in Juno film, 214 in Plough, 187 Morgan, Terence, 336 Morning Post, 208 Morris, William, 291, 320 Moscow, 210 Youth Festival, 1957, 390 Moscow Art Theatre, 440 Mother-and-Child controversy, 331, 332 Motley, 220 Mount Jerome cemetery, 27, 29, 30, 77, 91,109, 117,293 Mount Stewart, Co. Down, 206, 231-2 Mountjoyjail, 85, 105, 136, 157, 296-7 Mountjoy Square, Dublin, 256, 341 eviction, 343 O'Casey living in, 131-2, 134-6, 137 Moyne, Lord, 334 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 258 Muintir na Tire, 390 Mullen, Michael, see O Maolain, Micheal Municipal Gallery, 8 Murphy, Babsie, 75, 103, 117-18, 293-4 death of daughter, 293-4 Murphy, William Martin, 86-7, 89, 90 Murray, T.C., 172 and Oak Leaves, 298 plays by, 94, 142, 156, 189, 197, 200 and Red Roses, 275, 289 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 407 music halls, 45-6 Mussolini, Benito, 178 Nabokov, Vladimir, 43 Nagy, Imre, 376 Napoleon Bonaparte, 323 Nash, Frank, 218 Nash, John, 306 Nathan, George Jean, 231, 235, 237, 238, 240-41, 278, 300, 304 and Ford film, 245, 246 health, 329, 333, 343, 370, 371-2

meets O'Casey, 233-4 O'Casey correspondence, 224, 239-40, 307, 392, 443-4 on Bonfire, 356, 363 on Cock, 302, 308, 313-14, 320 on Oak Leaves, 280 on one-act plays, 329 onPurpkDust, 265, 382 on Red Roses, 286 on The Star, 258 on Tassie, 335 O'Casey on, 243, 244, 245 Theatre Book of the Year, 1946-47, 301 death of, 405-6 National Archives, 392 National Gallery of Ireland, 62, 138, 352 National Insurance Act, 1911, 82 National Library of Ireland, 7, 114, 426, 429 national school system, 25 National Theatre, Broadway, 236, 239 Gates, 233-8 National Theatre, London, 170, 442 National University of Ireland (NUI), 73-4 Nazism, 269 NBC Television, 341, 369-70, 409, 425 Ne Temere decree, 13 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 370 neutrality, 262-3, 271-2, 277, 280, 297 Nevin, Donal, 88 New Deal, 232-3 New Irish Writing, 289-90 New Princess Theatre of Varieties, 46 New Socialist Party of Ireland, 163 New Statesman, 268, 419 on Drums, 280 on Inishf alien, 312 O'Casey reviews, 241 'play of ideas' debate, 330 on Rose Tattoo, 392 New Theatre, 333 New Theatre, London, 191, 286 New York, 188, 224, 247, 298, 304, 310, 352, 363, 443 censorship, 304-6 Eileen in, 406, 407-8, 409, 410 essay, 333 Macmillan office, 257, 258, 266 mss sent to, 264-5

Index 573 O'Casey productions Cock, 314, 315, 316, 320, 366-7, 406-7, 442 Gates, 228, 231, 233-8, 413 Juno (musical version), 407, 413-14 Plough, 199 Purple Dust, 274, 379, 380, 382, 399, 406 Red Roses, 286, 368-9, 371 New York City Centre Theatre, 337 New York Journal-American, 313-14 New York Post, 382 New York Public Library, 7, 42 New York Times, 157, 272, 313, 367, 372, 373, 406-7 'From Within the Gates' (O'Casey), 236-7 O'Casey obituary, 436 on Purple Dust, 382 New York Times Magazine, 431, 435 The Lark in the Clear Air Still Sings' (O'Casey), 411 New York University, 238, 278, 328 Newcastle upon Tyne. see People's Theatre, Newcastle Newman, Alec, 403 Newman, Angela, 365 Newman, Cardinal J.H., 367 News Chronick, 285, 362, 366 Newsweek, 382 Ni Dhomhnaill, Maire, 365, 438 Ni Fhlanagain, Sinead, 67, 71, 74 Nic Shiubhlaigh, Maire, 93 Nichols, Beverley, 187 Nichols, Dudley, 245 Nichols, J. and C., undertakers, 109, 117 Nietzsche, F.W., 7, 213 Nobel Prize, 168, 382, 416 Norman, Connolly, 76 North Circular Road, Dublin, 8, 186, 342, 393 cattle drives, 40 O'Casey living in, 137, 147, 162, 164 O'Casey vacates, 183, 190 North Wall Goods Stores, 51 Northern Ireland, 434 Norton, William and Mrs, 361 Novarro, Ramon, 197 Novello, Ivor, 208 Novy Mir, 390

6 6 6 6 6

Dalaigh, Judge Cearbhall, 401 hAodha, Micheal, 356, 436 hAonghusa, Micheal, 365 Lochlainn, Gearoid, 171 Maolain, Micheal, 105, 127, 128, 131-2,211,341 in Gunman, 142 sharing with O'Casey, 134-6, 137 6 Riada, Sean, 428, 430 QBE, refusal of, 417 O'Brien, Conor Cruise, 123, 362 O'Brien, Flann [6 Nuallain, Brian], 271, 335, 360 O'Brien, George, 167-8, 169, 201 O'Brien, John A., 349-50, 401 O'Brien, Kate, 361 O'Brien, William, 123, 127, 129, 163 in Crimson in the Tricolour, 133 Observer, The, 141, 145-6, 209, 420 on Gates, 224-6, 226, 227 Gogarty on O'Casey, 259-60 on Oak Leaves, 299 Orwell on Drums, 280 on Pictures, 271 on Rose and Crown, 336 Tassie correspondence published, 201, 203, 204-5 O'Callaghan, Sean, 391 O'Casey, Breon (son), 5, 221, 222, 235, 249, 264, 268, 281, 292, 299, 325, 405, 407 birth of, 203 in Devon, 261, 281, 343, 351, 373 education, 217-18, 232, 240, 249, 250,

251,277,278,311

father's death, 437 holidays, 206, 216, 394 London flat, 320-21, 326, 353 marriage, 412 National Service, 286-7, 299-300 Mail's death, 379-81, 381-2 painting career, 62, 306-7, 335, 352 book jacket, 323 set designs, 358 in Stives, 395, 412 relations with father, 277, 300-301, 303, 306-7, 371 portraits, 335, 358, 367, 369, 372 O'Casey, Eileen (wife), 6, 7, 160, 214, 308, 324, 332, 366, 431, 432 admirers, 216, 325, 342, 372, 437

574 SednO'Casey O' Casey, Eileen continued extravagance, 199, 206, 247, 327 family life, 221, 267-8, 277, 286-7, 300, 310-11, 335, 337, 342-3, 399 cars, 373 children, 196, 197, 200, 203, 231, 238, 239-40, 261 children's education, 218-19 Christmas, 303 fear of pregnancy, 219 finances, 321, 340, 426 holidays, 206, 216, 291, 325, 394 marital crisis, 216 move to Chalfont-St-Giles, 217-20 move to Overstrand Mansions, 217-20 move to Torquay, 351-3 move to Totnes, 255-7, 261 move to Woronzow Road, 199 NialFs death, 378-81, 381-3 post-war, 282-3 wartime, 265, 280-81 health aftermath of Niall's death, 394-5 breaks wrist, 351 fall, 296 nervous breakdown, 325-7 suicide attempt, 382-3 marital crisis, 216 memoirs, 282, 296, 327 politics, 269 professional career, 188-9, 215-16, 218, 219, 222 Bitter Sweet, 205-7, 215 relationship with Sean, 215-16, 235, 237, 238, 348, 371-2, 417 and biographies, 423 first meeting, 187-9 courtship, 195-6 marriage, 196-7, 430 as carer, 200, 265, 292, 372, 430 Dartington, 247-51 Sean's eightieth birthday, 417 writings related to, 228-31 and Young Cassidy, 428 widowed, 435,436-7 and Sean's work Bonfire, 360-63, 419, 420 Cock, 368, 406, 414-15, 418 Father Afcd, 395, 402 Gates, 225, 226-7

Juno musical, 413 Oak Leaves, 299 Red Roses, 285, 286 The Star, 264 Tassie, 203, 429 tape-recording, 430 travels Dublin, 1935, 243 Glasgow, 338-9 London, 232, 364 New York, 406-10 Paris, 369 O'Casey, Niall (son), 325, 351 birth, 239-40 death of, 380-81, 390, 412, 437 aftermath, 381-5, 386, 387, 392, 395, 399 in Devon, 261, 373 education, 249, 300 military service, 342-3, 353, 364, 369 personality, 335 political views, 375-8 O'Casey, Sean, see also Abbey Theatre LIFE biographies of, 7, 422-3, 440-41 childhood and youth, 11-29, 51, 62-3 birth of, 11-12,24 baptism, 20 and Bella, 33-4, 75-7, 108-9 Boer War, 52-3 education, 22-3, 26, 28, 30-31, 33, 40-42, 49 and father, 27-9 leaves Mick, 129-30 poverty, 17-20, 30, 34, 42-3, 160-61 size of family, 18-19 theatricals with Isaac, 42-7 thefts, 43, 51 correspondence, 219-20, 241, 371, 372, 373, 430-32 (see also Nathan, George Jean) Carney, 205, 211, 220, 263, 266, 267-70, 292 Cummins, 215, 220, 260, 274 Fallen, 184, 190, 210, 220, 240, 245, 256, 268, 275 female correspondents, 291, 324-5 Niall's death, 380, 382 publication, 7, 430-31, 435 Shaw, 116, 124, 200, 203, 220, 223-4, 251, 265, 430

Index 575 eightieth birthday, 417-18 family life, 286-7, 300, 335, 342-3, 355-6, 373, 399, 412-13 Christmas, 303 domestic role, 267-8, 277 Eileen's career, 206-7, 219, 222 marital crisis, 216 marriage, 219 Niall's death, 90, 381-5, 386, 387, 399 diary, 383-5 health, 262, 298, 328, 352, 356, 360, 369 breakdown, 1933, 223-4 depression, 296, 348, 395 eyesight, 62, 82, 164, 184, 265, 284, 423 childhood, 27-8 deterioration, 200, 283, 415, 430 and education, 30, 31-3, 34 infection, 392 penicillin, 292 prevents play-going, 112, 153, 282 under stress, 207 final decline, 433-5 prostate and kidney, 371, 373 silicosis, 301 smoking, 223, 433 Tassie rejection, 203 TB, 91-3, 101 homes, 7, 137, 147 (see also Torquay) Chalfont-St-Giles, 217-20, 226, 231 Dartington negotiations, 247-51 Dublin, 131-2, 134-6, 137, 147, 162, 164, 183, 190, 343 (see also Abercorn Road) landlord disputes, 256-7, 261-2, 343 London, 183-209, 199, 231, 240 Totnes, 7, 251, 255-7, 343 honours, 185-6, 416-17 income, 92, 101, 292 lectures by, 110,237-8,245 love affairs (see also O'Casey, Eileen) Maire Keating, 113-18, 119-21, 429-30 Beatrice Toal, 160-62 mother's death, 115, 116-18 parish activities, 58-60, 61 personality, 71, 77, 84, 101, 221, 240, 444-5

acting, 110-11, 194 and alcohol, 56 artistic, 33, 61-2, 79, 84, 101, 294 attitude to violence, 70-71, 139-40 book purchases, 49-50, 51, 62, 128, 152, 169, 171 change of name, 66-7, 70, 141 combative, 443, 444 diet and cooking, 145, 151, 169, 185, 332 intellectual homelessness, 210-11 music and song, 58, 71, 84, 106, 223, 272, 298 copyright, 355 RE talks, 364-5 protestant ethic, 386, 446 psychological development, 49-51 sexual desire, 219, 221-2, 230 travel Dublin visits, 243 London, 240-41, 243-5 USA, 232-9 politics, 104-5, 122-4, 131, 210, 277 Black-and-Tan raid, 135-6 communism, 280, 308-9, 332, 386, 446-7 and Christianity, 435 in Inishf alien, 313 and McQuaid, 388, 393-4 post-war, 284-5 row with Niall, 375-8 Second World War, 268-9 nationalism, 58, 59-60, 74 Easter Rising, 102-4 Gaelic League, 65-9 ICA, 88-90 IRB, 66-8 Pipers' Band, 83-5 and Plough riots, 176-9 and neutrality, 262-3, 271-2 republicanism, 78-9, 138 socialism, 80-81, 155, 163, 169, 291 trade unionism Larkin split, 137 Liberty Hall split, 127-9 Lock-out, 1913, 85-9 miners' strike, 189-90 portraits of Breon, 335, 358, 367, 369, 372 John, 189, 191, 199, 352

576 Sean O'Casey O' Casey, Sean, LIFE, portraits of continued Kernoff, 224 Tuohy sketch, 189 public image, 3-6, 235-6, 312, 424-5, 442-6 radio talks, 356, 363, 364-5 religion, 23, 42, 48-9, 79, 91, 92, 117-18,435 confirmation, 56-7 tape-recordings, 430 death of, 432-5 ashes scattered, 437-8 tributes, 435-7, 442 will of, 433, 436-7 WORK agents, 332 archive, 433 assessments of, 347-8, 422-4, 442-6 O'Casey's reaction to, 413 book jackets, 257, 296, 323, 353 employment, 5, 49-51, 55-6, 60, 62 GNR, 63-5, 77, 81-2 IWWU caretaker, 128 income, 124-5, 316, 327, 370, 399 after Tassie rejection, 215 American, 238, 354 film rights, 245 royalties, 231 from Abbey, 169, 206, 209, 271, 303 Bonfire, 363, 419 Gates, 227

Gunman, 144, 145 History oftheICA, 124-5 Juno, 170-71 Oak Leaves, 299 Plough, 239 Purple Dust, 399 Songs of the Wren, 108

1920s, 199, 209 1930s, 216-17, 247, 257 1940s, 271, 279, 292, 303 1950s, 343, 373 stage readings, 425 taxation, 205-6 television fee, 409 wartime, 266 Young Cassidy, 426

interviews, 235-6, 341-2 Barry Fitzgerald, 408-10

Johnston, 291 NBC, 369-70 Nichols, 187 AUTOBIOGRAPHIES, 2-3, 3-5, 142, 160, 170, 224, 235, 251, 255, 262, 294, 301, 305, 443 Abbey in, 48-9, 166 Bella's death in, 108-9 Bella's marriage in, 35, 37-8 brother's marriage in, 63 cattle-drive, 40 children's education, 218-19 construction of, 3-8 employment, 49-51, 55 family politics, 22-4 'Hill of Healing', 32-3 honeymoon not mentioned, 197 Isaac and theatre in, 53-4 Lady Gregory in, 290 mother's funeral in, 117 myth-making, 1-3, 3-8, 12, 184-5, 211,424-5,425 painting, 61-2 prose style, 269-70 railway travel, 64-5 royalties, 279 theatre in, 49-50 writing of, 265, 447-8 Yeats in, 241 Drums under the Windows, 97, 102, 270, 279, 292 Gaelic League in, 65-6 Larkin in, 296 Playboy riots in, 68 reviews, 280, 287-8 Tom's death, 90-91 I Knock at the Door, 57, 410

banned, 259 Bella in, 35 dramatisation, 370 O'Casey's birth in, 11-12 reviews, 259-60 sales, 266 school, 40-41 writing of, 246-7, 257

Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 287, 310,

341-2, 430 & in, 331 Maire Keating in, 349, 430 proofs, 306, 307 reviews, 311-13, 339

Index 577 The Raid', 136 writing of, 283, 292, 296 Mirror in My House, 370, 428 Pictures in the Hallway, 17, 269-70, 272, 273 banned, 271 Boer War, 52-3 dedication, 58 parish, 59 publication, 270-71 recording, 406 reviews, 270-71, 272 Rose and Crown, 323-4, 329-30 children's education in, 218-19 legal problems, 335 reviews, 331, 335-6 writing of, 306, 322 Sunset and Evening Star, 270, 332, 353-4, 359 legal problems, 340-41 reviews, 353-4 Shaw's death, 327 Young Cassidy, 298, 425-30 PIAYS, 1-2, 255, 301 O'Casey as playwright, 113, 125-6, 191, 212-13, 288 agents, 224, 231, 233-4 artistic judgment, 332-3 assessments of, 332-4, 422-4, 440-42, 443 bans Irish productions, 404, 418, 432-3 characterisation of women, 222, 275 choice of actors, 170, 414,207 comic types, 412 and critics, 241, 243-5, 405, 420-21 development as playwright, 185-6 dramatic imagination, 125-6 experimental, 226, 227, 313, 315, 318, 319, 441, 443 expressionism, 193, 210, 224-5 finances of production, 339-40 first plays, 93-7 history plays, 122 influence of, 261, 374-5 influences on, 210,112,124,131 lack of support for, 318-19 part shares sold, 221 'play of ideas' debate, 330 realism, 45, 150, 152-3, 193, 236-7

redefinition after Tassie, 210-11 refuses text changes, 172, 449 relationships in plays, 449 stage-Irishry, 266 symbolism, 236-7, 265 technique, 125 transformation in, 272-3 use of Dublin speech, 126-7, 150-51 use of fantasy, 322-3, 329 use of violence, 448 working methods, 5-7, 115, 128, 164, 221, 251, 282-3, 330 Bedtime Story, 222, 328-9 Behind the Green Curtains, 411-12, 413, 444 The Bishop's Bonfire, 64, 387, 390, 394, 408, 424, 447, 449 writing of, 348-51,352 casting, 356-7 first production, 355-63 Mermaid production, 419-20 O' Casey on reaction to, 365, 366, 372, 429 protests, 359-62 publication, 364, 367, 420 reviews, 362, 367 Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, 292, 313-18, 321, 341, 349, 367, 390, 412, 424, 445, 447-9 writing of, 301-2 Nathan on, 313-14, 356 productions London, 368, 414-15, 418 New York, 332, 342, 406-7, 442 Pike seeks, 366-7 premiere, 310, 313-18, 434 Yale, 370 publication, 307-8, 310, 313-14, 329 reviews, 317, 319, 333 themes anti-catholic, 304-5 sexual politics, 350, 358, 412 use of fantasy, 322-3, 329 The Cock Crows, 185 The Cooing of Doves, 146 The Crimson in the Tricolour, 131-4, 144, 145 The Drums of Father Ned, 405, 406, 418-19, 420, 433, 447

578 Sean O'Casey O'Casey, Sean, PLAYS, The Drums of Father Ned continued and An Tostal, 340, 394, 396-404, 412 writing of, 387-8, 391-2 changes sought, 395, 400-402 Irish premiere, 441 and McQuaid, 388, 389 productions Indiana, 413 publication, 418 The Frost in the Flower, 113, 127 Green Gates (see Within the Gates) The Harvest Festival, The, 96, 113, 125-7, 131, 143, 272, 273 Juno and the Pay cock, 6, 8, 59, 94, 133, 149-50, 156, 165, 197, 223, 230, 347, 398, 423 Dent recording, 366 Dublin speech in, 127, 150-51 film rights, 200, 214, 245, 246 influence of, 320 productions Abbey, 167, 206, 394 Derry, 434, 438-9 first, 151-4 re-opening, 432-3 Dowling, 212 English tour, 191 Gaiety, 441 Germany, 197 Globe, 395 London, 169, 171, 172, 178, 187, 190, 199 Old Vic, 441-2 premiere, 184 New York, 266 musical version, 407, 413-14 Newcastle, 275 Paris, 267 radio, 356, 364 USA (Abbey), 219-20 publication, 156 reviews of, 151, 152-3, 170 royalties, 266 and The Slough, 95-6 themes & satirised, 204 civil war, 140, 177 immorality, 239 love affair, 121

O'Casey's mother, 116-17 pregnancy, 36, 216 versions of, 149 wins Hawthornden Prize, 185-6 writing of, 147-51, 170 Yeats on, 158 Kathleen Listens In, 139, 146-7 Nannie's Night Out, 153, 155, 156-7, 166, 213 Oak Leaves and Lavender, 292, 300-301, 303, 304, 312, 391 writing of, 268, 279, 448 collected, 329 London production aborted, 284, 286, 297-9, 303 Nathan on, 280 publication, 287 reviews, 289, 298, 299, 318 The Plough and the Stars, 1-2, 8, 134, 154, 166, 232, 253, 333, 347, 352, 375, 390, 414 writing of, 158, 159-60, 162-6 casting, 171-2 dedication of, 117, 179 dialectic drama, 165-6 expressionism, 193 first promptbook, 169-70 Ford film, 165, 245-6, 426 O'Casey refuses film, 399 productions Abbey, 189, 206, 271, 280, 334, 365 alterations, 167-70 centenary, 440, 441 criticised, 1947, 302-3 Festival, 1938, 260 re-opening, 1966, 432-3 riots, 172-6, 189, 283, 360, 409, 428, 429-30 effect of, 176-9 Germany, 216 London, 186, 187-90, 191, 421, 442 Newcastle, 275 Paris, 366 radio, 356, 364, 365 television, 441 USA, 197-8, 199, 234, 239 publication, 159, 172, 189 republican attitudes to, 161, 164, 165-6, 189

Index 579 reviews, 173, 178, 187 songs in, 146, 167-8 structure, 164-5 themes Bodenstown, 85 Easter Rising, 97, 103 futility of war, 1-2 ICA, 88 immorality, 239 love affair, 38 politics, 163-4 prostitution, 222 setting of, 19 socialism, 163 use of Dublin speech, 126, 151, 171-2 A Pound on Demand, 228, 231, 243 Profit and Loss, 93 Purple Dust, 265, 273, 275, 301, 344, 387, 448 writing of, 262, 268 productions Liverpool, 280, 285 Mermaid, 420 New York, 274, 342, 379, 380, 399, 406 Newcastle, 314 Wanamaker, 336-40 publication, 266, 329, 386 reviews, 382 stage-Irishry, 266 The Red Lily, 157, 184-5 Red Roses for Me, 45, 59, 270, 279, 293, 314, 370, 374, 443 writing of, 272-7 criticisms of, 423 painting, 61-2 productions Abbey, 441 Dublin, 274, 275-7 London, 284-6, 335, 356, 421 New York, 304, 342, 368-9, 371 radio, 356, 364, 365 USA, 332 publication, 274-5, 329 reviews, 275, 276-7, 285-6, 288-9 text changes, 368 themes death, 448 love affair, 120-21, 283, 284 motherhood, 41

O'Casey's mother, 117 strike, 81 topography, 38 union activities, 82 On the Run (see Shadow of a Gunman) The Seamless Coat ofCathleen, 137, 138, 146 Shadow of a Gunman, 8, 16, 143, 144, 147, 158, 165, 340, 347, 407, 414 Abbey productions, 140-46, 197, 434 writing of, 134-6, 139 first lines, 112 Grigson in, 220, 373 O Maolain template for Shields, 132 O' Casey refuses film, 399 poem, 229 productions London, 195, 199, 442 New York, 406 Newcastle, 275 radio, 356, 364 publication, 156 reviews, 142 technique, 125 themes guerrilla war, 102-3 raid, 341-2 self-deceit of artist, 444 violence, 140 use of Dublin speech, 81, 151 The Signal, 184 The Silver Tassie, 205, 206, 225, 335, 347, 362, 403, 420, 429 Abbey rejection of, 7, 191, 200-205, 228, 241, 243, 260, 279, 362, 445 correspondence published, 201, 203, 204-5 effects of, 210-11,213 in Rose and Crown, 335, 336 writing of, 185, 190, 191-3, 198-9, 200 criticisms of, 213, 423 expressionism, 193 influences, 198-9 modernism, 443 music in, 194-5, 207 operatic version, 194, 449 productions, 211-13

580 Sean O'Casey O'Casey, Sean, PLAYS, The Silver Tassie,

productions continued Abbey, 242-3 English, 442 Gaiety, 299 Hunt, 441 London, 207-9 Queen's, 44 publication, 200, 203-4, 301, 320 reviews, 203-4, 208-9, 211, 242, 276, 335 themes evangelicalism, 445 hospital ward in, 93, 197 separation money, 129 sexual anxiety in, 195 topography, 38 view of women, 222 war, 106 The Star Turns Red, 272, 275, 295,

446 writing of, 246, 251,257 negative responses, 258-9, 423 productions London, 263, 291-2 publication, 262, 301, 320 reviews, 264 Within the Gates, 232, 245, 332, 367, 418, 443, 448 Abbey interested, 242 writing of, 221, 222-4 Cockney dialect, 225 experimental, 226, 227 music, 223 productions banned in Boston, 238-9, 277, 304 Irish premiere, 441 London, 225-6, 299 New York, 228, 231, 233-8, 237, 308, 413 publication, 223, 224-5, 301, 320 reviews, 224-6, 264 royalties, 247 seen as film, 213-14, 215 themes prostitution in, 222, 223 one-act plays The End of the Beginning, 215, 221,

228, 231, 240, 243, 275, 340

Figu.ro in the Night, 410-11, 413

Hall of Healing, 9, 328, 340, 395, 403-4 The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe, 413,

415 Time to Go, 328-9, 340 collections Collected Plays, 301, 310, 329-30, 334, 420 reprints, 332 reviews, 319-20, 332-3, 445 Five Irish Plays, 243 Selected Plays, 354

Two Plays, 156, 159, 171,232 POETRY, 79, 109

'A Walk with Eros', 229-30 'Gold and Silver Will Not Do', 230 'Life is Dear to Me', 114-15 'Mary Most Lovely', 121 'Saintly Sinner, Sing for Us', 330 'She Will Give Me Rest', 230-31 The Call of the Tribe', 105 The Dreamer Dreams of God', 230 The Grand Oul' Dame Britannia',

228

The Scent of the Blossoming May', 372 The Soul of Man', 69-70 The Summer Sun is Tightly Folding', 114 The Sweet Little Town of Killwirra', 70-71 Thomas Ashe', 105 Thoughts of Thee', 114 ToMaire', 114 Collections Songs of the Wren, 69,115

Windfalls, 228-31, 240 PROSE, 82-3, 92, 109, 121, 152, 289, 333, 393, 433 on communism, 269 on contemporary theatre, 315 on dramatic criticism, 289-90 first time in print, 72-4 as hack writer, 107-8 prose style, 269-70, 288 pseudonyms, 73-4, 269, 277 reviews, 241 in Time and Tide, 221

on trade unions, 150 articles

Index 581 'A Few Boos', 243 'A Stand on the Silver Tassie', 243 'Bonfire under a Black Sun', 366 'Coward Codology', 244 'From Within the Gates', 236-7 for Gaelic League, 68-71 'Gulls and Bobbin Testers', 156 Tmmanuel', 399 Tn Defense', 243 in Irish Worker, 89 'New Whine in Old Bottles', 277 'O 'Casey's Liking for Life', 414 'Ode to an "Impudent Upstart"', 431 'play of ideas' debate, 330 'Sound the Loud Trumpet', 73-4 The Bald Primaqueera', 434 The Curtained World', 268 Three Shouts on a Hill', 116, 124 book reviews, 257-8 Mail, 383-5 The Pope, the People, and Politics, 309 The Sacrifice of Thomas Ashe, 104 The Story oftheICA, 102-3, 108, 110, 117, 121-4 The Story of Thomas Ashe, 104 Three Shouts on a Hill', 116, 124 'Under a Greenwood Tree He Died', 381, 382, 384 collections Under a Colored Cap, 420-21, 424-5, 434 The Flying Wasp, 6, 243-5, 251, 289, 354, 443 reviews, 245 The Green Crow, 354, 370, 372 banned, 392, 395 reviews, 373 Feathers from the Green Crow

(Hogan), 423-4 Windfalls, 228-31, 238, 240 short stories The Corncrake', 143 T Wanna Woman', 221-2, 228, 241, 329 The Job', 228, 230 The Seamless Coat', 138 The Star-Jazzer', 228

O'Casey, Shivaun (daughter), 7, 270, 277, 282-3, 300, 326, 378, 394, 433 acting career in Gunman, 442 US tours, 392, 395, 398-9, 405, 406, 434 in Young Cassidy, 427 birth, 26f Bonfire opening, 360, 361, 363 in Bristol, 412 dedication to, 367 education, 278, 343, 353, 373 father's death, 433, 437 on later plays, 449 in London, 338, 381-2, 383 Niall's death, 379-81 in Paris, 369 pneumonia, 298 O'Connell, Daniel, 2, 21, 80 O'Connor, Batt, 91-2 O'Connor, Fergus, 107-8, 111, 114, 115, 121, 129 O'Connor, Frank, 220, 347, 408, 409 O'Connor, Garry, 7, 324 O'Connor, Jim, 408-10 O'Connor, Joseph, 112 O'Connor, P.J., 365 O'Connor, T.P., 186-7 O'Connor, Ulick, 3, 362 O'Connor, Una, 207 Odd Man Out, 246, 297, 409 O'Dea, Denis, 271, 302, 338 Odets, Clifford, 238, 319-20, 336, 374 on O'Casey, 445 O'Donnell, Frank J. Hugh, 142, 198-9 O'Donnell, Peadar, 164 O'Donoghue, Brendan, 7 O'Donoghue, Fr, 403 O'Donovan, Fred, 358-9 O'Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah, 164 O'Driscoll, Tim, 402 O'Faolain, Sean, 276-7, 288, 311, 318, 403 'Love among the Irish', 349-50 O'Farrell, Eamon, 66 O'Flaherty, Liam, 170, 172, 210 The Informer, 245, 246, 259 on Plough, 177 O'Flanagan, Father Michael, 169 O'Flynn, Philip, 365, 438 O'Grady, Father, SJ, 397 O' Grown ey, Father Eugene, 65

582 Sean O'Casey O'Hanrahan, Kieron, 285 O'Hara, Joan, 414 O'Hegarty, PS., 131 O'Herlihy, Dan, 276 O'Herlihy, Michael, 358, 366 O'Hickey, Dr Michael, 74, 91 O'Higgins, Brian, 107 O'Higgins, Kevin, 171, 172 O'Kelly, Seumas, 94 Old Age Pensions Act, 1908, 77 Old Bailey, 335 Old Vic, London, 263, 280, 285 Juno, 441-2 O'Leary, J.J., 363, 394, 395, 401, 408-10, 409 Olivier, Laurence, 170, 441-2 O'Loughlin, Kevin, 78 Olympia Theatre, Dublin, 46, 196 Father Ned, 441 Red Roses, 276-7, 365 O'Mahony, Tope', 297 O'Malley, Mary, 417-18, 441 'One Big Union', 80 O'Neill, Eugene, 157, 171, 186, 193, 234, 245, 369 The Iceman Cometh, 305 illness, 301-2 Mourning Becomes Electra, 224, 235, 301

and O'Casey, 235, 238 O'Casey compared with, 333 on The Star, 258-9 death, 343 O'Neill, Maire, 170 O'Neill, Sheila, 291, 324-5 in Bonfire, 349

Orange Order, 17, 21, 59, 64, 139 O'Regan, Brendan, 398, 401, 402 O'Reilly, John Boyle, 107-8 O'Riordan, Kay, 377 O'Riordan, Michael, 377 Ormond Street, Dublin, 17 O'Rourke, Sean, 78 Orpen, Sir William, 86 Orwell, George, 280, 308, 354 Osbornejohn, 170, 342-3, 368, 374, 378, 419 meets O'Casey, 415 O'Shannon, Cathal, 110, 123, 163, 177 O'Shaughnessy, John, 332, 368, 371 O'Shea, Katharine, 22 O'Shea, Milo, 336

O' Sullivan, Seumas, 312 O'Toole, Peter, 415, 427, 441 Our Ally, 290 Our Most Holy Redeemer & St Thomas More, Church of, London, 196 Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, 231, 240, 250-51, 320, 321, 343 debt outstanding, 256-7, 261-2 Owen, Wilfred, 199, 202 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, The (Yeats),

202, 241, 259-60 Oxford Playhouse, 187 Oxford Terrace, 84 Oxford University, 183

Paignton, 343 Palace Theatre, Cork, 154 Palace Theatre, Manchester, 206-7 Papp,Joe, 329 Paris Festival of Dramatic Art, 365-6 Park Hall Camp, Oswestry, 342 Parker, Lynne, 441 Parkhurst prison, 297 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 21-2, 24, 28, 52, 80, 364 Parnell Street, 83 partition, 263 Pascal, Gabriel, 302 Pasuka, Berto, 414 Paterson textile strike, 327 Paulson, Arvid, 382 Peacock Theatre, Dublin, 212, 334 Pearse, Mrs, 174, 177 Pearse, Patrick, 163, 174, 179, 424 Bodenstown oration, 85, 111 and Connolly, 97, 178 Easter Rising, 102 and education, 278 IRB,89 and lock-out, 1913, 85 in Plough, 164, 246 and SLOT band, 83 Pearse, Willie, 174 Peasant and Irish Ireland, The, 73-4 P.E.N. Club, 263 People, The, 208

People's Music Hall, 46 People's Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, 275, 434 Cock, 314-18 Perrinjohn, 144, 175

Index 583 Persse, St John, 416 Pharmacy Society, 58 Phethean, David, 418-19 Phillips, Stephen, 193 Phillpott, Eden, 195 Phoblacht, An, 85 Phoenix, 317-18 article on contemporary theatre, 315 Phoenix Company, 442 Picasso, Pablo, 333 Pigott, Professor JJ., 403 Pike Theatre, 366-7, 403-4 Rose Tattoo, 388-9, 392-3 Pinker, Steven, 4 Pius XI, Pope, 393 Playhouse, Houston, 332 Playhouse Cinema, Gerrards Cross, 218 Plays and Players, 415 Plough Productions, 408 Plunket, Archbishop, 42 Plunkett, James, 87, 359, 417 Plymouth, 265, 292 bombed, 264, 266, 270 US troops in, 278 Plymouth Brethren, 50 Poblacht na h-Eireann, 138 Polakov, Lester, 379, 406 Poland, 261, 393 Pollitt, Harry, 309 Pollock, Gordon W., 368 Pope, Alexander, 6, 69 Portrane Hospital, 76 Portugal, 272 Post Office, 26, 51 Pound, Ezra, 158, 333 Priestley, J.B., 318 prostitution in 'Bedtime Story', 329 in Gates, 239 in 'I Wanna Woman', 222 in Plough, 159-60, 167-8, 173, 176 Protestant Gaelic Leaguers, Committee of, 72 protestantism, 41, 58, 67, 134 in Casey family, 53-5 in Dublin, 17,20-21,39 and employment, 49-50, 64 evangelicalism, 13-15 funerals, 411-12 and Gaelicisation, 23 and O'Casey, 375, 446

relationship with Maire Keating, 117-18, 119 and use of Irish language, 71-2 Prunty, Jacinta, 17 Pulitzer Prize, 305, 313 Purcell, Noel, 297, 337 Pushkin, 291 Puvis de Chavanne, 169 'Q' Theatre, London, 198 Quaker Meeting House, 218 Quaker School, Long Dene, 218-19, 232 Quay Police, 59 Queen's Theatre, Dublin, 43-4, 53, 96, 270, 418, 432, 438 Abbey moves to, 334-5 Queen's University Dramatic Society, 242 Quiet Man, The (film), 334, 409 Quigley, Godfrey, 395, 399-400 Quill, Mike, 437 Quinn, Tony, 142 radio, 146, 341 Radio City Music Hall, 235 Radio Eireann, 356, 436 O'Casey talks, 360, 363, 364-5 Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE), 87, 356, 395, 413, 441 Raffles, Gerry, 315 Raftery, Antoine, 255 railways, 5, 63, 81 dispute, 1911,272 Random House, 245 Rattingan, Terence, 330 Read, Herbert, 306 Reading, Jack, 225 Reagan, Ronald, 355 Rebel Players, 263 Reddin, District Justice Kenneth, 156, 172 Redmond, Jimmy, 115, 116 Redmond, John, 73-4, 89, 104, 111 ballad against, 106 Redmond, Liam, 337-8 Reinhardt, Max, 224 Religious Education, Board of, 42 Religious Sisters of Charity, 92-3 Relph, George, 337 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 169 Republican Club, UCD, 177-8 Republican Party, 177

584 SednO'Casey Reynolds, Edward, 188 Reynolds, Horace, 237 Reynolds, Mrs Kathleen, 247, 316, 343, 353 and drinking, 195-6, 382 housed during war, 262 Niall's death, 379, 380 relationship with Sean, 195-6, 200, 326 wartime, 265 Rhondda, Lady, 221, 244 Richards, Shelah, 160, 274, 284, 361, 365 and/imo, 153-4 and Plough, 171, 173, 175 Red Roses production, 274, 275-7 Richmond Lunatic Asylum, 76 Rimsky-Korsakov, N.A., 314 Ritchard, Cyril, 336 Riversdale House, 243 RKO Studios, 245, 246 Robbins, Frank, 89-90 Robinson, Lennox, 78, 95, 136, 151, 246, 247, 361 and Abbey subsidy, 141 as actor, 153 alcoholism, 247 dramatic principles, 164 edits Gregory Journals, 277, 290 and Lady Gregory, 156 and O'Casey, 144, 261 post-Tassie, 219-20 and O'Casey plays, 127, 132-4, 137, 139, 234 Gunman, 140-41, 145-6 Juno, 149-50, 170 Nannie's Night Out, 157 Plough, 165, 167, 168, 171-2, 172, 175 Tassie, 200, 201, 203, 204, 209, 212, 335 plays of Church Street, 246-7 The White Blackbird, 169 The Whiteheaded Boy, 145, 149

funeral of, 411 Robinson, Sir William, 20 Robson, Flora, 427 Rocliff, George, 59 Rodgers, W.R., 341 Rodway, Norman, 399-400, 414 Rogers, Dr, Bishop of Killaloe, 398 Rokotov, Timofei, 257

Romberg, Sigmund, 195 Rooney, Philip, 365 Roosevelt, F.D., 233, 268-9 Rose, Billy, 304 Rose Tattoo controversy, 388-9, 392-3, 397, 404 Ross, Alec, 298 Rossiter, Leonard, 420 Roth, Philip, 184 Rotha, Paul, 409, 410 Rotunda Buildings, Dublin, 75, 212 Roxborough House, 290 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) , 298, 373, 380, 381, 383 Royal Artillery, 287, 342 Royal Canal, 297 Royal Court, London, 195, 205, 369, 374, 428 Cock, 368, 414-15, 418 Gunman, 199 Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, 379, 381 Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 34, 66, 74, 192 First World War, 93 Royal Engineering, 34 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIG), 113 Royal Seven Stars Hotel, Totnes, 255, 332, 340 Royal Shakespeare Company, 442 Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital, 33, 76 Royalton Hotel, New York, 233, 234-5 Royalty Theatre, London, 184 Gates, 224-7 Juno, 170-71, 185 Rubens, Peter Paul, 307 Rubin, Jane, 332, 337, 407, 425 Rummel, Walter, 176 Rupert Guinness Hall, Dublin, 334 Rushdie, Salman, 179 Ruskin, John, 61 Russell, Bertrand, 277, 370 Russell, Father Edwin, 265, 433-4 Russell, George (jE), 87-8, 108, 145, 152, 170, 177, 229, 241, 276 Gogarty on, 259, 260 in Inishfallen, 330-31 on O'Casey, 220 O'Casey on, 204-5 Russell, Sister Kevin, 218 Russia, see USSR

Index 585 Russian Revolution, 1917, 105, 109 Rust, Bill, 309 Rutland Place North, Summerhill, 41, 49,75 Ryan, Desmond, 78, 424 Ryan, Frank, 172, 174, 177-8 Ryan, H.P., 78 Ryan, Phyllis, 271 Ryan, William Patrick, 73 St Andrew's Church, Westland Row, 242 St Andrew's Mansions, London, 195 St Barnabas, parish of, 39-40, 42, 54-5, 57-8 St Barnabas Boys' School, 40-41, 49, 85 St Barnabas church, 55, 58-60, 92 Easter Rising, 103 St Barnabas soccer club, 40 St Bartholomew's Hospital, 379, 380 St Catherine's Church, Thomas St, 16, 17 St Catherine's College, Cambridge, 245 St Columb's Hall, Derry, 438 St Enda's College, 85 St Eugene's Cathedral, Derry, 438 St Francis Xavier Hall, Dublin, 397 St George's Church, Dublin, 20 St Ives, Cornwall, 395, 412, 437 St James's Theatre, London, 336 St John Baptist Church, Clontarf, 56-7 Stjohn of God's Hospital, 283 St John's Wood, see also Woronzow Road St John's Wood, London, 321, 369 St Kevin's Church, 72 St Kevin's Hospital, 293 St Laurence O'Toole church, 119 St Laurence O'Toole (SLOT) club, 82-4, 92, 93, 103, 112, 113, 115, 144, 365, 399 singing, 106 fund-raising concert, 110-11 St Laurence O'Toole (SLOT) Dramatic Society, 110-11, 125 St Laurence O'Toole (SLOT) Pipers' Band, 83-5, 91, 119 St Laurence O'Toole's school, 113, 283 St Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital, 28, 31-3 St Marychurch, Torquay, see Torquay St Mary's Church, Mary St, 20-21, 36 St Mary's Infant School, Dominick St, 25-6, 28, 30-31, 33, 34

St Stephen's Green, Dublin, 18, 102 Fusiliers' Arch, 74-5 St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, 194, 197 O'Casey operation, 92-3, 101 Salazar, Antonio, 272 Salinger, J.D., 273 Salkeld, Cecil, 242 Salvation Army, 276 Sarah Bernhardt theatre, Paris, 366 Saroyan, William, 265, 300, 310, 319 Sarr, Kenneth, 156 Sassoon, Siegfried, 202, 229 Saturday Review, 209

Schneider, Alan, 310-11 Schrank, Bernice, 448 Schwarz, Arthur, 305 Schweppe, Fred, 135 Schweppe, Mrs, 341-2 Scots Observer, 226

Scott, Michael, 401 Scott, Thomas, 27 Scott, Sir Walter, 416 Scottish National Players, 96 Scully, Seamus, 335 Sears, David, 276 Second World War, 7, 31, 146, 267, 268, 295, 327-8, 364 phoney war, 261-2 black-out, 265 bombings, 270, 273-4 D-Day, 278 evacuations, 278 loss of mss feared, 264-5 neutrality, 262-3, 271-2, 277, 280, 297 ends, 280-81 sectarianism, 243, 289, 331, 393 Senate, Irish, 152 Seneca, 388 separation allowance, 129, 192 Seville Place school, East Wall, 83, 303 Shakespeare, William, 44, 50, 282, 334, 338, 353, 366, 416 Antony and Cleopatra, 1 3 Henry VI, 45 Henry VIII, 44

influence of, 238, 374, 407 Julius Caesar, 44, 158, 179

King Lear, 63, 91,405 myth-making, 2 6 Maolain's interest in, 132, 134

586 Sean O'Casey Shakespeare, William continued O'Casey's interest in, 27, 41, 50, 115, 128, 272, 273, 381 childhood theatricals, 44-5 quater-centenary, 430, 431, 432 Richard III, 236 Shaw, Byam, 306 Shaw, Charlotte, 190, 203, 225, 251 Shaw, George Bernard, 7, 33, 43, 61-2, 115, 143, 155, 179, 197, 210, 257, 261, 275, 293, 415, 416 and correspondents, 324, 325 and Dartington, 247, 251 and IAL, 220 Moscow visit, 210 and music, 307 ninetieth birthday, 290 and O'Casey, 133, 331, 359, 445 Breon's education, 240 centenary appreciation, 372 dedication to Maire Keating, 430 Eileen visits, 326-7 Epstein bust of, 363 on film rights, 200 and Gates, 223-4, 225, 227 influence of, 48-9, 131, 202 O'Casey compared with, 147, 333 O'Casey radio interview on, 341 O'Casey sends work to, 116, 124 and Plough, 190 and Purple Dust, 265 and Tassie, 203, 205 'play of ideas', 330 plays of Arms and the Man, 165, 355 Back to Methuselah, 48 Bond on, 374 construction, 191 dialectic drama, 165 Heartbreak House, 213 John Bull's Other Island, 221, 243, 265, 283, 391 Man and Superman, 166 O'Flaherty, V.C., 106 Saint Joan, 166, 207, 432 Widower's Houses, 112 socialist influence, 92 Sheed, F.J., 284 Sheehy-Skeffmgton, Francis, 97, 110, 174 O'Casey on, 122-3

Sheehy-Skeffmgton, Hanna, 174, 175-8, 179 Sheehy-Skeffmgton, Owen, 341 Shelley, P.B., 50, 115, 132, 437-8 Shepherd, Leonard, 207 Sheridan, Peter, 278, 441 Sheridan, R.B., 19, 20-21 Sherriff, R.C., 208, 209 Shields, Arthur, 112, 142, 145, 151, 242 Shields, Jane, 54 Shields, Patrick, 54 Shields family, 51 Shirley Society, 245 Short, Granny, 117 Shubert Theatre, Boston, 238-9 Shyre, Paul, 379, 406, 425 Silas Marner (film of), 214 Sim, Alistair, 336 Sim, Sheila, 298 Simon, Sir John, 256-7 Simpson, Alan, 38-9, 366-7, 403-4 Rose Tattoo, 388-9, 392-3 Sinclair, Arthur, 112, 170, 221 and Plough, 187, 197-8, 199 Sinn Fein, 89, 103-4, 105, 107, 129, 169 after Rising, 122-3 convention, 1922, 138 and labour movement, 162 in plays, 131-4 republican moralism, 123-4 Sinn Fein, 77 Sinn Fein Courts, 139 Sisk, Robert E, 246 Slade School of Art, 306 SLOT, see St Laurence O'Toole Smith, Brendan, 389, 394, 395, 397, 398 and Father Ned, 399, 400, 401-2, 403 Smith, Maggie, 114, 427, 429 Smyth, Michael, 111 Smythe, Colin, 290 soccer, 40, 192 socialism, 66, 78, 80-81, 92, 268, 446 arts in service of, 154-5 and drama, 146, 213, 319 lock-out, 1913, 85-9 Socialist Party of Ireland, 110 Society of Authors, 200 Solomon, Louis, 399 Song of Songs, 230 Sorel, Julien, 6 'souperism', 13

Index 587 South Africa, 188 Soviet Cultural Society, 359 Soviet Daily War News, 268 Spanish Civil War, 246, 258, 262-3, 272, 295 Spanish 'flu, 108, 115-16 Spanner, Mrs, 184 Spectator, 226, 312 Squire, Sir J.C., 186, 340-41 Stage, 317 Stalin, Joseph, 258, 264, 303, 319 O'Casey's commitment to, 258, 268-9, 373, 376-7, 377, 446, 447 Stalingrad, 268, 269 Standard, 276, 288, 359, 362 Standard Hotel, Dublin, 294 Stanislavsky, K.S., 248, 290 Stanwyck, Barbara, 246 Starkie, Walter, 201, 260-61, 406 Stein, Joseph, 407, 413 Stephens, James, 102, 103, 151, 156, 204, 312 Cock dedicated to, 308 The Insurrection in Dublin, 163 Stephens, James Naoise, 308 Stephens, Winifred, 185 Stephenson, John, 171, 275, 365 Sterne, Laurence, 1 1 Stitt, Nicholas, 57 Stoneleight Park Camp, Coventry, 307 Story, John Benjamin, 31-2, 33, 76 Strachey, Lytton, 3 Straight, Beatrice, 247, 286, 337 Strandville soccer club, 40 Strasberg, Lee, 407 Stratford on Avon, 282, 343 Stravinsky, Igor, 370 strikes, see also lock-out, 1913 miners, 189-90 railway, 81 Strindberg, A., 179, 193, 224, 226, 382 Studies, 362 Suez crisis, 375-6, 378, 381, 383 Sullivan, Charles, 44 Sullivan, Ed, 410 Sullivan, Fr Russell M., SJ, 239 Sullivan, Marian, 44 Sullivan Irish Combination, 44, 46 Sunday Independent, 403 Sunday Post, 306 Sunday School, 42, 61

Sunday Times, 170, 186-7, 208, 209, 244, 274, 285, 363, 420 on Oak Leaves, 299 O' Casey reviews, 257 Suschitzky, Wolfgang, 369-70, 409 Swanzy, H.R., 31 Swift, Carolyn, 366, 392-3 Swift, Dean Jonathan, 20, 271 Swinburne, A.C., 276 Sydney Daily Mirror, 306 Synge, J.M., 108, 121, 152, 165, 186, 234, 323 influence of, 150, 320 and Molly Allgood, 189 O'Casey compared with, 172, 198, 266, 285 Playboy of the Western World, 112, 141, 172, 298, 355, 366 riots, 68, 175, 198, 242 Shadow of the Glen, 171 Tagore, Rabindranath, 247, 311 Tailteann Games, 156 Talbot, Matt, 274, 277, 359 Tamarin, Al, 304 Tate Gallery, 186 taxation, 205-6 debts, 257 income tax complaint, 340 Taylor, Rod, 427 television, 399, 408, 443 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 384, 437 Theatre Arts, 407 Theatre Arts Monthly, 171, 333 Theatre-in-the-Round, Dallas, 320 Theatre of Cruelty, 434 Theatre Royal, Dublin, 45, 46, 47, 194, 196, 205, 285 Isaac Casey in, 53 Theatre Royal, Newcastle, 414 Theatre Workshop, 314, 315-16, 442 Theatre World, 194 Theatres Act, 1847,46 Thomas, Dylan, 406 Thorn's Almanac and Official Directory, 19, 20,24 Thorndike, Sybil, 352-3 Time and Tide, 221, 226, 227, 239, 241, 244 Time Magazine, 236, 237, 363 Times, The, 332 on Bonfire, 362

588 Sean O'Casey Times, The continued on Gates, 224, 226 on Oak Leaves, 299 on Red Roses, 277, 285 on Tassie, 208

O' Casey obituary, 442

Times Literary Supplement, 435

on autobiographies, 240, 271, 312

on on on on on on on

Bonfire, 367 Cock, 314 Collected Plays, 320, 332-3 Feathers, 424 Gates, 225 Purple Dust, 266 The Star, 264

Tingrith', Station Road, Totnes. see Totnes, Devon Tippett, Michael, 298 Tivoli, Dublin, 75 Tivy, Dr Cecil, 292 Toal, Beatrice, 160-62, 179 Tobin, Captain Paddy, 93 Tobin, Richard Francis, 93 Todd, Mike, 320 Toller, Ernst, 179, 193 Tolstoy, Count L.N., 291 Tomelty, Joseph, 360 Tomlinson, Rev John Edward, 59 Torbay Clinic, 433, 435 Toronto, 239, 406 Torquay, Devon, 265, 372, 379, 436-7 Breon's studio, 373, 395 move to, 343, 344, 351-3 Niall row, 376-8 visitors, 366, 408-10, 420, 433-4 Torquay Herald and Express, 363

Johnston, 291, 331 Larkin, 295-6 Mooney, 285 Totnes Council for British-Soviet Unity, 269 Townsend Dramatic Society, 44 Townsend Street, 44 trachoma, 31-3 Tracy, Spencer, 246 trade unions, 5, 28, 90, 109, 127-8, 150, 272 Traynor, Oscar, 392 Treaty ports, 262, 268, 271 TrewinJ.C., 338 Trilling, Lionel, 334 Trim, Nanny, 216, 217 Trinity College, Dublin, 16, 52, 57 catholic ban, 394 honorary degree refused, 416 Trower, Peter, 315, 316, 317, 434 Tuerk, John, 231,235 Tuohy, Fr Patrick, 396-7 Tuohy, Patrick, 8, 189 Turgenev, Ivan, 43 Turnage, Mark Antony, 449 Twain, Mark, 271 2LO, 146, 184 Tynan, Kenneth, 349, 362, 374, 420 typhoid fever, 18 Tyrell, Marcus, 395 Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), 88 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 163, 210, 290, 300, 446 articles for, 277 cold war, 293 and copyright, 269 Germany invades, 268 and Hungarian revolt, 375-7 O'Casey contacts, 257-8 post-war opposition, 284-5 unionism, 23 United Irish-American Societies, 234 United Irish League, 73

Tostal, An, 389-90, 391, 393 Council of, 396-8 znd Father Ned, 396-7, 398-404 Totnes, Devon, 251, 282-3, 286, 293, 308, 400, 433, 442, 443 domestic role, 267-8 family life, 277, 306-7 move from, 343, 348, 351-3 United Irishman, 47, 73 move to, 255-7 United States of America (USA), 178, Second World War, 265, 280-81 251, 268, 338. see also New York phoney war, 261-2 Abbey tours, 186, 219-20, 234, 239, bombing raids, 266, 270, 273-4, 278-9 241, 246, 247, 260 evacuees, 261, 262 catholic church in, 356 visitors, 298, 310-11, 325-6, 336, 337, censorship, 304-6 425

Index 589 Larkin in, 90, 92, 96, 97, 295 imprisoned, 128-9 McCarthyism, 334 and O'Casey, 234, 313, 333-4, 336, 354 Gates, 223 income from, 266 Juno, 266 Life profile, 342 Plough, 197-8 tide turning against, 418 visit, 1934, 232-9 Second World War, 262, 266, 278 Shivaun on tour, 383, 392, 395, 398-9, 405, 406, 434 Unity Theatre Club, 263-4, 314, 333, 395 The Star, 291-2 University College, Dublin (UCD), 161, 167, 173, 177-8, 179, 192, 394 chaplain, 396-7 University College London, 364, 369, 375 University of Durham, 416 University of Minnesota, 328 Utley, Freda, 298 Van Gogh, Vincent, 128, 449 Vanishing Irish, The (O'Brien), 349-50 Varian, Dr George, 301, 356 VE Day, 280-81 Venables, Clare, 442 Vernon, John E., 56 Victoria, Queen, 52, 53, 66, 307 Voice of Labour, 177 Volta Cinema, Dublin, 213 Wagner, Richard, 194 Wain, John, 425 Wales, 324 Waller, Dr Harold, 223, 264 Walsh, Archbishop, 88 Walsh, J., 117 Walsh, Michael, 274 Walsh, Ronnie, 302 Walters, Evan, 203, 352 Wanamaker, Charlotte, 338 Wanamaker, Sam, 334, 338 Purple Dust, 336-40 Wardle, Irving, 415 Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 221, 277 Warren, Robert Penn, 328 War render, Alice, 186

Warsaw Pact, 376 Washington, D.C., 413 Watson, George, 447 Watt, Stephen, 46 Watts, Dickie, 407 Watts, Richard Jr, 382, 407 Weatherby, WJ., 421 Webb's bookshop, 152 Webster, John, 238,383 Webster, Margaret, 336 Wesker, Arnold, 319, 374, 375, 376-7, 430 Wesley, John, 20 Westminster Gazette, 196 Whelan, Gerard, 392-3 Whieldon, HA, 82 Whitaker, T.K., 390 White, Captain Jack, 88 Whiting, John, 298, 425, 426, 429 Whitman, Walt, 50, 232, 320 O'Casey poem on, 330 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 276 Wilde, Oscar, 3, 31,50, 366 Wilde, Sir William, 31,33 Williams, Raymond, 448 Williams, Tennessee The Rose Tattoo, 388-9, 392-3 Willis, Ted, 291-2 Wilmot, Seamus, 398 Wilson, Andrew Patrick, 94, 95 The Slough, 95-6, 112 Wilson, Colin, 375 Wilson, Cyril, 362 Witches ofEastwick, The (play), 314 Wodehouse, P.G., 267 Wolfe Tone, Theobald, 20, 84-5, 177 Wolfe Tone Memorial Fund, 77 Wolff, Tobias, 442 women, violence against in Bonfire and Cock, 358 Women's and Children's Relief Fund, 88 Wordsworth, William, 69 Workers' Choir, 96 Workers' Orchestra, 96 Workers' Republic, 96, 106 workers' theatre, 430 Workers' Union of Ireland (WUI), 137, 205, 295, 341, 359 Works Progress Administration (WPA) , 233 World Fair, New York, 233

590 Sean O}'Casey World Theatre Season, London, 432 World's Congress of Writers, 263 Woronzow Road, St John's Wood, 199, 205, 213, 215 Hitchcocks visit, 214 lease sold, 216-17 Worth, Katharine, 265, 449 Wren, Sir Christopher, 20 Writers' Project, 233 Wyler, William, 301 Wyndham's Theatre, London, 286 Wynne's Hotel, Dublin, 355 Yale Review, 251 Yale University, 370 Yankee Doodle Dandy (film), 314 Yeates, Padraig, 90 Yeats, Anne, 276 Yeats, Cottie, 167 Yeats, George, 176, 190, 203, 241 and Tassie, 191, 212 Yeats, Jack B., 46, 145, 167, 171 Yeats, Michael, 200 Yeats, William B., 2, 97, 121, 149, 314, 347, 395, 404, 429, 440 and Abbey subsidy, 141, 165-6 and compulsory Irish debate, 157-8 epitaph, 412 Gogarty on, 259-60 and Irish-Americans, 234 and Lane gallery, 86, 154, 155 and lock-out, 1913, 88

and O'Casey, 127, 137, 143, 144-5, 312, 418, 443 'at-home' invitation, 153 Crimson in the Tricolour, 133-4 Gunman, 140 O'Casey on, 259 O'Casey's dependence on, 170 Plough, 165-6, 167, 168, 170, 178,

189

riots, 175, 176 reconciliation, 241-2 rejection of Tassie, 7, 193, 200-203, 205,206,209,211,243,445 supports T Wanna Woman', 221 and O'Casey plays Juno, 151, 152 rejection of Tassie, 219-20, 279, 362 Open Letter to Lady Gregory, 153 plays of Countess Cathleen, 14, 51-2 At the Hawk's Well, 153 The Hour-Glass, 171 Pot of Broth, 110 Purgatory, 14-15, 239 politics of, 177 death of, 259, 261 Young Cassidy, 46, 114, 298, 425-30, 434 Young Vic, 310 Zhdanov, A. A., 333 Zion Church, Rathgar, 58