Sean O'Casey: A Life Read online

  Sean O’Casey

  A Life

  Garry O’Connor

  Copyright © Garry O’Connor 1988

  The right of Garry O’Connor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in 1988 by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Mrs Henderson: Them words is true, Mr Gallicker, and they aren’t. For to be wise is to be a fool, an’ to be a fool is to be wise.

  Mr Gallogher (with deprecating tolerance): Oh, Mrs Henderson, that’s a parrotox.

  The Shadow of a Gunman

  To Catherine Carver

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Act One

  Swords of Light

  1880-1921

  1 — Two Eternities

  2 — The First Sword

  3 — Fiery Blossoms

  4 — The Third Eye

  5 — They Dreamed and Are Dead

  6 — Lethe’s Wharf

  Act Two

  On the Run

  1921-1927

  7 — The Shaft Which Flies in Darkness

  8 — Hearts of Flesh and Stone

  9 — Green, White, Orange — or Yellow

  10 — Divine Afflatus

  11 — Free Wheeling

  12 — A Part in Life

  Act Three

  The Shape of a New World

  1927-1964

  13 — Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  14 — A New Character

  15 — The Phantoms of Hyde Park

  16 — Pink Wilderness

  17 — A Detrimental Temper

  18 — Divorce, Irish-Style

  19 — Th’ Gentle Ripple of a Rose

  Epilogue — Saint or Gunman?

  Prologue

  Imagine Falstaff as a paragon of virtue, a sainted character akin to Jesus; as a representative of a decaying aristocracy; as a dietician’s example of the wrong kind of eating and drinking; as a slapstick comedian — or as a figure of pure wish-fulfilment. No single label provides a satisfactory description. The complete Falstaff is the sum of his parts: remove one element, one strength or weakness, and you diminish his glory.

  Sean O’Casey, the great dramatist born in Dublin in 1880 and who died in Devon, England, in 1964, was another such type. He created many rich characters, but none richer or more many-sided than himself. A good number of the weak and self-indulgent figures in his plays were based on himself, or on brothers and friends who resented his depiction of them. He was never much interested in foreign travel or in expanding his mental horizons. The inner animus he fed on excluded everything that was not connected with it: cultivating grievances, he was always spoiling for a fight. Yet he had an intense and eloquent vision of humanity which aligns him with some of the Christian prophets. And, paradoxically, for all his bitterness, he became a great comedian, developing a generous capacity for laughter, and turning the ferocity, the dark inequalities and passions of his times into a cleansing and liberating release of high spirits.

  Lady Gregory, a director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, where O’Casey’s first five plays, among them the “Dublin Trilogy”: The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, were produced, once defined as the Irish frailty “our incorrigible genius for myth-making”. The author of those plays, christened John Casey and known as Jack, before he orchestrated his name into Sean O’Cathasaigh, Johnny Casside or Cassidy, and eventually Sean O’Casey, gave the idea (seized on by others as fact) that he was born one of thirteen.[1] Hugh Kenner, the American literary critic, has recently called the vagaries of exaggeration, hearsay, and personal vanity one is likely to encounter in writing the biography of an Irish writer, “Irish fact”.[2] The size of the Casey brood is perhaps the first Irish fact we encounter in the O’Casey story.

  Significantly, twelve of its components occurred before Sean’s birth, he being the youngest in the family. But the birth of only eight Casey children was actually recorded or spoken about. Three of them died in infancy and five reached maturity. One of thirteen would mean that eight were stillborn or died as infants — a “fact” reiterated by those who have perpetuated the myth of O’Casey the underdog. Yet, judging by other records, the rate of stillbirths and early infant mortality in areas of Dublin other than slums in the late nineteenth century was not especially high.[3] Moreover, the Casey family lived in a relatively spacious and well-aired part of the city. The Rotunda Hospital, only a short distance away, had been one of the great centres of obstetrical knowledge in Europe, and the rate of mortality among the thousands of children born there was lower than in much of Europe; in 1840, for example (unless this is also Irish fact), 0.53 per cent for 10,785 deliveries.[4] Susan Casey, O’Casey’s mother, may have given birth to thirteen children, but some of them should perhaps be put down to that incorrigible genius for myth-making.

  So was O’Casey unreliable in what he said about himself? In the worst slums of nineteenth-century Dublin the figures for death and disease were, to be sure, as bad as in Calcutta: O’Casey was certainly not brought up in such a slum. Yet he later assessed his background: “It had often been recorded in the Press, by those who could guess shrewdly, that Sean was a slum dramatist, a guttersnipe who could jingle a few words together out of what he had seen and heard. The terms were suitable and accurate.”[5]

  They were suitable, but accurate only perhaps in a sense very different from what O’Casey meant, or was understood to mean. In accounts of himself that he gave to others he frequently misrepresented his age — those who defend his doing this say he did not properly know how old he was, but this is just not supported by the evidence — while in his Autobiographies, 1939-54 (collected in two volumes of three books each, over half a million words in all), he even wrongly located the street of his birth.

  More gravely — or defiantly — from the point of view of truth, he rearranged the sequence of events to suit himself and showed a mocking contempt for dates. Evidence of certain kinds did not impress him. unless it supported what he wanted to say. His process of recall was imaginative and emotional: suffering from poor eyesight throughout his life, he based his vision of the past on his scrupulous ear for the rhythms of speech heard round him, but his sweet tooth for rhetoric sometimes made him as self-indulgent as someone who can never refuse another cream cake. The truths in his autobiography belong more to the ear and heart than to history.

  “Lying for its own sake”, wrote a fellow Dubliner, Oscar Wilde, still remembered in O’Casey’s day by old ladies who had known him as a young man, is not only “absolutely beyond reproach” but “the proper aim of art”. George Bernard Shaw, known at the same period in some Dublin circles as Georgie, and who in O’Casey’s middle age became his friend and mentor, shared his contempt for factual truth: “No man is real”, Shaw said, “until he has been turned into a work of art.” GBS applauded vigorously the strong rhetorical element in O’Casey: praise from such a quarter boosted his ego and encouraged him to fabricate more.

  *

  In the following pages I attempt to show how Sean O’Casey, slum dramatist and guttersnipe, hobnail-booted labourer and communist freethinker, who disdained a tie and thumbed his nose at conventional bourgeois behaviour, painstakingly created himself out of the real-life John Casey. For the character O’Casey designed for himself became real and inhabitable — much greater, perhaps, in scope, dimension, humour and sadness, than any of the great stage characters he carved out of his Dublin upbringing.

  But there were some highly disagreeable elements in this character. O’Casey was far from being a Class I Soviet working-class h
ero; his powers were much more subtle and more complicated than his “socialist realist” admirers (i.e. from the Communist bloc), or his more sentimental Irish-American adulators, with their rags-to-riches mythology, like to imagine. The portrait O’Casey held up for the world to see, wearing it and thrusting it where it would cause the greatest guilt and outrage, was skilfully tattered and cunningly stained with, in his own phrase, “the diseased sweat of the tenements”.

  Of course O’Casey had bad eyes; he had been humiliated by deprivation and deeply hurt, in his early life, by loss. But his assumption of poverty was, like a saint’s, ultimately an act of will. He fashioned out of actual materials the image, part fact, part fiction, by which he came to be recognised. He saw the opportunity to become the poetic symbol of the Dublin slums: he seized it. Such an assumption was very middle-class — and with O’Casey, also the result of a strongly Protestant outlook.

  “Where we are dealing with a man of such tremendous spirit as Sean O’Casey one must be honest,” wrote Sean O’Faolain. O’Casey was fastidious, touchy, a prey to both colourful and irritating contradictions and obsessions, capable, almost at the same instant, of biting the hand that fed him, and cutting off his own nose to spite his face. As much lazy as hard-working, as much fragmented as a man of integrity, he was in many ways perhaps the ultimate affront to his own background — as much English as Irish. Narrow-minded, sometimes to the point of bigotry, he was a man of many creeds jostling at different times for self-expression.

  But above all he was a man of his times — times that were, for all their cruelty and inhumanity, of great intellectual generosity and artistic scope. When he wrote his best work man was still (at least in Ireland) the measure of all things, and O’Casey was able to employ successfully a truly Elizabethan breadth of language and emotion. It is, above all, his humanity which everyone can recognise and love. If we discover that there is as much weakness in it as strength, as much self-deception as truth, this still does not weaken its appeal, but should help to build or restore our faith in ourselves as indivisible, and united in one “tremendous and glorious bond”.

  Act One

  Swords of Light

  1880-1921

  It is said God never ceases

  working out His way,

  so why the hell should I?

  1 — Two Eternities

  Archer was the maiden name of O’Casey’s mother Susan: when he was sixty-five years old, he wrote to Nan Archer, no relation, of Rush, County Dublin, about his family tree: “That’s curious about the Archers of Galway or Wicklow. My mother’s mother came from Wicklow, and, I think, my own mother was born in Delgany. And I have heard when I was a kid that she spent some years when she was young in Galway — possibly with some relatives.” O’Casey understood from an alderman, Tom Kelly, that the Archers had come to Ireland with the Normans; there had been Archers in Dublin for 800 years.

  O’Casey’s father was “of the Limerick branch of the O’Caseys”,[6] and would claim, when in expansively Gaelic mood, that the original form of his name, O’Cathasaigh, came from a very old sept of an old clan. The only property the family ever possessed, as O’Casey once tartly observed, was the family plot in Mount Jerome graveyard, plot A 35-247-7166, for which they paid five shillings a year. Michael Casey, of farming stock, settled when young on the south side of Dublin, near St Patrick’s Cathedral, and there met and married Susan Archer, who lived in the same street. Michael, unlike the rest of his family, was a Protestant: Susan, whose father, Abraham, was a prosperous auctioneer, echoed his faith through her own Anglo-Protestant origins. They were married in 1863 in the Protestant church of St Catherine where, sixty years before, Robert Emmet had been hanged, drawn and quartered for his part in an abortive rising against England.

  — Is it a roman catholic church? asked Johnny.

  — No, no, said Uncle Tom; it’s a protestant one.

  — You’d think they’d hang a roman catholic rebel outside a roman catholic church, said Johnny.

  — But poor Emmet was a protestant, Johnny.[7]

  To have so strong a Protestant background stamped Sean O’Casey from the start. Although by no means a passport to wealth or social superiority, it did mean that he had, like his brothers and his sister, at least initially the chance of entering a profession denied to someone of the Catholic faith. That he chose for the most part not to take the proffered opportunities, working for many years with little to distinguish him from an ordinary Catholic labourer, did not mean that he abandoned for one moment his deeply ingrained Protestant attitude to life, and especially to the Catholic Church. As a Catholic contemporary observed the difference, a Dublin child was at once aware of two separate and immiscible kinds of citizen, his own kind and the Protestants, a hostile element, “vaguely menacing us with horrors as Mrs Smylie’s houses for orphans where children might be brought and turned into Protestants”.[8] Protestants were proselytisers, a trait O’Casey kept all his life, never losing the habit, even while professing atheism, of trying to convert someone to something or other.

  For the first twenty or so years of their married life the Caseys, while never prosperous or part of the ruling Protestant garrison, were comfortably off, moving house several times, usually to larger premises within the same area of Dublin, a cheerless but clean and tidy district to the north of the city centre and halfway to Drumcondra, a suburb in which the clerical and skilled working class, generally with nationalist leanings, predominated. The Caseys’ own area was much more volatile terrain, reflecting rapid upward or downward social mobility in that city of amazing contrasts. This mobility was evident in the volatile emotions of the family into which O’Casey was born.

  As a Protestant clerk earning five pounds, fifteen shillings and eight pence a month, roughly twice the average wage of a manual labourer — and moonlighting as a teacher for an extra fifteen shillings — Michael Casey belonged to Class 3 in a social structure of five strata. Above him were the professional men such as lawyers and doctors, the employers and senior clerks: below were the semi-skilled, the transport workers, and, last of all in the pecking order, the vast mass of unskilled labour. This last numbered a fifth of the working population, and included a large contingent of street beggars, hawkers and vagabonds. The poverty among this lowest class was appalling, the great majority of them lodging in unheated tenement dwellings where they slept and ate, inadequately, among their own filth, with families of six commonly housed in one room; but there were also, in this city of stark contradictions, numerous charitable agencies for the alleviation of the destitute, many of which were also proselytising bodies. The largest were orphanages catering for every religion and social class. It was for one of these bodies, the Society for Church Missions, that Michael Casey may have worked for as long as twenty-two years, before he retired — whether forced to through ill health or because his contract had expired is unclear.

  Michael and Susan’s first child, Isabella Charlotte (known as Bella), was born in 1865. She and O’Casey’s three older brothers — Michael, born in 1866, Thomas (1869), and Isaac (1873) — came far more under their father’s influence than Sean. Their development gives little indication of decisive and firm fatherly control, although Bella appeared the most hard-working member of the family. Michael Casey may have been more of a Limerick Catholic than he liked to admit. According to her burial document Susan Archer Casey was eighty-five when she died in 1918 and therefore four years older than her husband: this and the more prosperous background she came from may have had something to do with her being clearly the dominant partner in the marriage.

  Michael Casey did not send his children into the national school system, which would have been free, but to the fee-charging Central Model Schools where they could grow up among their middle-class peers. Isaac was the most proficient at his lessons, which included music, drawing, bookkeeping, handicrafts and algebra, and he gained in the family the reputation of being a mathematical wizard. Later he was to fancy himself as an ac
tor. From their school reports Michael and Tom appear to have failed to reach the required standard some of the time, although in the general view they were considered bright. Their father, who had ambitions for them and hoped that Michael, who could draw well, might become an architect, paid for additional tutoring by the headmaster.

  Both the older boys were set to become teachers; however, upon their father’s death their propensity for taking the easy way out — and poor application to learning — again asserted itself and they began to drift downwards socially. This is what turned them, particularly Mick, into characters O’Casey could later draw on in his plays; working all their lives at jobs far below their training or ability, they generated in their brother a terrible sense of waste. Only Isaac, though his schooling suffered as a result of his father’s death, was to keep the status of a clerk.[9]

  Sean had two tragic predecessors: two other John Caseys were born, the first in August 1871 and the second in May 1876, both of whom lived long enough to be christened by the Revd John Black, who officiated at most of the Casey baptisms. Neither of these boys was buried in the family plot at Mount Jerome; and there is no record of the birth of a sister whom O’Casey mentions in his autobiography, where no reason is given for her death. The first John’s death O’Casey attributes to croup, while the second, living a year and contracting a bad cough, is depicted as a victim of poor medical attention: waiting in hospital to be seen by a doctor, he choked to death, and his distraught mother, sooner than leave him behind, carried his little body home to his father. O’Casey, ironically referring to himself as the “third Johnny” and, in an Elizabethan phrase, the “shake of the bag”, believed his parents did not rate his own chances of survival as high. But Michael and Susan’s defiant naming of him, their determined care of him in infancy, gave him that extra push in life which was lacking not only for the two earlier Johns, but for his older brothers who lived.