Mr. O'Casby Continued
Drums Under the Windows. By Sean O'Casey. (Macmillan. 15s.)
THOSE who, like myself, have not read the first two instalments of Mr. Sean O'Casey's serial story of his life, may feel, like the celebrated " Captain " Jack Doyle in Juno and the Paycock, that he is " in a state of chassis." What is this serial story, which is to be concluded in the next number, about? Ostensibly, it is Mr. O'Casey's autobiography, but it is manifestly fiction. No one could possibly remember every- thing that anybody ever said to him or that he ever said to anybody with the particularity with which Mr. O'Casey here reports conversa- tions that took place over thirty years ago ; so Mr. O'Casey, professing to record them exactly, must be drawing on bis imagination. The reader may well wonder whether he is not inventing, especially when he finds that the book is untidily set out : a chapter full of wounded soldiers from the first World War is followed, as if in sequence, by one describing the gun-running at Howth which occurred immediately before the war began. As a bitter invention, the book is entertaining. As'an. account of events, it is nonsense. The reader is treated to a description of the way in which Patrick Pearse surrendered to the British Forces at Easter, 1916. One might imagine that Mr. O'Casey had witnessed the surrender, so neat are his details. "He comes steadily, in no hurry ; unafraid, to where two elegant British officers are waiting for him," and, having heard a demand for unconditional surrender, " hands over his sword ; bows, and returns to marshal his men for a general surrender." So writes Mr. O'Casey.
It happens that I received an account of the surrender from the
late Lord Basil Blackwood, who was private secretary to the Lord- Lieutenant. It was given to me as we both crossed from Kingstown to Holyhead soon after the Rising was suppressed. Blackwood said that Thomas MacDonagh had gone to the surrender with his head high and his step firm and without the slightest appearance of qualm, but that Pearse had reeled there like a drunken man, his great head, made hideous by a squinting eye, lolling from side to side as if it were about to fall off. I ought to add that his account was not in the least unsympathetic. His admiration for MacDonagh's calm and courage was obvious. He showed no contempt for Pearse, though he might well have done so, but seemed to think that the first President of the Irish Republic was suffering from wrecked emotion. Remembering his account of the surrender, and comparing it with Mr. O'Casey's, I find myself wondering how much there is in this autobiography that is veracious. In a postscript to a letter to his nephew, Charles O'Malley, Godfrey O'Malley, in Lever's novel, remarks that one Considine had called out and shot " a fellow in the knee, but finds out that after all he was not the candidate " for Parliament, " but a tourist that was writing a book about Connemara." And in another postscript, he complains that " Old Mallock is a spiteful fellow, and has a grudge against me since I horsewhipped his son in Banaghar. Oh, the world, the world! " A vast amount of Drums Under the Windows is like that; and we are left with the impression of very few good men on this earth, Mr. O'Casey being about the best of the lot.
The style is a mixture of Jimmy O'Dea and Tommy Handley. There are thousands of invented words, bad puns, and stuff that nobody outside a Dublin slum will understand. " There's nothin' like hitchin' your flagon to a bar! " might have been said by That Man Again. There's a piece like it on almost tvery page. But no one who knows Mr. O'Casey's work can fail to expect vivacity in it, nor will his expectation be disappointed, though I found much of the eloquence wearisome. Some fearful blows are dealt at heads of all sorts, especially heads of the Roman Catholic Church, and many of the blows are deserved. Mr. O'Casey, giving rough hands to Madame Markievicz, tells a good deal of the truth about that odd lady, but forgets to consider the supreme fact about her, that she was out of her mind. He spends many pages in cussing the hierarchy of the Church of Rome in Ireland for its unjust treatment of Father Michael O'Hickey when he demanded, and the hierarchy declined, compulsory Gaelic in the New University. That cunning old peasant, Cardinal Logue, receives some sharp smacks, but not for a second does it penetrate Mr. O'Casey's head that the hierarchy were right, and Dr. O'Hickey was wrong. Mr. O'Casey, indeed, positively maunders about this obsolete lingo, just as he maunders about Com- munism, and the ould, ancient days in Ireland, when, it seems, all was exceedingly well until the thick-skulled English abolished Grattan's Parliament. He does not realise that the Act of Union was a supreme blessing to Ireland. Under it, the entire social structure of the island was changed enormously for the better. Before 1800, not a single Roman Catholic could sit in Parliament or practice a profession on terms of equality with Protestants. At the end of the Union, the majority of the representatives of Ireland were Roman Catholics. and the whole power of the landlords in the counties had passed from grand juries to elected bodies. And every farmer either owned, or was in process of owning, his land. It was Cosgrave who abolished popular government in local authorities, with, indeed, ample warrant for abolishing it. All sorts of people, Bernard Shaw, Yeats, A. E., Dr. Douglas Hyde (who receives fearful slaps), Arthur Griffith, James Connolly, James Larkin, and one Bulmer Hobson figure vividly in the book. But among them all only two continuously shine with grace: Mr. O'Casey's mother and his Protestant Rector, the Rev. E. M. Griffin. Drums Under the Windows will be understood by Irishmen whom it will enrage; it will not enrage Englishmen because they will not understand half of it, and will not want to understand
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