OOKS OF THE DAY
Dubliner
res in the Hallway. By Sean O'Casey. (Macmillan. Iss.)
N would seem to have, as a city, a particular way of imprinting on the tender imagination. When to the susceptibility of the has been added the susceptibility of the still voiceless artist, results to be shown are remarkable. The emotions of childhood adolescence are recollected in anything but tranquillity. One take it that any capital city does something to any child—but, the evidences of literature, one might equally take it that Paris Dublin have had up to now a greater power than London to s, oppress, penetrate and disturb. London has put out, so no Proust, no Joyce ; I would say she had found her most er subject in Dickens. But with Dickens the memory is vested in the tale. I know of no London-bred writer who has given ope the retrospective monologue as a thing in itself. es Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is, inevitably, prototype book about Dublin youth. It is difficult to read Sean serfs Pictures in the Hallway without looking for parallels or gences. Joyce and O'Casey have both placed at a distance "I " subject by using the third person, not the first: for e's Stephen Dedalus O'Casey has his Johnny Casside. Johnny's gs and actions are, in the main, to be traced back further than hen's—the greater part of Pictures in the Hallway deals with a ood, and we leave Johnny at about seventeen. With the de household, as not with the Dedalus, poverty is an ever- t and ever-pressing, tireless, relentless, ingenious foe. There father-figure, only two elder brothers ; Mrs. Casside is a widow. is a strong sense of family feeling in the Casside stand made t the world, the conspiracy between Johnny, the youngest , and his mother in their joint attempt to preserve those illusions which one lives.
fact, fierce and tender regard for the life-illusion is a it-fain of Pictures in the Hallway, as it is of all the O'Casey plays. temptation to stand aside and brood upon life's bitter mystery less ground with young Johnny than with young Stephen— ' :is the oilcloth, for instance, to be kept unspoiled by the hideous ss through the Casside home of the "dung-chasers " with their sly-carried loads: only when this is over may one return templation of the flowering hawthorn tree. Mrs. Casside, to take in a neighbour's washing for sixpence and a glass of er, loves to have autumn berries brought back to her from the ley, " to brighten up the room a bit," she said, " and make us a little less like what we are." Throughout Pictures in the ay, as throughout Portrait of the Artist, the burning power e idea, of the image, is to be felt. But in the O'Casey book feels more sharply the impact of the outside, everyday world. chapters deal more with different conflicts with circumstance with interior crises of the mind. With Johnny, desires do not e themselves ; their very force makes him a practical er. He steals the copy of Milton that his unfairly docked have made him unable, after all, to buy. While Stephen, in the rain on the top of the Howth tram, is crying aloud of , Johnny is tickling Alice's legs on the ladder of a Dublin rant general department store.
e Protestant atmosphere, in contradistinction to the Catholic, s out sharply, and is very well done. Protestants, in the Casside of life, are an active and redoubtable minority. They stand each other, as a matter of policy, but are not, as Johnny's en ce shows, averse from grinding each other's faces down. ishness and hard-fistedness would appear to mark the admirers g Billy. " Decency "—at least with regard to appearances- nne qua non, in the business world, of the creed, and Johnny off in a borrowed overcoat, with two well-faked letters of ce, to the interview that leads to his first job. Unwillingly, es one of the deputation that present the wedding clock to loathed Mr. Anthony. And in Johnny's approach to the Gaelic e he confronts the predicaments of the Protestant Nationalist. the Dublin of the Lost Leader, Catholic Ireland's great tam, the fallen Parnell. -
chapters are pictures—and pictures brilliantly done. Dublin times, in all -weathers. Johnny's day out with his brothers, run to Kilmainham gaol, the approach to the theatre, the days store, the ridden-down mass meeting, Mrs. Casside's fight 64 son's life, Johnny's dance with the girl in the sunset-bedazzled
street, the slaughter-house alley, the work for Harmsworth's, the embattled election of wardens for the Protestant church—all these, strung on the thread of one inner meaning, are rendered with O'Casey's dramatist's clarity. Some scenes are dreadful enough, but they are redeemed front dreariness by the heroic arrogance of the fight. For Sean O'Casey, revolution—be it only individual revolution—is inherent in the very living of life. For all its detach- ment, Pictures in the Hallway reads like an ultimatum. The human
spirit demands its own Lebensraum. • ELIZABETH BOWEN.
Previous page
