Sow's ear
John Stewart Collis
Autobiographies Sean O'Casey (Macmillan, 2 vols., £15 each).
The Irish genius is seen best when the light of comedy is thrown upon squalid characters and sordid scenes — though we must remember that the great dramatic poet John Synge achieved the same relief through poetry.
It is not disputed that Sean O'Casey used the spirit of comedy to raise up scenes in a Dublin tenement into two classic masterpieces, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. The comic genius is so successful, the structure so disciplined, the rnise-en-scene so clear, that they are true classics.
O'Casey, who was born in 1880, saw them staged at the Abbey Theatre in 1924 and 1926 respectively. After the obligatory rioting of the audience (the most obtuse in the world) at the first showing, the plays were received with vast acclaim in Dublin, London, and New York. After this, until his death in 1964, O'Casey sank with a great deal of trace.
He was the last born of 13 children of whom only five survived in what was strictly the battle of life in those days. In addition to near starvation and clothing so meagre that cardboard was stuck into shoes in lieu of leather, the boy became practically blind, and it seemed that he would grow up a blind dunce. But after much pain and repeated set-backs he overcame his blindness and could go to school where he was bullied and laughed at. After school he worked as stock boy, van boy, brick builder, and railway navvy. In short, he was greatly privileged — as an artist: for true artists are stronger than other men, being chiefly composed of steel and of flame.
After his success with Juno and the Plough, he realised that this vein would soon be worked out, and that he must seek wider material. Exactly the same problem would have faced John Synge had he lived longer; though his Deirdre of the Sorrows suggests that he might have written great Irish historical plays, but luckily he was never put to the test. O'Casey had no misgivings. He would take the Great War and make a stupendous drama of it. So he wrote The Silver Tassie and made haste to put it into the eagerly waiting hands of Yeats and Lady Gregory for the Abbey Theatre.
But Yeats considered that he had not pulled it off, and that The Silver Tassie could . not be accepted without drastic emendation. Utterly astonished and infuriated O'Casey quarrelled with Yeats, and tearing up his roots he left Ireland for ever. In England he wrote a number of other plays, none of which made the same impact as those early ones, nor justified the claims which he made for them. He wrote a polemic against critics called The Flying Wasp, and also six volumes of autobiography — here condensed.
They will be valued as good source material for historians and sociologists concerned with a century of Irish political history, social conditions, theatre, and clerical influence. As autobiography it is disconcertingly ill-composed. His life was worth, say 300 succinct and absorbing pages. He elected to write 1,331 pages. It never occurred to him to make a plain statement: he was always out for effect. He breaks every rule of the game. Take chronology. He thinks that dates don't matter. Yet they are vital signposts on our road, even important windows on our landscape. He doesn't even tell us when he was born. This is how he starts:
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 brown horses and white-and-black horses and brown-and-white horses trotted tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tappetytap 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.
Following this opening the author tells us what is happening at the moment in the military world, the literary world, the cleri cal world, and the scientific world. He then repeats the opening passage again with the addition of ten more lines of staggering verbiage. And it is not even about his own birth, but refers to an elder brother! When he does come to himself — born at an unspecified date — he calls himself Johnny, and later as Sean, for this makes it easier for him to indulge in self-pity or in self-esteem. Even so it won't wash. For a cardinal rule is broken here. If an author wants the reader to weep for his characters he must not weep. If he is hard his readers will be soft; if he is brutal his readers will be tender. Throughout these volumes O'Casey is much too kind to O'Casey.
Worse than this, he shows off even at the expense of his characters. His sister, Ella, gets engaged. He is less interested in her than in the inner monologue he supplies her with, which consists of five page of one paragraph of one sentence (I think). Dubliners are fond of using the word 'blather'. Here is blather brought to a fine degree of non-art. It is bad to blather in your cups: worse when sober. Far too much in these volumes is blather.
When Yeats turned down The Silver Tassie it was a terrible blow. Of course. But this is the experience of all men of genius at all times in their careers: and it must be met with courage, resolution, good manners, and with the readiness to suppose that there may be substance in the criticism. Literary men who have risen from the ranks as it were, always think that they know best and are often very arrogant — (given space I could supply a formidable list). O'Casey was an extreme example of this. Faced with the unexpected reverse, he panicked, sulked, blustered, and ran away. For the rest of his life he adopted the most selfdamaging of all attitudes — that of contempt towards anyone who criticised him. When Orwell complained about his lack of chronology he asked who knew the exact date of the birth of Christ, Mohammed, or Buddha; and then attacked Orwell and all his works with the unintelligent ferocity of a wounded child. When Denis Johnston, author of the magnificent ,play The Moon in the Yellow River, failed to notice Augustus John's portrait of him at Totnes, O'Casey assailed him. When Agate criticised one of his plays adversely, he called him 'the refined son of a refined Calliban'. When Mrs Bernard Shaw asked him why he was so unpleasant about A.E., he said that he wrote according to the prompting of the Holy Ghost. He never attacked Shaw, for Shaw had befriended him and called him a Titan. In any case he never would have abused Shaw, for he recognised in him a superior being with whom no one could squabble. And his account of Shaw's death as witnessed by his wonderful wife Eileen, is touching, beautiful, indeed superb.
A clue to O'Casey lies in the fact that he much admired Strindberg 'the greatest of them all' he declared. He was fascinated by the Swede's dramatic experimentation. But experiment is not enough. You must have something to say. O'Casey had nothing to say except huge platitudes such as War is terrible, the rich grind the faces of the poor, the clergy are the cause of endless feuds, life should be lived to the full and so on. There is no element of surprise in his thought. Even that would not have mattered if he had been in command of language. But only in comedy, drawn from direct experience, could he really shine.
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