| "Good God, he
made up a life," scoffed a professor of Irish literature, asked about Sean
O'Casey. Indeed, Sean O'Casey had fabricated a persona transcending the
man who came out of Dublin's slums to produce writing which pleased, provoked
and infuriated, sometimes all in the same instant. Perhaps he did what
all thinking persons have to do -- make up a life in an effort, futile
or otherwise, to escape sociological limitations. To find life in a life-denying
age is the highest art. This was O'Casey's gift to himself and to others.
The figure who dominated Irish theater early in the twentieth century with a series of lyrical, naturalistic and tragic plays was born John Casey in 1880, youngest of five surviving children in a poor family living within bleak slums called by some the worst in Europe. His father died in 1886, and the sickly, weak-eyed boy was raised by his mother who came to personify the unsung heroines of oppression. His most famous play, The Plough and the Stars, was dedicated to her, "To the gay laugh of my mother at the gate of the grave." Young John Casey toiled as an unskilled laborer, becoming active in the Citizen Army -- an illegal organization associated with the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union which, in alliance with the Irish Volunteers and Sinn Fein, planned rebellion. Some of the Fenian leaders, believing a blood sacrifice would sanctify the proclamation of an Irish republic, rose in the Easter Rebellion of 1916. O'Casey found himself caught between admiration for former friends and a belief that a greater objective had been compromised. O'Casey, according to David Krause, author of "The Conscience of Ireland; Lalor, Davitt, and Sheehy-Skeffington, "had placed the need for immediate social and economic reforms before the cause of national independence" (Eire -Ireland, A Journal of Irish Studies, Earrach-Spring, 1993, p. 29). For the man from the slums, bread came before bullets, and he "...was not alone in his belief that once again the men of physical force had overcome the men of moral force" (Krause, p. 30). Despite his misgivings, O'Casey supported the Citizen Army. Twice apprehended and twice released, he escaped further punishment as widespread denunciation persuaded the English to dismiss their firing squads. The glory and despair of those days would be perpetuated in his Dublin dramas.
After early rejections the Abbey Theatre produced two of his plays, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and Juno and the Paycock (1924). Reaction was emotional and powerful, pumping vitality and funds into a cash-starved theater. Applause, however, turned to pandemonium during the second performance of The Plough and the Stars (1926). Romantic patriots and sophisticated literati condemned the self-educated author as a mocker and reviler of Irish Culture. They were particularly stung by the juxtaposition on stage of barside patter, beery heroics, in counterpoint to a street scene where another actor issued forth the brave words of the poet Padraic Pearse, a leader of the Easter Rebellion. O'Casey had posed a root question. What did it all mean -- slogans, guns, killing, burned tenements -- to the toiling poor? Who were the heroes: the men who tramped willingly to their deaths or the women and children left behind? Denunciation of the playwright provided the easy course, and a host of critics followed it. Embittered by rejection, O'Casey went into self-exile
in England. In 1928 the Abbey Theatre added to his pain and anger by rejecting
The
Silver Tassie, which would have its premiere in London. Four years
later O'Casey turned his back on the Irish theater by refusing charter
membership in the Irish Academy of Letters. Yet like another eye-troubled
Dublin expatriate, James Joyce, O'Casey's inspiration continued to spring
from the place and people of his youth.
While O'Casey went on to create over fifteen provocative new plays, his greatest success came from his autobiographical works, published as six individual volumes beginning in 1939 and collectively as Mirror in My House in 1956. The author casts his protagonist, Johnny-Sean-Casey-Casside-O'Casey, as a man who celebrates the human spirit and who finds beauty in tragedy, light in darkness. (Attracted to Celtic nationalism, John Casey from his earliest days as a writer adopted the Gaelic Sean O'Cathasaigh, or phonetically in English, O'Casey.) Until his death in 1964, he rejected the despair and ugliness he saw in modern literature and reaffirmed his cry of joy even in the midst of sorrow and pity. "Roses don't grow around tenement doors; pianos are rare in rooms; but brave people are there, and many have wider visions and more original chatter than others who come from dignified college or glossier high school." These concluding words from "Purple Dust in Their Eyes," in Under a Colored Cap (1963), echo one of O'Casey's earliest and most characteristic themes. Because of persistent and contentious involvement in controversy and his so-called communism, it is not easy to get the measure of O'Casey. On the one hand, he evolved into an ethnic totem, and Irish-Americans ritualistically flock to the three plays that make up his canon whenever they are performed. Yet much of his audience is hardly aware of the fury generated by their early productions in Dublin. On the other hand, the playwright is seen by some as not Irish enough -- his family was Protestant, his politics were labelled communistic, and he died in England. Moreover, there were chic critics who stated that O'Casey had not kept pace with the stark, absurd theater, the sort of thing associated with that other great playwright, also Dublin-born, Samuel Beckett. How should O'Casey be remembered, this spinner
of words who, like so few playwrights since Shakespeare, composed dramas
as poems? Perhaps the answer is not all that difficult. It could be maintained
that beneath all analyses and classifications of modern writing, a fundamental,
archetypical division occurs. Writers are forced to respond to a challenge
whose ultimatum is universal and absolute. Some authors have espoused the
cause of life; others have turned to the opposite. The thunder of one of
the most antique of authors is apropos:
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.
Pictured, this tenement house
at Upper Dorset Street, Dublin, was the birthplace of Sean O'Casey.
On stages where the plays of other writers appeared,
a collective moan sounded, with characters cast as empty, as interchangeable,
as defunct, as metamorphosed into monstrosities. "Horrorhawks" of the theater
are such writers, shouted O'Casey in Blasts and Benedictions, published
in 1967. "...a lot of these boyos sit in the minds of their characters
like a spider in the web's centre, noting every vibration and agitation
in their characters, as if, like the spider, they themselves had woven
the mysterious and multi-multiple web of the human brain" (from "The Bald
Primaqueera," 1964). The irascible Irishman was a hawk of another kind.
He saw the web and the spider, but his eye focused elsewhere. To resist,
to keep on, even to sing is not absurdity signifying nothing:
No one passes through life scatheless. The world has many sour noises, the body is an open target for many invisible enemies, all hurtful, some venomous, like the accursed virus which can bite deeply into flesh and mind. It is full of disappointments, and too many of us have to suffer the loss of a beloved child, a wound that aches bitterly till our time here ends. Yet, even so, each of us, one time or another, can ride a white horse, can have rings on our fingers and bells on our toes, and, if we keep our senses open to the scents, sounds, and sights all around us, we shall have music wherever we go.
actress Eileen Carey, seen together here on their wedding day in 1927. Below, In 1954 O'Casey settled in Devon town of Torquay
where, a year later,
The horse, the cab, and the driver sent ghosts of the past sidling up to Sean; shadows of the time when men's eyes sought the jutting bustle, and whose ears listened for the frou-frou of the trailing skirt; when the inverness cape was set on their shoulders and the double-peaked cap was set on their heads; when men rode bicycles that could be mounted only if one had the spring of a leopard; when Madame Patti sang Home, Sweet Home under the gas-light glitter, and when Sherlock Holmes stole through the streets to solve some mystery; time of the transformation scene and the harlequinade, of roses from Picardy, and the Martini-Henry rifle; with two old children enjoying it all; a joyous jingling hour of life; a big, red berry on life's tree. A joyride: the pair of them [George Jean Nathan] were young again, and heaven was all around them.Divining the apparently inconsequential into epiphany is the function of the seannachie, the storyteller, the minstrel who knows the prime element in the song is the singer. As O'Casey said, "the author is the main element of any play." "Isn't the whole play a cry for courage, decency and vitality in life," he asks in his essay "Within the Gates," (in Rose and Crown). In routine is the core of purpose: When he thought of all the common routine of life that had to be gone through -- to eat, to drink, to sleep, to clothe ourselves, to take time for play, lest we perish of care, to suffer and fight common and uncommon ills, then the achievements of man, in spite of all these, are tremendous indeed.Pictured below, O'Casey's firt visit to Boston attracted the attention of the local press. the full text of drama critic Elliot Norton's article appears on a separate page. Follow this link.
Among all who come and go, who is there fit to say that in men's anxiety, their bargaining, their lovemaking, their laughter, there is no sign of the blue of Mary's mantle, the white of Mary's frock, or the red-like crimson of Jesu's jacket? ("Childermess" in Sunset and Evening Star)The playwright became infuriated by decadent voices. While one psychiatrist said the only real dilemma we face is whether or not we should kill ourselves, O'Casey placed himself with "sweat-stained comrades" for whom the moment, though hard, was always worth experiencing. Albert Camus suggested "benign indifference." Thomas Mann smothered characters in ennui. O'Casey's characters came into the parlor where there is darkness-death but also light-love. The good is hard, Plato had stated; indeed, it's a fight said O'Casey in the first scene of Within the Gates (1933). "No one has the right to life who doesn't fight to make it greater." Interviewed on American television he exclaimed, there is a "lament in one ear, maybe; but always a song in the other." The Irishman had no use for G.K. Chesterton's proselytizing, but the English journalist had struck a similar note in 1903: Does the earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If it does, there is but one further truth to be added -- that everything means nothing.
Oh, foolish girl, there can never be evil things where love is living. Between the evil things an' us we'll make the sign of the rosy cross, an' it's blossomin' again the dead and dhry things will be, an' fruit will follow. We are no' saints, and so can abide by things that wither, without shudder or sigh, let the night be dark or dusky. It is for us to make dying things live once more, and things that wither, leaf and bloom again. Fix your arm in mine, young and fair one, and face for life.
--It's no light matter, she said. Quarrelling with people this way, you will have enemies everywhere. Why do you do it? . . . .
To the end O'Casey played the wild Celt who swung life by the tail, and sometimes life spun him round and round, but his voice and the voice of his God remained loud. Sometimes it shouted: Skerighan (impatiently) . . What I want tae know is whether God is ipso a Protestant or a Roman Catholic.If God is a shout, O'Casey was in His image and likeness. "I don't care what your creed or colour is," he said in The Sting and the Twinkle, Conversations with Sean O'Casey, "so long as you take your life and live it to the full" (E.H. Mikhail and John O'Riordan, eds., 1974).
Follow the star, he called, you who wear soft hats
(traditionally associated with the poor and the workers), the red star
of communism; but it was O'Casey's communism and not Stalin's, not a corpse
in Red Square but good works. His brand of communism looked at another
leader:
"...He was a great communist."The communism described in The Sting and the Twinkle boiled down to service and charity: "The lad is troubled. He cannot make up his mind whether or not to become a Communist. I asked him what he wanted to do for a living. When he answered, 'A doctor,' I told him 'Be you the best practising doctor that ever lived -- not only for those who can afford you, but also for the poor, for those who cannot afford you -- and you'll be the best practising Communist that ever lived.'"
The God-man called upon by Mrs. Boyle set the criteria
for evaluation: "By their fruits ye shall know them." The fruits of Sean
O'Casey are rich indeed -- a body of fine dramas, more than one touching
greatness; a collection of characters personifying the essence of the Irish
soul; an autobiography that contains some of the most moving and superb
bits of English ever written; and a flurry of stimulating literary odds
and ends. "Hoorah" for him, for if he made up a life, he made one worth
living and worth knowing about. If the Irishman did not show the depth
of fulfillment of a Bernanos or a Mauriac, he avoided and denounced in
a singular voice the gaping mouth of modern Manichaeism, its obsession
with imperfection, with the evil of life.
For wash'd in life's river BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE AND SELECT WRITINGS 1880 Born in a Dublin tenement. (The annals of the poor are often less than clear, and there are confusing reports on the number of children in this family. In his autobiography O'Casey writes of his mother, Susan, "...she knew that she would never have another child. She had had seven before -- three boys and one girl living, and one girl and two boys dead. Each of the two dead boys had been called John, and her husband said that this last boy's name was to be John too.") ("A Child is Born," in I Knock at the Door, 1939) 1886 Death of father, Michael Casey, raised by mother, a noble working-class woman. Works as unskilled laborer. 1914 Becomes secretary of Irish Citizen Army. 1916 Easter Rising. Escapes death by firing squad. 1919 Publication of The Story of the Irish Citizen Army under pseudonym P. O'Cathasaigh. 1923-27 Presentation by Abbey Theatre of The Shadow of a Gunman. Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars. 1926 Condemned as mocker and reviler of Irish culture. 1927 Marries actress Eileen Carey Reynolds, settles in England in self-exile. 1928 The Abbey Theatre rejects The Silver Tassie. 1929 The Silver Tassie produced in London. 1932 Refuses founding membership in Irish Academy of Letters. 1942-56 Writes Red Roses for Me, Cockadoodle Dandy, The Drums of Father Ned and six autobiographical works (collected in Mirror in My House, 1956). 1963 Publication of Under a Colored Cap (essays). 1964 Dies of heart attack at his home in Devon, England.
Kenneth MacIver, a professor in the Department of Sociology, came to Salem State College in 1962 to teach history. Between 1969 and 1977, he directed the Social Welfare Program. He incorporated work from O'Casey in Steal Your Heart Away, broadcast in 1974 on National Public Radio (and featuring dramatic readings by Salem State faculty members Michael Antonakes, Thomas Luddy, and Patricia Zaido). In addition to publishing many articles, short stories and scripts, Professor MacIver's novel, High the Mountain, has been accepted by Canadian Literary Associates. |
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Of
all great modern authors who expressed their message in English, Sean O'Casey,
one of the foremost voices for life, stands looking back at the column
of moderns who made the other choice. Where he saw darkness, he envisioned
light, the roses round tenement doors. His message poured forth in torrents
of words, while some of his contemporaries, experiencing dried hope, only
trickled words. Nothing to come, not even Godot, sobbed Beckett,
while O'Casey wrote "hoorah" as the last word in his autobiography. In
ruins, in dirt, in war and in sorrow, life goes on, a terrible beautiful
life. Many were the cries of dissolution saturating literature; life was
called a waste of breathe, empty, absurd, sick, hollow, wrong and meaningless
-- and O'Casey wrote to an American woman, "I love it, even in the midst
of pain."
Bernard would have accepted. O'Casey proclaimed true revolution -- revolve,
resist, return. The essence of tragedy, readers were reminded, was not
grim fate but the struggle against it. The cause is defined in the contrast
between the values of O'Casey and those of the younger Beckett (1906 -
1989). Beckett's dramatic world is alien, empty, a lonely void where hollow
images submit pathetically. "One day we were born, one day we shall die,
the same day, the same second . . ." (Waiting for Godot). Sound
itself disappears. Beckett's pieces become supremely minimalist, lasting
silent seconds, the quiet of death. --Too quiet for O'Casey, whose words
sprang bardlike. "I have nothing to do with Beckett. He isn't in me; nor
am I in him. I am not waiting for Godot to bring me life; I am out after
life myself, even at the age I've reached. . . . There is more life than
Godot can give in the life of the least of us." ("Not Waiting for Godot,"
1956, in Blasts and Benedictions).
The
Irishman repudiated the call for temporal rejection that came from T.S.
Eliot. No "Ash Wednesday" for O'Casey -- hearing and hearing not, "to care
and care not," silent under the "thousand whispers of the yew tree." Eliot
labelled the world a "wasteland" and turned inward, seeking the still point;
but the voice in Sunset and Evening Star that remembered an Easter
in 1916 would have none of it: "[H]e who runs away to hide, deserts the
life that God gave."
Scene
from the Huntington Theatre Company's 1985 production of The Plough
and the Stars in Boston with Wyman Pendleton as Peter Flynn, Sean G.
Griffin as Fluther Good, Keliher Walsh as Nora Clitheroe, and Pauline Flanagan
as Bessie Burgess.