SEAN O'CASEY NO ANTI-IRISH GENIUS
--------

Left Ireland Because He Made Less Than a Dollar a Day With Plays, But Still Loves Country

By Elliot Norton

Sean O'Casey, the Dublin hod carrier who became one of the world's great playwrights, left his native country to live in England merely because he couldn't make as much as a dollar a day in Ireland from the plays that have gained him world fame!

STILL TRUE TO IRELAND
He has no grudge against Ireland. He has no idea of becoming a synthetic Englishman. His sympathies --despite the Dublin riots against his play, "The Plough and the Stars"-- are all with Ireland.

But, in Dublin, the most his amazing dramas could bring him was the equivalent of 95 cents a day! And that is why he moved his home to London.

He doesn't intend to give up writing about Ireland, either, he said yesterday on his arrival in Boston, though his newest play is the first in which he doesn't use an Irish background. (The play, by the way, is entitled "Within the Gates"; is on view in New York and has most of the critics engaged in critical flagpole sitting, wondering what it's all about.)

Does Believe in God
Some of the other things which the amazing O'Casey took pains to make more or less clear in one of those press gang interviews are these:

1--He isn't a member of any organized religion, but he does believe in God.
2--"Within the Gates" is not an attack on organized religion, whatever the critics may say.
3--The "bad words" in "Within the Gates" are not bad words at all --just good old Anglo-Saxon terms.
4--If Boston's censor --he was surprised to learn we had one, by the way-- should ban his plays, then Boston "is lower than Montreal." (He thinks the last-named place is low because a statue of the classic Discobolus was adjudged naughty there.)

Had No Formal Education
5--He thinks the Catholic religion is very beautiful.
6--All his plays to date have brought him a total of approximately 3000 pounds, or less than $15,000, in nine years. This amounts to about $1700 a year, or $32 a week!

He has had no formal education whatever. He was a poor boy, genuinely poor. He worked as a day laborer and a hod carrier for many years, as late as 1924. He saved a few pence here and there from meagre earnings to buy Shakspere's plays. He wrote endlessly once he had started to toy with the idea of dramatics, and had many attempts refused before the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin, accepted his "Shadow of a Gunman."

Defies Convention
This piece was a big hit. And as is sometimes the case in Europe, the first night audience shouted: "Author!"

Whereupon, up rose a long, thin, peaked man in a trench coat and a visored cap, to take a bow and to startle the sophisticates on his appearance.

He still startles, sartorially as well as otherwise. Yesterday, for instance, he appeared at the Hotel Touraine for interview purposes attired in a shaggy brown suit which bagged at the knees, a strangely-shaped hat that might have looked snappy on Daniel Boone, and wearing a choker sweater like those affected by rugby players.
His face is thin, peaked. His eyes are extremely brown, with pupils the size of BB shot-- the most amazingly tiny eyes you ever saw, guarded by gold-rimmed glasses.
He is not easy to interview. His reasoning is not easy to follow. He is capable of witticisms, but his conversation is not at all the sparkling kind that you expect from the writers of the new Irish "renaissance."

Lectures at Harvard Today 
It is hard to get from him a clear-cut unequivocal answer to a point-blank question.
He was asked, by way of example, because of the fact that he moved from Dublin to London to live:

"Have you moved away from Ireland for good? Will you always live in England?"
And he answered:

"Why should I?"

Eventually, it is true, he declared, that he is only staying away from Ireland because he couldn't earn enough money from the Dublin theatres. But it was "eventually" and not before. Which is the way he answers most all questions.

He is going to lecture at Harvard this afternoon, by the way.