Inventing Ireland (31 page)

Yet still he names no names, perhaps out of tact, more likely because he wants to assume intimacy and to place himself at the centre of an event which happened during one of his absences from Ireland. "That woman" (Constance Markievicz), "this man" (Patrick Pearse), "the other" (
Thomas MacDonagh) are all discussed, praised, and their lost beauty, learning and literary skill are pondered. Even the despised
John MacBride (who married Maud Gonne and was deemed a drunken lout in the earlier dream) must now be numbered, however reluctantly, in the song. Despite most "bitter wrong" done to the poet's beloved, he also has been transformed.

The third stanza offers an accounting of the joys of life which might have made these idealists reconsider their "dream" of death. As in "The Stolen Child", the homely realities of farm life and household animals seem concrete and alluring against the stone-enchanted heart. The horse-hoof plashing in the real pool seems somehow preferable to the winged horse ridden by Pearse in the previous stanza. The changes of cloud, birds and riders seem more vital than the unchanging stone: yet they only "seem" so, for without that stone in its fixity no ripples could vibrate at all. So the poet, with scrupulous exactitude, claims only that sacrifice "can" make a stone of the heart. By refusing to change the rebels have, in fact, changed everything, yet even in that recognition the poet is still not convinced that they were right. For "Easter 1916" is a covert love-lyric, written to soften an unrelenting woman, and the poet
wishes to ask Maud to forget the stone for the flashing joy of the fully lived life. His own fanatical devotion has left him childless at fifty, a man who in another poem of the period would contrast the passionate coupling of Coole's swans with his own lonely mortality: and here the swans become hens calling out to their moorcocks, while the poet feels himself the victim of a dilemma ("excess of love") no different from that posed by the rebels' reckless self-sacrifice:

What if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?

The final stanza collapses into a series of terrified questions, none of them properly answered, but each suppressed by an even more pressing interrogation. The post-bardic desperation of a prayer to God:

O when may it suffice?

is checked at once by a return to traditional duties:

That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name . . .

However, other questions will not be denied, though none can be entertained for long:

What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream: enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.

Those questions are charged with personal passion, while the statements are a fulfilment of bardic duties, shot through with tones of increasing resignation. The demetaphorizing imagination which could reduce a
Pegasus to a splashing horse now revokes all romantic he-is-not-dead-but-sleeping evasions. This movement is complex, for it countervails the attempt by the rebels to raise their mundane lives to the level of the mythical. The rebels dreamed – as the poet had earlier "dreamed" MacBride a mere lout – and the verb suggests that they may
have all been mistaken in various ways: but the poet writes as one waking to a new reality.

The hardest question of all is the last: what if the rebels' love was converted by the magic stone to hatred of England? But the thought is insupportable: and so the personal interrogations of the poet, about the cost to human integrity of such drastic self-simplification, are drowned out by the somewhat perfunctory but conclusive intonations of the bard:

I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly,
A terrible beauty is born.

The very stridency of the triple negation back in "no, no, not night but death" indicates how much forcing is needed to suppress those questions, if the poet is to deliver the encomium promised in the tide. Those questions prove so searing as to throw into doubt the self-assurance of the refrain, a doubt already voiced in terms of the costs to their sexuality of the political convictions of Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz.

At the outset of the poem, the refrain was declamatory enough: by the end of the third stanza, however, it is omitted, as if the poet is no longer sure that he has anything to celebrate. When it returns at the close, it comes back shamefacedly, as an admittedly rhetorical device to suppress the terrifying interrogation. It would be voiced hesitantly by a skilled reader, with the terror rather than the beauty now uppermost. The public bard is still trying to complete a poem which will please Maud Gonne, while the private lover is still hoping to cure her of political rigidity, urging her to forget the stone for the call of the moorcock. And, since "Easter 1916" is a love poem, its final refrain must be interrogative more than assertive, ironic rather than literal. The very fact that it is based on Gonne's recorded response to the Rising ("tragic dignity has returned to Ireland") would suggest that the poet can endorse it only with severe qualification. That qualification may be read into the rather clichéd tones of the closing lines, which seem sometimes like fillers ("Now and in time to be") or like jaded formulae ("Wherever green is worn"), indicating Yeats's bitter awareness that this
utterance, too, will become part of the inevitable simplification of a complex event. As a national (rather than nationalist) poet, he has tried to articulate the contesting feelings of rival Irish groups at the time – the feelings of the rebels' supporters after the executions; the sentiments of those still convinced of England's goodwill; the pacifists who saw violence in terms of human cost; the ascendancy mockers. However, he foresees that these strands will all be forgotten, as the rebels are converted into classroom clichés and his own poem quoted only for a refrain which will be ripped out of its wider context. The rebels are changed, but into the fixity of heroes in a museum.

The underlying strategy is a delayed delivery of the audience's expectation, whose compelled attention the poet holds while he lodges all the necessary reservations. This allows
Yeats to explore his own deeper affinities with the ascetic revolutionary mentality, so that his questioning of the rebels is not ill-bred, since it is really his interrogation of himself. Phrases from the writings of the dead men haunt his lines: for example,
Pearse's "excess of love" which allows his "fool" to die for the Gael, leaving a sorrowful "mother" naming her child. The poem is thus a disguised exercise in inter-textuality, with the words of dead men modified by those of a living poet, who has grown terrified of the coercive power of texts. He goes through the inevitable guilt-ridden feelings of a survivor who has seen others live out more fully the implications of his Cuchulain, his Cathleen, his world. This may hint at a further reason for his prolonged hesitation to name: if to name is to assert power over the rebels, then to refuse that option is to admit their power over him, an influence discernible in his complimentary use of quotations and metaphors from their writings.

Dining with society personages in England when news broke of the Rising, Yeats must have felt himself marginal to the event: and his poem becomes his subsequent attempt to insert himself back into history, to regain control and to earn the right
to
perform that final bardic naming. Ironically, by the time the poet has won himself that right, he can no longer enjoy it. History has taken fire as virtue, but it has taken fire in someone else's head.

Such was the interaction between street and stage in the years after 1916 that the following note appeared on the programme for Sean O'Casey's first successful play: "Any gunshots heard during the performance are part of the script. Members of the audience must at all times remain seated".
The Shadow of a Gunman
was produced at the Abbey Theatre on 23 April 1923, while the final gunfire of the Civil War erupted sporadically through the ensuing, uneasy week. The events treated in the play had taken place less than three years earlier, in May 1920, but
Joseph Holloway could write in his diary, after returning home from the production, of "that stirring period in our history".
¹
It was as if, saddened by the frustrations of the 1921 Treaty and by the fratricide of the Civil War, he was already investing the War of Independence with the aura of a golden age when all Irish people could agree on what they were fighting for. Such nostalgia overlooked the massive suffering endured by many townlands at the hands of the Black-and-Tans. Not the least of O'Casey's achievements in
The Shadow of a Gunman
was to remind sentimental nationalists of just how wasteful and unheroic any war – even a war of national liberation – can be.

O'Casey was a working-class realist who focused his Dublin plays not on the deeds of warriors but on the pangs of the poor. These people found their streets invaded by rival armies who used them as shooting-galleries for weeks on end. O'Casey's deepest indictment of the rebels was that he allowed them to appear so seldom on his stage, as if to suggest the irrelevance of their lofty ideals to the actual needs of the urban poor. As far back as 1914, he had decided that James Connolly had made a terrible mistake in bringing his Irish Citizen Army into a direct alliance with the nationalist forces of the Irish Volunteers. He reminded Connolly of his oft-repeated maxim that you could paint all the pillar-boxes green and hoist the tricolour over Dublin Castle, and
yet achieve nothing, for unless there was a change in the distribution of wealth, you would simply be exchanging one
set
of exploiters for another. He resigned from the Citizen Army on this and a number of related principles.
²
Events thereafter in Irish public life unfolded very much as he had feared.

His fullest artistic expression of the ensuing disappointment is in
Juno and the Paycock.
There, the stock
melodramatic device of a legacy which turns out to be false would be taken as his sarcastic metaphor for what he derided as the fake inheritance of Irish republicanism. Equally, the melodramatic device of the rapacious Englishman who leaves a decent Irish girl pregnant could be read as his indictment of a dishonest and over-hasty British withdrawal, which seemed to create far more problems than it solved. The execution of Johnny Boyle in the play by former comrades was an apt image of a land sundered by civil war: but for
O'Casey the most depressing feature of all was the sudden pretensions to respectability among republican families, as yesterdays rebels rapidly became the new managers and exploiters of the infant state. The Boyle family, who had once encouraged their son's republican principles, end up mocking him as a "die-hard", leading to the erosion
of
his self-confidence which causes him
to
betray his principles. But, long years before he had written this script, O'Casey had foreseen it all.

It was, in a sense, inevitable that he would identify his cause as that of the Dublin poor. He was born in 1880, one of thirteen children, eight of whom died in childhood. Dublin in those years was a raw and desperate place: its death-rate (forty-four in every thousand of population) was worse than the slums of Calcutta. Almost one-third of its citizens lived in tenements (many officially listed as unfit for habitation), and over two-thirds of the tenement-dwellers lived in a single room. On average, over fifty people lived in each tenement. Such a setting dictated the controlling mood of the Dublin plays, each of which is a study in claustrophobia, in the helpless availability of persons, denied any right to privacy and doomed to live in one another's pockets. Many of O'Casey's poetic speeches are attempts by characters to create a more spacious world in the imagination than the drab, constricted place in which they are expected to live. In that respect, O'Casey is an heir to Synge, who had found in the rich idiom of the peasantry an implicit critique of a monochromatic world. Moreover, all the nervous joking by characters about money-lending and evictions was rooted in the social realities of the time. Almost one-third of tenement-dwellers were evicted annually for inability to pay rent: hardly surprising when the average wage for an adult male was fourteen
shillings for a seventy-hour week. In evidence given to the official enquiry into the cause of the 1913 Lock-Out, the labour leader Jim Larkin told the commission what every worker in Dublin already knew: that the dire accommodation in Mountjoy prison was nonetheless far superior to that on offer in the Dublin slums.
³

Though
O'Casey's family was nothing like the poorest of the poor, this was a life which he knew fairly well. His father died when the boy was young, bequeathing to his son a love of books, especially the sentimental melodramas of Dion Boucicault, in which O'Casey delighted to act. Their robust juxtaposition of
farce and tragedy was a lesson he would apply in his plays, despite the raised eyebrows of some fastidious critics. O'Casey's idea of a well-made play was only partly conditioned by Abbey precedent: indeed, his autobiography recalls how he stood in a milling crowd outside the theatre on the night of the
Playboy
riots, consumed with curiosity yet cursing his inability to afford the shilling admission fee.
⁴

An even more potent influence were the conventional Victorian melodramas (which he saw regularly at the
Queen's Theatre for sixpence) and the stock situations of the music-hall variety show. Hence his delight in the comic male pair, straight man and joker, Davoren and Shields, Joxer and the Paycock, Uncle Peter and the Covey, Simon and Sylvester, each
duo traceable to the stock Irish types of English drama. Though accused by purists of perpetrating another stage-Irish fraud, O'Casey breathed life into a moribund tradition, so that it was later available to Samuel
Beckett, in such couples as Didi and Gogo, or Hamm and Clov. Indeed, the younger Beckett would astutely link O'Casey's drama to the music-hall in a handsome tribute: "Mr. O'Casey is a master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sense – that he discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities. This is the energy of his theatre, the triumph of the principle of knockabout in situation, in all its elements and on all its planes, from the furniture to the higher centres".
⁵
Despite their youthful pomposity, those sentences explain O'Casey's immediate acclaim from Dublin audiences, for he saved the Abbey from financial ruin by wooing large numbers of the Queen's audience to his plays.

Before his advent, cynics complained that Yeats and his co-directors had a machine which tested each play for a mystery ingredient dubbed PQ (peasant quality); but after
The Shadow of a Gunman
audiences could see new kinds of character in an urban setting. Whether they were actually witnessing a radically new form of drama is doubtful, but certainly they were seeing elements of the variety-show in the revised
contours of the Abbey play. These successes permitted the short-sighted labourer (then in middle age) to escape from poverty and they gave him the chance to challenge some of the emerging orthodoxies of the new state. While he entertained audiences with a song and a joke, he could question some of their ingrained assumptions. This
Shavian technique had its dangers, of course: people, confronted with a sweetened propaganda pill, might learn how to suck off the sugar coating and leave the pill behind.

Nonetheless, O'Casey asked vitally important questions at just the right time. Though an early enthusiast of the Gaelic League, he detected a fatal addiction to respectability among his cohorts, some of whom had "confused the fight for Irish with the fight for collars and ties".
⁶
These people, he sourly noted, despised the labourer whose Irish was in truth far better than theirs. At about the time of his breach with the Citizen Army, O'Casey initiated a caustic analysis of the Gaelic League: "the problem of havin' enough to eat was of more importance than of havin' a little Irish
to
speak". By 1919 he had extended his critique of idealism to the sacred entity of socialism itself: "Self-realization is more important than class-consciousness. Trade Unionism may give the worker a larger dinner-plate – which he badly needs – but it will never give him a broader mind, which he needs more badly still".
⁷

Nevertheless, the playwright was marked forever by his early years as a loyal assistant and secretary to Connolly in the Irish Citizen Army. It was as a socialist orator that he had first developed his
rhetorical skills, with the constant repetition of key words and sonorous phrases to create a rhythmical, rolling cadence, mounting towards a crescendo in the closing sentence. This is a technique to be found not only in purple passages of his
History of the Citizen Army,
but in many protracted speeches of the plays. There is one major difference, of course: the style used in the history to extol military action is later used, even more powerfully, to denounce it. As a style, it won worldwide acclaim in the 1920s and 1930s, especially among emerging black writers, for whom
Langston Hughes spoke when he wrote: "The local and regional can become universal. Sean O'Casey's Irishmen are an example. So I would say to young Negro writers, do not be afraid of yourselves. You are the world".
⁸

That style could produce remarkable effects, as in Seamas Shields's commonsensical outburst in
The Shadow of a Gunman
: "I believe in the freedom of Ireland and that England has no right to be here, but I draw the line when I hear the gunmen blowin' about dyin' for the people, when it's the people that are dyin for the gunmen! With all due
respects for the gunmen, I don't want them to die for me!"
⁹
Shields, a man who has repented of his former
republican idealism, orates from his untidy bed and is closer to O'Casey's views than any other character in a powerful, if finally coarse, play. He has the sharpness of mind to expose the ways in which war can mask its hideousness in the symbols of Christian belief:

The country is gone mad. Instead of countin' their beads now they're countin' bullets; their Hail Marys and Pater Nosters are burstin' bombs – petrol is their holy water; their Mass is a burnin' building; their "De Profundis" is
"The Soldier's Song" and their creed is, I believe in the gun almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . .
¹⁰

Despite this intensity, the character develops a shrewd line in self-deflation. Reminded of a time when he himself believed in nothing but the gun, he jocularly replies "Ay, when there wasn't a gun in the country". Shields may also speak for O'Casey in his assertion that his is not an attitude of cowardice so much as one of practicality:

. . . you're not goin' to beat the British Empire by shootin' an occasional Tommy at the corner of an occasional street. Besides, when the Tommies have the wind up they let a bang at everything they see – they don't give a God's curse who they plug . .. It's the civilians that suffer, when there's an ambush, they don't know where to run. Shot in the back to save the British Empire, an' shot in the breast to save the soul of Ireland.
¹¹

For O'Casey the twin competing factions of Orange and Green had become dreadful images of one another. However, a vital question remained: was this diagnosis that of a cynical, sidelined nihilist, or did O'Casey offer it from some alternative point of vantage?

He had at least one thing in common with James Joyce: a conviction that the songs and stories of the past always celebrated the wrong people, the smiters rather than the smitten. For all his impatience with republican militants, he was deeply moved by the assertion of the hunger-striker
Terence MacSwiney that it was not the people who could inflict the most but those who could suffer the most who would win in the end. Hence his insistence that real heroism often emerges wherever and whenever it is least expected, frequently in women like Juno or Mary Boyle. Yet this heroism, on inspection, is often no more than a sturdy refusal of all abstract ideals in the name of the suffering human body. Mrs. Boyle, for instance, may sound at times like a
commonsensical socialist, when she tells her wounded nationalist son: "You lost your best principle when you lost your arm: them's the only sort o' principles that's any good to a workin man".
¹²
But she uses the same cutting eloquence to deride the labourist politics of her daughter: "When the employers sacrifice wan victim, the
Trade Unions go wan betther be sacrificin' a hundred".
¹³
To her daughters insistence that a principle is still a principle, she corrosively responds that principles don't pay the shopkeeper. Yet she becomes the moral centre of O'Casey's play, which itself amounts to little more than an attack on all -isms and a celebration of those wives who pick up the pieces left in idealism's wake.

O'Casey's code scarcely moved beyond a
sentimentalization of victims, and this in turn led him to a profound distrust of anyone who makes an idea the basis for an action. If this was radicalism, Irish-style, it was a bleak illustration of the old truism that in Ireland "socialism" never stood for much more than a fundamental goodness of heart. As a dramatist (if not as a prose-writer), O'Casey proved no more capable than any of his characters of developing or analyzing an idea. He was at his best in describing the horrors of war rather than its causes: and he could show, with poignant detail, the defeat of entire communities in the face of imperial coercion, nationalist
naïveté
and the blindness of ordinary people to their real self-interest. But he seemed unable in any work of art to raise questions about the quality of thinking which could give rise to such blindness. He did issue his stirring demand, through Juno Boyle, that people abandon idealist illusions: she tells her daughter that war and want have nothing to do with the will of God: "Ah, what can God do agen the stupidity o' men?"
¹⁴
In this fashion, he told people that they had the power to shape their own lives, to be the subjects as well as the objects of history: but he aborted the dialectic at that point in a play which resolutely mocks anyone who takes an idea seriously. Ideas in his
schema
are anti-life: those who spout aphorisms from texts, whether theosophical or socialist, all emerge in the end as blathering and blithering idiots. This is not just true of
Juno and the Paycock
but of
The Plough and the Stars
which, for all its flaws, remains a remarkable play. In it, O'Casey confronted himself with the greatest technical challenge of his career,
the
challenge also faced by Yeats: how to represent onstage a revolution in all its nobility, its baseness and its unprecedented turbulence.