Authors: Declan Kiberd
On the surface at any rate, O'Casey had many advantages with this topic. The Rising hardly needed to be theatricalized; it simply needed to be transferred from street to stage. Despite the patent sincerity of its
leader, Patrick Pearse was, in the words of one of his staunchest female admirers, "a bit of a
poseur".
15
He wore an ancient sword through much of the urban guerrilla confrontation and insisted on handing it formally to the leader of the British forces at the moment of surrender. The
theatricality implicit in the choice of date and location was evident also in the demeanour of the rebel leaders: MacDonagh carried a swordstick and cloak,
Ceannt wore a kilt and played bagpipes in the lulls between fighting, Plunkett sported Celtic rings and bracelets and, having been condemned to death by the court-martial, married the beautiful
Grace Gifford in a midnight ceremony before his execution at dawn. In casting themselves in these self-appointed roles as sacrificial heroes, they were conscious of re-enacting the Cuchulain myth. Even the Proclamation repeated the Gaelic conceit of Ireland as a woman summoning "her children to her flag".
Yeats's poem "Easter 1916" is happy to treat the rebels as they saw themselves, but O'Casey is resolute in his refusal of such artfulness. A paradox ensues. The national playwright spurns the theatricality of the rebels and searches instead for signs of a defiant poetry on the lips of the urban poor, whereas it is the national poet who celebrates the insurgents in terms drawn from tragedy. O'Casey despises such heroics as boyscoutish vanity and he mocks the obsession with swords and uniforms as the decadent vanity of self-deceiving men. While Yeats lists the names of the warrior dead, O'Casey worries about the nameless civilian casualties. Where Yeats salutes the heroism of the rebels – while, of course, questioning its necessity – O'Casey goes farther and questions the whole idea of a hero. The Cuchulain cult appears to the playwright less as a spur to battle than as a confession of impotence. It is only the timid and the weak, he implies, who desire the vicarious thrill afforded by the blood-sacrificing rhetoric of Pearse, the speaker at the window in the second act.
This treatment must have recalled for older members of the Abbey audience Synge's own mockery of the Mayo villagers in
The Playboy of the Western World
it had been a mark of their emptiness that they should have made a nonentity like Christy Mahon into a celebrity. In both cases, it was probably the critique of heroism (rather than specific irritants such as Synge's use of the word "shift" or O'Casey's juxtaposition of the Citizen Army flag with a prostitute) which roused nationalists to protest. The 1926 audience was tolerant enough of Yeats's refrain "A terrible beauty is born", but O'Casey later savaged it in his autobiography by titling one of its chapters "A Terrible Beauty is Borneo" (source of the famous Wild Man).
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The difference between
Yeats's and O'Casey's responses can best be explained with reference to another play,
The Life of
Galileo
by
Bertolt Brecht. There, a youthful radical had appealed to Galileo to defy the church inquisition and, having been rebuffed, lamented "Unhappy the land which has no heroes": and that is the voice of Yeats. After due reflection, however, Galileo responds with the sad wisdom of experience: "No, unhappy the land that is in need of heroes"
17
: and
that
is the voice of O'Casey.
Not everybody concurred with Yeats's vision of the Rising as a Greek tragedy. At the end of the episode, one British officer sarcastically quipped: "The Irish ought to be grateful to us. With a minimum of casualties to the civilian population, we have succeeded in removing some third-rate poets".
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The remark, though flippant and insensitive, has a kind of honesty about it: the honesty of a man who is still too close to an event to grasp its long-term significance. It is useful in other ways, too, because it reminds us that for every person a great public event is, also, and finally, a private experience. For most Dubliners, the week was memorable because of the difficulty in finding bread and groceries. Such personal considerations might also explain the public activities of many leaders, if we could only know for sure: it has been suggested, for example, that Pearse's school was in debt by Easter
1916 and that a rebellion appeared to him to be as good a way as any of escaping pressing creditors.
Apart from his political reservations, O'Casey had a personal reason for staying out of the Rising: he had to nurse his ailing mother, of whom he was sole support. This explains that poignant scene of the play which has the future rebels declare that "Ireland is greater than a mother/wife"
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: O'Casey did not agree and chose to spurn the abstract Mother Ireland for the flesh-and-blood woman who needed his support back in East Wall. For years, through his work in the Gaelic League and Citizen Army, he had helped to wind the revolutionary clock: now, as it started to strike, he stayed away. Much the same might be said of Yeats who, as a young man, had been a figure in the Irish Republican Brotherhood: but in later years the
Playboy
riots marked his irreparable
break with militant nationalism. Yeats was reported to be rather insulted that the leaders had not informed him before taking action. His immediate response was coloured as much by private as by public considerations: the knowledge that young rebels had been excited by his plays; the involvement of Pearse with whom he had collaborated; and, of course, the death of MacBride who had been his rival for the hand of Maud Gonne. Looked at in this way, O'Casey and Yeats appear as figures complementary to the rebel leaders. Men like Pearse and
MacDonagh had begun as playwrights and poets but, having failed to satisfy their natures in art, turned to a life of action.
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O'Casey and Yeats had been political activists but, growing weary of the rigidity of many nationalists, had turned for glory to a life of art. It can be argued that while the writers were frustrated revolutionaries, the rebels were frustrated poets. Presumably, this was what the British officer meant by his quip.
The power of "Easter 1916" arises from the balance maintained between Yeats's public and private responses: his bardic duty to celebrate the dead was countered, as has been shown, by a personal questioning of hearts which seemed to have enchanted themselves to a stone. The latter image was borrowed by O'Casey for
Juno and the Paycock:
"Sacred Heart of the Crucified Jesus, take away our hearts o' stone an' give us hearts o' flesh!".
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The final effect of Yeats's poem is a balanced assessment of the event, implicit in his subtle use of the stone image: for its very fixity and immobility cause ripples in the stream, just as the rebels by their unchanging fidelity changed everything. The tribute to those rebels seems the richer for being able to survive hard questions: it is self-critical, unlike the "ignorant goodwill" of the fanatic. "We make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric", said Yeats, "but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry".
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"Easter 1916" enacts that truth in its poised debate between public and private voices. This is not consistently the case with O'Casey's play, which sometimes seems less a quarrel with himself than with others, a retrospective attempt to justify his absence from the Rising and to question the motives of those who fought. His political reasoning is sated by the Covey:
When I dunk of all th' problems in front o' the workers, it makes me sick to be lookin at oul codgers goin' about dhressed up like green-accoutred figures gone ashtray out of a toy shop!
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Later, he will remind listeners that more die of consumption than are killed in the wars, "because of th' system we're livin' undher",
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and the only war worth fighting is to improve the material well-being of workers. In all this, tainted witness though he be, the Covey speaks for O'Casey who attempts in
The Plough and the Stars
to compose a tragedy of irrelevance – on the irrelevance of the rebels to the needs of the people in whose name they act, or the irrelevance of the speechifying Pearse to the needs of a prostitute. The irrelevance declares itself most obviously for O'Casey at the level of language. Pearse is heard to use the resonant idiom of Christian religion to promote his military
purpose ("without the shedding of blood there is no redemption") and this leads to a confusion of realms: the listeners think themselves excited by a political challenge, when actually they may be responding to the familiar imagery of the Mass. The Covey's materialist diagnosis is vindicated, even if his shying away from Rosie Redmond exposes him as a prude: the crowd thrills at first to the
rhetoric of Pearse, and then discredits his cause by their
looting. O'Casey, therefore, chooses to locate Pearse offstage, suggesting he is not really a force in their lives: but mere may be other, technical reasons for this
treatment. Just as Synge's marginalization of Catholic priests owed much to his ignorance of rural spirituality, so O'Casey faces a problem which confronts all artists of revolution: how to render a turbulence which has eluded all previous framing devices?
This was, of course, initially a problem for the rebels, who solved it by using religious and mystical imagery: but for O'Casey, this was just not good enough. Pearse achieved a partial solution of the crisis of representation by resort to a biblical language: O'Casey, faced with the same difficulty, refused to attempt a solution at all. This is scarcely the radical ploy it has sometimes been made to seem. Rather than admit the powerful disruption of both Christian and Celtic codes by their subversive combination in the rhetoric of Pearse, O'Casey opted for the much safer, traditional repetition of Christian moralism: his Bessie Burgess, the loyalist alcoholic, is centralized. While the rebels are portrayed as prating of blood-sacrifice, she is extolled as the one personality onstage who actually honours that code. The gunmen are depicted by O'Casey, and by later revisionist historians, as Catholic bigots rather than as men who by rising risked damnation by official Catholicism. The Pearse on O'Casey's stage does not die, but is a dealer in the deaths of others: the brute facts of history, however, show that the gunmen died for the people, just as the people also died for gunmen.
O'Casey does, of course, achieve some piercing insights. He is acute on the self-deception of some rebels, as they flee the war-zone. Clitheroe fires a warning-shot over the heads of looters: however, he refuses to fire directly at them because "bad as they are, they're Irish men and women". His companion, Captain Brennan, follows James Connolly in asserting that the looters should be shot: "If these slum lice gather at our heels again, plug one o' them or I'll soon shock them with a shot or two myself".
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While his anger is understandable, the snobbish contempt with which it is stated is not. As a matter of record, looters took mainly food and clothing, risking death to do so.
26
The
phrase "slum lice" indicates a gulf of misunderstanding between some insurgents and the people in whose name they rose, a misunderstanding which has dogged the efforts of many republican militants in the decades since. The respectability of some Gaelic Leaguers was coming home to roost.
All of this is based on socialist criteria which people may admire or not as they please, but the single-mindedness of the critique may reduce the stature of the play. Great literature always has a place for the essential criticism of the code to which it finally adheres, which means that the play, if it is to be truly artistic should render the full pressure of the nationalist appeal, especially if the superior validity of socialism is to be established. In
The Plough and the Stars,
however, the nationalist case is never put, merely mocked. This has led Seamus
Deane to complain that all of O'Casey's gunmen are shadows:
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not for even twenty minutes of a two-and-a-half hour play are the rebels allowed to state their case. The extracts used from Pearse's speeches are highly selective, focusing on his blood-rhetoric at the grave of O'Donovan
Rossa, but giving no indication of his support for Dublin workers during the Lock Out of 1913.
Pearse's recantation in that year of earlier attacks on Synge showed his identification with the playwright in a martyr's role, but also the progressive refinement of his literary sensibility under the influence of MacDonagh. Connolly was also a conditioning force in those years, leading Pearse to move beyond the notion of a single Christlike redeemer to the idea of a people as its own Messiah. This was of a piece with O'Casey's rejection of individualist heroism; and, indeed, as
1916 approached, Pearse often seemed to out-socialize Connolly, as when he wrote of the democratic effect on nationalism of "the more virile labour organizations", or when he declared that "no private right to property is good against the public right of the nation. But the nation is under a moral obligation so to exercise its public right as to secure strictly equal rights and liberties to every man and woman within the nation".
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An urge to
self-justification mars the artistic balance of O'Casey's play, an urge which probably had roots in the survivor-guilt of a former Citizen Army man. He recoiled, for honourable reasons, from the carnage of 1916, but the natural aggression that remained unpurged in his personality was finally vented on the rebels in his text. He was rigidly selective in the motives attributed to them. Doubtless, there were vain men in the Rising such as Captain Clitheroe, men as interested in self-advancement as in serving a cause; and doubtless there
were weak men, like Lieutenant Langon, whose courage failed them when they were wounded or fell. But there were others too, whom O'Casey does not depict but who evoked heartfelt tributes from their enemies. In shaping his myth of the Rising, O'Casey was capable of inaccuracy, as when he portrayed the rebels using dum-dum bullets: even the official British enquiry found no evidence of that. Disgusted by a violence he had once endorsed, O'Casey felt the need to distort the evidence, exaggerating the mendacity of some rebels and the virtues of their British opponents.