Authors: Declan Kiberd
To O'Casey, mockery seemed a sort of perverse heroism: the Bessie Burgess who constantly jeers Nora becomes her unexpected saviour at the close, by which time the diagnoses of the jibing Covey have all been confirmed. O'Casey's was indeed a satiric vision, but it is hard to imagine any workman seeing much of himself in Fluther, or any Dublin housewife identifying with Mrs. Gogan. "Such writings as
touch no man will mend no man", said
Alexander Pope, who also remarked that
satire is a glass wherein people discover everybody's face but their own.
42
O'Casey treats his protagonists with much condescension, revealing selfishness to be their predominant motive. Those who fleetingly help their neighbours do so in a tone of self-admiration, like that of Fluther as he mends Nora Clitheroe's lock or the Covey as he reels off Marxist clichés. Many of the main speeches have a self-caressing quality, as if the stage were inhabited by egotists who talk at rather than to one another.
So, a consistently socialist perspective is not maintained to the end. Instead,
The Plough and the Stars
is an intermittently sharp diagnosis of the pitfalls in the path of a people's revolution. Through his suffering females, O'Casey calls on men to abandon illusions about their situation, but he does not see that this can be nothing other than the demand to end a situation which can feed such illusions. Insofar as O'Casey raises the issue of socialist analysis, it is to mock the exponents of ideas: the Covey is a real martyr to textuality, eternally quoting Jenersky's thesis on the origin and consolidation of the evolutionary idea of the proletariat and then denouncing an unfortunate prostitute. Ideas are considered only to be deflected as impediments to life: idealists are put on stage only for purposes of mockery. It is, in some ways, excessive to call O'Casey a
satirist, for satire presupposes some norm, by whose criteria other ways of living are found wanting: it only works if there is something about which the writer is not finally satirical. In
The Plough and the Stars,
O'Casey uses socialism to denounce nationalism, and then finds socialism inadequate anyway. For him, all -isms are wasms. He thus achieves the unusual feat of making politics one of his obsessive concerns, and yet emerging as a type of the apolitical artist. He is that strangest of modern phenomena: an auto-didact who becomes fiercely anti-intellectual.
What saves O'Casey from some of his own sentimental excesses is the fact that his instincts are often more honest than his mind. The play is dedicated "to the gay laugh of my mother at the gate of the grave" and is at its strongest, like Yeats's 1916 poem, in identifying those moments when the private world of the women and the public zones of the men refuse to stay neatly distinct. Nora wishes to make her home a haven and so she buys a lock for her hall door but to O'Casey this is a futile gesture. He cannot avoid showing the home as an intimate reflection of the corruptions of the outside political world. The basic situation of the Clitheroes tells all: the young husband's interest in his wife is fading after just a few weeks of marriage, mainly
because it is impossible for the couple to snatch even a few minutes of privacy in the crowded tenement. Their brief romantic scene is cloying to the point of embarrassment, not because Clitheroe's love is false, but because, lacking a developed idiom of tenderness, he is doomed (like O'Casey himself, in fact) to express an authentic feeling in a derived "insincere" form. The lack of privacy, the helpless availability to tenants, is the direct result of a social system which gives the lady from Rathmines a houseful of rooms and the Clitheroes not even one.
Nora's solution to poverty and overcrowding is to fill her flat with two other tenants in hopes of some day saving her way to better accommodation: Jack's is to buy a gun and strike for a better social order. So, the precise details of the play are at variance with its overall moral pattern. Overall, it suggests that the rebellion is the enemy of family life. O'Casey is forced by the facts of history to show a husband and wife who, though seemingly at odds, may be working towards the same end. Even more astonishing than Clitheroe's seven-week itch, however, is the older people's acceptance that this is the natural order of dungs. Mrs. Gogan rather savagely remarks by way of consolation to a deserted Nora: "if you'd been a little longer together, th' wrench asundher wouldn't have been so sharp".
43
This speaks volumes of the quality of married life in such conditions: the home which Clitheroe has abandoned is not as enticing as some of O'Casey's interpreters would have us believe.
At the root of this play and of Yeats's 1916 poem lay a set of allegations about the failure of
sexual relations in Ireland. In the poem, Yeats expressed his conviction that those who deny or repress their sexuality will become sloganeering caricatures: and the Covey is a further illustration of the theme. Yeats had applied the same criteria to the protesters against Synge's
Playboy,
likening them to eunuchs maddened by their own sterility in the face of the creativity of Synge. That unease with sexual repression was a common refrain among writers of the revival. In his foregrounding of Rosie Redmond, O'Casey touched a very raw nerve: "There are no prostitutes in Dublin" shouted a protester, to which a defender of the author responded "I was accosted by one last night". This led to the final put-down: "Well, mere were none till the British soldiers brought them over".
44
The exchanges had an added piquancy given the fact, recorded elsewhere by O'Casey, that many Dublin prostitutes had sheltered republican gunmen on the run from the Black-and-Tans. The whole scene was reminiscent of that during the
Playboy
riots when a young doctor told Synge that he could hardly refrain from standing on a chair and pointing out those
protesters whom he personally had treated for venereal disease. The protesters against Synge had been dissident nationalists in a British colony: O'Casey's audience was a new élite, invested with power. It was for that reason, perhaps, that he did not develop a fully worked-out sexual politics in his Dublin trilogy. However, in choosing as an unexpected heroine a loyalist alcoholic, he was brave enough to offer his own wry comment on the myth of female purity beloved of Irish nationalists. As his admirer Denis Johnston would joke, "the birth of a nation is never an Immaculate Conception".
45
The artistic problem remains, however: can Bessie's bravery retrieve the play at this late point? Her action is not just surprising but strictly unintentional. She is shot in a window-frame by the British army (in which her son so proudly serves), as she tries to comfort the ambitious housewife whom she hated for her youth and her pretensions. While her life ebbs away, she unleashes all the old animosity: "I got this through you . . . you bitch".
46
It is a moving line, in its refusal to be heroic, one of the few occasions of maximum pressure in the play when O'Casey resists the temptation to compose a rolling speech. But it is actually a refusal of tragedy, a studied refusal to enlarge her listeners' sense of the dignity or the possibilities of life. In many ways, it is a wonderful dramatic moment – but it leaves the audience with nowhere to turn, unless it can take a bleak kind of pleasure in finding dungs as bad as the mockers always claim them to be.
Irish producers have responded to this bleakness in the usual way: by playing up the buffoonery, the comedy and the farce, and by greatly subordinating the pain. (In similar fashion, after Synge's death, they extracted the violence from
The
Playboy,
leaving only the lyricism; and, after Beckett's, they
removed the suffering silences from
Waiting for Godot,
leaving only the pacy one-liners.) This device, though it has kept O'Casey remarkably popular, hardly honours his original intention. Today, there is far too little tension between the play and its audience, too little recognition that O'Casey saw himself as writing out the tragedy of an entire social class. Today, audiences see both
Juno
and
The
Plough
as portending the decay and death of Dublin's inner city: they read them as laments for a lost community, conveniently forgetting that this decay happened as a result of policies which those audiences still sponsor, and that O'Casey's people were actually victims of a British imperialism whose existence many of his current admirers completely deny. It is largely O'Casey's own fault if the
sentimentality which he indulged has proved catching among his admirers: but they may nonetheless be finding his characters more admirable than he did.
If O'Casey is impressed by these characters' endurance, he is also deeply worried by it, for he knows that it is more often blindness and ignorance rather than understanding and insight which enable people to go on. Though impressed by the human capacity to persist, he was also sufficiently Protestant to be scandalized by people's willingness to accommodate themselves to catastrophe, to acquiesce in disasters precipitated by irresponsible leaden. The trouble is that O'Casey himself becomes a party to that acquiescence, in his political denial of all hopefulness and in his artistic acceptance of outmoded forms.
For decades after independence, the 150,000 Irish who fought in the Great War (for the rights of small nations and for Home Rule after the cessation of hostilities, as many of them believed) had been officially extirpated from the record. No government representative attended their annual commemoration ceremonies in Christ Church: and none publicly sported a poppy. Such amnesia was weird, given the large number of families whose men were involved, but also considering the manifest links of mood and mentality between the Easter rebels and the battlers at the Somme. Although many soldiers in the trenches would have supported the official line that the Rising was a stab in the back, many others would have shared in the confusion reported by Monk Gibbon in
Inglorious Soldier.
This tells of how the young man of the British forces, home on leave, wondered whether he was in the right army.
The rebels emulated the demeanour of the British Army and proved that, in an issue which truly engaged their sympathies, they could be as brave as any. Accordingly, the soldier-poet
Francis Ledwidge found no great difficulty in writing a lament for his friend Thomas MacDonagh in the internal rhymes favoured by Gaelic bards on such occasions:
He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky, where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.
Nor shall he know when loud March blows
Thro' slanting snows her fanfare shrill,
Blowing to flame the golden cup
Of many an upset daffodil.
But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor,
And pastures poor with greedy weeds,
Perhaps he'll hear her low at morn
Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.
1
Only a state which was anxious to repudiate its own origins could have failed – after a predictable period of post-independence purism – to evolve a joint ceremony which celebrated the men who served in either army. It is worth recalling, in this context, that the policemen who surrendered to the Easter rebels after a fierce battle at Ashbourne, Co. Meath, reminded their captors that they were proud to be Irishmen too. In the same spirit, George Russell wrote the only significant poem of the time to lament the Irishmen who died in both conflicts. "To the Memory of Some I Knew who are Dead and who Loved Ireland", published in
The Irish Times
in December 1917, was, among other things, probably a response to "Easter
1916" and certainly a celebration of two Thomases, MacDonagh and
Kettle:
I listened to high talk from you,
Thomas MacDonagh, and it seemed,
The words were idle, but they grew
To nobleness by death redeemed.
Life cannot utter words more great
Than life may meet by sacrifice,
High words were equalled by high fate,
You paid the price: You paid the price.
You who have fought on fields afar,
That other Ireland did you wrong
Who said you shadowed Ireland's star,
Nor gave you laurel wreath nor song.
You proved by death as true as they,
In mightier conflicts played your part.
Equal your sacrifice may weigh
Dear Kettle of the generous heart.
2
Sean O'Casey, for his part, never saw the battle-fields of
Ypres, the Somme or the Dardanelles, and for that rather flimsy reason Yeats rejected
The Silver Tassie,
arguably the writer's most accomplished play. O'Casey responded with corrosive derision: "Was Shakespeare at Actium or Philippi? Was G. B. Shaw present when St. Joan made the
attack that relieved Orléans? And someone, I think, wrote a poem about Tír na nÓg, who never took a header into the Land of Youth". Yeats's answer was to lament that this play lacked "some unique central character who dominated all about him and was himself a main impulse in some action that filled the play from beginning to end". This rather naïve nostalgia for an easy, Victorian methodology came strangely from a stage experimentalist like Yeats, who might not otherwise have deserved the ensuing lecture from O'Casey: "God forgive me, but it does sound as if you peeked and pined for a hero in the play. Now, is a dominating character more important than a play, or a play more important than a dominating character? In
The Silver lassie
you have a unique work that dominates all the characters in the play".
3
That work is the war itself, which O'Casey finally brings to the centre of his stage, examining not alone its effect on civilians but also on the men who fought it. Once again, he investigates its fall-out on those in whose name it is being waged; and his theme is that its canker infects trench and home-front in equal proportions. O'Casey had no need to visit battle-fields: the war was all around him, visible in the disintegration of social and domestic relations. He measures its moral virtue in terms of the life which the soldiers defend (seen in Act One) and the life that follows the cessation of hostilities (seen in Acts Three and Four). He finds the culture eroded rather than ratified by the battles to protect it, much in the manner of the young pacifist
Bertrand Russell who, on being asked why he was not at the front defending civilization, returned the white feather to his matronly assailant with the words: "Madam, I
am
the civilization they are fighting to defend".
4
Yeats complained that the dramatic action of
The Silver Tassie
did not "burn up the author's opinions". O'Casey rejoined by asking why, then, the Abbey had mounted the opinion-crammed plays of Shaw. When consulted on the controversy, Shaw actually absolved Yeats: "he is not a man of the world and when you hurl an enormous chunk of it at him, he dodges it, small blame to him". However, Shaw helped O'Casey mount a production of his work in London. Thereafter, O'Casey in self-exile in Devon, deprived of a known audience and players in the Abbey Theatre, never again knew anything like the intense success or controversy of his Dublin years. His later plays veer off into symbolism or expressionism, which has led many Irish critics to identify
The Silver lassie
as the work in which this wrong turning, as they see it, was made.
It is no such thing, but a play in which O'Casey maintains a near-miraculous balance between the real and the symbolic. In so doing, he
solves many of the formal problems which had bedevilled his Dublin plays. In them, it was as if some inner censor had prevented O'Casey from displacing, even for a visionary moment, the oppressed and oppressive environment which he so despised. Significantly, those censors are still active in the Dublin settings of
The Silver lassie
(as if the playwright feared that carping critics might catch him out violating some tenet of photographic realism); but these acts are set in vibration with the choric
expressionism of the continental scenes. Even more subtly, within the prosaic Dublin scenes, there are redemptive moments of poetic drama, which led Shaw to praise the opening act as "deliberately fantastic chanted poetry".
This opens with a celebration of Harry Heegan's exploits in helping the Avondale Football Club to win a cup: the festive occasion, as so often in O'Casey, being shadowed by deaths in war. Here the women, enjoying governmental "separation money", are anxious to get their menfolk back "safely" to the war. They cannot understand the soldiers' irritability: "you'd imagine now, the trenches would have given him some sense of the sacredness of life";
5
and they turn to religion to justify war, for "the men that go with the guns are going with God".
6
In creating a sporting hero, O'Casey deliberately establishes an ideal of physical excellence which will be shattered in the war; and he mocks by implication the link between sport and empire in the upbringing of youth. Sport in the English schools had been long regarded as a sound preparation for battle, for the empire was built "on the playing fields of Eton"; and one company at the Somme went over the top kicking four balls, produced by officers seeking to give courage to their men.
7
A stage-direction says that Harry Heegan "has gone to the trenches as unthinkingly as he would go to a polling-booth. He isn't naturally stupid; it is the stupidity of persons in high places that has stupefied him".
8
That stupidity, which leads to a false identification of the values of religion and war, also afflicts Harry who, in his moment of victory, hoists the silver casket "joyously, rather than reverentially, as a priest would elevate a chalice". He lacks a reverence for life.
It was the second act which, in its expressionism, outraged early critics. Apart from Barney, no other character in the war-zone is identified as an individual: to the generals they are mere numbers. This was a master-stroke by O'Casey: had the play been ritualized from the start, the audience would have had difficulty sensing the characters as suffering persons, but because these characters have been introduced in naturalistic detail in Act One, the audience can know something of the extinction of personality which they now endure.
9
Such an
effect could
not be achieved either by realism or expressionism alone: it was the combination which was O'Casey's brilliant innovation. The backdrop of a ruined monastery suggests that the war has left nothing but the shell of a religion which agreed to validate it: on the other side of the stage, against me crucifix, is pitted the figure of Barney, tied for a breach of discipline to a gunwheel:
And we show man's wonderful work, well done,
To the image God ham made.
10
If the soldiers have displayed an irreverence for life in war, they are also its manifest victims. In the war-zone, me idiotic remark of Mrs. Heegan comes strangely true: they come (when it is very late) to sense the sacredness of life. O'Casey never wrote a more tender scene. (Had he managed to extend a similar imaginative sympathy to the rebels of 1916,
The Plough
would have been a far greater work.) At times, the men's chants attain an intensity reminiscent of Eliot's
religious poetry: on other occasions, their homely, cockney diction recalls the voices of the pub at closing time in
The Waste Land
:
The padre gives a fag and softly whispers;
"Your king, your country, an' your muvver 'as you 'ere".
And last time 'ome on leave I awsks the missus:
"The good God up in heaven, Bill, 'e knows,
An' I gets the seperytion money reg'lar".
11
In place of a God who refuses to appear, the soldiers can only conjure up nostalgic images of domestic bliss, of a child with a balloon, of a lane in Cumberland. The scene is cast in poetry, because their confrontation with the realities of terror and doubt has made them unconscious poets. The irrelevance of an officialdom which offers improving lectures on "the habits of those living between the Frigid Zone and the Arctic Circle" is patent: but the real shame is that soldiers capable of such intense effects in their own language should fall for the feeble rhetoric of their commanders, and end up praying to a gun which will surely destroy them. The whole of Act Two is in that sense a reworking of the second act of
The Plough,
where O'Casey depicted a people unable to understand the events that were overtaking them.
This act echoes all the key phases of the sacrifice of the Mass – the Kyrie; prayers of the faithful; prayers for the dead. However, there is no consecration, no mention of the silver tassie. That moment had
occurred, out of proper time, in Act One, when Harry hoisted the chalice, but it was a false consecration, a blasphemous parody of the Mass, courting punishment. In this act, "every feature of the scene seems a little distorted from its original appearance",
12
which is how the tassie will appear on its return in later acts. By then, it symbolizes suffering rather than victory, a casket-turned-chalice. Harry comes to learn this deeper meaning and to confess that "the Lord hath given and man hath taken away!".
13
The war may be over in those two closing acts, but its horrors continue: as Harry says of his unrequiting lover, "the shell that hit me bursts forever between Jessie and me".
14
The question put in
Juno
– how does a society which creates heroes with such relish actually treat them when they fall? – is raised again with more subtlety. O'Casey shows that society can never discharge its responsibilities to such figures, for to do so would be to admit the self-deception which is the basis of the communal fantasy. (It seems a loss, in this connection, that he could not have written a play on the Free States similar treatment
of
defeated republicans after 1923.) O'Casey demonstrates, with rare empathy, how the demobbed soldiers hated returning home, because they were tortured by their inability to describe the war to relatives: a problem which he had faced (and dodged) in
The Plough.
In Act Three here, nobody can talk honestly to Harry: his isolation is an eerie continuation of his condition in the war-zone, where each soldier stood on a spookily silent set and "only flashes are seen. No noise is heard".
15
Harry Heegan has to cure himself of his own bitterness, because the others have learned nothing from the war even his best friend Barney comes home only to steal his lover. The metaphor of illness which had persisted like a stain through O'Casey's earlier plays (in such figures as Johnny Boyle and Mollser) is enriched here, as the victim somehow fights back and asserts a measure of self-knowledge and of dignity. The post-war world, with its studied effort to be trivial, is acutely rendered, and the mood is similar to that of D. H. Lawrence's
Kangaroo:
We hear so much of the bravery and horrors at me front. It was at home the war was lost ... At home stayed all the jackals, middle-aged, male and female jackals. And they bit us all. And blood-poisoning and mortification set in ... They were feeding on our death all the while.
16
The energy of O'Casey's anger is tapped and disciplined by ritualized choruses, by symbol and silence, and by his subordination of character to symbolic pattern, as the phases of prosaic realism are punctuated by
passages of austere poetry. All of these make
The Silver
Tassie
the most Yeatsian of plays, which leads to the suspicion that Yeats may have banned it from the Abbey Theatre because of a subconscious resentment that O'Casey had invaded his staked-out territory and made it his own too.