On & On with Sean

ROSE AND CROWN (323 pp.)--Sean O'Casey--Macmillan ($4.75).

In 1929, William Butler Yeats wrote to Sean O'Casey explaining why the Abbey Theater was rejecting The Silver Tassie, Sean's new play about World War I. "I am sad and discouraged," Yeats complained. "You have no theme. You were interested in the Irish Civil War and at every moment of those plays wrote out of your own amusement with life or your sense of its tragedy . . . but you are not interested in the Great War; you never stood on its battlefields, never walked its hospitals, and so write out of your opinions. You illustrate those opinions by a series of almost unrelated scenes, as you might in a leading article."

Yeats's rejection slip caused the loudest literary furor of the year. O'Casey took his Tassie to Producer C. B. Cochran, who staged it brilliantly and profited handsomely by the Yeats-O'Casey uproar. Today, this battle seems a mere skirmish in literary history--to everyone except Sean O'Casey, who describes it in the fifth volume of his autobiography as if it were the Battle of the Boyne.

Yeats's letter hit O'Casey at a moment when he was girding for greater battles. He had just left Ireland and was "planting a foot for the first time on the pavement of London ... to be shown off, a new oddity ... a guttersnipe among . . . the richly clad, the slum dramatist, who, in the midst of a great darkness, had seen a greater light" (i.e., Marxlight). Rose and Crown tells how O'Casey had to struggle in the next few years not only to support his wife and child but to keep his proletarian poise.

Virgil or Ferghil? London society was very kind to Sean. When he ailed, the aristocrats sent their limousines to haul him away to the doctor; when he was destitute, they gave him money and a home. They asked him to their receptions and gave him a chance to glower--which he did with a will. One evening he buttonholed Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and refused to let the stolid statesman go until he had listened to O'Casey's thesis that Virgil, commonly known as a Roman poet, was actually a Celt named Ferghil. "The Celtic race must indeed have been an amazing one," replied poor Baldwin.

Why did such people put up with O'Casey's blend of mystical dither and proletarian blather? Partly because (as O'Casey is happy to emphasize) they had a lot of money but were pinched for poetry. Moreover, every fashionable hostess likes to show off a lion, even if she is not a competent judge of lionflesh. But London's aristocrats also put up with O'Casey out of kindness, and this put him in a moral jam. He did not decline their invitations, but he did not want to suffer a decline in his proletarian reputation.

In Rose and Crown, O'Casey tries to straighten out this snarl, and his means are neither new nor pleasing. He describes the great houses in detail--the Sheraton, the Chippendale, the mother-of-pearl, the ebony, the sparkle of diamonds on "a white and saucy breast." It was a spectacle, he says, "that fair dazzled the eye," and he admits that he found it "elegant," "gracious." even "delightful at times." But he then goes on to say how much it disgusted him. Moreover, his hostesses were all deaf and seemed not to hear when he cried: "Come, sell all thou hast, and come follow me . . . follow the people."

World by the Waist? The same sort of double life persisted when O'Casey went abroad. He traveled to the U.S. in all the luxury of cabin class, but he atoned for this by asking "if he could have his meals with the crew." In New York (for the production of Within the Gates'), he landed in a world of "walnut and mahogany reflecting the gleam of glass and the glitter of silver," a world more "fit for Arnold Bennett. . . than . . . Walt Whitman." At which point the reader suspects that it fit O'Casey like a glove.

"His talents are undeniable," writes Sean O'Faolain, "but so far they have not produced a play without the stamp of the workshop on it." The same can be said of O'Casey's autobiography. Most of its long and lyrical passages of proletarian praise are marked chiefly by what Stephen Potter might call prosemanship. Here & there are real gems of observation and poetic imagination. But when O'Casey declares that he would like 1,000 years of life "to encircle [the peoples of the world] with his arms like a girdle encircling the waist of a motherly woman," the reader can only feel that even if Providence permitted the embrace, the world would be wise to wriggle out of it.

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