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Sean O'Casey The Playwright and the Stars

SEAN O'CASEY A Life By Garry O'Connor Atheneum. 448 pp. $25

THE DUBLIN PLAYS of Sean O'Casey, products of the Irish troubles of the first two decades of this century, continue to have an immediate and wrenching relevance because of the crescendo of political murders in the North of Ireland for the past 20 years. For many people, the urgent prayer of Mrs. Tancred in Juno and the Paycock, repeated later by Juno, seems to offer the only permanent solution to the Irish problem -- a change of heart that would substitute human values for brutalizing political commitment: "Sacred Heart O' Jesus, take away our hearts o' stone, an' give us flesh! Take away this murderin' hate, an' give us thine own eternal love!"

There are problems with this separation of morality from politics, of course, but there can be no doubt that O'Casey remains a great popular dramatist. At least in Ireland, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars will continue, apparently forever, to move audiences to tears one moment and make them laugh the next. Many in the audience at an O'Casey play, even today, are not regular theatergoers, but will go to see reflected on the stage the subculture of a poverty with which they have at least a nodding acquaintance. They see, too, a humanism and working-class solidarity which challenges the sacrificial ideology of Irish nationalism. And they cheer on O'Casey's strong women, who offer, as real life counterparts in Ulster sometimes do, a robust resistance to the destructive politics inspired by male hatred and vanity.

Garry O'Connor's book is the first attempt at a full-length biography of O'Casey. His subtitle, in its use of the indefinite article, suggests a wise modesty about claiming authoritativeness: there will doubtless be other and rather different lives of this controversial figure. Writing a biography of an Irish writer is singularly daunting, given not only the self-dramatizing traits of at least some Irish writers -- O'Casey was certainly one of them -- but also the apparent propensity of the Irish to invent stories about their writers. The biographer inevitably encounters plausible and entertaining but highly unreliable accouts, rich in their deployment of what Hugh Kenner (cited several times by O'Connor) calls the "Irish fact." In this case, one must also reckon with O'Casey's six-volume autobiography, a confusingly fictionalized work.

Given this thicket of misleading information, O'Connor does an heroic job of setting the record straight. He demonstrates clearly that O'Casey was born into a middle-class Protestant family in Dublin and that his experience of the Dublin slums was largely elective. He illuminates for us the long period O'Casey spent in Dublin before becoming a successful playwright (O'Casey was 43 before his first play was produced), the period when he was variously "fund-raiser, recruiting officer, treasurer, secretary of this and that, a functionary in a score or more of different organizations and a well-known local figure."

O'CONNOR'S PORTRAIT includes warts and all -- the playwright's deeply ingrained contentiousness (he seems always to have been spoiling for a fight), his lack of generosity, his capacity to switch personal allegiances, his spite and bitterness, his inability to see anything redeeming in former friends. O'Casey seems to have been driven to seek out differences, to resolve them disagreeably and never to forget them. He pummeled Yeats and AE (George Russell), and snubbed Lady Gregory and many others who had been kind, because they crossed him. Shaw, who later became one of his most enduring friends, told him when he knew him only as a correspondent and suppliant: "This objecting to everyone else is Irish, but useless."

O'Connor cites unpublished diaries and letters to chronicle in fascinating detail O'Casey's life in England. O'Casey went to England for a brief visit to publicize a play and stayed there for the rest of his life, more than 30 years. He found love there and the kind of success he felt he could not get in Ireland. Especially when he arrived, O'Casey was lionized. This Irishman, a rough diamond, a self-proclaimed communist, was taken up by the political and cultural establishment of Britain. He won the Hawthornden Prize (though his age should have disqualified him), and received it from the hands of Asquith, who had been officially responsible for the execution of the martyrs of 1916, something that confirmed the worst suspicions of the Irish nationalists in whose ranks O'Casey had once numbered himself. A supporter of Stalin, O'Casey hobnobbed with Harold Macmillan (the Tory politician who was O'Casey's indulgent publisher) as well as with Lady Astor and Lord and Lady Londonderry. His elastic definition of communism somehow included good-hearted Conservatives.

O'Connor's account of O'Casey's personal and public life in England is more revealing and surefooted, on the whole, than his treatment of O'Casey in Ireland. The reason may be that the first half of O'Casey's life needs to be put into the context of those chaotic years in which, politically, socially, and culturally, modern Ireland was being defined. To master this period and reduce it to a backdrop for O'Casey's life is a monumental undertaking to which few would be equal.

Although this is a biography, and a good one at that, I wish O'Connor had incorporated some sense of the sharp division of critical opinion between O'Casey's champions and his detractors, a division that has to do not only with esthetics but with the argument of O'Casey's Dublin plays that family and human values transcend any mere politics.

All in all, this is a thoughtful and highly readable account of the life of a controversial modern playwright.

Anthony Bradley, who teaches Irish literature at the University of Vermont, is editor of the forthcoming second edition of "Contemporary Irish Poetry" and author of a book on the plays of W.B. Yeats.