Books: Poor, Dear, Dead Men

DRUMS UNDER THE WINDOWS (431 pp.) —Sean O’Casey—Macmillan ($4.50).

Ah, yes, at that time Dr. Douglas Hyde (“make way there, yous, keep back, keep back, give him space there”) was a famous, fine man. Playwright Sean O’Casey, now 65, remembers that Dublin gawked and said wasn’t Hyde the grandest champion the glorious Irish language had ever known, although to be sure he hardly spoke a word of it himself. Indeed, a famous man, a “sure sage, with almost all the priests applaudin’ “; and him a Protestant, too (“make way, there—silence—”). And standing nearby was Jim Connolly, “the renowned Socialist leadher,” author of Socialism Made Easy (“if you knew all you should know, you wouldn’t have task”). And standing on the other side was Arthur Griffith, little and squat, spectacles on his nose, a dark green velour hat stuck on his head, “the great man with the brain of ice,” probably dreaming of Cathleen ni Houlihan and never giving a thought to the far-off days when he would be Eire’s President.

The gallery also included Eamon de Valera, young and “full of the seven deadly virtues”; William Butler Yeats, who in his “strange, deep way” loved the people more than Griffith or De Valera did “or ever could”; Patrick Pearse, the one militant leader to fight for Ireland “from the midst of the Faith” (“Ah, Patrick Pearse, you were a man, a poet, with a mind simple as a daisy”). And all the rest of the Irish, great & small: the Pat O’Rourkes, Maggie Burkes, Tim Sheas, Muldoon the Solid Man, the Rose of Tralee, Dr. Michael O’Hickey, Tom Clarke, Sean T. O’Kelly in his top hat and frock coat.

The Smoking Gospel. Drums under the Windows is the third volume of Playwright O’Casey’s autobiography (preceding volumes: I Knock at the Door, Pictures in the Hallway). Rambling, rhapsodic, episodic, it is written sometimes in straightaway English, sometimes in lyrical doubletalk like that of the earlier James Joyce. The subject is his grimmest, bitterest, pre-playwright years: the 15 years or so up to and including the 1916 Easter Week Rising. Like almost any good book written by a good Irishman about those days, Drums is at bottom sentimental and romantic, but the resemblance to the standard stops about there. O’Casey is no standard Irishman; he lives in England, is a Communist,* obviously has no great affection for the powers at Maynooth or Dublin Castle. But he remembers affectionately the Ireland of his young days, though even then he was often dead set against it. With many a “saucy, fine, pene-thratin’ phrase,” he recalls his own worries and wonderings, the stirrings almost everywhere, the “gospel of discontent smoking faintly in the hearts of most men.”

Before he thought of writing plays, or had a spare shilling to spend on a ticket to the Abbey Theater, O’Casey swung a pick & shovel as a day laborer, worked at nights for the cause of the Gaelic League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Citizen Army. He lived with his mother in a few flea-ridden Dublin slum rooms. When bis sister died, there was no money in the house to bury her. When his brother-in-law went crazy, the clutchers came in a plain, black cab and carried him off to the home for loony paupers at Grangegor-man. He himself had been born with weak eyes, and contracted “a tubercular swelling” on his neck. With his “tattered clothes and broken boots,” he looked like “a ragamuffin . . . a shuddering sight for Gaelic gods to see.”

Shaw & Larkin. One day a friend told him about Bernard Shaw: “the cleverest Irishman the world knows, Sean. A wit of wonder. A godsend to men who try to think.” Another day he listened to Jim Larkin talk at Liberty Hall in Dublin—about the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, the “red flag rather than the green banner.”

Finally, there was the Trouble, begun on Easter Monday, 1916: Pearse, Connolly, Tom Clarke and the boys taking over the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, the terrible days of gunfire, burning, looting. O’Casey, with hundreds of others, was corralled and locked up by British soldiers. “Th’ wild Irish,” said a soldier then; “drink goes to their ‘eads. Wot was bitin’ em? Barmy, th’ lot of ’em. Wot did they do it for? Larfable.” “Poor, dear, dead men,” says O’Casey now, “poor W. B. Yeats.” The wit and rich lingo of Juno and the Paycock, the legendary and the tragic, real Ireland of The Plough and the Stars, run through his pages like the River Liffey through Dublin.

* Explained O’Casey the other day, talking in his Devonshire home: “After all, I’ve been a Communist for 25 years, which is half a lifetime.” But, he added: “I am almost a supporter of all parties, whether Tory or Liberal, Socialist or Catholic, Mohammedan, Buddhist or Labor. All my life I’ve been in the struggle to see things improved, which is what everyone else is trying to do too, isn’t it?” His latest play, Red Roses for Me, produced in suburban London in February, is about the Dublin transport strike of 1913. Said the Daily Express: “Glorious.”