Gaum to the Last

INISHFALLEN, FARE THEE WELL (396 pp.) --Sean O'Casey--Macmillan ($4.75).

"A slum dramatist, a guttersnipe who could jingle a few words together." That was how Playwright Sean O'Casey (The Plough and the Stars, Juno and the Paycock) summarized what much of the Irish press said of him and his works. Absolutely correct, agrees O'Casey--and proud of it. He promises to spend his whole life wearing "the tattered badge of [his proletarian] tribe . . . soiled with the diseased sweat of the tenements."

Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, the fourth volume of his third-person autobiography,* is essentially an arrangement of O'Casey's counter-compliments to the Irish reviewers, clerics and laymen who refused to take him on those terms.

Of Black & Tans. The free-for-alls of O'Casey's Volume IV are set in the years when Eire was finally obtaining her independence. Black & Tans roar through Dublin in armored cars, Irish rebels fight them off shoulder to shoulder--and, after defeating them, turn their ferocity against one another. The air is full of flying shillelaghs, ecclesiastical croziers, broken staves of office, and splintering scepters. But olive branches are missing from the scene and O'Casey, parodying Yeats, chants sarcastically:

A terrible beauty is borneo . . .

In the dawn of a wonderful morneo.

Through all the hullabaloo moves O'Casey himself, an ex-laborer who burns with a hot, proletarian fire. He is poor as a church mouse and still, at 35, such "innocent gaum" (dumbbell) that when he gets a check for one of his first plays he doesn't know how to go about cashing it. But he is sustained by wonderful dreams and illusions in which he sees Ireland peopled by "golden boys" who wander through lanes "canopied by the sly innocence of the woodbine's dangling stems," while adoring lasses stroke "the faded, maybe bloodstained, cloth" of heir uniforms with "shy, white fingers." He dreams of poets who move through life like gods, never erring, never sinking into sordid realms of spite and pettiness.

The innocent gaum O'Casey woke up with a bump to find that most people were clay after all. When his proletarian plays were staged by Dublin's Abbey Theater, many critics hissed maliciously and poets looked nervously the other way. Even pioneers, O'Casey discovered, fear public opinion; even democrats get a kick out of wearing striped pants and top hats; even noble esthetes enjoy walking with one foot in the gutter. Sean was shocked to find that stately, plump Oliver St. John Gogarty surreptitiously read whodunits ; that refined Lady Gregory reveled in Peg o' My Heart; that the great Yeats himself (an admirer of Zane Grey) was prepared to acclaim O'Casey as "the Irish Dostoevsky"--though O'Casey says he happened to know that Yeats had barely looked into Dostoevsky. Appalled by such duplicity and filled with hatred of the new Eire's clerical atmosphere, O'Casey packed up and went to England, where his pure heart is still parked.

Of Red Stars. The mingled steam of dreams and self-pity makes much of this book pretty dank reading. It is best when Dramatist O'Casey shoves Innocent Sean off the stage and tells stories (e.g., a vivid chapter about a Black & Tan raid on his boardinghouse). It is at its dismal worst when Communist O'Casey, hoodwinked by his own fancies as much as any Irish poet was ever entranced by the leprechauns, cries passionately: "The Red Star [of the U.S.S.R.] is a bright star. No pope, no politician, no cleric, no press-lord can . . . screen its ray from our eyes ... It is the star shining over the flock in the field, over the mother crooning her little one to rest . . . Red Health of the sick, Red Refuge of the afflicted, shine on us all!"

*The first three: I Knock at the Door (1939); Pictures in the Hallway (1942); Drums Under the Windows (1946).

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