Crackerbarrel O'Casey

TKE GREEN CROW (303 pp.)--Sean O'Casey--George Braziller, Inc. ($3.95).

Like most men, Sean O'Casey is a hero to his mirror. Yet he has reason above vanity for some of his pride; he climbed out of the Dublin slums to the fameupholstered penthouse of playwriting, leaving at least two masterpieces to mark the trail, i.e., The Plough and the Stars, Juno and the Paycock. Along the way he has also taken on a habit of piling chips on his shoulders and wearing them like epaulettes. The Green Crow is largely a dress parade of pet peeves, mostly in the form of journalistic pieces on the theater, actors, critics, fellow playwrights and, Lord have mercy on their souls, the benighted detractors of Sean O'Casey. What raises this book above its crotchets is the old (76) dramatist's unslaked love of life and the lilt of his harpsprung prose.

"Come to the Fair!" he calls in one essay. "The Fair of Life is a fine one, even though we may, at times, fall from the swing-boats, or grow dizzy and faint as we ride the galloping, scarlet and gold clad roundabout horses, or fail to win a thing at any of the booths . . ." The booth marked "Modern English Theatre," O'Casey seems to believe, is rigged by a bunch of gyp-artists. First off, there are the critics, "death-or-drivel boys gunning with their gab from their pillboxes . . . those who take a step forward to enthrone imagination in the theatre and make it more of a temple and less of a den of thieves." Actors are bad actors: "They talk as themselves, dress as themselves, move about as themselves, and feel to be themselves. They are one-finger composers of the music of life . . ."

Zymotic Bilge. Among the playwrights only Shaw is placed above suspicion of shoddiness, and the long arm of an O'Casey grudge can reach far back to cuff an offender ("Pinero . . . turned the wine of drama into water. A miracle, a miracle!"). Three pieces are devoted to the demerits of Noel Coward, whose works are finally summed up in two words (of George Jean Nathan's): "zymotic bilge." As for the "flea minds" of Ireland who are not properly reverent to their self-exiled bard, "these critics do not injure O'Casey, but they disgrace Ireland." He feels he is in good company, for Shakespeare too seems to him to be disgraced in his homeland ("The Old Vic is only a hole-and-corner existence for England's greatest dramatist").

When O'Casey's mind leaves the theater, he brightens perceptibly. He loves national flags--except for that of Ireland which "should replace the sickly-looking tricolor of green, white and yellow" with "the old flag, a lovely one, of the green field with the harp in its center." In "The Power of Laughter: Weapon Against Evil," O'Casey voices his deepest conviction: "Laughter is wine for the soul . . . Once we can laugh, we can live. It is the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living ... It is odd how many seem to be curiously envious of laughter, never of grief . . . The saying is all wrong--it should be 'Grieve and the world grieves with you; laugh and you laugh alone.' "*

Still the "Paycock." Yet there is precious little laughter in the four short stories with which O'Casey ends his book. Each of the tales pictures a helpless bit of humanity fluttering in the cage of need. Best of the lot is I Wanna Woman, in which a young Londoner, whose girl friend fails to keep a date, spends the night with a Piccadilly prostitute and wakes to a racking hangover of disgust and remorse.

Astringent and idiosyncratic, The Green Crow brings out the crackerbarrel philosopher strain in O'Casey. But the flashes of lyric power are there still, since fortunately, like the leopard, the proud "paycock" cannot change its spots.

* An inversion of the lines of Edna Wheeler Wilcbx, the female Edgar Guest of the late 1800s: "Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone."

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