{"id":15459,"date":"2023-07-24T15:09:17","date_gmt":"2023-07-24T14:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=15459"},"modified":"2023-07-24T15:09:17","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T14:09:17","slug":"hitching-the-plough-to-the-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2023\/07\/24\/hitching-the-plough-to-the-stars\/","title":{"rendered":"Hitching the Plough to the Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul O\u2019Brien\u2019s biography, Sean O\u2019Casey, Political Activist and Writer<\/em> (Cork University Press)<\/a><\/span> is a timely re-assessment of an often controversial, figure whose place in the literary canon is, O\u2019Brien argues, is insufficiently acclaimed.<\/span><\/p>\n

It coincides with the hundredth anniversary of Druid\u2019s production<\/a><\/span> of O\u2019Casey\u2019s Dublin Trilogy: \u2018The Plough and The Stars\u2019, \u2018Juno and the Paycock\u2019 and \u2018The Shadow of a Gunman\u2019 which opened recently at the Galway Arts\u2019 Festival<\/a> <\/span>and will tour Belfast before coming to The Abbey in September. But, with the publication of Timothy Murtagh\u2019s new book Spectral Mansions<\/em><\/a><\/span> on how the once graciously lofty Henrietta Street turned into tenements adding to the mountain of scholarship<\/a><\/span> about Dublin tenement life, O\u2019Casey\u2019s plays, are, on that basis alone, destined for immortality.<\/p>\n

As enduring testimonies of the unflinching reality of Dublin tenement life, no playwright evokes and captures the life of Dublin\u2019s tenements as does O\u2019Casey and that is the central theme of this tour-de-force of scholarship.<\/p>\n

Sean O\u2019Casey was born in 1880 into a lower middle class Protestant family \u2013 the youngest of eight children \u2013 and was raised in Lower Dorset Street, where the family enjoyed a relatively comfortable lower middle-class life until after his father\u2019s death in 1886. His father had been employed in the Irish Church Mission and his older brothers attended the Central Model School in Marlboro Street for which a small fee was required.<\/p>\n

In reduced circumstances after his father death, and when O\u2019Casey was nine, the family moved to the East Wall \u2013 a hot bed of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) and the ITGWU. His entire oeuvre<\/em> dramatizes with unflinching realism and lack of sentimentality the grim realities of tenement life in Dublin, infusing his characters with compassion and humanity.<\/p>\n

By the 1930s, Dublin\u2019s tenements were among the worst slums in Europe with a very high mortality rate, rampant prostitution and disease reflected in \u2018The Plough and The Stars\u2019 in the character Mossler Gogan dying of TB and the prostitute Rosie Redmond. Indeed, according to O\u2019Brien \u2018[i]n 1914 it was believed that tenement dwellers had a better chance of survival on the Western Front than in the diseased-ridden hovels of Dublin.\u2019\u00a0 Thus, O\u2019Casey became \u2018a life-long activist for the preferment of dwellers of tenements, reflecting their lives with scrupulous realism and compassion, their humanity always shone through as did their heroism and their promise.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Henrietta Street, Dublin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Excruciating Detail<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Paul O\u2019Brien biography on O\u2019Casey charts with intense and excruciating detail the development of O\u2019Casey\u2019s politics and how those politics fused and informed his writings, especially his dramatic works. In that sense, O\u2019Brien\u2019s book takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach to O\u2019Casey\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

While O\u2019Casey\u2019s older brothers attended the model school in Marlboro Street, Sean, a delicate child was largely home schooled, self-taught and, for a time, taught by his older sister, a teacher. Later, O\u2019Casey was immersed in all the key political movements of his time, the ICA, the Gaelic League, the GAA and was a big admirer of, and influenced by, Parnell.<\/p>\n

He mastered Irish, hence the change in his birth name from John to Sean and he studied the Classics. From early in his life, he was interested in the national movement but it was the emergent labour movement, gaining momentum under his life-long hero, James Larkin<\/a><\/span> that really gripped him and the entire dynamic of his subsequent political and writing life revolved around his failure to find a synthesis between Irish Republicanism and the international struggle of the working classes.<\/p>\n

In other words he never could accommodated the \u2018green\u2019 of Nationalism with the \u2018red\u2019 of Labour and this unreconciled tension remained the central dilemma of his entire life and, in exploring it in minute intensity, Paul O\u2019Brien uncloaks it as both the triumph and tragedy of O\u2019Casey\u2019s life too. While Paul O\u2019Brien clearly admires his subject, he is candid about the unjustified personal animosity of O\u2019Casey towards James Connolly. O\u2019Brien does not shirk from revealing any of O\u2019Casey\u2019s flaws in judgement and personality, while never losing sight of his overall genius.<\/p>\n

Imbrications between the cause of the working classes in Dublin and accelerating nationalism were unavoidable after Parnell and were so fused as to often be indistinguishable; the overlaps were everywhere, not least in the Irish Citizen Army (ICS) of which O\u2019Casey was a member until he finally severed all ties in 1914. He also derided the Irish Volunteers which emerged in the South, in parallel with the formation of the Ulster Volunteers in response to the Home Rule Bill of 1912.<\/p>\n

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James Larkin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

James Larkin<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

James Larkin arrived in Dublin in 1907 and inspired O\u2019Casey to use \u2018words as weapons against exploiters of the Dublin poor.\u2019 O\u2019Casey first gave vent to his rage in Larkin\u2019s paper The Irish Worker<\/em>. Later, in his biographies, O\u2019Casey lacerated the corruption of Dublin Corporation.<\/p>\n

From an early age, O\u2019Casey\u2019s love of literature was manifest. The hope that Irish life would be transformed died with the early and tragic death of Parnell in October 1891. In the aftermath, the prospect of peaceful evolution along the lines of Dominion Status enjoyed by Canada and Australia receded.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Casey saw Larkin as the greatest Irishman since Parnell. \u2018The Plough and The Stars\u2019, O\u2019Casey\u2019s most controversial play premiered in the Abbey in 1926 and was well received on its first night. But on the second night, a combination of 1916 widows and Republicans escalated into full blown riots with added moral consternation at the prostitute Rosie Redmond awaiting clients and the un-named figure in the window, identifiably Patrick Pearse extolling the sanctity of bloodshed.<\/p>\n

The first two acts of the play are set in 1915 looking forward to the liberation of Ireland, but the second two acts are set during the 1916 Easter Rising.<\/p>\n

In the evolution of his political ideals, O\u2019Casey had a number of influences aside from Parnell; the writings of James Fintan Lalor (1809-1849) and John Mitchell (1915-1875) influence him. The 1913 Lockout in Dublin was a watershed moment for O\u2019Casey.<\/p>\n

Parnell had provided a vision for Ireland with no conflict between the Protestant religion and the principles of freedom which had a democratic and libertarian pulse, rooted in Constitutionalism. But contemporary conditions would sweep O\u2019Casey away from family and Protestant traditions.<\/p>\n

A Dublin Tram conductor and an Abbey actor introduced him to rawer politics. This, combined with the ICA and the ITGWU provided different currents on O\u2019Casey\u2019s development. In terms of his literary work, Dion Boucicault remained a strong influence in how he used songs and comedy to lighten the tragedy of his own writings. (O\u2019Casey wrote many, long forgotten, ballads)\u00a0 While Boucicault\u2019s plays are traditional melodramas there is also a \u2018political ambivalence that challenges the stereotypical image of the stage Irishman; \u2018Arrah-Na-Pogue\u2019 and \u2018Peep O\u2019Day\u2019 are about the 1798 rebellion. Boucicault created a more trustworthy image of the Irish, replacing the racial stereotype in English literature which was finally killed off by George Bernard Shaw in Larry Doyle in \u2018John Bull\u2019s Other Ireland.\u2019 O\u2019Casey draws on the techniques of Boucicault, Shakespeare\u2019s history plays and on Shaw to create a unique synthesis of his own. O\u2019Brien argues that O\u2019Casey\u2019s conclusions are \u2018open-ended.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Dion Boucicault.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Boer War<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Defining nationhood was intensified by anti-British sentiments after the Boer War, the centenary celebrations of 1798 and the Jubilee celebrations in 1889.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Casey imbibed the sentiments of the Gaelic League like many other Protestants. The plough and the stars was the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, and O\u2019Brien identifies O\u2019Casey\u2019s problem was to \u2018hitch the plough to the stars.\u2019<\/p>\n

He joined the Gaelic league in 1901 and took up hurling. He became an apprentice bricklayer and worked for a number of years on the Great Northern Railway Line. In 1908, he became secretary to the Drumcondra branch of the Gaelic League and spent ten years promoting Irish language and culture but increasingly he saw the chief enemy as the crushing force of capitalism, and, as he matured, he rejected romantic nationalism.<\/p>\n

James Connolly was able to unite nationalism and socialism, but O\u2019Casey could never fuse them into a cohesive theory remaining haunted by the voice of the urban poor. O\u2019Casey resigned from the IRB in 1913 when they refused to take the workers\u2019 side in the Great Lockout.<\/p>\n

He ditched the Gaelic League for Larkin and the momentum behind Larkin radical labour movement became the driving force for his plays. This transition is reflected in his earlier plays The Harvest Festival, The Stars Turn Red and Red Roses For Me which deal with the labour history of the 1913-1914 Lockout. After the failure of the Great Lockout O\u2019Casey\u2019s views were crystallised into the view that the \u2018struggle was not one of English Imperialism versus Irish Republicanism but between international capitalism and the workers of the world\u2019 and this is reflected uncompromisingly in his plays.<\/p>\n

In 1914, Larkin went to America to organise the international workers of the world and was jailed for criminal anarchy. The Ulster Covenant saw 4,000 Ulster volunteers sign up and the respondent Irish Volunteers were despised by O\u2019Casey who saw it as dominated by \u2018overfed aristocrats\u2019.<\/p>\n

He clashed with Tom Kettle and Pearse and wrongly accused them of not supporting workers. In 1914, along with Larkin, he drafted a new constitution for the ICA but the problems of aligning the red of Labour with the green of nationalism persisted for O\u2019Casey.<\/p>\n

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Countess Constance Markiewicz.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2018a spluttering Catherine Wheel of irresponsibility.\u2019<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

When Connolly expressed his vision for the re-conquest of Ireland in a pamphlet in 1915, O\u2019Casey saw it as Connolly lowering the red flag in favour of the green and made a sudden and final split with the ICA. The Countess Markievicz joined the Irish Volunteers and the ICA.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Casey was intensely hostile to her \u2018hauteur\u2019: \u2018she whirled into a meeting and whirled out again a spluttering Catherine Wheel of irresponsibility.\u2019 His motion, however, to expel her from the ICA failed. According to O\u2019Brien \u2018he rushed headlong into one dispute after another, damaging himself and alienating his friends.\u2019<\/p>\n

O\u2019Casey published a book on the ICA in 1919 but, according to O\u2019Brien it lacks balance and is saturated with vitriol and opinions. His core argument was that nationalism gained and labour lost as a result of the ICA\u2019s involvement with 1916. \u2018O\u2019Casey was alone is seeing Irish history from a working-class perspective when, after 1916, The Labour movement was subsumed into the struggle for independence.\u2019<\/p>\n

When Connolly joined the Volunteers in 1916 it completed the fusion with the ICA. 220 members of the ICA rose on Easter Monday 1916, but 1,200 Irish Volunteers did. As O\u2019Brien points out, Connolly had little choice but to fight on nationalist terms in 1916.<\/p>\n

Connolly had grasped the importance of a united front where O\u2019Casey failed. O\u2019Casey never acknowledged Connolly\u2019s attempts to unite Labour and Nationalism but in later years he did acknowledge Connolly\u2019s standing in the Labour movement but \u2018he never lost an opportunity to denigrate Connolly in favour of Larkin.\u2019<\/p>\n

O\u2019Casey became \u2018a disgruntled outside, a hurler on the ditch, shouting the odds as history passed him by.\u2019 Many critics put O\u2019Casey\u2019s vitriol against 1916 in \u2018The Plough and the Stars\u2019 down to \u2018survivor\u2019s guilt.\u2019 The summary execution of Francis Sheehy Skeffington<\/a><\/span>, a socialist and passivist abhorred him. He felt successful revolution on nationalist terms only empowered the new Irish ruling classes \u2013 the very people who had reduced the Dublin poor to abject poverty.<\/p>\n