ROSE AND CROWN (323 pp.)—Sean O'Casey—Macmillan ($4.75).
In 1929, William Butler Yeats wrote to Sean O'Casey explaining why the Abbey Theater was rejecting The Silver Tassie, Sean's new play about World War I. "I am sad and discouraged," Yeats complained. "You have no theme. You were interested in the Irish Civil War and at every moment of those plays wrote out of your own amusement with life or your sense of its tragedy . . . but you are not interested in the Great War; you never stood on its battlefields, never walked its hospitals, and so write out of your opinions. You illustrate those opinions by a series of almost unrelated scenes, as you might in a leading article."
Yeats's rejection slip caused the loudest literary furor of the year. O'Casey took his Tassie to Producer C. B. Cochran, who staged it brilliantly and profited handsomely by the Yeats-O'Casey uproar. Today, this battle seems a mere skirmish in literary history—to everyone except Sean O'Casey, who describes it in the fifth volume of his autobiography as if it were the Battle of the Boyne.
Yeats's letter hit O'Casey at a moment when he was girding for greater battles. He had just left Ireland and was "planting a foot for the first time on the pavement of London ... to be shown off, a new oddity ... a guttersnipe among . . . the richly clad, the slum dramatist, who, in the midst of a great darkness, had seen a greater light" (i.e., Marxlight). Rose and Crown tells how O'Casey had to struggle in the next few years not only to support his wife and child but to keep his proletarian poise.
Virgil or Ferghil? London society was very kind to Sean. When he ailed, the aristocrats sent their limousines to haul him away to the doctor; when he was destitute, they gave him money and a home. They asked him to their receptions and gave him a chance to glower—which he did with a will. One evening he buttonholed Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and refused to let the stolid statesman go until he had listened to O'Casey's thesis that Virgil, commonly known as a Roman poet, was actually a Celt named Ferghil. "The Celtic race must indeed have been an amazing one," replied poor Baldwin.
Why did such people put up with O'Casey's blend of mystical dither and proletarian blather? Partly because (as O'Casey is happy to emphasize) they had a lot of money but were pinched for poetry. Moreover, every fashionable hostess likes to show off a lion, even if she is not a competent judge of lionflesh. But London's aristocrats also put up with O'Casey out of kindness, and this put him in a moral jam. He did not decline their invitations, but he did not want to suffer a decline in his proletarian reputation.