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In Rose and Crown, O'Casey tries to straighten out this snarl, and his means are neither new nor pleasing. He describes the great houses in detail—the Sheraton, the Chippendale, the mother-of-pearl, the ebony, the sparkle of diamonds on "a white and saucy breast." It was a spectacle, he says, "that fair dazzled the eye," and he admits that he found it "elegant," "gracious." even "delightful at times." But he then goes on to say how much it disgusted him. Moreover, his hostesses were all deaf and seemed not to hear when he cried: "Come, sell all thou hast, and come follow me . . . follow the people."
World by the Waist? The same sort of double life persisted when O'Casey went abroad. He traveled to the U.S. in all the luxury of cabin class, but he atoned for this by asking "if he could have his meals with the crew." In New York (for the production of Within the Gates'), he landed in a world of "walnut and mahogany reflecting the gleam of glass and the glitter of silver," a world more "fit for Arnold Bennett. . . than . . . Walt Whitman." At which point the reader suspects that it fit O'Casey like a glove.
"His talents are undeniable," writes Sean O'Faolain, "but so far they have not produced a play without the stamp of the workshop on it." The same can be said of O'Casey's autobiography. Most of its long and lyrical passages of proletarian praise are marked chiefly by what Stephen Potter might call prosemanship. Here & there are real gems of observation and poetic imagination. But when O'Casey declares that he would like 1,000 years of life "to encircle [the peoples of the world] with his arms like a girdle encircling the waist of a motherly woman," the reader can only feel that even if Providence permitted the embrace, the world would be wise to wriggle out of it.