THE NAIVETY OF SEAN O'CASEY
Bardan, John Franklin
The Naivety of Sean O'Casey Reviewed by JOHN FRANKLIN BARDIN 1N1SHFALLEN FARE THEE WELL. By Sean O'Casey. New York. 1949. The Macmillan Company. 396 pages. $4.75. Mri HE LABOUR MOVEMENT ISN'T A...
...lower still, many will drop to death...
...Rhetoric is preferred to fact...
...O'Casey must be aware of this possible, face-saving qualification— for he does take cover in a vaguely intended, although ubiquitous irony...
...And the rhythm of the phrases, the et.vle of writing, is appropriate to a type of melodramatic speech that is vulgar and ineffective...
...He calls him a "gaum" and allows himself the luxury of raillery, a masochistic privilege...
...Only a cultural snob would be disappointed and disgusted to learn that Yeats and A. E. read "Blood and Thunder tales...
...It is part of a political speech uttered on a terrible and desolate occasion...
...These free-associating, stream - of-consciousness sections are infrequent in Inlskfullen, Fare Thee Well...
...O'Casey's already four-volumed autobiography (and more to come) is concerned with his friendships w^th Lady Gregory, Yeats, Stephens and A. E. He likes all but A. E., yet he talks of them with a gossipy back-biting air that is embarrassing...
...A man cannot escape his preferences...
...O'Casey understands Joyce either...
...When the anecdote was finished, I was again closeted with an elderly man who was romanticizing his youth...
...but they also allow the critical reader to detect the immaturities and the insufficiencies of the author...
...His book would have been less honest indirectly, but perhaps closer to readability...
...He writes the way one of the young radicals in his plays speaks, which is fitting for such a character in the long ago time of the Black and Tan troubles but out of place in a serious writer who represents himself as being politically sophisticated...
...I think the clues to what is so exasperntingly wrong with Scan O'Casey, his politics and his autobiography, are implicit in this quotation...
...Wouldn't you agree that about the last probable guess you might make is that this is a critical opinion of a famous playwright, an expression of his dislike for a play by a contemporary, given casually in conversation—but remembered for more than a score of years and finally considered fit for printing in his autobiography...
...lower down, most of the climbers have dropped to death...
...And only a man who nurses a grudge could keep alive for a quarter-of-a-century some of the slurs and backbitings of a group of writers he once knew...
...At no point does he explain in any argument that is not made up of cliches, and the oldest and most hackneyed ones at that, Why he loves Russia and hates Catholicism...
...Mri HE LABOUR MOVEMENT ISN'T A mourning march to jail house...
...All those who were highest up have dropped to death...
...He hates well and loves his own maddening, falsely nostalgic anecdotes about the suffering he has lived through...
...e • THE PARODIES OF OTHER MEN'S styles, especially Joyce's, have aroused considerable comment when previous volumes of this long work were reviewed...
...This might be...
...The invectvc is loose and inexact...
...No writer I can honor today could write in this way and excuse himself for it, unless he intended it ironicallly...
...He effaces his editorial self and allows the represented self to hold forth...
...I doubt if Mr...
...Those that are included do not come off...
...O'Casey must assume the role of the omniscient manipulator...
...but just beneath these is the invincible vast crowd that will climb to the top by the ways made by their dear dead comrades...
...We are I climbing a high hill, a desperately steep, high hill through Are and venomous opposition...
...The third person narrative method also permits him to pity the earlier Sean, to build reader empathy deceptively as a novelist creates identification for a protagonist...
...A minor part of this volume of Mr...
...By pretending to write about someone other than himself, Mr...
...The language in which he chooses to express himself reveals his restraints and excesses, his strength and his impotence...
...Certain scenes— the death of his mother, the raid in the tenement, Lady Gregory's Ill-fated lighting of the acetylene lamp have a vividness, an immediacy, that would make the fortune of any writer if used consistently...
...He fails and his failure left me with the feeling that he had never understood Yeats, had' seen Lady Gregory as a fictional grande dame and had looked upon the others as competition...
...John Franklin Bardin is the author of "Dev'l Take the Blue Tall Fly...
...THIS DEVICE ENABLES the author to adopt an ambivalent attitude toward his younger self...
...The sentiment is nauseous...
...O'Casey happened to recreate for us the society of Irish Intelligentsia and artists...
...He strikes me as having once had- a great talent and still having a great competence...
...These, I believe, are illegitimate techniques in an autobiography...
...While reading these sections of the book, I could set aside my aesthetic, political and moral judgments end revel is the delight of what's-going-to-happen next...
...The character he draws of Sean Casside is of an intemperate, sentimental, effusive Irish Communist...
...What sort of an excerpt do you suppose this is...
...They lead an author to a false sense of security behind the novelistic pretense...
...His autobiography eschews the conventional "I" and writee about its subject, himself, as Sean Casside...
...I submit that had he been writing "I" as often as he wrote "Sean," he would not have credited himself with as many fatuous acts and sayings...
...ignored, forgiven as eccentricity, if Mr...
...Or could it be the j'r- {sm of a hack pamphleteer...
Vol. 32 • March 1949 • No. 11
