Living With Books:
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Aging Sean O'Casey's Latest Memoirs Are Lively, Peevish and Provocative WITH Sunset and Evening Star (Macmillan, $4.75), Sean O'Casey brings to its conclusion...
...There is the touching portrait of George Bernard Shaw on his deathbed, and the slightly sardonic account of Mrs...
...The gentle O'Casey, after his visitor's angry departure, reflects sadly on "a mind that flushes into a rage whenever another ventures to disagree with it...
...The sequels, all written in the same vein, carried O'Casey through his young manhood, his participation in the struggle for Irish freedom, the beginnings of his career as a dramatist, and all his many battles in the theater...
...What is wrong with the book is that so much of it was written out of irritability...
...Here, with whitened hair," he concludes, "desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down, and with only the serenity and the calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to Life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be...
...But he did write them, characteristically devising a new form to say what he wanted said, and they may be remembered longer than his plays...
...Dogmatic and contentious as he is, and often illogical and sometimes mean-spirited, he has a deep passion both for freedom and for beauty...
...But it would be a mistake to pay too much attention to this foolishness...
...James Agate, Oliver St...
...John Gogarty, Louis MacNeice and George Orwell are among the critics he belabors, and there is a tediously long attack on someone named Denis Johnston...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Aging Sean O'Casey's Latest Memoirs Are Lively, Peevish and Provocative WITH Sunset and Evening Star (Macmillan, $4.75), Sean O'Casey brings to its conclusion one of the major literary achievements of our time...
...If he had been able to get his plays produced, he might never have written these autobiographical volumes, for his first love is unquestionably the theater...
...At any rate, he goes out of his way to describe how "a big photograph of the upright Stalin, full face, handsome and jovial," together with one of Gandhi, looked down on the dying Shaw...
...The book is full of political as well as personal prejudices...
...O'Casey's shortcomings were never more apparent than they are in Sunset and Evening Star, but the book is touched with his genius, too...
...I cannot feel that the end crowns the whole work--indeed, neither the fifth volume nor this is as good as the first four--but there is a great deal that I would have been sorry to miss...
...Shaw...
...Although he is stupid enough to let himself be used by the Communists, O'Casey is still in fundamentals the independent, sensitive, greatly talented man that he has always been...
...Even more objectionable is the spirit in which O'Casey takes on the people who have spoken unfavorably of his work...
...The distressingly unjust denunciation of Orwell,for example, was obviously provoked as much by his attack on Stalin as by his attack on O'Casey...
...There are some lively passages about evacuees and air raids, there is a vigorous tribute to Ireland, and there is the author's valedictory...
...Fifteen years ago, in I Knock at the Door, he told about his proletarian and Protestant boyhood in the Dublin of the Eighties and Nineties...
...Lady, said Sean, softly, I have been a comrade to the Soviet Union for twenty-three years, and all she stands for in the way of socialism, and I don't intend to break that bond for a few hasty remarks made by one who obviously hates the very bones of the Soviet people...
...Hurrah...
...This was no conventional autobiography, but a series of singularly vivid sketches written in a variety of styles...
...Poetic impressionism, hard realism, the Joycean stream-of-consciousness, and wild, vituperative rhetoric combined to create a work of great color and great individuality...
...And now he has caught up with himself, for this sixth volume describes the late Thirties, the Forties and the early Fifties, when its predecessors were being written...
...O'Casey's constant ranting against Catholicism has always been tiresome, and here, especially in the repeated pecking at G. K. Chesterton, it seems peevish and pointless...
...And the more you shout, lady, the less I hear...
...One wonders whether O'Casey's admiration for Shaw would have persisted if the latter had not been more or less sympathetic to his political views...
...O'Casey's faith was, of course, untouched by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which he doesn't mention, though he does have plenty to say about Munich, and during the war it did his heart good to see Red flags in Devon...
...Today he assures his American readers that "Soviet bombs will never fall on New York City, unless New York bombs fall on Moscow first...
...There is, for instance, a wonderfully sharp and compelling account of a visit to Cambridge University...
...The blissful naivete of O'Casey's kind of Communism is strikingly revealed in his account of an interview with someone he calls Creda Stern--presumably Freda Utley...
...If there is bitterness, we must admit that O'Casey has had cause to be bitter, and in the end it is his courage that impresses us...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 48
