Sean O'Casey, the Man Behind the Plays by Saros Cowasjee (review)

344 MODERN DRAMA December such instances of either "superfluous self-explication," or "unctuous vanity." Secondly , there is no real intended unity underlying the book, and it is unfair to judge it as a unified work purporting to set up a system. The very blindness of many critics made it necessary for Ionesco to repeat certain ideas which, although they may strike the sophisticate as platitudes, are as a matter of fact, rather elementary truths which have too often been lost sight of, and bear repetition. I submit that the following "banalities," for example, have not yet been sufficiently chewed and digested--r even put on the table in many households: Didacticism is above all an attitude of mind and an expression of the will to dominate. No society has ever been able to abolish human sadness; no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. Where essentials are concerned, it seems to me Ionesco is not afraid to maintain a position, and to do so with a lucidity which belies the intellectual exhaustion and pessimism for which he has been reproached. LEONARD C. PRONKO Pomona College SEAN O'CASEY, THE MAN BEHIND THE PLAYS, by Saros Cowasjee, St. Martin 's Press, New York, 1964, 266 pp. Price $7.50. Although books on O'Casey have been following each other with some rapidity in recent years, the times are not wholly propitious, quite apart from the dangers inherent in trying to make any survey of this minefield. One trouble lies in the present state of the biographical record. A second is in the changing nature of the canon. Indeed, the mind staggers at the thought of this eminent scholar from Bombay confronted with the available source material and trying to distinguish the wells of Truth from the drains. For what, after all, has he got to go on? The journals of Lady Gregory as cut and edited by Lennox Robinson; the personalities and random hearsay collected by Mr. Peter Kavanagh for his Story of the Abbey Theatre; the myopic views of Mr. Gabriel Fallon, dean of contemporary Irish criticism.; and fifty years of turgid rubbish contained in the diaries and scrapbooks of the late Joseph Holloway, now deposited in the National Library for the confusion of all future enquiry. Add to these the document that is generally regarded as O'Casey's six-volume autobiography but which is actually a very powerful melodrama that will outlast many of his plays, and one will appreciate the difficulties that Professor Cowasjee is up against in preparing a serious biography. In this last source the names of actual people are sometimes used and sometimes perverted. "Hymdim Leadem Be Co. Wholesale Chandlers," referred to as such by Mr. Cowasjee are actually Hampton, Leedom Be Co. Retail Hardware Merchants; while on the other hand Yeats and Orwell are largely imaginary characters appearing under factual names. As for that ridiculous storm in an inkpot over the temporary rejection of The SilVer Tassie by the Abbey Theatre, in which Yeats is made to play the villain, not even Mr. David Krause has been able so far to do full justice to the real story. Professor Cowasjee very acutely penetrates the sham of O'Casey's professed Communism -an aspect of his sympathy for Labor that wore amusingly thin when the Abbey Company recently threatened to go on strike when about to present two O'Casey plays in London. Nor does it require very much reading between the lines of this useful book to get a vivid impression of the real man, not only 1965 BOOK REVIEWS 345 in his sentimental and loveable moments, but also while happily engaged in boiling his Unbelievers in prose. Shaw-not the Abbey Theatre-was O'Casey's Mephistopheles, as readily appears once the orchestra stops .playing and the green follow-spots are turned off. Written presumably a few years ago, Mr. Cowasjee's book refers to a number of items of O'Caseana as supposedly lost, when they have actually been in print since 1962 in a volume edited by Mr. Robert Hogan under the title Feathers from the Green...