O'Casey and Yeats and the Druid

O'CASEY AND YEATS AND THE DRUID (Some reflections provoked by the recent publication of O'Casey's Blasts and Benedictions*) SEAN O'CASEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN RIPE FOR REVENGE after W. B. Yeats rejected The Silver Tassie in 1928. His first three plays had rescued the declining Abbey Theatre from artistic and financial disaster, and his new Expressionistic play had been written in precisely the experimental spirit which Yeats had described in founding an Irish Theatre dedicated to "that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres in England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed." But Yeats and his fellow directors said no-the final decision was Yeats's, the worst blunder in the history of the Abbey Theatre-and the bewildered, outraged O'Casey, his career as a dramatist disrupted and endangered, was cut off from his theater and his country. Nevertheless, in the years following the rejection, O'Casey, a man who seldom forgave an injustice, defended and cele:brated the genius of Yeats, though he was understandably slow in forgetting Yeats's role in the rejection. And this refusal to seek revenge tells us something about the genius of O'Casey. In accord with his personal mythology, one might have expected he would see himself as a proletarian St. George girding himself for battle against an aristocratic dragon. Instead of such an allegorical struggle, however, the two men promptly became engaged in a battle of words. In their letters to each other over the rejection, a correspondence which O'Casey released to the press contrary to Yeats's wishes, they hurled their opposing theories of drama at each other. Yeats, who had apparently reserved for himself the freedom to experiment with new dramatic forms, seemed to believe that his verse plays for dancers, based upon Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's version of the ritualistic Japanese Noh Theatre, were now the only valid drama. He objected to O'Casey's use of an historical event like the first World War as the theme of The Silver Tassie because, as Yeats insisted, "the whole history of the world must be reduced to wallpaper in front of which the characters must pose and speak." Furthermore, since O'Casey had not taken part in the Great War, Yeats went on, he could only write out of his "opinions," and dramatic action was "a fire that must burn up the author's opinions." O'Casey shot back his reply at point-blank range: "Do you really mean that no one should or could write about or speak about a war·Sean O'Casey, Blasts and Benedictions: Articles and Stories, Selected and Introduced by Ronald Ayling (Macmillan, London; St. Martin's Press, New York, 1967). 252 1968 O'CASEY AND YEATS AND THE DRUID 253 because one has not stood on the battlefield? Were you really serious when you dictated that-really serious, now? Was Shakespeare at Actium or Philippi? Was G. B. Shaw in the boats with the French, or in the forts with the British when St. Joan and Dunois made the attack that relieved Orleans?" Then, with an ironic shot aimed at Yeats himself, he added: "And someone, I think, wrote a poem about Tir na nOg who never took a header into the Land of Youth." Since Yeats had only the highest praise for O'Casey's first three plays, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1925), and The Plough and the Stars (1926), and those plays had all dealt with the history of the Irish War of Independence, and had clearly reflected the dramatist's "opinions" about the War, O'Casey was understandably puzzled by the nature of Yeats's objections to the new play: "I have pondered in my heart your expression that 'the history of the world must be reduced to wallpaper,' and I find in it only the pretentious bigness of a pretentious phrase. I thank you out of mere politeness, but I must refuse even to try to do it. That is exactly, in my opinion (there goes a cursed opinion again), what most of the Abbey dramatists are trying to...