GUIDE TO GOOD READING

Sean O'Casey’s life continued
in fifth volume, Rose and Crown

| FRIENDSHIP. VOLUME

O'casey’s message to Americans

Sean O’Casey has sent. a mes-
sage for a Russian-American

ee ae

THE FIFTH volume of Sean
O’Casey’s biography, Rose and
Crown, covers the period of two
of his plays, The Silver Tassie
and Within the Gates, and the
adventures attending their pro-
duction in (Britain, the United

“States and Ireland.

It needs little telling how
Sean O’Casey made a reputation
by his earlier plays, Juno and
the Paycock, and Plough and the
Stars. Brought to London by
the Irish Players—a wonderful
team—they scored a triumph.

O’Casey’s ykill in combining
deep poetic imagining and pro-
found human feeling, and pre-
senting them in the form of
quasi-photographic realism, car-
ried a new sensation for London
playgoers.

True, it may be doubted
whether many of them saw more
than the hilarious surface—the
knockabout of the Dublin tene-
ment houses and pubs; the con-
trast between the dreary reality
of the slum and the richly col-
ored splendor of vernacular Irish
speech.

Few English people could, per-
haps, be expected to féel the
force of the deep tragedy into
which these strands were woven

"— the terrible background of

“Juno,”’ the civil war in which
the men who had routed the
Black-and-Tans turned in em-
bittered misconception to rend
and slaughter each other,

Nor could they be expected to
feel behind Plough and the Stars
either the exaltation of an Irish
Republic proclaimed in arms, or
the tragedy of the defeat—the
GPO headquarters burning un-
der the fire of incendiary shells,
and the flag of the Citizen Army
—the Plough and Stars of the
title—tfalling from its - flaming
staff to be consumed in the fire.

One had to have lived through
that tragedy as Sean O’Casey
had, to have felt it as deeply.
One had to'have his insight to
see the intensity of the tragic
reality. And moreover one had
to be filled with a sense of the
historic significance of the Irish
national struggle foy liberation
to see that tragedy in its rela-
tion to the universal struggle of
common humanity,

That English critics should
fail to see more in O’Casey’s
early work than its deliriously
comic surface was not surpris-
ing. But it was a painful shock
for Sean when W. B. Yeats, for
the Abbey Theatre, reacted with
hostility and contumely to his
next play, The Silver Tassie.

Yeats wanted another “Juno’”
and O’Casey wanted to carry for-
ward the theme from an exclu-
sively Irish to a more universal
plane—that of the horror and
senseless brutality of war be-
tween nations. Yeats responded
as though he had seen no more
in O’Casey’s earlier work than
a “mere” Englishman. And hav-
for O’Casey when W.B. Yeats, for
ing seen so little, resented be-
ing asked to see more.

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O’CASEY’S heart and mind
were with the common people,

.their struggle, their hopes and

their aspirations. And he was
resolved that his art works
should be weapons in _ their
hands, and an inspiration to
their cause.

He was in London in 1926
during the ‘‘nine days’ wonder”
of the General Strike. He says:

e

“The trade union leaders
found fright in their hearts
when the stillness began to
brood over the. land; they
feared for the fat salaries
their jobs gave them, they
feared to lose the happy as-.
similation of friendship with
those who had more than they
needed .. . and Sir John Sim-
on, after a search through
many old books of parch-
ment discovered that the
strike was illegal. Parchment
Sacramental with sealing wax
declared against the workers.
The leaders called the strike
Ose

Naturally O’Casey supported the
miners in their struggle. Equal-
ly naturally, one of the literary
johnnies who were trying to coax
him into proper behavior pro-
fessed himself shocked at
O’Casey’s “‘sedition.”” Still more
naturally O’Casey told him and
his like to ‘‘go to hell.”

There is an _ unforgettable
sketch of H. G. Wells calling up-
on O’Casey—just when he was
busy at a thankless job ‘that had
to be done because money was
desperately needed.

Wells- had called with his
Rolls-Royce to take O’Casey to
Lady So-and-So’s reception. The
lady had insisted. O’Casey must
obey.

But he wouldn’t — he had a
job to do and needed the money.
So H. G. Wells went off in a huff
and was barely civil to him
thereafter,

Then there was J. H. Thomas,
the Labor leader who became a
renegade. As O’Casey describes

-him, he

“chose the red carpet to be
under his proletarian — feet
rather than the Req Flag to

fly over his head... . Here he
was in grand form, tailed coat,
white waistcoat and tie,

stormy with a sense of his own

importance.” * -

‘But, though Thomas “looked
hale and ‘was excited at having
done the decent thing by the
Rose and Crown, the moment he
had handed over the workers t6
the chill clutch of defeat, that
moment he had fallen, had died,
as Courage tossed his name out
of the book of the people’s life.”

* * *

ONE COULD continue to

quote until one had run through '

the whole book. Best of all
perhaps is a comic dialogue be-
tween O’Casey and Stanley Bald-
win.
Here’s a bit of it:
“You do well to remember
your heroes — Danie] O’Con-

nell, T. P. O’Connor, and Tim-
othy Healy.”

“Aye, and mister McGilli-
gan, tha famous father of Dub-
lin’s wonderful Mary Anne,”
added O’Casey,

: it

“Him, too,” added Baldwin,

“all good Irishmen.”

If one had never known “hon-
est Stan’? one would suspect
O’Casey of having invented this.
But it was just like Baldwin to
cite the names of three of the
most notorious ‘West-Britons’”’
and hold them up for the ad-
miration of an Irish-Irelander
who had known and struggled
alongside Larkin and Connolly.

And like O’Casey too, to punc-
ture the inflated humbug with
the mythical heroics of a street
ballad, which Baldwin was too
ignorant to rFecognize.

A great man, Sean O’Casey—
and a great book. (It is ob-
tainable here at the People’s Co-
operative Bookstore, 337 West
Pender Street, price $4.50.)

—T. A. JACKSON.

ON THE SCREEN

shortly,

land, in his message.

well.

other one,

fall.

Lord and of men.

Soviet Union.”

Friendship Book to be published #

“Your great people hadn't the §
war on their doorsteps,” writes
O’Casey ,froni*his home in Eng-

“We had, and in our houses,
too. We know what war is too
We want no more of it;
and I for one don’t believe the
British people will stand for an-

“Many, millions maybe, would
And to me, the death of a |
young man or woman before he }
or she thas had the time to give
all he or she had to life is an 3
abomination in the sight of the

“For peace, then and friendship too among all nations. And
now, in this accepted time, peace with, and friendship ‘for, the

SEAN O’CASEY

Dreiser's ‘Sister Carrie’ survives

A FAIR TEST of the worth

of a novel these days is to see’

how it stands up to the Holly-
wood treatment. If the novel
has true greatness, as few mod-
ern novels have, then something
of its quality will survive even
the worst distortion and muti-
lation. :

A Place in the Sun, a recent =
Hollywood version of Theodore.

Dreiser’s' An American Tragedy,
proved this, although the film
eliminated most of the social
content that gave the book its
authentic greatness. Now in
Carrie (Capitol), Hollywood’s
version of Sister Carrie, it is
proved again. Sister Carrie is
actually the lesser of Dreiser’s
two great novels, but it has been
made into the better film.

Carrie Meéber (Jennifer
Jones) goes from a Missouri
farm to stay with her sister. in
Chicago in the early nineteen
hundreds. Her sister finds her
a job in a boot factory under
the appalling conditions typical
of the times. Working in bad
light, she runs a sewing-machine
needle into her finger and is
fired. She is desperate for a
job and turns for help to a com-
mercial traveller she has met on
the train.

He seduces her and instals her
in his apartment.
he is a'way on the road, she
meets and falls in love with the
middle-aged manager of an ex-
pensive restaurant, George
Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier).

Hurstwood breaks up his love-
less marriage, gives up his job
and ruins his prospects by per-
suading her to run away with
him. ;

Difficulties dog their every
step. Their marriage is a fake.
Hurstwood’s wife follows them
to New York and threatens big-
amy proceeding unless he signs
over to her everything he owns.
The money they have has been.
stolen from the restaurant and
must be returned. And what
restaurant will employ a known
thief as manager?

With no money and no job,
the once prosperous Hurstwood
goes to-pieces. | At’ last Carrie
sends him back to his son, back
to the life he is used to, and she
herself goes on the stage to

‘make a living.

Then, while '

LAURENCE OLIVIER
Romanticism replaces realism

But Hurstwood does not go
back. After she has long sought
for him unsuccessfully he re-
appears momentarily, a beggar,
‘down and out. She wants to
make up to him what he has
suffered for ther sake.
rather than be a burden to her
he takes some small change and
shuffles out of her life again.

Heavy melodrama, some may
sneer. Perhaps it is, but Dreiser
has loaded it with his hatred of
capitalist hypocrisy and thé ugli-
ness of capitalist society.

It’s to the credit of Theodore
Dreiser, rather than William
Wyler who produced and direct-
ed Carrie for Paramount, that
a great deal of this comes
through. The slums are there,
the people are there, even the
viciousness of the ruling class is
there. But the emphasis thas
been shifted from Dreiser's real-
ism to Hollywood’s romanticism,
accentuated by Olivier’s por-
trayal of Hurstwood so that his
tragedy and not Sister Carrie’s
story becomes the main theme.

For all this, Carrie is one pic-
ture worth seeing.—T:S,

* * *

A WESTERN—but a Western
with a new and dangerous twist.
That’s High Noon (Vogue).

The story is about a U.S. mar-
shall (Gary Cooper) who has
resigned and is about to leave
the small frontier town to which
he has brought “law and order”
when word is received that a
brutal gunman, convicted of

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — AUGUST 15, 1952 — PAGE 8 ~

\

But |

even Hollywood's distortions |

murder, has been paroled from
prison and is returning on the
noon train to organize his hench-
men for a new reign of terror.

The marshall resolutely puts
up his badge again and prepares
to raise a posse. But, for vari-
ous reasons, none of the citizens
is prepared to defénd the town
and the marshall is forced to
face the gunmen alone,

The story is plausibly told
with a skilful blend of*conflicts
such as those familiar with the
work of Stanley Kramer — he
produced Champion and Cyrano
de Bergerac—have come to ex-
pect. But the plausibility only
makes the underlying theme the
more subversive of the demo-
cratic idea,

The ‘‘clear-sighted’’ marshal
does not finally win the com-

munity for organized action — f

quite the opposite. This frontier
town prototype of the superman
Saves ‘the day single-handedly
while the spineless and_ self-
seeking citizenry stand on the
sidelines until the issue is de-
termined. Then they rush to
praise him,
lofty contempt.

This insulting caricature of
the common people and, by con-
trast, this idealizing of the
superman, also serves to reflect,
through “Hollywood’s ‘eyes, the
American’ ruling class’ fear of
united action by the common
people, —2N.S, :

GARY COOPER
Cow-town superman

only to meet his