Word: casey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Case Against O'Casey...
...Casey at the Bat" [TIME, Nov. 15]: Being an Irishman, or partly one, I find it slightly painful [that] Sean O'Casey . . . respects a political organization which has slain and tortured uncounted millions all over their world-with their "inexhaustible energy, the irresistible enthusiasm of their Socialist efforts" . . . O'Casey may be a "roguish wordmonger," but so was Goebbels and Pravda ... He is entertaining, but he is also bitter . . . There is too much of his "failing desires" to make him palatable to anyone who knows there...
Sean O'Casey is a literary salmon who splashed out of a Dublin slum, leaped the rapids of poverty, and has never stopped swimming stubbornly upstream to spawn his silvery prose. Sunset and Evening Star is the sixth and final volume of his lively, third-person autobiography. With cantankerous, merry and garrulous gusto, the 74-year-old O'Casey evokes the great shades of Irish letters-Yeats, Shaw, Joyce-without fully clinching his eventual right to join them. But "bad or good, right or wrong, O'Casey's always himself," probably the world's greatest...
...Casey proudly calls himself a Communist and has a soft spot in his head for the Soviet Union ("The inexhaustible energy, the irresistible enthusiasm of their Socialistic efforts, were facts to Sean; grand facts"). But this does not make his autobiography any less entertaining. O'Casey admits the existence of other literary lights only to short-circuit them, and he is at his best when he is blowing fuses. Samples...
...rare heroes. O'Casey can also bring himself to toss a rhetorical posy: "Oh, Shaw, there is not your equal now! When shall we see your like again!" A roguish wordmonger, O'Casey peppers each page with Joycean puns and wordplays, e.g., Tea Deum, imaginot line, the rust was silence. Ever the dramatist, O'Casey savors his exit with ..a tender salute to old age and a last toast to life: "The sun has gone, dragging her gold and green garlands down . . . Soon it will be time to kiss the world goodbye...