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SUNSET AND EVENING STAR (339 pp.)-Sean O'Casey-Macmillan...
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...
...great trouble with the great Irish writers is that they make Irishmen seem like nobody else at all. That, as James Joyce, Sean O'Casey and a dozen others have proved, is fine up to a point, but sooner or later even the most sympathetic reader gets tired of a literary chosen people. Short Story Writer Frank O'Connor has a nice way of making his people look, feel and sound like anyone else. Any reader might find himself saying: there but for lack of poteen, a certain uneasiness about sex and a wary relationship with the parish...
...Washington, the sadly slumping Senators fired Manager Bucky Harris after five losing years, were reported ready to hire Chuck Dressen, who led the Brooklyn Dodgers to two successive National League pennants (1952-53) before being fired himself. In New York, after his first losing season in six years, Manager Casey Stengel was given a new, two-year contract by the Yankees (estimated salary...