Word: caseys
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DRUMS UNDER THE WINDOWS (431 pp.) -Sean O'Casey-Macmillan...
...that time Dr. Douglas Hyde ("make way there, yous, keep back, keep back, give him space there") was a famous, fine man. Playwright Sean O'Casey, now 65, remembers that Dublin gawked and said wasn't Hyde the grandest champion the glorious Irish language had ever known, although to be sure he hardly spoke a word of it himself. Indeed, a famous man, a "sure sage, with almost all the priests applaudin' "; and him a Protestant, too ("make way, there-silence-"). And standing nearby was Jim Connolly, "the renowned Socialist leadher," author of Socialism Made Easy...
...Smoking Gospel. Drums under the Windows is the third volume of Playwright O'Casey's autobiography (preceding volumes: I Knock at the Door, Pictures in the Hallway). Rambling, rhapsodic, episodic, it is written sometimes in straightaway English, sometimes in lyrical doubletalk like that of the earlier James Joyce. The subject is his grimmest, bitterest, pre-playwright years: the 15 years or so up to and including the 1916 Easter Week Rising. Like almost any good book written by a good Irishman about those days, Drums is at bottom sentimental and romantic, but the resemblance to the standard stops...
Before he thought of writing plays, or had a spare shilling to spend on a ticket to the Abbey Theater, O'Casey swung a pick & shovel as a day laborer, worked at nights for the cause of the Gaelic League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Citizen Army. He lived with his mother in a few flea-ridden Dublin slum rooms. When bis sister died, there was no money in the house to bury her. When his brother-in-law went crazy, the clutchers came in a plain, black cab and carried him off to the home for loony paupers...
Finally, there was the Trouble, begun on Easter Monday, 1916: Pearse, Connolly, Tom Clarke and the boys taking over the General Post Office on O'Connell Street, the terrible days of gunfire, burning, looting. O'Casey, with hundreds of others, was corralled and locked up by British soldiers. "Th' wild Irish," said a soldier then; "drink goes to their 'eads. Wot was bitin' em? Barmy, th' lot of 'em. Wot did they do it for? Larfable." "Poor, dear, dead men," says O'Casey now, "poor W. B. Yeats." The wit and rich...