Word: oed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, the fourth volume of his third-person autobiography,* is essentially an arrangement of O'Casey's counter-compliments to the Irish reviewers, clerics and laymen who refused to take him on those terms...
...Black & Tans. The free-for-alls of O'Casey's Volume IV are set in the years when Eire was finally obtaining her independence. Black & Tans roar through Dublin in armored cars, Irish rebels fight them off shoulder to shoulder-and, after defeating them, turn their ferocity against one another. The air is full of flying shillelaghs, ecclesiastical croziers, broken staves of office, and splintering scepters. But olive branches are missing from the scene and O'Casey, parodying Yeats, chants sarcastically...
Through all the hullabaloo moves O'Casey himself, an ex-laborer who burns with a hot, proletarian fire. He is poor as a church mouse and still, at 35, such "innocent gaum" (dumbbell) that when he gets a check for one of his first plays he doesn't know how to go about cashing it. But he is sustained by wonderful dreams and illusions in which he sees Ireland peopled by "golden boys" who wander through lanes "canopied by the sly innocence of the woodbine's dangling stems," while adoring lasses stroke "the faded, maybe bloodstained, cloth...
...innocent gaum O'Casey woke up with a bump to find that most people were clay after all. When his proletarian plays were staged by Dublin's Abbey Theater, many critics hissed maliciously and poets looked nervously the other way. Even pioneers, O'Casey discovered, fear public opinion; even democrats get a kick out of wearing striped pants and top hats; even noble esthetes enjoy walking with one foot in the gutter. Sean was shocked to find that stately, plump Oliver St. John Gogarty surreptitiously read whodunits ; that refined Lady Gregory reveled in Peg o...
...tonight Howard Mumford Jones, professor of English, F. O. Matthiessen, professor of History and Literature, Arthur T. Merrit '29, professor of Music, and Dorothy Adlow, art critic of the Christian Science monitor will deal with the Arts and letters section of the five day symposiums...