Word: sean
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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SUNSET AND EVENING STAR, by Sean O'Casey. The sixth and last volume of one of the most readable and crotchety autobiographies written in this century, by the world's greatest living playwright...
...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...
...English literature. Much as he loved to pretend that he was too detached an artist to have "sympathies," every word he wrote shows that he was much too softhearted (and not really intelligent enough) to possess the large hatreds of a Swift or the noisy spites of a Sean O'Casey. If his plays date, it is not because the humor has gone bad, but because the plots are usually as sappy and mawkish as the worst of Dickens...
...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...