What is the Stars?

BY TIM PAT COOGAN C EAN O'CASEY and Dr. Konrad Adenauer have Oa good deal in common. Both are practically indestructible, religion plays a large part in the lives of both—and neither knows how to retire. O'Casey is eighty-three and while his ego has developed with the years to a point of megaton destructiveness, the quality of his work has not shown a parallel increase in excellence.

But you may say who would expect a man of eighty-three to be improving on Juno? Even if he were to decline from Juno or the Plough to a point 98 per cent below he would still be 100 per cent ahead of most contemporary dramatists, a comet compared to meteorites. The point is that savage old Sean, now writing about himself in the third person,* is still firing from fixed positions on the same old targets he's been pounding at since he first took a pen in his hand.

In his general writings this restricted field of fire has resulted in some warped and decidedly middle-distance thinking on the subject of Chris- tianity, critics, Communism, science and his native country. In his plays it has led to pitiful things like The Drums of Father Ned.

Science, of course, is to be the new opiate of the people. It will make us all live longer, happier, better. No need any more for the shibboleths of religion which have deluded us down through the ages. No more worrying about whence we came, where we're going or why. But what, in the name of Jasus, is the stars? Who made them? If not a who, what? And what made the what? Why? Only a lunatic would attempt to deny the discoveries of science. But they are discoveries. The substances we are now benefiting from have been here for millions of years. The question is, why the evolutionary process? Why should billions die in misery without ever dreaming of what was possible?

Surely we are not expected to believe a man living in a centrally heated skyscraper, inocu- lated by his BCG, BVD and NBC, will be in- sulated against the knowledge that man is mortal? Not be so conditioned that his mind won't quest for answers that science can't give him?

Whether in his search such a man chooses to regard religion as a band-aid which man applies to his bruised soul, or whether he decides to opt for unreasoning consolation and in return for hope pay some sect's teachings the homage of his understanding, or whether he decides that no religion will bridge the gap between reason and faith, but decides to go forward as best he can in charity and justice, getting what solace or inspiration he can from his chosen faith, never fully convinced, such a man is far from being a dupe.

His rejection of panacea answers like science seems to me to be based on far better premises than the angry, propagandist rejection of O'Casey, who tries to have it both ways by speak- ing of God and Christ, with whom he is on first-name terms as friends, but of religion as obscurantist and retrograde. Certainly it is better than offering up three blessed test-tubes on the altar of science to the Sacred Bunsen Burner and calling it a day.

O'Casey fails to acknowledge that reactionary bishops and other clerical pustules are sons of bitches because they were born that way. A son of a bitch is a son of a bitch, is a son of a bitch—not merely because he was ordained one. Nor is the fact that Sergi Ivanovich is a decent man attributable only to his Communism.

O'Casey will go part of the way towards a uni- versal compassionate understanding. For in- stance, he sighs for both the American and the Chinese mother mourning sons in Korea—and in his present state of mental calcification this could be only empiricism; he lost a son himself to leukxmia—but he calls Hungary a 'sad necessity.'

He screams against the evil practices of Chris- tianity, but not against their Communist counter- part. Suez, Tibet, Hungary, the Bay of Pigs were all bloody hashes. (Though he could argue that the Communist slaughters were the more efficient.) They all cry for condemnation, as do all acts of barbarity, great or small, whether committed by Turk, Jew, Atheist or Papist.

An artist is first a creative spirit commenting on human behaviour freely and in such a way as to bring beauty, horror, evil or good, truth, falsity or whatever to all men, pink or yellow, in a form which will allow of objective judgment. He is not called up to act as a narrow apologist for any 'ism' or `ocracy.' If he can't admit that there are faults on both sides, there is little hope of getting him to admit that there could be good on both sides also. And this is the man who once wrote, 'Take away our murdering hearts of stone and give us hearts of love.'

This book is a slight work, a compendium of essays and memories, some of which have been published before. Its main attraction is that it was written by O'Casey. Its merit is contained in occasional passages like that describing his son s death, odd quirksome reflections and in the kind of wrong-headed admiration which the old chap's gusto and blasphemous courage sometimes evoke. There can't be many men of his age who would cackle off the `Whoremus' verse which blasphemy-wise will seem to the ortho- dox to compare with Joyce's 'Write it down and I'll be back' bit, or the sermon from the Mackerel Plaza.

Nor can there be many octogenarians who would defend the rights of boys and girls 10 go to bed together by saying that such a spec- tacle is preferable to having two youths do AI There is some justice in his charge that a great deal of modern plays, literature, poetry are ex- cessively sordid on the one hand and aridly intellectual on the other. But this is a dangerous field for a writer to enter: 'Art should he healthy,' Mr. Joyce. As his arguments are more concerned with subject-matter rather than treat- ment, one could end up with nothing but 'uplifting' works concerning the flowers that bloom in the spring tra la and with no Plough and Stars, say, or with And Quiet Flows the D

And one might perhaps agree with his plea for a little more sentiment in modern writing' but the next minute the old devil will turn around and lambast some of his fellow-man s most cherished sentiments.

Sure he comes out splendidly against hunger, disease, hypocrisy and that cataclysmic obscenity the atomic bomb, but this is the least that could be expected from Sean O'Casey. Nowadays this sort of thing conies under the heading of Profit- able Public Protest. Bernard Levin could do that much. But it's pathetic to see him praising unofficia1 strikes, ranting against an Ireland which doesn't exist, against Catholicism in the manner of a Sunday school teacher thinking up good ones with which to refute the Catholic kids or against Kenneth Tynan for knocking Purple Dust. It is hard for me as an Irishman to criticise O'Casey, because, bigoted and egotistical as he is, some of the pinpricking attacks mounted on him down through the years by fellow-Irishmen. whose main claim to fame is the fact that they knew him, have had more to do with chain/iron-1, pietas and jealousy than they have with judg- ments of him as an artist.

Bitterness is a sometimes émigré phenomenon, but it takes the Irish emigrant in a particularly corrosive form. This type is the original looker- back in anger. Slums may come down, incomes go up, enlightenment spread, food, clothing, housing and free speech abound in a manner of which one only becomes appreciatively aware when one visits an Iron Curtain country, bat, meanwhile, back in Narksville, exiled Donal 01 the Denigrations will continue to blame Church, State, family, climate, That Crowd, for his un- happiness, lack of sense, lack of prosperity or whatever.

It is sad to sec one of Ireland's greatest con' tributors to the literature of the world CnCan: cered by the disease of lesser men at the end of his days.

* UNDER A COLORED CAP. By Sean O'Casey' (Macmillan, 21s.)