Sean O’casey (Magill Book Reviews)
At a glance:
- Author: Garry O’Connor
- First Published: 1988
- Type of Work: Biography
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: 1950’s, 1960’s, Family or family life, Mothers, Socialism, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, Nineteenth century, Revolutions, 1940’s, 1910’s, 1920’s, 1930’s, Nationalism, Drama or dramatists, Ireland or Irish people, Plays or playwrights, 1900’s, Activism
- Locales: England, Ireland
Sean O’Casey’s plays still speak to audiences, as attested by the success of the 1988 New York production of JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK, to be shown on public television. That seems a minor miracle, given the intricate Irishness of his work, its grounding in a tangle of social and political conflicts which headlines from present-day Ireland do not begin to explicate. Garry O’Connor’s biography helps to fill in that background while telling the story of a complex and contradictory man.
O’Casey, who was born to a Protestant family in Dublin in 1880 and died in Devon, England, in 1964, told the story himself in six volumes of autobiography. His account is an impressionistic one, and very free with the truth. It is the biographer’s job, then, to clarify the distinction between what really happened in O’Casey’s life (insofar as that is possible to determine) and the reshaping of that experience in the telling of it. O’Connor does not hesitate to point out instances of O’Casey’s fabrications--noting, for example, that O’Casey exaggerated the poverty of his family and misleadingly portrayed himself as a product of Dublin’s slums.
The need to create a myth of himself, O’Connor suggests, was close to the roots of O’Casey’s creativity. Narcissistic, quarrelsome, wrongheaded (even after the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, he refused to criticize the Soviet Union), O’Casey was also sensitive, generous, capable of wonder: Like many writers, he was childish and childlike in equal measure. O’Connor does justice to both sides of the man. The text is supplemented by illustrations (period drawings as well as photographs), notes (with a brief list of further sources in addition to those cited), and an index.
Sources for Further Study
Booklist. LXXXIV, May 15, 1988, p. 1566.
Boston Globe. May 22, 1988, p. 109.
Chicago Tribune. May 29, 1988, XIV, p. 5.
Kirkus Reviews. LVI, March 15, 1988, p. 437.
Library Journal. CXIII, May 1, 1988, p. 80.
The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, July 3, 1988, p. 7.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIII, April 8, 1988, p. 80.
San Francisco Chronicle. June 19, 1988, p. REV7.
The Spectator. CCLX, April 9, 1988, p. 31.
The Times Literary Supplement. May 6, 1988, p. 495.
The Washington Post Book World. XVIII, June 5, 1988, p. 5.
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