[An American journalist and critic, Atkinson was perhaps the most influential and respected theater critic of his time. In the following mixed review of Sunset and Evening Star, he asserts that, in spite of its quarrelsome tirades and general irascibility, O'Casey's prose still evokes "grandeur" and a joyous affirmation of life.]

With Sunset and Evening Star Sean O'Casey completes his autobiography. The six-volume series began fifteen years ago with his valiant and lovely impressions of childhood, I Knock at the Door. In that book "Johnny Casside," as the chief character was then named, innocently entered the slum world of Dublin. In Sunset and Evening Star (another glorious title) the chief character is named "Sean." He reports some of the things he did and many of the things he thought between his return to England from America and the years following World War II. Since the autobiography is no chronicle of vital statistics, Mr. O'Casey is chary of dates. But the period covered in the new volume is from 1934 or 1935 to, apparently, 1949 or 1950.

Whatever else the autobiography may be, it is a masterpiece of writing. The writing has music, eloquence, passion, bitterness and force. It can recreate sense perceptions with concrete exactitude. As a sample of Mr. O'Casey's descriptive writing with its vivid use of details, note this sentence about an English nursing home where Mrs. O'Casey was a patient: "The rooms were heavy with old air, and wore a weak look, as if they, too, were sick: and all he saw seemed to whisper cynically of uncleaniliness and of clumsy, uncomely methods of management and care."

Or consider this description of the flower-strewn fields of Devon, where the O'Caseys live: "Newly ploughed fields of red earth, spreading out in a view as wide as the eye can cover, aglow with their differing hues, from reddish-purple, reddish-brown to what seems to be a vivid crimson, separated here and there by squares and diagonals of green as rich and velvety as the red, a sight to be wondered at and loved. Oh, the Devon people have a beautiful carpet under their feet."

Mr. O'Casey has long been fascinated by the mystical prose style of James Joyce, whom he regards as a master of writing. There are more than the usual number of Joycean passages in Sunset and Evening Star, and it must be conceded that Mr. O'Casey manages them well. When he takes wing into one of these records of sensory impressions, interwoven with subjective comment, he keeps one foot on the ground. Whether they are Joyce or Carlyle might be closely argued. But they do give Mr. O'Casey an opportunity to convey overtones of scorn for the rich, horror of the inhumanity of bombing, contempt for his enemies. Their flow of imagery is his comment—generally ironic—on the facts or the people with whom he is dealing.

It seems to me that the impressionistic passages are second-best O'Casey. The best O'Casey, which is also the best in modern English prose, is the direct statement of what happened, like the hilarious chronicle of a cold night at Cambridge University where Mr. O'Casey got lost in an unlighted corridor; or, the description of Shaw and Mrs. Shaw at the luncheon table, with a record of what they said. Mr. O'Casey is not a self-conscious stylist. The strength and beauty of his writing are implicit in the purpose of his autobiography: "The idea of setting down some of the things that happened to himself; the thoughts that had darkened or lightened the roads along which he had traveled; the things that had woven his life into strange patterns, with the words of a song weaving a way through a ragged coat, or a shroud, maybe, that has missed him and covered another."

Through all his works Mr. O'Casey has one theme. He is for joy and freedom. He hates anything or anyone who does not contribute to the joy of being alive or who impinges on personal freedom. He hates gentility because he suspects that it is joyless. He hates wealth and power because he believes that they are bought at the expense of ordinary people. Never having been in the Soviet Union, he wistfully imagines that joy and freedom for all the people will grow like a beautiful flower out of the wide land where the slave camps flourish. Never was there a man less suited by temperament to the harsh disciplines of Soviet society.

Mr. O'Casey is not one to abandon old ideals lightly. One of the most pungent chapters in Sunset and Evening Star portrays his imperious dismissal of a former Soviet worker who has the effrontery to tell him that the Ogpu took her husband away. "Not proven," is Mr. O'Casey's lofty verdict. "Lady," said Sean [to quote what he has written], "I have been a comrade of the Soviet Union for twenty-three years, and all she stands for in the way of socialism, and I don't intend to break that bond for a few hasty remarks by one who obviously hates the very bones of the Soviet people. And the more you shout, lady, the less I hear."

Pegging away at his writing in Totnes, Mr. O'Casey is not inclined to have an old faith shaken by an overwrought woman back from Russia whose husband had been spirited away by the police. He dislikes her so much he probably suspects that her husband conspired with the police to get away from home. He dismisses her from his house with a royal gesture.

Despite the grandeur of the writing, Sunset and Evening Star is a quarrelsome book. When Mr. O'Casey is not relating what happened to himself and his family, he carries on running feuds with the Roman Catholic Church, to which he keeps returning; G. K. Chesterton, whom he regards as a fake; Denis Johnston, who was so ignorant that he did not recognize a Giorgione picture hanging in the O'Casey hallway (a good example of the O'Casey snobbery in reverse); George Orwell, who reviewed Drums Under the Window contemptuously, and other people and institutions that Mr. O'Casey keeps on his griddle. These tirades, some of them as furious as tracts, become tiresome before the book is finished. But they are part of the O'Casey temperament and have to be borne, though not necessarily in silence.

One reason they grow tiresome is that Mr. O'Casey is also a warm-hearted, gentle man, affectionate toward his family and his friends, and he is spiritually unconquerable. There is plenty of the lovable O'Casey in these pages. Note, especially, his compassionate understanding of the needs of children; his devotion to the memory of his mother, who was the immortal character in the early books; his sorrowful portrait of a Totnes mother who had just lost her son in battle; his loyalty to Lady Gregory; his respect for Yeats; his kindly interest in the American soldiers quartered in Totnes during the war; his humility toward his wife.

In all his moods there is one dominant fact about Mr. O'Casey: He is thoroughly alive. In his seventies, he is still a fiery particle. He is not giving quarter on any side. Laying down his worn pen in the sixth volume of his story, he writes this word of farewell: "Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down, and with only the serenity and calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to Life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah!"

He's a man.