[O'Neill-Barna is an American writer. In the following review, she asserts that O'Casey's status as a major playwright and a social and theatrical visionary, long obscured by the opposition of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and other influential critics, is firmly established in The Sean O'Casey Reader.]

Doubtless it sounds ponderous to some and quixotic to others to say that Irish literature affirms the worth of ordinary man. Ponderous if we feel this is merely the neutral conclusion arrived at by all literatures; and quixotic if we weigh up particular writings about Ireland, either crowded accounts of wars, evictions, famines, workhouses and immigration, or whimsy about untidy servants, "Irish bulls," quaint amusing remarks, leprechauns and "Little People"—these last appreciated most by landlords and visitors. For neither the misfortunes of multitudes nor the fancies of a few are likely to convey an idea of human value.

But a striking element in Irish literature is that the worth of man is bound up with, even arises from, his enjoyment of words: language becomes the tool by which he shows his worth.

Both the tradition of Gaelic Ireland and the great Anglo-Irish writers agree on this rather distinctive point; to them ordinary man—who is in this case of course an Irishman—is seen as simple and helpless, without money, influence, job or education. But he can knock a glory out of life by his courage, his loyalty, and his powers of imagery and description, which include the comic. Comedy is one half of the heroic—the important half—the one that makes the hero human. The comic spirit calls into play the sense of justice which forces a man to resist oppression and the sense of irony which makes wars merry and songs sad.

Dead center in this tradition stands the work of Sean O'Casey. In this new volume [The Sean O'Casey Reader: Plays, Autobiographies, Opinions] in which his friend Brooks Atkinson has consolidated his writings, we can see the pattern of irony, satire and imagination, and above all, of the magic that can be wrought with popular speech. O'Casey the man is central too: his large view; his strong sense of justice and its opposite side, grievance; his courage in holding to his "own way of thinking and freedom to give it utterance," and his very acknowledgment of the force of the written word.

Once, Alan Dent tells us, he went along with Brooks Atkinson on Atkinson's annual visit to O'Casey in Torquay. O'Casey remarked that it was the first time a British critic had called, though New York ones came regularly. When Dent pointed out that O'Casey had attacked English critics, O'Casey said with a smile, "Sure, they should have the sense to know that I'm only venomous when I have a pen in me hand." To him, as to the Gaelic bards, it was fundamental that written words were made for battles and human contacts for empathy.

So it is extraordinarily helpful to hold between two covers nine O'Casey plays, 300 pages of autobiography, eight expository "opinions" from his later works, and a little-known short story. The plays show his empathy, his profound knowledge of the human experience as comic and tragic, real and visionary: the prose writings give us embattled words, in his own commentary on the plays and empathy again in his own human story. Choosing both what is essential and what is representative, Brooks Atkinson has not spread old wounds or controversial views; and by giving the lot, he has made possible a long-needed total impression.

We have the framework; birth in 1880, poverty-stricken Dublin boyhood, bad eyes, wonderful mother, manual jobs, the lock-out of workers in 1913, Irish Labor party, Citizen Army, despair at these and all organizations, dogged attempts at playwriting, triumph of the first Abbey plays, break over The Silver Tassie, England, marriage, turn away from realism, "Communism," the family, international acclaim, death in 1964.

But the choice thing is that here, at last and at once, is the source material for an O'Casey overview. He emerges as a touchstone of right feeling; for man he had a social and religious concern like the idealists of an older, simpler time. In the teeth of every Establishment, he stubbornly held true to his hopes for humanity as the great 19th-century rebels did, and as we do not—though typically this generation would admit that a man who is against everything can't be all bad.

O'Casey and his writing were of one piece, and we can now see that it was not his work but only his reputation which suffered by his "exile." While the early indictment of his realistic drama for combining comedy and tragedy died down, the accusation stood that the later plays lost touch with Ireland and were unrealistic on that account as well as by being expressionistic. But the Irish people whom O'Casey knew, relatively free of both benefits and corruptions of materialism, relatively simple and spontaneous, were the unveneered mankind he needed for his plays, and their use of English—so tremendous, concrete, witty, rich, racy-of-the-soil, fresh-minted—was perfectly suited for adaptation to his humor and poetry. He did not go wrong in characterization, for though Ireland may have changed, O'Casey folk may still be found there even today.

Instead, the out-of-touch airy-fairy canard stemmed from the two derogating forces that shadowed O'Casey's entire life—that of Irish reaction and that of Yeats. The work developed intact, but the man had to fight an unending battle, for since the Irish disparaged the Irish plays and Yeats and ensuing British critics the others, between them they would have licked the platter clean. One of the excitements of this book is to watch O'Casey defend with logic and fire what he had written out of love and pity.

Irish reaction of course harked back to Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, presented by the Abbey Theatre in 1905. Riots had resulted from objections to the word "shift" (woman's undergarment). The stalls, their delicacy offended, are reported to have cried, "Lower the bloody curtain and give us what we bloody well want." So in 1926 when O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars met the same chauvinism, everyone from Lady Gregory down foresaw that it would be another Playboy, and indeed they were right.

Joseph Holloway, that Irish Babbitt, said it was suited only for filthy minds, because one of the characters was a streetwalker and "there are no streetwalkers in Dublin." (Reply by another spectator: "I was accosted by one only last night." Holloway: "There were none in Dublin till the Tommies brought them over!") After consultation with her confessor, an actress refused the lines "any kid, livin' or dead, that Jinnie Gogan's had … was got between the bordhers of th' Ten Commandments," and F. J. McCormick declined to say the word "snotty." Interesting speculations arise: what arcane connotations lurk here? Borders! Snotty! You never know. An Irish barrister once told me that in cross-examination "conversation" could be a dangerous word: "Did you have a conversation with her?"

And there was the fuss about bringing the flags of the Republic into a pub, and umbrage over pseudo "patriots" shown as cowards and looters. Behind the scenes Yeats pulled strings with a ruthless determination for publicity. He gave what was intended to be a famous speech from the stage, or rather gave it to the newspapers; the riot squads were called out just in time; the whole country was rocked. All of this meant one sure thing for Sean O'Casey—not the "apotheosis" of Yeats's rhetoric—but that he would be the target forevermore of middle-class Roman Catholic nationalistic sensibility, then rising into full spate of power with the Irish Free State. For while the opposition to Synge had been nationalist-romantic, that to O'Casey was nationalist-political—and had control.

In a way it was a tribute. As we have seen, the Irish have always recognized the effectiveness of words; they have their proverbial gift of the gab and their mastery of repartee, and in Gaelic times their poets used verses to raise pimples on an enemy or to cause his death. Thus they bitterly resented the stereotype fixed on them by the English, that of the comic, low-life stage Irishman. In their struggle for independence, they understandably saw that this image must be changed at all costs. As Ireland gradually became the place "where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove," a new frontier for patriotism opened up for them in the theater, where by booing at a bad word or an earthy character they could not only strike a blow for Ireland but also get in well with the right political side. In the process, they jettisoned their esthetic sense.

But this was only the first of the two main difficulties, and this one was shared with Joyce, Shaw, Synge and other honest observers. The other difficulty was more destructive and solitary—the antipathy of Yeats, who owned and operated Anglo-Irish literature. Whatever praise is justly given Yeats as a great poet, it is now beginning to be allowed that as a philosopher and dramatist he was inferior, and that as a judge of writers he was a disaster. Poets may be ipso facto introverted, but Yeats was singularly unable to acknowledge the achievement of others, and singularly conceited. It is a pity that as far as England was concerned he was the arbiter of Irish letters, and as the editor of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, in a position of great influence.

There were of course, eminent figures who stood apart from his opinion: in America, Brooks Atkinson and George Jean Nathan; in Ireland Lady Gregory, who had discovered O'Casey and had given him the gratefully received advice that his forte was characterization. She alone of the Abbey group appreciated his grandeur, but she was outvoted and upstaged. In England Shaw defended, counseled, and sympathized (while Mrs. Shaw urged concessions to the powers that be).

Ironically, at the time of the trouble with Yeats, O'Casey was credited with "being singlehandedly responsible" for the worldwide revival of the "Abbey's declining phase." His The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars had been produced in 1923, 1924 and 1926. But when in 1928 he duly sent in The Silver Tassie with every expectation of its acceptance, Yeats wrote him an arrogant letter of rejection, upbraiding him for dealing with the Great War which, he told O'Casey, O'Casey was not interested in. O'Casey asked in amazed reply, "What human being was not?"

Other critics were upset by O'Casey's use of expressionism along with realism, an objection which has simply evaporated with the passage of time, the mixture of documentary and symbolic being a commonplace today. The case of Ulysses is parallel—another work belittled not only as blasphemous and obscene but also as incomprehensible—which is now understood without difficulty.

Like Joyce, O'Casey was penalized for being in advance of his time, for being universal, original, passionate and antiheroic. He realized his position; here as elsewhere Atkinson gives us relevant passages: "Yeats's denunciation of The Silver Tassie had done Sean's name a lot of violence. The Nobel Prize winner, the Leader of English literature was a judge against whom there was no appeal for the time being."

"For the time being" is the operative phrase. One long result of the rejection of The Silver Tassie is that O'Casey's plays are typically read rather than seen. Even so, they wear well. The fantasy which seemed outrageous even 20 years ago is coming closer and closer not only to modern stage techniques but to modern experience. And if he never were a dramatist, this volume makes it abundantly evident that O'Casey would rest on his autobiographical writings as a master of prose. When he says in his heart-breaking lament for his son, "though I may bear it like a man, I must also feel it like a man," it is a key statement, for man, loving and enduring, is his subject. Frustration, deprivation, poverty and, above all, war are always with us, but so is O'Casey's challenge to these destroyers of human goodness and gusto.