[MacNeice was an Irish-born English poet, playwright, critic and educator. In the following review of Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, he faults O'Casey's writing as overly polemical and intemperate, yet concludes that its vitality and verbal invention redeem these shortcomings.]

The fourth and last volume in Mr. O'Casey's record of his Irish experiences [Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well], which this time include the Troubles and the Abbey Theatre, again throws much light both on Ireland and on O'Casey. There are many very good things in it and some pretty bad ones, but even the latter are illuminating; this man who brought something new and virile into the modern theatre remains for better or worse a creator. He may be unjust, but he is sincere; he may be naive, but he is alive; he may sow with the whole sack, but it is his own sack. He is the most powerful "proletarian" writer we have, one who, in his own words, "would ever preserve, ever wear—though he would never flaunt it—the tattered badge of his tribe." (I query merely the clause that I have italicised.) He tells us that his Irish critics in the Twenties accused him of "exploiting the poor," a judgment which illustrates not only the well-known malice of the Dublin intelligentsia, but also their cowardice when faced with uncomfortable facts. O'Casey, who says truly that "there were few things in Dublin more conventional than the boastful, free-and-easy manners of its bohemianism," is no respecter either of conventions or of persons.

This refusal to compromise is both his strength and his weakness. There is perhaps no other writer of his calibre using the English language to-day who shows less self-criticism and self-discipline. Incorrigibly slap-dash he often here, as elsewhere, travesties his own profoundest feelings and perceptions by a kind of writing which belongs to a twopence-coloured novelette. A plethora of ready-made epithets such as third-rate writers use to make poignant what they do not feel, is found in O'Casey obscuring his intensest feelings of what is most poignant by its nature. And this over-emphasis and crudity of style are linked, as they are in Dickens, with a major flaw—a flaw of the intellect—which can only be called sentimentality. This is not, of course, the sentimentality of someone who fakes his feelings; it is that of the muddled crusader who lacks a sense of proportion. O'Casey in his earlier days was labelled a realist, and still calls himself a rationalist, but he is, in fact, a romantic. Only a romantic could indict the Roman Catholic Church for its interference with freedom of thought and of discussion and, almost in the same breath, utter a hymn to the Red Star which beats the lushest of orthodox hymnographers on their own ground.

To see the world in terms of sheep, all white or all red, and of goats as black as top hats or a priest's robes is an asset perhaps to a prophet or pamphleteer, but is not what we expect from a dramatist. And a distinction is apparent between O'Casey the dramatist and O'Casey the dithyrambist. The characters of his earlier plays emerge as individuals—neither black nor white but multi-coloured as in life. When keeping his eye on the people he knew he had ample scope for those surprises so characteristic of life and so necessary to a dramatist. Bessie Burgess in The Plough and the Stars behaves very oddly—but truly. The recognition of such human inconsistency gives a dramatist two things he needs—irony and concentration. It is the sheep-and-goaters, not those who see life as complex, who lose themselves in verbosity. O'Casey throughout his autobiography alternates between irony and naivety, between concentration and diffuseness. "Do the insurance companies pay if a man is shot after curfew?" That one line from The Shadow of a Gunman is worth pages of slogan-plugging, and O'Casey can still tap that vein when he lets the people speak—not the masses nor the megaphones, but the people whom that phrase, "the masses," disembodies. The best thing in this new book is a chapter called "The Raid"; here again is a multum in parvo of tangled emotions and issues, here again the ironic pay-off that lifts reporting into tragedy. This chapter would make a magnificent one-act play.

O'Casey at his best, then, writes about real people but we should not, even in his earlier work, simply label him "realist." Mr. Sean O'Faolain has recently done so ("unassuaged realism" was his phrase), contrasting him with Synge, but the two playwrights have much in common. An early critique by F. R. Higgins, though quoted with resentment by O'Casey, touches at least on the other half of the truth in suggesting that the Dublin plays show "a technique based on the revue structure." The prominence in the plays of song, of tags of poetry and of incantatory speech, is, like Synge's over-packing of imagery, at least an "assuagement" of realism. Irish peasants do use striking imagery and Dublin slum-dwellers do sing songs in the most unlikely circumstances but both Synge and O'Casey have greatly strengthened the mixture—and quite right too; they are dramatists. But the ingredients were drawn from life, from a particular life; it was when O'Casey left the Dublin scene that, in such sentimental plays as Within the Gates or Oak Leaves and Lavender, he got the ingredients themselves wrong. It should be added that this declared Communist and rationalist has always been obsessed with religion. Thus both his last two books have been dedicated to the memory of Maynooth professors. These two Roman Catholic teachers were to some extent rebels within the fold but what goes on in that fold seems to fascinate this Dublin Protestant turned Communist. And the Catholic butler in his latest play remains more genuinely eloquent than the butler's Communist son. In Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well nothing could be more bitter than the attacks, sometimes merited, on the Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland but as usual, when he starts to propagandise, O'Casey spoils his case by over-simplifying. It is too easy a score to set. Stalin's Life of Lenin against Sir Joseph Glynn's Life of Matt Talbot (the Dublin labourer who was beatified for wearing cart chains next his skin.)

Compared with O'Casey's previous autobiographical books this final movement is monochrome and sober. He has here abandoned—and it is no great loss—his Finneganese Without Tears but he has also all but abandoned those flights into wild satirical fantasy which so distinguished Drums Beneath the Windows—such astonishing pieces of writing as "The Song of a Shift" (on the repercussions of Synge's Playboy) or the dialogue between St. Patrick and St. Laurence O'Toole or the apocalyptic picture of the madhouse. Still, this last volume has plenty of bitter humour, at its best when the commentary is made in character and through dialogue:

You see, it's this way: if Document No. 2 gets accepted, Ireland'll be what you could call a sequestered country that is still within the outlines of the British Empire.

—I don't much like the sayin' of within the outlines of the British Empire, and I don't altogether like the word sequestered either.

—If we don't take the chance offered in Document No. 2, said the whisper, louder now than it had been before, the land'll become an improvised inferno.

Irish politics, Irish social life and Irish intellectuals give plenty of chances to a satirist of genius and O'Casey seizes them with gusto. He brilliantly caricatures the post-Treaty social climbers "feverishly fitting themselves into the castoff manners and minor deportment of the English." He has no less fun with De Valera and his disingenuous method of taking the oath of allegiance. As for the Abbey Theatre he gives a slapstick picture of the riot over The Plough and the Stars when Barry Fitzgerald knocked someone into the stalls and Yeats "stormed in utter disregard of all around him … as he conjured up a vision for them of O'Casey on a cloud, with Fluther on his right hand and Rosie Redmond on his left, rising upwards to Olympus," etc., etc. This satirical gift, however, is sometimes abused as in the long and laboured attack on A. E.—though we should be grateful that he also includes a long panegyric on Lady Gregory. Sheep and goats—here we are again but that is O'Casey, take him or leave him. And those who like a writer to have guts and loyalties, those who prefer a river however muddy to a pool however ornamental, those who are interested in living words or living workers or the still living Ireland, should certainly take him.