[Gilman is an American critic, editor, and educator. In the following review, a small portion of which appeared in CLC-5, he contends that O'Casey's literary reputation has been unduly inflated by critics, and that the value of his correspondence is not in "revelation about what-lies-behind-greatness … [but] that of insight into a flawed career."]

He described himself in the titles of several of his books as a "green crow" and a "flying wasp," but the image of Sean O'Casey that's fixed in my mind is of a more ungainly sort of winged creature: a crane or stork, a great flapping, squawking, long-necked, near-sighted bird with Adam's apple bobbing in rage or indignation. O'Casey pretended to—and sometimes possessed—the homely uncorrupted sagacity of the crow of our animal tales, and regarded himself as called on to administer stinging wasp-like rebukes to social and artistic complacency. Yet as this ponderous volume of his correspondence [The Letters of Sean O'Casey, Volume I, 1910–1941] demonstrates, he was often simple-minded rather than innocently wise, and querulous, even mean-spirited, instead of intellectually valorous.

There's nothing to be surprised at in this: we expect a man's letters—a fortiori a writer's—to reveal his dissonances and contradictions. Still, in the matter of O'Casey something of more than psychic or moral interest is at stake when we find him displayed to us in this informal way. Anomalies and contradictions abound in his writings and in the zone of estimation that surrounds it. What is his place, this troublesome, erratic, autodidactic Irishman? Was he really one of the great modern playwrights, as so many textbooks and so much popular consideration would have it? I remember the litany from my student days: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, O'Casey, O'Neill—the recent masters.

His towering importance is naturally assumed by the editor of these letters. David Krause is the author of a serviceable if indulgent literary biography, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, which has just been reissued by Macmillan in an expanded edition, and he has worked with astonishing diligence to track down nearly every scrap of correspondence O'Casey ever wrote. This volume, 1910–1941, is to be followed by two more going up to O'Casey's death in 1964, the whole enterprise being likely to come to more than 2,500 pages. "A heroic figure," "the radical conscience of the modern theater," "a generation ahead of his time," Mr. Krause says of his subject, and one would like it all to be true, if only to justify such stupendous labor.

But it's not true. O'Casey can't bear the weight of such an apotheosis, which threatens by reaction to diminish his limited achievement. There are too many bad and even deeply embarrassing plays in his oeuvre (Within the Gates, The Star Turns Red, The Bishop's Bonfire, et al.) and too many esthetic sins of naiveté, rhetorical excess, sentimentality and tendentiousness in all but his very best work: Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, the late and only half-successful Cock-a-doodle Dandy. I suspect that O'Casey's inflated reputation in the textbooks and in certain theatrical circles is largely a set of extra-artistic circumstances: the sterility of the English-speaking theater in the twenties when he came to prominence with his "Dublin" plays at the Abbey Theater; his ferocious battle with censorship; his own "dramatic" story—slum childhood, self-education, lifelong nearblindness, self-exile.

If the letters have value, then, it's not in the mode of revelation about what-lies-behind-greatness, etc., but (it doesn't seem to me insulting to say) in a more prosaic vein, that of insight into a flawed career. The peculiar violence of O'Casey's circumstances, his beleaguered physical and economic condition, his struggle with Irish prudery and provincialism, make him something other than a fully representative literary figure, but he is representative in having been frequently unconscious of the true nature of his work, in having felt simultaneously misunderstood and touched with glory, and in having doggedly insisted on his inspiration even when it was leading him to imaginative disaster.

"Writing letters is a talent the gods have denied me. I must have been a secretary in a previous existence," he writes in 1925 to Gabriel Fallon, an actor-friend to whom many of the most personal letters are directed. Yet he obviously relished it, and though there is indeed something secretarial in the dutifulness with which he sets down the details of his own career, there is also an attractive energy in the way he goes about it. He lets nothing get past: he pounces, groans, fulminates, lyricizes, protests. And always in the substance of what he writes, or in its subtext, is the assertion (or question) of who he is, what he has done.

The letters are to friends and acquaintances, of course, but there are also a great many to newspapers and magazines, constituting the text of O'Casey's lifelong public debate. They begin when he is 30 and for some years, until he turns seriously to writing plays, mostly concern his political ideas and activity. (Most of the early ones are signed S. O'Cathasaigh: christened John Casey, he Gaelicized himself in his mid-twenties, adopting his final name when The Shadow of a Gunman was accepted by the Abbey in 1923.) As he begins to think of himself as a writer the letters touch more and more on literary matters and from then on move easily among politics of an increasingly radical kind. He writes finally about the theater and, to intimates, about the details of his besieged existence.

Impetuous to defend himself, he rushes headlong at every criticism. His letters to journals where he has been attacked are full of impassioned (though not usually very seductive) claims for the value of his plays or ideas, together with frequently vituperative assaults on his detractors' intelligence and, in some instances, sanity. Of an opponent in a controversy over The Plough and the Stars he writes: "Mrs. Skeffington is certainly not dumb but she appears to be both blind and deaf." To the poet AE, in the latter's capacity as editor of The Irish Statesman, he says: "Calm yourself, calm yourself, and try to force a definite thought or two out of the congested mass of nonsense in your nut."

He himself is "altogether too vehement to be a good critic," as he tells a friend. But the awareness doesn't prevent him from being a sedulous and savage one. Except for Shaw, who befriended him, and Joyce, he detests his Irish contemporaries. Of Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor he writes that "they go along in literature like two little neatly dressed colleens, arm in arm, out for a walk." And from London, where he settled in 1926, he anathematizes the entire English cultural establishment in a letter to Fallon of 1929: "What these Literary and Art controlling posers want is to be chained together and made to look at Punch and Judy shows, visit Circuses, stare at Revues, and do years of hard labor dancing Jazz. Then there might possibly be a glimpse of God for them."

There was a basis to his complaint. British culture between the wars was in fact desiccated and nowhere more so than in the theater. Yet in its cocksure invocation of popular forms with their presumed vitality and childlike directness the passage is revealing of one strand of O'Casey's opaque self-estimation as on artist. He considered himself a "natural" singer, a voice from the streets, making a virtue of his lack of formal background and seeing himself as the victim of a conspiracy of highbrows: "I can honestly say that I don't care a tinker's damn about art," he writes in 1938 to George Jean Nathan, who had become his advocate in America and later a close friend, "simply because I know nothing about it. But I love the way I imagine the Greeks wrote [and] the way I know the Elizabethans wrote."

Admirable sentiments. The trouble was that O'Casey's ambitions after his "naturalistic" period demanded something tougher than such splendid innocence. He wanted to experiment, to mix structures and styles, to be more "poetic." Yet his sensibility and theory of drama, grounded in what he acknowledges in a letter to be a strange equality of admiration for Shakespeare and Dion Boucicault, were scarcely up to the job. With The Silver Tassie in 1928 he fell into some of the most flagrant delinquences—bathos, ideological cant, pseudo-poetic rhetoric—of the then dying Expressionist movement, and most of his plays from then on exhibit the same malfeasances.

The controversy over the Abbey's rejection of The Silver Tassie is fascinating and instructive. (O'Casey had the entire correspondence published in The Observer, and Krause reprints it here.) Speaking for the Abbey's directors, W. B. Yeats told O'Casey that the play suffered from both inadequate technical prowess and imaginative unconvincingness, to which O'Casey, furious, replied that "you seem … to be getting beautifully worse…. There are shallows in you of which no one ever dreamed." On O'Casey's behalf Krause asserts that "it is still an open question whether Yeats was right or wrong about this challenging work." But the question isn't open: Yeats was right, and though, as Krause says, O'Casey was treated shabbily, there was no failure to discern his genius.

Convinced, though, that the play had been rejected because of its disturbing originality, O'Casey seized on and built up a role as prophet unhonored. He was given ample material: the bannings of his plays in Ireland and Boston, the abuse of outraged jingoists and bluenoses. But political irreverence, anti-clericalism and sexual honesty aren't enough to constitute literary genius. Good as his best work is, emotionally accurate as it occasionally can be, O'Casey's theater mostly lacks that mysterious agency by which experience is shaped by form into new consciousness. His six-volume part-fictional autobiography, to which these letters serve as an addendum and a check, is perhaps the most durable of his contributions.

When Ibsen heard in Rome of the critical outcry back home against Peer Gynt he wrote superbly to a friend that "the definition of poetry will have to be changed to conform to my play." Ibsen's critics were artistically obtuse; O'Casey's were simply morally dense. He was not ahead of his time: to see this one has only to compare his "experiments" with those of Brecht and Pirandello, who wrote during much of the same period.

In any case, this book shows him reacting with extraordinary persistence and violence to the low-level critique which, sadly, was almost all he was offered. I don't want to give the impression that there is nothing else in these letters: O'Casey could be a warm, shrewd, witty and generous correspondent, all of which qualities are in full evidence. But he misunderstood the nature of his imaginative powers, and that is the important cultural fact. In one of the last of these letters he writes to his American agent: "I've never written anything that didn't cause a dispute, a row, a difference of something." He was right, but the disputes were mostly ephemeral, the differences pitifully small.