O'Casey at the Bat

SUNSET AND EVENING STAR (339 pp.)--Sean O'Casey--Macmillan ($4.75).

Sean O'Casey is a literary salmon who splashed out of a Dublin slum, leaped the rapids of poverty, and has never stopped swimming stubbornly upstream to spawn his silvery prose. Sunset and Evening Star is the sixth and final volume of his lively, third-person autobiography. With cantankerous, merry and garrulous gusto, the 74-year-old O'Casey evokes the great shades of Irish letters--Yeats, Shaw, Joyce--without fully clinching his eventual right to join them. But "bad or good, right or wrong, O'Casey's always himself," probably the world's greatest living playwright, and "a darlin' man" to read.

O'Casey proudly calls himself a Communist and has a soft spot in his head for the Soviet Union ("The inexhaustible energy, the irresistible enthusiasm of their Socialistic efforts, were facts to Sean; grand facts"). But this does not make his autobiography any less entertaining. O'Casey admits the existence of other literary lights only to short-circuit them, and he is at his best when he is blowing fuses. Samples:

G. K. CHESTERTON : "The hopalong cassidy of the roman catholic church."

GEORGE ORWELL: "Had quite a lot of feeling for himself; so much, that, dying, he wanted the living world to die with him. When he saw . . . that the world wouldn't die with him. he turned the world's people into beasts, [i.e., in Animal Farm') . . . Since that didn't satisfy his yearning ego. he prophetically destroyed world and people in Nineteen hundred and eighty-four: [his] Doomsday Book."

GRAHAM GREENE: "With [him] life is a precious, perpetual, snot-sodden whine."

T. S. ELIOT: "When this poet traverses 'Streets that follow like a tedious argument and 'Watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows,' he never stirs his sympathetic, supercilious mouth to call out even once, 'What cheer, me buddies . . .' Eliot seems to rasp at life itself, looking at men as living only in so far as they have not yet been buried. Yet with all his well-fifed madrigals of death and desolation, Eliot longs after life."

IRELAND AND ITS WRITERS: "A country where so many were never afraid to die is now a country where so many are afraid to live. The clerical shareholders are listening. The writers of Ireland must get instinctively to know just what not to say . . . Ireland's a decaying ark . . . windows bolted, doors shut tight, afraid of the falling rain of the world's thought."

To one of his rare heroes. O'Casey can also bring himself to toss a rhetorical posy: "Oh, Shaw, there is not your equal now! When shall we see your like again!" A roguish wordmonger, O'Casey peppers each page with Joycean puns and wordplays, e.g., Tea Deum, imaginot line, the rust was silence. Ever the dramatist, O'Casey savors his exit with ..a tender salute to old age and a last toast to life: "The sun has gone, dragging her gold and green garlands down . . . Soon it will be time to kiss the world goodbye. An old man now, who, in the nature of things, might be called, out of the house any minute. Little left now but a minute to take a drink at the door . . . Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him ... and with only the serenity and the 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!"

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