Fiction – Page 4 – mary morrissy

Marilyn and Sean – fashion icons

April 14, 2014January 2, 2015by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

Marilyn Monroe posing in her Aran sweater

What do Marilyn Monroe and Sean O’Casey have in common? They never met and she never appeared in any productions of the playwright’s work. However, she was a fan. On a visit to England in 1956 with then husband Arthur Miller, she said the person she most wanted to meet was O’Casey and she had read the first volume of his autobiographies. But there is another unlikely connection between them – a Dublin shop.

Cleo is a knitwear and handcrafts shop on Dublin’s Kildare Street, opened by Kitty Joyce in the 1930s, and now run by her daughter. It’s the subject of a book by Hilary O’Kelly (Cleo: Irish Clothes in a Wider World, Associated Editions). The book tells the story of the shop’s foundation and features photographs from the shop’s back catalogues of celebrity customers wearing its merchandise, including Marilyn Monroe and O’Casey.

Having spent several years inhabiting the world of Sean O’Casey while writing The Rising of Bella Casey,I thought I was familiar with almost every facet of the playwright’s life. Except this one – Sean O’Casey as fashion icon!

After O’Casey moved to London in 1926, he rarely returned to Ireland. He was stung by Yeats’s rejection of his WW1 play, The Silver Tassie, in 1928, a decision which deprived him of a natural repertory of actors to perform his work. It hardened his attitude towards Dublin and fastened his self-imposed exile in England. However he did visit Dublin at least once afterwards – he came on a holiday with his wife, Eileen, in 1935. Perhaps it was then he acquired the Aran jumper shown in the Cleo catalogue. Or perhaps it was later, sent to him as a gift or ordered by mail?

In the photograph featured here, O’Casey also wears a decorated skull cap, another distinctive accessory he favoured in latter years. In her memoir, Sean, O’Casey’s wife Eileen remembers their daughter, Shivaun, bringing home a brightly-coloured felt cap she had made in school. “Trying it on, he found it most comfortable, and this was how his collection of caps began. Frequently he was photographed in one; people would send him others from many countries, and he would make his choice for the day as the mood took him.”

The cap featured in the title of O’Casey’s last book, Under a Colored Cap,(1963), a collection of articles “merry and mournful with comments and a song” dedicated to his granddaughters, Alison and Oona. O’Casey’s daughter Shivaun used the same title for her film documentary of her father in 2005.

Sean O'Casey with his wife, Eileen, in distinctive coloured cap and Aran sweater — Sean O’Casey with his wife, Eileen, in distinctive coloured cap and Aran sweater

The World of Bella Casey

Fiction – the asylum for the insane?

March 13, 2014June 27, 2014by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

For some reason, I’ve always written about institutions. There is a lunatic asylum in both The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey and a TB sanatorium in my first novel Mother of Pearl. Perhaps it’s a feature of writing historical fiction, predominantly based in the 19th century where the state played a more heavy-handed part in individual lives. I found this blog on celebrated inmates of insane asylums of that era fascinating. . .

Interesting Literature

By Suzanne Shumway

1. Mary Lamb (1764-1847), sister of the essayist, poet, and playwright Charles Lamb. In 1796, Charles checked himself into a private asylum and spent six weeks there, never dreaming that a few months later, his sister would fall victim to a madness so severe that she would kill her own mother in a fit of rage. Although Mary was confined to Fisher House Asylum immediately after the murder, a verdict of lunacy assured that Lamb escaped punishment, and she was eventually released into Charles’s custody. However, she occasionally returned to an asylum when she felt madness coming on.

2. Rosina Bulwer Lytton (1802-1882) was the wife of the immensely popular novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Theirs was a love match, but the relationship hit the skids within eight years of their marriage. When her husband took up with other women, Rosina protested, and the result was a legal separation…

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News and Events, The World of Bella Casey

She Do the Police in Different Voices

January 16, 2014January 16, 2014by Mary Morrissy4 Comments

The Rising of Bella Casey is to be RTE Radio’s Book on One next week, January 20 – 24. The night-time slot consists of 15-minute excerpts broadcast, Monday to Friday. One of the challenges of the programme is to edit down a 300-page novel to roughly 25 pages so that the listener gets a flavour of the book. That’s producer’s Aoife Nic Cormaic’s job.

Sometimes the books are read by actors; sometimes by the authors. I chose to read mine. It’s a strange experience. On the one hand, who could be more familiar with the text than the writer? On the other, editing and reading for radio requires you to look at the book almost as if you’d never seen it before.Unlike a public reading,where you can make eye contact with your listeners and judge the reaction, the broadcast is a dramatised interpretation aimed at a faceless audience.

Having done the recordings, now the challenge is to listen back to them. And to hear your voice as other people hear it! RTE Book On One is on nightly, 11.10pm

The World of Bella Casey

Bella and Sean, as Hollywood saw them

December 30, 2013January 2, 2015by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

It’s not surprising that the late great Peter O’Toole played Captain Boyle in one of Ireland’s classic plays, Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. The Irish-born actor produced and acted in a 1966 version of the play at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, sharing the stage with Siobhan McKenna and Jackie McGowran. But what might be more surprising is that his first wife, Sian Phillips, played O’Casey’s sister, Bella – subject of my latest novel, The Rising of Bella Casey – on screen.

The film, based on O’Casey’s autobiographies and titled Young Cassidy, was a major Hollywood production and shot on location in Dublin. It was due to be directed by John Ford but Ford fell ill a couple of weeks into production and was replaced by Jack Cardiff. The film featured a star-studded cast – Michael Redgrave (as W B Yeats), Edith Evans (Lady Gregory) Maggie Smith and Julie Christie. Flora Robson, Jackie McGowran and T P McKenna, played the roles of O’Casey’s mother and brothers.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of casting was the actor, Rod Taylor, playing Jack Cassidy, a thinly disguised version of O’Casey himself. The Australian beefcake was an odd choice to play the bookish O’Casey, but the playwright approved of the casting (Sean Connery and Richard Harris were also considered for the part) though he didn’t live to see the film.

The reception of the film was mixed. The New York Times found the brogueish Irishness of the production charming, but dismissed John Whiting’s screenplay as “long on character, short on plot,” echoing Lady Gregory’s verdict on the first play O’Casey sent to the Abbey Theatre. Young Cassidy, the review went on, “may thrill the romantics, but it will leave the realists looking at holes through the screen”.

Sian Phillips, left, as Bella and Rod Taylor as the “brawling, battling” Sean O’Casey, in Young Cassidy (1965)

Reviews and articles, The World of Bella Casey

Sister in the shadows

December 14, 2013by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

Caroline Kennedy Photograph: nycprowler.com

Christina Hunt Mahoney reviewed The Rising of Bella Casey in last week’s Irish Times. Here’s her take on the novel complete with Caroline Kennedy reference!

O’Brien Press continues its impressive revival of the Brandon imprint with Mary Morrissy’s first novel in more than a decade. The Rising of Bella Casey is the imaginative afterlife of an historical person, not the first time Morrissy has constructed such a fiction. The Pretender is the postmodern tale of a Polish factory worker who claimed to have been the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Morrissy’s new book partakes of a related tradition: a fictive life of a family member who was a satellite to a great writer. We’ve had Rameau’s Niece, by Cathleen Schine, and several incarnations of Shakespeare’s sister, so why not an Irish entry into the genre?

Morrissy’s oeuvre is small but fine, also including the metafictional Mother of Pearl and a disturbing collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (the protagonist of the title story, in a timely detail, envies Caroline Kennedy’s good fortune to have had a father worthy of assassination). Morrissy’s work has been recognised with a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library and a prestigious Lannan Literary Award. She is truly a writer’s writer, but one with an avid following.

Isabella Casey was Seán O’Casey’s sister, a minor figure in his multivolume autobiography. Fifteen years her brother Jack’s senior, Bella was a second mother to the boy who would “rise” to fame years later. The real Bella married beneath her and seems to have fallen out of the family narrative. Morrissy recreates for her a life that fills the gaps in her story.

Dodging bullets

As the novel opens, on Easter Monday, 1916, we see an obsessed, middle-aged Bella risking her life, and that of her young son, dodging bullets on Dublin’s streets to drag an abandoned piano back to their house. (This is a book in which keyboard instruments come and go, indicating changes in the family’s fortunes.) Bella’s rescue of the piano is a symbolic act, restitution for years of deprivation with an abusive English soldier. The novel then returns to Bella’s early days as the promising scholarship girl, the proud new teacher in Dominick Street, and finally the victim of the violent act that brought an end to her dreams.

The geography shifts twice to England – signalled by a change in font – and the reader encounters a blocked Seán, working on his life’s story, first in Battersea and later in Totnes. Here the novel becomes more complex, also more akin to the writer’s earlier style. Not only is she creating Bella’s lost years, she is simultaneously crafting a fiction to explain Seán’s reluctance to deal with Bella’s life in print, told from his perspective. O’Casey, in Morrissy’s rendering, is a complex portrait, part socialist activist, part judgmental Edwardian brother.

His character is also hampered by being in possession of only some of the “facts” of Bella’s downfall, facts that are totally of Morrissy’s devising. There is thus something of a Chinese puzzle here, suitably couched in the melodramatic rhetoric of the period. The tone mimics some of O’Casey’s own writerly language, influenced as it was by his early exposure to the music hall and popular theatre. His characters also appear regularly, and he is given to thinking of his sister’s life as theatre.

Bella’s predicament is Dickensian, down to Morrissy’s decision to name the villain of the piece Reverend Leeper. Dickens or no, the crime committed within her pages is so brutal the nearly comical name and representation of Leeper seems to undercut the author’s intent. Similarly, with so many women in the novel who seem perfectly capable of defending themselves, one wonders at Bella’s continued naivete, pretension and timidity.

But The Rising of Bella Casey is a welcome volume, especially as we commemorate a formative stage in Ireland’s history and those who helped to make that history.

The World of Bella Casey

On location in Henrietta Street

December 12, 2013January 4, 2015by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

The Rising of Bella Casey will feature on RTE’s cultural review programme tonight (RTE, 10.50pm). There’ll be a couple of short readings and an interview with presenter John Kelly. The interview and readings were recorded in 12 Henrietta Street, one of Dublin’s best maintained Georgian streetscapes.

Henrietta Street was developed between 1729-1758 for the Georgian gentry but fell into disrepair in the late 19th century as the well-to-do migrated to leafy suburbs beyond the canals. By 1911, the street was a haven of notorious tenements with as many as 825 people living in abject poverty in just 15 houses. Number 12, designed by Edward Lovett Pearce, was built by banker and property speculator Luke Gardiner between 1730 and 1733. Its first known occupant was William Stewart, 3rd Viscount Mountjoy and later 1st Earl of Blessington.

Now privately owned, Number 12 still maintains the spirit of its formal Georgian elegance – marble fireplaces, exquisite stucco work – as well as the marks of its later decline. The lips of the steps of the ruined staircase are worn into smooth hollows by the weary tread of the oppressed; there are glimpses of lathwork – the very skeleton of the house – behind the crumbling plaster walls. The walls are like a geological cross-section showing the variegation of paint layers applied over the years, roseate and lichen green. Damp has left its shadows and draughts whistle through the unadorned casements.

As I stood shivering at the first floor windows, looking out on to the rain-slickened cobbles and the car-less, unpeopled street, it was easy to imagine myself back into my heroine Bella Casey’s world (she lived in a tenement on Fitzgibbon Streeet). Our host, Kevin, kindly lit a fire in a downstairs room and we huddled gratefully close to it, between takes, clasping takeaway coffees in the Stygian gloom.

Number 12 has not been made over or prettied up and all the better for that; in its present unrestored but nonetheless cherished state, it allows the visitor to imagine its various manifestations by inhaling its history on the spot.

The Works can be seen on the RTE player: http://www.rte.ie/player/ie/show/10232969/

The World of Bella Casey

Two degrees of separation

October 25, 2013April 2, 2015by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

In 1918, the year Bella Casey died at the beginning of the Spanish ‘flu epidemic, the poet Louis McNeice (above) was just 11 years old. Bella was living in the tenements of Dublin; McNeice was growing up as a son of the rectory in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim. So what’s the connection between them? The Rising of Bella Casey is.

McNeice happens to be on of my favourite poets but that;s not the reason he has an underground connection to the novel. He’s there because sometimes when you’re writing historical fiction, people and dates happily collide.

McNeice’s mother, Elizabeth (Lily) Clesham trained as a teacher with the Irish Church Mission in Clonsilla, Dublin, in the 1880s. At the same time Isabella Casey was studying at the Church of Ireland Model School on Marlborough Street (now site of the Department of Education). There’s absolutely no evidence that these two young women – devout Anglicans both, trainee teachers and exact contemporaries – met, let alone knew each other, even though they shared the same historical space (much like James Connolly and Nicholas Beaver – see my post October 22).

However, I like to think that Dublin was a small city then and if there’s no proof that Bella and Lily were acquainted, there’s equally nothing to say they weren’t. So I played God; I got them together at a teachers’ social in October 1889 and, hey presto, they became fast friends on the page.

Elizabeth Clesham was born on October 18, 1866 (a year-and-a-half after Bella Casey) and was brought up outside Clifden. Her father, Martin Clesham, had been born a Catholic but had converted to the Church of Ireland. Here was another point of similarity between Bella and Lily. Michael Casey, Bella’s father, was also a convert having been proselytized by the Protestant evangelist Rev Alexander Dallas, founder of the Irish Church Mission, which ran mission or “ragged” schools in Ireland from the 1850s onwards.

Michael Casey worked as a clerk in the Irish Church Mission (ICM) headquarters on Townsend Street and Lily Clesham taught in ICM ragged schools in Dublin and Galway so that was another ready-made link between the two women. I began to feel they should have met.

Lily met clergyman John McNeice, the father of the poet, around this time. (He also makes a cameo appearance in The Rising of Bella Casey.) They married in 1902. Rev John McNeice served in the North of Ireland from 1899 onwards and in the 1930s was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor and Dromore.

Lily Clesham suffered from severe depression following Louis’ birth in 1907 and in 1913 she was moved to a nursing home in Dublin. The five-year old Louis never saw her again; she died of TB on December 18, 1914. Her death had a profound effect on the poet. In his poem, Autobiography, he writes: –

My mother wore a yellow dress;
Gentle, gently, gentleness.
Come back early or never come.
When I was five the black dreams came;
Nothing after was quite the same.

I tried to imbue “my” Lily Clesham in The Rising of Bella Casey with that same sense of gentleness. Certainly, it is that quality in her, that ignites her friendship with Bella Casey. As for Louis McNeice, he never got over the early loss of his mother. He is buried with her in the churchyard at Carrowdore, Co Down.

Louis McNeice as an infant pictured with his mother in 1907.

The Carrowdore graveyard where McNeice is buried with his mother.

The World of Bella Casey

One degree of separation

October 23, 2013November 24, 2013by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

When you write in the grey area between biography and fiction, there are sometimes unlikely historical coincidences, often in the shape of real people in the margins of the narrative, who register like ghost images. One of those spectral presences in The Rising of Bella Casey is Labour leader and insurrectionist James Connolly (above). Not surprising, you might say, since part of the novel is set during the September 1913 Lock-out and the 1916 Rising. Even though the narrative takes a sidelong, feminine look at the political events of a turbulent time in Ireland’s history rather than placing the events centre-stage.

Although Sean O’Casey would have had direct dealings with James Connolly through the Labour movement and the Citizen Army, his sister, Bella, a staunch loyalist, would have been most unlikely to have crossed his path.

But there was a connection between Bella Casey and James Connolly, through her husband, Nicholas Beaver (below). He was a lance-corporal in the King’s Liverpools regiment from the early 1880s until 1895. At the same time, James Connolly,a Scot by birth, was also a serving soldier in the British army, a fact that he later kept quiet because it might damage his Republican credentials. According to Donal Nevin’s biography, James Connolly: A Full Life, Connolly also served in the King’s Liverpools although no record of him persists; however, it is likely that when he signed up in 1882 he did so under an assumed name because he was under age.

During the seven years he spent in the army, Connolly may have served in Cork, Castlebar, the Curragh and Dublin. As Nevin writes: “It is an intriguing thought that Connolly may well have been among the soldiers of the regiment who were dispatched to Belfast in 1886 to quell serious sectarian riots in the city. It is probable too that Connolly was among the troops who took part in the celebration of Queen Victoria’s jubilee in Dublin in 1887.” Connolly deserted in 1888 or 1889, perhaps because of the threat of being sent to India, according to Nevin.

There’s no evidence that Nicholas Beaver and James Connolly ever met but they could have. The possibility tantalised. So in The Rising of Bella Casey, they do meet. And the rest, as the historians might say, is fiction.

Reviews and articles, The World of Bella Casey

Fiction wins out

October 22, 2013October 22, 2013by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

Literary journalist Yvonne Nolan (above) reviewed The Rising of Bella Casey on the Arena arts programme, RTE Radio, Monday, October 22. She was generously enthusiastic about the language of the novel and the historical research, though she admitted being disappointed to learn that the “creepy” Rev Archibald Leeper was a wholly fictional creation. A really good “bad” character. She missed him when he disappeared from the narrative. Just goes to show you, fiction always wins out. You can listen to a podcast of the show on http://www.rte.ie/radio1/podcast/podcast_arena.xml

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Reviews and articles, The World of Bella Casey

A bookseller’s view

October 21, 2013October 21, 2013by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

History is full of lies and secret betrayals and never more so than in this new novel by Mary Morrissy. In his memoirs, Sean O’Casey killed off his beloved sister Bella a full ten years before her actual death, while Morrissy summons Bella from the dark margins of history. Fifteen years older than her famous brother, Bella is bright, beautiful and talented and wins a scholarship to train as a teacher. Her story unfolds against a backdrop of growing nationalism. The hopes of the Casey family rest on her success and Bella is determined to improve their lot through virtue and hard work. However, her promising future is compromised and, trapped by poverty and shame, Bella must become an expert in lies and deceit in order to survive. Beautifully written, compelling and meticulously researched; one of the best Irish novels of recent years.

– Josie Van Embden, Dubray Books, Dun Laoghaire

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Louis McNeice as an infant pictured with his mother in 1907.

The Carrowdore graveyard where McNeice is buried with his mother.

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