Two Letters of Sean O'Casey

Abstract

The two letters of Sean O'Casey which follow were written ten years ago and it may be necessary to explain how they came to be written. The first one appears to be a reply to a request for advice about how to write. In fact, it was not quite that. I originally wrote to O'Casey to ask him his views on socialist realism, because I had been reading his work systematically, and had been led on from it to read Joyce. This had led me to the conclusion that O'Casey himself had nothing to do with socialist realism, and that if socialist realism had anything to do with art, it was purely accidental. His first reply clearly confirmed that he shared these views, so I wrote to him again, asking him why he did not express such opinions publicly, since if he and other great Communist artists like Brecht, Guttuso and Picasso were to speak up, the whole cramping, debilitating nonsense would be completely discredited. His second letter did not directly answer this question; but I read it as implying an answer, that if we "first removed the beam from our own eye" we should see that the enemy of art in Britain was not Zdanov but the liberal establishment.