Lady Gregory's Toothbrush

by Colm Toibin

  In Our Irish Theatre, Lady Gregory described with great relish the meetings she had with the authorities. She must have enjoyed telling James Dougherty, the Under-Secretary, that “the subject of the play is a man, a horse-thief, shaking his fist at Heaven, and finding afterwards that Heaven is too strong for him. If there were no defiance, there could be no victory. It is the same theme that Milton has taken in Satan’s defiance in Paradise Lost.” At a further meeting which Yeats attended, Dougherty “implored us … to save the Lord Lieutenant from his delicate position”. “Can you suggest no way out?” he asked. “None, except our being left alone,” they told him. “Oh Lady Gregory,” he said, “appeal to your own common sense.” Both Dougherty and the Lord Lieutenant himself, Lord Aberdeen, were interested in drama and also in favour of Home Rule. They were a symptom of England’s weakening hold on Ireland. They were easy pickings.

  Shaw wrote opposing a private performance: “Threaten that we shall be suppressed; that we shall be made martyrs of; that we shall suffer as much and as publicly as possible. Tell them that they can depend on me to burn with a brighter blaze than all Foxe’s martyrs.” Finally, when the Castle threatened to forbid the performance of the play, Yeats and Lady Gregory, realizing what was at stake – they would lose their patent and be fined – “very sadly … agreed that we must give up the fight. We did not say a word of this at the Abbey but went on rehearsing as usual.”

  It is difficult to imagine them making a decision to give up the fight, who had never given one up before. It makes for a better story, however, especially one with such a triumphant ending. “When we had left the Theatre,” Lady Gregory wrote, “and were walking through the lamp-lighted streets, we found that during those two or three hours our minds had come to the same decision, that we had given our word, that at all risks we must keep it or it would never be trusted again; that we must in no case go back, but must go on at any cost.” Dublin Castle caved in and the play opened, to capacity audiences and huge publicity, on 25 August. Yeats issued a statement: “Tomorrow night Blanco Posnet will have a triumph. The audience will look at one another in amazement, asking what on earth did the English Censor discover objectionable. They will understand instantly. The root of the whole difference between us and England in such matters is that though there might be some truth in the old charge that we are not truthful to one another here in Ireland, we are certainly always true to ourselves. In England they have learned from commerce to be truthful to one another, but they are great liars when alone.”

  Even Patrick Pearse was impressed, praising Yeats and Lady Gregory for “making a fight for Irish freedom from an English censorship”. In her account of the opening night, Lady Gregory reported that “a stranger outside asked what was going on in the Theatre. ‘They are defying the Lord Lieutenant,’ was the answer; and when the crowd heard the cheering, they took it up and it went far out through the streets.” George Bernard Shaw later said that Lady Gregory was “the greatest living Irishwoman”. However, her daughter-in-law Margaret, recently married to Robert, told Lady Dunsany that, although Yeats had not seen any rehearsals, “realizing that all the English and foreign critics had collected and that there was a stir, he asked her to let him take the [last dress] rehearsal, saying he wished the reporters to think he had stage managed it, and she is so used to giving way to him that she agreed”.

  Among the audience that night was the twenty-seven-year-old James Joyce, home briefly from Trieste, and he published an account of the whole business in Il Piccolo ella Serda in Trieste. “Dubliners,” he wrote, “who care nothing for art, but love an argument passionately, rubbed their hands with joy … and the little theatre was so filled at the first performance that it literally sold out more than seven times over … at the curtain fall, a thunderous applause summoned the actors for repeated curtain calls.” For Joyce, the play confirmed his views on Shaw. “Nothing more flimsy can be imagined, and the playgoer asks himself in wonder why on earth the play was interdicted by the censor. Shaw is a born preacher. His lively and talkative spirit cannot stand to be subjected to the noble and bare style appropriate to modern playwriting … In this case he has dug up the central incident of his Devil’s Disciple and transformed it into a sermon. The transformation is too abrupt to be convincing as a sermon, and the art is too poor to make it convincing as drama.”

  Joyce had known Lady Gregory since 1902. He had read his poems to her and asked for advice. She invited him to Coole, but he did not go, deciding instead to go to Paris. He wrote to her: “I am going alone and friendless … into another country … I do not know what will happen to me in Paris but my case can hardly be worse than it is here … And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.” Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “I am afraid he will knock his ribs against the earth, but he has grit and will succeed in the end. You should write and ask him to breakfast with you on the morning he arrives, if you can get up early enough, and feed him and take care of him and give him dinner at Victoria before he goes and help him on his way. I am writing to various people who might possibly get him tuition, and to Synge who could at least tell him of cheap lodgings.” Yeats did as he was told. Arriving at Euston Station at six in the morning to meet Joyce, he took the young writer around to meet people he thought might be useful to him, finding him “unexpectedly amiable”.

  Joyce’s amiability took a sudden turn for the worse soon after he arrived in Paris. In December 1902 he wrote to Lady Gregory, telling her that “to create poetry out of French life is impossible”. In March 1903 he was asked by the literary editor of the Daily Express in Dublin, to whom Lady Gregory had introduced him, to review her Poets and Dreamers. Despite his intermittent use of a toothbrush, his teeth were sharp enough to bite the hand. In her book, he wrote, Lady Gregory “has explored in a land almost fabulous in its sorrow and senility”. The storyteller from whom Lady Gregory took the stories had a mind, he wrote, “feeble and sleepy … He begins one story and wanders from it into another story, and none of the stories has any satisfying imaginative wholeness … In fine, her book, wherever it treats of the ‘folk’, sets forth in the fullness of its senility a class of mind which Mr Yeats has set forth with such delicate skepticism in his happiest book The Celtic Twilight.”

  On the same day as the review appeared, Synge reported to Lady Gregory from Paris that Joyce was “being won over by the charm of French life” while remaining penniless and indolent. “I cannot think he will ever be a poet of importance,” Synge wrote, “but his intellect is extraordinarily keen and if he keeps fairly sane he ought to do excellent essay-writing.” Later that same year, as his mother was dying, Joyce came back to Dublin and crashed a party at Lady Gregory’s; a fellow guest watched him “with his air of half-timid effrontery, advancing towards his unwilling hostess and turning away from her to watch the crowd”. A year later, as he was getting ready once more to leave Ireland, he managed to touch Lady Gregory for five pounds. Her reward was to be one of Yeats’s “giddy dames” in his broadside “The Holy Office”, which he had the good sense not to send to her when he published it in Pola in 1905. The following year he wrote to his brother to say that “W.B. Yeats ought to marry Lady Gregory – to kill talk”, and in “Gas from a Burner” in 1912 he referred to her as “Gregory of the Golden Mouth”. Twenty years later, just after the publication of Ulysses, he wrote her a very rude letter in reply to her request for permission to quote from a letter of his: “While thanking you for the friendly remembrance contained in it, and for acts of kindness in the past, I shall feel very much obliged if you will omit from your forthcoming book, which I understand is largely a history of the Irish literary movement, all letters of mine and all mention of me. In doing so you will be acting in strict accordance with the spirit of that movement, inasmuch as since the date of my letter, twenty years ago, no mention of me or of my struggles or of my writings has been made publicly by any person connected with it … M
ay I ask you to be kind enough to convey to Mr Yeats, for whose writing I have always had the greatest admiration, my thanks for his favourable opinion [of Ulysses], which I value very highly.”

  It would be easy to read this as an example of an arrogant young genius becoming a middle-aged curmudgeon, but it discloses something more interesting and revealing. Once her Cuchulain translation was in print and the Abbey Theatre established, Lady Gregory held power in Ireland. Many young men and woman of talent followed her, writing peasant plays or acting in them, going west in search of knowledge and wisdom, believing in the uncomplicated tradition she had invented. The stories she wrote were simple, and her aim too was simple: to add dignity to Ireland, to revive the national spirit. The cultural nationalist movement was diverse: it contained Griffith and Pearse, whose vision and projects were rather more fierce than those of Yeats and Synge, whom it also contained. Lady Gregory would attempt to work with Pearse as much as with Synge. In a letter to Yeats in December 1904, around the same time as she gave Joyce five pounds, she wrote about her discussions with Pearse regarding an Irish-language theatre: “In answering Pearse I said I believed all those who were in earnest in wishing to develop the drama as part of our national life would be together again, and we on our side were very anxious to avoid hard or discourteous words and had made every possible concession, and that we had proposed some time ago that those who did not get on with us should take up the development of Gaelic Drama, in which they could work side by side with us and with our help. That is a little bait for him.”

  Joyce’s relationship to Irish cultural nationalism remained complex. The very views that he himself put forward when he wrote for the Italian press, he mocked in Ulysses. In “The Dead”, the very cosmopolitan self that Joyce was in the process of creating was dramatically and hauntingly undermined by the call of the west. He understood the immense power of what Lady Gregory was proposing. He made use of it in his work, but he knew that, if he gave in to it, it would destroy him. There was a whole world under Lady Gregory’s nose – of clerks and servants and lower-middle-class Catholics and Dublin loungers and layabouts – which she never noticed. They belonged to city life. They were Irish, but not in the way she had redefined the meaning of being Irish. They had no interest in ancient stories, but much interest in backing horses. They knew Victorian ballads as much as rebel songs. Later, when Sean O’Casey appeared, she would have to consider this world, but by then she had consolidated her position.

  Lady Gregory thought that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was “a model autobiography”. In the last pages of the book, our hero keeps a diary. One of the last entries tells of John Alphonsus Mulrennan, who had just returned from the West of Ireland, from the world which Lady Gregory had made central in the Irish experience and from which Joyce sought to escape. “He told us he met a man there in a mountain cabin. Old man had red eyes and a short pipe. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English. Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man sat, listened, smoked, spat. Then said: –Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world.

  “I fear him. I fear his red-rimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till days come, till he or I lie dead …”

  In 1911, in the United States, elements in the Church and the Fenians were waiting for the Abbey Theatre to arrive with The Playboy of the Western World, which, they had heard, mocked the purity of Irish women, a matter very close to their hearts. Lady Gregory sailed to the United States in September of that year. She had planned to spend a “quiet winter, writing and planting trees” and waiting for the birth of her second grandchild. (Her first, Richard, had been born in 1909.) Instead, because Yeats asked her to go with the Abbey Players, she had the richest and most rewarding and most exciting months of her life, almost a mirror image of her time in Egypt thirty years earlier when she combined foreign travel, a great political cause and a secret passion.

  John Quinn was forty-one; Lady Gregory was fifty-nine. He was a rich and brilliant New York lawyer, art collector and connoisseur, with, in Roy Foster’s phrase, “an eye for the first-rate”. On a visit to Ireland in 1902, he had travelled west with Jack B. Yeats and attended the unveiling of the new tomb for Raftery, the blind poet, which Lady Gregory had erected. Afterwards, he joined her and Yeats and Douglas Hyde and others at Coole, being astounded not only by the lush surroundings but also by the seriousness and intensity and talent of his fellow house guests. “These were wonderful nights,” he wrote, “long nights filled with good talk.” He corresponded with the Yeats family and Lady Gregory over many years, offering assistance both moral and practical. When Yeats’s father moved to New York in December 1907, complete with his considerable wit and indolence, and then refused to come home – he died there in 1922 – he was bankrolled and cared for by John Quinn. The old man said that Quinn was “the nearest approach to an angel in my experience”.

  As soon as she arrived in the United States, Lady Gregory was treated as a celebrity. Her being a “Lady” made her interesting to start with, but she was a lady with a controversial Irish play in tow. Journalists followed her everywhere she went, copiously misquoting her. (“When I say pig, it comes out sausage,” she wrote to Robert.) The hostesses of the day lionized her. (“Mrs Jack Gardner, who is the leader of fashion [in Boston], and has a large collection of pictures, came and seized my hands and said ‘you are a darling, a darling, a darling’.”)

  Boston was easy, despite some protests and complaints; so too Providence, where the Police Commissioners “found nothing to object to in the play but enjoyed every minute of it”. She didn’t think much of Washington. (She wrote to Yeats: “There doesn’t seem to be much population, except members of government and niggers.”) In Washington she was invited to the White House and met President Taft. (“When I was standing near him talking, something soft and pillowy touched me, it was his tummy which is the size of Sancho Panza’s.”)

  Lady Gregory had taken no part in the public debate about The Playboy at the Abbey; unlike Yeats, she had no experience of speaking in public. Now, since there was huge demand for her to speak, she began to give lectures, and this newly discovered facility was another aspect of the great novelty of America. In November, as she arrived in New York and stayed at the Algonquin Hotel, the priests began to preach against The Playboy. When the disturbances in the theatre began, as Quinn had warned her they would, she went backstage and “knelt in the opening of the hearth, calling to every actor who came within earshot that they must not stop for a moment”. It amused her that the protesters threw both rosaries and stinkpots.

  Former president Teddy Roosevelt, who had admired her Cuchulain translation, sat in the same box in the theatre as Lady Gregory and spoke afterwards about his admiration for the play. “When we got to the theatre,” she wrote, “and into the box, people saw Roosevelt and began to clap and at last he had to get up, and he took my hand and dragged me on my feet too and there was renewed clapping.”

  Lady Gregory spent day and night being fêted and interviewed; the rest of the time she wrote letters home. She kept copies of these letters and used them as the basis for a chapter of her book Our Irish Theatre, which appeared in 1913, but the chapter lacks the astonishing vitality of the letters, especially those to her son Robert. Her indignation and malice and indiscretion are matched by sheer delight at her adventures and an eye for absurdity and detail and a sense of wonder that this was happening to her. “I have nice rooms now,” she wrote to him, “on the ninth floor, there are twenty-two floors altogether, the place riddled with telephones and radiators etc and I was glad to hear the voice of a fat housemaid from Mayo a while ago. It is a strange fate that sends me into battle after my peaceable life for so many years and especially over Playboy that I have never really loved, but one has to carry through one’s job.”

  The real trouble came in Philadelphia, where the cast was arrested. Lady Gregory ca
lled John Quinn and told him that she “would sooner go to her death than give in”, adding in a letter to her son that she “should like to avoid arrest because of the publicity, one would feel like a suffragette”. Quinn had been watching the coverage of The Playboy very carefully. He wrote to her: “The policemen that ought to be put in the theater ought to be Irish policemen; then the town would have the edifying spectacle of Irish policemen ejecting Irish rowdies from an Irish play. I have not seen anything like the bitterness or unfairness of these attacks both by Irish ignoramuses and abnormal churchmen since the last days of Parnell.”

  Once the players had been arrested, Quinn took over the legal case and caused enormous excitement by arriving in the courtroom, fresh from New York, just in time to cross-examine a witness and make “a very fine speech”. The actors, she wrote, “adore John Quinn, and his name will pass into folk-lore like those stories of O’Connell suddenly appearing at trials. He spoke splendidly, with fire and full knowledge.” In her book, Lady Gregory watered down her great hatred for the other side, the Irish-Americans without toothbrushes, which she expressed in her letters to Robert: “The witnesses brought against us were the most villainous-looking creatures. I wanted to get a snap-shooter but could not get through the crowds. Their faces would have been enough to exonerate us.” She also left out what she told Robert on Christmas Day 1911: “Quinn has given me a very small and simple gold watch bracelet, I like it, though it doesn’t look the 180 dollars I saw on the ticket when I tried it on! … Quinn won’t go bankrupt at present over it, as yesterday he was kept all day on unexpected business and came in at 10.30 to explain it was a reconstruction of a railway company he had been suddenly asked to undertake and his fee will be 10,000 pounds in shares.”