Lady Gregory's Toothbrush

by Colm Toibin

  When the tour was over, Lady Gregory stayed with John Quinn for almost a week. The letters she wrote to him on her return to Ireland in March 1912, when she celebrated her sixtieth birthday, and in April, suggest the intensity of their relationship during that short time. “My dear John,” she wrote, “I think you are never out of my mind – though sometimes all seems a dream, a wonderful dream … How good you were to me! How happy I was with you. How much I love you!”; and “My John, my dear John, my own John, not other people’s John, I love you, I care for you, I know you, I want you, I believe in you, I see you always”; and “Oh my darling, am I now lonely after you? Do I not awake looking for you … Why do I love you so much? … It is some call that came in a moment – something impetuous and masterful about you that satisfies me.”

  Quinn’s letters to her, which he kept copies of, are in the New York Public Library alongside her letters to him, including the letters quoted above. He was a rambling, deeply opinionated, gossipy correspondent. The fact that he dictated many of the letters gave him ample opportunity to be long-winded, but it also meant that he was careful. “I often think of you over there with the two grandchildren,” he wrote in November 1913, “and your work and your success and the full rich life you lead.” And three years later: “What a wonderful woman you are, with the energy of a Roosevelt and more balance! If you had been in Redmond’s place there would have been home rule long ago.” And two years after that: “I have always said that you were the most wonderful woman I have ever met.”

  While these admiring letters from Quinn lack the intimate, ardent tone of Lady Gregory’s letters to him from 1912 and tell us nothing more about the nature of their relationship, it is clear there some of his letters are missing. Thirty years earlier, Lady Gregory had destroyed the sonnets she wrote to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, sending him the poems in disguised handwriting but keeping no copies; now, at Coole, she told John Quinn: “your dear letter goes into the fire tonight. I must keep it till then.”

  Between her husband’s death in 1892 and Robert’s coming of age ten years later, Lady Gregory worked to clear the debts on the estate. From 1902, Robert was the owner of the house and the estate, although she had a right, according to Sir William’s will, to live in the house for her lifetime. There was an intermittent conflict between Robert’s interest in being master in his own house, seated at the head of his own table, and his mother’s interest in having Yeats at the head of the table, offering him the master bedroom and devoting her household to the cause of the poet’s comfort.

  Sir Ian Hamilton, a cousin of Lady Gregory’s, described Yeats at Coole: “No one even can have heard anyone play up to him like Lady Gregory … All along the passage for some distance on either side of Yeats’s door were laid thick rugs to prevent the slightest sound reaching the holy of holies – Yeats’s bed. Down the passage every now and then would tiptoe a maid with a tray … All suggestions that I could cheer him up a good deal if I went into his room and had a chat were met with horror.”

  Early in their friendship, Lady Gregory had written to Yeats: “I want you to have all you want, and I believe that suffering has done all it can for your soul, and that peace and happiness will be best for both soul and body now.” A year later she wrote: “How bad of you to get ill just when I am not there to look after you! Do take care of yourself now, and feed yourself properly – and with any threatening of rheumatism you should look to your underwear.”

  In September 1907 Robert Gregory married Margaret Parry. Although the Gregorys lived much in London and Paris, Robert’s resentment at Yeats’s usurpation of his rightful place at Coole was exacerbated, if anything, by his marriage. In 1913 Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “I wonder if you would mind ordering some wine for yourself this time or is it dry sherry – and perhaps a special decanter. I will explain this strange request when we meet.” In her biography of Lady Gregory, Mary Lou Kohfeldt wrote that “Robert Gregory was startled one evening when he called for a bottle of an especially fine vintage Torquey laid down by his father to find it was all gone, served bottle by bottle by his mother to Willie over the years.” During the First World War, while Robert was in the British Army, Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats about the accounts at Coole, which she was about to go through with Margaret: “If as bad as I think and if you are well off in the summer, I’m afraid I must ask you to pay what will cover your food (not your lodging).”

  Although he was a talented painter and stage designer, Robert did not have his mother’s single-mindedness or energy. And it was clear that the days of landlords living on income from rents was coming to an end in Ireland. In 1909 Yeats wrote in his journal: “I thought of this house, slowly perfecting itself and the life within it in ever-increasing intensity of labour, and then of its probably sinking away through courteous incompetence, or rather sheer weakness of will, for ability has not failed in young Gregory.” In 1912 Yeats wrote an eight-line poem called “The New Faces” about Coole, imagining its mistress dead and the new generation in control. In what Roy Foster calls “one of his moments of superb tactlessness”, Yeats sent Lady Gregory the poem. She was about to return to New York with the Abbey to see John Quinn once more and it is unlikely that she was flattered by the poem or that she would have shown it with pride to the eponymous new faces, her son and daughter-in-law. She wrote to him: “The lines are very touching. I have often thought our ghosts will haunt that path and our talk hang in the air – It is good to have a meeting place anyhow, in this place where so many children of our minds were born. You won’t publish it just now? – I think not.” He did not publish it for ten years.

  Her influence on him did not only include delaying publication to save her and her family from pain, but also in 1914 involved hurrying publication as a way of smiting her enemy. Her enemy, and the enemy of many others at that time including Yeats himself, was George Moore, who had published a new volume of memoirs. Moore had, as already noted, been forced to delete the passage in his first volume suggesting that Lady Gregory had in her youth attempted to convert Catholics to the Protestant religion. (“I think it is a good thing to have got the better of him,” she wrote to Yeats.) Nonetheless, Lady Gregory told Yeats at the time that she “shook with laughter” at Moore’s description of Edward Martyn. “No one ought ever to speak to him again, though I suppose we shall all do so,” she added.

  Now she was in a rage, and her nephew Hugh Lane was also in a rage. She wrote to Yeats, “I have (by request of Hugh Lane who has been thinking of an action – but don’t mention this) been reading Moore’s book – it is unspeakably filthy and insolent.” The third volume of Moore’s memoirs dwelt at great length on Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory and Hugh Lane. The tone was garrulous and irreverent, and it is hard, even still, not to shake with laughter at some of his remarks, including those about Yeats (“lately returned to us from the States with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat”) attacking the middle classes thus causing Moore, who had inherited ten thousand acres, to ask himself “why our Willie Yeats should feel himself called upon to denounce his own class”.

  Moore had much to say about Synge, including: “Synge’s death seems to have done him a great deal of good; he was not cold in his grave when his plays began to sell like hot cakes.” He accused Lady Gregory of plagiarism in her Cuchulain translation and went on to describe her in tones that lacked the respect Lady Gregory normally commanded: “Lady Gregory has never been for me a real person. I imagine her without a mother, or father, or sisters, or brothers, sans attaché.” He was not present, he wrote, for her first meeting with Yeats, “but from Edward [Martyn]’s account of the meeting she seems to have recognized her need in Yeats at once.” Moore proceeded to patronize and mock her plays: “We must get it into our heads that the Abbey Theatre would have come to naught but for Lady Gregory’s talent for rolling up little anecdotes into one-act plays.” His remarks on Hugh Lane, who was possibly homosexual and certainly an advanced bachelor, were the most outrageous, as he desc
ribed an afternoon when Lady Gregory “had occasion to go to her bedroom, and to her surprise found her wardrobe open and Hugh trying on her skirts before the glass”.

  Earlier, Lady Gregory had written to Yeats about Moore: “I didn’t send my answer to Moore after all. I was afraid he might himself put a note in the English Review, which would probably be worse than the first offence – I wish you would publish that second poem as soon as possible, in some weekly paper, such as the Saturday or Nation, and put some title as ‘suggested of a lately published article’. It is the best answer to give, and the simile of the dog would stick to him.”

  Eighteen days later, on 7 February 1914 Yeats published “Notoriety” in The New Statesman. It ended, “all my priceless things / Are but a post the passing dogs defile.” The subtitle was “Suggested by a recent magazine article”. Moore and his ten thousand acres had been briefly put in their place.

  Lady Gregory was in Coole for Easter 1916. On 27 April, when the Rising was still going on in Dublin but no clear news had come to Coole except reports of local unrest (which she always viewed differently from national unrest), Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “It is terrible to think of the executions or killings that are sure to come – yet it must be so – we had been at the mercy of a rabble for a long time both here and in Dublin, with no apparent policy.” On 7 May she wrote to Yeats: “I see in the paper today that MacBride has been executed – the best end that could come to him, giving him back dignity. And what a release for her! … I am sorry for Pearce [sic] and McDonogh [sic], the only ones I knew among the leaders.”

  Slowly, however, her attitude changed. On 13 May she wrote to Yeats: “My mind is filled with sorrow at the Dublin tragedy, the death of Pearse and McDonogh, who ought to have been on our side, the side of intellectual freedom and I keep wondering whether we could have brought them into the intellectual movement. Perhaps these Abbey lectures we spoke of might have helped … It seems as if the leaders were what is wanted in Ireland and will be even more wanted in the future – fearless and imaginative opposition to the conventional and opportunistic parliamentarians who have never helped our work even by intelligent opposition – Dillon just denounces us in his dull popular way.” But fearless and imaginative leaders of the Rising were different from the local republicans in Galway to whom Lady Gregory refers in the same letter: “We have been calling out against those armed bullies who have been terrorizing the District for the last couple of years … just village tyrants drifting about in search of trouble.” The next day she wrote again to Yeats about the Abbey Theatre: “What I am rather upset by today is the putting on of Playboy at this moment – our management have shirked it for years and now it seems as if we were snatching a rather mean triumph in putting it forward just as those who might have attacked it are dead or in prison … I believe we should have done it but for the Rising.”

  On 20 August 1916 Lady Gregory wrote a crucial letter to Yeats, who was staying with Maud Gonne in France and having much amorous discussion with her daughter Iseult, to say that she had been “a little puzzled” by his “apparent indifference to Ireland after your excitement after the Rising. I believe there is a great deal you can do, all is unrest and discontent – there is nowhere for the imagination to rest – but there must be some spiritual building possible, just as after Parnell’s fall, but perhaps more intense, and you have a big name among the young men.”

  The following month Yeats wrote his poem “Easter 1916”, whose listing of the names of the executed dead and whose refrain “A terrible beauty is born” had all the rhetoric of a nationalist ballad and offered a grandeur to what happened, giving a larger and more intense meaning to the “unrest and discontent” of Lady Gregory’s letter. (Wilfrid Scawen Blunt at first believed that Lady Gregory had written the poem.) Later, the poem would be seen as a part of the great change in Irish politics which led to the Sinn Féin victory in the 1918 election and the death of the Irish Parliamentary Party. What’s strange is that the poem was not published instantly in a periodical or a pamphlet or even in Yeats’s next volume, The Wild Swans at Coole, which came out in 1919. Lady Gregory realized how dangerous the poem was; she did not want it published. She had uncorked the genie by writing to Yeats in August about his future role and influence; now she sought to put it back in the bottle. On 28 March 1917, six months after he wrote the poem, when Yeats arranged to have twenty-five copies printed to be distributed to close friends, he wrote to the printer: “Please be very careful with the Rebellion poem. Lady Gregory asked me not to send it to you until we had finalized our dispute with the authorities about the Lane pictures. She was afraid of it getting about and damaging us and she is not timid.”

  Lady Gregory’s nephew Hugh Lane, to whom she had become very close, died when the Lusitania was torpedoed off the coast of Cork in May 1915. Bernard Shaw was staying at Coole, and her son Robert was home on leave. Shaw asked her what he could do to help her. “I said I longed to be alone, to cry, to moan, to scream if I wished. I wanted to be out of hearing and out of sight. Robert came and was terribly distressed, he had been so used to my composure.”

  Lane’s will, which was found in London, left his valuable collection of pictures to the National Gallery of England. But, on Lady Gregory’s suggestion, his desk at the National Gallery in Dublin, where he had become director in 1914, was searched and an unsigned codicil to his will was found which left the paintings to Dublin and named Lady Gregory as his trustee. She worked until her death in 1932 to get the paintings back to Ireland. Over and over she travelled to London to see the great and the good; she tirelessly wrote letters and lobbied. (She even wrote to George Moore.) She enlisted the help of Sir Edward Carson and Augustine Birrell, who had been Chief Secretary in Dublin during the 1916 Rising. All her old contacts in London came in useful. She had moved in the 1890s from unionism to support for Home Rule. Now, after the Rising, she was in the rebel camp, even though her son Robert was in the British Army and part of a world that viewed the Rising as an abject piece of treachery, even though she was in London talking as though nothing had changed.

  The publication of “Easter 1916” would threaten the ambiguity under which she had sheltered. The plays she and Yeats had written had not been a direct celebration of recent rebellion; they were rooted in history and could be read as metaphor. And even though “Easter 1916” had several passages that expressed ambivalence about the Rising, the poem’s listing of the leaders and its refrain were what people would notice and remember. On Lady Gregory’s insistence, the poem’s publication was deferred; although Yeats read it aloud a few times to friends, it did not appear in print until 17 March 1919, when The Irish Commonwealth, a Dublin magazine, quoted the first sixteen lines, and it was not published in England until October 1920, when it appeared in its entirety in The New Statesman.

  Four of her Persse nephews were killed in the fighting in France. In almost all of her letters to Yeats during the war, there was some reference to her son Robert, who had become a pilot. In June 1917 she wrote: “Robert, having been given Legion of Honour for France, has now been given military cross for England. He must have been very brave and very efficient out there. He is at Salisbury now, trying out the new machines and there is to be flight instruction for a bit.” Later, she wrote about the new planes: “The machines are single-engine, he will be alone with a machine gun.” In October 1917 she wrote: “And there is only half of me here while Robert is in danger. He is in France this week inspecting aerodromes, flying from one to another.” Soon, he moved to Italy. In December 1917 she wrote: “We had a cheery letter from Robert from Milan … There is danger everywhere.”

  A month later, Robert was shot down in error by an Italian pilot as he returned from a mission, although Lady Gregory never knew about the error. She was alone in Coole when the news came and had to make her way by train to Galway to tell Margaret, Robert’s wife. “I stood there and Margaret came in. She cried at once ‘Is he dead?’ … Then I sat down on the floor and cried.�
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  Yeats wrote four poems on the death of Robert Gregory; two of them are among his greatest. The circumstances of the composition of all four poems, and Lady Gregory’s close monitoring of them, remain the most astonishing and telling episode in their long relationship. She wrote to him on 2 February 1918: “If you feel like it some time – write something down that we may keep – you understood him better than many.” A few days later she wrote to Yeats about Margaret’s wishes for him to do something: “If you would send even a paragraph – just something of what I know you are feeling – to the Observer – or failing that the Nation – she would feel it a comfort.” She enclosed notes for him about Robert. Yeats wrote to John Quinn: “I think he had genius. Certainly no contemporary landscape moved me as much as two or three of his, except perhaps a certain landscape by Innes, from whom he had learned a good deal. His paintings had majesty and austerity, and at the same time sweetness. He was the most accomplished man I have ever known; he could do more things than any other.” Yeats also wrote to Iseult Gonne that Robert Gregory had “a strange pure genius … I have always felt that he had a luckless star and have expected the end.” He wrote a piece for the Observer saying that Robert Gregory’s “very accomplishment hid from many his genius. He had so many sides that some among his friends were not sure what his work would be.”

  Yeats wrote to John Quinn, saying that his real grief was for Lady Gregory. In his first poem about Robert Gregory, “Shepherd and Goatherd”, Yeats’s invocation of Lady Gregory at Coole is among his most pedestrian work: