Lady Gregory's Toothbrush

by Colm Toibin

  She goes about her house erect and calm

  Between the pantry and the linen chest,

  Or else at meadow or at grazing overlooks

  Her labouring men, as though her darling lived,

  But for her grandson now […]

  The poem goes on to deal with Robert, how he had built no house in his lifetime and left merely a few paintings. It cannot have offered Lady Gregory much consolation when Yeats showed it to her on his arrival in Coole in April 1918. The dead artist, he wrote:

  […] left the house as in his father’s time

  As though he knew himself, as it were, a cuckoo,

  No settled man. And now that he is gone

  There’s nothing of him left but half a score

  Of sorrowful, austere, sweet, lofty pipe tunes.

  In a letter to his wife, which John Kelly quotes in Lady Gregory: Fifty Years After, Yeats, who had begun to write “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” at Coole, wrote: “I have done nothing but … discuss with Lady Gregory the new stanza that is to commend Robert’s courage in the hunting field. It has been a little thorny but we have settled a compromise. I have got from her a list of musical place-names where he hunted … I have firmly resisted all suggested eloquence about aero planes ‘& the blue Italian sky’. It is pathetic for Lady Gregory constantly says that it [the poem] is his monument – ‘all that remains’.”

  The pathos of the poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” comes not from the qualities claimed for Robert Gregory, which are exaggerated, but from the withholding of his name until the sixth line of the sixth stanza. In many journal entries between now and her death, Lady Gregory also withheld her dead son’s name, referring to “the grave in Italy” or “the grave in Padua” or “my darling”. Now, in Yeats’s poem, other names can be mentioned – the poet Lionel Johnson, the playwright Synge, Yeats’s uncle George Pollexfen – but since the poem is called “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”, we know that these names are being mentioned only because the poem cannot bring itself to mention the real name, the name that is unsayable in the body of the poem. The poet is accustomed to the “lack of breath” of those he has named,

  But not that my dear friend’s dear son

  Our Sidney and our perfect man

  Could share in that discourtesy of death.

  In the last stanza, the poet says that he thought to comment on more of his friends, “but the thought / Of that late death took all my heart for speech”. The poem will delay as long as possible coming to its point, just as Lady Gregory in January 1918 on her way to Galway to tell Margaret that Robert was dead desperately wanted to postpone the moment when it would have to be said. (“In the train,” she wrote, “I felt it was cruel to be going so quickly to break Margaret’s heart, I wished the train would go slower … It was agony knowing the journey was at an end.”) Yeats, too, wants the poem to go slower, to hold the telling. But once it’s said, then it is too sad to go on, no other dead friends can be summoned up. Thus he did not merely obey Lady Gregory’s request to put the names of places like Esserkelly or Moneen into the poem; he sought to follow in his poem the shape of her grief.

  In much of Yeats’s poetry, there are two voices: one is public, it is there to persuade; the other is private and whispering, a poetry of the night. Often the same poem comes in these two guises – “September 1913” and “The Fisherman”, for example, or “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium” – and now too, along with the public poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”, a poem to be read aloud to a group, came its whispered counterpart, a sixteen-line poem told in the first person by Robert Gregory, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”. And this, too, after the tactlessness of “Shepherd and Goatherd”, sought to console Lady Gregory, after all she had done for her country, that Robert had died in a war not Ireland’s. The poem rid Robert of imperial will, or English patriotism. It changed the “Major” into “An Irish Airman”. It made him abstractly heroic: his “lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds”. It handed him back to Coole which the war could not touch, the house his mother had guarded for him:

  My country is Kiltartan Cross,

  My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

  No likely end could bring them loss

  Or leave them happier than before.

  The fourth poem, eventually entitled “Reprisals”, is the strangest. As the terrible beauty of the 1916 Rising made its way into guerilla war in 1919 and 1920, Lady Gregory was in Coole and Yeats either in Dublin or in England. Her journals for the period remain one of the best accounts of the daily and nightly terror unleashed by the Black and Tans, whom the British had sent to pacify Ireland. She wrote a number of articles for The Nation in London, making clear what was happening in Ireland. She did not sign the articles, but it was known among the republican leadership that she had written them. This, and her generally good relationship with the locals, meant that Coole was not endangered. She viewed the violence of the rampaging British with horror. She also viewed the poem Yeats sent her from Oxford in November 1920 with horror. He initially entitled it “To Major Robert Gregory, airman”:

  Considering that before you died

  You had brought down some nineteen planes,

  I think that you were satisfied,

  And life at last seemed worth the pains.

  ‘I have had more happiness in one year

  Than in all the other years,’ you said;

  And battle joy may be so dear

  A memory even to the dead

  It chases common thought away.

  Yet rise from your Italian tomb,

  Flit to Kiltartan Cross and stay

  Till certain second thought have come

  Upon the cause you served, that we

  Imagined such a fine affair:

  Half-drunk or whole-mad soldiery

  Are murdering your tenants there;

  Men that revere your father yet

  Are shot at on the open plain;

  Where can new-married women sit

  To suckle children now? Armed men

  May murder them in passing by

  Nor parliament, nor law take heed: –

  Then stop your ears with dust and lie

  Among the other cheated dead.

  November 23 1920

  “My dear Lady Gregory,” he wrote in his customary greeting (she always wrote “Dear Willie”), “I send you this a new poem to Robert. I am sending it at once to The Times and if they will not have it, I will send it to The Nation.” He mentioned that he had not asked her leave, but added that the poem was “good, good for its purpose”. On the envelope, which is in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, she wrote: “I did not like this and asked not to have it published.” In her journal she wrote: “Yeats writes enclosing lines he has written and has, without telling me, sent to The Times, I dislike them – I cannot bear the dragging of R. from his grave to make what I think a not very sincere poem – for Yeats only knows by hearsay while our troubles go on – and he quoted words G.B.S. told him and did not mean him to repeat – and which will give pain – I hardly know why it gives me extraordinary pain and it seems too late to stop it … and I fear the night.”

  Shaw had written to her about Robert: “When I met Robert at the flying station on the west point, in abominably cold weather, with a frostbite on his face hardly healed, he told me that the six months he had been there had been the happiest of his life. An amazing thing to say considering his exceptionally fortunate circumstances at home; but he evidently meant it.” This idea that the adventure of the war had made Robert happier than his childhood at Coole or his marriage would not have been a great consolation to his mother or his widow or his three children. Nor that he was among the “cheated dead”. Nor, indeed, that he “had brought down some nineteen planes”. Lady Gregory managed to stop the poem being published. It did not appear in any periodical of the time, nor in any collection by Yeats. It was first printed
in a magazine in 1948 when they were both dead.

  Lady Gregory continued to read manuscripts submitted to the Abbey, alert always to possible new talent, but also, especially as the new state was coming into being, to the political implications of a new play. Thus in November 1921 she noted in her journal a play called “The Crimson and the Tricolour” by Sean O’Casey. “This is a puzzling play,” she wrote, “extremely interesting … It is the expression of ideas that makes it interesting (besides feeling that the writer has something in him) & no doubt the point of interest for Dublin audiences. But we could not put it on while the Revolution is still unaccomplished – it might hasten the Labour attack on Sinn Fein, which ought to be kept back til the fight with England is over, & the new Government has had time to show what it can do.” She decided to have the play typed at the theatre’s expense. She met the writer five days later and remarked in her journal that he was “a strong Labour man” who nonetheless said that if his play would weaken Sinn Féin then he “would be the last to wish to put it on”. Yeats, in any case, did not like the play and it was turned down. He thought that it was “so constructed that in every scene there is something for pit and stalls to cheer and boo. In fact it is the old Irish idea of a good play … especially as everybody is as ill-mannered as possible & all truth considered as inseparable from spite and hatred.” Robinson sent this critique to O’Casey, who dismissed Yeats’s objection to his play.

  In November 1922 the Abbey accepted O’Casey’s play The Shadow of a Gunman. Lady Gregory and he shared an earnestness and a belief in duty, a belief that mankind could be improved and Ireland could be helped too. Sometimes, in her journal, when she quoted him, his aims and ambitions sounded very close to her own: “Now his desire and hope is rather to lead the workers into a better life … in drama especially.” As good Protestants, they had both read their bibles in youth and they discussed the beauty of the language. On the opening night, 12 April 1923, O’Casey saw the play from the side wings only, but the next night Lady Gregory sat with him in the theatre, having brought him – she called him “Casey” in her journals – “round to the door before the play to share my joy at seeing the crowd surging in”. He said to her that “all the thought in Ireland for years past has come through the Abbey. You have no idea what an education it has been for the country.”

  That, she said, put her “in great spirits”, but more important perhaps was the fact that they liked each other. Later, he wrote: “I loved her, and I think she was very fond of me – why, God only knows. Our friendship-affinity was an odd one: she from affluence, I from poverty; she an aristocrat, I a proletarian Communist. Yet, we understood each other well, talking, eating, and laughing easily together.”

  In March 1924 Juno and the Paycock opened at the Abbey. “A long queue at the door,” Lady Gregory wrote in her journal, “the theatre crowded, many turned away, so it will be run on next week. A wonderful and terrible play of futility, of irony, humour, tragedy.” O’Casey now told her that he was glad she had turned down his earlier play. “I owe a great deal to you and Mr Yeats and Mr Robinson,” she reported him saying, “but to you above all. You gave me encouragement. And it was you who said to me upstairs in the office – I could show you the very spot where you stood – ‘Mr O’Casey, your gift is characterisation’. And so I threw over my theories and worked at characters, and this is the result.” Yeats said the play reminded him of Tolstoy. Lady Gregory recorded in her journal that she said to him: “This is one of the evenings at the Abbey that makes one glad to be born.”

  Lady Gregory took Sean O’Casey to one of Yeats’s Monday nights. “He is studying pictures now,” she wrote, “has bought some books but knows so little about painting he wishes lectures could be given, ‘And if the employers cared for us workers they could sometimes arrange for an afternoon at the Galleries, or an evening at the Abbey for their men.’” On 7 June that year O’Casey made his first visit to Coole. “I am alone,” Lady Gregory had written, “& have no amusements to offer, but I think you would find the library an interest, it is a good one.” She met him at Athenry and they travelled together third class – she always travelled third class – to Gort. He loved the house and the woods, but almost fell asleep when she read to him at night. Both of them have left accounts of the visit. O’Casey, in Lady Gregory’s journal-version, spoke to her about his mother and his grief at her death, told her of his learning to read, his communism. She read to him from Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts. “He is tremendously struck with it,” she wrote. “He is very happy walking in the woods and dipping into the books in the library.”

  O’Casey devoted a chapter to Lady Gregory in the fourth volume of his autobiography, Inishfallen Fare Thee Well, published in 1949. He called the chapter “Blessed Bridget O’Coole”. She was, he wrote, “a sturdy, stout little figure soberly clad in solemn black, made gay with a touch of something white … Her face was a rugged one, hardy as that of a peasant, curiously lit with an odd dignity, and softened with a careless touch of humour in the bright eyes and the curving wrinkles crowding around the corners of the firm little mouth. She looked like an old, elegant nun of a new order, a blend of the Lord Jesus Christ and of Puck, an order that Ireland had never known before and wasn’t likely to know again for a long time to come.”

  Another account of O’Casey’s visit to Coole was written by Anne Gregory in her book Me and Nu: Childhood at Coole. She recounted the shock among the staff at O’Casey’s attire: “‘Great playwright is it?’ Marian snorted, drawing herself up, her starched apron creaking, her white cap quivering with fury. ‘Great playwright? I’ll give him great playwright. What right at all has a man like that to come into Coole without a tie on his collar, nor a collar on his shirt.’”

  In the end Lady Gregory prevailed on the playwright to wear a “neckchief”. Anne Gregory and her sister continued to observe the visitor carefully: “We were both fascinated by him, for though Grandma had told us about him having taught himself to read and write, and that he had written such a brilliant play, we hadn’t realised that he would have such a terrific Dublin accent. We couldn’t believe that anyone who talked like that could write at all, let alone write brilliant plays, and we listened intently as he and Grandma talked and talked over lunch and tea.”

  In November 1923 Yeats won the Nobel Prize. In a draft of his acceptance speech, which he showed to Lady Gregory, he had written that the prize should have been shared with Synge and with “an old woman sinking into the infirmities of age”. (“Not even fighting them,” she wrote in her journal.) She asked Yeats to amend his remark, which could, she thought, “be considered to mean that I had gone silly”. In his final version, he wrote of “a living woman sinking into the infirmity of age”.

  There was always that mixture in their relationship of complete empathy and bouts of tactlessness on his side, and a mixture of possessiveness and a willingness to stand up to him on her side. “It is strange,” she wrote to him in January 1914, “I had a very bad dream last night, I dreamt you were dying, lying in a bed, crumbling to earth as I looked at you. I awoke quite distressed and troubled.” In that same month, she read his new collection of poems Responsibilities and wrote to him: “I read through the poems last night, I think they will make a fine volume and send your reputation up higher than ever. ‘The Grey Rock’ is the one I care most for, but I like all except ‘Friends’. I don’t like being catalogued.” In “Friends”, the poet named three woman who “have wrought / What joy is in my days”. The first was Olivia Shakespear, with whom he had had an affair; the last was Maud Gonne. Lady Gregory was in the middle:

  And one because her hand

  Had strength that could unbind

  What none can understand,

  What none can have and thrive,

  Youth’s dreamy load, till she

  So changed me that I live

  Labouring in ecstasy.

  Despite his praise for the strength of her hand, he did not much rate her as an artist. In Nove
mber 1924 she recorded him telling her that her play The Image was “rubbish”. In his Memoirs, he wrote: “Being a writer for comedy, her life as an artist has not shaken in her, as tragic art would have done, the conventional standards. Besides, she has never been part of the artist’s world, she has belonged to a political world, or one that is merely social.” In his categories of people in his book A Vision, he placed her with John Galsworthy and Queen Victoria. (“But I don’t think she could have written ‘Seven Short Plays’,” Lady Gregory commented.) In 1931, when Lady Gregory was in Dublin for medical treatment and was staying with the Yeatses, George Yeats, who had married W.B. Yeats in 1917, wrote to Dorothy Shakespear, who was married to Ezra Pound: “Since then – that’s eleven days ago – life has been a perpetual fro and to and to and fro … Christ, how she repeats herself … she’ll tell you the same saga quite literally three times in less than an hour, and repeats it the next day, and the day after that too.”

  As the new Irish state came into being, both Lady Gregory and Yeats needed all their social and political skills to ensure the survival of the Abbey and indeed their own survival. Yeats became a senator in the Free State and during the Civil War needed an armed guard on his house. Lady Gregory refused an offer of a seat in the Senate at first and then in 1925 let her name go forward for election, but did no canvassing and was not elected. She was alone at Coole for some of the time watching the children of her peaceful tenants becoming radical and unruly. She wrote to Yeats: “I think the division in politics draws a pretty clear line between fathers and sons about here.” In 1920, when she saw six or eight young men in her woods and they did not stop when she told them to, she wrote in her journal: “I felt terribly upset – it seemed like what we had heard of the French Revolution as it began and lately in Russia, the peasants making themselves free of the woods.” Two years later, when a tenant made demands on her, she showed him “how easy it would be to shoot me through the unshuttered window if he wanted to use violence”. Yeats referred to this in “Beautiful Lofty Things”: