Lady Gregory's Toothbrush

by Colm Toibin

  Lady Gregory was nervous about the reception of Cuchulain of Muirthemne and about her own credentials as a translator. On 9 January 1902 she wrote to Yeats about his proposed introduction: “Whatever you write will be beautiful, but I don’t think you need write much, the chief thing is to show that you, representing the literary movement, accept the book, and that it is not rubbishy amateur work, as critics might be prepared to think.” His introduction was grandiloquent. It began: “I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my time.” He wrote about the language of the translation: “As she moved about among her people she learned to love the beautiful speech of those who think in Irish, and to understand that it is as true a dialect of English as the dialect that Burns wrote in. It is some hundreds of years old and age gives a language authority.”

  She dedicated her translation to the people of Kiltartan. The page-long introduction managed a number of astonishing false notes, as though Lady Gregory had been caught halfway in the act of self-invention. In attacking Professor Atkinson, the mistress of Coole left herself open to mockery: “And indeed if there were more respect for Irish things among the learned men that live in the college in Dublin, where so many of these old writings are stored, this work would not have been left to a woman of the house, that has to be minding the place, and listening to complaints and dividing her share of food.” She mentioned at the end of the dedication that the people of Kiltartan “have been very kind to me since I came over from Kilcriest, two-and-twenty years ago”. For a moment, Roxborough, with its English colonial sound, was being wiped off the map. The place she came from, in this final sentence, would have an Irish name.

  She would also create a past for herself, much as Yeats would do, a heritage that did not include rent-collecting and proselytizing Protestantism and three brothers who died from drink. In her dedication, she mentioned a figure who would emerge as central in her version of her past. “I have told the whole story in plain and simple words,” she wrote, “in the same way my old nurse Mary Sheridan used to be telling stories from the Irish long ago, and I a child at Roxborough.” In her memoirs she would also invoke the spirit of Mary Sheridan, whom she claimed to have overheard talking to a beggar woman about their memory of the French arriving in Killala, Co. Mayo, sixty years earlier, in 1798.” And a child of the Big House”, she wrote, “keeps a clear memory of the old, old nurse in earnest talk on the doorstep with an old, old beggar, each remembering, through near a century, the landing of the French in that year to help the rebels.” Mary Sheridan, Lady Gregory wrote, had previously worked for Hamilton Rowan, one of the leaders of the 1798 rebellion.

  This invocation of an old, old past would leave out most of her ancestors but would include Lady Gregory’s great-grandfather William Persse, a member of the Volunteers who sought greater autonomy for Ireland in the 1780s. The Volunteer Bridge near Roxborough had a plaque in his memory: “This bridge was erected in 1789 by William Persse, Colonel of the Roxborough Volunteers in memory of Ireland’s Emancipation from Foreign Jurisdiction.” In re-creating herself, she moved from claiming a background that was connected to Irish rebellion to writing in support of rebellion itself. In the May 1900 edition of the Cornhill magazine, in an article called “Felons of Our Land”, she wrote about the ballads and poems of Irish rebellion with great naïveté, praising the literature of rebellion with the unrestrained approval of the recently converted. The fate of the Manchester martyrs, she wrote, “gave the touch of pathos that had been wanting to the Fenian movement”. She included some lines written by Blunt while in jail in Galway and inscribed on a book for her as an example of an old Irish ballad. In those years, as she re-made herself, anything could become part of the useful past.

  She was in Rome when the magazine came out. An old friend of her husband who read the article scolded her, as she put it, for “going so far from the opinions of my husband and son”. She wrote in her diary: “I had determined not to go so far towards political nationality in anything I write again, because I wish to keep out of politics and work only for literature; and partly because if Robert is Imperialist, I don’t want to separate myself from him.” The publication of her article did not prevent her and her son from being entertained at the British Embassy in Rome.

  It would be easy to suggest that Lady Gregory’s activities in these years are tinged with a sort of hypocrisy or blindness to the strangeness of her own position. But such shiftings and turnings and dichotomies and inconsistencies are part of the history of Ireland in these years. The period between the fall of Parnell and the end of the Civil War saw a great vacuum in Ireland which many opposing forces sought to fill. None of these forces – from the unionists in the north to Patrick Pearse and his followers in the south to the trade union movement to the landed gentry – remained stable. In the period between 1890 and 1925 every force changed and adapted.

  Like many others, including those with the benefit of greater hindsight, both Yeats and Lady Gregory misread the period after the fall of Parnell. In “Ireland After Parnell”, published in The Trembling of the Veil in 1922, Yeats wrote of “an intellectual movement at the first lull in politics … the sudden certainty that Ireland was to be like soft wax for years to come”. “After Parnell,” Lady Gregory wrote in 1911, “young men were no longer tied up in leagues and politics, their imagination called out for something more.” Yet any study of the committee of the Gaelic League or the Gaelic Athletic Association in any town in Ireland in these years makes clear that a good number of the young men would quickly emerge as more interested in politics, and indeed revolution, than in culture or sport. The soft wax quietly hardened, and this process was both helped and hindered in ways both knowing and unwitting by Yeats and Lady Gregory and their associates.

  At Coole in the summer of 1901, a year after she had determined to keep out of politics, Yeats told Lady Gregory of a dream “almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak” who was “Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung, and about whom so many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death”. This woman would lead the young man of the house away from domestic happiness to join the French who had landed at Killala.

  It is now absolutely clear that the play that this dream became, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, though credited to Yeats, was written largely by Lady Gregory. The idea belonged to Yeats and Yeats wrote the chant of the old woman at the end. But he could not write peasant dialogue, and the play depends on the naturalistic setting, the talk of money and marriage, the sense of ease in family life in a smallholding. In the manuscript held in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, Lady Gregory has written in pencil on the first section of ten pages “All this mine alone”, and “This with WBY” at the beginning of the second section. James Pethica has described how Lady Gregory managed in the play to temper Yeats’s tendency “‘to symbolise rather than to represent life’ and grounded the development of the play within a realistic framework. Her emphasis on the emotional ties and hopes and dreams of the peasant family also invested Yeats’s political allegory with tragic force, by vividly realizing the well-being that Cathleen’s call destroys.”

  In her journal for 1922, Lady Gregory said that she wrote “all but all” of Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Lennox Robinson stated that “the verses in it are the poet’s, but all the homely dialogue is Lady Gregory’s. Indeed Yeats has told me more than once that the authorship of the play should be ascribed to her.” Willie Fay also reported that Lady Gregory had written all the play “except the part of Cathleen”.

  It is clear that Lady Gregory contributed “directly and abundantly”, in James Pethica’s phrase, to Yeats’s work for the theatre, especially to On Baile’s Strand, The Pot of Broth, The King’s Threshold and Deirdre. In his dedication of Where There Is Nothing to Lady Gregory in 1902, Yeats wrote: �
��I never did anything that went so easily and quickly, for when I hesitated, you had the right thought ready, and it was always you who gave the right turn to the phrase and gave it the ring of daily life. We finished several plays, of which this is the longest, in so few weeks, that if I were to say how few, I do not think anybody would believe me.”

  Although Yeats gave Lady Gregory some public credit for this collaboration, he never acknowledged the extent of her work on Cathleen Ni Houlihan. In a diary entry in 1925 Lady Gregory complained that his failure to credit her as co-author was “rather hard on me”. Elizabeth Coxhead, in her literary portrait of Lady Gregory, wrote that “when her family … urged her to stake her claim, she always refused with a smile, saying that she could not take from [Yeats] any part of what had proved, after all, his one real popular success”.

  The play was performed with George Russell’s play Deirdre in Dublin in April 1902, with Maud Gonne playing Cathleen. Lady Gregory, according to Roy Foster, attended one rehearsal and “slipped away to Venice well before the first night”. Yeats, in an interview with the United Irishman, said that his subject was “Ireland and its struggle for independence”. “Apparently,” Roy Foster wrote, “neither of them anticipated the response to their joint production.” The hall was packed every night, and the effect of the play was powerful. It was short and stark, with no sub-plots or stylized dialogue until Cathleen herself appeared, and its message was clear: that young men would have to give up everything for Ireland. The audience and the ordinary people on the stage were as one, and both were visited by this haunting force, a woman both old and young, who would pull them towards heroism and away from everyday materialism. The critic Stephen Gwynn attended the performance and wrote: “I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot … Yeats was not alone responsible; no doubt but Lady Gregory helped him to get the peasant speech so perfect; but above all Miss Gonne’s impersonation had stirred the audience as I have never seen another audience stirred … Yeats has said somewhere that his defect as a dramatist is that normal men do not interest him; but here in one brief theme he had expressed what a hundred others have tried to do, the very spirit of a race forever defeated and for ever insurgent against defeat. He had linked this expression with a perfectly normal household group.”

  George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play “which might lead a man to do something foolish”. By 1904, Yeats was ready to deny that “it was a political play of a propaganda kind”, but he was not convincing. Many years later, he would wonder “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?”.

  It can be argued that one of the main reasons why Lady Gregory did not want to claim co-authorship was her own ambiguous relationship with this material: she kept her friends in England, she remained a landlord, she did not wish to be connected directly with the emotional call for action that Cathleen Ni Houlihan and indeed Maud Gonne proposed. But her own restraint, once she was away from Coole and her role as a landlord, was always open to other forces. She wanted and generally managed both to be landlord and also to write stirringly about rebellion, although she made sure that her rebels’ political ambitions were vague. Fortunately, her rebels never wanted land. Two other one-act plays to which she gave her name as author, Gaol Gate and The Rising of the Moon, both produced and published over the next few years, made no bones about her support for rebellion. Lennox Robinson wrote that Cathleen Ni Houlihan and The Rising of the Moon “made more rebels in Ireland than a thousand political speeches or a hundred reasoned books”.

  How she managed her two separate worlds in these years is a mystery, but she managed superbly. In these same years, she could write Yeats a description of a dance at Coole: “Our dance last night went off splendidly, lasted till three o’clock this morning, I wished you could have been there it was such a pretty bright sight, the drawing room cleared and lighted by close of fifty wax candles, the supper served on the twenty silver dishes, all the table silver and flowers and tempting dishes … We were about thirty, chiefly cousins of Robert’s and also two or three officers and a sister of Lord Westmeath’s, Lady Emily Nugent … It was the merriest dance I ever saw (my experience has not been great, Buckingham Palace and Indian Viceregal and Embassy Balls chiefly) … Tomorrow I am giving a tea party to the old women in the workhouse.”

  Lady Gregory continued her friendship with Lady Layard, whom she had known since the early days of her marriage. She stayed with her in London and in Venice. In May 1909 she wrote to Yeats from Venice: “The Royal Yacht is anchored off the Piazza and yesterday the Queen, the Empress of Russia and the Princess Victoria came to lunch here and were pleased and pleasant. There was a Russian Prince between me and your friend the Queen but she talked to me sometimes across him. I think she looks younger than ever. The Empress looks like a Phil May housemaid.”

  In Cathleen Ni Houlihan, The Rising of the Moon and Gaol Gate, indeed in the story of Cuchulain himself, the lone male hero was ready to sacrifice himself. He was an idealistic, inspirational figure, free from the mire of Land League politics. In Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the family’s desire for more land is something the son will have no truck with now that the old woman has come to the house and the French have landed at Killala. There was no grubby land-hunger in the rhetoric of these heroes.

  Thus it was easier for Lady Gregory to apply the same zeal to collecting her folklore as to collecting her rents. In her references to the tea party for the old women of the workhouse and to “your friend the Queen”, there is a sense of the irony that her strange allegiances allowed her. She was also, on at least one occasion, frightened enough by what she herself had created to write to Frank Fay in 1907: “I particularly didn’t wish to have ‘Gaol Gate’ [in Galway] in the present state of agrarian excitement, it [might] be looked on as a direct incitement to crime.”

  Her plays could incite crime; but when crime came close to her, it kept her awake. There was no irony in her letter to Yeats in May 1912 about her tenants: “Dear Willie, I am in great trouble this week – my brother wrote last week that he had had a meeting with the tenants but that they could not come to terms at present. Then Monday was rent day and he wired ‘Tenants demand 6/- in the pound reduction – no rents paid.” This was a shock and gave me a sleepless night and in the morning I had a letter from him saying the tenants are trying to blackmail us – and that he is making preparations to seize their cattle end of this week or beginning of next, which will he thinks bring them to reason, especially as the bulk of them are really anxious to pay – I wrote to Father Fahy to do what he could, but this morning I decided to go home this afternoon, though Frank had told me not to come, as the cattle will be impounded in Coole, and I would be nervous – But I must do what I can to keep peace – I don’t know what outside pressure has been brought to bear on them, for they had paid full rent up to this, and this is not a bad year – My terror is that if their cattle are seized they may retaliate and that could give Robert a turn against them for ever. It is a great shock and sorrow. Don’t say anything about it.” She wrote to her son that their agent “was sure that the seizures would bring them to their senses … He had arranged to start from Gort at 7 o’clock Friday morning, with eight Gort men, four Coole men and twenty police; to begin with the stock of the small tenants, and to sweep that of the larger ones as well.”

  The cattle raid in Coole did not take place, however, as a settlement was negotiated, Lady Gregory and Fr Fahy working as intermediaries. Robert, who was away, owned the estate and the rents were his income. “I hope you think I have done right,” she wrote to him, “I have done what I think best for your happiness.” This is the key to understand her role as landlord at Coole. The cold, ruthless tone in her letters to Yeats and Robert about the tenants was not because she was a landlord’s daughter who could not shake off this tone. She held Coole for Robert. It was his heritage and his inheritance. No matter how she changed in other areas, she rem
ained steadfast in this. It was her duty and she believed in doing her duty more than anything. She merely invented other duties, and when these seemed to conflict with her primary duty, her tone grew steely.

  In 1910, in The Green Helmet and Other Poems, Yeats wrote twelve lines about Lady Gregory’s plight as a landlord. The poem made no apology; it was Yeats at his most lofty. It was called “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation”:

  How should the world be luckier if this house,

  Where passion and precision have been one

  Time out of mind, became too ruinous

  To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun?

  And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow

  Where wings have memory of wings, and all

  That comes of the best knit to the best? […]