Lady Gregory's Toothbrush

by Colm Toibin

  Augusta Gregory seated at her great ormolu table,

  Her eightieth winter approaching: ‘Yesterday he threatened my life.

  I told him that nightly from six to seven I sat at this table,

  The blinds drawn up’ […]

  During the Civil War Lady Gregory had a mastectomy and spent time recovering at the Yeatses’ house in Merrion Square. With Yeats, she saw a great deal of the first government, even though her secret sympathies lay with the republican side. As the new state was formed, Yeats and Lady Gregory decided the best way to ensure the theatre’s future was to offer it to the state; there were many discussions and negotiations. In the end, it was decided that the state would subsidize the theatre, rather than take it over, but the price of the subsidy was a government representative, the economist George O’Brien, on the board of the theatre. This was the context in which Yeats and Lady Gregory’s last great battle about censorship and freedom of expression would take place.

  In August 1925 O’Casey submitted his new play The Plough and the Stars, which dealt with Easter Week 1916, to the Abbey. Yeats and Lennox Robinson and Lady Gregory liked the play (“she is an extraordinarily broad-minded woman”, O’Casey wrote to a friend) and it was to be staged in February 1926. By early September there were problems. One of the players wrote to Lady Gregory: “At any time I would think twice before having anything to do with it. The language is – to use an Abbey phrase – beyond the beyonds. The song at the end of the second Act sung by the ‘girl-of-the-streets’ is impossible.” In rehearsal some of the actors objected to individual lines, one having been forbidden by her confessor to say them. The play allowed Irish nationalists to mix with prostitutes; it also showed a Tricolour being brought into a pub. But the overall message of the play was even more offensive: it did not glorify those who fought for Irish freedom at a time when many of them were hungry for glory. Soon, the play was read by George O’Brien, the government representative on the board, who wrote of “the possibility that the play might offend any section of public opinion so seriously as to provoke an attack on the Theatre of a kind that would endanger the continuance of the subsidy”. In his letter to Yeats he listed words which he though should be removed (these included “Jesus”, “Jasus” and “Christ” as well as “bitch”, “lowsers” and “lice”). Of the presence of the prostitute, he wrote that “the lady’s professional side is unduly emphasized”. The tone of his letter suggested that he was within his rights to demand the removal of words, characters and undue emphasis.

  When Yeats came to Coole to discuss this, Lady Gregory, according to her journal, “said at once that our position is clear. If we have to choose between the subsidy and our freedom, it is our freedom we choose. And we must tell him that there was no condition attached to the subsidy.” She and Yeats did, however, discuss cutting the offensive song from the play. At the subsequent directors’ meeting, Lady Gregory gave George O’Brien a lecture on the theatre’s battles with censorship. O’Brien still wanted the song removed. “We had already decided it must go, but left it as a bone for him to gnaw at,” Lady Gregory wrote.

  On 11 February there was a riot in the theatre. Lady Gregory was at Coole and read about it in the newspaper on her way to Dublin. Yeats had been in the theatre and had addressed the audience, who had difficulty hearing him, from the stage. However, he sent his speech to the Irish Times: “You have disgraced yourselves again … Is this … going to be a recurring celebration of Irish genius? Synge first and then O’Casey! The news of the happening of the last few minutes here will flash from country to country. Dublin has once more rocked the cradle of a reputation. From such a scene in this theatre, went forth the fame of Synge. Equally, the fame of O’Casey is born here tonight. This is his apotheosis.”

  Yeats met Lady Gregory at the station. He wanted to have another debate, as they did after the Playboy riots, but she realized that this was different: many of the rioters were women who had lost men in 1916 and the War of Independence; they were not the rabble, and they would always have the support of the public. Some of them owned toothbrushes. They were led by the ardent republican Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, whose husband had been shot in the Rising while trying to prevent looting, and they included Maud Gonne MacBride. Lady Gregory had very little time for women, and no interest in debating with them. In 1906 she wrote to John Quinn: “I should be content to have Jack Yeats and Douglas Hyde here for six months of the year, but a few weeks of their wives makes me hide in the woods! And I have felt the same with AE and his wife.” She had a rule, which she wrote down in her journal for 29 September 1919, “of never talking of politics with a woman”. Five years later her position had not changed, as she believed that the badness of the newspaper Sinn Féin was a result of there being “too many women on it”. Thus there was no Abbey debate. Four years after her death, Yeats wrote that “Lady Gregory never rebelled like other Irish women I have known, who consumed themselves and their friends”. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote of her: “She is the only woman I have known of real intellectual power equal to men and that without having anything unnaturally masculine about her.”

  Mrs Sheehy Skeffington, however, was eager for more rebellion and wrote to the newspapers: “In no country save in Ireland could a State-subsidised theatre presume on popular patience to the extent of making a mockery and a byword of a revolutionary movement on which the present structure claims to stand.” She and O’Casey had a spirited debate in the newspapers, but O’Casey became ill during a public debate with her, partly, he said, because of the sight of Maud Gonne MacBride, “the colonel’s daughter still”. Also, a number of younger writers who disliked Yeats now took this opportunity to dislike O’Casey; among them were Liam O’Flaherty and Austin Clarke.

  Once more, despite the opposition from the republican widows and the government representative on the board and the young writers who disliked him, Yeats and Lady Gregory prevailed. The theatre was packed; the play was not taken off, nor the subsidy removed. In the early years of the Irish state, the production of The Plough and the Stars stood almost alone as a blow for freedom of expression.

  The rejection of The Silver Tassie in April 1928 and the consequent alienation of O’Casey stands alone in Lady Gregory’s career as an example of mismanagement and short-sightedness. The play was read by Robinson in Dublin and Lady Gregory in Coole, and was sent to Yeats in Italy, but he did not read it until his return to Dublin. The fourth director, Walter Starkie, who had replaced George O’Brien on the board, was in Spain. None of them liked it but they did not meet to discuss what they should do with it. Instead, Yeats wrote in his magisterial style: “There is no dominating character, no dominating action, neither psychological unity nor unity of action.” He wrote to Lady Gregory suggesting that O’Casey, to save face, should withdraw the play. O’Casey, in the meantime, was in England, where his first child had just been born; he was so sure that the theatre intended to produce his play that he had suggested a cast-list to Robinson and was preparing the text for publication. Instead, Lady Gregory sent him Yeats’s report, making clear that his view was “what we all think”, although Walter Starkie had still not given his view. (He thought they should produce the play.) She noted in her journal for Saturday 23 April: “Of course it must be a severe blow, but I believe he will feel its force, its ‘integrity’ and be grateful in the end … But I had a bad night, or early morning, thinking of the disappointment and shock he will feel.”

  O’Casey was not grateful. He wrote to Robinson in a rage at Yeats’s suggestion that he should withdraw the play to save face: “There is going to be no damned secrecy with me surrounding the Abbey’s rejection of the play. Does he think that I would practise in my life the prevarication and wretchedness that I laugh at in my plays?” Some of the correspondence was published in the Observer in June 1928 and the rest in the Irish Statesman a week later.

  Lady Gregory never saw O’Casey again, although they maintained a formal and sporadic correspondence until her
death in 1932. She came to regret what had happened. “It is the only occasion I can recollect”, Lennox Robinson wrote, “when on some important matter of opinion or policy she did change her mind.” On her last visit to London in April 1931 she expressed a wish to meet O’Casey again and see his wife and son, but he did not want to meet her. Finally, on 30 October 1931, she wrote to him from Coole: “I don’t think I am likely to cross the Channel again, for I am at present crippled by a rheumatic attack, and at my age it is not likely to pass away … Perhaps one day you will bring your wife here. I am sorry not to have met her.”

  In his autobiography, despite everything that had happened, Sean O’Casey recited Lady Gregory’s praises: “Not Yeats, nor Martyn, nor Miss Horniman gave the Abbey Theatre its enduring life, but this woman only, with the rugged cheeks, high upper lip, twinkling eyes, pricked with a dot of steel in their centres; this woman only, who in the midst of venomous opposition, served as a general runabout in sensible pride and lofty humility.”

  As the 1920s went on, however, neither her pride nor her humility allowed her to keep up with the times. Neither she nor Yeats paid any attention to developments in the European theatre. They had supervised one theatrical revolution; they were not ready to pay attention to another. This may go some way towards explaining their failure to appreciate the expressionist central act in The Silver Tassie. In 1927 a clever young playwright named Denis Johnston submitted his “Shadowdance” to the Abbey, thus giving the perplexed directors something new and strange to mull over. The dialogue in the opening of the play was entirely made up of lines from nationalist ballads and speeches, cliché rendered into hilarious claptrap, thus making Cathleen Ní Houlihan and all who sailed in her seem ridiculous. The rest of the play was a vicious and energetic parody of Irish nationalism. Almost nine months passed without a word from Lennox Robinson or Yeats or Lady Gregory.

  Johnston did not suffer pieties gladly. He was sophisticated and clever, from the Dublin Protestant upper-middle class. He had not enjoyed the Irish Civil War and its many causes. He was ready to be an enfant terrible in the new Irish state, taking a dim view of its central beliefs and its theatrical hierarchy. “I was never invited to Gort,” he wrote as though it were a badge of honour.

  In 1928 the Abbey invited him to direct King Lear, but he still heard nothing about “Shadowdance”. One day, however, as they were walking from Lennox Robinson’s house to the bus stop in Dalkey, Yeats finally spoke. “We both seemed rather embarrassed”, Johnston wrote, “as we walked a long way in silence. Finally he said ‘I liked your play, but it has one or two faults. Firstly, the scenes I thought were too long.’ He turned for a while and gazed at a coal boat in the Dalkey sound. ‘Then,’ he continued, ‘there are too many scenes. If we put on this play we would annoy our audience and lose £50. We do not much mind the £50, but we do not want to annoy our audience. So we’re prepared to give you the £50 to put it on for yourself.”

  His manuscript was returned, much stained and annotated. A stray poem by Yeats was left among the pages. And, according to Johnston in the 1960 edition of his Collected Plays, someone had written “The Old Lady Says No” on the title-page, though this has been disputed and Johnston may have invented the title. Johnston had met Lady Gregory, the old lady in question, in “the back sitting room of her hotel in Harcourt Street”, according to himself, and she had expressed “distaste” for the play and described the opening playlet as “coarse”. It seems from Johnston’s account that she did not realize that the play was an elaborate joke. But it was clear, in any case, that she did not like it. Johnston took his play to the newly founded Gate Theatre, and the Abbey Theatre began its decline.

  Lady Gregory did not own Coole. Once Robert came of age in 1902, it was his, and when he was killed it was inherited by his widow Margaret. In her journals between 1918 and her death, Lady Gregory wrote almost every day about her three grandchildren, who stayed with her during holidays. She believed that Coole should now be preserved for Richard, who would be twenty-one in 1930, just as she had once preserved the estate for Robert. She continued to love Coole. In February 1924 she wrote in her journal: “last night in the library the firelight, the lamplight, shining on the rich bindings of that wall of books; and this evening, by the lake, so silent and beautiful, Cranagh so peaceful – ‘the tilled familiar land’; and later as I went upstairs and looked from my window at the sunset behind the blue range of hills, I felt so grateful, as I have often done of late, to my husband who brought me to this house and home”.

  Her disputes with her daughter-in-law also pepper her diaries. Margaret wanted to sell not only the land, but the house and the furniture as well, and was shocked to discover that Lady Gregory owned much of the furniture. There was no open warfare between them, merely disagreements and assertions of rights. They also admired each other, and after Lady Gregory’s death, in her dealings with both Yeats and Lennox Robinson, Margaret made clear her resentment of how her mother-in-law had been undervalued. In 1928, with Lady Gregory’s blessing (“I believe Robert would be, or is, glad”), Margaret married Guy Gough of the neighbouring estate Cutra (who had lit the bonfire for Queen Victoria in 1897).

  After the sale to the Ministry of Lands and Agriculture on 1 April 1927, Lady Gregory rented back the house and gardens for a hundred pounds a year. She wrote to Yeats in October: “The Commissioners are coming to take over the place. I feel rather downhearted. I know it can’t be helped as Margaret has long set her heart on selling and I don’t think I should be able to go on taking the burden of expense and management very much longer – yet it is a break, almost a defeat – there are so few houses left.”

  She enjoyed offering hospitality to any member of the Free State government who came to a play at the Abbey; she continued to supervise affairs at the theatre throughout her seventies. In October 1921 she was having a meeting in the Mansion House in Dublin when she mentioned to the Lord Mayor that she had never seen Eamon de Valera “and would much like to see him, even from the window”. When de Valera appeared she was hurried to the doorway and introduced to him. “I said I was just going to his old constituency, west Clare, and he said that he had never had time to go there since just after his first election, and I said there were many very proud of having had him as a representative.” She told him that he had been “so often in my prayers I wanted to see what you looked like”. She liked his face, “good, honest, with something of Lincoln”.

  In the year of her death, he took power in Ireland and held it for almost a quarter of a century. The ideology on which he based his politics was essentially hers, but without her liberalism and her belief in the aristocracy, and, because it was politics, ready to accept failure. It stressed rural values and an ideal Ireland; it exalted those who had lived frugally and traditionally. It spurned material and economic interests. Her dream Ireland began in stories and books and plays, but it ended in politics. She managed to inhabit two ideologies – that of landlord and that of nationalist – at the same time; so, too, de Valera managed his policies on partition and the Irish language and self-sufficiency with a masterly ambiguity.

  In 1959 de Valera became President of Ireland, and for fourteen years he would inhabit the old Viceregal Lodge, now Áras an Uachtaráin. Lady Gregory knew the building; it was here she had faced down Lord Aberdeen over Blanco Posnet. Since the early days of the Abbey Theatre she had refused to accept invitations here, even when the representatives of the Crown offered not to publish her name as a guest. When Tim Healy became Governor-General of the Free State, Yeats had written a formal letter to His Excellency asking for a meeting. Healy had replied: “My dear Boy, come and see me whenever you like in the ‘bee-loud glade’.”

  In 1928 Healy was replaced by James MacNeill, who invited Lady Gregory to stay in the house on a number of occasions. She wrote in her journal: “The thought came to me that a hundred years ago, 1828, William, my husband, may very likely have been playing about in these rooms and terraces, a boy of twelve.”
In February 1929 she came with her granddaughter Catherine. As they were shown around the house, Lady Gregory said that Catherine’s grandfather, Sir William, had come to this house when his own grandfather was Under-Secretary and also lived in the Phoenix Park. Sir William had learned his Latin lessons from the Viceroy, Lord Wellesley, in these rooms. In these rooms too, Sir William as a boy had asked the future Lord Melbourne for a stick of sealing wax and had been told: “That’s right. Begin life early. All these things belong to the public, and your business must always be to get out of the public as much as you can.”

  Lady Gregory had done the opposite. And now she was in a unique position in the new state. She, whose family was steeped in the history of Anglo-Irish power, was welcome in the house of the Irish governor-general that had been the seat of English power for so long. Others who came from her class and espoused the cause of Irish nationalism were too extreme now and opposed the compromises that the new state had made. Most of her class had left the country. She was skilled in the politics of compromise and was a superb tactician. But her eye remained on her goal: to establish Ireland’s ancient past as part of its present culture and to produce contemporary Irish masterpieces in an Irish theatre. She put all her steely energy into this and she succeeded, turning a blind eye to the parts of her own heritage that did not suit her purpose. She lived in two worlds: one of them became the Irish Free State and she was proud of that. The other one disappeared. In 1930, Richard had his twenty-first birthday at Coole. “But it is a contrast”, she wrote, “to Robert’s coming of age, with the gathering of cousins and the big feast and dance for the tenants – Coole no longer ours. But the days of landed gentry have passed. It is better so. Yet I wish some one of our blood would after my death care enough for what has been a home for so long, to keep it open.”