I knew that about the main issue between us – the style of acting which Yeats called the Abbey tradition and Higgins called ‘porthery’ – Yeats was absolutely right, and I preached the same doctrine to Hunt at every opportunity, but not being a theatre man I felt it was my immediate responsibility to get the theatre on its feet, with a repertory of modern Irish plays and a style of acting that suited them. Yeats wanted a continuation of the Senecan style of acting, common in the universities in Shakespeare’s day, in which words were all-important, nobody spoke while moving and nobody moved while someone else was speaking for fear of distracting attention from the words – the opposite of the later English naturalistic convention in which beautiful speeches are chopped up and fitted into bits of stage business – picking up matches, for instance. It is like a duet in which two instruments never play together. But the Senecan style must have been out of date even in Shakespeare’s day. In one of the Parnassus Plays there is a scene in which Shakespeare’s friends, Burbage and Kemp, give an audition to some university lads trained in the Senecan tradition, and they describe it as resembling a walk with someone who speaks only when he comes to a stile. The Senecan is a purely rhetorical convention and admirable for poetry; the other, the Shakespearean convention, is purely dramatic, and sometimes plays hell with poetry, even Shakespeare’s. And how easily I could have got round Yeats if only I knew then what I know now and could have given him the word ‘Senecan’ to brood over! He was a man who loved pedigrees, even for his canaries, and would have been so happy murmuring to visitors, ‘Our convention, the Senecan, which preceded the convention of Shakespeare…’
But Hunt had been brought up in the Shakespearean convention, and he couldn’t take the Senecan style seriously, so that when he produced the plays of Lady Gregory and Yeats he did have a tendency to squeeze the poetry out of them to make room for dramatic effects. Our biggest disaster was with Deirdre, and for this I was largely to blame. I wanted to produce The Player Queen, my favourite Yeats play. As Hunt wanted occasionally to work with an English actress, we suggested Jean Forbes-Robertson, who had the fairylike coloratura quality that the imitation queen must have. But Yeats had promised the part to an actress with whom he was friendly at the time. She was inexperienced, and since I had heard no favourable account of her I refused to invite her to Dublin. After that, all Yeats would give us was Deirdre. Apart from the fact that we didn’t like the play, it was quite unsuitable for Jean Forbes-Robertson. It was like asking the perfect Zerlina to play Isolde. I felt even more unhappy when I took Jean out to lunch and she said gaily, ‘Well, I don’t understand a word of the part, but I’ve made up a little story of my own that covers it pretty well.’
So, on the first night I gave up my seats to friends from the country and went to the theatre only to check the takings. They were good and the reception – to judge by the prolonged yells that could be heard in the foyer – was overwhelming. I was in the box office when Yeats came staggering up the stairs from the stalls, clutching his head. ‘Terrible! Terrible! Terrible!’ was all he could bring out. I was certain he was exaggerating, so next evening I went by myself and sat in the back of the gallery. It was even worse than Yeats and Higgins had led me to believe, because they at least had liked Mícheál MacLiammóir as Naisi and I could see no merit in anybody. I felt that all the actors must have heard Jean Forbes-Robertson’s ‘little story’. None of them could keep still for two minutes, and the play needed all the Senecan starch. Higgins’ ‘porthery’ simply couldn’t exist in that Shakespearean atmosphere. Unfortunately it was a great popular success, and its expensiveness forced us to continue it after MacLiammóir left, so Hunt took on the part himself. It should be enough to say that Hunt was half MacLiammóir’s build and with less than half his voice, and that it was no use trying to explain to him how an actor in the Senecan convention can build a tremendous climax merely by using fractions of semitones.
Naturally Yeats was furious, and Higgins stormed against Hunt, without, however, having the faintest idea of how to produce the poetic effects he talked of. Instead, he had invented something called ‘Peasant Quality’ – which the players turned into ‘PQ’ and used the slogan ‘Mind your PQ’.
And yet neither Yeats nor Higgins could see that the English naturalistic convention, applied to new Irish plays and players, produced an exquisite effect that was neither purely Senecan nor naturalistic, but an extraordinary blend of simplicity and polish – ‘beauty like a tightened bow’. With the new plays the result was an entirely new style and an entirely new type of actor – represented by Cyril Cusack – that seemed to suit perfectly the sort of theatre we wanted. I doubt if even Hunt knew the secret of what he was doing, for its presence could be detected only because by Friday – unless the players were closely watched – it began to rub off, the opposite of what usually happens in repertory, where the players gradually begin to settle into their parts.
There was an interval of peace when some of the players left to tour America with Higgins as manager. The tour got off to a disastrous start. Hunt was keeping the theatre open with a second company, and we wanted a fair split, reserving a stiffening of the older players, while letting American critics have a glimpse of the new talent being produced by the Abbey. However, the older players, thinking of Hollywood contracts, resented this and got at our American manager, who cabled his own list of players, which we had to accept.
In America Higgins dropped the company altogether, and all the news we could get of them was from American newspapers, which described furious scenes between rival lawyers. Higgins simply ignored our cables, though after a month or so I got one report from him which was a masterpiece of wild humour, but told me nothing we really wanted to know. Blythe wanted to dismiss Higgins by cable and appoint Arthur Shields in his place, but Yeats simply mocked at the idea. ‘What you and Blythe want is a three-pound-a-week clerk,’ he snorted. ‘You can’t buy a genius for three pounds a week.’ But we didn’t want a genius; we merely wanted someone to keep that wretched touring company out of our hair while Hunt went on with the real business of the theatre, which was producing new plays.
And that was no easy task. For years I had been haunted by the subject of the Invincibles, a little group of Dublin terrorists who assassinated the British Chief Secretary in Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, in 1882. I drafted a play about them. It was a bad subject for me because it is a peculiarly Dublin tragedy and would have needed an O’Casey to handle it. When Hunt agreed to join me as collaborator, putting real theatrical bones into my dramatized history, it became still more unsuitable, because, though in real life he was a brave and patriotic Englishman, as a man of the theatre he felt bound to identify himself with his subject, and no amount of lecturing would keep him from writing lines like ‘Christ, we’ll cut the throats of all the dirty English bastards!’ It is, as Arnold said, the tragedy of the artist – ‘we become what we sing’ – and I was watching Hugh Hunt turn into a terrorist under my eyes.
During the production two things happened that I shall never forget. One was Cyril Cusack’s performance. Hunt had asked me not to embarrass him by attending rehearsals, for fear I should compromise the cause of terrorism any further, and I had loyally agreed. He suddenly asked me to attend the last rehearsal but one, and speak to Cusack, who was behaving very badly. So far as I was concerned he was Hunt’s discovery – a great actor, and, as Hunt explained to me, ‘Not Irish at all, you know; straight Cockney’. Cusack played the part of young Tim Kelly, the choirboy who followed his older friend, Joe Brady, the stonemason, to the gallows. I went to the rehearsal and listened in dismay. I knew Cusack’s part was vilely written, but he was deliberately ignoring the most commonplace theatrical effects as though they bored him. Maybe they did. At the same time I realized that it was far too late to interfere because anything I suggested would only throw off the other players, particularly Willie O’Gorman, who, as Joe Brady, was carrying the whole play magnificently on his shoulders.
Next day I went to the dress rehearsal and listened to Cusack again. He hadn’t changed an iota of his interpretation; he still seemed to throw away every speech, but after a few minutes I began to feel a physical chill in the theatre. I looked round and saw two of the actresses weeping openly. When actors weep at someone else’s performance in dress rehearsal it has to be pretty good. Of that unspeakable part Cusack had created something that wasn’t in any line of it, a loneliness so terrifying that it made you wonder how the human mind could sustain it. I had always known what a great writer could do. That day showed me what a great actor could do.
The other thing I remember is Robinson’s extraordinary behaviour. As a member of the Board he had read and approved the play. He had done more than that. He had taken me aside and pointed out to me the simple but important mistake I was making. I had written the play almost entirely in brief speeches, as a storyteller writes, and ignored the fact that in the theatre brief speeches – the equivalent of the Greek stichomythia – must be interrupted by long, expository ones, to give the actor and audience breathing space. I was grateful and pleased because I felt that Robinson was treating me like a friend, but there was small hope of that. By the time the play was ready for production, word had reached us through the Dublin underground that the Left Wing groups disapproved because they thought the play exploited and caricatured terrorism, and they proposed to wreck the theatre. On the first night this looked more than likely because Yeats’ old girlfriend Maud Gonne came in for the first time and took her place in the stalls. There was no riot that night because Maud apparently decided it might not be understood, and the only protest came from a Nazi visitor who thought the play was directed against Hitler and wrote to the papers to say how shocked he was at this defence of tyrannicide. But while the players were still wondering whether or not they would have to fight, Robinson went to a debate at the rival theatre across the road and denounced Hunt and me bitterly for having dramatized a subject that was bound to cause pain to the relatives of the men who had been hanged by the British fifty years before. On the whole, the relatives of the men who had been hanged didn’t seem to be too upset, and when Joe Brady’s sister arrived at the theatre – to lend us the suit that her brother died in, for our production – Hunt felt it his duty to receive her as if she was royalty.
But everybody in the theatre realized that Robinson’s remarks were a stab in the back and that he was trying to provoke a riot of his own. Hayes immediately tabled a resolution demanding his dismissal from the Board. It would have been plain common sense on my part to support Hayes, but before the meeting Yeats invited me to meet him for tea so that he could explain why he must oppose the resolution ‘for personal reasons’. He knew he didn’t have to tell me what the personal reasons were. Robinson was his friend whom he had already defended against Lady Gregory, and he had been a good friend to Mrs Yeats when she needed friends, and he was adored by Yeats’ children. Yeats knew Robinson was in the wrong and was obviously distressed – a different Yeats altogether from the one who knew he was in the right and was determined on proving it to you. I merely told him that in any matter that concerned his peace of mind he could rely on me, which was perhaps disloyal to Hayes, though I don’t, think Hayes would have regarded it so.
It was a queer, agonizing evening. It began on the theatre backstairs. Yeats was obviously very ill and could only climb a step or two before pausing for breath. It seemed rude to stand behind him for minutes on end, waiting to see him take the next step. If it had been Russell, I should have taken his arm and lifted him up, but I knew Yeats wouldn’t tolerate that from me. I could have run ahead and chattered from the top of the stairs, but I had been trying, without much success, to get the other members of the Board to stand up when he came into the room, and that didn’t seem right either. He was doing this on Robinson’s account, not mine.
At last we got up and he fell into a chair with Robinson on his left-hand side and Hayes at the foot of the table on my right. Hayes moved his resolution quietly – normally he was the quietest of men. Mr MacNamara had been asked to resign from the Board because he had given in to a hot-headed impulse that everyone understood and sympathized with. Could any member of the Board sympathize with Mr Robinson in an act of calculated treachery, and if so how could they justify their behaviour to a loyal colleague like Mr MacNamara? Hayes had the grand manner, and he could be stinging on an occasion like this. He looked directly at Robinson and asked why – since Mr Robinson was so sympathetic with the relatives of the executed men – he had waited until the previous Sunday to express his sympathy. Robinson sat with downcast eyes and did not reply.
Then Yeats made his speech and I have not forgotten the opening words. It began: ‘Every member of this Board realizes that Lennix Robinson is no longer responsible for his actions’ and went on to say, ‘Robinson will apologize for his behaviour and his apology will be published in the Dublin newspapers.’ Robinson sat that out too; his very despondency was his greatest strength. It was a technique I was now beginning to recognize. At times it was almost as though he enjoyed his own humiliation, as, with that strong masochistic element in his character, he may have done. And yet I knew he worshipped Yeats and that it must have been agony for him to endure that humiliating apologia, as it was for Yeats to offer it. We were all glad when it ended. After the meeting Yeats left without speaking to him. He was angry at finding himself in the wrong camp and angrier still at having been forced to humiliate a friend in front of strangers.
There was some truth in what he said about Robinson not being responsible. Robinson wrote an apology which was merely a repetition of everything he had said about Hunt and myself. When Hayes saw it he grew really angry. ‘Send that to Yeats!’ he said. ‘If he’s prepared to stand over that, he and Robinson are in this thing together.’ I did what he suggested, and by return came a handsome apology, which may or may not have been published. But even that Yeats had to write for him, as I later learned.
There were other signs of mental deterioration in Robinson. He could no longer afford to keep up his home on Dublin Bay. He embarrassed me and delighted Higgins by producing a completely dotty scheme according to which Bernard Shaw (‘He has lots of money’) would buy the house, set him up as custodian, and he would provide a residence (‘at a trifling cost’) for younger writers like ourselves with books to finish, which needed to be finished in the beauty and repose of Killiney. He was drifting into the part of the literary panhandler, the famous figure whom every mediocrity in Dublin could afford to patronize. Yet those who knew him in those years still remember little touches of consideration and sweetness which showed that the old Robinson was still there.
FOUR
The death of Yeats
20
The row between Yeats and Higgins and Hunt and me had now got completely out of hand. It isn’t, as I have said, that most of the time I was not entirely on Yeats’ side and didn’t try again and again to explain to Hunt the sort of acting that the older type of play required. There was, for instance, the little matter of Dervorgilla, Lady Gregory’s beautiful one-act play, which I had insisted on restoring to the repertory. Hunt mistakenly gave the part of Dervorgilla to a young and inexperienced actress, and – again I think mistakenly – allowed the treniendous final speech of the old queen to be broken by the young actress’s sobbing (as though Dervorgilla, realizing that, because of her love affair with the King of Leinster, Ireland had become a subject province and herself a woman whose memory would be execrated, would regard it merely as another example of the old saying that ‘the woman always pays’). This was a clear example of the way English naturalistic production inevitably turns Deirdre into ‘The Second Mrs Conchobhar’. I squabbled with Hunt about it at the dress rehearsal, and later, visiting Yeats on other business, told him what I had done. ‘Is it ever permissible for an actor to sob before the final curtain?’ I asked, and Yeats snapped, ‘Never.’
During that visit Yeats was in a state of delight over a Chin
ese carving in lapis lazuli which some friend had given him, and he was writing his acknowledgment in verse. It was characteristic of him that when he was in a mood of excitement every casual conversation got swept into the poetry, sometimes with alarming results to the logic. That night my Advice to the Players somehow got itself embodied into Yeats thank-you poem as:
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
Once, when O’Faolain and I were at the house together, Yeats read us the Meru poem on the Trinity and asked if we understood it. O’Faolain, being both clever and well-brought-up, replied, ‘Oh, yes’, but I said, ‘I don’t understand a word of it, W.B.’ Higgins reported that Yeats had said to him later that night, ‘O’Faolain and O’Connor were here, and I read them the Meru poem, and O’Faolain said he understood it and he didn’t, and O’Connor said he didn’t understand a word of it, and he understood it perfectly.’ (Nothing would ever persuade Yeats but that I was cleverer than I was.) And sure enough his next poem in the series begins, ‘Although you said you understood no word’.
Still, I don’t think he ever understood that I was on his side, or maybe he felt I was but was too arrogant to admit it. Next time he came back to Dublin from the Riviera, he and I had one of our biggest set-tos. By this time I was convinced that it was impossible to keep Hunt on over the opposition of Yeats and Higgins, which was usually unreasonable and often ungenerous.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 41