If I couldn’t have Hunt I wanted Denis Johnston, but the very name of Johnston made Higgins cringe. Like most of the other members of the Board, he wanted to keep the theatre under his own personal supervision, and if he couldn’t do this with Hunt, what chance had he with Johnston? Like members of the Opposition everywhere, he wanted a weak government, and I finally agreed that we should look round for some young man of the theatre whom Hunt could train. Hunt, who was completely selfless in his devotion to the theatre and in Roman times would probably have trained the lion to devour him piecemeal in order not to spoil the show, chose two young men he thought he could train and gave them plays to produce. I went to the rehearsal of one of them and said I was not interested. I didn’t go to the other’s rehearsals because he had cast himself for the principal part and would have so much trouble producing himself that he would have no time for the other members of the cast.
What sank me completely was Hunt’s production of The Playboy of the Western World, and Cyril Cusack as Christy Mahon. This was as misconceived as it was magnificent. Cusack – the greatest Irish actor I have seen – interpreted the part brilliantly, but there is nothing in it that the words do not interpret better; as with Deirdre and Dervorgilla it was the English inability to get out of the way of poetry. The long surging lines, which must be spoken in the manner of Racine’s alexandrines, either in one breath or with the trained singer’s tricks of imperceptible breathing, were broken up by the elaboration of points that were only a distraction, and were of the same order as picking up matches.
Higgins and I had an angry scene about it. Yeats was abroad; Higgins was in the position of unofficial widow, and I could not get him to admit how sensitive the production was, how lovingly every detail of background and lighting had been re-created, or how beautiful Ann Alery was as Pegeen Mike. All he could see was that Cusack had chopped up the ‘porthery’, and in Hunt’s absence he went to Cusack’s dressing-room to make a scene about it. I only learned this when Hunt told me he intended to complain, and I felt he was justified in doing so. There are better ways of indicating to a great actor that you disapprove of his performance than by going to his dressing-room when he is overwrought and starting a fight.
So I supported Hunt and Cusack, while Higgins complained to Yeats, who, after his return, arrived at the next Board meeting looking like the terrible judge of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. He ignored me and delivered a long speech on the sanctity of the Abbey tradition and a violent attack on Hunt’s Playboy. That made me furious to begin with. For a man of the theatre to criticize a performance he hasn’t even seen is unforgivable, and I had no intention of letting Yeats get away with it. When my time came I replied at length and said that, while I agreed with him about the speaking of poetry, I could find no evidence for the existence of a tradition in the theatre except a lot of bad acting. This was trailing my coat with a vengeance, and the reader is fully entitled to blame me. The very memory of this hurts me now, and I often blame myself for this deliberate trampling on Yeats’ toes, but at the time I felt that Yeats had trailed his coat a bit, and if he was going to gang up with Higgins and his infernal ‘porthery’ I was going to gang up with Hunt.
Then Yeats made a serious tactical mistake, which left him wide open. He lost his temper and turned the attack on me. ‘And you—’ he stammered, ‘you said you’d try to find some man to take Hunt’s place, and when two young men produced their plays you weren’t even there.’ This was true enough so far as it went, and I had an answer to it (one of the young men was Cusack, whom I was defending), but at this stage our difference had gone beyond discussion of the Abbey and it was Higgins who had come between us. I had Yeats where I wanted him. ‘If you’re dissatisfied with my work as a member of this Board, you can have my resignation right now.’ I said, ‘but while I am a director of this theatre there is one thing I will not do, and that is reply to green-room gossip.’
There was no doubt about who had won that round, because Yeats was the most loyal of colleagues, and he had repeated greenroom gossip, only the green-room gossip had not originated with the theatre company, but with Higgins, and I hadn’t the sense to see it. Yeats went white. It was the sort of imputation he could not bear, and at our last meeting, just before he went to France to die, the charge still rankled, for when he wanted to tell me that he trusted me he had to begin with the complaint that I did not trust him. ‘You think I listen to green-room gossip…’
But if I had won that round, he won the match, because no one but myself would stand up to him in one of his bullying moods. Hunt was debarred from all further productions of Synge, Lady Gregory and Yeats; and, in atonement to Synge’s memory, Higgins was invited to produce a ‘classical’ performance of the Playboy directed by one of the old players.
Higgins was a good poet, but he couldn’t produce a child’s recitation. He went into a dither of excitement, begging the players to remember their ‘Peasant Quality’ and pronounce every ‘st’ as ‘sht’ and say ‘Cashelbar’ instead of ‘Castlebar’. This seemed to me exactly the same fault of excessive naturalism that Hunt had been blamed for. The performance was a nightmare. Such an evening of uncontrolled caterwauling and wailing was never heard in any theatre, while the players tried to demonstrate their ‘Peasant Quality’ and did their best to imitate Higgins’ imitation of a County Mayo accent. Hunt’s splendid lighting was entirely dispensed with, and instead every stage light was turned on full, masked by yellow screens, which, of course, reduced the apparent depth of a stage that was impracticably shallow anyhow to about six feet. Sitting in the stalls with Yeats, I kept expecting that every time a player rushed on stage he or she was going to land in my lap. There are at least six imperative changes of lighting, all of which were blandly ignored. People came on with a lantern, and the light didn’t change; they went off with it and the light didn’t change, and finally Pegeen Mike quenched the only conceivable source of illumination, and still the stage remained looking like Times Square on Christmas Eve.
‘What do you think of that?’ I asked Yeats as the curtain fell.
‘Oh, very fine, very fine,’ he replied with an abstracted air.
‘I think it’s absurd,’ I said and walked out of the theatre.
But no reasonable human being could fight for long with Yeats. As well as a successor for Hunt I had to find a successor for Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who insisted on leaving with him, and I arranged to send Yeats’ daughter, Anne, who had been assisting Tanya, to study stage design with Baty and Jouvet in Paris. I had warned Anne Yeats that Baty was a magnificent director of players with no notion of stage design. God alone knows what complicated intrigue Yeats saw in this, for it would simply never have occurred to him that I had been watching his daughter’s work with interest, but as no one was allowed to excel Yeats in courtesy he arranged to publish a superb edition of my translation of ‘The Lament for Art O’Leary’, with coloured drawings by his brother, Jack.
A short time later I invited myself out to Rathfarnham to present a friend of mine to Mrs Yeats. At once Yeats started explaining to me that as a father he could not possibly allow his daughter to go to Paris unprotected, and that she must go to the Old Vic instead, where she could be looked after by some aunt, cousin or friend. I replied that nothing I had seen in the Old Vic had given me the idea that we had anything to learn from it and that I wouldn’t consent to spend a penny of the theatre’s money on sending Anne there. Yeats grew sulkier and sulkier, but George, seeing us to the door later in the evening, lifted my spirits by doing a dance step in the hall. ‘That old bully!’ she said. ‘It’s about time someone stood up to him. He’s always trying to push people around.’
It was not the first time she had saved an evening for me, but it may perhaps explain why I shut Higgins up when he talked of the Yeats’ domestic affairs. I knew the apparent childish selfishness of Yeats, because once when I was seeing him home, he went to his club, and told me that George was ill with some infectious disease and that he coul
dn’t go home. I, thinking of George by herself in the house, said ‘Oh, that’s awful!’ and Yeats replied mournfully, ‘Yes. You see, I can’t even get at my books.’ But I also saw the other side, which apparently Higgins didn’t see. Once, when we went in a taxi to some Board meeting, I paid the taxi driver and Yeats grabbed the money frantically from his hand and created a scene while he tried to find money of his own – always a difficult task for him as he never could make out where his pockets were. I said, ‘Oh, stop it, W.B.,’ and he turned on me. ‘You don’t understand, O’Connor,’ he gasped. ‘I wouldn’t mind, but my wife would never forgive me.’ Maybe only a storyteller can understand that, but I knew that a man who worried about what he was going to tell his wife about who paid the taxi fare was a man in love, whatever anybody else might think.
By this time I was in a bad state of unrest myself. I was unwell, and now, to the difficulty of holding down a job as librarian, running a runaway theatre and trying to write, was added an annulment action in the ecclesiastical courts that might go on for years. My publisher, Harold Macmillan, had said to me in his wise way, ‘You’ve reached the stage where you must decide whether you’re going to be a good writer or a good public servant. You can’t be both.’ I knew he was right, but it wasn’t an easy choice. The only security I had ever known was the position I had made for myself, and I knew that once I gave it up I should never find another. I had got myself too much of the reputation of a firebrand. While I hung on to my job I could be ejected only with difficulty, but once out of it there would be plenty to see that I never got another chance. At last I gathered up what little courage I possessed, threw up my job, and went to live in County Wicklow.
And that, in some ways, was even worse. A writer is as conditioned to his methods of work as any old horse, and I found that the long day’s leisure away from the activities that interested me was simply something I was not trained to take advantage of, so that when I did sit down to work at my usual hour after supper the day’s idleness had already drained and dispirited me so that I wrote without aim or conviction.
Another source of anxiety was that I knew that until the annulment went through I should be a source of danger to the theatre. This was precisely the sort of weapon that its enemies would use, and not long before, when Hayes and other members of the Board had sat joking about a love affair between two of the players which had caused some scenes, I had said, ‘This is no joking matter, and if I hear of it officially I shall ask for the resignation of both. The theatre is more important than anyone’s feelings.’ I decided to see Yeats and ask him to let me resign quietly. Hayes knew what I intended doing and, in his wise way, he tried to dissuade me. I liked being dissuaded, because there was nothing I wanted to do less than resign, but I had the puritanical sense I had inherited from Mother and Corkery and felt that though what I chose might be wrong I still had to choose. Yeats and I went out to dinner, and I explained how I felt about it. I even explained what I had already said about the players, and he was amused. ‘That is quite different, O’Connor. If it had been a question of a Protestant director and a Catholic actress, I should have asked for his resignation immediately. But a Catholic director and a Protestant actress – we are unassailable.’ Besides, in his romantic way he was thrilled by the more ceremonial usage of the ecclesiastical courts and said wistfully, ‘I suppose the case will go to Rome’, obviously thinking of the fine figure he would have cut himself in an atmosphere of Renaissance diplomacy.
And then, growing serious and becoming the Yeats I loved, he said, ‘I can’t accept your resignation, O’Connor. I know you think I listen to green-room gossip’ – the old rebuke that he brooded over for months – ‘but when I die I want to leave my theatre to you and Higgins.’ There, again, was the essential Yeats – the man who never ignored a rebuke or an obligation.
This opened the way for a general discussion, and I begged him again to bring Denis Johnston in as producer. Of course I was attacking the obsession with Higgins, and the stubborn Yeats was aroused by his loyalty. Because he was feeling fond of me, he let me down lightly. Whenever he wanted to compliment me he quoted his wife as his authority and he said: ‘You and George have exactly the same admiration for Denis Johnston. George made me listen to a radio programme of his on the Siege of Derry, and it was a masterpiece. But I can’t help thinking he is a young man who would want his own way.’ I knew perfectly well that Johnston would want his own way – was there ever a gifted man who didn’t? – but I wondered what he thought Higgins and Blythe wanted.
The discussion swayed to and fro as such discussions must between a young man and an old one. Then he said sternly: ‘At the next meeting of the Board I attend I want you to propose the dismissal of Robinson. When you quarrelled with him before, I knew you were right, but I had to oppose you; I had certain personal commitments. They no longer exist. I know Robinson is a danger to the theatre, and he must go.’
Well Yeats might talk of commitments. For years I had been watching what George Yeats was doing for him – and long after his death she told me that I was the first person who recognized that she was doing a job for him. But she wasn’t being fair, any more than Yeats or Robinson or I was being fair. How could any of us be fair? I worshipped George Yeats, and I admired Robinson because it seemed to me that he too understood what she was doing. So I said to Yeats, ‘Having accepted a public apology from Robinson I can’t very well ask for his dismissal.’ ‘That was because you didn’t know who wrote the public apology,’ said Yeats. ‘I wrote it, and I said to him, “Sign that.” And he signed it,’ Yeats added bitterly, and I knew that this was what upset him, and that if Robinson had pulled himself together and told Yeats to go to hell, Yeats would have been so proud of him that no one on earth could have attacked him.
While we ate, he went on, reminiscing about their relationship and the dozens of minor treacheries it had involved. And yet more revealing of Yeats’ real nature were his last words on Robinson. After he had told me everything he had against him, he raised his finger and said sternly, ‘But remember, O’Connor, that was Lennix Robinson the drunken intriguer’, not Lennix Robinson who was your friend and mine.’ Even today I can hear Yeats’ voice as he uttered that magnificent line. I never did think him worth a damn as a love poet, but as a poet of friendship I felt he had no equal. How else could he have written:
For friendship never ends
And what if mind seemed changed
And it seem changed with mind;
When thoughts rise up unbid
On generous things that he did,
And I grow half-contented to be blind?
At times like this Yeats fascinated me. I had seen it once or twice before, most clearly on the night when Miss Horniman’s death was announced, and he suddenly poured forth stories of her and her friends which are not in the official histories. It was not so much that the stories were particularly interesting in themselves, but that they threw such an extraordinary light on his own character. Anyone who had listened to him talk of Lennox Robinson in earlier days might have been forgiven for regarding him as a foolish, fond old man; listening to him when he suddenly decided to talk freely one realized that the foolish, fond old man was only half the personality, the personality that made the poetry, but that beneath it was another sort of personality altogether, sensitive and compassionate, but watchful, cool and without illusion, the mind of a novelist rather than that of a poet. This, of course, was what gave him his extraordinary capacity for development, and even in the few years I had known him I had seen his poetry getting nearer and nearer to my own ideal of poetry. He warmed my heart so much that night that I picked up enough courage to pay him a compliment. I said that if God gave him another ten years he would be the greatest lyric poet who had ever lived. He took this modestly, as Mother took praise of her good looks, and said, ‘All the things I wanted to do when I was eighteen I am doing now that I’m an old man.’ He was, and with the craziest of equipment. He was writing popular songs
with no one but Higgins to give him a hand with the tunes, and poetry that has much of the quality of Old Irish verse on the basis of some translations of mine.
But if he thought that Higgins and I were going to perpetuate the sort of theatre he had dreamed of when he was young, he was very wide of the mark. All the same, things looked promising. Suddenly the Government offered a vast sum of money for the rebuilding of the Abbey as a national theatre. Yeats was enthusiastic. It looked as though after his death the theatre would be continued as an institution like the Comédie Française; he had heard me say at Russell’s graveside that we had grown up in a country without institutions, and he would have wished the theatre to be one of them, Everybody was enthusiastic but myself. When Blythe produced his draft agreement with the Government I had to point out that all we were doing was handing over everything we possessed to the Government with no guarantee that we should have the least voice in the eventual policy of the theatre. I was then asked to draft an agreement of my own, and I did, and took it to Yeats for his approval. We went through it clause by clause. He was in an emotional state and talked of what it meant to him that, after all the hostility and violence, he, Synge and Lady Gregory should at last be accepted by their own people. I felt just the same; and I think the proposal of mine that pleased him best was that the main theatre must be called the Gregory Theatre. But the money made me unhappy and in the middle of our conversation I dropped my usual brick.
‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that we have created vested interests?’ I asked, and Yeats gave me an angry look and said bitterly, ‘Did you think I wasn’t aware of it?’
Nowadays I wonder if he wasn’t, and if that cool, watchful intelligence had not already warned him of what was going to happen after his death. Nothing had warned me except an old fear of money in the arts, and yet God knows that I should have been made suspicious by the peculiar things that were happening about me. I had just been involved in a most peculiar row about Yeats’ play The Herne’s Egg. I should have had more sense, but at the time the incident completely befuddled me. Yeats had read it to me while he was writing it and, apart from one of our usual wrangles about a music-hall joke in the first scene, I had admired it greatly. But when it was submitted to the Board at a meeting not attended by Yeats, the members rejected it because it was obscene. Only Ernest Blythe supported me, and he did so on the grounds that the play was so obscure that no one would notice that it was obscene. This was not what I felt at all, and it seemed to me intolerable that the Board which Yeats had selected himself should coolly reject one of the finest plays of its founder. Hayes became really violent and threatened to resign if it was produced. When I argued with Hayes afterwards, he told me that Higgins had assured him that Yeats’ intention was that the seven men who rape the priestess should represent the seven sacraments. This interpretation appeared to me to be the utmost nonsense, but I saw no reason to disbelieve Higgins’ story – did I say I was simple-minded? – for I knew that when Yeats was bored or depressed he was capable of saying the most outrageous things. (Indeed, I had heard him not long before tell a young woman who had drunk up his entire ration of whiskey for the night that ‘the Blessed Trinity was an invention of a homosexual monk’.) But I did know Catholic doctrine as Higgins – and Hayes apparently – didn’t, and I could not see how anybody of reasonable intelligence could accept such a stupid interpretation. Now, the play isn’t very difficult. Any reader of Yeats can test that argument for himself. Clearly, the seven men represent the sciences and the priestess revealed religion, while the rape is merely a stylization of the nineteenth-century assault on religion. From the point of view of Christian orthodoxy you could comfortably produce The Herne’s Egg in any ecclesiastical seminary. Indeed, an ecclesiastical seminary might be about the only place you could produce it where it would be fully understood. But I could not persuade Hayes, a really pious man – and by pious I don’t mean prissy – that Yeats had no intention of being blasphemous.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 42