Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (10 page)

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 Far
e 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.”

I
n 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:

Despite his praise for the strength of her hand, he did not much rate her as an artist. In November 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.”

A
s 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”:

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.”