Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (6 page)

After a week of riots in the theatre, there was, on Yeats's suggestion, a public debate held in the Abbey on 4 February. Synge was too ill and uninterested to attend; Lady Gregory remained in the background. Yeats took the stage. Referring to a priest in Liverpool who had
withdrawn
a play because of the public's objection, Yeats said of the Abbey directors: “we have not such pliant bones and did not learn in the houses that bred us a suppliant knee”. The audience would have understood this very clearly as a statement of arrogant Ascendancy values over suppliant Roman ones. When Yeats's father in the same debate referred to Ireland as an island of saints and scholars and then, sneeringly, referred to “plaster saints” (“his beautiful mischievous head thrown back”, as Yeats described him many years later in “Beautiful Lofty Things”), the audience would also have understood his remark as an insult to Catholicism. (“Get the loy,” someone shouted to Yeats as his father spoke.) Lady Gregory's nephew led a group of Trinity students to the theatre to defend the play and offer what was perhaps most notably absent in the debate – a rendering of “God Save the King”. And as the disturbances continued in the theatre, the Abbey directors, as
property-owners,
knew what to do: they called the police, who arrested rioters. The calling of the police did not win them many friends in nationalist Ireland.

Yeats, for the public debate, sat on the stage, wearing his bow tie, wallowing in all his beautiful ambiguity. He had called the police and he could also declare, in case
anyone
wished to question his patriotic credentials, that he spoke as the author of
Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
Joseph
Holloway
, who kept a diary of Dublin theatre life, wrote: “The odd thing is that Fay told me Lady Gregory wrote the whole of it except the part of ‘Cathleen'.”

Lady Gregory disliked
The Playboy of the Western World;
both she and Yeats had already removed words and phrases from the acting text. There would always be tension between Lady Gregory and Synge. Although he told her that her translation of Cuchulain was part of his daily bread, Synge felt, with some reason, that Lady Gregory promoted Yeats's work for the theatre and, indeed, her own work over his, which he rightly felt was superior. She, in turn, liked him as little as his play. After his death, there is a crossed-out passage in the manuscript of her journals where she wrote: “One doesn't want a series of panegyrics and we can't say, don't want to say what was true, he was ungracious to his fellow workers, authors and actors, ready in accepting praise, grudging in giving it … On tour he thought of his own play only, gave no help to ours and if
he repeated compliments they were to his own.” Yeats in his journal wrote of Synge's “complete absorption in his own dream. I never heard him praise any writer, living or dead, but some old French farce-writer.”

After his death, Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “You did more than anyone for him, you gave him his means of expression. You have given me mine, but I should have found something else to do, though not anything coming near this, but I don't think Synge would have done
anything
but drift but for you and the theatre.” And also: “I think you and I supplied him with vitality when he was with us as the wild people did in the Blaskets.”

Lady Gregory had remarked some years earlier that “we are all born bigots in Ireland”. Yeats in his journal for 1914 remarked: “A long continuity of culture like that at Coole could not have arisen and never has arisen, in a
single
Catholic family in Ireland since the Middle Ages.” Unlike the Yeatses, however, Lady Gregory confined her anti-Catholicism to a number of jokes and sharp, funny comments in her letters and journals. In February 1888, for example, she found dinner at the Denbighs' “rather dull, all Catholics or perverts, except Lady Louisa Legge”. In Rome, she saw the Pope and thought the afternoon wasted, “unless it is a gain to feel more indignantly
Protestant
than ever”. In 1899 she wrote to Yeats about her Catholic neighbour Edward Martyn: “These papists
haven't the courage of a mouse.” In 1909, two years after
The Playboy
, she acidly placed the conflict between the Abbey directors and the Catholic nationalist mob in starker and, indeed, funnier terms: “It is the old battle,” she wrote to Yeats, “between those who use a toothbrush and those who
don't
.”

As Catholic, nationalist and cavity-ridden Ireland felt more indignantly against
The Playboy of the Western World
, Lady Gregory needed all her courage. She and Yeats had to withdraw the play from performance in Birmingham during the English tour and then justify this to an irate Synge. And she had to go back to Coole, where because of her involvement with Synge's play she was forbidden by the local council to visit the workhouse or entertain the schoolchildren in Gort. When she asked Fr Fahy to
intercede
for her, he replied: “The request coming from you shall have all the more weight when forwarded to the board by yourself.” The people without toothbrushes were getting their revenge.

B
etween 16 February and 8 March 1909 George Bernard Shaw wrote his own version of
The Playboy
; it was a short play called
The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet: A Sermon in Crude Melodrama,
and it was set in America, Blanco being an unrepentant horse thief with strong views on the Almighty.
There were also several foul-mouthed women, and a lot of very funny, sometimes silly and often irreverent and
blaspheming
dialogue. Like
The Playboy,
it was deeply
objectionable
as much in its general tone as in its particulars. Shaw offered it to the actor Beerbohm Tree, who was to get a knighthood within three months. Tree's concerns about the blasphemy and general immorality in the play were irrelevant because the Lord Chamberlain was
prepared
to ban the play. The Chamberlain's remit did not extend to Dublin, however, and when Shaw handed the script to Lady Gregory, she took it to Yeats and they decided to produce it at the Abbey.

This would prove, if anyone needed proof (and indeed some did), that the Abbey Theatre would oppose
censorship
from every quarter. Yeats and Lady Gregory had stood up to the rabble; now they would, with the same hauteur and moral authority, stand up to Dublin Castle. In August 1909 Lady Gregory herself directed the play while Yeats stayed at Coole; it was the first play she had directed alone. Soon, the authorities wrote to her: “The play does not deal with an Irish subject, and it is not an Irish play in any other sense than that its author was born in Ireland. It is now proposed to produce this play in the Abbey
Theatre
which was founded for the express purpose of
encouraging
dramatic art in Ireland and of fostering a dramatic school growing out of the life of the country.” It was
pointed out that the fact that the censor's remit did not extend to Dublin was “an accidental freedom”. Lady
Gregory
was warned that the theatre could lose its patent.

In
Our Irish Theatre,
Lady Gregory described with great relish the meetings she had with the authorities. She must have enjoyed telling James Dougherty, the Under-Secretary, that “the subject of the play is a man, a horse-thief,
shaking
his fist at Heaven, and finding afterwards that Heaven is too strong for him. If there were no defiance, there could be no victory. It is the same theme that Milton has taken in Satan's defiance in Paradise Lost.” At a further meeting which Yeats attended, Dougherty “implored us … to save the Lord Lieutenant from his delicate position”. “Can you suggest no way out?” he asked. “None, except our being left alone,” they told him. “Oh Lady Gregory,” he said, “appeal to your own common sense.” Both Dougherty and the Lord Lieutenant himself, Lord Aberdeen, were interested in drama and also in favour of Home Rule. They were a symptom of England's weakening hold on Ireland. They were easy pickings.

Shaw wrote opposing a private performance: “Threaten that we shall be suppressed; that we shall be made martyrs of; that we shall suffer as much and as publicly as possible. Tell them that they can depend on me to burn with a brighter blaze than all Foxe's martyrs.” Finally, when the Castle threatened to forbid the performance of the play,
Yeats and Lady Gregory, realizing what was at stake – they would lose their patent and be fined –  “very sadly … agreed that we must give up the fight. We did not say a word of this at the Abbey but went on rehearsing as usual.”

It is difficult to imagine them making a decision to give up the fight, who had never given one up before. It makes for a better story, however, especially one with such a triumphant ending. “When we had left the Theatre,” Lady Gregory wrote, “and were walking through the
lamp-lighted
streets, we found that during those two or three hours our minds had come to the same decision, that we had given our word, that at all risks we must keep it or it would never be trusted again; that we must in no case go back, but must go on at any cost.” Dublin Castle caved in and the play opened, to capacity audiences and huge
publicity
, on 25 August. Yeats issued a statement: “Tomorrow night Blanco Posnet will have a triumph. The audience will look at one another in amazement, asking what on earth did the English Censor discover objectionable. They will understand instantly. The root of the whole difference between us and England in such matters is that though there might be some truth in the old charge that we are not truthful to one another here in Ireland, we are certainly always true to ourselves. In England they have learned from commerce to be truthful to one another, but they are great liars when alone.”

Even Patrick Pearse was impressed, praising Yeats and Lady Gregory for “making a fight for Irish freedom from an English censorship”. In her account of the opening night, Lady Gregory reported that “a stranger outside asked what was going on in the Theatre. ‘They are defying the Lord Lieutenant,' was the answer; and when the crowd heard the cheering, they took it up and it went far out through the streets.” George Bernard Shaw later said that Lady Gregory was “the greatest living Irishwoman”.
However
, her daughter-in-law Margaret, recently married to Robert, told Lady Dunsany that, although Yeats had not seen any rehearsals, “realizing that all the English and
foreign
critics had collected and that there was a stir, he asked her to let him take the [last dress] rehearsal, saying he wished the reporters to think he had stage managed it, and she is so used to giving way to him that she agreed”.

A
mong the audience that night was the
twenty-seven-year-old
James Joyce, home briefly from Trieste, and he published an account of the whole business in
Il Piccolo ella Serda
in Trieste. “Dubliners,” he wrote, “who care
nothing
for art, but love an argument passionately, rubbed their hands with joy … and the little theatre was so filled at the first performance that it literally sold out more than seven times over … at the curtain fall, a thunderous applause
summoned the actors for repeated curtain calls.” For Joyce, the play confirmed his views on Shaw. “Nothing more flimsy can be imagined, and the playgoer asks
himself
in wonder why on earth the play was interdicted by the censor. Shaw is a born preacher. His lively and talkative spirit cannot stand to be subjected to the noble and bare style appropriate to modern playwriting … In this case he has dug up the central incident of his
Devil's Disciple
and transformed it into a sermon. The transformation is too abrupt to be convincing as a sermon, and the art is too poor to make it convincing as drama.”

Joyce had known Lady Gregory since 1902. He had read his poems to her and asked for advice. She invited him to Coole, but he did not go, deciding instead to go to Paris. He wrote to her: “I am going alone and friendless … into another country … I do not know what will
happen
to me in Paris but my case can hardly be worse than it is here … And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.” Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “I am afraid he will knock his ribs against the earth, but he has grit and will succeed in the end. You should write and ask him to breakfast with you on the morning he arrives, if you can get up early enough, and feed him and take care of him and give him dinner at Victoria before he goes and help him on his way. I am writing to various people who
might possibly get him tuition, and to Synge who could at least tell him of cheap lodgings.” Yeats did as he was told. Arriving at Euston Station at six in the morning to meet Joyce, he took the young writer around to meet people he thought might be useful to him, finding him “
unexpectedly
amiable”.

Joyce's amiability took a sudden turn for the worse soon after he arrived in Paris. In December 1902 he wrote to Lady Gregory, telling her that “to create poetry out of French life is impossible”. In March 1903 he was asked by the literary editor of the
Daily Express
in Dublin, to whom Lady Gregory had introduced him, to review her
Poets and Dreamers.
Despite his intermittent use of a toothbrush, his teeth were sharp enough to bite the hand. In her book, he wrote, Lady Gregory “has explored in a land almost
fabulous
in its sorrow and senility”. The storyteller from whom Lady Gregory took the stories had a mind, he wrote, “feeble and sleepy … He begins one story and
wanders
from it into another story, and none of the stories has any satisfying imaginative wholeness … In fine, her book, wherever it treats of the ‘folk', sets forth in the fullness of its senility a class of mind which Mr Yeats has set forth with such delicate skepticism in his happiest book
The Celtic Twilight.
”