Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (7 page)

On the same day as the review appeared, Synge reported to Lady Gregory from Paris that Joyce was
“being won over by the charm of French life” while remaining penniless and indolent. “I cannot think he will ever be a poet of importance,” Synge wrote, “but his
intellect
is extraordinarily keen and if he keeps fairly sane he ought to do excellent essay-writing.” Later that same year, as his mother was dying, Joyce came back to Dublin and crashed a party at Lady Gregory's; a fellow guest watched him “with his air of half-timid effrontery, advancing towards his unwilling hostess and turning away from her to watch the crowd”. A year later, as he was getting ready once more to leave Ireland, he managed to touch Lady Gregory for five pounds. Her reward was to be one of Yeats's
“giddy dames” in his broadside “The Holy Office”, which he had the good sense not to send to her when he published it in Pola in 1905. The following year he wrote to his brother to say that “W.B. Yeats ought to marry Lady Gregory – to kill talk”, and in “Gas from a Burner” in 1912 he referred to her as “Gregory of the Golden Mouth”. Twenty years later, just after the publication of
Ulysses,
he wrote her a very rude letter in reply to her request for
permission
to quote from a letter of his: “While thanking you for the friendly remembrance contained in it, and for acts of kindness in the past, I shall feel very much obliged if you will omit from your forthcoming book, which I understand is largely a history of the Irish literary
movement
, all letters of mine and all mention of me. In doing
so you will be acting in strict accordance with the spirit of that movement, inasmuch as since the date of my letter, twenty years ago, no mention of me or of my struggles or of my writings has been made publicly by any person
connected
with it … May I ask you to be kind enough to
convey
to Mr Yeats, for whose writing I have always had the greatest admiration, my thanks for his favourable opinion [of
Ulysses
], which I value very highly.”

It would be easy to read this as an example of an
arrogant
young genius becoming a middle-aged curmudgeon, but it discloses something more interesting and revealing. Once her Cuchulain translation was in print and the Abbey Theatre established, Lady Gregory held power in Ireland. Many young men and woman of talent followed her, writing peasant plays or acting in them, going west in search of knowledge and wisdom, believing in the
uncomplicated
tradition she had invented. The stories she wrote were simple, and her aim too was simple: to add dignity to Ireland, to revive the national spirit. The cultural
nationalist
movement was diverse: it contained Griffith and Pearse, whose vision and projects were rather more fierce than those of Yeats and Synge, whom it also contained. Lady Gregory would attempt to work with Pearse as much as with Synge. In a letter to Yeats in December 1904, around the same time as she gave Joyce five pounds, she wrote about her discussions with Pearse regarding an
Irish-language 
theatre: “In answering Pearse I said I believed all those who were in earnest in wishing to develop the drama as part of our national life would be together again, and we on our side were very anxious to avoid hard or
discourteous
words and had made every possible concession, and that we had proposed some time ago that those who did not get on with us should take up the development of Gaelic Drama, in which they could work side by side with us and with our help. That is a little bait for him.”

Joyce's relationship to Irish cultural nationalism remained complex. The very views that he himself put
forward
when he wrote for the Italian press, he mocked in
Ulysses.
In “The Dead”, the very cosmopolitan self that Joyce was in the process of creating was dramatically and hauntingly undermined by the call of the west. He
understood
the immense power of what Lady Gregory was proposing. He made use of it in his work, but he knew that, if he gave in to it, it would destroy him. There was a whole world under Lady Gregory's nose – of clerks and servants and lower-middle-class Catholics and Dublin loungers and layabouts – which she never noticed. They belonged to city life. They were Irish, but not in the way she had redefined the meaning of being Irish. They had no interest in ancient stories, but much interest in backing horses. They knew Victorian ballads as much as rebel songs. Later, when Sean O'Casey appeared, she would have to consider this world,
but by then she had consolidated her position.

Lady Gregory thought that Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was
“a model autobiography”. In the last pages of the book, our hero keeps a diary. One of the last entries tells of John Alphonsus Mulrennan, who had just returned from the West of Ireland, from the world which Lady Gregory had made central in the Irish experience and from which Joyce sought to escape. “He told us he met a man there in a mountain cabin. Old man had red eyes and a short pipe. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English. Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man sat,
listened
, smoked, spat. Then said: –Ah, there must be
terrible
queer creatures at the latter end of the world.

“I fear him. I fear his red-rimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till days come, till he or I lie dead …”

I
n 1911, in the United States, elements in the Church and the Fenians were waiting for the Abbey Theatre to arrive with
The Playboy of the Western World,
which, they had heard, mocked the purity of Irish women, a matter very close to their hearts. Lady Gregory sailed to the United States in September of that year. She had planned to spend a “quiet winter, writing and planting trees” and waiting for
the birth of her second grandchild. (Her first, Richard, had been born in 1909.) Instead, because Yeats asked her to go with the Abbey Players, she had the richest and most rewarding and most exciting months of her life, almost a mirror image of her time in Egypt thirty years earlier when she combined foreign travel, a great political cause and a secret passion.

John Quinn was forty-one; Lady Gregory was
fifty-nine
. He was a rich and brilliant New York lawyer, art
collector
and connoisseur, with, in Roy Foster's phrase, “an eye for the first-rate”. On a visit to Ireland in 1902, he had travelled west with Jack B. Yeats and attended the
unveiling
of the new tomb for Raftery, the blind poet, which Lady Gregory had erected. Afterwards, he joined her and Yeats and Douglas Hyde and others at Coole, being astounded not only by the lush surroundings but also by the seriousness and intensity and talent of his fellow house guests. “These were wonderful nights,” he wrote, “long nights filled with good talk.” He corresponded with the Yeats family and Lady Gregory over many years, offering assistance both moral and practical. When Yeats's father moved to New York in December 1907, complete with his considerable wit and indolence, and then refused to come home – he died there in 1922 – he was bankrolled and cared for by John Quinn. The old man said that Quinn was “the nearest approach to an angel in my experience”.

As soon as she arrived in the United States,
Lady Gregory
was treated as a celebrity. Her being a “Lady” made her interesting to start with, but she was a lady with a
controversial
Irish play in tow. Journalists followed her
everywhere
she went, copiously misquoting her. (“When I say pig, it comes out sausage,” she wrote to Robert.) The hostesses of the day lionized her. (“Mrs Jack Gardner, who is the leader of fashion [in Boston], and has a large
collection
of pictures, came and seized my hands and said ‘you are a darling, a darling, a darling'.”)

Boston was easy, despite some protests and complaints; so too Providence, where the Police Commissioners “found nothing to object to in the play but enjoyed every minute of it”. She didn't think much of Washington. (She wrote to Yeats: “There doesn't seem to be much
population
, except members of government and niggers.”) In Washington she was invited to the White House and met President Taft. (“When I was standing near him talking, something soft and pillowy touched me, it was his tummy which is the size of Sancho Panza's.”)

Lady Gregory had taken no part in the public debate about
The Playboy
at the Abbey; unlike Yeats, she had no experience of speaking in public. Now, since there was huge demand for her to speak, she began to give lectures, and this newly discovered facility was another aspect of the great novelty of America. In November, as she arrived in New York and stayed at the Algonquin Hotel, the priests began to preach against
The Playboy.
When the disturbances in the theatre began, as Quinn had warned her they would, she went backstage and “knelt in the opening of the
hearth, calling to every actor who came within earshot that they must not stop for a moment”. It amused her that the protesters threw both rosaries and stinkpots.

Former president Teddy Roosevelt, who had admired her Cuchulain translation, sat in the same box in the
theatre
as Lady Gregory and spoke afterwards about his admiration for the play. “When we got to the theatre,” she wrote, “and into the box, people saw Roosevelt and began to clap and at last he had to get up, and he took my hand and dragged me on my feet too and there was renewed clapping.”

Lady Gregory spent day and night being fêted and interviewed; the rest of the time she wrote letters home. She kept copies of these letters and used them as the basis for a chapter of her book
Our Irish Theatre
, which appeared in 1913, but the chapter lacks the astonishing vitality of the letters, especially those to her son Robert. Her indignation and malice and indiscretion are matched by sheer delight at her adventures and an eye for absurdity and detail and a sense of wonder that this was happening to her. “I have nice rooms now,” she wrote to him, “on the ninth floor, there are twenty-two floors altogether, the place riddled with telephones and radiators etc and I was glad to hear the voice of a fat housemaid from Mayo a while ago. It is a strange fate that sends me into battle after my peaceable life for so many years and especially over Playboy that I have
never really loved, but one has to carry through one's job.”

The real trouble came in Philadelphia, where the cast was arrested. Lady Gregory called John Quinn and told him that she “would sooner go to her death than give in”, adding in a letter to her son that she “should like to avoid arrest because of the publicity, one would feel like a
suffragette
”. Quinn had been watching the coverage of
The Playboy
very carefully. He wrote to her: “The policemen that ought to be put in the theater ought to be Irish
policemen
; then the town would have the edifying spectacle of Irish policemen ejecting Irish rowdies from an Irish play. I have not seen anything like the bitterness or unfairness of these attacks both by Irish ignoramuses and abnormal churchmen since the last days of Parnell.”

Once the players had been arrested, Quinn took over the legal case and caused enormous excitement by arriving in the courtroom, fresh from New York, just in time to cross-examine a witness and make “a very fine speech”. The actors, she wrote, “adore John Quinn, and his name will pass into folk-lore like those stories of O'Connell
suddenly
appearing at trials. He spoke splendidly, with fire and full knowledge.” In her book, Lady Gregory watered down her great hatred for the other side, the Irish-
Americans
without toothbrushes, which she expressed in her
letters
to Robert: “The witnesses brought against us were the most villainous-looking creatures. I wanted to get a
snap-shooter 
but could not get through the crowds. Their faces would have been enough to exonerate us.” She also left out what she told Robert on Christmas Day 1911: “Quinn has given me a very small and simple gold watch bracelet, I like it, though it doesn't look the 180 dollars I saw on the ticket when I tried it on! … Quinn won't go bankrupt at present over it, as yesterday he was kept all day on unexpected business and came in at 10.30 to explain it was a
reconstruction
of a railway company he had been suddenly asked to undertake and his fee will be 10,000 pounds in shares.”

When the tour was over, Lady Gregory stayed with John Quinn for almost a week. The letters she wrote to him on her return to Ireland in March 1912, when she
celebrated
her sixtieth birthday, and in April, suggest the intensity of their relationship during that short time. “My dear John,” she wrote, “I think you are never out of my mind – though sometimes all seems a dream, a wonderful dream … How good you were to me! How happy I was with you. How much I love you!”; and “My John, my dear John, my own John, not other people's John, I love you, I care for you, I know you, I want you, I believe in you, I see you always”; and “Oh my darling, am I now lonely after you? Do I not awake looking for you … Why do I love you so much? … It is some call that came in a moment – something impetuous and masterful about you that
satisfies
me.”