Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (9 page)

The publication of “Easter 1916” would threaten the ambiguity under which she had sheltered. The plays she and Yeats had written had not been a direct celebration of recent rebellion; they were rooted in history and could be read as metaphor. And even though “Easter 1916” had
several
passages that expressed ambivalence about the Rising, the poem's listing of the leaders and its refrain were what people would notice and remember. On Lady Gregory's insistence, the poem's publication was deferred; although Yeats read it aloud a few times to friends, it did not appear in print until 17 March 1919, when
The Irish Commonwealth,
a Dublin magazine, quoted the first sixteen lines, and it was not published in England until October 1920, when it appeared in its entirety in
The New Statesman.

Four of her Persse nephews were killed in the fighting in France. In almost all of her letters to Yeats during the war, there was some reference to her son Robert, who had become a pilot. In June 1917 she wrote: “Robert, having been given Legion of Honour for France, has now been
given military cross for England. He must have been very brave and very efficient out there. He is at Salisbury now, trying out the new machines and there is to be flight instruction for a bit.” Later, she wrote about the new planes: “The machines are single-engine, he will be alone with a machine gun.” In October 1917 she wrote: “And there is only half of me here while Robert is in danger. He is in France this week inspecting aerodromes, flying from one to another.” Soon, he moved to Italy. In December 1917 she wrote: “We had a cheery letter from Robert from Milan … There is danger everywhere.”

A month later, Robert was shot down in error by an Italian pilot as he returned from a mission, although Lady Gregory never knew about the error. She was alone in Coole when the news came and had to make her way by train to Galway to tell Margaret, Robert's wife. “I stood there and Margaret came in. She cried at once ‘Is he dead?' … Then I sat down on the floor and cried.”

Yeats wrote four poems on the death of Robert
Gregory
; two of them are among his greatest. The
circumstances
of the composition of all four poems, and Lady Gregory's close monitoring of them, remain the most astonishing and telling episode in their long relationship. She wrote to him on 2 February 1918: “If you feel like it some time – write something down that we may keep – you understood him better than many.” A few days later
she wrote to Yeats about Margaret's wishes for him to do something: “If you would send even a paragraph – just something of what I know you are feeling – to the Observer – or failing that the Nation – she would feel it a comfort.” She enclosed notes for him about Robert. Yeats wrote to John Quinn: “I think he had genius. Certainly no contemporary landscape moved me as much as two or three of his, except perhaps a certain landscape by Innes, from whom he had learned a good deal. His paintings had majesty and austerity, and at the same time sweetness. He was the most accomplished man I have ever known; he could do more things than any other.” Yeats also wrote to Iseult Gonne that Robert Gregory had “a strange pure genius … I have always felt that he had a luckless star and have expected the end.” He wrote a piece for the
Observer
saying that Robert Gregory's “very accomplishment hid from many his genius. He had so many sides that some among his friends were not sure what his work would be.”

Yeats wrote to John Quinn, saying that his real grief was for Lady Gregory. In his first poem about Robert
Gregory
, “Shepherd and Goatherd”, Yeats's invocation of Lady Gregory at Coole is among his most pedestrian work:

The poem goes on to deal with Robert, how he had built no house in his lifetime and left merely a few paintings. It cannot have offered Lady Gregory much consolation when Yeats showed it to her on his arrival in Coole in April 1918. The dead artist, he wrote:

In a letter to his wife, which John Kelly quotes in
Lady Gregory: Fifty Years After,
Yeats, who had begun to write “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” at Coole, wrote: “I have done nothing but … discuss with Lady Gregory the new stanza that is to commend Robert's courage in the hunting field. It has been a little thorny but we have settled a compromise. I have got from her a list of musical place-names where he hunted … I have firmly resisted all suggested eloquence about aero planes ‘& the blue Italian sky'. It is pathetic for Lady Gregory constantly says that it [the poem] is his monument – ‘all that remains'.”

The pathos of the poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” comes not from the qualities claimed for Robert Gregory, which are exaggerated, but from the
withholding
of his name until the sixth line of the sixth stanza. In many journal entries between now and her death, Lady Gregory also withheld her dead son's name, referring to “the grave in Italy” or “the grave in Padua” or “my
darling
”. Now, in Yeats's poem, other names can be
mentioned
– the poet Lionel Johnson, the playwright Synge, Yeats's uncle George Pollexfen – but since the poem is called “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”, we know that these names are being mentioned only because the poem cannot bring itself to mention the real name, the name that is unsayable in the body of the poem. The poet is accustomed to the “lack of breath” of those he has named,

In the last stanza, the poet says that he thought to comment on more of his friends, “but the thought / Of that late death took all my heart for speech”. The poem will delay as long as possible coming to its point, just as Lady Gregory in January 1918 on her way to Galway to tell
Margaret that Robert was dead desperately wanted to postpone the moment when it would have to be said. (“In the train,” she wrote, “I felt it was cruel to be going so quickly to break Margaret's heart, I wished the train would go slower … It was agony knowing the journey was at an end.”) Yeats, too, wants the poem to go slower, to hold the telling. But once it's said, then it is too sad to go on, no other dead friends can be summoned up. Thus he did not merely obey Lady Gregory's request to put the names of
places like Esserkelly or Moneen into the poem; he sought to follow in his poem the shape of her grief.

In much of Yeats's poetry, there are two voices: one is public, it is there to persuade; the other is private and
whispering
, a poetry of the night. Often the same poem comes in these two guises – “September 1913” and “The
Fisherman
”, for example, or “Sailing to Byzantium” and “
Byzantium
” – and now too, along with the public poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”, a poem to be read aloud to a group, came its whispered counterpart, a
sixteen-line
poem told in the first person by Robert Gregory, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”. And this, too, after the tactlessness of “Shepherd and Goatherd”, sought to console Lady Gregory, after all she had done for her
country
, that Robert had died in a war not Ireland's. The poem rid Robert of imperial will, or English patriotism. It changed the “Major” into “An Irish Airman”. It made him abstractly heroic: his “lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds”. It handed him back to Coole which the war could not touch, the house his mother had guarded for him:

The fourth poem, eventually entitled “Reprisals”, is the strangest. As the terrible beauty of the 1916 Rising made its way into guerilla war in 1919 and 1920, Lady Gregory was in Coole and Yeats either in Dublin or in England. Her journals for the period remain one of the best accounts of the daily and nightly terror unleashed by the Black and Tans, whom the British had sent to pacify Ireland. She wrote a number of articles for
The Nation
in London,
making
clear what was happening in Ireland. She did not sign the articles, but it was known among the republican
leadership
that she had written them. This, and her generally good relationship with the locals, meant that Coole was not endangered. She viewed the violence of the rampaging British with horror. She also viewed the poem Yeats sent her from Oxford in November 1920 with horror. He
initially
entitled it “To Major Robert Gregory, airman”:

“My dear Lady Gregory,” he wrote in his customary greeting (she always wrote “Dear Willie”), “I send you this a new poem to Robert. I am sending it at once to The Times and if they will not have it, I will send it to The Nation.” He mentioned that he had not asked her leave, but added that the poem was “good, good for its purpose”. On the envelope, which is in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, she wrote: “I did not like this and asked not to have it published.” In her journal she
wrote: “Yeats writes enclosing lines he has written and has, without telling me, sent to The Times, I dislike them – I cannot bear the dragging of R. from his grave to make what I think a not very sincere poem – for Yeats only knows by hearsay while our troubles go on – and he quoted words G.B.S. told him and did not mean him to repeat – and which will give pain – I hardly know why it gives me extraordinary pain and it seems too late to stop it … and I fear the night.”

Shaw had written to her about Robert: “When I met Robert at the flying station on the west point, in
abominably
cold weather, with a frostbite on his face hardly healed, he told me that the six months he had been there had been the happiest of his life. An amazing thing to say considering his exceptionally fortunate circumstances at home; but he evidently meant it.” This idea that the
adventure
of the war had made Robert happier than his
childhood
at Coole or his marriage would not have been a great consolation to his mother or his widow or his three children. Nor that he was among the “cheated dead”. Nor, indeed, that he “had brought down some nineteen planes”. Lady Gregory managed to stop the poem being published. It did not appear in any periodical of the time, nor in any collection by Yeats. It was first printed in a magazine in 1948 when they were both dead.

L
ady Gregory continued to read manuscripts submitted to the Abbey, alert always to possible new talent, but also, especially as the new state was coming into being, to the political implications of a new play. Thus in November 1921 she noted in her journal a play called “The Crimson and the Tricolour” by Sean O'Casey. “This is a puzzling play,” she wrote, “extremely interesting … It is the
expression
of ideas that makes it interesting (besides feeling that the writer has something in him) & no doubt the point of interest for Dublin audiences. But we could not put it on while the Revolution is still unaccomplished – it might hasten the Labour attack on Sinn Fein, which ought to be kept back til the fight with England is over, & the new Government has had time to show what it can do.” She decided to have the play typed at the theatre's expense. She met the writer five days later and remarked in her journal that he was “a strong Labour man” who nonetheless said that if his play would weaken Sinn Féin then he “would be the last to wish to put it on”. Yeats, in any case, did not like the play and it was turned down. He thought that it was “so constructed that in every scene there is something for pit and stalls to cheer and boo. In fact it is the old Irish idea of a good play … especially as everybody is as
ill-mannered
as possible & all truth considered as inseparable from spite and hatred.” Robinson sent this critique to O'Casey, who dismissed Yeats's objection to his play.