Lady Gregory's Toothbrush Read online

  Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush

  COLM TÓIBÍN

  THE LILLIPUT PRESS

  DUBLIN

  for Dympna Hayes

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  LADY GREGORY’S TOOTHBRUSH

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  Pencil drawing of Lady Gregory by John B. Yeats, 8 May 1905 (National Theatre of Ireland)

  Coole Park, east front, summer 1896, with Lady Gregory second from left and Sir William Gregory far right (The Irish Architectural Archive)

  Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, by Tristram Ellis (by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Sir William Gregory (Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

  John Quinn with three dogs (John Quinn Memorial Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

  Robert Gregory, by Charles Shannon (Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin)

  LADY GREGORY’S TOOTHBRUSH

  In 1933, a year after her death, in his book The Winding Stair and Other Poems, Yeats published his two great poems about Lady Gregory. He described her old age in “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”:

  Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound

  From somebody that toils from chair to chair;

  Beloved books that famous hands have bound,

  Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere;

  Great rooms where travelled men and children found

  Content or joy; a last inheritor

  Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame

  Or out of folly into folly came.

  In “Coole Park, 1929” he contemplated Coole’s legacy and the legacy of his old friend:

  They came like swallows and like swallows went,

  And yet a woman’s powerful character

  Could keep a swallow to its first intent;

  And half a dozen in formation there,

  That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,

  Found certainty upon the dreaming air,

  The intellectual sweetness of those lines

  That cut through time or cross it withershins.

  The house is indeed gone, but there is no shapeless mound, there are no nettles. Coole did not meet the fate of other such houses in the period between 1918 and 1924. It was not burned; it was not attacked by the locals. It was sold to the Forestry Commission of the new Irish state, and in turn, after the old woman’s death in 1932, it was sold to a local builder who demolished it. The site where it stood is now cemented over. But the famous tree where the famous carved their initials is still there, and it is still possible to make out the letters, from WBY and JBY to JMS and SOC and AE to GBS and, indeed, some others, less famous, both locals and visitors.

  The house where Augusta Gregory was born, Roxborough, just seven miles away, was burned down in the Civil War. Soon after the fire, on 8 October 1924, she went to look at it: “The house, the ruin is very sad,” she wrote in her journal, “just the walls standing, blackened, and all the long yards silent, all the many buildings, dairy, laundry, cowhouses, coach houses, stables, kennels, smithy, sawmill and carpenter’s workshop empty, some of the roofs falling in.” “This is a sad day to the whole of us,” Sean O’Casey wrote to her. “The ruins of all these lovely houses constitute a desolate monument of shame to Irish humanity.” The estate Lady Gregory’s family had run for many generations was divided into one hundred and twenty smallholdings, each, as one of her early biographers noted, “with its own neat grey box of a house”.

  She was born Augusta Persse in 1852, the youngest girl in a large family followed by four boys. In 1914, when George Moore in his autobiography attempted to suggest that she was “an ardent soul gatherer in the days gone by but abandoned missionary work when she married”, she vehemently denied this in a letter to his publisher. “My mother and my two eldest sisters”, she wrote, “thought it right to point out what they believed to be the different teaching of the Bible to that of the Catholic church to any Catholics who would listen. They made no secret of this proselytism which was much mixed up with benevolence and charity in those days, and my sister, Mrs Shawe-Taylor, especially, worked ardently for its accomplishment … I myself, the youngest, shrank from any effort to shake or change the faith of others.”

  She was brought up in a strict and rigid Protestantism with much Bible-reading and devotion to duty. Her mother held strong views on what or who was unsuitable for her daughters. This included the reading of novels, and extended to John Lane, whom her sister Adelaide eventually married, and her cousin Standish Hayes O’Grady, the distinguished translator from the Irish, whom her mother, believing that cousins should not marry, banned from the house.

  Lady Gregory’s sisters were taller than her and had greater accomplishments in the art of finding a suitable partner. Augusta was considered the plain one, destined to be the carer, the spinster, whose type was depicted in A Drama in Muslin, George Moore’s novel of Anglo-Irish decay set ten years later. In 1879, however, while accompanying her mother and her brother, who was ill, to Nice, she renewed her acquaintance with their neighbour Sir William Gregory, a widower, who owned Coole Park. He was thirty-five years older than her, he had been a member of parliament for both Dublin and Galway and had also been Governor of Ceylon. Unlike her own family, he did not farm his Irish estate or live fully on its proceeds. He lived mainly in London, where he was a Trustee of the National Gallery. He was interested in books and paintings and, when he came to Ireland, he gave her the run of his library at Coole. She read Roderick Hudson under his auspices, and Middlemarch. In 1880 she married him.

  The house he took her to, and the life he gave her in their twelve years of marriage, and indeed his own connections and history, offered her a rich set of associations. At school in Harrow, he had sat beside Anthony Trollope. “He was a big boy,” Sir William Gregory wrote in the Autobiography which Lady Gregory edited after his death, “older than the rest of the form, and without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met. He was not only slovenly in person and in dress, but his work was equally dirty … These peculiarities created a great prejudice against him and the poor fellow was generally avoided … He gave no sign of promise whatsoever, was always in the lowest part of the form, and was regarded by masters and by boys as an incorrigible dunce.”

  In the early 1840s, when Trollope was working for the Post Office in the Irish midlands forty miles from Coole, he renewed his acquaintance with Gregory and was a guest in the house. At twenty-five, Gregory had become an M.P. and was a great favourite among the political hostesses in London and indeed, for some time, was a protégé of Prime Minister Peel himself. “As Gregory’s guest in Coole,” Victoria Glendinning has written, Trollope “listened to the social and political gossip and did not forget it … It was the best possible fodder for a novelist … It was the politics and the sexual scandals of the 1840s, when he knew almost no one, which were to be the starting-points for his fiction long after he left Ireland.”

  William Gregory introduced Trollope to many of the leading writers and politicians. Trollope repaid the compliment by using aspects of Gregory, his popularity and his promise in the London of those years, in the creation of the character of Phineas Finn. In 1875, when Gregory, to his own disappointment, had reached the pinnacle of his career as Governor of Ceylon, Trollope stayed with him for two weeks.

  Despite the birth of their only child, Robert, in 1881, Sir William Gregory and his young wife spent a great deal of time in the 1880s trave
lling. They left their son at home, and this caused her much pain. Within a short time of her marriage she met Henry James in Rome, and later, in London, Robert Browning, Tennyson, James Russell Lowell, Mark Twain and many other writers and politicians and hostesses who were in Sir William’s circle. Her accounts of those years are observant and wry. “I sat next to Henry James,” she wrote, “and being in the middle of reading ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, asked why he had let Isabel marry that odious husband Osmond. He said she was bound to do something foolish, and I said yes with all that money. ‘But without it,’ he said, ‘where would have been the story? Besides, it is delightful for a poor man being able to bestow large fortunes on his heroines.’”

  Lady Gregory’s most important and enduring relationship of those years began in Egypt in December 1881. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a handsome English poet and anti-imperialist, was travelling in Egypt with his wife, a granddaughter of Byron. Both couples became interested in Egyptian nationalism and especially in the fate of Arabi Bey, the Egyptian leader who sought a degree of freedom from the control which Britain and France exercised over his country. Blunt and Gregory began to write letters to The Times, whose editor was a friend of Gregory’s, and their arguments went against the grain of British official policy. This made Blunt immensely happy. He loved foreign causes, but as the British government became more alarmed, Sir William, a pillar of the establishment all his life, slowly withdrew support. On 19 May 1882 Blunt wrote in his journal: “Gregory has failed us.” Blunt continued to cajole, write letters and raise money. And Lady Gregory remained on his side. According to her diaries, Sir William said to her: “You and Wilfrid talk more nonsense than any two people settling the affairs of the world, and as old Mrs — said of the two English Commissioners sent to investigate the potato disease ‘There isn’t a hap’worth of sense in both your blocks.’” To win support for Arabi in England, Lady Gregory wrote an account of visiting his house and meeting his wife and children. Sir William gave her permission to publish it, and then withdrew permission as Arabi’s forces were defeated by the British, and then restored permission when Arabi faced possible execution. It was her first published work, printed in The Times and later separately as a pamphlet.

  The Gregorys spent the summers in Coole and the rest of the year travelling or in London. Lady Gregory kept a diary of her reading, she visited the poor, she enjoyed society. She remained an imperialist in these years, attacking Gladstone’s assertion “that England without colonies would be as powerful as she is now” with elaborate argument. “He would probably also tell his gardener”, she wrote in her notebook, “that a tree repaying by shade and shelter the nutriment drawn from the soil by its wide spreading roots would flourish and perform its function equally well if confined in a flower pot.”

  She seemed eager to impress Blunt and also to keep him at a distance, as he extended his anti-imperialist sympathies. In October 1883 she wrote to him: “Sir William writes to me from London that you are credited with having gone to India with the intention of overthrowing English supremacy and establishing Mahommedan rule and rapine throughout the peninsula, so I think you still have a chance of Tower Hill.” From Coole she wrote: “The poor people come to the door daily, believing that I can cure them of all diseases, including poverty, and I mix their cough cures and buy their flannel and dye it with madder in an iron pot, and altogether I am at present one of the happy people without a history.” But she did have a history, and as Blunt became more involved in the cause of Irish land reform, ending up in prison in Galway for his pains, her history gave them grounds for disagreement: “Called on Lady Gregory,” he wrote, “who is growing very bitter against my politics, if not against me. It is curious that she, who could see so clearly in Egypt … should be blind now that the case is between English landlords and Irish tenants in Galway. But property blinds all eyes, and it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for an Irish landlord to enter the kingdom of Home Rule.”

  Sir William died in March 1892. Lady Gregory’s tone in her journal entry in January 1893, when she remembered his death and his funeral, was grave, full of sharply remembered moments. “At Gort [near Coole],” she wrote, “the people met him at the train & carried him to the Church & went into the service – And next morning the tenants came, & attended service again, old Gormally kneeling by the coffin all the time – Snow was falling & there were few able to come from a distance – but all the poor were there.” In between describing these events, she wrote: “Oh my husband! Do you know how little I have forgotten you!” By temperament and upbringing she was skilled in the art of “dutiful self-suppression”, in James Pethica’s phrase, and skilled too in the art of discretion. It is possible that nobody noticed anything special or peculiar in the twelve sonnets entitled “A Woman’s Sonnets” which Wilfrid Scawen Blunt published at the end of January 1892, just over six weeks before Sir William Gregory’s death. In his diary he wrote: “I have remodelled Lady Gregory’s twelve sonnets, which I heard from her a day or two she would like to see printed in the new book, though of course without her name. They are really most touching and required little beyond strengthening here and there a phrase and altering a few recurrent rhymes.”

  Her sonnets make clear that she was in love with him and that she had an affair with him which began during their Egyptian sojourn, when she had been married for less than two years, and ended eighteen months later. Her image after Sir William’s death was that of a dowager who exuded dryness and coldness and watchfulness, who wore black and modelled herself on Queen Victoria. The sonnets, on the other hand, disclose someone else:

  If the past year were offered me again,

  And the choice of good and ill before me set

  Would I accept the pleasure with the pain

  Or dare to wish that we had never met?

  Ah! Could I bear those happy hours to miss

  When love began, unthought of and unspoke –

  That summer day when by a sudden kiss

  We knew each other’s secret and awoke?

  In these twelve poems she was in the sweet position of disclosing the love which had to remain secret:

  Pleading for love which now is all my life –

  Begging a word that memory may keep,

  Asking a sign to still my inward strife,

  Petitioning a touch to smooth my sleep –

  Bowing my head to kiss the very ground

  On which the feet of him I love have trod,

  Controlled and guided by that voice whose sound

  Is dearer to me than the voice of God.

  Very few of the changes Blunt made to the poems improved them; he tended to soften her directness and dull her precision. But he could do nothing to lessen the sense of loss and shame in some of these poems, which are quoted here in her versions:

  Should e’er that drear day come in which the world

  Shall know the secret which so close I hold,

  Should taunts and jeers at my bowed head be hurled,

  And all my love and all my shame be told,

  I could not, as some women used to do

  Fling jests and gold and live the scandal down –

  I could not, knowing all the story true

  Hold up my head and brave the talk of town –

  I have no courage for such tricks and ways,

  No wish to flaunt a once dishonoured name –

  Have still such memory of early days

  And such great dread of that deserved shame

  That when it comes, with one all hopeless cry,

  For pardon from my wronged ones, I must die.

  The ten years in Lady Gregory’s life between the death of her husband in 1892 and the first performance of Cathleen Ni Houlihan involve what is ostensibly a complete transformation in her life. A landlord’s daughter and widow, steeped in the attitudes of her class, she became an Irish nationalist and leader of a cultural movement that was more powerful than politics. But her activitie
s in these ten years also displayed what would, for the rest of her life, range from ambiguities to deep divisions in her loyalties and her beliefs. In 1893, for example, she published in London an anonymous pamphlet called A Phantom’s Pilgrimage or Home Ruin, essentially a piece of pro-unionist rhetoric, in which Gladstone returns from the grave ten years after Home Rule to find that every class in Ireland has suffered dire consequences. Later that year she travelled alone to the Aran Islands, staying in a cottage in Inishere “among people speaking scarcely any English”. She wrote to English friends about the trip and her reading of Emily Lawless’s novel Grania, set on the islands, and Jane Barlow’s Irish Idylls, stories of Irish peasant life. (“I look on it as one of my Irish sermon books; it really gives me sympathy with the wants of the people.”) In the meantime, she worked on her husband’s incomplete manuscript for his Autobiography.

  While this work seemed to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt merely a widow’s “pious act”, and had very many dull moments and displays of Sir William’s self-importance and vanity, it was at the same time a piece of careful repositioning and re-invention which would become the basis not only for Lady Gregory’s life at Coole and her work with Yeats, but also for many of Yeats’s poems about Coole and many of his Anglo-Irish attitudes. It would emphasize, as in her account of Sir William’s funeral, that he was loved by the people, that he and his family were respected as landlords. She would insist upon this all her life. In her own conclusion to the book, she quoted from a letter he had written to her “just before our marriage”: “I always felt the strongest sense of duty towards my tenants, and I have had a great affection for them. They have never in a single instance caused me displeasure, and I know you can and will do everything in your power to make them love and value us.” She continued: “He was glad at the last to think that, having held the estate through the old days of the Famine and the later days of agitation, he had never once evicted a tenant. Now that he has put his harness off I may boast this on his behalf. And, in the upheaval and the changing of the old landmarks, of which we in Ireland have borne the first brunt, I feel it worth boasting that among the first words of sympathy that reached me after his death were messages from the children of the National School at Coole, from the Bishops and priests of the diocese, from the Board of Guardians, the workhouse, the convent, and the townspeople of Gort.” In a letter to a friend of his in London composed while she was working on the manuscript, she wrote: “I attach great importance to the breadth and sincerity of his views on Irish questions being remembered.”