Lady Gregory's unspilt beans
Denis Donoghue
Seventy Years 1852-1922: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory Edited by Cohn Smythe (Colin Smythe Ltd £9.75) In 1914, a few months after the publication of Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of A utobiography, Lady Gregory started writing the remaining chapters as a separate book. It developed by fits and starts: she would write a few pages, read them to Yeats, and add Yeats's comments Without bothering about the flow of narrative. The typescript was completed in April, 1923 but It was not published, Mainly because Putnam's reader Constant Huntington thought it too long and in any case marginal to the main interest of Lady Gregory's life. Huntington kept the typescript for several years until Robert Gregory's widow asked for it sometime around 1943. She held on to it and probably forgot, after a few years, that it existed. It turned up again in 1972 and has now been published as part of the great Coole Edition of Lady Gregory's writings. Huntington made a mistake, I think, in not Publishing the book as it stood. In 1923 it was difficult to think of Lady Gregory as having any life apart from the Irish Literary Revival and the Abbey Theatre, but the most interesting chapters of Seventy Years are concerned with Lady Gregory's life as Sir William's wife, not as the first lady of the Irish theatre. The narrative runs quickly through the years in which Lady Gregory was merely Isabella Augusta Persse of the Roxborough Persses, a girl to whom nothing much happened, but it settles down to a full-scale account of her life from March 4, 1880 When she married Sir William to March 6, 1892 When he died. During those twelve years she lived a far more exotic life than anything available to her as Miss 'Persse. Sir William brought his bride into the large world with London at the centre and a circumference Marked by India, Ceylon and Egypt. Lady Gregory's first published work, Arabi and His Household (1882) was an attempt to sway Public opinion in Arabi's favour at a time when
the British Government thought of executing him. As Sir William's wife, Lady Gregory defined her purposes in terms of politics and philanthropy: she was anxious to turn her hand or her pen to any cause she deemed good. She did not yet think of herself as a writer. The first part of the book is in fact more interesting than the second. We know enough of her later life not to covet more knowledge of it; her meetings with Yeats, Synge, Edward Martyn, her daily work in the Abbey, these are fully chronicled down to the last wild swan at Coole and the last discussion in the Nassau Hotel. It is time to see what Lady Gregory made of her meetings with Gladstone, Kinglake, Mark Twain, Sir Frederick Burton, Henry James, Sir Henry Layard, Sir Alfred Lyall, Browning, Wilfrid Blunt, Masefield, Shaw, John Quinn, Theodore Roosevelt. The first half of the book reports these events, with a fairly rich mixture of impressions and anecdotes. Lady Gregory never goes very far or very deep, much of what she says about a celebrated person could be delivered to him, as it probably was, across a dinner table. Her public life, like her signature fan, assembled major names. But like a good hostess she moves from one guest to the next, maintaining an interest in each without, committing herself to any. She reports the visible evidence; how the man looked, her impression of his nature so far as it declared itself to her eyes but no further. She does not intrude. In social life she was formidable though not dazzling, she contented herself and gratified her husband by being sensible. Her salon in St George's Place was enjoyable if not . brilliant.
The limitation of Seventy Years is that Lady Gregory does not even intrude upon herself. Her life consisted of meetings with other people,
major and minor, but she does not spend many pages meeting herself. She considered herself a good person, generous and worthy, she reports the nice things other people said of her without suggesting that the praise was excessive or the report vain. She attends to her life as though it made news, and good news. But she does not trace her sensibility further than the dining room or the printing press. We may infer whatever we like, but she discourages us from going beyond the public evidence. If we think of asking what her marriage to Sir William was really like, on the modern assumption that it cannot have been identical with its appearances, she turns the question aside in silence. The progress of her life is given as a moving picture, picturesque at times, but we are not allowed to stop the cinematograph for a close look. What we are given, we may take or leave. In the space of five-hundred pages Lady Gregory yields only once to the force of intimate feeling, when news reaches her of her son's death, January 23, 1918. The book ends upon that note, the first of its private kind.
Much, then, is left unsaid. Lady Gregory evidently thought that an autobiography was an extended newspaper. A person's life consisted of those portions of it which might by published in the Times, she was not given to the accumulation of privacies. The second part of her book often consists of letters from Yeats, or from old John Butler Yeats, or from George Russell, transcribed without comment as though their interest were intrinsic. The letters are given in any order that occurs to the transcriber, she does not bother to maintain even the low order of chronology. This is charming in its way. But it exempts Lady Gregory from the obligation of dealing with actions, events, and feelings for which she herself is responsible. She says a good deal about Gladstone, and it is lively stuff, but nothing about the circumstances in which she wrote and published anonymously a pamphlet against Gladstone and Home Rule, A Phantom's Pilgrimage (1893). She makes a few innocuous references to Gosse, but says not a word of the quarrel she had with him in 1910 about Yeats's Civil List pension.
In 1914 she threatened a libel action against George Moore for an article in the English Review calling her a proselytiser and soulgatherer. Moore toned down the reference before putting it in his book, though his second version is nearly as malicious as the first. Seventy Years mentions the question of soulgathering, but says nothing of Moore's charge or Lady Gregory's threat. It would be foolish to expect Lady Gregory to spill the beans as freely as Yeats did; not for nothing was he called William Tell. But it would be a happy concession if she were to allow a few beans to spill on her page. I would like to know, for instance, how Lady Gregory felt on the occasion in 1909 when fifteen of Sir William's tenants applied successfully to the Land Court to have their rents reduced. Yeats wrote a poem about it, 'Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation', but there is not a shaken word about it in this book.
Colin Smythe is engaged upon a splendid enterprise. His books are handsomely designed
and printed, the work is clearly a labour of great care and devotion. Seventy Years has
been somewhat lightly edited, many references are left unexplained. It was a matter of tact for Lady Gregory to conceal names behind initials, but it is no longer necessary to let Agnes Tobin appear as A.T., Molly Allgood as M, Prothero as X, and Edward Dowden as E: Presumably the
reference to the villain of James's Portrait of a Lady as Osband is Lady Gregory's error, not Mr Smythe's. Incidentally, when one of Yeats's
letters is transcribed and it also appears in Allen
Wade's edition of the Letters, comparison shows that the version in Wade is often abbre
viated without editorial indication, and the texts sometimes differ. The editors of the projected Yeats Correspondence will have to sort out these discrepancies. Meanwhile Seventy Years is a fine thing and very welcome.
Denis Donoghue is Professor of English and American Literature at University College, Dublin
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