A gay goodnight and quickly turn away

Stan Gebler Davies

LADY GREGORY, FIFTY YEARS AFTER edited by Ann Saddlemeyer and Colin Smythe

Colin Smythe, £2750

Without the patronage of Lady Greg- ory we should not have had Synge and might have had less Yeats. O'Casey, in dire need of kindness, allowed her to supply some, and was characteristically uncertain how to be grateful. What's left of the Abbey Theatre is memorial to her. So also is a pile of scholarly effusions ten foot deep, burdensome to the strongest shelf and wearisome even to the most patient reviewer. Most of this stuff proceeds from North America, there being a bull market in academe there for anything remotely to do with what is called the Irish Literary Renaissance.

And yes, the same renaissance was a collection of characters living in the same small town who detested one another and had nothing much else in common than a determination to scrape a living from literature, mostly by scrounging off the likes of Augusta Gregory. It is also true that the influence of none of these writers is detectable in contemporary Irish writing, save possibly for Yeats, whose poems are fed to our neophytes by way of provoking antibodies against truth and beauty.

It is still remarkable that so many excel- lent writers appeared at the same time and in the same place (apologies to Leopold Bloom), but the explanation of it cannot be provided by academics, because it is too simple, and too offensive to Irish national- ist sensibility.

James Augustine Joyce, who was not part of the gang, and only got out of Lady Gregory the fiver essential to his emigra- tion, provided that explanation when his English friend Frank Budgen asked him in Zurich whether he approved of independ- ence as embodied in the Irish Free State: he was, he said, in his art and in his person, the very embodiment of the connection between England and Ireland. 'Ireland is what she is,' he told Budgen, 'and there- fore I am what I am because of the relations that have existed between Eng- land and Ireland. Tell me why you think I ought to wish to change the conditions that gave Ireland and me a shape and destiny?'

The best of living Irish writers are those who have in mind the connection, one way or another. I mean Jennifer Johnston, Molly Keane, William Trevor, even Anthony Cronin, who bangs the drum occasionally for C. J. Haughey. Nor should we exclude from this happy band Mr Beckett, who has been spitting critics who don't get jokes since shortly after he left Portora Royal school in Enniskillen.

But these are subjects for another essay and the subject of the present is Lady Gregory, whose corpse is here exhibited in 464 pages, no more than 50 of them capable of being read with anything approaching pleasure by persons not in- tending the composition of a thesis or monograph on some related subject.

There are extracts from the memoirs of 14 acquaintances. These constitute the most lively part of the book, along with Elizabeth Longford's account of Augusta's amour with W. S. Blunt. Mary Lou Kohfeldt Stevenson, who used to teach English Literature at the University of North Carolina and published a massively turgid biography two years ago when she was merely Kohfeldt, here contributes a boiled-down sketch of 14 pages — with nothing new in it. Her marriage to Mr Stevenson, which one devoutly hopes has increased her share of human happiness, has as yet done nothing to improve her prose.

Colin Smythe himself provides a 'check- list' of Lady Gregory's contributions to periodicals which reveals the extent of her anonymous hand in the political effluvia of Yeats and Blunt and will be of consider- able value to historians. It is donkey work of a high order. Mr Smythe, who is content to describe himself as publisher and bib- liographer, is determined to print, or re- print, every damn thing to do with Augusta and her friends. He should promptly be granted the grandest decoration in the gift of the President of the Republic of Ireland and a plot prepared for him in Glasnevin cemetery, to be surmounted by a brass monument representing the countless Irish tomes this indefatigable Englishman has quarried.

The most curious piece is a short dis- sembling speech delivered by Bernard Shaw in London on behalf of the Abbey in 1910, in which he compares Lady Gregory to Moliere. Shaw was an incorrigible liar, a point which I am sure will be rammed home by Michael Holroyd in his forthcom- ing biography, but rarely can he have been so blatant as when he put Augusta in such exalted company.

She provided the Abbey with three plays of Moliere, translated into the execrable Kiltartan dialect which was the invention of herself, Yeats and Edward Martyn. She was a lousy writer. I give you Moliere's own version of a speech from L'Avare, and then I give you hers.

MOLIERE

He quoi! charmante Ehise, vous devenez melancolique, apres les obligeantes assur- ances que vous aver eu la bonte de me donner de votre foil Je vous vois soupirer, helas!, au milieu de ma joie! Est-ce du regret, dites-moi, de m'avoir fait heureux? Et vous repentez- vous de cet engagement oa mes fear ont pu vous contraindre?

GREGORY

What ails you and what is vexing you, Elise, and you having given me your word you would never break with me? Is it right for you to be fretting at the time I am so well content? Is it that you are sorry now for the good words you said to me? Are you drawing back from the promise I maybe hurried you into, with the strength of my asking and my love?

Is it maybe we could be asking for the decent twilight to be at last descending and for the dear old bones be laid at length to rest at Coole, and the dear quiet peace come down on all of us?

Not a chance of it.