Read Online Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín - Free Book Online

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.
    â€œI 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 …”
    Â 
    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 forthe 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,