The double life of a lady - Andrew Frazier 23/03/02

This year is the 150th anniversary of the births of Augusta Gregory and George Moore, two west of Ireland landlords born within weeks of one another, and dying only months apart.

In 1895, Moore, author of a bestseller, Esther Waters, began to be invited to Lady Gregory's London flat for teas, then dinners. That was three years after the death of Sir William Gregory and six months before set her cap at Yeats. She liked Esther Waters (another single mother with one great aims, to raise a son), but not, after considerable inspection, Moore.

When Moore visited Coole in 1899, he found Yeats already established there. The poet wrote in the library sat at the head of the dinner table, and was offered the master bedroom. He drank old Sir Williams vintage Tokay. When Augusta Gregory - "still agreeable to look upon" - heard that Moore were going to collaborate, her face clouded. Nothing good results "when a man of genius and a man of talent come together". The scratch hurt.

In 1914, Moore's Vale narrated a story told round Galway. In the post famine days, the youngest Augusta Persse, her mother and sisters had gone around the Roxborough estate reading the Bible to Catholic tenents (Augusta swore she did not read the Bible: the others did). Her was Moores real dig: The Abbey theatre was, for Gregory, such missionary activity by other means. The title of Colm Toibins delightful Lady Gregorys Toothbrush underlines the same theme. During the Playboy riots,

Gregory consoled Yeats: "It is the old battle between people who use a toothbrush and those who don't." The abbey was setup to civilise Dubliners, but, sadly, there was a long way to go. Gregory is so good in that vane of rude, haughty wit. She compared Annie Horniman (a "difficult" patron) to a fairground amusement - a shilling at the bottom of a tub of electrified water; everyone would try to get it out. Gregory's plays, however, are syrupy, grandmotherly, and cute. Toibin makes no defense of them.

Instead, he shows that they don't reflect the real Augusta Gregory, the woman who risked writing passionate poems to the gorgeous Wilfred Scawen Blunt and love letters to John Quinn, fought the viceroy about banning Shaws The Shewing - The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, defended the The Playboy of the Western World in Philidelphia against "Irish ignaramuses and abnormal churchmen", and forged a real friendship with Sean O'Casey. Millionaire John Quinn had as mistresses two of the most beutiful and charming women of New York, but he brought to his bed the 60-year-old Augusta Gregory. Unbeknown to the public in her life time, there was some other women inside the Madame Tussaud likeness of Queen Victoria.

This "biographical essay" makes a case that, out of guilt and trauma, Gregory became a key figure in the invention of a romanticaly glorified Ireland. The " Gregory Clause" - her husbands amendment to the 1847 poor law -prohibited famine relief to anyone inhabiting more than 1/4 acre, which basically meant, give up your holding or starve. Augusta Gregory grew up in a Connaught inhabited by million of Ghosts, and the ruins of a dying Gaelic civilisation.

After the death of Sir William, her eyes were opened to the failings of the landlords. While never mentionning the Famine, she tried to rescue the stories, beliefs, and dignity of the civilisation the famine destroyed. Most of Irish people were the good souls in the West who could tell stories of faries, people who were humble, imaginative, wise, and Gaelic-speaking. They are in an extra toothbrush realm altogether. Those in Dublin, whos use of a tootbrush was intermitent - Dublin clerks, loungers, and layabouts, people like Joyce - were evidently less Irish. Grgorys rosy, glorified view of the Irishman of the West became DeValeras view, a kind of state mythology, in an Irleand that no lounger had room for the class of People that dreamed it up.

This is a really well-told story. I could have done with more on the Jamesian deflections of desire, the Madame Merle-like complications of the Yeats / Gregory relationship. But any writer will admire, every reader enjoy the pace, aptness of quotation, and luminess intelligence of the book's prose.

Last year, rumours went around that the novelist was hunched over the Gregory archive in the New York Public Library. Scholars braced themselves: Was it to be a novel or biography? What was his aim? Anne Saddlemyer, James Pethica, and Elizabeth Coxhead were about to be recapitulated by a pro, without footnotes.

In a Daily Telegraph piece on Dublin [April 15ht 2000], the novelist may have given one hint of his motive for writing the book. He tells of coming up to UCD from the country, a Catholic boy from a housing estate, fascinated by Beckett, Shaw and other Protestant authors. Indeed he speaks of Protestants almost the way Wilde and other aesthetes spoke of Catholics in the 1890s, as entrancing exotics. You'd have to become one to know one. He attended Bach at St. Annes on Dawsons Street, and addored his Anglo-Irish landlady, herself a Rembrandt of the Old Dublin, then being pulled down. He listened to this ladys haughty, gushing voice, the way Synge listened through the floor boards to the Catholic kitchin staff, each trying to evoke a vanishing, seperate way of life. The landlady is a kind of apparition of Augusta Gregory. Toibin tells a story of her life - her double life - with clarity, wonder, and charm.

Adrian Frazier is Director of the MA in Drama and Theatre Studies, NUI Galway. His book, George Moore: 1852 - 1933, was published by Yale in 2000.