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I am not Irish, but I was married to an Irishman.
Actually, that’s not quite accurate. Like most Americans, Wingding was a mix of ethnicities. He was more Irish than anything else, but there was English, Scotch-Irish, and Ashkenazic Jew in his family tree thanks to a series of marriages, divorces, and name changes that led to his grandfather being introduced to his own brother at a party (yes, really, and you have no idea how much I wish I’d been a fly on the wall to see what happened next). He might well have decided to explore his Canadian, or the English, or even decided to see which shtetl had birthed his great-grandfather, and no one would have so much as shrugged.
Wingding identified as Irish, though, and though he never touched alcohol he would always tear up at the sound of “The Rising of the Moon” or any other good Irish folk song. He had a fine tenor voice, deep blue eyes and quite a few freckles, and one of his most-read books was The Story of the Irish Race, Seumus MacManus’s readable, entertaining, and badly out of date history of the Emerald Isle and its people. A less dated (and much, much, much funnier) favorite was Myles na gCopaleen, one of the pen names of novelist Flann O’Brien, who wrote a newspaper column that joyfully skewered just about any and everything imaginable, from the stunningly banal opinions of “The Plain People of Ireland” to the tendency of the badly read but wealthy to buy up whole libraries of Great Books in the hopes of being thought well-informed. Wingding and I nearly laughed ourselves sick over the column that offered to provide pre-ruined books “well and thoroughly mauled” by experienced book-handlers, complete with marginal notes critiquing the text, exquisitely forged letters used as bookmarks, and dedications such as
“From your devoted friend and follower, K. Marx”
or
“Dear A.B., – Your invaluable suggestions and assistance, not to mention your kindness, in entirely re-writing chapter 3, entitles you, surely, to this first copy of Tess. From your old friend T. Hardy”
I mean, really — what nouveau riche illiterate wouldn’t welcome such a beauty into their home? Especially for the low, low price of only 32 pounds?
It was almost enough to make me wish that I, too, was Irish instead of Welsh. My Celtic ancestors had scarpered off to America and the comparative utopia of Pennsylvania while Wingding’s had been grubbing for potatoes and yanking their forelocks whenever the gentry’s carriage wheels spattered mud on their wee peat-scented crofts, and where is the romance in that? That my folk were warm, comfortable, fed, and helped drive the cursed redcoats out of their new homeland seemed terribly dull and bourgeois compared to the misty glamour of the whistling pipes and yearning folk music born of desperation, starvation, and truly hideous economic misery.
Fortunately my Miniver Cheever phase didn’t last all that long — a few post-divorce years where I came perilously close to losing everything I possessed cured me of thinking that poverty is even marginally romantic — but I still appreciate good Irish music, food, and writing. Yeats, Synge, Binchy, Stoker, Wilde, Ethna Carbery and Brendan Behan and James Joyce and Seamus Heaney — these are writers any country would proudly claim, a heritage that many might envy.
And then there was Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory, who might justly be called The Mother of Them All.
Lady Gregory was an unlikely candidate for an Irish nationalist. Born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, she married the former colonial Governor of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and MP for County Galway, Sir William Gregory, who was every bit as wealthy and cultured as one might expect. The couple split their time between a popular London literary salon frequented by Tennyson, Browning, and similar cultural heavyweights, and their country house at Coole Park, which boasted a fine art collection and a large library. They also traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and the British Raj, raised their only son, Robert (later the subject of one of Yeats’ poems), and lived as secured and sheltered a life as one might expect.
All this changed when Sir William, 35 years his wife’s elder, died in 1892. Lady Gregory had dabbled in writing throughout their marriage, but after she edited Sir William’s memoir for publication, she began to take her work seriously. As she later put it,
If I had not married I should not have learned the quick enrichment of sentences that one gets in conversation; had I not been widowed I should not have found the detachment of mind, the leisure for observation necessary to give insight into character, to express and interpret it. Loneliness made me rich—'full', as Bacon says.
Widowhood may have honed her power of observation and given her the solitude to write, but it also brought an unexpected gift, one that would change the literary and political fate of her homeland: a passionate love for the folklore, language, and people of Ireland.
It happened when she visited the Arran Isles the year after Sir William’s death. The wild landscapes and lyrical accent reawakened childhood memories of the legends and history imparted to her by her nanny, a local woman named Mary Sheridan, and soon she was taking Irish lessons and collecting folktales from County Galway. Several years editing her grandfather-in-law’s papers led to a deep dive into early 19th century Irish history, and by 1896 the Anglo-Irish aristocrat was a passionate Irish nationalist who had developed a profound “dislike and distrust of England.”
Then she met a promising young writer named William Butler Yeats, and the fate of both Lady Gregory and Ireland were sealed.
For once I’m not exaggerating. The friendship that began in 1896 was the catalyst for the literary movement known as the Irish Literary Revival, the great flowering of literary, cultural, and political development that eventually led to Ireland winning its freedom from Britain, the revival of Gaelic as a living tongue, and Yeats winning the Nobel Prize for some of the greatest poems of the 20th century. Lady Gregory herself was not in Yeats’ league as a writer — almost no one else in Ireland was, at least until James Joyce published Ulysses — but just look at what she accomplished:
- The Irish National Theatre (cofounded with Yeats and their mutual friend Edward Martyn) and its successor, the Abbey Theatre, premiered plays by Yeats, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw, and a host of other important Irish actors. Lady Gregory was a major financial support in the Abbey’s early days, and was a producer/playwright/occasional performer for many of its productions in the 1910’s and 1920’s. It’s still in business, still the greatest literary institution in Ireland, and has launched the acting careers of everyone from Maud Gonne to Colm Meaney and Stephen Rea.
- Several volumes of Irish folktales and legends, including two collections, Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men, written in the blend of English vocabulary and Gaelic syntax that Lady Gregory called “Kiltartanese.” Yeats thought so highly of her version of Ulster Cycle that he called it “the best [book] that has come out of Ireland in my time,” and though James Joyce later lampooned this pronouncement, the publication of a readable English version of Irish legends did much to establish Ireland’s claim to a distinct culture and history of its own.
- Over twenty plays for the Abbey (including at least one collaboration with Yeats, the political allegory Catherine ni Houlihan), some of which she acted in herself. She came to wield enormous power in choosing which scripts were produced, which led in turn to one disappointed playwright, Denis Johnston, retitling his first play The Old Lady Says “No” after the rejection note he received when she turned it down.
- Opening Coole Park to a host of creative types as the Irish equivalent of the Yaddo Colony, even after she sold the property to the Irish Forestry Commission to preserve the land from development. Shaw, Katharine Tynan, O’Casey, AE, Synge, George Moore, and Violet Martin carved their initials on one of the great trees on the estate, while Yeats was inspired to write one of his finest lyrics during a visit, “The Wild Swans at Coole,”
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
Is it any wonder that Yeats himself called his friend and collaborator “The Greatest Living Irishwoman”? That the Abbey Theatre proudly boasts of her involvement in its early history? That Trinity College, Dublin, announced that she would be one of the first women honored with a bust in the library’s famous Long Room? That she’s honored as one of the most important literary figures in Irish history even though her own work is rarely performed?Lady Gregory died in 1932 at her beloved Coole Park, her theater secure, her homeland free, and Ireland’s literary reputation among the finest in the world. Much of her work is out of print, but some of it is available on Project Gutenberg or other free download stes, so check out a few selections:
The Unicorn from the Stars (includes two collaborations with Yeats)
Poets and Dreamers: Studies & Translations from the Irish
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So...have you ever heard of Lady Gregory? Performed in one of her plays? Read any of her works? Listened to “The Rising of the Moon” one too many times and attempted to swim the lovely River Liffey out of an excess of Irish sentiment? Hoist a pint of Guinness and come share…
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