Free Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín Page A

more and it is unlikely that she was flattered by the poem or that she would have shown it with pride to the eponymous new faces, her son and daughter-in-law. She wrote to him: “The lines are very touching. I have often thought our ghosts will haunt that path and our talk hang in the air – It is good to have a meeting place anyhow, in this place where so many children of our minds were born. You won’t publish it just now? – I think not.” He did not publish it for ten years.
    Her influence on him did not only include delaying publication to save her and her family from pain, but also in 1914 involved hurrying publication as a way of smiting her enemy. Her enemy, and the enemy of many others at that time including Yeats himself, was George Moore, who had published a new volume of memoirs. Moore had, as already noted, been forced to delete the passage in his firstvolume suggesting that Lady Gregory had in her youth attempted to convert Catholics to the Protestant religion. (“I think it is a good thing to have got the better of him,” she wrote to Yeats.) Nonetheless, Lady Gregory told Yeats at the time that she “shook with laughter” at Moore’s description of Edward Martyn. “No one ought ever to speak to him again, though I suppose we shall all do so,” she added.
    Now she was in a rage, and her nephew Hugh Lane was also in a rage. She wrote to Yeats, “I have (by request of Hugh Lane who has been thinking of an action – but don’t mention this) been reading Moore’s book – it is unspeakably filthy and insolent.” The third volume of Moore’s memoirs dwelt at great length on Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory and Hugh Lane. The tone was garrulous and irreverent , and it is hard, even still, not to shake with laughter at some of his remarks, including those about Yeats (“lately returned to us from the States with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat”) attacking the middle classes thus causing Moore, who had inherited ten thousand acres, to ask himself “why our Willie Yeats should feel himself called upon to denounce his own class”.
    Moore had much to say about Synge, including: “Synge’s death seems to have done him a great deal of good; he was not cold in his grave when his plays began to sell like hot cakes.” He accused Lady Gregory of plagiarism in her Cuchulain translation and went on to describe her in tones that lacked the respect Lady Gregory normally commanded: “Lady Gregory has never been for me a real person. I imagine her without a mother, or father, or sisters , or brothers, sans attaché.” He was not present, he wrote, for her first meeting with Yeats, “but from Edward [Martyn]’s account of the meeting she seems to have recognized her need in Yeats at once.” Moore proceeded to patronize and mock her plays: “We must get it into our heads that the Abbey Theatre would have come to naught but for Lady Gregory’s talent for rolling up little anecdotes into one-act plays.” His remarks on Hugh Lane, who was possibly homosexual and certainly an advanced bachelor, were the most outrageous, as he described an afternoon when Lady Gregory “had occasion to go to her bedroom, and to her surprise found her wardrobe open and Hugh trying on her skirts before the glass”.
    Earlier, Lady Gregory had written to Yeats about Moore: “I didn’t send my answer to Moore after all. I was afraid he might himself put a note in the English Review, which would probably be worse than the first offence – I wish you would publish that second poem as soon as possible , in some weekly paper, such as the Saturday or Nation, and put some title as ‘suggested of a lately published article’. It is the best answer to give, and the simile of the dog would stick to him.”
    Eighteen days later, on 7 February 1914 Yeats published “Notoriety” in The