Savvy and noblesse oblige

William Scammell LADY GREGORY'S DIARIES, 1892-1902 edited by James Pethica Colin Smythe, £35, pp. 346 Lady Augusta Gregory is best known as one of the founders of the Irish literary revival at the turn of the century and as a patron and warm friend of Yeats, providing him with tea, sympathy, fairy stories and gracious living while he struggled with his poems and plays. From 1897 until 1917, when he married, most of his summers were spent at Coole Park, her country house in Galway. Though she was never a muse-figure like Maud Gonne, it's arguable that she was as important to his develop- ment as any other woman in his life. He repaid the debt by immortalising Coole Park and its gentle, intelligent owner in some of the best poems of the century.

Thirteen years older than Yeats, Augusta came from a large family of nine boys and seven girls (her father married twice) of the Protestant Ascendancy, and grew up in a big house in Galway. At 28 she surprised everybody by marrying Sir William Grego- ry, a neighbouring widower of 61 and for- mer governor of Ceylon. Their son, who died in 1918, is commemorated in Yeats's celebrated elegies 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory' and 'An Irish Airman Foresees his Death'. There was a brief fling with the notorious womaniser Wilfrid Blunt, not long after the marriage, but they parted over his nationalist politics, since in the early days, before her conversion to the great cause, Augusta regarded Home Rule as a species of Home Ruin.

These diaries cover the period from her husband's death in 1892 to the time when she was fully launched into national life and letters on both sides of the Irish Sea, i.e. from the Celtic Twilight to just before the setting up of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904.

If I had not married [she wrote later], I should not have learned the quick enrich- ment of sentences that one gets in conversa- tion; 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 inter- pret it.

The 39-year-old widow made over her life and narrowly Unionist prejudices, set up a `workshop of genius' at Coole, and began laying the foundations of her own literary career, though careerism, like the new mode of nationalism, was something she had to learn to work at.

The diary opens with a moving account of Sir William's death — that item which always seems to call out the best in writers, amateur and professional — when

for nineteen nights and days I never went to bed ... We had endless callers and enquir- ers ... I had never seen so many men with tears in their eyes — Then came another snow fall, and the cold seemed to put its icy finger in, in spite of all we could do, and touch him ... I said 'Who knows but we may meet again?' — 'Ah' he said 'and who knows but that we may not?'

Politically she was an ameliorist, of the enlightened landlord variety: It is necessary that as democracy gains power our power should go — and God knows many of our ancestors and forerunners have eaten or planted sour grapes and we must not repine if our teeth are set on edge — I would like to leave a good memory and not a 'monument of champagne bottles' — and with all that, I hope to save the home — the

I just wish it wouldn't come every time we call Bonzo.'

house and woods, at least — for Robert.

From there it is not a very large step to 'I defy anyone to study Irish history without getting a dislike and distrust of England.' Later still she quotes with approval Barry O'Brien's comment to an English cabinet minister, in 1897:

No Irishman ever gets anything from you till he goes to you with the head of a landlord in one hand and the tail of a cow in the other.

One hundred years on it is, to our eternal shame, a horribly familiar tale.

Elsewhere there are plenty of funny and shocking stories about the aristocratic ways of her friends and acquaintances — she moved in the highest London circles which have Mitfordish charm, and which contrast mightily with the mediaeval plight of her peasant neighbours and dependants in west Ireland. The fond mother sees Robert through school and holidays, takes bicycle-riding lessons ('very uphill work learning to mount!') and eventually buys an expensive 'Humber Wolverton' for £24, `a large sum which I can't very well spare', rescues some 'luminous beetles' from Jamaica (fireflies?) which Robert has left behind at a railway station, and provides lots of snapshots of the great and the good swapping stories and gossip over the dinner table: Carlyle's typically pig-headed bluster, for instance, about Tennyson: 'It's a pity to see that man wasting his great heart in bits of verses', and Yeats on AE's poems, 'dic- tated by the spirits and the scansion's all wrong'! We also learn that AE (George Russell) chose his pen-name because 'the dipthong exactly by its sound expressed the mood of his soul'. Would that be connected to the Aiee! of Greek tragedy, I wonder, or to the 'Ay me' of late Victorian aestheti- cism?

`When one is a writer one gets into the belief that a phrase will do everything,' said Yeats ruefully of his hopeless passion for Maud Gonne. When Augusta finally met her she was taken aback to find that the beloved looked more like a `death's head' than a great beauty. This and a thousand other such details make up the substance of the book. Dashed off at speed and cov- ering many of the crucial figures and moments in the Irish revival, this 'clever and fashionable woman' (Yeats's dismissive first impression) provides many fascinating glimpses of history in the making. It was from her as much as anyone that he came to think of folklore as `the Bible, the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer' of poetic inspiration.

Expertly edited and introduced — foot- notes take up nearly as much space as the text — this diary will delight the scholars and, I hope, be dipped into by anyone with an interest in Irish literature, for Lady Gre- gory is better company than I expected her to be. When Jack Yeats needed a pick-me- up after working all night, she went out personally to get him 'Bovril and cham- pagne' — as unlikely a combination as her own blend of savvy and noblesse oblige.