Abstract
The importance of the material support that Lady Gregory provided for Yeats in the early years of their friendship was common knowledge amongst their contemporaries. John Quinn, a model patron himself, would take it as an accepted verity in 1911 that “the world of letters owes it chiefly to her that in the last ten years Yeats has done so much creative work”.1 George Moore, recalling in Ave how “life at Coole was arranged primarily to give [Yeats] an opportunity of writing poems”, likewise acknowledged that her patronage had “released the poet from the quern of daily journalism”.2 These approving commentaries, like many others since, focus exclusively on the fruitful results of Lady Gregory’s support, and, whether from a sense that questions of money were trivial in comparison to matters of art, or from a notion that such topics should simply be overlooked in good taste, the cold cash actualities of her patronage have remained decorously unmentioned. The gifts and loans which cemented the partnership in its early years invite attention on several grounds. Most obviously they are crucial to an understanding of the personal transactions which sustained and defined the friendship; but, more importantly, they were to affect in complex ways the course of the creative collaboration between the writers.
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Notes
John Quinn, “Lady Gregory and the Abbey Theatre”, repr. in E. H. Mikhail (ed.), Lady Gregory: Interviews and Recollections (London: Macmillan, 1977) p. 79.
George Moore, Ave (London: Heinemann, 1911) pp. 271–2.
Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”, Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 214. Derrida draws on Marx directly, but principally via Saussure’s readings of Marx in Course in General Linguistics — from which he stresses Saussure’s formulation of money/language as systems “for equating things of different orders”.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift, tr. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1966) p. 1.
Writing to Wilfrid Blunt from Roxborough on 24 July 1882, Lady Gregory reported that there were “seven soldiers & two policemen in the house for the protection of one of my brothers whose life has been threatened, & there are nine policemen at the gamekeeper’s house” (Berg Collection, New York Public Library). For a concise account of relations between the Gregorys and their tenants 1880–7 see Brian Jenkins Sir William Gregory of Coole (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1986) pp. 277–87. Jenkins recounts how the Coole tenants had to be coerced forcibly by outside organisers before they would join the Land League, and in the main surreptitiously paid their rents even at the height of hostilities in 1882. None the less, relations were sufficiently strained in 1883 and 1887 for to Sir William to threaten evictions, and his trust of the tenantry was permanently shaken — matters omitted from Lady Gregory’s highly sanitised retrospective accounts of unbroken amity on estate.
In Martyn’s account of the meeting, recounted by George Moore in Vale (London: Heinemann, 1914) p. 180, Lady Gregory had “recognised her need in Yeats at once.” Symons’s jealous recollection of her arrival at Tulira is recorded in a letter by John B. Yeats in Letters to his Son, ed. Joseph Hone (London: Faber and Faber, 1944) p. 151: “as soon as her terrible eye fell upon [Yeats] I knew she would keep him”.
Lady Gregory, Seventy Years, ed. Colin Smythe (New York: Macmillan, 1974) p.331.
John Kelly, “‘Friendship is the only house I have’”, in Ann Saddlemyer and Colin Smythe (eds), Lady Gregory: Fifty Years After (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1987) p. 181.
Yeats had probably earned close to £200 in 1896, thanks to the unusually high rates paid by Leonard Smithers for his many contributions to The Savoy that year. The weekly advances that Lawrence and Bullen paid him for The Speckled Bird from around late December 1896 ran out about mid-1897. George Pollexfen may have supported Yeats financially for some time after 1894–5, since a relative interviewed by William M. Murphy in 1968 recalled that George had “allowed Willie a pound a week, which was continued for some years until Willie’s nationalist sympathies angered him and he stopped the grant”: see William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978) p. 176. If this grant was indeed paid, it is likely to have stopped in 1897 as Yeats’s part in preparing for the 1798 centenary became increasingly prominent.
See for example Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory: A Literary Portrait (London: Macmillan, 1961) p. 50. In his article “Father and Son: John Butler and William Butler Yeats” (Massachusetts Review, Summer 1974, pp. 481–501) Douglas Archibald suggests in passing that Lady Gregory served as one of a series of substitute “fathers” for Yeats. William M. Murphy, who notes this suggestion as “wholly valid” (Prodigal Father, pp. 197, 581), perhaps in consequence emphasises more than previous commentators the forcefulness with which Lady Gregory “managed” the Yeats family, though he still sees the mother-son element as the dominant model for the friendship.
Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?”, tr. Annette Kuhn, Signs, 7:1 (Autumn 1981) 48, 50. By contrast, Cixous associates the feminine with “the realm of the gift” — an ability to include difference, an economy “without ending”. However, her argument at this point is not principally concerned with the actual categories of exchange: rather, by establishing écriture feminine as a space of free play, she is challenging “Old Lacan” (p. 45) and male-centred models of writing.
See Deirdre Toomey, “‘Worst Part of Life’: Yeats’s Horoscopes for Olivia Shakespear”, YA 6 (1988) 222–6;
and John Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence (London: Macmillan, 1989) pp. 136–7.
George Mills Harper, The Making of Yeats’s A Vision (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987) I, 104.
Harper, The Making of Yeats’s A Vision, I, 112. Should we detect an element of irony in this answer? George Yeats “transferred” for Yeats in what was to prove the most influential collaborative experience of his life. The collaboration with Pound evidently presented Yeats with few anxieties in his questioning, presumably since, though Pound’s intellectual influence was considerable, his direct share in the writing of Yeats’s poems was minimal by comparison to Lady Gregory’s direct share in Yeats’s prose and plays. Besides, since Pound was part of the “masculine” world of competing thoughts, Yeats dramatised rather than repressed what creative anxieties he felt, most obviously in the fencing-sessions at Stone Cottage. See James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) p. 193. In later treatments of Pound’s influence, Yeats resorts to conventional means of rendering the challenge offered by his “foil” inactive, defining him in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley in 1935 as “the sexless American professor for all his violence” (LDW 23).
Lady Gregory, Seventy Years, p. 390. The comment may of course reflect Lady Gregory’s disagreements with Yeats’s occult interpretations, or their differences over issues of propriety, rather than simply signalling her competitiveness; as William O’Donnell has observed, in A Guide to the Prose Fiction of W. B. Yeats (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1983) p. 42, she took the opportunity to expurge “many occult details and sexual references” from Yeats’s original when revising his Hanrahan stories in The Secret Rose in 1903. Her sense of supremacy is clear in a 1912 article, “The Meaning of Folklore”, in which she asserts that in the realm of folklore work “I have outrun my master” (draft article, Manuscript Division, New York Public Library). The article was published in The Outlook (New York), Apr 1912, pp. 978–85.
Letter to Yeats, quoted in Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius (New York: Macmillan, 1958) p. 109.
Lady Gregory significantly damaged her relationship with Synge, for instance, by insisting that Yeats’s work was the “chief distinction” at the Abbey: see Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), Theatre Business (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1982) p. 197.
Synge was subsequently sceptical regarding his influence in the directorial triumvirate, and came to suspect the theatre of being a “Yeats-Gregory show”: see The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) I, 318. Yeats addresses the general rumours that Lady Gregory was taking “advantage of her position as Director to put her own plays on the stage” in Mem 161. In Two Flamboyant Fathers (London: Collins, 1968) p. 128, Nicolette Devas recalls that on a visit to Coole she was “shocked by the servile way” in which Lady Gregory waited on Yeats. Anecdotes abound to show that in other situations the roles were reversed.
Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. L. Opdycke (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), passim. The Duchess repeatedly uses a surrogate to speak for her, typically her friend Emilia Pia.
Robert Hanning and David Rosand (eds), Preface to Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), p. xiii.
Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) p. 200. Hereafter referred to as BTL; references in text.
Lady Gregory, The Journals, ed. Daniel J. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) II, 634.
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© 1997 Deirdre Toomey
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Pethica, J. (1997). Patronage and Creative Exchange: Yeats, Lady Gregory and the Economy of Indebtedness. In: Toomey, D. (eds) Yeats and Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25822-2_5
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