#279: WITH TOOTHBRUSH AND WITHOUT.   Colm Tóibín’s book Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush is a fairly splendid example of how much you can convey in the short space of 125 pages, and how much those pages can tilt your image of an artist and their time.  Lady Gregory, if she is only a name to you, was, with William Butler Yeats, one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which did so much to expand and alter the culture of Ireland, and a prime mover of the Irish Renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; she was a playwright, a collector of folklore, a translator of early Irish literature, a hostess and den mother to two generations of Irish (mostly) writers, and a political activist, who agitated for Home Rule.  She was also a dues-paying member of the Protestant Ascendancy class, and the inheritor by marriage of Coole, a large tenanted property in County Galway; anyone at all conversant in Irish history will recognize the conflict of interest and attitudes those facts suggest.  It is just that area of cross-purposes and ambiguity that is Tóibín’s subject, which widens out onto the cross-purposes (often violent) and ambiguities (to put it mildly) of that time in Irish history.  The puckish title of the book refers to Gregory’s smart remark sorting out the nice people from (ahem) the lower orders: of the riots attending the production of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, she wrote, “It is the old battle between those who use a toothbrush and those who don’t.”  She spoke with reverence of the Irish people as a general existence, but could be disconcerted by some of what those people got up to; to the end of her life she remained something of the grande dame, toothbrush at the ready.

       That given, the book might have been no more than terrifically entertaining gossip, but those “shiftings and turnings and dichotomies and inconsistencies,” in Tóibín’s phrase, are a true part of the history of Ireland at the time, with the theatrical and the political histories closely intertwined.  The theatre is one of those settings that takes who- and whatever a person already is and turns up the temperature; Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush is a breathtaking catalogue of people who worked together to put great drama onstage, and who offstage could not resist their own cleverness in coining (and often publishing) witheringly tactless and snide remarks about each other. This runs a close parallel to what was going on politically, where genuine commitment, genuine heroism, and genuine courage mixed with people blackguarding and sabotaging each other, all while trying to shake off the yoke of English rule.  What makes it distinctively Irish is that great national gift for every form of mockery, insult, and memorably-expressed derision.  Lady Gregory, who comported herself with conscious dignity, could murmur things that would melt your skin off.  But she was in the company of Yeats, who addressed the rioters in the Playboy audience with “You have disgraced yourselves again”; with O’Casey, who shocked the staff at Coole by showing with no tie, no collar and, God help us, a Dublin accent; and with Joyce, who accepted Gregory’s help and then panned her book in the press.  “Despite his intermittent use of a toothbrush,” Tóibín writes of Joyce, “his teeth were sharp enough to bite the hand.”  And then they got on with it, somehow.  After George Moore published some snark about a mutual friend, Gregory laughed and said, “No one ought ever to speak to him again, though I suppose we all shall do so.”

        The background of the book can be dark enough: the land agitations, the Black and Tans, the civil war, the buffleheaded and racist English rule, all those conflicts of political and social loyalties.  But Tóibín also evokes the works that grew out of it all, expressed it, reflected it, transcended it: the theatrical masterpieces, the great poems, Gregory’s genuine and steely resolve to create a theatre that would enhance the dignity of Ireland.  The pages Tóibín gives to Yeats’s writing of the poems about Robert Gregory—Lady Gregory’s only son, killed in air combat—are a beautiful reminder of how knock-you-down, breath-stealing great Yeats could be.  On the opening night of Shadow of a Gunman, O’Casey watched the audience crowding into the theater and said to Lady Gregory, “All the thought in Ireland in years past has come through the Abbey. You have no idea what an education it has been for the country.”  He was not wrong.

         That was before the feud that broke Gregory’s and O’Casey’s relationship.  So the book goes: triumph and unhappiness cheek by jowl.  The last lines of the book are Gregory’s:  “Coole is no longer ours. But the days of the landed gentry have passed.  It is better so.  Yet I wish some one of our blood would after my death care enough for what has been a home for so long, to keep it open.”  The house was allowed to fall into ruin; a plinth remains, showing its old location; the house was demolished in 1941.

Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, by Colm Toibin.  Picador, 2002.