Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toibin

Author:Colm Toibin [Colm Toibin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843512264
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2011-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Among the audience that night was the twenty-seven-year-old James Joyce, home briefly from Trieste, and he published an account of the whole business in Il Piccolo ella Serda in Trieste. “Dubliners,” he wrote, “who care nothing for art, but love an argument passionately, rubbed their hands with joy … and the little theatre was so filled at the first performance that it literally sold out more than seven times over … at the curtain fall, a thunderous applause summoned the actors for repeated curtain calls.” For Joyce, the play confirmed his views on Shaw. “Nothing more flimsy can be imagined, and the playgoer asks himself in wonder why on earth the play was interdicted by the censor. Shaw is a born preacher. His lively and talkative spirit cannot stand to be subjected to the noble and bare style appropriate to modern playwriting … In this case he has dug up the central incident of his Devil’s Disciple and transformed it into a sermon. The transformation is too abrupt to be convincing as a sermon, and the art is too poor to make it convincing as drama.”

Joyce had known Lady Gregory since 1902. He had read his poems to her and asked for advice. She invited him to Coole, but he did not go, deciding instead to go to Paris. He wrote to her: “I am going alone and friendless … into another country … I do not know what will happen to me in Paris but my case can hardly be worse than it is here … And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.” Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “I am afraid he will knock his ribs against the earth, but he has grit and will succeed in the end. You should write and ask him to breakfast with you on the morning he arrives, if you can get up early enough, and feed him and take care of him and give him dinner at Victoria before he goes and help him on his way. I am writing to various people who might possibly get him tuition, and to Synge who could at least tell him of cheap lodgings.” Yeats did as he was told. Arriving at Euston Station at six in the morning to meet Joyce, he took the young writer around to meet people he thought might be useful to him, finding him “unexpectedly amiable”.

Joyce’s amiability took a sudden turn for the worse soon after he arrived in Paris. In December 1902 he wrote to Lady Gregory, telling her that “to create poetry out of French life is impossible”. In March 1903 he was asked by the literary editor of the Daily Express in Dublin, to whom Lady Gregory had introduced him, to review her Poets and Dreamers. Despite his intermittent use of a toothbrush, his teeth were sharp enough to bite the hand. In her book, he wrote, Lady Gregory “has explored in a land almost fabulous in its sorrow and senility”.

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