Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness

This is a ghost story. It’s about ghosts looking back over their lives – and sometimes forward beyond them – to try to make sense of them, their times and one another.

Each is the ghost of a real person, an Irish or Irish-American person involved in the Irish Literary Renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These nine were entwined with one another too, as friends, frenemies, artistic collaborators, lovers, family members and political actors straddling an Irish Sea of contention and connection between Ireland and England. Their ghostly status gives them rein to muse more freely and believe they see things more clearly than they would have been able to during life.

Theirs were all turbulent lives played out on the western edge of Europe at a time of great change that shaped the course of the twentieth century, and that reverberates still in the twenty-first. Ireland was a kind of European third-world colony when it gained qualified independence from England in 1922 after 800 years of domination. That independence was won between two world wars in a long era of modern, violent conflict among nations, religions and ethnicities. In Ireland’s case, the conflict was between Ireland and England, Catholics and Protestants, Celts and Anglo-Saxons. It was a precursor to other twentieth-century uprisings by indigenous nationalist movements against empires and colonisers.

Often accompanying and impelling such movements were rejuvenations of the faded or repressed cultural inheritances of peoples occupied both militarily and psychologically. The Irish Literary Renaissance was such a reclaiming. It led up to and continued beyond the Irish Rising of Easter Monday, 1916. As William Butler Yeats famously wondered in his poem, ‘Man and the Echo’: ‘Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?’ Yeats’s mentor, writing partner and friend, Lady Augusta Gregory, was as responsible as anyone for bringing forward Irish folklore, mythologies and heroic tales into a modern world that would use them for its own liberating purposes.

Lady Gregory (1852–1932)is the main character in this book. Thus, its ghosts are ‘Gregory Ghosts’. As playwright, as a founder of the Irish Literary Theatre and as a director of the Abbey Theatre, she was artist, businesswoman, inspiration to other artists and imperious conductor of the tumultuous – and very male – Irish Renaissance ‘orchestra’. She was, too, an English lady, running her grand estate in County Galway, Coole Park, as a widow, with tender dedication to the land and its tenants, as well as an iron will she imposed on both.

She was an inveterate memoirist and an adept organiser of American tours for her Abbey Theatre company. She adroitly negotiated between Protestants and Catholics, Irish unionists and Irish rebels, Irish Free-Staters and Irish Republicans, clergy and laypeople, and Dublin and London galleries in defending the integrity of Irish art. So, we might say today, perhaps to this proper Victorian woman’s horror, that she was a proto-feminist. She demonstrated her superior abilities in a range of realms, prefiguring the rise of women in so many of them from which they had been excluded. The defining political, social and cultural structures in which she did so were being reinvented throughout her long lifetime.

Ireland was becoming an independent nation, but only after enduring the triple agonies of the failed 1916 uprising, the Anglo-Irish War (1919–21) and, right on its heels, the Irish Civil War (1922–3). Her Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy tribe was losing power and influence, most strikingly embodied by their eventual displacement from the grand country houses and estates that were the most visible icons of their authority and wealth. Aristocracies and monarchies everywhere were waning, the middle class and democracy waxing.

The most prominent Irish writers that her Irish Revival would enable in poetry, fiction and drama – Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, respectively – were in their very different ways middle-class iconoclasts, thoroughly familiar with tradition but turning it on its head for modernist effect. Then there was the unthinkable trauma of World War I, leaving some forty million wounded and dead. It would claim her only child, Robert, in a plane crash in Italy. The world in which she died in 1932 was hardly the one she had been born into in 1852. Somehow, she managed to evolve with it all.

I have been reading Irish literature since well before I wrote my doctoral dissertation about Irish literary autobiography more than forty years ago. Lady Augusta Gregory remains, for me, a unique, unlikely mover in the Irish tradition, a bundle of the contradictions mentioned above, a woman who brought them together to appropriate the Irish past for herself and use it to propel Ireland into a new and different future. In that sense, her spirit has haunted the richly contentious, innovative and lively Irish literary landscape since her death, and haunts it still. She was a ghostly presence in her own time as well in that she served as a sort of ghostwriter for her male colleagues, doing much work behind the scenes for which she got little or no credit.

The contemporary American writer Barbara Kingsolver has said, ‘The alchemy of literature is in its translation of global-scale themes – like, let’s say, the disposition of social collapse – into the intimate language of human experience’. Lady Gregory was indispensable in helping her fellow writers practice that alchemy in their fraught Irish moment. The interior monologue is the most intimate literary distillation of human experience. Each character in this book has one of her or his own.