Voyage Around an Old Story

Folktales, myths and legends are perennial as grass, yet with each retelling they change subtly or is it that we see them afresh by our modern lights?

Hello readers! I’m home from France in time for the golds and reds of autumn and a new chill in the air.

 We travelled from Cherbourg to Dublin on a ferry named W.B. Yeats. The ship boasts three dining rooms, Boylan’s Brasserie (named for the swaggering impresario who beds Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses), Café Lafayette, (referring to the Frenchman dubbed ‘Hero of the Two Worlds’ for his involvement in the American and French Revolutions) and the Lady Gregory restaurant.

I tried to imagine one of those fantasy dinner parties beloved of Sunday supplements at which this unlikely group of characters might gather. While Gregory and Yeats were old friends, I’m not so sure they would have enjoyed Blazes Boylan’s braggadocio, and although Lady Gregory had several lovers, she would hardly have fallen for his putative charms. She and Yeats might, however, have found Lafayette, the French aristocrat who had helped the Americans throw off the British yoke, more congenial company. One thing’s for sure though, the restaurant named for her does not serve her famous Gort cake. A rich fruit cake which she baked at her home in Coole Park, Gort, and brought to Dublin to sustain the actors in the Abbey’s green room during a performance. Instead, it boasts an Irish-style tiramisu. Go figure!

A member of the Anglo-Irish class, Augusta Gregory (1852-1932), was a central figure in the Irish literary revival at the turn of the nineteenth century. With her friends Yeats and Edward Martyn, she established the Irish National Theatre (now known as the Abbey Theatre) and was a folklorist and prolific writer of stories, plays and poetry. Her writing, popular in her lifetime, has been little presented since then. She collaborated with Yeats on several of his plays, a fact he did not always acknowledge.

This year the Abbey Theatre has been celebrating the work of Lady Gregory, a lead taken up by a couple of other venues, (Smock Alley and Bewley’s Café Theatre). This year’s Wexford Festival Opera will include a ‘pocket opera’, by novelist Colm Tóibín, based on Gregory’s affair with the Irish-American lawyer and supporter of the Abbey, John Quinn.

An earlier lover, the poet and diplomat, W.S. Blunt, published her love poems to him under his own name, as ‘A Woman’s Sonnets’, although, apparently, she sanctioned this as her husband was still alive at the time of their publication.

Wild words I write, and lettered in deep pain,
To lay in your loved hand as love's farewell.
It is the thought we shall not meet again
Nerves me to write and my whole secret tell.
For when I speak to you, you only jest,
And laughing break the sentence with a kiss,
Till my poor love is never quite confessed,
Nor know you half its tears and tenderness.
When the first darkness and the clouds began
I hid it from you fearing your reproof;
I would not vex your life's high aim and plan
With my poor woman's woe, and held aloof.
But now that all is ended, pride and shame,
My tumults and my joys I may proclaim.

(A Woman’s Sonnets XI)

William Gregory had been sixty-two at their marriage, she, twenty-eight. When he died in 1892 she declined to remarry as her energies were first focused on clearing her late husband’s gambling debts. At this time too she began to write and, applying herself to the study of Irish, to collect folktales, from her tenants and others in her neighbourhood, translating them into an idiom she called Kiltartan for the townland. This quasi-Irish idiom has been much lampooned, especially by Joyce, but her role in recording and preserving so much of Irish folklore and mythology cannot be overlooked.

Over the past year I have been dipping in and out of her collection of Complete Irish Mythology, a rich retelling of the stories I heard or read in sanitised versions as I was growing up. Last night, I saw the Abbey’s current production of her play Grania, based on one of the most famous Irish ‘love stories’. Just as my image of Lady Gregory herself has been revised in recent months, (she had modelled her demeanour on Queen Victoria which was somewhat off-putting) so my understanding of the Diarmuid and Grainne myth has shifted since reading her version and seeing her play.

Dolmen in a modern setting

In brief, the popular story resembles the Cornish tale of Tristan and Isolde, best known now from Wagner’s heart-rending tragic opera. Finn MacCumhail, leader of the warrior Fianna, decides to remarry and chooses Grania, the young daughter of the High King. Like many another fairy tale princess, she has so far refused all suitors but, surprisingly, accepts Finn’s proposal, only to be disappointed when she sees her grey-haired husband to be. At the wedding feast she is smitten by Finn’s warrior, Diarmuid, ‘the best lover of women in the whole world’. Her infatuation is complete when she sees the love mark on his forehead. She puts him under a compelling, druid’s, bond to take her away and he, although reluctant to betray Finn, must obey.

  The two flee and remain on the run for sixteen years. Through most of this time theirs is a chaste relationship because Diarmuid refuses the ultimate disloyalty to his leader and friend. That fidelity is broken when in an unusual move, Grania stabs Diarmuid in the thigh as he goes to kill a stranger who has embraced her.

Eventually they make peace with Finn, receive land, settle down and raise a family. But Finn’s anger is only banked, not quenched, and he orchestrates Diarmuid’s killing by a wild boar (a fate long decreed for the warrior). Shortly after his death, Grania, the unconscionable trollop, ups and weds Finn and ‘they stopped with one another to the end’. There was an ending I never heard before. The story is usually given in its tragic terms of the ill-fated runaway lovers, sleeping under dolmens and living off wild fruits and game.  

The Burren. ‘We were in that craggy place before and we were forced to quit it,’ says Grania.

In her dramatization of the story, Lady Gregory shows us this hard-headed Grania, in full golden gown. The three-hander opens with a prescient dialogue between Finn and Grania on the nature of love. He wonders what she knows of love, and she replies, ‘I asked the old people what love was, and they gave me no good news of it at all’. They said it brings delight, discontent and jealousy. Finn claims the last is the worst, but she is not convinced, ‘I would never think jealousy to be so bad a smart.’ In time, Finn’s jealousy will hound them the length and breadth of the country.

  The director of this production, Caitriona McLaughlin, compares Grania to Ibsen’s Nora Helmer, two ‘wilful, sexually awakened, powerful women taking control of their own destinies.’ In his programme note, Colm Tóibín interprets the play biographically. For my money, however, Diarmuid emerges as the most interesting character, his fealty to Finn at odds with the obligation Grania lays on him. When at last the runaways become lovers he wants them to move to an island where they can live in peace but she suddenly wants society.

Instead of focusing on the lovers’ desperation, the play centres on conflicting loyalties. In the final scene, as Diarmuid dies, having killed the invading King of Foreign, he apologises to Finn. Delirious, he scorns the notion that a man would ‘give up his dear master and friend for any woman at all.’ Now it is Grania’s turn to know jealousy, for Diarmuid’s greater devotion to Finn than to her. She insists on marrying Finn, to spite her former lover, and despite Finn’s promise to Diarmuid that he will take nothing that was his.

She inverts the belief in women’s fickle nature, saying ‘it is men that change and turn as often as the wheel of the moon’. Yet she has come full circle from the opening scene. With no high opinion of love she has used her sexual power to achieve her wishes, even in the face of mockery from Diarmuid’s former companions. Finn yields to her because their lives have been so long entwined that they ‘must battle it out to the end’.

Another reading of this woman might be that she is amoral, self-willed and greedy. Unlike her author, Grania insists on marriage to a powerful man as the way to get ahead. Lady Gregory made her own life when widowed, working to save her estate for her only child, Robert, and helping many men creatively and financially. That’s what I would call a woman ‘taking control’ of her own destiny. Maybe it’s time for another version of The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grania.      

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What do you think? Do the old myths have anything new to tell us about ourselves? If so, how is that truth best handled, in traditional tellings or modern re-workings?