“It’s not a revival so much as we’re marching ahead”: An Interview with Historian William Henry, Author of The Autograph Tree.
After reviewing Henry’s recent book, The Autograph Tree, our member Áine Fox Lynch had the chance to sit down with the acclaimed writer to really pick his brains.
Áine: What sparked your interest in the Autograph Tree, leading you to write this book?
William: Well, my family and I would go to Coole Park on picnics, and I had a bit of knowledge on the Autograph Tree, but not much really. The children used to ask a fair bit about the names on the tree but I had a no idea about a lot of them. My wife, Jackie, use to ask “Who else is on the tree besides Yeats?” And out for walks, I started to think about the idea of putting the book together, and rang Mary Keegan, one of my publishers, and discussed how this was an opportunity to find out who visited Coole Park and also what they meant. These people had to have had a serious impact in the Literature Revival and arts at the time for Lady Gregory to have invited them to sign on the tree. But very little was known about some of them, except within the circle itself, so I decided to put the book together and that's where it came from.
Also, I saw that you published this book in 2020 and I was just wondering, how did COVID affect the book's release, and even how was it affected by lockdown? How did it affect your own writing and reading and that sort of thing?
To be honest with you, I was locked here in my office so COVID was actually a time for me to really work, so I actually got out a few books during COVID, so I wasn’t really locked down, but the books and my publications were. And the, you know, the book came out in February 2020, The Autograph Tree, and we had so many plans for it, I mean, we were going to go to the Abbey Theatre, we were going to do a big launch in Coole Park and then the Lady Gregory Museum.
And then in March, everything shut down. Now we had lots of books, but nowhere to sell them, no outlet, so it really cancelled the plans. But in fairness there was a tribute here in Galway and a company that I do some work for, they did a big press release on the book, in the summer of 2020, which helped to generate sales but to answer the question, COVID really had a serious effect on the on the initial plans of the book.
I found, in reading the book, that each figure was so interesting and lived a life that could warrant a biography for each one. How was the process of choosing which bits of information to include and what to leave out? I assume it would be quite a hard kind of thing to do.
It was extremely difficult, to be honest. You know, individual biographies can be straight forward enough. You know, you can concentrate on one person. You include all the information that's available on that person. But sometimes it's a lot harder to write less than more about somebody's life. The problem with that was space. There were 27 biographies that went into one book. So I have to be very aware of that, and at the same time I didn't want to have a book full of information and full of text that was too heavy for somebody to take up at any time to read parts of it. I had to be careful of that.
So, of course I had to read a lot of books and manuscripts as well and I took it from the historical and literary viewpoint, just trying to concentrate on that. And then when I had that put together, I sent it on to someone for proofreading, to get their opinion. Because you know, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and everyone has one. It was actually great to get their input and we more or less agreed on what to put in the book. It was really difficult. There’s no doubt about that.
Yeah, I would say so because I think you did do a really good job in getting the main points across about them. I was surprised by how many of the artists and actors and people in this area were not from an Irish background, you know, the likes of John Quinn and Augustus John and, of course, Lady Sackville. What do you think it is about Ireland and maybe, rather, Irish literature that is so attractive and alluring to the outside world? Because even in reading it, so many of these people were drawn to Ireland and had that interest in Ireland.
It was a very special time in Ireland, you know, late 19th to early 20th century. Take Lady Gregory for instance, Mary Sheridan was one of her governesses and she was an Irish lady who introduced Lady Gregory, at a very young age, to the Secret Island because her mother would not have entertained the stories of the native Irish people.
But this lady actually kind of indoctrinated Lady Gregory as a child, I would say. Lady Gregory had this in the back of her mind when she got older and she was being introduced to the heads of Europe. She took on the mantle after William Gregory died in 1892 and she got deeper into the Irish psyche, so to speak, and that would have influenced a lot of people that would have known her at the time.
And there was also the fact that John Quinn, as you mentioned, was an art collector. He liked the works of Jack Yeats and WB Yeats and the like. Augustus John was actually the best man at Robert Gregory’s wedding. They would have introduced a great number of people to Coole.
Lady Margaret Saxfield, she was actually genius in her own right, and she came to visit Lady Gregory along with the Countess of Cromartie, and both of them very strong women. So much so that Lady Gregory actually once thought that Lady Margaret would have made a lovely wife for her son, Robert, which wasn't to be, you know.
And I think the literary renaissance, with the flowering of the Irish literary talent, at the end of the 19th century, in the beginning of the 20th century as I said, it was closely allied among nationalist politicians and the revival of the Gaelic league and the heritage and all of this, I think that had a major effect. Because, remember, you had a lot of the Irish nationalists in the United States promoting Ireland at the time, and there was a big Irish community there and it had a knock-on effect, so to speak. I think that had an awful lot to do with it.
Following on from Lady Gregory, what was notable about her guests that led her to ask them to sign the tree? For example, both General Sir Ian Hamilton and General Sir Neville Lyttleton had no background in the arts. What was notable about these specific guests that led her led her to ask them to sign this tree, because of course they weren't the only guests at Coole.
General Sir Ian Hamilton, he was in Gallipoli in the First World War and he actually blamed for the disaster in Gallipoli and he was friends with General Sir Neville Lyttleton. I just thought that maybe since Sir Ian Hamilton was a relative and had been a general in the same war her son Robert was killed in, maybe that was the connection. And I’ve often thought that maybe Lyttleton was just with Hamilton at the time, she invited him to sign it too, out of courtesy. But they were surprising to me.
Yeats was the first one in 1898 and from there on more and more put their names on it. Lady Gregory did have a lot of visitors to Coole and for me, she was the renaissance and it was all centred around her. Yeats was brilliant, don’t get me wrong, and of course George Bernard Shaw and the like, but she was the key to open the door for the whole lot of them.
All twenty-seven biographies show people who have contributed enormously to Irish literature, art and theatre and lived fascinating lives, but is there one among them you admire the most or enjoyed the most when researching?
I liked a lot of the characters, but GB Shaw stood out to me very strongly. I suppose I liked him for his wit. He was quite a character and would have one of my favourites to be honest. I loved his wit. The first time he returned to Dublin, he was asked what did he think about Dublin? Well, he says, I see the same old flies on the same old cake, on the same old shop windows. I thought it was brilliant! He went on to say that Dublin’s only saving grace was the Abbey Theatre and Modern Art Museum.
He was very close to Lady Gregory’s grandchildren and she loved him arriving. She always knew how long he was going to stay by the amount of baggage he had with him! During the war in which her son Robert was killed, there was a rationing on bread and butter and jam and people were only supposed to use butter OR jam on bread and not both, and so he deicide to use butter on one slice and jam on another! He was trying to wind the children up as they were flabbergasted but his argument was that he wasn’t eating both together!
The best one I think he made—sorry for going on about him—the best comment I believe he made was when he was 90 years of age: he was being interviewed and the interviewer was delighted with the interview. As the interview was finished, he just said to Shaw, Mr Shaw he says, I hope we can do this on your hundredth, and Shaw replies, I don’t see why not, you look quite healthy to me! I thought that was hilarious. I would have loved to meet him.
Were there any of the characters or people in it that you maybe didn't quite like them personally, but found them very interesting to read about? Because I know, personally, Yeats can kind of sometimes be....
I think the question is, is there any character I would have left behind! [laughs].
Yes, something like that.
George Moorse, definitely, without a doubt, he’s the one that stood out to me that I would not have had any great admiration for. He created problems for his own life, and he was somebody that I would never write a book about, never, to be honest with you. Only reason I included him is because he was included on one of the lists—he was mentioned on one and not the other, so I included both just in case.
He made comments that he shouldn’t have made regarding women, he didn’t look at the broader picture and he certainly didn’t look at the genius of Lady Gregory. There was one stage there that he mentioned about women, that women didn’t often “paint or write works of genius because they couldn’t transcend shame. They would never dare to make a full sexual confession.” I think that was a brutal thing to say.
He was totally out of order and totally incorrect. I think he was, to me, more narrow-minded and that's what I didn't like about him. Lady Gregory did an awful lot for him when he was in Coole, and he then turned and made some nasty comments about her.
He didn’t look at Violet Margaret, who was another signature on that tree, who was a wonderful writer. Lady Jane Wild, she doesn’t get half the credit she should, even today. She wrote all the stories of the folklore of the fairies and leprechauns and customs and legends of Ireland in her book, and she doesn’t get the credit she deserves which I think is a shame. And also Mary Ann Kelly, or “Eva of the Nation”, they are two prominent candidates I would have liked for The Autograph Tree besides Moore.
I suppose that was one of my questions, do you think these women contradicted this statement?
Oh, without a doubt, all the women on the tree contradicted it. I think he could have been intimated a little but then again, that’s my opinion, other people could have a different opinion about him.
Just kind of continuing on that thread about women, with Lady Gregory's dedication to the arts, of the twenty-seven only seven signatures, including her own, were by women. Do you think this was reflective of the time or maybe her own politics surrounding feminism? Because there doesn't seem to be much mention of her own feminism, whereas the chapter on Violet had a lot more.
To be honest with you, she was a woman of her time, you know. I think the reason that there were not as many women on it was because it was a time when women were fighting for their rights, fighting for the vote. Things that seem incredible today, that they could never have happened. They were attacked and put in prison in trying to get the right to vote. We can’t really comprehend that world. So I think what happened really was they were victims of their time. Lady Gregory did do her best. She invited Dame Ethel Smyth to sign the tree, and she was close friends with Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the suffrage movement. The thing for me is, I wonder how Pankhurst isn’t on that tree, and how Maud Gonne isn’t on that tree. Not that Gonne had an influence on the literary side of things, but I thought her connection with Yeats would have led to her signature.
I think you’ve kind of answered it, I suppose, but were you surprised by any decisions on the tree or the signatures that weren’t there?
I was surprised by the two soldiers. The tree is about people that have contributed greatly to the art world and the reason I thought Maud Gonne should be on it is because she inspired so much poetry for Yeats and Coole.
When Yeats was at Coole, Lady Gregory use to put extra rugs on the floors near his bedroom and tell the servants to actually tiptoe around so they wouldn't disturb Mr. Yeats when he was working.
He was there twenty years, every summer and he always wined and dined so to speak and there was one stage where Robert Gregory became totally annoyed by it. Robert had great time for Jack B Yeats, but at one stage he told WB to bring his own sherry next time he was visiting Coole, rather than taking all of theirs. Robert Gregory had a problem with this, but Lady Gregory didn’t. She’d say he was a genius, we have to look after him.
She was a great host for him, and she nurtured him, she brought him from, you know, from almost obscurity. She gave him the opportunity. And I think when, if you had the full summer, just drinking a couple of bottles of wine and having your food served to you, and having people tiptoe around while you work, or going for a walk in the woods and down by the wild swans at Coole, and all of this, you could absorb so much. But he was absorbed in it. The “it” being, not just the culture of Ireland, but also the folklore. He loved Sligo. I envy him in a way. The kind of way where, well, he really believed in these other worlds, in the folklore world, you know, and I think if you did, and you were given the time to write and to have all your problems put aside, just to write, you would come up with something yourself.
He seemed like a very romantic kind of character, and it seems like he had very grand ideas of Ireland and was very disappointed by the realities. And on page 104, you note that, Russell was disappointed, as well as Yeats, with the reality of Ireland after the Civil War. Objectively as a researcher do you think these men's opinion were grounded in reality, or maybe a bit removed from what Irish society and Irish people were going through at the time? And were they right to be disappointed?
Well, yes. Yes, definitely George Russell was totally disappointed. He was a very spiritual man. And he believed in religious freedom. And when he saw, like, what was coming in the thirties, that the Church was going to have a huge say in the state under the De Valera government at the time, I think that had a major effect on him leaving Ireland. He saw a different Ireland, of course. Nobody envisaged the Civil War, anyway. Well, not many people would have in 1916, many wouldn't have envisioned the war between both sides, but then certainly he was very disappointed with the whole country with that. And, of course, he wasn't alone. There were a lot of other people in the art world at the time that felt the same.
I was just going to say, and I don't think this is exactly Joyce’s reason for leaving, but he too left Ireland and I was kind of wondering why was he never invited to Coole? I think he did have a few spats with them, but I was surprised that he never made an appearance.
I was actually surprised at that myself, to be honest. George Russell actually supported Joyce, when he was a young writer, to submit articles for the Irish Homestead, but as time went on, Russell felt Joyce wasn’t keeping with the ideas of the magazine and asked him to stop sending material in. This of course caused the relationship to become strained after that. With Russell being a close friend of Yeats and Lady Gregory, this could have had some influence on Joyce not being invited to Coole. I'm not quite sure.
But in contrast to that, or having said that, John Quinn was in contact with Joyce and in fact purchased some of his manuscripts. Augustus John, who travelled to Paris after the war, met with Joyce and Nora Barnacle and completed a number of drawings of Joyce who posed for him frequently. Even in leaving Paris, Joyce gave John a copy of the French translation of Ulysses. And of course, Augustus John was close with Lady Gregory, as was John Quinn, so it is a puzzle as to why Joyce wasn’t on the tree.
On page 78, Fay “believed that it was time to make the Irish accent and dialect an expression of the Irish character, even when speaking English” and "didn't want the Irish Language or accent being used on stage to provide laughter”. It seems he was ahead of his time as it is only now that Irish language films is being presented to wider audiences. Do you think if Yeats had not opposed it, that Fay could have shown Irish-language plays in the Abbey and possibly garnered more support for Irish, or was Yeats right to appeal to what audiences would show more interest in?
Frank Fay was a strong nationalist and a friend of Arthur Griffith, and he believed in portraying the Irish people as they were, a real people, and not as they were portrayed to some English audiences, as a population of backward people. The days of Punch—and that was a brutal magazine for Irish people—were over and it was time now for the Irish theater to give the audience and the Irish people the respect that they deserved.
Now I know where Yeats is coming from trying, you know, with the more Irish plays. I think it should have been a compromise? Yeats was right also. Like, he had to appeal to English speaking audiences as well, like without those you wouldn’t pack the houses.
But I do think that the Irish language players would have been a success in Dublin, had they been given the proper format, and they had the backing support from for the Abbey Theatre. I do believe that to a certain extent.
And actually, on that subject, you know it is tempting to think that that would have worked after all. An Taibhdhearc in Galway has been running successfully since it opened its doors in 1938. I think this is why the Abbey Theatre could have worked, because it did work in Galway.
Of course there's interest in Irish language plays and do you to, kind of bring it to nowadays, do you think with the recent attention on Irish film, with 14 nominations at the Oscars, one film being entirely as Gaeilge, do you think the Irish fine art scene is kind of experiencing its own revival? Because there seems to be quite a lot of attention on it.
Oh definitely, without a doubt. In the last couple of years we’ve seen Irish films making it big, nominations for actors. We have a lot of great actors and actresses here. Going back to the 60s and 70s, the likes of Richard Harris, Peter O’ Toole, Pierce Bronson, the impact they were making on the world of film and there’s no reason why we can’t continue to go forward with it. I think we’re in a great space. It’s not a revival so much as we’re marching ahead. It’s wonderful for Ireland.
I think this might be my last question. Thanks so much for your time! With each of the biographies, each of them are very short and concise and they provide the reader with the most notable works and life events of each person, and because you have to keep the chapters short, is there anything you wish you could have expanded on in the book or found interesting and you would like to include it if book length had not been a factor?
Of course, of course there was. There was a number of stories that I would love to have explored.
I'd like to have explored the story of Sean Mac Bride, Maud Gonne’s son. And when Yeats's body was brought back to Galway by boat in 1948 with his family, his wife and children, waiting in the Great Southern Hotel for the boat to come in with the body.
The man who arrived with the minister for external affairs was Sean MacBride, and I would have loved to explore what that was like more. I would have loved to know more what MacBride had thought of Yeats. You know, like the poem that Yeats wrote in 1916 about Sean MacBride’s father, John MacBride, about how he had been a villain to Maud Gonne at the time. I would have loved to have known about Sean MacBride’s feelings towards Yeats and more about their actual connection.
And, of course, George Bernard Shaw, I would love to write more about him. There was a lot I wanted to write about him. His connection with his wife—they had an open relationship. There was no secrets about it.
I would love to go into Tom Casey’s life in the book, in Dublin. When he mentions to his grandchildren he was carving his name into the tree, he was well used to it because he had been carving his name into doors as a tenant in Dublin. I thought I would have liked to write more about that.
I would have liked to have written more about Augustus John. He was in Galway in 1915, he was actually painting doing a painting: The Burren from Salthill. Now, at the time, where was great suspicion that there was spies around this area, and that The German U Boats were coming into Galway Bay, which there were. And on that suspicion the police arrived and arrested him! Thinking that he was a German spy! If you only knew, like this man, like he just loved a few drinks like, and he loved his painting.
He painted in the Union Hall in Galway, which was the Sinn Féin Hall at the time. There was an awful lot of people that posed for him there. And we know that there was a number of women who were asked to pose for him naked there! I would have loved to explore that, particularly why he was in Galway so often. He explored the Aran Islands as well, he was one of those guys that had supposedly seen Tír na nÓg . So that would have been interesting.
Yeah, that was really interesting. And, just before we go, I wanted to ask you. I found it really interesting that a painting of George Shaw by Augustus John was given to the Queen of England. How did that come about? Because that was kind of it, just a line in the book and I was like, oh, I'd love to know more about that.
She was a great lover of art. In 1938, she contracted Augustus John to paint a painting of her and he did and now he was very slow in producing the work. He was nervous, it was the Queen like, you know, he was constantly nervous. He had to produce really good work. And actually, he found he could paint better when he had taken drink. His genius was actually enhanced by his lifestyle. She actually decided to put a bottle of Brandy into the press for him with his paints so he could have a little drink while he was doing her portrait. Interestingly enough, the painting disappeared from the world until 1961, where it was found after he died. It was found among his belongings, and it was presented to the Queen later that year. I would have loved to write more about this and Augustus John in general.
Thank you very much for the interview, your book really humanizes these people, so it was really interesting to get to talk to you.
Thanks an awful lot to yous too.
