Synge Read Online Free PDF Page B

deal with the actors. In some of the correspondence, as Roy Foster has pointed out, ‘he sounds both older and wiser than Yeats; he appears more at ease in dealing with people.’ In 1908, when the Fays had left the theatre Synge remarked: ‘Since then Yeats and I have been running the show, i.e. Yeats looks after the stars and I do the rest.’ The actors and workers in the theatre liked him. He appeared more natural, more in possession of himself than either of his colleagues. An Australian visitor in 1904 described him:
He was full of race and good breeding, courteous, sensitive, sincere … a simple man; but there was something strange and alluring about him, an indescribable charm expressed in his voice and manner and, above all, in his curious smile that was at the same time ironic and sympathetic.
    With the Abbey, as with his family, Synge was skilled at withdrawing. ‘I have often envied him his absorption,’ Yeats wrote, ‘as I have envied Verlaine his vice.’
    Lady Gregory disliked The Playboy of the Western World , although she defended it in public. She made sure that Yeats’s play The Pot of Broth was not used as a curtain-raiser, which would be, she wrote to Yeats, foreseeing the riots, like ‘Synge setting fire to your house to roast his own pig.’ After Synge’s death, she wrote a passage in her journal which she did not publish:
One doesn’t want a series of panegyrics and we can’t say, don’t want to say what was true, he was ungracious to his fellow workers, authors and actors, ready in accepting praise, grudging in giving it … On tour he thought of his own play only, gave no help to ours and if he repeated compliments, they were to his own.’
    Yeats in his journal wrote: ‘I never heard him praise any writer, living or dead, but some old French farce-writer.’
    The truth was that he understood the value of his own plays and did not rate very highly the work of Yeats or Lady Gregory for the theatre, although he admired other aspects of their work, such as Lady Gregory’s translations. He made no secret of this, and of his profound irritation at Lady Gregory’s tireless and fearless promotion of Yeats’s work and her constant production of her own work. In December 1906 she told Synge that Yeats’s dramatic work ‘was more important than any other (you must not be offended at this) as I think it our chief distinction.’ In March 1907, when The Playboy of the Western World has already been produced and Charles Frohman, an American producer, came to the Abbey looking for new work to tour in the U.S., Synge wrote to Molly Allgood:
I hear that they are showing Frohman one play of mine, ‘Riders’, five or six of L.G.’s [Lady Gregory’s] and several of Yeats. I am raging about it, though of course you must not breathe a word about it. I suppose after the P.B. [ Playboy ] fuss they are afraid of stirring up the Irish Americans if they take me. However I am going to find out what is at the bottom of it and if I am not getting fair play I’ll withdraw my plays from both tours English and American altogether. It is getting past a joke the way they are treating me.
    They, on the other hand, became increasingly sure that they had invented him. After his death Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats:
You did more than anyone for him, you gave him a means of expression. You have given me mine, but I should have found something else to do, though not anything coming near this, but I don’t think Synge would have done anything but drift but for you and the theatre … I think you and I supplied him with vitality when he was with us as the wild people did in the Blaskets.
    As soon as Synge arrived on the Aran Islands, he wrote to his mother, who wrote to his brother Sam:
I had a very interesting letter from Johnnie last week … The islanders of Aran found out that he was related to Uncle Aleck [who had been a missionary on the Islands] and came to see him and were quite pleased. He is now on Inishmaan