The Censor in Each of Us

Subject: The Censor in Each of Us Thu May 08, 2014 8:28 pm

This piece is drawn from the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, given by Colm Tóibín as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.

The Censor in Each of Us W.-B.-Yeats

It began, as many things do, with a dream. In the summer of 1901, while staying at Coole Park, the house that had belonged to Lady Gregory’s husband and now belonged to her son, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats had a dream that was “almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak” who was “Ireland herself,” personified as Cathleen ni Houlihan, “for whom so many songs have been sung, and about whom so many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death.”

The play that came from the dream was performed as “Cathleen ni Houlihan” in Dublin, in April, 1902. In the text, which is in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, there is a note in Lady Gregory’s handwriting: “All this mine alone.” And then, toward the end, “This with WBY.” It was clear to some even when it was first performed that most of the play was written by Lady Gregory, who was a playwright and translator, but the official author on the program was W. B. Yeats. Now, more than a hundred years later, it is in both his and her collected works.

The play had, on its first performance, an enormous impact. This was helped by the vivid sense of domestic space and the naturalistic dialogue, and by the talk of money and marriage. But the impact was itself caused by the sudden and mysterious transformation of an old woman into a young woman, a young woman “with the walk of a Queen,” the transformation caused by the arrival of French forces in the west of Ireland, in 1798, to assist in the struggle for Irish freedom. The audience understood that this change in the woman represented Ireland and what could happen to Ireland, were they to devote themselves to its cause. The hall was packed every night. The woman, both young and old, played by Yeats’s muse, Maud Gonne, seemed to lure the imagination away from everyday materialism and toward the heroic, from ordinary speech toward the poetic, the suggestive. The play showed how important and, indeed, how disturbing images of transformation could be in a society in which there was repression, paralysis, political stagnation, a strange vacuum. George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play “which might lead a man to do something foolish.” In the way it affected the audience, “Cathleen ni Houlihan” made clear how powerful words, poetry, and pure and risky theatrical images could be in a place where people had learned to distrust political speeches and the language of the official world, a place in which there was a hunger for something in the public realm that was new and could be trusted and almost believed.

More: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/05/colm-toibins-pen-lecture-on-censorship.html?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true

The Censor in Each of Us

The Censor in Each of Us

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