KATHERINE TYNAN’S MEMOIRS.

Otago Witness, Issue 4028, 26 May 1931, Page 68

KATHERINE TYNAN’S MEMOIRS.

By Eileen- Duggan. (Special for the Otago Witness.) It was curious that Katherine Tynan and Arnold Bennett should die together, for he was the only one who seemed to ruffle her pin-feathers. She records the incident with a Pepysian frankness. He evidently regarded her as a literary Mrs Grundy, for he hushed the others saying, “ Children, children, Mrs Katherine Tynan Hinkson is in the room,” which she counters by saying, “ Perhaps he meant that Pamela was present. I like to think he meant that.” Pamela was her young daughter. On another occasion he was discussing a certain artist with another woman when Katherine hurtled into the conversation, “Is that the Sussex artist?” “No! No! ” said Bennett impatiently, waving her off like a child. “ Well, he may not be the Sussex artist,” said she terrierwise “ but I know a house in Sussex where there are more of his pictures than anywhere else, and I can go there any day

I like. In fact, I am invited there especially to see them.” And she adds complacently, “ The country mouse scores there.” Like two children with tongues out, “So there, see! ” Playground gestures seem common in literary coteries. Another well-known figure with whom she was friends in youth was Tim Healey. ex-Governor-general of the Free State, who died the other day. The Parnell split divided them, but she acknowledges her indebtedness to the “ log-rolling ” he did for her in connection with her entry into English journals. Her memoirs will probably stand to her longer than her poems, though she set such store by them. They may even outlast Bennett's novels, for she met the greatest litterateurs in three countries, and she has a style as easy as Pepys’s, a naive style that tells as it sees. Occasionally there are passages of beauty. And at times the puzzle is—“ Is she simple or subtle, feline or innocent? ” “ She was the child of a “ strong farmer,” and lived in what was once the house of Sarah Curran, Emmet’s love, whom Moore celebrated in “ She is Far From the Land.” It was a deep-windowed old farmhouse, and the Tynan family was large, with an invalid mother. The little girl, Katherine, was threatened with an excruciating eye trouble. ' Her doting father at last found a doctor to cure her, though blindness hovered over her to the end. She was always cheerful about it, and she never spared her eyes, for she had a lion’s appetite for work. The rest of the family were unliterary,

but her father, a mighty, mirthful, goddam man, encouraged her. He, himself, appears in a book of Yeats’s. As she grew older she began to write verses herself, and the father of her fame was the editor of-the Irish Monthly, who introduced her to the Mcynells, through whom she got to know Francis Thompson, Henley, Lionel Johnson, Chesterton, Shane Leslie, and other great writers of the time. A letter of admiration for Dante Gabriel brought her the friendship of Christina Rossetti, who was the faithful attendant of an aged mother, “My affectionate Christina,” the old lady would say fondly. She met in tlie train a friend of Lord Lytton's, and he introduced her to Lytton’s notice. They corresponded for a while. In Dublin she met and entertained at the Whitehall farmhouse Willie Yeats, George Russell, Dora Sigerson, Rosa Mulholland, Francis Wynne, Rose Kavanagh, Jane Barlow, and others. In later years, in the same city, she was to write of meetings with James Stephens, Padraic Colum, Dunsany, and Ledwidge. Some of them liked her; some of them did not, but in either case they were always sure of their feeling. She had a hero-worship for George Wyndham similar to the hero-worship she had had for Parnell. He obtained for her husband a magistracy in Mayo, where she was unhappy. Neither the aristocracy nor the peasantry unbent to her. A title was always sweet in her ears, and poem after poem is dedicated to Lord This and Lady That. She was a welcome visitor at the Vice-regal Lodge in the Aberdcens’ day, and one boak of the memoirs deals largely with them. She met H. G. Wells at the Dunsanys’. In fact, there was scarcely a writer whom she did not meet. And her indiscretions make the meetings interesting for the reader if not for the met. She was a little daunted by Wells, and relates with relish that when the breakfast table took fire at Dunsanys’, he disappeared out the window. The young daughter got on well with him, and she claims that he expounded some of her politics in “.Mrs Britling Sees It Through.” Many of the letters deal with Yeats, not the Yeats of the Abbey, but the Yeats of the Whitehall days. She publishes a great, sheaf of their correspondence. In those days she patronised him, and sent him for errands with a grocery basket. The anecdotes include belittling ones of the psychic order. It is allowed that the Yeats of to-day has a sense of responsibility to himself, but was it fair to publish such drivel? And Yeats is not the only one who has cause to snort at the memoirs. Jane Barlow spoke her mind about them very straightly; .though she had less cause. The poetess found herself rather shouldered out of the Irish Renascence. The Irish writers had dropped out of her life, whether by her fault or theirs or time’s. The two she had known well had attained to a fame more solid than her own when she wrote to renew the acquaintance. They were no longer youths. They were poised men. Big, benevolent A. E. became the friend of her and her children, but Yeats never admitted her to the old intimacy. Many of the younger poets ignored her. And then she was by nature a moderate in politics. From sheer kindness she ran with the hare and hunted with the I hounds, and neither side believed in her sincerity. She devoted many chapters to her boys at the front, and to her daughter Pamela, who had joined the ranks of the novelists.

Katherine had the saving grace of humour, and she honestly enjoyed a joke against herself. She had fallen foul of the residents of one town, and mentioned that its old ladies crawled like black beetles up to the common. They retorted by calling her fat, yellow slug, and she does not hesitate to record the entomological metaphor. On another occasion she was rushed by a porter down a platform, “Third class this way! Third class this way! ” “ Oh, please,” said she, “do we look so very third class?” It was little naivetes like these that appealed to Lord Grey and others. One reads her memoirs with laughter, with admiration, with irritation, sometimes even with a tinge of disgust, but never with apathy. She was vain, childish, and even fawning at times, but she was also kind, tender, brave, and gay—in short, human. A mingled yarn, but a sound yarn.