Letter from George Yeats to Thomas MacGreevy. 19 September 1926.

[p.1 recto]

82, MERRION SQUARE,
DUBLIN
TEL.61831.
Sunday 19.9.26

My dear Tom.

Today two weeks I shall be in London! Willy goes to Liverpool on Oct 2 & I direct to London, then on Monday he, I & my motherMrs Tucker, visiting from Sidmouth.^note all foregather at the Orchard Hotel. Portman St.-------I cant make plans till I see her as I dont know what or how much she'll want to do. You'll probably like her but I dont know. Lennox said the other day that his mother & mine were rather alike ---- They are and are NOT!

I want to go to the New Wing of the Tate Gallery on Sunday afternoon. If you aren't doing anything else will you escort me? If you are fixed up let me know so that I may collect someone else.

You will have heard of the terrific reception "The Big House"Robinson's play, "The Big House," opened at the Abbey Theatre on 6 September 1926.^note got. And O dear, Mrs O'BrienO'Brien is described in Robinson's Curtain Up: An Autobiography (London: Michael Joseph, 1942), 199.^note is so distressed about it, and a dear old thing of some sixty Unionist winters got up at the matinee when the Black & Tan began drinking out of the decanter and said "This is a revolting play" ---The poor darling had an impediment in her v's which sounded luscious but ineffective. [p.1 verso] And after the ^first second act Countess Con Gore Booth Markievicz said "what a wonderful creation the English Bounder ('Capt Despard') is". And Dermod O'Brien said (this I did not repeat) "Anybody who didnt know the LynxOne of Lennox Robinson's nicknames.^note would think he had been born in the Slums" and Mrs O'Brien likes Lynx so much, one of her sons, and such a dear but he does get such queer ideas into his head sometimes, such wrong ideas; and she went out to Dalkey last Sunday afternoon to tell him he really mustn't and found a great party going on and so had to content herself with chaperoning Mrs CampbellProbably Mrs Joseph Campbell.^note and Kevin O'Higgins who wandered off and ate the forbidden grape — (In the greenhouse, grapes sprayed with poisonous matter & a notice on them "not to be eaten"!!!)See Terence de Vere White's version of the greenhouse episode in Kevin O'Higgins (London 1948), 168.^note

We are at Ballylee for two weeks, going up on the Thursday before we clear out of Ireland!

I'm glad Lennox told you I didn't write "Mr Murphy's Ireland""Mr Murphy's Island", which opened at the Abbey 15 August, was suspected also to be written by Lennox Robinson, but was later acknowledged to be by Elizabeth Harte, daughter of Tim Healy.^note — Everyone in Dublin thinks I did! Beastly. I wouldnt write a better play but I wouldnt write one bad just in the way it is bad —

Yours ever

George.