Heartbreak House: Frank McNally on Eileen Gray’s troubled relationship with her childhood home

Greystones reader Frank Kavanagh worries that the late designer Eileen Gray might not have appreciated my efforts in bringing stones from Wexford to commemorate her in Paris last week (Diary, November 4th).

As I mentioned then, the Halloween just gone was the 50th anniversary of Gray’s death. To mark which occasion, admirers unveiled a new plaque at the columbarium in Père-Lachaise cemetery, her second-last resting place.

That’s where her ashes used to reside and may do again, if and when they can be relocated from whichever general ossuary they were moved to, after a lease lapsed.

In the meantime, the commissioner of the plaque, lawyer and human rights activist Bill Shipsey, thought it might be a nice idea to get a stone from Brownswood House in Enniscorthy, where Gray grew up, to place in her new “niche”.

In the event, with the help of occasional Enniscorthy resident Oisín Ó Nualláin, I brought two small stones from Brownswood, and some fallen leaves into the bargain.

But as our Greystones correspondent reminds me, Gray had very mixed feelings about her birthplace, at least in the form it had taken by the time she left, circa 1900.

The original home, an elegant Georgian manor house, was gone then, replaced by a mock-Tudor mansion. One commentator called the latter “a magnificent specimen of Elizabethan architecture, with a charming parterre laid out in faultless style”.

Gray, to the contrary, considered it an atrocity against architecture, and against the happier memories of her childhood. Later in life, she always kept a photograph of the old house – or just “the house” as she called it.

Mind you, even that had been a cold place, physically and otherwise. Biographer Peter Adam writes that as the youngest of five children, most of them many years older, Eileen felt “lonely and unloved”. He adds:

“Despite considerable wealth and many servants, life was far from comfortable at Brownswood. In the cold wet weather, the children had to put on coats to cross the icy halls and staircases, ‘and even the nursery never seemed to warm up’.”

The redesign was mostly the work of an unlikeable brother-in-law, a snob who had married Eileen’s sister Ethel – someone she didn’t get on with either – when the future designer was only 10.

It was around then too that her parents, already long estranged, got a divorce and her father moved out. He had encouraged Eileen’s early interest in art and, despite the marital tensions, was much beloved by his youngest child.

But as Adam sums up: “It was the destruction of her childhood home, more than anything else, that finally drove [Eileen] away from her family. It had become a dead house, full of mannered, self-protective people. The old sepia-tinted photograph was all that remained with her of ‘the house’ of her childhood.”

Hence the concerns of my fellow Frank that taking part of Brownswood to Paris was not such a good idea:

“By bringing the stones from the mock-Tudor ancestral pile,” he writes, “Frank [McNally] may not have been following Eileen’s guiding principles [as quoted on the new memorial]: ‘To create, one must first question everything.’”

But in my defence, fellow Frank, I must protest that the stones were not in fact from the mock-Tudor ancestral pile. Much as I might have been tempted to take a hammer and chisel to the mansion – Gray may have had similar thoughts herself – I settled (via Oisín) for stones from the large, sloping front lawn instead.

That appears to be substantially the same today as the one wherein an infant Gray “would escape the nursery and go down to the beautiful Slaney river at the bottom of the grounds”.

And who knows? If stones could talk, maybe the ones I brought to Paris could even claim to have been debris from her original home: chips off the old block, as it were.

Houses aside, whether Gray felt any deep attachment to the land of her childhood is perhaps questionable. Her father was a Scot. So, by aristocratic heritage, was her mother. And Gray herself spent her whole adult life away from here, mostly in France.

During 70 years of exile, she became what we might now call “a citizen of nowhere”. And yet she felt some sense of belonging. As she put it herself once: “I am without roots, but if I have any, they are in Ireland.”

If leaves could talk, that’s a sentiment that would be shared by the two fallen and dried-up ones I also took to Paris, pressed between the pages of A Year’s Turning by Michael Viney (his chapter on October, naturally).

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I hope that, when arrangements for the new niche are finalised later in coming weeks, the leaves and stones will take their place in it. Then, pending the return of Gray’s ashes at some point, there will already be a little piece of Père-Lachaise that is forever Wexford.