New Ways to Kill Your Mother (7 page)

Later that year, John Butler Yeats wrote another story and a letter to his son displaying his confidence in it. ‘I have just completed what I think is a very pretty story, a tale of magic that will be said or sung I think many times by many people. You see how confident I am.’ A week later, he wrote again: ‘I have just written what I do not hesitate to call a lovely story which Spenser would not have been ashamed to have contrived. I never saw greater enthusiasm than Colum’s when I read it to him. I am sure it will sell. There are several other stories which I have written. There is money in these.’ Two weeks later the euphoria about his stories remained: ‘Yesterday, I was at Quinn’s and read to him two stories just finished, one from the land of phantasy, “The Wizard’s Daughter”, the other out of real life. He did not [know] which to prefer but was enthusiastic about both. Colum heard the wizard one and wanted then and there to carry it off to a magazine.’ The following day, John Butler Yeats decided to deliver the stories to a magazine himself. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote to his son, ‘I left at Harper’s my two stories, and I am very hopeful.’

Despite his work on the stories, his interest in plays did not fade. On 5 November 1917 he wrote to his son: ‘It is my belief that if all of these years you had seen more of me you would have written quantities of plays.’ On 25 January he referred once more to his own play:

You will remember that I have for a long time been meditatively at work on a play. It is now finished and typed (it cost 6 dollars) … I am certain you will like it and perhaps be moved to re-write some lyrics I have written. They had to be written, but are of course quite amateurish. I think when you have read the play you will be inspired, yes inspired, to write real lyrics. I am certain there is money in the play, and that it will hold the boards, and perhaps return to them many times.

Two weeks later, the play had been sent. ‘I hope by this time,’ he wrote, ‘you have seen my play sent in a reg. Letter by John Quinn to Lilly [sic] and Lolly [Yeats].’ Twelve days later, on 21 February 1918, he wrote again on the matter: ‘I am waiting to hear what you think of my play. If I find you like it I will be moved to write another scene (about which I have thought a great deal).’ Still there was silence from the other side of the ocean. ‘Why don’t you tell me about my play?’ he wrote in June. ‘You need not be afraid to praise [it] … I feel quite sure that someday [it] will be acted and be a success.’

4

Four days later, from Ballinamantane House in County Galway, where he was staying while Ballylee was being restored, W. B. Yeats, now fifty-two, wrote to his father, who was seventy-eight. ‘My dear Father,’ his letter began,

I have never written to you about your play. You choose a very difficult subject and the most difficult of all forms, and as was to be foreseen, it is the least good of all your writings. I have been reading plays for the Abbey Theatre for years now, and so know the matter practically. A play looks easy, but is full of problems, which are almost a part of Mathematics – French dramatists display this structure and 17th century English dramatists disguise it, but it is always there. In some strange way, which I have never understood, a play does not even read well if it has not this mathematics. You are a most accomplished critic – and I believe your autobiography will be very good, and this is enough for one man. It takes a lifetime to master dramatic form.

In March 1918 John Quinn received a letter from W. B. Yeats in which the poet arranged a matter that had been previously discussed by them: in exchange for Quinn’s financial support for Yeats’s improvident father in New York, Yeats would send Quinn manuscripts. Yeats went on:

Do you know is he going on with his autobiography? If he would finish that I might be able to get a very good price for that indeed from Macmillan, and would illustrate it with reproductions of pictures by himself, by Potter, by Nettleship etc. I hear with some alarm that he is writing a play, in which, as it is the most highly technical of all literary forms, he will most certainly not succeed while he certainly can succeed in the autobiography, and may do one of the finest that there is.

John Butler Yeats was not greatly disturbed by his son’s view on his playwriting. On 8 July 1918 he wrote to him:

Your opinion of my play does not alter my opinion. I am quite sure that it will ultimately reach the boards and the public, although doubtless it will need alterations. But these will be superficial. The germ idea will remain. I have no doubt you are overanxious, the play being by your father. That is only natural. Percy MacKaye, a man of some expression, was of all my critics the one that gave me the most encouragement. He did not see the actual play, but I told him all about it.

Having invoked the spirit of Percy MacKaye, who had not read the play, Yeats the father clearly saw no difficulty in invoking the spirit once more of Synge, now dead almost ten years. ‘When I told Synge that you had discouraged my writing the play, and that you spoke a good deal about Rules etc he said “Ask him if he himself obeys the rules.” Synge praised my dialogue. “You at any rate can write dialogue” were his exact words and as you know praise from Synge was rather a rarity.’

The significance of the phrase ‘You at any rate can write dialogue’ would not have been lost on Yeats the son. It suggested
that there were others who could not write dialogue and it implied that among them may have been W. B. Yeats himself. His father went on:

In my play there is phantasy. The old man made young is a creature of phantasy, and being good phantasy and consistent with itself is quite credible. I think he is a dear old man, and my heroine is right to love him even when he falls into sinfulness. The Colonel is the germ of my play, and the public won’t miss it. I laugh to scorn all the croakers. But I must be careful, for you yourself are my only croaker.

It would be very easy to misinterpret John Butler Yeats’s letters to his son about his own writings, to see them as merely foolish or boastful. They represent, it should be said, a tiny fraction of his concerns. He was mainly interested in the vocation of the poet, and he wrote with very great range, originality and energy on that subject; he was also fascinated by the meaning of life and was an astute observer of America. But unlike Henry James Senior, who was reduced by a crisis to a state of helpless infancy, John Butler Yeats did not need a crisis; he sought that state as an aspect of freedom, a way of living easily and hopefully and unsuspiciously in the world. He expressed this view often in his correspondence, most eloquently, perhaps, in a letter to W. B. Yeats written on 27 February 1916, where he pitted his own humility and his intense optimism against his son’s grand majestic spirit:

I think there is always with me a residuum, a something at the bottom of the cup of my sorrows, and that something is a conviction, an intuition inseparable from life – that nothing is ever really lost, and that if we could see our world and all that takes place on its surface, and see it from a distance and as if from the centre of the sun, we should find it to be a fine piece of machinery working to certain ends with an absolute precision. I had in my only philosophy a faith founded like that of Socrates upon the basis of my conscious ignorance – it is a sort of sublime optimism, and I am very satisfied with my ignorance as my betters are with their knowledge – and I call it sublime because it soars to such heights, and these logical people cannot reach it with their arrows, and I believe if the truth were known and confessed that this doctrine of a conscious ignorance is, at this present moment, the abiding solace and hope of all my fellow mortals. Grand majestic spirits will spurn it, but passive, inactive beings like myself, and all of us when the time comes that energy can no longer help and pride is humbled, will return to it as a last hope, and indeed the only one left – and so true it is to my mind that I feel I am writing only platitudes; moreover, I think it is only a doctrine for poets.

Willie and George

In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of
Yeats: The Man and the Masks
, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written.’ When Ellmann came to Dublin in 1946 to work on his book, ‘she produced an old suitcase and filled it with manuscripts that I wanted to examine. At the beginning she was anxious about one of them, the unpublished first draft of Yeats’s autobiography, and asked me to return it speedily … I was able to allay her disquiet by returning the manuscript on time.’ She had, Ellmann wrote, provided Yeats with ‘a tranquil house, she understood his poems, and she liked him as a man’. Now she oversaw the poet’s legacy with canniness and care.

When John MacBride, Maud Gonne’s estranged husband, was executed after the 1916 Rising in Dublin, Yeats talked once more of marriage to Maud, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his authorized biography of the poet, published in 1942. After Iseult finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, George Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very tired & have a great longing for order, for routine & shall be content if I
find a friendly serviceable woman. I merely know … that I think this girl both friendly, serviceable & very able.’

She also had money. He wrote to his father: ‘She is a great student of my subjects and has enough money to put us above anxiety and not too much money. Her means are a little more than my earnings and will increase later, but our two incomes together will keep us in comfort.’ They were married in October 1917. He was fifty-two; his new wife, soon to call herself George, was twenty-five. Ezra Pound, best man at the wedding, wrote to John Quinn in New York to say that he had known George Hyde-Lees as long as he had known his wife, who had been her best friend; he found her sensible and thought she would ‘perhaps dust a few cobwebs out of his belfry. At any rate she won’t be a flaming nuissance [sic] to him and his friends.’

Yeats wrote about their honeymoon in the introduction to
A Vision
:

On the afternoon of 24 October 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer … When the automatic writing began we were in a hotel on the edge of the Ashdown Forest, but soon returned to Ireland and spent much of 1918 at Glendalough, at Rosses Point, at Coole Park, at a house near it, at Thoor Ballylee, always more or less solitary, my wife bored and fatigued by her almost daily task and I thinking and talking of little else.

The first volume of Roy Foster’s biography of Yeats, taking us up to 1914, showed that while no statement or public position by Yeats could be taken at face value, this did not mean that he was a chameleon or in a permanent state of vagueness. He was, it seemed, a chameleon when it suited his imaginative purpose or while he was on the Irish Sea. Once arrived, he could be full of
firm and combative conviction. In writing about his life Foster manages an alertness to Yeats’s political skills and certainties and his sense of command, and, at the same time, offers a nuanced reading of Yeats’s protean enthusiasms and loyalties.

The slow release of Yeats’s papers and letters over the past sixty years has helped to establish this sense of a Yeatsian self in constant re-creation. Ann Saddlemyer’s biography of George Yeats offers a more taxing version of the life of Mrs Yeats than Brenda Maddox’s
George’s Ghosts
(1999), but it does not solve the mysteries surrounding the relationship between Yeats’s marriage and his work: it makes them instead more fascinating and more open to different readings and interpretations.

George Hyde-Lees’s interest in the occult, which began a number of years before she met Yeats, was part of the spirit of the age. In 1891, the year before George’s birth, Alice James confided to her diary: ‘I suppose the thing “medium” has done has been more to degrade spiritual conception than the grossest form of materialism or idolatry: was there ever anything transmitted but the pettiest, meanest, coarsest facts and details: anything rising above the squalid intestines of human affairs?’ Despite her objections, the James family continued to believe in transactions with the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and pouncing upon the first occasion helpfully to get at me’. Both James in his stories and Thomas Mann in
The Magic Mountain
(1924) understood the power that ghosts and séance scenes held in the imaginations of their readers. During the First World War, as Maddox says, ‘grieving millions turned to the spiritualist movement, searching for messages from their lost men’. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote: ‘I
seemed suddenly to see that it was really something tremendous, a breakdown of walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.’

Both Yeats in the 1880s and his future wife thirty years later would use the occult movement in London as a way of educating themselves outside the confines of a university. Yeats described his early involvement with men ‘who had no scholarship, and they spoke and wrote badly, but they discussed great problems ardently and simply and unconventionally as men, perhaps, discussed great problems in the medieval universities’. In 1911, when she was nineteen, George Hyde-Lees’s stepfather gave her a copy of William James’s
Pragmatism
, which asserted that ‘the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief’. She continued to admire William James’s writing throughout her life. By 1912 she was attending lectures on early religion and mysticism and reading widely on medieval and Eastern religion. She applied for a reading ticket for the British Museum, expressing her interest in reading ‘all available literature on the religious history of the first three centuries’. By the summer of 1913 she was including the study of the supernormal in her reading; her attendance at séances in London may have begun as early as the previous year. Soon she became interested in astrology. Her study was as serious and systematic as circumstances would allow, helped by an ambitious mother and a private income, and a knowledge of Italian and Latin. She was a regular visitor to her friend Dorothy Shakespear at her London flat after she married Ezra Pound in 1914; her relationship with the Pounds increased the breadth of her reading as well as offering her, and indeed her mother, an example of how someone with her unusual mixture of cleverness, earnestness and independence of mind might marry.