Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

by Colm Toibin

  They agreed, as William Murphy noted in Family Secrets, to write to each other with total frankness and then each burn the other’s letters as soon as they had been read. While Yeats kept his side of that bargain, Rosa Butt did not, although she may have destroyed a few letters that said too much. She saved just over two hundred of them. After her death in 1926, they passed into the keeping of her cousin, the painter Mary Swanzy, who eventually placed them in the Bodleian Library at Oxford with the strict proviso that they not be seen by anyone until 1979.

  The final chapter of Family Secrets, “John Butler Yeats and Rosa Butt,” offers a summary of the letters and the relationship between the old painter in exile and the daughter of his father’s friend. In the spring of 2017, I went back to the Special Collections at Union College in Schenectady to read the letters Yeats wrote to her.

  By this time William M. Murphy was dead for almost a decade. He had lived until the age of ninety-two. His ghost had joined the other ones that haunted the halls of Union College, including the ghost of Henry James’s father, who had briefly been a student here, and James’s grandfather, who had helped to fund the college and whose portrait hung in the president’s house.

  Sometimes, as I wandered in the grounds and corridors, I was alert to the similarities between the two families—the Jameses and the Yeatses—and the similar ways in which two famous sons had been influenced by their father and in which they had handled his legacy.

  In the autumn of 1828, when Henry James Senior, the father of the novelist, came to Union College, he entered fully into student life, drinking in taverns and having expensive suits made by the local tailor. He charged it all to his father, William, who was so wealthy that he owned the very land on which the campus of Union College was built. William James, who had been born in Bailieborough in County Cavan, was also one of the two trustees of the college.

  Henry James Senior’s departure from Union College, not long after his arrival, was the beginning of a journey in search of freedom of thought, eternal truth and interesting companions who were good listeners. James, like John B. Yeats, was a great talker. There are a number of other resemblances between the two men. Each of them, for example, married the sister of a classmate to whom they were close. Both of them suffered from, and also enjoyed, a lifelong indolence and restlessness; they dominated their households, but failed, or seemed to fail, in the larger world; they sought self-realization through art and general inquiry.

  Both men created households where artists and writers visited and where becoming an artist was a natural development. Both men believed that the self was protean and they opposed both the settled life and the settled mind. Thus neither Henry James the novelist nor William Butler Yeats nor any of the Yeats siblings benefited from, nor had their minds destroyed by, a university education. Their fathers, believing themselves to be formidable institutions of higher learning in their own right, had little interest in exposing their sons to competition.

  Both of the fathers were ambitious but often incapable of bringing a project to fruition. Talking for both took the place of doing, but both men were also capable of writing sentences of startling beauty.

  Both men loved New York, not for its intellectual life but for its crowded street life, which they observed with fascination. Henry James Senior believed (or, to amuse a listener, claimed to believe) that the companionship of the crowded horse car was the nearest thing to heaven on earth he had ever known. Their friends viewed both men as supremely delightful fellows; their company was much sought after. They both believed passionately in the future, seeing their children as fascinating manifestations of its power and possibility, at times much to their children’s frustration.

  They were both figures of real originality. On June 4, 1917, for example, some years before his son wrote his poem “The Second Coming,” John B. Yeats wrote to him: “The millennium will come, and come it will, when Science and applied Science have released us from the burthens of industrial and other necessity. At present man would instantly deteriorate and sink to the condition of brutes if taken from under the yoke and discipline of toil and care.”

  In a similar vein, Henry James Senior in 1879, almost two decades before his son wrote The Turn of the Screw, wrote the following account of a terror that came upon him on an ordinary evening in a rented house in Windsor Park:

  To all appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck, that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy.

  Each man had a daughter in possession of a rich and sharp and brittle intelligence, so brittle indeed that it would somehow prevent both Lily Yeats (and her sister Lollie) and Alice James from separating from their families; both Lily and Alice had a magnificent and acid epistolary style.

  Both fathers cared, it seemed, more about their elder children than the rest of their brood: William and Henry James and W. B. Yeats were treated differently than their younger siblings. John B. Yeats and Henry James Senior each fathered two genius sons, four men—Henry and William James, W. B. and Jack Yeats—who specialized, unlike their fathers, perhaps in spite of their fathers, in finishing almost everything they started. Three of them developed a complex, daring and extraordinary late style. All four boys studied art; William James had serious ambitions to be a painter. Two of them—W. B. Yeats and William James—began by dabbling in magic and mystical religion and went on to make it an important aspect of their life’s work. While all four men were significantly influenced by their respective fathers—sometimes negatively—they had hardly anything to say about their respective mothers.

  Both fathers used the Atlantic Ocean as a weapon in their arsenal, Yeats using it as a way of getting away from his family in old age, Henry James Senior using it as a way of further unsettling his unsettled children and indeed his loving wife.

  Although Henry James the novelist saw a lot of Lady Gregory in London in the 1880s and 1890s, he was not a friend of W. B. Yeats’s. By the time Yeats had begun to flourish in London, James had withdrawn to Rye. James, however, attended a performance of Yeats’s play The Hour-glass in Kensington in 1903, and in 1915 he contacted Yeats on behalf of Edith Wharton asking for a poem for a fund-raising anthology for the war.

  John B. Yeats had strong views on the question of Henry James. In July 1916 he wrote to his son: “I have just finished a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns. James has watched life from a distance.” When James’s unfinished volume of autobiography was published posthumously in 1918, John B. Yeats wrote to a friend: “Some believe that this war is a blessing disguised. It is enough for me that it stopped Henry James in writing a continuation of ‘The Middle Years.’ ” Two years earlier, he wrote to William: “Thinking about H James, I wonder why he is so obscure and why one’s attention goes to sleep or wanders off when trying to make him out . . . In James, it is his cunning to make suspense dull, tiresome, holding you in spite of yourself.”

  When an exasperated John Quinn wished to describe Yeats’s endless and expensive stay in New York, he used James’s late novel The Ambassadors as the example. “The whole damn thing,” Quinn wrote, “would make a perfect Henry James novel, and how he would get under your skin!” In this version of the story, Quinn made himself the ambassador and Yeats the lama:

  And so the book comes to a triumphant close with the victory of the Lama over his family, over the Ambassador, over the Doctor, over the nurse, and over his friends, it all being a triumphant vindication of the philosophy of the ego, of the victory of the man who regards only himself, of the man who does not care for others when they cease to amuse him, the artist’s ego, the ego parading in the poet’s
singing robes, and—to use a vulgarism which Henry James would, I am sure, hugely enjoy—the egotist in his singing robes, crowned with laurel, the consummate artist, the playboy of West 29th Street, the youth of eighty without a care, with never a thought of his family or his friends, with eternal self-indulgence, with an appetite for food and drink at the age of eighty that is the envy of his younger friends and the despair of the Ambassador; this young man who has enjoyed fifty years of play and talk and health and high spirits and wine and drink and cigars, the man who enjoys the evasions of the artist—he “gets away with it,” as Henry James would say.

  In 1884, two years after the death of Henry James Senior, William, his eldest son, edited a selection of his writings. This publication caused Henry James the novelist to feel “really that poor Father, struggling so alone all his life, and so destitute of every worldly or literary ambition, was yet a great writer.”

  In 1922, when John B. Yeats died, John Quinn suggested that a new selection of his letters should be published. He wrote to W. B. Yeats: “I feel very strongly that instead of making extracts from his letters, his letters should be published in full as were the letters of Henry James.” In this case, it was Henry James the son, who had died in 1916.

  *

  Rosa Butt lived in Battersea in London with her two sisters, Amy and Lizzie. Lizzie was a widow who specialized, it seemed, in disapproving of things. She had not taken any pleasure in her own marriage and she certainly took no pleasure in whatever was going on between her sister and Yeats. Her sister’s disapproval of him was referred to in many of Yeats’s letters to Rosa. He, in turn, disapproved of her sister’s disapproval.

  Even though their fathers had been lifelong friends, Yeats and Rosa Butt did not ever meet, it appears, until he was about twenty. “When I first saw you,” he wrote to her years later, “you were a woman grown (as well as growing) and I a hobbledehoy.” He thought her, he wrote, “the most beautiful woman” he had ever seen. In the 1880s, when he visited her parents, he wrote, “I used to listen to every word that concerned you.” It is clear that he saw her a number of times over the next ten years, and again in 1897, when York Powell remarked on her “beautiful face.”

  In the year before his wife’s death, they began to correspond, the tone on his side affectionate. On December 1, 1900, when Susan Yeats was dead for almost a year, he wrote: “You must not think I write to anyone as I write to you or have ever done so.” It is obvious that at some point in these next few years something happened between them. In the spring of 1906, when she was coming to Dublin, he wrote:

  You must not torture me by treating me as if we were not something more, something much closer than lovers. In your letters you now treat me as I treat you, that is, as if there is between us an absolute intimacy. And you must do this when we meet . . . I feel myself to be yours body and soul.

  In a subsequent letter, he suggested marriage to her, even though they would both face problems—he had no money and she was timid and also felt an obligation to her sisters. After a single meeting with him on that visit to Dublin, she fled back to London.

  Once he was installed in New York, Yeats began to write to her about the relations between them not as something that might have been, but rather as something alive and vivid, as though they were young still and had all the time in the world and these letters were part of a courtship. He seemed to enjoy writing openly about his physical passion for her, knowing that she would disapprove of his explicit tone. When he was seventy-one, for example, he wrote:

  You are bright-eyed and alert, muscled and deliciously plump. You are so comely and so inviting, and so pleasant and plump in the places where you ought to be plump . . . If I were with you and we were alone I would coax you into good spirits. I would place my hand around your waist—one hand—and the other hand would distractedly find its way, however forbidden, into your bosom. And fighting with me would put you into good spirits and me into bad spirits.

  The tone is affectionate, teasing, boyish, speculative. In 1908, for example, he wrote: “I often wonder if we had been man and wife, [whether] I should have got on with you at all.” There is the freedom in the letters of someone idly dreaming: “I write to you more freely and would talking [sic] to you more freely than anyone in the world. That is in my mind the relation between us.” He confides in her the miseries of his marriage:

  I remember that my wife never failed to tell you bad news. If there was good news it did not seem to her worth talking about. It was only when things were going wrong that she spoke. It was the Pollexfen habit. They were a dour people. They trained each other so as to always keep their conversation and thoughts in the channels of the disagreeable. They were the most disagreeable people I ever met. All the time they were longing for affection . . . and their longing was like a deep unsunned well.

  He wrote to her as a lover who had been accused of inconstancy:

  I am full of affection and longing for you and it is wrong of you to say I write to anyone as I write to you. To me you are always part and parcel of myself. I would as it were tell you things that I would not tell to myself. Can you understand this?—so that you are more to me than I am to myself.

  Or, six days later, as he worried about losing her to someone else: “I got a dream which during its progress much depressed me. I dreamed that you were married, and that I asked why you had consented.”

  The possibility of his going home remained a constant theme. In February 1908, he wrote: “I don’t know yet when I am returning . . . It is my last chance and if I don’t make something of it I may go home for good.” The following month, he wrote: “I don’t know how I shall ever induce myself to leave New York.” In January 1909, he was still toying with the idea: “I want to go home with a New York success behind me. I don’t want to go home a failure, or even under suspicion of it. It is my last chance and I don’t want to lose it.” Three days later, he wrote: “I want it put on my tombstone that I was successful in America. Here lies J. B. Yeats much liked by his few friends and successful in America aged 98 years.”

  Later in the year, he wrote: “I must try another winter here. I cannot leave America without a success, a real success, and it is written on the cards. I am convinced that next week I shall succeed. The studio may be the beginning of a new epoch.”

  Four months later, in November 1909, he noted that although Lily wanted him home for Christmas he would stay for a while longer: “I won’t go home till June. Ah! how I would love to have you in my room where no second bed would be wanted.” Three months later, he wrote: “I think I may come home in May or June—certainly not April—and possibly July.”

  This feeling that he would come home never left him, especially as each Christmas approached. In November 1915, he wrote: “I shall return soon, I think.” But he also believed that New York had rescued him. In that same letter, he wrote: “My time in Dublin was awful, and in London also. And I was never well. New York saved my life. That is God’s truth.” Later that month he wrote: “Why do I stay in New York when I expect every winter to be my last I don’t know. I just stay on here, and dread Dublin as if it were a dark room haunted by a ghost.”

  Intermittently, he was confident that he would be successful in New York, but often less sure about his relationship with Rosa, or at least the part of her that emerged in her letters:

  To think of you is sometimes like crying for the moon. However, I shall return next spring, and with success and money, I hope, in which case I shall certainly see you, and if I have money manage to see a great deal of you. We have been never long enough together to have real confidences. That is why you don’t give yourself away in your letters.

  He imagined her in the city with him: “If you lived here in New York we should be sweethearts. Everyone would know it and everyone would respect the relation. No one would smile, offensively or inoffensively. They would think it natural and therefore right.” He imagined her as young: “I have your secret and know you know that you are
a young girl, as young as you ever were, and as capable of caresses—and of receiving them too sometimes.”

  The problem of money persisted. On January 20, 1909, he wrote: “My money here for lodgings and for board is long overdue and Mrs. Ford [his first landlady] wrote to Quinn asking him to advise my return to Ireland.” And on February 5, he reported that his debtors from Dublin were writing to him: “With your letter came a nasty letter from a Dublin tailor. He writes as if I did not pay because I did not want to do so.”

  When Quinn offered to pay his first-class passage back to Ireland, he wrote to Rosa: “The bitterness of it is that I feel my reputation steadily rising.” He wanted to get a studio “and paint all New York. Nothing will ever dislodge the idea from my mind I should go back sorrowful.”

  When the summer came, his outlook grew sunny: “You see I want an ‘old wife’ . . . you want a husband to advise you. I won’t call myself old, nor you either. In my thoughts you are young as ever.”

  But eleven days later, he was less sure of her:

  In the most abominable way you keep me at a safe distance. I have always felt it, though till now I have never complained of it. Of course it is that you do not trust me, and this I know cannot be cured unless I went to London and stayed there long enough for the feeling of intimacy to be created, this mysterious intimacy that I am always trying to create at a single stroke, but which you will have on no terms.

  He wrote about how much he admired America: “The good thing about a Democracy is that it can correct its errors and repent of its misdeeds.” And how much he admired New York: “I love the people here, and so would you, after a while. At first your conservative instincts would be shocked, but in a little you would cease to struggle and go with the stream.”

  In a number of letters they argued, as most people in their world did, about the personality of George Moore: