Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

by Colm Toibin

  I know you like to hear of people but I find it increasingly difficult to write to you about people, as with your early Victorian psychology you always misunderstand people . . . As to Moore, you have made up your mind long ago, so it is needless to talk any further. To make up your mind in an instant and stick to it all your life is a feminine characteristic of the early Victorian mind. How well I remember it . . . This is Victorian psychology to think no evil of your friends and all evil of everyone outside your friends. I think my tendency is exactly the other way around . . . I don’t like George Moore because he is obscene in a callous sort of way, but I like his way of seeking his own pleasure. That is why he is always interesting and refreshing, and one feels a sort of gravitation to him for being so.

  Sometimes his letters were filled with tenderness, at other times the tone was tough. In November 1909, for example, he wrote: “As to your father, I never doubted your love . . . but I still think you hate all his political ideas, to which he gave his life and his genius.” And also: “Having to live among stupid people, you have adopted all their stupid imbecilic ideas, and deserted your father’s noble political ideas.” But two months earlier, he had written:

  I think of you constantly again and again, put myself to sleep thinking of you, fancying myself married to you, and both of us young, picturing to myself what you would say and do and what we would say to each other . . . I love you every way. I think I love you best when you are cross.

  And having enclosed a sketch, he wrote:

  Here you are as I think of you when I fancy myself married to you. You look a little timid. You are just entering the bridal chamber . . . How nice you look, the big crinoline and the white drawers peeping underneath and the wide-eyed seriousness . . . I wish so much you would never doubt yourself, or your power over me.

  And two months later: “You are a prude, although your heart is as hot as a coal of fire.”

  Some of his letters dealt with their little arguments:

  I have always known you to have intellect and to be your father’s daughter . . . and I try to make my letters intellectual, thinking to interest you, and yet you always treat me as if I was insulting you, which is early Victorian with a vengeance. I sometimes try to make them amusing and there also I fail.

  Two months later: “You in Dublin among the people you like and who like you but make you hard-hearted towards everything I like, so that I am afraid that I might say something in my letter that may be quite out of tune with your ideas.”

  Whatever had happened between them in Dublin when they had been alone in his studio continued to interest him: “I am always so glad you think about the studio. I am always thinking of it, and I know we both love to think of it,” he wrote in February 1910. And then the following month: “I wish you would try and shock me . . . I once had a chance with you and my courage failed, but if ever again I get a chance my courage won’t fail.” And five days later: “Merely to think and dream of kissing you throws all my senses into delirium, like a thirsty man who sees a vision of a lake.” And then the following month: “There are so many things I want to say to you, things that could only be spoken and that I think would only be said between a man and a woman in the sort of intimacy that arises between a man and a woman who love and trust each other.”

  In May 1910, having written: “You are a kettle with the lid open. I . . . am a kettle with the lid shut,” he began to dream about the life they could have had:

  It is a pity that you and I did not live together, your quick mind and my slow one . . . I would have taught you philosophy, for which I have a talent and you none, and you would have taught me concrete visible life in all its poetical and humorous details. We would have been great friends and lovers. What nice little admonitions you would have whispered to me from your pillow as we lay together talking far into the night. But this is dangerous ground which I must avoid.

  And a few months later:

  Some time ago Quinn asked me did I ever strip an amorous woman. I answered with a loud “No, never.” “Ah,” he said, “you have missed a great pleasure!” . . . Your bosom is as soft and round as when you were eighteen, and your spirit, your inner self, is like your bosom.

  And again in October: “I love you. I can’t tell you why. I dreamed of you last night, saw you sitting handsomely dressed, with your ankles showing, and the drawers quite visible . . . So perhaps you see how I love you.” And in a postscript: “I often think of making lots of pictures for your eye, you and I married and young in our bedroom standing together looking at ourselves in the looking glass on the first night and before anything has happened, and then our picture after. Ah! Rosa, Rosa, it makes me tremble to think of you.”

  This ebullient and teasing tone was tempered in other letters as the real world impinged. The previous June he had written starkly: “None of my projects have materialized. Some failed utterly.” And now in October 1910, as there was a possibility that his son would be made a professor at Trinity College: “I think if Willie is made a Professor and Lily and Lollie are better off all my resolution will break down and I will go home.” As Christmas approached, he began to miss Dublin: “I am terribly homesick, only the more I long for home the more I feel its hopelessness. Here my work lies but my affections are in Ireland, especially now, for I always enjoyed Xmas at home, since Lily and the others are naturally festive and rise to these occasions.” The following day he wrote again: “I am longing to be at home, but the more I long the keener is my sense of its impossibility.” And a month later, as Christmas was close, he wrote: “I am horribly homesick.”

  The following year he was still thinking about success: “It would be a cruel thing if, just as I had made all my preparations for returning, offers of work etc should pour in forcing me to stay. I have slaved all my life for success, so if success [were] offered I could not refuse it.”

  And again there was always the problem of money. On January 27, 1911, he wrote to Rosa: “I am frightfully behindhand with my money and so have a horrible haunted feeling night and day.” More than two years later, in April 1913, he wrote: “Yesterday, had it been possible I would have taken the first steamer home.” In November 1914, he wrote: “I can tell you that I am sometimes so worried that I have to walk the streets to keep my nerves quiet.”

  Exile gave Yeats a chance to think about his family and his wife’s family. In October 1910, he wrote to Rosa: “One reason why I am so incensed against class distinctions is because those very small gentry around Sligo always excluded the Pollexfens from their friendship.” And a month later: “The Pollexfen family hated personal feeling, nothing for them but rules, the dour mind, hard, unfeeling, but honest.” And in April 1913: “My wife’s relations thought it an indecency to be cheerful. I think that to show sorrow is an indecency.” He also wrote about the connection between his daughter Lollie, who was visiting Rosa, and her mother:

  Lollie will be with you now, a curious little creature who has two demons. As a Yeats, she is gay and affectionate, looking on the best side of things. As a Pollexfen, she has a tendency to be gloomy and pessimistic, with a desire to wound her best friends, to positively stab them to the heart, though only so as words go. The last characteristic she inherits directly from her mother . . . When the fire has passed, she does not remember having said anything that could hurt anyone’s feelings. This also was a trait of her mother’s.

  He continued to let Rosa know that he loved her and that he imagined how they would be were they together: “You don’t know how I love you, reasonably,” he wrote in September 1912, “but above all unreasonably, and you would have me all reason.” And then a month later: “Had we married, you would be all for movement, and I for sitting still, and we should have fought like cat and dog, and everyone would have sympathized with you and called me a pig, and I’d have called myself a lazy pig.” And two days later: “If you and I were together and by ourselves I would give you such a loving embrace that all youth would start up in your veins. Ah, I won
’t say what thoughts are in my head and in my veins.” And a month later: “I am longing to spend some hours with you, though I never let my mind dwell on the subject. It is too painful and too tantalizing. I don’t even like you to allude to it for it can’t be helped. It only disturbs us both.”

  Early the following year, Yeats grew more explicit: “Had we married, I’d have enjoyed sometimes making you angry, say the last thing at night your eyebrows black and horizontal, and you standing in your nightgown—and I longing for you. That’s how we would play the game and you would know perfectly well that the front of your nightgown was open.”

  In this correspondence that centered on impossible or dreamed-of love and the imagined loved one, it is easy to think of W. B. Yeats’s long and impossible attachment to Maud Gonne, or, since this is a story of love in old age, Yeats’s early poem that began:

  When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

  Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

  But these letters to Rosa Butt are not letters of regret about a lost love, or a love not reciprocated, or written with sadness now that the years have passed. Rather, they are filled with defiance in the face of old age. Thus they are closer to some poems about age that W. B. Yeats wrote after his father’s death. For example, lines such as these from “The Tower”:

  Never had I more

  Excited, passionate, fantastical

  Imagination, nor an ear and eye

  That more expected the impossible . . .

  Or lines from “The Wild Old Wicked Man” such as:

  “Because I am mad about women

  I am mad about the hills,”

  Said that wild old wicked man

  Who travels where God wills . . .

  Or:

  “A young man in the dark am I

  But a wild old man in the light . . .”

  Or:

  “But a coarse old man am I,

  I choose the second-best,

  I forget it all awhile

  Upon a woman’s breast.”

  Or Yeats’s late poem “The Apparitions,” which includes the lines:

  When a man grows old his joy

  Grows more deep day after day,

  His empty heart is full at length

  But he has need of all that strength

  Because of the increasing Night

  That opens her mystery and fright.

  Or the last stanza of “Are You Content”:

  Infirm and aged I might stay

  In some good company,

  I who have always hated work,

  Smiling at the sea,

  Or demonstrate in my own life

  What Robert Browning meant

  By an old hunter talking with Gods;

  But I am not content.

  Or his short poem “The Spur”:

  You think it horrible that lust and rage

  Should dance attendance upon my old age;

  They were not such a plague when I was young;

  What else have I to spur me into song?

  Or the lines in “An Acre of Grass”:

  Grant me an old man’s frenzy.

  Myself must I remake

  Till I am Timon and Lear . . .

  Or the last stanza of “A Prayer for Old Age”:

  I pray—for fashion’s word is out

  And prayer comes round again—

  That I may seem, though I die old,

  A foolish, passionate man.

  In these letters to Rosa Butt, John B. Yeats, the foolish, passionate man, with his excited, passionate, fantastical imagination, did not write about the life he had missed, but the life he imagined, and he gave that life a sense of lived reality, as though it were not only almost possible, but somehow present. In January 1914, for example, he made clear that he saw their correspondence as a sort of marriage:

  One of the charms of marriage is that two people can talk to each other of things that the woman would not talk of to other women or the man to other men, and that is why I insisted on our letters being burned, so that you and I could write to each other as if in married frankness, and I do write to you as if you were my real wife and one flesh with me (which also you are not in reality).

  And in an earlier letter, he wrote about their marriage as though they were living it in slow detail, having arguments in real time:

  All my life I have longed for the friendship of a clever woman, but you will give almost anything except your intellect . . . Had we married years ago, we should have fought the question, only sometimes together late at night, my arms around your waist, my dear, you cross and I coaxing, perhaps burying your face in the pillow to escape my kissing you—gradually you would have got quiet and at least passive, and in the morning as you went about the room dressing I would have stolen furtive glances at you to see how you were taking it. And at breakfast we would have been a little formal, your face fixed, and if I stroked your hand you would have pulled it away. Perhaps I would have stroked your breast, and you would have moved, as if to let me know that it was nothing to you what I did, and I’d have felt bad all day, and so would you. After a few days, we’d both get hungry for each other, but neither would give in. But for want of courage, you would think of asking for a separate room, not that you really meant it, but just as a demonstration. Suddenly some[thing] moving, something very delightful would happen, perhaps one of the children would show itself particularly nice and good (and all our children would have been nice, affectionate at any rate) . . .

  While we get so much of John B. Yeats, all we have of the recipient of these letters is a photograph of her, a pencil sketch by Yeats and his portrait of her. Since Yeats burned Rosa’s letters, we do not have her voice except for four words that he repeats in an undated letter. The four words are “My dear old lover.” And they suggest that her side of the correspondence was, in its own way, ardent, even if not as open and honest as his side. (“You think the correct thing for a woman, when she writes a letter, is to say nothing and do it over a long letter.”) Despite the fact that we only have this single phrase, what is strange is how vividly Rosa emerges in these letters from him to her. For example, it is clear that she does not share in his easy lewdness. (“Not for worlds would you write these words: ‘bottom’ or ‘thigh,’ nor would you allude to your breasts.”) And there was nothing impetuous about her. She does not write to say that she is coming to New York on the next steamer or that he must return to Dublin or London forthwith and marry her.

  As he writes not only about how he feels about her, but with news about his life, where he has been and who he has met, with much gossip about John Quinn, and reference to “free love” in America, with confessions about how he once and only once strayed during his years of marriage to Susan Pollexfen, she writes back to him time and again, and as she does so we feel, from ways in which he responds, her kindness, her reticence and her calm intelligence and stability.

  The idea that she kept the letters also matters. She knew of their value. What Yeats wrote, in all its honesty and wild impracticality and open sexuality, may have brightened up her life, but in the care he took with his letters to her and the amount of sweet emotion in them, there is a sense that her life was more than worthy of such brightening, that she was a rare spirit who did as much justice as she could to her correspondent, who responded to her “My dear old lover” with: “And we are lovers. And if we meet and when we meet, we shall kiss and be young and then kiss, our bodies and souls meet.”

  As they grew further into their seventies, he worried about himself and about Rosa. In April 1913, when he was seventy-four, he wrote: “I know of course that the sands are running low and that presently I shall begin to notice that my memory is beginning to fade.” And in October: “All last night I had vivid and broken dreams about you. I cannot remember them except that they were very miserable. I often woke and th
en bitterly reproached myself that I had not for a moment anticipated that you could be sick.” In January 1915, he wrote: “At my age months count as much as they do when we are children.”

  But always he would recover from his melancholy and return to his old self again: “Do you think I would have fallen in love with you if there was not plenty of Venus? It was Venus herself that decorated you with the breasts in which I take such delight.” Two months later, he wrote to her again about her breasts: “I would like to make a portrait of them with the little pink nipples.”

  And then a month later, he wrote once more about what would have happened had they married:

  Alas! that we did not marry! You would have made a man of me, and I would have made you the woman that you are and that you do not know you are . . . I often in imagination look back and see you with my baby at your breast, both of us watching it, and yet—and yet—I think that perhaps our children would have been unhappy, at any rate living in Britain.

  He worried sometimes that he was losing her. In May 1914, he wrote: “Is it my fault or is it yours that you have lost interest in me and my letters?” The following month, he wrote:

  Had we married and lived together, our mutual unlikeness would have made us perfectly interesting to each other. I fancy you love Religion while I hate it, because of all its sins and wickedness. I am a radical socialist anarchist Home Ruler, everything you abhor, so I sometimes think it would be best to let this correspondence drop. If I go home this year we shall meet and have many talks and then start again to write to each other.

  And again in October he questioned the point of their correspondence, becoming almost rude to her: “But you can be dull beyond words, and you give me no thanks for my efforts to write amusing letters . . . I am disposed to think and believe that I bore you to death and the correspondence is only a bother to you.”

  Although Rosa Butt’s father, as we have seen, had been the one to place the words “Home Rule” at the center of the debate between Ireland and England, Rosa herself was, it seems, not a Home Ruler. As the political atmosphere in Ireland heated up in the second decade of the twentieth century, Yeats had much to say to her about politics and changing life in Dublin. In January 1913, he wrote: “Ireland is progressing, beginning to take an interest in intelligent things, in poetry and art, but all this is to you nothing. You are about as interested in ideas as if you were a nun, or a priest, or a Swanzy.” (Rosa Butt’s mother was a member of the Swanzy family.)