Maud came with an introduction from the sister of the old Fenian John O’Leary. What is not clear is why she came at all. She had had a free and loving but unsettled childhood in Europe and Ireland, where her father had been posted with his regiment after the risings of 1868. After his death she had lived in France and taken a middle-aged lover, a French politician, Lucien Millevoye. Both of them were agents of the Boulangists, called in this book ‘a strange mixture of republicans, royalists, and socialists’ but sometimes described as proto-fascists. Later, she and Millevoye took a vow to join the world’s violent protesters, he for Alsace-Lorraine, she for Ireland. In her high eagerness, Maud can surely never have hoped for much from John Butler Yeats, who was a moderate Home Ruler, and his student son, Willie.
Maud, led by ‘inspirations which come to me and always guide me right,’ gloried in public demonstrations and secret activities, stormy meetings and wild journeys. Yeats’s place in Ireland’s history was with the Revival and with literary politics. At times, he saw the contrast between himself and Maud ironically, as Maud could not. ‘I was sedentary and thoughtful; but Maud Gonne was not sedentary, and before some great events she did not think but became exceedingly superstitious…Once upon the eve of some demonstration, I found her with many caged larks and finches which she was about to set free.’ Irony, however, never restricted the passion which Maud accepted, he wrote, ‘with scarce a pitying look.’ Being deeply engaged with Ireland’s ancient presences, Oisin, Cuchulain, and Maeve, he began to create his own mythology for the twentieth century, where she could be assured of immortality:
Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting a train,
Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head.
Were they ever lovers? George Moore, according to his own account, was the only person to put this question to Yeats directly, and he received a riddling reply. ‘There was about Yeats,’ wrote Micheál Mac Liammoir, ‘as about so many respectably bred Irishmen, something endearingly old-maidish.’ Maud, on the other hand, disliked sex, except for the procreation of children. She refused Yeats’s many proposals of marriage, but asked him for a spiritual union compared to which ‘material union is but a pale shadow’. In this collection of letters there is a brief period, at the end of 1908, when she addressed him as ‘Dearest’ instead of ‘Dear Willie’ or ‘Dear Friend,’ but she also says that she has prayed for all earthly desire to be taken out of both her love and his, and, in December, that she believes that, if necessary, she could ‘let him marry another.’
These letters are published here for the first time, and no one could ask for better editors than the two that Maud Gonne has been granted—Professor A. Norman Jeffares and her own granddaughter, Anna MacBride White. They have provided a detailed commentary, two introductions, a chronology, notes, and explanations of almost everything. These are not only closely researched but have about them the voice of prolonged friendly discussion—the voice of Dublin itself: ‘Let me see now, May Gonne, what was she to Maud?’ There are, unfortunately, only twenty-nine letters from Yeats: ‘[MG] told me,’ says Professor Jeffares, ‘when Free State soldiers raided her house in St Stephen’s Green, the great loss was that most of her papers were burned in the street and among them her letters from him.’ There is very little before 1923, although a draft is included of his plea to her not to marry John MacBride, on the curious grounds that if she took ‘one of the people’ as a husband they would cease to trust her. Papers later than 1923 were stored elsewhere, and there are twelve further letters from Yeats. Here at last we have the two of them confronting each other, but by then their friendship had sunk to low ebb. ‘We will never change each other’s politics,’ Yeats wrote. ‘They are too deeply rooted in our characters.’ Even their common interest in the unseen and in supernatural communication had begun to drift a little. ‘Now that you do so little occult work,’ she told him, ‘I never know at a distance as I used to what you are thinking. You did not even know when I was almost dying, & for three days almost unconscious & when I wrote to you the words didn’t convey anything to you. I think you were astonished yourself they did not.’
The correspondence covers forty-five years, during which time Maud had borne another child to Millevoye and left him, founded the Young Ireland Society in Paris and the Daughters of Erin, opposed the Boer War, devised a plan to hide bombs in the coal-bunker of British troopships, appeared in Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan as the personification of Ireland, was received into the Catholic Church, married the revolutionary John MacBride and divorced him for adultery and indecent behaviour, started the Women Prisoners Defence League, nursed the war wounded, and fed, consoled and took up the cause of many. Yeats, she soon felt, was not to be trusted with ‘the outer side of politics.’ When the two of them were trapped in a Dublin tea shop by demonstrators protesting at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, he refused to let her go out and face a charge by the police. ‘Do you know,’ she asked him (June 1897), ‘that to be a coward for those we love, is only a degree less bad than to be a coward for oneself. The latter I know well you are not, the former you know well you are.’ He had higher work to do, she told him, whereas she was born to be in the midst of a crowd. ‘For the honour of our country, the world must recognise you as one of the Great Poets of the century.’ He had been chosen to write poetry for the glory of Ireland. She would have rejected with indignant words Joyce’s ‘Art has no purpose, but it has a cause.’ For her, the purpose and the cause were the same. She didn’t like Portrait of the Artist, didn’t like Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ (which he sent her after MacBride’s execution). Both of them were unworthy of Ireland.
Yeats was also there to carry out errands. You cannot be Maud Gonne and devote yourself, soul and body, to a cause without making good use of those who happen to be helplessly in love with you. ‘My dear Willie, are you going to Sligo and when? If you are, will you try and do something for me not at all in your line…There is a poor old man called Durkan who Lord Arran evicted under very hard circumstances’; ‘Could you get Mr O’Leary to write a letter which could be published saying he is satisfied as to my Irish descent?’ ‘I thank you for all the trouble you have taken for me—perhaps you will have to take a little more & get us all permission to return to Ireland.’ Anna MacBride White tells us that ‘Willie was the long-time friend remembered with affection, toleration and amusement,’ and there is a good deal of that in these letters, where Willie’s help is treated as a kind of natural resource. When Maud’s daughter Yseult made an unsatisfactory marriage, Yeats undertook to disentangle it. When her son Sean MacBride, who was opposed to the treaty of 1921, was arrested by the Free State Government forces, Yeats made himself responsible for the boy. When Maud herself was taken to Mountjoy Gaol in 1923, he wrote to Olivia Shakespear that the day before her arrest she had told him ‘that if I did not renounce the Government she renounced my society for ever. I am afraid my help in the matter of blankets, instead of her release (where I could do nothing), will not make her less resentful.’
Meanwhile Yeats had married, and, however necessary he thought it to choose between perfection of the life and of the work had become a harassed public man. He was disturbed by the increasing bitterness of Irish nationalism, and in particular by the way Maud was hurling the little streets against the great and, in the process, transforming herself into an old bellows full of angry wind. It seemed to him that her actions were based on hatred. ‘In 1910 or 1911,’ he wrote to her in 1927, ‘when you were working on the feeding of school children I met you in Paris & you told me that you were convinced that all the misfortunes of your life had come upon you because you had taken up movements which had hate for their motive power.’
Maud’s beauty had once made young and old stop and stare at her in the street (this, by the way, seems to have been a much commoner habit in Edwardian days). It faded early, although her dignity remained, as photographs show. In describing her to those who had never seen her, Yeats was defending her against Ti
me, although he could hardly claim, as he did with Eva and Constance Gore-Booth, that Time was her only enemy. He had also cast his own heart into his verse, but Yeats, although painfully candid in poetry, was much less so in his memoirs. (Compare, for instance, Maud’s letter of September 1903 about the opening of Cathleen ni Houlihan with the account in Dramatis Personae.) One of the objects of this book, Maud’s granddaughter tells us, is to set the record straight and at the same time to save her from marginalization as no more than an ‘adjunct of Yeats.’ We are being asked to read the letters, not for old sake’s sake, but for her own.
They show the ferociously busy life of a romantic revolutionary—Maud’s day-to-day troubles, consoling spirit visions, very occasional times off when she went conger-eel fishing by moonlight in Clew Bay or painting in Seine-et-Marne (‘but I am not made for a peaceful life’). Unfortunately, although she often recorded her dreams, ‘it never comes naturally to me to write of thoughts or impressions.’ Yeats noted in one of his journals, quoted by Jeffares, that her dread of the sexual relation probably affected her whole life, ‘checking natural and instinctive selection and leaving fantastic duties free to take its place.’ In terms of his vision, however, she was a Helen born out of her time and mismatched to her phase of the moon, to whom Ireland could not offer an adequate catastrophe. These explanations may have satisfied Yeats. Maud herself comes close to one when she writes (July 1900), ‘I have chosen a life which to some might be hard, but which to me is the only one possible. I am not unhappy only supremely indifferent to all that is not my work or my friends. One cannot go through what I went through & have any personal human life left, what is quite natural & right for me is not natural or right for one who still has his natural life to live.’ Sixteen years later, however, when Yeats wrote that too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart, Maud objected bitterly (November 1916): ‘Though it reflects your present state of mind perhaps, it isn’t quite sincere enough for you who have studied philosophy & know something of history.’ Her reminiscences, which were published in 1938, are not of much help here. She began a second volume, but never finished it, finding it too painful to go on.
Partly on account of her own temperament, partly because as a woman she could not be admitted to the political organizations, Maud worked as a freelance. Although in these letters she appears surrounded by children, lawyers, friends, prisoners, dogs, birds and old servants, Yeats more than once in his poems calls her ‘that lonely thing.’ She was driven in upon herself, it seems, but without feeling the need to explain what she found there. Her granddaughter remembers that in old age ‘she wished to be gone and said she hated the lingering process.’ But about this there was nothing disheartening. Maud Gonne believed that beyond the grave our energies are renewed as when we were young. We can then begin the struggle again.
Times Literary Supplement, 1992
Lily and Lolly
The Yeats Sisters: A Biography of Susan and Elizabeth Yeats, by Joan Hardwick
W. B. Yeats says very little in his Autobiographies about his two younger sisters, Lily (christened Susan) and Lolly (Elizabeth), except that they sometimes ‘dreamed true,’ which interested him. However, in 1994 Gifford Lewis published The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala Press, and in 1995 came William M. Murphy’s Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relations. Both of these books make good use of Lolly’s diary and Lily’s scrapbooks. We have had a chance, then, lately, to know them much better.
Joan Hardwick is still indignant on their behalf, and although they never took the risks of the Rossetti girls (who printed an anarchist newspaper in the basement), or put up, as Somerville and Ross did, with being treated as the joke of the family, still, they can be seen as underrated and hard done by. For the Yeats family, it wasn’t only a question of keeping a home together but of maintaining any kind of an entity with a feckless (call it easygoing) artist father and a melancholic mother whose actions, William said, were ‘unreasonable and habitual, like the seasons.’ They moved from Ireland to England and back again so often that it might seem like flitting, and very nearly was. They went from Sandymount to various seedy addresses in London, then to respectably bohemian Bedford Park, back to Howth, Bedford Park again, and in 1901 a return to Ireland, this time to Dundrum. Their one real security was the mother’s family, the Pollexfens, who took them in for long holidays, so that for the rest of their lives they were homesick for the bare mountaintops and the voices of Sligo people.
Wherever they went, the pattern remained the same. Lily was the father’s favourite. Lolly, he thought (although she undertook the housekeeping), ‘should have been a man.’ William also preferred Lily to the restless, talkative Lolly. Jack, the youngest, the future artist, was sufficient to himself. Meantime, it was said that on one occasion in Bedford Park, there was only twopence in the house. Neither of the girls had had much in the way of education or training, but with admirable courage they set about earning a living. Lily ventured out first, as an embroiderer in May Morris’s workshop, later as a designer in her own right. Lolly trained as a compositor at the Women’s Printing Society. Her friend (unfortunately later her enemy) Evelyn Gleeson, a power in the Arts and Crafts movement, had raised enough capital to open a workshop near Dundrum, and this was the first home of what became the Cuala Press. William’s In the Seven Woods was the first title to appear, in the familiar grey cover with the glazed spine.
Hardwick goes to the attack, however, as well as to the defence. Although she acknowledges the usefulness of the material in Murphy’s Family Secrets, she interprets it quite differently. She has no patience with John Butler Yeats, who finally abandoned (if that’s not too positive a word) his family, to live the rest of his life in New York. Distrustful, on the whole, of charm, she sees him as nothing more than a scrounger. She defends the passionate, awkward Lolly against her seemingly gentler elder sister. William, she thinks, should have done more for both of them, though it is hard to see how they could not have got on without his introductions. Surprisingly little is made of his Nobel Prize award. The Bounty of Sweden, as he called it, helped with the expenses of Lily’s illness (she was tubercular) and of the Cuala, never without its difficulties. Lily sank back in gratitude, but Lolly felt thrust aside and resisted the appointment of new directors (both men). ‘My sister and I quarrelled at the edge of the cradle and are keeping it up on the grave’s edge,’ William wrote in 1937. He had mythologized his ancestors, his friends, and himself, but his sisters never.
The Yeats Sisters is clearly but somewhat flatly written, without much feeling for what Gifford Lewis calls ‘the unstable broth’ of Anglo-Irishness—still less for the wasteful virtues that, Yeats felt, gave it grace. But Lolly, for so many years the odd one out, would be grateful to Joan Hardwick for this generous account of her.
Times Literary Supplement, 1996
Monsieur Moore of Mayo
A Peculiar Man: A Life of George Moore, by Tony Gray
Tony Gray is a Dubliner who writes on Irish subjects, but seems to have hit on this one by chance. Two years ago, in what he calls a ‘spoof Booker contest’—it was actually a discreet promotion by Everyman—George Moore’s Esther Waters was named as the best novel of 1894. According to Gray, ‘the general reaction was “George Who?”’ In reply, he has put together this biography, as he frankly tells us, from good ready-to-hand materials, in particular the Life (1936) by Moore’s crony, Joseph Hone.
George Moore was born in 1852, the eldest son of a Mayo landowner. At the age of eighteen he inherited 12,500 acres and (when they could be collected) rents of over £5,000 per annum. Poverty was never a threat. During his wretched years at Oscott, he had learned almost nothing, but became convinced that he would make an artist. ‘He had gone to Paris straight from his father’s racing stables,’ Yeats wrote, ‘from a house where there was no culture…acquired copious inaccurate French, sat among art students, young writers about to become famous, in some café; a man carved out of a turnip, looking out of aston
ished eyes.’ His appearance seemed the one important thing about him. Sickert saw him as ‘an intoxicated mummy,’ Henry Tonks as ‘a spoilt child of four,’ Gertrude Atherton as ‘a codfish crossed by a satyr.’ Manet, who did three portraits of him, thought ‘he had the look of a broken egg-yolk.’ In Paris, Moore discovered that he couldn’t paint, but must write. Neither Zola, with whom he had scraped acquaintance, nor any of the painters he sat with in the Nouvelle Athènes, expected him to come to anything.
Having read nothing, Moore now set himself to read everything, and, as might be expected, began by writing French Naturalist novels in English. As such, they caused scandal, helpful to a beginner. The value of publicity was something he understood well, and he ably supported his publisher, the risk-taking Henry Vizetelly, and visited him during his spell in prison. At the same time, Moore began to be known in London as an art critic and, by some mysterious but gradual process, as ‘G. M.,’ the great Irish wit and armchair conversationalist. He had created himself, though never quite without caution: ‘to be ridiculous has always been mon petit luxe.’ But he knew that a man who had written Esther Waters could never, in fact, be considered entirely ridiculous.
‘It is all about servants,’ he explained to Clara Lanza, one of his many women correspondents, ‘servants devoured by betting. It begins in a house where there are racehorses.’ A Zolaesque theme, then, of corruption and obsession, while the story of a patient young woman ‘in service’ in a great house, made pregnant and disgraced, is told in a faultlessly unsensational voice. But the distinctive beauty of the novel, which Moore was never able to reach again, comes from the return of Esther’s story to its beginnings. She comes back at last to the mistress who once turned her out, and the two of them settle down together, two ageing women in a silent, decaying house. This surely is the ‘rhythmical sequence of events described with rhythmical sequence of phrase’ that Moore said that he was aiming at. And although he thought his family home in Mayo was ugly, and was quite content with the £7,000 compensation he got when it was burned down by the Insurgents, the years he had spent there had to be written out of him, so that Esther Waters is also about the mortality of great houses. In Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906), he wrote movingly of his return to Moore Hall at the time of his mother’s death. ‘The lake which I hadn’t seen since childhood I did not need to look at, so well did I know the place of every island.’ There is an echo here of the novel Moore loved best, Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, where Marius in the end goes home and looks as Moore had done himself into the dark family vaults.
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