New Ways to Kill Your Mother (8 page)

In this world of esoteric reading, leisured mysticism, visiting lecturers and poets making it new, Yeats had iconic status.

George’s mother knew him: her second husband’s sister was Olivia Shakespear, Dorothy’s mother, with whom Yeats had had an affair and remained on good terms. George met Yeats in 1911. She remembered vividly that she saw him and recognized him one morning in the British Museum, and later that same day while he was taking tea with her mother at Olivia Shakespear’s she was introduced to him. He was three years older than her mother and the same age as her father, who had been dead for two years, would have been. Over the next while, as George’s mother and her circle sojourned outside London, they were joined by the poet on a number of occasions. In February 1912 Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I am at Margate with a Mr and Mrs Tucker (she was a Mrs Hyde-Lees who I have known vaguely for years). I got rather out of sorts, digestion wrong & so on & wanted to do nothing for a day or two … This is a dismal place & it rains all day but it is very quiet & a good change & I am with pleasant people & out of the Dublin atmosphere.’

Yeats was responsible for the induction with great ceremony and solemnity of George Hyde-Lees into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a sort of Masonic Lodge for those interested in the occult, in July 1914. Here once again her dutiful, serious-minded, studious self emerged as she made her way through the Order’s elaborate stages, arriving at the same level as Yeats by 1917. In these years, as the war intensified, she worked as a parttime volunteer orderly and nurse in London while continuing her reading and visits to the British Museum. At the end of February 1917 she and Yeats went together to a séance; it seems that the following month he discussed with her the possibility of marriage. He did not then formally propose, but instead left her waiting while he dallied with Maud Gonne and her daughter.

When he did propose, six months later, she accepted him. He described himself as ‘a Sinbad who after many misadventures has at last found port’, but in the days that followed explained his
plans for a continuing familiarity not only with Maud Gonne but with her daughter Iseult. He made this clear to his betrothed and, in turn, to her mother. Her mother wrote in alarm to Lady Gregory, the person who she knew could most influence Yeats, and one of the few who was already aware of the engagement: ‘I now find this engagement is based on a series of misconceptions so incredible that only the context can prove them to be misconceptions.’ Her daughter, she wrote, believed that the poet had wanted to marry her for some time, but the mother’s own impression now was that, instead, ‘the idea occurred to him that as he wanted to marry, she might do’. George, she wrote,

is under the glamour of a great man thirty years older than herself & with a talent for love-making. But she has a strong and vivid character and I can honestly assure you that nothing could be worse for her than to be married in this manner … If Georgie had an inkling of the real state of affairs she would never consent to see him again; if she realized it after her marriage she would leave him at once.

Having interrogated the poet, who had come to Coole, Lady Gregory, in a letter that is now lost, seems to have tried to reassure the mother. She wrote also to George, expressing the hope that she would come to Galway soon before the floods rose above Ballylee, the ruined castle that Yeats had bought a year earlier. George, in the meantime, had been brought by Yeats to meet Maud Gonne and Iseult. Maud wrote to Yeats:

I find her graceful & beautiful, & in her bright picturesque dresses, she will give life and added beauty to the grey walls of Ballylee. I think she has an intense spiritual life of her own & on this side you must be careful not to disappoint her … Iseult likes her very much, and Iseult is difficult & does not take to many people.

Despite this, she told others that she believed the marriage to be ‘prosaic’. Arthur Symons wrote to John Quinn: ‘I wish you had
heard Maude [
sic
] laugh at Yeats’s marriage – a good woman of 25 – rich of course – who has to look after him; who might either become his slave or run away from him after a certain length of time.’

Thus in October 1917 George Hyde-Lees found herself on her honeymoon with W. B. Yeats, who was suffering from nervous stomach disorders. They went first to his flat in London and then to a hotel, where he received a note from Iseult wishing him well. Later, George told an interviewer that she felt him ‘drifting away from her’. He wrote to Iseult making clear his belief that he had made a mistake. Both he and George were miserable. Yeats began work on the poem about Iseult Gonne that eventually became ‘Owen Aherne and His Dancers’, using a notebook that Maud Gonne had given him:

I can exchange opinion with any

neighbouring mind

I have as healthy flesh & blood as any

rhymer’s had
,

But oh my heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;

I ran, I ran from my love’s side because my

heart went mad
.

‘What followed,’ Saddlemyer writes,

has been described several times by George herself … Fully aware of the reason for his unhappiness, first she contemplated leaving him. But then, reluctant to surrender what had been for so many years her destination, she considered arousing his interest through their joint fascination with the occult. She decided to ‘make an attempt to fake automatic writing’ and then confess to her deception once her distracted husband was calmer.

George made this admission that she faked it in the early 1950s to Virginia Moore, who was researching her book
The Unicorn:
William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality
. Yeats remembered the first words as: ‘With the bird all is well at heart. Your action was right for both but in London you mistook its meaning.’ George remembered writing: ‘What you have done is right for both the cat and the hare.’ Yeats would have understood that she was the cat and Iseult the hare or the bird. George’s hand continued to move and wrote, according to Yeats: ‘You will neither regret nor repine.’

‘The word “fake” would continue to haunt George, even though it was a phrase she herself employed in speaking with Virginia Moore and Ellmann,’ Saddlemyer writes. In 1961, when Norman Jeffares was writing his introduction to Yeats’s
Selected Poems
, she wrote to him: ‘I dislike your use of the word “Fake” … I told you this before & you had a happier phrasing in your book. However, I cannot ask you to alter this. The word “Fake” will go down to posterity.’

The words she wrote, in any case, worked wonders. Within days, Yeats described his new happiness to Lady Gregory: ‘The strange thing was that within half an hour after writing of this message my rheumatic pains & my neuralgia & my fatigue had gone & I was very happy. From being more miserable than I ever remember being since Maud Gonne’s marriage I became extremely happy. That sense of happiness has lasted ever since.’

It is easy to understand George’s objection to the word ‘fake’, despite her own use of it. By the time she spoke of these events to young and eager scholars, séances and the occult and automatic writing had gone well out of vogue. Also, the memory of what it was like in that hotel room on her honeymoon with the great poet must have been raw beyond explanation, easier to dismiss casually than explain carefully. Using the word ‘fake’ herself was defensive; seeing someone else using it made it different.

Before she married him, she knew Yeats’s work, attended his lectures and bought his books; she knew of his love for Maud
Gonne and his affair with her stepfather’s sister. She knew also of his love for Iseult Gonne and may even have known of her mother’s letter to Lady Gregory. She realized now not only that the famous poet did not love her and had married her on a whim, but that the idea of the poet, which would have fascinated her, was far removed from the grumpy, sickly, indifferent and miserable man with whom she was now confined in a small space.

In her panic that day, as she began to write in the room, neither her motive nor the language that came to her can be accurately described, however, as fake. What happened was that her needs and her reading converged as she began to eroticize the occult and its attendant forces, just as Maud Gonne had done with Irish nationalism. She was working with desperate longings under pressure; she was producing sentences that made those apparent, followed by words that came at will, easily, from her conscious and her unconscious selves, brought closer to each other by a fear and pain that offered her an unusual receptivity. It seemed that she both believed and didn’t believe in what she was doing. She was moving deliberately and sleepwalking at the same time. Ellmann’s interview notes with her from 1946 read: ‘Had it not been for the emotional involvement, she thinks nothing would have come of it – but as it was she felt her hand grasped and driven irresistibly.’

Yeats was tireless and unembarrassed in his questioning of the spirit, asking many questions, for example, about former loves. And she, in turn, allowed the automatic writing at times to make clear her own sexual needs. In this strange time between the prevailing influence of Madame Blavatsky and that of Sigmund Freud, they both remained ambivalent about the power of a medium to control the autonomous power of the unconscious mind. In 1913 Yeats wrote: ‘Because mediumship is dramatisation, even host mediums cheat at times either deliberately or because some part of the body has freed itself from control of
the waking will, and almost always truth and lies are mixed together.’ George’s problem was that she was now, on a daily basis, embodying this dramatization, in all its ambiguities and complexities. She was both cheating and allowing some part of herself to be freed from conscious control.

She was moving in dangerous territory, having been enough in occult circles to know how much opprobrium was heaped on the quack and the fake. Her husband needed her to keep working, especially once the medium said, in a beautiful phrase, that he had come ‘to give you metaphors for poetry’; she needed him, in turn, to stop talking in public about it, and she used the medium to warn him to be silent. She told Ellmann that her only serious quarrel with him in all the years of their marriage concerned his wish to publish a description of her automatic writing in the second edition of
A Vision
.

The medium gave him, as promised, metaphors for poetry. The experience, and her wish to keep it hidden, also gave him one of his narrative poems, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, in which the woman in her sleep offers the scholar hidden knowledge:

Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?

I say that a Djinn spoke. A live-long hour

She seemed the learned man and I the child
.

The narrator has cause to wonder, as George must have done in those early months of their marriage, if the sleeping wisdom that she offers is the sole basis for his love:

What if she lose her ignorance and so

Dream that I love her only for the voice
,

That every gift and every word of praise

Is but a payment for that midnight voice

That is to age what milk is to a child?

His reply to that question must have been of considerable interest:

All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things

Are but a new expression of her body

Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth
.

And now my utmost mystery is out
.

A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner
.

When George went with her husband to Ireland soon after her marriage, every move she made was studied intensely by the five women who were most involved with the poet. They were his unmarried sisters Lily and Lolly; Maud Gonne and Iseult; and Lady Gregory. The fact that George managed never to quarrel with any of them while maintaining her distance from each says a great deal about her patience and her temperament.

Lily and Lolly wrote to their father in New York describing their new sister-in-law. ‘You feel that she has plenty of personality but that her disposition is so amiable that she does not often assert herself,’ Lolly wrote, ‘not from inertness but because she is happiest in agreement with people around her.’ When they went to the Abbey Theatre, Lily noticed that ‘when the lights went down George used to sit forward and look round me at him, smile to herself and sit back again’. When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs W. B. Yeats.’ Lily thought her sister-in-law ‘delightfully sane, just think of all the pests of women that are going about who suffer from nerves and think it soul – and so does some unlucky man till he marries them – Willy is in luck.’