New Ways to Kill Your Mother

by Colm Toibin

  In London soon after her marriage, George set about befriending Iseult Gonne, inviting her to stay the night, giving her a dress for Christmas and generally taking the harm out of her. The following year, when her mother was imprisoned for sedition, Iseult stayed at Yeats’s old flat in London and was sent money by George, who wrote worried motherly letters to Ezra Pound (who would soon have an affair with Iseult) about the need for her to find a job, doubting if she would consent to doing ‘machine work’. When Iseult began to share a flat with the highly unsuitable mistress of Wyndham Lewis, both Yeats and George arrived from Dublin and swooped on the place, as though they were her parents, removing Iseult, Josephine her maid, her cat, her birds and her furniture to more decent quarters. George was less than two years older than her.

  Taking the harm out of Maud Gonne would prove more difficult. In October 1918, while Maud Gonne remained in prison, Yeats and George rented her house, 73 St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. ‘Should you be released,’ Yeats wrote to her, ‘and allowed to live in Ireland we will move out, which strangers would not.’ The following month, while pregnant with her first child, George caught the influenza virus that was raging through Europe. Yeats feared that she was dying. Maud Gonne, too, had been ill in Holloway Prison, and, after much agitation, was released to a nursing home in London. From there she fled to Yeats’s old flat, where Iseult was living. She wrote to Yeats: ‘My home in Dublin is the best place for all of us, with Josephine to cook for us. Please try & arrange that.’ Ezra Pound wrote to John Quinn: ‘I hope no one will be ass enough to let her get to Ireland … It is a great pity, with all her charm, that the mind twists everything that goes into it, on this particular subject’ – he meant politics, adding in brackets: ‘Just like Yeats on his ghosts.’ On 24 November, Saddlemyer writes, ‘disguised as an emaciated Red Cross nurse (perhaps in the very uniform George had cast off on her marriage), Maud slipped through the immigration line and arrived at the door of 73 St Stephen’s Green, demanding shelter’. She was accompanied by her two children and had much menagerie.

  Yeats refused to let her in, and even when a doctor arrived and informed Maud Gonne that her continued presence might endanger George’s life, ‘still the lunatic refused to go’, as Lily Yeats wrote to John Quinn. Yeats ‘had a scene with her and turned her out’. She wrote him venomous letters and denounced him to her fellow nationalists. ‘Later she would complain,’ Saddlemyer writes, ‘that although married to a rich wife, he took advantage of her in prison by offering such a low rent, and she never forgot that George’s pet hares ate all the greenery in her garden.’ In spite of this, once the Yeatses moved out, cordial but distant relations were established, and Yeats began to attend Maud’s ‘at homes’ on Tuesdays at number 73. The following summer, as George stayed with her baby daughter in Galway and Ireland prepared for guerrilla war, one of her mediums warned her husband ‘not to be drawn into anything … you may be tempted to join in political schemes if there is trouble and you must not’. The figure of Maud in the automatic writing was the ‘Bird with white & black head & wings’. She was ‘dangerous … Nothing must be said unless she speaks of it – then simply say you are destroying the souls of hundreds of young men. That method is most wicked in this country – wholesale slaughter because a few are cruel … I am not sure of her.’ A few years later Yeats wrote to George that Maud Gonne ‘had to choose (perhaps all women must) between broomstick and distaff and she has chosen broomstick’.

  Of the women who were closest to Yeats, Lady Gregory was the one he saw most of after his marriage. George, Yeats’s father noted when he met her in New York, was ‘the only woman I have ever met who is not scared of Lady Gregory. I fancy Lady Gregory is extra civil to her – naturally.’ She was, he wrote, ‘too intelligent’ not to see Lady Gregory’s ‘great merit, but yet alive to the necessities of self-defence’. The two women had much in common: notably steadfastness, conscientiousness, and a belief in Yeats’s genius. ‘They were shrewd judges of character,’ Saddlemyer writes, ‘and generous in the service of others; although good listeners, neither suffered fools or deceivers gladly.’

  Later, when the Yeatses had a house in Dublin, Lady Gregory stayed with them on her visits to the city. She attended Yeats’s ‘Mondays’ in the house. ‘It is supposed to be for men only,’ she wrote, ‘and might be better so.’ Unlike Mrs Oliver St John Gogarty, however, who presided at her husband’s evenings, George Yeats ‘always discreetly withdrew, reappearing only to serve refreshments’. When Lady Gregory came to stay, George gave up her room for her, ran messages and answered the telephone for her, all the while maintaining civil and often warm relations with her. In 1927 she wrote to a friend: ‘Lady G was here for one whole month … only left yesterday and I have been sitting in the smallest possible nutshell in order to preserve a moderate outward sanity.’ Even though she blamed Gregory for the controversy over the Abbey Theatre’s rejection of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, calling her ‘an obstinate old woman’, she kept her resentments to a few correspondents, including Dorothy Pound:

  Christ how she repeats herself now … she’ll tell you the same saga quite literally three times in less than an hour, and repeat it again the next day, and the day after that too. Burn when read … She wants W to go down to Coole for most of September, and I hope he will – he doesn’t seem to mind the reiterations. Personally they send me nearer lunacy than anything I ever met.

  Houses and flats and rooms had the same power for Yeats as phases of the moon. It is not a coincidence that a short time after his marriage he moved Iseult into his flat in London and then rented Maud Gonne’s house in Dublin. By allowing Iseult to inhabit his London rooms and by his own moving daily in the house her mother bought, and then by refusing them entry to 73 St Stephen’s Green, he was enacting and exorcizing these two women’s haunting of him. He was also behaving sensibly. Yeats was good at making sure that even sensible behaviour had an undertow of symbolic resonance.

  Thus he bought the derelict Norman keep at Ballylee in 1917, to assist him in his dreaming, telling Lady Gregory that its decoration would ‘depend on my wife if I marry’. In June he wrote to a friend: ‘I am 51 myself and do not like it at all and keep thinking of all the follies I have committed not to have someone to talk to after nightfall and to bring me gossip of the neighbours. Especially now that I am going to own a castle and a whole acre of land.’ Once married, George joined the dream and began to plan the renovation of the tower at Ballylee. ‘Among the duties she took over,’ Maddox writes, ‘was the correspondence with Rafferty, the builder who was renovating Thoor Ballylee. She did more. She paid, from her own bank account, the bills for the tower she had never seen in the country she had never visited.’

  George’s work on planning its restoration became, like her automatic writing, her contribution to the store of myth and symbol that would continue to nourish Yeats’s work. Nonetheless, both Yeats and Lady Gregory were concerned that George should not see the tower at its most inhospitable in winter, when it flooded and the walls were wet with damp. When they spent part of the summer of 1919 there, Yeats drew an idyllic picture for his father. ‘It may well be,’ William Murphy later wrote in his biography of Yeats’s father, ‘that one of the happiest days of his life was 16 July 1919. Fishing in the stream by the tower, with George sewing and “Anne lying wide awake in her 17th-century cradle”, he saw an otter chasing a trout.’ His tower, Yeats wrote to John Quinn, was ‘a place to influence lawless youth, with its severity and antiquity. If I had had this tower when Joyce began I might have been of use, have got him to meet those who might have helped him.’ Joyce, however, might have been more interested in the fact that conditions in the tower were so primitive. The nearest shop was four and a half miles away. It had no electricity or plumbing. ‘Water for washing,’ Maddox writes,

  had to be fetched from the river in a large galvanised water carrier on wheels, while drinking water came from another source farther away. Family life took place mainly in
the cottage (where the single earth-closet was located); peat fires or oil stoves had to be kept lit to reduce the dampness seeping from the walls. The roof and top floors of the tower were unfinished, and there was no possibility of sleeping there.

  The tower at Ballylee belonged firmly in the category of writers’ second houses, offering shelter to areas of imaginative energy rather than the growing family; it was dreamed into being, and then reworked and reconstructed in the way a poem was made. Both George and Yeats entered into the spirit of it wholeheartedly, pouring money into it, including much of the proceeds of Yeats’s American tour in 1920, and mentioning it constantly as the place to which they most longed to go. It was also their main connection to Ireland as the Black and Tan War raged. Lady Gregory must have taken a sly pleasure in writing from Coole in December 1920: ‘Your Oxford life sounds very peaceful – All chaos here still … The Black & Tans visited Ballylee, opened the door with a key & went in & there were rumours they were going to settle there.’ This caused Pound to report to Quinn: ‘George just in to say that the Blackantans have tanned Ballylee.’ No damage was done, however, and, as their second child was born, the Yeatses continued to plan a return to the tower, Yeats writing to Lady Gregory that his wife talked ‘constantly of the trees and of her garden and of the river’.

  In April 1921 they returned after an eighteen-month absence and were able to sleep for the first time in the tower itself, in the large bedroom above the ground floor. Yeats wrote to Quinn: ‘It is a great pleasure to live in a place where George makes at every moment a 14th-century picture. And out of doors, with the hawthorn all in blossom all along the river banks, everything is so beautiful that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind.’ Yeats wrote at a desk by the window, where he could watch the stares, or starlings, flying in and out of their nest, and, as the Civil War broke out in April 1922, this gave him the final line of each stanza in ‘The Stare’s Nest by My Window’:

  A barricade of stone or of wood;

  Some fourteen days of civil war;

  Last night they trundled down the road

  That dead young soldier in his blood:

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  While they had sat out the Black and Tan War in Oxford, now they would witness first-hand the Civil War – which was dangerous for Yeats as a supporter of the Free State. In August, when the bridge at Ballylee was blown up, George wrote to Ottoline Morrell:

  & when the fuses were lit & all the men ran off as hard as they could pelt, one man stayed behind to say: ‘In a few minutes now. There will be two explosions. Good night! Thank you.’ As though he was thanking us for the bridge! … At the time, after a feeling of panic when we heard the irregulars knocking at the door & had to go out to speak to them, one felt nothing but a curiosity to see how it was done & to try & save windows etc. But since then we have both felt rather ill & our hearts both hopping & stopping.

  By the end of 1923, with the Civil War over, her husband having won the Nobel Prize and now a senator in the Irish Free State, with a house in Merrion Square (the equivalent of Berkeley Square in London, Yeats wrote to a friend), with the tower coming into shape, and two engaging children, and the Irish Sea between herself and her mother, who could irritate her, George Yeats had added to her happiness by having a number of Irish friends of her own. Like many women of her class, she was in need of a pair of homosexual men to confide in and gossip with, and these came in the guise of the playwright Lennox Robinson and the poet Thomas MacGreevy. Since most of Dublin suspected their homosexuality, ‘neither was a threat to the good name of Mrs W. B. Yeats’, Saddlemyer writes. She worked with both on the Dublin Drama League, which sought to produce more cosmopolitan work than was being put on at the Abbey. When MacGreevy moved to London in 1925, she wrote: ‘I wish you were back here. Willy said last night very solemnly: “Now MacGreevy’s not here we have to do our own gossiping.” ’ In August of that year, the Yeatses spent time in Milan with Robinson and MacGreevy. Yeats, it seemed, did not enjoy the trip as much as George and her two new friends. He stayed in the hotel when the others went out sightseeing.

  ‘Only six years older than she,’ Saddlemyer writes, ‘Lennox quickly became George’s devoted pal. Together they gambled on the sweeps, went to the races (both horse and dog), the opera, the cinema and the theatre; they shared their experiences in gardening and breeding canaries.’ And they both drank a good deal, Robinson slowly becoming hopelessly alcoholic.

  In London, MacGreevy, much to George’s consternation, also befriended her mother, who immediately began to flirt with him. ‘You make me wish I were your own age,’ her mother wrote to him, ‘we could play a good game.’ By encouraging him to become an artist she seemed to feel that she had become one, too: ‘Love must be kept firmly in the present, it is a thing without past or future … The fact remains that, fundamentally and however painfully, we are artists and artists we shall remain, and we both know that art is the only thing that matters and the one thing that makes the world tolerable.’

  Soon George’s mother and the young Irish poet were discussing George, much to George’s annoyance:

  Please please please, don’t mention my name to my mother when you are writing to her more than is consistent with the usual necessities … My mother loves to make a whirlpool and especially if she can suck me in to it, and she has probably worked herself up into an annoyance with me in order to amuse herself over the Xmas holidays. That was why I said gaily to you in London: ‘you are not to discuss me with my mother.’

  Robinson and MacGreevy, in the early years of their acquaintance with George, thickened the plot by indulging in unrequited love. In 1919, Robinson, whose idol was Yeats, fell for Iseult Gonne, who rejected him despite Yeats’s suggestion that they should marry. Yeats’s sisters invited the unhappy couple to supper, but Lily remained doubtful that Iseult would change her mind. The following year Iseult married the eighteen-year-old Francis Stuart. George, Saddlemyer writes, sympathized with Robinson’s ‘lingering affection for Iseult’.

  Both gentlemen then directed their attention towards the artist Dolly Travers Smith, with whose mother, Hester, a well-known medium, they were also friends, both having boarded with her at different times. (Hester’s books included Oscar Wilde from Purgatory: Psychic Messages.) Hester and Dolly were to become the third mother and daughter in Yeats’s circle who provoked interest in the same men. George thought Hester ‘the unbending hard essence of everything I loathe mentally, emotionally and temperamentally. She makes me think of lumpy beds, Russian fleas and ipecacuanha wine.’

  In the same years that she was getting to know Robinson and MacGreevy, George was also spending time at Thoor Ballylee. In March 1926, she wrote to MacGreevy: ‘I go to Ballylee Thursday morning for three glorious days of solitude & cabbage planting & on my return will write you a sober & sane & reasonable letter.’ But there are also letters of complaint about conditions there, and the amount of hard work required to keep the place going. Yeats, in the meantime, was writing poems that used the tower at Ballylee as symbol and icon. In February 1928 The Tower was published. For the cover of the book Thomas Sturge Moore had made an etching of Thoor Ballylee. ‘Now,’ Saddlemyer writes,

  with that magnificent volume and A Vision both published, from now on, while still ‘this blessed place’, the tower had become emblazoned on his heraldic shield for all to recognize, assess and debate. Proud as she might be of the poetry she had done so much to make possible, the penalty was an inevitable dissipation of the original magic; by remaking the imagery, Yeats had once again taken possession of the tower itself.

  The tower had served its purpose; like the automatic writing, Thoor Ballylee had delivered him metaphors for his poetry; it had also allowed George to function in the domestic sphere while at the same time empowering Yeats, offering him both comfort and a charged environment. Once the book was published, neither she nor Yeats had any desire to go back there. Despite all the specially commissioned furnitur
e, the letters to the builder, the planning and dreaming, after 1928 the tower remained closed, a symbol of the way writers use houses for their magic properties rather than their domestic space. Over the next few years, as Lady Gregory’s health was declining, Yeats spent a good deal of time at Coole and ‘dutifully reported on regular inspections of the rapidly deteriorating cottage and castle’. When she grew older his daughter Anne ‘tentatively asked whether she might go there to paint, but George’s monosyllabic refusal was so abrupt that she gave up the idea of ever returning’.

  The abandonment of the tower may also be bound up with an essential change in the relationship between George and Yeats.

  Around 1928 and 1929 she ceased to have a close sexual relationship with him and became his nurse, the devoted mother of his children and a great worrier on his behalf. Yeats and their children seemed to suffer from great numbers of illnesses. From the time George and Yeats went on holiday to Spain in November 1927 until he died in January 1939, the state of his health and her children’s health became George’s main preoccupation; her tone in letters is often bitter and disappointed. In 1928 she wrote to MacGreevy: ‘had I known that all this might happen I should certainly never have had a family.’ She added ‘burn this when read’ at the top of the letter. When in Spain Yeats’s lung began to bleed, they made their way with difficulty to France and from there to Rapallo. Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear that George was ‘all goodness and kindness’. George, as she tried to get the children to Italy, wrote to Robinson: ‘I felt for years that life was quite unnecessary & if only a landslide would remove me they could have jointly a nurse a governess a secretary & a housekeeper & all get on so much better.’