New Ways to Kill Your Mother

by Colm Toibin

  In March 1928, George signed a lease on a large flat close to Ezra and Dorothy Pound overlooking the bay at Rapallo, where they spent two winters. Anne and Michael were sent to school in Switzerland. Yeats was released from being a ‘sixty-year-old smiling public man’ in Ireland. The company in Rapallo included the German poet Gerhart Hauptmann and the American composer George Antheil; others such as Max Beerbohm, Richard Aldington, Siegfried Sassoon and Basil Bunting passed through. In Rapallo Yeats recovered and relapsed and needed constant care. ‘Never was his dependence on George greater, or more pathetic,’ Maddox writes. ‘When told he needed a night nurse so that his wife could get some relief, he wept.’ Mostly in these years she was patient, but his helplessness sometimes exhausted her even temper. When she sent him a lamp to Coole in 1931 and he wrote to ask what oil to put into it, she replied: ‘The lamp of course consumes lamp oil, paraffin. What in Heaven’s name else could it consume?! Its very form shouts paraffin oil; you could surely not have imagined that it demanded Sanctuary oil, or olive oil.’

  In Ireland, the Yeatses gave up the house in Merrion Square for a flat in Fitzwilliam Square, and then in 1932 moved to a large house with a garden south of Dublin. When de Valera came to power Yeats flirted briefly with the Blueshirts, a semi-comic Irish Fascist group. George did not share his sympathies. She hated the Blueshirts. Unlike her husband, she was a de Valera supporter and voted Fianna Fáil.

  After the Rapallo sojourn he bounced back, writing to Olivia Shakespear in 1933 that the writing of the Crazy Jane poems was ‘exciting and strange. Sexual abstinence fed their fire – I was ill yet full of desire. They sometimes came out of the greatest mental excitement I am capable of.’ Two years later he told Iseult Gonne, who told Richard Ellmann, that ‘everything was terrible. He and his wife had gradually been alienated – he said she was a mother rather than a wife – that she had humiliated him in public.’ By then he had had a vasectomy, and begun to receive injections that increased his sexual desire in the very years when he was mourning lost sexual opportunities in his youth. ‘Wonderful things have happened,’ he wrote to Olivia. ‘This is Baghdad. This is not London.’

  The old poet started then to make up for lost time. Just as in the 1890s he had moved between Dublin and London, reinventing himself at each crossing, now forty years later London was once more a place that offered freedoms not available in Dublin. In his seventies, with a few years left, he began to have love affairs. George nursed him when he returned exhausted, and seemed concerned that his friends should hear regular news about his condition before he set off again. In January 1935 she wrote to Gogarty: ‘I would rather he died in happiness than in invalidism. He may not have told you of all his past 18 months’ activities. One of them is that he has been very much in love with a woman in London.’ She told Richard Ellmann that she said to him: ‘After your death people will write of your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, because I will remember how proud you were.’ In June 1936, having left Yeats with Dorothy Wellesley, with whom he was having an affair, she returned to Dublin. Robinson wrote to Dolly: ‘W. B. is not coming back at the moment to G’s relief, though Olive says she wants him back as soon as possible (she knows). I think I know that G at any rate wants to play roulette on Sat – and not have Willy.’ Earlier, however, when she went with him to Liverpool, but did not see him off on the boat for Spain, she wrote: ‘I felt too like the dog who sees his master going for a walk and leaving him at home.’

  In other words, her response to his affairs was ambivalent. She drank and was often ill; she was also lonely as Anne left home and Michael went to boarding-school. Nonetheless, she was practical and managerial and full of understanding, even writing to his new loves various accounts of his medical needs. She seems to have encouraged his regular decamping. When he read out loud to George a paragraph of one girlfriend’s letter that suggested that he and the woman might not travel to France alone, ‘she laughed at the idea of our not going alone. That means her blessing … Other people’s minds are always mysterious and I wanted that blessing.’

  Blessings might have come easy, but perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of her self-sacrifice was her willingness to cross the Irish Sea with him as far as Holyhead, accompany him through customs, get him on the train in the direction of one of his liaisons, and then return alone on the same day to Dublin. ‘It was,’ Saddlemyer writes, ‘a long day: an 8.25 train in order to catch the mail boat at Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), landing at Holyhead at 11.45, and departing again at 2.30 for arrival in Ireland at 5.25 p.m. This would become a regular routine.’ No wonder she was drinking.

  By the beginning of 1939, Yeats was in the South of France with George; Dorothy Wellesley and her friend Hilda were close by; and Edith Shackleton, another of his lovers, soon arrived. On Friday 27 January, when he lapsed into a coma, Dorothy saw him for a few minutes, then Edith sat by his bedside; the following day, watched over by George, he died. All three women attended the poet’s burial at Roquebrune near Menton on 30 January.

  As George returned to Ireland, she must have known that she had deprived the nation of one of its greatest joys – a big funeral. There was always something wonderful about the way she kept apart from Irish patriotism and fanaticism and puritanism; her arrival home now without the body of the great poet was almost heroic. As she set about comforting her family, however, the country went into spasm. Maud Gonne wrote to de Valera, the President and the Abbey Theatre, urging that Yeats be buried in Ireland. The poet F. R. Higgins, representing the board of the Abbey Theatre, replied: ‘We are making every endeavour to have the remains brought home to Ireland … I know personally he had a passionate desire to rest in Sligo.’ The theatre’s message to George about the matter was, as Saddlemyer says, ‘aggressive in its urgency’. The Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin offered a grave in the cathedral. De Valera hoped ‘that his body will be laid to rest in his native soil’. What was interesting about all this, besides the national ghoulishness in full flow, was that, since George Yeats had remained so private and reserved and in the background during her years in Ireland, no one felt a need to mention her in their statements. Clearly, the Englishwoman Yeats had married was not cut out to become the national widow.

  Yeats did indeed wish to be buried in his native soil, but he had witnessed the funeral of George Russell, the poet Æ, in 1935, and been appalled by the level of pomp. Five months before he died he had written to Dorothy Wellesley: ‘I write my poems for the Irish people but I am damned if I will have them at my funeral. A Dublin funeral is something between a public demonstration & a private picnic.’ In March 1939, George wrote to MacGreevy that Yeats had asked to be buried in Roquebrune ‘and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo’. George waited until Richard Ellmann came to Dublin in 1946 to report that her husband had also said: ‘I must be buried in Italy, because in Dublin there would be a procession, with Lennox Robinson as chief mourner.’

  When the first biography appeared, she wrote to Frank O’Connor that she was ‘afraid now that it is on the market I will meet people in Dublin who will ask me what I think of the book, so I will slink as I did after Yeats’s death round back streets to avoid the people who said: “You will bring him back, won’t you?” ’ His body was finally brought back in 1948, but, after much confusion in the graveyard in France and many versions of the story, it seems unlikely that the bones in the casket brought to Ireland did in fact belong to Yeats.

  In 1965, the year of Yeats’s centenary, three years before the death of George, Frank O’Connor made an oration over the grave in Sligo. He said: ‘Another thing he would have wished me to do – and which I must do since none of the eminent people who have written of him in his centenary year has done so – is to say how much he owed to the young Englishwoman he married, and who made possible the enormous development of his genius from 1916 onward.’

  In the same year, when Pound came to London for Eliot’s memorial service
, he announced that he wished to fly to Dublin on his way back to Italy. George, by then, only answered the phone at ten o’clock in the morning. On this day, by some miracle, she answered it when it rang at three o’clock in the afternoon, and took a taxi to the Royal Hibernian Hotel to meet Pound, who was travelling with Olga Rudge.

  They had known one another for fifty-five years. During the war, George had often listened to his broadcasts ‘in a humorous, half-conspiratorial sort of way’. Now they sat in silence. When Anne Yeats arrived she could feel the affection between them, but neither said a word. There is a wonderful photograph of them in the hotel that day, Pound gazing at George fondly, almost adoringly, and she, an old lady wearing glasses and a battered hat, taking him in, her expression placid and candid and wise.

  When she died in 1968, she was buried in the grave with her husband’s bones, or others like them, under Ben Bulben in Sligo in the country she’d lived in for more than half a century. Her husband had been, as Frank O’Connor put it, ‘most fortunate in his marriage’.

  New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Synge and His

  Family

  In 1980, having been evicted from a flat in Hatch Street in the centre of Dublin, I was, by accident, offered temporary accommodation around the corner at No. 2 Harcourt Terrace. The house, three storeys over basement, was empty, having recently been vacated by its elderly inhabitant. It was early April when I moved in and the cherry tree in the long back garden was in full blossom. Looking at it from the tall back windows of the house, or going down to sit in the garden under its shade, was a great pleasure. The thought might have occurred to me that whoever had just sold this house could be missing it now, but I don’t think I entertained the thought for very long.

  The aura of the previous inhabitant of this house, in which I ended up living for almost eight years and where I wrote most of my first two books, appeared to me sharply only once. I was putting books in the old custom-made bookshelves in the house when I noticed a book hidden in a space at the end of a shelf where it could not be easily seen. It was a hardback, a first edition of Louis MacNeice’s Springboard: Poems 1941–1944. I realized that these shelves must have, until recently, been filled with such volumes, and that the woman who had left this house and had gone, I discovered, to a nursing home, must have witnessed a lifetime’s books being packed away, the books that she and her husband had collected and read and treasured. Books bought perhaps the week they came out. All lost to her now, including this one, which gave me a sense of her as nothing else did.

  I asked about her. Her name was Lilo Stephens. She was the widow of Edward Stephens, the nephew of J. M. Synge. In 1971 she had arranged and introduced Synge’s My Wallet of Photographs. Edward Stephens, who died in 1955, was the son of Synge’s sister Annie. Born in 1888, when Synge was seventeen, he was aged twenty when his uncle died in 1909. Later, he became an important public servant and a distinguished lawyer. In 1921 he accompanied Michael Collins to London for the negotiations with the British that led to the Treaty which set up the Irish Free State. He was subsequently secretary to the committee that drew up the Irish constitution and thereafter became assistant registrar to the Supreme Court, and finally registrar to the Court of Criminal Appeal.

  In 1939 on the death of his uncle Edward Synge, who had not allowed scholars access to Synge’s private papers, Edward Stephens became custodian of all Synge’s manuscripts. He began working on a biography of his uncle, which would partly be a biography of his family. ‘I see J. M. and his work as belonging much more to the family environment,’ he wrote, ‘than to the environment of the theatre.’ He had been close to his uncle, having been brought up in the house next door to him and spent long summer holidays in his company, and been taught the Bible by Synge’s mother, as Synge had. But, in Synge’s lifetime, not one member of his family had seen any of his work for the theatre. At his uncle’s funeral, Edward Stephens would have had no reason to recognize any of the mourners who came from that side of his uncle’s life. For his family, Synge belonged fundamentally to them; he was, first and foremost, a native of the Synge family.

  ‘It was [Synge’s] ambition,’ he wrote,

  to use the whole of his personal life in his dramatic work. He ultimately achieved this … by dramatising himself, disguised as the central character or, in different capacities, as several of the leading characters, in some story from country lore or heroic tradition. It is in this sense that his dramatic work was autobiographical and that the outwardly dull story of his life became transmuted into the gold of literature.

  In his work, Edward Stephens ‘transcribed in full,’ according to Andrew Carpenter in My Uncle John,

  many family papers dating back to the eighteenth century; he copied any letters, notes, reviews, articles, fragments of plays, or other documentary evidence connected, even remotely, with Synge. He also recounted, with a precision which is truly astonishing, the events of Synge’s life: the weather on particular days, the details of views Synge saw on his bicycle rides or walks and the history of the countryside through which he passed, the backgrounds of every person Synge met during family holidays, the food eaten, the decoration of the houses in which Synge lived, the books he read, his daily habits, his conversations, his coughs and colds – and those of other members of the family.

  By 1950 the typescript was in fourteen volumes, containing a quarter of a million words. On Stephens’s death in 1955, it had still not been edited for publication.

  Lilo Stephens inherited the problem of the Synge estate. Out of her husband’s work – ‘the hillside,’ as one reader put it, ‘from which must be quarried out the authoritative life of Synge’ – two books came. Lilo Stephens made her husband’s work available to David Greene, who published his biography in 1959, naming Edward Stephens as co-author. Later, in 1973, Andrew Carpenter would thank her ‘for her patience, enthusiasm and hospitality’ when he edited her husband’s work to a book of just over two hundred pages, My Uncle John. Lilo Stephens had also inherited Synge’s papers, which had been kept for years in No. 2 Harcourt Terrace as her husband worked on them. In 1971 Ann Saddlemyer would thank her for first suggesting the volume Letters to Molly and providing ‘the bulk of the letters as well as much background material’. Edward Stephens had purchased these letters from Molly Allgood so that they would be safe. Finally, Lilo Stephens ensured the safety of Synge’s entire archive by moving it from Harcourt Terrace to Trinity College, Dublin, where it rests.

  Synge’s family remains of considerable interest, either because of the apparent lack of any influence on his work, or because they may or may not hold a key to his unyielding and mysterious genius. He seemed in his concerns and beliefs to have nothing in common with them – he stated that he never met a man or a woman who shared his opinions until he was twenty-three – and yet, for a great deal of his adult life, he lived with them and depended on them. Any version of his life and work has to take his family into account and understand the idea, in Edward Stephens’s words, ‘that the context of his life … was quite different from any other writer of the literary movement. I tried to create a picture of a class or group in Irish society that has almost vanished.’

  If a writer were in the business of murdering his family, then the Synges, with their sense of an exalted and lost heritage and a strict adherence to religious doctrine added to dullness, would have been a godsend. Synge’s great-grandfather, Nicholas Grene tells us in his essay on Synge and Wicklow in Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991–2000, ‘owned not only Glanmore [in County Wicklow], with its fifteen hundred acres of demesne including the Devil’s Glen, but Roundwood Park as well, an estate of over four thousand acres’. His grandfather, however, managed to lose most of this property, a portion only of which was bought back by Synge’s uncle. Synge’s father, who became a barrister, died when Synge was one year old. He left a widow, four sons, a daughter and four hundred pounds a year. The first three sons were solid citizens, becoming a land agent, an eng
ineer and a medical missionary to China respectively. The daughter married a solicitor. The youngest, it was presumed, despite his solitary nature and regular illnesses, would eventually find a profession to suit his family, if not his temperament.

  In his book Letters to my Daughter, published in 1932, Synge’s brother Samuel, the missionary, wrote:

  There is little use in trying to say what if our father had lived might have happened different to what did happen. But I think two things are fairly clear. One is that as your Uncle John grew up and met questions that he did not know how to answer, a father’s word of advice and instruction would have made a very great difference to him. The other thing is that probably our father would have arranged something for your Uncle John to do besides his favourite reading, something that would not have been too much for him but would have brought in some remuneration at an earlier date than his writings did.

  This was to consign Synge’s mother Kathleen to dust, to suggest a sort of powerlessness for her. She was, in fact, a very powerful person. Synge’s mother was born Kathleen Traill in 1838. Her father was a clergyman of whom Edward Stephens wrote: ‘He spent his life, as he put it, waging war against popery in its thousand forms of wickedness, which did not always endear him to his ecclesiastical superiors.’ Finally he became rector of Schull in County Cork, where he died in 1847 from a fever caught from the people among whom he worked. His widow, who had been brought up in Drumboe Castle in County Donegal, moved to Orwell Park in the southern suburbs of Dublin. From here in 1856, her daughter married John Hatch Synge, the playwright’s father. They lived in Hatch Street in the early years of their marriage, later moving to Rathfarnham, where John Millington Synge was born. Later, after her husband’s death, Kathleen Synge moved her family to Orwell Park in Rathgar.