Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

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  Apart from sinking on unsinkable ships, the principal inconveniences of a life at sea were the nuisance of having your head blown off by a cannonball, or the embarrassment of being captured by a pirate in drag. Apart from these, it was generally an appealing life, offering many opportunities for an ambitious Irish person to go down in history practically anywhere in the vast oceans.

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  Irish Writers: The Chicken-Leg Effect and Other Forms of Inspiration

  Irish painters were a relatively tame lot compared to their Continental counterparts. We have to look to France or Holland for people drinking absinthe and cutting off their ears. However, with writers we have done better. Per capita, we have definitely produced more drunken authors per pub, more Nobel Prize laureates per page and perhaps those with the worst lungs. But the life of the writer in the past in Ireland was trying. Many had to emigrate in order for their genius to be ultimately recognised at home. If an Irish writer couldn’t win a prize or get away, the next best thing was to have their work banned. But the prestige of being banned was historically undermined as a literary challenge when it became only a matter of mentioning the word “sex”, even in a biology book.

  We know from chaos theory, popularly known as the butterfly effect, that seemingly insignificant events can give rise to a chain of unpredictable consequences. Thus the inspiration for great literature can come from innocuous incidents. From the example of James Johnston Abraham (1876–1963), we learn that the smallest episode can inspire a literary genre. He set a chicken’s broken leg when he was a child. This made him decide to become a doctor. He also read a book when he was ten. That caused him to discover “real literature” and be aware of what it was he was ignoring in his own writing. He combined these two inspirations to shape his literary future.

  After graduating in medicine from Trinners, he promptly found himself on a banana boat writing what by his own standards was “unreal literature” – his first book, The Surgeon’s Log (1911). This was quickly followed by his chick-lit work, The Night Nurse, in 1913. This work was adapted for the big screen as the 1935 film Irish Hearts. This was reviewed as “the most ambitious and daring film” to have been made in Ireland at the time – moderate praise, considering it was probably the fourth film to be made in the country.

  The army reasonably rejected Abraham in 1914 for being over-qualified, because getting oneself killed in the First World War demanded little natural talent, and surely no training. He joined the Red Cross instead. In between operating on people, broadcasting and holding many distinguished offices, such as the president of medical societies, he wrote history, biography, journalism, medical articles and an autobiography – in case he was forgotten.

  Genteel Chick-Lit

  Historical chick-lit thrived out of the reach of the censors because it never involved actual sex. The genteel heroines may have been thinking about sex all the time but they weren’t doing it on the pages. Marguerite Gardiner (1789–1849), from Tipperary, who was an early proponent of the principles of chick-lit, knew a lot about sex but didn’t write about that sort of thing.

  She married a violent bully, Captain Farmer, but left him after three months and returned home. She then became “just friends” with Captain Thomas Jenkins in whose house she spent five years studying and reading. I am not an authority on chick-lit but I believe that the genre allows for its characters to enter into credible “friendships” with the opposite sex, because it is a form of fiction. She was such “just friends” with Jenkins that her future husband Charles Gardiner paid Jenkins £10,000113 compensation to allow Marguerite to live with him, Gardiner, as “new just best friends”. Soon after this, Captain Farmer died in a lucky drunken fall, so Gardiner was able to marry her.

  They moved to London where their home became a leading social venue for artists, politicians and writers. Marguerite was known as “most gorgeous” but she was also intelligent and witty. In 1822 she anonymously published her first work, which was a collection of essays. The couple went on a continental tour that lasted ten years – and why not? Gardiner died in 1829, leaving her with diminished funds and an increasing number of her own relations who had become part of her entourage. A recurring feature of marriage in the past was your entire family moving in with you if you just happened to marry someone rich.

  She turned to writing to make money. Her book Conversations with Lord Byron (1834) is her most significant literary work. Her fiction is notable for her shrewd observations of high society. Despite a prodigious literary output, she went bankrupt during the Famine.114 The stress of the literary life finally killed her in 1849.

  A Musing

  While a chicken leg might shape a notable literary career, it was more common for writers to be inspired by love. If you couldn’t write, you could become the object of literary affection in the form of a semi-professional muse, like our most famous literary stimulus, Maud Gonne (1866–1953).

  Gonne was the subject of most of the love poetry of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). Yeats was fascinated by the occult and in that sense Irish literature missed out by his choosing poetry over horror writing. By 1890 he was completely immersed in the supernatural, having joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a Rosicrucian and Kabbalistic esoteric society that practised ritual magic. He was a member of the Theosophical Society, the principal prophet of which was Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. From 1912 he attended many séances. Those were the days because currently it is impossible to find a reputable medium in Dublin.

  During his honeymoon, Yeats discovered that his new wife, George Hyde-Lees (1892–1968), who he married in October 1916, did not have muse qualities; however, she did have a capacity for automatic writing, whereby she claimed she was inspired by a spiritual source. For several years Yeats and his wife contacted spirits together, who provided them with an account of the forces governing historical change in Ireland, because spirits always know what is going on at a teleological level. This period even saw him win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

  By 1934 he was trying to revive both his poetry and his libido with several new muses, including the soon-to-be-insane actress Margot Collins, the novelist Ethel Mannin and the poet Dorothy Wellesley. But Gonne remained his constant inspiration throughout his literary life.

  Gonne was born in England, the daughter of Captain Thomas Gonne. Understandably, as an ardent Irish nationalist, she wanted to be Irish. She produced paperwork to prove it, eventually becoming more Irish than us Irish ourselves. Our genealogy office rarely disappoints. And what harm? She was the ultimate blow-in.

  In 1868, when Gonne was two, Thomas Gonne was appointed brigade major of the cavalry in Ireland, which was stationed at the Curragh. When she was six she was sent to live in London. From there, she went to live in the South of France, where she became fluent in French. When he returned from India in 1879, Thomas Gonne travelled around Europe with his daughter Maud. She spent time with her great-aunt Mary in France and Germany. Mary had ambitions to launch Gonne as a professional beauty, which would have condemned her to a life of attending literary salons. Gonne wouldn’t have any of it. She wanted to become a muse. Musing meant a life of attending literary salons. But her father rescued her from her great-aunt by taking her to Bayreuth in Germany for the Wagner Festival, and then back to Dublin.

  When her father died in 1886, Gonne and her sister Kathleen spent an unhappy time in London with their uncle, William Gonne. As no one remembered to tell Gonne that she would inherit a fortune when she was twenty-one, she tried to make a living by becoming an actress. But before she could develop her thespian skills, she met and began a passionate affair with Frenchman Lucien Millevoye, who was a married journalist with extreme right-wing political views.

  In December 1887 she hit the jackpot when her inheritance came through. Back in Dublin from 1888, she established herself in nationalist circles. Gonne was extremely rich, extremely ta
ll,115 extremely beautiful, fairly intelligent and extremely independent. By contrast, the nationalists were quite a dowdy lot. She became surrounded by a buzz of excitement and gossip because the nationalists had never seen anything like her.

  In London, Gonne stunned Yeats when he first met her in 1889. He fell instantly, madly, insanely and irreversibly in love: it was the love of the poetry nerd for the rock-star model. He wrote about her in fifty poems and many critics argue that she can be found in everything he wrote after meeting her, and maybe even before. She didn’t write reciprocal poems about him. But she did mythologise herself and her role in the formation of a nationalist consciousness in Ireland in her 1938 memoir, A Servant of the Queen.

  In 1890 she gave birth to Millevoye’s son, Georges, in Paris. She kept the baby but never mentioned him to her Dublin nationalist circle because she knew that they were prim revolutionaries. She was aware they weren’t plotting a sexual revolution. Indeed, she wasn’t allowed to join the nationalist organisations, the Gaelic League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the National League, because she was a woman.

  In 1891, Georges died. Gonne wrote to Yeats informing him that she was devastated by the death of an adopted child. By coincidence, she travelled back to Ireland dressed entirely in black on the boat that was carrying Charles Stewart Parnell’s (1846–1891) coffin, so the nationalists believed that she was in mourning for Parnell. This added to her mythology. At that time she may have actually been engaged to Yeats but nothing happened.

  In 1893, hoping to reincarnate their dead child, Gonne and Millevoye had sex in the crypt of the mausoleum that she had built for her dead son. Nine months later Gonne gave birth to Iseult Gonne (1894–1954), who she brought up in France but didn’t initially publicly acknowledge as her daughter.

  In May 1897 Gonne started her own journal, L’Irlande Libre, to present the Irish cause in Continental Europe, and opened a branch of the Young Ireland Society in Paris where she became intensely engaged with Irish nationalism among expatriates, providing support in the form of salons, writing and money.

  She eventually agreed to marry Yeats on another planet, according to their shared astral beliefs, but she wouldn’t marry him on Planet Earth. I am ignoring the many rumours about drugs having any role in this arrangement. But in 1898 Gonne eventually told Yeats about her children. This confession seems to have really shocked him. At that point she was willing to marry him on this planet, but he actually said no. Then he changed his mind, but by then she had also changed hers back again. Close!

  In 1902 she appeared as the lead in Yeats’s play Cathleen Ní Houlihan. In 1903 he begged her not to marry the Irish rebel John MacBride.116 But Gonne converted to Catholicism on 17 February 1903, and married MacBride in Paris on 21 February. MacBride, like many Irish getting married before and after him, vainly hoped that she would change after the ceremony. She travelled to Ireland to get “some space”. Conveniently, he couldn’t follow her because he was wanted by the authorities there.

  In Dublin she flew black petticoats from her home to mourn the death of Pope Leo XIII. This is typical of the ardent behaviour of the recent convert. However, she could not have chosen a more inappropriate garment to mourn the pope, unless she was a) making a deeply sardonic statement; b) it was a feminist declaration; c) her understanding of the papacy was flawed; or d) she knew some secret about the Vatican nuns. We can’t prove that drugs influenced her garment choice. She then protested against all the insidious foreign influences, except hers, in John Millington Synge’s (1871–1909) play The Shadow of the Glen.

  In 1904 in Paris, her son Seán MacBride (1904–1988) was born. She confessed to Yeats that he had been right all along about the prospects of her marriage. She told him that she had made John MacBride into a hero in her own over-active imagination. She sued for divorce. To support her litigation, she didn’t plead insanity. Instead, Gonne accused her husband of sexually assaulting practically everyone in her household or anything that moved. When James Joyce (1882–1941)117 read of the scandalous divorce proceedings in the French newspaper Le Figaro, he wrote to his brother that he was confident that Pope Pius X would alter Catholic regulations to accommodate this Irish Joan of Arc. But when the scandal reached the pious revolutionaries in Dublin, who were more orthodox than the pope, it instantly undermined Gonne’s standing amongst them. She was even hissed at in the Abbey Theatre in 1906 and not because of her acting talents. The divorce was a disaster for her Irish identity. Her “bohemian” circle in Dublin fled at the sight of her.

  After 1906 she lived mainly in France where Yeats was a regular visitor to her Normandy home. They had another affair on an astral plane in June 1908, followed by a brief liaison on Planet Earth. By 1916 she was back in vogue as the widow of a national hero. She might have asked what the British had ever done for her, but in 1916 they shot her ex-husband. She could hardly have hoped for more. The 1916 Rising saved her career as an Irish person. She wore black and called herself Maud Gonne-MacBride and forgave her executed husband all his transgressions, real or imagined.

  In a burst of exhilaration, Yeats proposed to the new merry widow in July 1916, whose bullet-riddled husband was still warm in his unmarked prison grave. Gonne rejected him. In 1910 Gonne’s daughter Iseult had proposed marriage to Yeats but he turned her down because their horoscopes were incompatible. But after Gonne’s rejection of him in 1916, he then proposed to Iseult. Iseult turned him down in August of that year, after consulting with her mother. She said no, not on this planet.

  Yeats married George in October 1916. However, Iseult continued to inspire his poetry between 1918 and 1919. She also inspired a poem as late as 1938, the year before he died. In 1920 Iseult married the writer Francis Stuart (1902–2000). She seems to have been a less successful muse in that relationship because the two fought violently – but maybe that was what was needed.

  Gonne was gaoled in Holloway Prison in 1918 for an alleged pro-German conspiracy. Yeats and her son, the fourteen-year-old Seán MacBride, spearheaded the campaign to have her released and returned to Dublin, which she was.

  Yeats and his wife George had been living an unsettled nomadic life. Gonne allowed them to use her house in Dublin when she was not there – whenever she was in prison, for instance – on the condition they move out by the time she came back. When she was released from gaol in 1918, she arrived home to find Yeats still living in her house, along with his sick pregnant wife, who looked like she was about to die. A massive row broke out, and things were never the same again between Gonne and Yeats, on this or any other planet. After all the musing that they had been through together, the idyllic inspiration sank on the prosaic rock of the parsimonious poet overstaying his welcome.

  Sticking with Joyce

  Much of our literary history seems to be the product of a series of apparently chaotic accidents of love. But are these as random as they appear? James Joyce ultimately became obsessed with the idea that he didn’t meet his true love and muse Nora Barnacle (1884–1951) by accident. From their separate beginnings, he in Dublin and she in Galway, it seemed improbable. He convinced himself that it was in fact incredible, and that his friends had set him up.

  Joyce was a bookish nerd; Barnacle wasn’t. After finishing school, Barnacle became a school porter and a washerwoman. She was a notably rebellious teenager for the conservative Galway of that time, frequently dressing up in men’s clothes, which seems to have been the pastime of half the women in Irish history. She may have borrowed them from the laundry. She thought it was fun to pass herself off as a man around the quiet dull streets of Galway.

  Her uncle, who seems to have been a pious busybody, and we can assume that Galway was crammed with that type at that time, beat her up over her relationship with a local boy. I imagine that same interfering uncle eventually came to regret his intervention after she eventually hooked up with Joyce. But his influence was crucial to Irish literary history because she left Galwa
y in 1904 to become a chambermaid in Finn’s Hotel in Dublin.

  She met Joyce on 10 June 1904, and again on 16 June, the day on which Ulysses is based. As mentioned, Joyce came to believe that the initial meeting might not have been the chance encounter it initially seemed but was arranged by his friend Cosgrave, who may have already been having an affair with Barnacle.

  Barnacle ran away with Joyce to Zurich, Switzerland in October 1904. They moved between Zurich, Trieste and Rome before going back to Trieste, where they settled. She washed and ironed while he wrote books and taught English, as you do. She became interested in opera and fashion. He became interested in booze and other women. She tried to ignore his drinking and womanising. In what is probably the most imaginative intervention in the history of addiction, she threatened to baptise their children if he didn’t stop drinking.

  But theirs was the kind of torturous relationship that was ideal for an aspiring literary genius. He was obsessively jealous over her former boyfriends, real or made-up. By 1909 they even split up for a while because of their constant rows over Joyce’s obsessive belief that Barnacle had been having an affair with his friend Cosgrave when they first met in Dublin in 1904. Joyce was not the kind of man who could let such an idea go. But perhaps we would never have had Ulysses if Joyce hadn’t been obsessed with the tiniest inconsequential details, real or made-up.