YEATS AND WOMEN

Also by Deirdre Toomey

lHE COLLECTED LEITERS OF W. B. YEATS, Volume 11: 1896-1900

(co-edited with Warwick Gould and lohn I<elly)

Yeats and Wonten

Edited by

Deirdre Toomey

Second Edition

Published in Great Britain 1997 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-333-69816-7 ISBN 978-1-349-25822-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25822-2

Published in the United States of America 1997 by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

ISBN 978-0-312-17408-8 cloth ISBN 978-0-312-17409-5 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yeats and wornen / edited by Deirdre Toomey. - 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-312-17408-8 (cloth). - ISBN 978-0-312-17409-5 (paper)

1. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), I 865-1 939-Relations with wornen. 2. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939-Characters--Women. 3. Wornen and Iiterature-lreland--History-2Oth century. 4. Wornen and Iiterature-lreland--History-l9th century. 5. Femininity (Psychology) in literature. 6. Poets, Irish-2Oth century--Biography. 7. Poets,lrish-l9th century-Biography. I. Toomey, Deirdre. PR5906.Y435 1997 82I'.8---dc21 [Bl 97-2178

© Deirdre Toomey 1992, 1997 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 2nd edition 1997 978-0-333-67049-1

First edition (Yeats anti Warnen: Yeats Annual No. 9) 1992 Second edition 1997

CIP

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10987654321 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97

Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on the Contributors

Abbreviations

List of Plates

Introduction

1 Labyrinths: Yeats and Maud Gonne Deirdre Toomey

2 At the Feet of the Goddess: Yeats's Love Poetry and the Ferninist Occult

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford

3 "The Music of Heaven": Dorothea Hunter Warwick Gould

vü

ix

x

xv

xvi

1

41

73

4 Away 135 Deirdre Toomey

5 Patronage and Creative Exchange: Yeats, Lady Gregory and the Econorny of Indebtedness 168

James Pethica

6 "Our Kathleen": Yeats's Collaboration with Lady Gregory in the Writing of Cathleen ni Houlihan 205

James Pethica

7 Yeats and Wornen: Michael Robartes and the Dancer 223 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford

8 "Secret Communion": Yeats's Sexual Destiny John Harwood

v

252

vi Contents

9 Florence Farr: Letters to W. B. Yeats, 1912-17 281 Edited by Josephine Johnson

10 Olivia Shakespear: Letters to W. B. Yeats 323 Edited by John Harwood

11 W. B. Yeats's "Poems about Women: a Broadcast" 384 Edited by Warwick Gould

Appendix: Manuscript Draft of Cathleen ni Houlihan 403 Transcribed by James Pethica

Index 419

Acknowledgements

My chief debt of gratitude is to Miss Anne Yeats and Mr Michael B. Yeats for granting permission (through A. P. Watt Ud) to use pub­lished and unpublished materials by W. B. Yeats in this volume. Unpublished materials are the copyright of Michael B. Yeats and Anne Yeats. Many of the contributors, including myself, are further indebted to Michael Yeats and Anne Yeats for making unpublished materials available for study.

Other unpublished materials have been made available through the kindness of Dr Ornar Pound. I am grateful to Colin Smythe Ud, on behalf of Catherine Kennedy and Anne de Winton for permis­sion to use unpublished materials by Lady Gregory, and on behalf of Mrs Diarmuid Russell to use materials from the unpublished work of George Russell. Mr John Hunter allowed access to and quotation from the unpublished papers of Dorothea Hunter. The Society of Authors on behalf of the Estate of George Bemard Shaw and Professor Dan H. Laurence allowed quotation from Shaw's un­published correspondence. A number of helpfullibrarians, includ­ing Catherine Fahy and B. McKenna of the National Library of Ireland, the late Dr Lola L. Szladits of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations), Dr Cathy Henderson and Professor Thomas F. Staley at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, have provided materials and research assistance.

Photographs reproduced in this volume have been provided through the generosity of Mrs Anna MacBride White and Professor A. Norman Jeffares, Mr John Hunter, a private collector, Josephine Johnson, Conrad A. Balliet, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Texas, the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, the National Library of Ireland, and the National Gallery of Ireland.

Linda Shaughnessy of A. P. Watt & Son, Professor Roy Foster, FBA of Hertford College, Oxford, and Professor John KeHy of St John's College, Oxford, on behalf of Oxford University Press, were generous with permissions. Warwick Gould helped at every stage of the production of this book. At MacmiHan, Charmian Hearne and Tim Farmiloe were particularly helpful.

vii

viii Acknowledgements

Six articles in this revised and enlarged edition of Yeats and Women originally appeared in Yeats Annual 9: Yeats and Women (1992): Elizabeth Butler Cullingford's "Yeats and Wornen: Michael Robartes and the Dancer" originally appeared in Yeats Annual4 (1986) and her "At the Feet of the Goddess" was published as Chapter 2 of her Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry (Carnbridge University Press, 1993; Syracuse, 1996). Jarnes Pethica's '''Our Kathleen'" origi­nally appeared in Yeats Annual 6 (1988). John Harwood's "Olivia Shakespear: Letters to W. B. Yeats" originally appeared in Yeats Annual6 (1988). The editor's "Away" originally appeared in Yeats AnnuallO (1993).

DEIRDRE TOOMEY

Notes on the Contributors

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford is Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (Macmillan, 1981) and History and Gender in the Love Poetry of W. B. Yeats (Cambridge University Press, 1993; Syracuse, 1996).

Warwick Gould is Professor of English, Royal Holloway, University of London. He is author (with Marjorie Reeves) of Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth Century (Clarendon, 1987) and co-editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, volume 11: 1896-1900 (Clarendon Press, 1997).

John Harwood is Reader in English at Flinders University of South Australia. He is the author of Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: "After Long Silence" (Macmillan, 1989) and Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation (Macmillan, 1995).

Josephine Johnson is Professor of English, University of Florida at Coral Gables. She is the author of Florence Farr: Bernard Shaw's "New Woman" (Colin Smythe, 1975).

James Pethica is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Richmond, Virginia. He is the editor of Lady Gregory's Diaries (Colin Smythe and Oxford University Press, 1996) and editor of Last Poems: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats (Cornell, 1997).

Deirdre Toomey is co-editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, volume 11: 1896-1900 (Clarendon Press, 1997).

ix

Abbreviations

The standard works listed below are cited by standard abbrevi­ations, including volume number (where appropriate), and page number. Manuscripts are cited using abbreviations for the main coHections, listed below. Second or later citations of other works frequently referred to are usuaHy made with an abbreviation or acronym as explained in the note accompanying the first citation in a particular essay.

Au

AVA

AVB

Berg

BL Add. MS

CLl,2,3

CVA

Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955).

A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon certain Doctrines at­tributed to Kusta Ben Luka (London: privately printed for subscribers only by T. Wemer Laurie, 1925). See also CV A.

AVision (London: Macmillan, 1962).

Books and Manuscripts, The Berg CoHection, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

Additional Manuscript, The British Library, London (foHowed by number). Manuscripts as yet uncatalogued are cited as BL Uncat.

The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, volume 1: 1865-1895, ed. John KeHy and Eric Domville; volume 2: 1896-1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John KeHy and Deirdre Toomey; volume 3: 1901-1904, ed. John KeHy and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 1997, 1994).

A Critical Edition of Yeats's AVision (1925), ed. George Mills Harper and Walter KeHy Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978).

x

Diaries

E&I

Emory

Ex

G-YL

I&R

L

LDW

LTWBY

MBY

Mem

Abbreviations xi

Lady Gregory's Diaries 1892-1902, ed. & intro. James Pethica (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996).

Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmillan, 1961).

Books and manuscripts in the Robert W. Woodruff Ubrary, Emory University, Atlanta Ga.

Explorations, seI. Mrs W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962; New York: Macmillan, 1963).

The Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893-1938: Always Your Friend, ed. Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (London: Hutchinson, 1992).

W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail (London: Macmillan, 1977) 2 vols.

The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan,1955).

Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, intro. Kathleen Raine (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

Letters to W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper and William M. Murphy with the assistance of Alan B. Himber (London: Macmillan; New Yorlc Columbia University Press, 1977),2 vols.

Manuscripts in the Collection of Michael Butler Yeats.

Memoirs: Autobiography - First Drajt: Journal, transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan,1973).

xii

Myth

MYV1,2

NC

NLI

NYPL

OBMV

PR

SB

UP1

UP2

VP

Abbreviations

Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959).

The Making of Yeats's "A Vision": A Study of the Automatie Script by George Mills Harper (London: Macmillan; Carbondale and Edwardsville, lli.: Southem lliinois University Press, 1987), 2 vols.

A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats by A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).

Manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland.

Manuscripts in the New York Public Library.

The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1895-1935, chosen by W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

The Poems: Revised, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan; New York: Macmillan, 1989).

The Speckled Bird, with Variant Versions, ed. William H. O'Donnell (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1976).

Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, volume 1, ed. John P. Frayne (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, volume 2, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Columbia Univer­sity Press, 1976).

The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957). Cited from the corrected third printing of 1966.

VPl

VSR

Wade

YA

YAACTS

YL

YT

YVPl, 2, 3

Abbreviations xiü

The Variorum Edition 0/ the Plays 0/ W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach assisted by Catherine C. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966). Cited from the corrected second printing of1966.

The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, ed. Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus and Michael J. Sidnell (London: Macmillan, 1992). Second edition, rev. and enl. (first edn Cornell University Press, 1981).

Allan Wade, A Bibliography 0/ the Writings 0/ W. B. Yeats, third edn, rev. Russell K. Alspach (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968). Item nos and/or page nos preceded by "p.".

Yeats Annual (London: Macmillan, 1982- ) cited by number.

Yeats: An Annual 0/ Critical and Textual Studies (1983- ) followed by number and date.

Edward Q'Shea, A Descriptive Catalog 0/ W. B. Yeats's Library (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985).

Yeats and the Theatre, ed. Robert Q'Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (Toronto: Macmi1lan of Canadai Niagara Falls, New York: Maclean-Hunter, 1975).

Yeats's Vision Papers, George Mills Harper (General Editor) et al. (London: Macmillan, 1992).

Note: Quotations from Yeats's poems in this volume are taken from the only edition to include the full range of variant readings, The Variorum Edition (see above). The best popular alternative to this edition is Yeats's Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares, with an

xiv Abbreviations

appendix by Warwick Gould (London: Macmillan, 1989; 3rd rev. edn, 1996). This annotated edition conforms to Yeats's preferred overall chronological volume arrangement whilst preserving his last two books as New Poems and Last Poems, and ordering the poems of the latter according to Yeats's last known wishes.

List of Plates

1 W. B. Yeats in the early 1890s 2 Maud Gonne, c. 1889 3 Lady Gregory as Cathleen ni Houlihan, Abbey Theatre,

Dublin, January 1919 4 Mausoleum of Georges Gonne, Samois-sur-Seine, near

Fontainebleau 5 Maud Gonne MacBride and Sean MacBride, c. 1906 6a Olivia Shakespear, c. 1897 6b George Russell's oil painting of Iseult Gonne (n.d.) 7 Florence Farr as a young woman (n.d.) 8 Florence Farr with her pupils at the Ramanathan

College, Sri Lanka 9 Dorothea and Edmund Hunter and their eldest son,

Ralph, c. 1898 lOa and b Shrine of Nem-kheft-ka, decorated by Edmund Hunter.

The portraits of Egyptian deities are probably by Farr 11 Maud Gonne, Lugh and Kezan, in the grounds of

Roebuck House, Dublin, early 1930s 12 W. B. Yeats, Menton, January 1938

Sources

1 Emest Rhys, Everyman Remembers, British Library 2 National Library of Ireland 3 Colin Smythe 4 Conrad Balliet 5 Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University 6a Literary Yearbook (1897) 6b National Gallery of Ireland 7 Josephine Johnson 8 Josephine Johnson 9 John Hunter

10a John Hunter lOb John Hunter 11 Anna MacBride White 12 Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

xv

Introduction

The young Yeats, as he is reconstructed in Autobiographies, was drawn to and domina ted by a group of strong fathers: his Pollexfen grandfather - "Even to-day when 1 read King Lear his image is before me, and 1 often wonder if the delight in passionate men in my plays and in my poetry is more than his memory"; his own father - "My father's influence upon my thoughts was at its height"; John O'Leary - "He had the moral genius that moves all young people"; Henley - "I admired him beyond words"; Wilde -"My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment"; Morris - "It was now Morris himself that stirred my interest, and 1 took to him at first because of some little tricks of speech and body that re­minded me of my old grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and joy and made him my chief of men": lastly, MacGregor Mathers - "a figure of romance ... a necessary extrava­gance". These figures had an essential shaping effect upon Yeats, more permanent than that of the friends of his own age: Russell, Johnson, Symons.

Yeats recalls that the influence of his father declined when he was about twenty-three years of age. "When 1 was in my teens 1 admired my father above all men ... but when 1 was twenty-three or twenty-four ... we began to quarrel." The break with John Butler Yeats initiates the beginning of the movement away from the group of strong fathers. Yeats's hierarchkal sensibility which demanded objects to admire, to mythologise, to be shaped by, could no longer be satisfied with an adolescent admiration of powerful older men, yet the women whom he had befriended as a young man had only a superficial impact upon him - Laura Armstrong seems as typkai an object of calf-Iove as does Katharine Tynan, a young man's de­sexualised, sisterly confidante.

It was at the time of his first meeting with Maud Gonne that he revolted against John Butler Yeats. At this point in Autobiographies, the power of the strong patemal figures is evidently on the cusp and by the mid 1890s Yeats's allegiance was transferring itself from men to women; not merely women as kons, sexual objects, muses, but as companions, mentors, fellow-workers. The first overpower­ing female personality he encountered was Madame Blavatsky - " A

xvi

Introduction xvü

great passionate nature", but he viewed her as half masculine, a "female Dr ]ohnson". The Theosophical Society led him to the beautiful Dorothea Butler, whose "purity of lrish vision" was greatly to influence his thought. Then came Maud Gonne - "I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past ... 1 remem­ber nothing of her speech that day except that she vexed my father by praise of war." Shortly afterwards he met Florence Farr - "a dis­covery that was to influence my life" and then, in 1894, Olivia Shakespear - "the most significant image of those years". It is with Augusta Gregory that Dramatis Personae conc1udes - "in her last years ... she always seemed her greater self". Of her he had con­ceded, "I doubt if 1 should have done much with my life but for her firmness and her care." All these women were, to a greater or lesser degree, unconventional: an occultist, a political activist, an actress, a novelist and an aspiring writer. All were economically more powerful than Yeats: it is notable that the women with whom he involved himself, emotionally or otherwise, were usually pos­sessed of an independent income. Maud Gonne's handsome private income gave her that freedom - "the will of the wild birds" - which Yeats admired and resented. His financial relationship with Lady Gregory had deleterious <'spects. Florence Farr told Henry Nevinson that Yeats was C .... 1905) afraid to marry "for fear of Miss Horniman, Lady Gregory, & the terrors of money". Yeats will con­tinue to be accused of misogyny in his writing, yet in ideology and actuality he was not an anti-feminist, despite the rhetorical chid­ings of "A Prayer for my Daughter". If one assesses the relative im­portance in Yeats's life of Pound - an authentie phallocrat - and Lady Gregory, one has to conc1ude that one of the strongest and most aggressive literary personalities of the twentieth century, hell­bent on mastery, failed to influence Yeats, both as man and writer, as Lady Gregory succeeded in so doing.

These relationships were not untroubled. The friendship with Lady Gregory is awash with her repressed hostility and resent­ment - perhaps exhibited most remarkably in her taking over the role of Cathleen ni Houlihan for three performances in 1919 to express her share in the authorship of the play, Yeats's "one real popular success". Yeats's negative attitudes are less accessible. Yet the monumental chill of his remark to Margaret Gough, when about to spend a night alone at Coole with Lady Gregory's coffin, that it would be Coole and its books and paintings that he would

xviii Introduction

regret, might indicate that Lady Gregory's ambivalence had its counterpart.

His love for Maud Gonne was fraught with fear, anger, disgust, the underside of an idealising romantic passion. Lady Gregory recorded in her diary for 1897-8 many belittling judgements by Yeats of Maud Gonne, induding the pronouncement that she might be "locked up as mad" if it were known that her political work was directed by visions - a remarkable example of a metaphysical double standard. Even with Olivia Shakespear, who was unusually forbearing and unegotistical, there were areas of profound un­happiness. He remained unable to present her with a text of the poems from The Wind Among the Reeds until1910, the time of their second affair. "After Long Silence" uncovers the suppressions and lacunre in their continuing intimacy. The friendship with Florence Farr seems ostensibly less troubled; their affair of c. 1903-6 appar­ently produced no resentments, probably because of Florence Farr's lack of any sense of sexual or emotional exdusivity. Yet in her diary she recorded her conviction that she had wasted her time with both Yeats and Shaw. George Yeats was to say that Yeats had despised Florence Farr's intellect, an assessment confirmed by The Trembling of the Veil. The evidence of Florence Farr's correspondence from Ceylon is that, although she remained fond of Yeats, her confidence was reserved for Shaw, who was told the full story of her illness, without euphemism or gloss.

The influence of Lady Gregory on Yeats obviously waned when he married. George Yeats's mediumship became a kind of authority which overrode even that moulding friendship. With his wife he had undergone a transfiguring emotional experience comparable in scale to the first meeting with Maud Gonne: "I heard her voice, 'Turn that 1 may expound / What's bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek.'" That "midnight voice" of mediumship is described in terms that make dear Yeats's sense of primary dependence upon his wife's gift - "to age what milk is to a child". The midnight voice of George's spirits drew him back emotionally to Village Ghosts and to his own mother's telling "stories that Horner might have told".

When George's mediumship came to an end, Yeats entered a phase of compensatory pseudo-adolescence, his "second puberty". This was characterised by aseries of, at times, near-farcical rela­tionships with a heterogeneous succession of women, Dolly Robinson, Margot Ruddock, Ethel Mannin, Dorothy Wellesley and

Introduction xix

finally Edith Heald. On the theoreticallevel, this "second puberty" was augmented by a preoccupation with eugenics. On his deathbed Yeats was watched over by bis wife and Edith Heald, but, as he acknowledged in a late letter, "the last kiss is given to the void".

OEIRORE TOOMEY