The Books: The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938

Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:

Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938.

I’ve written much about these two, two of the leading lights of the Irish Renaissance of the early 20th century, although they had different concerns and went about achieving Irish independence in different ways. Yeats focused on bolstering up a truly Irish culture, writing poems of the myths and legends of old, and spending his time creating the Abbey Theatre and nurturing other young Irish writers (telling them not to look to greater Europe for their inspiration – but to stick closer to home – he was a bit of a boss). And Gonne was wedded to politics and revolution. (Quite literally wedded. Her husband, whom she despised, was executed by firing squad following the Easter Rising in 1916, and she wore mourning garb for the rest of her life.) From the moment they met, they were intrigued and drawn to one another. He fell in love. She, not so much. Love was way low on her list of priorities. But their friendship, and what they called their “spiritual marriage” lasted their whole lives. They tried to meet one another in their dreams. They would set up meeting times – she in Paris, he in Dublin or London – and then check in: “Did you see me last night in your dreams?”

There’s a tragic nature to all of this, although both are long dead and buried. The union, if they had hooked up, would probably have been terrible for both of them. But there was something in their friendship that they could not get anywhere else. He loved her all the days of his life. He proposed to her numerous times. They probably did consummate their relationship, once, but she – perhaps smartly – refused to enter into domestic life with him. She kept a cooler head. He, torn up by his love for her, poured all of that into his writing, and his poems for her are some of the most memorable and heartachey love poems of the 20th century. We have her, and her refusal of him, to thank for all of those beautiful poems.

To quote one of my great acting teachers Doug Moston, who always said he was a great fan of “sublimation”: “Here’s what I mean by sublimation. You take your pain – and you make it sublime.”

Yeats took his pain and made it sublime.

Their correspondence is riveting. The only mark against it is that he obviously kept every one of her letters while she – who lived more of a peripatetic lifestyle, with constant police raids on her various abodes where much was lost – did not keep his letters. So we mainly only have her letters to him. There are a couple of his letters to her in existence, and they are included here, but not many. It is a great loss. But still: we have her messy, bossy, passionate, fiery missives and it gives a good feel for the openness of their relationship. They were not careful with one another. There were no boundaries. They barged right in to the deepest recesses of one another’s hearts and told it like it was. Maud Gonne thought Yeats was wasting his time with the Abbey, and her hectoring annoyance is a constant theme through literally decades of correspondence. She thought his time would be spent much more productively in his writing. Who cares about that silly theatre. She was wrong, but she obviously couldn’t know that at the time. Also, she never admitted she was wrong. She was a revolutionary. You can’t admit you’re wrong and be a proper revolutionary. She hated his poem about the Easter Rising. He never could please her when it came to politics. She lived in a black and white world of hate and rage, and his artistry was never blunt and bold enough for her. She wanted propaganda, not art. And she told him this, time and time again. And he, obviously, told her what he thought of her behavior, and her concerns. He was brutal when she decided to get baptized into the Catholic Church (his bigotry showing clearly). He was dismayed, horrified, and told her exactly why it was the wrong choice for her. He also didn’t think she was going about things the right way. It is a fascinating philosophical divide, and although we only have her side of the argument, his can be guessed. These letters show true intimacy, true equality. There is a rough truth in her letters to him, a freedom and unselfconsciousness that really speaks well of HIM, too: he was the type of man who could “take” having a woman fire off her truth at him.

She was a divine creature to him, but he did not treat her with kid gloves. They were fully engaged with one another – through years of strife and revolution and civil war – through her sudden marriage to McBride, through his eventual (very late) marriage – through her bearing of children – through long distance … They remain completely up to date on one another’s lives, and only at the very end do you feel any sort of distance between them. You can feel a sort of formality come over the correspondence by the end. They have agreed to disagree about politics. And you feel the loss. You feel that their friendship has been impacted by agreeing to disagree. Because once they agree to disagree there is nothing more to talk about except, “How have you been?”

The correspondence is a must-read.

I am going to post a letter from her (as well as the footnotes to said letter – the footnotes to this correspondence are particularly well done) from 1910. A pre-1916 letter. They have already been friends for years at this point, and he has already proposed to her a couple of times. Yeats has just sent her a batch of poems that he wrote for her.

Here is her moving response.

Excerpt from The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938

Colleville
29th October1

Dear Friend
I like the poems2 so much, even more than when I first heard them, the slight alterations you have made are improvements I think – Iseult read them & is wild over the music of the rhythm in them. There is a danger in my growing very vain when I think of these beautiful things created for me – thank you –

Of all my work & all my effort little will remain because I worked on the ray of Hate, I think, & the Demons of hate which possessed me are not eternal – what you have written for me will live because our love has always been high & pure – You have loved generously and unselfishly as few men have loved – It is what remains to me out of the wreck of life, what I can take with me into the peace of the Sanctuary.

Tell me, are you quite sure that Pernella was the wife of Raymond Lully? My memory is so bad but I think Pernella was the name of the wife of Nicholas Flamel the Alchemiste3 & two streets in Paris called one Nicholas Flamel & the other Pernelle named after them. I have no books here to look up, & can only do so when I go back to Paris on the 4th October.

You are hard on poor Bow & Arrows!4

I am longing to read what you have written on Mont St Michel. By the way did you call for your things – among others the bells from Mont St Michel, left for you at the Nassau Hotel.

I have been re reading the Cathedral by Huysmans,5, which is all on Gothic Art & which I think you would like, what a pity you are not here for us to read it together.

Alwys your friend
Maud

1 MG seems to have confused the months

2 Possibly from The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). This volume was not published until Dec 1910, so WBY may have sent MG manuscripts or proofs of the first eight poems. However, since her letter of 10 Oct prompted an erratum slip, the book was probably set and printed by then, so he may have sent her an advance copy of the book.

3 MG was quite right. The first eight poems from The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) were grouped under the general title ‘Raymond Lully and his Wife Pernella’. Lully (c. 1232-1315) was a Spanish theologian and philosopher. He led a dissolute life but became an ascetic from 1266, devoting himself to a crusade to convert the Muslims. He was stoned to death in Bugia in Algeria. An erratum slip pointed out that WBY had put Raymond Lully’s name by a slip of the pen ‘in the room of the later alchemist Nicholas Flamel’. Nicholas Flamel (1330-1418), of the University of Paris, with his wife Pernella, was said to have found the Philosopher’s Stone and thereby discovered the secret of transmuting base metal into gold. This was supposedly the source of their wealth, which they kept secret, living modestly but spending their fortune on works of mercy and charity.

4 The bow is a sexual symbol in WBY as in Blake. In their edition of The Works of William Blake (1893) WBY and Ellis commented that the bow had sexual symbolism, the arrow was desire, the spear was male potency, and the chariot of fire was joy. See WBY’s poems ‘The Arrow’ (YP, 129) and ‘No Second Troy’ (YP, 185), where MG’s beauty is like ‘a tightened bow’.

5 Joris Karl (George Charles) Huysmans (1848-1907), a French novelist of Dutch origin. His A Rebours (1884), with its hero Des Esseintes, is anti-naturalist and anti-bourgeois. La Cathedrale (1898) analyses the religious symbolism in the art of Chartres Cathedral.

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8 Responses to The Books: The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938

  1. Desirae says:

    Sheila, have you ever seen this?

    http://harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=66

  2. sheila says:

    Desirae – hahahahaha Yes. Perfect!

  3. Steven Boone says:

    As if this post weren’t magnificently depressing enough, I had to read the cartoon posted in the comments. And I don’t even have so much as a dirty limerick to show for my own various gone Gonnes. Of course, not all romantic scorn results in genteel poetry. This is where I would post a link to the youtube video (just taken down for copyright) that cuts from slender Tupac at age 17 speaking eloquently about the precious beauty of women, then cuts to him musclebound in all black at about 25, ranting about disloyal “bitches.”

    Anyway, great stuff, Sheila. Now, off to purchase a handgun, steroids and a lobotomy…

  4. sheila says:

    Steven – hahahaha Oh no!

    I love the juxtaposition of Tupac and Yeats. It all comes back to women, doesn’t it …

    Even though I’m sure Gonne’s repeated refusal of Yeats had to have been a torment for him … he didn’t marry until he was in his 50s, I believe – way WAY late – and he even considered proposing to Maud Gonne’s DAUGHTER Iseult – But anyway: I still can’t help but think that if these two had married it would have been a total and utter disaster. And yet – as friends, companions, pure lovers engaged in a spiritual marriage, kindred spirits – they were an absolutely perfect match.

    I’ve had one of those.

    One was enough.

  5. sheila says:

    And “My Gone Gonnes” would be a great title for something … a poem, a movie, a book.

  6. Steven Boone says:

    While gay marriage is slowly becoming legal around the world, spiritual marriage should be outlawed. It’s against every value I hold dear. Namely, it promotes the phenomenon of good women falling into the hands of brutes and ruffians. (<–haha) De-programming is in order. Fuck the genetic code. Re-wire all the women to wilt at the sound of fruity eloquence. Shit, if we done put a man on the moon…

    Yeah, if Yeats had just rapped his pain to the fellas, maybe something along the lines of Ice Cube's "I'm Only Out for One Thing", I suspect he'd have had less heartache–if also less beautiful work to show for it. But I'll bet Yeats would say now that literary posterity is just as overrated as this spiritual marriage business. :-p

  7. Kate P says:

    Do you think she underlined “friend” in her closing?

    I presented an, um, age-appropriate version of Gonne and Yeats to my 4th graders for their library class as part of my “Festival of Irish Literature” in March.

    Me: What is poetry about a lot of times?
    Class: ??? “We hate poetry. . .”
    Me: (ignoring philistines) Feelings, right?
    Class: “Oh, yeah.”
    Me: So, how do you think William Butler Yeats felt when Maude Gonne didn’t like him back?
    Girl: “Um, really, really sad?”
    Me: What do you think he did with those sad feelings?
    Class: “Wrote poetry!”

    They really got into it once it clicked. When I told them Yeats did get married to someone else, the slideshow came to a screeching halt because they had SO MANY questions about the picture of Yeats and his wife. Maybe it was the age difference?

  8. sheila says:

    Kate – I absolutely love the image of these little kids trying to figure it all out. It’s hilarious and touching. “Um, really, really sad?” hahahahaha

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