this strange time between the prevailing influence of Madame Blavatsky and that of Sigmund Freud, they both remained ambivalent about the power of a medium to control the autonomous power of the unconscious mind. In 1913 Yeats wrote: ‘Because mediumship is dramatisation, even host mediums cheat at times either deliberately or because some part of the body has freed itself from control of the waking will, and almost always truth and lies are mixed together.’ George’s problem was that she was now, on a daily basis, embodying this dramatization, in all its ambiguities and complexities. She was both cheating and allowing some part of herself to be freed from conscious control.
She was moving in dangerous territory, having been enough in occult circles to know how much opprobrium was heaped on the quack and the fake. Her husband needed her to keep working, especially once the medium said, in a beautiful phrase, that he had come ‘to give you metaphors for poetry’; she needed him, in turn, to stop talking in public about it, and she used the medium to warn him to be silent. She told Ellmann that her only serious quarrel with him in all the years of their marriage concerned his wish to publish a description of her automatic writing in the second edition of
The medium gave him, as promised, metaphors for poetry. The experience, and her wish to keep it hidden, also gave him one of his narrative poems, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, in which the woman in her sleep offers the scholar hidden knowledge:
The narrator has cause to wonder, as George must have done in those early months of their marriage, if the sleeping wisdom that she offers is the sole basis for his love:
His reply to that question must have been of considerable interest:
When George went with her husband to Ireland soon after her marriage, every move she made was studied intensely by the five women who were most involved with the poet. They were his unmarried sisters Lily and Lolly; Maud Gonne and Iseult; and Lady Gregory. The fact that George managed never to quarrel with any of them while maintaining her distance from each says a great deal about her patience and her temperament.
Lily and Lolly wrote to their father in New York describing their new sister-in-law. ‘You feel that she has plenty of personality but that her disposition is so amiable that she does not often assert herself,’ Lolly wrote, ‘not from inertness but because she is happiest in agreement with people around her.’ When they went to the Abbey Theatre, Lily noticed that ‘when the lights went down George used to sit forward and look round me at him, smile to herself and sit back again’. When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs W. B. Yeats.’ Lily thought her sister-in-law ‘delightfully sane, just think of all the pests of women that are going about who suffer from nerves and think it soul — and so does some unlucky man till he marries them — Willy is in luck.’
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
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.’
