New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Later, when the Yeatses had a house in Dublin, Lady Gregory stayed with them on her visits to the city. She attended Yeats’s ‘Mondays’ in the house. ‘It is supposed to be for men only,’ she wrote, ‘and might be better so.’ Unlike Mrs Oliver St John Gogarty, however, who presided at her husband’s evenings, George Yeats ‘always discreetly withdrew, reappearing only to serve refreshments’. When Lady Gregory came to stay, George gave up her room for her, ran messages and answered the telephone for her, all the while maintaining civil and often warm relations with her. In 1927 she wrote to a friend: ‘Lady G was here for one whole month… only left yesterday and I have been sitting in the smallest possible nutshell in order to preserve a moderate outward sanity.’ Even though she blamed Gregory for the controversy over the Abbey Theatre’s rejection of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, calling her ‘an obstinate old woman’, she kept her resentments to a few correspondents, including Dorothy Pound:

Christ how she repeats herself now… she’ll tell you the same saga quite literally three times in less than an hour, and repeat it again the next day, and the day after that too. Burn when read… She wants W to go down to Coole for most of September, and I hope he will — he doesn’t seem to mind the reiterations. Personally they send me nearer lunacy than anything I ever met.

Houses and flats and rooms had the same power for Yeats as phases of the moon. It is not a coincidence that a short time after his marriage he moved Iseult into his flat in London and then rented Maud Gonne’s house in Dublin. By allowing Iseult to inhabit his London rooms and by his own moving daily in the house her mother bought, and then by refusing them entry to 73 St Stephen’s Green, he was enacting and exorcizing these two women’s haunting of him. He was also behaving sensibly. Yeats was good at making sure that even sensible behaviour had an undertow of symbolic resonance.

Thus he bought the derelict Norman keep at Ballylee in 1917, to assist him in his dreaming, telling Lady Gregory that its decoration would ‘depend on my wife if I marry’. In June he wrote to a friend: ‘I am 51 myself and do not like it at all and keep thinking of all the follies I have committed not to have someone to talk to after nightfall and to bring me gossip of the neighbours. Especially now that I am going to own a castle and a whole acre of land.’ Once married, George joined the dream and began to plan the renovation of the tower at Ballylee. ‘Among the duties she took over,’ Maddox writes, ‘was the correspondence with Rafferty, the builder who was renovating Thoor Ballylee. She did more. She paid, from her own bank account, the bills for the tower she had never seen in the country she had never visited.’

George’s work on planning its restoration became, like her automatic writing, her contribution to the store of myth and symbol that would continue to nourish Yeats’s work. Nonetheless, both Yeats and Lady Gregory were concerned that George should not see the tower at its most inhospitable in winter, when it flooded and the walls were wet with damp. When they spent part of the summer of 1919 there, Yeats drew an idyllic picture for his father. ‘It may well be,’ William Murphy later wrote in his biography of Yeats’s father, ‘that one of the happiest days of his life was 16 July 1919. Fishing in the stream by the tower, with George sewing and “Anne lying wide awake in her 17th-century cradle”, he saw an otter chasing a trout.’ His tower, Yeats wrote to John Quinn, was ‘a place to influence lawless youth, with its severity and antiquity. If I had had this tower when Joyce began I might have been of use, have got him to meet those who might have helped him.’ Joyce, however, might have been more interested in the fact that conditions in the tower were so primitive. The nearest shop was four and a half miles away. It had no electricity or plumbing. ‘Water for washing,’ Maddox writes,

had to be fetched from the river in a large galvanised water carrier on wheels, while drinking water came from another source farther away. Family life took place mainly in the cottage (where the single earth-closet was located); peat fires or oil stoves had to be kept lit to reduce the dampness seeping from the walls. The roof and top floors of the tower were unfinished, and there was no possibility of sleeping there.

The tower at Ballylee belonged firmly in the category of writers’ second houses, offering shelter to areas of imaginative energy rather than the growing family; it was dreamed into being, and then reworked and reconstructed in the way a poem was made. Both George and Yeats entered into the spirit of it wholeheartedly, pouring money into it, including much of the proceeds of Yeats’s American tour in 1920, and mentioning it constantly as the place to which they most longed to go. It was also their main connection to Ireland as the Black and Tan War raged. Lady Gregory must have taken a sly pleasure in writing from Coole in December 1920: ‘Your Oxford life sounds very peaceful — All chaos here still… The Black & Tans visited Ballylee, opened the door with a key & went in & there were rumours they were going to settle there.’ This caused Pound to report to Quinn: ‘George just in to say that the Blackantans have tanned Ballylee.’ No damage was done, however, and, as their second child was born, the Yeatses continued to plan a return to the tower, Yeats writing to Lady Gregory that his wife talked ‘constantly of the trees and of her garden and of the river’.

In April 1921 they returned after an eighteen-month absence and were able to sleep for the first time in the tower itself, in the large bedroom above the ground floor. Yeats wrote to Quinn: ‘It is a great pleasure to live in a place where George makes at every moment a 14th-century picture. And out of doors, with the hawthorn all in blossom all along the river banks, everything is so beautiful that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind.’ Yeats wrote at a desk by the window, where he could watch the stares, or starlings, flying in and out of their nest, and, as the Civil War broke out in April 1922, this gave him the final line of each stanza in ‘The Stare’s Nest by My Window’:

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

While they had sat out the Black and Tan War in Oxford, now they would witness first-hand the Civil War — which was dangerous for Yeats as a supporter of the Free State. In August, when the bridge at Ballylee was blown up, George wrote to Ottoline Morrell:

& when the fuses were lit & all the men ran off as hard as they could pelt, one man stayed behind to say: ‘In a few minutes now. There will be two explosions. Good night! Thank you.’ As though he was thanking us for the bridge!… At the time, after a feeling of panic when we heard the irregulars knocking at the door & had to go out to speak to them, one felt nothing but a curiosity to see how it was done & to try & save windows etc. But since then we have both felt rather ill & our hearts both hopping & stopping.

By the end of 1923, with the Civil War over, her husband having won the Nobel Prize and now a senator in the Irish Free State, with a house in Merrion Square (the equivalent of Berkeley Square in London, Yeats wrote to a friend), with the tower coming into shape, and two engaging children, and the Irish Sea between herself and her mother, who could irritate her, George Yeats had added to her happiness by having a number of Irish friends of her own. Like many women of her class, she was in need of a pair of homosexual men to confide in and gossip with, and these came in the guise of the playwright Lennox Robinson and the poet Thomas MacGreevy. Since most of Dublin suspected their homosexuality, ‘neither was a threat to the good name of Mrs W. B. Yeats’, Saddlemyer writes. She worked with both on the Dublin Drama League, which sought to produce more cosmopolitan work than was being put on at the Abbey. When MacGreevy moved to London in 1925, she wrote: ‘I wish you were back here. Willy said last night very solemnly: “Now MacGreevy’s not here we have to do our own gossiping.”’ In August of that year, the Yeatses spent time in Milan with Robinson and MacGreevy. Yeats, it seemed, did not enjoy the trip as much as George and her two new friends. He stayed in the hotel when the others went out sightseeing.

‘Only six years older than she,’ Saddlemyer writes, ‘Lennox quickly became George’s devoted pal. Together they gambled on the sweeps, went to the races (both horse and dog), the opera, the cinema and the theatre; they shared their experiences in gardening and breeding canaries.’ And they both drank a good deal, Robinson slowly