becoming hopelessly alcoholic.
In London, MacGreevy, much to George’s consternation, also befriended her mother, who immediately began to flirt with him. ‘You make me wish I were your own age,’ her mother wrote to him, ‘we could play a good game.’ By encouraging him to become an artist she seemed to feel that she had become one, too: ‘Love must be kept firmly in the present, it is a thing without past or future… The fact remains that, fundamentally and however painfully, we are artists and artists we shall remain, and we both know that art is the only thing that matters and the one thing that makes the world tolerable.’
Soon George’s mother and the young Irish poet were discussing George, much to George’s annoyance:
Please please please, don’t mention my name to my mother when you are writing to her more than is consistent with the usual necessities… My mother loves to make a whirlpool and especially if she can suck me in to it, and she has probably worked herself up into an annoyance with me in order to amuse herself over the Xmas holidays. That was why I said gaily to you in London: ‘you are not to discuss me with my mother.’
Robinson and MacGreevy, in the early years of their acquaintance with George, thickened the plot by indulging in unrequited love. In 1919, Robinson, whose idol was Yeats, fell for Iseult Gonne, who rejected him despite Yeats’s suggestion that they should marry. Yeats’s sisters invited the unhappy couple to supper, but Lily remained doubtful that Iseult would change her mind. The following year Iseult married the eighteen-year-old Francis Stuart. George, Saddlemyer writes, sympathized with Robinson’s ‘lingering affection for Iseult’.
Both gentlemen then directed their attention towards the artist Dolly Travers Smith, with whose mother, Hester, a well-known medium, they were also friends, both having boarded with her at different times. (Hester’s books included
In the same years that she was getting to know Robinson and MacGreevy, George was also spending time at Thoor Ballylee. In March 1926, she wrote to MacGreevy: ‘I go to Ballylee Thursday morning for three glorious days of solitude & cabbage planting & on my return will write you a sober & sane & reasonable letter.’ But there are also letters of complaint about conditions there, and the amount of hard work required to keep the place going. Yeats, in the meantime, was writing poems that used the tower at Ballylee as symbol and icon. In February 1928
with that magnificent volume and
The tower had served its purpose; like the automatic writing, Thoor Ballylee had delivered him metaphors for his poetry; it had also allowed George to function in the domestic sphere while at the same time empowering Yeats, offering him both comfort and a charged environment. Once the book was published, neither she nor Yeats had any desire to go back there. Despite all the specially commissioned furniture, the letters to the builder, the planning and dreaming, after 1928 the tower remained closed, a symbol of the way writers use houses for their magic properties rather than their domestic space. Over the next few years, as Lady Gregory’s health was declining, Yeats spent a good deal of time at Coole and ‘dutifully reported on regular inspections of the rapidly deteriorating cottage and castle’. When she grew older his daughter Anne ‘tentatively asked whether she might go there to paint, but George’s monosyllabic refusal was so abrupt that she gave up the idea of ever returning’.
The abandonment of the tower may also be bound up with an essential change in the relationship between George and Yeats.
Around 1928 and 1929 she ceased to have a close sexual relationship with him and became his nurse, the devoted mother of his children and a great worrier on his behalf. Yeats and their children seemed to suffer from great numbers of illnesses. From the time George and Yeats went on holiday to Spain in November 1927 until he died in January 1939, the state of his health and her children’s health became George’s main preoccupation; her tone in letters is often bitter and disappointed. In 1928 she wrote to MacGreevy: ‘had I known that all this might happen I should certainly never have had a family.’ She added ‘burn this when read’ at the top of the letter. When in Spain Yeats’s lung began to bleed, they made their way with difficulty to France and from there to Rapallo. Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear that George was ‘all goodness and kindness’. George, as she tried to get the children to Italy, wrote to Robinson: ‘I felt for years that life was quite unnecessary & if only a landslide would remove me they could have jointly a nurse a governess a secretary & a housekeeper & all get on so much better.’
In March 1928, George signed a lease on a large flat close to Ezra and Dorothy Pound overlooking the bay at Rapallo, where they spent two winters. Anne and Michael were sent to school in Switzerland. Yeats was released from being a ‘sixty-year-old smiling public man’ in Ireland. The company in Rapallo included the German poet Gerhart Hauptmann and the American composer George Antheil; others such as Max Beerbohm, Richard Aldington, Siegfried Sassoon and Basil Bunting passed through. In Rapallo Yeats recovered and relapsed and needed constant care. ‘Never was his dependence on George greater, or more pathetic,’ Maddox writes. ‘When told he needed a night nurse so that his wife could get some relief, he wept.’ Mostly in these years she was patient, but his helplessness sometimes exhausted her even temper. When she sent him a lamp to Coole in 1931 and he wrote to ask what oil to put into it, she replied: ‘The lamp of course consumes lamp oil, paraffin. What in Heaven’s name else could it consume?! Its very form shouts paraffin oil; you could surely not have imagined that it demanded Sanctuary oil, or olive oil.’
In Ireland, the Yeatses gave up the house in Merrion Square for a flat in Fitzwilliam Square, and then in 1932 moved to a large house with a garden south of Dublin. When de Valera came to power Yeats flirted briefly with the Blueshirts, a semi-comic Irish Fascist group. George did not share his sympathies. She hated the Blueshirts. Unlike her husband, she was a de Valera supporter and voted Fianna Fail.
After the Rapallo sojourn he bounced back, writing to Olivia Shakespear in 1933 that the writing of the Crazy Jane poems was ‘exciting and strange. Sexual abstinence fed their fire — I was ill yet full of desire. They sometimes came out of the greatest mental excitement I am capable of.’ Two years later he told Iseult Gonne, who told Richard Ellmann, that ‘everything was terrible. He and his wife had gradually been alienated — he said she was a mother rather than a wife — that she had humiliated him in public.’ By then he had had a vasectomy, and begun to receive injections that increased his sexual desire in the very years when he was mourning lost sexual opportunities in his youth. ‘Wonderful things have happened,’ he wrote to Olivia. ‘This is Baghdad. This is not London.’
The old poet started then to make up for lost time. Just as in the 1890s he had moved between Dublin and London, reinventing himself at each crossing, now forty years later London was once more a place that offered freedoms not available in Dublin. In his seventies, with a few years left, he began to have love affairs. George nursed him when he returned exhausted, and seemed concerned that his friends should hear regular news about his condition before he set off again. In January 1935 she wrote to Gogarty: ‘I would rather he died in happiness than in invalidism. He may not have told you of all his past 18 months’ activities. One of them is that he has been very much in love with a woman in London.’ She told Richard Ellmann that she said to him: ‘After your death people will write of your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, because I will remember how proud you were.’ In June 1936, having left Yeats with Dorothy Wellesley, with whom he was having an affair, she returned to Dublin. Robinson wrote to Dolly: ‘W. B. is not coming back at the moment to G’s relief, though Olive says she wants him back as soon as possible (she knows). I think I know that G at any rate wants to play roulette on Sat — and not have Willy.’ Earlier, however, when she went with him to Liverpool, but did not see him off on the boat for Spain, she wrote: ‘I felt too like the dog who sees his master going for a walk and leaving him at home.’
In other words, her response to his affairs was ambivalent. She drank and was often ill; she was also lonely as Anne left home and Michael went to boarding-school. Nonetheless, she was practical and managerial and full of understanding, even writing to his new loves various accounts of his medical needs. She seems to have encouraged
