New Ways to Kill Your Mother

his regular decamping. When he read out loud to George a paragraph of one girlfriend’s letter that suggested that he and the woman might not travel to France alone, ‘she laughed at the idea of our not going alone. That means her blessing… Other people’s minds are always mysterious and I wanted that blessing.’

Blessings might have come easy, but perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of her self-sacrifice was her willingness to cross the Irish Sea with him as far as Holyhead, accompany him through customs, get him on the train in the direction of one of his liaisons, and then return alone on the same day to Dublin. ‘It was,’ Saddlemyer writes, ‘a long day: an 8.25 train in order to catch the mail boat at Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), landing at Holyhead at 11.45, and departing again at 2.30 for arrival in Ireland at 5.25 p.m. This would become a regular routine.’ No wonder she was drinking.

By the beginning of 1939, Yeats was in the South of France with George; Dorothy Wellesley and her friend Hilda were close by; and Edith Shackleton, another of his lovers, soon arrived. On Friday 27 January, when he lapsed into a coma, Dorothy saw him for a few minutes, then Edith sat by his bedside; the following day, watched over by George, he died. All three women attended the poet’s burial at Roquebrune near Menton on 30 January.

As George returned to Ireland, she must have known that she had deprived the nation of one of its greatest joys — a big funeral. There was always something wonderful about the way she kept apart from Irish patriotism and fanaticism and puritanism; her arrival home now without the body of the great poet was almost heroic. As she set about comforting her family, however, the country went into spasm. Maud Gonne wrote to de Valera, the President and the Abbey Theatre, urging that Yeats be buried in Ireland. The poet F. R. Higgins, representing the board of the Abbey Theatre, replied: ‘We are making every endeavour to have the remains brought home to Ireland… I know personally he had a passionate desire to rest in Sligo.’ The theatre’s message to George about the matter was, as Saddlemyer says, ‘aggressive in its urgency’. The Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin offered a grave in the cathedral. De Valera hoped ‘that his body will be laid to rest in his native soil’. What was interesting about all this, besides the national ghoulishness in full flow, was that, since George Yeats had remained so private and reserved and in the background during her years in Ireland, no one felt a need to mention her in their statements. Clearly, the Englishwoman Yeats had married was not cut out to become the national widow.

Yeats did indeed wish to be buried in his native soil, but he had witnessed the funeral of George Russell, the poet ?, in 1935, and been appalled by the level of pomp. Five months before he died he had written to Dorothy Wellesley: ‘I write my poems for the Irish people but I am damned if I will have them at my funeral. A Dublin funeral is something between a public demonstration & a private picnic.’ In March 1939, George wrote to MacGreevy that Yeats had asked to be buried in Roquebrune ‘and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo’. George waited until Richard Ellmann came to Dublin in 1946 to report that her husband had also said: ‘I must be buried in Italy, because in Dublin there would be a procession, with Lennox Robinson as chief mourner.’

When the first biography appeared, she wrote to Frank O’Connor that she was ‘afraid now that it is on the market I will meet people in Dublin who will ask me what I think of the book, so I will slink as I did after Yeats’s death round back streets to avoid the people who said: “You will bring him back, won’t you?”’ His body was finally brought back in 1948, but, after much confusion in the graveyard in France and many versions of the story, it seems unlikely that the bones in the casket brought to Ireland did in fact belong to Yeats.

In 1965, the year of Yeats’s centenary, three years before the death of George, Frank O’Connor made an oration over the grave in Sligo. He said: ‘Another thing he would have wished me to do — and which I must do since none of the eminent people who have written of him in his centenary year has done so — is to say how much he owed to the young Englishwoman he married, and who made possible the enormous development of his genius from 1916 onward.’

In the same year, when Pound came to London for Eliot’s memorial service, he announced that he wished to fly to Dublin on his way back to Italy. George, by then, only answered the phone at ten o’clock in the morning. On this day, by some miracle, she answered it when it rang at three o’clock in the afternoon, and took a taxi to the Royal Hibernian Hotel to meet Pound, who was travelling with Olga Rudge.

They had known one another for fifty-five years. During the war, George had often listened to his broadcasts ‘in a humorous, half-conspiratorial sort of way’. Now they sat in silence. When Anne Yeats arrived she could feel the affection between them, but neither said a word. There is a wonderful photograph of them in the hotel that day, Pound gazing at George fondly, almost adoringly, and she, an old lady wearing glasses and a battered hat, taking him in, her expression placid and candid and wise.

When she died in 1968, she was buried in the grave with her husband’s bones, or others like them, under Ben Bulben in Sligo in the country she’d lived in for more than half a century. Her husband had been, as Frank O’Connor put it, ‘most fortunate in his marriage’.

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Synge and His Family

In 1980, having been evicted from a flat in Hatch Street in the centre of Dublin, I was, by accident, offered temporary accommodation around the corner at No. 2 Harcourt Terrace. The house, three storeys over basement, was empty, having recently been vacated by its elderly inhabitant. It was early April when I moved in and the cherry tree in the long back garden was in full blossom. Looking at it from the tall back windows of the house, or going down to sit in the garden under its shade, was a great pleasure. The thought might have occurred to me that whoever had just sold this house could be missing it now, but I don’t think I entertained the thought for very long.

The aura of the previous inhabitant of this house, in which I ended up living for almost eight years and where I wrote most of my first two books, appeared to me sharply only once. I was putting books in the old custom-made bookshelves in the house when I noticed a book hidden in a space at the end of a shelf where it could not be easily seen. It was a hardback, a first edition of Louis MacNeice’s Springboard: Poems 1941– 1944. I realized that these shelves must have, until recently, been filled with such volumes, and that the woman who had left this house and had gone, I discovered, to a nursing home, must have witnessed a lifetime’s books being packed away, the books that she and her husband had collected and read and treasured. Books bought perhaps the week they came out. All lost to her now, including this one, which gave me a sense of her as nothing else did.

I asked about her. Her name was Lilo Stephens. She was the widow of Edward Stephens, the nephew of J. M. Synge. In 1971 she had arranged and introduced Synge’s My Wallet of Photographs. Edward Stephens, who died in 1955, was the son of Synge’s sister Annie. Born in 1888, when Synge was seventeen, he was aged twenty when his uncle died in 1909. Later, he became an important public servant and a distinguished lawyer. In 1921 he accompanied Michael Collins to London for the negotiations with the British that led to the Treaty which set up the Irish Free State. He was subsequently secretary to the committee that drew up the Irish constitution and thereafter became assistant registrar to the Supreme Court, and finally registrar to the Court of Criminal Appeal.

In 1939 on the death of his uncle Edward Synge, who had not allowed scholars access to Synge’s private papers, Edward Stephens became custodian of all Synge’s manuscripts. He began working on a biography of his uncle, which would partly be a biography of his family. ‘I see J. M. and his work as belonging much more to the family environment,’ he wrote, ‘than to the environment of the theatre.’ He had been close to his uncle, having been brought up in the house next door to him and spent long summer holidays in his company, and been taught the Bible by Synge’s mother, as Synge had. But, in Synge’s lifetime, not one member of his family had seen any of his work for the theatre. At his uncle’s funeral, Edward Stephens would have had no reason to recognize any of the mourners who came from that side of his uncle’s life. For his family, Synge belonged fundamentally to them; he was, first and foremost, a native of the Synge family.

‘It was [Synge’s] ambition,’ he wrote,

to use the whole of his personal life in his dramatic work. He ultimately achieved this… by dramatising himself, disguised as the central character or, in different capacities, as several of the leading characters, in some story from country lore or heroic tradition. It is in this sense that his dramatic work was autobiographical and that