Free New Ways to Kill Your Mother by Colm Tóibín Page A
Authors: Colm Tóibín
will give life and added beauty to the grey walls of Ballylee. I think she has an intense spiritual life of her own & on this side you must be careful not to disappoint her … Iseult likes her very much, and Iseult is difficult & does not take to many people.
Despite this, she told others that she believed the marriage to be ‘prosaic’. Arthur Symons wrote to John Quinn: ‘I wish you hadheard Maude [ sic ] laugh at Yeats’s marriage – a good woman of 25 – rich of course – who has to look after him; who might either become his slave or run away from him after a certain length of time.’
Thus in October 1917 George Hyde-Lees found herself on her honeymoon with W. B. Yeats, who was suffering from nervous stomach disorders. They went first to his flat in London and then to a hotel, where he received a note from Iseult wishing him well. Later, George told an interviewer that she felt him ‘drifting away from her’. He wrote to Iseult making clear his belief that he had made a mistake. Both he and George were miserable. Yeats began work on the poem about Iseult Gonne that eventually became ‘Owen Aherne and His Dancers’, using a notebook that Maud Gonne had given him:
I can exchange opinion with any
neighbouring mind
I have as healthy flesh & blood as any
rhymer’s had ,
But oh my heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;
I ran, I ran from my love’s side because my
heart went mad .
‘What followed,’ Saddlemyer writes,
has been described several times by George herself … Fully aware of the reason for his unhappiness, first she contemplated leaving him. But then, reluctant to surrender what had been for so many years her destination, she considered arousing his interest through their joint fascination with the occult. She decided to ‘make an attempt to fake automatic writing’ and then confess to her deception once her distracted husband was calmer.
George made this admission that she faked it in the early 1950s to Virginia Moore, who was researching her book The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality . Yeats remembered the first words as: ‘With the bird all is well at heart. Your action was right for both but in London you mistook its meaning.’ George remembered writing: ‘What you have done is right for both the cat and the hare.’ Yeats would have understood that she was the cat and Iseult the hare or the bird. George’s hand continued to move and wrote, according to Yeats: ‘You will neither regret nor repine.’
‘The word “fake” would continue to haunt George, even though it was a phrase she herself employed in speaking with Virginia Moore and Ellmann,’ Saddlemyer writes. In 1961, when Norman Jeffares was writing his introduction to Yeats’s Selected Poems , she wrote to him: ‘I dislike your use of the word “Fake” … I told you this before & you had a happier phrasing in your book. However, I cannot ask you to alter this. The word “Fake” will go down to posterity.’
The words she wrote, in any case, worked wonders. Within days, Yeats described his new happiness to Lady Gregory: ‘The strange thing was that within half an hour after writing of this message my rheumatic pains & my neuralgia & my fatigue had gone & I was very happy. From being more miserable than I ever remember being since Maud Gonne’s marriage I became extremely happy. That sense of happiness has lasted ever since.’
It is easy to understand George’s objection to the word ‘fake’, despite her own use of it. By the time she spoke of these events to young and eager scholars, séances and the occult and automatic writing had gone well out of vogue. Also, the memory of what it was like in that hotel room on her honeymoon with the great poet must have been raw beyond explanation, easier to dismiss casually than explain carefully. Using the word ‘fake’ herself was defensive; seeing someone else using it made it different.
Before she married him, she knew
Despite this, she told others that she believed the marriage to be ‘prosaic’. Arthur Symons wrote to John Quinn: ‘I wish you hadheard Maude [ sic ] laugh at Yeats’s marriage – a good woman of 25 – rich of course – who has to look after him; who might either become his slave or run away from him after a certain length of time.’
Thus in October 1917 George Hyde-Lees found herself on her honeymoon with W. B. Yeats, who was suffering from nervous stomach disorders. They went first to his flat in London and then to a hotel, where he received a note from Iseult wishing him well. Later, George told an interviewer that she felt him ‘drifting away from her’. He wrote to Iseult making clear his belief that he had made a mistake. Both he and George were miserable. Yeats began work on the poem about Iseult Gonne that eventually became ‘Owen Aherne and His Dancers’, using a notebook that Maud Gonne had given him:
I can exchange opinion with any
neighbouring mind
I have as healthy flesh & blood as any
rhymer’s had ,
But oh my heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;
I ran, I ran from my love’s side because my
heart went mad .
‘What followed,’ Saddlemyer writes,
has been described several times by George herself … Fully aware of the reason for his unhappiness, first she contemplated leaving him. But then, reluctant to surrender what had been for so many years her destination, she considered arousing his interest through their joint fascination with the occult. She decided to ‘make an attempt to fake automatic writing’ and then confess to her deception once her distracted husband was calmer.
George made this admission that she faked it in the early 1950s to Virginia Moore, who was researching her book The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality . Yeats remembered the first words as: ‘With the bird all is well at heart. Your action was right for both but in London you mistook its meaning.’ George remembered writing: ‘What you have done is right for both the cat and the hare.’ Yeats would have understood that she was the cat and Iseult the hare or the bird. George’s hand continued to move and wrote, according to Yeats: ‘You will neither regret nor repine.’
‘The word “fake” would continue to haunt George, even though it was a phrase she herself employed in speaking with Virginia Moore and Ellmann,’ Saddlemyer writes. In 1961, when Norman Jeffares was writing his introduction to Yeats’s Selected Poems , she wrote to him: ‘I dislike your use of the word “Fake” … I told you this before & you had a happier phrasing in your book. However, I cannot ask you to alter this. The word “Fake” will go down to posterity.’
The words she wrote, in any case, worked wonders. Within days, Yeats described his new happiness to Lady Gregory: ‘The strange thing was that within half an hour after writing of this message my rheumatic pains & my neuralgia & my fatigue had gone & I was very happy. From being more miserable than I ever remember being since Maud Gonne’s marriage I became extremely happy. That sense of happiness has lasted ever since.’
It is easy to understand George’s objection to the word ‘fake’, despite her own use of it. By the time she spoke of these events to young and eager scholars, séances and the occult and automatic writing had gone well out of vogue. Also, the memory of what it was like in that hotel room on her honeymoon with the great poet must have been raw beyond explanation, easier to dismiss casually than explain carefully. Using the word ‘fake’ herself was defensive; seeing someone else using it made it different.
Before she married him, she knew