Abstract
In “The Tower” Yeats accused himself of turning aside
From a great labyrinth out of pride,
Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought
Or anything called conscience once;
And that if memory recur, the sun’s
Under eclipse and the day blotted out.
(VP 413–14)
The crisis that caused him such shame can be identified as that of December 1898 to February 1899 from the close parallel with a passage in Memoirs: “Many a time since then, as I lie awake at night, have I accused myself of acting, not as I thought from a high scruple, but from a dread of moral responsibility, and my thoughts have gone round and round, as do miserable thoughts, coming to no solution” (Mem 133).1 What was his “cowardice” in 1898–9 and what was the “great labyrinth” from which he had turned aside?
… all knowledge is biography …
(Ex 397)
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Notes
Marjorie Perloff interprets these lines as referring to the lock-out of 1918, when Yeats refused to give Maud Gonne shelter in her own house, because George was ill and pregnant. See “Between Hatred and Desire: Sexuality and Subterfuge in ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’”, YA 7 (1989) 29–50. Maud Gonne was predictably angry at this affront and wrote letters accusing him of cowardice. However, the whole episode has more the embarrassing character of a contretemps in a Shaw comedy than of an episode which was to darken Yeats’s life. And there was no real conflict, no “turning-aside”; Yeats’s loyalties were with his sick young wife and his coming child. There was no “great labyrinth” to reject, but simply the prospect of putting up with Maud Gonne’s political manoeuvres for a few weeks. On 28 December 1918, Ezra Pound reported to John Quinn that J. B. Yeats had accused Maud Gonne of a “‘pure and disinterested love of mischief” and that Yeats had written to Pound from outside Dublin, saying grimly “‘even you would prefer a mountain to this city’” (Berg). John Harwood suggests that the lines refer to two failures: the rejections of Olivia Shakespear in 1897 and of Maud Gonne in 1898. The advantages of this reading are that it rejects the marginalisation of Olivia Shakespear and is close to Yeats’s mode of thought in the Automatic Script, in which crises are typically dyadic. I believe, however, that the lines refer to the loss of one woman only. See John Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence (London: Macmillan, 1989) pp. 161–2.
Maud Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen: Reminiscences (London: Gollancz, 1938). Lady Gregory’s understandable annoyance at Yeats’s in-and-out running in this matter is displayed in her rapid response to Maud Gonne’s marriage to MacBride. She sent her a letter of congratulation (ALS, Maud Gonne to Lady Gregory, 28 Feb 1903, Berg Collection)
When she was about to marry John MacBride, she wrote to Kathleen Pilcher, “As for Willie Yeats I love him dearly as a friend, but I could not for one moment imagine marrying him” — quoted in Conrad Balliet “The Lives — and Lies — of Maud Gonne”, Eire-Ireland, Autumn 1979, p. 32. This was a return to an earlier position. In February 1898 she had insisted to Yeats that she could only give him “platonic friendship” (G-YL 85). By August 1905 she had come to see marriage as wholly destructive for the majority of women (New York Evening World, 13 Aug 1905) — again a reversion to and development of an earlier stance: in May 1896, in a letter to Yeats, she had dismissed marriage as “only a little detail in life” (G-YL 60). John Harwood interprets Maud Gonne’s behaviour in 1898–9 and at other times as manipulative and frigid, ungoverned by any sincere desire at any time to marry Yeats. This reading of events has force given the contradictions in her statements and actions. See Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and Yeats. However in this essay I have not considered the case against Maud Gonne, as this has been thoroughly rehearsed in the last forty years of Yeats criticism.
A. E. Waite, Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers (London: George Redway, 1888 [YL 2210] pp. 95–118.
See also Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey, “‘Cycles Ago …’, Maud Gonne and the Lyrics of 1891”, YA 7 (1989) 184–93, esp. p. 186 and nn. 4–5.
The source for Yeats’s aversion to conventional domestic marriage is to be found at 3 Blenheim Road (see below, pp. 135–41). This matter is vigorously discussed in Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and Yeats, pp. 34–6. The majority of Yeats’s friends were single, and there were very few conventional marriages in his circle apart from those of the Rhyses, the Shorters and the Hunters. Lionel Johnson, Annie Horniman, John O’Leary and Martyn were all single and probably all celibate. In the early 1890s George Russell was in his chela phase, and Althea Gyles did not fall from grace until 1899. Dowson and Symons were promiscuous, but unmarried. Florence Farr was divorced, childless and promiscuous. Both Horton and Olivia Shakespear were unhappily married. The Mathers were a devoted couple, as close as possible to Yeats’s ideal of the Flamels, dedicated to a spiritual life. They were celibate. “I have always chosen as well as [Mathers] to have nothing whatsoever to do with any sexual connection”, wrote Moina Mathers: see Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) p. 118. William and Elizabeth Sharp, although obviously a united couple, could hardly serve as a model of conventional married life. There seems to have been much “trampling of the grapes of life” (AVA ×) in Yeats’s vicinity at the time. (See also Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and Yeats, p. 63.)
See Allen R. Grossman, Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats: A Study of The Wind Among the Reeds (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969) passim; Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and Yeats, ch. 4.
W. B. Yeats, Prefaces and Introductions, ed. William H. O’Donnell (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 156.
Jean-Marie-Mathias-Phillippe-Auguste, Comte Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël (Paris: Maison Quantin, 1890) p. 283. Yeats saw Axël in Paris in 1894, with Maud Gonne: see UPI 320–5 and CLI 382.
Started, of course, long before Yeats had met her. See Michael J. Sidnell, George P. Mayhew and David R. Clark (eds), Druid Craft: The Writing of The Shadowy Waters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971) p. 145.
Yeats made his living as a writer, despite subventions from Lady Gregory. Poetry was better paid than prose at this time. Thus this eighteen-month hiatus represents a financial as well as an artistic disaster. Yeats could get on average £5 for a lyric poem, yet only £15 for a long article: in fact in the summer of 1899, the North American Review offered him a fee of £20 for a poem, which he was unable to supply, although this sum would have represented two months’ income (CL2 436–7). Ellmann points to a similar hiatus after Maud Gonne’s marriage, although he slightly overstates the case. In this period Yeats was establishing himself as a playwright. See Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948; Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1987) p. 168.
For the most complete available text of this draft of the novel see the edition of William H. O’Donnell, YA 7 (1989) 147–75. Further references in text.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poetical Works (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895) p. 361.
There is a disturbing subtext to this choice of avatar. In 1900 Yeats probably read the revised version of The Golden Bough and certainly put its discussion of Christ and Haman to use later in his career. See Warwick Gould, “Frazer, Yeats and the Reconsecration of Folklore”, in Robert Fraser (ed.), Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1990) pp. 121–137, 144–6.
Yeats would have been presented with a brief but impressive discussion of Astarte/Ishtar as “the great Asiatic goddess of love and fertility” whose priestesses were sacred prostitutes and in whose honour “the daughters of the noblest families regularly prostituted themselves” (J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1900), III, 161). Margaret in the “Final Version” of the novel still retains geological layers of the earlier Margarets, so that by 1902 she seems absurdly hybridised.
The evidence of both Memoirs and the Automatic Script suggests that they were engaged for a week in the early 1890s, probably shortly after her son’s death. In a query to the Unknown Instructors on 3 April 1919 Yeats wrote, “was the first deception represented by my actions, such as becoming engaged to her”. The remainder of the query dates this to autumn 1891, which is consistent with Mem 133. See George Mills Harper, The Making of Yeats’s A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script (London: Macmillan, 1987) II, 242.
When Iseult Gonne rejected his proposal c.1916 he said, “I think that a marriage proposal is the myrrhe [sic] and incense which every beautiful young woman has the right to expect from every man that comes near her” ( Balliet, in Eire-Ireland, Autumn 1979, p. 43).
Eileen Simpson, Poets in their Youth (London: Faber and Faber, 1982) pp. 1, 156.
Thomas Gonne’s will indicates that his daughters were left a good deal of money in trust until marriage or majority. The estate was £28,828 and this probably did not represent all that the daughters inherited; the will refers to “my diamonds” as well as unspecified landed property. Maud Gonne could have derived an income of more than £550 a year from her father’s estate. The typical interest rate for marriage settlements in the late nineteenth century was 4 per cent. See Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics 1860–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) pp. 60, 66–7. Maud Gonne was able to support herself, Iseult, her half sister Eileen and more than one permanent establishment.
See The Wind Among the Reeds: Manuscript Materials, ed. Carolyn Holdsworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993).
He wrote to Russell in March 1899 congratulating him on having undergone a “great primary emotion” (Russell’s first child was born on 30 January). “I think a poet, or even a mystic, becomes a greater power from understanding all the great primary emotions & those one only gets out of going through the common experiences & duties of life” (CL2 370–1). This must represent an attempt on Yeats’s part to accommodate parenthood into a scheme of personal and spiritual development and it comes in the wake of the revelation. Another action which is significant is his copying “On a Child’s Death” into Lady Gregory’s copy of Poems (1899), presumably c.10 May 1899, when he gave her the book (she usually required him to transcribe a poem when she received a book). See Ronald Schuchard, “Yeats’s ‘On a Child’s Death’: a Critical Note”, YA 3 (1985) 190–2. Whether this action implies that by then Yeats had told her the truth about Maud Gonne is unclear.
The poem is based upon “The Vision of Aengus”, which Yeats could have read in John Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892 [YL 1741] pp. 169–71; in Revue celtique, III (1876–8) 342–50;
in H. D’Arbois de Jubainville, Le Cycle mythologique irlandais et la mythologie celtique (Paris: Ernest Thorin, 1884 [YL 1047] pp. 282–9; or Lady Gregory’s redaction of these materials in Cuchulain of Muirthemne (London: John Murray, 1902). Yeats has skewed the original narrative, so that Maeve, a completely subsidiary figure, becomes the centre of the tale. He has also made her children, the Maines, into grandchildren, to age her further.
Maud Gonne was taken aback by the first version of the poem, which described “crowsfeet” around her eyes. She insisted on a revision, so that it would not be assumed that Yeats was writing about Lady Gregory. See Ronald Schuchard, “An Attendant Lord: H. W. Nevinson’s Friendship with W. B. Yeats”, YA 7 (1989) 110–11.
She gave this information to A. Norman Jeffares. See Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1984) p. 124. The poem was originally placed in the 1912 edition of The Green Helmet and Other Poems (Wade 101), and was moved to Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (Wade 110).
From the original 3–8 [Practicus] Ritual of the Golden Dawn (private MS). Hodos Chamelionis (sic) is the name by which the Introducing Adept is known in the 5–6 ritual of the Golden Dawn. The use of this quotation in Autobiographies indicates Yeats’s principal source for his conception of the terrifying but seductively labyrinth. In G. R. S. Mead’s translation the imagery is less Lyttonian and more chthonic: “See that thou verge not down into the world of the Dark Rays,’ neath which is the Deep [or Abyss] devoid of form, where there is no light to see, wrapped in black gloom befouling, that joys in shades, void of all understanding, precipitous and sinuous, for ever winding round its own blind depth, eternally in marriage with a body that cannot be seen, inert [and] lifeless” — The Chaldean Oracles (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1908) II, 86–7. Yeats had owned this version: see Edward O’Shea, “The 1920s Catalogue of W. B. Yeats’s Library”, YA 4 (1986). Mead is undoubtedly the “authority” to whom he refers in Au 255. Blake also uses “labyrinth” and “labyrinthine”, often with a coded, negative intent. See for example the description of the Mundane Shell in Milton, and “puzzling themselves in Satan’s labyrinth” — The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York Doubleday, 1970) pp. 110, 552. But see also “But go, merciless man! enter into the infinite labyrinth of another’s brain” (p. 291) and “Labyrinths of wayward Love” (p. 477). Blake offered both extremely positive and extremely negative uses of the image.
For an exhaustive study of the idea and use of the labyrinth from classical antiguity to the Renaissance see Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Edward Martyn owned E. Curtius et al., Die Ausgrabungen zu Olympia, 5 vols (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1875–81).
In an early autobiographical fiction by Martyn, the hero, a Galway landowner, shows a guest “the report of the German government upon the excavations at Olympia” — Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930) p. 66. Volume II contains a magificant plate of Deidamia (also known as Isochomache and Hippodamia) struggling with the centaur Eurytion, and a detail of her head: YA 4 (1986) pls 1 and 2. After seeing these plates both Yeats and Symons dreamed of beautiful classical women, with or without centaurs, while at Tulira in 1896 (Au 372–5). For Yeats there would have been the additional resonance of the statue’s resemblance to Maud Gonne.
This aspect of the poem has been discussed by Elizabeth Cullingford in “Yeats and Women: Michael Robartes and the Dancer” (see below, pp. 229–30). Yeats’s obsession with a classicised Maud Gonne has been discussed by A. Norman Jeffares in “Pallas Athene Gonne”, in Tributes in Prose and Verse to Shotaro Oshima (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1970) pp. 4–7). As Jeff ares makes clear, the explosion of classicising references only comes in The Green Helmet and Other Poems, but the identification (if we are to trust Memoirs and Autobiographies) had always been there. Yeats’s account in Autobiographies and Memoirs of his first meeting with her turns on a classicising response, “the Virgilian commendation ‘She walks like a goddess’ [was] made for her alone” (Au 123; see also Mem 40). The allusion is to Virgil’s “vera incessu patuit dea” (“truly the goddess shows in her walk”), Aeneid 1.405.
Sextus Propertius, Erotica, ed. Walter K. Kelly (London: Bonn’s Classical Library, 1854 [YL 164 8]) p. 103.
See G. Brennan, ‘‘The Binding of the Hair’ and Yeats’s Reading of Eugene O’Curry’, YA 5 (1987) 220, pointing to the severed head as a symbol of castration anxiety; and also Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and Yeats, 59–82. Yeats remained drawn to this symbol; in November 1899 he had a vision of a “hanging head” and was surprised to find that Althea Gyles had thought simultaneously of such a motif for a projected book plate for him (VN).
One of the most important periods of biographical reprocessing after the drafting of Memoirs was the early stage of the Automatic Script. Through George, Yeats obsessively questioned the Unknown Instructors about the significance of key moments in his life, searching for a pattern which fitted the emerging system. In fact some of these sessions seems closer to psychotherapy than to occult research. In March 1919 he wrote a list of biographical crises to be checked against the control’s analysis of his Critical Moments and Initiatory Moments. He omits three significant dates: 1898, 1903 (Maud Gonne’s marriage) and 1910 (the second affair with Olivia Shakespear); see Deirdre Toomey, “‘Worst Part of Life’: Yeats’s Horoscope for Olivia Shakespear”, YA 6 (1988) 222–6. George Yeats as control supplied the last two in subsequent exchanges, but 1898 does not surface in the script except perhaps circuitously in a question which the control could not answer: “Was there no IM [Initiatory Moment] during my pursuit of MG [Maud Gonne] up to her marriage.” The control referred him to 1896, a significant period already adequately discussed and not that for which Yeats was fishing (Harper, The Making of Yeats’s A Vision, II, 302). Evidently George Yeats had not been told everything, as the irritable and evasive dialogue over the events of 1910 indicates. The Unknown Instructors were at a loss.
Commentators on this poem have tended to seek a specific passage in works by McTaggart, rather than to assume that Yeats was responding to McTaggart’s whole philosophy. A. Norman Jeffares was directed by George Yeats to a passage in Human Immortality and Pre-Existence (London: Edward Arnold, 1915 [YL 1201]): it is clear that this brief work meant a great deal to Yeats. See Jeffares, New Commentary, p. 419. Richard J. Finneran, in Editing Yeats’s Poem: A Reconsideration (London: Macmillan, 1990) p. 113, cites one passage from McTaggart’s seventy pages of discussion of his conception of “substance” in The Nature of Existence, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921, 1927 [YL 1202]). In 11. 12–14 of the poem, Yeats is probably conflating two ideas of McTaggart’s. The first is that there are no simple substances: all substances are compound. The second is that, as time does not exist, all stages of a life are permanently present. In draft versions of these lines Yeats comes closer to the Hegelian “collapse into immediacy” which so moved McTaggart: “Profound McTaggart thought so; in one breath / Self-sustaining and delighting life yet deathless death” (National Library of Ireland, MS 13593).
Peter Geach, “In an Atheist’s Heaven”, The Times Literary Supplement, 2–8 June 1989, p. 599. This Boethian concept had been important to Yeats since at least 1896. See VSR 135; Myth 348; Ex 37; AV A 73.
See Warwick Gould, review of A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), Notes and Queties, n.s., 28:5 (Oct 1981) 459.
Geach, in The Times Literary Supplement, 2–8 June 1989, p. 599. For a full discussion of McTaggart’s philosophy see Peter Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality (London: Hutchinson, 1979).
Nancy Cardozo, Lucky Eyes and a High Heart (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978) pp. 194–200.
See Margaret Ward, Maud Gonne: Ireland’s Joan of Arc (London: Pandora, 1990) p. 176.
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© 1997 Deirdre Toomey
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Toomey, D. (1997). Labyrinths: Yeats and Maud Gonne. In: Toomey, D. (eds) Yeats and Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25822-2_1
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