Abstract
“my mother died years ago”
On 4 January 1900, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory, telling her of the death of his mother. Yeats’s response to the event, as delivered to his closest friend and confidante, is oblique and flat:
It has of course been inevitable for a long time; & it is long since my mother has been able to recognize any of us … I think that my sister Lilly & myself feal it most through our father. … It will be a great blow to Jack & there was no softening of the news, for it came too suddenly; and he was devoted to his mother.1
The failure of affect is displayed without check; Susan Yeats is Jack’s mother, in the only sentence which admits of a sense of loss. Yeats had been present when his mother died, yet displays so little feeling that she might well have been dead several weeks, rather than a day. He also wrote to Maud Gonne — the letter does not survive — and she responded kindly, if vaguely.2 In a letter of condolence written on 20 May 1900 to Olivia Shakespear, on the death of her mother, Yeats reinforces the impression of insensibility. Early in the process of rapprochement after the end of their affair,3 he seeks to console Olivia Shakespear with folk-beliefs concerning the continuing presence of dead mothers; but he concludes by saying, “when a mother is near ones heart at all her loss must be the greatest of all losses”.
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Notes
Yeats kept a copy of the standard Anglican burial service (YL 2313). Susan Yeats was buried at Acton Cemetery on 6 January 1900. Jack Yeats arranged and paid for a plaque to be erected in St John’s church, Sligo. See William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978) pp. 216, n. 105. Hereafter cited as Prodigal Father.
John Masefield, Letters to Reyna, edited by William Buchan (London: Buchan & Enright, 1983) p. 297. Masefield also recalls Yeats’s having shown him a photograph of the family including his mother: “I saw from this photograph that she was very like Yeats’s sister, Lolly: a beautiful woman from Sligo, with dark-brown hair, and I should say an imagination of wonder & delight” (p. 492).
Thomas Austin, A Practical Account of General Paralysis (London: John Churchill, 1859).
Dr Gordon-Hogg had been in practice at Priory Avenue, Bedford Park, since 1889. He was a friend of J. B. Yeats’s as well as being the family doctor. See William M. Murphy (ed.), Letters from Bedford Park: A Selection from the Correspondence (1890–1901) of John Butler Yeats (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1972) pp. 21, 28.
The Yeats Family and the Pollexfens of Sligo (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971) p. 54. See, however, John Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence (London: Macmillan, 1989) pp. 34–6, for a critique of Murphy’s attitude and a discussion of the implications for Yeats of his parents’ unhappy marriage. Helen Vendler, in a rigorous review of Prodigal Father, presented the case against J. B. Yeats (“J. B. Y” [New Yorker, 29 January 1979, pp. 66–77]). Murphy responded by devoting a lecture at the 21st Yeats International Summer School to a defence of his position. In doing so, he made his bias (and indeed his antifeminist stance) all too clear. In the course of this apologia, he dismissed Susan Yeats as “a dull and commonplace housewife” and concluded complacently, that the misery of her life was worthwhile: “[a]ll in all, with due sympathy for the unlucky Susan, I rather like the way things turned out.” See his “Home Life among the Yeatses” in A. Norman Jeffares (ed.), Yeats, Ireland and Sligo (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980) pp. 170–88.
For a full discussion of this concept, see Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991) esp. ch. 7, “Art and the Depressive Position”. It could be argued in terms of Segal’s thesis, in which Art/Imagination is distinguished from fantasy/daydreaming by art’s accommodation of painful reality, that John Sherman is a somewhat marginal work. Certainly the plot of the novel avoids those painful aspects of reality which Yeats was experiencing daily at Blenheim Road. However, the work is saved from being mere fantasy-compensation, by its markedly depressed monochrome tint, its sadness of tone, the modifying factor on an optimistic narrative line. And one painful aspect of Yeats’s life which is fully incorporated is his hatred of London and longing for Sligo. I am grateful to Riccardo Steiner for drawing my attention to Hanna Segal’s work.
So described by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who met her in 1886. See Claude Colleer Abbott (ed.), Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins including his Correspondence with Coventry Patmore (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1956) p. 373.
See Robert Bak, “Being in Love and Object Loss”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 54 (1973) pp. 1–7.
For a fuller discussion of Yeats’s folklore interests and their significance, 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. 121–53.
Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1970) p. 70. For a similar usage see “Cathleen ni Houlihan”: “‘Is she right, do you think? Or is she a woman from beyond the world?’” (VP1 225). “Not right” means either being possessed of supernatural powers, or being supernatural.
Purgatory Manuscript Materials Including the Author’s Final Text, edited by Sandra F. Siegel (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986) pp. 53, 79, first and second drafts.
The Yeats Family and the Pollexfens of Sligo, p. 8. John Kelly, in a somewhat Bowlbyan reading of the relationship, concludes that Susan Yeats’s influence on her son was non-existent if not negative, save in the matter of her love for Sligo. His analysis of “maternal deprivation” is tied to his exploration of Yeats’s dependence upon Lady Gregory. See “‘Friendship is the only house I have’: Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats”, in Ann Saddlemyer and Colin Smythe (eds), Lady Gregory Fifty Years After (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1897) pp. 196–8.
In fact it could be argued that his comparison of his mother’s folk tales to Homer shows an instinctive grasp of Homer’s orality (first fully argued by Milman Parry and Albert Lord). This is supported by a remarkable statement in “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”: “all the machineries of poetry are part of the convictions of antiquity” (E&I 74), which is close in argument to Parry’s thesis that oral poetry is identifiable by its use of formulae, “groups of words … regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given, essential idea”. See Adam Parry (ed.), The Making of Homeric Verse; the Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971) p. 272.
See Mircea Eliade, Le Mythe de l’éternel retour. Archétypes et répétition (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) passim. Yeats’s early and continued concern with magical other worlds, such as Tir na nOg, is part of the same obsession.
For a full discussion of Yeats’s interest in both cyclical and linear theories of history, see Marjorie Reeves and Warwick Gould, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) pp. 202–71.
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© 1997 Deirdre Toomey
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Toomey, D. (1997). Away. In: Toomey, D. (eds) Yeats and Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25822-2_4
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