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· Mrs Yeats and her husband, old and grey.

By JAMES LONGENBACH [The Nation] – The time is 1917; the place, London. The war is on. You are a young woman, attractive, well-off, fluent in French, German and Italian. Since no adequate translation of Pico della Mirandola exists, you translate the Renaissance Neo-Platonist’s Latin yourself. But while your interest in esoteric philosophy leads you to become a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, your eyes are wide open. You volunteer for the Red Cross. You are immersed in London’s literary avant-garde. After all, your best friend is married to the American poet Ezra Pound. Your friend’s mother was once the lover of W.B. Yeats, whom Pound considers the greatest living poet—hardly an idiosyncratic opinion.

You have had no love affairs of consequence. When Yeats, a 51-year-old bachelor, once again proposes to Maud Gonne (the Irish actress and political activist with whom he’d fallen in love as a young man), she declines. When Yeats then proposes to Maud’s daughter, Iseult, she also declines; Iseult would later have an affair with Pound. A month later, when Yeats proposes to you, you accept. At 11:20 in the morning on October 20, 1917, you are married in the Harrow Road Registry Office; the witnesses are Pound and your mother.

“I think [this] girl both friendly, serviceable & very able,” writes Yeats to an old friend. “She is under the glamour of a great man 30 years older than herself & with a talent for love-making,” reports your mother. Honeymooning in the Ashdown Forest Hotel in Sussex, you cast a horary (an astrological chart designed to answer a particular question at a particular place and time). “Per dimandera [domandare] perche noi siamo infelice,” you write in a language you know your husband does not understand—“to ask why we are unhappy.” The discombobulated Yeats is writing letters to Iseult; he is writing poems: “O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.” A decade later, now the mother of two young children, the wife of a Nobel Prize–winning poet, you write “burn this when read” at the top of a letter to a close friend: “had I known that all this might happen I should certainly never have had a family!”

This is one way of describing the life of Bertha Georgie Hyde Lees Yeats…When asked how it felt to “live with a genius,” George replied, “Oh alright, I never notice.” Her devotion did not wobble, but she was no one’s fool.

Continued at The Nation |

 

Mrs Yeats and the instruction of spirits.

By HILARY SPURLING [New York Times] – The trouble was that George Yeats was a medium. The marriage was founded on a code of practice dictated to her by spirits, who rapidly established a hold on virtually every aspect of the couple’s life, including Yeats’s writing. In their first three years together, they had 450 sessions with these spirits, or roughly three a week. Minutes were taken down by George in 4,000 pages of handwritten script, which she locked up after her husband died. She had done her best to stop him talking about it in his lifetime, calling him ”William Tell,” and steadfastly turning down all his efforts to acknowledge her role in public.

”To my Wife” runs a dedication (that she refused to let him publish), ”who created this system which bores her, who made possible these pages which she will never read & and who has accepted this on the condition that I write nothing but verse for a year.” The manuscript in question was the second version of Yeats’s ”Vision,” based on his wife’s automatic writing, in which he claimed to have set out ”the prophecy of the next hundred years.” His publisher, Harold Macmillan, was dubious: ”To most ordinary minds it appears to be quite mad, and I cannot believe that the sale will be anything but a very small one.”

Continued at The New York Times | More Chronicle & Notices.

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