Maud Gonne was the beautiful and charismatic inspiration of W.B. Yeats’s love poetry, a leading activist in the Irish republican movement and the founder of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland). One hundred and fifty years after her birth, everyone still knows her face, but her life remains something of a mystery. Adrian Frazier's remarkable new biography The Adulterous Muse (published by Lilliput Press) pursues the story of what attracted Maud Gonne to a man like Lucien Millevoye, and what imprint the attachment left upon her. Once jilted by Millevoye, Gonne marched into a truly ill-starred marriage to Major John MacBride. The horrible truth of their mismatch is examined through the evidence entered by both parties in the divorce proceedings.
Here, we present an exclusive extract from The Adulterous Muse:
In ways that suggest feelings of something more than friendship, Maud Gonne began once again to report to Yeats her dreams and visions.
In one, amidst ‘titanic forms of light and immense energy’, Yeats was faced with a choice of great importance; he trembled with anxiety. She had a message to impart to him: he must ‘choose the higher’. In another dream, he was scaling a mountain but encountered an impassable obstacle. She wanted so much to come to his aid, but in the dream, she was unable to move her limbs. If Yeats drew no conclusions merely from the fact that Maud Gonne was often dreaming about him, he could not miss the sexual longing expressed by her 26 July 1908 letter, in reply to his own admission that he had ‘evoked union’ with her. After everyone in her Rue de Passy household had gone to bed, she prepared to visit him ‘astrally’. Together they flew up into the starlight and over the sea. It seemed then that he took the shape of a great serpent, but she was not sure of this because she looked only into his eyes:
[Y]our lips touched mine. We melted into one another till we formed only one being, a being greater than ourselves who felt all & knew all with double intensity – the clock striking 11 broke the spell & as we separated it felt as if life was being drawn away from me through my chest with almost physical pain.
After this interrupted union, she came to him two more times, but each time a noise in the house broke the spell before total ecstasy was achieved. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamt that they were in Italy together.
Yeats met Gonne in October 1908 in London, and found her ‘sad & gentle’. She spoke of ‘her old politics of hate with horror’. That is just how he thought of them too. When Gonne went to Dublin with Ella Young for several weeks, Yeats followed. When she returned to Paris, he went as well. In December he took a room for a month at Hôtel de Passy, near her residence at 13 Rue de Passy. What he had long wanted, or claimed to want, was about to be his.
The great event when it finally transpired was a disappointment.
It is generally agreed by scholars that it was in December 1908 in Paris that ‘the first of all the tribe’ lay at long last in Yeats’s arms, and – this seems strange – ’cried into this ear/ Strike me if I shriek’. An incident reported by Ella Young suggests that by this time the poet had overcome his former phobia about the intricate complications of female genitalia. Yeats, Gonne, and Ella Young visited the studio of Auguste Rodin, arriving to find the sculptor
... chiselling at a block of marble without a model of any kind ... He received us graciously, and explained that the marble he was working at would be a rapture of Sainte Therese. We gazed at it solemnly ... The room was full of Rodin’s sculptures. He led us from one to the other talking of them, and gesticulating as he talked. He invited us for a week-end at Meudon, and said finally: ‘But you must see my pictures in the other room, my sketches. They are my great works.’ The other room opened off the first ... The sketches hung in a line from wall to wall. When I had contemplated two or three of them, I looked into the garden. Yeats went reverently from sketch to sketch. Maud Gonne joined me at the window.
According to Yeats scholar John Kelly, what the poet was ‘reverently’ gazing at, and what provoked the sudden interest of the two women in horticulture, were Rodin’s erotic sketches, an almost obsessive series of depictions of vaginas.Ella Young concluded that Rodin had a sick mind. Not at all. Rodin’s drawings could once have served as art therapy for someone like the young Yeats; now the reverence of the poet’s gaze showed that he no longer required healing.
The great event when it finally transpired was a disappointment. To judge from poems published (somewhat cruelly) not very much later, Yeats discovered that the most beautiful woman he had ever seen was no longer quite so beautiful. According to ‘Peace’, published in 1910, time had touched her form. The ‘lineaments’ remained, but he could only ‘record what’s gone’ (‘Fallen Majesty’). Nothing could compare with the oft-imagined flesh of the muse; the uncovered body of a 42-year-old mother of three disenchanted him.
In spite of this programme of anger-management and self-improvement, Yeats could not keep a lid on rage that arose from decades of past humiliations.
All through December in Paris, he was not happy and satisfied, but short-tempered. Soon after sexual relations began, Gonne put a stop to them. She let him off easy and took the blame on herself, treating it as a problem not of too little desire on his part, but of too much on hers:
I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you & dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed & I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too. I know how hard & rare a thing it is for a man to hold spiritual love when the bodily desire is gone & I have not made these prayers without a terrible struggle, a struggle that shook my life though I do not speak much of it & generally manage to laugh. The struggle is over & I have found peace.
Paradoxically, love, once granted, rather than redressing Yeats’s long-suppressed rage, released it. Feeling his motiveless malignity, Gonne presented him with a notebook. Its purpose was that she ‘for whom and for myself I write may know me for good and evil, and that I may watch [my temper] and amend’. He accepted that he was irritable. He promised that this acceptance would force him ‘to make my writings sweet-tempered and, I think, gracious’.
In the pages of this notebook he examined his fits of temper: with Ella Young, over something stupid she said; with Arthur Sinclair the actor. It was, he reasoned, degrading to fight with such people. He must become like a hero out of Plutarch, someone whose pose was like a second self. He had to surrender his intellect – that faculty that goes around saying ‘Thou fool’ all day long to every stupid person – and cultivate his religious genius, which sees all things as equal, that even the merest Catholic Paddy had a ‘sweet crystalline cry’.
In spite of this programme of anger-management and self-improvement, Yeats could not keep a lid on rage that arose from decades of past humiliations. Even though Maud Gonne had been alone since 1904, and since then had been stuck in France out of all Irish affairs, Yeats kept going back to how she had hurt him between 1897 and 1903, with her attempts to ‘hurl the little streets upon the great’ (‘No Second Troy’).
True forgiveness was not to be. In September 1908, he drafted ‘Reconciliation’:
Some may have blamed you that you took away
The verses that could move them on the day
When, ears being deafened, the sight of eyes blind
With lightning, you went from me, I could find
Nothing to make a song about but kings,
Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things
That were like memories of you – but now
We’ll out, for the world lives as long ago;
And while we’re in our laughing, weeping fit,
Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit.
But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,
My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.
Those phallic Rosicrucian swords and vaginal helmets had been the very paraphernalia of their Golden Dawn play-acting and his Arthurian code of honour, as well as the substitute satisfactions of heroic age verse-dramas such as On Baile’s Strand. Now they were pitched into the aboriginal ‘pit’. His passion did not preclude wit. The rhyme-word in the final couplet ‘since you were gone’ includes a pun on her name as forceful as, yet less forced than, Shakespeare’s ‘will’ sonnet to the Dark Lady (Sonnet 135) or Sidney’s ‘rich’ sonnet on his mistress Penelope Rich (Sonnet 24).
When Gonne made him a present of herself in December 1898, he had not grasped what he quickly perceived to be a nettle.
‘Reconciliation,’ like ‘No Second Troy’, works the figure of speech praeteritio (bringing something up by saying it need not be brought up) with harsh irony: ‘Why should I blame her that she fill my days / With misery ...’24 In the positive column of the balance sheet, it was only her uncomprehending incomprehensibility that evoked the poetry in the first place (‘Words’). His losses in the other column were simply ‘The hourly kindness, the day’s common speech / The habitual content of each with each’– in short, a happy marriage. He was ‘a King and No King’: love, while finally returned, could never now be fully requited; his past desires remained unfulfilled, and the woman who could have fulfilled them no longer existed; an older one had taken her place. This was love talking the language of rage, or rage mimicking the language of love – it is hard to tell which.
In all the autobiographical love poems of Responsibilities (1914) there is unfairness, but also to be found there are the very lineaments of great poetry: electric, immediate feeling, some honesty in the court proceedings of self-judgment, and a highly perfected craft. What he felt to be shameful, and hard to forgive, was not that Gonne had passed him over in favour of MacBride in 1903, or that she had not told him about Millevoye before December 1898. If he were to be honest with himself, he had to admit that he had known a good deal about what was going on between her and both men well before he showed that he knew anything at all. When Gonne made him a present of herself in December 1898, he had not grasped what he quickly perceived to be a nettle. What was ineradicably shameful was that in the poems of The Wind Among the Reeds he painted himself publicly as her pathetically disappointed, always devoted lover.
Judging by those poems, the world must believe him to have been fooled about Millevoye and outmanned by MacBride. He holds her responsible for the ridiculous, un-Nietzschean figure he cuts in the early poetry. What he really hated was the image he had made of himself.
The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W.B. Yeats, by Adrian Frazier is published by Lilliput Press
