The Gonne-Yeats Letters: 1893-1938.

King, Daniel Patrick

A more unlikely and enduring friendship could hardly be imagined. Their political differences were profound. W. B. Yeats, perhaps the greatest of the English-language poets of the century, while not illiberal in political matters, represented landed Protestant interests as an Irish senator. Maud Gonne, an Irish Catholic revolutionary, inspired some of Yeats's best poetry. They met in 1889. She was twenty-two that year, when she conceived the first of two children by a French politician who had promised her marriage after he divorced his wife. He was twenty-three, already a polished and disciplined writer, when Gonne called upon the Yeats family in London, of which incident Yeats later wrote, "The troubling of my life began."

They both believed in spiritualism and embarked upon a "mystical marriage" which was to last until Yeats's death in 1939. A lively correspondence developed and endured through a world war, the Irish troubles, and a world tottering toward another cataclysmic conflict. Yeats proposed marriage to Gonne several times shortly after they met and again in 1916; she insisted, however, that theirs was to remain a mystic marriage. She wed Major John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary, with whom she had one son and whom she divorced shortly thereafter. Major MacBride, a drunk and a "blackguard," was executed after the Easter Rising.

Gonne's daughter Iseult also refused Yeats's marriage proposal, and he later wed Georgie Hyde Lees. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, and his last letter to Gonne was dated 22 August 1938. He died in France and was interred there, as the coming war prevented an Irish burial. Gonne agitated (along with other Irish nationalists) for his reburial in Ireland, which occurred in 1948. She died in 1953, after publishing the first part of her autobiography and with the second part uncompleted.

The volume's title is somewhat misleading, albeit understandable. Of 402 letters, only 29 were written by Yeats. The bulk of his correspondence to Gonne was destroyed along with the contents of her house when it was raided by Free State soldiers. We are thus left with an intriguing, one-sided dialogue, fondly wishing for the other half. There are, of course, other sources: Yeats's Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Mythologies as well as his letters to other people to fill the void for the serious researcher. What we have here is a magnificently detailed half-century of Irish life, complete with political intrigue, literary images, and the mundane day-to-day problems of illness, divorce, and child-rearing. In the final analysis, one is left with Maud Gonne's story, and it is slightly frustrating to read her constant refrain, "Thank you for your letter."

Did their marriage remain mystical? One of the editors (Norman Jeffares, a Yeats scholar) thinks not, citing the change in salutation around 1908 from "My dear Willie" to "Dearest." However, this conjecturing, while intriguing, seems to fail, for within months "Dear Willie" resumes. Although coeditor Anna MacBride White (one of Gonne's grandchildren) admits in her prologue that neither Gonne's autobiography nor her letters are revealing of her personality or relationships, the letters contained in this book are informative. Much of the correspondence is brief and perfunctory; other letters deal at length with substantive matters. The increasingly sharp tone of the letters suggests that the friendship deteriorated because of a chasm of political differences. There is in Gonne's letters an undertone of vituperative and unexplained condemnation of all who differed with her in matters of politics and religion.

Gonne was not modest and evidently was concerned about her public image. In 1905 she asked Yeats not to "trouble about watching papers for me. I have ordered a press agency to send me every thing where my name occurs for the present & the bundle of cuttings I receive every day are surprisingly large & require a certain amount of resolution to read." "I started the Sinn Fein Movement," she wrote in 1907, and later, "I am writing a very long & very egotistical letter." She clearly had her likes and dislikes - "I don't like American women" (1908) - and in a heated exchange of letters with Yeats in 1927 she wrote: "I held that Dreyfus was an uninteresting Jew & too much money was spent on his cause for it to be an honest cause & that greater injustice triumphed every day when poor men were sent to jail for the theft of food or clothing for their families & I would prefer to raise the cry for them. . . . Being a nationalist, I sympathized with French nationalists who objected to the Jews & international finance interfering in their country & upsetting their institutions."

Gonne was not lacking in strong opinions and certainly had no fear of acting on them. In 1897 Yeats and Gonne were taking tea at the National Club in Dublin when outside a riot ensued protesting Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee: "Maud Gonne got [up] and said she was going out and someone else said she would be hurt. I told them to lock the door and keep her in. . . . I refused to let her out unless she explained what she meant to do." Gonne wrote Yeats later: "Do you know that to be a coward for those we love is only a degree less bad than to be a coward for oneself. The latter I know well you are not, the former you know well you are. It is therefore impossible for us ever to do any work together where there is likely to be excitement or physical danger & now let us never allude to this stupid subject again."

When Yeats sent his poem "Easter 1916" to Gonne, she advised him in a letter dated 8 November 1916: "No I don't like your poem, it isn't worthy of you & above all it isn't worthy of the subject - Though it reflects your present state of mind perhaps, it isn't quite sincere enough for you who have studied philosophy & know something of history know quite well that sacrifice has never yet turned a heart to stone though it has immortalized many & through it alone mankind can rise to God."

A reading of these letters reveals the eloquence and brilliance of the orator for Ireland that Maud Gonne had become. A contemporary, Mary Colum, described her demeanor in facing an angry crowd as "the most beautiful, the most heroic-looking human bering I have ever seen before or since." In the end Gonne "always counted on [Yeats's] friendship and it has never failed me." His loyal yet sometimes cutting opposition to her remained sincere. In this regard Yeats wrote in 1927, "We will never change each other's politics. They are too deeply rooted in our characters."

Anna MacBride White obtained the letters after they were returned to her grandmother by Mrs. Yeats around 1942. Undated and jumbled in large manila envelopes, they were roughly sorted with the time periods written on the flap in Yeats's handwriting. In the hands of White and Jeffares, readers are able to see Maud Gonne as more than the almost mythical figure in Irish politics she has become to many. The seventy pages of editorial notes clearly define the political, economic, and social context of the times. The result is a valuable picture of two uncommon people searching for that "spiritual peace which made the broken toys & the fallen gods seem insignificant." "In that peace," she wrote in 1913, "I found I had not changed the ideals of my young days: only I saw that most of the efforts I had made to realize them had been mere playing with sand."

Daniel Patrick King Whitefish Bay, Wi.