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'Yeats’s Ghosts' by Brenda Maddox

Yeatses turned to occult to make sense of their lives

Sunday, January 16, 2000

By Peter Blair

	Yeats’s Ghosts By Brenda Maddox HarperCollins $30.00

For those who share, with Nancy Reagan and Shirley MacLaine, a believer’s interest in the occult, and for those who see astrology as an amusing delusion, Brenda Maddox’s new biography provides an expert yet readable portrait of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats and his wife, Georgie.

Focusing on Yeats’ marital relationship, the new book traces the husband and wife’s unlikely struggles to use the occult to make sense of their marriage, their children and the interstices of the physical and spiritual universe all at the same time.

Called by Maddox and many others the greatest poet of the 20th century, Yeats (1865-1939) was a study in paradox.

On the one hand, his lyric, incantatory poetry became world-famous in his lifetime. Irish children recited his verses at school because he was acknowledged as the leader of the Irish literary renaissance. In 1923, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

On the other hand, he was attacked as a snob, a dandy, a fierce Irish partisan, and even, in the 1930’s, a proto-fascist. Exemplifying what British poet W.H. Auden called “the Southern California side” of the Irish poet, Yeats immersed himself in the quasi-intellectual, nether world of the occult.

Since there are other comprehensive biographies of Yeats, Maddox chooses to focus on the later years of the prolific, sometimes irrational poet. The book begins in January 1917, the year leading up to Yeats’ marriage in the self-determined astrologically significant month of October.

The book’s second section examines the years from 1917 to 1922. In this lively section, tracing the honeymooners’ first months and ending with the birth of their second child in 1921, Maddox closely examines the automatic writing script that Yeats’ wife performed, acting as medium to several spiritual “instructors.” The book then examines Yeats’ difficult relationship with his mother and ends with the years from 1922 to his death in 1939.

Maddox draws creatively on the massive three volumes of Yeats’ “vision papers,” which record the automatic writing that Georgie Yeats performed in more than 450 sittings, where Georgie’s hand was supposedly “grasped” by spirits from another world. The volumes also include “sleep and dream notebooks,” where Georgie talked in a sleep-like trance, and Yeats recorded her words. The texts contain many obscure diagrams, symbols and backward-written words.

At the heart of this book are the grueling sessions of automatic writing, during which the poet, then in his 50s, fired questions at his 22-year-old bride. In answer, she then scribbled disjointed sentences and phrases across page after page. One of the poet’s blunt questions to his new wife was “Why were we two chosen for each other?” No stranger to the occult, Georgie had met Yeats through mutual memberships in occult societies such as the Order of the Golden Dawn.

As Maddox skillfully points out, Georgie’s automatic script may be read as “an exotic exercise in family planning.” Shortly before his marriage to Georgie, Yeats was passionately in love with Iseult Gonne, the 19-year-old daughter of Maude Gonne, a famous Irish beauty and patriot and the idealized subject of a number of Yeats’ lyrics.

Rejected by Iseult as he had been previously by her mother, Yeats turned to the admiring Georgie. After his marriage, he yearned for Iseult and doubted his love for his bride. But Georgie recaptured Yeats’ straying attention with her previously unsuspected talent for bouts of automatic writing. According to Maddox, “Georgie’s burst of magic was a brilliant stroke, one the most ingenious wifely stratagems ever tried to take a husband’s mind off another woman.”

Georgie’s scrawled messages from the spirit world gave practical sexual advice, including how many times a night a 56-year-old man should have intercourse: “Gradually try twice.”

The spiritual messages also reassured Yeats that he had chosen the right wife, and that his life would improve as a result of his marriage. Maddox argues that Georgie orchestrated the messages to induce Yeats to give her a son. Tellingly, in 1921, with the birth of their son, Georgie’s spiritual messages came to a gradual end. Lest we blame Georgie too harshly for manipulating her husband, Maddox reminds us that the sometimes arduous spiritual sessions were “an act of love.” They not only served as therapy for her and her distraught husband, but also inspired some of Yeats’ greatest later poems.

Yeats worked the notes into a theory of historical cycles and human personality based on the 28 phases of the moon, which he called “A Vision.”

Where did Yeats’ strange susceptibility to the occult come from? Maddox speculates that it derived partly from his early relationship with his mother, Susan Pollexfen Yeats. A cold and distant woman who may have been manic-depressive, Susan Yeats came to life only when recounting the magical tales she had learned as a child in rural Ireland. All his life, Yeats remembered his mother’s stories, which may have inspired him as both Celtic bard and Irish patriot.

As she relives the crackpot side of Yeats, Maddox still leaves somewhat mysterious Yeats’ ability to transform astrological minutiae into great art. One danger is that we may come to know the impulsive neurotic at the expense of the skilled poetic craftsman.

Maddox offsets this reaction with occasional close analysis of Yeats’ lines, matching imagery from the script with imagery in the poems written at the time.

Yeats’ later years, vividly depicted by Maddox, reveal a series of flirtations with younger women and flamboyant causes. In Maddox’s words, “the 1930s saw him fall into such follies as an operation for sexual rejuvenation, a flirtation with fascism, a slapdash enthusiasm for eugenics, and a succession of senescent love affairs.”

Readers will enjoy this book not only for its touching portrayal of an unlikely marriage. but also for its evocation of the transforming magic that enabled Yeats’ best-remembered poems to rise out of the daily clutter of a great mind.

Peter Blair is a prize-winning poet who teaches in Washington, D.C.