Brenda Maddox: George's Ghosts - a new life of W B Yeats

Picador

$24.95

Reviewed by Dennis McEldowney*

George (christened Bertha Georgie) was the wife of poet W. B. Yeats. Her ghosts were the spirits she summoned through "automatic writing," who confirmed her husband's circular view of history and provided the imagery for much of his greatest poetry. "George's ghosts educated me," Yeats claimed.

Yeats was 52 when he married, George 25. They were together 22 years, and this biography concentrates on those years. His earlier experiences appear in flashbacks - his upbringing in the west of Ireland, his unresponsive mother, early romantic poetry, Irish nationalism, involvement with the Abbey Theatre, association with Ezra Pound, who helped to turn him into a modernist poet. Above all, his hopeless passion for the actress and beauty Maud Gonne.

By the time he reached his 50s, after several lovers, Yeats felt he should be continuing the family name. Astrological calculations convinced him that the most auspicious time to marry was October 1917.

Maud remained out of reach, so Yeats fell in love with her daughter from a French liaison. Iseult was fond of him, but as a father figure, and finally turned him down in September 1917. The deadline was near.

Six weeks later he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who was the best friend of Pound's wife, Dorothy, who was the daughter of a former mistress of Yeats, who was Georgie's mother's sister-in-law. It was indeed a circular world.

On their honeymoon Yeats was desperately unhappy. He could think of nobody but Iseult. The arrival of the automatic writing saved the marriage. George summoned her ghosts, he exhaustively questioned them, and they went on daily for years.

Brenda Maddox does not believe in the ghosts. She believes Yeats and George were obliquely talking to one another. Thousands of pages of automatic writing still exist. Besides cosmology, the spirits instructed the pair on their sex life, and scolded Yeats for allowing his wife insufficient rest, especially when she was pregnant. But, says Maddox, "If George's ghosts were responsible for Byzantium they should not be mocked."

Yeats was now a public figure. He became a senator in the new Irish Free State. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In the 1930s he became notorious for two things: flirting with Fascism and surgery to increase his sexual potency. To him this was essential to, in fact identical with, his poetry.

It was rumoured he had been given monkey glands. In fact it was a simple vasectomy, which the surgeon assured him would increase his sexual vigour. Apparently it did. In his later years the succession of lovers, often several at once, was watched over from a distance by George, while she dealt with business affairs.

The biographer never lets the reader forget that she is dealing with a great poet. The paradox is that while Yeats' intellectual systems ran from the absurd to the repellent, he wrote sublime poetry. .

Maddox believes such a man deserves many biographies, from different points of view. "There never will be a last book on Yeats." She is over-modest. This is not merely "another biography." It is literate, intelligent, thoroughly researched, and enthralling.

*Dennis McEldowney is a writer and former publisher who lives in Auckland.