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April 08, 1990

Remembering Forgotten Beauty

Filed under: Archive,Books

1990

Olivia Shakespear and W.B.Yeats
John Harwood
Macmillan

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The reconstruction of any history is a gradual process and that of literary movements is no exception. The chronicling of Modernism has been a particularly baroque process. The key players were grandiose not only in mythologising themselves but in barracking for their chums as well. W.B.Yeats wrote himself into the Celtic dreamtime, Ezra Pound saw himself as Dante in a beret and T.S. Eliot smiled coyly while everyone else made him into a sort of archbishop of disenchantment.

Following on the unexamined premises of the writers themselves came a critical and scholarly reification of unprecedented proportions. The establishment of the apparatus of English Studies itself was significantly due to the richly allusive eclecticism of the Modernist poets. There was a lot of gold in them thar obscurities.

In his modest and painstaking biography of Olivia Shakespear John Harwood has not only added welcome cubits of knowledge about Olivia Shakespear, a figure worthy of recognition in her own right, but also provided fascinating insights into the life and work of W.B.Yeats her intimate friend of more than forty years.

In his Preface, Harwood notes that there are really only two kinds of biography-” those for which there is too little material and those for which there is too much.” The life of Olivia Shakespear is certainly the former kind. Details are in short supply, information has been acquired from back-bearings from other biographies, unpublished letters and some astute speculation. Olivia did not exactly help her biographer in destroying most of her personal papers when she was alive, while another important source, the letters and memoirs of her famous co-respondent Mr Yeats, give an account of events which must be taken with more than a pinch of pixie dust.

In this study, Olivia Shakespear emerges as a strong and attractive personality who produced six novels of varying accomplishment and was equally at home on the Yellow Book road of the Nineties as among the wacky fakirs and psychics of 1920’s theosophy. But Harwood’s title, Olivia Shakespear and W.B Yeats, also properly focuses on the significance of her relationship with Yeats and its effect on his life and work.

Even a casual acquaintance with the poetry of Yeats leads one to the name Maud Gonne. Characterised in his verse as muse, spirit bride, even Helen of Troy, she was an obsessive focus for Yeats throughout his life- and it seems that when Maud wasn’t fuelling his creative fire he was turning his fancy to her daughter Iseult. All of this has been recounted by the vast industry of Yeats commentators as solemnly as Yeats himself described it. He had succeeded brilliantly in setting the terms by which he was to be interpreted. This book is part of an important move to challenge those assumptions. In reconstructing the circumstances of Yeats’s love affair with Olivia Shakespear around 1896, John Harwood is examining attitudes and anxieties which reveal much about Yeats and the meaning of his work .

For all his talk of being a Celtic romancer and a Wild and Wicked Old Man, Yeats’s morbid fear of the sexual act was equalled only by Maud Gonne’s. A virgin still at thirty-one, it suited him very well to cast his conquests into the faery realm since the physical reality, despite Olivia Shakespear’s gentle blandishments, freaked him out completely. Harwood drily imagines the courtship of the unworldly Yeats by a woman surprisingly forthright and modern in her etiquette :

“She would have had to instruct Yeats, a far from promising pupil in such matters, in the intricacies of female dress, in order to return home buttoned and laced the same way as when she left (discrepancies of this kind were cited as evidence in at leat one late 19th century divorce case). There was also the question of contraception, which involved a choice between coitus interruptus and various crude mechanical devices . These were problems unknown on Danaan shores. Oisin had never been required to unlace a corset in near-freezing temperatures, or wrestle with a 19th century condom, and Yeats’s knowledge of these subjects was much the same as Oisin’s. Such obstacles must have further dampened the romantic poet’s ardour.”

The analysis of the relationship and its effect on Yeats’s views on love are more than significant footnotes to the Yeats biography. Harwood provides detailed analysis of Yeats’s poems published as The Wind Among the Reeds in 1899- showing dual preoccupations not unlike the schizoid split between the sexual and spiritual which D.H. Lawrence reveals through Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers. The Nineties poems read very differently- and convincingly -when seen as indications of alternating and conflicted depictions of Maud Gonne and Olivia Shakespear. Yeats’s failure to maintain a sexually mature relationship after this time has important implications when considered alongside Eliot and Pound’s antipathy towards women. There is still a serious book to be written about these chaps and their sexual politics.

In the meantime, Olivia Shakespear and W.B. Yeats raises important questions and provides illuminating detail. Olivia, until now a phantom in the history of this period, emerges as a significant link between Yeats and Pound – she was cousin to the Irish poet Lionel Johnson and it was through him that she met Yeats. It was Olivia also who introduced Yeats to his wife-to-be George Hyde-Lees .Her daughter Dorothy married Ezra Pound in 1914 and Olivia was principally involved in the care of their son Omar who spent his early years with his grandmother in London. All in all, her good sense, strength of character and carefully managed funds did much to sustain and assist the variety of basket cases who presently constitute the Modernist pantheon.

Despite its listing in Macmillan’s specialist catalogue this book has appeal to the general reader with an interest in the period. It is to be hoped that a further edition might be more reasonably priced and readily available. Carefully and elegantly written it is book that not only puts the wind among the reeds, it also has the potential to put the cat among the pigeons.

The Adelaide Review, 1990.

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