BIOGRAPHY: The books of Ann Saddlemyer are landmarks: editions of Synge's letters and plays, groundbreaking histories of the Abbey Theatre in The World of W.B. Yeats, and a massive recuperation of the Abbey's most popular early playwright in Lady Gregory: Fifty Years After. She made Seamus Heaney's Field Work possible by lending him her Wicklow house in which to write it.
If Ireland gave a prix, as France does, to foreign friends, it would have awarded the title ollamh stráinséar to Ann Saddlemyer. She loves Ireland, and loves the Gregorys, the Synges, and the Yeatses.
Becoming George is her biggest work yet, and it is much more than The Life of Mrs. W.B. Yeats. In half a million words over 800 pages, the book gives the family background of the Hydes, Lees, Tuckers, and others, going back to the 17th century, and up to 1914, when George Hyde-Lees was the student, and Yeats the teacher in the Order of the Golden Dawn. It tells the story of Yeats and his loves, when he was with George and when he wasn't. The poet paid his attentions to Maud and her daughter, Iseult Gonne, before October 1917, and several other hospitable women after 1933, when George became "too tired for sex". The detail is so abundant as to cause the reader sometimes to forget altogether about George back in Rathfarnham.
We also get lives of each of the children, Anne and Michael, and then of the grandchildren: the nannies who looked after them, the boarding schools they attended in Switzerland and the Dublin suburbs, what marks they got school year by school year, and how the chickenpox progressed in the case of Michael. We get a complete description of many dwellings, from London to Oxford, Ballylee, Merrion Square, Rapallo, Fitzwilliam Square, Rathfarnham, Majorca, Menton, and Palmerston Road, Dublin, and how George decorated and furnished each of them (this is quite interesting), and of their gardens, and all that was planted in them (this is less so).
After the death of the poet, there are 55,000 words on the decline of the poet's wife during 30 years at 46 Palmerston Road, housebound by arthritis and drink, lonely when not sought out by young academics: T.R. Henn, Derry Jeffares, Ellmann, William Murphy, and Saddlemyer herself. The widow did not give free run of the archive to any one student, but to those who passed her test (and sometimes made the gift of a bottle, or a ton of coal during the wartime winters), she apportioned enough manuscripts to be the making of a young scholar's name. The stories of these cat-and-mouse games with scholars are fascinating.
Early in the volume comes the high point: the story of a young Londoner who for a time captured the imagination of the greatest lyric poet to write in the English language. It is a fascinating case. When Georgie Hyde-Lees first set eyes on the poet in 1911, she was just 18, a friend and cousin of Dorothy, daughter of Olivia Shakespeare, Yeats's lover of 1896, and still his good friend. Yeats was 46, just the age of Georgie's late father. Thereafter, she followed a peculiar and daunting course of reading, e.g. Khunrath's Christiano- Kabalisticum (1609), Iamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians in an 1817 translation, and Yeats's own occult writings. Like him, she could be serious about astrology (Yeats: "a very flirtatious business"), table-rapping at seances, and spirits writing on slates. When she joined the Order of the Golden Dawn (a kind of graduate school for magicians), her pace up the academic ladder outstripped his.
In 1917, having bought the tower in Galway, Yeats was a man in need of a wife. Maud Gonne rejected him time and again, her daughter Iseult did too ("you wouldn't even say you loved me," she jeered), and, in a kind of "whirlpool", he suddenly turned to George Hyde-Lees. On their wedding night, a letter from Iseult rendered the bridegroom unfit for the bridal night. Would George leave him there and then? No, instead she pulled herself together and proposed they try automatic writing. He set the questions, and her hand wrote answers. Had he made the right choice? Yes, the hand replied, it was right for both the cat and the hare (herself and Iseult). Would he ever have peace of mind? "You will never regret or repine" came the reply. In fact, he had no call to do so; she was a lucky choice, compared with the alternatives.
George admitted faking the spirit-writing at the start, but said that subsequently she was "seized by a superior power". That seems to me true if the power spoken of is that of Yeats himself. He became obsessed with daily Q&A sessions, and his fevered questions led her a merry dance. The "communicators" pleaded with him that the medium needed more sleep, later that she needed more sex, and a baby, but he thought he was on the track of the secrets of life and death, of history and psychology. He would not leave the woman be for the next five years, during which time she was twice pregnant, had to move house five times, five times invent the environment in which he invented the poems, and once accompany him on a long lecture tour of the USA, leaving her baby daughter behind in Dublin.
Saddlemyer's account of the automatic script is vivid, scientific, and open-minded. She steers the reader determinedly, however, towards a certain assessment of George Yeats. The poet's wife struggled to be the perfect wife and perfect mother, and ultimately left behind various earlier identities to become truly herself, "George". She sacrificed her own talent as painter, playwright, or novelist. Little is left by which to judge that talent, but Yeats told her, "You are much the best letter writer I know, or have known", and he knew many great ones.
She is, Saddlemyer explains, the uncredited co-author of his philosophical system, and that system is a basis of many late poems. There is nothing in this biography the surviving family won't like, but some readers will resist its almost reverential tone.
As a mother, George was certainly very middle-class and English. She put her husband ahead of her children, relied on the governess and the boarding school to rear the young, and aimed to create "independent" people at a very young age. The marriage itself seems troubled. Within six years, she writes to her friends, Lennox Robinson and Thomas MacGreevy (in those letters, for the first time we hear her confidential self speaking), mentioning "W.B." or "the Poet" in a slightly estranged tone, a combination of awe and irritation. He told a mistress in the 1930s that his wife ridiculed him in public, and in private refused bodily tenderness. Husband and wife normally slept in separate rooms. When she became aware of his affairs, she did not object, evidently relieved he was off her hands. He had been a lot to take on, so one can hardly blame her. Indeed, George deserves our blessing for becoming Mrs. W.B. Yeats, inspiring the poet, keeping him alive and happy, fulfilling him as a man, and managing his massive legacy.
Of course, had she been the sort to make Yeats truly suffer, we cannot be sure the poetry would have suffered.
• Adrian Frazier is director of the MA in Writing and the MA in Drama and Theatre Studies at NUI Galway. He is the author of George Moore 1852-1933 (Yale UP, 2000) and guest editor of the forthcoming theatre issue of the Irish Review
Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats. By Ann Saddlemyer. Oxford University Press, 808pp. € 30.