Letters: Roy Foster, in the rightly acclaimed second volume of his biography of W.B. Yeats, characterised the letters which Iseult Gonne wrote to the 52-year-old poet in the autumn and early winter of 1917 as "affectionate, confiding, fey".
Now, with this volume, we have a chance to read the letters which the 23-year-old daughter of Maud Gonne continued to send to the man whose suit she had finally rejected as recently as the September before his marriage to Georgie Hyde Lees (two years older than Iseult) on October 20th. They are among the 60, along with 11 to the married Ezra Pound (with whom Iseult had a brief affair in 1918), that this book brings together from her correspondence.
The letters to Yeats begin when Iseult was 15 and conclude in the mid-1930s when she was a grown woman and Yeats a rapidly ageing man. Those of that fateful autumn of 1917 (Iseult later told Yeats that they would not have lasted a year if she had accepted the proposal which he had first tendered in the summer of 1916, having first been rejected by her mother) are certainly as Foster describes them, but they are also needy and dependent on the Yeats who proved himself, in his own often blundering way, the only man who ever really tried to care for what this book reveals was a troubled and unhappy young woman. Indeed, the biographical sections of this work, helpfully supplied by Iseult's granddaughter, Christina Bridgwater, and Maud Gonne's granddaughter, Anna MacBride White, compose a portrait of an acutely sensitive, depressive, fitfully indolent, occasionally violent-tempered, hesitantly, even awkwardly, beautiful young girl who grew into a woman who "once her not great supply of energy was absorbed", as Jeffares has it, "expressed herself largely through her letters to her friends".
Yeats, at least, for all the emotional muddle of 1917, sought to settle her in some appropriate employment and was anxious in a fatherly way that she was keeping bad company. Her own father, the French lawyer and political journalist, Lucien Millevoye, who had once asked his mistress and Iseult's mother, Maud, to sleep with another man to further his interests, had suggested to his spiritually idealistic daughter that the role of courtesan in the keeping of some powerful man was a role to which she could aspire. And the men, other than Yeats, who had been fascinated in their various ways by this waif of the Irish literary and national Revival, proved less than supportive. Arthur Symons, the Welsh/Cornish poet and author, could conduct a romantic flirtation but was trapped in a marriage to an impossible wife. Ezra Pound needed his wife's money and could not envisage a separation. The young Indian scholar who coached Iseult in Bengali (she was being urged by Yeats to translate Tagore), with whom she might have had a fulfilling relationship, fled back to India and an eventual professorship when their dalliance failed to develop.
A precipitate marriage in 1920 to the future novelist, Francis Stuart (then scarcely more than the Rugby schoolboy he had recently been), led to unhappy conflict, from which Yeats was recruited to extricate her for a period of emotional convalescence. Her marriage ended during the second World War, when Stuart established a second long-term relationship in Germany. His suggestion, after the war, that he and his new partner should join Iseult in what had been their marital home in Co Wicklow must have seemed the final nail in the coffin of that often fraught entanglement.
Stuart's notorious sojourn in Berlin had in fact already brought one improbable stranger to her door. Herman Goertz, the spectacularly ineffective German spy, had been given Iseult's address as a safe house and he turned up in May 1940, seeking refuge. Iseult obliged, at considerable personal cost, since she spent time in gaol awaiting trial as a result of this act of pro-German solidarity in neutral Ireland. Anna MacBride White is circumspect about this incident. She points out that many Irish people in 1940 sympathised with Germany in its war with the old enemy. Yet she does acknowledge that Iseult's daughter, Kay, thought the spy's "arrival and their friendship had a profound effect on her mother. He seemed an incarnation of some hero figure of her imaginings, with whom she could discuss not only Nazism in an idealistic 'cosmic' way, but share a deep interest in eastern philosophies".
She also discusses Iseult's friendship with Dr Edouard Hempel (the head of the German legation) and with his wife, indicating that they had a shared "vision of Germany as a power destined to ennoble and purify the world" with whom she also "shared the disappointment of defeat, the end of their dreams of a better world turning to disillusion and regret . . ."
There is a good deal in the letters this volume collects and in the extracts from Iseult's rather precious and limited writings that it also includes, to suggest that hers was a nature open to the kind of cut-price Siegfried which Herman Goertz represented (he arrived "wearing riding boots, a pullover, and a beret") and the philosophic Nazism he apparently peddled. Her metaphysical yearnings and depressed moods characteristically found consolation in the unregulated reading this volume records, as an attraction for the paganism of the classical world (with which the fascist Pound would have sympathised) vied for mastery in an unformed mind with a longing for the mystical transports of heterodox religious faith.
Only occasionally in this volume is there evidence that Iseult's weak-headed part in Hitler's war may have had a darker side. As a girl she could refer gratuitously to an individual delaying a family financial transaction as "the Jew" and in 1917 she had thought "Hebraic and Maçonic" (sic ) forces might be "at the root of the war". We would be inclined to attribute such moments of prejudice to the conventional attitudes prevalent in the period among people of her class until we remember that Roy Foster, in his biography of Yeats, has adduced evidence that in the late 1930s Iseult could shock one of her mother's friends by her anti-Semitism; which must give one pause, since Maud was frankly anti-Semitic. It must set one wondering whether the beautiful, unhappy girl pictured in the portraits and photographs this valuable book also includes, became a woman who was attracted to Nazism and its agents for other than idealistic and cosmic reasons.
• Terence Brown is professor of Anglo-Irish literature in Trinity College, Dublin