Gluck by Diana Souhami (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗
- Author: Diana Souhami
Book online «Gluck by Diana Souhami (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗». Author Diana Souhami
Father was never mentioned. Mary, their mother, left him, though she had no money, when the children were in their teens. Rumour had it that he drank and womanized. None of them subsequently saw him and on an occasion when Nora was drawing up a family tree, she left him off it with the remark ‘We don’t mention him.’6
In an article for the Daily Express, 10 August 1929, called ‘Men Who Interest Me’, Edith cited the King, Albert Einstein ‘a man who thinks in immensities … his mental adventures seem to me more terrifying than journeys to polar silences or solitary Atlantic flights …’, Edmund Dulac ‘… he could have been just as famous as a musician or a writer or an actor, and can cook a chicken with the same perfection with which he draws an Arabian princess in an enchanted forest’, G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells, whom she described as
attractive … but too reasonable to be mysterious and do not excite my curiosity as much as Mr W.B. Yeats, whose grave manners and melodious conversation seem to take one back to a more spacious ancient world, who can be as practical as any other Irishman (which is saying a lot) and yet sees the fairies and has dealings with spirits …
It seems that Edith was the last of Yeats’s lovers. She first met him when, aged twenty-one, she was in Manchester attending a lecture of his. Of their early relationship there is no record, but after Gluck’s death in 1978 about sixty letters from Yeats to Edith were sold to the Houghton Library, Harvard. Personal and passionate in tone, they date from 1937 until his death in 1939, keep her informed of all aspects of his work, invite her comments on the progress of his poems and cover such matters as his radio broadcasts with Dulac, the affairs and disputes of the Abbey Theatre, his family, friends and contemporaries. In 1937, when Edith was fifty-three and Yeats seventy-two, he was writing to her (29 May 1937) sentiments that echoed her own views on the ‘better bouquets than those we get at our first dances’. He wrote, in words that commend the romantic sensibilities of older people, of how, had Edith been younger, true intimacy between them would have been impossible. He told her he thought the finest bond of all occurs ‘when we have outlived our first rough silver’ and of how sweet this bond can be to the old and the half old. He spoke of his profound hopes for their friendship and of how peaceful the understanding and sympathy she accorded him made him feel.7 In a letter to Maud Gonne in June 1938 he described Edith as ‘one of the best-paid women journalists in the world. She found she had no leisure so she gave up the most of it.’
He stayed for months at a time in the Chantry House. Edith evidently revered him and provided him with an ideal environment for work. The ‘Yeats Room’, as it was called, was kept just for his use. He wrote many of his later poems and plays for the Peacock Theatre there and discussed his work with her: ‘When we meet at the end of the month I shall have much poetry to read you …’8 When in England he would stay with the poet Lady Dorothy Wellesley (who, though married to the Duke of Wellington, had a sexual preference for women) at her home Penns in the Rocks in the village of Withyham, about thirty miles from Steyning, and then move on to the Chantry House.
By 5 February 1938 he was writing to Edith that in England she alone mattered to him. They went on holiday to the south of France – to Monte Carlo and to Cap Martin, where they stayed at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour.9 On these trips Edith looked after him – he was suffering from a heart condition that made his ankles swell – and acted as his chauffeur.
His letters to her became quite impassioned – a mixture of friendship, timidity, romance and longing. They showed a growing dependency on her – her love of his work and understanding of it, the peace and comfort of the Chantry House, the quiet of her personality and her talk.
By 15 March 1938 he was writing of how, after a sleepless night, he wanted her arms to make him sleep. On 25 June he told her that what was left to him in life was hers. On 5 September he wrote of needing her as earth needs Spring and of how, in his fantasy, he began with timidity to hold her. On 12 September he wrote that he longed for her in body and soul, that his feelings forther transcended speech and that he wanted to say to her the kind of foolish things sometimes read out in breach of promise cases.
His wife, George Yeats, was unperturbed by his interest in Edith. ‘You won her goodwill,’ Yeats wrote to Edith of George and spoke of having her blessing for them to go away together. George Yeats wrote sharp letters to Edith from her home in Rathfarnham in Dublin about ensuring that WB took his medicine:
Do please extract from him his prescription for the digitalis mixture and make him take it twice a day while he is still with you.… He needs so much intellectual stimulus that you and others can give, but he unfortunately also
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