Abstract
The thirty-seven letters printed below seem to be all that survive from Olivia Shakespear’s side of a correspondence spanning the years 1894 to 1938. Allan Wade printed 121 letters from Yeats to Olivia Shakespear: only about ten further letters to her survive, and most of these are very short. Wade was, however, forced to make significant cuts in some of the letters he did print. Commenting on the letters which did not survive, he remarked: “After Mrs Shakespear’s death in October 1938, her son-in-law, Ezra Pound, sent back to Yeats all the letters from him which she had kept, and these unfortunately reached him while he was staying away from home, and some of them he destroyed, apparently at random” (L 12).
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Notes
For an account of the life and work of John Foulds (1880–1939), English composer and cellist, see Malcom Macdonald, John Foulds: his life in music (Triad Press Bibliographical series no. 3: Rickmansworth, 1975). In 1915 Foulds married Maud MacCarthy (1884–1967), an Irish violinist and singer who had visited India with Mrs Annie Besant to study Indian music. It was Maud MacCarthy (then Maud Mann) who composed the music for the first performance of At the Hawk’s Well, given in Lady Cunard’s drawing room in 1916. She and Foulds were also among the musicians. According to MacDonald, Maud MacCarthy cultivated in Foulds “the faculty he called ‘clairaudience’: the ability to hear, and take down as if from dictation, music apparently emanating directly from the world of nature or of the spirit” (p. 22). Foulds appears to have drawn on this method for Mood Pictures (1917), settings of a number of prose poems by “Fiona Macleod”. Foulds developed his theories of composition in his Music To-Day (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson Ltd., 1934), in which he remarked that he and W. B. Yeats discussed the question of musical accompaniment for poems “more than once, some years ago, and I sympathised quite sincerely with the poet’s conclusion that no musician of all those who had made the attempt had been able to enhance his poems; but that in every case (so I understood him) the effect of the songs was appreciably less than would have been the case had the poems been beautifully declaimed without music” (p. 69). A World Requiem, to which OS refers, was a joint Foulds/MacCarthy composition which involved a good deal of “clairaudience”. OS attended the world premiére, which received a laudatory review in The Times (12 Nov. 1923, p. 12). It was, according to MacDonald, a great popular success (“the ovation at the end for Foulds lasted 10 minutes”) but “its failure with the critics was almost total” (pp. 29–30). It had three more annual performances, in aid of the British Legion, and has never been performed since. I have not discovered any other reference to Foulds’ identification of himself with the Italian composer G. B. Pergolesi (1710–36).
G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic (London: Longmans, 1907); Garibaldi and the Thousand (Longmans, 1909); Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (Longmans, 1911).
Pound wrote to William Bird on 24 Aug. 1925 to say that a copy of A Draft of XVI Cantos (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925) had been placed in the Malatestiana at Cesena “by my own honourable hands with fitting inscription” (The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige [London: Faber and Faber, 1951] p. 273). See also Peter D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric: Ezra Pound’s Malatesta Cantos (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1983, pp. 6–7). I have not traced the article in the Rimini paper.
Count Hermann Keyserling (1880–1946), The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, tr. J. Holroyd Reece, 2 vols (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1925).
“The book” was the second volume of Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, published by the author in Paris late in 1924. Volume I was published in 1922. (See Phillipa Pullar, Frank Harris, London: Hamish Hamilton 1975, pp. 360–2.) The corresponding WBY letter has not survived; how the volumes came into AE’s hands is not known. Harris probably sent them to AE himself. AE and Harris were in correspondence in the early 1920s; Harris greatly admired AE’s writings on Irish political questions, and published an article by AE in Pearson’s Magazine (NY, 1921).
(See Henry Summerheld, That Myriad-Minded Man: a biography of George William Russell “A. E.” 1867–1935 [Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd, 1975] p. 203). AE would surely have wanted to destroy My Life and Loves; somehow Yeats managed to rescue the second volume. In a letter to Harris dated “Dec 23” (probably 1926), WBY said, “I thank you for this book of yours [My Live and Loves, Vol. II], which I had already read in a borrowed copy…”
G. K. Chesteron, The Everlasting Man (London: Hodder & Stoughton) 1925.
St. John Ervine, Parnell, London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1925.
Louis Berman, M. D., The Personal Equation (NY and London: Century Co., 1925). Berman, an American, explains human behaviour via a determinist theory of glandular influences. Ezra Pound reviewed Berman’s The Glands Regulating Personality in The New Age in 1922; OS may have originally recommended Berman’s work to him. She told Pound, in an unpublished letter dated 17 Jan. 1926, that she was looking for a copy of The Personal Equation.
The Matriarch opened at the Royalty Theatre on 8 May 1930. See Margot Peters, Mrs Pat: the Life of Mrs Patrick Campbell (London: Bodley Head, 1984) pp. 402–4.
This refers in part to WBY’s letter postmarked 9 February 1931 (L 781), but there was probably a subsequent letter from WBY which has not survived. L 781 explains the following references to AV [B], Shelley’s poems, and the “learned doctor”. Lionel Johnson, writing to J. H. Bradley on 15 June 1884, asked where he could find a portrait of Shelley to give to “a cousin who almost prays to Shelley, having lost all her other gods” (Some Winchester Letters to Lionel Johnson, London: Allen & Unwin, 1919, p. 111). The “learned doctor” was Frank Pearce Sturm (1879–1942). There is a photograph of Sturm contemplating his Buddha in Richard Taylor’s Frank Pearce Sturm: His Life, Letters, and Collected Work (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1969), facing p. 57. OS owned a small statue of the Buddha which she called “Uncle Hilary” (EPDSL, p. 16).
The corresponding WBY letter has not survived; I am unable to explain this reference. Lewis went to Morocco in May 1931 and appears to have stayed there for some months (see Jeffrey Myers, The Enemy: a Biography of Wyndham Lewis, [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980] p. 193).
The Quest Society was founded in 1909 by G. R. S. Mead (1863–1933) “to promote investigation and comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science, on the basis of experience” (EPDSL, p. 351). Olivia and Dorothy Shakespear attended meetings of the Society (which had its headquarters in Kensington) during the pre-war years. The librarian was a Miss E. Worthington; she is listed in an address book which OS began in 1910 and kept for many years; five different London addresses for Miss Worthington have been recorded and deleted, but nothing further is known about her. See also OS’s letter of 9 June 1932 (p. 355) below. Robert Eisler, The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, according to Flavius Josephus’ recently discovered “Capture of Jerusalem” and other Jewish and Christian sources … (Heidelberg, 1928; London: Methuen & Co., 1931). Eisler (1882–1949), Austrian economist and historian, wrote on subjects ranging from monetary reform to lycanthropy. His Stable Money: the remedy for the economic world crisis etc. (London: Search Publishing Co., 1932) aroused some interest during the 1930s.
William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: The Recollections of William Rothenstein 1872–1900 (London: Faber, 1931). The 1898 portrait of WBY appears facing p. 335.
James Stephens, In the Land of Youth (London: Macmillan, 1924). See L 780.
H. S. Ede, Savage Messiah (London: Heinemann, 1931). See also the following OS letter and L 782–3.
The Gaudier-Brzeska literature began with Ezra Pound’s Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (London: Allen Lane, 1916; Laidlaw and Laidlaw, n. d. [1916?]). Most of this book is in fact about Pound and Vorticism, but it helps to explain OS’s proprietary interest in Gaudier-Brzeska. Six of his letters to her, written shortly before his death in action on 5 June 1915, are quoted by Pound (pp. 73–9). It is clear that OS was fond of Gaudier-Brzeska, whom she and Pound first met at a London Salon exhibition on 27 June 1913, according to Pound’s recollection as interpreted by Roger Cole (Burning to Speak The Life and Art of Henri Gaudier Brzeska, [Oxford: Phaidon, 1978] p. 30). (Cole misidentifies Pound’s “OS” as Osbert Sitwell). There are frequent references to Gaudier-Brzeska in EPDSL: OS bought a white marble torso by Gaudier-Brzeska for £10 in Dec. 1913; he visited Brunswick Gardens on several occasions (including one of Rummel’s recitals); Harry Tucker also bought some of his work. All of this helps to account for the feeling behind OS’s letters: that Ede is an outsider invading family territory. Ede’s book (which consists largely of quotations from Gaudier-Brzeska’s letters to Sophie Brzeska, together with material based on her diary), makes clear that the relation between Gaudier-Brzeska and Sophie was both platonic and pathological. Sophie Brzeska was born in Cracow in 1871 or 1872; she met Henri Gaudier (1891–1915) in Paris early in 1910; they combined their surnames and often presented themselves as brother and sister. Sophie Brzeska was never mentally stable, and her condition worsened rapidly after Gaudier-Brzeska’s death in 1915. She was certified insane in November 1922 and confined in a Gloucestershire asylum, where she died of pneumonia in March 1925. Roger Secrétain quotes an interview with H. S. Ede, in which Ede describes the difficulties he faced in trying to rescue Gaudier-Brzeska’s work and Sophie Brzeska’s papers from the Court of Lunacy (Un sculpteur “maudit”: Gaudier-Brzeska 1891–1915 [Paris: Le Temps, 1979], pp. 305–6). Later biographers have not questioned the authenticity of either the diary or the letters: these materials are now in the University of Essex Library. But, even allowing for the distorting effect of Ede’s commentary, Yeats’s judgement of Sophie Brzeska seems rather naive. OS was clearly upset by the devastating impression left by Gaudier-Brzeska’s letters to Sophie Brzeska, which are those of a half-crazed child to a hysterical mother-substitute. His letters to OS in 1915 are mature, intelligent, and level-headed; they do indeed read like the work of another person altogether.
“The Results of Thought” (VP 504–5). WBY’s first fair copy of the poem is dated “August 18” [1931]. See Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963, pp. 212–16).
Louise Morgan, Writers at Work (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931); the interview with WBY is reprinted in W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, vol. II, ed. E. H. Mikhail (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 199–204.
Elizabeth Valentine Fox (1861–1931), née Ogilvy, m. Thomas Hamilton Fox in 1889. During the 1890s she lived at Hollydale, Keston, Kent. OS used Hollydale as the setting for her second novel, The Journey of High Honour (London: Osgood & Macllvaine, 1895), which describes a house (sketched by Hope Shakespear in Aug. 1896) “in the beautiful Elizabethan style, its tender greys and reds giving intense colour to the group of tall, scarlet and blue and white flowers standing along the walks …” (pp. 9–10). Valentine Fox was OS’s “sponsor” in the affair between OS and WBY. Her marriage, like OS’s, was unhappy; her only daughter, Ruth (1890–1966) was born nine months and five days after the wedding, as was Dorothy Shakespear. Ruth Fox married Hugh Dalton (1887–1962), a Labour politician who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the post-war Attlee government. In or around 1901, Valentine Fox fell deeply in love with Arthur Petersen (1859–1922), a wealthy barrister who later became a Chancery judge. To avoid a scandal, Petersen took the entire Fox family to live with him in a series of ever more luxurious houses. Hamilton Fox (1852–1923), a brewer from Kent, took to drink in his humiliation, but nevertheless outlived Petersen by some eighteen months. Petersen left Valentine Fox £1700 a year for life; the income went to Ruth after Valentine’s death in 1931. See Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), pp. 122–4, 197–8. OS and Valentine Fox had met by 1890 at the latest, and remained close friends until Valentine’s death.
The Testament of François Villon, A Melodrama by Ezra Pound, words by François Villon, Music by Ezra Pound (first performed in Paris on 29 June 1926) was broadcast on the BBC National Programme on 26 Oct., and repeated on the 27 Oct. on London regional stations. WBY, in an unpublished letter to George Yeats (from Coole Park, dated 17 Nov. 1931), refers to a missing OS letter describing the poor quality of the broadcast. See also Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) pp. 297–8.
J. J. Connington (pseud. of Alfred Walter Stewart), The Sweepstake Murders (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931). Stylistically unremarkable, but built around an apparently unbreakable false alibi which involves many ingenious technical devices.
WBY’s account of the “the Cunard scandal” appears in his letter to OS of 9 May, but for obvious reasons was deleted by Wade (L 794–5). Yeats, who had been told by Edith Sitwell that Nancy Cunard was living in a Negro hotel in Harlem, remarked: “I am not particularly shocked, though I was by the pamphlet attacking her mother. The rich should be above fear & therefore audacious as the aristocracy were in the eighteenth century — if you like negro lovers why not say so. She is typical of her cruel generation & it is always something to be typical.” The incident in question was first publicised on 2 May 1932 by the New York Daily Mirror, which announced that Nancy Cunard had arrived in New York in pursuit of the singer Paul Robeson, and was staying in the same Harlem hotel. Nancy Cunard called a press conference the following day in order to deny the story. For a full account, see Anne Chisholm’s authoritative biography, Nancy Cunard (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979) pp. 193ff. The “pamphlet attacking her mother” was Black Man and White Ladyship, privately printed in 1931. (At the Hawk’s Well was first performed in Lady “Emerald” Cunard’s drawing room in Apr. 1916). Wyndham Lewis and Nancy Cunard had a brief affair in Venice in 1922 (see Chisholm, pp. 88–9). “Henry” was Henry Crowder, a black jazz pianist who had a long and troubled affair with Nancy Cunard.
Austin Clarke, The Bright Temptation: A Romance (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932). See OS, 9.6.1932, note 5, p. 257 below.
Austin Clarke, The Bright Temptation: A Romance (Allen & Unwin, 1932). Clarke (1896–1974), poet, novelist and dramatist, was a foundation member of the Irish Academy of Letters and became its president in 1952. The Bright Temptation follows the fortunes of a young Irish monk who is thrown from the wall of his monastery at night, apparently by an earthquake, falls into a river, loses his clothes, and goes through a series of adventures which culminate in his living in a cave with a beautiful young girl of quasi-supernatural origin. The book was banned in Ireland from first publication until 1954.
Robert Bernays, “Naked Fakir” (London: Gollancz, 1931). An account of Bernays’s tour of India in 1930–31. Lord Irwin was then Viceroy of India; he agreed to release Gandhi from jail in January 1931. Sarojini Chattopadhyay Naidu (1879–1949), Indian poet and nationalist. She came to England in 1895 and became a close friend of Arthur Symons. She was also a friend of Yeats’s and came to Woburn Buildings in the late ‘nineties. In 1925 she became President of the Indian National Congress, and remained active in Indian politics until her death. See Mem 175.
See Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) p. 301.
Eric Burton Dancy, “A Great Poet speaks for Ireland”, The Daily Express (11 July 1932) 8. This interview (hitherto unrecorded) took place at Yeats’s flat in Fitzwilliam Square, at a time when he acted as unofficial go-between in a controversy over the oath of allegiance (CL 1, xxiii). Yeats told Dancy that he thought the oath “should go”, and said “After all, neither the French Republic nor the London County Council has an oath of allegiance of any kind. Our association must be natural. If the British Commonwealth of Nations is not a natural economic unit it should not hold together, and if it is we are not such fools as to want to vote ourselves out.” Yeats felt that the oath of allegiance to the British Crown would provide a focus for “Communists and all kinds of extremists” who would be “running riot in the country” rather than resolving differences in Parliament because “an Irish Communist, strange to say, is a pious man, and objects to anything savouring of perjury”. Yeats approved of loyalty to “the British Commonwealth of Nations and not to a royal house which has no organic relation to our history”. He “certainly d[id] not want to see Ireland a republic outside the British Commonwealth”. The interview focused on Yeats’s reading of Hermann Schneider’s The History of World Civilization, tr. Margaret M. Green (London: Routledge, 1931, 2v; see also YL 241–2). Yeats interpreted to Dancy the three epochs of modern Irish history in the light of Schneider’s theories concerning the results of racial union throughout long periods of history.
R. C. Woodthorpe, The Public School Murder (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1932). WBY’s taste for detective fiction is recalled by Clifford Bax: “he challenged his host (and me) to name any detective story he had not read” (Some I knew Well [London: Phoenix House Ltd, 1951] p. 98).
J. Arthur Findlay, On the Edge of the Etheric (London: Rider & Co., 1931).
Eva Ducat and Marjorie Oliver, The Ponies of Bunts, and the adventures of the children who owned them (Country Life, 1933).
Bhagwan Shri Hamsi, The Holy Mountain (London: Faber, 1934); intro. by WBY.
Marion Plarr, Cynara: the Story of Ernest and Adelaide (London: Grant Richards, 1933), a bowdlerised and sentimental account of Dowson’s life.
HD (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) seems to have come to London early in 1934 (exactly when she arrived is not clear) to dispose of a flat at 169 Sloane St. which she had leased for some ten years, and take another at 49 Lowndes Square SW1, though she spent very little time in London during the 1930’s. See Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: the Poet HD and Her World (London: Collins, 1985) p. 222.
Man of Aran (1934), directed by Robert J. Flaherty. The film was a great commercial success and won first prize at the 1934 Venice film festival. See Liz-Anne Bawden (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Film (Oxford: OUP, 1976) p. 445.
Frederic Manning (1882–1935) died on 24 Feb. He received a respectful obituary in The Times (26 Feb.), from William Rothenstein (see Men and Memories, vol. III, Faber 1939, p. 264). Manning, an Australian, came to London with Arthur Galton (1852–1921) in 1897. OS probably met Manning not long after that, since Galton had known Lionel Johnson in the 1880s. A section of Manning’s Scenes and Portraits (London: John Murray, 1909), is dedicated to OS. See EPDSL 349–50. He and OS remained on affectionate terms throughout his life. His most renowned book is The Middle Part of Fortune: Somme and Ancre by “Private 19022” (London: Peter Davies, 1929) which E. M. Forster called “the best of our war novels”. It was later reissued in abridged form by the same publisher in 1930 under the title Her Privates We by “Private 19022”.
Frederick Chamberlin, author of Chamberlin’s Guide to Majorca (Barcelona: Augusta, 1925).
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© 1997 Deirdre Toomey
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Harwood, J. (1997). Olivia Shakespear: Letters to W. B. Yeats. In: Toomey, D. (eds) Yeats and Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25822-2_10
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