About the Author
W. J. Mc Cormack is Librarian-in-Charge, at the Edward Worth Library, Dublin. Until 2002, he was Professor of Literary History and head of the English Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His publications include A Festschrift for Francis Stuart (1972), Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (1980, 1991 and 1997), Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History (1985), From Burke to Beckett (1993), Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge (2000) and The Silence of Barbara Synge (2003). He is also the author of a number of volumes of poetry under the name Hugh Maxton. Poems 2000–2005 will appear in 2005.
W. B. Yeats
The Life, The Death, The Politics
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Poetry, Drama and Prose by W. B. Yeats is reproduced by kind permission of A. P. Watt on behalf of Michael B. Yeats. Letters by W. B. Yeats are reproduced by kind permission of Oxford University Press.
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For Lucinda Thomson and Hugh Hartnett
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.
The Municipal Gallery Re-visited, 1937
It’s quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard
No reasoning forward ever gives me a conviction.
W. B. Yeats
Letter to Ethel Mannin,
24 May 1937
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title
Epigraph
Part One: The Death
In the Catacombs
A Sub-Fascist Underground
Introducing the Blood Kindred
A Sketch-Map of Jewish Harold’s Cross
Orientalism in Action
On the Edge of a Communal Fosse
A Troubled Mirror
Little Belfast
The Exploding View
Metaphors for Politics
Germany, Not Just Italy
Mind and Loins
Flirtation and Hatred
Some Paper Tigers
Coventry and W. H. Auden
A Bridge Too Far
Looks Like Carelessness
A Late German Contribution
Foreign Bodies in the Library
The Unspeakable Question
The Yellow Spot
After 1918
Commending Gogarty, Jewishing Beckett (1937)
The Ossietzky Case
Thomas Mann and Archibald MacLeish
‘My Frankfurt Honour’
The Goethe Centenary (1932)
The SS-Untersturmbahnführer as Executive Producer
February 1934 in Detail
Second Prize?
Once and Never
Intrusive Ghosts
Swift, Parnell and Some Anglo-Irish Others
Toller and O’Casey: Non Anglo-Irish Others
Casement and Wellesley
Walter Benjamin and the Lady from ‘Purgatory’
Part Two: Family Matters
Marital Politics and the House of Stuart
Isolde without Tristan
Enter George
A Very Young Pretender
‘A Hair Divides the False & True’
Morbus Démocraticus: (1924–25)
Jephson O’Connell and the National Army Mutiny
L’Action française
Terror, A Vision and Joseph Hone
Surfaces
The Senator and the Censorship
A Postscript on Jack Yeats
Blood
On the Boiler (1939), with a Digression on Canaries
‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’: Augusta Gregory as Victim
Two or Three Small Wars
Ceremonies and Innocence
Alfred Nobel and Peace
Between Balzac and Freud: ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’
Bones of Contention
Parapsychology and the Great War
Fighting with a School Friend
Part Three: Origins and Responsibilities
Victorian Kindred
Countless Kathleens
Ulstermen and Alfred Dreyfus
Tara’s Halls Uprooted
Bleaching History
Corbet’s Lough or Castle Corbet
Second-Hand Tragedy, or ‘Are You Content’
The Tendencies of Yeats’s Late Style
Rilke’s Conception of Death
Comparing William Faulkner
Hidden Gods
Demob
Clissmann Among the Danes
The Cold Eye on Moylett and MacManus
An Obituary for Francis Stuart (2000)
I, the Poet, William Yeats (Ltd); Or, the Good Man Doing Nothing
Picture Section
Notes
Acknowledgments
Text Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
In June 1934, W. B. Yeats gratefully received the award of a Goethe-Plakette from Oberburgermeister Krebs, four months after his early play The Countess Cathleen had been produced in Frankfurt by SS Untersturmfuhrer Bethge. Four years later, the poet publicly commended Nazi legislation before leaving Dublin to die in southern France. These hitherto neglected, isolated and scandalous details stand at the heart of this reflective study of Yeats’s life, his attitudes towards death, and his politics.
Blood Kindred identifies an obsession with family as the link connecting Yeats’s late engagement with fascism to his Irish Victorian origins in suburban Dublin and industrializing Ulster. It carefully documents and analyses his involvement with both Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult, his secretive consultations with Irish army officers during his Senate years, his incidental anti-Semitism, and his approval of the right-wing royalist group L’Action Française in the 1920s.
The familiar peaks and troughs of Irish history, such as the 1916 Rising and the death of Parnell, are re-oriented within a radical new interpretation of Yeats’s life and thought, his poetry and plays. As far as possible Bill McCormack lets Yeats speak for himself through generous quotation from his newly accessible correspondence. The result is a combative, entertaining biography which allows Ireland’s greatest literary figure to be seen in the round for the first time.
My first and warmest acknowledgment must be to Warwick Gould, a better Yeats scholar than I shall ever be, an excellent colleague while I was employed in the University of London, and an ever-constant irritant to my assumptions about political wickedness. Without his affable discouragement, Blood Kindred would never have been written. My second, no less heartfelt acknowledgment names Will Sulkin, who commissioned the book while we were both much younger. The last gentleman in London publishing, he has remained confident that the thing would be done, until now when ’tis done he has appointed Rosalind Porter to see it into print with sympathetic diligence.
Though work was concluded in the hospitable environs of the Bruno Kreitsky Haus and the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, extensive preparations were laid down in the National Library of Ireland: once again, I happily acknowledge the dedication and skill of Tom Desmond, most resourceful and obliging of the librarians in Kildare Street. Ciaran Brady, Alan Kramer, Eunan O’Halpin and Bill Vaughan in the School of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin, provided advice and direction on points of common concern; Katherine Simms kindly advised on points of medieval Gaelic Irish history, and Jane Maxwell clarified matters of College registration. Dr Seamus Helferty, of University College Dublin, assisted me in locating some obscure material relating to several minor members of the Blood Kindred. At the Military Archives, in Cathal Brugha Barracks, Commandants Patrick Brennan and Victor Laing were especially helpful to one whose project seemed at first remote from the material for which they are responsible. Staff at the Public Record Office (Kew) were expeditious as ever in finding bayonets in their haystack.
I am grateful to Dr Judith Priestman, of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, for her kindness in answering a last-minute enquiry.
Years before this book was set in motion, John Gray, librarian at the Linen Hall in Belfast, encouraged me to follow up the Ulster background of Yeats’s Victorian forebears. Even earlier, the late Rodney Green fired in me an enthusiasm for relating economic and industrial history (his discipline) with the loose baggy monster which then was Irish literary history. Iconoclasts both, they were under no obligation to like the consequences or to approve the conclusions reached. I make no claims to expertise in the field of industrial history – I just think one should make efforts to acknowledge the breadth and depth of the field in which literature grows.
Although Blood Kindred is intended to serve as a political biography of its subject, it may also be profitably read as a moral essay on method. In the latter sense, it resembles those Venndiagrams once beloved of school-book illustrations: that is, certain material is shown to belong in more than one category or discussion and consequently comes into view more than once. This critical double attention is suggested in micro-form, devised to refute the doctrine of limited liability by post-romanticism and retail scholarship. If the effect is inelegant at this point or that, I apologise for not completing the task suavely.
Anyone who sets out to write about Yeats must feel sympathy with undergraduates in Tony Blair’s New Labour Britain: it is fated that one begins the work burdened with debts. I should at the outset apologise to the thousands of commentators on Yeats whose articles, books, dissertations, editions, essays and other publications I have not read. Among the elite on whom I have relied I want to thank Terence Brown, Roy Foster, Warwick Gould (again), Derry Jeffares, Peter Jochum, John Kelly, Brenda Maddox, David Pierce, Deirdre Toomey and Tim Webb. All are known personally to me: indeed, though I differ sharply from one or two in the list, I count all as friends.
In Aarhus, Ane Line Søndergaard; in Bambery, Cecilie Roppelt, in Berlin, Bettina Schültke; in Cologne, Astrid Gerber; in Dublin, Jackie Blackman, Joe Collins, Ann Dolan, Rebecca Hayes, Tony Jordan, Carla King, Alan Phelan, Rosalinde Schut and Ronnie Wallace; in Frankfurt, Sylvia Goldhammer, Brigitte Klein, Steffi Lamla, Michael Lenarz and Konrad Schneider; in Galway, Basil Fenton and Hermann Rasche; in London, John London, Fiona Macintosh and Wim van Mierlo; in Rockcorry, Philip Clarke and Brian McDonald; in Vienna, Monika Wittmann and Mica Niculescu – all assisted in giving me access to, or insight into, material beyond the range I previously felt comfortable with. Margaret and Jennifer Fitzgibbon cheerfully tolerated the dying stages of the project when we might all have gone tobogganing. To all of these I owe debts of gratitude.
Ciaran Brady, Justin Keating, Mary King, Ferenc Takács and Dennis Tate read all or most of a near-final version. I am deeply grateful to each for the time spent, the patience exhibited and the assistance provided. The errors that remain are clearly ones to which I am attached.
Finally I should like to thank Michael Yeats for answering some unpalatable queries with great courtesy at the commencement of this work.
1. Hawkswood, County Cavan (author’s photograph)
2. Sandymount Castle (reproduced by kind permission of Oxford University Press)
3. Memorial tablet in the parish church, Tullylish, County Down (author’s photograph)
4. Victorian industrial buildings, County Down (author’s photograph)
5. Ashfield Terrace, Terenure (author’s photograph)
6. Iseult Gonne c. 1918 (reproduced by permission of Colin Smythe)
7. W. K. Magee (John Eglinton), from a drawing by J. B. Yeats (author’s photograph)
8. Austin Clarke (by Liam Miller)
9. Friedrich Bethge’s Frankfurt 1934 production of Yeats’s ‘Countess Cathleen’ in German translation (reproduced by permission of the Institut für Städtsgeschichte, Frankfurt-am-Main)
10. Dermot MacManus (reproduced by courtesy of Paul O’Neill-Rooney)
11. Roger Casement (reproduced courtesy of Dennis and Sylvia Tate)
12. Helmut Clissmann c. 1940 (reproduced from an unidentified wartime German newspaper)
13. Draft-list of nominees and winners of the Goethe-Plakette, 1934 (reproduced by permission of the Institut für Städtsgeschichte, Frankfurt-am-Main)
14. Friedrich Bethge, with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and others (reproduced by permission of Bettina Schültke, and Waldemar Kramer Verlag)
15. Eduard Hempel’s presentation copy of Germany Speaks (1937) to W. B. Yeats (reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees, the National Library of Ireland)
‘The work is done,’ grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in nought,
Something to perfection brought’;
But louder sang that ghost, ‘What then?’
‘What then?’, 1937
Where shall the case be heard? Where shall judgment be given? These questions serve to underline the extent to which William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) employed questions as a vital part of his poetic style. They also recall the tone of earlier debates about his politics – the clash of prosecution and defence, quarrels about evidence, appeals for a higher hearing. Without (I think) exception, biographers have accepted that the context in which he should be considered is Irish, defined in such a way as to hold together a cultural nationalism at home and a socio-professional career in England. In other words, they have accepted Yeats’s own definition of his world.
With appropriate derogations for individual circumstances, that is our world also. Some readers of the poetry may never have set foot in Ireland, others may deplore nationalism, others again laugh at the coterie of titled nonentities with whom he associated in his last two decades. But all agree that his achievement should be measured by the standards or codes of these ‘places of interpretation’ which can be located on everybody’s map, located and revisited imaginatively or actually. An ordinary universe.
But Yeats did not restrict himself to this world, these ideas. For example, he held strong views on life and death. While few – if any – may share all of these, it would be a foolish biographer who ignored them totally. His sources were diverse and his allegiance far from unconditional. But for much of his life, he professed what is generally regarded as a spiritualist belief in the afterlife. His dynamic of theories, experiences and desires gave prominence to a Vision of the Blood Kindred. According to Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), whose views Yeats used in devising his own system, the soul immediately after death is not aware of its new condition, but sees the familiar world and familiar persons as in life. This is not a permanent condition, for it leads into a complex reorientation of the soul – or dreaming-back – towards its original purity, towards what the poet called ‘radical innocence’.
Yeats came to this view early in his poetic career, and it never left him. There is a canonical statement in A Vision (1925), the first version of his quasi-official or public philosophy. ‘At death the man passes into what seems to him afterwards a state of darkness and sleep; there is a sinking in upon fate analogous to that of the individual cones at Phase 22. During the darkness he is surrounded by his kindred, present in their simulacrae, or in their Spirits when they are between lives, the more recent dead the more visible.’1 There is a second passage in A Vision that transfers the idea away from post-mortem dynamics into a future politics: ‘this thought must find expression’ among elites of learning and wealth and rank, and ‘those kindreds [sic] once formed must obey irrational force and create hitherto unknown experience, or that which is incredible’. As Roy Foster notes, these words were written in Mussolini’s Italy.2
To this unfamiliar notion, let us add another borrowed from musicology – borrowed through an unexpected agency. In Freud and the Non-European (2003), Edward Said speaks of Spätstil or late style, instancing ‘the intransigence and a sort of irascible transgressiveness’ of Beethoven’s final compositions. In offering a specifically political Life of Yeats, I am aware of the extent to which the topic has been conditioned by the author of Orientalism (1978). His recent appropriation of Yeats to the post-colonial cause seems perverse in the extreme, but his extraordinarily broad sympathies as literary critic, political activist and pianist earn him unusual respect.3
Yeats’s ‘late style’ can be dated from circa 1930 – that is, from the very different work that followed The Tower (1928). Perhaps one could point to a second phase, or intensification, commencing in mid-decade and involving surgery as well as poetry. One way or another, body and spirit engaged in a renewal of those struggles usually observed in early manhood. In the poem ‘The Tower’, Yeats declared, ‘It is time that I wrote my will’, but in practice he tore up rule-books for old men. His 1934 decision to undergo the ‘Steinach operation’, in pursuit of sexual renewal, has several political aspects. A desire to put the clock back emerges as a sometimes covert, sometimes dominant, theme.
Within Yeats’s corpus of poetry, drama and prose, the most accessible exploration of this arcane idea is to be found in his play ‘The Words Upon the Window-pane’ (published in 1934). This is a point of reference to which I return several times, for it handles a great deal of material with biographical implications. The outward circumstances are not auspicious. A shabby Dublin lodging-house provides the setting for a séance at which the voice of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) is heard in purgatorial anguish. But the great Augustan satirist is accessible only via a series of mediations through which the violent twentieth century and the timid-polite Victorian age play their parts. I want to write my political life of Yeats with these preoccupations of his in mind, neither accepting nor dismissing them. They constitute not only a spiritualist credo, but also a theory of history. For this reason, and others, they necessarily have a strong political character, not least with reference to notions of free will, social participation, class (democracy versus breeding), sexuality and ‘the body’.
Yeats sets the dead Swift amid commonplace listeners – a horse-racing enthusiast, teashop proprietor, gospel preacher and Cambridge student. It seems legitimate to wonder: amidst what unlikely figures might one (with privilege) encounter the dead Yeats? Or, to pose the question from his point of view, what former associates and ‘blood kindred’ did the soul of Yeats see when released from the body in January 1939? In dying, he had been comforted by a small group of intimates, of whom his wife was the most central to his career. But there is little further to be learned from envisioning these predictable angels. The processes of dreaming-back allegedly involve shocks of recognition, rather than reassurances. The underlying true character of the life is gradually unfolded, laying bare much that has been concealed or repressed. My organising conceit in these preliminary pages requires the identification of Yeats’s political unconscious, and the investigation of affinities largely denied in the life – and denied even more assiduously in the many Lives of the poet published to date. But I have no wish to shock for shock’s sake; on the contrary, I want carefully to discriminate between coarseness and subtlety, opportunism and self-denial. If at first Yeats is thrown among unsavoury characters, and shown to be of their world, the ultimate objective is to explain biographically how the poet came about.
He did not die at home in bed, but in southern France, a distant and warmer clime good for the health of an ailing man. One consequence of this off-screen obit has been the recurrent use of over-familiar directions to get him back in focus. Yeats has been successively located in the historic cartography of an Anglo-Ireland he helped to invent, of a nationalist Ireland he found alluring and infuriating, and of a domestic-professional milieu very tightly defined. All very good.
When serious reflective commentary on the poet began after the Second World War, the social condition of contemporary Ireland did not attract much attention. Its less attractive aspects were ignored in favour of generalised approval. So too with the other literary figures who had done so much to attract the world’s attention. Augusta Gregory (1852–1932) was stringently benign, J. M. Synge (1871–1909) a martyr, James Joyce (1882–1941) a genius. Most critics who chose to write about Yeats did so from a position that was sympathetic and approving from the outset. Thus R. M. Kain’s Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce (1962), described by Peter Jochum as ‘the intelligent reader’s Baedeker to Irish literature and literary Dublin’, scarcely went below the surface of the city’s Georgian squares and dull suburbs.4 The fault was not just one of unfamiliarity. Home-based Irish historians had not by the late 1950s begun to excavate mentalité or to document latter-day subversion. Approaches to the poet were, in various senses, positivistic.
Much has changed. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, even Yeats’s last days have been absorbed irrevocably into the past, to be denied nostalgia’s bonus. Conjuring a ‘Vision of the Blood Kindred’, we will call up ruffians and victims whom the Yeatsian tableau has not previously accommodated, figures all too characteristic of the time in which he and they lived. Habits of thought condition the way in which judgments are expressed and contextualised. These enclose ‘figures of the age’ who may become less familiar if loosened from habitual contexts. In the ordinary-language discussion of modern history, one of the most pervasive modes of periodisation has emphasised the distinctive character of successive decades. A dominant moral or other characteristic is frequently inferred: the Naughty Nineties, the Roaring Twenties, etc. Implicit in this simplified sense of historical movement is a series of qualitative changes occurring at ten-year intervals. Occasionally, major events underscored this sense of drastic change. The commencement of war in September 1939 undoubtedly assisted the configuration of the 1930s – which W. H. Auden memorably christened ‘a low dishonest decade’. Yeats died in the last January of peace. Looking back, too many have sought to preserve the memory of peace at the expense of historical truth.
Local, or small-scale, maps are required. To find our way back to the city over which Yeats has distantly presided, a ground plan of that largely mythic zone known as The Catacombs would be useful. There a few hardy specimens of Dublin’s literary Bohemia lived in Georgian pantries and wine-cellars, to achieve a flickering immortality in J. P. Donleavy’s novel, The Ginger Man (1955), and Anthony Cronin’s splendid memoir, Dead as Doornails (1976). There indeed was heard ‘porter drinker’s randy laughter’ – but not heard by Yeats. The Catacombs post-dated him, yet also can serve to mark off his neo-Augustan old age from contemporary reality. A ruinous eighteenth-century house appears, disappears and reappears in Yeats’s work, as if the building itself were an uneasy spirit. As literary undergrounds went, the ‘institutional’ Catacombs was a small holding which, by its allusion to the inhabited burial tunnels of Rome, evoked a coexistence of the quick and the dead. Those living therein were not always quick.
An ideological map of the same imaginative territory is likewise difficult to cipher, being older and more wrinkled with frustrated use than any Rough Guide to the Catacombs. Panoramas of right-wing politics in 1930s Ireland have been sketched primarily in terms of the Blue Shirts, whose nickname was designed to acknowledge continental models. The Army Comrades Association – to use their original cognomen – was bitterly opposed by the Irish Republican Army which was, for the most part, no less right-wing than its foes. On 28 February 1934, John A. Costello (1891–1976) advised Dáil Eireann: ‘The Blackshirts were victorious in Italy and the Hitler Shirts were victorious in Germany as, assuredly, the Blueshirts will be victorious in the Irish Free State.’ Confusion was not limited to parliament. When the IRA split along supposedly right/left lines, the dissidents reconstituted themselves as Republican Congress; they notably included Frank Ryan (1902–1944), a charismatic figure who ended his days as a less-than-reluctant bosom comrade of the Nazis. Irish paramilitary politics has displayed a steady right-wing bias, even when the rhetoric was socialistic.
The at once colourful and drab uniformity of this subversion against the Irish Free State persisted even after Eamon de Valera’s somewhat republican Constitution was adopted in 1937. As an old oath-bound member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), Yeats found himself divided between his psychological hunger for order and his ideological allegiance to rebellion. The appeal of fascism lay in its witch’s cauldron: the psychological and the ideological swapped places in a bubbling stew, with order and outrage for interchangeable salt and pepper. By contrast with its British cousin, Irish fascism lacked pedigree: there were no Anglo-Irish or ‘ascendancy’ Mitfords, nor could the demi-Republic boast of anything like Edward VIII, crony of Nazis and conniver in fascist hauteur. Passingly noted in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, Yeats’s disappointment with the Blue Shirt General Eoin O’Duffy (1892–1944) found consolation in a bad poem about the abdication crisis of 1936. From papers released in 2003, we gather that the security services in Britain had the means of ridding their king and country of Mrs Simpson, but chose to dispose of him, so great was the risk posed by his associations and behaviour.
Deprived of such a monarch, but willing to elegise Edward’s Russian cousins two decades after their deaths, Yeats had needs to look high. Division, in so many ways vital to the Yeatsian aesthetic, cropped up in his politics with all its gross actuality. You could find action in Ireland, yet have to look eastwards for breeding. As Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) put it, writing of Jack Yeats’s art, the problem lay in ‘the being in the street when it happens in the room, the being in the room when it happens in the street . . .’5 Whereas Ireland was Yeats’s native land, English was his native tongue. Whereas he had devoted himself to the common people of Ireland in their rural and traditional garb, he loathed the urban mob, amongst whom ideas of fascism might yet be sown.
Yeats’s self-proclaimed disillusion with the Blue Shirts has been taken as sufficient evidence of his disengagement from extreme politics. Two factors complicate this otherwise convenient rehabilitation. The first, as already indicated, was the absence of any politically active cohort amongst the class to which he aspired. Apart from a very few landowners and businessmen appointed with him to the first Irish Senate, no member of the so-called Anglo-Irish ascendancy played a significant role in national politics. Nor could there ever be a party to represent their interests or to nurture anti-democratic reaction in their favour. It was therefore necessary for Yeats to look abroad for stimulation in this regard – first to Mussolini’s fascisti, to L’Action française in the mid-1920s, and after 1933 to Hitler’s Germany also. In considering his attitude towards Italy after 1920, one needs to pay an historian’s attention to changes within the fascist regime, especially those of 1926–27 when Mussolini was demanding a uniquely fascist culture to complement a uniquely fascist state.6
Yeats’s interest survived that radicalising campaign. A further ‘reform’ occurred early in 1928, when Il Duce’s Council of Ministers drastically modified the country’s vestigial electoral system to authorise the Fascist Party’s ‘designation’ of public representatives: later that year Yeats resigned from the Irish Senate and by November had acquired an apartment in Rapallo. Ill-health took him out of Ireland; the choice of destination was his own. Spanish authoritarianism proved less attractive because of its Catholic populist rhetoric, a fact deftly deployed to suggest his distaste for all variants. Before acquitting Yeats of any further interest in fascism after 1934, one should additionally factor into the argument the petit-bourgeois nature of the movement in its local Irish manifestations. One could despise the Blue Shirts in the name of a Higher Fascism.
The classification of the Army Comrades Association, Coras na Poblachta, the Irish Friends of Germany, the People’s National Party, and even phases of IRA activity under the common name of fascism raises problems of definition. Some who regarded themselves as communists were willing to rub shoulders with admirers of Hitler, even after the Soviet Union was attacked. ‘The national question’ provided common ground, it seems. In addition to political theory, ordinary criminal activity deserves consideration. In the larger context of continental politics, purists have treated German Nazism as an amalgam of fascism and gross lawlessness, with the original Italian movement regarded as a model only partly imitated elsewhere.7 With violence forming an intrinsic part of fascism in action and in theory, the distinction is far from absolute. In Yeats, active violence bred envy, whether the exemplar was Patrick McCartan (1878–1963, IRB man turned medic) or Adolf Hitler (1889–1945, painter turned successful megalomaniac). Theories of violence informed Yeats’s philosophical writings, often through the notion of ‘terror’. It is worth enquiring if Nazism’s ability to legitimate (or at least institutionalise) violence in unprecedented extremes did not constitute its fundamental appeal for Yeats who, characteristically, held back from an open endorsement of his inner needs and desires.
If terror had patrolled back-street and small-farm Ireland during the Troubles of 1919–23, a decade later Irish society was wracked by less concentrated – that is, more pervasive – forms of violence. There was of course the inherited violence endured in poverty, to which de Valera (1882–1975) turned some attention after the electoral success of Fianna Fáil in 1932. The arrival of his reformed republicans in government consolidated the State in the long run, but bred immediate factional conflict, an increase in the use of capital punishment, and heightened debate about relations with the old enemy, Britain. In this context Yeats’s divisions came to possess what Lucien Goldmann termed a structural homology. That is, the literary corpus of poetry and imaginative prose presents in symbolic form the structuring conflicts and tensions characterising Irish society and its relations to the material world.8 We will have little time to expand on this relationship, except to stress that Yeats matters: his work is an essential part of a national history and, beyond that, part of an international crisis also.
Herein lies the quality distinguishing Yeats’s relationship to fascism from that of – say – George Russell (1867–1935, known as ‘AE’) on the one hand and Maud Gonne (1866–1953) on the other. In the early 1920s, AE evinced considerable interest in Italian developments, contributing an introduction to Odon Por’s book on Fascism (1923). His novel, The Interpreters (1922), had absorbed something of Mussolini’s politics in an effort to classify and stabilise the dangerous flux (as he saw it) of Irish society in the aftermath of 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, etc. While Russell is often regarded as the secular saint of the Irish literary movement, and his journalism as a bastion of liberal tolerance, he too can be found positively responding to the appeal of fascism.9 The novel just mentioned certainly influenced Francis Stuart (1902–2000), who proved more vulnerable or susceptible to the pathological side of what were loosely termed the new movements in Europe. Yeats might seem to lack the palingenetic or ‘born-again’ commitments that characterise Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism, but he did intermittently embrace the new, as with George Antheil’s new music, new para-psychological theories of identity, and (more crucially) the idiom of birth, death and rebirth. In the 1937 ‘Introduction’ written for a never-published collected edition of his work, he predicted that in two or three generations it will be known that natural and supernatural are knit together. Meanwhile to escape a dangerous fanaticism, ‘we must study a new science’. If the avoidance of fanaticism sounds admirable, the further prediction (in 1937) of Judaism’s disappearance from the historical background of Christianity does not.10 He certainly longed for a new order, if not the New Order.
For Maud Gonne, the central theme was racial, as befitted an English colonel’s wealthy daughter in denial. Hard on the heels of her anti-English conversion came the anti-Dreyfusard or anti-Semitic bile, in which latter Yeats signally had not supported her. Gonne’s irredentism after 1921 has less to do with political theory, or the definition of a republic, than it has to do with perpetuating areas of conflict in which her native land and first allegiance can figure as the Evil One. Psychologically, she exemplifies the element of resentment that propelled figures like Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) to the British extreme right. Together with Yeats, she exerted a baleful influence on young Stuart while simultaneously resisting his marriage to her daughter. The dynamics of the ghost family – Gonne-Yeats-Stuart – tell us much about the self-wounding and self-justifying masochism that forms part of the fascist psyche (see ‘Marital Politics’, pp. 232–259).
Gonne and Stuart outlived Yeats by many years. Indeed, in some bizarre attempt at the cancellation of his own generative history, Stuart outlived nearly all his children – and certainly wished to. These cruelties or callous amoralities gloss at the domestic level his more notorious wartime residence in Berlin. In Stuart’s Blacklist, Section H (1971), the manipulative figure of Yeats – dubbed Yardley in the first draft, after the cosmetics manufacturer – is superseded by a strangely distant Hitler. Published as the Troubles resumed in Northern Ireland, Stuart’s best-known novel might claim to be the last word in Irish anarcho-fascism, though its analytical dimension should not be overlooked in the rush to condemn its content.
Yeats’s death in France in January 1939 cannot be taken as a terminal date to this context. The war for which he prayed in ‘Under Ben Bulben’ obliged in September, and the eugenic theories he studied during his final years did not lose the name of achtung. Ireland, under de Valera’s canny rule, dropped out of sight to provide a darkroom for the blotchy development of a few Nazi plots involving people Yeats had known at whatever remove. In 1943, the first biography of the poet appeared, while his most assiduous admiring critic (Richard Ellmann) was serving in the American forces, and his early amour (Gonne) consorted with German agents. Only in 1948 was the poet’s body repatriated by an Irish inter-party government jointly led by the aforementioned Costello and Maud Gonne’s son, Sean MacBride (1904–1988).
Throughout the war years, the open alliance of Nazi Germany and the IRA moved from tragedy to farce and back again. While there is no reason to be surprised at the attitude of a Sean Russell (1893–1940) or a Joseph McGarrity (1874–1940) – the very term ‘physical-force men’ is sufficient – a different approach is required in the cases of Helena Moloney (1884–1967) and Kathleen Lynn (1874–1955). Both had been associated with the socialist, even Marxist, element of Irish insurrection in 1916, and both were committed to feminism. Their embroilment in the Gonnes’ protection of the spy, Hermann Görtz (d. 1947), is some indication of the intellectual and moral confusion that characterised Irish politics at the time. Indeed, the nest of gentlewomen that harboured the Nazi cuckoo constitutes a remarkable instance of the erotic as a component of fascist/radical dialogue. Iseult Stuart (1895–1954, née Gonne) not only sheltered Görtz in Laragh but had an affair with him, while her husband sent the housekeeping from Berlin.
In plays such as ‘The King of the Great Clock Tower’ (1934/35), ‘Purgatory’ (1938) and ‘The Death of Cuchulain’ (1939) Yeats explored themes of decapitation, polluted blood and betrayal. His recurrent emphasis on authority invested in status dramatised both a needy desire of fascist-style solutions and a brilliant defence against them. At the time of his much-trumpeted break with the Blue Shirts, Yeats had declared that he would rewrite his marching songs till nobody could sing them. This yearning for a greater extreme, beyond articulation, did not prevent his acceptance of a Nazi literary prize in June 1934. It signalled his frustration at failing to find in Ireland an allegiance to satisfy his needs without wounding his dignity. The leaders whom he had been able to name in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ – Kevin O’Higgins (1892–1927), W. T. Cosgrave (1880–1965), Eoin O’Duffy and Eamon de Valera – were either dead or compromised by their links to the popular mob. Yeats’s last-minute intervention into the 1936 controversy over Roger Casement’s diaries usefully re-established his patriotic credentials while attaching him to perhaps the least democratic of the executed 1916 leaders. (Nor had Yeats taken any interest in Casement’s African and South American campaigns for native human rights.) In contemporary Ireland, the enemies of promise were deplorably vulgar. As proof of Yeats’s lack of congenial allies, one has only to look at the men and women who, a year after his death, came together as the People’s National Party (to be called PENAPA for short), kindred of a decidedly bloody kind.
Yeats was a great man in life; in death he was greeted by his epigones. Let us pick out one or two among the posse for closer consideration. Among these we might choose the swashbuckling fascist and Higher Hindu, Dermot Arthur Maurice MacManus (1891–1974?), were it not for the difficulty in establishing his complex sense of identity.11 This difficulty will become a characteristic among the Kindred. Take another epigone, less attention-seeking. In 1939, the police believed that Patrick Moylett reached Dublin from Galway in around 1930. In their eyes, he and/or younger members of his family had been involved in petty crime. Together with a brother, Moylett became engaged in the confectionery trade; both professed a politics that merged right-wing and racist views with anti-imperialism. In July 1940, Patrick Moylett came to the attention of the Garda in connection with the activities of Liam Walsh, a convicted embezzler of Irish Army funds, a political maverick and low-level employee of the Italian Legation. Their associates included George Griffin and his wife, veterans of the Irish Friends of Germany. Griffin held that ‘propaganda regarding the German cruelties and the persecution of the Catholics were [sic] nothing but a fabrication of lies’.12 There was some uncertainty about Moylett’s other activities; he was ‘suspected’ of contributing to the Catholic Standard in the late 1930s. The sudden rise of PENAPA in the latter half of 1940 may have been assisted by external funding, though a refusal to pay hoteliers and printers helped to balance the books. Back in August, a garrulous Mrs Griffin told a police infiltrator that PENAPA was ‘purely Nazi in outlook [and] out to overthrow the Government’.13 Its putsch a distant prospect, the party was quickly suppressed, not least for the grossness of its racialist propaganda. Yet before this armageddon, Moylett had been expelled on 10 October for allegedly siphoning off party funds.
In Moylett, anti-Semitism and financial greed were united to an extent that would have fitted Theodor Adorno’s most astringent analysis of prejudice, for he practised what he preached against. A regular activity in Dublin was to oppose the renewal of licences held by Jewish traders, including money-lenders. On this basis, Moylett collected subscriptions from rival traders, while his colleague ingratiated himself with a bigoted minor judge. On 4 October 1940, Moylett confided to Griffin that a number of PENAPA letters had been held by the postal censor because the word Jew appeared in them. If this was an attempt to curry favour with a party leadership as much concerned with petty cash as gross prejudice, it was doomed to failure. In a police interview of mid-November, Moylett ‘stated that no general meeting of the “People’s National Party” had ever been held, but before the split Griffin and himself intended calling one with a view to electing officers’. A sequence of events at the Westbrook Hotel drew further attention to his independent ways. Having attended the first meeting on 29 October – apparently after his expulsion from PENAPA – he failed to turn up in November, perhaps because the proprietor had not been paid.
After that debacle, Moylett gravitated towards Coras na Poblachta, a bigger outfit, which sometimes gave the impression that it was the IRA’s political arm. A Gaelic National Socialist Youth Movement was also mooted with the name of Gerald Callinan, who had fled from Britain in 1939, mentioned in police enquiries. The band of 1939 arrivistes included specimens of ideological confusion whom we will encounter in various contexts. Their collective escape from the bodily rigours of war against Nazism, with (for consolation) refuge in Catholic Ireland, follows Yeats’s own passage from the earthly body to the reception rooms of the Blood Kindred. By comparison, Moylett had skiffled gracefully between Brixton and Ballyhaunis in 1920. Now his exit from PENAPA virtually coincided with the Garda’s decision to intercept his post, and a warrant for this purpose was issued in October 1940. The financial basis of that organisation had been frail, with nothing to justify hints of subvention by Joe McGrath, sponsor of The Forged Casement Diaries in 1936. In contrast, Coras na Poblachta was to attract several hundreds of people at its public meetings.
In May 1941, a meeting of the new movement heard a paper from Roger McHugh (1908–1987) on the evils of Freemasonry, the speaker being a member of the English Department at University College Dublin. Moylett observed that he had been put out of business by the masons, while Father Alexander Carey complained that the same element controlled the Aliens Section in the Department of Justice.14 By October 1941, young-ish McHugh – soon a Yeats scholar of some distinction – was interned on the Curragh. The more experienced Moylett steered between extremes of street action and rural sequestration by weaseling his way into the management of Coras na Poblachta. On 18 June 1941, the Irish Independent reported his election as treasurer of a south Dublin branch.
Meetings in June 1941 dramatically indicate how confused, or thoroughly varied, opinions held by members and sympathisers of Coras were. At a private session, one member ‘agreed with Herr Hitler and his policy’ on democracy. A week later, Nora Connolly-O’Brien gave a public lecture on her father (James Connolly), under the same auspices. It says much for their acumen that de Valera’s party was seen as a spent force in Irish politics. Meanwhile, the Coras line bore a strong resemblance to Nazi propaganda of ten years earlier. Native enterprise was being undermined by foreigners, amongst whom all Jews were lumped. Conspiracies by the same Jews, and by Freemasons, were detected even behind the private finances of a government member. Tactics resembled those of Kristallnacht (in November 1938) – the distribution of intimidating leaflets, anti-Semitic graffiti in public places, leading on to the smashing of shop windows. Coras was able to capitalise on the publicity that Moylett and Griffin had generated through opposing the renewal of business licences to Jews. When McHugh spoke at a public meeting in the Portobello district, on the control exercised by foreigners over ground rents, the proximity of Dublin’s Jewish quarter in Clanbrassil Street, of the synagogue on the South Circular Road and of a new Jewish school even closer to Portobello acted as his megaphone. At Terenure, where better-off Jews were moving, a crowd estimated by the police to number 300 heard a Coras speaker denounce government tolerance of English and Jewish firms that allegedly controlled sections of Irish industry. There was no mention, we may be sure, of Franz Winkelmann, a Nazi party member who was a senior employee in the Irish Glass Bottle Company, while the name of Mendel Waltzmann (a glass-blower in the same firm) prompted different reactions. Even less reference was made to the equally foreign Budina brothers, who had run the Kilmacurragh Hotel in Wicklow until, in 1939, they chose to run instead to Berlin. There was a physio-psychic link between the Budinas and Yeats: at the end of the 1920s, the house had been rented by Mrs Lucy (the ‘Lion’) Phillimore (née Fitzpatrick), a wealthy and argumentative writer with whom Yeats had a blazing row about politics on 1 September 1929. The speaker at the Terenure meeting of Sunday, 27 July 1941 was almost certainly McHugh again, who later edited Yeats’s correspondence with Katharine Tynan (published in 1953) and with Margot Collis (1970).
August was the cruellest month for these petty fascists. Father Carey’s disciples daubed slogans on the walls of Trinity College and planned to wreck Louis Wine’s shop in Grafton Street. A Special Branch man reported Moylett exposing Jewish plans to clear the debts of a Fianna Fáil minister (never named), and delivering yet another talk on ‘foreign’ control of industry. This was impressive in someone the Garda had regarded as ‘a man whom no party wanted’. But the financial motive recurs at least as often as the evidence of Moylett’s pro-Germanism. Associating him with yet another subversive group (An Cumann Náisiúnta) in July 1940, Special Branch officer M. J. Wymes believed Moylett to be ‘the type of person who would engage in dangerous activities if he was sure of profiting therefrom’.
Similar details allow one to construct a plausible sociology of Moylett’s money-shrewd extremism. Members of the family had been active in Dublin during the campaign against the sale of ‘Bass’ beer and English-manufactured confectionery between 1931 and 1934. Hostility to Bass was based on the connivance of the brewer (Lord Carrington) in English support for the Free State’s attack on republicans who had seized the Four Courts in 1922. The campaign was thus a republican animus rather than a broad nationalist resistance to product imperialism. Opposition to the sale of imported sweets and confectionery, on the other hand, touched directly on the family’s economic base. Patrick Moylett’s brother was a manufacturing confectioner, based in north Dublin. Moylett was employed as a commercial traveller, a role that facilitated political agitation among shopkeepers. In 1940, when the father was thought capable of dangerous activity if profit were to accrue, two sons were found guilty of larceny at a tennis club, an offence that carried a whiff of sectarianism.
In the autumn of 1940, Wymes believed Patrick Moylett to be engaged full-time in PENAPA business. Both he and Griffin were in ‘very affluent circumstances’. This hardly accords with his complaint of being ruined by Freemasons, and questions arise about the source of Moylett’s income. His business in O’Connell’s Street had benefited from a start-up grant of £1,200, and with his brother as supplier of goods Moylett enjoyed advantages envied by his competitors. Failing to mind the shop while attending full-time to the PENAPA, he may have quietly topped up his cashflow from the latter. But the resources to which he had access were very limited unless, of course, the party had private sponsors or external support. Moylett’s contacts with the Reich’s representatives in Dublin cannot be shown to have brought benefits. Trade-oriented rather than specifically ideological, they nonetheless failed to satisfy the Special Branch.