Though Yeats's father, John Butler Yeats, believed the Yeats Pollexfen marriage was what made artists of them all, between financial insecurity and the descent into depression of the poet's mother Susan Pollexfen, the home life it provided was anything but stable. Nor did it have an auspicious start with JBY getting diphtheria on their honeymoon in Galway's Railway Hotel and sending for his mother who took him to Dublin in an invalid carriage, leaving his wife feeling abandoned and inadequate.
HIS symbolises much about the relationship that was to develop. "I became engaged on two or three days acquaintance, and it was not first love or love at all," wrote JBY over 50 years later to Rosa Butt, "(this really entre nous I have never confessed it to anyone ) but just destiny." Elsewhere he complained that he could never talk to his wife "If I showed her my real thoughts she became quite silent for days, though inwardly furious."
One of his letters to her before marriage shows an intuition of the kind of difficulties that marrying him might involve.
"I hope you won't henpeck me. And make me withdraw from the intimacy of all people who are not acceptable to your ladyship. You are fond of the Exercise of power and authority in which I quite agree & which bodes ill to my freedom. I shall be afraid to ask anybody to the house without first asking your permission and if I do how cross you'll be with your head thrown back. Your utterance short and abrupt, your dress rustling angrily. The storeroom key grating harshly and sharply in the lock. How my spirits will sink. And how uncomfortable the unfortunate guest will be. And what a milksop I'll be thought and what a tyrant you'll be thought and how you'll be dreaded accordingly. How my poor sisters will tremble at your frown and how we shall make common cause together."
But it was not Susan who turned out the tyrant her husband's facility for afait accompli outflanked her. Having married a law student with good connections and a solid background in the Protestant clerical establishment, she had no reason to anticipate being carried off to bohemia, and never reconciled herself to the abduction.
The marriage, not surprisingly didn't prosper.
Susan Yeats, increasingly withdrawn and resentful, left her husband in no doubt about her feelings. "At first when Susan insulted me and my friends I used to mind a great deal, but afterwards I did not mind at all. I would say laughingly to her that if she drove me away there would not be a friend left to her." (Such a fate was, of course, far less of a hardship to a Pollexfen than to a Yeats.) Her withdrawal eventually became depressive Lily Yeats described her habit of lapsing into sleep. "[Her] illness was mental. She used to fall asleep as a young woman any time she sat quiet for a while or read out to us children. We just rattled her up again, poor woman. Some local opinion thought that Susan was "always very odd", but JBY too readily stressed the Pollexfen propensity to "depressive mania". He endlessly categorised and analysed her character especially when writing after her death to his great love, Rosa Butt, trying to explain the low key tragedy of Susan's life.
and... Her ill opinion was most undeviating impartially unfair. But she never could see any difference between a lord and a labourer. Not that she had any kind of spite against the lord. Simply, distinctions of class did not exist for her, and the labourer she knew a great deal about. She was self centred and did not notice any person outside the few people she liked. They were very few".
There were, of course, two sides to this story, and hers is silence. JBY was, he told Rosa Butt, "always chaste... I was faithful to my dear wife except for that one transitory passion which was to me a source of misery at the time." Elsewhere he dates this lapse as soon after the marriage, in the 1860s. But there are other forms of infidelity. Susan Yeats, her background dominated by a powerful and taciturn father, entered marriage to be dominated by an equally self willed though talkative husband. His letters to her convey exasperation at her anxiety, and her health worries. ("You tell me your weight but I don't know in the least whether it was good or bad as I don't know what your weight was when last weighed." "All your family's ailments begin in the mind a sort of nightmare takes possession of them and they lose their appetite and get ill.") But she had good reasons to feel uneasy.
John Butler Yeats's obsession with what he saw as the failings of his Pollexfen in laws may actually have been rooted in guilt at how financially dependent he continued to be on them. In time Susan Yeats withdrew almost permanently to her room upstairs, only intermittently emerging to wander around half clothed and bad tempered, erratically reading out bits from whatever book was in her hand.
Yeats family life was convulsed by volatile irritations and upheavals. JBY, always ready to sparkle for the benefit of guests, was in private increasingly humiliated, aggressive and argumentative with his sons. The issues that separated them might be "abstract and impersonal", but their resolution often came near violence. The sons, for their part, shouted at their father in an unVictorian way when, after one confrontation, Jack told his brother "mind not a word till he apologies", it represented a reversal of parent child roles. WBY's professional success was not the only reason why his relationship to his siblings became increasingly distanced a sense of survival drove him away.
On January 3rd, 1900, Susan Yeats died quietly at their London home in Bedford Park.
She had been away in a world of her own for some years the bad tempered outbursts recorded by her daughters had apparently been replaced by a slippage into silence and mental feebleness, precipitated by a series of strokes. In a composed letter to Gregory the next day, WBY remarked "it has of course been inevitable for a long time & it is long since my mother has been able to recognise any of us, except with difficulty. I think my sister Lilly [sic] & myself feat [sic] it most through our father." This was true. A few months later Olivia Shakespear's own mother died, and he wrote to her, "When a mother is near ones heart at all her loss must be the greatest of all losses." The tone is speculative rather than experienced, and he was honest enough not to compare his own loss to Shakespear's.