Next month sees publication of volume two of R.F. Foster's life of W.B. Yeats. In this edited extract, Foster looks at the relationship Yeats had with Dorothy Wellesley not long after an operation performed on him in 1934 by Norman Haire, which had some unexpected outcomes. The operation, actually a vasectomy, was intended to increase and contain the production of male hormone, thereby arresting the ageing process and restoring sexual vitality.
In 1935, Yeats met Dorothy Wellesley, one of the new poets whose work he had been reading for possible inclusion in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which he was editing. It was the start of a highly charged association, revolving around poetry and sex. It also had distinct echoes of his relationship with Lady Gregory and Coole.
On June 3rd he and Ottoline Morrell travelled to Penns in the Rocks, Wellesley's romantic house near Withyham on the Sussex-Kent border, to dine and stay the night. The meeting was, for them both, an epiphany. "Within two minutes of our first meeting," Wellesley later remembered, "standing in the hall at Penns, he said: 'You must sacrifice everything and everyone to your poetry'." Though she told him this was impossible, a note had been struck which would be sustained throughout their friendship, and an intense correspondence began as soon as he returned to Dublin on June 9th.
In his first substantial letter WBY wrote effusively about Wellesley's poetry: "Your work resembles & contrasts with that of Edith Sitwell. She too loves minute exquisite detail but her world is literary, artificial, almost that of a Russian ballet, whereas you play with the real world as a child, as a young girl, as a young man plays, you are full of poet's learning but it is the learning the unlearned desire & understand". She sent him Vita Sackville-West's poems, which, WBY assured her, were eloquent and technically skilled, but her friend was not a poet and lacked Wellesley's "masculine rhythm". When Dorothy Wellesley published WBY's correspondence five years later (to the horror of more reticent members of WBY's circle like Edmund Dulac), she called the volume Letters on Poetry, and this is the ostensible theme. But even in the early exchanges there is an extra dimension. To remark that Wellesley played with the real world "as a young man plays" in poems of a "masculine rhythm" carried its own message. So did her gift to him of Sackville-West's poetry: several of Sackville-West's poems, including a long passage in The Land, were addressed to Wellesley. For WBY's fascination with Dorothy Wellesley was partly to do with her exoticism, both as an aristocrat and as a well-known lesbian.
Born in 1889 as Dorothy Ashton, she was rich and well connected. The early deaths of her father and brother had left her an heiress, and after her mother's marriage to the 10th Earl of Scarbrough she grew up between Lumley Castle and other great country houses. In 1914 she had married the architect Lord Gerald Wellesley - later, rather unexpectedly, to become seventh Duke of Wellington. The couple had two children but separated in 1922. (Since he had already been engaged to Violet Keppel, Sackville-West's first lover and a spectacularly histrionic personality, he was something of a glutton for punishment.) Married or not, Dorothy Wellesley's life was closely woven into the tangled web of upper-class lesbian intrigue spun around the glamorous Vita Sackville-West. Their own love affair was over when WBY met her, and her long relationship with the influential BBC producer, Hilda Matheson, had begun, which would last until Matheson's early death. Tiny, slight, auburn-haired, "with blazing blue eyes" and an equally blazing temper, Wellesley was always at odds with her surroundings. Sackville-West wrote much later that Dorothy was "a natural rebel, rejecting all conventions and accepted ideas, loving to proclaim herself an agnostic, a fiery spirit with a passionate love for beauty in all forms": early on she was marked by "temper, pride and combativeness". Harold Nicolson, less diplomatically, reflected that "Dottie makes a mistake in trying to be at one and the same time the little bit of thistledown and the thistle"; her bad temper could deteriorate into malevolence and neurosis. As with Sackville-West herself, Wellesley possessed bohemian instincts that were at war with the dynastic grandeur and noblesse oblige of her public role. She was already, since her rejection by Sackville-West, trying to escape the tension through alcohol. Later, after she lost Matheson, she would give in to it completely.
Sackville-West was well known to be a lover of women (Edith Sitwell's tongue-in-cheek proposal of her as a Poet Laureate in 1929 had stated "Miss Sackville-West, had it not been for a flaw in fate, would have been one of Nature's gentlemen") and her liaison with Wellesley was no secret to Ottoline Morrell and her circle; WBY must have been forewarned. Nonetheless, he became infatuated with Wellesley and her world, curiously reminiscent of Woolf's Orlando: an androgynous, difficile, creative spirit, immobilised in the heraldic tapestry of historic English aristocracy. Early on she confided that she had been entranced when he told her his regret, after first reading her work, at learning about her social position. "I know that you realised instantly how difficult and exhausting it all is. Hardly shall a rich man enter into the temple of the muses. I have tried to keep faith since I a child, and now I am happier and shall probably make my peace with the Pharisees of all sorts. Is this right or wrong?" To many, this agonising about privilege, assuaged by frequent flights to southern Europe or the Near East, seemed a tedious affectation: her daughter would later describe her as "a phony Bohemian". Nor was WBY really regretful about his new friend's quasi-ducal status. Later, Ottoline Morrell would remark acidly that he had left her for Dorothy Wellesley's chef. There was also a Mayfair flat, and a Rolls-Royce, and the wonderful Sussex house. But the attraction was more profound than that.
Yeats admired the "passionate precision" of Wellesley's poetry, although a few months into their friendship he also knew her better personally.
He knew that she was erratic and affected as well as intelligent; he may also have observed the two bottles of white wine which were conveyed to her bedroom every night. But the limits of their relationship had been conveniently demarcated. A 70-year-old man with a strained heart and potency problems was not likely to inflict amorous demands which a 46-year-old lesbian would find unwelcome. Their friendship would settle into an amitié amoureuse: Ottoline Morrell could safely assure George Yeats (apparently recalling Margot Ruddock, whom she had met) that Dorothy was not a "minx". Wellesley, chronically unsure about her talent and partly trapped in a conventional and self-assured world which ignored her literary ambitions, had found both an admirer and a mentor whose greatness was unassailable. He read her work closely, made suggestions, encouraged her, and told her to sacrifice everything to her writing. She clung to this advice for the rest of her life, without ever being able to follow it.
He could offer practical help by drawing attention to her poetry - not only in the Oxford anthology, but by suggesting to Macmillan (already her publishers) that he edit a selection of her work and contribute an Introduction. This aspect of their relationship would arouse some derision, but Wellesley was (at least compared to Margot Ruddock) a moderately accomplished if minor poet, and the quality of some of her work has been vindicated by time. For WBY, the echoes from his past were irresistible. By the end of the year he was telling his hostess and correspondent that she could, for all her ambition, "write like the common people". As a writer, a great lady, and the possessor of a house which would give him a creative refuge, Dorothy Wellesley appeared, in the summer of 1935, to offer a glamorous replacement for Gregory and Coole. "How anxious she was to take Lady Gregory's place as Platonic Muse and flame behind the Bardic throne," reflected Shane Leslie, who knew them both, "and Yeats sighed for a last rose of autumn with a pink suffusion of passion, but all in vain."
As with Gregory, the relationship was cemented and symbolised by a house. Penns was as emblematic of Englishness as Coole of the Irish Ascendency. Its discreet white gate, sunk below the road between Crowborough and Groombridge, led into a long, winding drive through bluebell woods and great trees; as at Coole, the world fell away behind the traveller. The house, at first glimpse, was a small, dignified early-Georgian manor in rose-coloured brick; careful early-Victorian additions had filled it out into a more expansive shape, and a larger dwelling lay concealed beneath the regular doll's-house frontage. The drama lay in the setting. Penns looked across huge sloping lawns to the surprising natural feature which gave it its name: a great outcrop of sandstone rocks, like something out of a brooding Italian romantic landscape. Trees grew out of them, and on top of them, and walks wound around them: Ashdown Forest stretched for miles beyond. Strangely, only a few miles to the east lay Coleman's Hatch and Stone Cottage, where WBY had spent his honeymoon, and wintered with Pound in the early years of the war. Like Coole with its seven woods and disappearing lake, the house was hidden in a secret and surreal landscape, haunted by memory. There were walled gardens, restored by Wellesley when she bought the house in 1929, allées, high yew hedges; a lily pond and a romantic swimming-pool were added in 1935. On the south side of the house, where a large downstairs chamber was designated WBY's bedroom, wide windows commanded a view of a huge cedar and another great lawn stretching down to a river. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant came over from Charleston to decorate the dining room with large fauvist nudes; Wellesley's appalled son and daughter surreptitiously flicked mashed potato to cover up the "rude bits" on the paintings, but WBY much admired them. The house and its slightly brooding atmosphere were legendary. Both are preserved in a celebrated painting by Rex Whistler, a close family friend. In the dramatic foreground the two beautiful Wellesley children (who resented WBY's presence much as the young Gregorys had done) lounge gloomily among the Rocks, with a gun and a Great Dane; the house floats four-square in the distance, their mother's distant face framed in a window. Intentionally or not, she seems to be glaring.
During early 1936, while Yeats was absent and ill in Majorca, his relationship with Wellesley intensified. He longed for what he conceived as her intellect and sanity: "hitherto I have never found these anywhere but at Coole".
By the time he returned from Majorca and hastened down to Sussex, the terms of their relationship were set. Penns would give him a Coole-like sanctuary, and its chatelaine would provide the pleasures of literary collaboration and the resources to widen the circle. But there was an additional ingredient: many of the verses they exchanged would deal with sex, which was emphatically not a taboo subject. Wellesley's sexual orientation (and Matheson's presence) might rule out the kind of "beatitude" once provided by Ethel Mannin, but their collaboration on mildly salacious ballads acted as a kind of sexual displacement-activity. Given the complications that his entanglements with Ruddock and Gwyneth Foden had entailed, these limitations were not unwelcome. As their friendship deepened, their shared currency became more explicit: he wrote for her a bawdy lyric about flagellation, never published, and through the summer of 1936 they engaged upon a game of joint composition which produced a rather laborious mock-medieval ballad called 'The Three Bushes', dealing with substitution and surrogate sex. Much about their relationship concerned passions declared but safely kept in check. Jointly inspired creative works were - as he had once said to Gonne, and Gregory had said to him - their "children". "Ah my dear," he wrote to Wellesley later that summer, "how it added to my excitement when I remade that poem of yours to know it was your poem. I remade you and myself in a single being. We triumphed over each other and I thought of The Turtle and the Phoenix." If their relationship was technically platonic, its creative dimension represented the kind of erotic fusion which WBY had explored in the 'Supernatural Songs'.
His sojourn at Penns in June, 1936, marked a decisive advance in the relationship. As with Gregory, it was played out with a Jamesian complexity of self-presentation on both sides; as with Gregory, he would construct Wellesley into the symbol of a longed for tradition. The fact that, unlike Gregory, she was self-indulgent, erratic, and affected scarcely mattered, but it may be one of the reasons why a poem he wrote about her later that summer (called 'To D.W.') lacks both the depth and the clarity of his Coole elegies. Wellesley, with her aristocratic landscape, her Great Dane, her temperament, is invoked as a cross between Orlando and a vestal virgin. She is a woman in control of her surroundings but bidden by creative demons. Both characteristics qualified her to join the succession of similarly endowed women in his life, from Olivia Shakespear through Gonne and Gregory to Ruddock.
That autumn Yeats was back in London, his summer convalescence over, the proofs of the anthology delivered. He then travelled to Penns for "a quiet I find nowhere else".
There was not much company at Penns, but David Cecil, whom WBY had met as an Oxford undergraduate, and his wife, Rachel (daughter of the critic Desmond MacCarthy, an admirer of WBY), stayed en route to the local great house, Petworth. She sent a bemused report to her mother-in-law:
Dottie Wellesley and the poet Yeats are alone here. I don't know if you know her? I expect David has described her to you. It is a little difficult to do so now - she is a very odd woman, morbid and unhappy and silly; but there is something disarming and nice about her, and I am enjoying the experience of staying here, and meeting Yeats. We arrived in time for dinner last night. The evening was extraordinary. I now know what it feels like to be in a complete mental fog for several hours on end. I literally didn't quite know what the talk was about from the beginning to the end! Not that it was particularly intellectual, nor above one's head - but it was impossible to follow consecutively. Yeats talks slowly and clearly, in a beautiful low Irish voice, and describes people and things and books in rolling sentences which seem perfectly clear, and brilliantly put - and yet to me it was like standing in a tube station, with one train coming in evenly and slowly, while another one glided out simultaneously (which was Dottie Wellesley) she adores Yeats - in quite a touching way, she is so awed and grateful to him - but she is one of those people who can't listen, so that even though he is her Prophet, her train of thought never linked up with his once, so the conversation always had a double theme. David was also in a fog, but he managed the feat of somehow answering Dotty, and throwing Mr Yeats a question at intervals which would set him rolling on (rather fascinatingly I must say) for another 10 minutes on end. I had often heard him described before, and some people do find him a bore and don't think him really impressive - but I did think he was like a great poet. Perhaps you have seen him? He has a wonderful face - half ugly and strange, and half beautiful - with a very sensitively drawn mouth and chin. He was dressed in a scarlet shirt and square bow-tie of pale grey silk - but he has a dignified appearance, although perhaps his personality is not exactly so.
He is of course a thundering egoist - but I found his descriptions and stories strangely fascinating, although as I said, I couldn't follow the meaning! I have never anyhow heard anyone quite like him - and after dinner he read aloud some of the poems which hehad just written. One was a long sort of ballad - and although again I couldn't quite follow it - yet the sound was too lovely. He reads in singing, chanting voice, which lulls one almost to sleep - but he does it beautifully. I enjoyed that part the most, and he is so unselfconscious and spontaneous about his poetry - and it is so imaginative, that it is very moving to hear him read it. We also read out a long poem by Dottie Wellesley - but of that not one word could I understand, and I must say I had an awful struggle to keep my eyes open, the lulling effect was so strong! He doesn't appear until luncheon but I am quite looking forward to another hour or two of his strange company, and to being wrapped up in a fog again!
Penns might now have been WBY's Coole, but Wellesley herself was a very different figure from Gregory. Nor was their relationship comparable. That October in Penns, it moved on to another stage. It seems probable that after WBY's heated letters of the summer, he expected some physical passages, of the kind enjoyed with Ruddock and Mannin; but to judge from a strange letter he sent his hostess after he left, she had made it clear that her own sexual orientation ruled this out. Undaunted, WBY robustly converted it into an occasion of celebration. "O my dear I thank you for that spectacle of personified sunlight. I can never while I live forget your movement across the room just before I left, the movement made to draw attention to the boy in yourself. Alas that so long must pass before we meet - at last an intimate understanding is possible." "Our last" talk, he repeated in a later letter, "has created a greater intimacy": he was "a friend, who feels so much more than a friend". The poems he sent her in November included a first draft of poems eventually published as 'The Chambermaid's First Song' and 'The Chambermaid's Second Song', astonishingly and rather chillingly frank about post-coital tristesse.
I
Whence came this ranger
Now sunk into rest,
Stranger with stranger,
On my cold breast?
What's left to sigh for
Now all are the same?
What would he die for
Before night came?
May God's love hide him
Out of all harm,
Now pleasure has made him
Weak as a worm.
II
Joy left him upon my bed
Weak as a worm,
His rod, & its butting head,
Limp as a worm.
A shadow has gone to the dead
Thin as a worm,
Where can his spirit have fled
Bare as a worm.
Even Wellesley demurred at this uncompromising image; when it was eventually published, those who still cherished the WBY of 'The Fiddler of Dooney' would be correspondingly appalled. Sending a near-final version a fortnight later, WBY again rehearsed that "intimate conversation" at Penns: "My dear, my dear - when you crossed the room with that boyish movement, it was no man who looked at you, it was the woman in me. It seems that I can make a woman express herself as never before. I have looked out of her eyes. I have shared her desire". A month later he told her that her work relied upon its "masculine element allied to much feminine charm - your lines have the magnificent swing of your boyish body. I wish I could be a girl of nineteen for certain hours that I might feel it even more acutely". These were love-letters passed through a bewildering prism of transference and identification - which perfectly suited the circumstances of both partners. Erotic stimulation through an exploration of androgyny, odd as it seems, was another unexpected outcome of WBY's venture into the world of sexual rejuvenation and experiment introduced to him by the Steinach operation performed by Norman Haire.
© R.F. Foster 2003
W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939, by R.F. Foster, will be published by OUP on October 9th. It will be reviewed next Saturday by Seamus Deane Extract