LIKE MUCH OF his life, William Butler Yeats's fascination with French culture "was in a sense channelled through" his love for Maud Gonne, says Roy Foster, professor of Irish history at Hertford College Oxford and the author of WB Yeats: A Life.A few nights ago, Foster recounted the story of Yeats as "a great Irish European" to a rapt audience at the Irish College in Paris.
Yeats began visiting Gonne in Paris in the late 1880s, when she was living with her married French lover, the right-wing parliamentary deputy Lucien Millevoye. The daughter of a wealthy British army colonel and an Englishwoman, Gonne ardently espoused Irish nationalism, and published a newsheet called L'Irlande libre. Yeats usually stayed at the Hotel Corneille, near the Odéon. It had strong Irish connections. The old Fenian John O'Leary, who'd been one of Yeats's mentors, and John Millington Synge lodged there. So too would James Joyce.
Yeats believed that English Victorian literature was depleted, Foster explained. He and other young writers, including his London flatmate Arthur Symons, with whom he travelled to Paris, were inspired by the French symbolist movement.
Yeats tried (but failed) to meet the great French poet Stéphane Mallarmé.
Yeats did find Paul Verlaine, who by that time had spent two years in a Belgian prison for shooting and wounding Arthur Rimbaud, became a devout Catholic, then lapsed into the Bohemian life of an alcoholic in the Latin Quarter, gratefully accepting any offer of a glass of absinthe.
Yeats visited Verlaine “at the top of a tenement house in the rue St Jacques”, the Irish poet wrote in his autobiographies, as quoted by Foster. Verlaine had taught school for three years in England, and the poets conversed in English, with Verlaine searching for the odd word in a dictionary. Verlaine told Yeats he “lived in [Paris] like a fly in a pot of marmalade”.
An old man wearing ragged trousers, a rope for a belt and an opera hat, joined their meeting. Verlaine called him
Louis XI, because he allegedly resembled the French king.
At Verlaine’s funeral a few months later, Yeats wrote, “His mistress quarrelled with a publisher at the graveside as to who owned the sheet by which the body had been covered, and Louis XI stole 14 umbrellas that he found leaning against a tree in the cemetery”.
Yeats was a passionate theatre-goer, and Maud Gonne graciously translated for him when they saw Villiers de l'Isle Adam's five-hour symbolist play Axel. Before the two principal characters commit suicide, Axel says, "As for living, the servants will do that for us". The quote stayed with Yeats for the rest of his life.
The premiere of Alfred Jarry's Ubu roistruck Yeats as "evidence of a new, brutal culture", Foster said. It allegedly prompted Yeats to predict that after Mallarmé, Verlaine, Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes and his own poetry, would come "the Savage God". Though he lived only 74 years, Yeats's life spanned the chasm between 19th and 20th century Europe, from the romantic poetry of Verlaine to the rise of Naziism.
When Yeats co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre (subsequently the Abbey) in 1898, he was eager to import the stagecraft, lighting and symbolism he’d learned from French avant-garde theatre. But his Irish colleagues resisted these innovations from the continent.
Yeats had attended art college at the beginning of his career. He spent many days wandering through the Louvre and the great museums of Italy. His own taste tended to the Italian Renaissance, especially Titian, and he had difficulty understanding the then revolutionary work of Manet. But Yeats believed that the new French painting should be seen in Ireland, and helped to organise an exhibition in Dublin in 1899 of paintings by Millet, Corot, Manet, Degas, Monet, Daumier and Puvis de Chavannes.
Yeats was also involved in Hugh Lane's undertaking to establish a modern art gallery in Dublin. But he was disheartened by opposition to the plan. What he regarded as Irish philistinism inspired the bitter poem September 1913, with its refrain: "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone/It's with O'Leary in the grave".
Before the first World War, Maud Gonne lived in a small house with a garden in Passy, near the Trocadero. It was there, in 1908, that she and Yeats finally consummated their relationship, in their only night together.
During the war, Yeats often visited Gonne’s country house at Colleville, later the Omaha Beach of the Normandy landings. It was here that Yeats fell in love with Iseult, the beautiful daughter Gonne had with Millevoye. But Iseult, like her mother before her, rejected Yeats’s proposal of marriage.
There are many other chapters to Yeats’s associations with France and the continent, not least his support for the younger James Joyce, and his friendship with the American poet Ezra Pound, who settled in Italy.
It was appropriate that Yeats died in the Pension Idéal Séjour at Cap d’Ail, on the Côte d’Azur, Prof Foster concluded. Because “part of the pattern of his life is a linkage between Irish identity and an intellectual and aesthetic affinity with Europe, particularly France”.