For decades, W. B. Yeats fashioned his poetry around the radiant, insurgent figure of Maud Gonne but in the mid-1910s, Yeats’s tireless quest for female inspiration slid to Gonne's daughter, Iseult.

Book-loving and unblemished by age, or Ireland’s gun-smoke, Iseult Gonne felt like a chance to keep his myth of the eternal muse alive, untethered to the messy realities that now clung to her mother. His obsession with female beauty could be kept chez Gonne if he could convince her to marry him.

And get permission from her mother.

At 50, Yeats was as narcissistic as ever. He knew he was the closest thing Iseult had to a father-figure in her life. Her own father, Lucien Millevoye, was married with another family, and by this time was a sad old man who refused to acknowledge the damage his affair with Gonne had caused. He and recommended Iseult, who wanted to be a writer, should become an Aspasia, the very role that had ruined her mother's and her own life.

By contrast, Yeats was sensitive and kindly. He admired her talent and was an overseer during her girlhood, a role she acknowledged in diaries and letters. As here mother's erstwhile lover and constant friend, he loved him and called ‘Uncle,’

Iseult’s first surviving letter to Yeats was a thank-you note for a gift he’d sent—Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece. She was a great reader. Maud Gonne thought she should be a writer and encouraged her to translate into French Ella Young’s book of Irish legends for children, Celtic Wonder Tales, a book she herself had illustrated.

In the New Year of 1911 Iseult started a diary which has been a biographical source for scholars, with the most interesting extracts annotated in Letters to W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound from Iseult Gonne (scroll down for citation). The diary reveals a quick, intellectual humour, alongside sharp insights into human nature, as she describes deep talks with her girl-cousin Thora, stolen kisses with her boy-cousin Toby, impish provocations of her governess, and her mother's friends and factotums whom Iseult delighted in shocking.

Her journal bursts with stories, dialogues, and curious little essays about her reading–which balanced Plato with Pindar, Marcus Aurelius with St John of the Cross. Gonne liked to boast her daughter knew the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as her prayers and Iseult wrestled in her diary with her philosophical tug-of-war between Christianity and the old gods, a common struggle at the turn of the twentieth century for those of a spiritual bent

Her friendship with Yeats was founded on intellectual and spiritual connection and by 1917, when it had morphed into a flirtation, her letters to him quote Loyola and Sir Thomas Browne, Shelley and Keats, Pater and Voltaire, Nietzsche and Huysmans, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rudolf Steiner.

Iseult had self-possession, grace and charm and … youth and for a time, he allocated to her the place in his imagination he had previously set aside for Maud: as beautiful muse. She was profoundly spiritual with a deep  aesthetic sense and the intellectual and emotional stimulation she provided to Yeats at that time found its way into his essays, poetry and plays, just as she was trying her best to establish her own sense of herself as a woman and an artist.

Iseult's favorite place was the family's summer house at Normandy, ‘Les Mouettes,' (The Seagulls). It stood on the low bluffs at Colleville-sur-Mer, Calvados, halfway between the little fishing port of Vierville and what later became known as Omaha Beach. Maud Gonne first saw the spot on a 1902 holiday and, urged on by friends, bought the seaside villa that same year. The purchase money was supplied by Iseult's father, Lucien Millevoye, as a bequest to his daughter.

Millevoye was a married journalist and politician with whom Gonne had had a 13-year affair and two children. Georges, Iseult's brother, had died as a baby from meningitis and Gonne only acknowledged her surviving child as her daughter to close. She would introduce her as a neice or cousin she had adopted.

Iseult was not allowed to call her ‘Mama,' instead using the name ‘Moura'– the French word for love, amour, with the ‘a' switched to the end. It's the perfect appelation for this mother-daughter relationship which was so full of love but pulled back-to-front by the cruel conventions of the time which made children like Iseult ‘illegitimate' in the eyes of the law, and of society.

Les Mouettes Colleville

After her divorce from John MacBride, Les Mouettes became the family’s default refuge each spring and summer. Contemporary descriptions and a surviving postcard (see image right) show a small, villa with wrap-around verandas, ‘an amazing Moorish looking house with blue tiles and terraces,' according to IG Letters. The windows faced the Channel, the sound of the gulls was ever present, and life there was seaside idyllic. Its

 tamarisk sheltered garden stretched down to the shingle on the beach… At night the sea was sometimes phosphorescent. The crest of the wavelets shone like jewels, if you splashed the water it made fountains of white light… Every morning we had only to run out of our bedrooms for our morning dip in the sea… sometimes surrounded by yellow butterflies. (IGL, 12)

The Gonnes–Maud, Iseult, and Seán–spent long stretches there and entertained a wide circle of Irish and French friends—-including W. B. Yeats. It allowed him to work on his poetry, uninterrupted by Abbey Theatre business, something Gonne always encouraged. It also thrust him into a complex household drama.

For Yeats scholars this house was more than a picturesque backdrop. The poet paid his first visit there in In the spring of 1910, and clusters of poems were drafted here in the critical decade when he hardened his style into modernist diction.

The house witnessed his last proposal to Maud, his awkward courtship of Iseult, and the psychic turmoil that led to his marriage.

A Child Dancing

It was a favourite habit of Iseult's to dance, at dusk, at the edge of the waves on Colleville beach, in a freestyle, Martha Graham style movement.  The open and mystical innocence that she displayed while dancing touched Yeats deeply and produced his most famous poem for her.

When ‘To a Child Dancing in the Wind' and ‘Two Years Later' appeared back-to-back at the heart of his book Responsibilities (1914) Yeats labeled them ‘I' and ‘II,' inviting us to read them as one braided lyric rather than two unrelated poems.

They both capture the sense of foreboding and anxiety that he always felt about Iseult. The first poem’s energy mirrors her carefree spin as she dances, but a catalogue of future grief shadows her with the poet’s unease.

In the first, she is dancing by the seashore, wind and spray whipping her hair, as symbol of purity and vitality with just a hint of what awaits her in the ‘monstrous crying of the wind,’ as she dances on, oblivious.

I
To a Child dancing in the Wind (1912)

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?

In the second poem, ‘Two Years Later,’ the question at the heart of the poem has darkened. Here, she is a moth spiralling into a flame, one of Yeats’s favourite images of self-destructive desire.

She was not the only one in danger. The poet’s paterfamilial relationship with his protégée and quasi-step-daughter was breaking down. While he still felt a duty of moral protection, he was also beginning to feel a romantic pull towards her. Iseult was becoming a love object and this covert desire gives an uneasy erotic undercurrent to these poems of avuncular warning and fatherly reproof.

This poem marks the moment when Iseult moves to the centre of Yeats’s emotional life and bears all the weight of that move, including his feelings of pity for her mother.

II
Two Years Later (1914)

Has no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn’d?
Or warned you how despairing
The moths are when they are burned,
I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.

O you will take whatever’s offered
And dream that all the world’s a friend,
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.

Yeats compresses a whole bildungsroman into two six-line stanzas, as the innocence of youth darkens into inevitable disillusionment. The elder wisdom of the speaker is powerless to help. She will burn and she will break and nothing he can say will make any difference.

Twice the speaker insists that his ‘tongue'–his poems, as well as his physical voice–are useless, even unsuited to guide her. As we observe the the aging male poet, watching the young woman dance, his self-implicating confession that his words (of prophecy, of age, of male authority) are powerless lend the poem its power.

The Beauty Burden

At Colleville, a strip of ploughed land ran between the garden and the cliff—almost certainly the ‘furrows upon the ploughed land' that surface in this 1917 lyrical statement of his beliefs about beauty, the sort of beauty he ascribed to both Gonne women.

A Woman’s Beauty is Like a White Frail bird (1917)  (Compare to the Maud inspired poem The White Birds (1892).

A woman’s beauty is like a white
Frail bird, like a white sea-bird alone
At daybreak after a stormy night
Between two furrows upon the ploughed land.
A sudden storm, and it was thrown
Between dark furrows upon the ploughed land.
How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toils of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole,
Beyond hearing or seeing,
Or Archimedes’ guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness.

To A Young Girl

Iseult had come to Yeats for advice in love. What he advised is not on record but he was excited by seeing sexual interest in her.

I have always felt discomfort at this poem telling a ‘young girl’ how her mother once lusted just like she does now—with wildness that ‘set all her blood astir / And glittered in her eyes.’

Imagining how mother and daughter felt at reading this poem, and at the wooing of Iseult that inspired it was the inspiration for my novel series.

After all his discussions, his thoughts on beauty had altered not at all.

 

To A Young Girl
My dear, my dear, I know
More than another
What makes your heart beat so;
Not even your own mother
Can know it as I know,
Who broke my heart for her
When the wild thought,
That she denies
And has forgot,
Set all her blood astir
And glittered in her eyes.

***

In autumn of 1916, Iseult sent a long letter to Yeats, in which she referred to his recent critique of her writing.

I am most thankful to you for those criticisms you have made on my scribblings. Yes, they are bad. I knew it all the while and I am glad of what you say about truth and beauty. I will try and put it into practice . . . but just now I am still too tired to work.

Too tired to work. When I first came upon those words I felt a terrible sadness for this woman I was attempting to capture as a character in my novel. Yes, the writing she was doing at the time could sometimes be pretentious or derivative, but it also displayed a flair for language, a deep intellectual and spiritual engagement and flashes of brilliance. It was, in short, typical of a promising writer starting out: tentatively emerging, learning by imitation, feeling its way towards a voice.

What she needed at that point of her development was validation of her talent and motivation to keep on writing.

WB Yeats was undoubtedly a poetic genius, but he was a lousy mentor. ‘Those who can, do; those who can't, teach,’ goes the old saying, and like most sayings, it’s equally true in reverse. And also, not true at all. Many gifted writers also make effective mentors.

Mentoring is an ancient and respected artistic practice, documented in cultures as disparate as bardic Ireland, ancient Greece, the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. Though it has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, literary history is in many ways a history of mentorship.

Throwing memory back over the last two centuries, countless effective relationships spring to mind, whether man to man (Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins; Saul Bellow and Martin Amis); man to woman (George Lewes and George Eliot; Henry James and Edith Wharton; HG Wells and Dorothy Richardson); or woman-to-woman (Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë; Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop; Zora Neale Hurston and Tillie Olson).

Careless or self-serving advice to a fledgling writer can be disastrous – for their writing, and sometimes at a personal level too. ‘Such relationships powerfully evoke primal childhood memories and fantasies,’ says Anthony W Lee in Mentoring in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (2016, 238). ‘[They are] sites of tremendous psychic power, with the potential for either self-regeneration or destructiveness.’

Power dynamics of age and experience are greatly intensified if romantic and sexual desire is involved.

All his life, Yeats used work as a means of approaching women he found attractive

When a protege begins to find her own identity as a writer, the  tension can infuses both the mutual professional interest and the romance.

Ideally in a mentoring relationships, eventually the writer psychologically ‘kills' the mentor. A productive antagonism when the  rebelling against her lover's conception of art and the artist.

Iseult Gonne never reached this level of confidence. Having parried Yeats's sexual attentions and refused his offer of marriage, she moved on to a new champion, Ezra Pound, one of the most famous literary mentors of all time.

The Gonnes left France in 1918 and there is no record of any of them ever returning.

To A Young Beauty

Dear fellow-artist, why so free
With every sort of company,
With every Jack and Jill?
Choose your companions from the best;
Who draws a bucket with the rest
Soon topples down the hill.
You may, that mirror for a school,
Be passionate, not bountiful
As common beauties may,
Who were not born to keep in trim
With old Ezekiel's cherubim
But those of Beauvarlet.
I know what wages beauty gives,
How hard a life her servant lives,
Yet praise the winters gone:
There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey's end
With Landor and with Donne.

Pound nurtured the work of a remarkably diverse selection of writers, including James Joyce, TS Eliot and Ernst Hemingway. He took Gonne's talent seriously and offered her excellent advice in his ebullient way, but again the guidance was compromised by his desire to seduce her. Sexually, he had more success than Yeats, but nothing of artistic worth emerged from the liaison.

Owen Ahearne and His DancersI
A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought
Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,
Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.
It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.

The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,
The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.
It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempestthere;
It feared the hurt that shc could give and therefore it went mad.

I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,
I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had,
But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;
I ran, I ran, from my love's side because my Heart went mad.

II

The Heart behind its rib laughed out. ‘You have called me mad,' it said,
‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;
How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?
Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.'

‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,' I replied.
‘And all those lies have but one end, poor wretches to betray;
I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.
O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.'

‘Speak all your mind,' my Heart sang out, ‘speak all your mind; who cares,
Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistake
Her childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years?
O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.'

As Broken in the End

Surrounded by gifted, successful and opinionated men, Iseult's standards for herself were too exacting and prompted a disabling level of self-criticism. Exacting standards are essential at the end of the writing process, but Iseult brought them in at the beginning – and thereby strangled her words before giving them full form.

These are the most challenging mentorees to work with, those who shoot their work down before it’s even begun. The challenge for the mentor is enabling them to overcome learned behaviours absorbed from long ago.Iseult followed Gonne to Dublin, parting from Pound, and there she met the 17-year-old Irish-Australian fledgling writer Francis Stuart. In January 1920 she eloped to London with him but Maud Gonne hauled them back, and the couple married in Dublin that summer. They settled first in Glenmalure and then in Laragh Castle near Glendalough, County Wicklow .

They both pursued writing and mixed with Dublin’s literati. She was encouraging of his endeavours, but she also meted out some of the lofty condescension she had been dealt by Yeats, an attitude that caused great trouble in their marriage. They quarelled violently, and Stuart was abusive, knocking her down when pregnant, locking her in. Gonne called Yeats in to sort out the problem.

Three children followed—Dolores (who died in infancy), Ian, and Catherine. Stuart overcame her denigration and went on to write a series of controversial novels. Iseult published occasional poems and travel sketches but nothing of note.

Stuart's affairs and eventual adventures in Germany broke the household.

***

‘Les Mouettes' was heavily damaged by coastal shelling in 1944 and later demolished, though the name survives on a rebuilt stone guest-house a little inland, a modest B&B that sit roughly where the driveway to the Gonne's house once reached the beach road.

References: Jeffares, A Norman, MacBride White A. and Bridgewater, C. (eds.). Letters to W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound from Iseult Gonne. Basingstoke, Palgrave. 2004.