Horace's Gossip Column: Maud Gonne Checks Out of Rehab

Horace again, Dead Beat's Gossip Columnist, storming out of the tool shed, paper in hand.

"I offer this. Be careful what you say and to whom, about whom. Run from a curious man he'll love telling others. Secrets that you trust to open ears won't be well kept. And once a word escpaes, it flies. You can't recall it..."

"What you got this time, Horace?"

"More to tell on Maud Gonne."

"Horace, Horace, Horace, I told you already it better be juicy. None of this ancient folklore. W. B. Yeats pining for her and all that."

"She shaved her head. She just checked out of rehab."

Dead Beat rushes over, throws his arms around him in delight. "You might just keep the job, Horace. You might just." Dead Beat steps back swiftly, holds his nose. " One thing though: You got to take a bath."

Maud Gonne Loses Her Underwear - Horace's First Gossip Column

So Horace comes bounding out of Dead Beat's tool shed.

"I have it. I have it," he screams waving a sheet of paper above his head.

"What do you have" D.B. asks him, "apart from a major case of dementia?"

"My first literary gossip column sang of news, as will my very last. I did well and have a practice sword to prove it."

"Let's have a look," I say snatching it from his hand.

"At the start of 1898, 15yo James A Joyce (JAJ) was just coming down from a year of intense Catholic religious fervor, and turning just as passionately against the Church. He was probably working on a (lost) notebook of poems, titled Moods, and feeling very fin de siècle: "The spectacle of the world... filled him with such sudden despair as could be assuaged only by melancholy versifying":

I have consorted with vulgarity

And am indelibly marked with its fell kiss,

Meanly I lived upon casual charity

Eagerly drinking of the dregs of bliss.

Meanwhile 32 yo William Butler Yeats spent most of the winter of 1897-98 in London (where he'd taken an apartment in 1896, in order finally to lose his virginity) hosting a regular Monday night salon for his literary friends, taking hashish pills and pursuing magickal researches with the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Meanwhile Lady Agusta Gregory (who surely had secret designs on WBY though she was 13 years his senior) met with Maud Gonne who WBY was sweet on and jealously said, "instead of beauty I saw a death's head".

Off Maud goes to Paris and Yeats returned to London where he took mescaline-- supplied by Havelock Ellis-- trying to achieve astral communication with Maud in Paris.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Yeats had made no secret that Maud was his muse-- someone described the spectacle they presented on the street: "It is Maud Gonne and the Poet. She has a radiance as of sunlight. Yeats, that leopard of the moon, holds back in a leash a huge lion-colored Great Dane-- Maud Gonne's dog, Dagda."

But on 08 Dec 1898, after acknowledging their 'spiritual marriage' (and kissing him for the first time!) Maud traumatized WBY by finally telling him about her eight-year relationship with Millevoye, and of their two children (an infant son had died in 1891). On 18 Dec WBY would nonetheless propose to her, again, but she refused again: "I have a horror and terror of physical love."

Maud then returned to Paris, and WBY slunk off to Sligo, taking the hashish pills he relied on, to finish his new book of poems, The Wind Among the Reeds."

"Thats it, Horace? Your first Literary Gossip Column?"

"To some my satire seems too cutting, so extreme it violates the law..."

"It violates something that's for sure," I tell him. "Listen Horace, this is meant to be gossip, you know up to the minute slander. Jeez, Horace, Yeats is dead!"

"What exactly do you want Dead Beat?"

"Horace, Horace, Horace, at least Maud Gonne swinging her legs out of a taxi without her underwear on."

Dead Beat Gives Yeats A Piece of His MInd

Dead Beat has a great interest in the mind - he has studied Hypnotherapy and NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) for many years and is qualified in both. So it should come as no great surprise that Old W.B. (see previous posts) would wish to communicate with him over this. W.B. himself being a great man for the 'mystical' things.

"Is that you Dead Beat? Is that you?" (Deep echoing voice resounding in my library)

"Is that you W.B.?"

"It is D.B. (Echo) It is."

"I thought you were fed up with me."

"I was, but you appeared nevertheless. Dead Beat I am here to tell you about 'automatic writing'."

"I know, I know. You and your wife, Georgie Hyde Lees. Dropped the 'i' to become George (something to do with numerology). You were the questioner and she the medium. Her hand was 'seized by a superiour power' and automatic writing the result."

"Yes, yes, D.B."

"Geez W.B. give me a break."

"D.B. It is the truth...(echo) truth...truth...On the afternoon of October 24th 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half-dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. ‘No,’ was the answer, ‘we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.’"

"Now remind me Willie Boy, you bought this?"

"I wrote about it all in A Vision."

"Strange book, W.B."

"My best, D.B."

"Give me The Tower, The Winding Stair."

"They could not have happened without automatic writing."

"Metaphors for your poetry...(bass echo) metaphors for your poetry..."

"A superior power, Dead Beat."

"Georgie and wishful thinking. Willie, I love you, you would have made a great student of NLP. Hate to break it to you though. There is no 'superior power', no 'muse' just logical processes within the mind we do not understand so well, but D.B. is doing his best to learn. You'd have liked me Willie. You really would."

The Flowers of the Town are Rotting Away - Dead Beat's Aural Vision of W.B. Yeats

D.B. had an aural vision of W.B.

He thinks you all should have the same.

Listen in to Yeats

Current Cake and Playboys - Yeats, and Dead Beat Discuss Synge

"So W.B. you were talking about Synge."

"I want to escape this nightmare D.B."

"Finish your Synge story first."

"And then we will not dream of each other again. Our paths will not cross. W.B. Yeats, Nobel Laureate, will not set eyes of the unsavoury Dead Beat character infinitum?"

"It's a deal, Willy Boy."

"I don't even know if I should trust you.... When I had landed from a fishing yawl on the middle of the island of Aran, a few months before my first meeting with Synge, a little group of islanders, who had gathered to watch a stranger's arrival, brought me to the oldest man upon the island. He spoke but two sentences, speaking them very slowly, "If any gentleman has done a crime we'll hide him. There was a gentleman that killed his father and I had him in my house three months till he got away to America." It was a play (The Playboy of the Western World) founded on that old man's story Synge brought back with him. A young man arrives at a little public house and tells the publican's daughter that he has murdered his father. He so tells it that he has all her sympathy, and every time he retells it, with new exaggerations and additions, he wins the sympathy of somebody or other, for it is the countryman's habit to be against the law. The countryman thinks the more terrible the crime the greater must the provocation have been. The young man himself under the excitement of his own story becomes gay, energetic, and lucky. He prospers in love and comes in first at the local races and bankrupts the roulette table afterwards. Then the father arrives with his head bandaged but very lively, and the people turn upon the impostor. To win back their esteem he takes up a spade to kill his father in earnest, but horrified at the threat of what had sounded so well in the story, they bind him to hand over to the police. The father releases him and father and son walk off together, the son, still buoyed up by his imagination, announcing that he will be master henceforth. Picturesque, poetical, fantastical, a masterpiece of style and of music, the supreme work of our dialect theatre, it roused the populace to fury. We played it under police protection, seventy police in the theatre the last night, and five hundred, some newspaper said, keeping order in the streets outside. It is never played before any Irish audience for the first time without something or other being flung at the players. In New York a currant cake and a watch were flung, the owner of the watch claiming it at the stage door afterwards."

"What about the cake. W.B.? Did anyone claim that?"

"I WANT TO WAKE UP! I WANT TO WAKE UP!"

The Nullity of the Rich and the Squalor of the Poor

W.B. dreams up D.B. in a vision.

"What's up Will?" I ask.

"Just remembering."

"Your time in Paris?"

"How did you know, D.B.?"

"Sheer luck, W.B."

"I was thinking of J M Synge."

"Coincidence or what, W.B., I was thinking of the great John Milington just this morning also!"

"I had met John Synge in Paris in 1896. Somebody had said, "There is an Irishman living on the top floor of your hotel; I will introduce you." I was very poor, but he was much poorer. He belonged to a very old Irish family and though a simple, courteous man, remembered it and was haughty and lonely. With just enough to keep him from starvation, and not always from half starvation, he had wandered about Europe travelling third class or upon foot, playing his fiddle to poor men on the road or in their cottages. He was the only man I have ever known incapable of a political thought or of a humanitarian purpose. He could walk the roadside all day with some poor man without any desire to do him good, or for any reason except that he liked him."

"D.B.'s king of guy."

"I advised John Synge to go to a wild island off the Galway coast and study its life because that life had never been expressed in literature. He had learned Gaelic at College, and I told him that, as I would have told it to any young man who had learned Gaelic and wanted to write. When he found that wild island he became happy for the first time, escaping as he said "from the nullity of the rich and the squalor of the poor". He had bad health, he could not stand the island hardship long, but he would go to and fro between there and Dublin."

"Maybe I shouldn't ask, but what's wrong with Paris?"

"You are uncouth D.B. This is not a dream. This is a nightmare."

D.B.'s Vision of W.B.

So D.B. has a vision, and in that vision he is visited by no less than W.B. Yeats.

"You have been bandying my poetry about," he quarrels.

"Reminding the masses, W.B."

"They have not forgotten."

"Out here in the sticks they have."

"D.B. In the country you are alone with your own violence, your own heaviness, and with the common tragedy of life, and if you have any artistic capacity you desire beautiful emotion; and, certain that the seasons will be the same always, care not how fantastic its expression. In the town, where everybody crowds upon you, it is your neighbour not yourself that you hate and, if you are not to embitter his life and your own life, perhaps even if you are not to murder him in some kind of revolutionary frenzy, somebody must teach reality and justice. You will hate that teacher for a while, calling his books and plays ugly, misdirected, morbid or something of that kind, but you must agree with him in the end."

"W.B. I agree. I agree."

The Lake Isle of Innisfree - W.B. Yeats

"Ah now, Dead Beat aren't you becoming just a tad too cynical?"
"Not at all D.B. Too much window dressing out there."
"I hear you, Dead Beat, but it's -20 out there. There's a heap of snow. The days are getting shorter."
"Okay, okay... Here, D.B. Here's one by Yeats to cheer us up."








The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.


"That's more like it, Dead Beat."