A Muse Driven Mad

...In fact, his feeling for Margot was so mind-befogging that he included seven of her poems in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse he so disastrously edited —to an equal number of Eliot's, only three by Auden, and none by Wilfred Owen...

...Yeats had not had a very extensive sex life in his youth and middle years, and the awareness of this seems to have bothered him considerably: "Now that I am old and my work is finished I may have a few years to seek the sweetness I have lost," he wrote...

...She danced on its edge all her life, and was soon afterward to immerse herself in it...

...Soon Yeats is sending passionate postcards to Margot about the logistics of furtive meetings, adding, "I cannot bear the thought of a half-hour lost...

...First, for the biographical information about the poet's last years and this May-December love affair that briefly illumined them with a will-o'-the wisp glow...

...Here for once—if not in life, at least in poetry —age both knew and could...

...If that does not deliver speedy gratification, why not become a recluse in a Hindu monastery...

...This was in September 1934, the year Yeats had undergone a Steinach monkey-gland operation that was supposed to rejuvenate him, among other ways, sexually...

...The fact that you found this word, your own word, made me see you, it was as though I saw your face...

...They are drawn to the ostensible democracy of the arts, where, presumably, talent makes everyone equal, only to find their talents too meager or unfocused, their psyches too violently torn between traditional concepts of wifehood and motherhood, and new ideas of living for one's career...

...The letters, on the next level, afford glimpses of the literary, theatrical and mystical life of the times...

...Margot acted, wrote poems, improvised songs and dances, took care in slap-dash fashion of a baby daughter, and, when all else failed (as it often did), got drunk in a pub...

...But the operation, an arrant fraud, merely made him desire more strongly what he continued to lack...

...The dance here has lifted from the dancer's body and settled on—or unsettled—her mind...

...The book is most interesting, however, as an incomplete but stirring portrait of a lovely young woman fighting for her sanity...

...the child is not dead: "Instead of thinking of her think of what I am going to tell you...

...And: "When your technic is sloppy your matter grows second hand—there is no difficulty to force you down under the surface —difficulty is our plough...

...Before she headed for complete collapse in Barcelona, Margot faced the sea: "I stood on the rocks and could not go into the sea because there was so much in life I loved, then I was so happy at not having to die I danced...

...Repeatedly Yeats offers useful hints to Margot (besides actually rewriting her poems): "Never call any poor wretch a 'maiden' that word is as dead as 'swain.' " Or: "Even a saint returns to life and its particulars, even a lyric poet must so return...

...When Margot is finding it hard to enact a tragic role, and tries to imagine her infant daughter's death as a subtext, Yeats reproves her...

...I hate Gerard Manley Hopkins," he writes, and adds with that true modesty he was capable of, "but people quite as good as I am admire him...

...we regret that his answer (if he deigned to give one) is, like certain other items in this correspondence, unpreserved...

...More important, the fact that these last poems could unite a young man's craving for women with an old poet's skill and depth in expressing it, makes this verse unique...

...Though remarried, she is disconcerted when her former husband takes her to a movie without making a pass at her: "What's the use of having a nice body and wanting to give people happiness if no one will take it...

...One wonders what went on between them in camera...

...he is rather for an amitie amoureuse: friendship with "sexual pleasure [as] an accessory, a needful one where it is possible...

...Maudlin, and something worse: plucking another person's heartstrings...

...The advice, though good, tended to be too much for Margot's wayward temperament...

...Thus Yeats went to Majorca to translate the Upanishads there with his revered Swami—not only for reasons of health...

...The correspondence permits us to see the remarkable woman who elicited those somewhat less than remarkable poems, and at last enables us to know the dancer from the dance...

...Generality is our vice and we think it our virtue...

...Ashley Dukes, Rupert Doone, Tyrone Guthrie, Robert Speaight, Gordon Craig, and several members of the Abbey Theatre figure more or less prominently here...

...Yesterday I had a lump cut out of my tongue, tomorrow I shall know if it is cancer...

...I had not meant to tell you but do so now, as it may help you to act...

...But love and intimacy there was: "I miss you very much...

...The first thing about her that struck Yeats was her choice of the right word of praise for his poetry: "You spoke of the 'trueness' of my work, if you had said its 'veracity' or used any other word, such as reviewers use, it would have meant nothing...

...Particularly revealing and moving is letter 43, resounding with Margot's psychic panic...

...As we read in a lyric of A Full Moon in March, partly written for Margot, "Days go by in foolishness,/O how great their sweetness is...

...In late 1937, at the age of 31, she was permanently confined in an asylum, where she died at 44...

...It began with her suddenly dropping in on Yeats and the Swami in Majorca, and there, startlingly, cracking up...

...We find him inveighing against the romantic concept of love...

...The sea, clearly, was the symbol of death drawing and repelling her—more with her tides than with its own...

...Yeats experts have long ago identified the person behind these poems, but it is only now that an Irish scholar, Roger McHugh, has edited the letters that she and Yeats exchanged, under the title Ah, Sweet Dancer: W. B. Yeats and Margot Ruddock...

...Reviewed by John Simon IN YEATS' Last Poems there are two lyrics, "Sweet Dancer" and "A Crazed Girl," describing the same young woman, crazed and a dancer, whom the poet included in his private calendar of saints, of "beautiful loftv things," as he called them in another poem...

...And yet, for all their hurt, the monkey-gland operation and the experience of Margot did something both for Yeats the man and for his final poetry...

...Typically she writes: "If we cannot be supremely happy eventually what is the use of everything...

...Set adrift by the waves of higher education and greater emancipation for women, they are then hemmed in by age-old economic and sexual restrictions...

...Margot considered Swami an incarnation of the divine, and wrote, with that talent for metaphor that distinguishes her best verse and prose: "I'm sure it's very difficult to be man and God at the same time—rather like being a chameleon on a striped rug not knowing which color to turn...

...a poem like "A Stick of Incense" probably holds the sorry answer...

...He soon met her, a woman "of distinguished beauty of face and limb...

...It sounds like irony, yet, I am afraid, she meant it...

...It must have been a rude shock for Yeats, himself left with only two more years to live, to find that the embodiment of his symbol for the happy union of body and soul, the Dancer who dances the sea of chaos into submission (as on a bookplate he ordered for his daughter from Sturge Moore), should, instead, be swallowed up by that sea...

...The rest of the letter is a de profundis that hurtles from sexual frustration to cosmic despair, and concludes with the outcry: "When I think that I have before me possibly forty years of life my spirit quails...

...Margot was the prototype of many women one still finds in the literary salons of Europe and America: intelligent, sensitive, variously but vaguely gifted, jills of many trades but mistresses of none—except of some more or less famous man to whom they are insecurely attached...

...Or one might paint flowers all over the walls of one's room...

...In a much more significant poem of his last collection, "The Man and the Echo," where the poet anxiously assesses the consequences of some of his actions, the same girl reappears: "Did words of mine put too great a strain'On that woman's reeling brain...

...Though this ancient lover is usually quite sound in his views, he can, on occasion, become morbid...

...The correspondence that ensues can be read on several levels...

...Margot was one of these exallees: enthusiastic and despairing by turns, always seeking new outlets, precipitously snatching at people and solutions and as suddenly letting go...

...But the preeminence of the Hindu mystic, Shri Puro-hit Swami, is even more interesting...

...To Yeats, Margot was more than a last fling...

...How touching to find the septuagenarian writing, "I must not meet you again a tired man...

...Ah, Sweet Dancer can be read also as a highly practical primer for aspiring poets, with sound advice from a great master...

...The sway he held over Yeats and Margot Ruddock is characteristic of the rather strenuous flirtation with Indian mysticism that prevailed in certain literary circles...

...Margot Ruddock was 27 when she wrote the 69-year-old poet asking him for help in founding a Poets' Theater in London...

...A sad story, that of Yeats and his Margot...

...Or sing and dance for oneself...

...when I was tired of looking at you we could always quarrel," Yeats writes with specious grammar but genuine feeling...

...How deplorable, therefore, that Claude Driver, the owner of Yeats' letters to the Swami expressing consternation over Margot's fate, should not have made them available for inclusion in this correspondence that Roger McHugh has edited so conscientiously and tactfully...

...But the climax of the book is the account of Margot's extraordinary nervous breakdown, which she wrote up as a kind of short story...

...Narcissus being satisfied, it was now Priapus' turn—quite the proper order for the approach of Great Old Men by sweet young things...

...If poetry cannot gloriously fulfill us, why bother with it...

...Neither of these lyrics is particularly successful or important, although the central figure fuses two of Yeats' most important poetic personae: the dancer and the crazy woman—the one an image of soul and body united, the other, like Crazy Jane, the mouthpiece of harsh truth under the license of madness...

...Margot praises Houseman to her lover...

...One imagines that Margot, who addressed him not only as a postulant but also as a fan, excited Yeats' curiosity...

...Frank Kermode, in Romantic Image, recapitulates the significance of the Dancer in Yeats' "system," and observes that with Margot, "life . . . provided an exquisite variation upon the theme...

...We see Yeats' coolness to Eliot and his school, and his outright distaste for Hopkins...

...She was in her second unhappy marriage, this time to Raymond Lovell, who was later to become a successful movie actor, but was as yet as obscure as his wife...

...Better the theater...