A Woman of Strong Conviction
WEBSTER, HARVEY CURTIS
A Woman of Strong Convictions Lucky Eyes and a High Heart: The Life of Maud Gonne By Nancy Cardozo Bobbs Merrill. 468 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Author, "On a Darkling...
...A great poet or a great writer can give nobler and more precious gifts to his country than the greatest philanthropists...
...As Cardozo says in one of her concluding passages, for Maud "mankind had become indivisible...
...The readers of this fine biography, admirably researched and organized, frequently eloquently written, understand how and why, on her deathbed, Gonne could say: "I feel now an ineffable Joy...
...She admired his poetry and played the part of Cathleen ni Houlihan in the play he wrote for her, while continuing to disagree with his ideas about an Ireland governed by benevolent aristocrats...
...She became Yeats' lover, although she preferred "astral" orgasms to the physical ones favored by the poet...
...At least at the outset, Maud's friendship with Yeats was similarly motivated by politics...
...an Irish free state was for him merely an incidental matter...
...Before she met Yeats at the age of 22??by which time she was already rather notorious for adopting her father's illegitimate daughter and for smoking in public...
...Nonviolent, she condoned the use of force by the Irish against the English government and never discouraged "either a Dynamiter or a Constitutionalist, a realist or a lyrical writer" if he helped the cause...
...She organized soup kitchens for the Irish poor and school lunches for those who could not afford them...
...some legendary past...
...It belonged to...
...In her 80s she wrote in praise of Gandhi and on the importance of women in public life...
...The 24-year-old poet "had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty...
...In his later years, by contrast, Yeats saw her as "an old bellows full of angry wind...
...for the sake of Ireland, you must keep your writing before all else...
...Their friendship shifted to a different footing following her disastrous marriage to Major McBride, a revolutionist who was a leader of the Irish contingent that fought for the Boers, and an alcoholic who beat her up...
...your poetry must be your first consideration...
...From her father??a colonel in the British Army who died when she was 19, as he was about to leave the military to run for Parliament as a Home Ruler??she inherited what was perhaps her most intense concern: an independent Ireland...
...Yet as Nancy Cardozo's admirable study??the only book to be written on Gonne, except for her autobiography ??shows, Maud Gonne remained her integral self throughout her life.This was fortunate both for Yeats and for Ireland...
...Maud was a woman of profound convictions...
...Born wealthy, she nevertheless took to heart her experiences with the Irish poor...
...not that we are better than men but being fosterers of life we have greater instinct to protect life...
...she had been through an affair with Lucien Millevoye, a prominent Bona-partist...
...But Gonne's life is fascinating in itself, apart from her various friendships...
...you remember how for the sake of Ireland, I hated you in politics, even in the politics I believed in, because I always felt it took you away from your writing and cheated Ireland of a greater gift than we could give her...
...Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Author, "On a Darkling Plain," "After the Trauma" W. B. Yeats' readers have tended to look at Maud Gonne through his eyes...
...her speeches before somewhat smaller crowds were often received with comparable enthusiasm...
...A complexion like the blossoms of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a structure so great that she seemed of divine race...
...She left him, after bearing two children out of wedlock, because she discovered that his chief interest was an autocratic France...
...Her preoccupation with this cause is discernible in some of her most intimate personal relations...
...For example, she wrote to Yeats in 1908...
...As active and as little given to introspection as Maud was, her letters and autobiography??quoted here by Cardozo??show her to have been capable of a great deal of wisdom...
...according to Cardozo, she decided in early childhood that she would "change all that" when she grew up...
...She did not love him, but instead regarded him as a valuable ally in the effort to establish an independent culture...
...Far from being diminished by age or illness??she had been tubercular since early womanhood??her involvements widened...
...On one occasion she was cheered by 100,000 English workers in Manchester...
...She wrote voluminously for Fenian and Sinn Fein publications, and lectured successfully in France, America and England...
...Other highlights of her career, such as her work for the Tsar or her many imprisonments (one lasting 20 days), read like something out of an Eric Ambler thriller...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 2
