Quantcast
Channel: Author Orna Ross. Creative Living, Creative Publishing, Creative Writing » WB Yeats, Maud Gonne, Iseult Gonne
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 18

WB Yeats’s Fanatic Heart Was Not For Ireland But For Love Itself

0
0

“It was all ‘father, oh father’,” Bob Geldof says, mimicking a pious voice addressing a priest. Then in his own voice: “F**k off, you’re not my father.”

Geldof is railing against the the Irish State and its grovelling to Roman Catholicism in Fanatic Heart, an RTE documentary about the life and work of Ireland’s great poet (and subject of my most recent novel), William Butler Yeats.

Geldof argues that the poet and  literary statesman brought about immense change in Ireland’s struggle for independence, without firing a bullet. His modus operandi was a poetic national vision, betrayed by the Roman Catholic nation-state that emerged after Irish independence but it was not until the election of Mary Robinson, 50 years after Yeats’s death, that the country began to take the shape he had envisaged when calling it into being through poetry and myth in the 1890s and 1900s.

As an argument, it’s not wrong — but as an attempt to explain Yeats’s life and work, I found it one-dimensional.

For Geldof, the blood sacrifice of the 1916 leaders was just plain wrong. “It’s easy to die,” he says. “I’ve been around this.” Making us think, as we are surely meant to, of the wife and daughter he lost to suicide. It’s much harder to live, he says. To live and work for a cause, day by slow and difficult day, is harder than to die.

Perhaps. But it seems misplaced to compare his family’s personal, private tragedy to the public, sacrificial martyrdom of the 1916 leaders. The motive, intent and outcome are completely different.

Fanatic Hearts

The name of this documentary which Bob Geldof wrote as well as presented, is taken from a Yeats’s poem “Remorse For Intemperate Speech”. Decades ago, the young rock rebel took the “fanatic heart” lines as epigraph for his own autobiography:

Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother’s womb
A fanatic heart.

In this film, Geldof is still the punk rebel who hasn’t come to terms with his anger against the theocratic Ireland in which he (and I) grew up.

There is much to admire in the documentary — and much omitted, which is understandable. Yeats was such a complex person, and such a wide-ranging writer, that no two-hour film could possibly capture it all. Geldof refers to him only as a poet, for example, but he also wrote 26 plays.

More significantly, the over-emphasis on the relationship with Ireland and Irish nationalism shortchanges the true heart of Yeats life and the importance of women, sex and love in his creative process.

imgres-18 iseult-gonne images-7

Geldof reduces Yeats attraction to Iseult Gonne to a bad joke, and fails to figure her affect on his poetry, and the autobiography he was writing, at that time. He dismisses the women of Yeats’s later years as “a gaggle”, displaying the blindness and poor-judgement that always accompanies such sexism. Ditto, his misreading of Maud Gonne’s performance of the symbolic play, Caitlin ni Houlihan. And, indeed, his mockery of the pious.

All this anger, Geldof’s own fanatic heart, keeps getting in the way of the film.

But a star-studded line-up of actors and performers reading favorite Yeats poetry provide a balance. Particularly fine readings are Liam Neeson, Bono (yes, I was surprised too!) and Ambassador Dan Mulhall. Everyone’s favorite Yeats illustrator, Annie West, also makes an appearance.

To finish the film, Geldof tackles “Plato’s ghost“. After all Yeats’s successes, including the Nobel prize for literature; all the love affairs; the adoring younger wife; the two beautiful children; the many glorious friends; in short, all his ambitions met beyond his imaginings, Yeats was still seeking.

And still, in the words of another great Irish anthem of spiritual doubt, hadn’t found what he was looking for.

…I swerved in naught
something to perfection brought
but louder sang that ghost: “What then?”

Geldof answers Yeat’s soul-searching question with one word: Ireland. This is a nonsense.

A travesty, actually.

Yeats great life quest was not for Ireland, but for love. He was no Freudian but it is easy to see how, denied love from the mother who was so damaged and depressed and distant, he craved sex and avoided intimacy. Love was something he managed only during peak experiences of sex, and spiritual experimentation, and poetry.

Right to the end, he sought love in the arms of women and separated himself from politics. See the simple poem below, one of his last, written on the brink of the Second World War, which voices the craving, strong as ever.

The give-and-take intimacy of everyday love, that ordinary love which is — in spiritual or carnal form — the most extraordinary of all, was never his.

He knew it and he never got over it.

That was the true longing of Yeats’s fanatical, complex, aching, beautiful heart. The longing out of which he made such achingly beautiful art.

Politics

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

Now available on Amazon, Apple & Kobo

Now available on Amazon, Apple & Kobo

My Yeats-Gonne biographical novel, HER SECRET ROSE has started to take off on Amazon. As I write it’s at #58 in the Irish Literary Historical Fiction category on Amazon.com.

Can you help me to take it higher?

WAYS TO HELP
Buy The Book: * If you’d like to buy it in ebook or print, you can purchase it here if you are in the UK or Ireland Amazon.co.uk direct link and here for Ireland, US or the rest of the world: Amazon.com direct link

Review The Book: * If you’ve read the book and enjoyed it, could you leave a short review (it need only be a sentence or two) on Amazon, saying why you liked it. * If you’d like a free copy in exchange for a review, just email me and I’ll add you to my reviewers list

Share The Book: * If you’ve a friend who likes literary historical fiction, could you pass on the Amazon links? Again, they are: UK & Ireland Or US & rest of world

Thank you so much!


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 18

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images