3

Miss Horniman was certainly drawn to Yeats by something more than approval of his poetic drama; she was, in fact, in love with him. There is an embarrassment of evidence for this attachment. She kept a lighted portrait of the poet in her rooms at H1, Montague Mansions, London; she was pleased to claim that she served as his secretary in the 1890s; she made him a present of the Abbey Theatre, which is an expensive sort of gift to make to a mere friend; she was watchful for rivals, and jealous of Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Florence Farr. Horniman's almost daily letters to Yeats are addressed to her "Dear Demon" or even her "Dear Demonical Director" and signed "Affectionately." She let herself into his London apartment when he was absent, and in a fussy wifely way, spoke of moths in the curtains, dust on the bookshelves, papers on the floor; she even looked into his wastepaper basket (on a search for a parcel wrapper, she said), which suggests the sort of surveillance even a wife might reconsider.^[28] All this evidence bespeaks, on her side, love in name and spirit.

Yeats, on his side, kept company with her, sometimes answered letters, and in general permitted her to devote herself to him. William M. Murphy and James Flannery are correct that there is no evidence that he "encouraged her suit" only if her suit is understood to have been for either a sexual relationship or a marriage proposal.^[29] For Horniman to believe her affections in some part not unwelcome, it may have been enough that a poet like Yeats comported himself a great deal like a man in love.^[30] He talked about his feelings, and few men

[28] Horniman to WBY, 7 July 1907.

[29] Murphy, Prodigal Father , 271.

[30] Edward Martyn spitefully attributed Yeats's theatrical success to his high-handed way with women: "The qualities by which Mr. Yeats has made the theatre are Napoleonic and consummate. A fine poet and subtle literarycritic, he has above all a weird appearance which is triumphant with middle-aged masculine women, and a dictatorial manner which is irresistible with the considerable bevy of female and male mediocrities interested in intellectual things" (Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Literary Theatre [1930; New York: Lemma Press, 1974], 154). Admittedly, Yeats was dictatorial, but his real charm was his romantic, open-hearted, and intimate familiarity with women, which as friendship could be mistaken for love, and as love, for friendship.

not in love did such an "effeminate" thing; he wrote, and even recited, poems, a surefire sign in an ordinary man of an approaching proposal. Yeats's letters to women—especially those to Florence Farr and Olivia Shakespear—show him to have been a wonderfully chatty companion, an easy organ of confidential humor and private revelations. He was often ready to make a woman his cohort; for instance, he worked with Maud Gonne in politics, with Farr in cantillation, with Lady Gregory in playwriting, and of course with Horniman in the management of the Golden Dawn and the Abbey. This habit of respect for a woman's own powers was surely endearing. It would be wrong, however, to treat Yeats's relationships to all these women as equivalent. At one extreme, he desperately sought a sexual relationship with Maud Gonne; at the other extreme, he was oblivious to the possibility of a sexual interest on the part of Lady Gregory. His relations with Florence Farr offered him a relaxed combination of long friendship, professional collaboration, and sexual gratification. His relation to Horniman was like none of these.

The art of managing Annie Horniman involved a perfect balance between dismissing and introducing intimacy. The question was kept alive year after year, with immense assistance from Horniman. Most of Yeats's letters to his patron have not survived and those that have—addressed to "My dear Miss Horniman"—are generally the more public and least familiar of his communications. The type of relationship, however, can be inferred to some degree from Horniman's own letters, such as her 10 December 1906 missive following an incident at the Abbey Theatre. Maud Gonne had sued for divorce from Major MacBride early in the year, alleging bru-

tality and drunkenness; after a bitter trial during the summer, separation was granted. Throughout this painful episode, Yeats had supported his old love, and on 20 October 1906 he escorted her to the Abbey premier of Deirdre, The Gaol Gate , and The Mineral Workers . When the couple entered the theatre, with Maud Gonne dressed in black, members of the audience stood up to hiss the woman who had scorned an Irish hero and broken her Catholic vows of wedlock. Maud Gonne smiled, unperturbed, but Yeats "looked bewildered as the hissing went on," and afterwards he was in a fury of contempt for the village nastiness of Catholic nationalists.^[31]

Horniman's letter alludes to a conversation she had had with Yeats about Maud Gonne's reception at the Abbey:

When you get back [from Dublin] I must have a number of questions answered, I'll remove all reading matter from within reach & you will have to give me your full attention whether you are bored or no. You have been too much petted of late years until you have taken to use that crushed pained & distressed look of misery as a means of terrorising Lady Gregory and me whenever we object to anything.

You naturally made no remark when I said that Mrs. MacBride got what she deserved when she came to the theatre. In a case like that your silence is quite right—you know that it is true but of course you object to saying so. But you might remember that continual snubbings when kindly feelings are expressed may in time not only stop their expression but blunt their vitality or even at length destroy them. Yet, as I ought to know well, writing (& even speaking) makes no difference to you when you wish to abstract yourself from life, so I'm not at all cross & trying not be sad & I certainly will not worry you, for I have my own dignity to consider.^[32]

These are the words of a woman in love, in love with a man not in love with her, but dependent upon her. It can be inferred that Yeats did not answer her letters as often as she liked, but answered some; that he did not visit her until told

[31] Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (1958; rev. ed., Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1966), 124. See also Samuel Levenson, Maud Gonne (New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1976), 232–33.

[32] Horniman to WBY, 10 December 1906.

he must do so; that when he did visit her, he looked quickly for a book to entertain himself, went slightly deaf to inquiry, and finally forced to respond, put on his "crushed pained & distressed look of misery." He did not, in short, do much to sustain his relationship with Horniman, but he did just enough. In this letter, Horniman is in fact giving him instructions as to the degree of disregard she is willing to suffer: a certain number of snubs "blunt[s] the vitality" of her "kindly feelings"; a few more will destroy them altogether. The complicated mix of signals required can be deduced from a letter Florence Darragh (an actress friend of Horniman's) wrote to Yeats: Darragh counsels him on one hand that Horniman stood in need of "all those ridiculous little attentions which she values so much," on the other hand that she would "fling thousands in your lap if she saw you were becoming independent."^[33] The delicate art of management this required took its toll, especially when the patron expressed her "kindly feelings" by demanding that Yeats admit "Mrs. MacBride got what she deserved" when she was hissed and reviled at the Abbey. Horniman is bizarrely out of touch with Yeats's true feelings when she says he knows that this is true. On the contrary, Horniman's statement placed her among the group of petty, vicious puritans he loathed. Yeats kept his silence—and it must have been hard to do so—because to speak could only have been to blast Horniman's soul into a cinder, and with her, her money.^[34]

Yeats may have paid Horniman insufficient attention at times and ignored her altogether when she slanged Maud Gonne, but he was attentive enough about matters of money. In July 1906 Horniman wrote Yeats that she was ready to give up on Ireland and the Abbey; they had done their best, no one could do more, but it was time to admit defeat and try

[33] Florence Darragh to WBY, 22 September 1906; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:170–72.

[34] During December 1906 Yeats was deeply involved in creating a new scheme for the Abbey that would satisfy its owner and secure from her an additional £25,000 investment (WBY to Synge, 2 December 1906, especially the postscript marked "Private"; Saddlemyer, 175). These events are discussed below.

again at a new venue—namely, the Manchester Gaiety. Yeats, she suspected, would struggle onward for a while in Dublin, but when he tired, she welcomed him to join her in Manchester with his "little band of earnest, practised playwrights."^[35] In a gesture of extraordinary goodwill to him personally, she told him to "hold tight to the remembrance that [he could] always claim [her] help"; if he needed more cash, she would find a way to send it, adding "but this must not be known to anyone but you." Across the top of the letter, Yeats wrote and underscored the brief comment: "A letter offering to increase the £800 subsidy if necessary ." What is revealing here is the contrast between the sentiment of her private message and the strictly documentary, official attitude of his notation. She offers him a life in England and a gesture of her love; he takes it as a promissory note on her bank account.

It would be imprecise to say that Yeats hoodwinked Horniman; he had only to keep his temper while she hoodwinked herself. He also cannot be blamed for not taking the relation to a deeper stage of intimacy: he did not want to, and if Horniman did want a sexual relationship, she was not likely to admit to it. Her extraordinary aversion to the sexual motive—in herself as much as in Fay, Synge, and Dr. Berridge—was essential to her self-deception. It not only enabled Yeats to leave the relationship in a perpetual stall, it caused her to displace her desire in several ways, among them financial generosity. She hated Maud Gonne for "arousing the most animal passions": "the greatest artist on the stage" (by which she meant WBY) was "helpless compared to a beautiful woman screaming from a coal-cart," but it was just her own inability to arouse such passions, and to welcome them, that left a hole in her life, a deep hole into which she cast a great many bank-notes.^[36] She paid and paid, but what she paid for was never delivered. She aimed to buy the love of Yeats; lacking that, an Irish theatre society; lacking that, the Abbey Theatre building. In the end, she was relieved of title to the building, with

[35] Horniman to WBY, 13 July 1906.

[36] Horniman to Florence Darragh, 18 August 1906.

£1,500 remaining of a £13,000 investment, and of her relationship to Yeats.^[37] The poet did not hoodwink his patron; he exploited her, which is what patrons are for.