Nemo: George Yeats and her automatic script

New Literary History

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 291-314

  Harper, Margaret Mills ^a  

^a GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60950393535     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2002.0018     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. Aside from the voluminous automatic script, relatively few autographs of George Yeats have been published, but witness the letters to her friends Dorothy Shakespear and Ezra Pound edited by Ann Saddlemyer, "George. Ezra, Dorothy and Friends: Twenty-Six Letters. 1918-59." Yeats Annual, 7 (1990), 4-28
2. as well as the record contained in the Pound/Shakespear correspondence, edited by Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz (Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909-1914 [New York, 1984])
3. This situation is changing: David Pierce pays considerable attention to her, as do the recent biographies of Yeats by Brenda Maddox and Terence Brown. See Pierce. Yeats's Worlds: Ireland, England, and the Poetic Imagination (New Haven, 1995), hereafter cited in text as YW
4. Maddox, George's Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats (London, 1999)
5. published in the U. S. as Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B, Yeats (New York, 1999)
6. and Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1999)
7. See also Bette London, Writing Double: Women's Literary Partnerships (Ithaca, N. Y., 1999), especially chap. 6
8. "Romancing the Medium: The Silent Partnership of Georgie Yeats, " pp. 179-209; hereafter cited in text as WD
9. For several widely influential versions of the story see Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York, 1948), p. 219
10. Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York, 1964), p. 149
11. A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats, Man and Poet (New Haven, 1949), p. 191
12. and Virginia Moore, The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats' Search for Reality (New York, 1954). pp. 253-78
13. Jack Stillinger's explanation of this perhaps over-obvious phenomenon remains one of the most articulate; see Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York, 1991), chap. 1. "What Is an Author?" pp. 3-24
14. James Joyce, Ulysses, The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York, 1986), p. 170
15. Mary Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses (Rochester, Vt., 1995), pp. 4-5
16. R. F. Foster. W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 (New York, 1997), p. 437; hereafter cited in text as WBY
17. Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life (New York, 1972), p. 31; hereafter cited in text as TL
18. Alex Owen, "The Sorcerer and His Apprentice: Aleister Crowley and the Magical Exploration of Edwardian Subjectivity, " Journal of British Studies. 36 (1997), 99-133
19. Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism (New York, 1926), vol. 2, pp. 209-10
20. See also Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1983), p. 226
21. See R. A. Gilbert, The Golden. Daum Companion: A Guide to the History, Structure, and Workings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden. Dawn (Wellingborough, 1986), p. 45
22. George Mills Harper, general ed., Yeats's "Vision"Papers (London, 1992), vol. 1, p. 227; hereafter cited in text as YVP by volume and page number. Interestingly, the reasons for the Communicators' injunction against trance mediumship have to do with the free participation of the spirits in a true collaboration, not any danger to the human participants in the exercise. The spirits must come of their own volition to people they know, the Yeatses learned: "All mediumship which aims at obtaining contact with newly dead is wrong because it disturbs & obsesses the spirit This is very important But if the spirit wishes to contact with some special individual he can always do it in some way or another without going to a medium - they hate mediums they dont know" (YVP 1.252; see also Card S74 from the card file that Yeats kept as he wrote A Vision, which repeats this message almost verbatim [YVP 3.409])
23. Keith Alldritt, W. B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu. (New York, 1997), p. 255
24. The portrait of George Yeats appears in Pierce, Yeats's Worlds, p. 200
25. The other photographs mentioned appear in Foster, Yeats, Plates 10, 13, 14, and 16, between pp. 160 and 161, and in Pierce, Yeats's Worlds, p. 247
26. See Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia, 1990)
27. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston, 1989)
28. Diana Bashan, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (New York, 1992)
29. and, especially for its sensitivity to issues of class, Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1985)
30. W. B. Yeats, A Critical Edition of Yeats's A Vision (1925), ed. George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London, 1978), p. 125; hereafter cited in text as AV-A
31. Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper, "The Manuscript of 'Leo Africanus, '" Yeats Annual 1 (1982), 15. Adams and Harper summarize the alteration in Leo under the new light of the automatic script as well as the longer tale of his role in Yeats's life in their editorial introduction to the letters Yeats composed to and, semi-automatically, from Leo
32. I have suggested that this shift is important in "The Message Is the Medium: Identity in the Automatic Script, " Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, 9 (1991), 35-54
33. Bette London points out that other mediums as well regarded themselves in blended roles, both receiving and interpreting messages, and at least one medium, Geraldine Cummins, also used the term "interpreter." Indeed, in 1951, recalling her long experience, Cummins is insistent: "Every sitter has continually to bear in mind the idea that a medium is, in most cases, an interpreter, that assuming there is a discarnate mind communicating, the process is a collaboration between two minds, that of the interpreter and that of the discarnate being" (Cummins, Unseen. Adventures: An Autobiography covering Thirty-four Years of Work in Psychical Research [London, 1951], p. 133)
34. See London, Writing Double, pp. 166, 192-93
35. Incidentally, an exchange on nomenclature also occurs in the correspondence of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in 1919 and 1920; several writers suggesting that "medium" be abandoned and replaced with "sensitive, " "automatist, " or even "transmittor" (see, for example, a letter from Percy Dearmer, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. 19 [1920], 180)
36. Nandor Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science (Secaucus, N. J., 1966), p. 20
37. See Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, addressed to J. G. Lockhart (London, 1830)
38. Georgie Hyde-Lees' copy is in the Yeatses' library in Dalkey, Co. Dublin; see Edward O'Shea, A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats's Library (New York, 1985), p. 242
39. Yeats's library also contains a copy of Joseph Ennemoser, The History of Magic. To which is added an appendix of the most remarkable and best authenticated stories of apparitions, dreams, second sight, somnambulism, predictions, divination, witchcraft, vampires, fairies, table-turning, and spirit-rapping, tr. William Howitt, ed. Mary Howitt, 2 vols. (London, 1854)
40. see O'Shea, Descriptive Catalog, p. 91
41. For Yeats's introduction to this book see James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York, 1988), p. 56
42. See Bernard Porter, The Lion's Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850-1983 (London, 1984) on the topic that imperialism was "a symptom and an effect of her decline in the world, and not of strength" (xi)
43. At this point in the text, the translator has inserted the following comment: "[The drunken persons on this analogy would be the medium on this side and the intermediary on the other, both presumably in a trance-like condition. - TR.]": Theodore Flournoy, Spiritism and Psychology (New York, 1911), p. 184; hereafter cited in text as SP
44. On Yeats's efforts to locate the historical Anne Hyde see George Mills Harper, The Making of Yeats's A Vision' (London, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 209-10
45. For the location of Leo, see Chambers Biographical Dictionary, ed. David Patrick and Francis Hindes Groome (London, 1911) and Foster. Yeats, p. 465