Finding Yeats continued

In his poem, A Prayer for my Daughter, written in 1919, Yeats writes about the conditions he wants for his daughter as she grows and the kind of woman he hopes she will become. He wants her to have a solid foundation so she might cultivate qualities of mind he approves: kindness, courtesy, merriment, innocence and beauty. These are to be cultivated in contrast to women of opinionated mind who risk everything for an old bellows full of angry wind.

Oh dear, these are not the sentiments likely to appeal to modern women who value their 'opinions' and do not appreciate being put down for holding them. Yeats is yearning for establishment values based on long-term land ownership from which custom and ceremony cultivate fine sensibilities. But how many people have such a solid base and what happens when the base is rocky? Are we all bound to fall into barbarism?

These sorts of questions led me into a search to find out more about Yeats and where he was coming from. First, though, I read a short novel by the Irish-born novelist Elizabeth Bown whose books I once looked into and enjoyed many years ago. In The Last September (published in 1929) Elizabeth Bowen describes life in an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy mansion of the type Yeats seems to have yearned for and which was indeed part of Bowen's legacy at Bown Court, her family's country estate. The story is set in 1920 when Ireland was rocked by the 'Troubles' between the British army and the IRA. This was part of the context in which Yeats sought the stability of old places and old ideas. In Bowen's novel the movement is forward with the young woman of the place set to move on into a wider world.

R.F. Foster's wonderful biography of Yeats considers the context of A Prayer for my Daughter in fascinating detail. Yeats appears to be reacting against his own 'troubles' with Maud Gonne and contrasting her radicalism with what he perceived as the kindness and courtesy of his young wife, George, who had given birth to the 'daughter', Anne, who is the child of the poem. The poem is also influenced by Yeats's acquisition of a 'castle' (his famous Tower), and his immersion in spiritualism at the time. All this plus 'his apprehension at a world descending into formless anarchy' as he expressed over and over again in his poems, as in The Second Coming which he composed around the same time as the Prayer:
Things fall apart; the centre can not hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

Being introduced to Yeats's poem through my poetry group led my to think a lot about the foundations (or not), of place, of belonging, of reactions when stability is threatened. It led me to Elizabeth Bowen and into a reading of Yeats's life and his poetry. The journey through words is a rich and rewarding one.

Text details for this post:
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September. Vintage paperback novel (1998) with an introduction by Victoria Glendinning. pp. 206. Available Book Camel $8 plus postage and packaging.

R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life 11: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. Pulished by Oxford University Press, 2003. Copy borrowed from City Library, Melbourne.

W. B. Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter, in W. B. Yeats Selected Poetry, Macmillan paperback. First published 1962.

A kind of heroine

Biography is one of the most popular genres for readers and book buyers. Most libraries have well-stocked and well-used shelves of life stories about all sorts and varieties of people. Isn't it a great escape to peer into the lives of others, to see what they have done, how they have lived and been shaped by their families, their relationships and the times they have lived through?

I recently picked up a copy of the life of Nancy Cunard (1896-1965). Published in 1979, the biography is entitled simply 'Nancy Cunard' and the author is Anne Chisholm. It is a clearly written work, enhanced by a number of photographs, that tells the story of one woman's remarkable life.

Nancy's great-grandfather on her father's side was Samuel Cunard, founder of the Cunard line of steamships, who was created a baronet by Queen Victoria. Her mother, the famous society hostess and patron of the arts, Lady Emerald Cunard, was from a wealthy Californian family. Thus Nancy, an only child, was born into wealth and its attendant privileges, especially the entry it gave her to a world of fashion, travel and the arts.

These interests dominated Nancy's life. She took to them with a passion in the context of troubled times - World War 1, the 'roaring twenties', the 1930's 'Great Depression', the rise of communism and fascism, the Spanish Civil War and World War 2. She turned out a rebellious, independent woman whose way of life often scandalised both her contemporaries and her elders, including her mother. When Nancy lived and traveled openly with her black lover in the early 1930s, it opened up a split with her mother that was never healed. Mother and daughter were never to speak or meet again. Lady Cunard died in 1948.

While Nancy was briefly married during the First World War, she could not conform to the limitations that marriage threatened to impose on her freedom to love, travel and express herself as she pleased. She was a complex person whose personality and interplay of her many relationships are explored in the biography. Late in her life, after a period of disturbing behaviour, she was certified insane and kept for some time in a mental hospital. Alcohol played a big part in her troubles at this time.

Nancy Cunard deserves attention and respect for her serious work as a poet, publisher and journalist. Virginia and Leonard Woolf published her long poem 'Parallax' at their Hogarth Press in 1925, and she continued to write poetry and sometimes have it published for the rest of her life. In 1928 she established her own 'Hours Press' at her home in Normandy in the French countryside. She learned the whole printing process, setting type and printing herself and turning out some significant publications including one of Samuel Beckett's first published poems, 'Whoroscope'.

Her fascination for African art and decoration led her to collect an enormous number of ivory bracelets and other items. She delved deeply into black culture through relationships with black people including jazz musicians, writers and civil rights' activists. In 1934 her encyclopedic book 'Negro' was published. This was an unwieldy project where she brought together black writers, commentators on aspects of black culture and images of black culture. The volume is now rare (most of the stock was lost in the London blitz in the Second World War), and first editions now sell for more than twenty thousand dollars.

By the late 1930s Nancy was very much involved in the anti-fascist movement in Europe. Like others of her generation, she was a passionate supporter of the republican side in the Spanish Civil War which she also reported from as a journalist.

Nancy Cunard, despite, or possibly because of her privileged inheritance, lived a life that connects her as a kind of heroine to the modern world. She was an enormously eclectic artist who championed poetry, black rights, freedom for women and anti-imperialist movements. She certainly had her blind spots and may have been difficult to know and impossible to live with, but I'm willing to place her in my pantheon of stars from the past whose lives become known to us through the scholarship of modern writers.