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REVIEWS the Unwilling Persephone

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REVIEWS the Unwilling Persephone REVIEWS The Unwilling Persephone George Mills Harper (General Editor) assisted by Mary]ane Harper, Yeats's Vision Papers (London: Macmillan, 1992) 3 vols: Volume I: Tile Automatic Script: 5 November 1917-18June 1918, ed. by Steve L. Adams, Barbara]. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry, xiv + 565 pp. £65.00. Volume 2: 11Ie Automatic Script: 25 Jurle 1918-29 Marcil 1920, ed. by Steve L. Adams, Barbara]. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry, xiii + 596 pp. £65.00. Volume 3: Sleep and Dream Notebooks, Vision Notebooks 1 and 2, Card File, ed. by Robert Anthony Martinich and Margaret Mills Harper, xiii + 444 pp. £65.00 (£150.00 the set). Deirdre Toomey When George Yeats began her career as a medium, she could not have anticipated the long road ahead - and presumably neither could the tran­ scribers and editors of these volumes. However, the formidable labours of George Mills Harper el al have demonstrated that George Yeats was one of the greatest of mental mediums, irrespective of the usc that Yeats made of her scripts. A new generation of mental mediums had arisen in reaction to the increasing fraudulence surrounding manifestation mediumship: however, if one compares George Yeats's task with that of any other mental medium, one sees her superiority. Mrs Leonore Piper, one of the major trance mediums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had remarkable telepathic powers, but little culture. Mrs Piper's cheerful, unschooled presentation of "Sir Walter Scott", who arrives from Mars to chat to members of the SPR about the solar system, docs not inspire confidence in the Beyond. Like George Yeats, Mrs Piper did allow a question and answer format - a taxing procedure for the 267 268 Yeats ATlTlual No. 10 medium. Other mental mediums, such as Hester Dowden, Geraldine Cum­ mins (or earlier Catherine Muller), tended to present long spooling narratives, or well rehearsed speeches: true improvisation during the sitting was not called for. George Yeats, from the outset, allowed a Socratic procedure, which clearly placed great strain on her powers of memory, synthesis and exposition. Only once in these scripts does she descend to "romance" - and then clearly to give herself a break. During the summer of 1919 she delivered a long novelistic account of their previous lives and loves. This has the feel of historical fiction and is embarrassingly close to the "romances" of lesser mediums; indeed, she tried to rescind this talc carlyon. Where did it all come from? Flournoy analyses and identifies Catherine Muller's romances of Mars and India as the fantasies of a lively but frustrated young woman. I-lester Dowden's Oscar Wilde scripts of 1923, were a tOllr de force. Wilde complained that the afterlife had not improved his mother and passed judgement on Ulysses (which he disliked) and The Forsyte Saga (which he was enjoying) before recalling and dismissing Yeats with remarkable negativity - yet Hester Dowden did not come naked into the seance room. She had been reading Sherard's The Real Oscar Wilde. George Yeats presents a much greater problem. Almost from the outset she is improvising some kind of philosophical system. By 8 November 1917, she is well iilto the antithetical self and the primary self. Where did she get her basic material? It could be argued that there is little in the earlier part of the script which does not derive from Yeats's own thought, particularly "Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places" and Per Amica Silmtia L,lI/ae. Neither was published, but George could well have been shown the former some time before and the latter, composed during 1917, would have been an obsessive element in his conversation in that year. It would have been difficult for anyone close to Yeats to have avoided grasping the machinery of the essay, much of which had been part of his philosophy since 1909. The sun and moon symbolism, as first communicated on 5 November (be­ fOl-c it is sophisticated and elaborated in rapid response to Yeats's excited interpretations), seems to me to have a sexual drift: "don't forget - melt [saturn] in [venus] melt [saturn] in [venus]". Certainly Sun and Moon sym­ bols, as well as the more predictable Mars and Venus symbols, are used later in the script as a code for intercourse. The editors gloss these first communica­ tions as forming the basis of the sun-moon symbolism of A Visioll, and indeed this is how Yeats came to read them. But was this what George originally intended? Her first communications about the progress of personality and soul in a cycle could well derive from Theosophical theories of Karma and the wheel of rebirth, stich as Annie Besant's Reillcamalioll. George's statement on "The UlIwillillg Persepholle" 269 21 November 1917, about 2000-year cycles culminating in the final incarnation of an initiate, seems also a modification of Blavatskyan cycles. But what is the source of those "gyres and cubes and midnight things"? Those elements which Yeats isolates in "The Gift ofHarun AI-Rashid" as the true communication of the Djinn? All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things Arc but a new expression of her body Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth. Yeats here confesses the geometry of the automatic scripts as the one thing which could not have come from his mind 01' another's. Yet he also del'ives the strange shapes from the young wife's body, her sexual self. The link between the spirits and sexual activity is demonstrated to an astonishing degree in the scripts; the first flood of communication was, after all, in the early stages of their honeymoon. Later, when it was clear that Yeats found the communica­ tions more exciting than intercourse, George and the unknown instructors went on strike. Yeats was warned (30June 1919) that "script depends on the love of medium for you". He was intermittently told that without "[sun] in [moon]", i.e., intercourse, there would be no communieations, something about which he was surprisingly resentful for a man recently married to a woman half his age. Curiously, the link between mediumship and sexuality - especially in the case of physical manifestation mediums - was a topic in psychical research at this time. Dr Hereward Carrington argued that the sexual energies of the medium were translated into physical phenomena; he identified orgasm coincident with manifestation in certain mediums, including Eusapia Paladino. That these scripts provide a picture of the Yeatses' intimate life was to be expected. It is this aspect of the scripts which is most moving - George's playfulness and irritation, pretending to be a cat washing its whiskers and purring when Yeats wanted a communication (Yeats noted "cat trouble again"), scribbling a donkey's head (glossed with "idiot") at the conclusion of a script tedious to her. Her ordinary high spil'its at times give rise to a Marx Brothers' dialogue: "What question am I to ask? I That is because you are thick and heavy / What do you mean by hairy I Hear!)!, not hairy". George regularly gets the controls to remind Yeats to let the cat in, and later in the "sleeps" "Carmichael" engages in a Beckettian grumble about their having the cat Harry in bed between them washing itself, while he is trying to communi­ cate: "Washing, washing, more washing & swallowing all that dirt". Yet there arc also allccting outbursts on her part as to Yeats's separation from the ordinary rhythms oflife and his destructive exploitation of her gift. On 4 March 1918 there is a moving discussion, in which George tries to get Yeats 270 Yeats AlIlIual No. 10 to decide whether or not they should have children: she assures him that if they do he will always come first: her happiness will always depend on you only but the child would only give her happiness in being yoUI' child she docs not want a child for its own sake ... she will on the whole be equally happy during your life whether you want a child or no it will always be you she will love in the child ... Yeats clearly could give no satisfactory response to this heroically altruistic plea, for George explodes, "oh no but youll go on meandering for 10 years if I dont fix a time". A sad entry of 16 November 1919 indicates how by thcn George had come to regard the continuing burden of these scripts: "Persephone / Pluto & Persephone / The Unwilling Persephone ... ". She saw Yeats as Pluto dragging her down into the underworld and darkness, from the richness of ordinary natural life, which she was "unwilling to leave". That she saw the task increasingly as an ordeal is evident in the number of times that, pressured by Yeats to have yet another evening session, she allowed a control to come and to announce immediately that he was leaving - "nothing for tonight goodbye". Yet when Yeats gave her the option of abandoning the project, by asking "Has not all this painful process merely brought us to state of natural affection which many must reach at once? If not, what is the difference", she docs not usc this moment of doubt to end the scripts. Some of Yeats's own questions are moving and revealing; his concern to analyse the patterns of his life leads him to ask, "Is an unfortunate PF [personal fate] necessary to intellectual or artistic power?" George's answer is uncharacteristically brutal: " ... you are the one. No richness - all dried up - rattling Stones instead of thought - stones in a tin can." A response that found its way into A mound of refuse or the sweeping of a street, Old kettles, old bottles and a broken can, Old iron old bones, old rags ..
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