In <em>The Trap</em>, Miriam Henderson several times spots the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, who lives in a flat she can see from the one she shares with Miss Holland. Miriam is familiar with Yeats’s work and considers herself privileged to have a glimpse of the great artist.
Years after writing of Yeats in <em>The Trap</em>, Dorothy Richardson published this recollection of Yeats and life in Bloomsbury in <em>Life and Letters Today</em> (April 1939).
Early in the century there lay upon the oasis to the north of the British Museum a peace deeper than any to be found elsewhere in London proper. For above and within the rest of the fertile regions, known to guidebooks as London’s unrivalled series of parks and open spaces, there hovered always, the gift of their surroundings, a splendour whose tokens, visible or audible, were never far off, were always, in the quietest squares and in the remotest quarters of the parks, just round the corner.
But within the boundaries of Bloomsbury, to emerge from one quiet square was to find oneself almost immediately in another, with peace intact; for the interspaces, nearly as quiet as the squares themselves, gave no hint of distant tumultuous thoroughfares, and sound, save for the occasional clattering passage, emphasizing the stillness, of a burdened commercial vehicle, was present only as a far-off murmuring.
And even in wandering to either margin, to the north where the narrow, crowded, disreputable lane of the Euston Road, (still, at that date, remembered by the elderly as the hunting-ground of garrotters)in widening to salute its three large termini, added to the rest of its traffic an evocative to and fro of preoccupied travellers, to the south towards the thronged corridor of Oxford Street; to the east where almost deserted pavements hemmed the tide of drays and trams roaring along the Gray’s Inn Road, or westward to reach the din of the Tottenham Court Road, peace clasped one from the rear, stretching serenely backward, square beyond square.
The social status of this early Edwardian Bloomsbury was comfortably modest. Moving westward, Society had left behind only its houses, acre upon acre of cool grey stone buildings, thick-walled, spacious, many of them with gardens; a noble heritage for those of the inhabitants who in square, or in street linking square with square, for a modest outlay could enjoy their exceptional surroundings untroubled by the problem of staffing and running these unwieldy mansions.
For most of them had become either boarding or apartment-houses lodging students and others drawn to the neighbourhood by the museums, colleges, hospitals, medical schools and at least two unique and hospitable libraries; a collection making this district London’s more or less staid equivalent of the Latin Quarter. Though not yet a Vatican, issuing encyclicals to be devoutly pondered wherever two or three young persons were gathered together in the name of sophisticated intelligence, in possessing the Slade, so far unchallenged either by the Omega Workshops or the presence of Russian dancers, it had become, by day, the Mecca of the aesthetes.
But it was by night that Bloomsbury most clearly stated its character as London’s prize oasis. And on summer nights, closing blessedly down upon days that brought to central London’s exhausted prisoners a hopeless longing for bee-loud glades and the sound of lake water lapping, or even for the relative coolness of an outlying suburb, there was a region at its heart where such longings could be forgotten.
Soon after sunset a message would reach even the most stifling attic, brought by the evening air stealing in at its open window. Hanging out, the prisoner could discern, more sharply than in a country lane where, save for a habitual or a deliberate receptivity, such things come to be accepted as a matter of course, the breath of trees coming from those grouped central squares, and from the square round the corner, and from the one opening at the farther end of the street.
The street is silent. Distant thoroughfares send up their continuous murmur. someone whistles for a cab, briefly, peremptorily, London reasserting itself. Silence. The whistle sounds again, a louder blast, and again; prolonged this time to the limit of the breath, and shrill with half-angry, half-pleading protest. With a leisurely jingle-jingle, plock-plock, a hansom at last comes into sight, takes up its eager burden and jingles off to some scene of West-End revelry, leaving the onlooker to rediscover, within the familiar, inorganic air of London , restored by the evocative incident, the moist evening-breath of the close-clustered trees. Forest breath that will grow richer with the falling of a darkness that allowed the night wanderer, in the days before London streets had grown to resemble an overlighted stage, to see both moon and stars.
It was on a summer night whose full moon obliterated the gentle gleam of street-lamps that 1 first saw William Butler Yeats. I knew that the author of The Lake Isle of Innisfree, that satisfying vehicle for the intermittent longings even of those of us who would have placed almost any seaside resort above, the bee-loud glades in the world, the Irish poet, symbolizing for my indignant young mind the Ireland it had learned in an exceptionally open-eyed school to regard as monstrously maltreated, lived somewhere in the neighbourhood; also that he was tall and dark and wore a cloak.
Going home towards midnight from one of those evenings of intensive talk wherein young, London workers forget the day’s toil, and time seemed endless before the beginning of another day, crossing the square linking my friends’ street with my own, I went out of my way to walk on the little foot-path encircling the railings around the central grove, passing as I reached it from bright moonlight to deep shadow, and from the sense of tire’s endlessness to the conviction, assailing me whenever I found myself solitary within the spell of Bloomsbury’s deepest enchantment, of time’s nonexistence. The surrounding buildings became mere reflectors. of moonlight, infinitely far away. The giant trees mingled their breath with mine, their being with my own.
Just ahead, demanding a few paces to be taken in separation from the company of the trees, a pool of brilliant light, thrown by the full-moon across a gap in their grouping, lay over the path, uniting it with the bleak roadway. Nearing this pool, I became aware of an obstruction far more powerfully world-recalling, a figure approaching from the shadow on the farther side of the pool. But the men’s slow, meditative gait instantly revealed hip as a fellow-lover of nocturnal solitude, himself obstructed by a presence on the narrow path and presently to be obliged to step into the gutter and, passing on, to gather together, as best he might, the broken fragments of his meditation.
It was my chosen path. It was his. We should pass each other in an equality of annoyance? Silently exchange congratulations, connoisseurs, catching each other adoring the same masterpiece?
Simultaneously we reached the respective margins of our pool, and paused. Although in recognising this tall cloaked figure with dark hair ebullient above a pallid brow and eyes revealed, when he raised his bent head, as gazing upon nothing that was immediately visible, to be beyond doubt the author of The Lake Isle, I felt that I ought if possible to varnish into the earth, I was nevertheless held in my place. Partly, no doubt, for lack of practice in skipping into the gutter to make my way for men; even for kings amongst men. But chiefly I was held by the sudden enhancement of everything about me in the presence of this articulate lover of the kind of beauty I then most dearly loved, and by the desire somehow to acknowledge my debt.
And now those unconscious eyes, within whose depths I seemed to see a man aged and astray in sorrow, awoke to awareness of the present, to recognition of the nature of the obstruction in his path and, to my unspeakable joy, to something approaching a glimmer of recognition, acknowledgment of a fellow-worshipper.
By what means we passed each other I do not know. Once fully awake, the poet will have stepped into that adjacent gutter? For memory, we stand permanently confronted on either side of that lake of moonlight.
Early in the following summer I unintentionally discovered his retreat by moving into lodgings exactly opposite his own in a Bloomsbury backwater. A flagged alley lined by narrow, close-packed, little old four-storied houses retaining, in their decrepitude, something of an ancient dignity and, with the faded painted ceilings of their main rooms, a torch of a former splendour. Here, then, was his sanctuary, remote from thoroughfares and within a few paces of Bloomsbury’s woodlands; a village, with a local population marking and marked by it, and its own snug, unpretentious shops. From above the cobbler’s, his window looked into mine, above the stonemason’s.
Though youth and curiosity run hand in hand, Yeats never knew himself observed. Neither in his day-time talks with the bent old cobbler, no mere passing of the time of day with a fellow-tenant whose inner shop-door stood open upon the passage leading to the street, but long confabulations, wherein the two stood obviously in an equality of communication discussing, agreeing, disagreeing, never at a loss and frequently amused, usually parting in laughter wherewith equality gave place to something eon-parable to the relationship between father and son when this is happy, the poet’s laugh, ringing out into the oven as he stood half-turned for departure, meeting the bespectacled old man’s quavering chuckle as he glanced up at his friend in farewell, affectionately; nor at night when people gathered in his room from afar.
Most frequently, during the evenings of that torrid summer, the window across the way, whose dark green art-serge curtains hung drawn aside to admit, together with the parched air, the light, obscured by high, surrounding buildings, of the alley’s narrow sky, showed only, standing upon a low table near the window, two immensely tall, thick white candles, giving the dimly visible background the air of a deserted shrine. When these were alight in the early falling London twilight of pre-“summer-time” days, it meant that friends were there, shadowy forms seated in high-backed antique chairs, or standing clear in the window space; talking, talking, but in an inequality of communication, and, chiefly, being talked to by the tall pervading figure, visible now here, now there, always in speech.
Poetry, discernible by the way, with movements of an outstretched hand, he would sometimes conduct its cadences, he would read aloud to a single friend seated opposite in the window-space, for a whole evening, turning, now and again, with an eager, en-quiring smile, to gather the listener’s response.
In repudiating his earlier work, which indeed is that of one in flight from reality and wistfully yearning for impossible reversals, Yeats sets his critics a problem. Was there, rather than development, revolution and cleavage, a reorientation of his spiritual compass? Or was the early work a facade, deliberately set up and by no means representing him? A characteristic preciosity, growing now and again a little uneasy, stiff in the gait, as if the material were being pushed, willy-nilly, painfully along, rather than carried by a flood-tide, would appear to justify this supposition. Can one imagine Yeats, supposing him grown to maturity and getting beyond, or through, his rapturous animism, ever repudiating its fruit?
Whether bringing about cleavage and reorientation, or an emergence from behind a deliberately constructed defence, the varied experience of his maturity, wherein he gathered together,
and projected into his later work, all the forces of his nature, must unawares have poured into his ranged memories an ever-deepening intensity. And it may be, despite his protests, that in looking back upon his earlier self, the Bloomsbury solitary who had written The Lake Isle of Innisfree be found, not a regrettable wanderer in a self-made darkness, but the hesitant younger brother of the author of Michael Robartes.
My study of Yeats has informed my learning about DR