Biography: Jeanne Robert Foster

ELT 46 : 3 2003 times recalcitrant poems, plays, novels, and essays, the voice of eugenical discourse is nonetheless present and nonetheless significant for its reticence about being seen and heard. (14—15) The underlying metaphor here is that of the critic as prosecutor. In the absence of a "smoking-gun" he must base his case upon "circumstantial evidence," which he has to "tease ... out of sometimes recalcitrant" witnesses . This critical model may account for some of the logical and rhetorical excesses of Modernism and Eugenics. The zealous overstatement of parallels as influences establishes complicity, while the reliance upon inference and speculation masks the absence of solid evidence. The author's allegations may have merit, but they would carry greater conviction if his argumentation were less prosecutorial and more judicious. HUGH WITEMEYER ________________ University of New Mexico Biography: Jeanne Robert Foster Richard Londraville and Janis Londraville. Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford: Jeanne Robert Foster and Her Circle of Friends. Writing American Women. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. xxix + 288 pp. $29.95 JEANNE ROBERT FOSTER'S "circle of friends" encompassed many of the creative luminaries of the first half of the twentieth century , including not only John Butler and William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford, but also Constantin Brancusi and Gwen John. During her remarkable life, she also endured a somewhat sinister affair with Aleister Crowley, forged a strong bond with the Czech nationalist Tomás Masaryk, and sustained a six-year relationship with John Quinn. How a young woman born and schooled in the late nineteenthcentury in the rural environment of the Adirondacks managed to meet or correspond with the famous and infamous makes for an often engrossing tale. As the sketches and photographs the Londravilles have included clearly demonstrate, Jeanne Foster was a striking woman, and it was her arresting appearance that initially served as her entree into the international community of artists, writers, and patrons who significantly influenced the course of modern European and American cultural history . Her image appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and the Sunday Telegraph, she was named the "Harrison Fisher Girl" of 1903, and one night in 1911, while eating dinner in a Boston restaurant, she caught the eye of John Butler Yeats. Their close friendship was to last 324 BOOK REVIEWS until the elder Yeats's death in 1922, after which he was interred in Foster 's family plot in Chestertown, New York. (Foster herself would be buried next to him in 1970.) The painter served as her first literary mentor, critiquing her early, sometimes "mawkish" poetic efforts and sending some of them to Van Wyck Brooks for additional commentary and suggestions . In May 1914, he introduced Foster to his eldest son, following a poetry reading that "seemed to her a synthesis of man and art," the performance of a man "in full command of the force of his poetry and masculinity ," who had clearly "achieved his desire of being one with the ancient bards of Ireland." Foster's adulation of the Yeatses was not unusual for her, for throughout her life she professed and seemingly acted on "the belief that genius resided only in men" and that therefore "her own considerable talents as writer and editor were better utilized in the service of some superior man." This attitude appealed to John Quinn, whom she came to see as "the superior male she had always longed to serve." The two were brought together by J. B.Yeats's bout with influenza in 1918, and Foster shortly thereafter became the powerful lawyer and patron's associate, rapidly developing into "the companion that he leaned on for the rest of his life," the person he trusted implicitly to "be the recorder for his interviews with famous figures and his intermediary with people such as Gwen John and Henri-Pierre Roché." According to the Londravilles, the depth and endurance of her emotional commitment to him are revealed by her disclosure to Dorothy Pound that she desired "to have a child with him" and by her dogged efforts to preserve intact his magnificent collection of art works and manuscripts after his death in 1924. Indeed, although she herself would live...