Denise's Story: W. B. Yeats, Dorothy Wellesley, and the Remaking of "Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by His Pupils"

In 1923, Yeats committed to publisher T. Werner Laurie the manuscript of A Vision: An Explanation of Life founded upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka (1925), first issued to subscribers on January 15, 1926.¹ But already, in a long entry of March 14, 1926, he had begun to plan in his diary major revisions for the substantially rewritten version of A Vision that materialized on October 7, 1937, when the standard edition was published by Macmillan, without subtitle.² These two renditions of the same book—the second edition of A Vision and its 1925 predecessor (which will be hereafter referred parenthetically as AV:EL)—posed very different assumptions about the author in relation to his sources, both fictional and actual.³ Although Yeats registers no qualms in the diary about how close AV:EL adhered to the research source of his wife's automatic writing, Richard Ellmann has stated that she opposed an elucidated second edition that would acknowledge the spirit guides who informed the work's mystic philosophy:

Mrs. Yeats was absolutely opposed to this, and they had then, as she told me, the first and only serious quarrel of their marriage. Yeats prevailed, but included his mythical variations as well as his realistic account. The second edition of 1937 made room for many second thoughts and also many doubts. When Allan Wade asked him if he believed in A Vision, he said evasively—though accurately, "Oh, I draw from it images for my poetry." The book hovered between philosophy and fiction, bread and cake.⁴

To put some perspective on the quarrel, it should be noted that Yeats's private revelations to friends put an end to George Yeats's "philosophical sleeps" on November 27, 1923.⁵ Yeats subsequently disclosed their modus operandi in A Packet for Ezra Pound (Cuala Press, 1929), revealing that theirs were the same "Two contemplating passions [which had] chose[n] one theme / Through sheer bewilderment" in "Desert Geometry or The Gift of Harun Al-Raschid" (AV:EL 125, ll. 32-33). The disclosure motivated a number of maneuvers implemented, eventually, in A Vision. The chief maneuver required that one of Yeats's masks, that of Kusta ben Luka, be omitted, along with the poem just cited and preliminary matter by the fictitious character Owen Aherne, so that Giraldus (the likeness of Yeats, bearded and turbaned, by Edmund Dulac) might yet preside though moved from the frontispiece to the interior of a whole new body of fiction called "Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by His Pupils." This was privately published by the Cuala Press in 1931 in company with Yeats's play The Resurrection. Literary gambits involving the fabled Judwalis and the education of the Caliph had given way to the contemporary scene of bohemian artists and mystics retrieved from the pages of The Secret Rose (1897), especially from the story "Rosa Alchemica" augmented by "The Tables of the Law" and " The Adoration of the Magi." The objective of setting straight "Dear Mr. Yeats" by means of transcripts in A Vision signed by John Aherne, Owen's brother, and by John Duddon, another new character based on an old Irish tale about the fleecing of gullible yokels, offers a tongue-in-cheek counterpoint to the serious point of Yeats's open letter to Pound on the authority of A Vision.⁶ As Ellmann suggested, the former inventions might be regarded as cake to the bread of the latter philosophy and that of the partitioned main body of A Vision proper, Books I-V.

In time, difficulties within the marriage led Yeats to cultivate interests in other women. Almost as a premonition of the philandering "wild old wicked man" of the 1930s, Yeats also wonders, in the diary entry of March 14, 1926, whether AV:EL, when revised, might require a final section on the nature of love in the form of a letter by Michael...