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New Literary History 33.2 (2002) 291-314



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Nemo:
George Yeats and Her Automatic Script

Margaret Mills Harper

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WHEN SHE WAS INITIATED into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1914, sponsored by the adept Demon Est Deus Inversus, Georgie Hyde-Lees took as her motto and magic name the Latin word Nemo: no one or, suggestively, no man. 1 Several years later, on 20 October 1917, Hyde-Lees married her former sponsor and Nemo became the author of George Yeats's magnum opus, the collaborative and related ventures of the automatic script and the long partnership with W. B. Yeats. The script radiated outward to encompass two editions of A Vision as well as numerous other works by Yeats. The partnership broadened into a symbolically appropriate tetradic family and thirty years of mutual affection and support. Yet as the histories and criticisms of Yeats have multiplied in the decades since his death, Mrs. Yeats has continued to occupy a curious position. It is generally known that her hand wrote many of the ideas that occupied her husband's time and creative energy in his astonishingly productive late years, and it is also no secret that she was a woman of dauntingly independent intelligence, 2 and yet she and her work have until recently remained somewhat occluded in Yeats studies. 3

Most of the scholarly attention paid to George Yeats has occurred in the course of retelling the story of the first days of the Yeatses' marriage and the start of the "incredible experience" of discovering that Mrs. Yeats could accomplish what might now be called channeling, receiving through spirit Controls or Guides messages from invisible realms. 4 She plays a number of different roles in these stories, from bit part to supporting actress: a self-effacing young bride and mediumistic helpmeet; an unconscious Sybil, ignorant of the wisdom that comes unbidden from her lips or hands; the smart perpetrator of the perfect hoax for a depressed bridegroom with magical inclinations; or yet another silenced woman behind a literary genius. Past the honeymoon, though, the critical notice has tended to wane. After some mention that the experiment of the automatic script continued for several years, the attention generally shifts to the texts Yeats authored and back to Yeats the author of them. This state of affairs is understandable, of course. After all is said and done, literary interest is inextricably related to [End Page 291] interest in authors. 5 Yeats studies are likely to be pulled toward Yeats. The difficulty of moving in a direction other than towards Yeats in an examination of the Vision papers or any of the many texts associated with them has much to do with intellectual reliance on the notion of authorship. 6 But it is more than merely interesting to notice that unwary readers are led away from the ambiguities of multiple and nameless authorship back to the relative security of "Yeats" in trying to make sense of texts that have their source in communications the writers believed were held with beings from beyond this world and/or their higher selves, in a setting that is utterly, if confusingly, collaborative. The messages themselves are wrapped in the clouds of just such ambiguities, from the innocuous abstractions of the Four Faculties and Principles in A Vision to more disturbing threats to self possession in settings such as Yeats's poems "Leda and the Swan" or "The Second Coming."

Multiple lines of creative force move beneath imperfect authorial or subjective control in late Yeats. This phenomenon, which among other things prevents "Yeats" from becoming a stable textual element in the works derived from the automatic script, contributes both to a number of mixed signals in A Vision (either in the 1925/6 version or the later revised edition of 1937) and to the dynamic subjectivity of the later poetry. We might trace to this cause the shifting subject of "Among School Children": bemused and bewildered old man sliding into youthful image-worshipping mother and beyond, to enable the triumphal last apostrophe blending subject and object...

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