The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats by Adrian Frazier (review)

Anyone who has read the poems of W. B. Yeats, or knows anything about his life, knows that he fell in love with Maud Gonne, the beautiful Irish nationalist, when he was a young man; proposed marriage to her several times over the course of almost thirty years; that she did not requite his passion; and that Yeats wrote some of the finest love poems in the language, ranging from the adulatory and mythologizing to the accusing and embittered: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery. …" The conjunction of sexual desire and political nationalism in her person was typically transmuted in Yeats's poetry into a powerful erotic nationalism, so that even when a poem (such as "Easter, 1916,") appears self-evidently to be about something else, in Frazier's compelling and persuasive reading, it is really all about Gonne.

The Adulterous Muse is a highly readable and even sensational book, replete with political imbroglios and sexual intrigue, well paced and expert in its narration, and impressive in its lightly worn scholarship. Frazier has tapped into French archives that feature fascinating newspaper and magazine articles about Gonne and her adulterous lover, Lucien Millevoye, in 1890s Paris. Of the three main players, we presumably know most about Yeats, thanks especially to R. F. Foster's biography, but by focusing on his relationship with Gonne (offering illuminating and original readings of Yeats's poems about her), Frazier manages to shed new light on his artistic and emotional life. Maud Gonne has remained a more opaque figure, despite her autobiography A Servant of the Queen (1938), and several biographies. Whether she is admirable or not depends on your leanings in Irish politics—yet even one sympathetic to her activism might wonder about her emotional life beyond the near-fanaticism of her dedication to Irish nationalism.

Frazier shines a light into Gonne's private life that illuminates her relations with both Yeats and Millevoye, who is not well known (unless you have reason to be familiar with late nineteenth-century French politics, and the Boulangist movement of which he was a ranking member). Frazier recovers Millevoye as an important personage in Gonne's life—after all, he was her first lover and the father of two of her children—whose political convictions reinforced her own. Frazier summons up the ambience of the time in France, its nationalism, its anti-Semitism, its politicians and their mistresses, its duels, its antiparliamentary threats ending with a whimper in the grim farce of General Boulanger's suicide.

As well as running a salon on behalf of Millevoye, Gonne simultaneously performed as a muse figure for the young Irish nationalist Yeats, who saw in her the incarnation of romantic Ireland. That role, Frazier says, she "worked … for all it was worth." As with Millevoye, there was in her relationship with Yeats the combination of an intense personal alliance with a political allegiance to a revolutionary national ideal. She was an actress on occasion—notably in the first performance of Yeats's and Gregory's Cathleen Ni Houlihan—and in real life histrionically played the role of Yeats's muse.

"[T]hey all write about some woman in their poetry," says that unchaste Penelope, Molly Bloom, in her early morning soliloquy as she briefly fantasizes about becoming the muse for Stephen Dedalus, who has just departed the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street after having a cup of cocoa with her husband. (Earlier in the day she had had an adulterous encounter with Blazes Boylan.) It still comes as something of a shock to recall, as Frazier's wicked title prompts us to do, that when Yeats first met her, both of them in their early twenties, she was already the mistress of the married Millevoye, and that she kept Yeats in the dark about this for a long time, and combined leading him on, as it were, with dark hints about tragic...