Glory and delirium of Celtic fever

Maud Gonne by Nancy Cardozo (Victor Golancz E7.50).
This account of the life and times of Maud McBride Gonne, Ireland's doughtiest female warrior in its fight for liberation, is the first incursion into biography by its American author, poet and short-story writer, Nancy Cardozo. Not unexpectedly, it shows a lack of objectivity, minor errors of fact, inconsistencies in nomenclature.
Many historians have quailed before the daunting task of bringing cohesion and coherence out of' the tangled web of Irish politics from the mid-19th century till now. Miss Cardozo strives valiantly to do this for her herione, now at the centre, now on the periphery but at any moment clinging defiantly to any one of the myriad strands of that web, inextricably inyolved in and totally committed to the cause.
Yet nothing in Maud Gonne's birth and early upbringing could have presaged the obsession which was to be her destiny and undoubtedly one of Ireland's glories. Born in the Curragh army camp of a British colonel, she belonged, before she realised it, to a privileged ruling class and might have become a pampered and anonymous butterfly flitting decoratively but ineffectually in Vice-Regal society. Instead, she caught the Celtic fever and lived in its delirium until she died.
That noble-minded but uncompromising Fenian, John O'Leary, became her political mentor. What she had seen of cruel repression, evictions, imprisonments, famine and partytorn Ireland served to strengthen her resolve to become a champion of Irish Liberty.
Land Leaguers, Unionists, Home Rulers, Young Irelanders and the United Irish League jockeying for position and power threw up powerful leaders like Michael Davitt, James Connolly, William O'Brien and a host of others.
Maud employed her energies in relief work for the fighters and their victimised families, in political speaking all over Ireland and even in England, France and America, enlisting sympathy and support for the rebels, and doing her own share of intrigue and political manoeuvre. .
Strong, tall, beautiful, imperious and fearless, she unflinchingly faced the militia, their rifles trained on her; she defied and broke through police barriers, almost died of pneumonia in Holloway jail and became to her fellow-countrymen the living embodiment of all Ireland's mythological heroines. She was Grania, Mhaeve and lastly, because of Yeats, for ever Cathleen ni Houlihan.
Maud's links with the Celtic literary revival were largely the result of Yeats' life-long passion for her. She certainly inspired almost all his love poetry, much of his nationalistic poetry and his one great drama, Cathleen ni Houlihan, in which Maud played Cathleen. Any student of Yeats would do well to make this biography an interpretative starting point of his poetry, though that can speak for itself also.
How annoying, then, that Miss Cardozo constantly refers to Yeats. arguably the greatest poet of the century, as "Willie". Maud, his friend and lover, uses the diminutive with unforced naturalness. In Miss Cardozo's hands it becomes somehow intellectually diminishing. As well describe T. S. Eliot as "Tommy".
Let Yeats pay the last tribute: "But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you And loved the sorrows in your changing face . . ." — soir a la chandelle!
Maud was 80 when she died. She had lived to see her son Sean McBride fight his way into the Dail at the head of a middle, moderate party which was to bring about a coalition government uniting the warring parties. That too was doomed to failure.
She did not live to rejoice in his award of the Nobel Prize as leader of Amnesty International, for to grieve over the Ulster apotheosis of Yeats' ominous refrain in his poem "Easter 1916" — "A terrible beauty is born."
Brother Hilary Cluderay, FSC