I was in Majorca, breakfasting in bed at 7.30 when my wife announced that Margot Collis had arrived1—a† woman in whom I had some two years before divined a frustrated tragic genius. She had asked my help to found a poets’theatre.2 Of distinguished beauty of face and limb, a successful provincial actress, managing her own company, she had come to Londonhoping to get work on the London stage.3 Her father’s name was Ruddock, and she wishes, when we speak of her as a poet, to be called Margot Ruddock. I brought herto Dulac the painter, and Ashton the creator and producer of ballets,4 subtle technical minds with an instinctive knowledge of the next step in whatever art they discussed. I asked her to recitesome poems. She had all the tricks of the professional elocutionist, but rehearsed by Ashton and Dulac substituted a musicalclarity pleasant to a poet’s ear. In a few days she had lost it and returned unconsciously to the tricks, but what can bedone once can be done again.5 I had never seen her act, but after thirty years’ experience I know from the mind of man and woman what they can do† uponthe stage when they have found their legs, judging that mind perhaps from the way they sink into a chair or lift a cup. Therewas something hard, tight, screwed-up, in her, but were that dissolved by success she might be a great actress, for she possesseda quality rare upon the stage or, if found there, left unemployed—intellectual passion. She had set her heart upon my Player Queen where the principal character might give the opportunity she had lacked, seemed indeed in some senses of the word herself.
I gave Margot Ruddock permission to arrange for a performance of The† Player Queen wherever she could, said all I cared about was that she should play the principal part, and returned to Ireland. Such a performance was arranged for, butfor some reason I have never fathomed, Margot Ruddock, or, to use her stage name, Margot Collis, had but a minor part whichshe played with beauty and distinction.6
Meanwhile I had discovered her poetry. She sent me passionate, incoherent improvisations, power struggling with that ignoranceof books and of arts which has made the modern theatre what it is. I criticized her with some vehemence and the improvisationsbecame coherent poems. I selected ‘The Child Compassion’, ‘Autumn’, which have something of Emily Brontë’s† intensity, andsome others for an anthology I have compiled for the Oxford University Press.7 She wrote from time to time, most letters contained a poem or poems, but these poems seemed to have lost form; had she fallenback as after the Ashton and Dulac rehearsal? It was not now a falling back into convention but an obsession by her own essentialquality; passion followed passion with such rapidity that she had no time for deliberate choice; she seemed indifferent toscansion, even to syntax. I got angry and told her to stop writing.8 After that almost every day brought some big packet of verse; I was busy with Shree Purohit Swami, we were translating theUpanishads†; I left the packets unopened, or thrust the contents into some drawer unread. And now she had come to defy meand to cover my table with her thoughts. I sat down with boredom but was soon amazed at my own blindness and laziness. Herein broken sentences, in ejaculations, in fragments of all kinds was a power of expression of spiritual suffering unique inher generation.9 ‘O Song, song harshened, I have leashed you to harshness.‘…‘I will shut out all but myself and grind, grind myself down tothe bone.‘…‘Follow, follow lest that which you love vanishes, Let it go, let it go.’†… ‘Shape me to Eternal Damnation to ridme of the phlegm that spits itself from unbearable cold.’…‘Bleed on, bleed on, soul, because I shall not cease to knife youuntil you are white and dry.’…‘Almost I tasted ecstasy and then came the Blare, and drowned perfection in perfection.’…‘Icannot endure it when I see you asleep, having carefully tucked your teddy bear beside you. I cannot endure it. Even if youwould have been born anyhow. Even if you did choose me. Even if it was because I cannot endure it you chose me!’…† ‘Good nature, sweet nature and you’ll have to be crushed. You shall not be; by God youshall not be. Whatever you do I will see that you are not crushed. I will not stand that you be crushed.’ ‘Feed the cat! feedthe cat, you can’t starve people though they can starve you. Might as well eat as I feed the cat; now the cat wants my food.’‘Consider and consider and always come back to what you said in a flash and to what you knew when you saw it.’ ‘Give me powerto choose to keep wisdom.’ ‘I will scald myself to cool.’
‘O sky harshen, O wind blow cold,
O crags of stony thought be steep
That mind may ache and bleed,
That mind be scattered to the wind.’
‘All is true of all
For all that is is true;
But Truth is not;
To become Truth Is not to be.’
‘Grief is not in Truth
But Truth in grief must live grief
Yet know no grief;
For Truth is proof against all but itself.’
‘When all thought is gathered into the heart
And set out to ripen like good fruit;
And that which might have been eaten withered,
And that which were better withered eaten;
I sit and sit
And marvel at the itch of it.’
‘I have counted all that may happen
And it will not happen,
I have said all that shall be
And it will not be.’
‘O song, no tears but thine
Be sung, no thought
That is not secret
Shut out all others
For all earth must lie
But thou, and I.’
June 1936
Margot Ruddock left for Barcelona and a few days later the British Consul there wired that she had fallen out of a windowand broken her knee-cap.10 My wife and I went to Barcelona and found her in the Clinica Evangelica where she had been brought the night before. Shewas sitting up in bed writing an account of her experiences. She has added since, mainly at my suggestion, four or five explanatorysentences, and crossed out a word here and there.11 Her dominant thought, during those wanderings from house to house, street to street, had been, she said a few weeks ago,that God died and suffered in everything that we ate and in everything that we did. She was undergoing an experience perhapswell known once in Europe and in Asia, though in† every individual it must take a different form. Some old Indian writer hassaid, ‘The Yogi must often seem mad, must often be mad.’12 But she was sane when I saw her in Barcelona; her main thought the trouble she was causing, or had caused, and she has remainedsane.
I publish on my own responsibility what she then wrote; the first pride of authorship passed she would have preferred to hideit or destroy it. Some of her friends and mine think that its publication may injure her, but I am not of that opinion. Thestory that appeared in the Press, her supposed attempt at suicide,13 will soon be forgotten, is already forgotten perhaps, but all her life some like story would have followed her; far betterthat the true story should be known seeing that it lacks neither nobility nor strangeness. Though her poems, their descriptionsof what old poets have called the ‘razor’s edge’,14 despite their occasional technical imperfection, have in a still greater measure that nobility and strangeness, they gain,like many lyrical poems when their origin is known, a second beauty, passing as it were out of literature into life.
There are only twenty little poems in this book, all written with great difficulty over a considerable space of time, andif she writes more it will be perhaps upon some different theme. The mystic who has found or approached ecstasy, whether inthe midst of order or disorder, must return into the life of the world to test or employ knowingly or unknowingly his newknowledge. Margot Ruddock may become Margot Collis again, and forget amid the excitement of the Boards that more perilousexcitement.
W. B. Yeats