There is an intersection in a woman’s life where she feels like the many-armed Shiva, juggling the roles of mother and lover, daughter and wife, child and grandparent, the all-purpose female, all in one. She is the night nurse, gliding through the wards at midnight soothing anxious patients, wondering who is going to soften the blows when they fall on her. Between 1934 and 1939, Pamela became that woman. It began with AE’s death.
Late in 1934, AE was suffering from bowel cancer. He did not suspect it, nor did his doctors. He was tired but not tired enough to reject an offer, which came though a bombardment of cables from Mary Rumsey, to visit the United States in December. Rumsey wanted him back in Washington, D.C., to lecture and advise on American rural communities. He might also give advice, she said, on the repatriation of the Mexican Indians.
AE was fascinated by the spiritual lives of American Indians. He always told his Irish acolytes that the Native Americans had religions of “a rather profound pantheistic character. Nature, its works, trees, earth, lakes, clouds, are Being to them.” But he did want to warn his friends in America that he was four years older than the last time he saw them, not yet senile, but “out of harness.” After one of the cables arrived, AE had asked Pamela’s advice. She told him “Go at once.” And he sailed on the Aurania on December 13, 1934.1
When he arrived in New York City two weeks later, he found Mrs. Rumsey had died. AE felt old, tired, finished himself. But once again, the Americans greeted him as a seer. He lunched with the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace, who was, he told Pamela, “my special friend, a great man.” John Collier, who had been commissioner of Indian affairs for two years, was overjoyed to see him back in the States. Early in January, Collier invited him to “go south to see the Indians on the reservations.”2
Collier had seen Taos as a Red Atlantis that held secrets needed by the white world.3 This impressed AE, who regarded Collier as a mystic who “loved the Indians and thinks I, as a pantheist and visionary, could get into the minds of the chiefs of the tribes and expound to them the cooperative policy which Collier thinks will strengthen the Indian organization.” He thought it amusing that Collier, who had read his poems and his book Candle of Vision, “should have picked me as a kind of possible ambassador to the tribes.” Collier wanted him to beguile the Indians “into safeguarding their ancient culture and industries by cooperative methods. I would love to see them…but I feel too aged for such adventure, going so many thousand miles.” In the end, he rejected the New Mexico adventure.4
For Pamela, AE had a great piece of news. During a trip to Chicago to see his son, Diarmuid, and meet his daughter-in-law, Rose, he had had lunch with the head buyer in the book department at the giant store Marshall Field’s. As AE told Pamela, “She was the person whose enthusiasm for Mary Poppins gave your book a send off. The [commercial] traveler gave her a copy. She read it and ordered 500, to the traveler’s astonishment. She actually sold over 1,100! I heard the book talked of with delight, to my great delight. I said with pride I knew you, and they wanted to know all about you.” A special advertisement had been placed in the Chicago papers to promote the book which was “a best seller, Pamela dear. Hunger and cold fade from your horizon.”
The Marshall Field’s buyer assured him that if Pamela ever came to Chicago she must visit. The buyer would “show you around and get you to give talks which means dollars,” he wrote to Pamela. Overall, Pamela thought AE’s letters from the United States were tired and dispirited but she had no idea just how exhausted AE felt by February, when he sensed the full extent of his illness. The main problem was his frequent, urgent need to empty his bowels. He sailed home, again on the Aurania, arriving in mid-March 1935, and found new lodgings at 14 Tavistock Place, near Euston Station.
Pamela heard nothing more until late March, when AE wrote that he had “some inflammation in my insides and they are investigating me bacteriologically.” His doctor and friend, Hector Munro, diagnosed dysentery and ordered a diet of milk, barley water and junket. Pamela did not trust Munro. She sent AE barley sugar and homemade treats, and worried even more, although his letters to her in April reassured her that he was “getting better rapidly.”
Pamela’s instincts took her to him in London. It was obviously very serious. AE was going to the lavatory every few minutes. At last, in despair, she brought him all the medicines she already had stashed away in the medicine cupboard for enteritis. They didn’t work, but AE was cheered when she told him how long she had suffered enteritis without it getting worse. Pamela thought he looked gray, and she begged him to see a specialist.5
Her own doctor recommended one. AE promised that if he didn’t get better in a week, he would see the man. In the meantime, Munro decided to call in a specialist himself. AE saw a surgeon in Cavendish Square who X-rayed him seven times and pronounced diarrhea in the lower bowel and constipation in the upper bowel. He amused the doctor by telling him then of the chakras, the seven spiritual centers of the body, to which the doctor replied, “Oh surely not, Mr. Russell.”6
Pamela asked AE to stay at Pound Cottage, where she could nurse him in peace, among the early greenery and bluebells, but he felt “I must postpone all thoughts of shifting to the country until the doctor gives his decision.”7
Although Pamela was living mainly in Pound Cottage with Madge, she traveled to London often to visit the office of the New English Weekly, then edited by Philip Mairet and directed by a board that included Jessie Orage, the American widow of its founding editor, A. R. Orage. During 1935 Pamela became close friends with Jessie, a tall, fair woman who was descended from generations of Connecticut clergymen and scholars.8
That year, Pamela sometimes stayed at Jessie’s apartment when she visited London. For many years, Jessie kept a diary whose pages reveal much of Pamela’s life for the next decade, sometimes in detail, but at other times in mysteriously allusive phrases. The diary shows that by April 26, 1935, Pamela and Jessie “talked all night,” as they did again the next evening. When Pamela stayed at a hotel, the two women had breakfast together and Pamela often invited Jessie and her two young children, Dick and Anne, to stay at Pound Cottage. By the end of May, Jessie was writing in her diary “I like her so much.”
The two women had been calling on AE in London who was, by then, very ill. On June 14, he signed a new will. A week later he traveled to Bournemouth by train with Dr. Munro and Charles Weekes, a friend from London who had been his publisher and agent. AE had decided to stay at Havenhurst, the convalescent home of a Miss Phoebe Myers. He gave up his flat at Tavistock Place—the specialist thought he would be better out of London. At Havenhurst, overlooking the sea, he lay in a deck chair under the trees.
On July 4 he wrote Pamela a card, which she found an odd way of writing, for him,9 saying, “I don’t know how long I will be here. This is a lovely place but I wonder if I will ever get better. I am no further in spite of sun, sea air, kindness, that I often feel my holiday in this place is nearly over. Thanks, dear P, for the invitation [to Mayfield] but I can hardly rise out of a chair.”10
AE began to write farewell letters to friends, asking every day if there was news for him from Yeats. There never was. He asked Munro to write to Pamela to tell her he needed “a serious operation for stoppage.” By then the doctors had discovered secondary growths. Pamela rang Dr. Munro to learn that AE had only a month or so to live. Munro told her that the doctors had never examined AE’s rectum until he got to Bournemouth. A new doctor had been called in, and after the examination said he must have a surgeon. It was the surgeon who broke the news, and he was so moved by the way AE received it that he broke down himself and had to leave the room.11
The news had come on July 9. The following day, AE underwent a colostomy operation at the Stagden Nursing Home. Pamela could bear it no longer. On Saturday she drove down from London to Bournemouth, where she booked a room at Havenhurst. She was greeted by William Magee, AE’s friend, another writer (who wrote under the name John Eglinton). “I’m glad you’ve come,” Magee told her. “He keeps asking, and I can’t make up to him for you.”12
In the morning, she visited AE. Pamela sat on the chair by his bed and put her head on his pillow. He lifted his hand and put it on her hair and said, “You’re a kind, sweet girl.” She found him terribly changed. Pamela thought he looked like a prince, the gray of his beard changed to gold, “the face so slender and dear and the eyes so deep and blue. Oh…I could not restrain my tears.” She managed to say she had come to be near him, that she would not leave him. AE asked for news of Mary Poppins Comes Back. She said she had brought it with her and would work at it there. She kissed his hand again, then left, asking if he would like her to look after his letters and he said, “Yes.”
The next day she went to him, stood by his bed, and took down in pencil many farewell letters, including this letter to Henry Wallace:
My dear Henry,
This is to say good-bye to you. My illness can’t be cured either by medical or surgical means. I do not know how long I have to remain here, possibly less than six months, death does not make much matter, we understand each other.13
She did not weep. The doctor asked if there was anything he could do. AE said, “Perhaps a little Chinese tea.”
On Tuesday, back at Stagden, he asked if she had been swimming. They talked of tides. AE was in a much worse condition. He could not sign the letters, asking Pamela to sign on his behalf. They said their farewells. He said he wished he could have lived long enough to see her poems published. She said they would be dedicated to him. Pamela spoke to AE’s doctor; death was imminent. AE asked, again, if there was any message from Yeats. Nothing. Pamela sent the poet a cable: “AE dying and daily looking for a word from you.”
She was relieved when Con Curran, one of AE’s Irish friends, arrived with news that the Irish Academy intended to recommend AE for the Nobel Prize. Until then, her only other support in Bournemouth had been Magee. She was on the phone each day to Charles Weekes, back in London.
On Monday and Tuesday nights she hardly slept, waiting for a telephone call from the nursing home. As he lingered, she felt herself thinking, “Oh be gone my darling, do not wait. Be gone!” A nurse from Stagden called on Tuesday night, but it was only a false alarm. Oliver St John Gogarty sent her a telegram on Tuesday: “Kindly say if I shall be in time to see my friend Russell if I leave this evening Dublin.” She wired back, “Come quickly.”
On Wednesday AE was given morphia and was mostly unconscious. Jessie heard that Pamela might need help and drove down from London in her black BSA sports car. Madge had also arrived. A telegram finally arrived that morning from Yeats: “Give my old friend my love.” AE was asleep when Gogarty came. He woke at four.
Before he entered the room, Gogarty kissed Pamela’s hands and said, “Be ever blessed with this!” Then he straightened himself, “already weeping,” and went in. Before the door closed she saw Gogarty on his knees beside the bed, with his cheek on AE’s hand.14
Outside in the sunny garden, his friends sat talking, waiting. Pamela looked up at a porch to see a bird wildly fluttering.15 AE fell into a deep sleep. They all knew he would die that night. The nurses suggested they wait in a downstairs sitting room, and they assembled there: Pamela, Madge, Jessie, Con Curran, Charles Weekes, who had returned to Bournemouth, Gogarty, Magee and Hector Munro. Pamela begged to see him one more time, but they said it was better if she did not go into his room. At about ten o’clock, Munro said AE’s breathing was now “only automatic, he himself has flown.” An hour later, Munro told them AE was “in the death rattle.” Pamela felt sure that could not be right and asked Munro to return upstairs. The doctor came down once more to tell Pamela that AE had passed into a peaceful sleep. He died at twenty-five past eleven.
As if in church, Con Curran stood and said, “Let us now praise famous men.” Each one stood, the circle of friends. The moon was very full. Pamela thought everything was bright and rich and lovely at its zenith. Jupiter and Venus were high in the heavens and the moon was streaming out to sea.
His body lay in the bed next morning. Pamela went up to the room. She had never before seen a dead man. He seemed noble, almost majestic. In his hands he held two sprigs of rosemary Pamela had taken to him from Pound Cottage. She asked the nurse if they could be buried with him. Simone Tery arrived from France and wanted his coffin opened to photograph him but Pamela was glad the funeral home would not allow it. Sean O’Sullivan made three sketches of AE’s head, which, pressed into a pillow, resembled an ethereal halo. That night, Pamela followed the hearse to the mortuary. Charles Weekes’s oversized wreath sat propped up in the back seat of her car. She saw that the moon was gold and full over the sea. She noticed the smell of death in the mortuary.
On Friday, Pamela and Con Curran traveled on the train with the coffin to Euston Station. Pamela remembered thinking, “I shall never travel again with my genius.” In London, they were met by the Irish high commissioner and Helen Waddell, an academic and London friend of AE’s. They went for a drink at Euston Station hotel where she had met him often. Brian Russell, AE’s elder son who remained at loggerheads with his father until the end, joined them later on the ferry to Ireland. AE had said he wanted to be buried there.
His body was taken to Plunkett House, the old office of the Irish Statesman, where he had worked for so long. The coffin lay in the hall; his friends came with flowers. On July 20, AE was buried at St. Jerome Cemetery. Yeats and de Valera walked in the long funeral procession. Frank O’Connor gave the oration, quoting from an Arabic poet: “He saw the lightning in the east and he longed for the east, he saw the lightning in the west and he longed for the west, but I, seeing only the lightning and its glory, care nothing for the quarters of the earth.” Pamela had asked that words be spoken from Ecclesiasticus, the book of the Apocrypha: “Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us…the people will tell of their wisdom, and the congregation will show forth their praise.” The night he was buried was, she thought, as beautiful as the night he died. “Everything about him was lifted to its fullness and that is a triumph for a man.”16
• • •
In the days and years that followed his death, Pamela sifted through her memories of AE, raking them as a Zen garden is raked, making patterns and sense. She wanted to make clear she “wasn’t a fan of AE’s. I did nothing for him. What does a flower do for the sun? Nothing, it just lives and grows by it.”17
She wrote to her friends that as Orage gave rise to intellect in men, so AE gave rise to the spirit in them. Although she had grown closer to him in recent years, he had not spoken much of his feelings to her. Pamela thought he accepted her constant need of money and her bad health as “part of my karma” but found out from others that both made him anxious. She had taken “everything” to him and from him all her good had come, material and immaterial. He knew she loved him. She had tried to tell him but it was too difficult.
Pamela leant on Diarmuid Russell who arrived a week too late to see his father alive, and in August went to stay with Lota Law in Donegal for six weeks. She felt AE’s presence everywhere in Breaghy and Dunfanaghy, that sense of a soul hovering above, not yet willing to fly away. Lota Law looked after her like a mother.
As C. S. Lewis said of grief, the emotion which so shocks the survivors is the sense of nervousness. She hadn’t been well since he died, and feared her sense of loneliness. The worst moments, as every grieving child, husband or wife knows, come when drawers and wardrobes must be cleared, when everyday reminders are spread before you, the hairbrush with hair still entwined, little poems on yellowing paper, safety pins carefully saved in a tin, a scarf that still smells of a neck you once loved to kiss.
When Pamela sorted out his clothes and personal possessions she found a little reel of black cotton and a needle and realized how often he must have mended his own things. “It was simply heart breaking. He never let people do things for him. He was very contained and aloof…I find myself so often thinking, “I must tell AE” or “I must ask AE” and then—I realize!”18
She no longer felt afraid of her own death, unless it might be a sudden disastrous one, with no time to compose her heart or mind. After AE died, she had terrible nightmares about him, as she did about her mother after her death. In the nightmares he was always ill and sad. But one night she dreamed he made her a little tucked apron. Then, when he found out she was cold, he produced a warm cloak, green, embroidered with rough lines of blue. This, she thought, was exactly what he did in life. AE wrapped up his friends warmly, but also had the gift of giving cold, stark comfort, the kind which said, “It’s your battle, you must fight it without weapons, you may lose but I can’t help you.”
She bundled up copies of his collected poems for the nurses at Stagden—women whom she found full of tenderness. Pamela had hoped she could make a selection of his essays for magazines, but AE’s friend, the writer Monk Gibbon, had started something similar while AE was alive. Although AE didn’t like it, his son Diarmuid felt that Gibbon should have the first chance to compile the memoir.
Yeats had suggested to Pamela that she should prepare a special selection of his Irish writings but she believed that this would step on Gibbon’s rights. Diarmuid asked her to write AE’s biography, but again, she felt unsure if she could do it well enough. How could you tell the “story of a soul,” as she saw his life?
On her first visit back to Dublin after his death, she took lavender from the garden at Pound Cottage and planned to sprinkle it on his grave, but couldn’t tell which it was. There was still no headstone.19 Eventually a stone was erected, engraved with the lines: “I moved among men and places and in living I learned the truth. At last I know I am a spirit and that I went forth in old time from the self ancestral to labours yet unaccomplished.”
• • •
By late October 1935, after long days and nights spent at the typewriter, Pamela finished Mary Poppins Comes Back in an exhilarating burst of three weeks. It was published in both the United States and England in November, in time for the Christmas trade. Madge thought it was a better book than the first.
Eugene Reynal, the American publisher, had been in England in October and was “kind and generous and touchingly gentle to me.” He asked her how much she needed to live on and assured her he would try to boost Mary Poppins’s sales in America. “And it wasn’t just bluff and hard headed business but something real and quick and human and generous.”
Now, at thirty-six, Pamela felt fatherless, for there was “nobody to whom one may go for the deeps of life and being.” She wrote to friends that “AE would expect us to do now for ourselves what he did for us. And I will try to do that.”20