A Trip to Tara with Ella Young

From Ella Young's memoirs:

Source: http://www.neheleniapatterns.com/english/fw230.html

    It is an expedition to Tara of the Kings that is dashing along the road from Dublin. It consists of two autos. The leading one, a bright yellow roadster flying two Sinn Fein flags, is piloted by the Countess Markievicz. At top speed it ricochets from bump to bump of a road made for horse vehicles. The expedition was organized by Gavin Arthur whose Irish ancestry claimed him as soon as he set foot in the country.  The second car belongs to him. His young and brilliant wife, Charlotte, is at the wheel repeating, bump for bump, the career of the yellow car in front. Beside her sits the young poet, Lyle Donaghy, somewhat pensive and a little sullen...The back seat holds Gavin and myself. We are exchanging views on Irish history and legend, with pauses to remonstrate with Charlotte on the pace of the car and the frequency of the bumps. Charlotte is unsympathetic...The car in front, every now and then, lets out a joyous blast of its motor-horn; sunshine flecks the road with tree-shadow; the rich pasture land in green undulations  whirls by. Consoled, placated, well-advised we progress from bump to bump...
    [At Tara] We fell to talking of the Stone of Destiny, the Lia Fail, in ancient times one of the Royal Treasures of Tara. On this Stone, according to an old chronicle, the high-kings of Ireland took the oath to their people. When a true and destined king stood with both feet upon the Stone it gave out a deep sound of approval. It roared. Where is the Lia Fail? Tradition, trustworthy or untrustworthy, maintained that Scottish kings borrowed the stone...until Edward the First of England raided Scotland and took the Stone to London. There it was fastened into the Coronation Chair, and English kings were crowned on it...
    “If we could get that Stone,” said the Countess, “the Royal Sovereignty might come back to Ireland.”
    ...I  thought, as I listened, of raids planned by Maud Gonne and Emer Moloney. I called to mind a day, years ago, when I chanced into AE’s house and found AE and Yeats discussing plans for the kidnapping of the Stone. Yeats had a bunch of grapes in his hand, and between mouthfuls detailed an elaborate plan of action. AE was a bit doubtful of its success. I was more than doubtful (we had not then young captains of the Irish Republican Army to rely on). I said if the Stone possessed the Royal Sovereignty, we might, if we could make a strong enough spiritual centre, occultly transport that power to Ireland. The Stone must follow...
    I watched the shadows lengthen on the ruined and desecrated ridges that marked the palace-sites of Tara...Tara must keep many memories, but I could not surprise one...Grass renews itself. The dream that held Ireland’s lovers, renews itself. From ruin and disaster it struggles back to the light: it burgeons a-fresh...
    I knew that I would never visit Tara again.

From: Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately by Ella Young. Longmans, Green and Co., 1945.

Reverie, Poetry, Love and Yeats

I have only now discovered the writings of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) and am searching locally for his 1960 book The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos.  I must own this book!  

This quote from the book strikes me on a very personal note today as Peter's birthday draws near:  

"Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed. The reveries of two souls prepare the sweetness of loving…The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness."

The mundane is the enemy of love.  The mundane is the enemy of art.  

This, Peter and Yeats understood.  

Photograph by Peter Reichelt Hughes.  All Rights Reserved.

A Poet To His Beloved by William Butler Yeats

I BRING you with reverent hands

The books of my numberless dreams,

White woman that passion has worn

As the tide wears the dove-gray sands,

And with heart more old than the horn

    

That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:

White woman with numberless dreams,

I bring you my passionate rhyme.

On a Glimpse of Castle Island

W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, and (for a time) A.E. were involved in a magical project usually referred to as "The Celtic Mysteries."  There is no documentation to show that Ella Young was ever involved, though she knew all about what they were doing. How Ella's magical endeavors influenced Yeats, and perhaps vice-versa, has yet to be shown.

Photo by Franc.c  https://www.flickr.com/photos/francz/

Here is how I imagine the moment when Yeats first glimpsed the place that inspired his Mysteries. 

EXT: IRELAND.  A lLARGE LAKE.  SUMMER 1892 - MORNING.

YEATS and DOUGLAS HYDE, 35, a tall bearded man of great dignity and presence, are boating together on Lough Key in County Roscommon. A heavy mist rises from the lake.

Hyde rows with great ease and precision.

Yeats leans back in the boat and gazing up toward the sky.

YEATS

There are forces, mighty forces, that can do more for the revolution than my words will ever accomplish alone!

HYDE

Your occult experiments are a distraction - it is your poetry that should fill your days - and your nights!  

Hydes’ voice deepens.

Be careful of what you are asked to sacrifice so that you may gain this magic!

At that moment Yeats turns toward the lakes' center, watching as the wind sweeps away the mist to reveal a small island.  

As he sees the abandoned Castle on the island he remembers Gonne's words from an earlier time.

FLASHBACK - EXT.  IRELAND. A RUGGEDLY BEAUTIFUL SPOT FULL OF OLD STONES AND TREES. - MORNING  

Gonne and Yeats walk together, hands clasped.

GONNE

If only we could make contact with the hidden forces of the land it would give us strength for the freeing of Ireland.  The land will help us expel our enemy.  England, like the ancient Fir Bolg, will flee when our true gods empower us!

The wind on the hill blows through Gonne's dark hair and her eyes shine with her passion.

EXT. THE LAKE.

GONNE

(V.O.)

I see a tower in the middle of a lake, a shrine of Irish tradition where only those who dedicate their lives to this great land can go. It will be built of stone and decorated only with the Jewels of the Tuatha Dé Danann!

Yeats stands up in the boat and turns to Hyde.

YEATS

There! That of which my muse has spoken!  An obsession more constant than anything but my love itself is the need for mystical rites ... to reunite the perception of the spirit, of the divine, with natural beauty ... 

HYDE

Sit down, man - you'll topple us both over!  You are right about one thing - this land is holy and each of us must find our way to serve that holiness.

Yeats sits reluctantly and looks at Hyde. His voice rises with excitement.

YEATS

This is my destiny, Hyde. There are those who will serve with guns, and others with speeches, but as I serve magic so will magic serve Ireland!

Copyright Registered and  Protected. 

The Celtic Twilight of Carmel, California. Conclusion

Carmel. Photograph © Denise Sallee 2012

There was one very important and central point from which all of Ella Young's California connections sprung - Albert Bender. Bender, born in Dublin in 1866, arrived in San Francisco  at the age of 16 - working as an errand boy for an insurance office.  By 1890 he was an insurance agent - owning his own company and becoming very wealthy and influential.  But most of all, Albert Bender was a discerning patron of the arts with a deep love of books, literary manuscripts, and Ireland. And he was kind and generous. It was Bender who arranged for Ansel Adams' first portfolio of prints to be published and also took him to Carmel to meet the Jeffers and the O'Sheas. 

When Ella arrived in  San Francisco for the first time her manager, Jessica Colbert, told her  “There are two people in San Francisco that I hope you will meet, one is Albert Bender...the other is Noel Sullivan...”  (Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately. Ella Young. Longmans, Green and Company, 1945).  Both Bender and Sullivan became long-lasting friends with Ella - they were her admirers and her patrons. 

Bender adored Ella and she him. He was instrumental in her struggle with the U.S. government to remain in America and he introduced her to his closest friends who immediately became her closest friends. This, indeed, was the power of social networking. It was through Bender and Sullivan that Ella became a part of the Carmel community. She was soon a central figure in the art and literary scene of the small village. It was not only Ella's poems and folktales that drew many Carmelites to the Irish immigrant. Her deeply magical consciousness and passionate love for Ireland fueled many a soul on the western edge of America. She inspired established poets, such as Dora Hagemeyer and Sara Bard Field and encouraged others, such as Ansel Adams and John O'Shea, to explore in words and images, their own connections to the natural world. 

How fitting it was when in 1935, Una Jeffers, splendid in a new black velvet gown, spoke at the opening of the Yeats exhibition at Mills College, where Albert Bender was a trustee and benefactor. Robinson Jeffers also attended the event  - important, I think, in linking the two great poets known so well by Ella Young.  

Credit: Special Collections, F.W. Olin Library, Mills College

The exhibit was organized by Bender, containing many items from his own collection.

Credit: Special Collections, F.W. Olin Library, Mills College

Ella spoke at the University of California - as revealed in this newspaper article from the Berkeley Daily Gazette of October 23rd - the following month as part of the ongoing Bay Area Yeats celebration. 

In December of 1930, Ella wrote to Albert Bender:

The top of the morning to you and a hundred thousand thanks. There is nothing in the world like a good friend. (Albert H. Bender Collection. Special Collections, F.W. Olin Library, Mills College)


Carmel, Ireland, poets, mystical seekers,  and Ella Young.  A truly magical connection!

The Celtic Twilight of Carmel, California. Part Two

It is tempting to compare Ella Young's Dublin connection with W.B. Yeats and his elusive love, Maud Gonne, with her later connection to Robinson Jeffers and his wife, Una.  There is, of course, the great-poet-and-his-inspiring-woman connection that links the two couples - but far more important - there is Ireland.

Una Call  - Mrs. Edward Kuster - a young, beautiful and vivacious graduate student, met Jeffers in Los Angeles in 1906. While traveling in Ireland in 1912, to sort out her feelings for both her husband and her new lover, Una wrote a letter to Kuster describing her ancestral land:

"We passed through a beautiful country Emerald - indeed…Meadow lands crossed by little wandering streams and everywhere amidst tall, lush grass great beds of golden iris growing wild. Giant trees and hawthorn hedges break up the fields and very often a crumbling tower in the midst of an utter solitude…"

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2010

A crumbling tower.  Little did Una know then how Irish towers - and their real and symbolic roles  - were to figure in her life with Jeffers.  

In a few short years Una's new poet-husband would build for her a tower of her own in Carmel from stones he hauled up from the beach and shaped into a fitting sanctuary for his beloved bride. In the foreword to his book, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, the poet describes his first view of his new homeland: "A second piece of pure accident brought us to the Monterey coast mountains, where for the first time in my life I could see people living - amid magnificent unspoiled scenery - essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer’s Ithaca. Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions."


I think this poem by Jeffers reveals what he felt while building Hawk Tower:

To The House

I am heaping the bones of the old mother

To build us a hold against the host of the air;

Granite the blood-heat of her youth

Held molten in hot darkness against the heart

Hardened to temper under the feet

Of the ocean cavalry that are maned with snow

And march from the remotest west.

This is the primitive rock, here in the wet

Quarry under the shadow of waves

Whose hollows mouthed the dawn; little house each stone   

Baptized from that abysmal font

The sea and the secret earth gave bonds to affirm you.

From Roan Stallion, Tamar and other poems. Boni and Liveright, 1925

Credit:William Brooks Collection, Henry Meade Williams Local History Room, Harrison Memorial Library, Carmel, CA

In another letter, from 1927, Una tells her dear friend Albert Bender how much she treasures her inscribed picture of Yeats' own tower and cottage, because, as she writes "Yeats is one of my most honored authors - because its on a coast I love - and because it seems unbelievable that another poet should have a tower and cottage on a western shore!"

In 1929 the Jeffers went to Ireland - staying for the most part in County Antrim but also touring throughout both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. By now Una and Ella Young were very close friends. Ella wrote letters of introduction for the Jeffers to take to Maud Gonne, but cautioned Una about Maud, saying "Hope Maud Gonne won't be in prison or deported when you arrive." Ella goes on to reassure Una, telling her "I know she would enjoy you all."  Ella wrote to Maud prior to the visit, describing Jeffers as "the big poet of America" and Una as "his Irish wife." 

Robinson Jeffers was drawn to the many ancient towers and sacred ruins of Ireland. He wrote several poems while he was there - poems that often merged the local mythos with the land. A theme that was prominent in his California writing, as well. 

The Low Sky

No vulture is here, hardly a hawk,
Could long wings or great eyes fly
Under this low-lidded soft sky?

On the wide heather the curlew's whistle
Dies of its echo, it has no room
Under the low lid of this tomb.

But one to whom mind and imagination
Sometimes used to seem burdensome
Is glad to lie down awhile in the tomb.

Among stones and quietness
The mind dissolves without a sound,
The flesh drops into the ground.

From Descent to the Dead. Poems, etc.  Random House, 1931 

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2010

Una Jeffers met Ella Young in the spring of 1926 when Ella lectured at the Golden Bough Theatre (owned by Una's former husband Edward Kuster). Ella's lectures were entitled "Nature Magic" and "The Celtic Myth of Creation." How I wish I had been in the audience on that enchanted evening!  

Una was there and later she wrote this description:

“Ella Young was like a Druidess that first time I saw her, in flowing gown, against the lovely blue-green curtain of the Golden Bough stage, a wisp of veil about her head, gray eyes shining and hands weaving magic as she named the old Irish gods and heroes and told the deeds they wrought. Since that night I have seen her in many different settings; kneeling to succor a wounded snake; hovering on the seat of my car... [on] that terrible old coast road...peer[ing] into the chasms at our side, following a hawk’s flight as carefree as if she too had wings.”   The Carmel Pine Cone.  December 20, 1935 pg. 9

And so we further explore a little of what made Carmel, in the first decades of the 20th century, such a Celtic and magical refuge for so many people - both ex-pats like Ella Young and those who feel an Ireland of their own possessing their souls. I fall into the latter category and yearn most for what Una perfectly captured when she wrote "an utter solitude…"

The Celtic Twilight of Carmel, California. Part One

In the next few posts I want to share a bit of my research on Ella Young and her involvement with several key people that helped to shape California’s culture in the first decades of the 20th century - Albert Bender, Noel Sullivan, Robinson and Una Jeffers, and John and Mollie O’Shea. In particular, I will show how their lives wove together like a magic carpet - with threads of poetry, music, drama, and art - and through Ella’s unique gifts and vision the Old Ways were once again spoken of and honored. 

It is not hard to envision how it looked and felt in Carmel in those early years and how those drawn to the mystical world of Celtic legends might find here a land pulsing with the same ethereal spirit - with wind-twisted cypresses draped in silvery mist and Manannan, Son of Lir commanding the white-capped waves of the mighty Pacific. 

Ella Young was drawn to the land that hosted Carmel and its neighbors to the south - Point Lobos and Big Sur.  Ella sensed the presence here of a magic akin to what she had left behind in Ireland. In her first lecture in Carmel, in 1926 at the Theatre of the Golden Bough on Ocean Avenue, she spoke on two topics: “Nature Magic” and “The Celtic Myth of Creation.” It was later reported that Ella told her Carmel audience that faeries had found a home at Point Lobos - such was the unspoiled power of this place at that time. Apparently, the following day several women from the village were spotted at Point Lobos peering under ferns and behind rocks all in pursuit of the wee folk. 

One of the first plays performed on Carmel’s historic outdoor stage - The Forest Theater was W.B. Yeat’s The Land of Heart’s Desire in 1911. It was directed by the theater’s founder, Herbert Heron and set in County Sligo, Ireland (not far from where I called home for an amazing year). 

The Herbert Heron Collection, The Henry Meade Williams Local History Room, Harrison Memorial Library, Carmel, CA

In 1911, many of the people that would become part of Ella’s circle had not yet moved to Carmel. The village was already preparing itself for her arrival and every year another poet, artist or mystic found their way to the tiny village with the alabaster white sands skirting the sea  - all a-glimmer and so very alive.

I see the performance of Yeats’ play as the beginning of what I call Carmel’s Celtic Twilight and it is easy to understand how, fifteen years later, the village would enthusiastically embrace Ella Young.

The Herbert Heron Collection, The Henry Meade Williams Local History Room, Harrison Memorial Library, Carmel, CA

In this excerpt, we see a struggle occurring between the new religion, Christianity, and the Old Ways, personified here in “The Child” - a faery spirit. 

FATHER HART. I will confront this mighty spirit alone.

Be not afraid, the Father is with us,

The Holy Martyrs and the Innocents,

The adoring Magi in their coats of mail,

And He who died and rose on the third day

And all the nine angelic hierarchies.

(THE CHILD kneels upon the settle beside MARY and puts her arms about her.)

Cry, daughter, to the Angels and the Saints.

THE CHILD. You shall go with me, newly-married bride,

And gaze upon a merrier multitude.
White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds,
Feacra of the hurtling foam, and him
Who is the ruler of the Western Host,
Finvarra, and their Land of Heart's Desire,
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song.
I kiss you and the world begins to fade.

[and as the play nears its end]

(Outside there are dancing figures, and it may be a white bird, and many voices singing.)

"The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away;
While the faeries dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,
Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue;
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say--
When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
The lonely of heart is withered away."'

TO A CHILD DANCING IN THE WIND

I will!  I will dance again upon this shore as I did once before...

TO A CHILD DANCING IN THE WIND

 BY W.B. YEATS 

DANCE there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
Photograph © Denise Sallee 2012