Gluck by Diana Souhami (top 10 inspirational books .TXT) 📕

The Duke of Buccleuch described, when passing through Hawaii with his wife on a world tour, being whisked through the mountain passes in Nesta’s ‘snow white open Cadillac with a pair of café au lait Weimaraners occupying the back seat, their amber eyes flashing above their diamond collars.’4 Nesta was a tireless letter writer – she would write, and receive, twenty or so letters a day. She wrote in an uncensored rush in blue biro on blue paper. In the postwar years she took control of her life and lived it fearlessly. She had a crystal quality, a many-faceted sparkle and energy, that impressed and attracted and with her charm and talent for the art of friendship, and her wealth, she contrived, despite the distances, to keep her friends and make many more. People had fun when she was around. She never stopped hoping that Gluck would be fulfilled, successful and happy.

I do hope and pray that everything is falling into place about the picture and that your spirit is satisfied. I know it is going to be a masterpiece. Oh Tim! If you could only think out your life as you tell me to think out a picture …

At the moment you are not loving when you think of your new life, you are threatening. ‘I’m going to do this, that, etc and if they … they can damn well … etc. ‘All right, all right. Don’t frown and fold!!!5

By contrast to Nesta’s free flight Gluck’s life seemed all too earthbound. She absorbed into Edith’s world, then resented her for the drain it made on her own resources. As ever she could not clearly define the boundaries between herself and her partner. The flip side of her dominance was her dependence. Edith was supportive, trustworthy, loyal and sympathetic, so many of the old pains of insecurity were assuaged. She did though, as the years passed, become consumed with jealousy which neither of them resolved. It became ultimately a tense and cruel relationship, though it began pragmatically enough.

One of the first trips abroad they took together as part of their new shared life was to the cemetery at the village of Roquebrune in the south of France to visit Yeats’s tomb. For Edith the trip was a pilgrimage – to recapture that ‘wonderful southern night of stars’ when eight years previously she had kept vigil by Yeats’s bedside the night he died.

When they arrived at the cemetery, on 10 June 1947, they found no trace of Yeats: no headstone, grave nor mention of him. Edith was totally disbelieving. Gluck, whose French was fluent, questioned the local priest, Abbé Biancheri, who checked the records with the Director of Funeral Services at Menton. The Abbé’s findings shocked both women. With graves as with most things you get what you pay for. Yeats’s widow, George, had a choice between a permanent site, a concession for ten or fifteen years or, cheapest and worst, a ‘fosse commune’, known colloquially as a pauper’s grave. This she chose, or by mistake, got. It meant that Yeats’s corpse had been put in a communal grave, along with four or five others of the newly dead. Every few years each ‘fosse commune’ got cleared to make way for more corpses. This happened to Yeats’s site. Some bones were dug up in 1941 and then in January 1946 the whole site was cleared and all the bones put in the communal ossuary.

On the night of 10 June 1947, in the Hotel Mirabeau in Monte Carlo, Edith was inconsolable. She was crying and kept saying ‘I would know his bones anywhere.’ Gluck made notes for a poem, in rather blank verse, about the traumatic episode:

              The Hotel Bedroom

Exhausted – Distraught – our pilgrimage in vain

To whom to turn, to help

To reach the Truth, so rudely shattered

Then – Language I had – I seized

The Telephone – I reached Authority

I spoke of what we had found

All through I heard her agonised crying, crouched on the ground

‘Let me but see – I would know

his bones anywhere’ ran through my

brain as I tried in vain to move officialdom.

But this could not be, for

ossuaries are not for rifling through

as searching in a dustbin or waste

paper basket to piece together what

has been scattered with like matter.

An added problem was that Yeats, in one of his last poems, Epitaph, had expressed the wish to be buried in Drumcliffe, County Sligo, Ireland, where his father had lived and his great-grandfather was once rector: ‘Under bare Ben Bulben’s head, In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid’ he wrote. Gluck checked the records, rechecked and checked again – with Abbé Biancheri, the town hall at Roquebrune, the director of ‘Maison Roblot’ the undertakers in Menton. The facts were beyond doubt as the Abbe wrote to her: (15 June 1947):

The registers of the Roquebrune Town Hall show that Mr Butler William Yeats [sic] was buried on 30 January 1939 in a communal grave (square E, at the spot which is now occupied by the body of Madame Victoire Lanteri.) No permanent grave was acquired in his name. His bones were dug up in January 1946 and put in the communal ossuary.

I questioned M. César Lautier, the official responsible for exhumations and the upkeep of the graves, at length. His recollections are vague, but he thinks that Yeats’s body had a surgical truss circled with thin strips of steel. If this information is correct, one could perhaps, with a great deal of difficulty, find some remains of the hapless poet. But the already arduous task of finding the right bones in this ossuary is complicated by the fact that there are new exhumations every day.

When Edith and Gluck got home they went immediately to see Edmund Dulac and Helen Beauclerck. Dulac had been a close friend of Yeats for twenty-five years and of Edith for twenty years. He decided to cover up what seemed to him an appalling blunder on the part of Yeats’s widow, George. Dulac wrote to the Abbe Biancheri accordingly