More Miracle Than Bird
This is a magical novel—in the most literal sense. And yet Alice Miller has based her first book-length fiction, More Miracle than Bird, firmly on facts. It is the story of the courtship and marriage (in 1917) of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, 52, and the English Georgie Hyde-Lees, 25, told mostly, very beautifully, from her point of view.
After being refused in short order by two other women, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century abruptly married an enigmatic third. What? Why? How? Fact and fiction are equally compelling; Miller has made a wonderful novel out of the bizarre truth.
The story unfolds mostly in London during World War I, where Georgie was a nurse in an army hospital and Yeats was a literary celebrity. Also, the ex-lover of her best friend’s mother. They moved in the same esoteric-aesthetic social circles. Both belonged to the mystical Hermetic Brotherhood of the Golden Dawn (robes, ceremonies, tests). Both were fascinated by the occult. (Incidentally, so were other major contemporary writers as disparate as Conan Doyle and Hodgson Burnett.)
“If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word,” Yeats asserted.
His critics differ on that point. But according to his biographer Richard Ellmann: “Had Yeats died instead of marrying in 1917, he would have been remembered as a remarkable minor poet.” The honeymoon was a disaster until—abracadabra!—Georgie became a spirit medium and “automatic” writer of mystical messages. Extremely useful material for a symbolic poet! Together they produced 4000 visionary pages, two babies and Yeats’s incomparable late poetry.
Magic? She used, then retracted the word “fake.” Read the book … see what you think.
