Flowering Dusk

I have had a copy of Ella Young's autobiography Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately (1945) for more than thirty-five years, but this was my first read-through from the beginning to the end. Of course I'd read parts before--in particular, the chapters on Kenneth Morris. Young knew Morris in Dublin in 1895-96, and came to encounter him again in southern California in the late 1920s. It was Young who got her own publisher, Bertha Gunterman of Longmans, Green, to read the manuscript of Morris's Book of the Three Dragons, and thereby it was published in 1930. Young spends a significant number of pages discussing Morris, his writings, his love of classic Chinese poets, and she quotes a number of Morris's recensions of the poems (he wouldn't call them translations), and from his letters to her. But she mostly doesn't give dates, or the context that scholars want. Plus the book is written in the present tense, as if the reader is there in the moment. It was this artistic choice that kept me from reading the entire book for so long.  

Yet now having done so, I see its attractions and came fairly quickly to appreciate Young's choice of style and her talent in achieving it. She knew practically every artistic figure in Ireland, and many of the key figures in the rebellion were her friends. So one gets interesting personal perspectives on Maude Gonne and William Butler Yeats, at particular times of their lives; of AE, Standish O'Grady, and on to Patrick Pearse and Eamon de Valera and Roger Casement. If one knows who these people were before reading Young's memoir, all the better. She continues on in a similar manner after she left Ireland in 1925 and came to America on a lecture tour. Lured west, she got to California, and settled there. But she also travelled with Ansel Adams (who photographed her in her mid-60s, when she still had an almost classically-styled sculpted beauty), and she stayed a while in New Mexico with Mabel Dodge Luhan, and hobnobbed with Frieda Lawrence and Georgia O'Keefe. She recorded her impressions of various native peoples (e.g., Zuni) traditional ceremonies. In California she was welcomed by a number of people of Irish descent. One of these was Noël Sullivan, whom Young described as:

A sojourner in many cities, he has touched hands with many people, success-crowned or forlorn, yet he belongs to another era and other comrades. Sensitive to every phase of culture, to every colour of beauty, he cannot separate these in his consciousness from the grave-pall black, the underlying misery of life, He is concerned with the agonies of the soul, as men were concerned in the days when they knew how to build cathedrals and palaces, and fenced themselves in cloisters from the fires of Hell and the more heart-piercing fires of Paradise.

Ella Young by Oscar Maurer

With such descriptions of people (and there are many in this book) one wants to know more about such individuals. And it turned out that Sullivan was the rich nephew of Senator James D. Phelan--and it was Sullivan who funded a lectureship at the University of California in Berkeley, named after his late uncle, through which Ella Young was employed as a lecturer from 1931-36. 

Throughout Flowering Dusk there are examples of Young's mysticism, via her experiences of ghosts and beliefs in fairies, all pointing towards a larger more interesting world than the mundane one. Her experience of "fairy music" is splendid: 

The music as I first heard it was orchestral and of amazing richness and complexity . . . There is a myriad-tongued litany; there are voices that call on fixed notes; there are also voices that wrangle and seem to shout aimlessly: clamorous, clangorous voices that do not repeat a rhythm on one note, yet the turmoil they make resolves itself into harmony with the whole . . .  This faerie music has in it the sound of every instrument used in a great orchestra, and the sound of many, many instruments that no orchestra possesses, It has singing voices in it sweeter than human: and always it has a little running crest of melody like foam on a sea-wave or moon-gilding on the edge of a cloud. All these sounds, and sounds more indefinable, are going on at the same time: undertones and overtones to a great main melody; to a lilted air, a snatch of song; or the resonance of a swung bell.

Young published other books of interest: several small collections of poetry; a collection of Celtic Wonder Tales (1910), the first edition with fine decorations by Maude Gonne; and three children's books, two retelling Irish stories, The Wonder Smith and His Son (1927), and The Tangle-Coated Horse (1929), and the more personally imaginative The Unicorn with Silver Shoes (1932). Flowering Dusk is her longest and most-significant prose work, but the manuscript was cut for publication during the paper-shortages of W.W. II. In 1956, at the age of 88 and diagnosed with cancer, Young chose to end her own life.