`A Childlike Vision Leaping Into View'

In the April 14-15 edition of The Wall Street Journal (page P14 in the print edition), Tom Nolan proposes an ingenious solution to an almost-40-year-old mystery: Who is the eponymous Madame George of Van Morrison’s song? Nolan rightly calls the cut on the Astral Weeks album “a melancholy, 10-minute, slow-march requiem.” It’s also an achingly beautiful melody, with lyrics, as in many Morrison songs, mingling equal parts Irish realism and mystical mush. The song begins like this:

“Down on Cypress Avenue
With a childlike vision leaping into view
Clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoe
Ford & Fitzroy, Madame George
Marching with the soldier boy behind
He's much older with hat on drinking wine
And that smell of sweet perfume comes drifting through
The cool night air like Shalimar
And outside they're making all the stops
The kids out in the street collecting bottle-tops
Gone for cigarettes and matches in the shops”

By the time Morrison released Astral Weeks, in November 1968, millions of listeners were decoding rock lyrics with the intensity of Talmudic scholars. Most of the speculation about “Madame George” focused on Dublin transvestites and pedophilia. Nolan’s unmasking of the title character is infinitely more informed and convincing as he argues the case for George Hyde Lees, better known as Madame George Yeats, who was married to William Butler Yeats from 1917 until the poet’s death in 1939.

Morrison knows his fellow Irishman Yeats. He mentions him in “Rave On, John Donne,” and pairs him with Lady Gregory in “Summertime in England,’ where he also cites Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Mahalia Jackson. In “Too Long in Exile” he names Joyce again, along with Wilde and Beckett. Nolan writes:

“For those who look, there is no end of connections between Van Morrison and W.B. Yeats – a poet whose life and oeuvre were assertively revived by a woman named George, a self-declared medium and a proactive muse who spurred her husband’s creativity through automatic writing and the inducement of trance states.”

Yeats and Morrison share a confounding obsession with New Age claptrap. In 1994, I interviewed William M. Murphy, the Yeats scholar at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. He was about to publish Family Secrets, his examination of the entire Yeats clan. Sixteen years earlier he had published Prodigal Father, a biography of John Butler Yeats, the painter, raconteur and father of the poet. Murphy was fed up with the whole bunch, and described W.B. Yeats’ occult predilections as “silly.” Murphy told me:

“Willie was not always an easy fellow to get along with. He was a very arrogant and abrasive character. Nobody seemed to like him.”

This echoes countless assessments of Van Morrison’s own temperament. The coexistence of mysticism and self-centered truculence should hardly surprise us. While recording A Sense of Wonder in 1984, Morrison wanted to include his version of Yeats’ “Crazy Jane on God.” The Yeats estate bridled, and Morrison is reputed to have said, “My songs are better than Yeats’!” The song showed up in 1998 on The Philosopher’s Stone.