William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Autograph letter signed (‘W.B. Yeats’) to Frank Harris, 82 Merrion Square, Dublin, 23 December n.y. [after 1926]
Two pages, 112 x 172mm, bifolium. Provenance: James Gilvarry; his sale, Christie's New York, 7 February 1986, lot 555.

On the phantom cat incident and offering his opinion on Harris’ recently published My Life and Loves. ‘I thank you for this book of yours, which I had already read in a borrowed copy; I had made one incident Ruskin & the Phantom Cat the theme of three months controversy with Sturge Moor, (Paul Moore of Cambridge on one occasion being called in as a consultant) the most momentous problem depending on the difference if any between that cat and The House Cat’. Returning to the book, ‘As for the rest, being an old man engaged in the salvation of my soul, I prefer Plotinus upon the impassivity of the unembodied. Your book makes me too full of regret that I did not live your life as well as my own’. The brief letter concluding with a postscript ‘You knew London that came just before my London in time, & in many passages you have made vivid & rich scenes & associations that remained cold & distant to my imagination’.

A clue to the events referred to in the present letter may lie in another written in 1926, from Yeats to Paul Moore, discussing a report by Frank Harris of an incident with John Ruskin, during which Ruskin broke from conversation, ran to the other side of the room, picked up and defenestrated something he later described as a demon in the form of a cat. Published between 1923 and 1927, Harris’s My Life and Loves was a heavily-embellished and at times wholly fictitious 'autobiography' which became notorious for its sexual content. In a separate letter to Olivia Shakespear, Yeats had termed Harris’ memoirs as ‘vulgar and immoral – the sexual passages were like holes burnt with a match in a piece of old newspaper’.