A chara, - In his review of MacBride's Brigade, by Donal McCracken (Books, October 23rd), Giles Foden appears intent on telling us of his own family tree, and denigrating John MacBride. He repeats the loathsome and undeserved lines penned by W. B. Yeats in the poem Easter 1916. Willie Yeats, of course, felt he had good reason to hate MacBride for marrying Maud Gonne, whom Yeats had pursued for the previous 10 years and made his muse. Foden refers to Roy Foster's belief concerning an alleged incident between Iseult Gonne and MacBride. The Yeats-Gonne versions of various allegations against John MacBride have been peddled as the "truth" by successive biographers of Yeats and Gonne. The fact that these allegations were not upheld in the Parisian court counts for naught with these scholars. When I challenged Roy Foster in Fred Hanna's bookshop in 1998 on the occasion of the launch of the paperback edition of his Apprentice Mage, he replied, "Yeats believed them and so do I."
Major John MacBride's own version of the "truth" has never been written up. This will change next year, when my "discovery" of MacBride's own papers in the National Library of Ireland, will be incorporated into a book, entitled The Yeats-MacBride-Gonne Triangle. - Yours, etc., Anthony Jordan,
Gilford Road, Dublin 4.