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Jeanne Eugenie Heyse (Ione de Forest)
Born: 1890 in Edmonton, Middlesex. Died: 1 August 1912.
Jeanne Eugenie Heyse was a young actress and dancer at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, her tuition paid by a local businessman. She was the oldest of three sisters, born in Edmonton, Middlesex, to Holland-born wholesale merchant Ferdinand Francis E. Heyse and his Irish wife, Margaret. Under her stage name Ione de Forest, her major previous experience was playing The Blue Bird (1909) by Belgian playwright and winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Literature Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949). Joan, as she preferred to be called, had no interest in the occult, but she entered Crowley’s circle when she answered an ad in Stage seeking dancers for a performance at Caxton Hall. Her body was as gaunt and cadaverous, and the pale powders she wore made her anemic skin even more pallid. Black hair dangled to her slight waist, and golden eyes beamed vacantly from her oval face. Beautiful and sweet, she could be manic one moment, melancholic the next. Indeed, two years later her newlywed husband would describe her: “She was in poor health, highly strung, and occasionally suffered from hysteria.” Although considered a wooden and untalented dancer by some, her lover, American expatriate modernist poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972), offered the following portrait in his “Dance Figure”:
Dark-eyed, O woman of my dreams, Ivory sandalled, There is none like thee among the dancers, None with swift feet.
Jeanne Heyse had become an art student and had gotten involved in the social circle of the New Freewoman, a feminist journal run by Dora Marsden (1882–1960) and Rebecca West (1892–1983), to which both Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington (1892–1962) were literary editors. In December 1911 she also married engraver Wilfred Merton (1888–1957), a Trinity College graduate and avid book collector credited with rescuing “the once-famous Chiswick Press,” who had printed Crowley’s early works. She nevertheless carried on an affair with Victor B. Neuburg; this resulted in Wilfred naming both Jeanne and Victor as respondents in a divorce complaint. Separating around early June pending their court date, her husband provided her with a £300 annual allowance, and she moved into a flat at Rosetti Studios, Flood Street, Chelsea.
On Thursday, 1 August 1912, Jeanne announced to Nina Hamnett that she was leaving in the morning for a long time, possibly not returning. She offered Nina her clothes if she were to come by; an underfunded art student, Nina gratefully accepted. Arriving the next morning, she found pinned to the door an envelope containing the keys to the flat. Nina let herself in. She looked and called for her friend but received no reply. Then, drawing aside a long red curtain, she discovered her friend’s dead body.
Jeanne had shot herself through the heart with a pearl-handled revolver.
On a nearby table was a copy of her wedding certificate, her gun license, and a note addressed to the Coroner:
In retrospect, she had threatened suicide over the months to both her husband and her solicitor, E.S.P. Haynes, but no one had taken her seriously. The day she died, her solicitor received a letter saying “I cannot endure things any longer.” Her husband, meanwhile, received the note, “You have killed me.” An inquest ruled her death as “suicide during temporary insanity.” Griefstricken, Ezra Pound waited a year to write—and even longer to publish—the obituary poem, “Dead Iönè:”
Empty are the ways, Empty are the ways of this land And the flowers Bend over with heavy heads. They bend in vain. Empty are the ways of this land Where Ione Walked once, and now does not walk But seems like a person just gone. |