I was going to write about William Butler Yeats and the famous monkey gland transplant but it was the monkey I wanted to think about. Where did he come from? Did he have a name? Presumably they had to kill him. Did they sing to him as he died or read a poem? Maybe there was a sting quartet in the operating theater. If the monkey died while listening to music what would have been played? Did anyone interview the musicians afterwards? Maybe there were no musicians. Maybe they used gramophone records.
It turns out Yeats didn’t have a monkey gland transplant and the story is an urban myth. I was really disappointed. I wanted a genuine monkey to eulogize. I wanted to think about the monkey’s youth. Of course youthfulness is the sub-text: in his late sixties Yeats wanted his sexual drive restored. Instead of transplanted monkey glands he had a kind of vasectomy. He had his operation in Harley Street, London in April 1934. The surgeon was Norman Haire who was England’s foremost practitioner of a rejuvenation procedure pioneered by Eugen Steinbach, an Austrian physiologist who believed that modifying the sex glands could restore youthfulness. His British follower Dr. Haire was briefly famous as the restorer of men and was known to have operated on two hundred patients. Apparently he also performed the procedure—really a kind of vasectomy—on H.G. Wells.
No monkey. No string quartet. My speculative morning walk almost ruined…but where did the monkey story come from? In the early 20th century a doctor named Serge Vonoroff transplanted slices of monkey and baboon testicles into impotent men. For a time he was in such demand he started his own monkey farm in Italy. So there were monkeys. But not for Yeats. By the way, the word “monkey” never appears in Yeats’s poems.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
