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the literary life of Bloomsbury. London was full of Australian artists and writers:some, such as the artist Will Dyson, and Esson's half brother Frank Brown, havingcome back wounded from the trenches. After the war others, including Vance Palmerand also a young playwright, Sydney Tomholt, were in London waiting to berepatriated. Also there, working as a journalist and doing war work on the homefront, was William Moore, at one of whose 'Drama Nights', back in Melbourne in1910, Esson's first play, The Woman Tamer, had been produced. Moore gatheredthe little band of expatriates together and tried to organize a programme of oneactAustralian plays for production. And so it was that, in a little flat in Bloomsbury,with the prospect of a London production, Esson wrote his first successful Australianfolk bush drama, The Drovers. It was to exert an influence for 30 years, and is stillregarded as one of the best one-act plays written by an Australian.The plays Moore gathered were never produced but Esson did find a Londonpublisher for a volume of his one-acters, a volume which included Dead Timberand The Drovers, and he was delighted and flattered when Yeats wrote to himpraising the work and asking him to come down for a stay at the Yeats householdin Oxford. So began the second great pilgrimage. Esson later looked back on theexperience and wrote, conscious perhaps of the ironies of his position:I had a little difficulty in connecting the Irish poet with Oxford, but it was quiet, he said,and he was near Bodleian, a famous and comfortable library. Every summer he goes toIreland, to a romantic old castle, a beautiful place, that has been raided during his absenceby the Black-and-Tans. I was proud to make my pilgrimage to Oxford, and the poet'sstudy, with its fine books, the great brass candlesticks, the pictures by his father and brother,and the Blake drawings, will always seem to me the most eloquent place in the world. 14Yeats met Esson at the station and took him home where they had 'a simple meal,with sherry in his favourite Jacobean decanter.' There were no long late walks bynow. After dinner they went upstairs to Yeats' sitting room and sat around the glowingIrish peat fire, with the soft light of the candles in the great brass candlesticks. Esson,in Australia, had a reputation for being one of his circle's greatest conversationalists,but in the presence of his master he was mainly silent. He wrote later that Yeats'talked till after midnight, touching on and illuminating all sorts of themes',15including early Egyptian art, Blake, Shelley, Browning, Balzac, the Irish literarymovement, Shakespeare, Henry James, Tolstoy and the Saints, Japan, and, last butnot least - well, perhaps least - what he called the 'distinctive nationality ofAustralia.'16 Esson must have said enough to convey to Yeats some of the self-doubtwith which he was troubled, for the poet reassured him by pointing out that 'Youhave been in Australia longer than the Icelanders have been in Iceland when theycreated their great sagas.'17They also talked about Ben Jonson and when Yeats expressed an interest in aprivate production of Volphone by the Phoenix Society in London, Esson, in a stateof high apostate excitement, was able to invite his master to it, for he was a member.Years earlier, in late 1904, Esson had arrived at the Abbey Theatre and had takena cheap seat, out of humility rather than poverty. From on high he had watchedYeats prowling the stalls and had not realized until afterwards that the poet hadbeen looking for him. By 1920 things had changed. A week after the meeting inOxford Yeats came up to London:I escorted him to his seat in the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. He caused a sensation,dressed in a suit of fawn velvet corduroy, with a big silk scarf tied in a bow, pince-nezattached to a broad black ribbon, and the mass of iron-grey hair swept back from hisgreat forehead. During the interval he met Bernard Shaw. "This is not a play for you,Shaw," he said. That was all the conversation we had. 1838WESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989