Beyond faeryland.

Simon, John

R. F. Foster W. B. Yeats: A Life Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939. Oxford University Press, 798 pages, $45

The four great twentieth-century anglophone poets are, in my reckoning, Eliot, Graves, Pound, and Yeats, followed by Auden, Cummings, Frost, MacNeice, and Ransom. (Stevens and Williams do not speak to me.) Interestingly, the top four had in common the need for a system of belief on which to hang their work and, to a certain extent, their life. For Eliot, this was Anglo-Catholicism; for Graves, the cult of woman as the White Goddess and his various wives and mistresses. For Pound, it became fascism, with its skewed political, racial, and economic notions. Yeats espoused, along with an aristocratic elitism, various forms of occultism, culminating in spiritualism and automatic writing.

Out of fear of mortality and a cognate quest for immortality, Yeats delved into various mythologies, and also created his own. The universe had to involve a system, deducible from history and astrology. Hence his postulation of an Anima Mundi, gyres (cycles), interpenetrating cones of objective and subjective two-aeon periods, and the twenty-eight phases of the moon, revolving between extremes of objectivity and subjectivity, and governing one's life according to which phase one was born in. This required some sleight-of-hand in historical dating, and also impelled Yeats to embrace such movements and people as Theosophy, Madam Blavatsky, Swedenborg, Neo-Platonism, Blake, Bishop Berkeley, Nietzsche, Mohini Chatterjee, Shri Purohit Swami, and other gurus and clairvoyants. This may strike us as ludicrous or pathetic--Auden called it silly; Pound, bughouse--but it did provide an infrastructure for Yeats's poetry. Add to this a fervent elitist belief in the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, to which, as an artiviste, he attached himself, and you have the wherewithal for a Yeatsian psychograph.

That the great poet was largely an autodidact ("I had gone to art school instead of university") contributed to some of his susceptibilities, but there was also a practical undercurrent to his mystical bent that could unexpectedly crop up. Upon being notified by phone of winning the Nobel Prize, his first comment was, "How much ... how much is it?" He could monitor his expenses meticulously, down to three cents for a newspaper, ten cents for oranges, and carefully list in a diary income from serial publications. Even though he wanted to be a popular poet, he came to resent the success of his earlier poetic and dramatic works at the expense of his later, more demanding ones. Lady Augusta Gregory noted that "a gram expression crossed his face whenever some charming lady gushed about Land of Heart's Desire or Inisfree." Although he wanted to be variously useful to Ireland, he had mostly contempt for the Irish people. A complicated, often contradictory personality, this William Butler Yeats in his involvements in diverse kinds of cultural, literary, and often plain politics, as well as in passionate romantic entanglements and personal allegiances and enmities.

All these combine to justify R. F. Fosters gigantic Yeats. The first volume, The Apprentice Mage (64-0 pages), was reviewed here by Richard Tillinghast ("W. B. Yeats: 'The labyrinth of another's being,'" November 1997); the second is my happy and unhappy task to review herewith. Happy, because Roy Foster has researched tirelessly and written cogently, elegantly, and wittily about all of the life and much of the work; unhappy, because what normal-sized review can begin to do justice to so many tightly packed tall octavo pages?

The Arch-Poet begins with Yeats about to be fifty, and follows closely the quarter-century remaining to him. Some leitmotifs can be pinpointed. There is the intimate but nonromantic friendship with the writer-chatelaine Lady Gregory, and Yeats's love for her home, Coole Park, with a room for him to write in, and the adjoining woods for inspirational rambles. This is behind his championing of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Antithetically, there is his enduring passion for the beautiful revolutionary, Maud Gonne, only once fleetingly consummated, and his transference of it to Iseult, Maud's comely but flighty daughter, complete with contemplated marriage, though never consummated. Also the growing regret of having given up his affair with the novelist Olivia Shakespear for Maud, as expressed in some letters of his lifelong correspondence with Olivia, and in some of his poetry: "One looks back to one's youth as to [a] cup that a madman dying of thirst left half tasted."

Important, too, are William's relations with his family: sister Lilly, an embroiderer and family chronicler in her letters, and Lolly, who ran the Coala Press (which published much of her brother's work) into the ground; brother Jack, the gifted painter; and the profligate father, the painter John Butler Yeats, who later refused to give up his bohemian life in the United States, where he was subsidized by the lawyer and art collector John Quinn in exchange for manuscripts Willy Yeats periodically sent him.

Next, the metaphysical, spiritualist pursuits, which climaxed in Yeats's marriage to George (actually Georgie, but renamed by her husband) Hyde Lees, a woman not very pretty but dependable and practical, and, above all, a good medium. Thus sex and spiritualism would for a while progress paripassu, though eventually the highly understanding George, who tolerated and sometimes even encouraged Willy's involvements with other women, sought solace in alcohol. Another recurring motif is the impressive collection of Impressionist paintings owned by Hugh Lane, Lady Gregory's nephew. In a fit of not unjustifiable pique, he had willed them to England. In a last-minute codicil of debatable legal standing, just before going down with the Lusitania, he bequeathed the collection to Ireland, but the British government was unwilling to yield them up, resulting in all kinds of negotiations and intrigues in which Yeats was periodically embroiled.

Then there are the political activities, sympathies, and antipathies, and their role in Yeats's writings. This includes his actions during his years as Senator (an office less influential than the title suggests), mostly of a cultural nature, largely involving struggles against political and religious censorship. Also, later on, his rather ignominious sympathizing with the fascist Blueshirts, for whom he wrote some marching songs, which, however, proved too esoteric to be of much use to those worthies. Also Yeats's ambivalence about the executed Irish rebels of the Easter 1916 uprising, and about other political activists.

Further, the keen sense of regret during his last years at not having had enough love affairs and sex ("I shall be a sinful man to the end, & think upon my deathbed of all the nights I wasted in my youth"), and his intensive attempts to make up for this with various operations and questionable injections, and affairs of uncertain sexual efficacy with a number of mostly much younger women. Hence the treatment with the notorious (and misnamed) "monkey glands" by the highly suspect medical practitioner Norman Haire.

Finally, and most importantly, the works. These include the fascinating but greatly manipulated memoirs, the philosophical and critical writings of uneven quality but never without interest, and the two versions of A Vision, Yeats's metaphysical summa, each requiting years of gestation but ultimately futile, except as they bear on to his poetry and drama. Relatedly, the joint founding of the Abbey Theater with Lady Gregory and Synge, and being one of its guides through much bitter controversy. This included the writing of numerous plays, mostly in verse and not very actable, and also the producing or rejecting of plays by other writers, often arousing violent clashes in the press and in the theater building whenever Irish puritanism felt provoked. Foster pays laudable attention to the poems and plays, elucidating and assessing key works with sensitive insight.

In pursuing these and some lesser strands with sustained readability and the ability to keep dextrously juggling with so many balls, Foster can lay claim to having executed a heroic task with exemplary aplomb and aptitude. Especially satisfying is the extensive use he makes of letters from, to, or about Yeats, assembled from even some most unlikely sources, often submitted to him by people whom he scrupulously acknowledges. In both letters and texts, he goes back wherever possible to manuscript originals, and so includes significant bits omitted from the published versions He explicates whenever necessary, offering his own opinions sparingly but appositely, and is dryly witty in the right places. Above all, he sees his subject's strengths and weaknesses clearly, without any exaggeration or glossing over. I appreciate his quoting Yeats, whose spelling was atrocious and grammar sometimes faulty, exactly as he wrote, for it is comforting to us lesser mortals to see the Achilles heel of genius.

Some of Yeats's misspellings are mostly mundane, e.g., beleive or machanation, but some are spectacular; thus scholour, discrease (for decrease), Guido Renyi, Geothe, Stephen (for Stefan) George, and even Dierdre for his own heroine Deirdre, not to mention such plural misses as fashism and Fachist, and compound ones as prolotariot. But biographer, like biographee, is only human, too, and the good Foster has his lapses as well. It is offputting to find the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford write "Rafferty, whom [sic] WBY decided must be related to Raftery," intriguing (for fascinating), centered around (for on), "Lilly's and Lolly's menage" (for Lilly and Lolly's), masterful (for masterly), "from whence," "the reason was because" and "and nor." Also Gerhard (for Gethart) Hauptmann, Bertold (for Bertolt) Brecht, and Hannibale (for the Italian Annibale). I am also disturbed by his use of sprezzatura three times in the book; I tend to agree with Marianne Moore that even "incredible, fabulous, rapturous, used more than once in a lifetime, lose force." Troublesome, too, is Foster's referring to various Yeatses by their initials; thus William is always WBY, and his father JBY, which takes getting used to. Lady Gregory is just plain Gregory, which smacks of transgendering, and saves space at the cost of losing grace.

Yet this is more than compensated for by such good writing as this on the automatic writing sessions with George: "What burns through most strongly ... is the will to believe; and what is hardest to understand is the passionate credulity which lies behind these endless sessions, and would produce the irrational exactness of A Vision.... But the faith placed in the automatic script draws on another source as well: the need to make sense of his sudden and apparently desperate marriage, indeed to make a triumphant success of it." Foster is very good on tracing George's role in this: "Now the idea of the mythic hero [Cuchulain] as his own alter ego was specifically established. ... And when George's 'Instructors' [from the Great Beyond] told WBY that Cuchulain's 'Evil Genius' was banished by his rejection of the Hawk Woman, Gonne's surrogate in [Yeats's play] At the Hawk's Well, the medium knew exactly what she was doing." Since Yeats was obsessive, "No wonder George was tired.... The 'Instructors' often prescribed erotic relations, perhaps to give the medium a respite from her other activities." There was method in the medium's automatism.

George altogether emerges as a sensible and sympathetic character. Thus she remarks that her husband's looking at his early writing "ought to make Willy kind to young poets, some of it is so bad." Even more pointedly, "Just when A Vision was being published, she confided to her friend Tom MacGreevy, 'there's nothing in his verse worth treasuring but the personal. All the pseudo-mystico-intellecto-nationalistico stuff of the last fifteen years isn't worth a trouser-button." We read further, "After nearly ten years [the] marriage had subsided into quotidian domesticity, a state less welcome to George than WBY assumed." And further yet, "With the disappearance of her role as spirit-medium, the erotic dimension of their marriage had clearly faded.... With [Lennox] Robinson, George went to the cinema, entertained the Drama League, and drank rather too many cocktails." Yet how well she looked after Willy (and, later, their children) in all sorts of ways, even extricating him from the hot water when relationships with other women soured. Her life now was "that of helpmeet, secretary, and domestic organizer, no longer muse and mediator." In many respects she was still a collaborator, as on The Oxford Book of English Verse, which Yeats was editing, and which, in his befuddlement, he kept calling the Cambridge Book of English Verse. Foster writes, "She was essential to WBY in countless ways, he missed her when away for too long.... [a] tough-minded and unsentimental realist ... in some ways the direction the marriage had gone was not unwelcome to her." After his death, she gave souvenirs of her husband to some of his women, playing "the part of Emer, the understanding wife, to the end."

Foster is very good at discussing and evoking Yeats's various domiciles. The poet wanted, and often had, two residences: one in Ireland, one in England, or one in Dublin, one in the country. The country usually meant County Galway and the vicinity of Lady Gregory's Coole Park. This led to the acquisition of a nearby rather primitive square stone tower and attached cottage, which he named Thoor Ballylee. It stood on an island, and there were problems with furniture and pictures; there were floods, and water also seeped through the walls. But George loved it and did wonders there. Some early Yeats residences were very modest, some later ones--notably in Merrion Square, Dublin--were rather grand. Moreover, English friends and mistresses had houses in England, some quite fancy, where Yeats would stay, often protractedly. The Yeatses also lived in Oxford for a while, but eventually settled in a modest home, complete with chickens, on Dublin's outskirts. Periodically, as various illnesses required a warm climate for William, there were stays in the south of France, either in an apartment or in various hotels.

Yeats's literary friendships and enmities also make colorful reading. Especially so the relationship with Pound, at whose Stone Cottage in Ashburn Forest Yeats lived for a while. This spirited friendship ceased after they disparaged some of each other's works, but was partially renewed years later. There was also a warm nexus with Sean O'Casey, whose Dublin trilogy Yeats successfully produced at the Abbey. But he harshly rejected The Silver Tassie (rightly, in my view), which caused a long rift with O'Casey. It was eventually patched up, and the play mounted by the Abbey. A friendship and collaboration with George Moore ended bitterly, with Yeats publishing a screed against Moore. His closest and most enduring literary friend was AE (George Russell), although Yeats did not attend Russell's funeral, for which he later castigated himself. Other more or less close relations included Sturge Moore (whom Yeats called a sheep in sheep's clothing), St. John Gogarty (Joyce's Buck Mulligan; he also was the one who dubbed Yeats the Arch-Poet), Lennox Robinson (a playwright who at times ran the Abbey, and was an unsuccessful suitor of Iseult Goune), Sean O'Faolain, James Joyce, Bernard Shaw, Padraic Colum, and others, including the artist Edmund Dulac, another close friend, who illustrated books and designed stage productions for Yeats. Several of these friendships followed an up-and-down pattern. Particularly ambivalent--and often hostile--were his relations with the next generation of poets, Auden, MacNeice, etc.; somewhat warmer with Eliot. He liked Lawrence's fiction, and adored Balzac, whose complete works he kept rereading, and who, he said, taught him much about politics and life.

Fascinating, albeit tragicomic, were most of his relations with women in his last years. About a visit to a brothel, he told Montgomery Hyde, "It was terrible. Like putting an oyster in a slot machine." It is not clear how much medicine--or quackery--was able to do for him sexually. With the beautiful but near-crazy twenty-seven-year-old would-be poet and would-be actress Margot Ruddock, it does seem to have been a real relationship, with Margot's irrational shenanigans causing Yeats much embarrassment until Margot was institutionalized. It is hard to say what went on with Ethel Mannin, novelist, journalist, feminist, and free spirit, who was to recall that Yeats was "obviously much more romantic than actively sexual." Lady Dorothy Wellesley was a lesbian, but became a good friend, and had a fine estate where Willy often stayed. He included a lot of her undistinguished poetry in his Oxford Book of English Verse of which Gogarty was to remark, not without some justification, that "only titled ladies and a few friends were admitted." There were others, too, all young and pretty until, oddly, he settled happily on Edith Shackleton Heald, who was neither. She was variously described as "a wizened, mischief-making spinster," or looking like "a lady's companion." As Foster writes, "While no longer capable of full intercourse, his relationship with Edith was intensely sexual: surviving blurry snapshots show her sunbathing barebreasted ... under his rapturous gaze." And she was there at the end.

The huge topics I have mostly avoided here are Yeats's poetical and political careers. Foster has so much to say about both, in great detail and with sharp insight--as, for instance, about that splendid poem "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz"--that to do justice to these aspects would have required another review of this length. Let me, however, quote Foster's parting assessment:

 Frederic Prokosch prophetically suggested
 that Last Poems stood in relation to Yeats's
 earlier work as Guernica did to Picasso's
 youthful clowns and absinthe-drinkers. The
 comparison might have surprised the poet,
 who in old age conceived of himself as a classicist;
 but his work, once seen as so distinctively
 Irish, was now entering the canon of
 modern world literature.... "A great poet is
 the antithetical self of his people," WBY had
 remarked on one of his American tours,
 "saying truths they have forgotten, bringing
 up from the depths what they would deny. He
 is the subconscious self." As usual, he was
 talking ostensibly about Synge, but really
 about himself.

Yeats died and was buried in France, World War II preventing burial in Ireland. The account of the rocky path to his postwar reburial there is grotesque enough. The ceremony took place in Sligo, with George, the two Yeats children, Anne and Michael, and brother Jack in attendance. It was September 17, 1948, by year's end, "the country whose consciousness Yeats had done so much to shape, would declare itself a republic."

Forthcoming in The New Criterion:

Lengthened shadows: a series concluding essay by Roger Kimball

Dylan Thomas by David Pryce-Jones

Is Bob Dylan a poet? by Eric Ormsby

The Tour de France: a history by Robert Messenger

Benedict Kiely rediscovered by Brooke Allen

Scouting for boys by Anthony Daniels

Poetry chronicle by William Logan