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Vol. LX, No. 3: AUTUMN 2007
Grease, Balance, and Point of View in the
Work of Anthony Trollope
Skating Upriver; A Wedding in Maine;
Ring Effect
Bald Spot
The Interpreters;
In Tide Pools
CHRONICLES
Art
At the Galleries:
Toronto & New York
Theatre
International Theatre
Dance
Cunningham's Collaboration
REVIEWS
The Long and the
Short of Robinson
The Art of What Remains
How Dosty Did It
Another Wharton
If Lucky Jim Could
See Him Now
Jim Crace's
Violent Verities
COMMENT
Letter from India
Yeats was buried for the second-to-last time on January 30, 1939, in the hilltop churchyard at Roquebrune in the South of France. He had died two days before, in the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, a seaside villa below Roquebrune’s rocky outcrop where he was wintering with a small group of friends, admirers, and caretakers, including his wife George. The body was taken from the villa up the hillside, where it lay for a night in the church. The group that had gathered around the poet held a short burial service the next day. The grave was meant to be temporary: it was hoped that the body could be returned to Ireland after a year or so, when the furor surrounding his death had died down and his wish for a simple, private funeral could be honored. “When the newspapers have forgotten me,” he had instructed George, considering the possibility that he might die in France, “dig me up and plant me in Sligo.”
But World War II interfered with the planned reinterment. On the same day that Yeats’s friends gathered around the makeshift grave in Roquebrune, Hitler stood before the German Reichstag and prophesied the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. In September, the month George had settled on as the best time to transfer the remains, France declared war on Germany, forcing the poet’s family and friends to postpone the removal indefinitely.
But the end of the war brought a bizarre and unwelcome surprise. The body had disappeared. When Yeats’s last lover, Edith Shackleton Heald, returned to Roquebrune to visit the grave, she found that the grave was gone. A confused exchange of correspondence between the priest at Roquebrune, the undertaker’s office, and a small group of Yeats’s friends revealed that, apparently due to a clerical error and the priest’s ignorance of Yeats’s identity, the grave had been dug up and the poet’s remains taken to the ossuary, where anonymous bones were kept. It would be difficult to find the poet’s skeleton: in the ossuary skulls and limbs were stored separately.
A macabre comedy followed these strange revelations. Heald and a few of the poet’s English friends decided to cover up the disappearance and keep it secret from Yeats’s family in Ireland. They began implementing an elaborate and farcical scheme, swearing the priest to secrecy and designing a substitute gravestone (it portrayed a unicorn flying to the stars), while at the same time, George Yeats and the Irish authorities were conferring about the best way to bring the poet’s body to Sligo, to the landscape he had known as a boy, and the best way to stage an Irish funeral. In the end, the English contingent, which discovered the plan to return the remains to Ireland by way of an article in the Times, had no choice but to confess the case to George, who took it up with the French government. Authorities from Paris descended on Roquebrune, hastily identified and reassembled the poet’s bones, and arranged a ceremony in which the new coffin, draped in the Irish flag and escorted by a French guard of honor, was driven to Nice, where it joined an Irish naval vessel bound for Galway. Here it was met by the poet’s family and taken ashore before a large crowd. At Sligo, where it was escorted by a pipe band, it met another guard of honor, this one Irish, and lay in state for an hour before an enormous throng in front of the Town Hall. Then, finally, on September 17, 1948, Yeats was buried for the last time, in Drumcliff churchyard overlooking the dramatic peak of Ben Bulben. Down to the epitaph on his headstone, the situation of the grave was just as Yeats inscribed in his great death-anticipating poem “Under Ben Bulben”:
Under bare Ben Bulben’s headFrom his makeshift grave in France and the disarrangement of his bones, Yeats arrived in precisely the setting he had always intended, a setting he had already dramatized as his final resting-place. Out of the whirl of accidents an order emerged, as if Yeats had planned it all along.
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
The career of Yeats’s corpse and the career of Yeats’s life have a great deal in common, and not merely because they each involve a deep concern for “contact with the soil.” The way the morbid and uncanny, in the burial story, blends with a weird and slightly hapless comedy, resolving into a triumphant symbolic order laced with suggestive myth —Yeats’s bones, after all, may not really be buried at Drumcliff—closely resembles the relation of the same elements in the story of his life. His legendary preoccupation with occult ritual and magic, which led to his membership in societies such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was constantly tipping into the ridiculous, as in his 1917 attempt to drum up investors for the “metallic homunculus,” a creation of the inventor David Wilson which was supposed to enable its users to listen in on the conversation of the dead. (“It seems,” the inventor wrote, “to constitute a kind of ear-hole into the unknown region.”) And yet it was the same occult fascination that led him to the subjects—and, we may suppose, the incantatory tone—of many of his greatest poems, including “Byzantium,” “The Second Coming,” and “Cuchulain Comforted.” He famously wrote that the poet is never “the bundle of accident and incoherence” who sits down to breakfast in the morning, but something “intended” and “complete,” forcibly separating the artist’s life from his creative work. And yet no artist ever worked harder to integrate the two: as “Under Ben Bulben” shows, Yeats was strenuously involved in his own canonization; he tried to live his life as an extension of his art and explicitly negotiated his place in Irish history in the very poems that ensured that he would have one. At the end of his life he wrote: “When I try to put all into a phrase I say, ‘Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.’ I must embody it in the completion of my life.”
And yet no artist may have had to contend with a greater natural store of accident and incoherence than Yeats. In R. F. Foster’s splendid biography of the poet,1 many of the secondary accounts illustrate Yeats’s attempts to balance accident and poetic self-dramatization, and some of these are extraordinarily touching. Here is the wonderfully vivid recollection of an old woman who, as a girl, visited Yeats’s friend and patroness Augusta Gregory at her manor at Coole Park, and witnessed the poet trying to give a private reading in the library with his young daughter playing at his feet:
It was all very dramatic. He was “flourishing” as they say, waving his arms, declaiming on the poem. I was watching the child, who just wouldn’t leave him alone. Her nose, well, her nose was running enormously, and she kept coming up to him and yanking his coat. . . . Why the mother didn’t grab her I don’t know, but the girl was annoying Yeats . . . not seriously, you know, but she was sort of a beloved nuisance, if you see what I mean. He may have been annoyed with his wife, why doesn’t she take her away, I don’t know. He didn’t repulse her or chase her off, he just stopped everything and took care of it. He put the book DOWN, reached into his pocket, took out a large handkerchief which he had been flourishing earlier, went down—BLOW!—a loud blow. Put it back in his pocket and continued reading.The scene is even more amusing when one remembers that Yeats’s wife—a fellow occultist who, shortly after their wedding, contrived to distract him from other women by acting as a spiritual medium and transmitting messages to him from supernatural beings—had originally convinced him that their daughter was foreordained to be a son; and not just a son, but the reincarnation of a distant family ancestor; and not just a reincarnation, but an Avatar who was coming, in Foster’s words, “to impose a new order on the world.” Whether Yeats imagined wiping the Avatar’s nose in the library at Coole Park is a point not recorded in the archive; but he accepted the disillusionment without rancor, and, in fact, without disillusionment. “I think a daughter,” he simply and genially wrote to Lady Gregory after the child’s birth, “pleases me best.” Yeats once blessed Cervantes as the writer of “heroic life,” and so it is perhaps not surprising that his own life sometimes suggests Don Quixote: he seemed to believe with perfect conviction things he could not possibly have believed, and when they were proved wrong, to lay them aside with childlike equanimity, giving no sense of retreat, remaining blithely self-composed, preserving all his larger certainties.
This is not, however, to patronize Yeats; indeed, like Don Quixote, he is almost unpatronizable. There are always the poems, where the ungainly aggregations of the life are distilled into moments of airy and bluff and sweet and impossible beauty, and as long as the poems exist, the last word will be theirs. To laugh at Yeats’s life is to find oneself softly checkmated. The poems are things of such constant astonishment that they dismay description; flocks of adjectives graze on them and never see the ground. Reading the fourth section of “Vacillations” makes one understand very well how the split sense of the burial story could have come into existence, how the poet could appear simultaneously as a helpless collection of bones and a powerful guiding spirit. Its ten plain lines show how accident can be transfigured by inspiration.
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessèd and could bless.
It is subtitled The Arch-Poet, and the second, final volume of Foster’s life of Yeats is a kind of arch-biography, a huge, admirable book that sets out, day by day, with a minimum of commentary, the events of the poet’s life. In this it is surprisingly radical. Yeats himself, as part of the campaign to cast his life as a function of his art, wrote a series of autobiographical works in which the details of his history are freely recomposed in order to fit the thematic scheme he had decided his life should assume. (“Hammer your thoughts into unity,” he wrote in one of his reminiscences: a process which apparently requires you to hammer your dates as well.) His later biographers have been more careful with accuracy, but they have generally followed him in preferring a thematic arrangement of his experience as a means of interpreting the relation between his life, his work, and the many strands of his thought; the consequence is that they tend to ratify the Yeatsian idea of a life achieved and ordered like the poems. This is especially true of Richard Ellmann, whose masterful biography Yeats: The Man and the Masks, has been since its publication in 1948 the standard work in its line; so Foster’s steady chronologies are trailblazers of a sort. Foster, who holds Oxford’s first professorship devoted to Irish history, is known in Ireland as a “revisionist” historian, a label meant to distinguish him from the “nationalist” historians who long controlled the field. The nationalists see a clear evolutionary line running through Irish history, in which the oppressed Gaelic nation, and especially its Catholic majority, gradually wins independence from English and Protestant oppressors, until at last it achieves self-rule in 1921. The revisionists, in contrast, emphasize the variety and plurality of Irish experience, including both its Protestant strains and those types of Irishness which are, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, “alloyed with Englishness.” Foster’s exhaustive and detailed account, a miracle of interwoven sources, is his method of allowing the greatest multiplicity and range into his treatment of Yeats’s life; it is therefore its own means of analysis, arguing against simplistic reduction and in favor of a complicated wholeness. Yeats’s life, which overlaps with and involves most of the founding moments of modern Ireland—the death of Parnell, the Easter uprising, the creation of the Free State, the Civil War—provides a vast matrix of political, social, literary, military, economic, and religious contexts for Foster to explore, and is to that extent a natural subject for him, as Joyce’s life, say, would not be. (We might add that Yeats, who became the quintessential Irish bard despite being born into a Protestant tradition and living for long stretches in London, is similarly fortunate in the attitude of his biographer.)
The great strength of Foster’s biography lies in its charting of these matrices, its intricate reknotting of the nets. If not exactly brought to life, Yeats’s world is splendidly panoramaed; Foster’s meticulous details slowly and unfussily convey the idea of just how much Yeats was up to at any given time, how deep and miscellaneous his relations were with the currents of his time. Few poets’ schedules have been more cluttered with fascinations. Between attending séances, running the eternally embattled Abbey Theatre, rebuilding the sixteenth-century tower of Thoor Ballylee, wintering at Stone Cottage with Ezra Pound, subsidizing his improvident artist father’s bohemian life in New York, lobbying Parliament for the return of Hugh Lane’s disputed art collection to the Dublin Municipal Gallery (he hoped Lane’s spirit would reveal the location of a more satisfactory will), entertaining literary London and Dublin, rising in Irish politics (as a senator he helped to design the newly independent nation’s coinage), and coping with his unrequited love for the beautiful revolutionary Maud Gonne (he also proposed to her daughter; who, it should be noted, led him on), not to forget writing poems, stories, memoirs, essays, and plays, Yeats somehow found time to correspond with hundreds of acquaintances, tour the United States as a lecturer, marry George and start a family. A whole book could be written on any one of these entries; they are all thoroughly dealt with in the second volume of Foster’s biography, which does not begin until Yeats is almost fifty years old.
But the book’s success is not merely a matter of scale. Foster has spent seventeen years working on his life of Yeats and has absorbed the store of sources. The winding, circumstantial line of his narrative liberates him to make the best possible use of them. His knack for apt quotation is a delight greatly aided by his subject having lived at the center of an extremely quotable circle, including his painter father and his marvelously clever and perceptive sister Lily, who answers the question of whether the domineering Lady Gregory had any social tact: “Willy thinks she has an enormous amount. I say she has none, but goes for what she wants straight over everything in her way. I call her the Juggernaut. She hurts people in a way that would surprise her if she knew it.” We are used to thinking of Yeats’s relationship with Maud Gonne in the idealized terms of his poems for her, some of which are almost heartbreakingly lovely:
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,But there is something perversely refreshing in learning that years later, when Gonne had been imprisoned and released for revolutionary activity, she fled illegally to Dublin, where Yeats, whose family was living in her house, turned her away at the doorstep because his wife was ill. “The patriot,” Lily remarked ironically, “was, so to speak, banging on the door the whole day long.” The family was forced to move, and Yeats sent Lady Gregory a few choice words about his idolized beloved. (Incidentally, Yeats was also a terrible speller.)
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crown of stars.
I cannot go to the house in Stephens Green because Madame Gonne has come out of prison with Neurasthenia & her hatred has pitched on me. She writes me the most venemous letters. It all started with my refusal to allow her to stay there while George was ill. It has finally taken the form of beleiving that I have conspired with Shortt to shut her up in an English sanatorium that I might keep possession of her house. It would be much simpler to call it possession by the devil & then one could beleive it might be over—after a Mass or two.Elsewhere in the book, we read of Yeats’s response to winning the Nobel Prize; according to Lily, he and his wife “sat up till 1 a.m. answering the telephone and being interviewed, then at 1 o’clock went down to the kitchen and fried sausages, next morning marched out and bought new stair carpets.” We read of Yeats being given (in Oregon) the Japanese sword he immortalized in “Meditations in a Time of Civil War”; some time later we find a disputed account of his using it to terrorize an Indian visitor who unwisely attempted to instruct him in the Brahmin ideal of peace. “I’ll tell you what you do,” Yeats said. “Take a hundred thousand men from each side and let them fight it out. Let streams of blood flow.”
It will come as no surprise, given this boisterous wealth of sources, that the subtler work of Foster’s book is a kind of patient unstitching: of the idea that Yeats’s life was a willed unity, of the idea that any life so energetically engaged with the erratic and unruly world could ever be continuous with a body of artistic work. We understand, reading the book, how it was that Yeats longed for his life to achieve that continuity —we see it in the poems, too; in “Sailing to Byzantium,” for instance, when he imagines leaving his aging body and taking the form of a mechanical golden bird—and we see how the temperamental longing for a lived artistic perfection was the very quality that most often goaded him to silliness. It is very likely that his willingness to risk looking foolish in pursuit of his vision of himself was a kind of strengthening self-trial essential to his attaining to the poems. And it is likely that he knew this, or came to realize it: “O what am I that I should not seem / For the song’s sake a fool?” he wrote in a poem called “A Prayer for Old Age.” But in other versions of the life all the strands of social, historical, and personal contingency seem gathered in Yeats’s hand, as sensible to him as a marionettist’s strings; Foster’s is perhaps the first to portray them as lying beyond his grasp, to show that Yeats was figured in the shifting planes of contingency, and did not constitute history solely in his own person. It should lay to rest the lurking truism that Yeats somehow invented himself as a complete, intended being in his life, and not only in his poems.
Partly because it presents itself as a ceaseless progress of facts, a kind of checklist of inarguables, Foster’s life of Yeats is nearly impervious to a certain sort of criticism. There is nothing for the critic to take hold of, because almost everything that Foster writes is true. If there is something dissatisfying in the book, it is not precisely that the author, a historian, is inadequate as a reader of the poems, for Foster’s readings are generally apt and informative, though they are seldom deep. And it is not precisely that Foster devotes himself to the outer events of Yeats’s life and gives short shrift to the inner, for that is merely a consequence of his method, inseparable from its many advantages. Whatever lingering doubt the book leaves comes from neither of these things, exactly, but from something that half suggests each of them. This something strikes very close to the essential problem of writing about Yeats’s life and illustrates its fundamental difficulty. The bones were buried at Drumcliff; the love for Maud Gonne is legend; the events of the life which have been enshrined in the poems have the status and inevitability of myths and have myths’ inaccurate accuracy. The myths, from the outset, exist, and as long as the myths exist, it is impossible to ignore them; they fall into place in the mind. How does a biographer, in a work devoted to the complexity and variety of life, to life’s facts rather than its stories, treat the fact of Yeats as an icon?
Foster’s method, which is by no means the wrong one, is to keep scrupulously to the documented details while at the same time explaining Yeats’s self-canonizations, his busy shepherding of his own reputation, in such a way that the myths remain in view—but quietly, and without direct endorsement. Foster allows for Yeats’s “ruthless talent for choreography,” but also writes of his “spiritual return to Sligo” after his death. Elsewhere, Foster—whose tone is for the most part either reportorial or gently ironic—lets slip into his sentences a tiny echo of the rapt or awestruck sound that one might more reasonably expect to find in a version of the legend. The word “ancient,” for instance, suggesting a certain millennial endurance, is repeatedly applied to Yeats’s habits, opinions, and friendships, often when they are no more than fifteen or twenty years old—as though Yeats were an epoch in himself and made the terminology exact in the grandeur of proportion. The effect of these recourses is that the myths are preserved, but at a level of rational remove that is its own silent form of criticism. To a certain extent, perhaps, this is merely the next step in the posthumous career of a self-created icon: rather as Byron was once celebrated for the things he was celebrated for, and then only celebrated for being celebrated, Yeats is now being dramatically mythologized for being so dramatically self-mythologizing.
And this is not necessarily inappropriate; some part of the myths is deserved, after all, and what Foster writes about the symbolism of the Sligo reinterment is no more than the truth. But the removal of the myths to a manageable and implicitly criticized secondary level, though it does a great deal of good, also seems to dictate that Foster remove almost everything that falls on the intangible side of the innumerable Yeatsian dichotomies. Everything that is not action, history, fact, or detail, everything that is not hand-recorded in a sum or a vote or a posted paragraph, is quietly lifted away: which means nearly everything that has to do with genius, feeling, experience, and thought, everything, in short, that has most to do with the inner reactions that led to the writing of the poems. The consequence at the end of the book is that, though we know more about Yeats than we have ever known before, some part of our sense of him, a part of the vivid presence of his own inner life in our minds, is reduced. (It requires going back to the poems again to restore it.) Though Foster avoids giving any direction to this effect, the great prevalence of external social and environmental information tacitly encourages us to explain Yeats’s achievement by referring exclusively to his circumstances; which is a little like crediting the cave’s darkness for a blind fish born with eyes.
“I will be flesh and blood,” Shakespeare wrote,
For there was never yet philosopherThe truth is that no human life is ever intended and complete. We are made of accident and incoherence, and none of us holds the strings of circumstance. But we navigate it; we are more than the files of our own imposed details. Poetry proceeds from the mind and the heart, which are creative as well as responsive organs; and no poet may be told about entirely by telling what he did, or what he saw, or where he went. The difficulty for the conscientious biographer is that what goes deeper than circumstance, though it may be immediately sensed, cannot, like Yeats’s bones, be unearthed and disassembled. The book of every poet’s life begins with an invisible first page.
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods,
And made a pish at chance and sufferance.
Foster’s immense and monumental work is the story of the Yeats who was buried when he died, and not the Yeats who, in Auden’s phrase, became his admirers. Foster cannot articulate what we sense in Yeats, what we sense was in Yeats, that allowed him to write his poems, and he does not give us the imaginative satisfaction of trying. But he has written a great book about Yeats by masterfully bringing together almost all there is to know about the poet’s life and time, until, through sheer accretion, we almost do begin to glimpse something fragile and moving at the core of his arduous foolishness. It is not heroic, but it is human. It is therefore the pure subject, not of biography nor of legend, but of poetry.
1 W. B. YEATS: A Life: Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939, by R. F. Foster. Oxford University Press. $45.00.
The Hudson Review Vol. LVII, No. 1 (Spring 2004)
Copyright © 2004 by The Hudson Review