W. B. Yeats
MYTHOLOGIES
Edited by Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey
546pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £80.
1 4039 4505 5
On June 11, 1925, in the course of a debate in the Seanead Eireann (the Senate of the Irish Free State) on the first reading of Bills of Divorce in both Houses of the Irish Parliament, one Senator strayed a little from the matter in hand. On that occasion, Dr W. B. Yeats’s mind turned back to the marital irregularities of Daniel O’Connell (about whom “It was said, . . . in his own day, that you could not throw a stick over a workhouse wall without hitting one of his children”), and then the decidedly nobler figure cut by Charles Stuart Parnell. “We had a good deal of trouble”, the Senator reminded his audience, “about Parnell when he married a woman who became thereby Mrs Parnell.” Lord Glenavy, in the Chair, felt at this point obliged to ask the question, “Do you not think we might leave the dead alone?”, but this barely interrupted Yeats’s oratorical flow: “I am passing on,” he responded. “I would hate to leave the dead alone.”
Of course, Yeats was not especially good at leaving things alone: the texts and canon of his poems and other writings, like the recollected details of his own life, were subject to perpetual revision; and the small army of his chosen dead could never escape the poet’s earnest and repeated interrogations. By the 1920s, the séances and magical invocations of Yeats’s youth and middle age had been replaced, in large part, by the hard work of his wife George’s automatic writing. This provided a stream of convoluted communion with those kindred spirits who were no longer alive, but were keen to aid (or sometimes hinder) the development of the ageing Irish writer’s philosophy of being and history – a project which reached its first culmination with the appearance of A Vision (1925). Some spirits who were never, strictly speaking, alive in the first place found a voice in the introduction to that book, and they rather resented Yeats’s persistent interest in them, as “Owen Aherne” pointed out, recalling a chance meeting with “Michael Robartes” in the National Gallery some eight years before:
I brought him to a seat in the middle of the room, and I had begun to speak of the changed world we met in when he said: “Where is Yeats? I want his address. I am lost in this town and I don’t know where to find anybody or anything”. I felt a slight chill, for we had both quarrelled with Mr Yeats on what I considered good grounds. Mr Yeats had given the name of Michael Robartes and that of Owen Aherne to fictitious characters, and made those characters live through events that were a travesty of real events. “Remember”, I said, “that he not only described your death but represented it as taking place amid associations which must, I should have thought, have been highly disagreeable to an honourable man.”
Robartes, on mature reflection, was content with Yeats’s announcement of his death (in the story “Rosa Alchemica” of 1897), judging that “he had done me a service” since “One by one my correspondents ceased to write”.
Robartes and Aherne were characters from Yeats’s prose fiction of the late 1890s, who underwent resurrection in very much later work. Unable to leave them alone, the poet imagined them failing to leave him alone: in the 1925 introduction, the stalkers reach “the little Bloomsbury court where Mr Yeats had his lodging”, but Robartes reasons that “it will be better to write and make an appointment”, since “He is almost certain to be out”. Years pass, and finally the pair meet Yeats, much against Aherne’s wishes (“Mr Yeats has intellectual belief but he is entirely without moral faith”, he protests to his companion), to pass over to him the materials to be written up as A Vision. Eight years earlier, in The Wild Swans at Coole, the same characters had shared the poem “The Phases of the Moon”, turning up this time at Yeats’s tower, Thoor Ballylee, where Aherne asks Robartes, “Why should not you / Who know it all ring at his door?”. Here, Robartes gives Yeats and his 1890s fiction some brisk treatment:
He wrote of me in that extravagant style
He had learnt from Pater, and to round his tale
Said I was dead; and dead I choose to be.
Not so much dead as never alive, Robartes still had plenty of business to transact with Yeats; and Yeats, for his part, had no intention of leaving him alone. Ideas of resuscitating prose fiction as one of his genres are aired by the poet in a letter to Ezra Pound of 1918, where “a bundle of stories & dialogues concerning Michael Robartes” is mentioned. (The project is not very promising: “One that I am thinking out at present”, Yeats explains, “concerns the Egyptian Sphinx which becomes jealous of Christ & thinks of being born.”) By 1922, Yeats reported to his bibliographer, Allan Wade, that “I have brought him [Robartes] back to life”, and shared the joke about his character’s demise: “My new story is that he is very indignant because I used his real name in describing a number of fictitious adventures, and that because I called my fictitious hero by his name, many people have supposed him to be dead”. By 1924, sending Edmund Dulac “my preface, or rather Owen Aherne’s” to illustrate for A Vision, Yeats could scribble the postscript, “I am just off to Senate” – there to fail again, presumably, to leave the dead alone.
All through the mid-1920s, Yeats busied himself with the repackaging of his own writings. In the potentially profitable wake of his 1923 Nobel Prize, Yeats’s publishers, Macmillan, undertook The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats and shaped these eventually into seven volumes. Early Poems and Stories, which appeared in 1925, brought together Yeats’s fiction from The Celtic Twilight (1893) and The Secret Rose (1897), both of which books had been revised and republished by the poet already once or more, with the early (and enduringly popular) poetry alongside which the stories, supernatural anecdotes and ventures into folklore of his short prose had been composed. In this 1925 volume, Robartes and Aherne found themselves back in circulation (just when A Vision, published privately, was allowing them to express satisfaction at having dropped out of sight), in stories first printed near the end of the previous century. The “extravagant style” in which they had come to birth now had its wings clipped, resembling less what Yeats supposed to be the style of Walter Pater; at the same time, more recent Yeatsian idioms and preoccupations were allowed a certain prominence. In his dealings with the writings of his own past self in the mid-1920s, Yeats worked to a strictly contemporary artistic agenda.
Editing and rearranging the large mass of his early prose, Yeats tried to bring into coherence a diffuse body of writing. The pieces which were first collected in The Celtic Twilight were largely concerned with Irish folklore. These detailed, and occasionally meandering, reports from what Yeats considered the front line of racial memory and pagan religious instinct were deliberately distinct both in tone and procedure from the already established methods of the folklorist. The young Yeats’s prose is highly wrought, and yet this style is at the service of no real argument. It is important to the effect of The Celtic Twilight that its first-person voice should be identified as that of a young modern poet, importing much un-Victorian primitivism and mystery into contemporary writing; beyond that, larger patterns of coherence (and even smaller ones) are neglected. Ghosts abound, but not as the agents of philosophical instruction or religious apocalypse. “Drumcliff and Rosses”, Yeats writes of his own home ground, “are choke-full of ghosts”, adding a catalogue which seems to tire of its own effects: “By bog, road, rath, hillside, sea-border they gather in all shapes: headless women, men in armour, shadow hares, fire-tongued hounds, whistling seals, and so on”. Just in case his readers might baulk at the last item (having taken the others in their stride), Yeats tops this off with “A whistling seal sank a ship the other day”. The supernatural is everywhere, but its meaning and intentions (if any) are generally inscrutable. One anecdote tells of how the Devil approaches two women as a lover: he offers a lift to one; she refuses, and he vanishes. The story of the second woman is similarly un-scary:
The other was out on the road late at night waiting for her young man, when something came flapping and rolling along the road up to her feet. It had the likeness of a newspaper, and presently it flapped up into her face, and she knew by the size of it that it was the Irish Times. All of a sudden it changed into a young man, who asked her to go walking with him. She would not, and he vanished.
Although this dates in fact from 1902, Yeats was able to place it in The Celtic Twilight with artistic propriety; the idiosyncratically worldly grasp of the supernatural was essential to the collection of ten years before, even if the idea of the Devil taking the physical shape of a copy of a Unionist newspaper tickled the sense of humour of a slightly older and more experienced man. Later still, Senator Yeats was content to put back into print a joke which he might no longer, perhaps, be altogether inclined to make.
The younger self who wrote The Celtic Twilight was, for Yeats, indistinguishable from the author of the verse which had eventually delivered him a measure of celebrity, but which his own later poetry had – artistically and intellectually – far outstripped. For this reason, Early Poems and Stories made a useful conjunction. Yeats’s work begins in an apprehension of the supernatural, but the core of his achievement is in the lifelong labour of understanding that initial – uncertain, conflicted and self-doubting – series of encounters. In the early prose, Yeats wrote as a bystander of his own poetic inspiration – with results that were occasionally more fully achieved, in their way, than the early poems themselves. The narrative voice of this prose is observant and sometimes ironic: it is liable to exchange a scientifically tinged tone of objectivity for the rapt over-expressiveness of abandoned credulousness; yet it is a fresh voice, and one capable both of economy and arresting directness.
Of the many figures who make up The Celtic Twilight’s cast, the most important is that cut by Yeats himself as narrator. It is perhaps unsurprising that this figure should have haunted an older Yeats in a troubling way; for taking care of the business of a literary career, as well as the compulsions of an autobiographical artistic temperament, meant that he could not leave this particular spirit alone. In “The Old Town”, a memory of incidents in 1887, first published in 1902, Yeats told the story of a walk with his two Middleton cousins through the ruins of Sligo’s “Old Town”, burned to the ground in the Cromwellian wars. In his account, all three are poised “on the threshold, between sleeping and waking, where Sphinxes and Chimeras sit open-eyed and where there are always murmurings and whisperings”.
