Barbara Hardy on the memoirs of W.B. Yeats
The prose of poets often lies close to their poetry. "Oh masters of life, give me confidence in something, even if it be but my own reason," exclaims Yeats in the Journal, joining passion with argument. Like Coleridge in the Notebooks and Keats in the Letters Yeats writes the first draft of his Autobiography and his early Journal, here brought together*, to tread a path between interpretation and response. Absorption in the moment saves him from excesses of system, artistic self-consciousness and rational questioning make sure that the moment is tested for meaning. Denis Donoghue is right to distinguish the retrospective meditations of autobiography from the immediate responses of a journal, but both documents are fine instances of the artist's openness. Yeats's memory of the far past, and of the immediate past that runs right into the present, make what he calls "forms of life," expressions of the imaginative enterprise of an artist refusing to arm himself too heavily with opinions in case they damagingly defend "his uninspired moment against his inspiration." Of course Yeats was a great system-builder, but he builds in order to unbuild and rebuild. He can say, like Keats, that there may seem to be no unity in the artist's life.
"Why do I write all this?" he asks in another passionate question, as he analyses his motives in the misunderstandings and quarrels between Grosse and Lady Gregory over his own Civil List pension. "I suppose that I may keep to my own in every situation in life; to discover and create in myself as I grow old that thing which is to life what style is to letters: moral radiance, a personal quality of universal meaning in action and in thought." Yeats plays with masks, mirrors and myths in order to engage with fresh experience. Traditionalist though he is, he discovers his imaginative pragmatism by coming up against the Gregory code of honour with its immediate prompting to action, and prefers to follow the uncoded advice of an intuition which solicits by its " minute, almost secret, ungeneralised thought."
But the very recognition is an ordering, though unfixed and free. Yeats is in his prose, as in his poetry, using ideas but not freezing them. Maud Gonne is Ireland, but also a woman who moves dangerously from playing with dolls to mothering ideas. Yeats's dreams are fluid and dizzy, yet at *W. B. Yeats: Memoirs edited by Denis Donoghue (Macmillan £4.00) times look like completions of waking thought. The curious working of psychological analysis of character and motive is defended as a means of progression, perhaps necessarily pathological. Each moment of experience is savoured and scrutinised, but with a knowledge of the pressures of his art. He thinks that irritability and exaggeration of feeling may show the need to take time off from the emotional nobility of poetic purpose, or may be a proud Cordelialike retreat from high claims to high feeling. Yeats is concerned with the public life, as Donoghue insists, but never without the sense of the poet's privacy. It is the poet who does experimental magic, gossips, loses his temper, organises pressure groups and propaganda, worries, and loves.
What he prays to be able to trust in is his own reason, the artist's reason. A mood moves into analysis, and argument into a lyric. Reason itself is seen as killing, through the image of a stopped pendulum, and death. The more rationally distanced Autobiography still summons up a vivid past; the more casually flowing Journal can halt to remember, qualify, and ruminate. The immediacy of the Journal not only combats logic, as Donoghue says, but also stops the insidious flow of what Yeats calls literature, making a submission of uninspired moments to inspiration, preserving the fine isolated verisimilitudes. Donoghue speaks of a record of daily "matter and impertinency," but there is nothing that is not pertinent. Everything is grist to Yeat's joyful vigorous mill, grinding the experience to make moral radiance, individual forms of life. The Irish League, the Abbey, friendship, enmity are revealed in their moments of drama. But even the immediate present is past before the record catches it.
Yeats shows us one link between his two forms of chronicle when in one of those elegant turns that are like echoes of an unparadoxical Wilde, refusing to subordinate definition to wit, he speaks of our faith in a past that never was and our hope for a future that never will be. A brilliant sense of the creative nature of personal memory and fantasy joins both parts of this book, makes each individual, fluid, experimental.
The onion is peeled with the delicacy and scruple of a Peer Gynt who knows it's his own skin he pares. Hence the superb defence of morbidity as the result of facing the world afresh: the man of genius is a new Adam "face to face with death and change," breaking use and routine, generality and blandness, making mirrors whose sincerity makes us " share his feeling," whose strangeness makes us "share his vision." Such abstract formulations of the sincerities of art are animated by those intimate passages here published for the first time. We see the agonies of a prolonged virginity, a guilty and scared masturbation that made him ill, sexual desire that made him scream; and the late randiness of his rejuvenescence takes on a new look. We have a fairly detailed summary of the first love affair with Olivia Shakespeare (Diana Vernon) and can feel more sharply the warmth of sexual gratitude, an emotion expressed more rarely than longing and rapture, in much of his early poetry.
But the sex isn't all torment. There is the matter-of-fact chronicle of the prostitute whose kinky clients included the man who brought her pigeons to strangle; and even the purchase of Yeat's first bed of down, bought embarrassedly at so much per inch in Tottenham Court Road, has its funny side, at least before it was haunted by that dark bedhaunter, Maud Gonne. In all this we are aware of chanciness and of ordering. When Maud's image became too strong not to be painfurly visible to Olivia the affair ended, but Yeats candidly explains that he might well have prevented this by reading love poetry to bring "the right mood round." A reminder of the strength of poetry and the fragility of passion.
Yeats knew that sexual solitude and pain could be creative. For him the enemy of feeling and art is not frustration, but impersonality. "A thousand impersonalities have filled the world with the imitation of what was once gold," he says, of education and newspapers. His political antagonism to education is not ingratiating, belonging with his defence of moneyed leisure and grace, the cult of Coole. But the chronicle does at least fill in the reasons for the ideologies. He makes loving use of Blake's comment that Government is " sonitething Else be sides Human Life." His distrust of mass education comes from personal experience of the mechanical destructiveness of political parties and public life, which need logic and 'commonplace eloquence' and imitate rather than initiate the passions, except perhaps for hate. He sees public life as having "no use for distinguished feeling or individual thought" and one could hazard the argument that his own views on class as well as his defence of the terrible beauty of violence were perhaps products of his own corruptibility. Like many people caught between the sterilities of political action and the sterilities of political apathy, Yeats found no solution.
He never sentimentalises his passions, never completely rejects reason. When he prefers the ecstasies of Crashaw to modern raptures because the older poetry is grounded in common language and common life, there is not only a corrective to the defence of feeling, but a reminder that Yeats at his wildest, in the Crazy Jane poems, is the poet of reason as well as extreme passion. "Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement" is a truth grasped by the intelligence as well as the body's knowledge. The demonic poet is the passionate man whose impulses are argued and licensed by his philosophy.
One of his most vivid comments on the killing political life is a more personal one, amusingly related to his early attack on the vicious pressures of family life. Observing that evil may wear the mask of virtue, he says that he has known more men "destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by harlots and drink." For himself, he says, the destructive force was not the family but the nation. Yeats's awareness of rationality should not tempt anyone to claim him too complacently for any Establishment.
He is speaking here of the temptations of the imaginative man. One of the great pleasures of this book springs from the blended powers of prose and poetry, making a beam of great strength, like Yeats's own dazzling image of the joining of sunlight and moonlight. "This beam shines not only as the prose uses the imagistic and fabulous forms of poetry, but as prose becomes actual poems. The danger of system is that the poet may vulgarise himself and pass out of "his passion as from under a fiery cloud," and here Yeats can move right into the heart of his fiery cloud, passing from the brooding moment, where intelligence and passion join to the order and intensity of lyric. The moral radiance and forms of individual life aren't just discussed. They rise out of the discursive prose, stare at us and make the persuasive case for sincerity and the moment, show us what he's talking about, engage our imagination. The moral sense, Yeats says, needs theatricality, a quality he found lacking in Wordsworth but sadly not missed by the 'better sort' of journalism, exemplified by reviewers in The Spectator "who are part of the machine and yet care for poetry." We can see Yeats's moral sense taking on theatricality, isolating and extending part of an event, or stretching response imaginatively to grasp a fresh possibility. The movement into poetry shows exactly what he means by the relation between discipline and the theatrical sense. It involves the imagining of "ourselves as different from what we are," as in a pose as well as a poem. Some times it is the imagining of a hard answer, for the process involves argument, as well as feeling. The unwilled nature of such efforts is striking, in the general absence of explicit decisions to make a poem, the gradual rise from prosaic utterance to a rough or limp poetic version. There was one beast, Yeats tells us in one of the fables in this book, which Adam didn't name, or named wrongly. It cannot be called anything or summoned, but it does permit us to call it pegasus.
Pegasus comes along, uncalled, on many occasions. Chronicle becomes lyric. Yeats's habit of writing prose versions of poems is here seen at source, and forces us to stop drawing hard distinctions between prose and poetry. The poetic moment is there, in intense feeling and meditation, when Yeats despairs about Maud Gonne's lack of understanding, when he thinks of the rejection of the Playboy of the Western World, when Lady Gregory goes to America. There is the movement from feeling to reason. After all, he ruminates, his poetry exists in order to explain to Maud Gonne (if she understood, it would not be necessary); the rejection of Synge was envy of his virile force; though he is troubled by a sense of foreboding about Lady Gregory's voyage, even the ghosts will be more vivid than new faces in the old rooms. The argument is intelligent and creates fresh feeling. Despair about Maud is argued into faith through opposition; a defensive feeling about Synge moves through contempt into praise; fear becomes confident and tender assurance. Of course the process doesn't always break out into poems. The brooding on Synge, for instance, rises from a sporadic analysis into a twinned set-piece, ' Celebrations ' and ' Detractions,' still prose, but intense, eloquent and structured. The images from the poems emerge later, absorbed back into prose, like the eunuch in the Synge poem, which turns up to aid Yeats in a Jeremiad against the sterility of Ireland. We move out of the rough block into poetic form, back again into the block.
It is never merely blockish, nearly always what Yeats called joyous and crea tive. It must be said, however, that this sense of identity and relation with the poetry has to be provided by the reader, and by a reader fairly well endowed with a knowledge of the poems and the life. Denis Donoghue provides full and useful factual notes, but they might have been more valuably extended to give the less knowledgeable reader more biographical detail, for instance, about Yeats's continuing friendship with Olivia Shakespeare, and the later stages of his relation with Maud Gonne. The editor may have felt that such elaboration was poaching on the preserves of his own projected biography of Yeats, but its absence weakens the blurb's claim to fascinate not only scholars but the general reader. Even the scholar may have his complaint. There is a useful guide-list to Estrangement and The Death of Synge, which includes extensive passages from the Journal, but only a general indication of those passages in the Autobiography which have not previously been published. Perhaps a more important omission is that of sustained commentary on the actual materials. What we are offered is rather cursory, even halfhearted. We are told for instance that the poems are always there in the 'foreground,' but that's all there is about the poetry. We are not given the full critical and biographical introduction we might expect from an editor who has been brooding for so long over such treasures.
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