R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: a Life, Vol. II: the Arch-Poet, 1915-1939.

Archibald, Douglas

R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939. Oxford, OUP, 2003. 798 pages. EUR 43.18 (hardback).

Both Volume I, The Apprentice Mage (1997), and Volume II are dedicated to F.S.L. Lyons whose early death in 1983 led to Roy Foster's taking on this monumental project: one of Ireland's most distinguished historians salutes another. Both volumes insist that this is an historian's work: 'Most biographical studies of WBY are principally about what he wrote; this one is principally about what he did'. Chronology trumps themes--'we do not, alas, live our lives in themes, but day by day' (I, p.xxvii)--and poems are often quoted in early drafts or printings '[i]n an effort to recapture immediacy' (I, p.xxx). Volume II attends a little more fully to literary context, to 'the way certain poems are embedded in the text--and in the life' (II, p.xxi), but still insists 'that while his greatness as a lyric poet is unassailable, he was very much more than simply that' (I, pp.xxi-xxii).

That all sounds straightforward, brisk, professional, unexceptionable. But is it really the best approach to the biography of a man who knew by the time he was sixteen that if he was to be anything at all in the world, he would be a poet? Has anyone ever said that Yeats was simply anything? And wasn't everything, somehow, ultimately in the service of lyric poetry? It is tempting to think that the most unfinished, unguarded utterance is the most revealing, that it gives us the drop on the poet, but the counterstatement--that the most worked is the most true--has the authority of most poets, the wonderful manuscript work of Bradford, Stallworthy and others, and Yeats's bold quatrain about revisions:

 The friends that have it I do wrong
 When ever I remake a song,
 Should know what issue is at stake:
 It is myself that I remake.

A small example of the consequences of the choice of doing over writing is Foster's account of a sequence of events that took place between Christmas 1912 and the publication of 'Upon A Dying Lady' in August, 1917, events accurately and helpfully recorded at the end of Volume I and beginning of Volume II: Yeats learned of Mabel Beardsley's cancer in late 1912, visited her in a nursing home in Hampstead in January 1913, noticed the dolls sent by Charles Ricketts, wrote two good, detailed letters to Lady Gregory, and a sequence of poems which rightly pleased him, withheld from publication until Mabel's death in 1916, and first printed in the Little Review when Harriet Monroe offered too little from Poetry. What this leaves out is the vivid presence of Aubrey, dead since 1898, to his sister and mother, now ministering to her second child, and the spiritual, social, and imaginative generosity of the poems' discovery of strength, gaiety, and courage rather than pathetic loneliness and triviality. It also omits the ways in which the poems pass judgment on the nineties, including Yeats's own work, declare growth, and move on. That is: the rigorously biographical account can miss some of the complex ways in which (to quote a famous passage central to all biographical consideration of Yeats, including this one) the poet 'has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete', the ways in which random life becomes achieved content.

This is not a call for a series of readings of poems and plays from a formalist or biographical/historical, or any other theoretical/critical perspective. It is an expression of disagreement about a strategic decision and of disappointment that this magnificent, magisterial, definitive work does not comprehend imaginative texts with the fullness and richness of, say, Ellmann's Backgrounds to 'The Dead' and Ulysses or W. J. Bate's accounts of Rasselas and 'The Vanity of Human Wishes'. Sometimes we feel the gap between the experience of a Yeats poem and the experience of reading Foster on a Yeats poem as more complete than it needs to be. The less the gap, the more satisfying the experience of reading Foster. For at least one reader the gap is smallest with those poems and plays most completely intermeshed with twentieth-century Irish history ('Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen', 'Meditations in Time of Civil War') or with the Anglo-Irish condition ('Blood and the Moon', 'In Memory of Eva Goore-Booth and Con Markievicz', The Words upon the Window-Pane, Purgatory), largest with poems of personal and existential resonance ('A Prayer for my Daughter', 'Among School Children', 'Vacillation', 'Lapis Lazuli', 'The Man and the Echo'), except for the wonderfully full account of 'The Wild Swans at Coole'.

That gap and those reservations do not obtain for the prose. The background to Dramatis Personae, for example, creates just the kind of blurred margin among 'factual history', Yeats's rendering of the nineties from the perspective of the thirties, and Foster's account of all three that makes this such an engaging book. A different kind of successful juggling occurs with the Oxford Book of Modern Poetry and all its complex attendant issues, and the sustained treatment of the Occult, A Vision, and the System is lucid, thorough, sceptical, and persuasive.

So what's the news? What does the informed reader of Yeats learn from this long, packed book that follows a slightly less long, equally packed Volume I? I think it is a matter of consolidation rather than revelation (though I, for one, did not know that Yeats wore just pajama tops, eschewing the trousers--even at Coole!--and had forgotten about the blue hair rinse in the late, leonine years). Our sense of Yeats's life is not fundamentally altered, but it is presented with such clarity and authority and in such massive detail that another take anytime soon (a century?) seems impossible. Here are some of the major categories.

Money. There has been some bad faith tittering about Yeats's first reaction to the telephone report of the Nobel Prize in 1923: 'How much Smyllie, how much is it'? Foster is exhaustive. There was never enough. JBY's improvidence was not charming for those who lived it. George's income of about 600 [pounds sterling] a year matched his own and was protected as 'a rampart round the children'. In 1917-1918, the year of 'A Prayer for My Daughter' with its yearning for rootedness, 'one dear perpetual place', the newly-weds had 20 addresses in 12 months. The Nobel money 'represented a brief interlude, not a settled future'. The work of the shrewd publicist, literary entrepreneur, and manager of manuscripts and editions, a team effort with George, had lofty ends in cultural politics and literary reputation, but began in financial need. When he died the estate was modest and encumbered.

Family. In 1906 JBY wrote two strong, angry letters to his eldest son, who had appeared indifferent to family affection. They were probably justified but over the course of his long life, Yeats was steadfast and loyal. He tolerated his father's irresponsibility in London and Dublin and supported him in New York. He stepped in when Jack had a breakdown in 1915-1916. He subsidized the Cuala Press extensively and so kept from destitution Lily, his closest sibling, and Lolly, a real trial: later in their lives he met her at the Shelburne because it was the only place she could not shout at him.

Women. Iseult Gonne's hold over his affections and emotions 19171920 was stronger, and she was treated more brutally by Francis Stuart, than most of us realized. The platoon of admirers/supporters/ botherers in the thirties is dizzying: Margot Ruddock, Ethel Mannin, Dorothy Wellesley, Elizabeth Pelham, Edith Shackleton Heald, the appalling Mrs Gwyneth Foden ('Gertrude Riddell, nee Wollcott' in the index), a Moya Llewellyn Davies. Foster is generous and astute as well as amused by the combination of sexual desire without potency, imaginative energy and need, awareness of bodily decay and death, and knowledge of both public status and the state of being beyond one's public identity that animates these several relationships. They are sometimes rescued by a saving, if slightly grotesque, irony; to Edith in September, 1937: 'I am longing for you body and soul ... O my dear, I want to say all those foolish things which are sometimes read out in breach of promise cases'.

The Occult, A Vision, and the System. It all matters, but it matters not as eschatology but as an expression of 'the will to believe', 'passionate credulity', a 'religious temperament unattached to a religion', and in 1917 when the automatic writing began, 'the need to make sense of his sudden and apparently desperate marriage, indeed to make a triumphant success of it'. Improbable and outre as it sometimes sounds, this system of analysis and belief exists in the service of freedom and creativity.

Politics. The politics are class-based because he carries with him Sligo, Yeatses and Pollexfens, the rights and dignity of the minority, the history of Anglo-Ireland, but not--or not usually--because he speaks for narrow or Ascendancy or unionist class interest. The bedrock is intellectual and artistic freedom. He was a serious senator genuinely at risk; he and his wife were courageous in their determination to stay in Dublin. From the late twenties on he was often tactless, aggressive, enraged; never anti-Semitic; authoritarian and haphazardly Fascist, but not Nazi'.

Many illuminating particulars. Here are three accounts wholly adequate to their varied, important occasions. The controversy over Hugh Lane's pictures. Lady Gregory as hostess, friend, collaborator, conscience, type, and image. 'Great hatred, little room'--the self-conscious struggle against hatred, the desire to cast it away, that lasts all his life, even while he indulges it.

Yeats's luck. He was lucky in his father (Foster is not easy on JBY but his summary is just and generous), in his brother and one of his sisters, in his women, his collaborators, and his occasions, the fit between his inner life and the outer weather breaking all around him. But, as Foster knows and shows, poets, like athletes, make their own good or bad fortune. 'It is myself that I remake' applies to the life as well as the text.

One measure of the confidence of this book is Foster's ready wit, the sly glance or raised eyebrow, a command of his material so thorough that it can be off-hand, like the gods as household deities in late Yeats. After a full account of Mrs Yeats's first immersion in automatic writing on their honeymoon: 'No wonder George was tired'. On Shaw's The Black Girl in Search of God: 'This Voltairean fable created, among other special effects, a living Jesus who was an odd amalgam of Shaw and Swift, advanced racial intermarriage on a global scale, causing a gratifying uproar in South Africa, where GBS had written it'. The other side of this is the only annoying stylistic in a beautifully written book: the unnecessary, knowing adjective or adverbial phrase: 'unsurprisingly', 'as usual', 'predictably', 'of course', 'as always'.

This is an extraordinarily useful (astonishing archival work, impeccable index, notes and other apparatus), handsome (wonderful photographs and illustrations), witty, generous, and lucid book. It provides the same extensive, high-level pleasure as do the great biographies by Ellmann, Bate, Tomalin, Holmes, and others, and so raises an interesting question: maybe this is not the Age of Theory in spite of Theory's power in the academy, but of life writing, political (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln) in the United States, literary and cultural in the UK and Ireland.