REVIEWS The Unwilling Persephone

George Mills Harper (General Editor) assisted by Mary]ane Harper, Yeats's Vision Papers (London: Macmillan, 1992) 3 vols:

Volume I: Tile Automatic Script: 5 November 1917-18June 1918, ed. by Steve L. Adams, Barbara]. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry, xiv + 565 pp. £65.00. Volume 2: 11Ie Automatic Script: 25 Jurle 1918-29 Marcil 1920, ed. by Steve L. Adams, Barbara]. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry, xiii + 596 pp. £65.00. Volume 3: Sleep and Dream Notebooks, Vision Notebooks 1 and 2, Card File, ed. by Robert Anthony Martinich and Margaret Mills Harper, xiii + 444 pp. £65.00 (£150.00 the set).

Deirdre Toomey

When George Yeats began her career as a medium, she could not have anticipated the long road ahead - and presumably neither could the tran­ scribers and editors of these volumes. However, the formidable labours of George Mills Harper el al have demonstrated that George Yeats was one of the greatest of mental mediums, irrespective of the usc that Yeats made of her scripts. A new generation of mental mediums had arisen in reaction to the increasing fraudulence surrounding manifestation mediumship: however, if one compares George Yeats's task with that of any other mental medium, one sees her superiority. Mrs Leonore Piper, one of the major trance mediums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had remarkable telepathic powers, but little culture. Mrs Piper's cheerful, unschooled presentation of "Sir Walter Scott", who arrives from Mars to chat to members of the SPR about the solar system, docs not inspire confidence in the Beyond. Like George Yeats, Mrs Piper did allow a question and answer format - a taxing procedure for the

267 268 Yeats ATlTlual No. 10

medium. Other mental mediums, such as Hester Dowden, Geraldine Cum­ mins (or earlier Catherine Muller), tended to present long spooling narratives, or well rehearsed speeches: true improvisation during the sitting was not called for. George Yeats, from the outset, allowed a Socratic procedure, which clearly placed great strain on her powers of memory, synthesis and exposition. Only once in these scripts does she descend to "romance" - and then clearly to give herself a break. During the summer of 1919 she delivered a long novelistic account of their previous lives and loves. This has the feel of historical fiction and is embarrassingly close to the "romances" of lesser mediums; indeed, she tried to rescind this talc carlyon. Where did it all come from? Flournoy analyses and identifies Catherine Muller's romances of Mars and India as the fantasies of a lively but frustrated young woman. I-lester Dowden's Oscar Wilde scripts of 1923, were a tOllr de force. Wilde complained that the afterlife had not improved his mother and passed judgement on Ulysses (which he disliked) and The Forsyte Saga (which he was enjoying) before recalling and dismissing Yeats with remarkable negativity - yet Hester Dowden did not come naked into the seance room. She had been reading Sherard's The Real Oscar Wilde. George Yeats presents a much greater problem. Almost from the outset she is improvising some kind of philosophical system. By 8 November 1917, she is well iilto the antithetical self and the primary self. Where did she get her basic material? It could be argued that there is little in the earlier part of the script which does not derive from Yeats's own thought, particularly "Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places" and Per Amica Silmtia L,lI/ae. Neither was published, but George could well have been shown the former some time before and the latter, composed during 1917, would have been an obsessive element in his conversation in that year. It would have been difficult for anyone close to Yeats to have avoided grasping the machinery of the essay, much of which had been part of his philosophy since 1909. The sun and moon symbolism, as first communicated on 5 November (be­ fOl-c it is sophisticated and elaborated in rapid response to Yeats's excited interpretations), seems to me to have a sexual drift: "don't forget - melt [saturn] in [venus] melt [saturn] in [venus]". Certainly Sun and Moon sym­ bols, as well as the more predictable Mars and Venus symbols, are used later in the script as a code for intercourse. The editors gloss these first communica­ tions as forming the basis of the sun-moon symbolism of A Visioll, and indeed this is how Yeats came to read them. But was this what George originally intended? Her first communications about the progress of personality and soul in a cycle could well derive from Theosophical theories of Karma and the wheel of rebirth, stich as Annie Besant's Reillcamalioll. George's statement on "The UlIwillillg Persepholle" 269

21 November 1917, about 2000-year cycles culminating in the final incarnation of an initiate, seems also a modification of Blavatskyan cycles. But what is the source of those "gyres and cubes and midnight things"? Those elements which Yeats isolates in "The Gift ofHarun AI-Rashid" as the true communication of the Djinn?

All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things Arc but a new expression of her body Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.

Yeats here confesses the geometry of the automatic scripts as the one thing which could not have come from his mind 01' another's. Yet he also del'ives the strange shapes from the young wife's body, her sexual self. The link between the spirits and sexual activity is demonstrated to an astonishing degree in the scripts; the first flood of communication was, after all, in the early stages of their honeymoon. Later, when it was clear that Yeats found the communica­ tions more exciting than intercourse, George and the unknown instructors went on strike. Yeats was warned (30June 1919) that "script depends on the love of medium for you". He was intermittently told that without "[sun] in [moon]", i.e., intercourse, there would be no communieations, something about which he was surprisingly resentful for a man recently married to a woman half his age. Curiously, the link between mediumship and sexuality - especially in the case of physical manifestation mediums - was a topic in psychical research at this time. Dr Hereward Carrington argued that the sexual energies of the medium were translated into physical phenomena; he identified orgasm coincident with manifestation in certain mediums, including Eusapia Paladino. That these scripts provide a picture of the Yeatses' intimate life was to be expected. It is this aspect of the scripts which is most moving - George's playfulness and irritation, pretending to be a cat washing its whiskers and purring when Yeats wanted a communication (Yeats noted "cat trouble again"), scribbling a donkey's head (glossed with "idiot") at the conclusion of a script tedious to her. Her ordinary high spil'its at times give rise to a Marx Brothers' dialogue: "What question am I to ask? I That is because you are thick and heavy / What do you mean by hairy I Hear!)!, not hairy". George regularly gets the controls to remind Yeats to let the cat in, and later in the "sleeps" "Carmichael" engages in a Beckettian grumble about their having the cat Harry in bed between them washing itself, while he is trying to communi­ cate: "Washing, washing, more washing & swallowing all that dirt". Yet there arc also allccting outbursts on her part as to Yeats's separation from the ordinary rhythms oflife and his destructive exploitation of her gift. On 4 March 1918 there is a moving discussion, in which George tries to get Yeats 270 Yeats AlIlIual No. 10

to decide whether or not they should have children: she assures him that if they do he will always come first:

her happiness will always depend on you only but the child would only give her happiness in being yoUI' child she docs not want a child for its own sake ... she will on the whole be equally happy during your life whether you want a child or no it will always be you she will love in the child ...

Yeats clearly could give no satisfactory response to this heroically altruistic plea, for George explodes, "oh no but youll go on meandering for 10 years if I dont fix a time". A sad entry of 16 November 1919 indicates how by thcn George had come to regard the continuing burden of these scripts: "Persephone / Pluto & Persephone / The Unwilling Persephone ... ". She saw Yeats as Pluto dragging her down into the underworld and darkness, from the richness of ordinary natural life, which she was "unwilling to leave". That she saw the task increasingly as an ordeal is evident in the number of times that, pressured by Yeats to have yet another evening session, she allowed a control to come and to announce immediately that he was leaving - "nothing for tonight goodbye". Yet when Yeats gave her the option of abandoning the project, by asking "Has not all this painful process merely brought us to state of natural affection which many must reach at once? If not, what is the difference", she docs not usc this moment of doubt to end the scripts. Some of Yeats's own questions are moving and revealing; his concern to analyse the patterns of his life leads him to ask, "Is an unfortunate PF [personal fate] necessary to intellectual or artistic power?" George's answer is uncharacteristically brutal: " ... you are the one. No richness - all dried up - rattling Stones instead of thought - stones in a tin can." A response that found its way into

A mound of refuse or the sweeping of a street, Old kettles, old bottles and a broken can, Old iron old bones, old rags ...

There is evidence of considerable tension between them when George does not have enough data to work from and when Yeats is determined not to assist. It seems to me that when discussing the Archer vision in January 1918, he is deliberately making things difficult for George, who does not yet know enough about the experience to answer coherently. The prolonged analysis of Yeats's emotional history, particularly the affairs with Olivia Shakes pear and Maud Gonne, arc productive of real tension. George gets her dates wrong (and hence her Critical Moments and Initiatory Moments) and Yeats becomes a hostile cross-examiner. Here, I think, the reader would have been helped by mOl'e "The Unwillillg Persepholle" 271

precise biographical information from the editors, particularly the exact dates of the affair with Maud Gonne of 1908-9 and those of his second affair with Olivia Shakespear in 1910. These are quite crucial maUers, as GeOl'ge was not fully informed in these areas and was often working in the dark. Yeats again refused to help her out, demonstrating the true SPR spirit. The three volumes have a long introduction by Professor Harper which offers a useful overview of the progress of the scripts, and there arc concise but equally useful introductions to the "Sleeps" and to the Card File. The annota­ tion of the three volumes provides a good running guide to the development of the System. It would be unreasonable, given the massiveness of the task which faced these editors and their very considerable achievement, to quarrel much with the level, or indeed consistency, of annotation. I merely offer some queries and a few alternative J·eadings. On 24 January 1919, George wrote angrily "Script tomorrow 10 30 but no/ on Sunday or Monday & be careful not to let those physical psychics get into my area." The annotation is of limited usc, merely distinguishing the two types of medium, physical and mental. Who are the physical mediums to whom George is so hostile? The major Dublin mediums of this period were, like her, mental. However, the date led me to cOl~ecture that she was thinking of the Goligher circle in Belfast, which centred upon Kathleen Goligher, a physical medium whose ectoplasm-producing abilities had been investigated by William Crawford since 1914. Indeed, Yeats was to lecture with Crawford in Dublin on 26 January 1919. George's violent distaste must have sprung from the rich aroma of sexual pathology and fraud emanating from Kathleen Goligher's mediumship. She wished for no link between the Goligher activities and her own mediumship. Early in the automatic script, on I February 1918, George told Yeats that he would shortly encounter a m;yor medium who would be of great use to him, "a high medium", and counselled him as to his behaviour towards this (unknown) woman: "talk to her of Glastonbury of your own work". The editors (mis­ takenly) gloss this as a reference to Hester Dowden, whom Yeats had known for many years and with whom he had sat ft'equently, especially when trying to contact Hugh Lane. It is impossible that George Yeats could have been thinking of Hester Dowden; by 1918, Yeats would have bored her silly about the Hugh Lane communications. Further, the editors' sale reason for identify­ ing Hester Dowden as the unnamed medium is the reference to the celebrated Glastonbury Scripts, to which she contributed, but not until well into the 1920s. I think it more likely that the "high medium" is fictive, but that already George was beginning to sicken of her task and to hope that Yeats could be encouraged to seck another medium to share the burden. Some areas of dispute are less clear-cut. On 2 September 1918, after a 272 Yeats Annual No. 10 puzzling and unglossed reference to "what happened to us" on the previous day (obviously something very unpleasant, "serious danger"), Yeats asks "Thomas": "Can you say what is 'allusion' in Palmers hypothetic [hypna­ gogic?] picture." The editors annotate this by quoting lines 12-20 of "The Phases of the Moon", a strategy which, although stimulating, mobilises more difficulties than it resolves. The drift of Yeats's question concerns automatic drawing and artistic images which derive from the collective unconscious. It could be that Yeats and George had been reading A. H. Palmer's Life of his father and had been reflecting on Palmer's account of the genesis of "The Lonely Tower". Palmer insists that the whole composition came to him "un­ awares" and continues, "That mystery cannot be commanded, that immaterial and therefore real image ... falls into the earthly soul and becomes subject in a great measure to the condition of matter." Some omissions seem puzzling; the Freud reference that the editors were unablc to trace is from The Psychopathology of Everytlqy Life (p. 124 in the Standard Edition). Some very obvious biographical allusions remain un­ glossed. On p. 20 of Volume 3, there is no note on the "Initiation of the Spear" (Mem 134); George had clearly been shown either the manuscript of Memoirs or the Visiolls Notebook of 1898-1901 - possibly the latter. Material relating to George's mother, Nelly Tucker, is unannotated, although it is clear that the drunken husband of Volume 2, p. 422, is Gilbert Hyde-Lees, apparently some­ thing of a rotter. The "blundering man" of Volume 3, p. 424, is poor Harry Tuckel', Olivia Shakespear's brother, a mild timorous man dominated by Nelly, who sought refuge in insanity (and subsequently total nudity) in 1931 (.John Harwood's Olivia Shakespear alltl W. B. Yeats tells the story). A more obscure allusion is the running obsession during the "sleeps" with the smell of violets. Maud Gonne always wore a violet scent. Yeats strongly associated this scent with her, and in 1912 had asked Olivia Shakespear to psychometrise some violets which had been given to him by Maud Conne. I think that material relating to magical practices should have been more consistently glossed. "Thomas" often insists on there being a "banishing" before a sitting. This is presumably a GD banishing ritual, such as that of the Lesser Pcntagram. The note on Samekh (vol. 3 p. 87) is wholly inapposite, merely glossing the letter's numerical value and symbolism. The path Samekh on the Cabbalistic Tree (the path of the arrow) is linked to one of the obsessions of Yeats's life from 1896 on, the Archer Vision (see Au 375, Myth 340, Mem 100-104). In lines 119-23 of "The Phases of the Moon" the path of the arrow is seen as the way out of the Wheel. As the AI'Cher vision is glossed in the first volume, this perhaps indicates the numbing effect upon the editors of working on the automatic scripts. A desperate note on Yeats's reference to a "story from the Masonic Diction- Les cygnes sauvages a Coole 273 a .. y about a ce .. tain mystic (he is in 'Wa.. and Peace')" runs: "Possibly a .. efe .. ence to Pie .... e who has a vision of the country as a living thing". One can have unqualified sympathy fo,· editors faced with the prospect of re-reading War al/d Peace, seeking an unspecified mystic, but "Masonic Dictionary" surely refers to Kenneth Mackenzie's The Royal Masol/ic Cyclopedia (which Yeats pre­ sumably inherited from Uncle George). War al/d Peace has a masonic sub­ theme: thus a surprising number of mystics are briefly mentioned. Yeats is probably thinking of Saint-Martin (the Martinists are referred to in Volume II, Pa .. t 3). In Mackenzie's entry on Saint-Martin there is no "story" that fits Yeats's allusion but there is a cross reference to J. G. Gichtel, whom Saint­ Martin admired. Gichtel believed that he had been married to a divine bride, Sophia; that the marriage had been "consummated" and that they were to have spiritual children. Given the context - Yeats's brooding on his unborn SOil, the New Avata,· - this seems the most likely "story". The edito .. s have ref.. ained from conjecture in such matters as the names of George's controls, but a reviewer is not so restricted, and I would offe .. a suggestion. lie .. first control, Thomas of Dorlowicz, is possibly composed from the names of D .. Ochorowicz, the psychical .. esea .. che .. , and his medium Mile Tomczyk (by this time ma .... ied to Yeats's friend Everard Feilding). George's othe .. controls and guides largely follow the convention, established by mental mediums, of loosely c1assicised names: Moses Stainton had "Recto.. ", "Im­ pe .. ator", "Prudens", "Magus" and "Mentor", a group subsequently absorbed by Mrs Piper. Geraldine Cummins had 'Astor'. The Glastonbury sc .. ipts came through "Johannes". George follows this convention with "Dione .. tes", "Ontclos", "Ameritus" and - her little joke - "Epilamia". I bet she was glad when it was all over.

w. B. Yeats, Les cyglles sauvages Ii Coole, trans. Jean-Yves Masson (Paris: Verdier, 1990) 180 pp.

Adolphe Haberer

On the fundamental impossibility of t .. anslating poetry into anothe .. language, all the essential arguments have long been given. The truly poetic dimension of the poem, that which is related to the signifier, cannot but be ir .. emediably lost and only the meaning is p .. ese .. ved, ill-defined and p .. oblematic though it may often be. As Auden put it in "The Cave of Making", "this unpopula .. a .. t ... 274 Yeats Annual No. 10

cannot ... be 'done' like Venice I or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon I being read or ignored". The desire to attempt the impossible must be very great, though, for in his bibliography Jean-Yves Masson lists no fewer than six previous translators of Yeats's poems into French, the poet Yves Bonnefoy being one of them. But all of them gave no more than a selection of the better-known pieces, and Masson's work is the first complete translation into French of one of Yeats's collections of poems. The author, moreover, announces the forthcoming publication of Michael Robartes etla dallsellse and La TOllr, and he may well have in mind the long-term project of a comprehensive translation of the Collected Poems. Les cyglles sallvages Ii Coole is in any case a beautiful book. The choice of type, the quality of paper and print, the generous lay-out, allowing each translation to face the original poem, and giving each new poem, whatever its length, the same pride of place at the beginning of a new page - everything adds up to make it a refined object to handle and read. The overall quality of the translation is also to be praised. Jean-Yves Masson is a careful, precise and often elegant translator. Though there may be something slightly absurd in presenting to English-speaking connoisseurs of Yeats a translation they will probably never feel the necessity, or the desire, to read, they may feel some satisfaction on thinking of the number of French people who, without any working knowledge of English, will henceforth have access to some of Yeats's best-known poems. There are, of course, details about which one may disagree. One may object to the rendering of "Who draws a bucket with the rest" by "Cclui qui traine un seau plein de rebuts" ("To a Young Beauty", pp. 46-7), to that of "All know the man their neighbour knows" by "Tous ont de I'homme la mcme connaissance que leur voisin" ("The Scholars", pp. 50-51), or, to give one last example, to the choice of "pures images" to translate "He has found, after the manner of his kind, I Mere images", which Robartes says in a superior, deprecatory way ("The Phases of the Moon", pp. 132-3). Such rare blemishes, however, are far outbalanced by the general competence of the translation and its many felicitous strokes. The greatest service rendered to poetry and to Yeats, though - and I mean this without any irony or malice towards Jean­ Yves Masson - is maybe to make any reader familiar with Yeats aware of some of the irreplaceable beauties of the original text. Let me give some examples to make the point clear. "Mais gardez inchangees I Les mains que j'ai baisees I Au nom de notre ancien amour" (leaving out the question of the comma) cannot emulate the extraordinary strength and memorability of "Leave un­ changed I The hands that J have kissed, I For old sakes' sake" ("Broken Dreams", pp. 96-7). "Soldat, savant, cavalier, tout cela: I Com me si c'etait I'abrege de la vie tout enticre" literally emasculates the potency of the stressed, alliterating, rhyming pronoun detached in self-glory as end-word in "Soldier, "Blossom Tinted Stone" 275

scholar, horseman, he, I As 'twere all life's epitome" ("In Memory of Major Robert Gregory", pp. 28-9). To end with the title-poem, "leurs ailes tumul­ tueuses" may be semantically acceptable for "their clamorous wings" but leaves out the subtle consonantal reference to Coole as well as the more obvious play on amorous, while "Ies froids, lies complices courants" obliterates the myste­ rious effect of one of the most endearing Yeatsian polysyllabic words, the "companionable" of "in the cold I Companionable streams" ("The Wild Swans at Coole", pp. 16-17). Such striking poetic saliences are indirectly brought into sharper relief by the fact that they cannot be translated. They bring us close to the irreducible nucleus of the English language - its true genius or, to use a Laeanian concept, the real of the English language. They make us feci once more what Seamus Heaney described as "the indomitable effect of [Yeats's] own deed of poetry", whose force, if one stretches the point Heaney was making about stanzaic form, is made "palpable through the firmness, in-placeness and undislodgeableness of ... form". Is not "undis­ lodgeableness", after all, what in Yeats's poetry will forever resist displacement or ... translation?

"Blossom Tinted Stone"

The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938: Always Your Friend, cd. Anna Mac­ Bride White and A. Norman Jeffares (London: Hutchinson, 1992) xvi + 543, pp. £25.00

Deirdre Toomey

John O'Leary once warned the young John Hughes that Maud GOI1lIe'S lovely face and sweet manner were deceptive: "She looks at yeh as tho' she was dying in love with yeh - but she isn't!" The 373 letters published here (with very extensive annotation and editorial apparatus) confirm O'Leary's suspicion and belie the gentle face smiling from the dust-jacket. Political matters dominate these letters and those last romantics who might have hoped for a Maud Gonne expressive of her physical self will be dis­ appointed. Her political positions from the early 1890s are now available in an exploded version which, I think, undercuts Roy Foster's identification of her as "radical right". This description certainly fits the revanchist anti-semitic chauvinists with whom she moved in Paris, but does little justice to the sheer 276 Yeats Allllual No. 10

complexities of her allegiances: as she rather naively told WBY, she was "edectique". As well as her Irish Nationalist affiliations, she also spent a surprising amount of time with socialists and anarchists. One is pulled up to read within a single sentence of her sympathy for the communards, "the murderer of 30,000 french men women & children - defenceless prisoners after the Commune" and of her anti-semitism, " ... the lawyer of the jews". She attended socialist meetings in Paris, joined Connolly's Irish Socialist Republi­ can Party and, in May 1899, referred to democratic socialism as if it were a political creed she and Yeats shared. The ugly side of her convictions cannot be avoided. Her anti-semitism is a profoundly depressing actuality. Her con­ temptuous dismissal of Dreyfus, "an uninteresting jew" (Yeats was a Dreyfu­ sanl) and her regular anti-semitic remarks are not casual or conventional but part of a nativist Nationalism: one· begins to see why after the Second World War she refused to discuss the Death Camps (possibly she believed this a British conspiracy) and devoted hel' energies to helping German (but not Jewish) children. Yet when young and fully politically active she had qualities which were lamentably eroded in her later years - humour, irony and a sense of the ludicrous. Her reaction to the machinations of McCarthy Teeling (a nationalist chiefly remarkable for being madder and more marginal than Frank Hugh O'Donnell), who in 1897 had accused her of being a British spy, is almost devoid of anger: "I thought he was some narrow minded idiot who was scandalised at a woman leading an independent life ... but now I begin to think worse of him than that". She kept her temper remarkably well during a pamphlet campaign against her by Frank Hugh O'Donnell, despite his attempts to stitch her up for treason-felony and the sacks of hate-mail which he sent to her. When Ramsay Colles, the editor of the Dublill Figaro who had also libelled her, was attacked by a sjambok-wielding Arthur Griffith, she visited her defender in Mountioy Prison and reported him to be "in very good spirits notwithstanding wearing prisOl! dress of an extraordinarily ugly description". Maud Gonne at Mountjoy Prison, a thing never seen again! She had always projected the greatel' part of her positive and negative feelings onto political life, but when after the end of her marriage, she was denied an outlet in practical politics, the blocked emotions increasingly im­ pactec\. Betrayal had always been a key concept for her and the betrayals and tragedies of her personal life were always projected onto politics. Increasingly she became the figure Maire Comerford recalled, a figure of "reactions, rescnt­ ing injustice, going whel'e places were burnt ... ". After 1921, the political grudge letters become a Niagara. Yet could she have been happy if a Republic had been created then, without partition? Bitterness was, I think, too en­ grained. As Yeats asked, "Where had her sweetness gone?" "Blossom Ti,lted Slolle" 277

But what of Yeats? Of the thirty letters to Maud Gonne which survive, the greatest revelation is found in that ofc.lateJanuary 1903; the myth that Yeats heard for the first time of Maud Gonne's marriage when about to give a lecture is destroyed by this letter - one of at least three letters written seeking to prevent her marriage. Yeats seems to have sent her a draft, with cancellations and revisions, which give the manuscript a very expressive character. The story of the lecture stems from George Yeats (she told the same version to both Jeffares and Ellmann in c. 1946) and must represent the version given to her by Yeats. Perhaps Yeats did receive a letter announcing the actual marriage at a lecture and had a reaction of shock despite having known Maud's plans for weeks. Yet why the distortion - why not tell the tmth to George? Why the mythologising of cruelty and thoughtlessness? Perhaps because it was painful for Yeats to admi t that the letter published -here, a letter from the heart, failed so grossly (he had once confessed to Lady Gregory his belief that "a phrase will do everything"). A version of events was constmcted in which he had been given no chance to prevent the marriage. The letter is, indeed, wholly counter-productive and desperately sincere. Yeats first appeals to their common occult life and to their "spiritual marriage" of December 1898, copying the passage from his visions diary which described their astral "marriage" by Lugh. In effect, Yeats is telling Maud that she would he committing some sort of spiritual bigamy ifshe were to marry MacBride (a thesis she came to accept after the failure of the marriage). Yeats then threatens her with spiritual and socio-political calamity: "you will fall into a lower order & do great harm to the religion of free souls that is growing up in Ireland". He argues that she has power over "the people" because she does not belong to them. Yeats's agressive elitism was not likely to move Maud. His violent attacks on Catholicism would also have been counter-productive; an emerging Ascendancy self here combines with an old Fenian self to produce the thesis that the clergy have always inhibited nationalism: "Is it the priest, when the day of great hazard has come who will lead the people. No no. He will palter with the government". Finally he returns to spiritual threats: "it is your own soul that you are about to betray". The combination of occultism, class antagonism and anti-catholicism makes a heady mixture. Maud Gonne responded with exemplary calm and kindness: Yeats's letter must have re­ inforced her decision. She was not, however, apologetic - "I k,IOW I am fulfilling a destiny ... I am the voice, the soul of the crowd." Her letter written three days after the marriage, in respollse to letters of Yeats's which do 1I0t survive, is friendly and reasonable. Her letters to Yeats give us no clue as to why she chose MacBride, although in her letters to her sister she makes clear her wish to create a family for Iseult. Yet the statement made to Yeats, that she was "fulfilling a destiny" and 278 Yeats Amlllai No. 10 various cloudy remarks about the Sidhe and Lugh, might indicate that the influence of her favourite composer, Wagner, had something to do with the marriage. When telling Yeats of the divorce proceedings she refers to MacBride as "a hero I made": she had regularly gone to Bayreuth for the Rillg and might have been intent on constructing out of MacBride a Siegmund or a Seigfried­ "dcr weihlichste Held - ich weill es". She later told friends and family that she and MacBride were planning to assassinate Edward VII on their honeymoon, a scheme aborted when MacBride went out and got drunk: this again sounds as if she saw the marriage as modelled on Act I of Gotterdammerullg. Little else in the correspondence can give us the sense of dialogue felt in these letters. The physical aDair of 1908-9 is presented from her perspective alone and one is also left conjecturing Yeats's response to the excessively sordid story of the divorce from MacBride, one of the very few occasions in the correspon­ dence when she expressed powerful feelings from personal (as opposed to political) life. The unusual frankness with which she writes of this farce­ tragedy throws her typical repression when dealing with personal matters into sharper relief. These letters, written in great anger and with rare self-criticism demonstrate her trust in Yeats (as do the letters concerning Iseult's wretched marriage). Even the sordid story of the marriage and divorce is lightened by accounts of MacBride's insistence that Maud had slept with every man whose photograph she had - including AE! - and by MacBride's stealing her copies of Yeats's works, which had "always annoyed him considerably". This helps to explain the surprisingly small number of signed copies which survive. Presum­ ably MacBride trashed them. Her inhibitions in personal matters produce guarded oblique writing, par­ ticularly in the earlier letters and it has not always been possible for the editors to guess at her allusions. Thus in October 1893, in a postscript to a letter which briskly deals with a cancelled political meeting, a decision not to accept a "journalistic proposition" and her G.D. 3 = 8 examination, she writes, "Thank you for the poem but I must ask you most earnestly not to publish it". This is unglossed, but is possibly a reference either to "On a Child's Death" or to "The Glove and the Cloak". Both manuscripts are of early September 1893 (close to the anniversary of the death of her first child, who had died 31 August 1891) and both deal with her mourning of Georges. The first poem is the more likely candidate for transmission to Maud Gonne, in that it deals with her feelings: further it remained unpublished, although Yeats later inscribed it in Lady Gregory's copy of Poems 1899. "The Glove and the Cloak" which deals with Yeats's resentment of Maud GOIllIe was issued most obscurely in Roma (a colfee-table book published to raise funds for charity) in c. May 1897. Maud's plea for non-publication would have made any man less unsophisticated than Yeats suspicious. Yeats and the Poetry of Death 279

Her attitude to Yeats's work is almost universally respectful, even humble­ not an impression which one gets from Autobiographies. She learnt "He thinks of those who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved" by heart and was particularly attached to rite Secret Rose and TIle Sltadowy Waters. She is unusually tolerant in her response to poems which load her with blame, such as those from rite Grem lie/met alld otlter Poems: "what you have written for me wi11live because our love has always been high & pure - You have loved generously and unselfishly as few men have loved." Even when she is in combat with Yeats it is evident that she takes his work immensely seriously. Her very hostile response to "Easter 1916" is yet the reverse of philistine. She sees the nexus of the poem in "A terrible beauty ill born", the only line of which she fully approves and is prepared to assess the poem in the context of Yeats's philosophy of flux and of historical cycles; but she also sees that a political poem has to remain open to a political critique. And nine years before she had written a letter to Yeats noble enough to be the basis of a fine poem - also a letter of political reproof; " ... as in my case, the frauds who I had exposed, the publicans & drunkards I had driven out, the cowards who I had made own their cowardice all join Mac­ Bride's party and whisper calumny against me - but in neither of our cases were the people generally to blame". Yeats responded; "After nine years, I sink my head abashed".

Jahan Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry oj Death (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990) xi + 244 pp.

Marjorie Perloff

How can we reconcile the myth of reincarnation, so prominent in Yeats's esoteric writings, especially in Per Amica Silel/tia L,mae and A Visiol/, with the ongoing effort of his lyric "to summon up heroic energy in the face of death" (p. 2)? How can we make sense of Yeats's violent denial of death even as he rehearses the death theme in poem after poem, of "his 'belief' in an afterlife and yet his refusal of this consolation in the pained prose elegies of the Autobiogra­ pIty"; of "his belittling of the fear of death and yet his assertions that terror alone begets knowledge" (p. 7)? Jahan Ramazani's diagnosis, in this subtle, sensitive, and unusually sensible book, is that Yeats's brave talk of reincarnation and the heroic defiance of death must be understood as what psychoanalysis calls "reaction-formation", 280 Yeats Allllual No. 10 the representation of the "frightening thought of death by its opposite" (p. 7). "Death in Yeats's major poetry", he argues, "cannot be understood in terms of presence - the rotting body or the later incarnation - but must be seen as a mode of absence, an absence that may be interpreted psychologically as the absence of libidinal objects, ontologically as the anticipated absence of one's own being, and linguistically as the absence of which the sign is a trace" (p. 3). Nor is this absence/presence dialectic peripheral to Yeats's oeuvre, whose great­ ness, according to Ramazani, is precisely this "to-and-fro movement between the repression of death and the avowal of its finality" (p. 7). To read Yeats's lyric, especially his elegies, as embodying this conflict model may seem, on the face of it, to do no more than to repeat traditional New Critical readings of Yeats ian self-conflict; readings by, say, Richard Ellmann or Helen Vendler 01' Thomas Whitaker, who, for that matter, served as the director of Ramazani's Yale dissertation, which was the germ of Yeats a/ld tile Poetry oj Death. But the fact is that Ramazani's argument is less New Critical, 01' even psychoanalytic (despite the many nods to Freud and to Lacan), than Wittgensteinian, the tone being set by the epigraph from the Tractatus to be found on the book's opening page: "Death is /lot all evellt oj life. Death is 1I0t lived througll". Not Yeats's attitude toward death but the language used to contain it: this is Ramazani's subject. The long opening chapter" 'Breathless Faces': The Elegy" begins by observ­ ing the prevalence of the death wish, not for the poet himself but for his beloved, in the early elegiac love poeh'y. "To an extraordinary extent", observes Ramazani, "[Yeats] thematizes his dependence on the beloved's death and absence for the life of his poetry" (p. 19). In "A Dream of Death", 101' example, the poet has to imagine his beloved (Maud Gonne) dead in order to idea lise her. The poet's own inscription "Slie was //lore beauliful til all 119' firsl love, / But IIOW lies rmder boards", implies that the act of writing depends upon the sweetheart's defacement. And in "He Wishes his Beloved were Dead" the poet's sweetheart can only be controlled by turning her into a corpse (p. 23). In discussing the representation of death in the early poems, Ramazani is not always as careful with chronology as he might be. "He Wishes" was first printed in 1898, whereas the final version of "A Dream of Death", which contains the apocalyptic lines about lying "under boards" (in the 1891 version, lines 11-12 read "And gazed upon the mournful stars above, / And heard the mournful breezc")' dates from 1913. True, even the revised vcrsion was written "Long before asking the famous question of 'The Towel": 'Does the imagina­ tion dwell the most / U pan a woman won 01' a woman lost?'" But one wonders how the language of death has changed in the twenty years between the two versions of" A Dream of Death". Ramazani is more at home, in any case, with the great "group elegies" of Yeats and the Poetry of Death 281

Yeats's middle years, which include "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" and "Easter 1916". He is, I believe, the first critic to stress the importance of the unusual "collective focus" oftl1ese elegies. Traditional elegy moums for the individual or, in the case of Milton's "Avenge 0 Lord ..." and Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", for the anonymous mass. By contrast, Yeats's best-known elegies concern the demise of a specific group, "the identi­ fication with the dead [being] combined with another impulse: the antitheti­ cal impulse of separation" (p. 33). The desire for separation accounts for the odd preponderance of blame over praise in the elegies: in "All Souls' Night", for example, the "confused" William Horton, the "withered" Florence Emery, and the crazed MacGregor Mathers are viewed as figures in decline even as the poet purports to celebrate their individual virtues. Again, the implication of "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" is that the poet can memoria lise his friends only once he has "sealed himself off from the feelings that once denoted their loss. The very success of mourning has meant its termination" (p. 42). Mourning, in other words, does not draw the poet closer to his dead friends; on the contrary, it paradoxically "increases the poet's distance from the dead, reconsigning them to the grave". Poetic speech is thus purchased at the expense of the dead, the fear of death being so strong in Yeats that he must repeatedly assign that death to others (p. 44). The scorn for the dead one finds in Yeats's elegies - Alfred Pollexfen is described as "a nobody", Sean McBride as a "drunken, vainglorious lout", Con Mal'kiewicz as an ideologue whose "voice gl'ew shrill" - is thus the embodiment of Yeats's poetic self-division, his need to confront his own im­ agincd death through the historic occasion ofloss. "Easter 1916", for example, posits that the "heroic event could not have been predicted fi'om the antiheroic participants". "Terrible beauty" - and here Ramazani's reading departs from the usual ones - is not the oxymoronic attribute of the patriots, as seen from the vantage point of the poet; on the contrary, the four rebels of stanza 2, desig­ nated as they are by demonstrative alljectives ("that woman", "this man", "this other") rather than by name, "hardly forebode terrible beauty, singly or together". Rather, the transformation celebrated in the refrain is both "defini­ tive" and "inexplicable". Indeed, it is the poet "who has changed them utterly .... He re-enacts a historical change as a perpetual linguistic event" (p. 66). I find this discussion of elegy extremely stimulating - Ramazani is especially acute on "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz" and "Parnell's Funeral" - but the subsequent chapters of Yeats alld tlie Poetry of Deatli don't quite live up to it. The second, "'Laughing to the Tomb''', which turns from genre to mode, from elegy to t.he poems of "tragic joy and the sublime", could have been stronger if Ramazani had followed his own initial hunch that heroic 282 Yeats Amlllal No. 10 posturing in Yeats is usually a sign of repression - in this case, the repression of death as a threat to the poet. The problematic bravado of such poems as "The Gyres" - "What matter though numb nightmare ride on top / And blood and mire the sensitive body stain? / What matter?" - is taken more or less at face value. "Tragic joy", we read, "is Yeats's own more assertive and aggressive version of the final movement in high Romantic mythologies: it is his equiv­ alent for Blake's organised innocence after jubilant innocence and despairing experience" (p. 95). Well, yes, but does this "equivalent" stand up to the sort of scrutiny Harold Bloom applies to it in his Yeats? Ramazani recognises that "The energy released in the poems of tragic joy often take the form oflaughter, and laughing "into the face of Death" is one of Yeats's favourite symbolic gestures, though it remains largely uninterpreted" (p. 101). But it remains largely uninterpreted in his own critique as well, the chapter's long section on Yeats's rhetoric of the sublime evading the issue of self-aggrandising "mummy truths" that Bloom discusses so acutely. The third chapter, which deals with Yeats's self-elegies, has some fascinating pages on the ekphrastic mode of such poems as "Meru" and "Sailing to Byzantium", as well as on "the trajectory of the poet's development away from 'feminine' vulnerability to invulnerable coldness and hardness" (p. 161). And Ramazani rightly suggests that Yeats's description in A Visioll of what happens after death is an indirect and idealised account of what happens before death, and that the "Return" in "The Soul in Judgment" really functions as an analysis of self-mourning. But when he turns to specific poems - "The Tower", "A Dialogue of Self and Soul", "Vacillation", and "The Circus Animals' Desertion" - he rehearses fairly familiar themes of self-division and choice. In the case of "The Tower", for example, we learn that "The poet's self-division is symptomatic of the splitting of the ego characteristic of melancholia", and that "it is a rhetorical gesture that usefully implies that the 'I' of the poet is separable from the dying 'absurdity'" (p. 168). And further: "The primary rhetorical and psychical action of the poem is gradually to strengthen this inversion of death and choice, dying and decreeing" (p. 169). John Holloway'S "Style and World in 'The Tower'" made many of the same points as long ago as 1965 and went further than Ramazani in exploring the complex rhetoric of the poem's tripartite structure. And I myself have argued, in an essay on Yeats's autobiographical mode (joumal oj Modem Literature, 1 [February 1975)), that "The Tower" 's pivot is the rhetorical question: "Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or a woman lost?", and that the inevitable answer to this question ("upon a woman lost") suggests that, if the thought of his own death was so unusually painful for the later Yeats, it was because he increasingly came to feel that he hadn't really lived; that, in abandoning the pursuit of Maud Gonne, however futile that pursuit W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction 283 may have been, he was consigning himself to the rank of those for whom the "dreaming back" would be especially painful. What I am suggesting here is that Ramazani's study of Y cats's "poetry of death" might have been strengthened by at least some consideration of the poet's biography, a biography in this case entirely germane to the argument. At the same time, the book would not have suffered if it had contained fewer allusions to Heidegger and De Man, Derrida and Lacan, none of whose theories do more, in this case, than confirm what the critic has already discovered in the poetry and prose writings of Yeats. But these are minor caveats, Ramazani's great strength among younger Yeats scholars being his unusually thorough knowledge of the larger lyric and elegiac context of Yeats's death poetry. He understands the genres, conventions and modes available to Yeats and his successors, and he is, accordingly, an unusually good, close reader of the poems themselves. Yeats and the Poetry of Death makes one look forward to this young critic's future work.

Stan Smith, W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1990),179 pp.

George J. Watson

Most teachers will be grateful for this book, a good, modest introduction to Yeats's poetry, aimed at school-leavers and undergraduates. (The title is misleading in the sense that relatively little is written about the plays.) Stan Smith achieves his major aims: "to help the student ... to approach a difficult poet without being intimidated by him, and to write critically about his poetry without simply reproducing the ideas of established critics". The Yeats he oUers is a familiar one, but the emphases - on the centrality of conflict, on the antithetical vision, on the masterfulness of diction and syntax - are right. Smith sets about rendering Yeats less formidable with a proper stress on the poet's rejection of the organic metaphor for creation, and illustrates how much slogging work and revision lies behind the achieved poems. He also demystifies criticism (as far as is possible these days) by offering in his opening chapter a clear explanation of fashionable critical buzzwords, "discourse", "polysemic", "deconstructive", "reader response" and "interpretive community". The little victims, however regardless of their doom, had better stop playing and know this stuff if they want that ticket to graduate school. Smith's own position is 284 Yeats ATlTlual No. 10 qualifiedly Fishy; but he uses the terms rather than being used by them, and stresses that any new reading must be persuasive enough to convince us. The esoteric and system-building Yeats is disposed of with chenful brutality: A Visioll is "a fascinating and infuriating mish-mash of many traditional ideas, including much half-baked historical and metaphysical speculation and a great amount of intellectual garbage". Well, that's a relief. Every teacher of Yeats will be familiar with the feeling that he or she is grading essays written less by the students than by Rajan or Unterecker or Ellmann or Jeffares. A strong aspect of Smith's book is that it offers an approach to reading Yeats, rather than an exhaustive exegesis of the major poems. Thus students are left free to construct their own readings within the contextual parameters Smith establishes. There is no attempt to "cover" the canoll; and even when Smith turns his attention to a major poem such as "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen", he concentrates his critical fire (most intelligently and sensitively) only on Yeats's use of the swan in that poem. The book thus gives students some elbow room. Only occasionally does Smith lose touch with his commitment to interpretive openness, and plunge into reduc­ tiveness. "Among School Children" loses something if presented as being about "power relations in the classroom"; "Nineteen Hundred and Nine­ teen" goes well beyond being a poem "about the last stages of ... revolt against British rule"; and is the "rough beast" most centrally "the beast of Bolshevism"? (Even if it is, Professor Smith should be more kind to tired examiners who have no defence against such statements churned out in their metastesised hundreds every June.) Another quibble: precisely because Smith gives such a lively and persuasive reading of "Michael Robartes and the Dancer", showing that it is not "a distasteful exercise in patriarchal bullying", he may leave tender minds with the impression that Yeats is less sexist than he actually is. The heart of the book is a chapter on "Themes and Motifs". Smith sees Yeats as essentially a maker of images; and his discussion offalcon, dove, swan, house and tower, of Byzantium and Troy, of Leda and Helen, and of dancers and gyres is very well done, and all the better for being done economically. He is especially good on the doctrine of the Mask, concentrating on its national­ historical rather than the personal-psychological dimension; and has perci­ pient things also to say on Yeats as the poet of unrequited love, and of terror and apocalypse. The book is very good on the Irish background, and conveys an impressive amount of historical perspective in its necessarily limited space. Smith sees Yeats's limitations (his elevation of the merely romantic Emmet over the vastly more influential O'Connell, for instance, and unwillingness to acknowledge any "tyrants that spat" among the Anglo-Irishry), but there is no sneering at W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction 285 his aesthetic nationalism. As for the wider implications of Yeats's political attitudes, his hienuchical anti-democratic feudalism and sympathy for Fas­ cism, Smith provides all the evidence. He knows, however, how to be silent; his politics are clearly not those of the poet, yet he clearly loves the poetry. The problem quitc properly is left for the reader or student to ponder - we can all think of efforts to explain this side of Yeats which only succeed in explaining him away. The only serious weakness of Smith's book is its unwillingness or inability to deal properly with the earlier work. He offers a rather outmoded view of Yeats as writing Celtic vapidities while awaiting the arrival of Pound, who will lick him into good modernist shape - "The early poetry is that of a competent minO!' poet, able to reproduce the langorous rhythms and world-weary atti­ tudes of the period"; the "Lake Isle" is "one of the worst poems written by a great poet"; "Yeats was 45. His real poetic life had just begun". (Thus do four volumes bite the dust.) I cannot agree that the early poetry IS all inferior stun: and that later always means better in the Yeats canon. Think of a II that boring swagger about wild old wicked men, and the tub-thumping. (May thc avenging furies of Political Correctness be looking the other way, but isn't Crazy Jane just a tiny bit tedious too?) More important than individual reactions to the poems, however, is that Smith - a critic normally very alert to the ideologies and politics inscribed in Iite1"ature - should have ignored the forces shaping Yeats's early work in the directions it took. The spiritual peasant, the ethereal landscapes, the ornate and embroidered diction and all the rest are obviously tinged with the moods of the Decadence; but they equally obviously need to be seen in the context of the racist stereotypes of Paddy the Ape-man, oflreland as a backward, filthy and superstitious dump, which journals like P,lI/cI, dissemi­ nated with merry insouciance through the latter part of the century. That Ycats may have internalised quite a lot of Arnold's ideas in his creation of the nohle Celt and the melancholy Land only establishes my general point more firmly: the early poetry is as fully implicated with the matter of Ireland as anything that comes later. Maybe the early work just bores Smith, or maybe he just did not have space for a fuller discussion. This is a real pity, because it would be nice to have Smith perform his stylistic analyses on the earlier work as well as he docs them on the later. He has a few excellent pages on Yeats's syntax which really will help students to sec what all the fuss is about. Finally, there is a useful Guide to Further Reading. Macmillan must be rebuked for their pricing. 286 Yeats Annual No. 10

Wayne K. Chapman, Yeats alld Ellglislt Renaissance Literature (London: Macmillan, 1991) 290 pp.

Jahan Ramazani

"For the most part," Yeats advised in a letter quoted at the beginning of this book, "all one can do, for anybody who wishes to write it, is to tell them to read as much good poetry as possible, and the older the better; plenty of Elizabethan and Jacobean lyric writers". Tracking Yeats's conscious borrowings from Spenser,Jonson, Donne and Milton, Chapman argues that Yeats followed his own advice - that he was deeply read in the work of his Renaissance forebears and crafted much of his own poetry after their example. Chapman carefully documents a variety of Yeats's borrowings from the Renaissance, including stanzaic patterns (such as the Cowleyan and Spenserian stanzas), tropes (Donne's eroticised and self-consuming wicks or "Tapers"), and genres (elegy, love poem, and country-house poem). Chapman has discovered some new debts and reminded us of some familiar ones. His book is an exercise in patient and cautious documentation, taking its cues from marked passages in Yeats's copies of Renaissance texts, from literary references in letters and journals, from manuscript revisions, and from other forms of overt testimony. It adds to the growing list of scholarly books and essays written on Yeats that are based in source-study, now encompassing everything from his Romantic and Anglo­ Irish literary affiliations to his ties with philosophy and the occult. This family of empirical studies, strengthened by Chapman's contribution, will no doubt continue to assist the hermeneutic works that shape our critical understanding of Yeats's poetry. As a study of influence, Chapman's book returns to a traditional model, a model in which Yeats is the willing apprentice to his Renaissance masters, the tractable descendant of his Renaissance forefathers. While Yeats assumes the subservient position in this relationship, he nevertheless remains in control of his own education: he bids the Renaissance sages to perne in a transhistorical gyrc, and they agree to become the singing-masters of his soul. Chapman perceives little difference between Yeats's literary apprenticeship and the prin­ ciple of illlilatio, commended since antiquity and reinvented in the Renaissance. He offers, however, an interesting complication to this model: instead of the onc-to-one relation of master to apprentice, Chapman argues that Yeats some­ times absorbed his Renaissance influcnces in pairs or even clusters. In the Yeats and English Renaissance Literature 2B7 chapter on Yeats and Spenser, for example, he argues that Yeats's inheritance from Spensel' was mediated by Shelley. When the young Yeats reached for a Spenserian trope 01' stanza or line, Shelley often cast his shadow over the words of the Renaissance poet. Yeatsian quest-romance is based on an interfusion of Spenserian and Shelleyan quest-romance. Even so, Chapman also wants to identify, in Yeats's early poetry, Spenserian influences in which Shelley played little or no part. [n this regard, he disputes Romanticist readings of The Island of the Statues and "The Seeker", arguing that critics have underrated the Spenser­ ian element in these and other early works. "Mediation" is an important concept in interpreting Yeats's Spenserian inheritance, but it inevitably com­ promises Chapman's attempts to disentangle the truly Spenser ian element in Yeats from the Spenserian element as remade by Shelley. Lest we suspect that the "dyadic cluster" is a new version of the poetic genealogy of grandfather (Spenser), father (Shelley), and son (Yeats), Chapman interprets Yeats's inheritance from Jonson as bound up with the influ­ ence of Jonson's fraternal rival, Shakespeare. Moreover, the "dyad" be­ gins to fracture into triadic "complexes" when Jonson's elegiac influence tUl'llS out to be mediated by Shelley, and when Jonson turns out to be linked not only to Shakespeare but also to Donne. Although Chapman may seem to want to schematise the patterns of elemental recombination in "Yeats's mind at moments of creation" (xii), he permits the empirical pressure of his evidence to dissolve the binary structure of his provisional model. In addi­ tion to this synchronic dimension of his source-study, Chapman is also in­ terested in the diachronic narrative of Yeats's development, and he patiently clarifies the impact of Spenser on Yeats's early career, of Jonson on his middle career, and of Donne on his middle and later career. At each stage, Ycats uses his Renaissance predecessors to further his own development, remaking himself under the salutary guidance of their tutelage. Yeats's quest after distant literary forefathers enabled the poet, as Chapman shows, to reeducate himself and to cleanse himself of hated "modern" influences. This quest could also be seen as part of his unrelenting and successful work of self-canonisation. To group himself with Landor and with Donne, to write in the satiric rheto.ric of Ben.I onson, to depict himself as a Miltonic poet working by a solitary candle in his tower - these self-conscious acts of literary inherit­ ance arc dynastic in character, for Yeats "would accounted be" among the great writers of not only the Irish but also the English literary canon. Unlike revisionist scholars of influence, Chapman discerns little friction between Yeats and his chosen ancestors. This interpretive difference may derive as much fi'om Chapman's subject as from his critical assumptions, for Yeats, like Eliot and Pound, tended to be less ambivalent about remote literary authorities than he was about immediate precursors, less anxious about his 288 Yeats Anllual No. 10

Renaissance grandfathers than about his Romantic and Victorian fathers. In this regard, Chapman's study complements more than it contradicts the work of Bloom and other critics concerned with Romantic influences on Yeats. Even so, the contrasts between these books on literary influence - Chapman's scholarly book and Bloom's 1970 bombshell - could hardly be greater. Chapman's assumptions about influence are based in the Renaissance revitalisation of imitatio, which Chapman renders "adaptation", while Bloom's premises were rooted in a late Romantic theory of originality. Bloom gave us an agonistic Yeats, grappling in mortal combat with his poetic fathers; Chapman would return us to a mild and cooperative Yeats, ami­ ably taking notes from his distant masters. For Bloom, influence does not leave its calling card in overt praise or conscious imitation but functions at the deeper levels of unconscious literary force and counterforce. For Chap­ man, in contrast, it is conscious influence that is most important, and so he spends much of his time amassing evidence about who introduced Yeats to a precursor's work, when Yeats read the work, and what he said about it. Bloom gave us the "anxiety of influence"; Chapman rehearses what might be called the piety of influence. Much as Bloom's agonistic book, in revolt against the Yeats establishment, exemplifies its own theory, Chapman's study also accords with its adaptive model, enacting the consensual para­ digm that it celebrates. But in spite of his pervasive modesty, Chapman opens his book with a somewhat surprising description of his own method: "The approach is l'igol"Ous"; "The methodology is an innovation"; "The strategy is a deliberate one" (xi, xiii). In contrast with BlOOl~, Chapman's book is indeed "rigorous", "deliberate", and "accurate", but these aims are more accessible to him than the kind of "innovation" that Bloom ac­ complishes. Chapman's book is unlikely to startle most readers into new ways of thinking about Yeats's poetry; yet this diligent book will increase the precision of the scholarly study of Yeats's literary inheritances. Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes 289

Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul: Greek alld Romall Themes ill Yeats, Irish Literary Studies 32 (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1990) xxi + 241 pp.

Virginia Hyde

The title comes from a familiar passage in Reveries Over Childhood alld YOll/h (1915), in which Yeats laments that he knows Greek and Latin books only in translation, though they have been "the builders of [his] soul" (All 58-9). Previous critics have by no means ignored these "builders", but none has made a more systematic, even programmatic, attempt to show how Yeats employed Greek and Roman philosophy, myth, religion, history, literature, and visual art images in his works. Although such themes may cluster most strikingly in The Tower (1928), they are so pervasive elsewhere as well that this study provides a broad guide to the Yeats canon, dealing with more than 100 individual works. Several pages of photographs suggest the book's diversity, showing sculpture and painting that inspired some of Yeats's poetry; colonial Greek coin designs such as he advocated as models for Irish minting; and the Greek aspect of Buddha sculptures, an influence he mentioned in his prose draft of "The Statues" (1939) and incorporated into his ideas about the shifting predomi­ nance of Westel'll and Eastcl'll civilisation. Arkins is known lor Sexllality ill Ca/Ill/lls (1982) and articles on classical and English litcrature, including Yeats. Although many of his interpretations in this book are not new, his expertise in the Greek and Roman sources allows him to confirm (or occasionally to challenge) earlier studies with some confi­ dence (he gives dozens of specific citations from the classics). He also has a sense of history, taking his subject to extend beyond specifically Greek and Roman works to inlluences li'Dlll the late Hellenistic world, the Renaissance, and classicist "revivals" from the Augustans and Romantics through the Aesthetes of the I B90s and others contemporary with Yeats. Hut the book docs not give equal attention to these areas. I t may seem ungrateful to wish that so ambitious a book were even more so, but its own goals call for more. Particularly undeveloped is the treatment of the IB90s and tUI'll-of~the-century cultural climate, in which Yeats leal'lled some of his "Classicism" in the arcane and exotic guise held forth by Theosophists such as G. R. S. Mead and Madame Blavatsky. Arkins shows how Walter Pater and Lionrl Johnson were among the mediators of classical suhjects to Yeats; he 290 Yeats Annual No. 10

even allows that his topic includes the late nineteenth-century occultist pre­ occupation with classical idealism, for he refers to Mead (pp. 15-16,29) and to Madame B1avatsky's blatant Platonism (virtually constituting "an extremely late revival of Renaissance Platonism" [po 25]), but he makes no connection between this milieu and the eclectic "Gnosticism" of the period. Yeats, he states, cannot generally be associated with a Christian heresy (as Harold Bloom, for example [1970], has done in naming the poet "a Gnostic"). While Bloom himself is but murkily evasive on his meaning, Arkins may seem unnecessarily doctrinaire (pp. 26-9), unmindful of the fact that Yeats would have associated "Gnosticism" with such ancient pagan sources of gTlosis as the Theosophists often linked with it. "The old wisdom handed down by the seers of the Mysteries" traces back not only to ancient Judaism but also to Orphism, the Mysteries of Isis, Mithraic rites, Hermes Trismegistes, and "the Orient generally", according to Mead's Frag11lel/ts of a Faitll ForgotteTl (2nd ed. [1906], pp. 52-7), which Yeats possessed (YA 4286). In the 1920s, Yeats's library included Mead's works not only on Gnosticism but also on Orpheus, Hermes, Plotinus, and late Hellenistic mystery religions, yet Mead is nowhere mentioned in an appendix listing the authors who contributed to Yeats's knowledge of Greek and Roman themes. Part of the difficulty is in the appendix itself, which does not reflect all the material mentioned in the text, and which is awkwardly divided into categories that make it oddly hard to follow. Among other works Yeats had at hand in the twenties, several more should be named - from Thucidides, translated by Richard Crawley, and Tacitus, translated by Arthur Murray, to Swinburne's AtalaTlta ill Carydoll (1897), Tennyson's Demeter alld Other Poems (1889), H. R. Fairclough's The COlmee/ioll Be/ween Mllsie alld Poetry ill the Earry Greek Li/efa/llre (1902), and others. While the appendix seems to claim comprehensiveness, it is, therefol'e, attenuated (or possibly intentionally selective), and should be consulted along with the increasing scholarship on Yeats's books - not only Edward O'Shea's A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats's Library, which Arkins has used, but also supplemental lists by Wayne Chapman (YA 6234-45; YA 8 199-202) and O'Shea's catalogue of the Yeats library in the 1920s (YA 4 279-90). Indeed, an appendix to an article by Arkins (YAACTS 715) lists two Mead books missing from the book's appendix. Builders of My SOIlI, however, is not really about Yeats's reading so much as about his dynamic adaptation of his themes, and Arkins has a good sense of this creativity - of the author's shifting and fluid relation to his sources. While much of the book shows that Yeats, like his Romantic predecessors, often favoured Greek lore over Roman, Arkins is at no loss on the latter influence. Despite his early claim that Modernism is far removed from "Neoclassicism", Arkins ably shows the Virgilian strain in Yeats as well as his occasional Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes 291 indebtedness to Augustan work (like Dryden's translation of Lucretius). Some of the best discussion concerns the classical pastoral poem that leaves its traces on The Islalld of Statues (1885), "The Song of the Happy Shepherd" (originally appearing with 71Ie /slalld of Statues), "Shepherd and Goatherd", and other works. The most pervasive pastoral influence, Virgil's Fourth Ee/ogue - the same "Messianic Eclogue" that attracted writers like Milton, Dryden, and Pope - is traced in Yeats's conception of the "Platonic Year" or recurring "Golden Age". Philosophy, rightly termed the "crucial area" for Yeats, comprises an early chapter, establishing a highly comprehensible Platonist and Nco-Platonist view of the world and explaining the Doimoll doctrine with straightforward economy. Highlighting the poet's interest in ultimate metaphysical issues, Arkins is never tempted into interpretations that deal with less (although he is usually aware of layers of meaning, of contradiction and paradox). The or­ ganisation of the book is well-suited to this approach, concluding with the "holy" city in "Byzantium" (1929), where "eternally valid" art works are "conceived of as Platonic essence" - just as, in "Colon us' Praise" (1928), explicated earlier in the book, "no less than a Platonic form upon earth" is the immediate source of Athenian cultural achievements. Arkins might have said more about the vexed connections between aesthetics and philosophy by considering the complication implicit in the banishment of poets from Plato's republic. But he is on especially well-trodden ground when dealing with Plato, being obliged to acknowledge prior critics like Kathleen Raine, F. A. C. Wilson, and James Olney, whose 1980 study of the "perennial philosophy" in Yeats, Plato, and J ung (Tlte Rilizome olld t/,e Flower) possesses a psychological dimension largely undetailed (if taken for granted) in Arkins. Patrick J. Keane's Yeats's Ili/eraetiolis with Traditioll (1987) is also needed to correct the absence of Nietzsche, whose influence Keane has skilfully interwoven with those of classical and other Yeats sources. A few other unexpected oversights appear in the bibliography: for example, David R. Clark's scholarly Yeats at SOllgs olld C/IOTUses (1983), dealing with Yeats's versions of Sophoclean odes, and The Writillg rif "Sop//Oe/es' Killg Oedipus" by Clark and J. B. McGuire (1989) are both absent; yet Arkins recently reviewed the latter himself (YAACTS 8367-9). Elizabeth B. Loizeaux's Yeats alld tile Visual Arts (1986), which is mentioned only in a note, had evidently appeared "too late" to be helpful; and Giorgio Melchiori's Tlte Whole Mystery of Art (1960), though acknowledged elsewhere, is not listed among authorities on Yeats and the visual arts, despite the critic's identification of iconographic modcls, including Francesco Colonna's Hypllerotomaellio Poliphili (1499) relating to "Leda and the Swan" (1924). But Arkins has made use of much standard and recent Yeats criticism as well as plentiful sources (including dissertations) 292 Yeats Annual No. 10 on Greek and Roman themes in six categories. If olle "misses" all entry in the hack of the book, it may simply be because the bibliography and indexes are as sub-divided as the appendix. iJuilders of My Soul is one of those valuable books one may often consult and may recommend to students as well. It presents the Yeats oeuvre as a coherent whole, not only collecting the instances of his Greek and Roman themes but also providing through these a window into his thinking and creative revision­ ism. Arkins tends to write very readably though his text ean grow cryptic, resorting occasionally to an outline-like format. It deserves to be longer: the interest of the subject and the usual lucidity of the presentation are such that one would welcome the extra reading.

Leonard Orr (cd.), Yeats and Postmodemism (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991) ix + 204 pp.

Wayne K. Chapman

This book deserves to be read with the scepticism and intelligence which enlivcnlllosl urits pages, if sometimes too self-consciously. It is provocative and hright without being brilliant, and it is timely. It confirms what many of us suspected: that Yeats will withstand the assessment of the disciples of Derrida, Hillis Miller, de Man, Foucault, Bakhtin and other touchstones of recent literary criticism who lend their authority to the ten authors of this volume. Besides the fairly persistent annoyance that the book's logic is derivative and its method chidly comparative, inadequate attention to Yeats's work undermines the argument in some cases, at least on matters of fact in extraordinary contexts. Granted that it is probably futile to devise an exact and stable taxollomy (n° what one calls "postmodernism" ("As for postmodernism, it may llot l'ven exist"! rp. 3]), the editor does a commendable job presenting, instead of a single viewpoint, a variety of them drawn to represent developments in contemporary theory. "The shift ... from the object of study to the tools and ideas that can be used to approach an old subject anew ... is the idea behind the presellt collection and the explanation of the title" (p. 6). I would rather credit the slIccesses of this book than make too much issue of its shortcomings. First, Orr is the perfect helmsman for an unorthodox craft. His overview produces a serviceahle text, an instructive introduction, and a bibliography less lIseful 011 Ycals than 011 postll1odernism and poststructuralism (which in Y cats and Postmodernism 293 several places in the book are equated - somewhat to the disapproval of two or three contributors). OI'l"S guidance seems responsible for the sense of coher­ ence which emerges from a number of the essays after a straight-through reading. His introduction observes, unsurprisingly, that the age of modernism is past (or "passc" and that, although "a risky enterprise", the "postmoderniz­ ing of Yeats" (p. 1) must now follow in line with already successful ventures on Pound and Joyce. The argument sounds crusading, perhaps, but is tem­ pered by sound scholarship, by an objective summary of heated debates on postmodel'llism and the so-called "periodisation" of literature, and by a note of mild amusement for "apologetic" Yeatsians who now worry "exactly how deconstructive" they are (p. 10). Treatments of Yeats by Bloom, Hartman, de Man and Hillis Miller have had mixcd receptions precisely because they were the work of "theorists, rather than Yeatsians". With the objective established by Leonard Orr, the "process of postmodcrnizing Yeats" ad­ vances with chapters by Ronald Schleifer, William Bonney, Kieran Quinlan, William Johnsen, Kathleen O'Connan, Steven Putzel, Kitti Carriker, Cheryl Herr, and R. B. Kershner. The first and last of these will be remembered for having rcconciled Yeats with DCl'I'ida and llakhtin, respectively. Both chaptcrs fret over paradox. (The first chooses to cmbody it in a style of writing that the last classifies as a lit­ erary "register" (pp. 181-2); the last superficially attempts an "oxymoronic" mixture of oil and water, making negligiblc, by spUl'ious argument on dyslexia, vcry great diffcrences hetween the anti-Communist lyric poet, Yeats, and his Marxist contemporary, Bakhtin, who spul'lled the lyric gelll'c.) The point infcl'I'ed from the placement of these chaptcrs is that Yeats can be compared "theoretically" with the fathers of postmodern phil­ osophy, whether these he poststructuralist 01' not. If we do not get dowlI to cases and points in Schleifer's essay, and if the book fades with Kershner's rambling, we have the impression that, within limits, Yeats Illig'" be "postmod­ ernised" by the other writers. He isn't. Rut the book gets increasingly interest­ ing if read forward from the beginning or backward from the end. Reading forward, one meets a strangely graceful and finally truculent mis­ reading of Yeats's supposed schizophrenic (and thereforc postmodcl'll) tropo­ logical "stuttering" and "stammering" hefore the altar of the "noumenal agent of causality, which he [Yeats] calls 'life'" (p. 59) but which the wiser critic aOirllls to he the great nothing of poststructuralist "cosmic disconti­ nuity" (which also rollows Schleircr's confusing Yeats with Mallarmc). One shakes hands with an observer of the "revisioning" or history and Yeats by Irish writers or the Field Day group, especially Deane and Heancy, who Illay not he "New Historicist's", cxactly, but fill in as examplcs ror the timc being. And one learns how 110/ to conduct a genetic study of poetry to affirm 294 Yeats Annual No. 10

the ideas of an idol, even, arguably, "the most comprehensive theorist of a postmodern future beyond (interminable) deconstruction" (p. 81). All great fun when one understands that "post modernising" mig/tt be a process rather like trying old locks with new keys! Bonney1s example of Peckhamesque rage for chaos dissuades by an increasingly gratuitous and careless application of metaphor; hence gratified we arc in the first moments of his essay, when he takes care to represent the interesting historiography of Hayden White. Quinlan, however, brings us to the centre of the turbulence by daring to repeat Jean Howard's sobering question: "'if one accepts certain tendencies in poststructuralist thought,' then is the possibility of an historical criticism even possible?" (p. 66). Turning to feminist procedures, Johnsen suggests almost the same thing, in lavish pmise of Rene Gil'ard, yet fashions an ex­ egesis which manages to avoid textual materials elucidated by Yeats's edi­ tors of the past forty years - materials available now expressly for analysing Ycats's "successive instances" of revision. Reading from the othel' end of the book, one takes similar exception to Carriker's semiotic treatment of iconography in "The Dolls" and parts of "Upon a Dying Lady", when the Platonic concept of mimesis, and several well-known passages in Yeats's critical writings, are ignored in deference to Kristeva. Herr's essay un Yeats and Foucault as "dual exponents of modernism on the cusp" (p. 147), on the other hand, shows how a skilful comparative analysis instructs through observation, inducing evidence to an inference about one's subjects. Her argument convinces by providing a substantive link (Nietz­ sche) between the o~iects of comparison - like Yeats, contextualising her abstractions. The connection is fortunate, fm' with it she clarifies the postmod­ em view of cultural (or historical) "periodicity", relating it to the "cosmic machinery" - the gyres and epistemei - of Yeats and Foucault. Hence "post­ modernising" depends on conceptually shifting labels impressionistically ap­ plied to the time-line of Western civilisation from the Renaissance onward. That Yeats, as "last romantic", might stand at the threshold of post modern­ ism, follows from the Foucauldian assertion that the modern period began with the Romantics. "Vestiges" of the Renaissance, classical, and modern periods "continue to emit content" (p. 156) in times increasingly "shorn of the histori­ cal construct, 'Man', and its attendant human scicnccs" (p. 153); and influence is given its tribute. The dynamic is not quite the anxiety process heralded by Bloom, although it dues hold with his pattern of declension. The reader has reached the heart of the book. At its centre, indeed, arc two essays which, without ceremony, actually make Yeats's work the object of study, by methods introduced in the past thirty years. Of these, the second is the more pluralistic but also the more obeissant to poststructuralist precept. The first is a straightforwardly orthodox analysis of perfon native speech acts in Deirdre and 7/,e Player Quem, as prescribed by John Searle, who in particular The Esoteric Comedies of Carlyle, Newman, and Yeats 295

has dcfcndcd thc philosophy of his mcntor, John Austin, against attack by Dcn'ida (not mcntioncd in thc cssay; scc Glyph I [1977] pp. 198-21O). Kathlccn O'Connan finds in Ycats's plays selcctions which suitably avoid thc limitations of spccch-act thcory as a critical tool, and shc makcs this tool work to cxplain thc Iifc-Iikc uttcranccs of charactcrs, rathcr than making dcmonstration to justify a mcans. Such unselfconscious striving for elucidation is also virtuous in Putzel's scmi-comparativc study of Yeats and Zeami Motokiyo via thc insights ofrcccption thcorists translated in thc 1970s. "Gaps", "placcs", and "chasms" of "indetcrminacy" (hcre Roman Ingardcn's word) are shown to bc Ycats's intcntion in At the Hawk's Well and in 11,e Dilly Jealousy of Elller bccausc of infclTcd purposc to cngagc thc audiencc in "complicit" rcadings. Putzel's cssay is comparative whcn it distinguishes betwccn authcntic Noh drama and Ycats's adaptations (as misrcadings, cssentially, mediatcd by Pound and Fcnollosa), failing to account for WcstCl'l1 and thcn-contcmporary influences that channel into the synthcsis, such as Craig's Italianatc thcatrc of "Ober-marioncttcs". Thc novelty of Putzel's innovations, howevcr - so rcprcscntative of thc most cngaging aspccts of Yeats alld PostmodeTllism - tcnd to ovc\'l'idc such omissions, which arc pcrhaps for thc "complicit" rcadcr to fill in for himself. In gcncral, a rcadcr nccd not always agrcc with a writer's stance, all of his derivations or undcrlying assumptions, to takc plcasurc in implicit dcbatc on ponderable subjccts. The chicI' weakncss of the "postmodcrn" appl'Oaches rcprescntcd in this book is that they do not always distinguish betwcen thc inscrutablc and thc pondcrablc (thc latter being, for instancc, Iitcrary tcxts and pcrsons who makc thcm). Yct one should rcad this demanding, gcncrally well-writtcn book in anticipation of similar treatmcnts now sure to follow - and, of coursc, for thc plcasure of taking its vigol'Ous cxercisc!

Steven Hclmling, Tlte Esoteric Comedies of Carlyle, Newmall, alld Yeats (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988).

Peter Kuch

Stcvcn Helmling has written a livcly, engaging book about thrcc works, which, as hc politely points out sccm morc honourcd than rcad - Carlylc's Sarlor Resm'lus, Ncwman's AjlOlo,l!,ia Pro Vita Sua and Ycats's A Visioll. All thrcc, hc argllcs, can bcst be describcd as "csotcric eomcdics" - csotcric bccause cach 296 Yeats Annual No. 10

agitates vocabularies and themes that most readers will find recondite and perhaps absurd; comic, because each attempts, using mock sagacity, to reaffirm the spirit at times ofa culture-wide crisis offaith and belief. The stance of mock sagacity is deliberately assumed, Helmling argues, to avoid the embarrassing miscues that may result with satire when the satirist mistakenly assumes that his audience shares both his values and his reading of the contemporary situation. Swift's A Tale of a Tub is cited as a case in point. Helmling begins with an elegant thirty-page essay sketching in the principal characteristics of "esoteric comedy" from two perspectives - protomodernism and the decorums of self-assertion. Esoteric comedy is seen as protomodernist by virtue of its difficulty; its self-referentiality; it sense of itself as text; its use of parody for the purposes of defamiliarisation; and its adoption of the narrative stance of the eiroll - the wise man who enlightens others by playing the fool. Its distinctive characteristic, however, is seen to be its sensitivity to the decomms of self-assertion. Aware of the prohibitive burdens of the prophetic stance post-Milton, esoteric comedians comport themselves with an amiable but shrewd eccentricity which at once deconstructs their opposition and disarms their audience. What rationalism and materialism purport to expose as fanci­ ful, esoteric comedy playfully re-establishes as foundational myth. Its pro­ gramme is thus comparable with the comedy of medieval Christianity which, as Northrop I"rye has remarked, has to do with salvation rather than social integration. Helmling's Introduction raises a number of significant issues, not all of which are examined with equal success. He is at pains to point out that he does not see esoteric comedy as "another genre" (pp. 4-6) - though just what he means by genre is left teasingly unexplored. He is also at pains to emphasise that his trilogy of writers have deliberately, consciously, intentionally adopted esoteric comedy as a strategy. "They are", he says, "acutely aware ofmanipu­ lating words to alternately sllmmon and void seeming presences in the silent spaces of print, and they are entirely self-conscious about it; they know that the imperturbable poker face of a carefully composed page will abide no question." (p. II). If nothing else, the intertextuality of these works, which Helmling himself sees as one of their defining characteristics - and for that matter, the intertextuality of his own book - should have made him wal'y of such asser­ tions. The transactions between writers, readers, historical periods and texts cannot be known with this degree of certainty. Helmling is finally at pains to point out that his approach is exploratory rather than exhaustive - yet he concludes his Introduction:

But though I do not claim that their comedy tells us all there is to know about Carlyle, Newman, and Yeats, I am persuaded that an account of any The Esoteric Comedies of Carlyle, Newman, and Yeats 297

of them that leaves it out leaves out something essential, because I assume ... that a writer's characteristic ways of disposing language provide the most useful handles on the motives and intentions shaping the larger motions of the oeuvre and the eareer. (p. 32)

The problem here is that "something essential" may tell us about "a writer's characteristic ways of disposing language" - but, then again, it may not. It is one argument to assert that A Visioll is essential to understanding Yeats; it is quite a diOerent argument to assert that A Visioll discloses Yeats's characteristic ways of disposing language, for what is thought to be characteristic may be just as essential to understanding a writer as what is thought to be uncharacteristic. Helmling devotes a chapter to each of his thl'ee esoteric comedies. With SarloI' Resar/lis he follows the last three decades of Carlyle scholarship in focusing on the interplay between the author, the period and the reader, and the figures of the mock-reader, the Editor and Diogenes Teufelsdrockh. Helmling's approach enables him to emphasise the comedy of the book, examine its intertextuality, and demonstrate convincingly how Carlyle's disgruntlement and didacticism eventually subverted his own project. Seeing Sartor Resartlls as an esoteric comedy emphasises the ways in which Carlyle the writer engaged the com­ plexities of reading, particularly at a time when audiences were in dangel' of becoming saturated with print. The advantages of using esoteric comedy as an interpretative strategy are not as evident in the chapter on Newman's A/lOlogia Pro Vita Slia. While it does enable Hclmling to (!t'aw attention to Newman's deft use of parody for thc purposes of def.mniliarisation, his self-rcferentiality, and his shrewd play with the decorums of self-assertion, the Apologia seems to scrutinise the esoteric rather than adopt it as a stance. What to others seems esoteric is to Ncwman intrinsic to the faith. His discourse, which Helmling explores with great skill, envisiolls the transcendent, the miraculous, the mysterious, the sacred and the revealed rather than the esoteric. The chaptel' provides a stimulating reading of a complex and subtle text, though such a reading could have come from working through comedy rathcr than csoteric comcdy. With Yeats, Hclmling uses esoteric comedy to locate what he calls the Visioll projcct - a short-hand tcrm for Ycats's perennial cngagemcnt with the occult and the arcanc - in the oellvre, life and times of the poet. He shrewdly draws altl:ntion to the way Yeats pits fictions against one another to manipulate till: reader's resistance to the implausihle. And he persuasively argues that the poet devoted himself to such labours not only as a wilful act of defiance but also as a calculated celehration of thc generative power of the imagination. The Vision project thus hecomcs a type of Tower, complete with winding stair, refuriJishrd in order to dominate the contcmporary waste land of empiricism and materialism. 298 Yeats Annual No. 10

The interpretative strategy of esoteric comedy yields a rich understanding of the position and function of the Vision project in Yeats's oeuvre, and the poet's stance in writing the 1925/6 and 1937 editions of A Visiollj but it does not function to deconstruct these texts in the way that it deconstructed Sartor Resar/lls and the Apologia. The careful exploration of contexts leads the reader to expect a fuller reading of the two editions of A Vision than is provided. 171e Esoteric Comedies of Carlyle, Newman, and Yeats is a provocative, lively, if somewhat limited reading of three complex works.

NOTE

The chapter on Yeats incorporates, for the most part without reVISion, Helmling's "Y calS'S Esotcric Comcdy", Hlldsoll Review, xxx, no 2, Summer 1977, pp. 230--46. The firsl Iwo pagcs and the last paragraph orthe article have been rcworkcd; thc remainder of Ihe arlic\e appears on pp. 165-7, 179-B7 and IB8--9 of Ihe book.

Masaru Sckine and Christopher Murray, Yeats and the Noh: A Compara­ tive Stut!Y (Gcrrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990)

Yoko Chiba

This new book on Yeats and Noh is a "joint comparative study" co-authored by Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray, with four other contributors, including Augustin Martin and Katharine Worth. Professor Martin explains in the Introduction how the idea of writing the book evolved after Sekine's production of Tile Dreamillg of Ille BOlles and its Noh model, Nisliikigi, at Uni­ versity College Dublin in 1986. The experiment proved so stimulating that it made the book a virtual necessity. Sekine's main purpose in this work is to analyse FOllr Plays for Dancers in close comparison with corresponding Noh plays, from both textual and staging viewpoints, the first attempt of its kind. As a trained Noh actor, Sekine shows hisforte in describing practical details of Noh pefonnances in the light of Yeats's dance plays. Two interesting essays at the end, Colleen Hanrahan's "Acting in Tile Dreamillg of tile BOlles" and Peter Davidson's "Music in translation: Yeats; Pound; Rummel; Dulac", serve to Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study 299 enhance this ol~iective from their professional perspectives in acting and music. Finally, Katharine Worth expands the dramatic horizon by joining Samuel Beckett to Yeats and Noh. Christopher Murray first gives a succinct account of the background to Yeats's dance plays, the development of his early drama by the usc of allegory, para hie, nationalism and heroic Irish saga; it was also a process of decolonisa­ tion of the Irish theatre. The chorus in Deirdre predates his acquaintance with Noh, while Yeats's collaboration with Gordon Craig, using his abstract design, lighting, masks and screens for a revival of Tile Hour-Glass at the Abbey Theatre in 1911, prepared the way for his acceptance of the Noh form a few years later. Yeats's gradual movement towards Noh is thus emphasised by Murray in agreement with Leonard E. Nathan. Noh also taught Yeats how to "employ fable symholically" (p. 1). AI Ille lIawk's Well is not really a Noh drama, according to Murray and Sekine, despite a dance at the climax. Murray's underlying idea, "What seems to be missing is a clear recognition of the role of the supernatural" (p. 9), directly relates to the often vague definition of Noh itself. Not all Noh plays deal with the spirits of the dead or with gods and demons. Such magical phenomena as possession and exorcism, common practices throughout medieval Japan, arc also important aspects of Noh. In this sense, possession, the word Sekine himself uses, is the clement of Noh employed in Alille Hawk's Well. Structurally speaking, however, the play does not follow the conventional formulas of Noh, and here Murray and Sekine agree. On the other hand, the human ghosts are successfully dramatised by Yeats in Tile Dreaming oftIle Bones in the style of Noh, which Murray praises highly, emphasising its political connotations in Irish history. Despite the co-authors' surface agreement about some details, however, the book is grossly undermined by Sekine's extremely chauvinistic attitude in his conclusion, which confronts Murray's Irish view. Murray says that Yeats's adoption of Noh was "virtually another form of cultural colonisation" (p. I), and therefore doomed the Theatre he had laboured to decolonise. Murray's summary of several Western scholars' views on Veats and Noh, such as those of Richard Taylor, 1\. S. Knowland and Karen Dorn, is that Veats assimilated what he wanted from Noh. These views are unheeded by Sekine, who simply dismisses the dance plays as "an emblem ofVeatsian heroic failure" and "too amateur". Sekine continues: "there is a lack of finish in the plays, a failure to lollow up inspirations and to complete the promise inherent in the material", and "The Four Plays for Dancers stands out as a marvellous discovery of the richness of Japanese classical theatre" (pp. 119, 120). This discrepancy be­ tween the two writers inevitably leads one to question the structure of the book. 300 Yeats Annual No. 10

It reads like a collection of essays with differing views and angles, with its hundred pages by Sekine himself and the remaining sixty-five or so pages shared by the five other contributors. The structural problem also extends to Sekine's own chapters, which are each divided into four sections under the sub-titles of Yeats's four plays juxtaposed with their Noh models, as in At the Hawk's Well I Yoro, Tlte Dllry Jealousy of Elller I Aoillo-ue, The Dreamillg of the BOlles I Nisliikigi, and Calvary I Sumidagawa I Miwa (or, when inappropriate, Calvary stands alone). This method is applied dutifully to seven chapters out of ten, on subjects such as "Themes", "Characterization", "1)lots and Functions of Musicians", "Con­ cepts of Masks," "Stage Props and Costumes", "Dancing and Acting" and "Poet\'y and Imagery". (The first chapter is devoted to Noh.) Such minute categorisation, though not unusual in Japanese books, seriously hampers the flow of the argument. The sets or combinations of plays limit and constrain our understanding of the true nature of the influence, for Yeats as a creative writer was by no means bound by Noh and, as Murray says, never used it slavishly. Out of some fifty translations of Noh, including synopses, in Fenollosa's manuscripts in the possession of Pound, Yeats could choose ideas variously. Hence this type of categorisation is merely arbitrary. Yoro might have inspired At the Hawk's Well but these two plays have very few similarities other than some apparent symbols and characters. Rather, one may detect in the Yeats play some strong influence of psychical research and spiritualism, which preoccupied his mind simultaneously with Irish folklore and Noh plays in the mid-19\Os. The inseparable relationship between these three is not considered in the book. A still greater difficulty with Sekine's categorical arrangement is its repeti­ tiveness, let alone its fragmentary tendency. This may work in chapters on such technical aspects as masks, or stage props and costumes, which can be treated relatively independently of other elements. But all other chapters are so inter­ related that in every new chapter Sekine has to refer to what he has previously stated. For instance, the explanation of the symbols of lIisllikigi and /IOSOII/IIIO is reiterated several times; so are the relationships between Prince Genji, Princess Rokujo and Lady Aoi. Thus, the same mistakes are carried over in each chaptel': he takes Rokujo for Genji's wife and Aoi for his mistress, whereas the reverse is the case. This misinterpretation equates Princess Rokujo with Emer, in that they both give up their husbands. Emer's heroic choice docs not apply to AoiTlo-lIe, where the issue transcends psychology, whercas Sckine emphasises that "Noh plays ... show dramatic psychological changes in their main charac­ ters, when spiritual power is evoked, often by prayer" (p. 116). As Carmen Blacker has elucidated, in The Catalpa Bow: A Stul{y of Shamallistic Practices iIlJ(/jlall, Buddhism and Shintoism have been deeply interconnected in Veats and the Noh: A Comparative Study 301

their beliefs (despite the Western conventional distinction between them), under which have run strong shamanistic elements throughout japanese his­ tory. With this in mind, the religious aspect of Noh can be explained sufficiently well in relation to Yeats's thought and dance plays. Sekine is generally clear on this point about "the harmonious blend of Shinto and Buddhism which per­ meated the Noh plays" (p. 55). But then he contradicts himself in a phrase such as "an unusual mixture of religions" (p. 44) in Miwa, in discussing Calvary. Perhaps the most confusing of all are his comments such as "almighty Gods such as Buddha and The Sun Goddess" (p. 72) and "in Nishikigi ... the travelling monk prays to the almighty to intervene and save the ghost couple from their sufferings" (p. 42). The absence of the very concept of the "almighty" in japanese religions is indeed that, underlying Noh drama, which attracted Yeats. As Murray points out, quoting from James Flannery, Yeats's drama fundamentally concerns "religious impulse", as against the Elizabethan interest in "questions of policy and kingcraft", since "Ireland was interested primarily in religion, morals and personal emotion" (p. 6). Sekine's last chapter, on rituals and religion, had the potential of developing these ideas; released, for the first time, from the categorised preceding chapters. He could have developed the aesthetic of yllgen and Zen Buddhism, that "tended towards symbolism and minimalism" (p. 74) in the Noh theatre, with its relation to Zeami's and Yeats's dramaturgy. But that was outside the scope of this study. Instead, Sekine's attitude towards Buddhism and Shintoism, as being little different from Christianity, and his idea of the dualism of good and evil, alienate him from Yeats. "Since Yeats's plays are not religious", he concludes, "they are incapable of turning a theatre into a place of worship" (p. 115). Apart from these conceptual aspects, Sekine makes some interesting observa­ tions, referring to other Noh plays, acting styles and poetic imagery in the two theatres; and the chapter on Masks is perhaps his best. The subject of Yeats and Noh stretches over very wide areas despite its seeming meagreness and it is difficult to uncover them all. It is nearly thirty years since Him Ishibashi said that Yeats's dance plays were composed based Oil his "misunderstanding" of Noh. Such japanese commentaries, Sekine's now included, sadly miss the point. But once that barrier is overcome, our understanding of Yeats's rela­ tionship to Noh can become more appreciative and creative. 302 Yeats AnTlual No. 10

Stephen R. L. Clark, Civil Peace alld Sacred Order: Limits ami Renewals I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) x + 198 pp.

Donald T. Torchiana

Stephen R. L. Clark has written an imaginative, compelling, provocative, and highly learned book that unites political philosophy with metaphysics and ultimately theism. The enemy throughout is usually identified with "pmres­ sional secularists", in most cases academics or proressional philosophers. Clark chooses to oppose those enlightened moderns with pre-modern thought, largely traditional theism rrom the Bible, ancient Greece and Rome, a theism kept alive by such as Berkeley, Burke, Newman, Yeats, Kipling, and Chesterton among others. As a selr-proressed "anarcho-conservative" and Anglican, Clark takes aim at society, fi'om ramily to national state to international order, and promises us two more volumes that will treat, respectively, the structure or the soul and or reality. Thus, the burden or his fighting Prerace. Eight chapters rollow, that I ought to sum up briefly. The first, "Reason, Value, and Tradition", takes up Clark's effort to prevent the ruin "not only or Great Britain ... but or any human polity" (p. 5). The thrust or the chapter is a detailed rerutation or what he claims to be the nine points of liberal modernism: dogmas that insist on the importance or private judgementj the superiority or modern empirical knowledge and scientific method; a contempt ror traditional prejudices; devotion to the claims or per­ sonal reason; resistance to any moral fiat rmlll abovej disdain ror otherworld­ linessj a holding to only truths that are value-rreej and belier in the primacy or personal relationships. The second chapter, "Ending the Age", examines the collapse of a seeular order now berert or ceremony, ritual, and raith in God. With His death, a second has rollowed, the death or the Self. But ror right to triumph, it must also "lie at the roots of the world" (p. 43). Hence the third chapter, starting rrom a beginning very close to Filmer's, asserts the basic society to be pre-political, a "network or families, baby-sitting circles, resi­ dents' associations, parents' associations, children's gangs... shops and pubs ... structured and maintained by women and by children" (p. 67). No sexist, Clark. This chapter, "Society without the State", gives way to a fourth, "The I rrele\'ance of Consent", that is no less bold. Clark opens by employing the (i:mininc rather than the masculine pronoun and then swings easily to his t(,ntati\'(, th(,I11<', namely that any state must embrace a higher moral order than that of (,(,()lIomics. Moreover, that sacred order must look to God, though Civil Pcacc and Sacrcd Ordcr 303

priest and king must of course remain separate. "Civilizations as World Orders" follows, a chapter that traces the movement of our pre-political community to our natural intemational one. Our national walls, as Clark deftly puts the matter, arc always broken by our economic energies. And all religions arc one in such an order, although he disallows the legitimacy of South Africa or the ANC as govemments in a community of nations. Chapter 6 is called "The Laws of War". The German motto, "Colt Mit VIIS", anc! the recent skirmish in the Persian Gulf, however, may tarnish Clark's thesis here: "a law that is not backed by God's clear pUl"pose in providing peace has no authority" (p. 131). Yet the courage of Clark's stand is perhaps nowhere else more compelling than in his doubts about Hiroshima, Dresden, and necklacing in South Africa. The penultimate chapter, "Gaia and the Great City", quite simply addresses the subject of our civilisation in this one Great City, the Earth, that is the Lonl's own. Here the monstrous possibility of nuclear war must give way to the good sense of envirdnmcntalism. Though we cannot expect "a pleasure garden" (p. 150) and may even have to ignore obvious tyrannies, wisdom resides in no specific race, creed, or country. Finally, in the last chapter, Clark admits to having written as an educated, philosophic pagan - in so fill· as he can - yet the cosmic religion that he would bestow on us demands thc overriding piety that makes the book so daunting.

But what has all this to do with Yeats? Well, Civil Peace alld Sacred Order is a hook that Yeats might indeed have read, at least partly. But in his later years I am not sure that he would resist throwing it across the noor, as he supposedly did with Rose's hook on Rilke. Clark's rcpcatcd rcfercnces to Yeats and his vision of the new order enshrined in "The Second Coming", an age ensuring the destruction of our own, seems more than relevant to thc threat of ruin Clark Sl'nses in our civilisation. And who cannot but applaud Clark's recognition of Yeats as a prophetic poet and thinker (as compared, say, to Auden). Yet to see him as the foe of modern Whiggery - and Clark quotes the relevant lines from "The Seven Sages" as epigram for his book -may not be enough. For Yeats, at the end of his life, spelled out his political vicws in all the Boiler, views he had held most of his life. And they were hased on violence, war, and virtually enforced eugenics, seemingly uncontradicted by his deeper faith in God, free­ dom, and immortality as disclosed in his 1930 Diary. So while I may cavil with Clark's tuming Yeats into something like an Irish Anglican divine, I cannot help hut admire his upholding the poet-prophet-visionary for adulation, in the t:'lce of his current Dublin detractors, who would reduce him to little more than a misplaced heretic well-rorgotten by university wits that have lell him fill· he-hind Oil their road to the Celestial City. 304 Yeats Annual No. 10

Geoffrey Elborn, Francis Stuart: A Life (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1990)

Roy Foster

Sometimes, if you live long enough, the world will obligingly take you at your own estimation. Something of the sort has apparently happened to Francis Stuart, and this biography is part of the process. In a sense, Stuart has dictated the interpretive agenda himself through his one masterpiece - the sardonic, awkward, riveting Black List, Sectioll H, a fictionalised autobiogmphy. In this reviewer's view at least, his other fiction preserves the awkwardness and the autobiographical themes, but not much else. His life rcmains a great subject: repudiation of an Ulster bourgeois back­ ground, marriage to Iseult Gonne at 17, imprisonment as a Republican in the Civil War, precocious literary success, removal to Germany in 1939, broadcasts for the Nazis, post-war internment, years of poverty before a second late blooming from the 1970s. He is now much admired by critics such as Seamus Deane, and revered by many for what he constantly explains as an artistic imperative to place himself beyond the pale. Stuart's own much-vaunted literary radicalism raises a few doubts, and one notes in Elborn's early pages his subject's youthful taste for Rupert Brooke: romantic individualism and a taste for heroics recu ... Mr Elborn's account is straightforward, based on much time spent with Stuart and his second wife, and laudably attempts some distancing from time to time. But he has not been well served by publisher or editor. Typesetting is chaotic; proofreading apparently non-existent; commas, hyphens and inconsistent capitalisation float freely and arbitrarily through the text; misnomers and misprints abound; proper names appear differently from page to page (for example Clissmann, Manzoni, Monroe, Nicolson, MOl1therlant, Raffael all have variant readings); unedited sentences convey a certain artless Daisy Ashford quality. Awkward

conllations such as U a Black and Tan Auxiliary" or "an Anglo Irish supporter" (prcsllmably meaning Unionist) suggest some unfamiliarity with the historical context, while well-known characters sllch as Bryan Cooper are left unident­ ified (U a M~or Cooper"). Decent editing - or any editing at all - could have remedied most of this. Another dilliculty in Mr Elborn's way is less manageable - the refusal of Scan MacBride and others to cooperate with his researches. Thus the best material in the book comes directly from Stuart - especially on the early family back- Francis Stuart: A Life 305 ground, grim and bizarre, and the German period. Here as elsewhere, Black List is taken as the template (even down to a certain selective reticence about sex and relationships: much more could now be said about John MacBride's part in Iseult's past). Elborn bravely tries to confront Stuart's wilful political ignorance, on Irish as well as Nazi matters, but some statements require more interrogation: Stuart was deeply embroiled in the Civil War when it "sud­ denly" struck him "arc we really fighting for de Valera, for his puritanism and a thing I didn't personally believe in, his ultra-Catholic Gaelic state?" His political gullibility is instanced as the basis for his belief in the anti-Semitic statements of the German newspapers, though this might be queried by a close reading of his 1931· apologia, Things to Live For (usually unmentioned by his biographical entries in literary anthologies), and the journal, TOlllorrow. The Yeats connection is rather played down. Their first meeting remains vague. Stuart's imitative poetic efforts do not receive much attention; his rather laboured interest in Boehme (here spelt Boeheme), and his recurrent hare symbolism, are not related to a likely Yeatsian influence. Yeats's own obsession with Iseult is underestimated; this makes his attitude to Stuart's literary qualities less explicable, not to mention the interest Lady Gregory took in the young couple. More might also be said about Swart's friend Ethel Mannin's relationship both to Yeats and to Maud GOIlIle. But there are valuable nuggets here for any student of Yeats's life, notably in some of Iseult Stuart's acerbic boIlS IIIO/S. As with her remark to Richard Ellmallll - "My mother is 1I0t a woman of much discel'l1ment, but she had enough to know better than to marry Yeats" - her judgement often seems close to the mark. Shortly before her death she wrote to Stuart: "Very shocking (and not really like you) what you wrote to me a long time ago about having to live your own life and the children theirs and how they would quite understand etc. But you have often talked smug rubbish just to annoy me". Long before, Yeats wrote: "The young man is I think a Sadist, one of those who torture those they love, a recognised lunatic type". Elborn finds this judgement "extraordinary", but it is hard not to feel some sympathy with it. Certainly, it is hard to award his novels the portentous status which Stuart and his biographel' believe validates the vicissitudes of the author's life. Basil Liddel-Hart, who knew Stuart in his post-war disgrace, recorded a less high-falutin' analysis. "As a student of history, I have often found that what seems on the surface to have some deep political significance may not infrequently be due to more romantic urges .... Romantics ought to keep out of politics". Maybe Stuart ought to have stayed faithful to Rupert Brooke. 306 Yeats AI/flual No. 10

The Selected Writings ojJack B. Yeats, edited by Robin Skelton (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991).

Images ill Yeats, Exhibition on the Occasion of the Twelfth International JamesJoyce Symposium, June 1990 (Monaco: Jelfcrson Smurfit Group pic, 1990) .

.lack B. Yeats: Tlte Late Painlings, Exhibition at Arnolfini, Bristol / Whitcchapcl Art Gallery, London / Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, February-September 1991 (Bristol, London, The Hague: Arnolfini Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1991).

John Purser

Robin Skelton's edition of all Jack Yeats's playsl was a landmark in Yeats scholarship, bringing a number of important works into print for the first time. This was an act of faith made in the face of little critical interest, and for that alone Skelton deserves to be honoured. Sadly, his selection from the prose and drama of Jack Yeats does not heap bays upon laurels. The idea of selecting extracts is itselfan admission ofliterary and publishing defeat, and it docs a particular disservice to the coherence of works which are not in print and hard to obtain, for the reader has no easy remedy. The so-called Introduction makes no attempt to explain the selection, offers no clue to the plots of the novels from which extracts are taken, and discusses texts not printed in the selection at the expense of ones which are. More than a page is given to explaining The Scourge Of The Gulph (which is an early miniature play not printed in the book), whereas The Amarallihers gets two sentences, though eighteen pages of it are presented. Three pages of discussion are devoted to La La Noo, not one word of which appears in the extracts, whereas the forty-page extract from The Careless Flower is given one sentence, in which we are told nothing of the characters 01' their situation, nothing of the plot, and are given no idea of what part of the book the extract comes from. But this is true of all the extracts fi'om the novels. Abandoning the Introduction and attempting to find coherence in the selec­ tion without its aid is no easier. To devote sixteen text pages to the articles from the Mallchesler Guardiall (pleasant but slight) and omit the four-page prologue to /11 Sand, though the dust-jacket claims the whole text is published, seems Selectcd Writings and Paintings of Jack B. Ycats 307 perverse, especially given the discussion of that prologue in Skelton's Introduc­ tion. It is also hard to understand Skelton's having printed six of the articles for the Mallchester Guardiall while ignoring Illdigo /leigllt, which is much more than journalism and would have given breadth to the selection of short prose works. But, worst of all, these articles draw their breath from the combination of picture and story. As journalism they belong to a genre now rare, in which the artist / reporter can only be properly appreciated if the whole work is pub­ lished. For instance, the text of Racillg DOllkeys belongs with a wonderfully witty drawing, not reproduced. Instead Skelton accompanies the end of this article with an irrelevant Yeats drawing of a donkey taken from Alld To YOII Also. It occupies the page the proper drawing might have filled. The text itself is not accurately reproduced - the omission of italics from the eel jelly man's cry deprives us of the authentic sound of his delivery. The same is done for two other wmds in the ai·ticle, so the rhythm and emphasis of the writing is not truly reflected here. There are also one or two misleading statements. III Salld is given the date of 1964 in the contents list (Jack Yeats died in 1957), because this was the date of its first publication; but it was written in 1943 and first staged in the form published here in 1949. Skelton's statement in his Editorial Note, that there are no chapters in any ofYeats's novels, is not strictly true. Sailillg Sailillg Swiftly is clearly divided into six chapters, though they are not given a listing or a heading; hut the commencement of each chapter on a new page, with an illustration at the top and the initial letter in a larger type-face than all the other capitals, plus the conclusion of each chapter with an illustration, is more than sufficient evidence. It is also unfortunate that 111e Careless Flower is given the date of 1947, which is merely the date of its final publication. The novel was complete by 1933 and substantial parts of it were published in Tile Bell, Tile New AI/iallee and Dublill Maga:[.ille in 1940. It is therefore not his "last, energetic, prose work" but probably only the third of his seven novels. 2 The Bibliography is also strange, for it is titled "Books Written And Illustrated By Jack B. Yeats", without any clue that only those published during his lifetime are included or that the many books that he did not write himself, but did illustrate, are omitted. Throughout the book, illustrations are scattered without mention of their source and with a disregard for their significance. Drawings £i'om Life ill tile Wesl oj Irelalld are interleaved with the articles for the Mallchesler Guardian (which are all about places in England) without any explanation. There are two from Sailillg Saililll? Swiftly in the extract from The Amarallthers, the manuscript for which has its own drawings; one from Alld To You Also appears in the extract from Sligo; and illustrations from Sailillg Sailillg Swiftly are used for The Charmed I.ife and 111e Careless Flower. A publication of the work of a writer / artist should 308 Yeats Amlllai No. 10

surely tcll us whcn it is manipulating matcrial in this way; and to anyone with the slightest knowledge of the novels it is simply ridiculous to see Annette in mourning paying off an outside-car driver in Dublin, used as an image for Aylcen in London in a complctely different novel. The article which Skelton has reprinted as his Introduction is itself substan­ tially drawn from his Introduction to the edition of the plays. Such additions and alterations as there are make no critical advance on that Introduction. The main themes of practically everyone of Jack Yeats's works are missed. The Faustian significance of TIle Charmed Life (recognised by W. B.)3 is not even hinted at; the central theme of inheritance and the confrontation of capitalism in 1'lle AII/arallthers is not given a whispered utterance; the talk in Harlequill's Positiolls is dismissed as "inconsequential, highly anecdotal, and seems rather aimless", when in fact it is closely focused on the theme ofimpcnding war and how we behave when faced with a choicc of participating or no - as Ireland was, at the time of its first production. Yeats himself described it as "a play of war's alarums":' Thc selection from the novels, such as it is, is not designed to give the reader any insight into thc coherence of Yeats's thought or method. We are given a passage from The Amarallthers whose meaning is only made clear in the last pages of that novel, and a section from The Charmed Life, when Bowsie and No Matter make their way to the Pride Hotel via a sequence of symbolic encoun­ ters that are bound to seem arbitrary on their own, especially without any explanation of the context of the journey, in which the names of the hotels visited have allegorical significance. It would have been better to have pub­ lished one or two of the relatively self-contained tales in the novels, which make good sense on their own without a word from an editor. Such are the story of the man who went to Spain, in TIle Charmed Life; or the story in TIle Amarallthers of the jealous captain of a lighter, taking her over the harbour wall in a hurricane to forestall his wife's lover; or, in the same novel, the virtuoso description of the ellcct ofa drink of Romance on a man unworthy of it - a piece of comic writing as fine as anything in Flann O'Brien. This approach to Jack Yeats, in which precision of imagery, allegorical significance and even straightforward narrative coherence and basic subject­ matter are by-passed in favour of a whimsical acceptance that he is a pleasant and garrulous genius best left unexplained, has also bedevilled the world of the art cri tics. It is perfectly true that Jack Yeats sanctioned a wide variety of interpreta­ tions of his paintings. Many artists do, often because they are fed up with trying to explain to people that it takes longer than five minutes to look at a painting and see what is in it. The oft-repeated story of Yeats deciding, after a dinner party at which his work was ignorantly discussed, to pin an artificial rose to his Selcctcd Writings and Paintings of Jack B. Yeats 309 easel and paint fOl' ever under its cloak of secrecy, is best interp.·eted in this light. Instead, it is used to justify the critical meanderings and lack of observa­ tion which provoked it in the first place. Whenever Yeats did speak or write about one of his paintings he was quite clear and precise about it. The subject-matter is stated and its significance outlined. He was prepared to explain "Tinkers' Encampment - The Blood of Abel" to Stephen Rynne;5 was precise about the symbolic action and colour-scheme of "Helen,,;6 made a straightforward comment about "Bachelor's Walk - In Memory" which has been completely by-passed;7 commented that "The Old Days", with the two horse-bus ostlers fighting, has a cemetery as a backcloth, with the c1ea.· implication that the theme is a broader one than a scrap over a woman - which was also his own suggestion;8 and, on the many occasions when he described paintings in his writings, gave clear descriptions of them with the same eye for detail that he exhibited in all his work. Fortunately, the two recent important exhibitions of Yeats's paintings have been superbly selected and reasonably introduced, though theJack B. Yeats, Tile Lale Pail/lil/gs catalogue pins its colours to the mast of the ship Vagl/ery with a well-chosen selection of quotations, and the Monaco catalogue has the odd false sighting from the crow's nest. The difference in approach is marked. Hilary Pyle guides the spectator, whereas Jack B. Yeals, TIle Lale Pail/til/gs attempts no guide to individual exhibits, and in this is consistent with the tenor of the four introductory pieces of its catalogue, which draw their inspiration from Sam Beckett's "One can simply bow, wonder-struck".9 Rudi Fuchs has delivered a brief eulogy, joining those who regard Jack Yeats as a great European master; Stephen Snoddy has rightly stressed Yeats's "draughtsmanship and observation which underpin all his work"lo - a remark all the more welcome because some art-critics have thought his draughts­ manship poor and others have failed to notice his frequently detailed observa­ tion. Mark Haworth Booth has gathered in the writings of previous critics and painters, from Sickert to John Berger, in a valuable mixum-gatherum, wisely including a piece of negative criticism; but strangely omitting Kokoshka, who addressed Yeats as "the great painter (may-be the last)" and wrote to him, describing "Two Travellers" (which appeared in the exhibition)

you know that one with the two men meeting in the country on a heath or dale, one with short, the other one with ruffed black hair and leery eyes, but the air was so much Irish and tension between the two so vivid, that one could spinn the yarn on and on for oneself without a verbally written story to support it .... Please, after having had your rest, let your unruly soul for another turn out in the wonderfull world of your sagas and take up painting again! You alone call to-day tell in painting such touching stodes! II 310 Yeats Annual No. 10

I was at first seduced by the absence of comment in the catalogue, knowing the works and their background well. But putting myself in the shoes of others, I see that it will not do. It is not fair to the English or Dutch gallel'y-goers to expect them to know that Hy-Brazil is a magical island, or to have any notion of who Queen Maeve was (or even Wolfe Tone), and it is a bad business to mis-spell the title of "Humanity's Alibi" as "Humanities Alibi" and leave it without any reference to the earlier work from which it is derived - "The Barrel Man" - the I;\ir-ground origins of which are necessary lor a propel' understand­ ing of the strange image of a man in a barrel with hundreds of sticks flying through the air at him.'2 It is a measure of the strength of the paintings that they can often hold their own without even a basic understanding of their titles and subject matter, but it is feeble sentimentality to imagine that such an understanding is so secondary in importance that it can be omitted (as it is) from the catalogue. Among the paintings in this exhibition was the magnificent "Queen Maeve Walked Upon This Strand". A frock-coated figure stands close beside, and watches, a swan spreading its wings at the edge of the ocean. Yeats scholars need no further description to set their minds racing over millennia of symbol­ ism; but sec the painting, and the timelessness is also present in the lavish beauty of the colours of land, sky, and ocean, all playing with each other, yet each distinct in its own place. This masterpiece belongs to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and it is a measure of the mixed attitudes to Jack Yeats that it has been rarely on show. "Defiance" was in the Late Paintings exhibition as well as at Monaco. Its subject matter draws on Yeats's !i'eqlH:nt interest in the interraction between humans and other animals. The man 1.·OIn the sea, breasting the top of a cliff, is surprised and confronted by a sunlit cormorant, bravely defending its own - yellow and blue struggling to a compromise in the midst of a wild canvas. If you fail to see the cormorant you miss half the point of the painting, but it is not easily seen at first because Yeats has deliberately made it a part of its own environment, and the man the surprised invader of its space. 1l The monumental and supremely beautiful painting ofa donkey, "Of Ancient Lineage", in which again creature and landscape seem to inhabit each other, requires little or no commentary, but the viewer who does not recognise the quotation from Caroline Norton's The Arab's Farewell to llis Steed, in the title of "My Beautiful, My Beautifu!!", is needlessly denied access to a valuable additional understanding - one which the Monaco catalogue provides (see below). "The Basin In Which Pilate Washed His Hands" requires that the viewer consider the meaning within relatively precise limits, though its title may not yet need explanation. The basin is there as a side-show at a fair, with a towel 011 the back of the chair on which the basin sits. We have the chance of Selected Writings and Paintings of Jack B. Yeats 311 repeating Pilate's act, with the added irony that we must pay 2d for the privilege! Why should humans be drawn to do such a thing? But drawn we are. Nor is the credulity of the fair-goer something we can smile upon with superior­ ity if we have ever bothered ourselves to enter the doors of a Madame T ussa ud' s. The Monaco exhibition was the work of Hilary Pyle and contained paintings of supreme importance, some of them rarely seen, "Defiance" and "The Harvest Moon" in particular. Pyle is a sympathetic interpreter. She does not try to prove hersclfwith convoluted aesthetic theories, or by dragging chains of innuence about in ordel' to show us that she has looked at the work of other painters. She uses her own eyes and applies them to what is in f!'Ont of her, and mostly her eyes are sharp. The "golden-haired boy,,'4 she sees in "Islandbridge Regatta" is in fact a woman (as scale, neck-line and hair-style make clear) and she has missed the figure of the hanged man in "Excitement On A Road"; but her understanding and feeling for paintings such as "A Welcome", "The Map" or "The Harvest Moon" help us to see with a fresh and innocent eye that there can he depth in simplicity and no need for jargon, and she writes magnificently and movingly about "My Beautiful, My Beautifu!!"

"That penetrating look, wide and steady" of the noble steed of this painting, betrayed by his master for gold, yet g!'Own greater in stature than the man, elevates him to a plane beyond all human transactions, which may have an intentional theological reference. Rather than merely illustrating the poem, Yeats has created, in his inimitable manner, a moving image oflove, and the forgiveness that is its essence.l~

The exhibition (drawn mostly from the Smurfit Collection and the National Gallery of Ireland) gave a sense of the scope of Yeats's work within tight limits, from early illustrations, through the daring treatment of space and colour of "The Ball Alley", to the anguish of "He Sings Alone" - a man haunted by a deep tragedy, singing himself out of darkness into light with feeling imprinted on his purple lips and an unforgettable longing and loss in his eyes. In Monaco many of the Joyce scholars did not visit the Yeats exhibition: when Jack Yeats tops a million dollars no doubt they will; and when that day comes, the Tate Gallery might choose to hang its own Yeats paintings more frequently, for the English as well as the Scots have slept unknowingly on a fortune. But we must not leave Jack Yeats to be judged by the hand-washers or the thirty-pieces-of-silver men only. His work, be it in words or in pigments, requires that we keep ourselves alive to all the thoughts, beauties, troubles and delights of his astonishing mind and be prepared to accept that his intellect and his pcn werc as sharp as his eye, and that through them he expressed, with 312 Yeats Annual No. 10 clarity and affection, a range of understanding that is still largely only guessed at. In giving us that opportunity once more, these two exhibitions were of outstanding impol·tance; and even Skelton's seriously flawed selection bears with it a distant smell of the great ocean of discovery that awaits the adventurer who is I'eady to board a ship such as the one in The Careless Flower, that trades under the uncompromising name of The Scmlilleer.

NOTES

I. Tile Collected Plays of Jack B. Yeats, cditcd with an Introduction by Robin Skclton (London: Scckcr & Warburg, 1971; and Indianapolis/Ncw York: Bobbs-Mcl'1'ill, 1971). 2. John Purscr, Tile Literary Works rif Jack B. Yeats (Gcrrards Cross: Colin Smythc; Savagc, Maryland: Barnes & Noble, (991) p. 22. Hcreafter cited as Purser. 3. W. B. Yeats, 011 the Boiler (Cuala Press: Dundl'Um, 1938) p. 36. 4. Jack Yeats to Ria Mooncy 01' Eric Gorman, 19 Scptember 1938, from a dealcr's type-written abstract of this correspondence, source unknown. 5. Stcphcn Rynnc, "Tca With Jack B. Ycats 1940", Eire-Irelalld, VII, 2. 6. Shotaro Oshima, "An Interview with Jack Butler Yeats", inJack B. Yeals: A Cmlmary Ga/herillg, edited and introduced by Rogcr McHugh (Dundl'Um: The Dolmen Prcss, 1971) pp. 53-1. 7. "A Talk with Jack Yeats", Wes/millS/eT Ga.?;ette, 21 December 1921. The mis-reading of this painting is discussed in PUTser, pp. 4-5. 8. Jack Ycats, in an intcrview with Thomas MacGrecvy, BBC Third Programmc, 17 May 1948. An edited transcript by Jolm Purser of the full interview (only part of which can be heard in the archives on disc) made from the disc and the initial transcript, was dcposited with the BBC library and sound archives, and is repro­ duced in John Pursel', "The Literary Works of Jack B. Yeats", unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Glasgow, 1989, pp. 177 e/ seq. 9. Samuel Beckett, "Homage to Jack B. Yeats", Les LeI/res Nouvelles, April 1954, (translated by Ruby Cohn inJack B. Yeats: A Cell/mary Ga/herillg, as above, pp. 75-6). 10. Jack B. Yeals, 17Ie Lale Pailltillgs (sec above), p. 15. II. Oskar Kokoshka to J ack Yeats, II November 1956, courtesy of Olda Kokoshka. 12. The painting is discussed in PurseT, p. 27. 13. The cormorant is centrally placed, facing the man. The man's right hand is at its feet and under its breast, above which its yellow neck and beak arc stretched upwards. The rest or its body and its wings arc mostly painted in dark blue. 14. Images ill Yeats, p. 33. 15. Ibid. p. 1l3. Thc Literary Works of Jack B. Ycats 313

John W. Purscr, The Literary Works oj Jack B. Yeats (GclTards Cross: Colin Smythc) 221 pp.

Robin Skelton

There is a (probably apocryphal) story of the late Eric Partridge being dis­ covered saying to a balled Workers Educational Association class, " ... and the fifth of the lost comedies of Menandet· ... ". John Purser, in discussing the writings ofJack B. Yeats, faces, as he admits, much the same problem. For the greater part of his book he is interpreting plays and novels which arc not only unavailable in stores but also unobtainable in libraries. Nevertheless, anyone reading his admirable and challenging study is certain to become excited and is extremely likely to clamour lor republication ofJack Yeats's works, for hc goes a long way towards proving that these writings are much more complex, profound and original than has previously been admitted, and even comes dangerously close to echoing the enthusiasm for which I myself have rccently been castigated by sceptical reviewers. His arguments arc persuasive and his analyses thorough, and I find it hanl to quarrel with him, especially as his acknowledgement of my own work is so generous and his disagreements arc so sensible that criticism would seem churlish. Reviewers, however, must be churls, and I feel ohliged to wonder if it is the word "literary" in the book's title that has caused the author to omit consideration of the "Plays for a Miniature Theatre", which, in their symbol­ ism and their melodrama, do anticipate some of the methods and attitudes or the later plays. I am also sad to find no real exploration of the articles in periodicals, some of which also bear directly upon themes of the more am­ hitious fictions. To judge from a reference to lack of space in the formidable analysis of A Charmed Life, and the shortness of the penultimate chapter on /\IU/ To YOII illso and flit Well, it may be that the puhlishing house restricted the author as to length. Proc\'llstes was an editor. Setting these c

Jack Yeats's (,xtraordinary vitality, ebullience and comic wit, and docs not pick up Yeats's devotion to The Sillgular Adventures of Bal"OlI Miillchausen, which, I believe, influ('nced his writing in a number of ways. I also suspect that he may have been aflccted by reading Rabclais, whose love of making lists equalled his own. Inlitl('nn' hunting is a pleasurable academic sport, but often little more than an cntertailllnent. Nevertheless, in the study ofJack B. Yeats it is of more than uSllal importance 10 emphasise that he was an erudite man and not the naive, inspired painter who tore offhis plays and stories in a fit of almost irresponsible eXllberance and !:'tntasy. This has been the view held by too many people lor too long. Whether or not Jack Yeats's vision should be described exactly in the terms John Purser pl:ovides is something which demands further discussion. His view that the conlliet in the novels is very frequently between Flesh and Spirit, occasionally sounds simplistic, and from time to time the relationship between the universalities of symbolism and the particularities ofIrish politics seems less certain than he would have us believe. I find myself wondering whether there are not other, though possibly subsidiary, symbols that should concel'll liS: the image of travelling I'Uns though a great deal of Jack Yeats's writing, and dearly represents both spiritual and psychological journeying and the individual's experience of time passing. Time is one of the main characters in all these writings. As Purser points out, there is little or no sexual love, but there is a li'cquentuse of male camaraderie, even (to usc a fashionable expres­ sion) of male honding. There is a lot more exploring to be done. Apart entirely from the richness of Yeats's symbolism, there is an extraordi­ nary verbal IIlIISic, which Purser deals with effectively, though all too briefly. When John Blltler Yeats spoke of Jack as a poet, it is my belief that he was rclhring not merely to his son's fertile imagination but also to his car for verbal harlllonies, and his production of a style of writing which L. P. Hartley once described as "hypnotic". Jack Yeats, like his cider brother, wrote for the cal'; his IISC or alliteration, assonance, consonance, and even occasional sly passages or metre, reminds one of the cunning of Joyce, while his exuberance has no equal anywhere. John Purser has done a good deed in bringing Jack B. Yeats before liS. May this hook lead to the republication of all those brilliant and little known works of a Master. Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats 315

Gordon S. Armstrong, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associ­ ated University Presses, 1990) 268 pp.

Katharine Worth

Dust-covers arc sometimes a clue to the thrust of a book, and it is so with Gordon Armstrong's. The front cover, Jack Yeats's magical painting, "Two Travellers" (1912), is a 'pointer to what is most valuable in this curiously uneven but interesting study. (We need not dwell on the back cover, which tells us only that the author had himself photographed with Beckett in the hotel cafe where he met academic visitors.) The five colour plates and other illustrations arc one of the pleasurable clements in a book which has genuine insights to offer, along with a fair amount of critical confusion, notably where W. B. Yeats is concemed. Like other enigmatic later paintings by Jack Yeats - "Glory", for example, which is reproduced here, aJ~d "There Is No Night", which is not - "Two Travellers" ofrers convincing testimony to an affinity between the work of the painter and the elliptical art of Beckett. The figures in the picture - two ordinary men, wearing hats as if walking down a town street - stand isolated in a landscape as strangely empty as the country mad where Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot. The bold usc of swirling forms and blotches of unexpected colour invests moors and distant hills with surreal intensity. This is the best kind of evidence for the deep likeness between painter and playwright which is the book's chief argument. Beckett's admiration for Jack Yeats's art is not in doubt. "Homage to Jack Yeats", the title of an appreciation he published in 1954, exactly represents his attitude. No comment onJack Yeats's art, he said, could dojustiee to its "great inner real"; its admirers could merely bow in wonder. Later he spoke of this "real" in words that could be applied to his own writings: "I'educing the dark where there might have been mathematically, at least, a door. The being in the street, when it happens in the room, the being in the room when it happens in the street". We hear the voice of Hamm, musing, "I was never there ... Absent, always. It all happened without me" or those women's voices coming out of a dark streaked with purposeful light, speaking of themselves as of someone else, merging into a dimension where they can no longer be dis­ tinguished from the "shades" they have evoked. Jack Yeats's later paintings arc remarkable, one critic suggests unique, for presenting human figures in a 316 Yeats Annual No. IO similar way, as if almost part of the landscape they so distinctively inhabit. Sustained close criticism of individual works is not Armstrong's forte but he oilers a thought-provoking analysis of Not I and Rockaby in support of his ruling noiion: that Beckett's technique for representing process - the "stages of an imagc" - has much in common with the painterly method of Jack Yeats. Beckett's advice to Hildegarde Schmahl, playing May in Fooifalls, is appositely quoted: "It is an image which develops gradually." Other readings, however, lack finesse, and even the interpretation of Not I requires more arguing. It is not cnough to dimiss Hersh Zeifman's view - that the removal of the Auditor would not damage Mouth's "communicative posture" - without referring to the television version (accepted by Beckett) from which the Auditor has indeed heen removed. Armstrong's silence on this and other'controversial issues makes some black holes in his commentary. His method is to present his own view by piecing together, as in a patchwork quilt, a vast number of highly coloured scraps. The elfect is often striking but not all the scraps will bear close scrutiny (there arc some real errors and oddities, including the mind-boggling reading of "cowslips", in Not I, as "cow slops"). Allinitics between J ack Yeats and Beckett arc easier to establish than the specific, even dominant, influence of the one on the other. Armstrong believes that "something" changed Beckett's art in the seventies and the "something" was.J ack Yeats. He is obliged to admit that Beckett never acknowledged any sllch influence, even when pressed in correspondence, but makes a case from the likcncsses he observes in their sense of the "great inner real" and their methods of conveying it. The surmise is not unreasonable, though he stretches heliefwith confident assertions to the eRect that conversations with Jack Yeats during walks in Ireland in 1945 "profoundly alfected Beckett's attitude toward artistic creation"; and that the influence lay dormant for decades till it came into its own with Not I in 1971. Thc case is not strengthened by the extravagant claims made for Jack Yeats as novelist alld playwright. It is arguable that he has been underestimated in that sphere (although he himself said "I wish they'd forget this stulf ... they should remember me as a painter"). But the argument runs into absurdity whl'lI it ('X tends to invidious comparisons between the great painter who also Wrotl' novrls and plays, and the grcat poct, his brothel'. Evcn when quoting li'Olll the plays of both, Armstrong docs not seem to recognisc the dilfercnces in wrhal and rhythmic subtlety which make his comparison inept. His tendency to tr('al works of art, sayings and ideas as evidence of the samc order is a factor hen'. W. B. Yeats is seen as a symbolist,Jack Yeats and Beckett as symbol-frce: the ('()mparison is almost as crude as this and it leads into some vcry cursory,

("'('11 garhled criticism, as when wc arc told that "Unlikc Beckett's Krapp, Y('ats is lhl' Old rvlan in Ililhe IIawk's Well." Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry 317

It is a great irony thatJack Yeats's influence on Beckett should be elevated at the expense of his brother's, when the hard evidence is all the other way. It is useful to be reminded of the youthful Beckett's caustic comments on W. B. Yeats's attitudes to Irish life. But those reservations co-existed with admira­ tion. Armstrong knows this, of course, but he seems not to feel the potent pl'esence ofW. B. Yeats within Beckett's plays, perhaps because he is no lover of the poetry or perhaps simply because he is so committed to the cause ofJack Ycats. It is sad that his response to the most exquisite tribute one poet ever paid another - the ghostly repetition of the last lines of The Tower, Yeats's valedictory, in ... but the clouds . .. - should be the prosaic remark, "Yeats's power of invention of language had a strong impact on Samuel Beckett" (he adds, incomprehensibly in the poignant cont~xt, that Beckett's way of drama­ tising consciousness was very different from the "strutting and posturing of the older poet"). It would be a pity, however, to let the failures of expression and critical sensitivity, jarring as they often are, obscure the very real interest of the book. It is often vivid and suggestive; it is generously scattered with graphic illustra­ tions and quotations; and it is driven by an enthusiasm for the art ofJack Yeats which casts a valuahle light on that extraordinary achievement, and some, by reflection, on that of Beckett too.

William Carleton, Traits a1ld Stories of the Irish Peasantry, with a foreword by Barbara Hayley, 2 vols (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe) vol. I £5.95; vol. II £5.95.

D. Godkin

This facsimile edition of Traits al/d Stories of the Irish Peasal/try is very welcome; it is the only complete printing of the "Definitive Edition", published in 1842-4. This was the last edition that Carleton oversaw; it came after the text had gone through several editions, changing considerably in the process. The illustra­ tions are particularly valuable, as Barbara Hayley remarks in the opening sentence of her discerning and useful foreword. They include work by Harvey, Phiz, Macmanus, Gilbert and other artists, and they are an admirable ac­ companiment to the rumbustious tales themselves, crowded, as Professor Hayley puts it, "with laughing, weeping, fighting, working, playing, dying, praying peasants in suhlime scenery, poverty-stricken cottages, cosy public houses, trim farms, broken-down barns, hillside chapels, hedge-schools, hovels". 318 Yeats Anllual No. 10

As a young man Yeats greatly valued Carleton; in March 1889 he remarked that Carleton "has never added anything untrue, anything incongruous; no other man ever knew the Irish peasanu'y as he did; none ever touched Irish folk-lore with like genius" (UPI 138). He noticed his own compilation, Siories from Carletoll (1889), while reviewing Carleton's The Red-Haired Mml's Wife (1889) anonymously for the Scols Observer: this piece appeared on 19 October \B89, and it reveals Yeats's knowledge of Carleton's work (UP} 141-6). As in the introduction to Stories from Carletoll (\B89), he discerned three distinct periods in Carleton's life and writing, and here he gave them more decisive description. The first period followed his conversion to Protestantism, when he wrote the short stories that began with "The Lough Derg Pilgrim" and ended with the Traits alld Stories and Irish Life alld Character. During the second, "after his heart at any rate returned to Catholicism", he wrote a series of long stories of peasant life, beginning with Fardol'OlIglw the Miser and ending with 1'l,e Black Pro/Jhel. The third was a time of "twenty years' decadence", a time mainly "of bad historical novels" . In this review Yeats was concerned to put his own views of what Irish literature should be: he saw Carleton's early period as one when no Irish public took Irish writing seriously, and so Carleton was responding to readers who wanted books which would answer their desire to laugh a great deal, "and they did not mind weeping a little, but they wished all through to retain their sense of superiority". In his middle period Carleton avoided the "fierce political feeling" that degraded his later work into caricature. Yeats praised the writing of Fa rdorollgha , the mournfulness, the grotesque humour and intense lyricism of The Black Prophet. The last phase was one in which, Yeats asserted, Carleton knew well he had written himself out (UPI 143-4). He defended Carleton (in replying, in a letter dated 3 January 1890, to a review of his Sioriesjrom Carleloll) against a reviewer who had attacked Carleton for "envenomed caricature" rather than portraiture, advising Irish critics to keep the "slanderous" Carleton in the literary pillory. Yeats, generally full of generosity himself, argued that Catholicism could well aflord to be generous: "no Catholic need show the bigotry of some poor sectal'y" (UPI 166--8). He extended this largeness of view in a letter to Ullited Irelam/, 23 December 1893, where, while praising Carleton as a man of genius, he thought him, apropos Valell/ille McCllI/clty, so bedevilled by partisan political violence that he forgot to remember how men ally themselves with any and every calise for the best of motives (UP} 306--7}. After a succession of masterpieces, he remarked in a review in TIle Bookman, of August I B94, Carleton contributed three stories to his Library of Ireland and in them departed from his own amiable manner, "and instead of creating new masterpieces of pity and humour, wrote three tracts against intemperance, sloth, and the secret societies, and nevcl' after quite got the beam out of his eyes" (UP} 335). He continucd this line of criticism in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry 319

"Irish National Literahn'e IV", in The /Jookmall, October 1895, blaming the patriotism and political enthusiasm or an Irish reading public that made no distinction between literature and rhetoric, ror Carleton's writing stories "now against intemperance, now against landlords" (UP1 383). Previously, in the first article on Irish National Literature, subtitled "From Callanan to Carleton", in Tlte Bookmall, July 1895, Yeats had remarked that "only Carleton, horn and bred a peasant, had been able to give us a vast multitude or grotesque, pathetic, humorous persons, misers, pig-drivers, drunkards, schoolmasters, labourers, priests, madmen and to fill them all with an ahounding vitality" (UP1 364). He mentioned the "almost spiritual gran­ deur", given to "almost whole pages" or Fardorouglta and Tlte Black Propltet, and praised Cadeton as a true historian, the peasant Chaueel' or a new tradition, at his worst railing into melodrama, more rrom imperfect criticism than imperfect inspiration (ihid.). In the second article, in Tlte Bookmall, August 1895, he had alluded to the "exultant and passionate lire" Carleton celebrated, its "rough­ ness ami tumult" (UP1 370) . .Then came a review of D. J. O'Donoghue's edition of 17le Life of William Carleloll (1896), an incomplete autobiography in two volumes. By this time Yeats had, in addition to selecting his Stories from Carletoll (IBB9), included excerpts rrom him in his Re/neselliatiue Irislt Tales (1891). In this review he described him as coming rrom "the heart or Gaelic Ireland", his autobiography telling or the experiences that went to the making or "the hair imaginary adventures" or the Traits alld Stories (UP1 395). Yeats had been deeply impressed hy Carleton's account of the Lough Derg pilgrimage; he had described it in Stories from Carletoll as

a most wonderful piece or work. The dim chapel at night, the praying peasants, the fear of a supernatural madness if they sleep, the fall of the young man rrom the gallery - no one who has read it rorgets these things. (/'&/26)

And this comment on the story still holds true: it is indeed memorable. In this introduction Yeats expressed admiration for the force of Carleton:

None came near him at jig or hornpipe. He was great, too, with his big peasant's hody at all kinds of athletic contests, could swing a shillclah with any man, and leap twenty-one feet on a level. (1'&/2'1)

Yeats did not mind repeating himself; and developed this description in the Introductioll to his Re/JI'eJf1Itatille lriJIt Tales, where Carleton is portrayed as having outdone othn Irish lIovelists, with no cOllscious art at all 320 Yeats Annual No. 10

by the sheer force of his powerful nature. It was not for nothing that his ancestors had dug the ground. His great body, that could leap twenty-one Icet on a level, was full of violent emotions and brooding melancholy. (P&I 33)

Yeats seems to have lost interest in Carleton in the mid to later nineties, as his OWII art pursued essences and symbolism in his Paterian prose. In 1904 he wrote in John Quinn's copy of Storiesjrolll Carletoll that he had "thought no end of Cadet on in those days and would still I dare say ifl had not forgotten him" (Wade 237). Carleton, however, in his depictions of violence - of the secret societies, as in "Wild Goose Lodge", and of brutality, as in "The Party Fight and Funeral" - may have shaped some of Yeats's later political - and sexual - vicws. Carleton portrayed pre-Famine Ireland in all its vitality and exuber­ ance. Yeats, however, had grown up within the Victorian puritanism of a protestant family in an Ireland which was, itself, because of the economic and social dlccts of the Famine, sexually repressed into abstinence. But Yeats was attracted by the idea of a lively peasant sexuality, the overflowing energy that Carleton depicts in all areas of pre-Famine Irish country life, and expressed this in his later Crazy Jane poems, which continue his earlier blindness to puhlic attitudes founded upon repression, an unawareness of the likely sec­ tarian response, [or instance, that his praise of Carleton had evoked, just as the Irish Theatre was to receive attacks for plays that did not conform to parochial ideas of sexual or at times political morality. His dislike of the increasing power of the many, in modern Ireland, was probably developed because this was so dim~renl (i'om his eadier hopes for a society in which peasant and al'istocrat would combine in a culture rooted in the best of the past, one not under the influcncc o[ demagogues, priests, and a materialistic middle class. He li'cqucntly expressed his disappointment with publishers for not making Carleton's best work available. This fine new edition of Traits al/d Stories fills a !!;ap, and we can be grateful for having the opportunity of I'eading stories by a writer whose varied achievement has been so well appreciated and criticised by Yeats, We can ponder not only the effect of Carleton's stories upon him, as a young man hunting out his folk tales and learning about the hidden Ireland, hut also speculate how, buried in his memories, theil' material could surface again in the powerful poems and polemic of his middle and later periods. Rediscovering Herbert Horne 321

Ian Fletcher, Rediscoveri71g Herbert Home: Poet, Architect, Typographer, Art Historiall, foreword by Peter Stansky (Greensboro: ELT Press, 1990, distributed in Europe by Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, Bucks) xv + 188 pp. £25.00 hbk.

Anne Varty

In July 1988 Ian Flctchcl' cntcrtaincd delegates of the "New Work on Patel''' Conference in Oxford with an extraordinary performance of agile scholarship and humol11' at Horne's expense, though hardly an acsthcte or politician ofthc 1890s cscaped without debit. "Dear Herbert Horne! poring ovcr Botticelli's washing bills - and always a shirt missing," as he said then, quoting Reginald Turncr, and as he rcpcats in this monograph of "rediscovery". Ian Fletcher's death followed soon after, and we are indebted to Robert Langenfeld, Loraine Fletcher and Kathlecn Mason Driskcll for thc final prcparation of this study for publication. Until now the reputation of Herbcrt Hornc (1864-1916) has rested on the painstaking archival rescarchcs of his 1908 monograph on Botticelli, although, in 1957, Fritz Sax I publishcd on his al'Chitcctural work, and, in 1980, John Russcll Taylor drcw attcntion to his work as a dcsigner in Tile Art Nouveau Book ill Britaill. Such divcrsity of achievement calls for the comprehensive survey which Fletcher offcrs hcre, printing pocms from manuscripts and small maga­ zincs, cxamplcs of his title-page designs and typesetting, and of Horne's stylish innovations to the covel' and tailpiece of the Ce/ltury Guild Hobby lIorse, on assuming the editorship in 1886. The facsimile reproductions of these designs are handsomely presentcd in this volume. Thcsc and other contributions by Hornc to jill-de-siecle culture are complemented by Fletcher's knowing, witty analyscs; hc cOcctively "discovers" this figure, though without the cynicism, as Horne himself, whilc living in Italy and rescarching Botticclli, threatencd Binyon to "discovcr for you Agostino di Duccio" (p. 119); and with the discovcry Flctcher reveals again the cxhilaratingly complex cultural life of thc period. [n 1891 Horne announced that hc uscd thc term "Art" to mcan "whatever Art is finc in its nature, in contradistinction to those which arc merely mcchan­ ical" (p. 61), clearly campaigning under the banner of Morris and Pater; and his own creative progress through these "Arts" proceeds, if not by a series of disgusts, then certainly hy enthusiasms, thcir expression halancing "torrid" 322 Yeats Anllual No. 10 matter with "frigid" manner, and passing the gem-like flame on to the twen­ tieth century. Fletchel' leads us through Horne's early poetic and erotic adventures (perhaps cl\l'iously merged in the ambiguous sexual identity of the speaker in the dramatic monologue "Amata Loquitur" [J888]); through his admiration for the culture of seventeenth-century England; to his partnership with the architect A. H. Mackmurdo at 20 Fitzroy Street, where the Rhymers met and Dolmetsch played and where the Century Guild was formed by Horne, Mack­ murdo and Selwyn Image in the early !B80s. The taste promoted by the Guild, with Horne as the editor of its journals, included the printing of Blake's Maniage of lleaufll al/ll Hell in J887 and the Book of Los in 1890; both "Uranian" and "Pandemian" poetry by Symonds, Johnson and others was represented, while Horne himself contributed his aesthetic manifesto, in January !B89, which culminates in praise of architecture as the "highest art" and is supported by I-Iorne's other contributions on this subject. His desire for the harmonious interplay of the dillerent arts, exhibited supremely by architecture, is manifest ill the finely produced artefact of the journal itself. The piaI/O I/ohile of Horne's House of Thought remains Allesal/dro Filipe/Ji, G'01ll1l101/!y Galled Sam/ro lJotticelli, Pail/ter, of FloreT/ce, the fruit of more than ten years' work and greeted by Roger Fry as a "classic" (p. 135). Fletcher classes Horne amongst Venturi's "philological art critics" (p. 130), but he, like Fry, notices how the lyrical and finely observed descriptions of individual works sit awkwardly with the detailed and demythologised account of canon, prov­ enance, politics and production methods. Fletcher quotes extensively from Horne's description of the Nascila di Vel/ere in order to "suggest affinities" with Pater's 1870 introduction of the painter to British attention. The "afIinities" begin with direct, unacknowledged quotation, ending with the observation that the "roses are em browned a little, as Bottieelli's roses always are" (p. 140). Much lies in the quiet emendation of Pater's "flowers" to "roses" here; this introductory pastiche (too blatant for plagiarism) marks a subtle rejection of Pater's impressionistic style, a rejection heralded already twenty years earlier in Horne's editorial notes to Nero (IBBII). Horne veers abruptly from the langorous (/itlse) generalisation, to assert his precise archival instincts in the mention of "sprigs of cOrIlcockle". Although his accounl, like Pater's, is in the present tense, Horne uses this as a device, unlike Pater, to show how Botticelli has arrested a moment of mythological narrative: he reads the painting like a slOry, from leli to right, and indicates how it is poised to continue. But lor Pater, the tense had been a way or lifting the emblem above temporal con­ straint \0 emphasise the artisl's visionary power, avoiding narrative altogether. And whereas Pater had entertained, only to dismiss, the notion that Botticelli was a "mere naturalist", Horne asserts that he was "ever careful of Ihal A Widening Gyre; W. B. Yeats, Poems of Place 323

tradition of naturalism" (hence the corncockles), and that Venus herself, while "of more than human mould", was based on the "Tuscan type" of woman; as for the water, here, as in Pater's text, it is "'showing its teeth''', but Horne adds grimly that this was water Botticelli "might have seen on his way to Rome". Finally Horne admits Pater openly to the discussion: "the colour, 'cadaverous, or at least cold', which Pater noticed in the picture, is partly due to the fact that ... the glair and yolk of egg ... has much deteriorated" (p. 112). "Cadaverous", in Pater's text related to "embrownment", had been "imaginative colouring", the pigment of transience in stasis, Botticelli's rellec­ tion oflove's passing even at birth; but Horne, more accurately perhaps, rclates it to an altogether diflcrcnt kind of transience. Yet Fletcher, having earlier pointed out that this book is in part dedicated to Pater (p. 158), maintains that Horne cherished lasting admiration for the father of aesthetic criticism. If this is so, then Home's initial citation of Pater's text must function as invitation and excuse for the historical concerns of the volume, which reflects Horne's ability to judge authenticity but his reluctance to evaluate acsthctic quality. Flctcher's careful research in the Florentine Museo Home reveals scvcral itcms missing from thc inventory of Horne's own intellectual washing bills, and, as his prcfacc concludes, "what is ncedcd ... is not only an edited collection of Hornc's cssays and closer analysis of his diverse work, but a full-scale biogra­ phy. Those considerable tasks [ must leave to others" (xv).

Toshi Furomoto (cd.), A Wide1lillg Gyre - Poems on W. B. Yeats (privately printed, Japan, 1990) x + 240 pp.

W. B. Yeats, Poems oj Place, introduced and edited by A. Norman jef!;\I'cs, illustrated by Nicholas Parry (Market Drayton, Shropshire: Thc Tern Press, 1991) viii + 52 pp.

Warwick Gould

"Perhaps one day an undaunted enthusiast will collect thesc gems and publish them", commellled K. 1'. S. Jochum, in listing some 11-7 poems about Yeats (not including parodies) in the lirst edition of his W. B. Yeats: II Classified Hiblio.ltmjJ/I)' ~l Criticism. Toshi Furomoto has risen to thc challcnge and col­ lected 213 poems written to and abollt W. B. Ycats. The list of poems is allgnH'ntnl hy a bihliography, and the arrangement, alphabetical, allows some 324 Yeats Anllual No. 10 piquant conjunctions. There are some deliberate exclusions: Auden's overly facile elegy, Berryman's Dream SOllgS, and better known pieces by Pound and others. Jochum's second edition lists 227 items, plus parodies, so the gyre continues to widen. Apart from the noted absences, and those signalled by a comparison between Jochum's list and Furomoto's table of contents, I can think of only a few omissions. Gavin Ewart's "The Doggerel of Life", his "Variation on Two Lines from W. B. Yeats" and his "Sailing to Byzantium (A 61st Anniversary Version)" arc all in his Collected Poems (1991). John Masefield's four poems ["What manner of poetry was in the world"] and "On his Tobacco Jar", "Finn and the Chess-men" and "On what he was" can be found in his Some Memories of W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Cuala, 1940). A. D. Hope, whose "William Butler Yeats" with its "noble, candid speech" is the great poem of the volume, has also written "[Poet, farewell!)" (see YA 4, pp. 161-71). Seamus Heaney's "Settings xxii", from Seeillg Tlu'lIgs, had an early appear­ ance in the TLS as "Small Fantasia for W. B." Its last three lines questioned Yeats

What was learned from the midwife and the hangman? What's the use of a held note or held line That cannot be assailed for reassurance?

Now untitled the poem concludes

What's the use of a held note or held line That cannot be assailed for reassurance? (Set questions for the ghost of W. B.) l~uromoto's text records the earlier text, some small reassurance that Heaney (like his ghost) does not "hold" lines which can be transformed into new antinomies. Perhaps tact led ruromoto to omit what K. P. S. Jochum calls a "nine verse affair" by Terry Eagleton, an English academic much preoccupied by Irish matters. Among the comic inclusions of real talent, however, is the royal reply to Yeats's protest at the visit to Ireland of Queen Victoria in 1900. It came while the Queen was still in Ireland, and was conveyed by "Jamesy Murphy, Deputy Assistant Waiter at the Viceregal Lodge". He had overheard "The Queen's After-Dinner Speech", and cut it into lengths of poetry (assisted by Percy French) for the Dublin Dairy Express and Evmillg Mail, 18 April 1900.

"An' I think there's a slate," sez she, "Off Willie Yeats," sez she, A Widening Gyre; W. B. Yeats, Poems of Place 325

"He should be at home," sez she, "French polishin' a pome," sez she, "An' not writin' letters," sez she, "About his betters," sez she, "Paradin' me crimes," sez she, "In the 'Irish Timcs'," sez she,

The first question Furomoto's assembly prompts is whether it is possible to say why peoplc other than poets write poems about Yeats. It is easy to dismiss the phenomenon of academics writing the odd poem to show that they can do so. F. W. Bateson was once so moved by the muse ofrivalty that he decided to prove himself a better critic than Leavis by writing a passable poem, and some such spirit clearly moves academics when they sit down to read Yeats. What was intended as fine raillery usually reads as slovenly butchering. At the very least, with such bardic Sunday drivers, the words move slow. While Bloomian influence-theory doesn't get one far with weak ephebes, the pathology of the subject remains compelling. There are some who do it to dance a measure on Yeats's grave. Others pretend to cast a cold eye while cocking a hind leg at the same monument. As time passes some terrible ironies fall due. Roger Woddis thought that the Birmingham pub bombings were a good moment to parody "The Song of Wandering Aengus", whereby Aengus becomes an IRA bomber. He must regret this now. Furomoto's volume should be updated and made available in the West. It has had a frustrating history, for years ago the manuscript was presented to the Dolmen Press but copyright problems led to the volume's being shelved. Meanwhile, Furomoto added to his collection, and the IASAIL-Japan ·confer­ ence of 1990 spurred into action the private issue of the augmented collection. Readers who would care for a copy need only write to the editor for a free copy of the anthology. The address is

5 - 16 Mondo - Okada - cho Nishinomiya, Hyogo Japan 662.

Derry Jelfares has contributed a clear and helpful overview to the Tern Press's beautifully produced Poems of Place. The edition is limited to 175 copies, on Arches paper, and is signed by the printers and binders, Nicholas and Mary Parry. Bound in light green paper boards printed with designs showing a Dublin doorway (top board) and neo-Romantic Irish landscape (lower board), with linen spine, it includes a further twelve such drawings by Nicholas Parry. The selection takes the reader from Sleuth Wood to the "cleft that's christencd 326 Yeats Annual No. 10

AI!" via a widc and wcll-choscn routc, reminding one how comprehensively Yeats studded evcry Irish "rock and hill" with new poems. No wonder the only discernible tradition of poems about Yeats is an Irish one, also a poetry of place, and that poets such as Seamus Heaney take a certain necessary delight ill clearing new spaces for their own work. The retail price of this collector's item is £5B.50, and the address of the Tern Press is

Saint Mary's Cottage, Great Hales Street, Market Drayton, Shropshire, England. Publications Received

The following have also been received by Yea Is II//1l11al, and some will be reviewed in the next number.

Arnold, Bruce, 71Ie Scalldal of Ulysses Greene, Roland, Posl-I'elrarcllisll/: OrigillJ (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991). alld illllOualiolls of Ihe JIIeslem Il'ric Seqll(l/{f Bornstein, George (cd.), Repmelltillg Mod­ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, emisl Texis: Edilillg as IlIlerprelatioll (Ann 1991). Contains one chapter on "Nomi­ Arbor: The University of Michigan native to Artir.'Ictual: Interval and 1rlllO­ Press, 1991). Contains Richard.J. Fin­ vat ion in Two Se(IUcnces by Yeats I'A neran's "Text and Interpretation in the Man Young and Old' and 'A Woman Poems of W. II. Yeats", pp. 17-48. Young and 01d'1", pp. 153-194. Brake, Laurel, and Ian Small (cds), Paler ill Hakutani, Yoshinobu (cd.), Selecled Ellglish Ihe 1990s (Greensboro: ELT Press, 1991). Wrilillgs of YOlle Nogllchi: 1111 Easl-Wesl Clark, Rosalind, 11,e Great Qlleells: Irish J.ilerary A$$imilalioll, vol. I, /'oe I 1')' Goddesses from II,e Morrigall 10 eatldull III (Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fair­ HOlllihall (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, leigh Dickinson University Press; Lon­ 1991). don and Toronto: Associated University Denman, Peter, Salllllel Fergllsoll: 1711 Liler­ Presses, 1990). lIl)' !lchieulllltIIl (Gerrards Cross: Colin Harvey, Charles and Jon Press, Williall/ Smythe Ltd, 1990). Morris /)esigll allli Ellierprise ill Vicloriall Drake, Nicholas, 17,e l'oeIl)' of w. n. Yellls Britaill (Manchester and New York: (London: Penguin, 1991) Penguin Cri­ Manchester University Press, 1991). tical Guides, 135 pp. HoOrauir, Richard, 71Ie 111'1 rif Resirailll: Dunleavy, Janet Egleson and Gareth W. Ellglish /'oell)' frolll Hardy 10 I.alkill nunlcav)', /)ollglaJ 1I)·de: II Maker of (Newark: University of Delaware Press; Mot/em Irelalld (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London and Toronto: Associated Uni­ Oxtonl: University of Calilornia Press, versity Presses, 1991). 1991). Kennedy,Judith (cd.), Victoriall Allllrors allli Finneran, Rkhard J., l'eals, ,Ill ,llIlIlIlIl rif Iheir Works: Rellisioll Molillaliolls alld Mot/eJ Crilical alld Texllltll SllIdifJ, /lOlllllle VIII, (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, IYYO (Ann Arhor: The University of 1991). Contains George Bornstein's'" II :'I-lichigan Press, 1991). Contains "Yeats is myself that I remake' [sic]: W. B. li'om a Comparatist PcrspectiVl''', co­ Yeats's Revisions to His Early Canon", .. dited by Edward Engelberg. pp. '11-~6. This appears to be Born­ Gardner, Joann, I'Mls al/(I Ihe RI!)'lIIers' Mein's revision of his earlier "R("nakinl( Clllb: " Nillflies' I'm/lrcli/le (l'\ew York himscll: Yeats's Revisions of His Early Bern, Frank"",t am :\'Iain, Paris: Peter Canon", in D. C. Greelham and W. I.ang, 191111). Speed Hill (('ds), TEXT: TTl/IIsacliollS of 327 328 Yeats Annual No. 10

the Sociery for Textual Scholarship 5 (New "Stcndhal's Mirror and Ycats's Looking­ York: AMS Press, Inc., (991) pp. 339- glass: a Reconsideration of The Tower" 58. and "Yeats Ihc European". McGarry, Jim (compiler), The Drealll I 1'ellltllOS, No. 12. KI/ew: Memories of 1'hirry Years of the Yeats Whilaker, Thomas R., SWatl atld Shadow: fI,temaliol/al Sl/lIIlIIer School (Coolooncy: Yeats's Dialogue with His/ory (Washing­ Jim McGarry, 1990). ton: Catholic University of America Martin, Augustine, W. B. Yeats (Gcrrards Press, 1989). Second edition, with a ncw Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990) sccond cdi­ prcface. tion, rcviscd, with a new "Note on the Ycats, W. B., The Secret Rose, Stories by Gyrcs". W. 8. Yeats: A Variorulll Editioll, edited l>y Malcrcr, Timothy (cd.), 17le Selected Lellers Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus, and of El.Ta Poulld 10 Johll Quiml 1915-1924 Micbael J. Sidnell (Basingstoke and (Durham and London: Duke University London: Macmillan, 1992) second cdi­ Press, 1991). tion, reviscd and enlarged. Miyake, Akiko, El.ra POI/lid alld the Mysteries --, The Secret Rose Call lradu?iollt i/alialla a of l.ove: II Plallfor The Call1OS (Durham frollte t prestlltatiollt di Sergio Dancluzzi and London: Duke University Prcss, (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 1991). 1991). --, The Heme's Egg, edited by Andrew Perloll: Mmjoric, Poetic LicellSe: Em!)'s all Parkin (Washington: Catholic Univer­ Mode/llis/ al/d Pos/modemisl Lyric (Evant­ sity of America Press; Gcrrards Cross: son: Northwcstern University Prcss, Colin Smythc, 1991). 1990). Contains "Yeats, Khlebnikov, --, Selected Plays, edited by A. Norman and thc Mathcmatics of Modernism", Jell'ares (London: Papcrmac, 1991) re­ Pl'. 71-98. vised and expanded edition. Stead, C. K., Allswerillg to the Lal/gl/age: Yeats-Eliot Review IX, I & 2 (Summer and Em!)'s all Modem Writers (Auckland: Auck­ Fall, 1991). land Univcrsity Prcss, 1989). Rcprints