August 6, 1999

Yeats, a Poet Who Kept Trying On Different Identities

By MICHAEL FRANK

EW YORK -- Nothing turns a man into a statue more effectively than a combination of fame, death and the passage of time. Together they join hands and hoist him up on a high cold plinth. If the man is a writer, he disappears into the official editions of his work, all polish and (ideally) perfection, the fits and starts and wrong turns folded out of sight like the hem on a pair of dress pants.

New York Public Library

"Pencil portrait of his son, William Butler Yeats," ca. 1888, by John Butler Yeats, one of the works in the exhibition "'Such Friends': The Work of W. B. Yeats" at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue & 42d Street, from June 26 through fall 1999.

There is always the biography. But in biography a man often undergoes a different sort of hardening: his turmoil, his inconsistency, his groping confusion are by necessity smoothed into a narrative whole. Even the most sensitive of biographers sacrifice throb and raggedness in the name of storytelling; their work would be unreadable otherwise.

For a sense of process -- in the work and the life alike -- exhibitions of manuscripts, books and related memorabilia can be extremely successful at getting the statue to come down off his plinth and take a breath or two. These exhibitions reverse time. They take a visitor back into the moment. Because of the inconsistency of materials available to a curator, they are not always comprehensive or in perfectly calibrated balance, but their subject is often palpable, paradoxical and animated.

Certainly this is very much the case with William Butler Yeats in "Such Friends," a rich survey of his work and life now on view at the New York Public Library.

Yeats (1865-1939) is a challenge to the curator, as he is to the biographer and in a different way to the reader of his verse, prose, memoirs and plays. He lived a long, complex, regularly self-reinventing life, and in his obsessions and enthusiasms he was sometimes, well, a little all over the place. His trajectory, of writing as of living, can be seen as one long attempt to build up, then to a degree break down again, a series of identities or preoccupations until he got closer and closer still to his true, authentic self and voice.

In his pivotal 1948 study, "Yeats: The Man and the Masks," which still remains fresh, Richard Ellmann saw these different identities as masks. Rodney Phillips, curator of the exhibition (and of the library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature, from which much of the material is drawn), highlights Yeats' use of doppelgangers, whom Yeats named variously Michael Robartes, Owen Aherne and Red Hanrahan. Many people have observed Yeats' lifelong self-division, which falls into two categories: Yeats the dreamer and Yeats the man of action.

Yeats the dreamer was variously attracted to the occult, spiritualism, fairy life and fairy tales, paganism, magic, seances, psychic phenomena, Eastern religion, Theosophy and Mme. Blavatsky, mysticism and William Blake. All of this culminated, famously, in his years-long preoccupation with the automatic writing of his wife, George, which was believed to give Yeats direct access to the spirit world and which led to "A Vision," Yeats' attempt to summarize and categorize all of human personality through "a system of symbolism."

Yeats the man of action, by contrast, worked for Irish nationalism, helped ignite the Irish literary renaissance, and was co-founder of the Abbey Theater, which encouraged the work of Irish playwrights. Mediating between -- and arcing over -- these two selves and drawing fully on their range of interests was of course Yeats the poet, whose lifelong directive, which he first articulated to himself when he was in his early 20s, was "Hammer your thoughts into unity."

Unity of thought is a tall, perhaps even an unreasonable, order for a man in his youth and his maturity both, and Yeats seems to have been only sporadically successful at achieving it. He was successful, however, at submitting himself to all these stimuli and all these interests, and out of them -- and his knowledge of life, which age deepened significantly -- he wrote magnificent verse whose meaning often remains accessible even when some of its inspiring symbols are obscure.

Yeats was supremely successful in another area as well. He made many profound and sometimes passionate connections to other people, and it is to these key human connections that Phillips has turned for the organizational tissue of his show.

Yeats' first connections were, like every human being's, involuntary, that is to say to his family, and in his, Yeats was both blessed and cursed. He was blessed because his family was artistic and accepting and encouraging of the pursuit of art and literature: his father, John Butler Yeats, was an intellectual and a painter, as was his brother, Jack; his sisters, Lily and Lolly, became printers who elegantly published many of Yeats' books at their Cuala Press.

Yeats was cursed, though, because his father was dominating, opinionated and often devouring of his gifted son. George Yeats told Ellmann that the poet brought a particular burden to their marriage: his lifelong tension with his father. And this when Yeats was already well into middle age. (He married at 52; George was 25.)

Little sense of the paternal burden comes through in the father's delicate and sensitive pencil drawings of the son, which like the best objects in this exhibition seem to live in a perpetual present tense, as though the artist had just lifted his pencil off the page minutes earlier and slipped the sketchbook behind glass for safekeeping. The notion is not so very far-fetched: John Yeats did in fact leave some of this work in Manhattan, where he lived for the last 15 years of his life, in a rooming house run by the Petipas sisters on West 29th Street. Rather like Leopold Mozart, it would seem, John Yeats withdrew from his son's life (and country) once the poet achieved success, at least in person: daily letters continued to flow.

Yeats had both a father and a father figure. The latter was the Irish Fenian Brotherhood hero John O'Leary, who is represented here in an album of photographs of prisoners. An editor of The Irish People, he advocated overthrowing British rule and was convicted of treason in 1865. He spent two decades either in jail or exile before returning to Ireland in 1885 and becoming a major influence on the young, politically awakening, ever versifying Yeats ("Beautiful lofty things: O'Leary's noble head").

Also on display are O'Leary's copy of "Mosada" (1886), Yeats' first publication, and a famous letter in which he tells O'Leary that, next to poetry, he has decided to make magic "the most important pursuit of my life."

"The mystical life," he asserts, "is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write."

Among his friends Yeats was not alone in splitting his personality and trying on different identities. There must have been something in the air in the 1880s and '90s: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dorian Gray (and his portrait) among the fictional schisms, George William Russell and William Sharp among the real ones. Russell, mystic, poet and artist, published under the pseudonym A.E.; he and Yeats intersected in their fascination with Theosophy, Irish matters and dreams. A.E. is represented here by manuscript material and a sketch by John Yeats.

William Sharp is an even more curious case. After publishing literary biographies under his own name, in 1893 he began to write poetry on Celtic subjects under the name of Fiona Macleod. Yeats said that Fiona was Sharp's "imaginary beloved," and that in her "all the heart, all the brain of the Celtic races shall be stirred." Fiona had her own literary style and feminine handwriting and conducted her own correspondence with Yeats and others.

As friends and lovers, or a mixture of the two, actual women were focal in Yeats' life. The poet Katharine Tynan, one of his earliest women friends, recalled that Yeats was "beautiful to look at with his dark face, its touch of vivid coloring, the night-black hair, the eager dark eyes." "He asked you to be profoundly interested in his poetry," said Tynan, whose work appears here alongside Yeats' in "Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland" (1888). "On the other hand, he was always interested in yours."

Yeats formed one of his most enduring friendships with Lady Augusta Gregory, a folklorist and a major figure in the Irish Literary Renaissance. Lady Gregory, whose papers became part of the Berg collection in the 1950s, is abundantly represented in "Such Friends." In her diary entry for April 14, 1894, for example, she records her first meeting with Yeats: "At the Morrises I met Yeats, looking every inch a poet." (That is the William Morrises, who also numbered among Yeats' friends.)

Then inevitably there is Maude Gonne, Yeats' elusive, longtime love and muse, who rejected his marriage proposals on five separate occasions. "I had never thought to see in a living woman so great a beauty," Yeats wrote of the first time he met her.

A radical Republican, Gonne conducted her personal life with more daring than Yeats initially grasped. In December 1898, after they kissed for the first time, she confessed to him about her affair with Lucien Millevoye, by whom she had two children. Yeats promptly wrote to Lady Gregory, in a letter on display here: "I have come to understand her & admire her as I could not have done before. My life is a harder problem to me than it was yesterday."

Two years later Gonne told Yeats: "I know that just now, perhaps, it is useless my saying to you 'love some other woman.' All I want of you is not to make up your mind not to."

In the cool marbled hall of the library, this century-old passion and the attempted thwarting of it flame fiercely. They're visceral. They live in Gonne's crunched, sloped, rushed handwriting and in Yeats' more deliberate script. They live in the hastily folded paper and the envelopes the paper was hurried into and the flaps licked urgently shut. Above all they live in the words.

Life fairly exudes from these cases: this one man's one busy, layered life, which burst out in action and writing and friendship, decade after decade. Phillips referred to "the whole 'six degrees of separation' thing." Three, more like it. There's the Rhymer's Club, where Yeats and his poet friends met weekly to discuss one another's work. (Oscar Wilde stopped by.)

There is the Irish Dramatic Movement (its goal: Irish plays on Irish soil) and the eventual forming of the Abbey Theater. Here the links proliferate: to the actress and critic Florence Farr, to J.M. Synge, to George Bernard Shaw (who appears in three beautiful photographic self-portraits), to Sean O'Casey.

There are Yeats' encounters with the pricklier figures of 20th-century letters. When he met James Joyce, who was 17 years his junior, Joyce reputedly said: "I have met you too late. You are too old." "Deteriorating" is another word that slipped out that November day, but somehow Yeats' father sketched Joyce anyway, and Yeats was generous enough to recognize Joyce's gifts, telling him, "The work which you have actually done is very remarkable for a man of your age."

First Joyce, then Pound: for three winters a young Ezra Pound served as Yeats' personal secretary in a spare stone house in a tiny village in Sussex. He took dictation, read to "Uncle William," studied Japanese literature with him and, in a foreshadowing of his later relationship with T.S. Eliot, revised Yeats' work unbidden and published the revisions unapproved. Yeats was furious at first but later allowed most of them to stand.

"All life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens," Yeats wrote near the end of one of his autobiographies, "Reveries Over Childhood and Youth." Alas something did happen to Yeats: in 1917, in middle age, he married.

Nearly 20 years earlier he had written to A.E. that "a poet, or even a mystic, becomes a greater power from understanding all the great primary emotions & these one only gets out of going through the common experiences & duties of life." This was very prescient. As a husband and eventually a father, Yeats grew to feel "more knitted into life." His work became more powerful. And he found in George, as Ellmann puts it dryly, that he had "married the Sibyl herself."

When Yeats panicked early in their marriage, George decided to soothe him by faking a few lines of automatic writing. Yeats was soothed and captivated and compelled, but the joke was on George, since she apparently had a talent for receiving messages from her various "communicators" or "controls" and in 450 subsequent sittings was to produce 3,600 pages of this "miraculous intervention," which became the basis for "A Vision." The first preserved page of George's automatic script (which has been lent to the library by their son, Michael Yeats) shows George's wobbly writing dropping off the page in an increasingly illegible slope. This is a document remarkable to behold: an obsession close to its original provoking moment.

All life prepared Yeats for marriage, perhaps, but it also seems to have prepared him for more life. To inhabit it, that is, and his art, more fully.

"I must lay aside the pleasant patter I have built up for years, & seek the brutality, the ill breeding, the barbarism of truth," he wrote in 1937. The barbarism of truth: his late verse is veritably racked with it; and with sharp, merciless, naked self-inspection; and with grief, as his friends began to die; and with an acute sense of his own approaching mortality.

Throughout "Such Friends," working holograph drafts, much-amended typescripts and revised proof copies of Yeats' verse are on display. In the end little makes the poet live and breathe so vibrantly as watching him do what he did best, fitting the words together like the shards in a mosaic, arranging and rearranging them until he achieved his exact and most radiant design.

In the final room of the exhibition the first continuous draft of "The Circus Animals' Desertion," Yeats' great retrospective poem of 1937, is laid out in all this searching evolution. It famously ends:

"Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."

These words, some of the most beautifully conjoined in the English language, did not come easily to Yeats. He wrote and rewrote, he erased and he spliced and he sharpened. In looking back over his life as in anticipation of it, he worked hard, and he reworked hard. He was not a statue at all. He was a man.

Where and When

"Such Friends: The Work of W.B. Yeats" remains at the New York Public Library's Gottesman Exhibition Hall, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, through Aug. 21. Admission is free. Hours: Mondays and Thursdays through Saturdays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesdays and Wednesdays 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Information: (212) 869-8089.

Michael Frank is a book critic, essayist and short-story writer