by Clive James
As man’s intellect, say, expands, the emotional nature contracts in equal degree and vice versa; when, however, a narrowing and widening gyre reach their limit, the one the utmost contraction the other the utmost expansion, they change places, point to circle, circle to point, for this system conceives the world as catastrophic, and continue as before, one always narrowing, one always expanding, and yet bound for ever to one another.
Keeping that up for hundreds of pages, Yeats may or may not have added to the discoveries of ‘philosophers back to Heraclitus’, but he certainly added more than his share to the flimflam cranked out by every tent-show seer from Madame Blavatsky through Ouspensky and Gurdjieff to L. Ron Hubbard. It would be good to think that having codified his vision he got it out of the way and left himself room to synthesize experience in the only mode that mattered: the poetic. In fact, however, he was still tinkering with his revelations to the very end, and published a reworked edition of the book not long before he died. So we are stuck with the connection between the high art of his poetry and the low comedy of a self-deceiving boondoggle. The question that matters is whether the connection is important. Surely Joyce was merely being polite when he regretted that Yeats didn’t put the ‘colossal conception’ of A Vision into ‘a creative work’. There is nothing colossal about A Vision except its waste of time. Except, of course, that Yeats didn’t think so. Genius has to be forgiven its foolishness. Newton was just as interested in his wacko chronology as in his celestial mechanics. But about Yeats’s rickety paranormal hobbyhorse, his secretary Ezra Pound spoke the cruel truth early on. He said Yeats’s ideas about the phases of the moon were ‘bug-house’.
Startlingly, Yeats’s otherwise patient wife George thought the same. This is where Foster’s book comes good, although it takes a long time doing so. Upon the publication of A Vision, she told a friend that there was ‘nothing in his verse worth preserving but the personal. All the pseudo-mystico-intellecto-nationalistico stuff of the last fifteen years isn’t worth a trouser-button.’ George emerges from this book as a model of good sense. Foster would have done the same if he had taken a tip from her at the start, and viewed the spiritualist clap-trap with a more dismissive eye. Admittedly George was up to her neck in it. At the long sessions of automatic writing, George was the channel, or control, or whatever you care to call it. But on the evidence of the wearisomely cited transcripts, George was serving her own ends. Having seen off the poisonous Maud Gonne and her even more dangerous daughter Iseult, both of whom Yeats had proposed to in rapid succession, George wanted to make sure that the Gonnes stayed gone. Magically, voices from the Beyond instructed Yeats that he should spend more time in bed with his wife. This could have been funny if humour were among Foster’s tools.
To regret its absence is not necessarily frivolous. For a critic, humour is primarily a means of compression, and compression is what a book like this needs most. At least a third of it is junk because it analyses junk, and junk analysed is still junk. That being said, it is gratifying to have all the details that prove Yeats’s stature as a practical politician. After he recorded the birth of the terrible beauty, Yeats had a right to think that the literary revival of which he had been such a prominent member had ushered in the new Ireland. But in the Free State there was no automatic welcome for his Protestantism, for his Ascendancy background, and above all for his liberal, tolerant outlook. (Although he had some noxious views about hierarchy and due deference, to paint Yeats as a fascist is a waste of breath: he believed in free speech, for example, which no fascist does.) As a Senator who vocally insisted that Ulster could be won for a united Ireland only by an example of enlightened domestic policy, he was in danger.
Worse, so was George, whom he loved despite her devotion. Bullets punctured the windows of their grand house in Dublin. George played it cool, just as she did in his last phase when monkey-gland injections helped harden – if that’s the word we want – his perennial conviction that wisdom was to be found under the storm-tossed banner of a woman’s beauty. He was already in his dotage when he found himself between the sheets with a twenty-seven-year-old stunner called Margaret Ruddock. He cast her horoscope, which failed to tell him that she was not only giftless but psycho. She ended up in the bin. Other mistresses gathered around his death-bed, where George kindly marshalled the traffic. She forgave both them and him that he had written immortal poems so often to them, and so seldom to her. But that was what they were for: to be wild swans, to flood the everyday with the unknown, to ready him for Byzantium. This book will be essential to Yeats scholarship. but ever since Professor Donoghue, following Dr Leavis, decided that Yeats’s poetry needed too much explanation, the burning question has been about how essential the scholarship is. If it keeps young students from some of the greatest poetry ever written, then the answer is easy: about as essential as a suit of armour to Ian Thorpe.
Postscript
For a significant cultural figure, there is always room for a biography. But I don’t believe there is room for the Indispensable Biography, the one encouraging the seductive notion that its subject can’t otherwise be understood or even appreciated. If the cultural figure isn’t already alive in our minds before he is explained, no biography, however huge, can do anything except kill him off. We might, of course, have got from his work the wrong impression of his actual character; and to have the facts supplied might rescue us from being gulled on the level of practicality; but if his art is real, it has already made the best sense of his life. Without the biographical facts, we might assume from his work that Brecht, for example, was a tireless campaigner for human betterment. He wasn’t, but if we get from a biography the idea that he wasn’t a great poet either, we have allowed his life story to get in the way of his true life. Ditto for Pablo Neruda and Nicolàs Guillèn. The same obfuscation is particularly likely to happen in the case of Yeats, who could be such a fool that even those drawn to the magnetism of his poetry can be repelled again when they find out exactly how foolish he was. Something like this must be going on when academic critics as finely tuned to poetry as Professors Donoghue and Ricks turn against Yeats. It can’t be that they have belatedly contracted a case of tin ear. When Dr Leavis announced that only a grand total of three Yeats poems were the ‘fully achieved thing’, nobody could doubt that his limiting judgement was fully achieved nonsense, because he had no real sensitivity to poetry anyway, a failing proved by his prose, which was colourless even when it was still vigorous. But the younger men could hear Yeats’s music. One can only conclude that they ceased to approve of the man who made it. Scholarship got in the way of criticism.
With all that said, however, there is undoubtedly a case for being told in advance that the magnificent detachment of E. E. Cummings from the workaday business world was made possible by a trust fund, and that the apparent anti-Semitism of one of his poems was indeed the expression of a prejudice, although he was nothing like as bigoted as his wife. If I had known those things before I wrote my first article about him, I would have been slower to praise him as an example of the unfettered intelligence. I found them out from a poorly written but awkwardly accurate biography. But I read it only because I had always loved the best of his poetry, and I still do. I really don’t think there is all that much of substance in Foster’s two volumes about Yeats that is not already there in Jeffares’ single volume, but undoubtedly the Foster behemoth is more up to date, and deserves to become the standard work. Heaven help us all, however, if a generation of students should feel compelled to wade through it before they have submitted themselves to the full impact of the poetry to which Yeats gave his life, and in which, and nowhere else, he is truly alive.
CYRANO ON THE SCAFFOLD
His nose preceding him by a quarter of an hour, the hero of Cyrano de Bergerac is a reminder that there were once things plastic surgery couldn’t do. Today it can turn Michael Jackson into his own sister. But the original Cyrano, furiously active as poet, swordsman and celestial fantasist in seventeent
h-century France, was stuck with his deformity. If he had been born in the late 1890s, when the play that bears his name was written, he still would have been stuck with it. The playwright, Edmond Rostand, could count on that fact, and use it to bring the sophisticated theatre-goers of Paris to their feet after reducing them to helpless weeping. Appearance was destiny. If a man’s appearance ruled him out in the eyes of the woman he loved, there was nothing he could do about it. Except, perhaps, one thing. What if he could rule himself back in through her ears?
Armed with a tragically inflexible law and a comically rich possibility for how it might be broken, Rostand was inspired to a poetic narrative that conquered the world. The eloquent but very ugly man, Cyrano, loves the beautiful young woman, Roxane. She favours the beautiful young man, Christian. He lacks the words to thrill her. The heartbroken Cyrano, wanting her to be happy, lends him some. Thus supplied, Christian wins her hand, but he is killed in battle. In the end, with the mortally wounded Cyrano dying in her arms among the fallen autumn leaves of the convent courtyard, Roxane finally realizes that it was his words, and therefore him, that she had loved all along. Alas, it is too late. And yet hooray, for true love has won through. Sacre bleu, quelle histoire!
There are reasons, which we will get to, for thinking that this seemingly unbreakable dramatic arc works best in the original French, but it would still provide a good night out in Esperanto, and at the great classical theatre on the Ginza a kabuki version would not be inconceivable. In his own country alone, there were more than a thousand performances of the play while Rostand was still alive. Many of the productions he supervised personally. Their accumulated box office receipts ensured that he would die rich. His magnificent house at the foot of the Pyrenees is still there to inform visiting writers that if they envy the domestic arrangements of Pinter, Frayn and Stoppard then they haven’t seen anything yet. Rostand’s chuckling ghost lives well. There may be plastic surgeons in California who live better, but not even they have yet managed to take the sweet sting out of an immortal story.
A brilliantly successful bullion raid from the start, the plot-line of Cyrano de Bergerac will probably never cease to make money until every male baby born on Earth is a clone of Orlando Bloom. Men who can’t wow a woman with the fearful symmetry of their faces will always have to talk for victory. Cyrano will go on showing them how, in a coruscating tragicomical pastiche that almost no amount of miscalculation can make dull. It must be said, however, that the new production at the National Theatre might have been designed to prove otherwise. A critic, in my view, should always report the reaction of the audience before he delivers his own opinion. Well, the first-night audience clapped dutifully at the end, and there were cheers for Cyrano himself, as incarnated by the film star Stephen Rea. But the Germans have a phrase that fits: der Beifall war endenwollend. The applause wanted to be over.
Things never looked promising to begin with. In the Olivier Theatre there is no curtain to go up, so the audience, as it came in, was already faced with the huge and deadly suggestion that the sets would consist mainly of scaffolding. This turned out to be true, although the space-station centrifugal stage machinery was occasionally put into operation so that the scaffolding could be seen from a different angle. On its first appearance, the vast metallic structure was dotted with supernumeraries whose weary attitudes suggested that they might have expired from boredom while bolting it together. Ever since the first post-war translations of Brecht spread their pervasive influence, student productions of any play at all have characteristically established their dedication to the alienation effect with precisely those two elements: scaffolding, and an opening tableau of underemployed walk-ons. This was going to be a student production. The premonition did not necessarily spell disaster: last month in Wellington I saw a student production – admittedly buttressed by the participation of a few semi-pro actors – which cleverly adapted Gogol’s The Government Inspector to local New Zealand small-town politics. Seated on each side of a tin shed, the audience had a wonderful time. Gogol had a big nose: so big that he made it the disembodied hero of its own story. These were desperate things to be thinking of in the million-dollar arena of the Olivier while waiting for the main actors to join the scaffolding, but without trust there is no life.
The trust paid off, but only in small change. The big notes had already been thrown on the fire long before a misconceived production reached its opening night. The scaffolding had already told us that we would not be seeing seventeenth-century Paris. The attire of the actors soon told us that we would not be seeing many seventeenth-century costumes either. There were a few of them dotted about, but only because they had been preserved in the same skip as all the other clobber, which dated variously from any time up to the day before yesterday. Rostand gives some warrant for this, because he himself, writing more than two centuries after his reported events, didn’t care very much about strict adherence to temporality. But he cared like mad about theatricality. He wanted the full romantic tackle, and he wanted it to swash until it buckled. Cloak, plumed hat and proper sword: he specified them all for his dynamic hero. It was thus three times a bad sign when Cyrano made his entrance minus any of them. The plume sprouting from Cyrano’s hat is meant to be the mark of his panache. In French it is actually called a panache, and provides the once inexhaustibly prolix Cyrano with his dying word, the last word of the play. The plume on Stephen Rea’s hat was a mere shy puff instead of a proudly flying banner. The sword was a sword-stick: a different thing, and not appropriate for holding Cyrano’s cloak extended at the back, as one of his friends describes.
But he had no cloak. Instead, he had an overcoat, of a type worn by students all over the world to indicate that they are in rebellion against bourgeois values. No sooner had I seen this overcoat than I was thinking once again of Gogol, who wrote a play called The Overcoat, and had a big nose. I would have been thinking of catching the next plane back to New Zealand if Cyrano, along with everything else he had been deprived of, had been deprived of a big nose. Mercifully he had one, and the quality of its putty looked sufficiently durable to last the night. Perhaps it had been provided by the same construction firm that won the contract for the scaffolding, which clearly would last forever.
Except for the nose, Mr Rea had been comprehensively sabotaged before he left the dressing room, but he generously agreed to remain on stage even when the choreography was taking place. The choreography – the supposed necessity for which would have been news to Rostand – was fit to drive the audience out of the theatre and into the Thames, but it wasn’t going to do that to Mr Rea, who staunchly defied several kinds of doom simultaneously, like a boy on a burning deck with his finger in a dyke. His close-ups on screen prove him to possess a winning charm of facial expression, and his voice on the soundtrack is blessed with a melodious Irish burr fit to render any Roxane breathless. On stage, to which he is no stranger, both these attributes were still in evidence, but the large nose necessarily worked against the first, and the larger distances it had to cross unnecessarily worked against the second. The Olivier only looks as if it could swallow the sound of a Boeing 747 revving at full throttle against the brakes. In actuality, a quite small mortar bomb could go off on stage and most of the audience would still notice. Even in those cavernous expanses, an actor’s voice can ring if it has power. Mr Rea’s voice hadn’t. Unfortunately Cyrano is lost if he can’t shout the place down. It is not enough for him to be audible. He must be able to dominate the stage and everyone on it with a single bark of anger, and send a sigh of regret winging to the gallery. For Cyrano, vocal confidence is a handy attribute even in the movies. Steve Martin, playing Cyrano as a small-town fireman in the excellent Roxanne, talks with a fluency that makes his mouth, and not his nose, the centre of all eyes. In Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s movie of 1990, Gerard Depardieu commands silence from everyone else each time he speaks. Most memorably of all, in the Stanley Kramer movie of 1950, José Ferrer raged with the effortless verbal authority
that makes Cyrano’s tenderness mean so much when he succumbs to it.
For a stage Cyrano, verbal authority is not just a nice plus, it’s the whole game. For all I know, Stephen Rea in real life has the verbal authority to hail a taxi in a whisper. But as Cyrano he showed little confidence in what he had to say. He should be excused for that, because what he had to say was a brand-new English translation that achieved the difficult feat of making Cyrano no more thrilling as a speaker than a police commissioner at a press conference. Derek Mahon, who claims responsibility, is an accomplished poet in normal circumstances. His poem about mushrooms in a garden shed is a justly celebrated anthology piece. He is even an accomplished poet when translating from the French: his version of Valery’s Le cimetière marin miraculously conveys almost all the pastel nuances of the original. But Rostand, although he has pastel nuances of his own, employs them only as grace-notes to his vaulting exuberance of invention, which depends for much of its effect on being compressed and energized within strictly rhyming couplets. Disastrously, Derek Mahon was persuaded to keep the couplets but throw away the compression, by making the rhymes so approximate that they were usually undetectable, and piffling when they were not.
I prefer not to believe that the persuasion was done by himself. The fee should pay his bills while he hides out in a foreign country until all this blows over, but when he gets back he will probably be too polite to point the finger. Those less bashful will be inclined to detect the same genius for miscalculation that placed the order for a thousand tons of scaffolding. Here again, the director, Howard Davies, might not have been solely responsible. There is a school of thought, to which I subscribe, which holds that some kind of interstellar virus has taken over the separate brains of prominent theatrical people and united them into a single autistic personality dedicated to the unremitting gestation of bad ideas. The virus was already active when Tyrone Guthrie invented the thrust stage, the awful precursor of theatre in the round. In his memoirs, Sir Alec Guinness said all that needed to be said about the thrust stage: in the absence of a proscenium, the actor could never make a clean entrance or exit, and most of his moves would be dictated by the requirement of giving every sector of the audience a fair share of looking at his back. But Guinness was only an actor, and the directors were already in control, with every dullard dreaming that he was the new Meyerhold or Piscator. The virus struck again with an even more debilitating notion, the raked stage, down which no broken king can stumble without the audience fearing that he will join them in the stalls. The virus decreed that a raked stage could be dispensed with only on the understanding that a flat floor would provide the base for a sufficiency of scaffolding, which would be mandatory if the text made reference to trees and balconies.