Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

by Colm Toibin

  His problem was that if he did not like someone, then he found it difficult to paint them. His work was an act of sympathy. “I have always said of myself,” he wrote to John Quinn, “that I can only paint friendship portraits.”

  Yeats was also invited to stay at Coole Park by Lady Gregory, who wrote to John Quinn: “I think him the most trying visitor possible in a house. Space and time mean nothing to him, he goes his own way, spoiling portraits as hopefully as he begins them, and always on the verge of a great future.” At Coole, he also left his socks lying about, but was neat, Lady Gregory noted, with his brushes, oils and palette.

  Yeats could not be pinned down on any matter. In 1903, he wrote to his son: “Admiration for English character is the greatest possible mistake. Its source is largely hunkering after the fleshpots of their beastly civilization.” Later in the year he wrote in Arthur Griffith’s newspaper United Irishman: “When their ill-gotten possessions are not molested or their right to universal thieving questioned, the English are a good-natured people, who steer the middle course, avoiding extremes; in matters of conduct, choosing compromise, and in matters of art, adoring the pretty. They have the lax morals and the easy manners of the genial highwayman and the footpad.”

  Lollie Yeats, who ran the Dun Emer Press, later the Cuala Press, had considerable difficulties with her brother the poet, who wished to control what it published. Their father took the view that while William and Lollie had the morose and difficult manners of the Pollexfens, Lily and Jack had the lightness and charm that he associated with his own family. But he could change his mind about this too. In 1922, for example, he wrote to Lily: “The Pollexfens all disliked Willie. In their eyes he was not only abnormal, but he seemed to take after me. But however irritable (‘the crossest people I ever met,’ my sister Ellen called them) they were slothful and so let him alone. And therefore in Willie’s eyes they appear something grand like the figures at Stonehenge seen by moonlight.”

  During one row over the question of control at the press, he wrote to his son, who had managed in a letter to insult all of his three siblings and infuriate Lollie. “Why do you write such offensive letters? There is nothing fine in a haughty and arrogant temper. It is Fred Pollexfen’s characteristic [Fred Pollexfen was an uncle of W. B. Yeats’s] and through it he got himself turned out of the family business . . . I think you ought to write a frank apology.” When his son did not apologize, his father wrote again: “As you have dropped affection from the circle of your needs, have you also dropped love between man and woman? Is this your theory of the overman?”

  He felt guilty that he was still not making enough money to pay for his own board, while his daughters went to work every day. He wrote to his son remorsefully: “If only I could make a little success and a little money and help a little Dun Emer would be all right, and Lily and Lollie would be at ease. In a deeper sense than you will ever guess at, my want of success has made me the evil genius of the family.”

  In Ulysses, as we have seen, Buck Mulligan gets to call Lily and Lollie Yeats “the weird sisters” and “two designing females.” Since their names were so alike, and they lived together and did the same kind of work, it is tempting to see them as interchangeable. But they were closer to warring factions and could not have been more different. Lily, the calmer one, and a great letter writer, had nothing good to say about her sister. Towards the end of Lily’s life, when her sister was already dead, she wrote to a cousin:

  You were right about Lolly. She had very good brains and many talents but frittered them all away for want of balance. For the last twenty years I lived in dread of her losing her balance altogether. They were twenty years of Purgatory to me. It was curious that people writing after her death said how distinguished she looked and how much they admired her, but no one said they loved her.

  She also wrote: “I hope in the next world I will be left with those of calm nerves and not egotists. I have had enough. I hope to be surrounded by calm, comfortable angels, and no fuss. Lolly probably hopes for a circus, organs, barrels, merry-go-rounds, not literally so, but racket round her and she in the middle on a pivot.”

  William Butler Yeats, one of Lollie’s main sparring partners, suggested that his sister had fallen out “from the cradle” and told Lily: “She is a tragedy, really never happy, always doing the wrong thing, restless, irritable, unloveable, unbalanced.” Despite the differences, the sisters were never apart. “Lollie would go mad,” John B. Yeats wrote to a friend, “if it were not for Lily, who is a haven of refuge and a harbour of peace, with whom she may weep her sad bosom empty.”

  Living in the same house must have been wearing for Lollie, Lily and their father and not made any sweeter by the lack of difficulty with which the two Yeats brothers won fame and many admirers and managed to control their lives and their finances, keeping apart from the drama of the family when the notion took them and becoming involved when they were in the humor for it, William to cause trouble, Jack, as usual, to maintain his reputation for being lovable and unknowable in equal measure.

  *

  By 1907, when John B. Yeats was sixty-eight, his high hopes for success as a painter in Dublin had come to nothing. People still visited his studio to talk rather than have their portrait painted. He arrived home every evening to war between his daughters. His son William became increasingly haughty and famous. And perhaps even worse, his son Jack, whom he barely saw as he was growing up, was industrious and determined and slowly becoming a successful painter and illustrator. And added to that, an Italian portrait painter of the very worst kind called Mancini had arrived in Dublin and was painting everybody. Even W. B. Yeats was using one of this Italian’s portraits as a frontispiece to one of his books.

  If, in 1907, news had spread that John B. Yeats was not long for the world, and, forlorn, was finally giving up the ghost, who would have been surprised?

  His friends and supporters in Dublin raised money to lift his spirits by offering to send him to Italy, where he had never been. Lollie wrote to John Quinn: “It is a splendid idea and most generous of them . . . I said the thing was to get Lily to get him to go . . . They just want him to see Italy and the great pictures and enjoy himself in his own way. It will be very hard to get him off.”

  Soon, when he discovered that Lily was going to New York for an Irish exhibition, Yeats decided that he would use the Italian money to accompany her. He bought a new suit and did two farewell pencil sketches of Edward Dowden before his departure. Since he kept his studio, his paints and brushes neatly stowed, and had plans for what he would do when he returned, it is unclear if he actually knew what he himself had in mind as he set out for New York. His moving back to Dublin from London had been done as drift rather than rational decision. So, too, with this.

  On December 21, 1907, he sailed from Liverpool to New York. He would never return to Ireland, he would never see Lollie or Jack again, or his brother Isaac, or most of his old friends. And once Lily left him behind in America on her return to Dublin on June 6, 1908, he would never see her again either. “My coming was a miracle of folly judged by human standards,” he wrote to Lily seven years later. “I longed for someone to say to me that I should go away with you [back to Dublin]. But no one spoke, and it was again Providence that ordered the silence.”

  John B. Yeats lived until his death in 1922 as a New Yorker, a much admired and loved figure in his adopted city. And since his family and friends were far away and he would need to write to them, he became one of the best letter writers of the age.

  One of his son’s major themes as a poet would be the vitality that remains in the spirit as the body ages. As W. B. Yeats did not now witness his father’s slow and inevitable physical decline, but instead received many letters from the old man filled with good humor and wisdom and a soaring hunger for life and ideas, then his father’s exile was enabling and inspiring for his son’s work. And for his father, since he could not influence his son or mold his thinking in the day-to-day life of Dubl
in or London, exile was also a gift. He could attempt to influence W. B. Yeats and guide him, as he never had managed before, by writing to him intelligent and compelling letters about art and life, about poetry and religion, about his own hopes as an artist and his life in the city. Since the letters were so well written and original, his son would come, at least some of the time, to appreciate and admire his wayward and improvident father, just as he had kept him at a distance in London and Dublin.

  In the meantime, with the help of John Quinn, the son would also have to provide for his father, pay the bills in the boardinghouse on West Twenty-Ninth Street, run by three Breton sisters called Petitpas, and ensure that he did not starve as, despite many pleas and cajolings, the old man refused to come home. Since John Quinn was a collector of literary manuscripts as well as paintings—he owned the manuscripts of The Waste Land and Ulysses as well as many Conrad manuscripts—he agreed to acquire W. B. Yeats’s manuscripts and pay by covering his father’s bed and board. He also commissioned sketches that he paid for in cash.

  The letters John B. Yeats wrote to his son dealt with his reading and contained thoughts of astonishing freshness and seriousness on art and life, and on poetry. In April 1913, for example, he wrote to his son about the idea of newness:

  What is new is detestable to poetry. When we do like anything new it is when we recognize the old with a new gloss, as the dawn of a new day, or a young girl who is like her mother or her grandmother or her ancient mother Eve, or like to one’s own sweetheart in some prenatal existence. I have just finished an article in which I maintain that art embodies not this or that feeling, but the whole totality—sensations, feelings, intuitions, everything—and that when everything within us is expressed there is peace and what is called beauty—the totality is personality. Now a most powerful and complex part of the personality is affection and affection springs straight out of the memory. For that reason what is new whether in the world of ideas or of fact cannot be subject for poetry, tho’ you can be as rhetorical about it as you please—rhetoric expresses other people’s feelings, poetry one’s own.

  And on the notion of personality, he wrote:

  A man with a personality may talk about many things, but in things which touch his personality, he will prefer to be silent. Lincoln had this kind of silence, and Goethe when greatly moved became silent and wrote verses. Intellect and the moral sense can always explain themselves—they have words at command. Personality has too much to say for mortal speech. It can only exclaim—“Here I am, look at me, and not with your corporeal eyes but with your spiritual eyes—with my imagery and my rhythm, and the loud music of my harp, I will rouse you from mortal sleep.”

  On Matthew Arnold’s definition of poetry as “criticism of life,” Yeats wrote to his son that it was “a bad heresy,” managing a couple of aphorisms as he composed his letter: “If the rose puzzled its mind over the question how it grew, it would not have been the miracle it is . . . The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.”

  The artist, he believed, should not admire life “as does the American,” although

  he occasionally by good chance may have admired some of it, he recoiled from most of it. If he was to live he must escape from the surface of life, and he found his asylum in his dreams; here was his workshop where he mended life . . . only in his dreams is a man really himself. Only for his dreams is a man responsible—his actions are what he must do. Actions are a bastard race to which a man has not given his full paternity.

  In a later letter to his son, however, he emphasized the need for reality in the making of art: “all art begins in portraiture . . . That is, a realistic thing identified with realistic feeling, after which and because of which comes the Edifice of Beauty—the great reaction.” Soon, however, he returned to the subject of dreams: “The chief thing to know and never forget is that art is dreamland and that the moment a poet meddles with ethics and the moral uplift or thinking scientifically, he leaves dreamland, loses all music and ceases to be a poet.” Nonetheless, he needed to make clear to his son that believing dreams to be real was dangerous:

  The poet is a magician—his vocation to incessantly evoke dreams and do his work so well, because of natural gifts and acquired skill, that his dreams shall have a potency to defeat the actual at every point. Yet here is a curious thing, the poet and we his dupes know that they are only dreams—otherwise we lose them. With our eyes open, using our will and powers of selection, we, together in friendship and brotherly love, create this dreamland. Pronounce it to be actual life and you summon logic and mechanical sense and reason and all the other powers of prose to find yourself hailed back to the prison house and dreamland vanishes—a shrieking ghost.

  Having sent his son this complex and urgent missive, which will strike any reader of W. B. Yeats’s work as a fascinating effort to influence the work and change its direction, Yeats wrote to him again the following day, December 22, 1914, this time composing passages of great eloquence to invoke the power of art against that of science and thus send comfort to his son and, indeed, back to himself in his solitude and his weakness:

  Science exists that man may discover and control nature and build up for himself habitations in which to live in ease and comfort. Art exists that man cutting himself away from nature may build in his free consciousness buildings vaster and more sumptuous than these, furnished too with all manner of winding passages and closets and boudoirs and encircled with gardens well shaded and with everything that he can desire—and we build all out of our spiritual pain—for if the bricks be not cemented and mortised by actual suffering, they will not hold together. Those others live on another plane where if there is less joy there is much less pain. Like day labourers they work, with honest sweat to earn their wages, and mother nature smiles on them and calls them her good children who study her wishes and seek always to please her and rewards them with many gifts. The artist has not the gift for this assiduity, these servile labours—so falling out of favour with his great mother he withdraws himself and lives in disgrace, and then out of his pain and humiliation constructs for himself habitations, and if she sweeps them away with a blow of her hand he only builds them afresh, and as his joy is chiefly in the act of building he does not mind how often he has to do it. The men of science hate us and revile us, being angry with impotent rage because we seem to them to live in profitless idleness, and though we have sad faces we are yet of such invincible obstinacy that nothing can induce us to join their ranks. There are other things about us which perplex and offend them. They always work in gangs, many minds engaged on one task, whereas we live and work singly, each man building for himself accepting no fellowship—for we say it is only thus we can build our habitations. So it follows that they charge us with selfish egotism and insolence and pride, and it is vain for us to say that we work in the spirit of the utmost humility, not being strong enough for their tasks, and suffering many pains because of the anger of our offended and beloved mother. They are mighty men with strong wills. We are weak as water, our weakness is our raison d’être, and now and again when the strong man is broken he comes to us that we may comfort him. We even may make merry together, for we love our fellow men more than we do ourselves.

  He signed off: “Yours affectionately—J. B. Yeats.”

  A collection of passages from John B. Yeats’s letters appeared in a small book edited by Ezra Pound in 1917. Another small volume, edited by Lennox Robinson, appeared in 1920, with a further small book edited by Pound in 1923. In 1944, Joseph Hone selected a larger edition of the letters, published as J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others. This was reissued in an abridged edition with an introduction by John McGahern in 1999. But it was known in Dublin that an important cache of letters remained in private hands. These were the letters written to Rosa Butt, daughter of Isaac Butt, most of them during Yeats’s exile in New York.

  The National Gallery in Dublin owns
the tender and intriguing portrait Yeats painted of Rosa Butt in 1900, after his wife’s death, when they were both sixty years of age or sixty-one. Rosa Butt has a distant dignity in the picture. Her face in repose has a fluidity as well as a stillness, a sadness but also the suggestion of a rich inner life, an aura in her gaze that has much that is withheld but also exudes a sense of comfort in the world. She is someone who looks as though she would enjoy company and also be content when alone. She has a freedom in her aspect that one could associate with what Yeats’s son would call custom and ceremony, a freedom that gives her face and her pose in this picture a formidable and ambiguous power.

  Since the painting was done in the year Yeats’s wife died, it is easy to imagine the painter as an unsettled widower, whose life was funded mainly by his older son and controlled by his two unmarried daughters, and whose marriage had been less than happy, studying a woman whom he admired. All of his life he thought about what he might have become. That was one of his great subjects. He knew how much damage his impecunious ways had done to his wife and his daughters, but he knew also that had he been a successful barrister, he would have ruined himself.

  Now, after his wife’s death, he had freedom and he chose further freedom. He chose to be bohemian and poor in Dublin and then in New York, to let his mind take him where it would, to seek out good company, to study life closely, to put more energy into his talk and his letters than into his art.

  Rosa Butt appears in this portrait as a sensibility that he admired, but that would perhaps contain him. He did not wish to be contained. But there must have been times in the boardinghouse in New York when the poise in her face, the sense of ease and wit and civility that he gave her in this portrait, came to him as a dream of a life he did not have and recognized as oddly, sadly beyond him.