The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats: Volume II, 1896-1900 edited by Warwick Gould, John Kelly and Deirdre Toomey Clarendon Press, Oxford 790pp, £40 in UK
This is the third volume of Yeats's letters to have been published in the Oxford edition so far; Volume I, 1865-1895, and Volume III, 1901-1904, have already appeared. The break in chronology is not explained, and hardly matters. It is to be assumed that numerous volumes will follow, for Yeats was a prolific letterwriter, as might be expected of an artist whose life was lived so much in the rough-and-tumble of political and social action.
The Letters is an extraordinary venture, a masterpiece of scholarship that is positively Borgesian in its labyrinthine apparatus. Besides the correspondence itself, with its exhaustive annotations, there is in this volume a 40-page, detailed Chronology of the poet's life from birth to death; 32 pages of Addenda, containing letters that have come to light since the publication of Volume I; a 76-page Biographical and Historical Appendix ranging from a long biographical sketch of Edward Martyn, "playwright, landlord, Irish nationalist, and first President of Sinn Fein", to a loving recreation of 18 Woburn Buildings and environs, where Yeats lived at the time of these letters ("The urchins frequently mobbed the grander guests, and Stephen Gwynn records them driving Lady Margaret Sackville's coachman to the point of martyrdom"). All this is besides the usual lists of sources and recipients, acknowledgments, illustrations, general index, etc.
Off-putting? Certainly not. This marvellous book is an engrossing, enlightening and supremely entertaining read. True, it is primarily a tool for scholars (who, one trusts, will be suitably appreciative), but it will also fascinate anyone interested in Yeats's poetry, life and loves, in the Literary Revival, in the Irish Nationalist movement of the late 1800s, or simply in a good, racy read. What it offers is nothing less than a portrait of the coming to maturity of one of Irish literature's supreme sensibilities.
Yeats was 31 at the time of the first letter printed here, a New Year's Day greeting to his sister Lily (Yeats, an atrocious speller, has it as "Lilly") written from two rooms he occupied in London's Middle Temple. He was already a published poet of some reputation, as he lets Lily know, with that note of jaunty self-confidence that he usually employed when writing home: "My book [ Poems, 1895] has been selling well & my new book `The Secret Rose' is nearly finished . . ." The following month he moved to Woburn Buildings, where he was to live for the next twenty-three years. It is a fact little remembered, that this most Irish of poets spent a large part of his active life as an artist based in London.
As Roy Foster's recent, superb biography of the poet showed, Yeats was a vigorous self-promoter, and the very fine and informative Introduction to this volume (not signed, but one assumes it is by the general editor, John Kelly, one of the greatest living Yeats scholars) tells us that "in the course of his residence in London he was to entertain almost every resident and visiting writer of note". He was still forced to do hack work to make a living, but his fame was growing, and his earnings along with it, to the point that at the end of the decade a short article for the North Ameri- can Review brought him the remarkable sum of £40, so that "for the first time in my life I have been able to pay all my debts". As ever, this great autodidact was immersed in those arcane magical studies which, for all their silliness, fed his imagination and his writings. And of course, he was writing poetry; "I am," he told Robert Bridges, "doing my best work or my worst & do not well know which." These were the years of Yeats's most energetic public activities: "I have never written simply as a poet but always as a poet whose poems are an action as well as a thought," he declared in 1897. This commitment to the life of action, which he was to sustain, more or less rigidly, for the rest of his life, was to keep him outside the mainstream, if one may call it that, of the Modernist movement, with its cult of depersonalisation and detachment from the vulgar struggles of commonplace life. It is true, of course, that Yeats was always an artist first and an activist afterwards; indeed, it might plausibly be argued that his politics were, as Joyce said of the Homeric structure of Ulysses, merely "a way of working". Art is conscienceless, and takes its inspiration and its energies wherever they may be found. When Yeats wondered Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot? we hear not only the lament of the artist who fears he has sold himself to the propagandists, but also the irrepressible glee of a poet glorying in the fact that his poetry has made an unmistakable impact on the world.
From his earliest years as a poet Yeats had acknowledged that he was "not a democrat in literature", and believed in the necessity of instituting a high consistory of great men (and women - Yeats was a feminist before his time) from whom the mass of people would take their inspiration. In 1896 he consolidated his friendship with Lady Gregory, and, as the Introduction has it, "was introduced into a real house set in real history, a house in which rituals of custom were an aspect of daily life, not something fabricated from esoteric rituals . . ." Coole Park was to be a touchstone throughout his life, both an inspiration and a sanctuary.
And often he was in need of sanctuary, not only from the tussles of political and theatrical business, but from the emotional storms precipitated by his troubled love for Maud Gonne. In December 1898 she at last revealed to him the details of her affair with Lucien Millevoye, by whom she had had two children. Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory, displaying admirable restraint: "Today & yesterday I have gone through a crisis that has left me worn out. MG is here & I understand everything now. I cannot say more than that if I am sorry for my self I am far more sorry for her & that 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."
That "harder problem" would stay with him for years, years that would see, however, the full flowering of his poetic genius. Our harder age may take Yeats's grand passion for the prosaic Maud Gonne with a pinch of sceptical salt, yet out of this love, as out of every setback or triumph that he experienced, the poet derived valuable instruction. As John Kelly puts it, with his usual elegance and force, "Yeats was to learn that no revelation could bring closure, no apocalypse completion, but that life and history were a ceaseless struggle, and that we begin to live when we conceive life as tragedy."
John Banville is Literary Editor of The Irish Times