In his preface, Terence Brown writes that this critical biography would not be possible without the work of the previous scholars and writers on Yeats that he is able to draw on. These are many, and all are acknowledged. He also states that he wishes the work to be open to the general reader.
The early chapters have the rich detail of William M. Murphy's sympathetic biography of John Butler Yeats. They cover much the same ground, but the methods are very different. This can be seen in Brown's treatment of JBY's extraordinary decision to give up the law for art and move from Dublin to London to study drawing at Heatherley's Art School, leaving his wife and two children with her parents in Sligo.
Brown draws on both Murphy's partisan account and on Gifford Lewis's study of The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala: to Murphy it was a necessary if reckless artistic impulse; Lewis saw it as an act of a profoundly irresponsible man who sacrificed his family for the sake of a feckless whim. Brown gives his own reasons why Gifford's judgement is too severe and narrow, but he is almost equally distant from Murphy's warm advocacy. Brown resorts to this method frequently.
It could degenerate into fair-minded dullness, but instead it adds to the richness of the text, partly because he has such command of his many sources that he is able to thread them so unobstrusively together that they seem part of a single narrative. And when it is necessary, he is never shy of speaking bluntly.
Throughout the work he is alert to social and cultural change and the effects of such change. In a few pages he is able to trace the disastrous effect of the rise of the mass market on the lives of the poets who belonged with Yeats to the Rhymers. "In an apparent paradox, it was increased literacy which put the role of the man of letters in question", and he argues how the ensuing fragmentation of the serious literary market place led indirectly to the fin de siecle of the l890s.
He is equally alert to political change, which is even more necessary as he sees Yeats's extraordinary career, in its many aspects, reflecting this country's complicated relationship with Britain, and certain of his works are seen as interventions in that history. With the same careful selection and threading of quotation, he is able to evoke atmosphere:
"We glimpse Yeats again in this Edwardian twilight on the brink of European dark, in the spring of l9l4 at dinner in Sir Edmund Gosse's fine house in Regent's Park, `a pattern of talk . . . dancing to and fro across the table . . . easy and effortless' (Stark l983: l30). It is a striking vignette: `Beyond Yeats's dark hair and heavy chin like that of some prelate not too ascetic, and Sickert's aquiline profile, the open windows showed heavy garden laburnums pale in candlelight against the sombre leafage of the park' (ibid)."
Similarly, Brown cites many critics and writers, patiently and unobstrusively, as he searches to explain the poet's work. At the heart of this search is Yeats's life-long fascination with the occult. Here Brown turns to that clearest of clear minds, E.R. Dodds, author of The Greeks and the Irrational, who as a young man knew Yeats in Dublin and was later to be a sceptical member of the British Society of Psychical Research. In his autobiography, Dodds distinguishes between two approaches to psychic phenomena, though sometimes they are mixed in individual minds. "One has that of the occultist who sought experience rather than explanation; the other that of the psychic researcher who wishes to abolish the occult in the clear light of day".
DODDS thought Yeats an occultist, whereas he numbered himself among the psychic researchers. Brown, characteristically, thinks that for all his dedication to the occult there was much of the investigator in Yeats, and it is in this light that he comes to examine that most perplexing of Yeats's work, A Vision.
Yeats married George Hyde-Lees amid doubts and hesitations:
"It was Lady Gregory who managed to bring the reluctant but lonely prospective husband to the sticking point, having first been persuaded that Yeats's intentions were in fact honourable, if ill-expressed. Some home truths must have been spoken. The mistress of Coole was particularly scathing about Yeats intending to marry Hyde-Lees in the clothes he had purchased to woo Iseult (Gonne)."
The marriage almost ended during the honeymoon. To distract her husband from his depression, the young bride faked a session of automatic writing, to discover that she had a ready facility. Yeats was fascinated:
"It was a gift she was to exploit to remarkable effect in the early years of a marriage which might otherwise have foundered. For it quickly made her a daily focus of the poet's almost insatiable curiosity about the paranormal, about the possibility of spirit communication, and gave her the means by which she might direct, without obviously appearing to do so, a conjoint exploration of their relationship."
What began in faking lead to the extraordinary collaboration that was to grow into A Vision. Brown suggests that the collaboration could also have contained elements of analysis such as Jung was conducting at the time. Brown handles this most difficult material with the same delicacy and insight he brings to his reading of the poet's work.
The risk in any critical biography is the preservation of a balance. In the greater part of the book this is kept and sensitively held, but there are times in the second half of the book when I felt the balance swings too heavily toward academic criticism, and as a result the narrative appears to hurry in the compelling closing chapters, as if there was an awareness that it had lingered too long elsewhere.
The work is fascinating and a pleasure to read, Brown an illuminating and companionable guide throughout its extraordinary intricacies, and it made this general reader want to revisit certain plays, and the magical poems.
John McGahern is a novelist. His abridged edition of The Letters of J.B.Yeats, edited by Joseph Hone, to which he also wrote the introduction, was published earlier this month by Faber & Faber