Biography: W B Yeats was aware that his life and enterprises were open to the kind of indictment that can sometimes suggest court proceedings. "We the great gazebo built," he proudly boasts to the Gore-Booth sisters in his haunting memorial poem to them, but "They convicted us of guilt". "I thirst for accusation" he asserts in Parnell's Funeral, which records the terrible sense of political disillusion he felt as the governance of Ireland after independence fell into what he thought were unworthy hands, writes Terence Brown
Immediately after his death in 1939, WH Auden, in a famous essay, thought it apt, given so much that could be deemed suspect about the Irish poet's life and writings, to assess Yeats's career by means of a case for the prosecution and for the defence. Yeats had thirsted for accusation and he had begun to get it.
In 1965, Conor Cruise O'Brien took up the prosecutor's role in a compelling essay, Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of WB Yeats, which subjected Yeats's politics as they were expressed in his writings and actions to sustained critique. His judgement was severe: "The argument of this essay has been that his politics deserve to be taken more seriously than they have been, were not fundamentally inconsistent, vague or irrelevant to his 'real self', and were in his maturity and old age, generally pro-fascist in tendency, and Fascist in practice on the single occasion when opportunity arose." That opportunity had presented itself in the summer and autumn of 1933, when for a moment it had seemed an Irish fascist movement might wrest power from a democratically elected government, with help where necessary from the poet himself.
A good deal of critical and biographical work since 1965, when it has engaged with Yeats's politics, might be characterised as the case for the defence, as it has sought to answer O'Brien's charge (which, it must be said, posed for O'Brien a key critical issue as to why he continued not only to admire but to love the poetry).
It is in this context that Mc Cormack enters the lists, affronted that the case for the defence has had such a lengthy hearing and has failed to take due cognisance of the evidence he reckons is salient. He is more than ready to consolidate and augment the case against a poet whose work he certainly admires ("probably the greatest poet in the English language since John Milton, and certainly the greatest since Wordsworth") but perhaps cannot bring himself to love. "Understanding without sympathy" he announces as the objective of this book; but to achieve that understanding he adopts an unremittingly adversarial, forensic tone that implies judgment must be an aspect of such comprehension.
Yeats and the Blueshirts naturally forms part of the book of evidence. But Mc Cormack is more intent in this volume on associating Yeats not with the Italianiate version of an odious political ideology but with its even more virulent mutation: German National Socialism. The award to Yeats of a Frankfurt prize in 1934, a Goethe-Plakette, in the same month as his play The Countess Cathleen was performed in that city - by then firmly under control of the Nazis - is made central to the argument.
Taking this as a cue, Mc Cormack weaves back and forward through Yeats's life and times (his book is a kind of meta-biography, dependent I suspect on a basic knowledge of Yeats's life's trajectory to be readily assimilable), seeking damning indications that allow him to represent the poet as something of a Nazi fellow-traveller. I say "something" here, for it must be said that the actual argument of this well-researched book can proceed by implication as well as rigorous dialectics, sometimes obfuscating direct communication.
Related to this is a rhetorical strategy, much used by courtroom strategists when judges nod, which is seeking to suggest guilt by association. For Mc Cormack contends that Yeats's regard for "blood kindred", which one can understand as a dark version of the concept of "elective affinities", may include in the Yeatsian narrative a cast of characters he knew with dubious politics (among them Maud and Iseult Gonne and Francis Stuart) and people they certainly knew, such as the German spy Hermann Görst, as well as a gallery of individuals linked in one way or another with Irish sympathy for, or work on behalf of, fascism.
Yeats's problem, it seems, was that he had such friends, who brought him within the ambit of very nasty political opinion and activism. The effect of this as argument on an imagined jury is hard to judge. My sense is that it weakens the case, especially since when, on the point of resting, counsel for the prosecution confesses that he has been indulging in a rhetorical ploy all along: "I apologise (somewhat)," Mc Cormack writes, "for my fiction of Yeats's personal Blood Kindred . . . but he who believes absurdities is open to being taken seriously."
What challenged me most in this engaged, even angry book is a clue as to why Mc Cormack, while admiring Yeats's poetry, may not love it. Of Yeats he observes that his "abundance of emotions found no room for compassion". Which sets one wondering if for all the beauty of his early verse and the charged drama of his later and last achievements, Yeats's poetry tellingly lacks that emotion. Which may make it hard for love to coexist with admiration in his readership. And one notes that, when Cruise O'Brien in his essay tried to answer the question as to why he continued to admire and love Yeats's poetry, despite loathing the politics, he spoke of things that would command respect and admiration rather than love: moments where consciousness of the terrible force of history is concentrated in powerful metaphors.
Terence Brown is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin and author of The Life of WB Yeats: A Critical Biography.
Blood Kindred, WB Yeats, The Life, The Death, The Politics. By WJ Mc Cormack, Pimlico, 482pp. £12.99