IT was T.S. Eliot who famously proclaimed that Yeats was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time", and this magnificent, richly textured first volume of Roy Foster's authorised biography explores that complex symbiosis of life and history in an almost day-by-day account, showing how the two impacted upon each other to produce Ireland's great poet. We follow Yeats from his birth through every complexity of pose and mask as he defines and redefines his place in his society and culture, until, by the end of the book, he is writing Reveries over Childhood and Youth, and helping to shape the history through which he is living.
Of books on Yeats there is no end, but this is a quite exceptional contribution to the field, and no Yeatsian worth the name will be able to do without it. Professor Foster has consulted an awesome number of archives to produce a text which not only gives by far the fullest and most reliable account of Yeats's career, but also relates developing themes in his thought and works to their biographical occasion. The detailed narrative is like a sumptuous brocade, but it has the intricate patterning of a Turkish carpet - and rightly so, for, diverse though they may seem, Yeats's various concerns - political, theatrical, sexual, magical - were elaborately interconnected. Not least among the book's many triumphs is the adroit way it manages to do justice to this tangled but crucial reciprocity.
A marginalised Irish Protestant, born into a declining social class, the son of an impoverished Bohemian artist father, and constantly moving as a youth between Dublin, Sligo and London, Yeats became aware early of the need for self-definition and at the same time, grasped that his background allowed him more latitude in constructing himself than would have been possible for those of more settled background. His need to create a persona also has psychological imperatives: he was naturally timid, and he had a pathological hatred of being ridiculed. He saw, too, that any attempt to reposition himself would involve political decisions, and this in an age when, the political situation itself was undergoing profound change. Professor Foster's expertise as a historian comes into full play in tracing the ramifications of this position, and not only are Yeats's own words and opinions interpreted in terms of their context, so are the many contemporary comments which enliven and amplify our picture of him.
Residence in London in the late 1880s sharpened his awareness of competing national and social identities, and the rootlessness and genteel poverty of his life in England made Sligo appear a haven of security. This local patriotism widened into a larger cultural nationalism after he met the returned Fenian, John O'Leary, who lent him Irish books and brought him into advanced political circles. It was through O'Leary that his first major book of poems, The Wanderings Of Oisin, was published by subscription, and O'Leary gave Maud Gonne an introduction to him, so plunging him into an unhappy love affair that lasted for many years.
He tried, with a certain success, to interest Maud in the Irish literary societies he set up in the turmoil following the death of Parnell. In these initiatives he adopted what Professor Foster describes as a neo-Fenian position, in the vain hope of attracting the younger men to his side and so circumvent a takeover by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, a moderate ex-Young Irelander and anti-Parnellite. This coded use of the Irish Republican Brotherhood rhetoric sat uneasily with his calls for a national literature that would be above party and faction. It was even further removed from the High Tory and Imperialist tone of the Scots Observer, edited from Edinburgh by William Henley, in which he was placing regular articles. The conflict between an advanced nationalist position and professional success continued throughout the 1890s and was even more acute after the inauguration of the Irish theatrical movement, when it brought him into conflict with Griffith Moran and eventually (according to AE) with most of Dublin.
As Roy Foster points out, Maud Gonne is related not only to Yeats's national aspirations (she had set out, trahison des debutants, to be the Irish Joan of Arc) but also to his occult interests. Deeply religious by nature, Yeats had lost his orthodox faith by reading the post-Darwinians and all his life sought revelation through occult societies, visionaries and mediums. In the early Nineties he was already finding connections between the teaching of the Golden Dawn, the magical society to which he belonged, and Irish folk beliefs, and in the mid-Nineties he planned with Maud a Celtic Mystical Order to be based in an island in Lough Key.
Occult interests became even more important to his relationship with her after December 1898 when she told him of her long-standing affair with the married French politician, Millevoy, and of the birth of her two illegitimate children. He wrote devastated letters to Lady Gregory but thought he had entered into a mystical marriage with Maud, and they communicated "astrally and chemically with mescalin and hashish. Unsurprisingly," Foster drily comments, "visions followed." Nor was this the only time that the occult was put at the disposal of his romantic or sexual interests. In 1913 he made a frantic appeal to a medium to discover if his then mistress was really pregnant as she alleged. When the spirit message that she was lying turned out to be true, it confirmed even more strongly his belief in the powers of the medium concerned.
A wealth of new material from notebooks, diaries and letters provides the fullest account yet of Yeats's important friendships, especially those with women. His long collaboration with Lady Gregory is recounted in all its detail (including Gogarty's crack that Yeats's visit to Italy with her must have been like seeing the place from the back of a Black Maria), as are the constant vicissitudes of his relationship with the love-lorn English heiress Annie Horniman (with whose plight the tender Gogarty sympathised in a limerick: "What a pity it is that Miss Horniman/When she wants to secure or suborn a man/Should choose Willie Yeats/Who still masturbates/And at any rate isn't a horny man.") Perhaps horny enough, however, to finally consummate his affair with Maud in June 1908, a "strange summer full of surprises and bewilderments". Their letters suggest that some resolution has been reached, and his ex-mistress, the actress Florence Farr, thought that "the long years of fidelity have been rewarded at last".
For someone who could not bear ridicule Yeats had chosen a perverse course in Irish life, but as time went by, and aided by Nietzsche and a growing disregard for the begrudgers, his mask hardened and he felt able to take on all comers. As early as 1888 Hannah Lynch was lampooning him as August Fitzgibbon, "too exquisite and ethereal to be ... appreciated by the common British reviewer". A few years later he appeared in the New Ireland Review as "William Blutiger KIeinbier", a mannered washerwoman's son with dirty linen, who was always on the scrounge. By the late 1890s he was being dismissed by Patrick Pearse as a mere English poet of the third fourth rank", and there followed more sustained attacks by Frank Hugh O'Donnell, D.P. Moran and, after an initial friendliness, Arthur Griffith. The final attack of this period came in George Moore's wickedly funny Hail and Farewell, a book which helped prompt him to write his own memoirs.
In this biography, as Professor Foster himself has suggested, Freud is replaced by Foucault: it is not childhood trauma but social context and early power-struggles that are seen to condition the later life. It tracks the ways in which Yeats's various preoccupations ricochet off one another", driven by a cluster of fundamental dynamics, and how he organised and followed up his various cultural and political campaigns. The range of the research and the exactitude of the scholarship make this required reading: the grace and wit of the style make it enjoyable reading.