7This book is as irrepressible as its subject: it has been around at least three times before. John Butler Yeats's letters were first selected and edited in 1917 by Ezra Pound (whose typographical peculiarities nearly drove Cuala Press mad). A further selection was produced by Lennox Robinson in 1920; eventually a fuller version was edited by Joseph Hone in 1944, footnoted in his characteristic style (intelligent insights mixed with a slapdash approach to dates and facts). That edition was republished in 1983, following the renewed interest aroused by William Murphy's luminous biography. John McGahern recently produced an introduction for an abridgement of Hone's selection, published in French: and this is what Faber gives us now.
The excuse provided is that JBY is "almost unknown here", but one wonders where here is. Thanks to Murphy's subsequent volume, Family Secrets, and a flood of biographies of Jack, W.B., Lily and Lolly, their father is a firmly established figure in that remarkable artistic dynasty whose several achievements make up so much of Irish cultural history in this century. It is all to the good that JBY's voice is heard as much as possible - sane, wise, iconoclastic, witty. But it seems a pity not to produce a proper edition, incorporating - for instance - the recently-released correspondence with the love of his life, Rosa Butt, and the letters subsequently printed by William Murphy, as well as full version of the letters abridged here. The odd result is to present a selection even less comprehensive than Hone's eighty years ago: reproducing his irritating blanks for names, apparent misreadings, and inaccurate glosses, and adding nothing to Murphy's consummate portrait.
And lying behind is an interesting and important question of personality. JBY was a determined Bohemian: born into the professional elite of the Victorian Irish Ascendancy, he threw up the Irish bar and became a portrait painter in London, living on exiguous commissions and unpaid loans, providing brilliant conversation and unfinished paintings in return. He was supported by his children as soon as they began to earn money. In 1907 he went to New York for a brief visit and stayed until his death fifteen years later, largely bankrolled by the lawyer and art patron John Quinn, who was in turn paid by several of WB's MSSs (not "all" of them , as improbably stated here). JBY's children tried but failed to get him back, regarding him with mingled exasperation and apprehension to the end.
When Murphy's book was published in 1978, acclamation was practically universal. But Helen Vendler in the New Yorker produced a directly contrary reading of the artist's life. Murphy marvellously presented his subject as an heroic sage, sacrificing worldly success for uncompromising artistic integrity, and rearing a family of consummate artists against adverse circumstances. As his famous son might have put it, he "ripened into truth" by sharing with the world at large a singularly sweet as well as independent spirit. Vendler saw JBY as a quietly ruthless patriarch, whose loquacious charm concealed a determination to batten onto his nearest and dearest, and whose selfish dependence denied his daughters a full life and drove his wife into depression. Gifford Lewis, in her challenging joint biography of the Yeats sisters, has refined the picture further (arraigning W.B. alongside his father). Murphy's own subsequent work has taken up the argument with gusto. But none of this is reflected in Mc Gahern's introduction, effectively a reduction of material from Prodigal Father into twenty-four pages, ignoring anything written since.
To new readers, nonetheless, the old man's voice will come through the fragmented letters with invigorating force. They are full of clever antitheses ("Have you noticed that when we talk of a man of genius one tries to explain his failure? When we talk of a man of talent we try to account for his success"), sharp national generalisations ("English people when they first come [to America] are very unhappy. They find themselves so much disliked - then they find that sociability and an easy affability are dutied, and New York's fascination falls upon them too") and personal artistic judgments ("I like Turner's pictures better than impressionists' works because while in them I become curious about the painters, in Turner's pictures I become so transported to the scenes painted that I forget to ask who painted them"). There are pointers to his influence over his poet son's opinions and intellectual development, often noted by critics like Ellman: JBY writes that the Catholic church "is good for the heart but bad for the brain", and one remembers his son unforgettably declaring that Home Rule was neccessary to "educate Catholics mentally and Protestants emotionally".
Jack, on the other hand, regarded his father with a beady eye and seems to have deliberately removed himself from the old charmer's sphere. And W.B himself knew that he has to seek other models, and reject as much as he accepted. One does not have to go all the way with Vendler to see JBY's influence as inhibiting his daughters' lives: while he encouraged their artistic achievements, Lily at least was never really happy away from him and he was, as she herself saw, both a continual worry and the real love of her life.
At the same time he had the self-centredness of the artist. "Never trust a sentimentalist", he wrote, "they are all alike, pretenders to virtue, at heart selfish frauds and sensualists". His letters are never sentimental, nor was his course through life. It would be good to have it charted by a full edition of his surviving correspondence; meanwhile, this reprint is an attractive hors d'oeuvre to be getting on with.
Roy Foster is an historian and critic and biographer of W.B. Yeats