Biography/Seamus Deane: This is the second of Roy Foster's two-volume biography of Yeats. The first, subtitled The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914, appeared in 1997.
The second half of Yeats's life was even more controversial and eventful than the first, and it is in this period of course that his most remarkable work was achieved. Foster was therefore faced with even greater challenges than before, including the need to master the immense secondary material on Yeats and to absorb it into his own account of the poems, plays and prose writings.
The alarming industrial rate of production in Yeats studies shows no sign of easing, but perhaps this work will at the very least give some pause to the prolific. For it is an achievement like that of Ellmann on Joyce or George Painter on Proust. After it, the deluge of commentary can only continue with a heightened sense of the conditions of its own possibility - which is all to the good.
What Foster has done is of such quality that it refreshes Yeats's own almost-too-famous phrase about the choice between "Perfection of the life or of the work". The life is here perfected as much as it imaginably could be and the work is, in consequence, irradiated.
Still, the later Yeats in especial, provokes incontinence in his commentators since they have to digest so much junk from his multi-channel spiritualist network and its attendant political commercials. A great deal of his work - like that of many of his contemporaries - should come with a health-warning attached. Their crusadings for British imperialism and/or European fascism are egregious and dangerous symptoms of "high" culture's assault on the arrival of mass civilisation. This seemed especially menacing after 1917, when the Rough Beast came slouching out of Russia looking for a Bethlehem in western Europe, but found to its surprise that the God in the manger was fascism. In a world made unsafe by democracy, the threatened élites across Europe agreed to grieve in concert for civilisation and culture and, like Dr Goebbels, immediately reached for their revolvers.
Yeats was a remarkable voice in this bourgeois lament for "aristocracy" that began to intensify in the decade of his birth with the Franco-Prussian War and the slaughter of the communards in Paris in 1870, and reached a culmination with the outbreak of the second World War in the year of his death.
The local detail of his Ireland was notably different: the democratic mass there was Catholic, and the Irish Protestant fear of democracy, vividly alive since O'Connell, became a panic in Yeats. The demise of the sectarian élite in Ireland had to be rewritten as that of a proud anti-modern aristocracy rather than that of a vile ascendancy. His cultural snobbery hid its vulgarity behind a trembling tragic veil and made a fetish of genealogy and degeneracy. Yet, the sectarian, racist, bigoted and esoteric features of Yeats's beliefs vitalised his theatre and his poetry; some tonic bitterness was needed to jolt him out of the stupor of Celtic-nationalism and its cultural kitsch. The autobiographical prose works in which he in part tells the story of his transformation are so subtly analysed by Foster that we can now even more clearly see how so many of his friends, particularly Synge, in effect were presented as versions of Yeats himself - the decadent who became the sponsor of a new vitalism peculiar to the peasant and the spiritual aristocrat.
This is an initial manoeuvre in the redirected venom of Yeats's attack on the pallid middle classes, particularly of the Catholic persuasion, who seemed to him the enemies of the new "noble" ideologies of strength, energy and violence, and war that he began to favour. This was an antidote to the 1890s narcosis, when the whiff of the satanic clung to the dandy and the addict, and the work of art had developed, for art's sake, a near-total immunity to political issues and popular audiences. In Yeats, the end of the century eventually segued into the end of a generation, or of a civilisation, a millennium, of two millennia, or a Great Platonic Year, of ancient Ireland or Anglo-Ireland. Or it was the overlap of those endings with other beginnings, each engendering the other in his peculiar occult version of the dialectic.
Yet, in keeping with that notion, he never wholly abandoned any previously-held position. He remained addicted to the pre-war aestheticism in which he had been formed. The style and design of Lolly and Lily Yeats's Cuala Press remained firmly in that era. So, too, did his affectation that a limited fine-print edition of a volume removed it from the commercial sphere to which the trade edition later reassigned it. This has been a financially inspiring model for Irish poets ever since.
Biographies of artists and scientists are always haunted by the general question of what bearing the material conditions of a life have upon our understanding of their achievements. And hard on the heels of that is another question - the sympathy, or lack of it, between the subject and the biographer. Can there be some ideal form of detachment? Neither question can be answered fully, but this biography manages to mute both of them. Certainly, the dominant relationships of Yeats's life - with his father, Maud Gonne, her daughter Iseult, with George Yeats, the evolution of his friendships with Pound, A.E. , Synge and, above all, Lady Gregory - when narrated with this degree of verve and care, illuminate all his work.
There are many examples, too, of information collected, dove-tailed and then released to allow us hear, within the strict chronology, the steady tattoo of Yeats's abiding obsessions. For example, the episode in which we learn about the genesis of the magnificent poem 'Among School-Children' in the visit to the Montessori school in Waterford in May 1926 is remarkable for its "background" detail, for its account of how the poem emerged from and went beyond that and - a regular excellence - for the placement of the poem in the volume it belongs to and in relation to Yeats's work as a whole. Yeats was a great strategist in relation to his own career; he so implacably pursued his reputation that he seems at times to have caught up with, or have planted in advance, some of its posthumous developments.
Another example is Foster's painstaking work on the detail of Yeats's occult beliefs, as elaborated in the two editions of A Vision of 1925 and 1934 - although, ultimately, his patience with their capillary detail frays.
It is wonderful, though, to see how this Legoland of wheels and cones and colour-coded historical sequences can soft- focus into historical and apocalyptic landscapes, as in the Byzantium poems, and surrender their autodidact rigidities. Generally, when an historical era visibly crumbles, history breaks down into images, not into stories; but Yeats has his occult story of collapse and rebirth to hand. And it is the kind that depends almost entirely on types of the kind in which 19-century ethnography in particular was fertile, and for which it created menacing listings and even waxwork museums of characteristic types. The definite article can do a lot of work when placed in front of "fisherman", "crowd", "bishop" or the like. It is especially effective when the implicit or explicit contrast is with a highly individuated self. In some of Yeats's poems, he appears like a visitor to a waxwork museum (or a Municipal Gallery) in which the only two kinds of representation are of the fiercely individuated or of the standardised type. He shares in both, of course; his initials, WBY, catch the blend of the poet whose uniqueness intensified to the point where he becomes the generic poet (and vice-versa).
His occultist writings are driven by this dynamic, as are his political reflections and rants. Why should the heroic individual, who does not drink the alcohol of the crowd, nevertheless suffer the crowd's hangover? Is that the fate of the national poet? These questions are at the heart of Yeats's fascism, or parafascism, terms with which Foster is uneasy.
Yeats had such a demented determination to distinguish the crowd from the community that he was bound to align himself with a central ambition of fascism, to create capitalism without alienation, but with communal fusion instead, particularly of the ethnic kind. But he wanted to distinguish himself within that from the mountebank Catholic form of corporatism that Fine Gael adopted to make itself distinct from the modernity of the left and agreeable to the Vatican. So Yeats produced, in response, his pinchbeck versions of a Protestant Irish tradition and a scandalising sexual assertiveness, the Wild Old Wicked Man and the No Petty People; just the obverse of the grim and prim Catholicism of the Catholic Bulletin and the Censorship Act, and of the rediscovered opportunities for servility that had been lost to the respectable between 1916 and 1922. But these were apparent opposites, natural allies, hating republicanism and revolution, seeking to give their hard-man authoritarianism the prestige of a "tradition" invented for that purpose. Foster has great fun with the Bulletin, but too little with Yeats.
For all his postures were impostures; all his styles, not just the early versions, were mannered; but usually, he had the gift of becoming absurd when he most threatened to be monstrous. His allegiance to the Blueshirts and Mussolini is of a piece with his evocation of Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, published in Venice in 1528, just before the society of that time was overtaken by warlike violence. At the heart of this is what Yeats at his best embodied - the admiration for that studied nonchalance - sprezzatura - that enabled the courtier to live a life of self-fashioning, to know that artifice is deployed for the sake of the real. This is the Yeatsian "artifice of eternity", the source of splendour in so many of his poses and in the great declarative poems and sequences from 'Meditations in Time of Civil War' right through to 'The Statues'.
Foster is himself at his best when he provides the astonishing accounts of the acquisition and recreation of Thoor Ballylee, how the relationship of George and WBY evolved within and through that building and home that was always also a symbol and an emblem; but most of all, how the poems emerged from a wonderfully intricate web of familial, sexual, literary and political-social connections that were organised with every appearance of spontaneity. There are so many illuminations here. I had never before quite seen how Yeats had managed to make the change from being one of the many modern writers of esoteric poetry (like Mallarmé) to being one of the few who made poetry public again.
This biography shows that there never was a simple changeover; he wrote both kinds of poetry and plays all his life, and it is the almost chemical (or alchemical?) interaction between them that gives them their special position in European and Irish history. The belief, that appears to contemporary convention so scandalous, that mass democracy meant the end of liberalism, by no means unique to Yeats, or to his generation, reaches in his work a level of anger and grief no other writer on that issue has equalled. This was the apocalypse - Ireland and Europe shattered, great civilisations bent. Yet the esoteric beliefs intervene at this point to give the energy of renewal; the body restored, and with and through it, the spirit.
The completion of this biography is in itself a moment of cultural rearticulation in Ireland. The work involved is staggering, but the narrative carries it with the ease of a lifting wave. A routine understanding of a poem such as 'Easter 1916', for instance, has always seen the image of the stone in the living stream as a representation of republican fanaticism; but the imageries of stone that extend from there through serial references to the Italian stone of ancient buildings (stone then the natural antithesis to iron, the "modern" and inert building material) to the ideal of beauty in the Greek statues of 'The Statues' (1938), reveals a more complex situation. The stone of these poems connects fanaticism and serenity, the Yeatsian doubt about the Irish revolution and the Yeatsian recognition that the Cúchulainn-Pearse transformation was, in his late view of it, a redemption of the country from everything formless that modernity meant to him.
It is one of the great virtues of Foster's work that the reader can pursue such connections through various shifts and changes and still see them clearly. The ravishing serenity of a poem such as 'Long-Legged Fly' and the unappeased disturbance of the climactic volume The Tower (1928) are both far apart and very close. Foster masters such distances, and enables the reader to do so as well.
Yeats was indeed lucky in his lovers and friends (he had almost as many of the former as of the latter). As he famously declared, "my glory was I had such friends". He can now, as he lingers on in, presumably, phase 15 of his great wheel of Becoming, add to that glory (and luck) such a biographer .
Seamus Deane is Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Among his publications are Reading in the Dark (1996) and Strange Country (1997). He has a collection of essays on Edmund Burke due from Cork University Press
W.B. Yeats: A Life - Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939 By R. F. Foster. Oxford University Press, 798pp, £30