New Ways to Kill Your Mother (6 page)

Had you stayed with me and not left me for Lady Gregory and her friends and associations you would have loved and adored concrete life for which as I know you have a real affection. What would have resulted? Realistic and poetical plays, and poetry in closest and most intimate union with the positive realities and complexities of life. And that is the world that awaits, so far in vain, its poet.

In families such as the Yeatses and the Jameses, where discussion of art and style was part of emotional life and writing was held in high esteem, attacks on each other’s tone in poetry and prose could be used as a way to mask other attacks, or make the attacks more fierce. Literary criticism became the coinage in which old family feuds were paid and repaid. Thus in 1905, having read
The Golden Bowl
, William James could write to his brother, who was sixty-two years old: ‘But why won’t you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigour and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style?’ So too in June 1921, when his son was in his mid-fifties, John Butler Yeats wrote:

Never are you happier and never more felicitous in words than when in your conversation you describe life and comment on it. But when you write poetry you as it were put on your dress coat and shut yourself in and forget what is vulgar to a man in a dress coat. It is my belief that some day you will write a play of real life in which poetry will be the inspiration, as propaganda is of G. B. Shaw’s plays. The best thing in life is the game of life and some day a poet will find this out. I hope you will be that poet. It is easier to write poetry that is far away from life, but it is infinitely more exciting to write the poetry of life.

William James had begun as a painter and become a psychologist, but he was also a deeply self-conscious prose stylist. His style, he wrote to his brother in 1907, was ‘to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it for ever’, as opposed to Henry’s, which was, William wrote, ‘to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing around and around it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn’t!) the illusion of a solid object’.

The failure of Henry James Senior in life was compounded after his death by the failure of the collection of his writings. In 1887, when it was clear that sales had reflected critical reception, Henry, who had written to one reviewer telling him that his attack on the book had been contemptible and barbarous, wrote to William: ‘What you tell me of poor Father’s book would make me weep if it weren’t somehow outside and beyond weeping.’ Thus the two successful authors, William and Henry James, each in his prime, had managed to kill their father rather fatally, as it were, by letting his work be published in book form.

3

During his time in New York, John Butler Yeats was worried over and advised and bankrolled by his son the poet, who wrote
about him and spoke about him as though he were an errant adolescent, a ‘youth of eighty without a care,’ as John Quinn put it. Slowly, over the years, father and son had exchanged roles. As a painter, John Butler Yeats could not compete with his elder son nor be overshadowed by him. But from the beginning of his exile in New York, John Butler Yeats also began to write stories and poems and a play, and in his letters he spoke of them to his son, as a starter to an older and more experienced writer. It is as if Senator Mann, having read his son’s
Buddenbrooks
, began to write his own faltering fiction, or Sir Leslie Stephen, having seen paintings by his daughter Vanessa Bell, began to dabble in drawings. In the annals of letters between father and son, there is no starker enactment of a slow and humiliating murder than in the letters about writing between John Butler Yeats and his son. The old man is an infant, innocent in his pride and hope, the son distant, godlike and all-powerful, ready to ignore and criticize and quietly destroy. The son is cold and ruthless; the old man desperate to be murdered. It is as though Oedipus and Herod and some third force out of Freud’s dark laboratory had joined forces.

At the turn of the century, John Butler Yeats incurred the wrath of the gods by praising his son Jack’s play in a letter to his playwright son. He wrote: ‘I am greatly disappointed to learn from Cottie [Jack’s wife] that you did not seem to care much for Jack’s “Flaunty”. I do think you are quite wrong.’ A few months later he wrote again: ‘Did I tell you about Jack’s play written for the puppet theatre. It is the prettiest and most poetical little play I ever read … You and Moore and Pinero and Arthur Jones had better take lessons from Jack. I assure you the play haunts me. He must have a real gift for construction.’ In 1901 and 1902, as new plays by W. B. Yeats were performed, his father became one of his critics. ‘I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed your play,’ he wrote in 1902, ‘but I maintain that the end won’t do.’ In 1913,
having seen a production of
The Countess Cathleen
in New York, he wrote: ‘I think the play should have a prologue. It would help the illusion and give the necessary atmosphere. All at once we are expected without any warning to enter the world of miracle and hobgoblin, and it is too much.’

Some of John Butler Yeats’s letters to his son about his own writings date from the early years of the century. In 1902, he wrote:

I am finishing my story and am longing to read it to you. I shall be disappointed if you do not like it. So far no one except Susan Mitchell and Norman have heard it and they are very enthusiastic. G. Moore heard the first part some time ago and commended it much, although it is not the sort of story he would naturally like.

In March he wrote again: ‘If I get my story finished I think you will be pleased. I read the first part to Moore and Magee and their commendations have induced me to go on with it.’

In 1908, in New York, John Butler Yeats wrote two short stories and sent them to his son. ‘I don’t know what you will think about them,’ he wrote. A month later, when he had received no reply, he wrote: ‘I fear your not writing means that you don’t care for my stories (possibly condemned unread). At any rate I should be much obliged if you would put them into a large envelope and send them back.’ The offhand reply that came nearly a year later did not help. It was dated 10 October 1909 and written from Coole. It ended: ‘I have found your two stories – they were among papers of Lady Gregory’s. I must have lent them to her and asked her to read them. I send them to you. The one without a name is much the best, I think.’

On 11 November, John Butler Yeats wrote unhappily once more about his stories, still not in fact returned. He was unclear, it seems, which one W. B. Yeats had liked:

You don’t give me any clue as to which story of mine you read. There were two. I am very sorry that I sent them, but I shall now be much obliged to you if you will send them back to me as soon as possible. I want them. Of one of the stories, ‘The Ghost Wife’, I have no other copy.

The one-sided argument between them over the stories continued. The following year he announced to his son: ‘I have my four stories in the hands of a literary agent, one a modern story, very crisp.’

In 1909 John Butler Yeats began to correspond with his son about a play he was discussing with many people in New York, but not actually writing. One of those to whom he spoke was a producer called Percy MacKaye. On 24 March he wrote: ‘I enclose a little paragraph from “The Sun” to show you that Percy MacKaye, who is so enthusiastic about my play, is a person of some position.’ Three weeks later, he wrote that the same Percy MacKaye had told him that ‘he felt sure if I submitted its scenario he could get a commission to write it. He spoke of the matter to me not once but a dozen times … He was most enthusiastic, imploring me to finish it, saying he would himself show it to every manager in New York.’

Four years later, John Butler Yeats, full of hope, was still writing to his son about the play, but it remained in the realm of the imagination. ‘My heart is set on a play,’ he wrote in February 1913,

a psychological comedy. There are several thrills in it, where people will weep happy tears, and it will be all as a clever girl puts it ‘well woven’. And as you may remember, Synge paid me one of his few compliments. He said I could write dialogue. The play has Unity and will go with a rush. Percy MacKaye told me he felt sure he could get me a commission to write it, if I would provide him with a written sketch of it.

It is likely that John Butler Yeats, in mentioning praise from Synge, was conscious of Synge’s attitude towards the plays of W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, his fellow directors at the Abbey Theatre. Synge was, to say the least, grudging in his praise.

In 1916, now seventy-seven, J. B. Yeats continued to remind his son about the play he had still not written. On 6 January he wrote: ‘You know I have a play in my head and mean someday to write it … And you know Synge praised my dialogue. And I bet if it is written it will be a success. Just you wait and see.’ Nine days later he returned to the subject. ‘I am thinking more and more about my play. I think it will surprise you, but at present I am busy on my own portrait.’ The self-portrait was still not finished at the time of his death six years later.

Instead of finishing the play, W. B. Yeats’s father wrote some poems which he sent to his son at the end of January 1916 with a letter of self-recommendation. ‘I send you some impromptu verses … I think they contain the rudiments of art and are spirited and have a beginning, a middle and an end and that’s saying a good deal.’ When his son had not replied, he wrote again:

I send you a great many letters. I begin to think I am a born writer. Did you get my ‘poem’? I thought it had spirit and a sort of flowing inspiration. Flowing in its small way at full tide. When I was in College I once wrote some verses and showed them to a clever friend, the present Sir John Edge of the India council, and he pronounced them to be superior to anything by E. Dowden, who was then writing poetry for the College magazine. Perhaps had I followed up my ‘success’, you would not be the first poet of my name. Ahem.

Two days later, John Butler Yeats wrote again: ‘I think I am entitled to call myself “an inheritor of unfulfilled renown”. I told [Padraic] Colum and his wife the whole plot of my play. I never saw people more delighted or more eager that it should be written. Percy MacKaye
if he begged me once begged me twenty times to write it.’ Less than a fortnight later, he sent another letter about the play he was going to write:

As soon as my lecture [on 4 April] is over and past, I mean to get to work on my play. It is Destiny and must be fulfilled. All the details are in my mind, and I will make it drama. The characters, the dialogue, all shall be drama – with a breadth of treatment that will carry across the footlights. The hero is a poet whose idea is revolt against the sovereignty of any woman, he being in himself exceptionally susceptible to women – the heroine very much in love with the hero – her love a woman’s, that is more of soul than of passion.

For the third time, Yeats the father mentioned Synge: ‘And remember Synge said I could write dialogue,’ he wrote, and then went on: ‘The whole play will be a novelty. I am confident. I have the idea, and I think that execution will be granted unto me. The play a success, I shall sing my “nunc dimittis”.’ His references to his writing and his sending his poems were met with silence from the other side of the Atlantic. On 19 March 1916 he wrote: ‘You say nothing about my “poetry”. I did hope for a compliment on the “spirit and go of my lines”.’ In a postscript he added: ‘At any rate let me know if you got my verses.’

By the end of May he had written more of the play:

I tell you it is good – not a tragedy or a satire or in any way profound, but a lively comedy. A psychological comedy, each character with its outlines distinct, with happy laughter and happier tears. I have not the slightest doubt that some day it will be acted. It is all in my head to the last line, and half or more of it is written, and it has its own melody and is a dream throughout.

The play was finished by October 1916. On 25 October he wrote to his son:

I have revised my play and as soon as possible will have it typed. And you will hear with consternation [my] mak[ing] the ghost express the state of his mind in rhymed verse, and by my soul, I think it is poetry – and it is modest poetry, like the poor ghost who sees it, and whose only wish is that he may be released from ghostdom and permitted to go down into Hell where his sweetheart waits.

Once the play was typed, its author was euphoric and foolish enough to write the following to his son, who had, by this time, written eleven plays:

As soon as I can manage it, I will send you my play. It is a Psychological Comedy and goes with speed and substance. I am convinced that when you have read it you will write to consult me as to your next play, showing it to me in its prose form. I think I shall be able to help you. I remember of old how quick you were to take a hint. You are receptive as well as creative.

Eleven days later, W. B. Yeats’s father had more good news about his play. ‘Yesterday for the first time,’ he wrote, ‘I read my play to a group of friends, and I assure [you] I had a most successful first night. Also be it noted that they praised my poetry, which is I assure you in excellent rhyme.’ Eight days later he wrote again:

A few nights ago at Sloan’s I read my little play to a small company. They were not literary, but just ordinary theatre-goers, and they were enthusiastic. It caught their fancies and I was given a very successful ‘first night’. Among them was a literary man who admired my poetry. For there is a ghost who tells his story in rhymes which are as old as your castle. Age in a castle is admirable, but in Rhymes may be another matter.

In January of the following year, John Butler Yeats returned to the matter of his own value as a teacher of playwriting to his son. ‘I sometimes wish,’ he wrote, ‘that it had been possible for you to
have consulted with me about your plays. I think I have a playwriting instinct, and that my play … proves it. And if it is simple it is without pretences, unaffected and easy, and yet fresh and new as a morning in June.’