The Meaning of Recognition (32 page)

But after the
Tampa
incident Australia had enough coin among people-smugglers to make their trade look a lot less profitable, which could be said to have been the first and most
important international event that an Australian government at the time should have been interested in. There is charm however in Ms Williams’s confidence that she can cite the opinion of
‘one insider’ without making us wonder what all the other insiders might be saying to the contrary. The ‘one insider’ kept on cropping up in different contexts throughout
her piece. Presumably he or she was not always the same person, but invariably the same central view was propagated, namely that Howard was ruling the country by a confidence trick aimed at the
gullible population, who either didn’t know or didn’t care that their once proud nation was sinking into disrepute overseas. Finally the views of the protean ‘one insider’
were summed up by Ms Williams’s most imposingly qualified consultant, the ‘one expert’.

Three years later, this cherished central tenet of the ‘one expert’ helped lead the Australian Labor Party to clamorous defeat, after which – but not, disastrously, before
which – it was at last realized by some of those in charge of the party machine that an opinion poll conducted in Australia’s suburbs is exactly what a Federal election is. Those of us
who would like to see the ALP restored to some of its former glory and fighting strength had better realize that a recovery will be slow to happen if the progressive intelligentsia goes on writing
bad essays. They are often written from genuine compassion – some of the immediate consequences of the
Tampa
incident were hard to be proud of – but high feelings turn loose
expression into low comedy, and the result is a growing subliterature of personal statements that express nothing substantial except the author’s impatience. There could have been a book of
them ten times as big as the one I reviewed. I would have had a lot of fun reviewing it, but beyond a certain point there is no reward in blasting away at a sitting duck.

Yeats was a great poet who was also the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy. Do we have to absorb the philosophy before we can appreciate the poetry? If we are
lucky enough to be in a state of ignorance, the question won’t come up. The poetry will get to us first. Suppose you’ve heard this much: that Yeats’s best stuff came late. So you
pick up the 1950 edition of the
Collected Poems
and start from the back. The last few lines in the book are the first you see.

Forty years ago, when I first read those lines, I had to remind myself to start breathing again. They still hit me with the same force, and I still can’t fully understand them. But I began
to understand them when I realized that putting together a phrase like ‘dazzled by the embroidery’ was something hardly anybody could do. ‘A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed
banner’ is something an averagely gifted poet might fluke, although not often. To write ‘dazzled by the embroidery’, however, you have to possess the means to put
ordinary-sounding words together in an extraordinarily resonant way.

That was what Yeats really meant by his seemingly twee talk of ‘articulating sweet sounds together’. In his earlier poetry, that richly combinative capacity was always operating, if
only intermittently condensing to full force, and in his later poetry – say from
Responsibilities
onwards – it attained incandescent fusion more and more often, until, with
The Tower
and all the poetry that followed, far into his old age, he was tremendous all the time. Except for Professor Ricks, who finds the later Yeats less a poet than a rhetorician,
nobody sensitive to poetry doubts the magnificence of Yeats’s steadily maturing achievement, his wresting of complexity out of mere fluency; and the otherwise acute professor could have
reached his contrary opinion only after a small asteroid had passed through his brain, perhaps while he was listening to Bob Dylan.

Apart from such cosmic interference, nothing can get between Yeats’s mature poetry and the reader except the magnitude of the attendant scholarship. Unfortunately that magnitude has now
received a massive augmentation. The second and final volume of R.F. Foster’s whopping biography of Yeats is Pelion, just as the first volume was Ossa, and now both mountains are piled on top
of what was already a great dividing range, with Yeats’s unassisted voice squeaking thinly on the other side of it, hard to hear even in its valleys. Many learned reviewers will be grateful
for Foster’s thoroughness. Let’s try not being grateful.

The defiant lines spoken by the Arabian lover (ah, how I did, how I do now more than ever, fancy myself as that Arabian lover, poised on a racing dromedary) put a rousing end to ‘The Gift
of Harun Al-Rashid’, which was pinned to the tail of the 1950
Collected Poems
only as a result of a posthumous round-up, and is actually not a very late poem at all. Barely latish,
it was first published in 1923. Alas, it was not published in
The Tower
, Yeats’s mightily confident 1928 book of poems that contained ‘Sailing to Byzantium’,
‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘Among School Children’, ‘All Souls’ Night’ and other knockouts in such profusion that
even Professor Ricks must sometimes wonder whether
Blonde on Blonde
quite survives the comparison. But ‘Desert Geometry, or The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, to give it its full
title, made its debut as the introduction to Book II in the first, 1923 edition of
A Vision
, Yeats’s prose
summa
of all things mystically deep. This gives Foster the chance
– nay, the mandate – to explain a living poem in terms of a stone-dead rigmarole. Here is a sample of Foster:

Clearer now? Foster himself follows up with a sample from
A Vision
. Risking our sanity, let us do the same.

Keeping that up for hundreds of pages, Yeats may or may not have added to the discoveries of ‘philosophers back to Heraclitus’, but he certainly added more than his share to the
flimflam cranked out by every tent-show seer from Madame Blavatsky through Ouspensky and Gurdjieff to L. Ron Hubbard. It would be good to think that having codified his vision he got it out of the
way and left himself room to synthesize experience in the only mode that mattered: the poetic. In fact, however, he was still tinkering with his revelations to the very end, and published a
reworked edition of the book not long before he died. So we are stuck with the connection between the high art of his poetry and the low comedy of a self-deceiving boondoggle. The question that
matters is whether the connection is important. Surely Joyce was merely being polite when he regretted that Yeats didn’t put the ‘colossal conception’ of
A Vision
into
‘a creative work’. There is nothing colossal about
A Vision
except its waste of time. Except, of course, that Yeats didn’t think so. Genius has to be forgiven its
foolishness. Newton was just as interested in his wacko chronology as in his celestial mechanics. But about Yeats’s rickety paranormal hobbyhorse, his secretary Ezra Pound spoke the cruel
truth early on. He said Yeats’s ideas about the phases of the moon were ‘bug-house’.

Startlingly, Yeats’s otherwise patient wife George thought the same. This is where Foster’s book comes good, although it takes a long time doing so. Upon the publication of
A
Vision
, she told a friend that there was ‘nothing in his verse worth preserving but the personal. All the pseudo-mystico-intellecto-nationalistico stuff of the last fifteen years
isn’t worth a trouser-button.’ George emerges from this book as a model of good sense. Foster would have done the same if he had taken a tip from her at the start, and viewed the
spiritualist clap-trap with a more dismissive eye. Admittedly George was up to her neck in it. At the long sessions of automatic writing, George was the channel, or control, or whatever you care to
call it. But on the evidence of the wearisomely cited transcripts, George was serving her own ends. Having seen off the poisonous Maud Gonne and her even more dangerous daughter Iseult, both of
whom Yeats had proposed to in rapid succession, George wanted to make sure that the Gonnes stayed gone. Magically, voices from the Beyond instructed Yeats that he should spend more time in bed with
his wife. This could have been funny if humour were among Foster’s tools.

To regret its absence is not necessarily frivolous. For a critic, humour is primarily a means of compression, and compression is what a book like this needs most. At least a third of it is junk
because it analyses junk, and junk analysed is still junk. That being said, it is gratifying to have all the details that prove Yeats’s stature as a practical politician. After he recorded
the birth of the terrible beauty, Yeats had a right to think that the literary revival of which he had been such a prominent member had ushered in the new Ireland. But in the Free State there was
no automatic welcome for his Protestantism, for his Ascendancy background, and above all for his liberal, tolerant outlook. (Although he had some noxious views about hierarchy and due deference, to
paint Yeats as a fascist is a waste of breath: he believed in free speech, for example, which no fascist does.) As a Senator who vocally insisted that Ulster could be won for a united Ireland only
by an example of enlightened domestic policy, he was in danger.

Worse, so was George, whom he loved despite her devotion. Bullets punctured the windows of their grand house in Dublin. George played it cool, just as she did in his last phase when monkey-gland
injections helped harden – if that’s the word we want – his perennial conviction that wisdom was to be found under the storm-tossed banner of a woman’s beauty. He was
already in his dotage when he found himself between the sheets with a twenty-seven-year-old stunner called Margaret Ruddock. He cast her horoscope, which failed to tell him that she was not only
giftless but psycho. She ended up in the bin. Other mistresses gathered around his death-bed, where George kindly marshalled the traffic. She forgave both them and him that he had written immortal
poems so often to them, and so seldom to her. But that was what they were for: to be wild swans, to flood the everyday with the unknown, to ready him for Byzantium. This book will be essential to
Yeats scholarship. but ever since Professor Donoghue, following Dr Leavis, decided that Yeats’s poetry needed too much explanation, the burning question has been about how essential the
scholarship is. If it keeps young students from some of the greatest poetry ever written, then the answer is easy: about as essential as a suit of armour to Ian Thorpe.

Postscript

For a significant cultural figure, there is always room for a biography. But I don’t believe there is room for the Indispensable Biography, the one encouraging the
seductive notion that its subject can’t otherwise be understood or even appreciated. If the cultural figure isn’t already alive in our minds before he is explained, no biography,
however huge, can do anything except kill him off. We might, of course, have got from his work the wrong impression of his actual character; and to have the facts supplied might rescue us from
being gulled on the level of practicality; but if his art is real, it has already made the best sense of his life. Without the biographical facts, we might assume from his work that Brecht, for
example, was a tireless campaigner for human betterment. He wasn’t, but if we get from a biography the idea that he wasn’t a great poet either, we have allowed his life story to get in
the way of his true life. Ditto for Pablo Neruda and Nicolàs Guillèn. The same obfuscation is particularly likely to happen in the case of Yeats, who could be such a fool that even
those drawn to the magnetism of his poetry can be repelled again when they find out exactly how foolish he was. Something like this must be going on when academic critics as finely tuned to poetry
as Professors Donoghue and Ricks turn against Yeats. It can’t be that they have belatedly contracted a case of tin ear. When Dr Leavis announced that only a grand total of three Yeats poems
were the ‘fully achieved thing’, nobody could doubt that his limiting judgement was fully achieved nonsense, because he had no real sensitivity to poetry anyway, a failing proved by his
prose, which was colourless even when it was still vigorous. But the younger men could hear Yeats’s music. One can only conclude that they ceased to approve of the man who made it.
Scholarship got in the way of criticism.