EDITOR'S PREFACE In 1938, Mrs. Yeats told her husband, '"AE was the nearest to a saint you or I will ever meet. You are a better poet but no saint. I suppose one has to choose"' (L 838). It is a distinction Yeats seems to have already endorsed in these lines from 'The Choice', written in 1931:
The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. (P 246)
But Yeats rarely makes simple choices, presenting us instead with a career of vacillations, of attempts -- always willful, sometimes heroic -- to have it both ways. No less than Keats, he thought that the poet leads a life of allegory and that his works are comments on it. Before comment, and as part of the process of perfection, comes transformation. He explained, in the 'First Principles' section of his 'Introduction' to his works, written in 1937:
A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedies, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria. Dante and Milton had mythologies, Shakespeare the characters of English history, or of traditional romance; even when the poet seems most himself, when he is Raleigh and gives potentates the lie, or Shelley 'a nerve o'er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of mankind', or Byron when 'the soul wears out the breast as the sword wears out the sheath', he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been re-born as an idea, something intended, complete. (LE 204)
Autobiographies invites us to attend to that rebirth, to the process by which accident and incoherence become complete, by which life, passing through phantasmagoria, becomes meaning, and experience becomes myth. It is that great Romantic achievement: a vision of personal history as art, and Autobiographies is the essential companion to the poems and plays. It shows Yeats at work -- summoning his people, realizing his places, making a world -- and so continues to dramatize and fulfill his belief that the act of writing entails a complex creation of a self. He had made the point in that bold youthful quatrain about revisions:
The friends that have it I do wrong When ever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake. (P 551)
Autobiographies is an allusive and illusive book. Yeats is not careful about details, dates, and references. It is difficult to escape the impression that he is wholly dependable about what is happening to and in his imagination, and how exciting it is, and not fully dependable about anything else. We are convinced that Yeats knew what he was about; like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, he knew that this wonderful, shrewd, intimate book would ultimately reside 'in all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria'; both writers enjoyed the sense that they were creating projects for future generations of scholars. This is the first edition to take up that challenge by providing a full set of explanatory notes. The 1,003 notes are marked in the text by superscript numbers; the notes are printed on pages 419?527. Those notes selectively include particularly interesting excerpts from earlier versions of revised passages.
Explanatory notes are not used for simple, straightforward mentions of the name of a person, place, organization, or historical event, or of the title of a book, play, poem, or story. Instead, those names and titles are described with 1,500 augmented entries in the index. Those augmented entries provide a person's name, birth and death dates, nationality, and profession; for books or other texts, the augmented entries identify the author, genre, and date. The page references in the index will lead the reader to any other occurrences in the text or notes.
The eighteen notes written by Yeats are printed among the explanatory notes, flagged with the heading 'WBY'S NOTE'. If the note was added later or was revised or omitted in any printing, that is mentioned. Explanatory notes to Yeats's notes are marked by superscript letters and are printed immediately following his note.
In Estrangement and The Death of Synge, each of the ninety-six sections is headed with a brief statement of its dating in the manuscript and a cross-reference to the manuscript transcription in Memoirs. For abbreviations of names and titles, see the List of Abbreviations, pages 33?36 below.
Background Notes on Writers, pages 531?539 below, provides a concise introduction to twenty writers who were important to Yeats but who receive only comparatively brief mention in Autobiographies.
DA WHO
Copyright © 1999 by William H. O'Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald
From Reveries Over Childhood and Youth
My first memories are fragmentary and isolated and contemporaneous, as though one remembered some first moments of the Seven Days. It seems as if time had not yet been created, for all thoughts are connected with emotion and place without sequence.
I remember sitting upon somebody's knee, looking out of an Irish window at a wall covered with cracked and falling plaster, but what wall I do not remember, and being told that some relation once lived there. I am looking out of a window in London. It is in Fitzroy Road. Some boys are playing in the road and among them a boy in uniform, a telegraph-boy perhaps. When I ask who the boy is, a servant tells me that he is going to blow the town up, and I go to sleep in terror.
After that come memories of Sligo, where I live with my grandparents. I am sitting on the ground looking at a mastless toy boat with the paint rubbed and scratched, and I say to myself in great melancholy, 'It is further away than it used to be', and while I am saying it I am looking at a long scratch in the stern, for it is especially the scratch which is further away. Then one day at dinner my great-uncle, William Middleton, says, 'We should not make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble and they can never see any end', and I feel grateful, for I know that I am very unhappy and have often said to myself, 'When you grow up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood'. I may have already had the night of misery when, having prayed for several days that I might die, I began to be afraid that I was dying and prayed that I might live. There was no reason for my unhappiness. Nobody was unkind, and my grandmother has still after so many years my gratitude and my reverence. The house was so big that there was always a room to hide in, and I had a red pony and a garden where I could wander, and there were two dogs to follow at my heels, one white with some black spots on his head and the other with long black hair all over him. I used to think about God and fancy that I was very wicked, and one day when I threw a stone and hit a duck in the yard by mischance and broke its wing, I was full of wonder when I was told that the duck would be cooked for dinner and that I should not be punished.
Some of my misery was loneliness and some of it fear of old William Pollexfen, my grandfather. He was never unkind, and I cannot remember that he ever spoke harshly to me, but it was the custom to fear and admire him. He had won the freedom of some Spanish city, for saving life perhaps, but was so silent that his wife never knew it till he was near eighty, and then from the chance visit of an old sailor. She asked him if it was true and he said it was true, but she knew him too well to question and his old shipmate had left the town. She too had the habit of fear. We knew that he had been in many parts of the world, for there was a great scar on his hand made by a whaling-hook, and in the dining-room was a cabinet with bits of coral in it and a jar of water from the Jordan for the baptizing of his children and Chinese pictures upon rice-paper and an ivory walking-stick from India that came to me after his death. He had great physical strength and had the reputation of never ordering a man to do anything he would not do himself. He owned many sailing-ships and once, when a captain just come to anchor at Rosses Point reported something wrong with the rudder, had sent a messenger to say, 'Send a man down to find out what's wrong'. 'The crew all refuse' was the answer, and to that my grandfather answered, 'Go down yourself', and not being obeyed, he dived from the main deck, all the neighbourhood lined along the pebbles of the shore. He came up with his skin torn but well informed about the rudder. He had a violent temper and kept a hatchet at his bedside for burglars and would knock a man down instead of going to law, and I once saw him hunt a party of men with a horsewhip. He had no relation, for he was an only child, and, being solitary and silent, he had few friends. He corresponded with Campbell of Islay who had befriended him and his crew after a shipwreck, and Captain Webb, the first man who had swum the Channel and who was drowned swimming the Niagara Rapids, had been a mate in his employ and a close friend. That is all the friends I can remember, and yet he was so looked up to and admired that when he returned from taking the waters of Bath his men would light bonfires along the railway line for miles; while his partner, William Middleton, whose father after the great famine had attended the sick for weeks, and taken cholera from a man he carried in his arms into his own house and died of it, and was himself civil to everybody and a cleverer man than my grandfather, came and went without notice. I think I confused my grandfather with God, for I remember in one of my attacks of melancholy praying that he might punish me for my sins, and I was shocked and astonished when a daring little girl -- a cou...
