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Yeats: The Man and the Masks

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THE definitive, open, and engaging study of the man T.S.Eliot declared the greatest poet of his age. Richard Ellman is no longer with us, but this is a monument of Yeats biography and criticism, the book which all subsequent biographers try to rewrite. The text itself, written as it was amidst a flurry of uncollected papers in the forties and with the co-operation of W.B.'s widow George, is understandably reticent about some elements of the poet's private life, notably his early lovers and extra-marital affairs; but the introduction printed with this new edition fills in many of the blanks, and gives the reasoning for Ellman's assertion that Yeats's affair with Maud Gonne was indeed finally consummated, confirming a suspicion hitherto based only on ambiguous references in letters and the poem 'A Man Young and Old'. Most of all, however, it is Ellman's sensitive and insightful treatment of Yeats's at once shy and self-possessed nature that impresses; the writer will never have a more accurate critic, and the man never a more sincere and biting appraisal of his contradictions. This is the place to start if you are interested in Yeats: you may not find the book or the man that you were expecting, an easy dreamy life of lost women and lake isles, but the portrait is truer, and the artistic genius more clearly delineated than in any other book on the subject, and there have been many. Ellman went on to write the definitive lives of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; that his first essay in literary biography stands comparison with these is its own testament.

Ellmann was only 30 when he published this in 1948, less than 10 years after Yeats's death; he was the first biographer to see Yeats's papers in their chaotic entirety. What an astounding job! You'd think this would read like a warm-up for his later magisterial biographies of Joyce and Wilde, but "The Man and the Masks" holds its own against those works, giving a sensitive, economical portrait of an unusually fractured poet.

Ellmann stresses Yeats's life-long effort to forge his thoughts into a unified system in the teeth of inbred skepticism, shyness and vacillation. He draws a discreet curtain over the sexual parts of Yeats's life but compensates with a keen understanding of the courage it took for this diffident, ill-read & dreamy man to make himself by fits and starts into a modern poet. My favorite parts of the book were the sections where Ellmann compares earlier drafts of the poems to the printed versions, showing just how hard-won Yeats's genius was. He tempers a critical eye towards Yeats's excesses--the wild mysticism, the Fascist sympathies, the arrogant public demeanor--with an understanding of Yeats's deep need for masks. According to Ellmann, Yeats's theories and systems weren't dogmas so much as postures he assumed to fulfill his own desire for a certainty of belief he never quite attained. Ellmann shows how that drive shaped the poems and ultimately rescued them from the deadness certitude would have brought. A classic study and an excellent starting-point for further reading on Yeats's life and work.

Ellmann was both a masterful biographer and first- rate literary critic. In this early book he writes an excellent account of the life of Yeats, and combines with an overall analysis of Yeats' literary development. He probes deeply into the symbolic and mythic meaning of Yeats' poetry and provides for the lay-reader a key to this often complex poetry's, understanding.
Ellmann would go on later to write his much larger masterpiece , the biography of Joyce- but here as a young man he shows a surprising depth of understanding of the full range of Yeats' problems through his remarkable creative, and not easy personal, life.

"Yeats: The Man and The Masks" (1979, W.W. Norton & Co., New York) by Richard Ellman is a landmark study of the greatest poet of the twentieth century. As a literary biography, it does far more to explain how Yeats continually recreated himself as a poet than would a mere historical biography only full of facts. First published in 1948, this book is based on the unlimited access Yeats' widow gave Ellman to literally thousands of unpublished papers in the decade after the poet's death, and is full of keen philosophical insight into the poet's life and writings.

Yeats' life and poetry were most influenced by two people - firstly by his father, who consciously sought to educate and shape him into a poet, and secondly by the woman who became the great love of his life. John Butler Yeats was a minor artist of the Victorian period who, although he could never quite achieve the visions he set for himself as a painter, was a great lover of the arts, and imparted his creative gifts to all his children. His was a very strong personality, and it dominated the family like an iron glove. Although they did not get along well in his formative years, Yeats acknowledged his father's very positive impact on his life and ideas in later years. Maud Gonne, on the other hand, was Yeats' partner in many of his early plans and schemes to resurrect Irish nationalism, theatre, and literature. He fell desperately in love with this tall, wild woman, but she never requited that love and broke his heart repeatedly. He pursued her for over a decade, and when she married another it looked at first as if he would never recover. But Yeats did survive, and his poetry was much richer for the experience of loving, and eventually outgrowing the self-absorbed Maud Gonne.

Some poets prefer simplicity and are not overly complicated, being fond of wine, woman, and song. But Yeats (who definitely loved the first two, but had no ear at all for music) was a complex man of immense yearnings and dreams, and involved himself in numerous movements and causes throughout his life. He was, first and foremost, one of the driving forces behind the Irish literary renaissance. He was also the co-founder of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, which had an immense impact on drama by providing a place for Irish playwrights "to bring upon the stage the deeper emotions of Ireland." He was an Irish Nationalist who dreamed of an Ireland independent of Britain, but who thought that violence was not the solution. He later came to see the that the "terrible beauty" of the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916 was, in fact, a bloody means to a greater end. Yeats was also a magician and mystic who enthusiastically joined Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, and later was an early member of the Order of the Golden Dawn - a Rosicrucian/Masonic-style occult society devoted to raising its members' consciousness to higher levels.

The Golden Dawn drew upon the Western kabbalistic and esoteric traditions, and his involvement had a great influence on both Yeats the Man and Yeats the Poet. For instance, he experimented with séances and automatic writing as a means of contacting the spirits he believed helped him unlock his latent powers as a poet and a magician. But his great breakthrough came after he married the patient and witty Georgie Hyde-Lees (whom he called George) as he neared his fiftieth year. It was Mrs. Yeats' great gift for automatic writing, and well as Yeats' dogged persistence, that allowed him to develop his system of symbols, and to become a far deeper poet than the simple lyricist he had been in his youth. Yeats' poetic vision of masks, his gyres (pronounced with a hard "g") - whirling spirals shaped like two intersecting triangles, his belief in his daimones (spirit guides or perhaps even muses), and his phases of the moon corresponding to levels of human awareness all sound very odd indeed and make one wonder if he was not mad. These ideas combined, however, to take his poetry to levels he had never before attained. Even more than these, the most important aspect of his poetic maturation was that he achieved what he called Unity of Being, and what others might call the Completeness of Character or Personality, by slowly combining the many and various sides of his psyche into a complete whole. Yeats thus forged himself into the great poet he had always longed to be, and achieved a much greater power with his written words than any other writer of his day and age.

As he grew into old age, Yeats became a revered figure and received many awards and prizes, but he was profoundly troubled by what he felt to be a lessening of his poetic powers. For someone who saw all art as "an expression of desire," these powers were inextricably interlinked with his libido, and so in 1934 at the age of 68, he underwent a new surgical operation called the Steinach operation. This procedure was evidently a variation on a vasectomy, and promised renewed vigour and strength to those who underwent the knife. Whether it was real or all in his mind, amazingly Yeats poetic ability rose phoenix-like and sustained him during the last five years of his life, years during which his wife George sustained, nursed, and humored him for the sake of his work and their love.

This early biography of Yeats strips away some of the intricate masks he created for himself - masks that he removed only for his closest family and friends. It is a vital literary biography for anyone seeking to understand how a minor Irish poet with some rather fantastic notions about magic and symbolism remade himself into the one of the greatest poets of all time. I recommend it primarily to those who enjoy literary biography, and who want to read in great detail how the life, loves, and poetry of W. B. Yeats were intricately and symbolically, intertwined.

Though I have the greatest admiration for Ellman, I must say that this critical biography of Yeats has a few too many blindspots, is too vague and shapeless in its outline of Yeats' life, to satisfy entirely. Roy Foster's two-volume account is ultimately preferable because far more complete.