by Colm Toibin
Henry James, by the time he began The Portrait of a Lady in 1879, had followed the serialization of Daniel Deronda. He read the book carefully and disapproved of it and then took what he needed from it. In Ralph Touchett he created another male whose role was both playful and pivotal, whose scepticism and illness undermined the very idea of attachment. He operates as a sort of surrogate novelist in the book, conspiring with his father to leave Isabel a fortune so that he can amuse himself watching what she might do with freedom. When Isabel marries Osmond, Ralph becomes the one who guesses how unhappy she is, and how bullying and cold her husband. As he lies dying, once more the unhappy wife finds in a single, unattached figure a saviour, someone who will help her break the glass of her marriage. ‘I believe I ruined you,’ he said, as she replies starkly: ‘He married me for the money’ and then later in the scene: ‘Oh yes, I’ve been punished.’
Soon afterwards Ralph dies, and the family is broken. When his mother Mrs Touchett hears that Madame Merle has gone back to America, she offers one of the truest and funniest lines of the book: ‘To America? She must have done something very bad.’ And Isabel returns to her husband, and there is a sense at the end of the book that she has not returned to be his wife, part of his family, but with a new power she has found, a resource that will allow her to resist him, repel him, move in the world alone and free not only of the family she inherited and came into, but the one she chose and sought to make.
Part One
Ireland
W. B. Yeats: New Ways to Kill Your Father
For a number of sibling artists who flourished in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century – Heinrich Mann and Thomas Mann; Henry James and William James; Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; W. B. Yeats and Jack Yeats – the death of the father, an overwhelming presence while alive, or the gradual and often dramatic enactment of a metaphorical killing, allowed the children a strange new freedom, the right to become themselves, and then do battle with each other over politics and style.
In the case of the Manns and Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, the literal death of their father when they were young and unformed allowed them to move to new quarters, both physically and emotionally, and removed a burden whose shadow alone would continue to haunt them. In the case of the James brothers and the Yeats brothers, the burden remained a living reality. In his book Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quotes Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ Ellmann writes:
From the Urals to Donegal the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his Confessions of a Young Man, blatantly proclaims his sense of liberation and relief when his father died. Synge makes an attempted parricide the theme of his Playboy of the Western World. James Joyce describes in Ulysses how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father … Yeats, after handling the subject in an unpublished play written in 1884, returns to it in 1892 in a poem ‘The Death of Cuchulain’, turns the same story into a play in 1903, makes two translations of Oedipus Rex, the first in 1912, the second in 1927, and writes another play involving parricide, Purgatory, shortly before his death.
1
In the autumn of 1828, when Henry James Senior, the father of the novelist, briefly attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, he entered fully into student life, drinking in taverns and having expensive suits made by the local tailor. He charged it all to his father, William, who was so wealthy that he owned the very land on which the campus of Union College was built. William James, who had been born in Bailieborough in County Cavan, was also one of the two trustees of the college.
Henry James Senior’s departure from Union College, not long after his arrival, was the beginning of a lifelong journey in search of freedom of thought, eternal truth and interesting companions who were good listeners. James, like John Butler Yeats, the father of W. B. Yeats, was a great talker. There are a number of resemblances between the two men. Each of them, for example, married the sister of a classmate to whom he was close. Both of them suffered from, and also enjoyed, a lifelong indolence and restlessness; they dominated their households but failed, or seemed to fail, in the larger world; they sought self-realization through art and religion despite family traditions of commerce and industry.
Both men created households where artists and writers visited and where becoming an artist was a natural development. Both men believed that the self was protean and they opposed both the settled life and the settled mind. Thus neither Henry James the novelist nor William Butler Yeats benefited from, nor had his mind destroyed by, a university education. Their fathers, believing themselves to be formidable institutions of higher learning in their own right, had no interest in exposing their sons to any competition. Both fathers were ambitious but almost incapable of bringing a large project to fruition. Talking for both took the place of doing, but both men were also capable of writing sentences of startling beauty. Both men loved New York, not for its intellectual life but for its crowded street-life, which they observed with fascination. Henry James Senior believed (or, to amuse a listener, claimed to believe) that the companionship of the crowded horsecar was the nearest thing to heaven on earth he had ever known. Their friends viewed both men as supremely delightful fellows; their company was much sought after. They both believed passionately in the future, seeing their children as fascinating manifestations of its power and possibility, at times much to their children’s frustration. They were both capable of real originality. On 4 June 1917, for example, before his son wrote his poem ‘The Second Coming’, John Butler Yeats wrote to him: ‘The millennium will come, and come it will, when Science and applied Science have released us from the burthens of industrial and other necessity. At present man would instantly deteriorate and sink to the condition of brutes if taken from under the yoke and discipline of toil and care.’ In a similar vein, Henry James Senior in 1879, almost two decades before his son wrote The Turn of the Screw, wrote the following account of a terror that came upon him on an ordinary evening in a rented house in Windsor Park:
To all appearances it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck, that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy.
Henry James Senior had five children and John Butler Yeats six, although two of the Yeats children died in infancy. Both men had a daughter in possession of a rich and sharp and brittle intelligence, so brittle indeed that it would somehow prevent both Lily Yeats and Alice James from separating from their families; both women had a magnificent and acid epistolary style. Both fathers cared, it seemed, more about their two elder children than the rest of their brood: William and Henry James and W. B. and Lily Yeats were treated differently than their younger siblings. John Butler Yeats and Henry James Senior each fathered two genius sons, four men – Henry and William James, W. B. and Jack Yeats – who specialized, unlike their fathers, perhaps almost in spite of their fathers, in finishing nearly everything they started. Three of them developed a complex, daring and extraordinary late style. All four boys studied art; William James had serious ambitions to be a painter. Two of them – W. B. Yeats and William James – began by dabbling in magic and mystical religion and went on to make it an important aspect of their life’s work. While all four men were greatly influenced by their respective fathers – sometimes the influence was negative – they had hardly anything to say about their respective mothers. Both fathers employed the Atlantic Ocean as a weapon in their arsenal, John Butler Yeats using it as a way of getting away from his family in old age; Henry James Senior using it as a way of further unsettling his unsettled children.
Althoug
h Henry James the novelist saw a great deal of Lady Gregory in London in the 1880s and 1890s, he was not a friend of W. B. Yeats. By the time Yeats began to flourish in London, James had withdrawn to Rye. James, however, attended a performance of Yeats’s play The Hour-Glass in Kensington in May 1903, and in 1915 he contacted Yeats on behalf of Edith Wharton, asking for a poem for a fund-raising anthology for the war effort. John Butler Yeats had strong views on the question of Henry James. In July 1916 he wrote to his son: ‘I have just finished a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns. James has watched life from a distance.’ When James’s unfinished third volume of autobiography was published posthumously, John Butler Yeats wrote to a friend: ‘Some believe that this war is a blessing disguised. It is enough for me that it stopped Henry James writing a continuation of “The Middle Years”.’ Two years earlier, he wrote to his son the poet: ‘Thinking about H James, I wonder why he is so obscure and why one’s attention goes to sleep or wanders off when trying to make him out … In James, it is his cunning to make suspense dull, tiresome, holding you in spite of yourself.’
When an exasperated John Quinn, the New York lawyer and art collector, wished to describe John Butler Yeats’s endless and expensive stay in New York, he used James as his literary model. ‘The whole damn thing,’ Quinn wrote, ‘would make a perfect Henry James novel, and how he would get under your skin!’ Quinn made himself the Ambassador and John Butler Yeats the Lama:
And so the book comes to a triumphant close, with the victory of the Lama over his family, over the Ambassador, over the Doctor, over the nurse, and over his friends, it all being a triumphant vindication of the philosophy of the ego, of the victory of the man who regards only himself, of the man who does not care for others when they cease to amuse him, the artist’s ego, the ego parading in the poet’s singing robes, and – to use a vulgarism which Henry James would, I am sure, hugely enjoy – the egotist in his singing robes, crowned with laurel, the consummate artist, the playboy of West 29th Street, the youth of eighty without a care, with never a thought of his family or his friends, with eternal self-indulgence, with an appetite for food and drink at the age of eighty that is the envy of his younger friends and the despair of the Ambassador; this young man who has enjoyed fifty years of play and talk and health and high spirits and wine and drink and cigars, the man who enjoys the evasions of the artist – he ‘gets away with it’, as Henry James would say.
In 1884, two years after the death of Henry James Senior, William, his eldest son, edited a selection of his writings. This publication caused Henry James the novelist to feel ‘really that poor Father, struggling so alone all his life, and so destitute of every worldly or literary ambition, was yet a great writer’. Henry James was thirty-nine when his father died and already, having published The Portrait of a Lady, one of the most famous novelists of the age. He could afford to be generous. His father’s writings centred on religious questions and did not stray into the territory of fiction.
2
When W. B. Yeats was thirty-nine, in 1904, he could look forward to eighteen more years of his father’s life; John Butler Yeats was said to be one of the few fathers who had lived long enough to be influenced by his son. He moved to New York at the end of 1907 and spent the last fourteen years of his life in the city. His letters to W. B. Yeats have been assembled by William M. Murphy and painstakingly typed and lie at peace in the library of Union College, Schenectady, where I read them in the summer of 2004, across the square from the dining hall where a portrait of William James of Albany hangs. In 1922 when John Butler Yeats died, John Quinn suggested that a new selection of his letters should be published. He wrote to W. B. Yeats: ‘I feel very strongly that instead of making extracts from his letters, his letters should be published in full as were the letters of Henry James.’
These letters from father to son, from New York to Dublin, from the great unfinisher to the connoisseur of completion, are among the greatest ever written. They centre on art and on life in equal measure. They are mostly good-humoured, but their author can be angry when roused. Both Yeats and Henry James wrote autobiographies that included careful self-positioning and some invention, and that caused difficulty to family and friends; but James wrote his books when both his father and brother were dead. ‘Four Years’, Yeats’s essay in autobiography, was produced while his father was still alive. His father now felt free to attack his son’s work. He wrote:
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, h
aving 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:
