New Ways to Kill Your Mother

by Colm Toibin

  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.’

  Later that year, John Butler Yeats wrote another story and a letter to his son displaying his confidence in it. ‘I have just completed what I think is a very pretty story, a tale of magic that will be said or sung I think many times by many people. You see how confident I am.’ A week later, he wrote again: ‘I have just written what I do not hesitate to call a lovely story which Spenser would not have been ashamed to have contrived. I never saw greater enthusiasm than Colum’s when I read it to him. I am sure it will sell. There are several other stories which I have written. There is money in these.’ Two weeks later the euphoria about his stories remained: ‘Yesterday, I was at Quinn’s and read to him two stories just finished, one from the land of phantasy, “The Wizard’s Daughter”, the other out of real life. He did not [know] which to prefer but was enthusiastic about both. Colum heard the wizard one and wanted then and there to carry it off to a magazine.’ The following day, John Butler Yeats decided to deliver the stories to a magazine himself. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote to his son, ‘I left at Harper’s my two stories, and I am very hopeful.’

  Despite his work on the stories, his interest in plays did not fade. On 5 November 1917 he wrote to his son: ‘It is my belief that if all of these years you had seen more of me you would have written quantities of plays.’ On 25 January he referred once more to his own play:

  You will remember that I have for a long time been meditatively at work on a play. It is now finished and typed (it cost 6 dollars) … I am certain you will like it and perhaps be moved to re-write some lyrics I have written. They had to be written, but are of course quite amateurish. I think when you have read the play you will be inspired, yes inspired, to write real lyrics. I am certain there is money in the play, and that it will hold the boards, and perhaps return to them many times.

  Two weeks later, the play had been sent. ‘I hope by this time,’ he wrote, ‘you have seen my play sent in a reg. Letter by John Quinn to Lilly [sic] and Lolly [Yeats].’ Twelve days later, on 21 February 1918, he wrote again on the matter: ‘I am waiting to hear what you think of my play. If I find you like it I will be moved to write another scene (about which I have thought a great deal).’ Still there was silence from the other side of the ocean. ‘Why don’t you tell me about my play?’ he wrote in June. ‘You need not be afraid to praise [it] … I feel quite sure that someday [it] will be acted and be a success.’

  4

  Four days later, from Ballinamantane House in County Galway, where he was staying while Ballylee was being restored, W. B. Yeats, now fifty-two, wrote to his father, who was seventy-eight. ‘My dear Father,’ his letter began,

  I have never written to you about your play. You choose a very difficult subject and the most difficult of all forms, and as was to be foreseen, it is the least good of all your writings. I have been reading plays for the Abbey Theatre for years now, and so know the matter practically. A play looks easy, but is full of problems, which are almost a part of Mathematics – French dramatists display this structure and 17th century English dramatists disguise it, but it is always there. In some strange way, which I have never understood, a play does not even read well if it has not this mathematics. You are a most accomplished critic – and I believe your autobiography will be very good, and this is enough for one man. It takes a lifetime to master dramatic form.

  In March 1918 John Quinn received a letter from W. B. Yeats in which the poet arranged a matter that had been previously discussed by them: in exchange for Quinn’s financial support for Yeats’s improvident father in New York, Yeats would send Quinn manuscripts. Yeats went on:

  Do you know is he going on with his autobiography? If he would finish that I might be able to get a very good price for that indeed from Macmillan, and would illustrate it with reproductions of pictures by himself, by Potter, by Nettleship etc. I hear with some alarm that he is writing a play, in which, as it is the most highly technical of all literary forms, he will most certainly not succeed while he certainly can succeed in the autobiography, and may do one of the finest that there is.

  John Butler Yeats was not greatly disturbed by his son’s view on his playwriting. On 8 July 1918 he wrote to him:

  Your opinion of my play does not alter my opinion. I am quite sure that it will ultimately reach the boards and the public, although doubtless it will need alterations. But these will be superficial. The germ idea will remain. I have no doubt you are overanxious, the play being by your father. That is only natural. Percy MacKaye, a man of some expression, was of all my critics the one that gave me the most encouragement. He did not see the actual play, but I told him all about it.

  Having invoked the spirit of Percy MacKaye, who had not read the play, Yeats the father clearly saw no difficulty in invoking the spirit once more of Synge, now dead almost ten years. ‘When I told Synge that you had discouraged my writing the play, and that you spoke a good deal about Rules etc he said “Ask him if he himself obeys the rules.” Synge praised my dialogue. “You at any rate can write dialogue” were his exact words and as you know praise from Synge was rather a rarity.’

  The significance of the phrase ‘You at any rate can write dialogue’ would not have been lost on Yeats the son. It suggested that there were others who could not write dialogue and it implied that among them may have been W. B. Yeats himself. His father went on:

  In my play there is phantasy. The old man made young is a creature of phantasy, and being good phantasy and consistent with itself is quite credible. I think he is a dear old man, and my heroine is right to love him even when he falls into sinfulness. The Colonel is the germ of my play, and the public won’t miss it. I laugh to scorn all the croakers. But I must be careful, for you yourself are my only croaker.

  It would be very easy to misinterpret John Butler Yeats’s letters to his son about his own writings, to see them as merely foolish or boastful. They represent, it should be said, a tiny fraction of his concerns. He was mainly interested in the vocation of the poet, and he wrote with very great range, originality and energy on that subject; he was also fascinated by the meaning of life and was an astute observer of America. But unlike Henry James Senior, who was reduced by a crisis to a state of helpless infancy, John Butler Yeats did not need a crisis; he sought that state as an aspect of freedom, a way of living easily and hopefully and unsuspiciously in the world. He expressed this view often in his correspondence, most eloquently, perhaps, in a letter to W. B. Yeats written on 27 February 1916, where he pitted his own humility and his intense optimism against his son’s grand majestic spirit:

  I think there is always with me a residuum, a something at the bottom of the cup of my sorrows, and that something is a conviction, an intuition inseparable from life – that nothing is ever really lost, and that if we could see our world and all that takes place on its surface, and see it from a distance and as if from the centre of the sun, we should find it to be a fine piece of machinery working to certain ends with an absolute precision. I had in my only philosophy a faith founded like that of Socrates upon the basis of my conscious ignorance – it is a sort of sublime optimism, and I am very satisfied with my ignorance as my betters are with their knowledge – and I call it sublime because it soars to such heights, and these logical people cannot reach it with their arrows, and I believe if the truth were known and confessed
that this doctrine of a conscious ignorance is, at this present moment, the abiding solace and hope of all my fellow mortals. Grand majestic spirits will spurn it, but passive, inactive beings like myself, and all of us when the time comes that energy can no longer help and pride is humbled, will return to it as a last hope, and indeed the only one left – and so true it is to my mind that I feel I am writing only platitudes; moreover, I think it is only a doctrine for poets.

  Willie and George

  In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written.’ When Ellmann came to Dublin in 1946 to work on his book, ‘she produced an old suitcase and filled it with manuscripts that I wanted to examine. At the beginning she was anxious about one of them, the unpublished first draft of Yeats’s autobiography, and asked me to return it speedily … I was able to allay her disquiet by returning the manuscript on time.’ She had, Ellmann wrote, provided Yeats with ‘a tranquil house, she understood his poems, and she liked him as a man’. Now she oversaw the poet’s legacy with canniness and care.

  When John MacBride, Maud Gonne’s estranged husband, was executed after the 1916 Rising in Dublin, Yeats talked once more of marriage to Maud, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his authorized biography of the poet, published in 1942. After Iseult finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, George Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very tired & have a great longing for order, for routine & shall be content if I find a friendly serviceable woman. I merely know … that I think this girl both friendly, serviceable & very able.’