by Colm Toibin
John B. Yeats, the son of a clergyman, was born in a village in County Down, where his father was rector, in 1839. While his father had a good income, he had also inherited land in Kilkenny through the Butler connection on his grandmother’s side. Of his childhood, Yeats would later write to his son: “In those days it was considered bad manners for parents to speak crossly to their children, and so we grew up in what I might call the discipline of good manners as contrasted with the discipline of good morals.”
Having attended a couple of boarding schools, Yeats entered Trinity College Dublin, as his father had done. By this time, his parents had moved to Dublin and were living in Sandymount, and, as good Anglo-Irish Protestants, they were moving easily in the best Dublin society. As a student, Yeats often joined his parents to dine at the house of Sir William and Lady Wilde, as his son would later dine at the house of Oscar Wilde in London. Isaac Butt had been a college classmate of his father’s and remained a close friend, close enough for John B. Yeats’s father to call his youngest son Isaac Butt Yeats.
Since two brothers from Sligo, Charles and George Pollexfen, whose family owned a shipping and milling business, were among Yeats’s best friends at school, and he, who was charming and open in his manners, had found their seriousness, indeed their sullenness, interesting and beguiling, he made a visit to them in Sligo while at Trinity. The town of Sligo, he later wrote, “was strange to me and very beautiful in the deepening twilight . . . Dublin and my uneasy life there and Trinity College, though but a short day’s journey, were obliterated . . .”
While staying with the Pollexfens, he met their sister Susan, whom he would marry in 1863. Years later, when he tried to explain his decision to marry her, Yeats said that her family genius “for being dismal” was, he felt, what he needed. “Indeed it was because of this I took to them and married my wife. I thought I would place myself under prison rules and learn all the virtues.”
After Trinity, Yeats studied to become a barrister, but, in fact, spent most of his time with a number of literary friends, including the critic Edward Dowden and the poet John Todhunter. Despite his desultory attention to his law studies, he was elected auditor of the Debating Society at the King’s Inns in Dublin. The address he gave to the society as auditor was attended by both Sir William Wilde and Isaac Butt. There is evidence that Butt, then the best-known barrister in Ireland, agreed to have young Yeats as his “devil” (a “devil” is a young lawyer who works with an older barrister and thus gains contacts and practical experience). Yeats liked Isaac Butt enormously, having learned, as he said, “to judge people by their manner,” which he believed “a surer indication to character than deeds, though it may be heresy to say so.” Years after Butt’s death, John B. Yeats wrote: “Such is the charm of personality that the man who has it is forgiven, though his sins be scarlet—for instance lovable Isaac Butt.”
By this time, his first child had been born. The boy was named William Butler Yeats. Soon afterwards the Yeatses had a daughter, Lily. As a law student, John B. Yeats had begun drawing, and it was his nascent talent, as well as the influence of his literary friends and also something deep within his sensibility, that pulled him away from the law. “I meant to succeed,” he later said. “My will was in it, that is my conscious will.” But in his unconscious will, he wanted to become an artist.
Thus early in 1867, leaving his wife and two young children in Sligo, he set out for London and enrolled in the Heatherley School of Fine Art. His wife’s family, the Pollexfens, the most practical of people, did not approve. Nor indeed did his wife. “I don’t think she approved of a single one of my ideas or theories or opinions, to her only foolishness,” he later wrote. None of this deterred him. In his unfinished memoirs, he wrote, “The Pollexfens are as solid and powerful as the sea-cliffs, but hitherto they are altogether dumb. To give them a voice is like giving a voice to the sea-cliffs. By marriage to a Pollexfen I have given a tongue to the sea-cliffs.”
Since John B. Yeats made no money as an artist and since the tenants on his estate in Kilkenny did not always pay the rent, his growing family, including Lollie, born in 1868, and Jack, born in 1871, lived for long periods in Sligo with the Pollexfens. For example, as a boy, W. B. Yeats spent more than two years with his mother and her family in Ireland, while his father remained impecuniously in London. Yeats’s youngest child, the painter Jack, lived in Sligo with his mother’s family almost continuously between the ages of eight and sixteen.
Yeats’s way of painting portraits was remarked on by many of his sitters. Edward Dowden, for example, described him at work:
he gets so thoroughly into the “fluid and attaching” state, every glance at one’s face seems to give him a shock, and through a series of such shocks he progresses. He finishes nothing, but gets his whole picture just into an embryo existence, out of which it gradually emerges by a series of incalculable developments; and all the while he is indulging in endless gossip of the peculiar Yeatsian kind, i.e. telling trivial facts and reducing them under laws of character founded on ethical classifications on down to Aristotle or any other student of character—classifications which are perpetually growing and dissolving.
Dowden noted that Yeats had “a pleasant rather high-pitched but musical voice . . . a soft elusive voice” and “one noticed the keen look in his eyes and the movement of his hands and fingers, for he had wonderful hands, not beautiful, but the long hand and finger of the sculptor and artist.”
When Yeats’s family finally joined him in London, they were able to observe at close quarters the problems their father faced. In his Autobiographies, W. B. Yeats remembered as an eleven-year-old observing what happened to a painting of a landscape by his father: “He began it in spring and painted all through the year, the picture changing with the seasons, and gave it up unfinished when he had painted the snow upon the heath-covered banks. He is never satisfied and can never make himself say that any picture is finished.” He recalled a stranger in London, on finding out whose son he was, remarking: “O, that is the painter who scrapes out every day what he painted the day before.”
Nor did John B. Yeats attempt to court the famous. When Browning, who admired one of his paintings, called and left an invitation for him to visit, he did not follow it up, and, despite encouragement, he did not visit Rossetti.
In 1881, when W. B. Yeats was sixteen, the family returned to Dublin and lived in Howth, overlooking Dublin Bay. Susan Yeats was always happier in Ireland. Her son, who liked to mythologize, later wrote: “She read no books, but she and the fisherman’s wife would tell each other stories that Homer might have told, pleased with any moment of sudden intensity and laughing together over any point of satire.” But her husband, in a letter, made clear that she was deeply unhappy. “If I showed her my real thoughts,” he wrote, “she became quite silent and silent for days, though inwardly furious.”
Even though Yeats made no money as a painter, and was constantly in debt, his humor remained good, his optimism high and his conversation sparkling and fresh. In his Autobiography, published in 1936, G. K. Chesterton, who was a visitor to the Yeatses on one of their further stays in London, wrote of the son:
William Butler Yeats might seem as solitary as an eagle; but he had a nest . . . The intensity and individualism itself could never wash out of the world’s memories the general impression of Willie and Lily and Lollie and Jack: names cast backwards and forwards in a unique sort of comedy of Irish wit, gossip, satire, family quarrels, and family pride.
Chesterton then wrote about John B. Yeats:
W. B. Yeats is perhaps the best talker I ever met, except his old father . . . Among twenty other qualities, he [John B. Yeats] had that very rare but very real thing, entirely spontaneous style . . . A long and elaborately balanced sentence, with dependent clauses alternative or antithetical, would flow out of such talkers with every word falling into its place, quite as immediately and innocently as most people would say it was a fine day or a funny business in the papers.
As the father continued to talk brilliantly and begin paintings and not finish them, as income from his Irish estate continued to dwindle and would end soon altogether when the Ashbourne Act of 1885 allowed tenants to buy the land outright from absentee landlords, Susan Pollexfen, in London, had a series of strokes and became a semi-invalid until her death on January 3, 1900.
Since she had believed she was marrying a man who was likely to become a prominent barrister or a judge, and since she disliked living in poverty in London, Yeats had reason to feel guilty about his failure to provide for his wife the life she had imagined. Twelve years after her death the remorse was still with him. He wrote to Lily: “Had I had money your mother would never have been ill and would be alive now—that is the thought always with me—and I would have done anything to get it for her—but had not the art.”
In these years when he returned to London, John B. Yeats had neither the art nor the money. Although he had received a windfall from the sale of the land, it served mainly to pay off debts. While their father’s financial circumstances worsened, all four of the Yeats children worked and made money. From early in their lives, they were serious, determined and industrious. By W. B. Yeats’s thirtieth birthday, for example, as William Murphy wrote, he “had published or made ready for publication seven books (and American editions of four of them), had seen 173 essays, letters, or poems published by 29 different periodicals, and had edited or contributed to 14 other volumes.” Both Lily and Lollie found work in design, embroidery and art teaching in London.
While neither of the girls married, Jack became an independent spirit as soon as he could, marrying at the age of twenty-three. William continued to live at home, in the family house in Bedford Park in London, even as he began to win fame as a poet and literary journalist and grew increasingly confident and eager to separate himself from his father.
It is interesting to watch him attack his father’s friend Edward Dowden, when, at the age of twenty-one, he wrote an article for the Dublin University Review, as it is to watch him associate in London with others of his father’s old literary friends, including John Todhunter, while excluding his father.
As W. B. Yeats interested himself in magic and the occult, his father, who had no time for such pursuits, was hostile. When Yeats the son received a letter from the old Fenian John O’Leary that suggested that mystical pursuits would weaken him, he understood that the message had come from his father, responding:
The probable explanation . . . of your somewhat testy postcard is that you were out at Bedford Park and heard my father discoursing about my magical pursuits out of the immense depths of his ignorance as to everything that I am doing and thinking . . . The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I write.
When W. B. Yeats was thirty-one and his father fifty-seven, a friend of the father’s wrote to a London editor suggesting that he use some illustrations by John B. Yeats, “a comparatively unknown man,” and introducing him as “the father of Mr. W. B. Yeats.”
While we have a lot of evidence of the growing fame of the son, and the rifts and arguments, including threats of mild acts of violence, between him and his father, we must also note that they continued to live under the same roof and that many evenings were ordinary and peaceful, and that they had many of the same interests. In a brief diary that Lollie kept, for example, in 1888, she noted that W. B. Yeats read aloud “all evening” to his father. Even when he left home, William was a regular visitor to Bedford Park, especially when he was short of money.
It was clear that Yeats as a father could be not only exasperating but also inspirational. In 1910, W. B. Yeats, while preparing lectures on drama, wrote to him: “In the process of writing my third lecture I found it led up to the thought of your letter which I am going to quote at the end. It has made me realize with some surprise how fully my philosophy of Life has been inherited from you in all but its details and applications.” But eleven years later, in a letter to John Quinn, he wrote about his father:
It is this infirmity of will which has prevented him from finishing his pictures and ruined his career. He even hates the sign of will in others . . . the qualities which I thought necessary to success in art or in life seemed to him “egotism” or “selfishness” or “brutality.” I had to escape this family drifting, innocent and helpless, and the need for that drew me to dominating men like Henley and Morris and estranged me from his friends . . .
The father, in turn, was capable of finding his son irritating. In a letter to Lily in 1896, he wrote: “Willie has been staying here the last few days. He has the greatest wish to be friendly and peaceable, but he can’t manage it, and though I was very sorry to see him go, for he is in good humour, both most attractive and affectionate, still wherever he is there is constant strain and uneasiness.”
His irritation stretched from the son himself to the son’s work. The following year, for example, he pronounced the play The Shadowy Waters as “absolutely unintelligible.” In 1906, he wrote to Lady Gregory about his son’s theories of drama: “As to Willie’s theories, there is not one of Shakespeare’s dramas that does not reduce them to utter mockery.” And about his son’s beliefs, in 1897, he wrote drily to the artist Sarah Purser: “I don’t know where Willie is or what he is doing. The last I heard was that he and [George] Russell had gone west (Sligo or thereabouts) to find a new God.”
He would also feel free to criticize his son’s closest relationships, such as this from a letter to Lily written in New York in 1914: “There could not be in the wide world two people more different from each other than Willie and Lady Gregory. Such a friendship or comradeship must be obstructive to the free play of natural feelings.” Despite his disapproval of his son’s friendship with Lady Gregory, however, Yeats could use her as a vehicle to express annoyance with his son. When he heard about the poet’s high-handed behavior towards an actress at the Abbey Theatre, for example, he wrote to Lady Gregory to take the actress’s side: “I am sometimes tempted to say that if a man has the gift of words he is thereby unfitted for every position in life except that of writing.” In 1906, he wrote to Lady Gregory: “Willie has a doctrinaire kind of mind. This is one of his difficulties, and makes a difficulty with his friends.”
These views did not stop him borrowing money from his son, writing to him, for example, early in 1902: “Could you let Lily have a few pounds, as much as ten pounds or whatever you can?” And then in May: “I am awfully sorry to ask you, but could you lend me two or even one pound—and could you send it by money order or postal order?” In 1904, when his son returned from a successful American tour, the father, whose requests for money from him had up to then been modest, asked him for a loan of twenty pounds (more than two thousand pounds in today’s money). In that same year, when his son annoyed him, he wrote to Lily: “I wish Willie had Jack’s tender gracious manner, and did not sometimes treat me as if I was a black beetle.”
In 1901, Sarah Purser, indignant at how John B. Yeats had been treated by the Royal Hibernian Academy, mounted an exhibition in Dublin at her own expense of his work and that of the artist Nathaniel Hone. On the evening it opened, his son’s play Diarmuid and Grania, written with George Moore, opened at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. And the following evening, an exhibition of paintings by Jack Yeats would open in Dublin too. The Yeatses were slowly starting to matter in Ireland.
In his catalog note for Yeats’s show, his friend York Powell wrote: “A person, a thing, must appeal to his feeling, as well as to his intellect, before he can care enough about it to make it the subject of his brush . . . He will do but the thing he likes best, and he will only do the thing he likes.”
Sixty-three of his works were on display, including sketches and portraits. The reviews were good, as was attendance at the show. Soon afterwards, Yeats was contacted from New York by John Quinn, later to become his most serious patron and benefactor, who wanted to buy some portraits from him and to commission some others.
Des
pite the fact that he was becoming famous in Dublin, however, Yeats was broke once more, remaining in the city only because he did not have the fare to return to London. Gradually, however, without actually making a decision, he found himself settling in Dublin, to be followed in 1902 by his two daughters, who would be involved with Dun Emer, a design and printing workshop, to be followed eventually—in 1910—by Jack and his wife, Cottie. W. B. Yeats was already spending a great deal of time in Dublin, taking part in setting up what would become the Abbey Theatre.
John B. Yeats’s studio on St. Stephen’s Green became a place for people to stop by and talk. If often the conversation was more intense and polished than the work produced, the painter himself did not seem to mind. Among those who came to his studio was the English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poems were not published until many years later, and among the regular visitors was John Millington Synge, whose work Yeats would defend vehemently.
Yeats even met the young James Joyce on the street. Joyce found him “very loquacious.” When he painted the actor Frank Fay, Fay recorded: “He was a peculiarly restless worker. He walked back and forward all the time, only halting now and again to use a tiny mirror from his pocket to see by reflection how the picture was getting on. Also he talked all the time, and it was the most entertaining talk I have ever listened to.” He also painted the lexicographer Father Dinneen, writing to John Quinn about the experience: “It is not every day that a Protestant has a chance of buttonholing a priest, and I seized my chance to say what I am always wanting to say to Catholics.”
If Yeats liked someone, he made a sketch of them or even a portrait. He was not too bothered if they did not pay. Years later he wrote:
I painted for nothing when I could not get the money. In Dublin money is not easy to be got. No one has any—but nice people with affectionate friends like to be painted . . . I have always said that if I was dying and anyone came in and asked to be painted, I could manage to put off the dying till the portrait was finished.
