Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  I think that sense of an ending has driven all three of these writers into a kind of piety towards their local origins, has made them look in, rather than up, to England. The loss of imperial power, the failure of economic nerve, the diminished influence of Britain inside Europe, all this has led to a new sense of the shires, a new valuing of the native English experience. Donald Davie, for example, has published a book of poems with that very title, The Shires, which attempts to annex to his imagination by personal memory

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  or historical meditation or literary connections each shire of England. It is a book at once intimate and exclusive, a topography of love and impatience, and it is yet another symptom that English poets are being forced to explore not just the matter of England but what is the matter with England. I have simply presumed to share in that exploration through the medium which England has, for better or worse, impressed upon us all, the English language itself.

  Yeats as an Example?

  A writer's dedication to his art can often entail some kind of hurt for those who live near and dear to him. Robert Lowell in the final poem of The Dolphin used the word 'plotted' to describe something that is questionable in the artistic enterprise:

  I have sat and listened to too many

  words of the collaborating muse,

  and plotted perhaps too freely with my life.

  not avoiding injury to others,

  not avoiding injury to myself—

  to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,

  an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting—

  my eyes have seen what my hand did.

  If there is more than a hint of self-accusation in that last line, there is a strong ring of triumph in it as well, and when Robert Lowell died I remember some of us toyed with it as a possible epitaph for him: it seemed to catch the combination of pride and vulnerability that lay at the roots of his poetic voice.

  It would have made a much more rueful tombstone verse than Yeats's:

  Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by.

  Where Yeats's eye is cold, Lowell's is warm, though by no means wet, sympathetic to the imperfections of living, the eye of a pedestrian rather than the eye of an equestrian. Where Yeats's last poems sang their faith in art and turned in scorn from 'the sort now

  growing up', Lowell's final work hesitated, and his trust in fictions seemed to waver:

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  Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—

  why are they no help to me now

  I want to make

  something imagined, not recalled? . . .

  Yet why not say what happened?

  Pray for the grace of accuracy

  Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination

  stealing like the tide across a map

  to his girl solid with yearning.

  We are poor passing facts,

  warned by that to give

  each figure in the photograph

  his living name.

  'Accuracy' seems a modest aim, even when it is as richly managed as it is here. Lowell abjures the sublime, that realm where his rhetoric often penetrated, and seeks instead the low-key consolations of the quotidian. He is almost, in Yeats's words, 'content to live'.

  Yeats would never have been 'content to live' merely, because that would have meant throwing words away, throwing gesture away, throwing away possibilities for drama and transcendence. From the beginning of his career he emphasized and realized the otherness of art from life, dream from action, and by the end he moved within his mode of vision as within some invisible ring of influence and defence, some bulletproof glass of the spirit, exclusive as Caesar in his tent, absorbed as a long-legged fly on the stream.

  Whatever Yeats intends us to understand by 'Long-Legged Fly', we cannot miss the confidence that drives it forward and the energy that underlies it, an energy that exhilarates in the faith that artistic process has some kind of absolute validity. There is a kind of vitreous finish on the work itself that deflects all other truths

  Yeats as an Example? / 1 o 5

  except its own. Art can outface history; the imagination can disdain happenings once it has incubated and mastered the secret behind happenings. In fact, we can sense a violence, an implacable element in the artistic drive as Yeats envisages and embodies it. The 'y e ll° w eyed hawk of the mind' and the 'ancient, glittering eyes' of the Chinamen in 'Lapis Lazuli' and the 'cold eye' of the tomb-inspecting horseman are all suggestive of sinister appetites. If the act of mind in the artist has all the intentness and amorousness and every bit as much of the submerged aggression of the act of love, then it can be maintained that Yeats's artistic imagination was often in a condition that can only be properly described as priapic.

  Is this, then, exemplary? Do we altogether assent to the samurai stare and certainty of 'Cast a cold eye/On life, on death'? Do we say yes to this high-stepping tread? Can we afford to disdain the life that goes on messily and cantankerously? How, in other words, do we regard Yeats's affirmation that the man who sits down to breakfast is a 'bundle of accident and incoherence' and that the man reborn in his poem is 'something intended, complete'?

  Personally, I find much to admire in the intransigence of the stance, as I find much to commend and imitate in the two things that Yeats was so often determined to set at loggerheads, his life and his work:

  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.

  What is finally admirable is the way his life and his work are not separate but make a continuum, the way the courage of his vision did not confine itself to rhetorics but issued in actions. Unlike Wallace Stevens, for example, that other great apologist of the imagination, Yeats bore the implications of his romanticism into action: he propagandized, speechified, fund-raised, administered and politicked in the world of telegrams and anger, all on behalf of the

  world of vision. His poetry was not just a matter of printed books making their way in a world of literate readers and critics; it was, rather, the fine flower of his efforts to live as forthrightly as he could in the world of illiterates and politicians. Beside the ringing antithesis of 'The Choice' we must set this other recognition:

  A poet is by the very nature of things a man who lives with entire sincerity, or rather, the better his poetry, the more sincere his life. His life is an experiment in living and those who come after him have a right to know it. Above all, it is necessary that the lyric poet's life be known, that we should understand that his poetry is no rootless flower but the speech of a man; that it is no little thing to achieve anything in any art, to stand alone perhaps for many years, to go a path no other man has gone, to accept one's own thought when the thought of others has the authority of the world behind it ... to give one's own life as well as one's words (which are so much nearer to one's soul) to the criticism of the world.

  I admire the way that Yeats took on the world on his own terms, defined the areas where he would negotiate and where he would not; the way he never accepted the terms of another's argument but propounded his own. I assume that this peremptoriness, this apparent arrogance, is exemplary in an artist, that it is proper and even necessary for him to insist on his own language, his own vision, his own terms of reference. This will often seem like irresponsibility or affectation, sometimes like callousness, but from the artist's point of view it is an act of integrity, or an act of cunning to protect the integrity.

  All through his life, of course, and ever since his death, Yeats has been continually rebuked for the waywardness of his beliefs, the remoteness of his behaviour and the eccentricity of his terms of reference. Fairies first of all. Then Renaissance courts in Tuscany and Big Houses in Galway. Then Phases of the Moon and Great Wheels. What, says the reliable citizen, is the sense of all this? Why do we listen to this gullible aesthete rehearsing the delusions of an illiterate peasantry, this snobbish hanger
-on in

  country houses mystifying the feudal facts of the class system, this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolemaic astronomy? Our temptation may be to answer on the reliable citizen's terms, let him call the tune and begin to make excuses for Yeats.

  'Well,' we might say, 'when he was a youngster in Sligo he heard these stories about fairies from the servants in his grandparents' house; and then when, as a young poet, he sought a badge of identity for his own culture, something that would mark it off from the rest of the English-speaking world, he found this distinctive and sympathetic thing in the magical world-view of the country people. It was a conscious counter-cultural act against the rationalism and materialism of late Victorian England.' To which the citizen replies, 'Anybody who believes in fairies is mad.'

  Yeats would not have thanked us for explaining him apologetically. He would want us to affirm him with all the elaborate obstinacy with which he affirmed himself. So for entertainment and instruction, I wish to observe him in action as a young poet, and then as an established poet and public figure; and in each case I hope to make clear what I consider to have been exemplary in his bearing.

  The Irish Theosophist, a magazine whose very title is enough to raise the ghosts of the nineties, carried an interview with Mr W. B. Yeats in its issue for 15 October 1893. It had been conducted by the editor, one D. N. Dunlop, who set the scene in his opening paragraphs:

  A few evenings ago I called on my friend, Mr W. B. Yeats, and found him alone, seated in his armchair, smoking his cigarette, with a volume of Homer before him. The whole room indicated the style and taste peculiar to its presiding genius. Upon the walls hung various designs by Blake and other less well-known symbolic artists; everywhere books and papers in apparently endless confusion.

  In his usual genial way he invited me to have a cup of tea

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  with him. During this pleasant ceremony little was said, but sufficient to impress me more than ever with the fact that my host was supremely an artist, much in love with his art.

  Yeats was then twenty-eight, and could deploy that elaborate style he had learned from Pater with as much indolent calculation on a sofa as in a sentence. If he had not yet formulated his theory of the mask, he had an instinctive grasp of the potency of his image; and if he does not altogether ruffle here in a manly pose, there is nevertheless a bit of a peacock display going on. The Homer volume was a good touch, and so was the cigarette and the 'ceremony' of the tea.

  The young man whose concern for appearances had led him, a few years earlier, to ink his heels in order to disguise the holes in his socks had obviously mastered more complex and sure-footed strategies for holding the line between himself and the world around him. He had not, to be sure, acquired the peremptory authority which Frank O'Connor was to see in action decades later, when the poet could silence an argument or buttress a proposition with a remark such as 'Ah, but that was before the peacock screamed', but he had about him already a definite atmosphere, a style that declared allegiance to disciplines and sources of strength not shared by his contemporaries. He was an artist, devoted to the beautiful; he was a magician, adept among hidden powers; he was a Celt, with a lifeline to the mythological depths; he was a propagandist, with a firm line for journalists. He was all these things, self-consciously and deliberately, yet they did not constitute a dispersal or a confusion of his powers or of his personality; on the contrary, they concentrated one another, grew from a single root, and if they were deliberate, the deliberation sprang from an inner compulsion, an energy discovering itself as vision. Yeats's performances, we might say, then and for the rest of his life, manifested themselves in the service of creative action. The longer we think of Yeats, the more he narrows the gap which etymology has forced between mystery and mastery.

  Aspects of the mysterious and the masterful reveal themselves in one of his coolest strokes during the interview, which was essen-

  Yeats as an Example? / 1 o 9

  tially a conversation about Yeats's connection with the Blavatsky Lodge of the Theosophical Society. He had been expelled by Madame Blavatsky, or at least had been asked to resign, about three years earlier. Dunlop asked him:

  'Can you remember anything in the nature of a prophecy, Mr Yeats, made by Madame Blavatsky, that might be of interest to record, notwithstanding the fact that you are yet awaiting your prophesied illness?'

  'The only thing of that nature', replied Mr Yeats, 'was a reference to England. "The Master told me", said she, "that the power of England would not outlast the century, and the Master never deceived me." '

  It seems to me that Yeats cut a sly swath with that answer, enlisting the esoteric fringe to serve the nationalistic heartland, hiding the cultural agitator behind the po-faced dreamer, making a cast across the sleeping pool of historical enmity with a line as neutral as theosophy itself, the calm surface of his speech depth-charged with potential rebellion. The remark leaves a broadening wake in the imagination and operates by the perfect camouflaging of judged intention in an aftermath of overlapping effects; and in this way it rehearses in miniature the more complex orchestration of intention and effect which he was to achieve in The Wind among the Reeds, a book whose title was already haunting his mind.

  'And what about your present work?' I asked.

  ' Celtic Twilight, a work dealing with ghosts, goblins and fairies, will be out shortly, also a short volume of Blake's poems', he replied. 'Then I am getting ready for publication, next spring, a book of poems, which I intend calling The Wind Among the Reeds and, as soon afterwards as possible, a collection of essays and lectures dealing with Irish nationality and literature, which will probably appear under the title of the Watch Fire.'

  In the event, Watch Fire never materialized. His essay on nationality and literature had appeared, however, five months earlier in

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  The United Irishman and work on similar themes had been published all through the late eighties and continued to be published throughout the nineties. He began with his famous championship of Sir Samuel Ferguson's poetry—'the greatest poet Ireland has produced, because the most central and most Celtic'—and went on to praise James Clarence Mangan, William Allingham and the ballad poets; to sponsor new voices like Katharine Tynan's and AE's; to write for English and Irish magazines bibliographies and reader's guides to the best Irish books; to affirm the validity of that magical world-view implicit in Irish country customs and beliefs; and to rehearse those beliefs and customs in the book he mentions which would give its name to an era, The Celtic Twilight.

  It was all part of a campaign, and the various suggestions in the word 'campaign' are apposite. It was sustained over a long period and was pursued on a number of fronts: journalistic, political, poetic, dramatic, amatory even, if we think of Maud Gonne as leading lady in The Countess Cathleen; it was pursued with the idea of conquest, not of territory perhaps but of imagination— though a successful awakening of the people's imagination would allow them to repossess their territory with a new conviction. As he comes to the end of that part of his autobiography dealing with the years 1887—1891, the note swells as he recollects his purpose:

  I could not endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound; Patrick or Colmcille, Oisin or Finn in Prometheus's stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes, rediscovering what I have called 'the applied arts of literature', the association of literature, that is, with music, speech and dance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design?


  Yeats as an Example? / 1 1 1

  If there is something plangent in this proud recollection, there was nothing of the dying fall in the notes struck by the journalism and controversy of the eighties and nineties as he pursued that 'common design'. For example, after declaring in his 1886 Dublin Magazine article on Sir Samuel Ferguson that of all things the past bequeaths the future, the greatest are great legends and that it was therefore the duty of every Irish reader to study those of his own country, he went on to make clear that this appeal was directed to the selfless and idealistic young:

  I do not appeal to the professional classes, who, in Ireland, at least, appear at no time to have thought of the affairs of their country till they first feared for their emoluments—nor do I appeal to the shoddy society of 'West Britonism' . . .

  That pugnacious thrust never deserted him, although he was to develop a less bare-fisted style, abandoning the short jab in the face in favour of a long reach for the side of the head.

  The point is, however, that no matter how much we have been led to think of the young Yeats as a dreamer, we must not forget the practical, driving side of him, driving forward towards his ideal goal. The founding of libraries, the association with political activists, all this was not undertaken without some resoluteness, some ambition, some expense of spirit. And all of this was by no means the whole story. There were his love affairs, first with Maud Gonne and then with Olivia Shakespeare, those enhancing and disturbing events in his emotional life that gave him power in other spheres. There were his more serious literary projects, such as the stories of Red Hanrahan, and those other strange stories, at once robust and remote, which formed the substance of The Secret Rose; and there was above all his own secret rose, the poetry itself.

  It is easy to admire this young Yeats: his artistic ambitions, his national fervour, his great desire to attach himself to a tradition and a corpus of belief that was communal. For all the activity and push of the enterprise, the aim of the poet and of the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into