When reading Brenda
Maddox's "Yeats's Ghosts" for the first time, I was very surprised to find that I had read some of it
before. It turned out that it was the same piece of work as "George's
Ghosts", although the former purports to be about the husband, and the latter about the wife of this married couple.
Everyone is of course familiar with William Butler Yeats's
poetry, and many realise that he was simultaneously a theatre manager in Dublin and also a very influential politician of the Irish Free State. Lots of books have been written about his life, but Yeats appears to be a very difficult study for biographers.
Each biographer of Yeats takes a different theme or topic as a starting point and relates Yeats to that point only. For example, "Images of a Poet" (Univ. Manchester 1961) is about portraits and a physical description of Yeats, whilst Richard Ellmann's "The Man and His Masks" (Penguin 1987) is about what lay under the surface, the personality expressed and sometimes hidden in the poetry produced by this master. Raymond Cowell's "Literasture in Perspective: W. B. Yeats" (Camelot Press Ltd, 1969) also concerns itself with interpreting his poetry, although both authors reach very different conclusions, one being more interested in the personality and the other in the writings.
"W. B. Yeats" by Michael Mac Liammoir and Eavan Boland (Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1971) is unashamedly nothing but a picture book of people and places associated with the great poet, and it does its job very well, while Keith Aldritt's "The Man and the Milieu" (John Murray (Publishers) Ltd. 1997) concentrates on Yeats's presence on the stage and in the theatre.
The most recent of these books is R. F. Foster's "W. B. Yeats: A Life", an enormous tome in two volumes, and I have to confess to only having read the second. It is a commendable attempt to knit together all that is known about Yeats into one work, so it is absolutely crammed with facts, names, places, processes that involved Yeats, and it is particularly good on politics and personalities of the Free State. However it describes them from the outside, from the point of view of an inhabitant of the early 21st century looking back on history, rather than from the point of view of the protagonist. Moreover the emphasis, necessary in a historian, of recounting facts obscures any attempt to interpret them in regard to Yeats's actual motivations, or in regard to any effects external events might have had upon him to cause, for example, his later depression and his embittered poetry. In contrast Bernard Krimm's book, "W. B. Yeats and the Emergence of the Irish Free State" (Whitston Publishing Company 1981) takes the opposite point of view, standing in Yeats's shoes, so to speak, and examining what exactly he did and said, and showing how deep his influence was. This tight focus gives a certain sharpness to the text and makes it more readable.
What comes across to the reader is a sense of the unfathomability, the opaqueness of the poetry, and the complete lack of any consensus about the meaning of some of it. It is clearly linked to periods of Yeats's life when he begins to suffer mental and physical illness. The earlier poetry is simple and direct, beautiful in its images and carefully controlled in its rhyme and rhythm, allusions and evocations, in contrast to which the later poetry is recognisably focussed and bitter, but on what? About what? Who are the people he names in them? Why does he give himself alter agos?
Maddox's books attempted to do something never yet done, to look at the private life of the married couple, the elderly W. B. Yeats and the teenage Georgina, whom Yeats called "George". This author acknowledged in the title of the book that she was looking for "Ghosts", mysteries which had never been uncovered in their lives. Many of the events and occurences she writes of were previously unacknowledged, such as the effect on Yeats of his wife's pregnancies, or relationships within his friends and family. Maddox goes into great detail and obviously spent a great deal of time researching, yet still she realises there are hiatuses, gaps which simply cannot be filled. Nevertheless she has produced one (or two) very readable works which say volumes about the character of the poet.
All that one can add to this is a small query. It does appear that some of Yeats's life is still subject to veto, principally around 1920-28, especially in the period 1925-27. When will this buried mass resurface, and from whence will it come?