Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Liked Father and Liked SonLetters to His Son W.B. Yeats and Others by J. B. Yeats; Joseph Hone; A Colder Eye: TheModern Irish Writers by Hugh KennerReview by: James SimmonsFortnight, No. 199 (Nov., 1983), pp. 18-19Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25547342 .

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BOOKS Bj^ggggggg^gggjgggggg^i LIKED FATHER AND LIKED SON

James Simmons J.B. Yeats, ed. Joseph Hone

Letters to his Son W.B. Yeats and Others

(Seeker & Warburg, ?7.95)

Hugh Kenner A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers

(Allen Lane, ?14.95)

It is good to see the letters of W.B. Yeats'

father in circulation again. One is pleased to find that the great poet and his brother the great painter had an equally great fa

ther, although when critics talk of his pain

tings they come up with such odd conclus

ions as khe stands,' rather more evidently than most, for so much more than he de

livered, and it is in this sense that I place him in the highest rank.' His letters are full of his own engaging uncertainty about his own talent. In his late seventies he is re

porting to his children the latest praise he has received, much as a talented young

man might write to his father.

W.B. Yeats was much more successful

than his father and was sending him money

up to the very end. The whole family

springs out of these letters as a very attrac

tive bunch, all busy, curious, tough

minded, very close to each other and in

terested in each other, and not afraid to

criticise. In 1921 J.B. wrote to his son:

When is your poetry at its best? I challenge all the critics if it is not when its wild spirit of

your imagination is wedded to concrete

tact... Not idea but the game of life should

have been your preoccupation, as it was

Shakespeare's and the old English writers',

notably the kinglike Fielding. The moment

you touch however lightly on concrete fact, how alert you are! and how attentive we

your readers become.

That catches very well the excitement in

people, life and art that stayed with him all his life. He always seemed to be meeting some interesting new person, always wor

king on a new picture, hoping for a big success, reading new authors, and writing to his children and his friends about them.

This is from his last letter, written at 83: All Sunday I sketched a Miss McCulloch

and then went to an At Home where I stay ed till after 7 o'clock spending the time in

making a sketch of a pretty lady; and com

ing back here sat with the Courtnays till 11

o'clock...

Miss McCulloch is a very clever and pret

ty young lady, self-supporting, who comes

from beyond Chicago... she is versed in all

the labour questions... Her people are Sab

batarian Scotch people. Naturally she pre fers New York to the Far West. But she is a

sensible girl and has a high opinion of her

parents. She is self-respecting and has the

most kindly mind I ever met with...

He was born in County Down in 1839, lost his religious faith at Trinity, went in for law without much enthusiasm, married

Susan Pollexfen and, in 1867 committed himself to a career as a painter. He was

always short of money, which was hard on

his nerves (even as an old man he had

dreams of his father-in-law chiding him for his lack of commercial success), but he never went hungry. He had a basic income of a few hundred a year from property in Kildare. The first letter here dates from

1869, written to Edward Dowden: Ellis and I have a studio in conjunction. On

the opposite side of this street lives Nettle

ship. They are both perfectly lovable men,

although so different. They and all four, are

looking forward to your article on Walt

Whitman...

It would be wrong to give the impression that J.B. Yeats was some sort of holy fool.

He writes beautifully and his darting mind is full of interesting thoughts.

To find out what was the mind of Shake

speare is valuable, but the real thing is to

find out what is my own mind when I read

Shakespeare or any other poem.

.. .we build all out of our spiritual pain - for

if the bricks be not cemented and mortised

by actual suffering they will not hold to

gether...

Do you not think that in Milton's Pardise

there is no religious emotion.

(On Napoleon) We follow such men be cause they are so visibly enjoying them

selves. Napoleon was always an improvisat ore. We follow happiness wherever we can

see it, even to our own destruction, follow

ing it we seem, because of our sympathy, to

possess it.

His son W.B. had no doubt about the

quality of his father's mind, quoting him

extensively in his own prose writings and

urging the father to write an autobiog raphy. J.B. was earning as much from art

icles for American literary journals as he was from painting in his New York years.

Hugh Kenner's book is not dissimilar in kind. It is partly a history of modern Ire land through literature and partly literary criticism written'personally and quirkily:

You had better know what it is you are

asked to trust: the hunches of a non-Irish

observer whose pan-Celtic claim derives

from one valued quarter of Welsh blood and

one of Scottish. A portion of the remainder,

nominally English, may be Cornish. I have

visited Ireland a number of times, and once

lived half a year there. A way in which I

resemble most Irishmen is in wishing I could

either read the official language or speak it.

Continued on facing page

^^^^^^^^_^ CARDS STATIONERY PRINTS ^> ^J^^^^^B

18 Fortnight November 1983

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COMPARING EVIL WITH EVIL John Darby

Martyn Turner?The Book

(Irish Times Publications) Political cartoons are about cartoonists'

political obsessions, or at least the best ones are. They are both sharp and blunt

instruments: sharp because they set out to

comment on an event in a way which cuts

through the verbiage and evasion which clutter political exchanges; blunt because the cartoonist, while he knows as well as

reporters that every story has at least one

other angle, cannot qualify his main attack

by conditional clauses. So the most mem

orable cartoons are usually assaults on the

cartoonist's pet paranoias. As Jules Feiffer

put it, 'cartoons are most likely to be effec

tive when the artist's attitudels hostile, to

be even better when his attitude is rage, and when he gets to hate he can really get

going.'_

It is not before time for Martyn Turner to give his collected obsessions an airing.

He has been drawing cartoons about Irish affairs for more than ten years, and is cur

rently the doyen of the Irish Full-time Sal aried Cartoonists Club, being its only

member. Martyn Turner?The Book

deals with ten years of cartooning north

and south of the border. It is divided into seven sections, but has no contents page.

Apart from this the Irish Times publishers have done him proud.

As for the cartoons, the most powerful are those about issues which particularly

annoy Turner -

Northern Ireland, the

Third World, nuclear war, and the anti

abortion amendment. Northern Ireland is

familiar territory, as Fortnight readers know, but none the less interesting for that. It is characteristic of cartoonists to

despise their early work. In this case it has

deprived us of some excellent cartoons

from the early 1970s, including one show

ing a judge berating a prisoner: 'Biased! How dare you, you long-haired Fenian

agitator.' However his cartoon of the tatt

ooist running out of space for Unionist

c.;ronyms on his customer's arm s in

cluded.

Many of the Third World and anti nuclear cartoons were new to me, and first

class. Those oh domestic politics in the Irish Republic during the 1970s are less

striking. So it is clear that the anti-abortion

referendum emerged before Turner's

grateful eyes like a young kid to a hungry lion, a synthesis of some of his favourite

targets: it revealed the conservatism and

hypocrisy behind Irish society; it made the

power of the church, usually discrete, ex

plicit; it provided yet another opportunity to bait Charles Haughey, one of the polit icians most disliked by a cartoonist who has little affection for any of them. If, as Scarfe said, the cartoonist can only express

good by a comparison between evil and a

greater evil, the referendum allowed Tur

ner to take sides.

Why is it, I wonder, that so many Nor

therners appear to find Southern politics so boring? Another cartoonist, Cormac; has asked a similar question about North

ern politics: 'Why this endless obsession with politics?' and answered himself. 'Be cause, without the Troubles, Belfast

would be incredibly boring.' Could it be that the cartoonist's problem in dealing

with the South is that its politics are, with occasional lapses, concerned with trivia?

It takes an issue like the referendum to shake them up, and provide Turner with a

target worthy of his pen.

Simmons on J. B. Yeats

This is meant to be engagingly frank; but J.B. Yeats never gets as dull and un

easy as this in his letters to real individuals. Kenner is adopting the intimate style; but to whom is he writing? Because he does not know, he is likely to irritate everyone. For some readers, new to Irish literature, he will seem obscure and allusive, a man

without a thesis. For those who are famil

iar with the ground it is irritating to be told what you know already.

Kenner is a clever, well-read man and is

capable of writing informative books ab

out literature; but here he has beentempt ed into the field of self-expression, more

by vanity than stupidity one suspects, and

although there are many interesting illum inations one is continually uneasy at being button-holed by someone who thinks he is

charming and demands that you think so too. For instance, he seems to me to get

Flann O'Brien all wrong: At Swim-Two-Birds is a preternaturally gif ted undergraduate jape. The Third Police

man is a unique mature minor novel. And he locked it away like something comprom

ising. He wrote acidulous blather for the

city's (Dublin's) most respectable paper.

If I were to tell you my opinion, I would feel obliged to argue the case.

Fortnight November 1983 19

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