Following Yeat's footsteps

IT has taken 10 years for Prof Roy Foster to pursue William Butler Yeats through a complex early life and on arrival at 1914, leave the poet at the end of the first volume of a biography which attracted controversy long be fore it was written.

Author of Modern Ireland 1600 1972 (1988), Charles Stewart Parnell The Man and His Family (1976) and Lord Randolph Churchill A Political Life (1981), Foster, the Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford, accepts there were doubts voiced by some observers who felt it a task more suited to a literary scholar. However, the facts of Yeats's life cancel those sections. The story of this 19th century man born in 1865 who became a central player in the shaping of 20th century Ireland and died in 1939, on the eve of the second World War, clearly demands a historian's approach. Foster was asked to undertake it on the death of another historian, F.S.L. Lyons, who had spent a decade researching the book he was never to write.

While there is an extensive library of textual criticism of Yeats's poetry, the life has not been as comprehensively explored as might be assumed. Richard Ellmann's Yeats The Man and the Masks (1948/79) is essentially a thematic study, somewhat unevenly balancing the work and the life. While deferring to Ellmann as a literary critic, Foster stresses the need for a chronologically structured biography marked by a historian's analysis of the period. "I think you could also say you don't need to be a poet to read poetry. The ability to read and interpret poetry does not depend on being a member of a university English department."

How significant is being Protestant to coming to a cultural understanding of Yeats? "If you had asked me that a few years ago I would have said it didn't matter. Now I think it does. I'm now able to be annoyed at the inference that you somehow have to prove your Irishness if you are not Catholic." Wary of the personal, Foster says Yeats devoted a great deal of time "to establishing that you could be Protestant and fully Irish while disagreeing with many indeed most of the ruling Irish pieties".

Throughout this responsible, disciplined book which witnesses Yeats enduring his passion for Gonne his distaste for the emerging Catholic middle class Synge's death and also his own awareness of ageing, Foster maintains a neutral, detached tone. Relying on facts, superb use of source material and a feel for the period which witnessed the decline of the Irish Protestant middle class, he makes no behavioural judgments and conveys a subtle sympathy for his subject. Interestingly, he chooses to end the first volume with Yeats as a middle aged man still childless, still unmarried, beginning to assess his childhood, a childhood Foster does not subject to pseudo psychology. "I don't like intrusively speculative biography based on paperback Freudianism." Nor is he censoriously judgmental about the poet's relationship with his father and siblings.

LITERARY criticism, as much as his poetry, has made Maud Gonne Yeats icon. Foster's treatment of her helps the reader to arrive at a sense of Gonne the individual instead of the wilful goddess more usually presented. "I admired her courage, her adherence toe principles and the essential sadness of her life." Had he had any particular opinion as to the importance of the Gonne/Yeats relationship before undertaking the book? "When I began I half expected to find that Yeats deliberately cast himself as the sorrowing lover to Gonne's romantic La Belle Dame Sans Merci as a vehicle for his poetry. I thought there might be a certain writerly calculation in it. But after reading his letters, his occult divining, his notebooks, his unfinished drafts, it was clear that this was a great passion which could not be easily manipulated."

Yeats was a poet, playwright, essayist, thinker, reader, mystic and nationalist. Shy and forthcoming, witty, malicious and kind, as uncertain as he was arrogant, he spent his life searching for, rather than actively creating, identities. The source material was immense. "Unlike Parnell, Yeats left a huge and now scattered archive of letters currently being worked on by a team of brilliant literary scholars," says Foster. There is another important dimension to Foster's approach. Just as Yeats had many diverse interests, his circle consisted of a colourful cast of characters, many of whom were gifted literary people and letter writers. Foster lets them reveal themselves through their letters.

Although exceeding 500 pages, the book achieves the narrative tightness of a shorter work. "I deliberately avoided digression. I knew I had to keep in a straight line and not go off into tangents."

The young Foster first encountered Yeats the poet as a schoolboy. "My mother read the poetry to us. I also began reading history when I was quite young."

The second book, when it comes, will cover events and achievements of such magnitude that any interest aroused by the first volume will, he hopes, be sustained. Foster believes this first book examines the groundwork which explains the greatness of the final years. Aware that for many W.B. Yeats appears to have arrived on Earth as the austere public man, Foster says "I very much wanted to follow the imaginative child, the intellectually omnivorous and passionately engaged young man travelling through the disillusionment of middle age, who became the great poet."