"I'VE had 76 years of living as part of a national monument: if I'm not used to it now I never will be."
The former senator Michael Yeats, only son of WB, endures the public scrutiny of his father's life with long-suffering patience and the occasional droll remark. I ask him if yet another interview with a journalist is as tempting as a trip to the dentist and he grins, too polite to agree, too honest to disagree.
Although his own life has been taken up with politics and the law, with no interest in poetry, he does bear a strong physical resemblance to his father: "When Roy Foster's second volume is published, the pictures of my father as an older man will look very much like me now. He is reluctant to say much about WB Yeats: A Life - VoI. 1, The Apprentice (OUP), which was launched last week, except that he likes it.
His sister - the artist Anne Yeats - is also approving of Foster's book: "This book puts Father into history. I found it fascinating reading and when I got to the end of it I wanted more.
Volume two will dwell on the second part of Yeats's life. Is the prospect of reading that volume a little more daunting, because it will include her story too? "Yes, it is daunting in some ways, but I believe Foster will be fair. He'll tell it as it is," Anne replies.
Volume one includes references to the strain of mental instability in the family of W. B. Yeats's mother, the Pollexfens, and this has been dealt with "fairly" and "without exaggeration", she notes. "Those references to the Pollexfens don't bother me," says Michael. "All the Pollexfens died out long before I was born. Most families have at least one nut anyway. What do I care about what was written about a Pollexfen in 1880?"
Both Anne and Michael were, it seems, chiefly reared by their English mother, George Hyde-Lees, who was almost 30 years younger than their father.
"We were closer to our mother," says Michael.
"Father was really more like our grandfather; it was Mother who kept the house together," notes Anne. "She tried to give us as normal an upbringing as possible. She probably knew some famous men's children and didn't want us to turn out the same way," she adds wryly.
As a young woman, George was "skittish", says Anne, and adored hats. This led to an occasional gulf between the middle-aged poet and the bright young woman he had married: "They were in London and Father came to the hotel room and told her: `I've seen it, in a shop window in Bond Street, all by itself. Come and look.' My mother was sure it was a hat, so she went with Father to Bond Street, very excited. It turned out to be one of the earliest silent typewriters. She told me that story, 50 years later, but the disappointment was still there.
However, Anne recalls her parents' marriage as "loving": "There were never any rows or cold silences. Mother looked after him very well." George knew all about Yeats's long obsession with Maud Gonne before she married him.
"My mother came to her marriage knowing the form. My father's life was public knowledge," says Michael.
"She knew about Maud Gonne and learned to accept it," adds Anne. "I don't suppose she liked it, any more than the others. But the little ventures he had, he turned into good poetry, and his poetry in particular appealed to her."
Michael remembers meeting Maud Gonne: "Occasionally I was sent to Roebuck house on my bicycle with messages for her: invitations to tea and suchlike. They kept in touch. I remember her enormous Irish wolfhounds in the garden, towering over me."
Anne saw the elderly Maud Gonne in St Stephen's Green: "She was tall and thin and dressed in black, with a black veil. I had no curiosity about her. She was just a famous figure in history."
Yeats was a dedicated poet: Anne remembers him "working non-stop", mostly "in his head": "If he started to wave his hands to the rhythm then we knew it was time to fade away and keep quiet," she recalls.
Yeats needed silence: "He couldn't bear voices around him when he was working, or even having someone in the same room," adds Anne.
She recalls an occasion when she and her father happened to take the same bus home to their house in Rathfarnham. He was oblivious of her presence, waving his hand and murmuring to himself. She did not approach him and sat alone at the back of the bus. When they both arrived at the gate of the house he said to her: "Who did you wish to see?" She smiles, remembering: "I did not take it amiss. He was not very observant. He would pass people by on the street. He was blind in his left eye."
She recounts the events of a dinner that her mother prepared for Yeats and AE: "She brought in the chicken and told my father to watch it because we had a cat. When she came in with the vegetables, the cat was on the table eating the chicken, and Father and AE were talking - miles away, worlds away."
Anne was eventually allowed to sit with the adults during some of these dinners, where "I learned to be a good listener: you didn't talk when Father talked. He liked to hold court."
She and Michael have fond memories of winter holidays in Rappallo, in Italy, where their parents stayed during Yeats's recuperation from Malta lever: "We used to admire the way he swam underwater in the sea, says Michael. "I think he did it to amuse us.
Anne adds: "He used to dive down and then come up and tickle us.
Yeats wrote poems for both his children, with less than positive consequences: "A Prayer For My Daughter followed me around and was an impossible ideal for me to alive up to" says Anne.
"I thought the poem he wrote about me was awful, so maudlin," says Michael. "I suppose after he wrote his famous one about Anne, he felt after I came along that he'd better write one about me too. But it is not a good poem. All that stuff about little Michael in bed. I was in boarding-school with tough, rugby-playing boys. They got hold of the poem and used to follow me around shouting `Bid a strong ghost'" (the opening words of the poem).
Michael concludes: "If poets write poems about their children they should not publish them until they leave school." Michael spent most of his youth at boarding-school, and his father died when he was 17: "The first and only time I felt I was having a natural discussion with him was just before he died in 1939. We talked about politics in central Europe."
Yeats had been a senator but "that stopped when I was about seven, and I was never conscious of it at the time. I don't remember Irish politics being discussed at home," says Michael.
He became a senator himself after entering political life, and was also a member of Fianna Fail: "I was not on the same political side as my father. He was never a party man but he voted one way always.
Certain similarities persist: Yeats the senator was pro divorce, and Michael is glad that it has been legalised at last.
Meanwhile, Anne saw more of her father: "I got to know Father when I was a teenager." Having hated boarding school, she was allowed at the age of 13 to attend art school instead: "I lived at home and went to the Hibernia Academy School on Stephen's Green, where I drew for five hours a day." Tuition was free: "you got in depending on your skills."
Anne's love of "drawing and the visual" started at an early age. She got into terrible trouble when she sneaked into her father's study and stole a piece of paper to draw on: "Apparently it had contained one line of a poem. I said in my defence, tearfully: `but it was only scribbles.' His writing was very scribbly," Anne recalls. Drawing was "the only thing I was good at", and she received early painting lessons from her aunt, Lolly Yeats: "With her, I did only brushwork. She helped me take my courage in my hands and make a great big blob."
Yeats himself had studied painting as a young man, and engaged his teenage daughter in conversation about Renaissance art and the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Later, when she was 16 and had started working on set design for the Abbey under Tanya Moiseiwitsch, he talked to her of Gordon Craig. Anne designed sets for productions of two of her father's plays On Baile's Strnnd and Purgatory: "He died shorty after I got Tanya's job, when I was 19."
When Anne began her mature career as an artist (long after her father's death), she tried to avoid being influenced by either her father, or the work of her "Uncle Jack": "I wanted to strike out on my own. But the combination of being a woman and being a Yeats was difficult. There was a sense that by the third generation, it must be wearing thin. Also, I was never sure that if I was praised, it was because I was a Yeats; or if I was blamed, it was because I was a Yeats."
Neither of the Yeats siblings has inherited the love of the supernatural which Yeats shared with Maud Gonne and subsequently, with their mother: "I'm prepared to believe in a ghost if I ever see one, but so far I haven't. I think astrology is nonsense," observes Michael. None of Yeats's grandchildren have turned to poetry: Michael's four children work in the areas of music, journalism, science and engineering. "There's no reason why any of us should have followed him," says Michael. "How many famous poets can you think of who have been followed by others from the same family?"
