Essay: After writing to WB Yeats as a Dublin schoolboy, A Norman Jeffares (1920-2005) went on in later life to become one of the poet's greatest explicators, writes Declan Kiberd
'I grew up in a city of talkers and self-dramatisers", wrote Derry Jeffares in 1996. "Talk was expected to be entertaining. Speech cost nothing and the common stock was rich."
He was born in Dublin in 1920 and wrote, late in life, a moving volume of poems celebrating its clopping dray-horses, delivery vans and buses whose drivers would stop whenever and wherever asked to do so. The streets were filled with chat, sometimes lyrical, sometimes bitchy, but almost always those who were denounced turned out (Jeffares recalled) to be deeply charming people.
Brought Up in Dublin recalls Kennedy's Bread, Citroën cars that drove on Sundays into Wicklow, and a Protestant middle class which got nervous when sons or daughters talked of joining opera companies or theatre groups. Jeffares attended the High School in Harcourt Street. While editing the school magazine, he had the audacity to ask one of its old boys, WB Yeats, for a poem. The poet, in one of his randy phases, said that he had nothing at present "suitable for schoolboys", but, true to later form, Jeffares knew how to negotiate. A week later a rather beautiful lyric did arrive, which began:
His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
"What then?" sang Plato's ghost. "What then?"
That was the beginning of a lifelong involvement, which would see Jeffares publish a major biography and definitive commentaries on Yeats. He himself had studied Classics at Trinity and honed his speaking skills at the "Hist", of which he was Auditor (so was Michael Yeats, son of the poet and a contemporary at Trinity). Those skills helped to make him one of the most entertaining lecturers on Irish literature in his generation.
He was offered a post as senior English master in a school, but felt that he needed to learn more and to get out of Ireland in order to learn it. "Shaw was completely right/ To cut and run across the Irish Sea," wrote Jeffares in a poem, called, significantly, Poor Dublin. In this attitude, he was like many Trinity graduates of his day, believing that his Irish wit might anyway be more valued in England.
Classics could not long hold his attention ("all that bloody memor-ising!") but he met Yeats's widow, George, who wondered whether he might like to write a book on her husband's work. "Take anything you like", she said, and so he did, sometimes being surprised by a late-night phone call urgently requesting the return of a manuscript. He wrote a DPhil thesis at Oxford that became WB Yeats: Man and Poet. At the time he undertook the work, many of Yeats's published texts had fallen out of print, but for the next 50 years they would reappear and stay in print under his editorial name.
AS A TRINITY debater representing the Hist at Glasgow in 1942, he met Jeanne Calembert and they married in 1947. The couple had a daughter, Bo, just after Derry had been appointed to a lectureship at Edinburgh University. A durable academic legend holds that one afternoon, he found a pile of books in a second-hand shop that had belonged to the great professor, Herbert Grierson. That scholar's pioneering work had brought the metaphysical poets to a popular audience and thus made the movement around TS Eliot possible. The young Jeffares was shocked to discover that the retired professor was now so poor that he had sold his books for food and warmth in one of the coldest winters of post-war austerity Britain.
Determined to avoid such a fate, Jeffares suddenly tripled his salary by a major move to the University of Adelaide in Australia. Advised by Australian admirers not to play the flash Brideshead type out in the colonies, he laughed such counsel to scorn and bought himself a Rolls Royce. He became an avid car-collector and founder of the Vintage Car Club of Australia. In his six years there, he developed a love of wines and winemaking.
His main work was done after 1957, when he took the Chair of English at a rapidly expanding Leeds University. To it he attracted not just first-rate scholars, but many writers from the British colonies and former colonies - West Indians, Irish, Indians, South Africans, Canadians - all bound together in a project that became, in effect, the very basis for post-colonial studies in Britain. The young Brendan Kennelly wrote a lyrical and funny account of his own experience of this Leeds postgraduate world in a 1967 novel called The Florentines. He and Jeffares remained fast friends for life, co-editing, with Katie Donovan, an anthology of Irish women's writing.
Jeffares believed that he could explain anything to anybody: and so he published at an astonishing range of levels, from the high scholarship of Yeats commentaries or the Yeats/Maud Gonne letters, through editions of Anglo-Irish playwrights and the popular "Writers and Critics" series to the vastly selling York Notes for schools.
He was a founder president of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature (IASAIL), which became a global organisation (with more than 600 members in Japan alone). He served as director of the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo from 1969 to 1972. His ability and energy made him a power-broker in an expanding academia, often in the chair on appointment boards.
"You'll have to go to Khartoum", he told one startled young doctoral graduate, "but don't worry - we'll get you back." It is a version (perhaps apocryphal) of what his Oxford supervisor, David Nicol Smith, had said to him when making the Australian offer that he couldn't refuse.
JEFFARES'S SECOND BOOK of poems is called Brought Up to Leave. He remained a constant return visitor to Trinity, whose scholars often fantasised about luring him back for good - but he was probably happier living at a certain angle to the old island. Jeffares family memories of Wexford and the troubles of 1798 were recalled in a poem which speaks of "those corpses lying everywhere". He preferred a global stage, anyway. It was the multicultural nature of Leeds in the 1960s which held his allegiance, its streets filled with "West Indian smiles, Yorkshire dames, Pakistani flames of colour". In recent years, he was delighted to note similar combinations emerging in his beloved Dublin streets.
For him, as for Swift (on whom he wrote often and well), Ireland provided a test case for the world. Yet he remained something of the old-fashioned Irish country gent, believing in family ghosts, apostrophising cats, searching out the best shops in a townland for fish or for fruit. And he and Jeanne smothered every guest with a boundless hospitality - the natural pleasure and amusement they took in each other's company was extended to all who came under their roof.
In 1974, he moved suddenly to Fife Ness in Scotland and served out his last academic years as professor at Stirling. Perhaps he was growing tired of being "A Norman Jeffares", the name which featured on all the book covers and interview boards. Many of his poems - which have the terse, graphic energy of his speech - lament the inevitable frustrations of endless committee work and the rise of a scholarly bureaucracy. He called A Norman "that academic doppelganger/ Who wrote the books/ That earned the cash/ Remaining a distant stranger,/ Formal, even in his name". That is too severe a self- assessment, for as a professor he was visionary, amusing and deeply helpful to colleagues and students.
But there was another Jeffares, "Derry", who preferred to loosen his tie for drink and good talk. The two finest essays he wrote were about figures a little like himself, John Butler Yeats and Oliver St John Gogarty (the latter's poems he would edit in 2001).
He was for the most of his career an almost exact contemporary of Richard Ellmann. Both men were early recognised by the clairvoyant Mrs Yeats as figures who would dominate Irish literary study in later decades, Jeffares with his sensitive integrations of life and work, Ellmann with his profound insights into the feelings and forms of modernism. How wise and shrewd Mrs Yeats turned out to be. The young High School boy who wrote to her husband turned out to one of his greatest explicators.
• Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at UCD. This memoir is extracted from the first AN Jeffares Memorial Lecture given by him at Leeds University last Wednesday