Yeats summer school shows a son critical of his father's efforts

John Butler Yeats, the barrister turned portrait painter, may have been bankrolled by his famous son when he moved to New York at the age of 69, but he was not above offering literary advice to the poet.

The relationship between the two was probed at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo this week as writer Colm Toibin recounted the father's quest for his son's approval as he pursued his own literary ambitions.

Letters from the father to the son "from the great unfinisher to the connoisseur of completion" were described by Toibin as amongst the greatest ever written.Toibin, whose first play - about the riots in the Abbey Theatre provoked by O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars - opens at the Peacock next week, must surely have felt for Yeats the elder as he pleaded for his son's opinion of his first play.

"John Butler Yeats was said to be one of the few fathers who had lived long enough to be influenced by his son," Toibin told students.

From the beginning of his 14-year exile in New York, John began to write stories, poems and a play, and his letters to his son are full of pride and hope. The son's response is "distant and godlike".

In his 70s the father wrote continuously to Yeats about the play he was about to write, assuring him that it would be a great success. When he eventually completed it he was euphoric and, according to Toibin, foolish enough to inform his son, who had written 11 plays by now: "I am sure that when you have read it you will write to consult me as to your next play."Eventually the 53-year-old Yeats wrote to his 79-year-old father, telling him: "It is the least good of all your writings."

John Butler Yeats was unabashed. "Your opinion of my play does not alter my opinion," he wrote to his son.