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Son of The Celtic Twilight

In this first volume of his projected two-volume biography, R.F. Foster, an Oxford professor of Irish history, proclaims that "most biographical studies of [William Butler Yeats] are principally about what he wrote; this one is principally about what he did." Indeed, Foster should have added "and what he was," for in this volume Yeats emerges (as he rarely does in previous biographies) as aggressively egocentric -- a trait, Foster observes, that "had preserved him through an unstable childhood." Mental instability, probably manic depression, was apparent in some of the Pollexfen family members, from whom Susan, Yeats's mother, descended. She herself was strangely inarticulate, the result, probably, of strokes over a period of many years. Yeats's father was an "eternally improvident" portrait painter who moved periodically from Ireland to England in search of an income. As though reinforcing the family's moves, the Irish Protestant ascendancy was losing power and prestige as the century drew to a close.

As a budding poet in search of subjects and symbols, Yeats found inspiration in Celtic myth, occult mysteries, and magic -- the means of transforming himself into a visionary of the "Celtic Twilight" (indeed, the archaic word "mage" in the subtitle signifies a magician). Aware of the progressive fragmentation in Western culture and his own loss of religious faith, he sought "Unity of Being" by studying correspondences between transitory appearances and eternal realities. By joining such groups as the Dublin Hermetlc Society, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, he attempted to confirm his occult discoveries and experiments with magic. His friendship with George Russell (a poet and mystic known as "AE") resulted in their study of Eastern thought -- for Yeats, a lifelong obsession that W.H. Auden briskly dismissed: "All those absurd books . . . mediums, spells, the Mysterious Orient -- how embarrassing."

Yeats's long relationship with the beautiful actress Maude Gonne, with whom he joined in a "spiritual marriage" after her initiation into the Golden Dawn and who provided inspiration for many of his poems, was, Foster contends, not always "spiritual," though she protested that she had no interest in sex. Foster is at his best when tracing the agony and the ecstasy of their relationship ("the force of her personality matched his own"), her affair with a French journalist (resulting in a son, who soon died, and a daughter, Iseult, later also an inspiration for several of Yeats's poems), and her brief, disastrous marriage in 1903 (after her conversion to Roman Catholicism) to the alcoholic Major John MacBride of the Irish Brigade, which fought for the Boers against the English. The marriage dissolved after MacBride abused Maude, seduced her half-sister and molested Iseult.

As a historian, Foster devotes much space to the fighting within and among various Irish nationalist organizations, political and literary, supporting his contention that Yeats found a "context" for his "mission to create a national literature." Though he was the object of attacks for his reluctance to write poems espousing political themes, Yeats often included allusions to Ireland's heroes and England's oppressive rule, as in his dedication of "Irish Tales," which celebrates "Exiles wandering over many seas" and "men who loved the cause that never dies." He also wrote poems, such as "September 1913," that reveal his distress over the materialism of the bourgeois Irish who "fumble in a greasy till," an indication that "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,/ It's with O'Leary in the grave."

In the early 20th century, Yeats, Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge were directors of the newly rounded Abbey Theatre, struggling with the complexities of staging plays (including their own). The nationalist group Sinn Fein (with, as Foster writes, its "overtones of Catholic confessionalism and cultural chauvinism") regarded the Abbey directorship as representing "the corruption and decadence of modern Ireland." On January 26, 1907, the opening night of Synge's "The Playboy of the Western World," a riot (no doubt inspired by Sinn Fein) erupted in the theater. No great admirer of the play, Lady Gregory sent a telegram to summon Yeats, then in Scotland: "Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift" (alluding to a woman's chemise).

Foster believes that the wealthy supporter of the Abbey Theatre, Ann Horniman, wished to establish more than a business relationship with Yeats. However, he maintained his distance from her and demonstrated that (despite her objection to the "sexual impropriety" of the players) he was capable of disciplining the company when necessary -- indeed, he even fined actors who were late. Horniman's letters at this time, Foster remarks, were "often a jarring combination of flirtation and threat." Tensions between the directors and Horniman resulted in her withdrawing her support for a time. The irreverent Oliver St. John Gogarty, a friend of Joyce and a recent acquaintance of Yeats, could not resist scribbling verse to define the Yeats-Horniman relationship:

What a pity it is that Miss Horniman
When she wants to secure or suborn a man
Should choose Willie Yeats
Who still masturbates
And at any rate isn't a horny man.

In closing this first volume on the threshold of Yeats's 50th year, Foster provides a preview of the second volume: "What lay ahead was more astonishing yet: perhaps his greatest poetry, political revolution, war, new loves, marriage, fatherhood, still more public controversy and acclaim beyond anything he had yet experienced."

Karl Beckson, professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, is the author of, among other books, "London in the 1890s: A Cultural History."