Prize Poet's Progress

DRAMATIS PERSONAE--W. B. Yeats--Macmillan ($2.50).

When a Dubliner is about to quote William Butler Yeats he stills his hearers and puts quotation marks in the air by raising his right hand as if to take an oath. Yeats himself never raises his voice above a faint chant. Absentminded, mystical, called the most complete type of fop that has ever appeared in literature, he has gone his dreamy way regardless of critical catcalls. has steadily grown in the estimation of Ireland and the world. Of the small, select number of first-rate modern poets, Yeats is certainly one. An old man now (70), he writes little new verse but indulges an oldster's privilege of reminiscence. Last week, in Dramatis Personae, he told of his part in the beginnings of an Irish National Theatre, a part that finally won him the role of Nobel Prizeman.

The two names Yeats chiefly honors are the late Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge, whose plays did as much as his own to make Ireland proud of the Abbey Theatre and the world aware of it. But the name that crops up oftenest is that of his early collaborator, onetime friend and longtime enemy, George Moore. To Lady Gregory, Yeats owed not simply a colleague's loyalty but a more personal debt. When he was a young man of 30 and she a widow of 45 they met, and she rescued him from the slough of "a miserable love affair" by taking him around to peasants' cottages, setting him to collect their folklore. She kept lending him money so that he could write what and how he pleased. Till he was nearly 50, Yeats's writing never brought him in more than -L-200 a year. Until she was 50 Lady Gregory never thought of writing herself; when she tried her hand at dialect plays she soon became the mainstay of the Abbey Theatre.

George Moore was as Irish as Yeats, but he had gone to seek his literary fortune abroad. When Yeats and his friends started their movement for a national theatre, Moore returned to help, and he and Yeats collaborated on a play. Moore admired Yeats but Yeats looked down on Moore, writes about him with a malice-sharpened pen. He accuses Moore of continual tarradiddles ("He was all self and yet had so little self that he would destroy his reputation, or that of some friend, to make his audience believe that the story running in his head at the moment had happened, had only just happened"). In appearance Moore was "insinuating, up-flowing, circulative, curvicular, pop-eyed ... a man carved out of a turnip, looking out of astonished eyes." He was preoccupied with women almost to "madness." In his pursuit of them he sometimes queered himself by saying the wrong thing. He once gloomily reported an unexpected failure, was told he must have been tactless, and admitted "I said I was clean and healthy and she could not do better."

From Yeats's point of view, Moore was very ignorant: he had read nothing ("I doubt if he had read a play of Shakespeare's even at the end of his life"), had picked up everything he knew from cafe talk in Paris. The problem of style had never occurred to him before he met Yeats; their collaboration was "unmixed misfortune for Moore, it set him upon a pursuit of style that made barren his later years." And Moore misunderstood his talent in other ways. He prided himself on his discerning palate. A tricky friend, dining with him in a restaurant, found the soup particularly good but slyly said to Moore: "Do you mean to say you are going to drink that?" Moore tasted it, called the waiter in high dudgeon, made a scene. Once he got in a row with some spinster neighbors who tore up a copy of one of his books, sent the pieces in a parcel to Moore, marked "Too filthy to keep in the house." Every night thereafter Moore would rattle his stick on their railing to make their dogs bark. He also stoned the spinsters' cat, because he said it was after a blackbird that sang in his garden. Both sides appealed to the S. P. C. A. Then Moore set a trap for the cat. He caught the bird. (Moore told this story himself; Yeats doubts its complete integrity.)

When Yeats was still on good terms with Moore he became concerned over an accusation of plagiarism against one of Moore's books, wanted him to defend himself. Moore calmly admitted he had lifted ten pages without acknowledgment. The quarrel that finally broke up their friendship was over a scenario on which they had collaborated for a proposed play. Moore wired Yeats that he had written a novel on the subject, threatened an injunction if Yeats tried to use it. Furious, Yeats got together with Lady Gregory and another friend, ground out the play in a fortnight, published it in an Irish newspaper, spiked Moore's guns. Yeats admits that he looks back on the incident "with some remorse." His final summation of Moore: a great realistic novelist, but--no style.

Middle section of Dramatis Personae consists of fragments of a later diary, notes on the death of Synge. Some typical Yeatsian epigrams: "My father says, 'A man does not love a woman because he thinks her clever or because he admires her, but because he likes the way she has of scratching her head.' " "Emotion is always justified by time, thought hardly ever." "I have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and har lots." "A gentleman is a man whose principal ideas are not connected with his personal needs and his personal success." "A good writer should be so simple that he has no faults, only sins."

Skipping to 1925, Yeats tells of the crowning of his career by "the bounty of Sweden," when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (the only time the prize has been given to an Irishman). The news reached him late at night, and when the reporters had gone he and his wife searched the cellar for a bottle of wine, to celebrate. The cellar was empty, so they cooked sausages instead. At the presentation ceremony in Stockholm, Yeats saw with dismay that the recipients, after going down from the platform to receive their medals from the King, had to walk backwards up the steps again. Most of them sidled up, half-turned; when it came Yeats's turn he made a great effort, clambered up carefully, straight backward. "As the cheering grows much louder when I get there, I must have roused the sympathy of the audience."

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