W.B. Yeats has been the subject of much scholarly attention in recent times.
Among others, Terence Brown's book, The Life of W.B. Yeats (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999), is a rigorous and sensitive study of the poet, while R.F. Foster's biography, W.B. Yeats: a life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 2003) gives a wonderfully detailed account of Yeats in its two sizeable volumes. Anne Saddlemeyer's Becoming George: the life of Mrs. W.B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) examines the life of George and her husband and explores the age and milieu in which they lived.
However, general interest in Yeats extends beyond his life and work to many related matters. In W.B. Yeats: vain, glorious, lout the author, Anthony Jordan, has built a narrative around his main subject of interest, Major John MacBride. The title of the book is a play on the words, "drunken, vainglorious lout ", which Yeats used to denigrate MacBride in his poem, Easter 1916 , and indicates here the author's negative attitude to the poet.In similar idiom, the book might have been entitled: "bitter, wrong". It is difficult to ignore the deeply bitter tone of the book and its dogged pursuit in redressing what the author considers the "wrong" done to MacBride by the poet and some of his critics.
The book deals with some of the main themes in Yeats's life including his family relationships, his love of Maud Gonne, involvement with the Abbey and nationalism. Jordan marshals the facts of these stories, discovers their worst aspects and interprets them in a manner designed to reflect unfavourably on the poet. He seems to chronicle every petty row and minor dispute in which Yeats was involved during the whole course of his lifetime. Courtesy is lacking in the style and narration of this story.
At times the text reads like a bad novel with Lady Gregory, an aging Salomé, thirsting with desire for the young poet and Maud Gonne a manipulative harpy, encouraging and rejecting the amorous advances of a crude and imbecilic Yeats. Most of the facts pertaining to Yeats in this book are already in the public domain and have been discussed dispassionately elsewhere. It is difficult for the reader to engage with a book in which there is a barely concealed antagonism towards so many players in the narrative.
Undoubtedly, Yeats could be considered awkward and argumentative and something more might be said in favour of MacBride, but a convincing argument cannot be achieved without balance and critical distance.
Noreen Doody lectures in the department of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at University College Dublin
W.B. Yeats: vain, glorious, lout By Anthony J. Jordan Westport Books, 200pp. NPG