Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839-1922), and: Letters to W. B. Yeats (review)

Reviews William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839-1922). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978. 688 pp. $27.50. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper and William M. Murphy, eds., Letters to W. B. Yeats. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. 628 pp. $37.50. Every conscientious biographer of a twentieth-century figure has, I suspect, at some stage of his career the feeling that he is in danger of being buried under a mountain of paper: the tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of pages of letters, diaries, interviews, and published documents that an industrious scholar can assemble. Yet the mountains that William M. Murphy worked through must have come close to setting a record. For not only John Butler Yeats, the poet W. B. Yeats's father and the subject of Murphy's biography, but many of Yeats's relatives and friends had the preserving instincts of pack rats. For several years, Murphy did nothing more than transcribe into typescript millions of words of nearly illegible handwriting . Millions more became available to him—transcribed or partially transcribed—through the good offices of the Yeats family. And from private and public libraries all over the world poured in still more material documenting the life of one of Ireland's finest portrait painters and certainly one of her most loquacious talkers. Though Murphy could certainly not now tabulate the quantity of 176 biography Vol. 2, No. 2 his research—or perhaps not even the duration of it (well over twenty years)—his materials were in his own words "vast" and led him to the production of a manuscript well in excess of 2,000,000 words, more than three times the length of the published book. In many ways, I regret that his publisher could not have been persuaded to issue that massive multi-volume life. For the present book, in spite of its bulk, has an oddly compressed quality: fact piles on fact as Murphy skillfully traces the movements of dozens of principal characters across the complex map of nineteenth and twentiethcentury Irish history. But in order to cram into one volume all of the events in the life of a most extraordinary man, Murphy has been forced over and over to abridge direct quotation from the prodigal eloquence of his subject. And yet it is John Butler Yeats's own great facility with words that makes him most interesting. Yeats, whom Murphy accurately describes as a "loveable, brilliant, and distressingly improvident man," was most memorable to everyone who knew him not for his accomplishments as a painter but for his achievements as a conversationalist, a public speaker, and a writer of superb letters, essays and memoirs. He was almost universally admired , even by men driven half wild by his incapacity to meet deadlines . (Paintings that had been promised at the end of five sittings often were unfinished at the end of thirty, abandoned when the man who had commissioned them gave up waiting for the perfection Yeats always dreamed of: the labored painting that would suddenly take on the improvisational quality of a sketch, precisely the quality his son Jack Butler Yeats would achieve in the great oils of his final period and that his other son W. B. Yeats would both define and demonstrate in such vivid poems as "Adam's Curse" and "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.") Though the world was to wait until fifty years after his death to acknowledge his power in portraiture (his first "one-man show" was held in Dublin in 1972), John Butler Yeats's power as a personality was instantly acknowledged by every man who met him. Van Wyck Brooks felt, "He was a much greater man than his son William Butler Yeats." Murphy reports that "[John] Todhunter told Edward Dowden that JBY was the only man he 'ever really worshipped,' and Edward Dowden for his part thought him 'a genius.' " The American painter John Sloan wrote to JBY's daughter Lily, "I assure you that my own father's death was not so great a loss to me. A few more men such as your father in the world...