Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words by Gordon S. Armstrong (review)

Book Reviews Shaw did, and when he could not, he explained his bafflement. He denied "individual [chemical] survival." ("New people corn[ingJ into the world ... will be using the same life.") But because no physiologists or biologists could handle the prelimi· nary question "What is the difference between a dead body and a live one?", he added, before a stupified interviewer, the nonplussing qualifier, "/ am talking about something I know lIothing about" (p. 521). So spoke the all-out expositor of the quintessence of things, who in a famous demonstration once showed that before he put pen to paper he knew six times as much about a topic as all his critics combined. A. E. WAL~CE MAURER, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY GORDON S. ARMSTRONG. Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words, Bucknell University Press. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses 1990. Pp. 268, illustrated. $38.50. This handsomely produced volume appears at first sight to fill an important gap in our knowledge of Samuel Beckett and Irish art. The color reproduction of Jack Yeats's Two Travellers (1942) on the dust-jacket provides a striking entry to the text. Like Beckett, who preferred to "simply bow in wonder" before Jack Yeats's art, we are nearly tempted ~o rest content with this powerful image of two men alone in the Irish landscape, sensing the deep affinity between author and artist which Samuel Beckett himself always refused to gloss. Unfortunately. the book itself is a disappointment. Although a good deal of scholarly attention has already been devoted to BeckeU's interaction with W. B. Yeats. his relationship to W. B. 's younger brother Jack, arguably the most important Irish artist of this century, has yet to be examined in depth, The primary evidence of 'this relationship is scanty enough: their joint signatures on the Verticalist Manifesto of 1931 ; Beckett's early review of Yeats's novel The AmarQmhers; his review of Thomas MacGreevy 's essay on the artist; a Yeats painting owned by Beckett; the homage Beckett wrote for the artist in 1954. Much was to be hoped from a truly careful analysis of this and other biographical evidence, and from a closer look at both the art and fiction of Jack Yeats. Yet almost nothing results. Perhaps there is in fact little to be said - certainly little enough is said here, in spite of the book's length. In brief, the method of argument consists almost entirely of sweeping claims which are never substantiated in Ihe general discussions Ihat follow. A few examples will have 10 suffice. To begin with W. B. Yeats: the author suggests that "there were .. , important literary lessons to be learned from W. B. Yeats. Those lessons influenced the entire course of Beckett's career, slightly acknowledged though they were." Yet the entire chapter on W. B. Yeats and Beckett provides little evidence for this assertion beyond surface resemblances: "Hawk's Well takes place at nightfall. Eli Attendant GOdOi also take place at nightfall"; "Twilight plays ~n important part in the canons of both Beckett and W. B. Yeats"; "Beckett dealt with the same Book· Reviews theatrical terrain as Veats"; and more of tile same. In the end, even the author seems to recognize how insubstantial most of this must seem, offering an almost apologetic conclusion: "The late plays of W. B. Yeats provide a frail but nonetheless supportive foundation for the early works of Samuel Beckett" and "Only with some difficulty does the analogy with Yeats's drama clarify the later work of art that needs no clarification." When the author turns to Jack Yeats, where we have reason to hope for more, there seems to be even less. II does not help that the author begins by radically mis-stating one of the few actual sources of Beckett's views on the painter; the homage of 1954. We are told that "Beckel! professed that he could submit 'in trembling to the unmasterable ' images that his Irish compatriot assembled on canvas." He said nothing of the sort. It is Yeats's own "final mastery which submits in trembling to the unmasterable ," an admittedly dark fonnulation which nonetheless has nothing to do...