Foreign Correspondence: News and Notes from England

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE: NEWS AND NOTES FROM ENGLAND By John Stokes University of Warwick In November 1985 the biographer Michael Holroyd gave a speech to celebrate the completion of Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie's edition of The Diary of Beatrice Webb. Volume IV, 1924-1943: The Wheel of Life (Virago, 1985). He took as text Noel Annan's observation that in the 1920s men and women came to regard behaviour "through the eyes of either Mrs Webb of Mrs Woolf," to become either sociologists or artists, collectivists or individualists, Marxists or Freudians. In an attempt to complicate matters Holroyd observed that the members of the Fabian Society had remained essentially late Victorian in their respect for religious or at least spiritual impulses, and that the Society had been born at a time when radical ideas were still infused with evangelical sentiment, when aesthetic enquiry into subjective states was not thought to be incompatible with social commitment: in other words, in the ELT period, when intellectual and political concerns were far less exclusive than they subsequently became. The point has been brought home by several editions of correspondence that have recently appeared here, and American readers in particular should find the English critical response to them and other related events in England of interest. Of the editions of correspondence, the most eagerly awaited and in general the best received has been the first volume of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, edited by John Kelly and Eric Domville, which covers the period from 1865 to 1895. Few reviewers have found serious fault with the editorial practice though the reproduction of every spelling mistake does mean that we can never be absolutely certain which errors are the poet's and which have been perpetrated by an editor or printer. The odds must always be that the error is Yeats's: with thoughtless sprezzatura he turned near illiteracy into one of the wasteful virtues. Incompetent spelling is only one of the quirks that have caused commentators to remark on the likable and slightly unexpected humanity of the young poet. There has, moreover, been a notable urge to put oneself in Yeats's place and vice-versa. Conor Cruise O'Brien, writer and politician, has drawn attention (in The Listener, 20 March 1986) to a letter in which Yeats "finds it less important for the writer 'to waken or quicken or preserve the national idea among the mass of people' than 'to fight for moderation, dignity and the rights of the intellect among his fellow nationalists.'" On the other hand, Tom Paulin, an Ulster poet who, unlike O'Brien, belongs to a generation not automatically persuaded of Yeats's genius, has contrasted the period of Yeats's youth with today, when it is "impossible to be warmed by the central 177 Stokes: Foreign Correspondence fire of inspired nationalism" (London Review of Books, 3 April 1986). It is a tribute to Yeats's continuing power that for all his personal eccentricity he should still compel others to state their views. In his respect for the spiritual Yeats was, somewhat surprisingly, almost rivalled by Oscar Wilde, whose shade must have chortled in an upstairs room at the Cadogan Hotel, Sloane Street (scene of his arrest), when Richard EUmann and the artist R. Fanto launched "The Oscar Wilde Playing Cards" there in October 1986. Three suits are based upon Wilde's writings: Hearts are Instigations, Clubs are Images, Diamonds are Complications. Spades are Happenings in Wilde's life. Whether it is a game of choice or of chance is not clear. Yet Wilde himself did believe in fortune. Further details of a strangely unsophisticated devotion to palmistry are among the few revelations in Sir Rupert Hart-Davis's edition of More Letters of Oscar Wilde (John Murray, 1985), which though unanimously enjoyed has generally been said to fill more gaps than it suggests new leads. On this single, albeit posthumous occasion, Oscar was upstaged by his wife, whose love-letters (if that is indeed what they are, Victorian politesse being notoriously difficult to decode) to the Piccadilly bookseller Arthur Humphreys came to light at Sothebys at much the same time as the publication of the Hart-Davis...