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Yeats, a Poet Who Kept Trying On Different Identities
Nothing turns a man into a statue more effectively than a combination of fame, death and the passage of time. Together they join hands and hoist him up on a high cold plinth. If the man is a writer, he disappears into the official editions of his work, all polish and (ideally) perfection, the fits and starts and wrong turns folded out of sight like the hem on a pair of dress pants.
There is always the biography. But in biography a man often undergoes a different sort of hardening: his turmoil, his inconsistency, his groping confusion are by necessity smoothed into a narrative whole. Even the most sensitive of biographers sacrifice throb and raggedness in the name of storytelling; their work would be unreadable otherwise.
For a sense of process -- in the work and the life alike -- exhibitions of manuscripts, books and related memorabilia can be extremely successful at getting the statue to come down off his plinth and take a breath or two. These exhibitions reverse time. They take a visitor back into the moment. Because of the inconsistency of materials available to a curator, they are not always comprehensive or in perfectly calibrated balance, but their subject is often palpable, paradoxical and animated. Certainly this is very much the case with William Butler Yeats in ''Such Friends,'' a rich survey of his work and life now on view at the New York Public Library.
Yeats (1865-1939) is a challenge to the curator, as he is to the biographer and in a different way to the reader of his verse, prose, memoirs and plays. He lived a long, complex, regularly self-reinventing life, and in his obsessions and enthusiasms he was sometimes, well, a little all over the place. His trajectory, of writing as of living, can be seen as one long attempt to build up, then to a degree break down again, a series of identities or preoccupations until he got closer and closer still to his true, authentic self and voice.
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In his pivotal 1948 study, ''Yeats: The Man and the Masks,'' which still remains fresh, Richard Ellmann saw these different identities as masks. Rodney Phillips, curator of the exhibition (and of the library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature, from which much of the material is drawn), highlights Yeats's use of doppelgangers, whom Yeats named variously Michael Robartes, Owen Aherne and Red Hanrahan. Many people have observed Yeats's lifelong self-division, which falls into two categories: Yeats the dreamer and Yeats the man of action.
Yeats the dreamer was variously attracted to the occult, spiritualism, fairy life and fairy tales, paganism, magic, seances, psychic phenomena, Eastern religion, Theosophy and Mme. Blavatsky, mysticism and William Blake. All of this culminated, famously, in his years-long preoccupation with the automatic writing of his wife, George, which was believed to give Yeats direct access to the spirit world and whi
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