We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess o f love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever the green is worn,
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.38
Yeats recognised that he had a religious temperament at a time when science had largely destroyed that option. He believed that life was ultimately tragic, and that it is largely determined by ‘remote … unknowable realities.’39 For him the consensus of life, its very structure, will defeat us, and the search for greatness, the most noble existential cause, must involve a stripping away of the ‘mask’: ‘If mask and self could be unified, one would experience completeness of being.’40 This was not exactly Freudianism but close and, as David Perkins has shown, it led Yeats to a complicated and highly personal system of iconography and symbols in which he pitched antitheses against one another: youth and age, body and soul, passion and wisdom, beast and man, creative violence and order, revelation and civdisation, time and eternity.41
Yeats’s career is generally seen in four phases – before 1899, 1899–1914, 1914–28, and after 1928 – but it is his third phase that marks his highest achievement. This period includes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and the prose work A Vision (1925). This latter book sets out Yeats’s occult system of signs and symbols, which were partly the result of his ‘discovery’ that his wife had psychic powers and that spirits ‘spoke through her’ in automatic writing and trances.42 In anyone else such an approach might have been merely embarrassing, but in Yeats the craftsmanship shines through to produce a poetic voice that is clear and distinctive, wholly autonomous, conveying ‘the actual thoughts of a man at a passionate moment of life.’43 Yeats the man is not at all like Bloom, but they are embarked on the same journey:
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans…
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
– ‘The Wild Swans at Coole,’ 1919
Yeats was affected by the war and the wilderness that followed.
Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude…
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
– ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,’ 1919
But, like Bloom, he was really more interested in creating afresh from nature than lamenting what had gone.
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
– Those dying generations – at their song,
Those salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
–‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ 1928
Yeats had begun his career trying to put the legends of Ireland to poetic use. He never shared the modernist desire to portray the contemporary urban landscape; instead, as he grew older he recognised the central reality of ‘desire in our solitude,’ the passion of private matters, and that science had nothing worthwhile to say on the matter.44 Greatness, as Bloom realised, lay in being wiser, more courageous, more full of insight, even in little ways, especially in little ways. Amid the wasteland, Yeats saw the poet’s role as raising his game, in order to raise everybody’s. His poetry was very different from Eliot’s, but in this one aim they were united.
Bloom is, of course, a standing reproach for the citizens of the acquisitive society. He is not short of possessions, but he doesn’t have much, or all that he might have, yet that doesn’t bother him in the slightest. His inner life is what counts. Nor does he judge other people by what they have; he just wants to get inside their heads to see how it might be different from his own, to aid his experience of the world.
Four years after Ulysses, in 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald published his novel The Great Gatsby, which, though a much more conventional work, addresses the same theme albeit from virtually the opposite direction. Whereas Leopold Bloom is a lower-middle-class Dubliner who triumphs over small-scale adversity by redemptive wit and low-level cunning, the characters in Gatsby are either very rich or want to be, and sail through life in such a way that hardly anything touches them, inhabiting an environment that breeds a moral and intellectual emptiness that constitutes its own form of wasteland.
The four main characters in the book are Jay Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Nick Carraway, the narrator. The action takes place one summer on an island, West Egg, a cross between Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Long Island, but within driving distance of Manhattan. Carraway, who has rented the house next to Gatsby by accident, is a relative of Daisy. To begin with, Gatsby, who shared some biographical details with Fitzgerald, the Buchanans, and Carraway lead relatively separate lives; then they are drawn together.45 Gatsby is a mysterious figure. His home is always open for large, raucous, Jazz Age parties, but he himself is an enigmatic loner; no one really knows who he is, or how he made his money. He is often on the phone, long distance (when long distance was expensive and exotic). Gradually, however, Nick is drawn into Gatsby’s orbit. In parallel with this he learns that Tom Buchanan is having an affair with a Myrtle Wilson whose husband owns a gas station where he often refuels on his way to and from Manhattan. Daisy, the original ‘innocent,’ a 1920s bright young thing, is blissfully unaware of this. The book is barely 170 pages long, and nothing is laboured. There is an early mention of ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires, by this man Goddard,’ a reference to Lothrop Stoddard’s eugenic tract The Rising Tide of Colour. This provokes a discussion by Tom about race: ‘If we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved … it’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things…. The idea is that we’re Nordics … and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilisation – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’46 The area where the fatal accident takes place, where Myrtle is killed, is known as the Valley of Ashes, based on Flushing Meallow, a swamp filled with garbage and ash. At other times, ‘breeding’ is a matter of exquisite fascination to the characters. But these points are lightly made, not forced on the reader.
Permeating all is the doubt that surrounds Gatsby. Dark rumours abound about the way he made his fortune – liquor, drugs, gambling. It soon transpires that Gatsby wants an introduction to Daisy and asks Nick, her relative, to arrange a meeting. When he does so, it turns out that Gatsby and Daisy already know each other and were in love before she married Tom. (Fitzgerald was worried that this was the weak point of the book: he had not explained adequately Gatsby’s earlier relations with Daisy.)47 They resume their affair. One afternoon a group of them go in two cars to Manhattan. In the city Tom accuses Gatsby and Daisy of being lovers. At Gatsby’s instigation, Daisy confesses she has never loved Tom. Angered, Tom reveals he has been checking up on Gatsby: he did go to Oxford, as he claimed; he was decorated in the war. Like Nick, the reader warms to Gatsby. We also know by now that his real name is James Gatz, that he comes from a poor background, and that fortune smiled on him as a young man when he was able to do a millionaire a favour. But Tom has amassed evidence that Gatsby is in fact now involved in a number of unwholesome, even illegal schemes: bootlegging and dealing in stolen securities. Before we can digest this, the confrontation breaks up, and the parties drive back to the island in two cars, Gatsby and Daisy in one, the rest in the other. We surmise that the confrontation will continue later. On the way, however, Gatsby’s car kills Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s lover, but doesn’t stop. Tom, Nick, and the others, travelling well behind, arrive to find the police at the scene and Mr Wilson distraught. Mr Wilson has begun to suspect that his wife is being unfaithful but doesn’t know who her lover is. He now suspects Gatsby, deciding his wife was killed to keep her quiet, so he goes to Gatsby’s house, finds him in the pool, shoots him, and then turns the gun on himself. What Wilson doesn’t know, and what Tom never finds out, is that Daisy was driving. This is kept from the police. Daisy, whose carelessness kills Myrtle, gets off scot-free. Tom’s affair, which triggers all this tragedy, is never disclosed. Tom and Daisy disappear, leaving Carraway to arrange Gatsby’s funeral. By now Gatsby’s shady business deals have been confirmed, and no one attends.48