William Butler Yeats – Vacillation

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Poetry, Reading Ireland, Vacillation, William Butler Yeats

I

Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath.
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?

II

A tree there is that from its topmost bough
Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;
And half is half and yet is all the scene;
And half and half consume what they renew,
And he that Attis’ image hangs between
That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
May know not what he knows, but knows not grief

III

Get all the gold and silver that you can,
Satisfy ambition, animate
The trivial days and ram them with the sun,
And yet upon these maxims meditate:
All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate;
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.

No longer in Lethean foliage caught
Begin the preparation for your death
And from the fortieth winter by that thought
Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

V

Although the summer Sunlight gild
Cloudy leafage of the sky,
Or wintry moonlight sink the field
In storm-scattered intricacy,
I cannot look thereon,
Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

VI

A rivery field spread out below,
An odour of the new-mown hay
In his nostrils, the great lord of Chou
Cried, casting off the mountain snow,
`Let all things pass away.’

Wheels by milk-white asses drawn
Where Babylon or Nineveh
Rose; some conquer drew rein
And cried to battle-weary men,
`Let all things pass away.’

From man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung.
What’s the meaning of all song?
`Let all things pass away.’

VII

The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme?
The Soul. Isaiah’s coal, what more can man desire?
The Heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!
The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within.
The Heart. What theme had Homer but original sin?

VIII

Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we
Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?
The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,
Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,
Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance
Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once
Had scooped out pharaoh’s mummy. I – though heart might find relief
Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief
What seems most welcome in the tomb – play a pre-destined part.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?
So get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on your head.

I have had, for a time, an uneasy relationship with W.B. Yeats. He was an early (though, thankfully not lasting) casualty of academia. Yeats was an intensive and obligatory part of my degree, and the detailed dissection with literary scalpels killed the life in the poetry stone dead. Yeats and Chaucer lay side by side, dismembered. Yeats was lucky, he inhabited only a shallow grave, but my resistance to digging up Chaucer’s bones continues to this day.

I was probably one of the luckier ones: some perhaps found it impossible to approach literature with joy and excitement ever again. One permanent corpse seems like a small price

Yeats began to rise and speak again to me quite soon, and this particular poem, Vacillation, from his 1933 Collection, The Winding Stair and Other Poems, was one of the ones which brought me back to hear his complex, beautiful voice

I was going through the almost obligatory early twenties state of existential unease, reading Sartre, Camus – and alongside, a lot of Colin Wilson’s non-fiction – starting of course with The Outsider, which focused on some writers I loved. But Wilson, alongside alienation was also looking at its opposite – connection. His writing introduced me to the work of American psychologist Abraham Maslow – which immediately struck a chord.

Western psychiatry, like Western medicine seemed focused on the damage, the lesion, the woundedness of the psyche. Maslow was championing a focus on the health. I suppose he was an early proponent (or a hangover from a much older tradition) of what might be called holistic medicine. Maslow was interested in studying the psychology of the healthy, recognising that this might be something which might be emulated, and, in terms of psyche, found within us all.

Maslow referred to the ‘A-Ha!’ moments, what he called Peak Experiences – that sense of coming right, being in the flow, somehow expanded into a world of meaning, connection. It’s the other side of the coin to that alienated disconnect, the sense of sickness, wrong, discomfort in one’s own skin and the skin of the world.

What has this to do with Yeats? (I can hear the muttering at the back)

Well, as Wilson was writing about Maslow, and Peak Experiences, he illustrated this with four lines from Vacillation, which resonated, profoundly, with me, and not only sent me back to Yeats, but have also been lines rather carved into my being

Yeats wrote the poem, a long and complex one, in middle age. In his 50s, he had long moved away from his sojourn and sympathy with Revolutionary Ireland, away from the lilting misty green lyricism. Politically he had moved rightwards (another reason for falling out of my favour!) in many ways. His poetry felt difficult to me.

In Vacillation, Yeats is looking back and forward on his life. He manifests much cynicism about the world – look at that cynical snarl in the first 3 lines of stanza III

Get all the gold and silver that you can,
Satisfy ambition, animate
The trivial days and ram them with the sun,

But, it is that 4th stanza, for me, the heart of the poem, and a wrenching into reality, that flames into clarity, particularly the last four lines, which are so potent – and something which resonated most powerfully for me:

My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

The language is unerringly simple, almost trite with its rhymes, but the meaning, profound.

And the placement of it, in the midst of some complex dialogues between Heart and Soul, within classical allusions Attis, Lethe, not to mention the Lord of Chou and von Hugel, the reference to whom is by all accounts linked to a book contrasting Homeric and Christian symbolism, is also potent.

There is the complicated surround, a kind of tangle of intellectual, philosophical themes, which almost pushes away and alienates the casual reader – and then, suddenly, in stanza 4, there is the recounting of the most ordinary of events, a prosaic normality, sitting in a café in London – and suddenly , blazing, being blessed, being able to bless.

By setting the A-Ha! The Awake! In the middle of the prosaic, Yeats acknowledges the absolute ordinary extraordinariness of those rapturous, graceful moments where suddenly we arrive at a sense of meaningfulness.

Those four lines have become a kind of mantra for me – a sense that however dark and alienated and full of ‘trivial days’ the world can sometimes seem, or us within that world, those pockets of twenty minute blaze are as much of reality as the sense of alienation. And, I believe the ‘blaze’ trumps the alienation, because the blaze also enfolds and acknowledges the alienation, the sense of blessed and could bless encompasses the knowledge of disconnection, whereas the disconnected moments cannot remember and hold the possibility of the other

And, in an irreverent conclusion, Yeats is clearly advising all of us to keep reading, and to keep reading in cafes: they are clearly excellent for the bless bless moments of awakening!

So, this Irish poet, reminds me, in Reading Ireland Month, how poetry is one of the provokers of the ‘super-reality, awake, awake!’ experience

Here is Yeats, near the end of his life, reading three of his own poems

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Arthur Schnitzler – La Ronde

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1900, Arthur Schnitzler, Austria 1900s, Book Review, La Ronde, Peter Zombory-Moldovan (translator), Plays, Stephen Unwin (translator)

It’s Sex that makes the world go Ronde

Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde has had a curious history. Schnitzler originally wrote it in 1897. The first publication was a printing in 1900 for private circulation, under its original, German title, Reigen, and its first commercial publication was 3 years later, in Vienna, in a run of 40,000. However it was promptly banned by the censors a year later, and not re-published until 1908 in Germany. A translation and publication in French followed in 1912, with the title which has become most familiar, La Ronde. The translation into English was published in 1920, in a ‘privately printed, privately circulated’ edition

As the play is ‘A Round’ of sexual encounters, it was clearly seen as far too hot to handle.  The title also inherently suggests a kind of dance, where partners are swapped. The play is presented in 10 two-person scenes. Characters are not named, instead, their ‘function’ describes them – for example, the first pairing is the Prostitute and the Soldier. The second scene is the Soldier (from the scene before), with, now, a new partner, the Maid (Parlour Maid). The third scene features the Parlour Maid with the Young Master. The final, scene 10 encounter involves the Prostitute from the first scene, so completing the circle

As difficult as it had been to get the play printed, early performance proved equally challenging. It was not performed until 1912 (in translation), in Hungary, and was immediately banned after that first performance. It had its first performance in German in 1920 in Germany and 1921 in Austria, and was quite violently received, both pro and anti. The ‘anti-camp’ included not only those outraged by its frank acknowledgement of sexuality, but also those who objected to Schnitzler himself – he was Jewish, so subject matter and race were linked by the ‘anti-camp’ as some of those antis were anti-Semitic – the play seen as pornographic, the author attacked as a Jewish pornographer. Schnitzler withdrew the rights to public performance of the play in German, though the play was popular in other countries, in translation – and, most particularly in France, where there were a couple of movie adaptations, one by Max Ophuls (1950) and one by Roger Vadim (1964)

Snippets of Ophuls

When the play came out of copyright early in the 80s, it rather gained a new lease of life, particularly with versions which updated the setting (1890s Vienna) to a more modern take on how class boundaries break down when sex itself, divorced from any idea of permanent encounter, or even, from love, is engaged in for its own sake

So there have been several adaptations of the play setting it in the gay community, a production with characters with a range of sexual orientation, and productions where the ‘class-levelling’ encounters were differently expressed, so, for example instead of Schnitzler’s ‘servant’ and ‘master’, the power dynamic could be expressed using more contemporary ideas of who has power and who doesn’t. There have also been re-writings or adaptations of the piece – for example, the British playwright David Hare, in his version The Blue Room. There have also been musicals based on Schnitzler’s play!

Nicole Kidman and Iain Glen in David Hare’s version of La Ronde, The Blue Room, 1998, Donmar Warehouse

I have to admit I did struggle with reading the play – far more than the first two novels I read in ‘Reading the Twentieth’ – (Theodore Dreiser’s wonderful Sister Carrie, and Colette’s remarkably free spirited look at the sexuality of young girls, Claudine at School). Schnitzler reads as quite dated. Not to mention a little coy. I don’t know how much translation (Stephen Unwin and Peter Zombory-Moldovan are both credited as translators and writers of the excellent introduction) itself is responsible, and how much is a kind of more dated quality in spoken language, particularly when something about class is being suggested by the use of slang. Using original slang can lose punch. Trying to update specific language can still sound peculiar. Certainly, a play depends on far more than merely words upon a page, but some plays seem to leap more easily into how they might look and sound, when read silently..

So, for example, in this translation, in the first encounter, (Prostitute, Soldier) the Soldier says to the Prostitute at one point ‘Give us a snog’ – so, fair enough, language has been modernised…..except that, a little later the Prostitute says ‘At least give me sixpence for the housekeeper’ and, when he runs off without paying, her language is restrained, her curses mild : ‘You scum! Bastard!’ The mismatches irritated me.

Gustave Klimt, The Kiss

What I did find, far more fascinating than the play itself on the page, was that excellent introduction in this edition, which looks not only at Schnitzler himself, and this play in particular, but at the politics, society and culture of Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, and examines, for example, the popularity of the sentimentalism of Strauss’s waltzes, Lehar’s operettas on the one hand, and the disturbing, more challenging and unsettling ‘new’ music as defined by Mahler and Schoenberg on the other. In the visual arts, a Viennese variant of Art Nouveau was emerging – as seen in the work of Klimt; Egon Schiele was also painting, and there is a frank eroticism in the work of both artists. Sensuality up front, as in La Ronde. There is also, in the music, in the art, and in La Ronde, an underlying anxiety, a melancholy – it is that ‘ring of bright hair about the bone’, the ticking clock, the impermanence of it all – and Schnitzler himself, in a diary entry, links love and death together

Each relationship carries its death right from the birth, just as people do

Lest this all sound too gloomy, there is also, quite clearly, a playfulness in the encounters, and I suspect the best productions will contain the idea of a kind of dance between each couple, a flirtatious game of seduction, deception, dishonesty. The sex-cheating-death-for-a-moment is subtext rather than smacking the audience in the head from the off

Egon Schiele The Embrace

Schinitzler himself, perhaps unsurprisingly, as he had originally been a doctor, was a Viennese, and clearly interested in the mismatch between our conscious structures and our unconscious drives, corresponded with Freud, another Viennese, also Jewish, who of course has been a towering and central figure on ‘the Century of the Self’. Schnitzler, as a doctor, was interested in ‘psychological approaches’ in the treatment of physical ailments. Freud was full of admiration for Schnitzler, and how his writings , through imagination, were laying out much of what Freud’s books are about. Freud’s conclusions came from observations and encounters with clients, and the process of psychoanalysis

Part of the 3rd movement of Mahler’s Symphony No 4, composed 1899/1900

Part of my reason for reading this has been because my original choice of Dreiser, the desire for a lighter read (Colette) and the fact that Freud’s Interpretations of Dreams seemed to me to be far and away the most potentially interesting non-fiction book of 1900, did end up making a kind of reading pattern around women, and attitudes to their sexuality, and the powerful drives we cannot simply rationalise away, though that is indeed what we may strive to do – so, a mismatch between surface and what lies below the surface has seemed a common thread. Dreiser references some of what is being discussed in the Interpretation of Dreams, and talks at one point about pre-existing scientific theories of dreams, which Freud also spends a lot of time dissecting, before talking about his own findings.

La Ronde has certainly been an illuminating 1900 piece, though, of course, a slightly controversial one to pin to a specific year, given its stop start, stop start history both on the page and in performance

La Ronde, translated by Unwin, Zombory-Moldovan NHB digital edition UK
La Ronde, translated by Unwin, Zombory-Moldovan NHB digital edition USA

A READING THE TWENTIETH POST – 1900 : FICTION – PLAY – IN TRANSLATION