John Sherman and Dhoya E-Book

William Butler Yeats

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1990

Beschreibung

John Sherman and Dhoya, novella and story, are among the earliest of W.B. Yeats's published compositions, begun at his father's prompting when the young poet was living in London in 1888. John Sherman is a poignant and delightful narrative that dramatizes the predicament of a young man in love, troubled by his senses. It is complexly autobiographical, projecting the poet's Self and Anti-self through the contrasted personalites of Sherman and Howard, exalting a yearned-for Sligo in the west of Ireland at the expense of an alien English metropolis. Dhoya is a wonder tale of the heroic age, also set in Sligo, blending Irish mythology with local legend, and anticipating the Celtic Twighlight stories of 1893 and the late Byzantium poems. Published first in 1891 and again in 1908, John Shermand Dhoya last appeared in America in 1969. This text followed that of the first edition and is accompanied by an Afterword by Eve Patten.

Leseprobe

John Sherman & Dhoya

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY Eve Patten

THE LILLIPUT PRESS 1990

Contents

Title Page

Editor’s Preface

JOHN SHERMAN

Part I John Sherman leaves Ballah

Part II Margaret Leland

Part III John Sherman revisits Ballah

Part IV The Rev. William Howard

Part V John Sherman returns to Ballah

DHOYA

Afterword: A Family Romance

Eve Patten

Copyright

Editor’s Preface

JohnSherman&Dhoya was first published in the Pseudonym Library (under the name Ganconagh) in 1891, reissued in 1908 with the author’s name attached, and published in a scholarly American edition in 1969. The title has a bewitching quality; while it may appear to refer to a single work, in fact it draws together the title of two separate tales, each of them named after a central male figure. Yeats never admitted either of the tales to any of his prose collections, and they have long been virtually inaccessible. The present edition uses the text of 1891, and readers with a penchant for bibliographical and textual arcana are directed to the meticulous apparatus of Richard J. Finneran’s 1969 publication.

With this reissue, the ETCH series moves forward into a new era of Irish publishing, which one may call the post-copyright era. Since the last day of 1989, the work of W. B. Yeats is no longer “protected” by the laws controlling intellectual property. “Protected” is given in mildly critical quote-marks because, while the copyright law did indeed protect texts against abuse, it also discouraged and even prevented their free circulation. In the present instance, it should be emphasized that Mr Michael Yeats generously approved our wish to republish his father’s early fiction even before the formal expiry of legal protection.

The point about copyright is made because the new conditions in which Yeats may be read will radically alter our view of the writer and his significance. No longer will the reader have to turn to those imposing and expensive hardback volumes by means of which Macmillan of London gather Yeats’s prose into a number of very curious compendia. Individual works can reappear on their own, to raise questions for reconsideration outside the intimidating categories of the publishers’ canon. As it happened Macmillan never published either of the two pieces which Ganconagh/Yeats issued together in the Pseudonym Library. We suggest that the reason for this omission lies in the mutual cancellation which links one tale, JohnSherman, to the other, Dhoya.

By concentrating on the father-son relationship in JohnSherman, Eve Patten’s elegant and informative essay raises several important questions even in its title. Freudian psychoanalysis names as “the family romance” a pattern of behaviour in which the subject persistently believes that his parents (one or both) are not the real, biological father or mother but mere step-parents who have ousted a far more distinguished (but concealed) parentage. Beethoven’s sustained and futile attempts to prove that he was born, not in December 1770 (as all the records proved) but in December 1772, should not be dismissed as a vain effort to reduce his age by twenty-four months: a half-articulated search for an alternative parentage was at work. In the writer’s case, unlike the musician’s, such alternative can be accommodated in the very material of the subject’s art. In Yeats’s early life Father was ever-active, Mother a virtual recluse; in JohnSherman, a father is marginalized while a mother reclaims centre stage.

Although the fiction appears to be an exceptional item in Yeats’s canon, it may now assume its due significance. Like his near-contemporary James Joyce, Yeats suffered the unusual difficulty of having as father a man who had already broken with conventional pieties and allegiances. Both Sherman and Dedalus experience some frustration in engineering an Oedipal revolt without appearing to affiliate with a pre-paternal authority. In each fiction, an uncle obliges by supplying dullness personified as a practice target for the would-be slayer of an errant father – Uncle Charles in APortraitoftheArtist and Uncle Michael in the present case.

Seen in this light, the complementary relation of JohnSherman to Dhoya becomes clearer. One story is set with whimsical precision in Sligo (under the name Ballah) and London of the 1890s: the other romps with undisguised pleasure in a prehistoric Ireland where the Bay of Ballah provides a solitary point of orientation. The second tells of a ferocious and powerful giant, abandoned on the coast by Formorians who had previously tried to harness him to their galley-ships. Dhoya is thus Solitary Man, parentless or – as the Greeks would say – autochthonic, born of the earth. Though this primary male rules the roost, the spectral woman who lures him and who is stolen from him by a fellow-spectre never comes under his sway. Dhoya, within the two-tale structure of the 1891 volume, fills the absence of Sherman’s father with a revealing exaggeration of maleness and solitude. Father is readmitted as a figure of unprecedented antiquity, an aboriginal so to speak, regal in his solitude and power, and yet untouched in sexual communion. Is this the progenitor whom Ganconagh sought? If so, it is a paradoxical and even impossible case in that Dhoya is solitary, virgin, terminal. The shade of John Butler Yeats may blench at that, for a classic instance of literary revenge – author upon patron, son upon father – must be suspected.

The unexpectedly harsh judgment on the eighteenth century – “the squalid century” – may officially be a character’s (Rev. William Howard) before it is the author’s, but it deserves consideration alongside Yeats’s more often cited opinions of the Augustan age. It is answered promptly by Sherman himself with a defence of small town life which has implications for Yeats’s politics – “every man one meets is a class”. Postmodernists, who dislike talk of history as much as they pretend to talk politics, will leap at the opportunity to show how Yeats’s novella (or tale or romance or whatever it is) proves the non-universality of Oedipus or even its non-existence. Postmodernism would certainly improve its status if it managed to prove anything. The availability once more of this intriguing early work should encourage several kinds of reassessment of Yeats, in which the postmodernists are welcome to play their part.

JOHN SHERMAN

PART I

JOHNSHERMANLEAVESBALLAH

I

IN the west of Ireland, on the 9th of December, in the town of Ballah, in the Imperial Hotel there was a single guest, clerical and youthful. With the exception of a stray commercial traveller, who stopped once for a night, there had been nobody for a whole month but this guest, and now he was thinking of going away. The town, full enough in summer of trout and salmon fishers, slept all winter like the bears.

On the evening of the 9th of December, in the coffee-room of the Imperial Hotel, there was nobody but this guest. The guest was irritated. It had rained all day, and now that it was clearing up night had almost fallen. He had packed his portmanteau: his stockings, his clothes-brush, his razor, his dress shoes were each in their corner, and now he had nothing to do. He had tried the paper that was lying on the table. He did not agree with its politics.

The waiter was playing an accordion in a little room over the stairs. The guest’s irritation increased, for the more he thought about it the more he perceived that the accordion was badly played. There was a piano in the coffee-room; he sat down at it and played the tune correctly, as loudly as possible. The waiter took no notice. He did not know that he was being played for. He was wholly absorbed in his own playing, and besides he was old, obstinate, and deaf. The guest could stand it no longer. He rang for the waiter, and then, remembering that he did not need anything, went out before he came.

He went through Martin’s Street, and Peter’s Lane, and turned down by the burnt house at the corner of the fish-market, picking his way towards the bridge. The town was dripping, but the rain was almost over. The large drops fell seldomer and seldomer into the puddles. It was the hour of ducks. Three or four had squeezed themselves under a gate, and were now splashing about in the gutter of the main street. There was scarcely any one abroad. Once or twice a countryman went by in yellow gaiters covered with mud and looked at the guest. Once an old woman with a basket of clothes, recognizing the Protestant curate’s locumtenens, made a low curtsey.

The clouds gradually drifted away, the twilight deepened and the stars came out. The guest, having bought some cigarettes, had spread his waterproof on the parapet of the bridge and was now leaning his elbows upon it, looking at the river and feeling at last quite tranquil. His meditations, he repeated, to himself, were plated with silver by the stars. The water slid noiselessly, and one or two of the larger stars made little roadways of fire into the darkness. The light from a distant casement made also its roadway. Once or twice a fish leaped. Along the banks were the vague shadows of houses, seeming like phantoms gathering to drink.

Yes; he felt now quite contented with the world. Amidst his enjoyment of the shadows and the river — a veritable festival of silence — was mixed pleasantly the knowledge that, as he leant there with the light of a neighbouring gas-jet, flickering faintly on his refined form and nervous face and glancing from the little medal of some Anglican order that hung upon his watch-guard, he must have seemed — if there had been any to witness — a being of a different kind to the inhabitants — at once rough and conventional — of this half-deserted town. Between these two feelings the unworldly and the worldly tossed a leaping wave of perfect enjoyment. How pleasantly conscious of his own identity it made him when he thought how he and not those whose birthright it was, felt most the beauty of these shadows and this river? To him who had read much, seen operas and plays, known religious experiences, and written verse to a waterfall in Switzerland, and not to those who dwelt upon its borders for their whole lives, did this river raise a tumult of images and wonders. What meaning it had for them he could not imagine. Some meaning surely it must have!

As he gazed out into the darkness, spinning a web of thoughts from himself to the river, from the river to himself, he saw, with a corner of his eye, a spot of red light moving in the air at the other end of the bridge. He turned towards it. It came closer and closer, there appearing behind it the while a man and a cigar. The man carried in one hand a mass of fishing-line covered with hooks, and in the other a tin porringer full of bait.

“Good evening, Howard.”

“Good evening,” answered the guest, taking his elbows off the parapet and looking in a preoccupied way at the man with the hooks. It was only gradually he remembered that he was in Ballah among the barbarians, for his mind has strayed from the last evening gnats, making circles on the water beneath, to the devil’s song against “the little spirits” in “Mefistofele.” Looking down at the stone parapet he considered a moment and then burst out —

“Sherman, how do you stand this place — you who have thoughts above mere eating and sleeping and are not always grinding at the stubble mill? Here everybody lives in the eighteenth century — the squalid century. Well, I am going to-morrow, you know. Thank Heaven, I am done with your grey streets and grey minds! The curate must come home, sick or well. I have a religious essay to write, and besides I should die. Think of that old fellow at the corner there, our most important parishioner. There are no more hairs on his head than thoughts in his skull. To merely look at him is to rob life of its dignity. Then there is nothing in the shops but schoolbooks and Sunday-school prizes. Excellent, no doubt, for any one who has not had to read as many as I have. Such a choir! such rain!”

“You need some occupation peculiar to the place,” said the other, baiting his hooks with worms out of the little porringer. “I catch eels. You should set some night-lines too. You bait them with worms in this way, and put them among the weeds at the edge of the river. In the morning you find an eel or two, if you have good fortune, turning round and round and making the weeds sway. I shall catch a great many after this rain.”

“What a suggestion! Do you mean to stay here,” said Howard, “till your mind rots like our most important parishioner’s?”

“No, no! To be quite frank with you,” replied the other, “I have some good looks and shall try to turn them to account by going away from here pretty soon and trying to persuade some girl with money to fall in love with me. I shall not be altogether a bad match, you see, because after she has made me a little prosperous my uncle will die and make me much more so. I wish to be able always to remain a lounger. Yes, I shall marry money. My mother has set her heart on it, and I am not, you see, the kind of person who falls in love inconveniently. For the present —”

“You are vegetating,” interrupted the other.