Books: Prize Poet's Progress

DRAMATIS PERSONAE—W. B. Yeats—Macmillan ($2.50).

When a Dubliner is about to quote William Butler Yeats he stills his hearers and puts quotation marks in the air by raising his right hand as if to take an oath. Yeats himself never raises his voice above a faint chant. Absentminded, mystical, called the most complete type of fop that has ever appeared in literature, he has gone his dreamy way regardless of critical catcalls. has steadily grown in the estimation of Ireland and the world. Of the small, select number of first-rate modern poets, Yeats is certainly one. An old man now (70), he writes little new verse but indulges an oldster's privilege of reminiscence. Last week, in Dramatis Personae, he told of his part in the beginnings of an Irish National Theatre, a part that finally won him the role of Nobel Prizeman.

The two names Yeats chiefly honors are the late Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge, whose plays did as much as his own to make Ireland proud of the Abbey Theatre and the world aware of it. But the name that crops up oftenest is that of his early collaborator, onetime friend and longtime enemy, George Moore. To Lady Gregory, Yeats owed not simply a colleague's loyalty but a more personal debt. When he was a young man of 30 and she a widow of 45 they met, and she rescued him from the slough of "a miserable love affair" by taking him around to peasants' cottages, setting him to collect their folklore. She kept lending him money so that he could write what and how he pleased. Till he was nearly 50, Yeats's writing never brought him in more than £200 a year. Until she was 50 Lady Gregory never thought of writing herself; when she tried her hand at dialect plays she soon became the mainstay of the Abbey Theatre.

George Moore was as Irish as Yeats, but he had gone to seek his literary fortune abroad. When Yeats and his friends started their movement for a national theatre, Moore returned to help, and he and Yeats collaborated on a play. Moore admired Yeats but Yeats looked down on Moore, writes about him with a malice-sharpened pen. He accuses Moore of continual tarradiddles ("He was all self and yet had so little self that he would destroy his reputation, or that of some friend, to make his audience believe that the story running in his head at the moment had happened, had only just happened"). In appearance Moore was "insinuating, up-flowing, circulative, curvicular, pop-eyed ... a man carved out of a turnip, looking out of astonished eyes." He was preoccupied with women almost to "madness." In his pursuit of them he sometimes queered himself by saying the wrong thing. He once gloomily reported an unexpected failure, was told he must have been tactless, and admitted "I said I was clean and healthy and she could not do better."