W. B. Yeats: Chameleon of Genius

Abstract

He was difficult (perhaps impossible) to know well. If we were merely ‘willing ears’ to M, we were even fainter apparitions to Yeats, as when, having talked to a lady for an hour, he politely peered forward and asked, ‘Am I speaking to Mrs Podmore or Mrs Dryhurst?’ He must have surprised many acquaintances. For instance, one evening at Edmund Dulac’s he said that the News of the World was his favourite English newspaper ‘because it reports the actions of men and women, not the babble of politicians’. A moment later he challenged his host (and me) to name any detective story which he had not read. He had also much more humour than most of his devotees would have expected. On the same evening he told us how once when he was walking down Grafton Street with James Stephens they passed a dog. ‘After a few more steps,’ said Yeats, ‘Stephens exclaimed, “I’m sorry, Yeats. I must go back and pat that dog. You see, I am a sort of honorary dog.” ’ And I have a letter¹ in which the poet records that in a Paris hotel George Moore, disturbed by the presence of a mouse, detected the creature’s hiding-place, took up his shot-gun, and sat for a long time in front of the hole in the wainscot, hoping to fire at the mouse.

Extracted from Some I Knew Well (London: Phoenix House, 1951) pp. 98–100.