It was not for the sake of seeking his name in print for the first time that he had composed it [a letter to the Irish Times advocating Home Rule]. Not because in his heart of hearts - though what really went on there it would still take him years to grasp - he had any great interest in Irish, or any other kind of nationalism. What was behind it was an instinct, far from conscious, to cut hiumself off from the world of his cousins once for all. [2]

Iseult was only too ready to play the part he’d assigned for her; he’d made a false move right at the start. He had placed his beloved in an unreal, Yeatsian world, instead of trying to take her into his which, however immature, was a very different one. [16]

[H to Isuelt:] “Dishonour is what becomes a poet, not titles or acclaim.” [17] “A poet must be a countercurrent ot the flow around him. That’s what poetry is: the other way of feeling and looking at the world. [...]”. [17]

He didn’t like her easy assumption of the absolute rightness and moral purity of the nationalist cause. His own feelings were confused. He honoured the 1916 men, as he did the Russians, particularly the poets Essenin and Mayokovsky (of whome he’d heard but hadn’t read yet) as revolutionaries and, above all, as having suffered calumny and derision. / What really attracted him were not the doings of patriots but the reports of certain crimes he read in the papers. He delighted in hearing of riots, no matter where, in civil disturbances, even in bank robberies; also in assassinations and anything that diminished or threw doubt on authority. He hardly distinguished revolutionary acts from those committted by criminals as long as the result was like that of a stone dropped in a mill pond. [20]

He didn’t ask her why she had chosen a boy like himself [24] with nothing to recommend him, immersed in his separate dream, idle, negatively disposed towards her mother (and ot much else besides that she held in esteem [...]), poor, whose father had died of delirium tremens and whose own mental capabilities had been seriously questioned by most of the masters at his various schools. [25]

The civil war created doubt and confusion, and thus a climate in which the poet could breathe more easily. In stead of uniting in a conformity of outlook that had to appeal to dull-witted idealists as well as those with intelligence, it divided people. And once the process of division had started, H foresaw it continuing, and subdivisions taking place, especially on the Republican side, perhaps creating small enclaves of what he looked on as true revolutionaries whose aim had less to do with Irish independence than in casting doubt on traditional values and judgements. (p.73-74; quoted in Harmon, 1990, pp.17.)

Was this the moment that they [girls on the commandeered train], like him, had been waiting for, when familiar habits and conventions were swept away and nobody was safe who didn't want to be, nothing was disallowed to the daring, and whatever could be imagined could be made come true? (p.85.)

He certainly didn't share their [the girls’] enthusiasm for de Valera. De Valera was one of the most reactionary of the leaders on either side. He had an integrity and vision that the Free State lot lacked, but this merely ensured that he wouldn't compromise on the national issue; as a revolutionary leader, in the sense that interested H, he had nothing to offer. (p.85.)

[On Yeats’s Nobel Prize:] [...] a sell out, letting them hang the ribbon with the bloody medal on it round his neck. If he wrote the sort of poetry that told the truth he’d be more likely to have the other kind of noose slipped over it’ [...] H reflected on what becoming a writer meant. He believed it was being able to exteriorise in fiction or poetry the intense but cloudy and otherwise inexpressible intimations and insights that obsessed him. (?p.96.)

He took to serious reading again [...] What attracted him were the lives of those writers and painters he admired. He read everything about them he could lay his hands on wiht feverish intensity an a kind of impatience as though looking for a particular message. And in several cases he came on what he’d subconsciously expected, experiencing an almost unbearable excitement, and believing [130] himself on the verge of a vital revelation that he was not yet quite ripe for. / From these he turned to the mystics, of which Iseult had a wide range. Sooon he was absorbed by states of mind that appealed to him first because they ran counter to the familiar ones. He began to put his whole heart into trying to share this kind of consciousness, quite strange, in which intense emotion was joined to a daring imagination that seemed natural to him, though it was rare in contemporary literature. / It became clear to H that t stody these accounts profitably wasn’t an academic exercise. He had to expose himself to them, and this involved a turning from other activities and preoccupations. (pp.130-31.)

From the first an air of disrepute and coming disaster had clung to him. The socially integrated sensed it and avoided him. Those who were normal and sound, firmly established, happily married, honored, justified, appeared to wound him by their very presence. He never got over the general indifference to his all-or-nothing approaches. (p.133.)

Christ had held the most forward position of His time for several hours. And it would fall to the condemned, the sick-unto-death and perhaps a handful of unregarded artists to defend these areas of consciousnes in the coming days as best they could. / Not that these reflections reconciled H to what he saqw and heard of the functioning of the local church, and of the average priest with his stomachful of indigestible dogmatics and a half-starved mind, self-poisoned by the complementary toxins of love of authority and fear of its loss. [140]

When an invitation came from Mrs. Yeats asking them to spend a few days at the Yeats house in Dublin, seeing Iseult’s face brighten at the chance of some intelligent company, H didn’t voice his own disinclination to have his seclusion broken again so soon. / They were given, and H was conscious of the honor, Yeats’s bedroom in the tall Georgian house on Merrion Square, with reproductions of Blake’s wraithlike figures on the walls: a mother and her little ones floating, upright and elegant, down the River of Life; an angel leaning precariously from her heavenly steed to gather in her arms a whimpering babe. On the outside of the door Georgie Yeats bad pinned a note: “Willie, this is now the Ruarks’ room.” (p.141; for longer extract on FS’s stay with WBY, see attached.]

‘The story [of pilgrims in a bus who have a “miraculous” escape] afforded H another depressing glimpse into the kind of religiosity in which many of these people seemed to find all they needed in the way of an image of God. It struck him that their central pulses, whose vibrancy determines the depth of men’s responses, had a mechanical tick. Set to a parochial clock, they went tick-tock, piously recording the do’s and don ‘ts for each day of the week, while around the cosmos the lingering echo of the original upheaval was merging with the first rumblings of the final bang. (p.146.)

He started reading Ulysses. From the first page he felt the new impact, though it wasn’t till Bloom appeared at his moring chores that H experienced a similar shift in his angel of vision to that whcih had taken place when he’d filled the turn from the mountain stream and had a baptismal bath. / No write, as far as he knew, had ever before stooped low enough through the portal of sense in order to register the tangible feel of life. At the other end of the scale, Dostoevsky kept his characters at the highest levels of consciousness, constantly in a spiritual crisis, while existing in a a kind of vacuum, sketchily housed and inadequately fed and clothed, without earning a living, washing, shopping, or making love. / Not that H found in Ulysses what he was seeking. Joyce’s central nerve was a marvellous compound of the physical and intellectual, but in its pulsations H didn’t find what he was listening for. [...] certain waves of disturbance traveling through outer space and echoing in the psyche, such as, at one point in history, the Gospels had seemed to record. / Joyce had a beautiful flexible style forged, in the first place no doubt, as his own interior communication system, with which to explore familiar but (till then) largely unrecorded [155] areas of consciousness. But, however much H admired him, they were not the areas to which H’s own inner nerve responded with the kind of excited beat that he craved to have set in motion. (pp.155-56).

Joyce fascinated and repelled H. He felt that at the heart of Joyce was a pool of acidity in which certain fragile treasures, prized by H for their very insubstantiality, were completely destroyed. (p.156; given in parenthesis.)

[Reading a booklet on Blessed Bernadette Soubirous:] He became absorbed in the story that was told in that limpid tone that recalled to H the pure, near-manic clarity that accompanies states of possession experienced by poets, mystics, and madmen, and which he himself responded to obsessively. For him, it was the song of the hidden psyche, inaudible to well-balanced, normally functioning brains, announcing its kinship to angels or demons as in thepoem of Emy Brontë’s [“He comes with Western winds ...”; 162 ] / There were passages in the Gospels with these peculiar limpid notes ofthe psyche’s secret song, like the description of the disciples coming from the lake in the evening and slowly recognising the risen Jesus tending a fire on the shore. [...] Bernadette had interpreted her vision according to images available to her. What fascinated H was the fact that, in pite of first impressions, whether because of a genetic variation, an abnormality of the structure of her brain cells or some other breach in the defensive thought-mechanism, signals had been received from that area of the subconscious with which there is all too rare communication. [...; quotes: “I lifted my eyes and saw a mass of branches ... behind these branches ... I saw immediately afterwards a white girl, no bigger than I ... I saw the girl smiling at me avec beaucoup de grace.”] (pp.162-63.)

With Iseult safely pregant, H gave himself up to his novel. [...] In order to enter the level of consciousness from where he knew a novel must come, he looked up old notebooks in which he’d put down phrases that had, by evoking deep responses, produced a semtrance in him in which the surface mind was stilled: “His calling isolates the artist, as does his crime the criminal.”’ [...] He became idle, lay for hours on his bed doing nothing. Then suddenly one morning he restarted writing, haunted again by imagined situations of isolation and disaster for his [173] two protagonists, finished his book in feverish haste and sent it to a publisher. (pp.173-74.)

Jews struck H as having an admirably skillful way of handling the messy, jagged-edged, borken mechanics of life, piecing together and straightening out what they could and making the best of what they couldn ‘t. Concepts of perfection and abstract ideals were things they didn’t indulge in, which was partly what made them reliable critics both of society and art, and at times, original artists themselves. (p.195; in the context of H’s enquiries with a solicitor about a possible divorce.)

[H:] “It’s the writer who’s one with his work, and doesn’t create it as a thing apart, as a beautiful artifice outside himself, as, say, Synge does, who says the things that now matter most.” (p.145.)

[Quotes WBY: “What portion in the world can the artist have ... &c.”] Surely Yeats had never been much immersed in the “common dream”. But he was not sure if he understood the poem correctly. The dream, common or uncommon, needed dreaming with exhaustiveintensity and in agonising detail if a write was to have something worthwhile to report. No important book was every produced by trying; it came about as the by-product of an all-obsessive and perilous inward journey. (p.185; US 1971 Edn., p.178; London Edn. p.185.)

He’d guessed for sometime [sic] now that it was only through surviving perilous situations, such as his father, Lane and the others hadn’t survived, that he’d gain the insights he needed to reach whatever degree of psychic and imaginative depths he was capable of, and be able to communicate these in shis fiction. (p.225.)

Was there no contemporary writer of the kind of Baudelaire, Poe, Keats, Melville, Emily Brontë, Dostoevsky, Proust, or Kafka, to name a few, who because of alcoholism, sexual excess, tuberculosis, venereal disease, rejected love, condemnation, and banishment, as well as even more extreme isolating factors unnamed and unknown, acting on ultra-responsive neurological systems, had been driven beyond the place where the old assumptions are still acceptable? Nobody whose imagination had been so extended by personal disaster of one kind or another to glimpse beyond the present limit of awareness? (Black List/Section H, p.232; also quoted in Harmon, 1990, pp.19.)

In the few moments between wagering half the sum he’d received that morning and the traps flying open, he’d hoped tha the tension would fleetingly expand the frontiers of his thought so that certain things about himself that his work, and especially its direction, that no amount of quiet meditation could illuminate, might become clear. This had semiconsciously been what had finally induced him to make the bet. (p.244.)

A communication from an underexplored area of consciousness, reached partly by accident and partly because of earlier traumatic experiences, addressed to anyone who might be somewhere in the same neighborhood, telling of the exciting shifts that take place there in familiar perspectives, such a piece of imaginative ficiton, though with its own inherent consistency, wasn’t meant to stand up to a public examination by literary accountants. / Meanwhile a caller had come to Dineen, introduced himself as Herr Scheffler, and invited H to go to Germany to give readings from his novels under the auspices of a body called die Deutsche Akademie. Iseult approved [...] (p.250.)

[In confessional:] “[...] I’m not temperamentally a skeptic, Father. My mind isn’t analytical and is open about the nature of reality, including the possibility of a find of super-spirit crossing the otherwise barred threshold of the combined wonderland and cesspool of my consciousness. fAnd for a time the account of Jesus’ extraordinary end, from the Last Supper to the Crucifixion, seemed to me to suggest the He indeed might be such a spirit. Of course there have been others who experienced even more extended periods of horror, but there are no reports of anybody with a neurological makeup so receptive and vulnerable who seems to have gone deliberately as far into the depths with the expressed purpose of gaining admission into other minds and hearts. And even if this is looked on as a myth, for me, as a writer who believes in the truth of certain fictions, that is irrelevant.” (p.253.)

ֻWhat I need, Father, isn’t the Christ at present preached in the Church but intimations of a spirit more (at least imaginatively and potentially) perverse than myself, one that has had the experiences I can only guess and tremble at, who bears not only the signs of the stigmata but of the most terrible traumata as well. [...]” (p.254.)

[...] however he rebelled against what generally passed as the acceptable norm, as he’d told the monk, his was not an unbelieving psyche. What it needed, he thought, was a concept of reality deep enough to lose itself in. (p.257.)

Was his being here a betrayal of them [Jews like Gollancz, et al.]? / The message that reached his conscience from his deepest nature, from what he felt were the genes on which his being was constructed, suggested that he had to experience, in his own probably small degree, some of what they suffered, and, on one level, even more, because he could not claim their innocence. He had long suspected that his destiny bound him to them in a manner more obscure than that of their present defenders such as Stroud. He also realized that he would go to certain lengths in association with their persecutors, in violent reaction against the mores of home, thus ensuring that his condemnation would not, unlike theirs, arouse any sympathy. (p.270.)

As Thomas Mann, the most apparently respectable of writers, had understood, there was an element of what vould be considered criminality in the intensely imaginative mind. But the artist’s guilt or innocence could never be stricktly determined, not by himself and certainly not by those in authority. Perhaps the quality of his work was the only real test of the state of a writer’s psyche. (p.274.)

Extract from H’s War Diary: “Time: Deepest winter, 1940. Situation: uncertain, compromised, companionless, cold to freezing, stump of broken front tooth needing attention. Alternatively: Alone and free, passionate involved in my own living fiction, imaginative participation unimpaired, unpredictable possibilities.” (p.308.)

[William Joyce/Lord Haw Haw:] “Germany Calling.” The tone was that of retribution being pronounced on a proud and stiff-necked people who had got away for too long with the role of the chosen ones. / Lord Haw Haw’s polemics left H cold. It wasn’t the political or military events that concerned him but the possible inner revolution that he hoped the war might bring about. Just as he had hoped long ago at school that the Russian Revolution and, later, the Irish Civil War, might be the first rumblings of a psychic earthquake. (p.317.)

[H to Capt. Manderville:] “The last thing I can, or want to do, Captain, is justify my being here in moral terms. Whatever the motives for my coming here, and they were complex and fra from pure, I’ve begun to realise that it’s here in the company of the guilty that with my peculiar and, if you like, flawed kind of imagination, I belong. The situation I’ve involved myself in, however disastrous for my reputation, and perhaps because it is disastrous, gives me a chance of becoming the ony sort of writer it’s in my power to be.” / [Manderville:] “I’d understand it if you told me you’d be at home among the defeated but surely not among these victorious brutes.” (p.331.)

the vain attempt to sow doubts in the minds of most of them [his Englische Seminar students] closed and impervious, of the students about the English writers with their orthodox insular mores and emotional poverty they’d learned to admire, and an equally unsuccessful effort to persuade them that it was the deeply disturbed and disturbing ones like Emily Brontë, [339] Keats, at his peak, and Lawrence, whom H was at last ready for, were the true soothsayers. (pp.339-40.)

Here he was, her prophet [Halka’s], as she sometimes called him in the biblical terminology that came natural to her, and what could he say to her? It wasn’t a matter of the death that comes from illness, old age, or even accident, in which the spirit is given a little time to make its retreat. It was destruction, utter and instantaneous, with no time for the psyche to sniff the oncoming of death and lay itself down in its own bed or whatever rags or straw it had gathered against that hour. This psyche, as the consciousness thought of itself, imagination’s unique locale, its beautiful pattern of roots in the deoxyribonucleic acid, drawing up its “vast ideas” from deep in the past, could it be annulled, reduced to a spot of slime on a collapsing wall? / Not that he felt any resentment against those who were doing the bombing. It was the apparent vulnerability of the nucleus at the ore of the cosmic structure that appalled him. / Though apropos of the Allied bombing, an English air-force officer whom he met in a French camp after the war told him they hadn’t been allowed to bomb the gas chambers in the concentration camps because the evidence of the enemy’s guilt was far to valuable to victory. (p.375.)

[...] the prohibited Thomas Mann and Kafka side by side with the unbanned but even more subversive Keats on top of the rugs. (p.376.)

[Hitler’s suicide:] Later, when he ponderd on the actual facts, he tried to gauge the degree of despair that had preceded the suicide; despair and disaster fascinated H in direct ration to his recoil from moral jubilation and victory. Had Hitler been capable of sinking at the very last, to the incommunicable darkness of the irredeemably lost? This, H believed, was a prerogative of certain drunkards and drug addicts, condemned criminals, and inmates of asylums, bestowing on them a mysterious grace that nobody who is still in some kind of contact with his fellowmen can imagine. H believed that Hitler’s experience in the bunker had been shared by few other men. He had [391] fallen through a spectrum of mental states from one of high manic exaltation to a realization of utter disaster in a short space of time. he’d been forced to the confines of what thought can bear by a calamity that in its outward magnitude and personal culpabiity had surely no counterpart. / What could a human being in that unique and terrible situation not have achieved, outside all norms of experience, by a prfound acceptance of his own ruin, so horrible and irreversible because it had involved millions of others? This was a supposition dependent upon the correctness of H’s view of pain, guilt, and disaster as offering a means of escape from self-imprisonment. The chcnes of Hitler having taken it were, of course, almost nil. [It was not for H to rule out completely.] Instead of preparing himself for the humanly inconceivable, saving miracle he had almost certianly spent his last hours accusing his own suffering people of betrayal. (p.391-92.)

Had he been born with this preference for the company of outlaws? Was it not his task as a writer, not to justify this to his critics but to relate it, if he could, to a wider kind of consciousness? (p.402.)

The music of Schumann, Chopin, and Listz, especially Chopin’s “Barcarole” and the “Ballade”, Opus 47 - he kept the flimsy, single-sheet program and studied it afterwards - introduced him, as previously only certain works of fiction had done, to new states of perception. Back to the cold room and, hunger forgotten, into bed where her [Halka’s] body became a sexual extension of the music and sensations were spiritual-sensual, sacred-obscene, complete as never before. (p.416.)

Comment: The text leaves one with the final feeling that Stuart has not unravelled the sources of his own behaviour or the neurosis at the root of it, and that his preoccupation with the song of the Psyche is ultimately a blind. Certainly the regular and almost systematic equation between Christ and Keats, Dostoyevsky and Hitler, civil-war republicans and Christian mystics, poets and die-hards seems irrevocably flawed at the ordinary ethical level - not to be compensated for by any appeal to the idea of the imagination, however ecstatic or exalted. [BS]