[...]
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.”
 “Otherwise you’d have him wandering in at any hour of the day or night,” she told them.
 On the very first evening at dinner H saw that if he was to contribute to the conversation, as the poet evidently expected him to, he’d have to emerge from his own preoccupations and think up the sort of things that would interest Yeats.
 As for Iseult, she was quite at home in the intellectual discussion; perhaps she should have married Yeats, but he’d have got on her nerves with his formal and deliberate ways, while H himself, idle and uncivilized, with his quiet and deceptive delinquency, still attracted her.
 Yeats was talking about the newly constituted state of which he was a Senator. The whole setup hadn’t come up to his expectations; he’d have liked, H saw, a role such as d’Annunzio was playing in relation to the new Mussolini government.
 “Would the people you fought for have made better rulers?” he asked H, turning on him his keen glance across the table, and then unfocusing him again and dropping his head as though awaiting some revealing words.
 Should H say that he hadn’t fought for anybody or anything, but in pursuit of an obscure impulse of his own which [141] had become somewhat clearer after he’d met and talked with Lane? Could he explain Lane to Yeats?
 “If you mean: would they also have imposed a censorship and forbidden divorce, I’m sure they would.”
 H caught Mrs. Yeats’s eye, glowing green below her coppery hair, her bracelets jingling as she raised her long-stemmed wineglass, and it struck him that she was the one who guessed some of his real feelings.
 H didn’t share the sense of outrage of Yeats and his fellow intellectuals at the censorship law. It was a matter of indifference to him. The Irish censorship would catch the smaller fish but if a really big one was to swim into view it would be set on by far more ferocious foes than any Irish ones.
 “If somebody somewhere writes a book which is so radical and original,” H announced, not looking at anyone in particular, “that it would burst the present literary setup wide open, that writer will be treated with a polite contempt by the critical and academic authorities that will discourage further mention of him. He’ll raise deeper, more subconscious hostility than sectarian ones and he’ll be destroyed far more effectively by enlightened neglect than anything we would do to him here.”
 Yeats had lifted his head and was regarding H intently. “You believe that the artist is bound to be rejected? You equate him with the prophet?”
 It was costing H a lot of nervous energy to formulate concepts for Yeats to take hold of. And, apart from that, he mustn’t forget he was a nobody in the literary world addressing a Nobel Prizewinner.
 “A poet may escape persecution because his vision is veiled from the literary arbiters, but the novelist who speaks more plainly is bound to scandalize them.”
 H caught what he thought was an appreciative smile on Georgic Yeats’s barbaric-looking, vivid, russet-tinged face in recognition of his adroit slipping out of the dilemma.
 H could only contribute to this kind of talk by allowing himself to get into a state of nervous fever in which his power of invention and improvisation came to his aid.
 That night, quite exhausted, he went to bed under the Samurai sword that hung above it, his thoughts madly racing. [142] He lay awake, being anyhow miles away from sleep, and prepared some largely imaginary anecdotes embodying unexpected and original-sounding comments on the kind of things that interested Yeats.
It ended by his being carried away by his own flights of fancy and pursuing them late into the night beyond the point where they could be used in conversation to his host, quite apart from the fact that Iseult, who clung to the factual, would be sure to interrupt with, “But, Luke, darling, whenever did all this happen?” (pp.141-43.)