The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, vol. 12: John Sherman and Dhoya. - book reviews

In this graceful and meticulously edited volume, two early stories by W. B. Yeats--John Sherman and Dhoya--assume their position in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, the 14-volume definitive edition of Yeats's corpus of poems, plays, essays, stories, criticism, autobiography, and visionary writings. The stories were experiments that Yeats undertook early in his career, before his first book of poems appeared in 1889 (although they were published, pseudonymously, in 1891), and are primarily of interest as such. Although published together, the stories are vastly dissimilar: John Sherman is a realistic novelette with a contemporary (late nineteenth century) setting; Dhoya is written as if it were a legend handed down from ancient times and thus anticipates Yeats's retellings of folktales from the west of Ireland and his elaborations of Celtic myths in poems and plays.

John Sherman is one of Yeats's few efforts (outside voluminous correspondence) at writing that reveals more than it hides. Unlike the slippery voice of his stories and essays, the brooding vacillation of his poetry, or the ritualistic impersonality of his plays, the narrative is realistic and quasi-autobiographical The protagonist, a dreamy young man from the west of Ireland, finds his life changed forever by his decision to try to accommodate the world by moving to London, working for a living, and finding a wealthy woman to marry. John Sherman anticipates Yeatsian ideas such as the division between Self and Anti-Self, the superiority of rural Ireland over London, and the distinction between the poetic (or Romantic) and the prosaic (or Classical) modes. Yeats's tendency to dwell upon pairs of opposites is a controlling--indeed, overused--structural device, defining characters, setting, scenes, and theme.

John's slender character is enriched if readers will commit the autobiographical fallacy and watch for such elements as his tendency to think of himself as divisible into two opposing parts (in good part by comparing himself to William Howard, his friend and rival), his sexual anxieties, or his escapist leanings as comments upon the young Yeats. We may, for example, imagine that John's varying emotions indicate poetic leanings and watch John's homesick imagination recall "a little islet called Innisfree," then "dream of going away to that islet and building a wooden hut there . . . and going out at morning to see the island's edge marked by the feet of birds." In 1888, soon after Yeats finished the story, he copied out an early version of his poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" for a friend, commenting that "In my story I make one of the characters when ever he is in trouble long to go away and live alone on that Island--an old day dream of my own. Thinking over his feelings I made these verses about them" (The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 1: 120-21).

Dhoya, the story of a fierce giant and his faery lover, is far more characteristic of Yeats's later prose and as such, arguably more important. In its spare, rhythmic narrative, one hears the impersonal bardic voice that Yeats would perfect in his treatment of Cuchulain, Dierdre, Fergus, and other figures from the Irish heroic age. One would never mistake for any other writer's work this story of an angry hero and his other-worldly mistress ending with a game of chess and death by riding into the sea, with its themes of the conflict between the world of change and passion and the eternal but sterile land of Tir-na-n-Og, the Country of the Young.

Richard Finneran, whose 1969 edition of the stories has long been standard, has almost completely reworked his apparatus, removing most of the interpretive elements of his earlier introduction and notes and adding many annotations of direct references in the text. Many of the new notes, those explaining Irish place names like Teelin or Tory Island, for example, are most helpful, and much is new and interesting in the publishing history that Finneran traces in the new introduction. I miss some of his critical comments from the earlier work, although I appreciate the desire to produce an edition as barren of idiosyncrasy as possible. And I wonder whether Finneran has been somewhat overcareful in his choice not to assume a "common body of knowledge," as he explains in his introduction, so that he finds himself telling readers of literature in English that the Virgin is "The Virgin Mary, mother of Christ in the Christian religion" or that the Thames is "the principal river in London." But perhaps in an edition that will be the standard for some time these precautions are worth taking.

Georgia State University                   Margaret Mills Harper
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