Yeats and the Nobel speech

A new state is rarely founded by the men who write its laws. More often it is founded, decades earlier and without warrant, by a handful of poets and playwrights who decide that a country which has lost its language must be given a literature in its place. By the time the lawyers and the gunmen arrive, the imaginative ground has already been broken, and the politicians inherit a country whose terms have been set for them. The poet who lives long enough to see this happen is asked, sooner or later, to come forward and explain it.

THE SENATOR FROM SANDYMOUNT

He is fifty-eight years old. He was born at Sandymount on the thirteenth of June 1865, son of John Butler Yeats the portrait painter and Susan Pollexfen of Sligo, schooled in Hammersmith and on Harcourt Street and at the Metropolitan School of Art on Kildare Street, founder with Lady Augusta Gregory of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, founder with Lady Gregory and John Synge and Annie Horniman's purse of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, Senator of the Irish Free State by personal commission of W. T. Cosgrave's government since the fifteenth of December 1922, Nobel laureate in Literature as of the fourteenth of November last. The prize citation reads, in the Academy's French, son inspiration toujours élevée, qui, sous une forme hautement artistique, exprime l'esprit d'une nation entière. A nation entire. Forty years of work has been compressed into that phrase.

Forty years, and seven people in a room. The Irish Literary Society was constituted in 1888 at George Pollexfen's house in Rosses Point, his uncle's house above Sligo bay, with the mountain Ben Bulben flat against the northern sky. He was twenty-three. The country then was a province of another country, its language already three quarters gone, its theatre an importation from London. The argument with the older nationalists, the Young Ireland men whose verse was political ballad and nothing else, had begun there and had not stopped. He had set himself to win the argument by writing better than they did. He had won it, in the end, by outliving most of them.

NYBROKAJEN, THE FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER

Stockholm is in heavy cold. The harbour at Nybrokajen is locked in white. The Old Royal Academy of Music stands above the quay, its concert hall warmed against the snow, and in the upper green-room the air smells of pinewood and damp wool. It is twenty past seven. He has come up from Dublin via London on the sleeper and the steamer, arriving on Tuesday, and has drafted the lecture at the Hotel Continental over three days. George is with him in a long blue evening dress; she is thirty-one, his wife of six years, the medium through whom the Vision manuscripts have been arriving since 1917. She straightens the collar of his evening coat and says nothing, which is what he needs.

The typescript is on the table. He has revised the closing four paragraphs three times this afternoon in pencil. The lecture is titled The Irish Dramatic Movement. He has chosen the title deliberately. He could have spoken about his own poetry; that is what the Academy honours. He has chosen instead to speak about the theatre, because it is in the theatre that the literary movement met the country, and it is the country, not the poet, that the Academy has named in its citation.

THE GREEN-ROOM, SEVEN-TWENTY

Now the seconds dilate. There is, on the table, a country he is about to describe to a hall of Swedes who have not heard of most of its dead. The Civil War ended in May. Three thousand five hundred dead since January 1922. Seventy-seven anti-Treaty men executed in the past months under the Cosgrave Public Safety Act, some of whom he knew. Erskine Childers shot at Beggar's Bush on the twenty-fourth of November of last year, his son in the chair beside him at Senate meetings now. He is the Senator of a state that has been killing the friends of the state's poets for sixteen months. He cannot say this in Stockholm. He can say something harder, which is that the country which has done these things is, even so, a country he helped to call into being.

Augusta is at Coole. She wrote last week to say she was glad of the prize but believed privately that John Synge ought to have had it in 1907 if he had lived. Synge died in 1909, of Hodgkin's disease, aged thirty-seven, the year after the riots in the Abbey pit over The Playboy of the Western World. The prize cannot go to a man who is dead. The prize has come to the survivor, and the survivor is the man whose duty in the next forty-five minutes is to name the dead by their work. There is a calculation, simple enough, which he settles in the green-room as the bell sounds below: he will not claim that the writers made the state. He will claim that the writers and the gunmen were one movement, divided by accident of temperament, and that the Abbey Theatre is the room in which that movement first learned to speak. It is a claim large enough to honour Synge and small enough to be true. He folds the typescript once and goes down.

THE CONCERT HALL

The audience is the Nobel Banquet audience, about a hundred and eighty in white tie and orders, the Crown Prince of Sweden in the front row, the Swedish Academy ranged behind him. The lectern is plain. He delivers the lecture without notes from a single sheet, the closing peroration carried in memory. He speaks for forty-five minutes. He speaks of the founding of the Literary Theatre in 1899 in the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin, of the move to the Abbey in 1904, of Miss Horniman's money, of the riots over Synge in 1907 when the pit roared down the third act for a week and the police were called and Lady Gregory wired him in Aberdeen, audience broke up in disorder at the word shift. He speaks of the long quarrel with the older nationalists who wanted a theatre that flattered the country, and of his own refusal to give them one. He speaks of the dead: Synge by name, John O'Leary by name, the men of his own generation. He does not speak of the executed, who are a different roll, but the hall understands that the country he is naming has paid for itself.

He closes with the sentence he has revised three times this afternoon. I think when I make that boast for our Theatre, I would gladly include in it the part played by my friend Lady Gregory, but I am too well aware that this would be an injustice to the world's perfect knowledge of her own accomplishment; my country, and the world's, have given her her own boast. The audience stands.

COOLE, THE SAME EVENING

Coole Park is in Galway under a thin December rain. Lady Gregory is seventy-one. She is at the writing-table in the library, working at what will become the Coole journals, the Abbey company up from Dublin reading through The Pot of Broth in the drawing-room for the Christmas tour. Sara Allgood is one of them. Augusta has known since November what is happening tonight in Stockholm. She has not gone. She has written to George that the prize is rightly Willie's, that Synge ought to have had it long since, and that she is content. She turns the page. The candle gutters. In Stockholm at the same hour her name has just been spoken into the world's record by the man she made a playwright of, in a hall full of Swedes who will go home and read her plays in translation within a year. She does not know this yet. She closes the journal at the page and goes in to listen to the rehearsal.

THE MEDAL AND THE TOWER

The medal had been placed in his hand by King Gustaf V at the formal presentation on the tenth of December, the date of Alfred Nobel's death, which by tradition is the day of the award. The purse came to about seven thousand five hundred pounds, the equivalent of something near four hundred and thirty thousand pounds a century on. He spent it on a Norman tower-house at Gort in County Galway, four miles from Coole, a square keep above a stream with a thatched cottage at its foot. Thoor Ballylee. He had bought the ruin in 1917 for thirty-five pounds; the Nobel money let him finish the roof and the upper floors and turn it into a working house. The poems of the late period were written there: The Tower in 1928, The Winding Stair in 1933. The country he had described in Stockholm in December 1923, the country whose imagination had been constituted by the Abbey, settled into its institutions over the same decade. The Senate sat. The Free State became Éire in 1937. He resigned from the Senate in 1928 on grounds of health and devoted what was left to the work.

He died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera on the twenty-eighth of January 1939, seventy-three years old. He was buried at Roquebrune through the war years; his remains were brought home aboard the Irish naval service corvette Macha on the seventeenth of September 1948 and reinterred under his own epitaph at Drumcliffe churchyard in County Sligo, in the parish where his great-grandfather had been rector, within sight of the flat-topped mountain on which the early imagination had been formed. Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by.

THE LONG VIEW

A national literature is the work of the long argument that precedes the state, and once the state has come the literature does not need it any more. The Abbey continued. The plays continued. The Nobel lecture of December 1923 entered the Swedish Academy's archive, was translated, was read in Tokyo and São Paulo and Helsinki within a decade, and was the principal anniversary essay of the Irish Times on the centenary in December 2023. The medal he brought back from Stockholm is in the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street, in a case under low glass, three minutes' walk from the Abbey Theatre and the door he first walked through in 1904.

The grave at Drumcliffe is one of the most-visited literary tombs in the country. The cars stop at the gate from Easter to October. The flat profile of Ben Bulben stands behind it, unchanged, the shape that was already in the head of the boy at Rosses Point in 1888 when the seven of them sat down at George Pollexfen's table and decided to make a literature for a country that did not yet possess one. The mountain. The grave. The tower at Gort. Three stones in a triangle across the west of Ireland, and a lecture in Stockholm at the centre of it, holding the whole thing together.