John Butler Yeats: An Irishman in New York, 1907-1922
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
'This Land of Saints', and then as the applause died out,
'Of plaster Saints'; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.
- WB Yeats, 'Beautiful Lofty Things'
John Butler Yeats (JBY) was just months short of his 69th birthday when he decided to accompany his daughter Lily on a visit to New York where she was due to exhibit her craft work. He arrived in America in late-December 1907 and never went back, New York City becoming his adopted home for the last 14 years of his life.
John Butler Yeats was born in Co. Down in 1839. The son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, he became a religious sceptic and an advocate of Irish nationalism, an enthusiasm he passed on to his children. He toyed briefly with a legal career before deciding to devote himself to art. He was definitely a gifted painter, but was incapable of earning a living and the Yeats family grew up in financially-straitened circumstances, mainly in London's Bedford Park.
His son's biographer, Roy Foster, describes him as "formidably articulate and relentlessly charming", but also "fundamentally self-centred" and "often inconsistent, even in his brilliantly articulated opinions." In WB Yeats's view, his father suffered from "an infirmity of will" that prevented him from putting his artistic talents to proper use. But, according to another source, he had an "extremely rounded philosophy of life".
Once in New York, JBY simply refused to go home. After she returned to Ireland in the summer of 1908, her father never saw Lily again and only had a handful of reunions with WB. His stay in America was made possible by John Quinn, a wealthy Irish-American lawyer and indefatigable patron of the arts. In exchange for literary manuscripts WB sent him, Quinn provided funds to pay JBY's bills at the boarding house on 317 West 29th Street run by three Breton sisters where he stayed contentedly for most of his time in New York.
As he put it, "to leave New York is to leave a huge fair where any moment I might meet with some huge bit of luck" which never quite came his way. Although he often pined for Ireland and suffered from periodic homesickness, it was, he said, "a sort of gambling excitement" that kept him tied to Manhattan.
JBY never made a breakthrough as an artist in New York. Perhaps he was incapable of conventional success, but did enjoy walking around the streets of Manhattan's West Side where he acquired a circle of devoted friends with whom he indulged his enthusiasm for tobacco, wine, and good conversation.
In New York, he appears to have found what he termed "intellectual happiness". He befriended the poet, Ezra Pound, and met the famed dancer, Isadora Duncan. The old painter became especially close to the much younger American poet, Jeanne Robert Foster (1879-1970), who, he wrote, combined a "really strong intellect with kindness and affection." Unable to finish commissioned portraits, he scratched out a modest living by selling sketches, delivering lectures and writing for American magazines such as Harper's Weekly, with John Quinn acting as an often exasperated but ever-reliable backstop.
JBY's letters from New York, especially those to WB, make marvellous reading although they are literary and philosophical rather than familial in character (his letters to Lily, Lolly and Jack B are more chatty, with the odd sideswipe at the imperious WB). JBY seemed to view himself as his eldest son's artistic counsellor, offering some genuinely sage advice: "You are at your best in verse. .. Prose is fettering, verse is lightness and freedom and coaxes the soul out of you." In 1921, JBY urged his son, who was by then probably the most celebrated poet in the English language, to write "poetry in closest and most intimate union with the positive realities and complexities of life". It may be no coincidence that WB Yeats wrote some of his most powerful verse in the last two decades of his life!
Although not everything about New York was to his liking - he disliked the city's hot, mosquito-plagued summers and its frigid winters - but the city's vibrancy impressed him. It was the "constant rapidity of progress and change that makes New York such a wonder." And he had great admiration for Americans. The American gentleman was, he judged, superior to his English or Irish counterpart, exhibiting "a truer dignity and unselfishness, and such an alert mind and will."
Americans were "myriad-minded" and always interested in new ideas, but he deemed the American intellect to be "without intensity - they are far too busy, busy, that is, in an airy theoretic way." In America, he considered that "there runs through all ranks a goodness and kindness". Americans were "the most idealistic people in the world and the least poetical" whereas in Ireland people were more concerned with the question "how to live" than "how to make a living."
JBY had strong views about the two American political titans of the age, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He had a dim view of Wilson, "a confirmed sentimentalist". In JBY's view you should: "Never trust a sentimentalist. They are all alike, pretenders to virtue, at heart selfish frauds and sensualists; against him we have Roosevelt, a man of highest courage and of passionate sincerity."
WB made a determined effort to bring his father back to Europe in 1920, but the old painter resisted, asserting that if he left New York he would "sink into the cradle of his second childhood." WB acknowledged that his father was "as full of the future" as when he was a child. To the very end, "he had his hopes and ambitions to the last, constantly writing that he was painting his masterpiece." Life in New York had evidently kept him going to the very end.
John Butler Yeats died in February 1922 and is buried in Chestertown, New York. His friend, the artist John Sloan, wrote Lolly Yeats a moving letter about her deceased father containing a remarkable tribute to him: "a few score men such as your father in the world at any one time would cure its sickness - but our civilisation produces other flowers - unsavoury blooms rank and poisonous - John Butler Yeats was one of the rare exceptions." Praise indeed for an emigre Irishman and an adopted New Yorker.
John Butler Yeats was not quite as hopeless in providing for his family as was John Stanislaus Joyce, but the two men had significant influence on their famous literary sons, John Joyce appearing as a vivid character in Joyce's novels. In the case of JBY, his influence was intellectual and WB eventually came to realise "with some surprise how fully my philosophy of life has been inherited from you."
Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador to the United States of America.