Fiction Extract: The Artist's Way

"The Artist's Way" is an extract is from A Life Before, a prequel to Her Secret Rose, which I published some years ago--and which has now morphed into a series of seven books, the first of which will publish in October 2023. In this extract from the beginning of the book, the young WB Yeats (20) arrives home to his parents' home, having fought to keep the Dublin Hermetic Society free of becoming a lodge of the London Theosophophy Society, but lost the vote. Now read on:

As WB let himself into the hall, his papa came through from the sitting room, with furious face. “Willie!” he said, startled eyes gleaming in the light of the candle he held, full of indignation. “You’re home.”

JB Yeats was a tall man, but to his son did not seem so tonight. He had been weighted with worry of late, with financial trouble and its fallout, but this was something new, or the old humiliation to a new level. To W.B.’s already overwrought senses, his father’s bent over silhouette in the ill-lit hallway looked like a walking question mark. Though the two of them had much difference of late, he felt a great pull of pity.

"Papa! What's wrong?"

"Wrong? Nothing!” But his fist holding the candle showed four knuckles, clenched to white. He was trying to steady his breath, causing the candle flame to dance erratically with each jagged exhale. “Johnston’s wasn’t it, you were at?” he said, trying to pass for normal. “Did you have a good evening?”

“Adequate.”

WB’s father knew nothing of his occult pursuits. It made life easier for him and his sisters if they kept certain matters secret from their father. In his occult work, he was breaking free of his father’s influence.

He’d told his family that he would be in Charley's house tonight as Charley, who needed to keep mum with his pater, a Northern Irish preacher no less, had said he'd be at the Yeatses. They’d always been welcome at each other’s hearth. Now, no more. He would leave his father to his sorrow, he had enough of his own. He moved to pass him and go upstairs, but then JB said, “You may as well know now, Willie. We’ll be moving back to London."

"London? But what about—"

“A family of artists and writers must be where the chances are plentiful. I haven’t told your sisters yet, so grant me time to inform them.”

“But—"

“It’s my hope that we should return to Bedford Park. I can get work that will pay far beyond anything possible here in Dublin. As can you, and your sisters. And Jack will come live with us again. It’s time now. He’s twelve years old and cannot live with his grandparents forever.”

W.B. found the familiar oedipal anger flaring. No pity in him now for the man before him, who was so thoughtlessly throwing his life around. Forever, this problem of making a living as an artist. His father had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite painter but now painted portraits of children selling newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket on her head. The change had come bit by bit, influenced by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools. “We must paint what is in front of us,” he would say. Or “A man must be of his own time.”

His father had complete dedication to his work. In his studio, that long room with skylight illuminating its pale green walls and an iron stove to keep them warm, a lunch of sandwiches and an apple, he painted all day every day, painting those he liked to paint, stepping forward over the strip of carpet in front of his easel, touching his work with a tentative or definite brush, stepping back again to see. Always in movement and always talking on high themes: the true meaning of the second part of Faust, the mystery of the Hesperian apples, the relation of villainy to genius. Talk, talk, talk of the most stimulating kind about life and art and god. His father was a radical rationalist, a disciple of Darwin.

He took commissions to get by, selling himself cheap to put bread on the table, but would always be hankering to return to his own project de jour. Whatever portrait was on his easel was going to be his best work and needed as much time as it needed. This would be his masterpiece, then the patrons would come.

He might have taken an easier course, and had early success, but then the rest of his life would be scheming and imposture, doing bad work palmed off as good. For any artist to know his business thoroughly required a long period of struggle and difficulty, before ease and dignity could come.

That vile woman Mrs Alexander Sullivan of Chicago, brought to his studio by Miss Tynan, told him his patrons wanted him to think not of his mission, but his commission. She would see. The portrait he was working on (not the one of her but of an urchin girl with a basket on her head) would be his masterpiece, then his next commission would make him rich enough to buy himself better materials, and the one after would yield a profit—and he’d be established. Then he despised Mrs O’Sullivan for making him think like this, like a common huckster.

Meantime, none of it happened. All he had build was a reputation for never finishing a picture.

As if reading his thought, his father spoke then of how he took too long over his portraits to succeed in Ireland. He’d been mistaken in bringing them back here five years ago, in thinking he could find his fortune in Dublin. Face-portraits of the Irish bourgeoisie were never going to provide the income the family needed. He could set the family up again in England where sketches for commercial books and magazines would be much more lucrative. Easy for him to do and payment would be swift.

“When?”

“Nothing is settled, as yet, but it cannot be too long. Now the Kildare property is sold to the government, we’ll have no more land rents coming in.”

“But you have the payment from the government for the purchase?”

“I’m afraid that’s mostly gone down the swally-hole.” His word for his debts. “Yet I was right to be rid of those rents, that much I know. The tenants paid less and less rent, less and less often. “Illustrations, for the magazines, that's where the money is.”

WB wanted to believe him and wanted to disbelieve him.

“No more Mrs Flanagan.” JB said, trying to win a smile. Mrs Flanagan was a tenant who was always behind with the rent and Lily had created a voodoo doll by that name. All of them used to stick pins in her when her non-payment meant their going without.

“It will be grand to be able to bring Jack home from Sligo. We'll be together again, as it should be."

"All for the family."

JB stiffened. “Don’t you worry, anyway Willie, about the details. I’ll look after all that.”

Another staring silence. The small hall was full of feeling.

"And what does Mama say?"

JB faltered. Mrs Yeats, as W.B. knew, longed for the fair terrain of Sligo, not the fuming city of London. Dublin was bad enough. JB tried to make a joke. "You know your mother... She’s like your Uncle George. If you tell either of them anything of significance, they look at you with the face of a horse.”

Again, WB said nothing.

“I’d determined in advance I wasn’t going to over-explain myself your mother—or indeed to you children. Pollexfens never explain why they like something, or do not like something. Why should I? I who am doing only what I—”

WB moved past him, while he was still talking. “Shall we ask her?”

“Willie, no… I forbid it.”

WB opened the door, went into the drawing room. The small coal fire in the grate—kept small, for economy's sake—threw the only light in the room. His mother sat by its heat, with her embroidery on her lap. A man in Sligo had once told WB that his mother was the most beautiful woman in Sligo when young. In the year of their marriage, his father had painted her as a pensive faced, large-eyed, delicate woman. Neither sight nor sign of beauty was there now on her gaunt, sunken, slow face, half-shaded in the firelight. The thick strands of her hair pulled away from her face and wound in pigtails around her ears, gave her a look of having been caught in a harsh wind.

She picked up her needlework as they entered, started moving the threaded needle up and down. He was convulsed with pity, a hundred thousand times what he’d felt for this father in the hall. He wanted to kiss her, make her forget how much she disliked them all.

“Mama.”

She picked up her stitching, moving her threaded needle up and down, keeping her eyes on her needlework to avoid looking their way. Whenever any of them showed her their real feelings, she became inwardly furious and outwardly silent. As his father was incapable of concealing his emotions, she was often silent for days, simmering in fury.

“Willie has been informed now, Susan,” said J.B. setting down the candle on the table that served as their collective workspace in the evenings, trying to regain control of the situation. “I’ll put out word to see about the renting of a house. Hopefully in Bedford Park again.”

The suburban parlour, with its furniture too small for the room was stifling to WB’s mind, already overheated by the evening’s proceedings. It seemed to him that the wallpaper was not affixed to the wall but floating in the air, and that the painted flowers floated on the wallpaper, and his mother floated on the flowers.

No sound, except for the crackle of the fire., and the sound of her not looking at them. She stroked the tray cloth she was working along the fold. Unlike him and, he presumed, unlike his father, the humble cloth knew how it felt to be caressed by her hand.

The great sword of her silence was out of its scabbard. His father paced, while she sat. He pleaded, while she scorned. He was all movement, while she was all embittered stillness. Then he stopped in front of her. The blue damask curtains over the long window moved, as if a hand had stirred them. A billow of smoke blew out from the fire. Like everything else in this house, the fireplace was faulty and did not draw properly.

Flakes of smoke hung in the air like snow. “Speak to me, Susan. I beg of you. I am distraught.”

Then she spoke. One word. She said: “Foolishness.”

They both knew what she meant. To speak in this emotional way was vulgar to her. To keep her in this penniless situation relying on the charity of her family to live was repugnant to her. The powerlessness of her position was a sorrow beyond sorrow to her.

She would have to go to London, drifting, innocent and helpless in the city of kings and thieves, and all for what? So her husband could play at painting pictures and invite the friends she disliked to her house. Once when money was so low, they were down to the butcher pressing for payment, a situation that caused her great distress, his father had casually invited friends to stay for a few days. When his mother learned of the invitation to these people she had no time for and could ill afford to entertain, she wrote and asked them to contribute something towards the cost of their stay. His father’s outrage and humiliation had been a turning point.

She turned now to look at them. She had an unnerving look even when calm, with her mismatched eyes —one blue, the other brown. Looking into them was like looking into two abandoned wells, deep in the woods. They bore it as long as they could, then both had to get out from under her disconcerting gaze.

To be continued... [image: from John Butler Yeats's Self Portrait. See the story of this painting here.