I'm not much more the wiser in my attempt to understand W.B. Yeats better. I thought there must be more to it than Celtic Twilight, mysticism and then Ezra Pound makes a poet out of him but on the evidence of Richard Ellman's Yeats, the Man and the Masks, perhaps not.I had thought that Ellman was a standard text on the issue but hadn't realized it was published in 1948. It is a 'critical biography', written well before the fashion in literary biography became more a set of anecdotes designed to describe the poet in relation to their work. Ellman explains in some detail how Yeats' thoughts on theosophy, the occult, mysticism, nationalism and philosophy informed his plays and poems but he says nowhere near as much as we would now expect about his life, the relationshiops with Maud Gonne, his wife, Pound and other writers. We are left with the impression that there wasn't much more to him than these thoughts, maybe there wasn't. But while we need to read Ellman in the light of how biography was done in the 1940's, we also need to understand Yeats in the context of the fin de siecle.
While his interest in seances, automatic writing and the elaborate systems of the theories he devised look madcap to us now, or to me at least, it is difficult to blame anybody for taking up ideas that were fashionable at the time, like a lot of 1970's campus marxists.
One can sympathize with some of the ideas behind the masks, the preference for symbol over the symbolized, and such ideas are in parallel with the signifier/signified distinction, as well as the difference between character and personality but how it can be allowed to be taken to quite such lengths and with such seriousness is hard to fathom from this distance.
There can't be much doubt that Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium, Among School Children and The Second Coming, amongst others, belong in any C20th canon, if canons are still allowed, and Ellman did go some way to explaining how they were arrived at but, heaven knows, I came away from the book feeling that I knew precious little more about the man than I did before. But if I'd been able to concentrate harder in the passages that detailed his esoteric theories, I'd know a lot more about some portentous, rickety old musings.
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So, that was an unsatisfactory attempt to fill the latest void in my reading list. Very shortly, I won't need any such filler to pad out my studious nights as a few hundred poems will be on their way shortly from South, from which I am to pick 60. It will be like an easy version of being a Booker Prize judge, a job that has always seemed incomprehensibly beyond me.
But, in order to remain sane, I've got a copy of Sebastian Faulks' Where My Heart Used to Beat on its way.
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And while reaction to the letters page of the TLS of a few weeks ago seems to have been left at a few cursory dismissals on Twitter - what do you have to do to get anybody interested - well, if you're Ben Elton, it's fine. Have an all-star cast and six half hour slots on a Monday night. But Upstart Crow has been worth sticking with. Ben's done his homework and has put some useful material in among some more obvious, and bawdy, jokes.
Perhaps the highlight so far was in last night's episode about the sonnets in which Shakespeare explains to his uncomprehending friends and family how 'prove' and 'love' are half-rhymes and thus better than full rhymes. They don't get it, of course, and won't have it. But, thanks, Ben Elton, William Shakespeare and David Mitchell. And to a few of you that may or may not be reading this, there you are, it's just like I told you.
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Whereas, don't quote me on this, unless it wins on Saturday.
A few years ago, I did a Derby preview, tipped Ruler of the World, lost confidence in it and removed the posting and then it won at 7/1.
It's fair to say that these days my interest in the turf is only when they put fences in the way to make it interesting. Flat racing is more about bloodstock, breeding, empires and world domination, not the novice hurdle at Fontwell Park.
And this year, of all years, the Derby is not a race to get heavily involved in. If evidence is often thin in these early classics, it is all the thinner this year because it appears wide open not because so many potentially great horses have staked their claims but because none of the trial races have provided anything convincing. It was only a couple of weeks ago that two fillies were among the favourites. Imagine that.
While the wisest advice might just be to follow Ryan Moore, who is the natural inheritor of Lester Piggott's position not only as having first pick of what to ride in the Derby but also as a reluctant communicator, I'll suggest Deauville as one that could easily get your money back each way if you don't like losing but could make it a respectable pay day if you're happy to take a chance.
Exactly how much of my profit so far this year is risked on it remains to be seen.