The question that I wish to explore in this paper is a threefold one and might be expressed thus: (1) Why is comedy so largely lacking in what one might describe as classic autobiography? (2) Why, on the other hand, is comedy so prominent (as I believe it to be) in Yeats’s Autobiographies? (3) What is the nature, and what are the motives, of comedy when it does occur in autobiography? And as a sort of fourth fold completing this threefold question I want to pose a paradox: that though there are not many humorous passages in classic autobiography yet this type, like all varieties of autobiography, might be said to be essentially and in its very nature of the comic mode.

I will begin with a definition of classic autobiography, which is not my own but is as good as any other definition known to me: ‘‘A retrospective account in prose that a real person makes of his own existence stressing his own life and especially the history of his personality.’’ It is clear, I think, that the kind of writing performance described or de- fined here is not likely to produce books notable for humorous or comic effects. When a ‘‘real person’’ undertakes a retrospective account ‘‘of his own existence stressing his individual life and especially the history of his personality,’’ he is more likely to be serious or perhaps solemn than he is to be comic and gay. And indeed in that long—very long— volume that Philippe Lejeune takes for his archetypal autobiography, the Confessions of Rousseau, there is only one joke as far as I can recall, and that one joke has little enough to do with Rousseau’s ‘‘own existence,’’ ‘‘his individual life,’’ or ‘‘the history of his personality.’’ The joke, if that is the right way to describe it, comes at the death of a woman with whom Rousseau found brief employment. ‘‘I watched her die,’’ Rousseau says. ‘‘She had lived like a woman of talents and intelligence; she died like a philosopher . . . She only kept her bed for the last two days, and continued to converse quietly with everyone to the last. Finally when she could no longer talk and was already in her death agony, she broke wind loudly. ‘Good,’ she said, turning over, ‘a woman who can fart is not dead.’ Those were the last words she spoke.’’ This scarcely qualifies as a great deathbed speech but at least it does provide, for Rousseau’s readers, a couple of lines of levity in more than six hundred pages of very uncomic, paranoid anxiety—the anxiety of an apologist who has the desperate feeling that his audience is unmoved and unconvinced by his ‘‘apology for his own life.’’ If Georges Gusdorf is right when he says that ‘‘autobiography appeases the more or less anguished uneasiness of an aging man who wonders if his life has not been lived in vain, frittered away haphazardly, ending now in simple failure,’’ we can see easily enough why it should contain so few laughs—one in the case of Rousseau, none in the cases of Saint Augustine or John Bunyan or George Fox or John Stuart Mill or John Henry Newman (though I do not at all mean to say that these men wrote autobiography for the reasons specified by Gusdorf). Trying to salvage or discover meaning for a life when the life is nearly over may produce a great book but it is not likely to conduce to great risibility. Thus in what I have termed classic autobiography— and it would be easy to multiply examples—one does not find much comedy, and if one goes to such a work with the same expectations as one goes to Joe Miller’s Joke Book one will be sadly disappointed.

I want now, however, to glance at a certain kind of irony that is typical of classic autobiography and indeed that is there almost by definition of the mode. Jean Starobinski concludes his essay ‘‘The Style of Autobiography’’ with these observations about Rousseau’s Confessions as a sort of dramatization of his philosophy: ‘‘According to that philosophy, man originally possessed happiness and joy: in comparison with that first felicity, the present is a time of degradation and corruption. But man was originally a brute deprived of ‘light,’ his reason still asleep; compared to that initial obscurity, the present is a time of lucid reflection and enlarged consciousness. The past, then, is at once the object of nostalgia and the object of irony; the present is at once a state of (moral) degradation and (intellectual) superiority.’’ If, as has been claimed, classic autobiography depends for its existence on some sort of conversion in the autobiographer’s life, then this great emotional and intellectual divide will almost inevitably be present in, and will indeed rule the autobiography, giving an ironic, if not always nostalgic, distancing to the past. I can clarify what I mean here by reference to Augustine’s Confessions, which I should describe as a radically ironic but never nostalgic book: radically ironic because the ‘‘I’’ narrating understands every event in the narrative differently from the understanding possessed in the past by the ‘‘I’’ narrated (the reasons for going from Carthage to Rome for example); but never nostalgic because Augustine did not at all share Rousseau’s notion of childhood as a time of innocence, happiness, and joy—quite the contrary. This variety of irony that distances the past narrated self from the present narrating self is surely what Yeats intends in a letter written to his father apropos of Reveries over Childhood and Youth: ‘‘While I was immature I was a different person and I can stand apart and judge.’’ What Yeats describes is present-tense judgement (‘‘I can stand apart’’ ) of a past-tense condition of being (‘‘While I was immature I was a different person’’ ). Thus we have in the first couple of sections of Autobiographies fairly frequent instances of irony exercised by the mature Yeats on the immature Yeats. This, for example, in ‘‘Four Years: 1887–1891’’:

[W]ith women . . . I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons when a couple of girls sat near and began enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since then I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young. Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses.

This kind of indulgent and semi-comic irony, exercised at the expense of a younger self, is not uncommon in autobiography. (Parenthetically, I might contrast the gentle self-irony of Yeats with the mordant self-irony of the following wonderful and justly famous passage in Augustine: ‘‘But I, wretched young man that I was—even more wretched at the beginning of my youth—had begged you for chastity and had said: ‘Make me chaste and continent, but not yet.’ I was afraid that you might hear me too soon and cure me too soon from the disease of a lust which I preferred to be satisfied rather than extinguished.’’ This is a very different matter from the Yeatsian self-irony, but it still results from the difference between the understanding possessed by the self then and the understanding possessed by the self now.) To return to Yeats’s letter to his father: after the sentence I have been looking at—‘‘While I was immature I was a different person and I can stand apart and judge’’—a sentence that provides the logic for a certain gentle self-mockery early in the Autobiographies, Yeats goes on to say, ‘‘Later on, I should always, I feel, write of other people,’’ and this opens the door not to self-irony but to irony, or more exactly comedy, deployed against others, a comedy that operates according to a vastly different logic from that of self-irony. It is the logic of this other variety of irony and comedy that I want to examine now.

I call upon a couple of passages from other prose writings in Yeats to explain the comedy of the second kind. The first passage I have quoted elsewhere but it is so excellent, both in itself and as rationale for the Yeatsian practice of autobiography, that any apology I might make for repeating it would be more pro forma than heartfelt. It occurs in one of Yeats’s annual pieces on the Irish theatre gathered together in Explorations as ‘‘The Irish Dramatic Movement.’’ Speaking of what was then (in 1902) a new troupe, the National Theatrical Company, Yeats says:

They showed plenty of inexperience, especially in the minor characters, but it was the first performance I had seen since I understood these things in which the actors kept still enough to give poetical writing its full effect upon the stage. I had imagined such acting, though I had not seen it, and had once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse them in barrels that they might forget gesture and have their minds free to think of speech for a while. The barrels, I thought, might be on castors, so that I could shove them about with a pole when the action required it.

When Yeats titles one of his later volumes of autobiography Dramatis Personae: 1896–1902, it does not take much imagination to conceive of the text as a Yeatsian drama, of the family, friends, and acquaintances therein as actors in the drama, each in his or her barrel labeled with the role to be played, and of Yeats as playwright, director, and stage manager, exercising complete control over everybody and everything, complete control over his text and his life, as he shoves the embarreled and imperiled actors about the stage with his pole of comedy and irony.

The second passage, of a somewhat more theoretical nature but still concerned with dramatic literature, comes from a short, intense piece called ‘‘The Tragic Theatre.’’ Having remarked that in poetical drama there is supposed to be ‘‘an antithesis between character and lyric poetry,’’ Yeats goes on: ‘‘Yet when we go back a few centuries and enter the great periods of drama, character grows less and sometimes disappears, and there is much lyric feeling. . . . Suddenly it strikes us that character is continuously present in comedy alone, and that there is much tragedy . . . where its place is taken by passions and motives.’’ Even in Shakespeare’s tragicomedy, Yeats says, ‘‘it is in the moments of comedy that character is defined, in Hamlet’s gaiety, let us say; while amid the great moments, when Timon orders his tomb, when Hamlet cries to Horatio ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile,’ when Antony names ‘Of many thousand kisses the poor last,’ all is lyricism, unmixed passion, ‘the integrity of fire.’’’ ‘‘When the tragic reverie is at its height,’’ Yeats declares, we never say, ‘‘‘How well that man is realised! I should know him were I to meet him in the street.’’’ Finally, Yeats writes, ‘‘I think it was while rehearsing a translation of Les Fourberies de Scapin in Dublin, and noticing how passionless it all was, that I saw what should have been plain from the first line I had written, that tragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that separate man from man, and that it is upon these dykes [that] comedy keeps house.’’ Comedy imagines the world in terms of character, it distinguishes this individual and his folly from that individual and his folly, and it never dissolves the contours of character and social reality in the strains of that pure lyric emotion that Yeats believed specific to high tragedy. ‘‘I look upon character and personality as different things or perhaps different forms of the same thing,’’ Yeats wrote to his father. ‘‘Juliet has personality, her Nurse has character. I look upon personality as the individual form of our passions. . . Character belongs I think to Comedy.’’ And in Autobiographies he confirms this sense of comedy and character when he says, ‘‘Tragedy is passion alone, and rejecting character, it gets form from motives, from the wandering of passion; while comedy is the clash of character.’’ It may seem somewhat paradoxical, in light of what I have said about autobiography earlier, that I should now suggest that autobiography, at least of the variety practiced by Yeats, is essentially comic rather than tragic—and indeed that all autobiography, not just that by Yeats, is in one sense always comic, never tragic. We should remark that in a tragedy like Purgatory, for example, there is nothing to be called character; there is only lyric passion and the keening song; while in the Autobiographies, on the other hand, where Yeats intends to catch character with an anecdote, we are offered a string of (as he has it in ‘‘Easter 1916’’ ) mocking tales and gibes that one imagines were first told, and probably retold many subsequent times, to please a companion around the fire at the club.

Take the character of George Moore first of all. It was apparently Moore’s Hail and Farewell, with its consistently mocking, and often quite funny, picture of Yeats, that first induced Yeats to start on his autobiographical writings. When I say the picture is quite funny, I don’t mean that Yeats found it so; on the contrary—it was largely Moore that Yeats was referring to when he wrote of himself that he had become

Notorious, till all my priceless things Are but a post the passing dogs defile.

Of the first volume of Hail and Farewell Moore wrote to a correspondent: ‘‘The reviewers look upon my book as a book of reminiscences, whereas I took so much material and moulded it just as if I were writing a novel, and the people in my book are not personalities but human types. . . [A]s a type of the literary fop one could not find a more perfect model than Yeats.’’ Yeats knew nothing of this letter, of course, but he knew well enough—too well, I should say—what Moore was up to, for it was very much what he was to be up to himself when he published his reminiscences of such type characters as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde— and Moore. What Yeats did not want and absolutely would not have was someone else taking over his life and his text, creating character for him when Yeats intended to be the comic playwright creating character aplenty for others: he was determined that he would control Moore and not vice versa. The interesting thing is that when Yeats reacted to Hail and Farewell in his journal, he did so with polemic and direct attack—‘‘Moore . . . is the born demagogue. . . . He has always a passion for some crowd, is always deliberately inciting them against somebody,’’ and so forth; but when he responds in a piece of autobiography intended for publication, Yeats asserts and maintains control over his life and text not through polemic but through a comic reduction of Moore and an ironic rendering of his foolishness and his pretensions.

Moore had inherited a large Mayo estate, and no Mayo country gentleman had ever dressed the part so well. . . . Yet nature had denied to him the final touch: he had a coarse palate. Edward Martyn alone suspected it. When Moore abused the waiter or the cook, he had thought, ‘I know what he is hiding.’ In a London restaurant on a night when the soup was particularly good, just when Moore had the spoon at his lip, he said: ‘Do you mean to say you are going to drink that?’ Moore tasted the soup, then called the waiter, and ran through the usual performance. Martyn did not undeceive him, content to chuckle in solitude.

This, which sounds very like a mocking tale to please a companion around the fire at the club, was published after Moore’s death but even had it been published during his lifetime there would have been no way for Moore to refute this sly picture of a man who pretends to culture but is undone by a coarse palate. It is as if one could hear Yeats saying to Moore, calling from the text of Autobiographies to the text of Hail and Farewell, ‘‘You imagine that you are the provider of barrels and that you have one for me titled ‘literary fop.’ Well, you are wrong: I’m running this show; there is your barrel—that one over there labeled ‘pretentious and ill-bred fool, also coarse in palate.’ Now get in there and stay in there.’’

‘‘Moore’s body,’’ according to Yeats—and no doubt he thought Moore’s body merely the outward form of his soul—‘‘Moore’s body was insinuating, upflowing, circulative, curvicular, popeyed.’’

He had gone to Paris straight from his father’s racing stables, from a house where there was no culture, as Symons and I understood that word, acquired copious inaccurate French, sat among art students, young writers about to become famous, in some café; a man carved out of a turnip, looking out of astonished eyes. I see him as that circle saw him, for I have in memory Manet’s caricature. He spoke badly and much in a foreign tongue, read nothing, and was never to attain the discipline of style. . . . He reached to middle life ignorant even of small practical details. He said to a friend: ‘How do you keep your pants from falling about your knees?’ ‘O,’ said the friend, ‘I put my braces through the little tapes that are sewn there for the purpose.’ A few days later, he thanked the friend with emotion. . . . He had wanted to be good as the mass of men understand goodness. In later life he wrote a long preface to prove that he had a mistress in Mayfair.

And so on, with much more to the same effect.

Yeats’s treatment of Shaw and Wilde is somewhat different—they hadn’t, after all, tried to make Yeats into a character actor and dispose of him in barrels of their own making as Moore had—but it is still anecdotal, devoted to drawing out character, the stuff of comedy rather than of tragedy. According to that other book of Yeats’s, rich in comedy, called A Vision, Shaw and Wilde were contrasting types— Shaw of the twenty-first phase, Wilde of the nineteenth, the former entirely styleless, the latter nothing but style—and Yeats so creates them, so deploys them as ‘‘characters,’’ as archetypal figures, in his Autobiographies. Parenthetically, I might point out here that Moore, too, along with Shaw, was assigned to the twenty-first phase in A Vision; and, again like Shaw, he is regularly described by Yeats in the Autobiographies as having no style, nor even any awareness that such a thing as style exists. The twenty-first phase is the phase of ‘‘the acquisitive man,’’ and Yeats’s description of the character of the man of phase twenty-one sounds like nothing so much as an abstraction derived from the figure particularized under Moore’s name in the Autobiographies. One might even suppose that Yeats has in mind the fact that Moore was to be typed as ‘‘the acquisitive man’’ when he says that he ‘‘acquired copious inaccurate French’’ sitting in a Paris café. To return to Shaw: Arms and the Man, Yeats says,

seemed to me inorganic, logical straightness and not the crooked road of life. . . . Shaw was right to claim Samuel Butler for his master, for Butler was the first Englishman to make the discovery that it is possible to write with great effect without music, without style, either good or bad, to eliminate from the mind all emotional implication and to prefer plain water to every vintage, so much metropolitan lead and solder to any tendril of the vine. Presently I had a nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing-machine, that clicked and shone, but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually.

Thus for Shaw. As for Wilde, Yeats speaks of his ‘‘fantasy’’ having ‘‘taken . . . [a] tragic turn,’’ and he says that ‘‘men who belong by nature to the nights near to the full are still born, a tragic minority, and how shall they do their work when too ambitious for a private station, except as Wilde of the nineteenth Phase, as my symbolism has it, did his work?’’ But though Wilde might have been a tragic figure in his own right, in the life he lived, he is not that in Yeats’s text; rather he is an archetypal figure, a man of phase nineteen, a character actor, like Ernest Dowson, assigned a humorous role in the comedy that Yeats calls ‘‘The Tragic Generation.’’

A Rhymer had seen Dowson at some café in Dieppe with a particularly common harlot, and as he passed, Dowson, who was half drunk, caught him by the sleeve and whispered, ‘She writes poetry—it is like Browning and Mrs. Browning.’ Then there came a wonderful tale repeated by Dowson himself, whether by word of mouth or by letter I do not remember. Wilde had arrived in Dieppe, and Dowson pressed upon him the necessity of acquiring ‘a more wholesome taste.’ They emptied their pockets on to the café table, and though there was not much, there was enough if both heaps were put into one. Meanwhile the news had spread, and they set out accompanied by a cheering crowd. Arrived at their destination, Dowson and the crowd remained outside, and presently Wilde returned. He said in a low voice to Dowson, ‘The first these ten years, and it will be the last. It was like cold mutton’—always, as Henley had said, ‘a scholar and a gentleman,’ he now remembered that the Elizabethan dramatists used the words ‘cold mutton’—and then aloud so that the crowd might hear him, ‘But tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character.’

However tragic Wilde’s life may have been, however tragic Dowson’s life may have been, they both assume bit parts as comic characters in The Life of W. B. Yeats, he the master dramatist and stage manager, in control both of his own life and of the lives of others who play minor roles, hostile or friendly, in the one grand design.

The other attempt on his life—other than George Moore’s, I mean—that Yeats intended to counteract by writing his life himself was Katharine Tynan’s rather awkward effort at homicide in a book she called Twenty-five Years: Reminiscences, which was published exactly contemporaneously with Moore’s Hail and Farewell (Moore’s three volumes were published in 1911, 1912, and 1914; Twenty- five Years appeared in 1913). Tynan, instead of presenting Yeats as a literary fop and a pretender to an aristocratic heritage that was never his, as Moore had done, chose instead to twit Yeats and make fun of him for his interest in the occult. Now, I think that Yeats’s relationship to occult matters was much more complex and his attitude a good deal more ambivalent than Tynan recognized—indeed, he was more ambivalent and skeptical about the occult than his critics have in general recognized. This is why those who were seriously engaged in occult practices and who gave their whole heart to the occult are regularly treated with much humor by Yeats in the Autobiographies. Mme. Blavatsky, for example, whom Yeats describes in a wonderful phrase as ‘‘a sort of female Dr. Johnson,’’ is surrounded and, as it were, held off by a string of anecdotes and comic tales designed to qualify very carefully any commitment Yeats might be supposed to have made with regard to occult practices. Likewise McGregor Mathers and the man Yeats describes as ‘‘an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the most panic- stricken person I have ever known’’: they are all rendered as comic figures in a way they would not have been had Yeats been a wholehearted enthusiast for the magic they engaged in. The following scene with the aged clergyman may be taken as typical. ‘‘Has your alchemical research had any success?’’ Yeats asks him. ‘‘Yes, I once made the elixir of life,’’ the old gentleman responds. ‘‘A French alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour’’—then Yeats interrupts to tell the reader, ‘‘the alchemist may have been Eliphas Levi, who visited England in the ‘sixties, and would have said anything’’—and the clergyman again: ‘‘but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might have made a mistake and that nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I meant to drink it when I was an old man, but when I got it down the other day it had all dried up.’’

For a final example of the uses of comedy and irony in the Autobiographies, then, I turn to the contrasting accounts given by Katharine Tynan and Yeats of a séance the two of them attended in Dublin. Here is Katharine Tynan’s account of what she calls ‘‘a spiritualistic seance in which I participated most unwillingly’’ (among other reasons, presumably, because she was a Roman Catholic):

In spite of my protestations my host gently but firmly made me take a part. We sat round a table in the darkness touching each other’s hands. I was quite determined to be in opposition to the whole thing, to disbelieve in it, and disapprove of it as a playing with things of life and death. Presently the table stood up slowly: the host was psychic. There were presences. The presences had communications to make and struggled to make them. Willie Yeats was banging his head on the table as though he had a fit, muttering to himself. I had a cold repulsion to the whole business. I took my hands from the table. Presently the spirits were able to speak. There was someone in the room who was hindering them. By this time I had got in a few invocations of my own. There was a tremendous deal of rapping going on. The spirits were obviously annoyed. They were asked for an indication as to who it was that was holding them back. They indicated me, and I was asked to withdraw, which I did cheerfully. The last thing I saw as the door opened to let me pass through was Willie Yeats banging his head on the table.

Passing from this account to Yeats’s own in Reveries over Childhood and Youth one seems to hear him murmur, ‘‘Oh, you want to play hard ball, do you? Right . . .’’ and he starts thus: ‘‘Perhaps a year before we returned to London, a Catholic friend’’—Katharine Tynan, of course—‘‘brought me to a spiritualistic séance,’’ and then he sets the scene: half a dozen people seated around a table, the medium asleep sitting upright in his chair, the lights turned out, and so on:

Presently my shoulders began to twitch and my hands. I could easily have stopped them, but I had never heard of such a thing and I was curious. After a few minutes the movement became violent and I stopped it. I sat motionless for a while and then my whole body moved like a suddenly unrolled watchspring, and I was thrown backward on the wall. I again stilled the movement and sat at the table. Everybody began to say I was a medium, and that if I would not resist some wonderful thing would happen. I remembered that Balzac had once desired to take opium for the experience’ sake, but would not because he dreaded the surrender of his will. We were now holding each other’s hands and presently my right hand banged the knuckles of the woman next to me upon the table. She laughed, and the medium, speaking for the first time, and with difficulty, out of his mesmeric sleep, said, ‘Tell her there is great danger.’ He stood up and began walking round me making movements with his hands as though he were pushing something away. I was now struggling vainly with this force which compelled me to movements I had not willed, and my movements became so violent that the table was broken. I tried to pray, and because I could not remember a prayer, repeated in a loud voice-

‘Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe . . . Sing, Heavenly Muse.’

But the conclusion to this account, so far as Katharine Tynan is concerned, comes in the next line: ‘‘My Catholic friend had left the table and was saying a Paternoster and Ave Maria in the corner.’’

Briefly, I would suggest that in this very funny and quite typical passage we can see the mature Yeats directing irony at his own immature self à la Starobinski; we can see him, by the distancing effect of the comedy, holding in balance commitment and non-commitment with regard to spiritualistic phenomena; and we can see him taking his life back from Katharine Tynan by making her a minor— even unnamed—comic figure in his own drama rather than agreeing to be an actor in a play—and that play a farce—scripted by someone else.

One final remark on the tragic and the comic: Yeats, as everyone knows, calls one section of his Autobiographies ‘‘The Tragic Generation,’’ and a tragic generation it no doubt was; but all is ‘‘changed, changed utterly’’ when the autobiographer makes it a part of his own triumphant story, transforming it into an element of his text and thus making of a figure or an event that is locally or in itself tragic a detail in a larger pattern that taken overall must play as comedy. This is the sense, mentioned earlier, in which any autobiographer, taking command of his life through inscribing it in a text, triumphs over insignificance, dead ends, and momentary tragedies by the very act of writing his autobiography. I believe that in certain sports they say that the best defense lies in offense, and one might put the matter this way: that to defend and preserve his life, Yeats adopts the strategies of comedy and irony, but he subtly transforms those defensive tactics into offensive ones, so that in the end he is triumphant, in text as in life, the actor become also the dramatist and the stage manager, and free thereby to live his life as he will.

Source: James Olney, ‘‘The Uses of Comedy and Irony in Autobiographies and Autobiography,’’ in Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, Vol. II, edited by Richard J. Finneran, 1984, pp. 195–208.