In his youth James was deaf to the cries of his family, knowing that if he had listened he would have been swallowed up by them. He determined to live vicariously, or as Stanislaus ruefully put it, he made living his end in life. Nevertheless the secret life of his mind was already in full and prodigious spate. He was notorious in the bars, an arrogant young man in frayed clothes, white rubber shoes and a yachting cap, eager to parry, to dissimulate, to discuss Euclid or Aquinas or Nelly the Whote and to warn adversaries that he would lampoon them in his satirical verses. So sure was he of his gifts that he had written to Lady Augusta Gregory, who was at the helm of the Irish literary revival, assuring her that he meant one day to be “somebody.” The story goes that he called on W. B. Yeats at a hotel in Rutland Square and sympathized with Yeats, who was thirty-seven on that day, as being too old to learn from him. His talents, he said, would burn “with a hard and a gem-like ecstasy.” That he was insufferable is probably true, but that he had the trepid intensity of a poet was also true, he who walked in the violet night “beneath a reign of uncouth stars.” He generated envy. Stanislaus envied him the purity of his intention. In his diary he observed everything James did, everything James said, conceding that he might have genius, then retracting it, believing James to be too reckless, too unsettled. Stanislaus, nicknamed “Brother Stan” on account of his ponderousness, seemed to take on all the woes and humiliations of the family. He admitted that James used him as a butcher uses a whetstone to sharpen his knife. How terrible it was to have a cleverer elder brother and, moreover, one who held him in as much regard as he might an umbrella.
No comments:
Post a Comment