EARLY MEMORIES; SOME CHAPTERS
OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
BY JOHN BUTLER YEATS.
THE CUALA PRESS
CHURCHTOWN
DUNDRUM
MCMXXIII
PREFACE
My father died in New York on February 2nd, 1922, at the end of hiseighty second year. He died after a few hours illness brought on, as itseemed, by a long walk in the cold of a New York winter. He awoke in themiddle of the night to find his friends Mrs Foster and Mr John Quinnsitting beside his bed and after a few words of pleasure at the sightsaid to Mrs Foster 'Remember you have promised me a sitting in themorning.' These were his last words for he dropped off to sleep and diedin his sleep. He had gone to America some ten or twelve years before tobe near my eldest sister who had an exhibition of embroidery there, andthough she left after a few months he stayed on. 'At last' he said 'Ihave found a place where people do not eat too much at dinner to talkafterwards'. As he grew infirm his family & his friends constantlybegged him to return, but, though he promised as constantly and wouldeven fix the day of sailing, he would always ask for a few weeks more.He lived in a little French hotel in 29th Street where there is a caféand night after night sat there, sketch book in hand, surrounded by hisfriends, painters and writers for the most part, who came to hear hisconversation. He seemed to work as hard as in his early days, and drewwith pen or pencil innumerable portraits with vigour, and subtlety. Hepainted a certain number in oils, & worked for several years at a largeportrait of himself, commissioned by Mr John Quinn. I have not seen thisportrait, but expect to find that he had worked too long upon it and, asoften happened in his middle life when, in a vacillation prolongedthrough many months it may be, he would scrape out every morning what hehad painted the day before, that the form is blurred, the compositionconfused, and the colour muddy. Yet in his letters he constantly spokeof this picture as his masterpiece, insisted again and again, as I hadheard him insist when I was a boy, that he had found what he had beenseeking all his life. This growing skill had been his chief argumentagainst return to Ireland, for the portrait that displayed it must notbe endangered by a change of light. The most natural among the fineminds that I have known he had been preoccupied all his life with theimmediate present and what he thought his growing skill, but begantowards its end, as I suppose we all do, to compare the present to theremote past. When I noticed how often his letters referred to long deadrelations and friends, 'those lost people' as he called them in oneletter, I persuaded him to begin his autobiography. He wrote, thoughwith difficulty and a little against the grain, the biographicalfragment in this book. When his account of friends and relations hadcome to an end the difficulty increased, and finding it more amusing toput the present into letters, or conversation, he put off the nextchapter from day to day. Everything that happened, the death or marriageof an acquaintance, the discovery of a new friend, stirred hisimagination; and his letters, now that his conversation can be heard nomore, are indeed the fullest expression of a wisdom where there isalways beauty. Yet this biographical fragment has its measure of wisdomand beauty, and I am pleased to think that when my son has reached hiseighteenth birthday he will be able to say 'Though my grandfather wasborn a hundred years ago, and I have never seen his face, I know himfrom his book and think of him with affection'.
W. B.