The Nation. - Department of Government at Cornell University

June 5.1995 The Nation. 783MINORITY REPORT.CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSReflections on Vzolence-to annex Sorel’s seductive tains the all-purpose word “healing,” and that it was foundtitle-are sometimes just reflections on violence. either by a computer search or by a resort to Bartlett or Web-Lazy people, when impelled to profundity about ster. I can be sure of this because I received a call myself, aactual violence, have a tendency to quote from few days later, asking me to locate the lines “things fall apart,William Butler Yeats. There is probably a good subconsciousreason for this. In one of the few faultless sonnets ever written,Yeats did say:I balanced all, brought all to mind,The years to come seemed waste of breath,A waste of breath the years behlndIn balance wlth thls life, thls death.Yet the ironic, melancholy stanzas of “An Irlsh Airman”are nothe lines preferred by enthusiasts in time of crisis. Moreavailable, and purchased at a cheaper price, are certain linesfrom “The Second Coming” and from “Easter, 1916,” whereYeats appears to be elther more prescient or more promiscuous.Thus in the national spin dryer, which whirls quotationsaround and around, one is as likely to hear people absentlysaying “what rough beast?” as “a terrible beauty is born” or“things fall apart” or “the center cannot hold.”In the days after the Oklahoma City atrocity, a rich choiceof bad Yeats was on offer. George Will, that great pseudointellectualof the right, employed the poet to deny any connectionbetween reactionary rhetoric and reactionary violence.Citing the following lines as composed by Yeats “when hewrote this about the civil war in Ireland,” Will borrowedas follows:Dld that play of mine send outCertaln men the English shot?Dld words of mine put too great strainOn that woman’s reeling brain?Could my spoken words have checkedThat whereby a house lay wrecked?Good questions, in their way, and conscientious questionseven if asked by Yeats not about “the civil war in Ireland” butabout the rising against British Imperialism in the previousdecade. With this limp grasp on history and poetry, Will hadno difficulty in blaming Oklahoma City on John Brown andother heroes of a revolutionary past he is glad he missed.And then the President chimed in, or perhaps his poetryconsultants did. Searching for a sign-off to his insufferablypious speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association,Clinton dragged this off the auto-cue in the husky mannerto which we have grown accustomed:In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountam start,In the prison of hls daysTeach the free man how to pralseThat is the peroration of Auden’s farewell to Yeats. (“W.H.Auden’s poem about Yeats,” as The New Yorker phrased It,before going on to say pathetically that “It’s not every Presidentwho can quote Auden and make you think he might haveactually heard of him.” Depends how gullible the “YOU”is, doesn’t it, buster?) Actually, it’s a moral certainty that thepoem was handed to Clinton merely because its last verse con-the center cannot hold.” I was able to furnish the relevantclichCs to the blameless office of George Stephanopoulos,who later told me that he needed them for the Hellenic-American Bankers’ Association. I wish I’d been at the dmner,because then I could have emphasized the later lines:The best lack all convlction, whde the worstAre full of passlonate Intensity.If Yeats had written nothing else he would deserve to beimmortal for that observation alone. A very double-edged observation,too, because, as The New Yorker’s sycophants hadnot bothered to establish, Yeats spent his poetic and politicalIf \ life oscillating between populismand fascism. He supported theDublin workers in the great strikeof 1913, and he gave a verse formto the inchoate mix of nationaland popular feeling that issummarized in the title “Easter,1916” and that comminglesChristian, Gaelic and insurgentemotions. But he also welcomedthe rise of Mussollni, approvedof the cruelty with which thevictors of the Irish civil war putdown the Republicans, yearned for a despotism of the richelite and offered his literary services to the “Blue Shirt” rnovementthat was the Irish contribution to fascism and that,under the grotesque leadership of General O’Duffy, sent Irishvolunteers to fight in Spain on Franco’s side. The entire pointof Auden’s valediction to Yeats was to assert, with great aestheticgenerosity, that a dangerous man like Yeats could stillbe an imperishable poet:Tlme with which thls strange excusePardons Klpllng and hls viewsAnd will pardon Paul Claude1Pardon him for writing well.Time, as Auden so beautifully put it, “worships languageand forgives/everyone by whom It lives.” If this were not so,Yeats’s reflections on courage and violence would not haveto be handled like plutonium; would not need to be employedcarefully and in some context; would not still have the powerto stir people who are as unquallfled as George Will or B~llClinton to mangle a quotation. So afrald was Yeats of theconsequences of his poem on the Easter Rising that he didn’tpublish it until 1920 (in a special issue of our sister weeklyThe New Statesman, devoted to a protest against the dirtywar in Ireland). He may have overestimated the power ofwords, but not in the clumsy way of those who, even now, lookat populism and fascism and claim to see-to the benefitof the fascists, not the popullsts-no difference worth fightingabout.