W.B. Yeats and Red Hanrahan: An Interview with James Pethica
by John Gentile, Adapter and Co-Director of Red Hanrahan
James Pethica teaches Irish Studies and Modern Drama at Williams College. His publications on Irish Revival writing include two volumes in the Cornell Yeats series, Lady Gregory's Diaries, 1892-1902, and Yeats's Poetry, Drama and Prose (Norton). He is currently working on the authorized biography of Lady Gregory for Oxford University Press.
JG: Yeats was deeply interested in Irish fairy lore, folklore, and mythology. How do those interests inform his stories of Red Hanrahan?
JP: During the 1880s and 1890s, Yeats promoted Irish folk and fairy lore as a fountainhead of ancient visionary knowledge—an essential imaginative resource, in his view uncorrupted by Modernity. He also regarded them as potential foundations for Irish identity. Folklore and legends, he wrote, “are the mothers of nations.” By the time he published his collection of Red Hanrahan stories in 1904, his earlier idealized view of the Irish peasantry as imaginatively rich and nearer to the unseen, and his confidence that the folk stories he had collected were unique to Irish culture, had both weakened, however. His focus in the 1904 stories is more on the figure of the wandering poet—his creative capacities and their consequences (or lack of consequences) on the ordinary world—than it is on the beliefs and practices of the country people with whom Hanrahan interacts.
JG: Yeats frequently revised his work over the course of this career, including the stories of Red Hanrahan, which exist for us in multiple versions. My new adaptation combines aspects of different versions of the stories. Some critics prefer the early versions written during the 1890s while others prefer the later versions completed in collaboration with Lady Gregory. What is your opinion?
JP: Yeats’s early versions of the stories are very much the work of a writer feeling his way. That’s so in terms of the varied ways they represent Hanrahan himself—from outsider, disturber or outcast, to redeemer, honored bard and magus. Yeats is still exploring here the roles he believes, or wishes, the poet-artist might have in Ireland. He’d written relatively little fiction, and he was feeling his way with short stories as a genre, and especially with the challenge of managing to reconcile his occult and symbolic interests with realist elements. The later versions, written in collaboration with Gregory, were crafted to form a book, so they offer a deliberate narrative arc and are smoothed and much more unified in terms of style. For me, the earlier, sometimes rather “raw” versions are far more revealing of Yeats’s hopes and anxieties as a writer and as an Irish Nationalist in the 1890s, and often as interesting for their limitations as for what is accomplished in them. The later versions are more powerful as an achieved artwork. I’m glad we have the multiple versions to compare, as they reveal much about Yeats’s evolving capacities as a writer.
JG: What was the nature of Yeats’s collaboration with Lady Gregory on the stories of Red Hanrahan?
JP: Lady Gregory largely shared, and followed, Yeats’s enthusiasms for Irish folklore as a resource, both in terms of her Nationalist ideals and also her sense that the countrypeople’s beliefs were a key source of imaginative and literary inspiration. Her principal contribution to the revisions for the 1904 volume has always been seen as supplying the distinctive “Kiltartan” speech used in these versions—a highly idiomatic style, based on the language of the Galway folk of her neighbourhood who, as she put it “thought in Irish but spoke in English” and thus tended to use Irish grammatical structures and turns of phrase, though their actual words were in English. Along with this, she also brought to bear a much greater real knowledge of the countrypeople than Yeats possessed, thereby tempering his tendencies towards abstraction and to representing the peasantry in stereotypical terms. Given their various collaborations prior to 1904 on plays centering on poet-figures or visionaries, and given her own considerable lionizations of Yeats as a Shelleyan poet-artist-prophet and shaper of the world, Gregory was well familiar with his broader aims and interests in representing Hanrahan as a wandering bard. And Yeats seems to have welcomed her input at the level of plot, not just style, even if he was always more interested in visionary and occult considerations than she was.
JG: Yeats wrote to his sister Lily in 1903 that he had “a notion that the Red Hanrahan Tales will be about the most popular thing I have done in prose.” Do you agree?
JP: Yeats was often convinced that the work he had just completed was his best. And it’s worth remembering that Lily Yeats jointly ran the press that was about to publish the Hanrahan stories as a limited-edition volume. So a little hyperbole and over-enthusiasm was probably at work in that 1903 letter. The stories were pretty much the last manifestation of Yeats’s early folklore work, and also one of his last efforts in writing fiction. His short novel John Sherman (1891) is to my mind a far more important (and was a far better-selling) work of fiction.
JG: I shall consider John Sherman for a future stage adaptation! Yeats was a playwright and a man of the theatre as well as a poet and an author of prose fiction and nonfiction. Douglas Hyde and Lady Gregory both wrote plays based on the character of Red Hanrahan but Yeats never did. What would he think about, would you say, his stories being adapted for the stage?
JP: Yeats, as he often acknowledged, needed help early in his career as a playwright to save him from “the clouds” of symbolism and abstraction. Gregory and Hyde brought a necessary vein of realism to bear when they collaborated with him. Though he didn’t write a play based on Red Hanrahan himself, Yeats did go on to write several plays in which a poet is a key figure. But by then, though he had much more facility as a playwright, he was no longer invested in “peasant plays” in the way he was up to about 1903. Stories and legends were the initiating seed for a number of Yeats’s plays—notably his Cuchulain cycle—so he would likely have been well pleased to see these works adapted as drama.
JG: I rather like to think so.
JG: Yeats was deeply interested in Irish fairy lore, folklore, and mythology. How do those interests inform his stories of Red Hanrahan?
JP: During the 1880s and 1890s, Yeats promoted Irish folk and fairy lore as a fountainhead of ancient visionary knowledge—an essential imaginative resource, in his view uncorrupted by Modernity. He also regarded them as potential foundations for Irish identity. Folklore and legends, he wrote, “are the mothers of nations.” By the time he published his collection of Red Hanrahan stories in 1904, his earlier idealized view of the Irish peasantry as imaginatively rich and nearer to the unseen, and his confidence that the folk stories he had collected were unique to Irish culture, had both weakened, however. His focus in the 1904 stories is more on the figure of the wandering poet—his creative capacities and their consequences (or lack of consequences) on the ordinary world—than it is on the beliefs and practices of the country people with whom Hanrahan interacts.
JG: Yeats frequently revised his work over the course of this career, including the stories of Red Hanrahan, which exist for us in multiple versions. My new adaptation combines aspects of different versions of the stories. Some critics prefer the early versions written during the 1890s while others prefer the later versions completed in collaboration with Lady Gregory. What is your opinion?
JP: Yeats’s early versions of the stories are very much the work of a writer feeling his way. That’s so in terms of the varied ways they represent Hanrahan himself—from outsider, disturber or outcast, to redeemer, honored bard and magus. Yeats is still exploring here the roles he believes, or wishes, the poet-artist might have in Ireland. He’d written relatively little fiction, and he was feeling his way with short stories as a genre, and especially with the challenge of managing to reconcile his occult and symbolic interests with realist elements. The later versions, written in collaboration with Gregory, were crafted to form a book, so they offer a deliberate narrative arc and are smoothed and much more unified in terms of style. For me, the earlier, sometimes rather “raw” versions are far more revealing of Yeats’s hopes and anxieties as a writer and as an Irish Nationalist in the 1890s, and often as interesting for their limitations as for what is accomplished in them. The later versions are more powerful as an achieved artwork. I’m glad we have the multiple versions to compare, as they reveal much about Yeats’s evolving capacities as a writer.
JG: What was the nature of Yeats’s collaboration with Lady Gregory on the stories of Red Hanrahan?
JP: Lady Gregory largely shared, and followed, Yeats’s enthusiasms for Irish folklore as a resource, both in terms of her Nationalist ideals and also her sense that the countrypeople’s beliefs were a key source of imaginative and literary inspiration. Her principal contribution to the revisions for the 1904 volume has always been seen as supplying the distinctive “Kiltartan” speech used in these versions—a highly idiomatic style, based on the language of the Galway folk of her neighbourhood who, as she put it “thought in Irish but spoke in English” and thus tended to use Irish grammatical structures and turns of phrase, though their actual words were in English. Along with this, she also brought to bear a much greater real knowledge of the countrypeople than Yeats possessed, thereby tempering his tendencies towards abstraction and to representing the peasantry in stereotypical terms. Given their various collaborations prior to 1904 on plays centering on poet-figures or visionaries, and given her own considerable lionizations of Yeats as a Shelleyan poet-artist-prophet and shaper of the world, Gregory was well familiar with his broader aims and interests in representing Hanrahan as a wandering bard. And Yeats seems to have welcomed her input at the level of plot, not just style, even if he was always more interested in visionary and occult considerations than she was.
JG: Yeats wrote to his sister Lily in 1903 that he had “a notion that the Red Hanrahan Tales will be about the most popular thing I have done in prose.” Do you agree?
JP: Yeats was often convinced that the work he had just completed was his best. And it’s worth remembering that Lily Yeats jointly ran the press that was about to publish the Hanrahan stories as a limited-edition volume. So a little hyperbole and over-enthusiasm was probably at work in that 1903 letter. The stories were pretty much the last manifestation of Yeats’s early folklore work, and also one of his last efforts in writing fiction. His short novel John Sherman (1891) is to my mind a far more important (and was a far better-selling) work of fiction.
JG: I shall consider John Sherman for a future stage adaptation! Yeats was a playwright and a man of the theatre as well as a poet and an author of prose fiction and nonfiction. Douglas Hyde and Lady Gregory both wrote plays based on the character of Red Hanrahan but Yeats never did. What would he think about, would you say, his stories being adapted for the stage?
JP: Yeats, as he often acknowledged, needed help early in his career as a playwright to save him from “the clouds” of symbolism and abstraction. Gregory and Hyde brought a necessary vein of realism to bear when they collaborated with him. Though he didn’t write a play based on Red Hanrahan himself, Yeats did go on to write several plays in which a poet is a key figure. But by then, though he had much more facility as a playwright, he was no longer invested in “peasant plays” in the way he was up to about 1903. Stories and legends were the initiating seed for a number of Yeats’s plays—notably his Cuchulain cycle—so he would likely have been well pleased to see these works adapted as drama.
JG: I rather like to think so.