Modern Mind

out Yeats’s occult system of signs and symbols, which were partly the result of his ‘discovery’ that his wife had psychic powers and that spirits ‘spoke through her’ in automatic writing and trances. 42 In anyone else such an approach might have been merely embarrassing, but in Yeats the craftsmanship shines through to produce a poetic voice that is clear and distinctive, wholly autonomous, conveying ‘the actual thoughts of a man at a passionate moment of life.’ 43 Yeats the man is not at all like Bloom, but they are embarked on the same journey:
    The trees are in their autumn beauty,
    The woodland paths are dry,
    Under the October twilight the water
    Mirrors a still sky;
    Upon the brimming water among the stones
    Are nine-and-fifty swans…
     
    Unwearied still, lover by lover,
    They paddle in the cold
    Companionable streams or climb the air;
    Their hearts have not grown old;
    Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
    Attend upon them still.
    – ‘The Wild Swans at Coole,’ 1919
     
    Yeats was affected by the war and the wilderness that followed.
     
    Many ingenious lovely things are gone
    That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude…
     
    O but we dreamed to mend
    Whatever mischief seemed
    To afflict mankind, but now
    That winds of winter blow
    – ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,’ 1919
     
    But, like Bloom, he was really more interested in creating afresh from nature than lamenting what had gone.
    That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
– Those dying generations – at their song,
Those salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
    –‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ 1928
     
    Yeats had begun his career trying to put the legends of Ireland to poetic use. He never shared the modernist desire to portray the contemporary urban landscape; instead, as he grew older he recognised the central reality of ‘desire in our solitude,’ the passion of private matters, and that science had nothing worthwhile to say on the matter. 44 Greatness, as Bloom realised, lay in being wiser, more courageous, more full of insight, even in little ways, especially in little ways. Amid the wasteland, Yeats saw the poet’s role as raising his game, in order to raise everybody’s. His poetry was very different from Eliot’s, but in this one aim they were united.
    Bloom is, of course, a standing reproach for the citizens of the acquisitive society. He is not short of possessions, but he doesn’t have much, or all that he might have, yet that doesn’t bother him in the slightest. His inner life is what counts. Nor does he judge other people by what they have; he just wants to get inside their heads to see how it might be different from his own, to aid his experience of the world.
    Four years after
Ulysses,
in 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald published his novel
The Great Gatsby,
which, though a much more conventional work, addresses the same theme albeit from virtually the opposite direction. Whereas Leopold Bloom is a lower-middle-class Dubliner who triumphs over small-scale adversity by redemptive wit and low-level cunning, the characters in
Gatsby
are either very rich or want to be, and sail through life in such a way that hardly anything touches them, inhabiting an environment that breeds a moral and intellectual emptiness that constitutes its own form of wasteland.
    The four main characters in the book are Jay Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Nick Carraway, the narrator. The action takes place one summer on an island, West Egg, a cross between Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Long Island, but within driving distance of Manhattan. Carraway, who has rented the house next to Gatsby by accident, is a relative of Daisy. To begin with, Gatsby, who shared some biographical details with Fitzgerald, the Buchanans, and Carraway lead relatively separate lives; then they are drawn together. 45 Gatsby is a mysterious figure. His home is always open for large, raucous, Jazz Age parties, but he himself is an enigmatic loner; no one really knows who heis, or how he made his money. He is often on the phone, long distance (when long distance was expensive and exotic). Gradually, however, Nick is drawn into Gatsby’s orbit. In parallel with this he learns that Tom Buchanan is having an affair with a Myrtle Wilson whose husband owns a