W. B. Yeats — A Generation Later

A Machine Readable Version

Thomas MacGreevy

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[p.3]

One of the things I most regret is that W. B. Yeats did not live for, at least, a year longer than he did. Had he lived through the autumn of 1939 he would have seen his divided fellow-countrymen re-uniting for the purpose of declaring Irish neutrality in regard to the second great war. Partition or no Partition, neutrality was a clinching re-affirmation of the Irish nationhood in which he believed and for the recognition of which he had helped to fight all his life long. He accepted the idea that a distinctive cultural heritage implies distinctive nationhood.

I cannot say whether W.B. would endorse a heartening remark Monsignor Paddy Browne once made to me. It was to the effect that the civil war had left less bitterness between Irishmen than the Parnell split had left a generation earlier. But I incline to think that W.B., who lived through both crises, would have agreed. He knew that after the Parnell crisis and until the general election of 1918 there was disunion (as between Redmondites, Healyites, All for Irelanders, Independents and Sinn Feiners — not to speak of the less disinterested clique represented by Edward Carson). He knew enough of human nature to realise that it is only in times of crisis that even the most serious minded and well intentioned men and women can overcome their inevitable, though ultimately perhaps minor, differences, and that the greater the crisis that has brought them together the greater for a certain length of time afterwards their differences will seem. His poem The Road at My Door written, I think, at Ballylee in the early weeks of the civil war when he was 58 shows how complete was his understanding and his sympathy for the men on both sides. An affable Irregular,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun.

A brown Lieutenant and his men,
Half dressed in national uniform,
Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear-tree broken by the storm.

[p.4] I count those feathered balls of soot
The moor-hen guides upon the stream,
To silence the envy of my thought;
And turn towards my chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream.

Back in Dublin, later in 1922, he decided to accept a seat in the Senate from Mr. Cosgrave's government. He was a little put out when, daring to argue with him against his decision, I remarked that Leonardo da Vinci had remained utterly detached in regard to the unholy rivalries and wars that arose between the different claimants to the duchy of Milan. But in spite of much misunderstanding on the part of those who did not know him well, despite the occasional stubborn obstinacies on his part that could annoy even those close to him — myself, I would at times feel "contrairy" about what, until I could come to fuller understanding, seemed to be his "contrairinesses" — I cannot, looking back, but think that W. B. Yeats was one of the most patient men I have known. He did not snub the young man that I was for disagreeing with a major decision he had made and I doubt whether his decision to enter the Senate cost him the regard of any serious minded Republican. Had he not written (in The Celtic Twilight) shortly after the Parnell tragedy: "There is always something in our enemy that we like and something in our sweetheart that we dislike." For him as for all Irishmen the evacuation of Dublin Castle by the English was a symbol and an event of the first magnitude in Irish history. After such a major achievement and taking the circumstances into account, a new disunion was not altogether unnatural. It happened. And the ranks did not close again until 1939. I think, however, that in spite of the civil war there was much understanding not only on the part of Yeats but amongst thinking men on both sides. I am sure that Republicans understood that W.B. made the decision he did make in order to see whether he could help to work constructively, in the new circumstances created by the unsatisfactory Treaty, for the cause of the Ireland he had always dreamed of and always written about. As was natural the Ireland he dreamed of was a cultural as well as a heroic Ireland deriving from its own past heritage adapted to present circumstances. It was to be the Ireland of The King's Threshold in which no mere man of power might, with impunity, dare to treat thinkers and poets, the men of mind and imagination, as inferior to himself. Ideally, the ambition for power should mean the ambition to be of service. The word "minister" means "servant" and "to serve." Has not the supreme [p.5] Head of the Church to try to live up to his noblest title "The servant of the servants of God"? I have spoken of Yeats as a patient man. He had dreamed of a cultural panel in the Senate that would be a cultural panel in his sense of the word, a panel not of mere men of property and professional specialists but of all-round humanists. His dream was not realised but he did not make a fuss over his disappointment. He just left after a few years without complaining.

Again, anyone who cared for his ideals in the theatre could not help but think that there, above all, he carried patience to excessive lengths. It was not from his Russian and French contemporaries, Stanislavsky and Lungé-Poe, that he got the idea of an art theatre for Ireland. He thought of it, he worked for it, he provided plays for it. Yet he allowed himself to be all but played out of that theatre by the realists and the defeatists. That he will yet be recognised as a great and inspiring dramatist I have no doubt whatever. Even I, who am growing old, hope that I rpay yet live to see Yeats's own plays — and Irish plays not unworthy to be played with them — being produced at the Peacock Theatre by a man or woman who has feeling for poetry; and, by God's providence, acted right through the year for Irish lovers of dramatic poetry, out of the tourist season as well as in it. The Abbey Theatre with its subsidy and its many more money-making plays should surely be able to act as guarantor!

I am quite aware that there are people who think that Yeats was not a dramatist at all. It seems to me that the poet who could present the miracle of the Resurrection of Our Lord convincingly in dramatic form was nothing short of a supreme dramatist. In any plays in which he collaborated with Augusta Gregory — they were both generous in acknowledging the debt they owed each other — we may take it that the heroic element was contributed by him, the passages of dialogue that made the heroic element easier for an audience to grasp, by her. He would have given her credit for that extraordinary prophetic play The Unicorn from the Stars in which the destroyer ends up with nothing to destroy except himself. But Lady Gregory would not have it that the play was hers. That play was written in 1908 twenty-five years before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, but when I saw it played in London in 1940 it seemed to me so cogent to the European situation of the day that (apart needless to say from the beauty of the treatment) it might have been commissioned from some Allied literary propagandist. Generous in her turn, Augusta Gregory, though she did allow herself to be treated as the author of The Rising of the Moon, would insist that Yeats had an important part in the writing of it. [p.6] (Incidentally, for those now living who saw Kerrigan's performance as the man "on the run" in that small masterpiece it must remain an imperishably inspiring memory).

There are a few of W.B.'s plays about which I have reserve. I once sat with him through a performance of The Shadowy Waters. It was not, on that occasion, well produced but, reading it now, I incline to think that, heroic as is the idea and beautiful as is the poetry, it is not one of W.B.'s specifically dramatic successes. Again, Calvary, which I have never seen played, though I am told that it is good "theatre", is as unconvincing to me as the Resurrection is convincing. Vis-à-vis Christian tradition it seems to derive, in the first place, perhaps, from the incipient scepticism of some of the dullest of the many dull lines in Tennyson's In Memoriam — Where wert thou brother, those four days?
There lives no record of reply ... and in the second place from the over-clever English eighteen-nineties. And again, I think I see too much of that same English eighteen-nineties influence in The King of the Great Clock Tower. I pay little attention to the influence of the so-called "Celtic Twilight" in which, in his young days, even Yeats himself half-believed. The Celtic Twilight seems to have been a flapdoodle theory invented by Ernest Renan and propagated by his English disciple, Mathew Arnold. The Yeats who at 27 or 28 wrote Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam
And Usna's children died not only integrated Ireland's sorrow into the sorrow of all the world since European civilisation began with Homer but was more than ready for all that the Renaissance came to mean to him from the time of his first visit to Italy, which was not until 1907 when he was 42. Of the twenty four plays, from the Countess Cathleen (1892) down to The Death of Cuchulain (1939), and not counting the translations from Sophocles, most are masterpieces. For me The Death of Cuchulainwhich was the last of all, and which I saw acted by Mr. Austin Clarke's players (with scenery and costumes by Anne Yeats) some years since, is one of the greatest of all. The conversation between Aoife and Cuchulain in that play is surely one of the most moving dialogues any tragic dramatist has written.

Defeated in his hopes of seeing the cultural panel of all-round humanists, Gael and Gall, that he had dreamed of for the Senate, as he had been defeated in his hopes of seeing the art theatre he had dreamed of for the Abbey, W.B. still refused to lose patience.

In talk he would protest that he could not consider himself an [p.7] educated man. Actually it is hardly to be questioned that all his life he went on educating himself to the extraordinary degree that was needed for the expression of his extraordinary gifts. In addition he had educated himself to the point of being able to say, simply and honestly, "I don't know" in regard to subjects of which he sensed the importance but did not feel himself sufficiently equipped to express opinions. He despaired, however, of the type of modern man who, whether he owns fifty thousand acres or whether he be a specialist in some profession or other, will say, off-handedly "I know nothing about art" and then insist on adding consequentially "but I know what I like." As if in regard to every aspect of living it did not take experience and study to know with some degree of certainty what one likes! Similarly W.B. despaired of the scientifically-minded amateurs who, whenever a new scientific discovery is made by technical experts, choose to assume that it justifies further disbelief in regard to the mysteries which, from the beginning of history, men of intelligence have pondered, the mysteries of God and of human existence.

Ostensibly the Yeatses were Church of Ireland Protestants but it would be difficult to say how far their upbringing encouraged them fully to conform to the teaching of any religion. Jack Yeats told me he had never been confirmed and in consequence had never "taken the Sacrament" as, I gathered, would have been necessary if he was to be considered a full member of his church. How the girls and W.B. fared in that matter I do not know. But I think it could hardly be said that W.B. subscribed formally to any established religious belief — or for that matter, to any philosophical system. Yet those who knew him well often noticed that any reference to personal religious experience or to personal restatement of a philosophic position excited his eager interest. His confession in some essay of his — one referring to Rapallo if I remember rightly — that he liked to sit in empty churches may have been a characteristic reaction to his very nineteenth-century father's latitudinarian approach in such matters.

He was the reverse of anti-religious but he seemed to have met few clerics whose answers to his questons satisfied him. Yet when (again in The Celtic Twilight) he pointed out the contrast between the cruelty of the endings of many Scottish stories of the "unseen", as compared with the good-natured and half humorous turn such stories take in Irish folk-lore as they reach their climax, he make it quite clear that he was having a thrust at the pulpit-influence of Calvinist teaching and, on behalf of the Irish tradition, added "the Catholic religion likes to keep on good terms with its neighbours." I know that there was at least one Catholic cleric in whose conversation he took pleasure. That was [p.8] Monsignor Browne. They met only rarely but I was myself present at one long evening session when the talk, whether serious or light, was of both men's best. I had been reading Duchesne and I suggested that some remark of W.B.'s savoured of Gnosticism. W.B. was immediately interested and questioning. Monsignor Paddy, hiding his amusement at seeing me in the rôle of amateur theologian — though I heard about that as he drove me back from Rathfarnham to Dublin — was able to amplify satisfactorily on my suggestion as W.B. questioned further. Incidentally, I heard W.B. repeat, orally, at that session, the message which he had already had conveyed to Monsignor, that, on her deathbed, Augusta Gregory asked me to let Monsignor Browne know that the Beatha Iosa Criost, which Monsignor, in collaboration with Monsignor Boylan, had recently published, was the book that gave her most comfort in her last days.

Despite some far-back connection with the Butlers, who once wielded power in Kilkenny, the Yeats family were not what is known as "big house" people. John Butler Yeats the Elder was a barrister turned artist. His father and grandfather were parsons. But one does not have to know much Irish history to know that in the nineteenth century "the big house" rather took parsons for granted. It was more concerned with wooing Catholic priests, in the hope that they would discourage their parishioners from effectively participating in the ever-recurring rebellious political and social agitations of the times. The Yeatses, W. B., Jack and their sisters, could take pride in being Yeatses but they took just as much pride in being, on their mother's side, Pollexfens. The Pollexfens were millers and merchants and ship-owners. "We had no gate lodges and no carriage drives," Jack Yeats would say. As W.B.'s fame grew, however, he inevitably had to rub shoulders with "big house" people in England. At one stage he said to me that Ottoline Morell was the only one of them he knew with whom he could talk his own kind of talk. I enquired of him about another group, socially but not intellectually of much the same world as Ottoline Morrell, with whom he had to do, when, on occasion, it suited their purpose to intrude on his world. "Church-wardens," said W.B. "They are only fit to be church-wardens." But, hopefully, he would make concessions. "One is always making concessions," he said to me once. At Coole and after he entered the Senate and the Kildare Street Club he had to meet more and more Irish "big-house" people. In one case he went so far as to speak at an election meeting on behalf of one of them, an amiable enough man who had inherited a library and who could throw an occasional literary tag into his not very stimulating conversation. Again I dared to ask W.B. why. Patiently, and obviously in agreement [p.9] with my estimate of the man concerned, he explained. "For me, he represents the people who, in the eighteenth century, read their classics." In retrospect, I think that that answer was a kind of preparation for the lecture he gave later at the Royal Dublin Society which startled many of his admirers, but which, again in retrospect, I incline to think was addressed rather more to the men of the "big house" than to the Irish people. For W.B. knew quite well that in lore and song and story the Irish people had cherished undying affection for the memory of the professional men of the ascendency and the rare "big house" men of the ascendency who, in the past, had deserted their own English provincial traditions and who, in such cases as those of Tone and Emmet — and Edward Fitzgerald too — had gone so far as to lay down their lives for the revolution it would have been had the people of the Irish nation won self-government. The Irish people knew also that Swift and Burke had on occasion been of some help. But, in his lecture, W.B. put forward these two, and George Berkeley with them, as reactionary (which to him, in his political innocence, meant merely orderly) counterblasts to the revolutionaries. Politically, W.B. was as innocent as most laymen. About 1923 or 1924 he told me he believed that Mussolini represented the rise of the individual man as against what he considered the anti-human party machine. I was most distrustful about 'Il Duce" but I did not know enough then to answer that Mussolini was believed to be in the hands of an economically, and therefore politically, powerful group of men in Italy. W.B. did know enough abstract history, to know that it is axiomatic that revolution has to be followed by reaction. The Irish ascendency as a whole had tended to be selfishly reactionary. In fact Irish landlordism had become a byword. W.B. would insist on trying now to provide the ascendency with a group of philosophic avatars, Swift and Berkeley and Burke, who were reactionary but not selfish. The question was whether, in the new order of things created in Ireland by the Treaty, ascendency people as a whole could be persuaded to play a constructive part. That could help towards the ultimate realisation of the unified and cultured Ireland of W.B.'s dreams. There is little evidence to show what influence his famous lecture has had on the ascendency, or how far any of its members has moved towards giving his or her first allegiance to Ireland.

Then, though now he was having to be careful of his health, W.B. began to plan something else. Myself, I had become Lecteur d'Anglais at the Ecole Normale in Paris. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that W.B. "consulted" me about his newest scheme, that of founding an Irish Academy of letters. He could, and I have no doubt did consult men better qualified to advise him than I was. But, patiently again, he [p.10] went into the question in some of his letters to me. I had no inner knowledge of the workings of the Académie Francaise and my first reaction was to point out that none of the modern French writers W.B. himself most admired, Balzac, Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Stephane Mallarmé, had been elected to membership of it. Still W.B. persisted. Staying with him on my way home on holidays, I gathered a better impression of what his hope was — that in the matters of cultural values and style the standards set by his academy should constitute points of departure for Irish literary men in the future.

Perhaps they have already done so, perhaps they will do so yet. Perhaps there will one day be a permanent Irish art theatre. Perhaps there will one day be a cultural panel of humanists in the Senate. Perhaps one day the remnants of the ascendency — or for that matter their only too possible Commisar successors — will give their first allegiance to Ireland. It will not be the fault of W. B. Yeats if these things do not come about.

W.B.'s Irish Academy of Letters brings me to a subject which is seldom referred to — the fun that it was knowing W.B. He had endless humorous stories of people's oddities of behaviour and the "contrairinesses" of individuals he had known. He could retail them lightheartedly and to effect. Thus he had at some time been involved in a London effort to establish an English equivalent of the Académie Française. The interested parties elected academicians and meetings were held. One of the members was an art authority and literary figure of some distinction named Selwyn Image. Image, I gathered, was a slight little figure and mild of manner, but at every meeting he would, sooner or later, be heard protesting, gently but persistently, that there was no sense in calling themselves academicians unless they wore a uniform! Only thus arrayed could they, to his mind, rank in the world's eyes as the equals of the forty "immortals" of the French Académie who, on official occasions, have to wear the famous habit vert.

It may have been from the London academy also that a deputation of writers, which I think included W.B. himself, was chosen to convey to Doughty, author of the famous but little-read Arabia Deserta, the information that the government wished to honour him; and to enquire whether he would accept the Order of Merit if it were offered to him. Doughty was a taciturn Olympian living a secluded life some distance from London. The deputation arrived at his house, was shown into the great man's presence and with all the courtesies and complimentary references to his work that the occasion called for, explained the purpose of the visit. Doughty listened in silence. When the visitors had each said his say, he gave his answer. Quite quietly and with the verbal [p.11] economy that has become characteristic of him he spoke: "I don't want the bloody thing" was all he said.

In the 1952 issue of The Capuchin Annual I referred to the comic conspiracies of Dublin literary life as W.B. would tell how he found them over the years. One or two will perhaps bear retelling. The Leader, apparently, was liable to be unfriendly to his ideas on an Irish art theatre policy. But W.B. told me laughingly that if, in the old days, they had a play coming on which was likely to prove controversial he could call round to The Leader office, tell D. P. Moran, the editor and ostensible enemy, about it and ask that, if the play had to be attacked it should be on some, to W.B., unimportant, ground rather than on the one that might prove damaging to the theatre effort as a whole. Always D. P. would see what he could do about it and no harm would be done. Again, apropos of the controversy as to who it was who should be regarded as the real founder of the theatre which in time became known as the Abbey Theatre, I remember a night when W.B. had undertaken to give a lecture to a group of students at, I think, some place in Grafton Street. Apparently he had proposed a title for the lecture which allowed him some latitude. For he came back from the function full of glee. "Frank Fay was in the front row" he told me, "so I didn't give the lecture I meant to give." Then he added with a mischievous smile, "I told them instead that they should all read James Joyce."

Actually, though he testified publicly that he thought Joyce had "a heroic mind" I doubt whether he really felt sympathetic to the philosophic implications of Joyce's literary work. There was an afternoon in London when on my way back from Paris I had to get some heavy luggage registered through to Dublin in advance. Dolly Lennox Robinson came up to Euston with me. There we came on W.B. who was also out on some errand or other. "We'll go to my club for tea," he said. So in we got to a taxi and set off for Brook Street. But when we arrived at the club the hall porter pointed out that it was not a "ladies" day, so Dolly could not come in. I proposed an alternative. "Let us go to the Carlton instead and it will be my tea. It is the best three-an-sixpence worth in London." Out we went, found another taxi and drove down Regent Street and Haymarket. Perhaps the Haymarket had already become a one-way street with a left turn at the end. At any rate I stopped the taxi at the side-door of the Carlton in Haymarket instead of going on to the main entrance whch was in Pall Mall to the right. As I knew the way it was agreed that I should go first. But behind me W.B. whispered to Dolly. "Look at the cool way MacGreevy walks into a place like this. I've always been afraid of grand hotels." (Actually I had grown up more afraid of grand hotels than any Yeats [p.12] but a short time as a young artillery officer in the first war had taught me not to be afraid of them and taught me too that you could often get better value in them than in less pretentious establishments). We did, in the event, have a very good tea and good service and I think we all enjoyed ourselves. Of the conversation, I remember particularly that W.B. said Joyce had been to see him early in the afternoon and that it had been a pleasant visit-though W.B. added "There is still that element of pugnaciousness in Joyce's manner that one used to notice in Dublin long ago."

Like most of the world and unlike the darkly resentful few, W.B. could have serious differences and even quarrels with people yet without final breaks resulting from them. He was young when he wrote "There is always something in our enemy that we like" and I would say that, for himself, that remained true up to the end. He could make a mischievous joke but it was only a joke and I never heard him say anything really damaging about anyone. The verbal portrait of him that George Moore painted in Hail and Farewell seems to me to be a piece of mocking mimicry rather than a portrait in the true sense of the word. Portrait painting after all is a noble art. As between Moore and Yeats there may or may not have been a final break but it was only when Moore Hall was burned down during the civil war that in my hearing Yeats bothered to invent a mischievous joke about Moore. "At last people in London will believe that he was brought up as a gentleman," he said. I never heard him refer to the story that Cardinal Logue had condemmed Countess Cathleen without reading it and I never remembered to ask him about it.

It was in London, where he introduced me to every friend of his who might be of interest to me or useful to me, that, at dinner one night, he said, "You ought to know Arthur Waley too. He is out with me at the moment but that won't last long." On a night when, with Mrs. Yeats, he was passing through Paris I dined with them. My latest news was that one of the parties in a drama of personalities that was going on claimed to be a re-incarnation of Shelley. Gleefully W.B. commented, "That makes four I have come across."

When he was alone with A.E. I believe they talked contentedly like the life-long friends they were. But if they had an audience there was danger of argument. Once, in company with Eamon Curtis, I heard them positively rage at each other about, of all thing, The Playboy row of years and years before. "It's like a war of the gods and heroes," Curtis whispered to me. I have friends who think that Yeats could be too cruel with A.E., as on a night in Merrion Square when A.E. rambled on for a while in praise of Walt Whitman. Yeats remained silent and [p.13] then suddenly cut in with oracular finality, "No, Russell! No! " he said firmly, "Whitman is one of the errors of our youth." But it could be that on such occasions Yeats was only getting his own back in his own forthright way.. In the literary world, like all worlds, rumour circulates and Yeats must surely have known that A.E. wrote parodies of his work in both poetry and prose and at his home in Rathgar Avenue would read them to his cronies. I myself heard A.E. read a derisive extravaganza he had written on the head of W.B.'s literary heroics, with particular reference to the use of the word 'Homeric' in an article which W.B. had published on Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne. Except on the lips of some — and only some — of the characters in her plays, I, myself, have always found the Kiltartan dialect used by Augusta Gregory somewhat irksome. Still, looking back now, I incline to think that the account in the Gregory book of Cuchulain's interview with his mother before going out to what, he foresees, will be his death, may well be considered Homeric.

Both A.E. and W.B. were interested in psychic phenomena. Whether A.E. ever engaged in what is called "psychical research" I don't know. W.B. did. So did people I occasionally came across, and in Paris and London as well as in Dublin. But it was W.B. who said to me, "Practically every medium has to cheat at times, especially with people whose eagerness for results springs from the need of comfort." I have never believed that knowledge of the inexplicable things that happen to all of us can be systematised. But, contrary to general belief, I know that, sooner or later, W.B. would come to laugh about occasions on which he had been ready to be over credulous. On the other hand, though he could laugh at the true comedy effects in Bernard Shaw's plays, he detested Shaw's tendency to dispose of the inexplicable with a smart phrase; as he detested the fact that Shaw's always too polemical plays tended to make actors speak like lawyers. W.B. would have them competent to speak like poets. It is to be feared that even in the Irish theatre the Shaw influence has gained ground at the expence of the Yeats influence.

Coming back to the fun it was knowing Yeats as a man, I would recall a letter he wrote to me about my monograph on T.S. Eliot. I had some years experience of Eliot's phenomonal charm, but I came to think that there was a perennial though only faintly perceptible element of astuteness behind it. In conversation Eliot tended to be excessively flattering to his interlocutor. It was thinking of Eliot that I learned to advise people, especially young writers, to beware of charm. "We can have charm ourselves," I told them, "when we want to" After a kind reference to the "momentum" he said he found in my "crabbed, [p.14] passionate and lucid" prose, W.B. went on to say — I quote from memory — "Eliot cannot write prose. Pound at his best writes finer prose than Eliot does . . . . Eliot is dancing among eggs."

Finally, returning to the Yeatsian attitude to Shaw, I noticed recently that a paper-back edition of Shaw's Androcles and The Lion has been published. It is a very good serio-comic play about a mixed lot of early Christians. The prose preface to the play, however, is no more than an attempt by a good-natured but all too smart casuist to present Christ as a most estimable social reformer who was deluded into believing himself to be God. I am convinced that that preface has been a disturbing influence on intelligent youth ever since is was first published; and that it is responsible for much of the disturbed state of mind of the youth of to-day. W. B. Yeats tended to prefer belief to disbelief. In the two or three years before his death, however, I saw little of him and I do not know where he stood finally in regard to Christianity. The reappearance of the Shaw play and preface in the bookshops reminded me of something that could be cogent. Once W.B. asked me could I explain why Browning's poetry had intellectual quality when the work of most English poets had not. My answer excited him. "Browning was a quarter Scots and a quarter Jewish." If W.B. were alive now it is not an answer I would have to excite him with; but a seemingly outrageous question to put to him that, as things are to-day, he would, I dare to think, find exciting. It is a simple question for mature intelligences but one that the world we live in needs to consider: "Would you agree that Saint John was a greater writer than Bernard Shaw?"

W.B. is dead over a quarter of a century. I think back on the excitement and fun that it was knowing him familiarly; and I miss him.