David Wyatt: Prodigal Sons: A Study in Authorship and Authority

Abstract

David Wyatt’s Prodigal Sons is a slender but critically ambitious volume, unequal in its parts and not always the book that its title might suggest, frequently very well written but occasionally bedevilled by an excess of Freudian terminology. It is rich in insights and in sensitive readings of the oeuvres of several authors, but unfortunately, given the place of this review, it does not have a great deal to say to students of Yeats. I fear that they will come away with the feeling that they have learned little from Prodigal Sons (especially if they have recently read William Murphy’s Prodigal Father), and this would be a pity because, though Mr Wyatt may not be at his best on Yeats (or, in my judgment, on Henry James, Hemingway, and James Agee), when he is at his best, as in the essays on Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Robertson Davies, he can be very good indeed, and he raises some very interesting and pertinent questions of a critical, theoretical nature in the epilogue that he calls “Career as Canon.” The very title of this epilogue, however, suggests one reason why the chapter on Yeats contributes relatively little: it has long been a commonplace of Yeats criticism that his career and his canon are one and that it is impossible to write about his work without touching on his life or about his life without drawing it largely from his work.