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YEATS, W. B.
Reveries Over Childhood and Youth.
Publisher: London, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1916
Stock code: 47898
Price: £60,000 Currency Conversion
First English edition of Yeats's first autobiography; a canonical presentation copy, inscribed in the month of publication, "Ezra Pound from W. B. Yeats, October 1916." One of 1,000 copies of the English edition; preceded by the American edition, as well as the first edition done at the Cuala Press in Dundrum. Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats lived and worked together in close quarters in Sussex over the course of three winters (1913–16). During that time, Yeats wrote and published the first of his memoirs, Reveries, assisted by Pound. Yeats told his father, "Ezra Pound and his wife are staying with me, we have four rooms of a cottage on the edge of a heath and our back is to the woods." According to biographer James Longenback, although Yeats did not mention that he was at work on Reveries, he was - and with Pound's assistance. On 15 January he informed a friend that he was "dictating from the manuscript he had completed on Christmas day, adding new material, while Pound typed the finished product for the printer." At the same time, Pound wrote to his parents that he was reading Yeats the autobiography of Herbert of Cherbury. Longenbach concluded that it was likely that this 17th-century adventurer, who revered the nobility of his own ancestry, provided a model for Reveries as Yeats and Pound collaborated to produce its final form. Meanwhile, in the beginning of the year, Yeats's father, "the father of all the Yeatsssssss", as Pound often called him, had been knocked down in a New York City street and painfully cut and bruised. John Quinn, the legendary patron of artists and writers, agreed to help Yeats solve the perennial problem of his father's expenses: £50 for the first portion of the manuscript of Reveries would remain in Quinn's hands to be used toward his father's medical costs. As Quinn waited patiently for the copy of Reveries, in manuscript and typescript, to arrive, Yeats wrote him on April 22: "I believe I sent you the typed script of Reveries [in February]. Till I got your letter I had no doubt on the subject. I wonder if it went down on some torpedoed ship? However, here is another." After a January letter saying that he was polishing Reveries with Pound's help, Yeats's next known remark about his autobiography appears in a letter dated "circa November-December 1915", in which he told his father "I am going on with the book, but the rest shall be for my eye alone." In 1916, Yeats and Pound were "terribly excited" when Reveries was published by the Cuala Press on 20 March in an edition of 425 numbered copies. On 26 April Macmillan and Company released its American edition in an unspecified number of copies. Six months later, Macmillan issued this English edition, limited to 1,000 copies.
Octavo. Original blue cloth, decoration and titles to upper board and spine gilt designed by Sturge Moore, edges untrimmed. Custom blue morocco-backed slipcase and chemise. Colour frontispiece (Memory Harbour) and 2 tipped-in portraits by Jack B. Yeats Front joint rubbed, small stain on rear cover, tissue guards a little browned, but a very good copy, especially considering the provenance - Pound was not especially careful with his books.
