146
PARTISAN REVIEW
The first device
I
thought of to get over the embarrassment of trying
to
write a book about myself-having nothing
to
write about-was
to
get rid of the "1, " the first person singular.
I
tried using the third person
singular, on the authority of
The Educatioll of Henry Adams.
But that
authority,1 soon saw, was not available
to
me. Adams wrote of himself:
Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple,
and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest,
under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more
distinctl y branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the
races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the cen–
tury was
to
offer.
But
to
be born Denis Donoghue was to incur no brand, no handicap: as
a name, it carried no implication. The only Donoghue one heard about
was a jockey, Steve Donoghue, no relation of mine. Narration in the
third person singular, 1 found, was more egotistical than the blatant if
not candid "1," because it would be claiming exemplary status, as
Henry Adams is justified in doing.
The second problem was that Illy childhood was bereft of incident.
The only things that would interest Ille in relation to Illy own life were
not things that 1 had done but the books
I
had read. Certain books,
sentences, phrases that I happened to have read, were indelible. 1 then
devised a method of writing a book full of quotations. At every weak
moment, when the trail of incident, such as it was, had run out, I would
produce a passage, a few sentences, a phrase, and I would mull these
over for a bit. Still, there was no easy way of getting over the difficulty
of having nothing
to
write about, and having nothing
to
say. And I
might mention, marginally, that it's perhaps significant that whenever I
have made any gesture at all toward bringing to an author an interest
mainly biographical, I have tended to move toward authors who like
myself had almost nothing in the way of a life. I wrote a critical biog–
raphy of Walter Pater, for example . .lUSt think, of all the major Victori–
ans, he was the one who had less life than anybody else, and I felt I
could recite his life in a few pages. I seemed
to
find that stirring in some
strange way. I started making a comparison between myself and Henry
James's John Marcher.
In
" The Beast in the Jungle," Marcher spends all
his life waiting for some marvelous thing to happen, waiting for prov–
idence
to
designate him as the one who would sustain some great des–
tiny, and he consumes his life waiting for this. And at the end, nothing
happens, he has no destiny at all, except the fate of having missed a
