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PARTISAN REVIEW
pram, and Lish insisted on making this photograph a centerpiece in the
book. I'm afraid I went along with the notion that the death of my brother
was a major episode in my life. Seamus Heaney once remarked that Irish
families that lose a child either cover the death with silence or talk about
it interminably. I never heard my mother or father speak of John after
they buried him. Nor did I speak of him. Maybe Lish felt that John's
death must have been indelible, since we couldn't bring ourselves to men–
tion it. When we left Warrenpoint, John's grave in Burren had no marker.
My father didn't arrange
to
have the grave named in any way. Many
years later, May, Kathleen, and I got a small piece of marble inscribed
with John's name and date of death. The grave doesn't need to be
attended to: instead of grass, it is covered with concrete and loose stones.
In the absence of plot, I did whatever I could for characterization, but
it was not enough. Whenever I felt inclined to insert myself in the book,
I found myself quoting passages from other writers. Some reviewers–
Karl Miller, for one-were irritated by this device. "If you have a story
to tell, tell it; if not, not." But my part in the little story consisted of the
books I read. I could say that my life was vicarious, lived through other
people, except that I never mistook another life for mine. I knew that
Prince Hamlet was one figure,
.J.
Alfred Prufrock another, and Denis
Donoghue a third: self-delusion was not one of my disabilities. I did not
conceive a theory of the imagination, but I knew that the imagination was
the mind in the practice of its freedom, and that mine exerted itself by
entering notionally into lives other than my own. Among books, 1 vaguely
thought that I might practice living a life alternative to mine, or that I
might have a life apart from my given one, and additional to it. Harold
Bloom says of James's Isabel Archer in
The Portrait of a Lady
that her
decision
to
return to her husband leads her to "the renewed Emersonian
realization that she is her own alternative." During my years, there were
no Emersonian intuitions in Ireland, much less realizations. The convic–
tion of being one's own alternative did not occur to me. But the experi–
ence of reading poems and novels at least allowed me
to
feel that 1 might
(moving from Emerson
to
Dickinson) dwell in possibility.
There was another way of expressing this vague desire, though I did
not come across it until years later. Yeats distinguishes between charac–
ter and personality. Character is the sum of our circumstances, a function
of chance: our parents, contingencies, the cultural and economic forces.
Personality is what we make of these conditions by choice and imagina–
tion, especially the imagination of difference. Yeats got the distinction
from his father, John Butler Yeats, especially from a letter of March 5,
'910.
Character, John Butler Yeats wrote
to
his son, "always means a
