FACTS ANI) FICTIONS IN ALL THREE GENRES
149
man in whom the will power is predominant, it is in fact the bureau–
cratic mind, and is as interesting as Berlin governed by its police." Per–
sonality
"to
my mind is human nature when undergoing a passion for
self-expression ... it is character in movement
to
declare itself."
In
my
early life, reading provided the only experience by which I could even
imagine becoming, in John Butler Yeats's sense, a persona lity.
The possibility was embodied for me not in plots but in sentences and
in lines of verse. I read for the style, and committed to memory the
examples of style I carried with me in Warrenpoint and later in Dublin.
My favorite line in Yeats's poetry-from an otherwise unremarkable
poem, "The
~olly
of Being Comforted"-is not even a complete sen–
tence: "The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs." To complete the
sentence, you have to add a few lines not as enchanting as that one:
Heart cries, 'No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. 0 she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.
So I turned my boyhood into an anthology, a small
Goldell Treasury.
Have I thought of trying
to
write a sequel
to
Warrenpoint?
The
thought has crossed my mind, or been put into my mind by two or three
friends. But without insistence. A sequel would be concerned with my
early years as a student of literature and music in Dublin. But I don't
think I could make much of them, or of the years in which I had a job in
the Civil Service (Department of
~inance,
Establishments Division) and
later in the English Department at University College, Dublin. I have not
felt under compulsion
to
write a sequel. However, I am not absolutely
innocent of the temptation. Recently I tried
to
write a memoir of Dublin,
but it ended up-not surprisingly-as a study of
T.
S. Eliot's poems; or
more accurate ly a description of the experience of submitting myself
to
a major writer. The book is entitled
Words Alone: The Poet T
S.
Eliot.
I
appear in it intermittently, and mainly in the first couple of chapters. I
chose Eliot because he was a major presence in my reading life. He was
everywhere, as poet and critic. Poets of comparable power-Yeats and
Stevens, for example-were amateurs in criticism, though I treasure
Yeats's essays and A
Visioll
and Stevens's
The Necessary Allgel
and
Opus
Posthumous.
