FACTS AND FICTIONS IN ALL THREE CENRES
159
shall hope to do so. The relationship with these various women drew
from him something that he found impossible to draw from himself
without them. He said that again and again in all sorts of different
forms. What they drew from him was a deep and powerful emotional,
imaginative, and aesthetic exploration. To create a vehicle, a structure,
in which he could pursue these very searching and exacting investiga–
tions into the nature of both feeling and form (the two always went
together for Matisse), he needed-and this will be one of the nubs of my
second volume, one of the things that absolute ly fascinates me-he
needed, generally,
to
respond
to
a specific woman. This is no doubt a
peculiarity of his character. One can't say that of every painter. I sup–
pose you could to some extent say that of Bonnard, his contemporary
and great friend, but the actual shape these re lationships took was very
different in the case of these two individual men.
Michal Govrin:
T hank you. The last question is for Denis. I was struck by
a connection between your talk and Conor Cruise O'Brien's this morning.
I was struck especia ll y by your telling how writing about yourself became
writing about your father. I want to pursue that as a cultural-poli tical–
historical question. Both of you spoke about your political background
and both of you evoked 1916 in your presentations. Would you say that
once you write in a place where history is still in the making, from an
ideological point of view, the legacy of the family, the lineage, the legacy
of the father is the tradition, is the larger form, as Catholicism may be
for Madame de Sev igne, for writing yourself, in a way that I would call
"the pre-writing" of your own life and that of your father's as well?
Denis Donoghue:
I don't think I cou ld have imagined any terms of refer–
ence other than the family, and then leading out from the family to the
larger social context, which I touch upon briefly. In fact there was more
to it. My mother's brother Seamus O'Neil was out in 19 16, he was a
rebel, second in command to Sean Treacy in south Tipperary, and he was
an ardent speaker and teacher of the Irish language. He gave up a ll polit–
ical activity at the civi l war because he would take no part in the murder–
ing of one Irishman by another. He to ld me some years later that if he had
been offered a choice to have Ireland stil l Irish-speaking, and still within
the British Empire, or the choice of modern Ireland as it developed, with
some degree of self-government, but on the who le speaking English, he
would have chosen
to
have Ire land remain within the British Empire as an
Irish-speaking country. If by divine intervention that had been possible, he
