The first volume of Frank O'Connor's autobiography (An Only Child, 1961) was the story of young Michael Francis O'Donovan…. That story began in the back lanes of Cork in 1903 and ended with the young man's release, courtesy of the Irish Free State, from an internment camp in 1923. This second, posthumous volume [My Father's Son] picks up the story at that point and brings it forward in time, though with no apparent regard for chronology, to the eve of the Second World War—or, to use O'Connor's own measure of his days upon earth, to the death of Yeats early in 1939. (p. 668)

Yeats is more fully sketched (it is by no means a full portrait) than any of the other figures whom O'Connor here assembles, and occasionally disassembles: AE, Robinson, Osborn Bergin, Geoffrey Phibbs and a dozen others whom he came to know as he made his way up in the world. This was the world of Dublin in the last years of the literary revival, very much a man's world and, as Joyce would have it, all too Irish.

The young provincial-turned-librarian … was eventually co-opted onto the board of directors of the Abbey Theatre, its great days already part of memory, and the last half of his autobiography is devoted in large part to still another account, more personally rancorous than most, of the feuds and infighting that went on in and out of the Green Room among assorted actors, directors, producers, poets and playwrights.

But a fight is only interesting if it is heroic or amusing. These scraps at the Abbey were neither, and one wonders why O'Connor chose to worry them over as he has done….

In the end we are left with the unfinished story of a man of great talent, akin to if not really a kind of genius, in whom the life of the imagination and the exigencies of practical intellect were never fully reconciled. In the young man a public official consumed the aspirations of a poet, in maturity a man of affairs intruded upon the private provinces of a born storyteller; and throughout the whole of his life, whatever his private or public role at the time, he was constantly scouting the encampments of scholarship but without ever realizing the full satisfactions of that fellowship. (p. 670)