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...