The Yew Tree at the Head of the Strand

These facts are the bones of his memoir, which is a thoughtful mulling of the chief passages and influences in his life: his family, his schooling, his literary education and his philosophical preoccupations. It is a valuable memoir because it is a frank admission and exploration of the ambiguities and cross-currents of a life that eludes or transgresses the anticipated categories: Northerner, Catholic, Nationalist. This is not to say that these do not obtain, they do, but they are made to weather all kinds of interrogations and qualifications. When, some years ago, I hoped that we would see lots of Irish memoirs, this is the kind of resulting document I had in mind.

It is a memoir that even when registering difference (for example, between himself and the Protestants he encountered along the way) is always alive to what humanly unites us. It is dedicated, commendably, to those “who have worked – publicly or behind the scenes – for peace and reconciliation in Ireland”.

The book begins with a memory of the father, then of the mother, and after accounts of what loom large in his memory (church, early reading, summer holidays, visits to the countryside, school, sport, and university), it returns again to the mother and finally to the widowed father. This is a pleasing symmetry of structured memory that conveys the essential balance that Brian Cosgrove’s life has achieved since his youth came to an end in Oxford, a balance wrested from circumstances that might have been expected to leave him restless, self-divided, bitter, even angry. He is after all a Catholic who grew up in Unionist Northern Ireland, a province of an England-dominated United Kingdom. Had he listened to some of his Christian Brother teachers, or had he grown up in a ‘strongly nationalist family,’ he might have ended up an anglophobic and sectarian republican activist. There would have been a waiting readership for the heated account of such a life. He is, however, a sane, self-assured citizen of the archipelago if touched with a certain sense of his own ‘outsiderness’, and perhaps an obscure sense of under-achievement that may be common among the older type of literary critic who knows he studies art but is not an artist.

Yet the ‘outsiderness’ seems to have stemmed from his birth order. The eldest son typically grows up competitive and dutiful because he is the new breadwinner-in-waiting, the second son is freer to express himself and to be irresponsible; but the third son is fated to take upon himself the conscience of the family, to be the brooder and reconciler; Cosgrove like myself is a third son and bears the imprint.

Equally does he bear the imprint of his Catholic upbringing, though this is hardly a matter for surprise. He recalls the corrosive guilt and shame that afflicted Catholics of his generation and as a result remembers confession and penance with no gratitude or warmth. Cosgrove feels no alienation from the Church in the matter of communion, which he interprets today as a purchase on transcendence, a spiritual oasis in a secular, information technology desert. He has, it seems, kept a renovated faith and he remains a believer in the Christian ethic as a cure for the malady of egoism (however much he admires the individualist philosophy of Protestantism). He views the institution of the Church as a guarantor of “Tradition.”. Literature as a tradition and a continuity seems to him to have been a secular partner of Christianity.

For Cosgrove, English literature and Christianity have been in traffic with one another. This is probably because he had to engage with literature only through Catholicism, and it has not been a clean breakaway: Cosgrove retains a suspicion of intellect and of secular thought and of the pleasures of the text liberated from ethical and spiritual obligations.This is a book about the making of a reader, a reader with a serviceable library and a very good memory. Refreshingly, Cosgrove’s literature is English literature across its broad range. This memoir makes a strong and novel case for the reading, remembering and study of English literature as a potentially reconciliatory force in a divided society like Northern Ireland. From the other side of the bar, as it were (i.e. as writer), Seamus Heaney might be thought to make the same tacit claim. This rooted belief in the spiritual and social value of literature is probably connected to Cosgrove’s dislike of literary theory, especially contemporary literary theory driven by ideology and all its arid interrogations.

Cosgrove has the likeable trait of not exaggerating his importance or taking himself seriously, while still being convinced of the importance of being earnest. His felicity is of incident or episode rather than of language. Here, instead, are fine vignettes of memory. The lower middle class, in which he was born, is hardly a formation at all, so pliable and amorphous it is (or was). It operated, it seems to me, to relay the utter ordinariness of life, without the consoling ruggedness of the working-class or the legitimate ambition of the middle class, and against which the gifted child struggled to assert himself, often by acceding to art or scholarship.

Meanwhile the child had the advantage of the Northern Ireland education set-up with its scholarship system, and like me, Cosgrove did sufficiently well in his Advanced Senior Certificate to go on to Queen’s University which he attended in the years 1958-62. He studied English and eventually became a professor of English, as I did. On the evidence here, his experience at Queen’s differed from mine to the extent that it had a Catholic dimension. I did not know that almost every Catholic student regularly visited the Catholic Chaplaincy on campus (a word used then only in reference to American universities), part religious resort, part social resort, and was to some extent monitored in his faith. This would have been inexplicable and unacceptable to me as a (Protestant) student, and one is tempted to conclude (adapting Joyce) that the Ulster Catholic back then served two masters, the Unionist Party and the Catholic Church. Cosgrove recalls that his “Nationalist contemporaries” had difficulty with the relentlessly non-Irish accents and British origins of the lecturers; there was only one Irish-born lecturer in the department then.

Cosgrove still frets over that most imperial of sports, cricket, to which he has had an early and lifelong devotion; he frets over cricket in Ireland and its assumed disloyalty, but of course can defend it by mentioning the names of Beckett (who played the game) and Joyce (for whom county cricket scores were part of the vast lumber of his mind). For even while cricketing, Cosgrove was a teen-aged member of the Legion of Mary who delivered The Catholic Herald, The Irish Catholic and The Standard. I relish the contradiction which, the memoir encourages me to see, is not quite the contradiction even the author of the memoir believes it to be. I am sure that, even in Unionist Northern Ireland, the vast majority of Ulster Catholics lived lives actually far more similar to those of Ulster Protestants than politics then and now permit us to recognise. Politics in Ireland, especially in Ulster, have hampered the flow of many personal forces: love, sexual feeling, friendship, a sense of our common humanity, and it has also hampered our memory and celebration of experiences that it turns out might have united, not divided us. So, as I said before, “let the memoirs be written”, for they will prove what I am saying. But only if the memoirs resist the mighty pull of a political and even literary tradition of reminiscence by, for their part, Catholics that stresses difference from Protestants, embraces nationalist culture over against British or Protestant culture, remembers slights and insults, and is often fuelled by resentment. Cosgrove’s memoir perhaps belongs with Voices and the Sound of Drums (1981) by Patrick Shea more than with Warrenpoint (1990) by Denis Donoghue, though the latter is the more eloquent.

The value of The Yew-Tree at the Head of the Strand is its honesty in confessing its author’s ambivalences and ambiguities and cultural promiscuity. The cultural promiscuity is of the text, for pages on cricket will sit beside pages on the sectarian make-up of Warrenpoint and how the sight of the Union Jack utterly estranged him. The text like his world was, and is, unstable, but Cosgrove wrestles it all into the light of day where its measure can be taken and measures takes against it, if necessary.

John Wilson Foster is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.