ROBERT GREACEN is a member of the generation of Northern poets that came of age during the second World War - his friend Roy McFadden is another - and that makes such an instructive contrast with both the older generation of John Hewitt, John Boyd and Sam Hanna Bell and the postwar generation, the existence of which Greacen never once acknowledges.
In various ways, his story is a familiar one. Born in 1920, the only child of an unhappy marriage, young Robert grows up in the hungry, bitter, homely Belfast of the Depression. His parents have a news agency, fag and sweet shop on the Newtownards Road, and the youngster is immunised from the worst of the social and economic weather; but he has little protection from the distress and ugliness of his father's alcoholism until he decides to protect himself and, in a memorable scene, depicts himself about to lay into the detested parent with a hatchet.
Since the sash Robert Greacen's father wore was less the regalia of Loyal Orange Lodge No. 525 to which he belonged than the hairshirt of his own incompetence and misanthropy, escape from the family home becomes all important. Soon enough, Robert is smitten by the lorelei of literature, makes the acquaintance - briefly - of Forrest Reid, and is swept along by the current of talk and trends in Belfast, much of it acquired from the Left Book Club. He goes to Queen's but doesn't take his degree, being too busy putting together magazines and "following a dream" of literary eminence. He makes contacts. He writes poems. Things are going well.
He moves to Dublin, where he meets Patrick Kavanagh, of whom glimpses are provided - though there are more substantial portraits of Cecil Salkeld and Valentine Iremonger, with whom the author coedited the anthology Contemporary Irish Poetry (1949).. (One of these days, somebody from those years is going to make news by saying he - or, more likely, she - didn't know Patrick Kavanagh.) He publishes a book of poems. He moves to London: it seemed my best chance of a career lay in England", he writes, not exactly an artistic manifesto. He marries Patricia Hutchins, author of James Joyce's Dublin, a pioneering volume in its way. And then he dries up: the Muse, like the lovely wanton she is, had forsaken me".
"Career" takes over, first as an official with the United Nations Association, then 20 years as a teacher of English as a foreign language. Of course there's also reviewing and other miscellaneous activity - not Grub Street, quite, more Grub Avenue. Some prominent names appear, among them Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford, T. S. Eliot and Alex Comfort.
An evening with Stanislaus Joyce in London, with a party of his students of English as a foreign language, is recalled. In 1975 the Muse returns, the author's A Garland for captain Fox is published. "At last I was back in the poetry business." He has remained in it ever since and is the success he set out to be.
Incorporating the author's memoir Even Without Irene (1969), which dealt with his Belfast years, The Sash My Father Wore is an amiable dander along the byways of the literary life. Its unselfconscious, undaunted, uncritical tone confirms without exploring the author's membership of a somewhat lost generation of Northern writers, for many of whose members literary ambition was the cry of the cultural orphan.