12
Fred Cogswell: The Many-Dimensioned Self
Cogswell’s “public” involvement in the CCF affected his future, as it did the futures of other young idealists in a political environment that was decidedly and timidly centrist in New Brunswick – and, it must be remembered, sympathetic to the radical message of the KKK. At the request of A.G. Bailey, and on the strength of his undergraduate record (he won the Bliss Carman Medal in 1946 and ’47, and the prestigious Douglas Gold Medal in 1949), he applied and was short-listed for a Rhodes scholarship. At the start of the mandatory interview in Saint John in 1950, he was asked when he was going to change his politics. When he stumbled and then became defensive about his answer, the interview abruptly ended, one of the shortest (he was later told) ever conducted. When it was announced that fellow UNB student Gérard La Forest won the award, Cogswell called to congratulate him. Both knew each other as upper Saint John River Valley boys, La Forest from Grand Falls. La Forest explained on the phone that his Liberalism had been the focus of genial discussion during the interview, which to Cogswell made perfect sense, for Liberalism had become dynastic in New Brunswick. That bit of political gerrymandering, however, meant that Cogswell had to settle for an IODE scholarship, going to Edinburgh for a doctorate instead of Oxford. Cogswell concluded that Liberal Premier J.B. McNair, himself an Oxford man and Rhodes scholar, would not tolerate a CCFer at his beloved university. (Cogswell later irritated McNair in editorials that denounced the Liberal claim that the CCF party was communist and, as such, would confiscate private property and family farms. As the son of a farmer, Cogswell’s denunciation of this scaremongering carried some weight in the province.) The prospect of spending two years in Edinburgh was not unpleasant, for Cogswell had developed great affection for Scotland during the war years. The stay also enabled Margaret to renew contact with her Irish family, with whom she wanted to share her two daughters (Kathleen Mary, younger sister to Carmen, was born in Fredericton in 1949). The project he began was a biographical study of the Scottish sociological novelist John Galt (1779-1839), who had written the first complete biography of Byron, and who had lived briefly in Ontario as Secretary of the Canada Company, a British land development agency founded to bring settlement to Upper Canada.6 But when Cogswell found sources unreliable and primary materials scarce, he switched to an examination of the idea of America in Romantic poetry, conducting the kind of broader survey of literary ideas that would come to characterize his critical method. By the start of the 1952 academic year, he had accepted a job at UNB with an annual salary of $3100, conditional on students being able to understand his speech. He was one of four members of the English Department in an Arts faculty that had less than fifty students. Cogswell and David Galloway split the freshman and sophomore class, also teaching service courses to larger numbers of engineering and forestry students. Desmond Pacey and Alec Lucas, who later went to McGill, were the other members of the department.
6
The study of Galt would form the basis of a later research grant Cogswell received in 1959 from the Nuffield Foundation.