BOOK REVIEW : A Wonderful Irish Memoir Shaped Like Its Author : WARRENPOINT <i> by Denis Donoghue</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf $19.95, 193 pages

Here is a book shaped like a man; and since it is a memoir, what better thing to say about it? It has the melancholy features, the gawkiness, the abstract reticence, the naked voice, the wrath and judiciousness, the stiff-necked and tender bent of its author.

That author is Denis Donoghue, the very eminent scholar and critic who lives in Dublin and sits in the Henry James Chair of English and American Studies at New York University. His prickly, disconcerting and quite wonderful book is about a man who cannot altogether sit where he lives, nor live where he sits.

Warrenpoint, the town he grew up in, was his first straddle, perched on the coast of Northern Ireland just across from the border with the South. In the ‘30s and ‘40s, about half of its population of 2,000 was Protestant, the other half Catholic.

Donoghue’s family was another straddle. Catholic, from the village of Tullow in Kerry, it moved north after independence and partition so that his father, a sergeant in the then-disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary, could retain rank and civil service status by going into the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

It was a Protestant force, and the elder Donoghue would never advance. On the other hand, representing such a force--even in those days before the violence--he was in some measure set apart from the Catholic community. Denis grew up in the police barracks but went to Catholic schools; his friends had such names as Sean and Michael and Mary, and not William or--”as I learned to my cost”--Isabel (she had caught his eye and a little bit more).

“Warrenpoint” presents a man who in all things stands a little apart--from himself, as well. There is distance in it, and in part, Donoghue’s tone is as cool as if his story were a manuscript he was assessing. But it is also the distance between two electrical poles and the blue flash that sparks across.

He goes back and forth between the spare and beautifully written narration of some bit of his growing-up, and literary quotations and speculations. In one page about a kitchen table, he manages to refer to Nabokov, Walter Pater and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is not a matter of academic display, but it is not quite a spontaneous or organic association, either.

Instead, it is a declaration of who he is. I am the sergeant’s son, he tells us; I am also the man who has made his life in books: I quote, therefore I am. In his explorations of the past--painful and difficult, though done with shining grace--he takes his authors along, as one might bring along a friend, for reassurance and identity, when visiting a painful relative.

Donoghue’s height--he is 6-foot-7--was among the things that set him apart as a child. And his life as scholar and critic sets him apart, he feels, from the art to which it is devoted. He is not spontaneous, he tells us; he never read fairy stories, he can’t remember plots, and did not read novels aloud to his children. “I wonder, had I lived a life without air, not enough oxygen or light or ease or fantasy,” he writes. “What am I preserving my gravitas for?”

He reads “Mr. Palomar” by Italo Calvino and speculates: “If you only put your mind to it, you could write a book like that. I dally with that fantasy for a few moments till I realize and admit that I could not write one sentence of any of those books. Well, let be.”

In the “Well, let be,” and in page after page of this memoir, Donoghue comes close. He breaks through the gravitas even while writing so dryly and movingly about it. Above all, his account of his childhood is a coming-to-terms with the apartness, and with the father it so largely seems to trace back to.

Sergeant Donoghue was a big, silent, unbending man, devoted to his police duties, his routines, and to an orderly life at home. The order was never disputed, though Donoghue’s mother would sometimes wail and fall into a nervous fit.

Yet the sergeant was kind in his sternness, respectful of his children’s privacy and companionable in his silences. He and Denis would go for 120-mile bicycle rides, stopping every couple of hours for tea or a meal. The sergeant had no interest in art, but once he cycled with Denis to a music store in Dublin to get the boy’s soprano recorded before his voice broke.

Perhaps it was the kindness, perhaps it was the respect for another’s distance, that made the rigor feel like something other than a prison. In his refusal to rebel, then or now, Donoghue commits an act of rebellion that seems near-scandalous. He rejects Freud’s doctrine that it is necessary to overthrow the father in order to be free. He calls it “vulgar.” He was furious when his older brother would violate the 11 o’clock curfew and get into shouting matches with his father. He couldn’t bear to watch when he saw the sergeant’s cap knocked off in a tussle with a drunken sailor; it was a universe overthrown.

We are at liberty to speculate that some of the author’s self-apartness came from what might be called his orthodoxy; except that it is so unorthodox. And yet it is impossible not to be moved by the courage and independence, nowadays, of a voice that can write:

“I felt that my father was not only a strong man but the source of strength for me. Not strength to be developed in me by conflict. He was to me an example, an image; it was sufficient that I contemplated it, and not at all necessary for me to vie with its power. Merely by looking at him or by watching him as he crossed the square, I saw that it was possible to be fearlessly at large in the world.”

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Tango” by Alan Judd (Summit Books).