This week, Miriam O’Callaghan meets novelist Emma Donoghue and her father, Denis Donoghue, the eminent literary critic.
Emma is the author of the novel Room, shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize and winner of the Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year at this year’s Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards.
Emma is the youngest of Denis’s eight children. He pays tributes to Emma’s writing skill, “She is a very good writer”, but Emma believes he reads her book as a loving father rather than a critic. He always sends her a postcard after the publication of each book, “raving about them”.
Emma recalls their first conversation about literature when she asked her father a question about a poem featured in the following day’s Inter Cert English exam. I don’t remember what I said in the exam, but I got the bug for literature and the for serious study of literature.
Emma recalls growing up in a house where there was a lot of conversation. As the youngest child, she was always trying to find a gap in the conversation to make her contribution. It was difficult, but it was an education, she tells Miriam.
Emma’s parents were very indulgent of her love of literature. They saw it as a perfectly good way to waste a good sunny afternoon, sitting inside reading a book, she explains.
Denis explains the difference between teaching in UCD and at Harvard where he visited in the 1950s. He preferred the lecturing style of Dublin rather than the tutorial style of Cambridge. Emma has attended her father’s lectures and says it sounds as if he is finding your way through the poem for the first time and everyone is allowed to listen in. Denis explains that he got into trouble for declaring during UCD’s Gentle Revolution in the late 1960s that “ Education… provides an opportunity for students to sit quietly and listen to a great mind communing with itself.”
Denis recalled his childhood in Warrenpoint, County Down where they lived in the RUC quarters as his father was the local RUC sergeant. Although his father was a very large presence in Denis’s life “he was a very magisterial presence”, he never fathomed some of his actions. That said, Denis recalls bicycle trips to Tullow, County Carlow by bike from Warrenpoint, County Down and a trip as a very small child to the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin.
Emma and Denis discuss the difference between writing fiction and writing literary criticism. Denis is incapable of writing fiction, claiming to lack imagination. Emma says that the two types of writing are different. Criticism is an industrious activity while writing fiction is more child like, more messy.
Emma explains how she explained to her father that she was a lesbian and how she wasn't expecting her parents nonchalance in the face of this revelation.
Emma lives in Canada, Denis spends time teaching in New York. Both reflect on Ireland as it is now. Miriam asks does an interest in art insulate you from the crisis? Denis says no, it makes him weep. He doesn’t think that Ireland needs to be in the state it is in. Denis also says that while the existence of a splendid novel is a wonderful achievement, he doesn’t think that literature can change society.