How critical fads left a true giant behind
Denis Donoghue, who died this week, wouldn’t bow to trendy thinking, says Cal Revely-calder
By the end of Denis Donoghue’s career, he struggled to fathom his students’ minds. In On Eloquence (2008), one of his final books, he wrote of the trouble this caused him at New York University, where he taught. The undergraduates would pick up the “modern masters”, but they’d ask questions of a curious kind: “The politics of Yeats’s last poems: was he a Fascist? Conrad versus [Things Fall Apart author] Chinua Achebe: was Conrad complicit with imperialism?” They wanted to talk about TS Eliot’s anti-semitism and VS Naipaul’s blindness to colonial sins.
“These and many similar topics,” Donoghue explained, “are in high standing in departments of English, but I am not much interested in them, because they lead me away from the literature I care for.” He felt his students didn’t think about “aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination”.
Donoghue, who died this week aged 92, refused to read literary works as political tools; politics was born of beliefs, and he was a stickler for evidence. Growing up in Warrenpoint, Co Down, in Northern Ireland – though his parents were from the south – he had planned to become a lawyer. But it was a nightmare from which he awoke, and he deviated into English and Latin, taking three degrees at University College Dublin (UCD), then crossing the Irish Sea. He taught at Cambridge and Pennsylvania, and became the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University (NYU). Writing over 30 books in a 60-year career, he stuck to his “masters”: to Conrad, Eliot and Yeats, and Dickinson, Lawrence and Swift. His approach, whatever you make of it, couldn’t be said to be fashionable now. He was an intellectual kinsman to Yale’s Harold Bloom, who died in 2019, having railed in vain for years at the “school of resentment”, who were “a pride of displaced social workers, a rabblement of lemmings… carrying their subject down with them”. English literature, in this view, was ruled by “latestmodel feminists, Lacanians, pseudomarxists”, and other henchmen of ignorance. (All the railing was already in vain: Bloom spoke these words in 1991.) Donoghue disliked the same “rabblement”, though he was never so impolite.
He was exceptionally poor at being quotable, since he had no respect for words sold on the cheap. (This may explain why his name rings fewer popular bells than that of Bloom or British critic Christopher Ricks.) Literary criticism couldn’t, he believed, be a pastiche of others’ thoughts. Marx and Engels were far from gods, and their critical offspring Terry Eagleton became a bête noire: “His hatred of consciousness and introspection is, to put it gently, exorbitant.” Eagleton called Donoghue’s work “fascinating”, though he also named him in a 1997 song, “The Ballad of Marxist Criticism (to the tune of ‘Somethin’ Stupid’)”, which had a line making fun of a “nostalgic petty-bourgeois socialdemocrat subjectivist empiricist”.
Donoghue was more open-minded on how open his own mind was, even when it entailed the defence of a view he didn’t share. He was no more a fan of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism than he was of Eagleton’s Marxist approach, but when Eagleton rounded on Derrida, Donoghue stood on courtesy: “It is neither my business nor my pleasure to speak for deconstruction, but I’m sure it is a more formidable thing than Eagleton’s version suggests.” His work was capaciously fair: his instinct was to believe that a writer was being honest, as well as anyone could.
By the end of his career, however, literary studies seemed mechanistic, and selfishly
‘Irish studies,’ he wrote, ‘sacrificed understanding on the altar of politics’
so. “The emerging discipline of Irish studies,” Donoghue wrote in 1997, “has wedged the study of Irish literature into an ill-fitting theory… it sacrifices literary understanding on the altar of politics”. All this siloing would make us blind to threads that didn’t run smoothly through time; learning what we didn’t yet know was why we read books, or did anything else.
Reviewing Donoghue’s memoir, Warrenpoint (1991), Karl Miller visited UCD, which the writer had quit for NYU, and “found the college echoing with the praises of the flown savant, with his sayings and with stories of his tenure”. His writing demanded, and repaid, attention; it cared less for commanding respect. This didn’t make Donoghue a household name, but it’s a reason to read him now.