Inspired by the support of his wife and a culturally mixed upbringing, Hugo Hamilton explains to Barry Egan how differences in his parents' personalities and languages have helped shape his childhood, his writing, and perhaps even his children's futures

Hugo Hamilton has a little boy's face -- a man-child of 58 years of age. He smiles a lot through his inescapably shy, and sometimes sad, eyes. He has a quiet, reserved nature. In conversation, his sentences are tentative, nervous, edgy almost. Those child's eyes will do anything but look at you. You imagine there is a lot going on in Hugo Hamilton's interior world.

He says his wife, Mary Rose Doorly, was his salvation. Without her, he continues, he would never have written his books. She helped take him out of his pain and helped him exorcise the demons of his past. When he talks of Mary Rose, it is like that John Lennon song about Yoko:

"Woman I know you understand/The little child inside the man/Please remember my life is in your hands."

Mary Rose presumably disproves Burton Roscoe's theory that "what no wife of a writer can ever understand is that he's working when he's staring out of the window". Hugo and I are sitting in the Westbury Hotel having a morning coffee and chat.

"We met here in Dublin in the early Seventies," he says of the journalist he married in 1976. Asked what drew her to a man withdrawn to the point of social dysfunction because of his father and his childhood, and vice versa, the acclaimed author says he has never given any considerable thought to those questions.

Did she see the boy in you?

"It's hard to say. But I think there was some natural affinity because her parents emigrated to Canada. So she was also a slight vagrant like myself with her family elsewhere. So I think we understood each other -- that whole business of being in the wrong place," he says. "That possibly put us on the same stage. She understood a lot of the stuff that was going on in my life because she had also experienced it in some ways. She was in boarding school here while her family was in Canada."

She had her own sense of isolation. Your isolation was more inside your head, I say; hers was inside a boarding school.

"Yes, like a lot of Irish people do because of that emigration. That's right. But it put us on the same track."

I ask him to describe Mary Rose. He clams up. "She ... is ... lovely ... " he says, and stops and takes a long sip of his tea. "I'm reticent. I'm meant to be a man of words, but it is very difficult. I feel a bit inadequate even as a writer talking about her in public."

And how would she describe you?

"That's hard to say. I think, particularly for me as writer, I feel exceedingly lucky because she had the listening quality. I don't think I would have become a writer if I hadn't met her. I am quite certain about that. I think you have to be lucky in the people you meet, because you are shaped very much by their personality. A lot of people have remarked on this; she has this hugely encouraging personality. She is a great listener and she really motivates you; motivates all the children; motivates everyone who is around her. So I think her hand is on my shoulder very much when I'm writing."

Hugo's hand was very much on his friend Nuala O'Faolain's shoulder when he brought her to Berlin before she died in 2008.

"I got to know her just after I wrote the memoir because she had written one as well. We met in America and places. Then it wasn't so long before the tragic news that she was dying."

He and Nuala met in Ennis just after she came back from America. They were on the stage together at a book festival. She said she loved Berlin and would love to go there. Hugo immediately suggested that they go there. He didn't think she would go because she was quite ill. They went to Berlin anyway.

"It was only 10 days before she died."

Did you feel it was healing for her?

"It was an extremely emotional, uplifting trip. It was actually the opposite to what she said on the radio," Hugo says referring to the famous, and emotive, interview on April 12, 2008, with Marian Finucane on RTE six weeks after being diagnosed with incurable cancer in New York.

"She kept saying that: 'This was the end of my life.' She talked of it as being a dark disaster in her life," Hugo says. "But then she went on this trip to Berlin and she wanted to know everything and go everywhere in Berlin. First, she wanted to go to the Botanic Garden where the flowers were coming up because it was spring. She wanted to see the Wall. She wanted to see the Pergamon Museum. It contradicted everything that she was saying because this was a woman who was full of life suddenly. In the last few days she wanted to pack as much into her life as possible. I thought that was a wonderful statement."

"Nuala," he continues, "had this extraordinary way of taking on the whole world -- and being the small girl and speaking like a small girl."

Hugo Hamilton spoke like a small boy with his beautiful memoir The Speckled People in 2003. He referred to himself and his siblings as "German bread with Irish raisin", the "speckled people". He was brought up by an Irish nationalist father from Cork who, as writer Aziliz Gouez put it, "wanted the Irish to win because they had been the victims of history, and a German mother who taught you how to surrender and to lose". They met in 1949, when Hugo's mother came to Ireland from Germany. English was forbidden in the house. They were allowed only to speak Irish and German. His father broke Hugo's brother's nose when he was caught speaking English. It was not an overly joyous childhood.

"I was definitely tormented by my childhood and unable to speak about it," Hugo says now. "But I'm extremely lucky because I've got a lot of my mother in me. She always had that smile that you are talking about. She laughed a lot. It was more my father who was the surly, earnest, serious type."

The conflict between his parents' personalities is "still going on in me. I have my mother's way of laughing at things a bit and not taking things serious all the time, and also the more forgiving nature in me definitely comes from my mother. My father was this guy: 'Remember everything. Never let it go.' Which is also good for writing".

The lowest point in his life, Hugo says, was in his late 20s/early 30s, "before I actually got to write. I was actually very ill. I wasn't well. I was kind of unhappy. I had difficulty with my lungs".

Was that because you were keeping everything in your entire life until you decided to write?

"I think so. It was eating into me not being able to tell my story. Not being able to explain myself. That was from the age of, say, 25 to 35 until I really got stuck into writing. I still had great times, or pretending that I had great times, but that is the life of the writer. You can only feel fulfilled in writing not in life. OK, it has balanced itself out now; I can do both now. But that's how I was in my 20s. I was very uncomfortable, very unhappy and very awkward. I couldn't really connect with people in pubs. It was only on paper that I could find a real way of saying things."

Through writing, Hugo Hamilton slowly emerged from himself. His first novel, Surrogate City, published in 1990, was handwritten on big A3 sheets. It was immediately cathartic. Hugo left his day job at Gael Linn to concentrate on the writing. Cyril Connolly said that the enemy of promise was the pram in the hall. Hugo Hamilton had three prams, so to speak, in the hall: he had three children, Birch, Sorcha and Coman.

"It takes guts to be a writer," he says. "And again that's the encouragement that I got from Mary Rose. She said, 'You need to do this'. She was making some money as a journalist."

For Hugo to give up his pay-packet could have been conceived reckless, especially as he recalls "it was in the middle of a recession. And I decided to give up a secure job for life to do this. It was an important decision. It proved to me that I really wanted to take it seriously. If I had kept half my foot in the job, I wouldn't have done it. I would have gone to the pub every Friday with the lads. It was always that fear that you would blow it off in the pub".

Most of us are probably glad that he didn't blow it off in the pub. In his new novel, Hand In The Fire, Hugo revisits his favourite theme of the search for identity and place: Serb immigrant Vid Cosic's friendship with Dublin lawyer Kevin Concannon is "overshadowed by a violent incident in which a man is left for dead in the street one night".

Like Hugo in a sense, Vid is an outsider coming into Ireland. "I think now, at this particular time in the world, we are beginning to understand the outsider a lot more than we used to. In the Seventies, here in Ireland it was completely isolated. We are beginning to accept all that now. In fact, it's cool now to be from somewhere else. It is still, though, one of those tricky things and particularly that feeling of inadequacy. I have put it in the book: The language that Vid speaks is over-formal at some stage. My brother Franz talked like that. That's how he learned English. He would say things like; 'Have you informed your sister that we're having a party at Easter?' We are still trying to feel right. We are still trying to catch up with the rest of the country.

"The outsiders are going to rescue us," laughs Hugo, whose son Coman lives in Germany. [Hugo's eldest daughter, Birch, runs the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland. His other daughter, Sorcha, works with the Irish Times.]

By some strange twist of fate, Hugo smiles, Coman decided to marry a German girl from the East. "He is repeating the whole experiment again. And it is going very well," Hugo laughs of the marriage two years ago to Teresa. "It is like the whole story is repeating itself again."

His head if full of big questions. "The big question about that whole emigrant experience is how far is that passed along the line? Are my children experiencing some residue of that? Or are they fully signed up? That is still kind of interesting for me, and part of Hand In The Fire; that sort of exploration. And I think that's also what's interesting about Ireland right now."

So are your kids fully signed up? "My eldest daughter has a girl now. She's just one. That's a great statement of belonging once you get a grandchild. You can't help look into the future."

Hugo never met his grand-parents on either side. He says it is a huge sense of security for a child when they meet their grandparents. "It gives them an idea. They can understand their own parents a little bit better because they can see where it all came from -- the madness or whatever."

'Hand in the Fire' is published by 4th Estate, price €13.99

- Barry Egan

Originally published in