(A review of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, first published by Jacobin)

 

“Oil, oil, oil”, wrote the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in early October, 2002: “Bush prefers to go to war than to raise the price of petrol.” America’s commander-in-chief had the previous month called the looming Operation Iraqi Freedom “a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal.” The effects of the illegal war, including the hundreds of thousands of dead, were yet to be realized. But some had a sense of it:  “The Democrats are sheepish”, Heaney continued, “and there seems to be no realization or care that an American attack in Iraq will send recruitment for Al Qaeda sky high and create general Arab disaffection.” Over the next two decades, the poet’s righteous anger would be vindicated.

 

Heaney went on to contribute to a literary anthology in support of the Irish anti-war movement, at a time when Shannon airport was in regular use by the US military, despite Ireland’s vaunted neutrality. “I oppose this war with a mute passion, a pain of deep anxiety that cannot find coherent expression,” Brian Friel, the acclaimed dramatist, stated in his introduction to the volume, adding that there was “something indeed” about the American aggression that “offends the notion of what it is to be fully human.” “Courageous, clarifying stuff”, Heaney remarked enthusiastically to his friend in their subsequent correspondence, praising him for his eloquence, “full of rage, reasonableness and ‘nature’, as my mother would have called it.” 

 

If the discernment was characteristic of Heaney, this was perhaps less true of the forthrightness and antagonistic tenor of his political positioning here. Known for his discretion and verbal finesse – his preference for well-worded nuance over declarative pugnacity in the stances he struck – for many years Heaney was the epitome of the public poet in Ireland: a quasi-bard, deftly able “to walk with Kings,” in the words of the imperialistic Rudyard Kipling, while retaining “the common touch”. Beloved by several generations of readers for the human depth and fluent craftsmanship of his poems, Heaney also had a permanent seat at the court of power. Bill Clinton is said to have named his pet dog “Seamus”, in tribute of the writer whose company he enjoyed so well. Joe Biden continues to regale members of the voting public with unsolicited recitations of the poet’s work. (Such dubious presidential honours have yet to be bestowed on Adrienne Rich and Bertolt Brecht, firebrands to their core.) “There are different ways of doing things, at different times”, Heaney suggested late in life, when asked about the “art and politics topic” – “forever new and forever old” — adding that the “worst [is] to fake it, good or bad”. For the poet, so it seems, the question of power and its redress was secondary to the more pressing and perennial preoccupation of artistic authenticity. As Heaney would discover, however, such concerns and pressures are often intertwined. 

 

Edited by Christopher Reid, The Letters of Seamus Heaney offers a behind-the-scenes view of the Irish poet. It shows him attempting to accommodate himself to the fame and acclaim that accrued to him over the course of his career, even as he struggled to remain true to his poetic instincts and emotional roots. As such, it sheds light on the contradictions and tensions that animated Heaney's work.

 

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Writing to Thomas Flanagan from the island of Poros in 1997, after having won the Nobel Prize for Literature two years previously, Heaney admitted to being dogged by the “feeling that sunlight and silence and free time on a Tuesday morning on a Greek island” were “an affront to the workers of the world,” even as the same factors were undeniably conductive to his own creativity. As his schoolfriend, and frequent interlocutor, Seamus Deane once observed, over the course of his career Heaney needed to develop a “way of dealing with his own contradictory sense of himself: his authority and his uncertainty … The authority usually wins out, but it needs the self-doubt to keep it from hardening, to keep vulnerabilities open.” The comment was somewhat bruising, in its boyish style, but inarguably astute. 

 

Wary of the fame that nevertheless enabled him to pursue his craft relatively free of financial constraints, and ever-alert to subtleties of social standing and cultural perception, the Derry-born laureate was nothing if not conscientious. Part “of me delights in the physical fact of lovely books”, he told one editor in 1985, but “another part of me rages at the rip-off factor which begins once they enter the market.” He expressed contempt for “the thought of the catalogues marking Death of a Naturalist,” his first book, published in 1966, “at $100 – or more.” That Heaney’s dutiful instinct was to ventilate the said “market” with down-to-earth values of decency and common-sense — rather than abolishing it in a single, anarchistic blow — may be indicative of a larger political inclination.

 

Joe Cleary has argued, persuasively, that “the writer as entrepreneurial professional — self-starting, agent-acquiring, prize-winning, striving and thriving in a competitive literary marketplace – has become the de facto celebrated contemporary model” in Ireland. It’s a paradigm that owes much of its justificatory momentum to Heaney and his assenting manner. Certainly, the letters reveal an increasingly acclaimed literary figure, consciously “striving and thriving” in a competitive field. What “appears as ‘stardom’ and ‘globetrotting’”, he posited, “is often simply the result of a decent sense of obligation to a person running a conference, arranging a lecture, whatever. Even honorary degrees come as pious duties to old friends.” Writing to David Hammond from an Air Canada flight lounge in 1996, Heaney chafed at the ever-increasing demands on his time: after a week hosting American academics in Dublin, followed by “lunch in Buckingham Palace” with British poet laureate, Ted Hughes (“not with herself, no”), and on the verge of flying to Edmonton, he sighed, “all I do nowadays is ‘turn up’ — I’m a function of timetables, not an agent of my own being.”  

 

For much of his writing life, Heaney fulfilled “the teacherly duty, a service of sorts” associated with his craft in the public realm. The cost, as above, was a growing anxiety that his work, and he himself, “may have become an alibi”: his rejection, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, of one form of violence (trading the “spade” and the “gun” for a “pen”, as his early poem, “Digging,” has it) potentially providing cover for a larger edifice of power that ultimately required its beneficiaries to “fake it”. Often, the gap he tried to bridge between historical witness and unburdened self-expression placed him under personal strain. The risk in returning “From the Frontier of Writing,” he suggested, was that of becoming “subjugated, yes, and obedient” within the very real polity of “armour-plated vehicles” and “cradled guns”, in which his fellow citizens continued to exist. 

 

“I stayed clear of the hunger-strike propaganda here last year”, Heaney wrote to Ted Hughes in 1982, referring to the Republican prisoners’ protest in the H-Blocks prison, which ended with the deaths — from starvation, because of Margaret Thatcher’s brutal intransigence — of Bobby Sands and nine others. Yet “if I’m not careful”, Heaney pivoted, a harried liberal flailing for balance, “I shall get entangled with a triumphalist Falklandia image which is equally subtly propagandist and misrepresentative.” Such concerns led the Irish poet, shortly after, to issue a verse-objection (reprinted in Reid’s collection) to his inclusion in “a new Penguin Contemporary British Poetry”, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion. My “passport’s green”, he retorted, a swinging bludgeon-thump, “No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen.” Perhaps being true to his belief that there are “different ways of doing things, at different times”, Heaney proved ready and willing to raise a glass to the British monarch, while seated at the top-table next to then-Prime Minister David Cameron, during the state banquet concluding her visit to Ireland in 2011.

 

Heaney was nevertheless broadly consistent in attempting to affiliate himself to an ecumenical cultural nationalism that was distinct — or at least, which he himself was keen to distinguish – from the physical-force tactics preferred by some of his contemporaries (albeit not always as gratuitously as their critics suggest). “As a matter of interest,” he wrote to the critic, Helen Vendler, in 1997, “the title ‘Requiem for the Croppies’”, a sonnet commemorating the peasant army that rose up against occupying Crown forces in Ireland in 1798, “echoes Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings,’” a haunting (and rather beautiful) royalist remembrance. The “court form” of the sonnet, a traditionally elitist paradigm of poetic imagining, had become, in Heaney’s hands, a means of honouring the slain rebels of a long-ago anti-colonial rebellion. 

 

In a typical qualification, however, Heaney later refrained from reading the poem in public, lest it be taken as an endorsement of the Provisional IRA’s ongoing armed campaign. Whether we see this as a justifiable assertion of conscience and personal independence, or an act of self-preserving political retreat, clearly the “confrontation [between] violence and resignation, between life and death”, as Heaney said of Yeats, was a live one for nationalists (and citizens) of every stripe. The poet, despite his stated efforts – and as any student of Karl Marx could have predicted – inevitably remained “entangled” in conflicts and identifications he would in other circumstances have preferred to avoid. His work surely gained much from the psychic and moral tensions that ensued.

 

As Terence Brown noted, from “the start Seamus Heaney has seemed oddly guilty about being a poet at all.” Paradoxically, throughout his career his assured and even audacious self-examinations seemed repeatedly to unearth cavernous reserves of self-doubt and a sometimes disarming capacity for self-recrimination. This infuses his work with a remorseful atmosphere that sharpens its redemptive impulses.  Evanescent moments of humane illumination are “hung,” strangely, “in the scales / with beauty and atrocity” – as in “The Grauballe Man” – tipped “with the actual weight / of each hooded victim, / slashed and dumped.” In one poem, catching sight of a badger as it “glimmered away / into another garden,” the Heaney stand-in finds himself filled with a creaturely understanding both unsettling and honest: 

 

How perilous is it to choose 

not to love the life we’re shown? 

His sturdy dirty body 

and interloping grovel. 

The intelligence in his bone. 

The unquestionable houseboy’s shoulders 

that could have been my own.

 

Heaney’s recognition of his own “interloping grovel” and “unquestionable houseboy’s shoulders” may speak to a deeper unease, burrowing persistently below the top-soil of his work: a nerve-rooted fear of not quite belonging in the life (and the role) he has pursued. 

 

The line between ethical “evasion” and “artistic tact” could be all-too-thin. Heaney acknowledged as much in the Station Island poem for his cousin, Colum McCartney, the victim of a sectarian murder in 1975, whom Heaney had previously elegised in his collection, Field Work. The first poetic memorial had merely “‘whitewashed ugliness,’” charges Colum’s ghost in the later sequence: “‘[you] saccharined my death with morning dew.’” As here, a chilling quiver of self-reproach – an almost bodily anxiety regarding his own subterfuges and self-deceptions – courses in the slipstream of Heaney’s art, undercutting from the inside, like a subterranean, shifting silt, the consolatory values of a bourgeois satisfaction he often invokes, without quite being able to believe in fully. So in “Oysters,” the leisure and ease of a meal (“My tongue was a filling estuary, /  My palate hung with starlight”) conjure for the poet images of the violence framing such gustatory pleasure: 

 

Alive and violated, 

They lay on their beds of ice: 

Bivalves: the split bulb 

And philandering sigh of ocean. 

Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered. 

 

Although “angry that my trust could not repose / In the clear light,” free of ethical incursions, the speaker confesses at the close to relishing the quickening sensation of complicity in the “Glut of privilege” that so sullies the otherwise “perfect memory” he has just described: “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.” The poet has once again attempted “to love the life” he has been “shown”, despite its plunderous roots.

 

Heaney devoted a lifetime to such figurative bell-ringing, pulleying the ropes in the hope of summoning a sky-clear music, rather than the deafening thud of weighted sadness that often came in its stead. The “strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief,” the slow rain of wounded lives and slipping memories, seemed to accompany even the most buoyant  of lyric epiphanies his verse conveyed. Consequently, in his final collection, Human Chain, there is a sense of genuine existential relief, and wisdom, in his eventual arrival at the threshold of “a not unwelcoming / Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar / On an overgrown airfield” — perhaps reminiscent of the now-shuttered RAF base at Long Kesh — “in late summer.” He can breathe freely, at last, in “a windfall” near to peace.

 

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In certain respects, the Heaney we encounter in Reid’s volume is the eminence we already know: more laddish in his humour, perhaps, and occasionally tetchier than we’re accustomed to, but essentially the same “smiling public man” that many readers will remember. Even in his earlier correspondence, his voice seems fully consolidated and recognizable: cautiously urbane, with an involving, thick-textured watchfulness that winks, here and there, at its own pretensions. “I want more and more,” he wrote to Michael Longley in 1971, “to find a manner of saying that blends discipline and disarms disciplinarians, if you know what I mean. Something like Shakespeare’s later blank verse might do.”

 

As they go on, the dispatches exhibit the dexterous, many-sided eloquence that we might associate with a benevolent statesman, secretly tallying votes in a contest that hasn’t yet been officially announced. Figures of entrenched cultural standing – writers, editors, and the like, not all of them friendly – are treated with skilled courtesy or vaguely hyperbolic veneration. The letters to Czesław Miłosz lurch between giddy personableness and almost comical respect (“That was an epiphany at the podium — great reading, sure-footed, magnanimous, beguiling”, effuses one; “Much love”, chirps another.) “A ring of truth comes off the life you’ve made,” he informs James Simmons, a poet whose “pretence of subversion” and “tin-pan alley sense of what was what” Heaney separately admits to having disliked. Helen Vendler — one of the very few long-term, female correspondents represented — is treated as a trusted confidante. “Heaney’s prose”, she summarized after his death in 2013, was “brilliantly accurate”: “voiced in a tone of colloquial engagement with his audience. It assumed that poetry was an indispensable part of any culture, serving to bring current concerns to the fore but also to recreate, in free play, the fabric of language.” Such qualities can be glimpsed in the correspondence Reid has collected, here.

 

The result is a portrait that feels both familiar – even intimate – and yet, strangely enough, not as fleshed out as it might have been. The volume makes scarce mention, for instance, of Heaney’s active support for the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, including the Dunnes Stores workers who went on strike for almost three years in solidarity with South African campaigners. Among his correspondents, meanwhile, we catch only a fleeting glance of Michael Hartnett, the socialist and bilingual poet whom he admired as being “not like anybody else”, recalling him elsewhere as a powerful presence on the Irish poetry scene: “things quickened and shone when he published.” Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin – both deeply accomplished, politically attuned poets, and Heaney’s near-contempories – are almost entirely absent. Other examples could doubtless be cited. 

 

Scholars immersed in the Heaney archive will be able to judge whether these omissive tendencies are an effect of the editorial preferences of Reid – whose selections seem to favor the metropolitan  circles in which Heaney increasingly found himself — or a reflection of a genuinely sparse communication between Heaney and these figures.  As it currently stands, the book reveals a great deal about Heaney's connections and interactions with the literary scene in London, for example, and the burgeoning field of Irish Studies in the USA. Perhaps this is appropriate, and inevitable, given Heaney's high standing among those establishments. But the full story of the Derry-born poet may yet remain to be told.  In any case, future readers may find themselves inclined to reinterpret Heaney — with his persistent sense of memory and moral obligation, his mixture of humane feeling and unrelenting political caution, his careful self-fashioning, his inveterately male perspectives — in light of the wider currents, both literary and historical, that surrounded him. “Anything Can Happen”, he once suggested, “the tallest towers // Be overturned, those in high places daunted, / Those overlooked regarded.” Poems and poets, literature and its reception, like everything else, live and breathe the dialectic.