Teacherly Duty

Writing to Thomas Flanagan from the island of Poros in 1997, after having won the Nobel Prize in 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 school friend 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 “thriving and striving” 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 honoring 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 Irish Republican Army’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 William Butler 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.

How Perilous It Is to Choose

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 topsoil 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 elegized 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 Royal Air Force base at Long Kesh — “in late summer.” He can breathe freely, at last, in “a windfall” near to peace.

Correspondents

In certain respects, the Heaney we encounter in Reid’s volume is one we already know: more laddish in his humor, 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 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 contemporaries — 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. This volume 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 United States. 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 be 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.