Getting behind famous Seamus
The facts about Seamus Heaney are well known. Described by Robert Lowell as "the greatest Irish poet since Yeats," he is three times a Whitbread prize-winner, a Nobel winner, and has been Professor of Poetry at Oxford and Harvard.
Maintaining a high degree of privacy, he gently rebuffs media interest with a wry air of never giving away more than he intends. Yet a very strong sense of what 'Famous Seamus' is like emerges from his words.
Heaney's early work is amongst his best known: his first collection Death of a Naturalist depicts rural life with "unparalleled vividness" according to the poet James Fenton. The poems' lines lodge in the memory - "Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests. /I'll dig with it". Such pre-eminence was achieved so young - Heaney was twenty-five when the poems were published by Faber and Faber - because his writing was informed by his experience.
One of nine children, he grew up in a farmhouse in County Derry and won a scholarship to a Catholic boarding school. The sounds of his country childhood fill the book, from "boots/ Crunching stubble" to toads "poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting."
He describes his feeling for verbal music as stirred by his mother's recited lists of Latin roots of words. The sprung rhythms of the old BBC weather forecast, the "gorgeous and inane" phraseology of the catechism, the litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the "enforced poetry" in his household. "...the phonetic foundations, the aural and oral grounds of utterance itself, were long in place. But they were only foundations, to be built on, or excavated."
The book helped propel a movement. At Queen's University Belfast he formed part of a 'Group' of young poets - including Michael Longley and Derek Mahon - who were encouraged by lecturer Philip Hobsbaum to see their roots as a legitimate subject for poetry, to reject restrictive poetic decorum. Death of a Naturalist fulfilled Al Alvarez's hopeful conjecture of 1962 that British poetry would move "beyond the gentility principle." When, with characteristic deftness, Heaney described the 'Group' as working to change the profile of regional writers from "craven provincials" to "genuine parochials," he might also have spoken for Hughes and Hill, and his generation. As he clarifies, however, the emphasis on location is not a modern equivalent of a pastoral ode, but a means of finding authentic self-definition, both personal and collective: "I don't think I set out to 'glorify pastoral Ireland.' It's just that some of my underground cables lead back to places and things in the country, places and things that by now feel like pre-natal possessions."
Heaney's preoccupations are so distinctive as to attract the oblique accolade of parody. 'Heaneyesque,' according to The New Review is sharp consonants covered in heavy topsoil. The same adaptability that lead to "mud-caked fingers in Russell Square Heaney" caused Blake Morrison to say "He can move from a kitchen on his uncle's farm, to 3 Queen's Square, to an American university. He's a real diplomat for poetry."
However, in his 1995 Nobel Lecture, Heaney highlighted the flipside of celebrating one's roots, acknowledging in 20th Century history the "terrible proof that pride in ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade into the fascistic" and consequently warning himself against "fetishizing the local." I asked him how this self-censorship operated, "I sort of knew at the time that the word fetshizing would come back to haunt me" I should have minded my mouth a bit better. But as I remember the context of the thing, I was mostly interested in affirming the positive, life-widening aspects of local stories and local images that had been freed into art, how they functioned as "bearers of value." Dante's farmer in his hillside field, watching fireflies, he's everywhere forever, a transmitter of the necessary delight."
For Seamus Heaney to say he should have chosen his words better is like Kate Moss wishing for a nicer face. He judges each word with knife-edge precision; his self-consciousness in the above instance being a product of how acutely aware he is of shades of meaning. In answering my questions he showed up my unwieldy phrasing with wry tact - when I asked him whether choosing to translate Beowulf was a retreat from controversy he picked me up on my choice of words: "I don't quite know what you mean about 'disavowing pugnacity'. Makes it sound as if the job involved some kind of pledge to decommission. I chose Beowulf because the notion of taking on the commission brought me to life."
His poetry, of course, relies on his linguistic dexterity: the line "Nicking and slicing neatly" from "Digging" is both his grandfather heaving sods, and Heaney working language.
He has the ability to reveal richness in things easily dismissed - finding beauty in a petrified bog woman and in putrefying fruit. He has done the same for Beowulf, catapulting the bane of the lives of first year English students into the Bestseller list. While not recreating the hysteria of Kingsley Amis, who called it "that anonymous, crass, purblind, infantile, featureless HEAP OF GANGRENED ELEPHANT SPUTUM, Barewulf" (and that's a caffeine-induced, Mods tomorrow and who the hell's Hrothgar rant if ever I heard one, said Larkin) I did ask Heaney if he wasn't tempted to reduce the digressions and adapt the original? "When I said in my introduction to the translation that the narrative "sidestepped" at times, I wasn't meaning to register disappointment or impatience with the work, I just wanted to alert the reader to the poet's method. This often involves a swerve out of the Beowulf narrative into some other story that parallels it. For example, there'll be a passage in praise of Beowulf's excellence as a warrior prince and then, to point this up, a switch to the story of King Heremod. "Heremod was different. But no, I wasn't tempted to hone the original. It holds together and within its original system is self-sustaining."
Similarly, Heaney reversed my tentative judgement of the poem as "gloomy." He said: "I was temperamentally at home with the stoical, un-blathery quality of the poem. I wouldn't call it gloom, exactly, because that word can have something pejorative about it, some unspoken 'Why can't you just cheer up?' The truth is, the poetry of Beowulf is often most glittering where it is most sombre - "Now shall flame consume/ our leader in battle, the blaze darken/ round him who stood his ground in the steel-hail, / when the arrow- storm pelted shot from bow strings"
Heaney's wonderfully positive ability to see features in flaws, combined with his erudite enthusiasm is convincing. His appreciation is that of one who has laboured to penetrate the work - he said translating the Anglo-Saxon was "like breaking stones for pleasure" - whereas to dismiss the epic dilettante-style is far easier. Heaney is continually instructive and inspiring in his attitude to literature as hard work.
4th May 2000