A Smiling Public Man

   As Heaney became more famous and influential, he often succumbed to the “friendship rack” and turned out a torrent of recommendations and blurbs. He told the poet Charles Simic that the “jubilant truth-to-impulse, the invention and laconic cluedinness of the work you’ve been doing is really heart-lifting.” The less deserving Anne Stevenson, biographer of Sylvia Plath, was bucked up by what he called her “different buoyancies, velleities, vigours, freshets, risks, frisks”—comments always vague enough to be apparently truthful. As his power began to subside from overuse, he metaphorically told one Guggenheim hopeful, “nowadays some of the starriest kites I’ve been tail to have failed to fly. I begin to wonder if I’m a dead weight.” Since the demands were unending, he had to declare a moratorium on the blurb game. But he was always a striking contrast to Mahon’s “pompous ass”; and to the savage wit of Vidia Naipaul, who awarded a second prize when nobody deserved a first, and crushed one hopeful novice by insisting, “Promise me you’ll never write anything again.”

Heaney revealed an important and often unnoticed source of creativity, Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field (1964), which gave him a lift of creative excitement and surge of inspiration. He admired “those long sectioned late Whitmanesque things; plus, of course, the greenhouse poems…that helped to trust a frank celebratory kind of writing, made to feel that illiterate, inchoate memory-place-feeling-stuff was as important as ‘thought.’…He sways and gleams beautifully.”

Heaney explained that his translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes was “about the artist and his relation to society. His right to his wound, his solitude, his resentment.” He also considered the important question, “do we trust the writer’s intentions or the reader’s understanding of what has been written,” and seemed to agree with D. H. Lawrence’s famous pronouncement: “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.”

The poet enlivened his serious comments with Irish jokes and his own. A Dublin bus-driver, asked what he most disliked about his job, replied, “stopping for passengers.” The poet called his nun-aunt a “nonantity.” There were rude japes about the town of Muff. Masturbation was “a honeymoon in the hand.” An uncongenial friend could (like Judas) “fuck up the Last Supper.” Flattered by a favorable review, he thought “it’s about time Marie knew I was ‘passionate, cultivated and authentic.’”

The vivid phrases of his epistolary style are a delight to read. He “broke cover” from his writing hideout. When praised, his “lashes were wet.” A welcome letter “sent rain to my roots.” The water metaphors continued as he listened to the wind make “a river in the trees.” Place-names aroused him. His old severe school was “St. Columb’s gulag.” Las Vegas was “the metropolis of the meaningless.” The local guides to the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, which had inspired Yeats’ “sages standing in God’s holy fire,” “knew every tessera in the town.” The infinitely distant astronauts had “ghostly movements on the moon.” His own frantic travels recalled the names of countries printed on the face of “an old wireless dial.” He’d seen a bullfight in Biarritz and, when decorated with honors, felt “like an old bull being stuck with rosettes” instead of swords. In a startling but effective simile, he observed that a Noh play in Japan was “actually an experience; coming out of it was a bit like coming out of a bullfight. You definitely had been through something.”

Some letters show a tender concern for animal life and human feelings. After he’d accidentally run over a badger, the first time he’d killed anything with his car, he introspectively told Hughes (who often wrote about animals) “the destructiveness of the implement came home to me. …His death has signalled an end of more than himself and the recognition of that will cause backlashes of a petulant sort.” In a surprising but consoling response, he felt obliged to explain and apologize, in a 2-page letter to a complete stranger, for hastening away from a poet’s memorial service without signing his own books (which would have been inappropriate): “I was upset to hear about the hurt your daughter felt and could sympathize immediately with the hurt and disappointment you felt on her behalf.” He had not, as she charged, ignored “the ordinary people who read my poetry. …It’s just a pity that your daughter was bruised in the crush. She was not singled out. I certainly did not, in any demeaning sense of the term, ‘turn my back on her.’ I hurried out of a crowd.”

The two main conflicts in this volume are between personal privacy and public exposure, between frantic travel and the solitude needed for work. He fiercely defended his private life, and letters to his family were at their request excluded from this edition. He thought a biography would be premature, and knocked the stuffing out of one vulturine life-writer. He tended to clam up when a discussion got personal, panicked at the thought of violation, and asked all interviewers to proceed with delicacy and discretion. But he made one great exception, which he was able to control, by cooperating with the poet and civil servant Dennis O’Driscoll in the first-rate interviews in Stepping Stones (2008). He praised O’Driscoll’s achievement as “prodigious in application, self-punished by high standards, unrewarded except by his own virtue.”

But even as he took part, he had grave doubts, and felt his personal life was “private and precious in the way one’s marriage is.” In a poignant and revealing passage about the deepest source of his poetry, he explained that if a photograph appeared of the sacred Moyola sandbed near his childhood home, “I would be devastated. It is one of the most intimate and precious of the places I know on earth, one of the few places where I am not haunted or hounded by the ‘mask’ of S.H.” Biographical violation “actually interferes with the way I process my own generative ground and memories; is therefore potentially disabling to me in what I could still write. And I feel it a matter of the highest risk.” Yet some intimate details seep through these letters. He was circumcised like “one of the chosen.” His courtship of Marie was “more a case of ‘petting’ than ‘making love.’ ” He and Marie “goaded” each other in marriage. He’d lost his faith and assented to the Nietzschean “proposition that God is dead.” In 1984 he refused to take communion at his mother’s funeral mass and felt guilty about it.

Heaney’s cornucopia of all the prizes, honors and awards known to mankind aroused intense jealousy and “drew out all the venom in the literary system of [Ireland].” One friend said his hernia operation was “at least a stab in the front!” His difficult choice for the prizes was either the protective, “don’t enter me (which looks as if you’re not ready to defend your title, as it were) or let things go ahead. Not the roughest situation to be in, but you know what I mean.” He had to keep writing to justify all the accolades, but they consumed his time, drained his energy and kept him from his true vocation.

He was willing, indeed eager, to attend all the conferences, listen to the boring academic speeches, read the tsunami of mediocre poetry and accept the tremendous adulation. But even after decades of homage and damage, he still couldn’t get enough of it. He had more degrees than a feverish patient, more gowns than a debutante, more hoods than Chicago in the Twenties. He did not survey mankind from China to Peru, but scrutinized it from the Faroe Islands to Cape Town, from Portugal to Hong Kong. He kept going, even when the restrictions of 9/11 made plane travel hellish. (Flying today is very different from my experience in Kuala Lumpur in 1966 when I phoned for a last-minute seat and they held the plane till I arrived. My taxi sped through the rubber plantations, drove across the tarmac and right up to the steps.)

In 1994 Heaney visited Denmark, Poland, Mexico and Australia. He resolved not to travel anywhere in 2003, but the perpetuum mobile went that year to England, Scotland, America, Spain, Poland and Russia. In 2004 (aged 65) he was sighted in America, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Sweden and Iceland. Exhausted in Russia, he was “treated like heads of state but had a similar schedule,” and couldn’t keep up with the heroic consumption of vodka. “Always I say I won’t be doing it,” he said, “always I end up on the road…hurled at great speeds in different directions for great distances round the curve of the globe.” He seemed to have lost control of his life and lamented, “I’m a function of timetables, not an agent of my own being. …I feel like Gulliver, pinned down by single liens of obligation…they panic me.” He was, in a serio-comic exaggeration, “a frazzled, frizzled item, a worn-out Triton, a punctured Michelin [tire] man, a posthumous paddy, a waft of aftermath.” He protested but persisted, and raged against the dying of the write. The one respite and reward was his dolce far niente visits to Derek Walcott’s luxurious estate in St. Lucia, with Graham Greeneish circulating fans, “a swimming pool, the foaming Carib Sea, big leafed growths of every kind—palms, rubber trees, banana plants.”

He wrote as many as 14 letters on one air trip, and may have been tempted, at the start of his transatlantic flights, to call for the plane’s carpenter and have him knock up a temporary desk. Yet the post piled up when he returned home, “the faxes gulping and slithering into one’s life and the requests for recommendations and introductions lurking.” The phone never stopped ringing, books came hurtling through the letterbox and he felt obliged to answer 15 pieces of mail every day. He was pleased when a postcard sent from Colombia to Irlanda wound up in Rwanda.

Heaney won the Nobel Prize in 1995, but the Stockholm avalanche came with additional burdens. He wrote the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who’d won it aged 81 in 2012, that the mask had replaced the man: “Yes, you were right to say the prize came early—too early—in my life. I suppose I was in denial about it for the first ten years or so, but it doesn’t go away and nowadays I realize that most invitations to speak, read and/or travel have little to do with me or my work, everything to do with the magic of the N word.” Devoted to public duty and personal friendships, Heaney defined his credo: “ ‘Being responsible’ and what it means, what it demands, has indeed preoccupied me—maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you’re up against,” as Beckett might have said.

As early as 1991 (aged 52) he felt intimations of mortality with heart fibrillations, pacified by shocks to the chest and a pacemaker. In 1997 he experienced “a feeling of stasis and crisis, if such a co-existence is possible. Boredom and unglory.” Eight years later this deepened into a long-lasting depression. Quoting Macbeth, he called it “a period – my first ever – of shaken confidence and endeavouring to screw the courage to the sticking point. …The well here is dry. But a bit of serious divin- ing may still give access to a jibble [scrap] or two.” He suffered his first stroke in 2006: “It all happened luckily, if it had to happen, in Donegal surrounded by friends, with my speech and my wits unimpaired. …Power gone from my left leg and left arm.” But he regained his balance and eventually got on “equal footing” with himself. The Irish playwright Brian Friel, just getting over his own illness, quipped, “Different strokes for different folks.”

He quite recovered, but was tormented the following year by gout: “The right big toe kindled on Sunday week, then the foot itself blazed and shone in earnest. …A little gristly Vesuvio.” In 2011 he was felled by a second stroke as he was about to receive another degree in Scotland. He listed to one side, couldn’t stand upright, stumbled dangerously on a flight of stairs and was caught just in time. In August 2013 he died of a ruptured artery. His last written words to Marie were Noli timere: Don’t be afraid.

The poet Christopher Reid, Heaney’s 1990s editor at Faber and editor of Hughes’ Letters (2009), has done a superb job of introducing and annotating these letters. He’s identified many of the literary allusions that swirled around Heaney’s head and were laced into his letters. Reid unavoidably repeats Heaney’s misspelling of two proper names, which should be Beckman (128 &137) and Tamalpais (141). I found only two errors: Edward Hirsch, not Joel Conarroe, has been the president of the Guggenheim Foundation since 2003 (417); and Robert Silvers, not Barbara Epstein, was editor of the New York Review of Books until his death in 2017 (622). It’s worth noting that Wyndham Lewis, in a letter to Ezra Pound in January 1915, expressed his unwillingness to publish anything in BLAST 2 that rhymed with “-unt, -uck or -ugger” (418).

In a late letter of June 2012, Heaney recalled “Tom Brangwen’s speech at the wedding of his daughter in Lawrence’s The Rainbow. It’s more than fifty years since I read it, but something of its power keeps in the memory.” When I asked Heaney what Lawrence meant to him as a writer, his vivid 2-page typed letter on November 12, l985, not included in this edition, recalled the pure honey of that novel:

Lawrence’s example was a corroborating one. His solidarity with the underground silent part of the psyche and of the society. His chthonic energy. His sexualizing of ground and growths. All that was entirely sympathetic to me and I felt naturally at home with his way of responding. When I was teaching The Rainbow in the late sixties, I was always affected by a number of the scenes there as if they were dream memories of my own—Anna being carried out into the stable, Will and Anna stooking the corn. I still love the forthrightness and impatience and sudden unmediated quality of much of his poetry. I also think the essay on the poetry of the living present is one of the best statements by a practicing poet about the essential differences between kinds of lyric.

Heaney emerges from these letters as sympathetic, conscientious and kind, generous with praise and with money, which can be said of few modern poets—and few human beings. When a friend asked him, “are you really as nice as you seem?,” he wittily replied, “I have been cursed with a decent set of impulses.”