Sláinte, Seamus

The Heaney Letters is a volume too substantial for its flimsy design. It doesn't 'perch on the hand' like Craig Raine's 'caxtons'. It gets bent too easily and after one reading of its 820 pages it will look well-used.

Not to worry. He is good company, forever apologizing for his overdue replies despite the amount of time he clearly spent writing letters. Being so eminent and having so many friends has its downside but one does sometimes catch him being uncharacteristically uncharitable about one contemporary or another which only goes to show that even those who appear passing saintly are still human.

He uses any number of ways of signing off, but Sláinte- 'cheers', or 'health'- is a favourite not reserved for his fellow Irish because Ted Hughes gets wished as much. One envies his friends for having counted him as such and him for having counted Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky among the international superleague of his acquaintance. Reading the incessant planning of new titles, pieces in magazines and not so the much reading tours makes one want to be involved in such even if one has just issued a title. But, no, not the readings. Although I dare say he showed up and deported himself most affably at all such events they do seem to be a chore he could have done without.

For the most part we might not need such a catalogue of his travels and holidays, his peripatetic career and social evenings but from time to time there comes a literary idea. The most profound of those so far might be to David Thomson in Sept 1983 regarding Patrick Kavanagh's,

impossible but proper ambition for himself as a poet: to play a true note on a slack string. He meant, I think, that a true writer is always aware of any technical trickery he may practice, however justifiably, and that this rigging of his material will rob him of some of his pride in his work.

I wonder if the idea is a variation on Edward Thomas aspiring to 'a language not to be betrayed', or be betrayed by, or if the impossibility of it is like trying to tell the dancer from the dance.

I'd have thought that all poetry, all writing and all art involved 'technical trickery'. It is artificial, however 'natural' it might purport to be and, in Donald Davie's phrase, a 'considered utterance' and that for 'trickery' we could equally read 'art' and thus conclude that it's an impossible ambition because to achieve it would ipso facto disqualify the result from being 'poetry'. For Marianne Moore it's 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them' and although it's nice when it happens, it doesn't always 'come as naturally as the leaves to a tree' as Keats would have liked.

So, there we are, more names dropped and cited in as few sentences as possible. There is an essay to be done on the subject, I dare say, if only one I've outlined several times before as I yet again do here.

I don't think I could ever write properly about Heaney because, not being Irish, I'm not sure it's my business. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion found themselves firmly if politely reprimanded for claiming him as British and he insists on his Irishness to an extent that I can't be expected to be a part of, his generosity of spirit being not akin to the reservations of some of us more Larkin-esque English but that doesn't raise the sort of objections it seems to for High Church Protestant, A.N. Wilson, whose often admirable scholarliness doesn't extend to sympathy for Seamus.

Having discovered that there's such a thing as Seamus Heaney and the Great Poetry Hoax: A critical exposé of Faber and Faber’s verse-man by Kevin Kiely, I'm tempted to look at the case for the prosecution, conspiracy theory though it may appear. Perhaps one shouldn't have a house full of only books one agrees with. I've been waiting for a chance to read what Shakespeare was really like, according to Stanley Wells who clearly doesn't know, but don't want to spend much on it and certainly with no royalty accruing to Prof. Sir Stan.

I don't defend Larkin, Gunn, Auden or Donne to the very last word and Heaney isn't quite them, for me. I defend Elizabeth Bishop and Rosemary Tonks further on the basis of different infatuations and the gender difference might not be insignificant. It's not the Nobel Prize that convinces me about Heaney - heaven knows Henry Kissinger got one of those - it's mostly do do with his music.

I might have a look round upstairs for some more fiction to re-read, though. 700-odd pages of similar letters can eventually make one look forward to some first-hand literature.