The Heaney Interviews

Certainly, it's hard to imagine any poet who was interviewed more than Seamus Heaney. Stepping Stones has 480 pages of exhaustive questions and answers and then lists about 130 others in its 'select interviews' appendix. One couldn't accuse him of being evasive. Many of the answers to Dennis O'Driscoll's questions are half a page long.

One almost feels like one was there throughout the childhood, then through adulthood, from Mossbawn, via Wicklow, to Dublin with international travel in between. The characters, the friends and family, the poets and the poems and the places. It's not obvious how much context poems need for their elucidation and it's not obvious it's this much. Jonathan Bate's biography of Ted Hughes went to 566 pages with 768 pages of the letters to go with it. Larkin has had three biographies and three selections of letters. As if the poems somehow didn't make themselves clear.

I'm not exactly complaining. One's first instinct is to think that academics in search of a project have to keep digging deeper to unearth previously unpublished insights but if the reason for there being so much terrible television and pop music and so many dull, dull films is that there is an audience for them then the explanation for the depth of investigation into the lives of the poets is that the likes of me will read it.

Heaney was always an attractive character with a bit of a twinkle in his eye and so the weight of detail is not hard to take on. It passes one's time enjoyably. What emerges from these conversations is that he didn't opt out of the sectarian strife of his home environment but preferred peace to violence.

His allegiance to Ireland, as a non-believing Catholic, and opposition to English rule of the 'province' are more pronounced here than we might have been led to believe when there were always enough more stridently Republican commentators who regarded him as some sort of cross-bencher. Both when he publicly raised objections to being made the 'godfather' to a generation of British and Irish poets in the Morrison/Motion Penguin anthology of Contemporary British Poetry in 1982 and when he was mentioned as a potential successor to Hughes as Poet Laureate, he readily dissociated himself and explained that his passport was green. The problem with being widely admired is that all sorts of causes, not all of which one wants to be claimed by, will try to claim you.

He would have been a different poet had he not been born where he was and when he was but there is a rare music to his words that make him, for instance, Mozart compared to the very worthy Michael Longley's Salieri, that would have made him a special talent anywhere at any time. It's possible that we might have heard more about technique than the circumstances in which he wrote but Stepping Stones is more biography than critical analysis. In among the anecdotes and life story, there is wisdom to be had, like,

if a poem is any good, you can repeat it to yourself as if it were written by somebody else. The completedness frees you from it and it from you. You can read and re-read it without feeling self-indulgent: whatever it was in you that started the writing has got beyond you.

That's excellent, not only making use of the casual phrase 'any good' but proceeding to define it in terms we can all understand. You might not find that in Donald Davie or William Empson.

One could also use the little game he invented,

You started with the appositional phrase, 'the well-known Irish travel agent, Conor Cruise O'Brien and went on as long as you could with parallerl inventions: the well-known Irish chimney-sweep Conor Flues O'Brien. The well-known Irish poet Conor Muse O'Brien. 

The one time I was lucky enough to see Heaney in the flesh was at the readings arranged by Simon Armitage alongside the 2012 London Olympic Games with him representing Ireland, Rita Dove the USA, Wole Soyinka Nigeria, etc. and Soyinka's mobile phone going off while he was reading seemed to me to be the headline news to mention in my review but not everybody thought so. Thus I'm a little bit reassured that a Nobel Laureate can treat the high-mindedness of art with some gentle irreverence and I'll play along with - the well-known Irish party-planner Conor Do's O'Brien, the well-known Irish cleric Conor Pews O'Brien, the well-known Irish landscape painter Conor Views O'Brien and the well-known Irish sneezer Conor At-choos O'Brien. Then I'll let you do some of your own but I'm glad we don't have to be so immersed in post-modern textuality, the dark arts of poetics or 'theory' that we can't join in with that.

Stepping Stones is an essential book for any Heaney devotee, none of which will be finding out about it here for the first time. It's useful and very worthwhile for me, too, who regarded him as quite possibly the greatest living poet in the language for many years on account of that natural music that occured as his default cruising speed in so much of his work. He understands entirely the choice to be made between 'free' verse, the short line and iambic pentameter and it requires a rare talent to make that decision for the best.

I haven't yet arrived at the chapter on The Spirit Level and my favourite Heaney poem, A Brigid's Girdle, which might not qualfy for in-depth discussion because it's not contentious or even possibly of much further interest beyond its gorgeousness but gorgeousness will do for me.

Heaney - A Brigid's Girdle