Remembering Seamus

shaun o’connell Neither Here nor There: Remembering Seamus first met Seamus Heaney after he read at Boston University in I 1976, at a reception hosted by Professor Helen Vendler on her patio along the Charles River in Cambridge. Affable, open, welcoming, Seamus greeted me like an old friend. He said I shared my name with a notable Derry Gaelic AA cornerback. I told Seamus that I was named after a Harvard halfback by a father who never went to college. He smiled at this serendipity and raised his glass in salute. This thin thread of name associa- tion became, in time, something of a family tie, for Seamus invited me, as he did so many, into his life — into both his actual and poetic landscapes: Heaney country — and changed my life in so doing. More than a lasting friend, Seamus became the brother I never had but chose. I knew then, of course, that Heaney was an original poetic voice; I’d read Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), Stations (1975), and North (1975), the collection that gave him distinction among Irish poets.1 And I had heard him read his poems, as well as gloss them in extended asides — low rumbles delivered like pub snug chats, “between the fire and the wall” in Frank O’Connor’s phrase — which clarified and drew his audience into both their making and their meaning. But, from that first encounter, it was as much the man, Seamus Heaney, as it was the poet who mattered to me. As Paul Muldoon aptly put it at Seamus’s grave in 2013, “It’s the person rather than the poet I’m focusing on today.”2 No question in 1976 about Heaney’s greatness as a poet: Ireland’s best since Yeats, as Robert Lowell said. When I introduced Seamus at a Boston Public Library reading in 1979, I echoed Lowell, calling Heaney “the next generation’s great poet.” Before he read, Heaney nodded, but demurred: “I’m honored and flattered and a bit timorous under that adjective ‘great,’ so I stand back from it a bit.” But Lowell’s words were prophetic, confirmed by the Nobel Prize in 1995. In a 2015 New Yorker essay on Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow, Louis Menand suggests that “Nobels are awarded to writers who are judged to have universalized the marginal.”3 So has Seamus 178 Heaney, following Irish Nobel laureates W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett (along with non-Nobel winner James Joyce) enlarged the significance of tiny, marginal Ireland. Just after the announcement of that award, a reception was held at Loeb House, hosted by Harvard’s president, Neil L. Rudenstine. As I entered the elegant, long-windowed reception room, Seamus strode toward me in his loping, cowherder’s walk; on his face — its rolling contours have been compared to an Irish potato — a characteristic grin flashed under his keen country eyes. “There must be some mistake!” he said in a loud stage whisper. Then, self-ironic about this fuss, he laughed and turned to the next guests, drawing us all into the joy of the moment. That was the man — assured yet humble, gracious but unwilling to be defined by the myths of “Famous Seamus” that others might impose upon him — who came to matter so much to so many of us. Paul Muldoon: “The Seamus Heaney who was renowned the world over was never a man who took himself too seriously, certainly not with his family and friends. That was all of us, of course.”4 “Fair enough,” I say, a phrase Seamus often uttered, words that suggest his range of tolerance and sense of balance in large and small matters. “Don’t fill your tank with petrol,” I recall him saying while gassing up his VW Beetle in the late 1970s. “Always save a few pence for a pint!”5 That was Seamus — a man who knew how to measure values. However, not everyone loved or praised Seamus Heaney. Unionist politicians, IRA members, and even some literary critics found reasons to fault him. When he moved from Belfast to Wicklow in 1972 he was accused of being a “well-known papist propagandist” by the Paisleyite Protestant Telegraph, which claimed that Heaney would find “his spiritual home in the popish republic.”6 In 1979 IRA leader Danny Morrison confronted Heaney on a Belfast-Dublin train and pressured him to write something in support of the IRA’s struggle against British rule in North- ern Ireland, but Heaney refused “to be a party spokesman,” as he notes in Stepping Stones. “If do write something, / Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself,” Heaney recalls saying to Morrison in “The Flight Path.”7 (Morrison remembers a more ambiguous encounter.) That era of dirty protests and hunger strikes by IRA prisoners stretched Heaney between his sympathy for the suffering prisoners — some he knew — and his anger at the implacable Thatcher government, along with his disagreement with the IRA’s terrorist policies. Though Heaney’s poetry, like that of Yeats before him, was intensified and dramatized by these political and personal conflicts, it was never narrowly politicized. 179 THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW “The end of art is peace,” he wrote in “The Harvest Bow.”8 But peace for Heaney came dropping slow. Desmond Fennell, a mav- erick Irish intellectual with a distaste for American culture and capital- ism, published a forty-three-page pamphlet in 1991 titled Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1.9 Fennell accused Heaney of betraying Ireland by fellow-traveling with corrupting foreign critics, with the particular sin of consorting with Harvard’s Helen Vendler. In an essay for the Boston Phoenix, I described Fennell as “well known in Dublin as a Catholic cultural nationalist, a man impatient with what he sees as heresy,” and his attack as “a long draught of Irish bitters, tossed full in his face by a chauvinistic Irishman.”10 Finding Heaney lacking in nationalist political passions and provincial patriotism, Fennell ignored Heaney’s goal of a “poetry of divination, as a restoration of the culture to itself.”11 Heaney did not reply to Fennell’s attack, but he did tell me he was pleased by my public counterattack against the denigration of his poetry and character. Now, with Fennell’s fulminations forgotten and Heaney gone, all that partisan accusation and literary backbiting seems dated, distant, too much ado, and misleading. “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living,” as Auden wrote in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” the year Yeats died and Heaney was born.12 Seamus invited me to visit him and his family in their tall Sandymount Strand house, which he had recently bought after having lived for four years in Glanmore, a pastoral Wicklow cottage. Glanmore had a distin- guished lineage — a former gatekeeper’s cottage on the Synge estate, rented to Heaney by Professor Anne Saddlemeyer, editor of Synge’s letters — but it was cramped and humble. (Years later he would buy and expand the cottage, using it as a writing retreat.) Seamus liked to recall how the aris- tocratic Robert Lowell — the scion of ascendency Boston’s Beacon Hill and Back Bay, visiting that one-room dwelling, crammed with three young children — was amazed and a bit appalled that Heaney could live and write in such a place. Seamus laughed with glee as he imitated Lowell’s patrician voice: “You see a lot of your children, Seamus!” The Heaneys moved to Glanmore in 1972, away from the bombs and sectarian murders that were tearing apart Belfast, explosions that made Marie shake in telling about them. Seamus left his Northern Ireland homeland “determined to put the practice of poetry more deliberately at the center of my life,” though it would be a poetry of exile and cunning. The Heaneys’ Dublin half-house, enclosed by a low wall, rose high above traffic-clogged Strand Road and overlooked the wide strand, across 180 Shaun O’Connell Dublin Bay to the hill of Howth beyond. “Ah, God, I never thought I’d own a house so large,” said Heaney on my first visit, not long after I met him. When I stayed with the Heaneys in those years he moved one of his boys, Michael or Christopher, out of his bed to put me up. (When I last saw them, mature young men, at Harvard’s memorial service for Seamus in 2013, I belatedly apologized for taking their beds. Christopher waved me off, saying, “Ah, that happened all the time.”) Other nights I slept in the snug attic garret Seamus used for his writing den. Years later, after the Nobel Prize, Seamus erected a three-story addition, adding an office, pushing out the side of the house and opening up the roof into a grand study with a proper desk, files, stuffed bookcases and, beyond the long window, a long view across Dublin Bay to the hill of Howth, where Molly Bloom said Yes, which is just what this visitor said upon seeing how Heaney’s former under-the-roof rabbit warren was opened up. When he won the Nobel, Seamus said he felt like he was “walking on air,” which may be a reason why he built for himself such lofty writing rooms by raising his roofs in Dublin and Wicklow. Back in the late 1970s and ’80s Marie Heaney invited me for meals at their kitchen table, where Seamus ate heartily from his own plate and plundered leftovers from the plates of his children.

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