“Amazing to be answering these questions, ending up as your own anthropological specimen.”
So says Seamus Heaney — winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for
literature; prolific author of poetry, commentary, criticism and drama;
avuncular raconteur; Irish poet and civil servant — in Dennis
O’Driscoll’s recent Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus
Heaney, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
From 2001 to 2007, O’Driscoll acted as a “prompter rather than
interrogator,” conducting most of these interviews in writing by mail
at Heaney’s request. This compilation is not a biography or a
chipping away at great cliff of poems but rather an overheard
conversation about relating one’s work to one’s life. As
O’Driscoll states in the introduction, Heaney has “the need to respond
to an insistent inner voice which asks ‘What did you do with your life,
what did you do?'”
Heaney was born in Northern Ireland in 1939 to a Catholic
family. His father was a cattle trader, and farm life —
with its web of family, neighbors, fields and livestock —
sparkles in bits of lush storytelling throughout the book. Horses
were to be “approached with circumspection. But then, it’s hard
for any operation with horses not to have a certain ceremonial aspect
to it.” He remembers his mother’s frugality one day at the shore: “My
mother, like many other country women in those days, regarded buckets
and spades as ‘catchpennies,’ flashy things not worth spending the
money on. So what she did was to buy a couple of wooden spoons
that we could use in the sand if we wanted to; they could then be
brought home and used all year round in the kitchen.”
Rather than a chronology, this river of recall follows the
topography of Heaney’s poems. It meanders back over familiar territory,
most notably Mossbawn Farm and the house at the Wood, both of which run
through much of Heaney’s poetry. Another pervasive theme is his
identity as an Irish poet and what it meant that during the Troubles,
his publisher, Faber and Faber, was an English company. Sections of the
book resound with name-dropping. What saves the litany from annoying
pretentiousness is Heaney himself. Here is a man who drove cattle
on break from college, who chose to teach at a “third-level
institution” instead of proving himself as a scholar, and who wrote a
set of Ulsterman-type verses for a magazine having “rhymes like ‘arts’
and ‘farts,’ ‘action’ and ‘erection,’ which generally did its best to
learn the art of sinking to the approved level.”
Balanced against the pub poetry is the writer who speaks of the
necessity of reading and memorizing poetry, taught at Berkeley and
Harvard, and justifies esoteric references in “Grotus and Coventina” as
giving “immediate aural and oral pleasure, the consonants and vowels
melt in your mouth like hard-boiled soft-centered sweets, and that
should compensate for any whiff of high culture off the names.”
Indeed.
Stepping Stones is like a park by Victorian landscape
designer Frederick Law Olmsted — an effortless world hiding the
deliberate structure that underpins its naturalness. Or as Heaney
says, “I was wanting to remind myself as much as anyone else that
sounding natural is a stylistic achievement. Just because you
have an idiom and an accent when you open your mouth doesn’t mean you
have style when you put pen to paper.”
This article appears in May 13-19, 2009.