Getting Messianic

As early as 1966, the year Faber & Faber published his debut collection Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney wrote to his friend and fellow Northern Irish writer Seamus Deane, “I have been unusually in demand during the last two months.” From that point on, the inundating requests, invitations, and intrusions on his time never stopped cutting into any opportunities he might have had to become “attuned to the silences,” as he put it. The portrait of Heaney that emerges in The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber, 2023), edited diligently and sympathetically by Christopher Reid, is of a man always tussling between duty and freedom. As Heaney wrote to the poet and critic Adam Kirsch in 2006: “‘Being responsible’ and what it means, what it demands, has indeed preoccupied me—maybe too much.”  

The insights these letters give into Heaney’s schedule—the trips, teaching, lecturing, and near-ambassadorial public years of the 1990s and 2000s—leave one surprised he wrote anything at all. Some of his discipline was temperamental: there is evidence throughout these letters of Heaney’s inborn work ethic, but more specifically of a hardwired sense of obligation, a taking seriously the feeling of being one of the “workers of the world” to whom he jokingly alludes while vacationing in Greece. An early letter to Michael and Edna Longley, two of Heaney’s most formative and enduring literary associates from the Belfast scene, suggests in part how the need to be responsible, which shaped his ever-increasing global reputation, was rooted in experience, in an awareness of the pitfalls of neglecting one’s presumptive duties. “I have been deeply upset since Monday night, not because of anything you said, but because it was only then I realized what I had done, or rather had not done, in the article,” the letter begins, referring to a piece about Belfast Heaney wrote for the New Statesman in 1966. “First of all, I was simply ashamed of myself: why I did not make the article an offensive for all that was good here, in art and people, I just don’t know. As you say, I was not evangelical,” he goes on, likening the friendship and poetry of Longley and others of their loose cohort such as Derek Mahon and Harry Chambers to the private intimacy of a marriage. He added, “I think until now I have enjoyed the luxuries of friendship without being aware of the full responsibilities.”

Heaney tipped his scales toward responsibility, rather than luxury, for the rest of his career. A raft of letters across decades testifies to how often he endorsed or weighed in on behalf of his friends to publishers, funding bodies, and potential employers. While Heaney was (sometimes sharply) reminded of the personal ties by which he was bound, there was also, due to the political climate in which he and his work were formed, a pressing sense of public-facing responsibility. One of the most instructive threads in the book is his trying to strike the right balance between avoiding being co-opted as a spokesman or “mascot” for the Northern Irish political situation—especially as some kind of straw man for the Catholic, republican “side” of the nation—while simultaneously responding to the seismic historical events to which he was a direct witness. There are relatively few mentions of the Troubles in these letters, at least in the sense of day-to-day concrete incidents, but Heaney does note, in a 1969 letter to John and Madeline Montague, that “fear is abroad in Belfast again.” That same year, in a letter to Rosemary Goad of Faber, he writes, “We’re still short of water after the explosions and I’m almost certain that the last flat wheel I got (it was flat when I went out yesterday morning) was the work of Protestant saboteurs.”

These notes point to the unavoidable reality of the political impinging on Heaney’s work and life, whatever position he might have taken—as he outlines most tellingly in a 1973 letter to Brendan Hamill, a former student and poet from Belfast. Hamill challenged Heaney to make his attitude toward the unfolding situation in Northern Ireland more explicit, exemplifying a pressure put on the poet both then and later to nail his colors to one or other mast. But Heaney was reluctant to make any declaration. He points out to Hamill that his putative allegiances are already unavoidable:

I think you have to read any poem in the context of the poet’s whole work, and the relation of that work to the society he inhabits. Northern Ireland always has been an especially neurotic and oblique place. You don’t have to make noises against the establishment if your name is Seamus, for example; it’s just taken for granted ... I had a few poems which were ‘political’ in the northern context, in that they assumed that Ulster was part of the Irish experience, not part of the British ... So I would begin by saying that from the beginning I was writing from a perspective that was at odds with the prevailing ‘Ulster is British’ atmosphere. I was not, however, very politically conscious as a poet.

Such was the pressure he felt, as both a family man and a cultural lightning rod, that the freedom he enjoyed during his first prolonged visit to Berkeley in the early 1970s proved the catalyst for a long-term dislocation from Belfast. During this period, one can sense Heaney’s inner wrangling as his guilt competes with the palpable and valid fear of being scapegoated or targeted for offenses, real or imagined, from either faction in the violent sectarian convulsions. Writing to Ted Hughes around the time Heaney decided to move from Belfast to Glanmore Cottage in County Wicklow, in the Republic, he notes:

I began to feel like a guerrilla-writer, which may be excessive, but the feeling of risk and possibility is in the air all round us here. In a perverse way I’m sorry to leave Belfast at the moment of truth.

While it may have required some form of exile to enact, the move was consistent with Heaney’s attitude toward overtly political poetry. He suspected that the sort of direct grandstanding demanded of artists in the divisive climate was ultimately too harmful to the work to be fully conscionable. It wasn’t, either, a case of jadedness, or a sense—in Auden’s phrase—that poetry makes nothing happen; as is clear here, Heaney wasn’t beyond the occasional lapse into a sort of Messiah complex, usually laughingly acknowledged as such: “The saviour of Ulster can be expected August 15th” he writes cheerily to Longley, while in a somewhat more pious mood he writes to Charles Monteith, his editor at Faber, that following the recording of a program for schools

... it’s back to bombsville. The whole thing is possibly driving me into this exaggerated sense of the urgency of a poem: but I actually think, or hope, that some of the stuff in Wintering Out could re-define things for at least a few people here, on both sides. My God, I’m getting messianic in my old age.

In a 1988 letter to Longley, Heaney clarifies, after the fact, some of his thinking during that early 1970s “moment of truth”:

Yet everything is indeed one thing, and what I wanted to do, I suppose, was to suggest that the tolerances and transcendences that we win are necessarily linked to the aboriginal set of conditions which they go beyond. It’s not that one poet is more ‘political’ than another; it’s that some make the (perhaps, though not necessarily always) artistic mistake of espousing ‘politics’ in the verse. I hear you groan. I enjoyed that.

While Heaney’s approach then was toward a thoughtful distillation through imagery and metaphor rather than explicit partisan declaration, there was one controversy that occasioned a more direct response. In 1982, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion included a significant selection of Heaney’s work in their generational anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. The problem was that British in the title; Heaney felt himself boxed into a corner, and wrote an open letter which contained the soon-infamous lines, “My passport’s green. / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen.” The letters make clear that Heaney was doubly conflicted due to his loyal friendship with Morrison, who had previously written a monograph on Heaney’s work. But this was one co-opting, however inadvertent, that Heaney couldn’t let slide, partly for his own inner weather and partly for the potential mischief it might unleash from those who would see it as a betrayal. In 1983, Heaney wrote to the poet Paul Durcan to explain his decision:

I had a sense of disrupting innocent enough complacencies and connivances, within the English and Ulster situation, but for inner cleanliness (poetry as Andrews Liver Salts) I felt I had to say in public the old-fashioned nationalist thing: I could not go on amphibiously because it was not so much amphibiousness as a sort of skulk. Good nature masking failure of nerve, all that.

This unwillingness to “go on amphibiously” didn’t mean Heaney reaching for “old-fashioned nationalist” lines, however. He was scrupulously balanced in the open letter itself, ensuring that he included Protestant allusions, in order that it be seen as having “an extra-national point of vantage,” as he put it to the playwright Brian Friel.

The anthology controversy isn’t the only example of Heaney trying to move beyond his “Good nature,” or at least to not allow it to run counter to his own best interests. As Reid mentions in his introduction, there are a few other moments of “defensive courtliness” in the letters, many of which have to do with Heaney’s understandable desire to fence off certain aspects of his life from public view as his own status as a national, and later global, figure developed. It’s heartening to see him draw the line somewhere, most often when requests impinge upon the few square meters of earth associated with the privacies and freedoms of childhood, as well as family members still living in the homeplace. In the 1980s, Michael Parker—an English teacher in Lancashire writing a thesis that later became a book about Heaney’s early life—treads on the poet’s toes several times. However well-meaning Parker’s “research,” there were intrusions that Heaney pushed against:

I prefer my family and the more personal hinterland of my life to remain private. There is quite enough of me and about me in print, I think, without going into the domestic and intimate details. It would be dishonest of me not to tell you that I was not a little irked when I heard you had visited The Wood.
 
The places you photographed and hope to map are actually now images that inhere as much in what I wrote as in what I remember. For this reason, the shock of intrusion, which I felt when I heard of your initial visit to my family, has been dramatically renewed ... 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. It would be a robbery and I would have the cruel knowledge that I had led the robber to the hidden treasure and even explicated its value.

It is, in context, a pleasure to see this steelier side of Heaney after pages of self-subsuming decency. Although there are other examples of him being less than saintly, the moments are usually fleeting instances of pique, often at slights received in print or in person. Sometimes even these are dressed up in the robes of performance, or game-playing, such as the satirical poems addressed to “editorial dopes” who printed things critical of his work. One such poem, from 1971, is addressed to Michael Foley, co-editor of the Honest Ulsterman magazine, which had taken a swipe at Heaney, Longley, and Mahon:

Your prose style, I must say, is excellent,
fit instrument for cheek-slash and death-blow
but is all that courage at the sticking point
screwed up by the real thing or some dildo?
 
Official gadflies are co-opted. Then beware.
You too might lunge and find your angry stick
is dunlopillo. Who do you think you are?
Rare Ben Jonson? Swift? Dryden? Or Ulick?

In his introduction, Reid talks about the lack of any “obvious gear-change” in Heaney’s epistolary tone. This is true, but perhaps the lack is due, in part, to Heaney’s sense that something posterity-shaped looked over his shoulder as he sat to write. A letter to Seamus Deane in 1966 catches something of this spirit, again lit with a self-aware, self-mocking note: “Marie and I are going to London to-morrow (Friday) (I fancy myself as a bit of a Keats with all these parentheses in my letters) because I have an interview in connection with the Gregory Award on Saturday.” If there’s no shift as his fame accelerates, it may be that he was always, for all his outward suppression of egotism or grandstanding, aware that he was writing some of the most pivotal poems of his interesting times, and that his would be a career subject to enduring scrutiny. In a letter to Mahon in 1992, he notes, “Christ, now that Larkin’s letters are out and Longley’s are in archives, I’m beginning to panic about putting down a line!” But by then some version of an afterlife had long since been guaranteed.

The letters also confirm that Heaney’s later eminence was not accidentally reached. Despite his many moments of self-chiding, his various periods of torpor, his “unbreakable lethargy,” his was an astonishing production rate, especially when one considers the standard of work being produced. Writing to Pat Strachan of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, his US publisher, in 1980, Heaney hints at this stamina when discussing his upcoming selected poems: “It was all part of a publication plan I conceived eight or nine years ago—to have so much done by 40!—and I was determined to go through with it.” One does sense a calculating mind behind the decision-making. As much as Heaney was driven by the necessity of what his art demanded, there was evidently an ambition to ensure the projects he devoted his energy to were appropriate, weighty, and leading toward the various milestones he envisioned. Writing to Monteith in 1982, Heaney demurs from the idea of running for the Oxford Professor of Poetry role at that time:

I think that I must not engage myself for it yet. I’d like to lay down two or three more works, which I feel responsible towards until they are finished, before venturing out into the ring. I do not mean the ring of the election, but the ring of the lecturer’s spotlight. I feel that if I can complete certain tasks in the next five years or so, I shall be in a better position, psychologically and critically, to deliver the kind of statements that I feel the position calls for …

As Reid flags in his footnote, it’s “interesting that the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, which [Heaney] was to accept in 1989 ... was something he was already training his sights on.” Even the Nobel Prize, awarded to Heaney in 1995, is somewhat more than an abstract blip on the radar before it arrives—“too soon,” as he apparently told poet Andrew McNeillie—with all its accompanying pomp.

There is, if read in a certain light, a sort of weaponized benevolence at play in some of the letters, or at least a disarming use of flattery and praise. John Montague becomes something of a bête noire on occasion—relatively speaking, given Heaney’s boundless amiability. “I don’t want any grapevines to be buzzing, especially since I think Montague feels he owns Sweeney,” Heaney writes to Monteith, referring to Heaney’s translation of the medieval Irish work Buile Shuibhne, about the mad King Sweeney. In another letter, to Longley, Heaney notes, “North [Heaney's 1975 collection] is to come out now in the last week of June. Next thing Montague will be saying I copied the title from him. Jesus. He is tedious.” Heaney’s usual tactic in dealing with Montague is to kill with kindness—and kindness is often the keynote when dealing with other writers, too, a further example of Heaney’s willingness to take on a diplomatic role, especially in later life.

One wonders if seeing the scale of the congregation who benefitted from his endorsements had a dampening effect on those who received congratulatory letters, a thought in part suggested by an acerbic response from Mahon to one of Heaney’s hymns of praise. Reid notes: “Below the signature, in Mahon’s hand, on the actual letter in the Emory archive: ‘Pompous ass.’” Heaney’s response to poems that he connected with seems genuine enough, however, and at times a book strikes him so much that he's driven toward the page himself. On reading Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998), Heaney rapidly produced a poem in its style—a sort of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” as he puts it, which found its way into the New Yorker soon afterwards.

Unlike Larkin’s, or indeed Hughes’s, Heaney’s letters won’t occasion any re-shifting of the poet’s posthumous reputation. Nor will they reset the shape of his canon or add a great deal to the store of his direct pronouncements on poetry. The lack of letters to the Heaney family is—while understandable, not least in the light of those letters to Parker—a felt loss. Here, we have the public poet who is almost always “on” and almost nothing of the private, off-guard man whose instinct surely wasn’t always toward such good behaviour. One’s feelings on Heaney, too, will be confirmed rather than altered by seeing evidence of his ceaseless work ethic, his willing acceptance of duty, and the price he paid for his sought-after prominence and the desire to maintain a well-judged, various, and regular publishing habit. There’s also a clearer sense of his somewhat inescapable social bind, illustrated by an anecdote about not attending a celebration of the poet Thomas Kinsella because

When he got the freedom of the city a few weeks ago I went to City Hall for the occasion and probably spoiled it for him—the innocent decent Lord Mayor goes out of his way in his opening remarks to name me specially for being in the audience …

This anecdote points to the ways in which Heaney’s later celebrity could prove an occluding, resentment-causing shadow for those around him, rather than a reflective source of communal glory. A throwaway line in a late letter to George O’Brien about the novelist John McGahern might, elliptically, point toward Heaney’s own post-Stockholm sense of himself: “I feel—what shits we have to be—he’s got too good at what he does.” If Heaney’s greatest sins were attempting to uphold nuance in public discourse during fraught political times and a later surfeit of decency, coupled with a too-earnest desire to be a servant for poetry, they’re sins that wouldn’t have worn out his knees at confession.