Seamus Heaney

"All we have to go on"

Interview by Karl Miller
   
'The Strand at Lough Beg' is an elegy for a murdered cousin, Colum McCartney. In a later poem of yours, 'VIII' in the collection of 1984, Station Island, Colum reproaches you for having 'saccharined my death with morning dew', and indeed there is some morning dew in the elegy. Next to the later poem stands one of your finest, least sweet, poems, in which the ghost of a friend, a murdered shopkeeper, appears to you, causing you to ask forgiveness for a former indifference.

That poem is sufficient in itself to show how a vigilance in relation to events whose significance is at once private and public, personal and political, can produce some of your best utterance. That friend, according to his deposition in the poem, squeezed his wife's hand before descending to the shop, where he was shot. Your Nobel Prize address mentions another squeeze of the hand, administered in 1976 to a Catholic workman by a Protestant workman, two of a party, all but one of them Protestant, which had been captured by gunmen.

    I hadn't thought of them in relation to one another until you mentioned the matter. What is at stake in these cases is something frail and true. I did think long about whether or not the story of the murdered workers should be included at this very public moment. Its function in the lecture is pedagogical, I'd say; it's a fable about how little we have to go on, but how precious and real that 'little' is. I hesitated, I suppose, because of the uplift factor: you know, the suggestion that there is that much hope. Even admitting that much hope - there is something overly consoling in that.
   
The end of the story was bitter enough. They were all killed.

    They were all killed. And maybe what should be left is the blood on the road instead of the squeeze of the hand. Nevertheless, the frailty of that gesture is all we have to go on.
   
The poem which has the apparition of your shopkeeper friend is visionary without being bardic. It encompasses a humbling of the bard, and uses the words that people say to one another in the street or the shop. How do you feel about it now?

    It's one that holds up. It's almost twenty years since I wrote it, but I still occasionally include it at poetry readings. I suppose it comes across because it's a story, and because of the colloquial aspect. What I enjoy is the muted rhyming, the slightly Dantesque formality of the verse, being combined with the speech rhythms of South Derry. And you're right about the 'humbling of the bard'. I suppose what got released in it was something I wasn't consciously seeking to release. My conscious concern was with the killings in the North and the adequacy or inadequacy of my response to them in the poetry I was writing, but unconsciously what was going on was a dialogue between my pre-writing, mid-Ulster, adolescent self and the more politically-aware, published-poet side of me.

    The speaker in the poem is unnamed, but he's based on a man called William Strathearne who was murdered in circumstances the same as those described in the poem - called down to the shop door in the middle of the night. I hadn't seen Willie for many years but I had known him when he was a young fellow, and famous locally for his style and gifts as a footballer. He belonged to the extra-literary, rural, parochial-hall part of my life, one of the people I gradually lost touch with as I moved on to live in Belfast during the Sixties, and then down to Wicklow, and into a different swim. For all the Troubles 'content', the poem is a kind of dialogue with myself.

    One thing I worried about in writing that section of 'Station Island' was whether to make the killers in the poem members of the RUC - since it had been rogue members of the police force who had committed the actual murder. Policemen who were paramilitaries when off-duty, as it were. That was why Strathearne had answered the door in the middle of the night. He saw uniforms and presumably felt safe, although what was about to occur was a sectarian assassination. He was killed because he was an easy Catholic target, living in a largely Protestant village.

    But even so, I felt that if I blazoned that into the poem, it would constitute an inflammatory, propagandist, almost pro-IRA gesture. It would be taken as saying that all the RUC were what the graffiti called them - murderers. So, for better or worse, I left the thing bare of political markings. Within the first circle of readers, of course, in Northern Ireland, most people would have known the incident on which it was based. Anyhow, I've never regretted the decision. And I'm inclined to elevate it into a proof of the rightness of Aristotle's claim that the poet is different from the historian, that the poet deals with what typically happens.
   
You've said that you think you've been lucky, lucky to have found love and poetry in your life. How lucky was the move from your first environment to a succession of very different ones? Did the move involve any forfeitings, any losses?

    I don't see what was forfeited or lost. The really valuable thing about my childhood was the verity of the life I lived within the house and the sense of trust that I had among the people on the ground. I'm not away from that. And I'm not away, I don't think, from my first speech. I think of that speech as a kind of guttural bough - as opposed to a golden bough. It's a kind of passport through the perils of the fake speech you are bound to encounter, a register that stays reliable.

    It's not that I believe you should confine yourself to the cultural or conceptual limits of that first language. Certainly not. In fact, it is precisely the experience of going beyond those limits that constitutes much of the luck of my life. But as a writer, I never want to get out of my phonetic depth, as it were. I like to feel that the line I am writing is being paid out from some old inner voice-reel, that it is coming up from the place I re-enter every time I go back to where I grew up. I still live a kind of den life when I go home, among my brothers and sisters in County Derry.
   
That den life is just as evident in the later poetry as it is in the earlier. In fact, one of the great exhilarations of the later poetry is the den that is celebrated there.

    There's a ruminant aspect to a lot of the more recent poems. But there's a certain amount of ranging around as well as reaching back. For example, in that Macedonian poem we were talking about, there is the flypaper from fifty years ago in the farmhouse in Mossbawn, but there is also a memory of the sumptuousness of being served a meal on the Lufthansa flight from Belgrade, the learned behaviour of the frequent flyer. You want to be able to include the experience at the circumference and to find your bearings between the circumference and the first centre.

    I sometimes wonder how I add up, and am tempted to think of myself as a very old-fashioned instance, a survival from the age of the priest and the plough. But after all, the whole species is going through certain changes in the conditions in which it lives, and whether you are living with your computer in a loft in New York or are still within the smell of silage in County Derry, as a creature of the planet you have to huddle at night, and you're haunted by your dreams.
   
So you'd mostly want to say that you haven't changed or been changed?

    I've learnt far more, of course, but I haven't been changed, no, not in any fundamental way. The image that always comes to me is of ripples in a round pool. They are beaming and brimming out from the original point, but if you look at them long enough, you begin to think that maybe they are rippling back in from the outer edge.

    That's what consciousness or selfhood or your meaning to yourself is like. Something inside you is still the same, an element at the centre of your being is still whatever it has been since you came to awareness, but obviously there's an acquired perspective too, new reaches of understanding and comprehension, a whole accumulated set of instincts and bases for judgement. Are there many people who cannot say, 'in my end is my beginning'?
   
To move into a world of professors and media people, reviewers, interviewers, and other creatures from Dante's Inferno, might be construed by some as a threat to the character. How have you managed to fight them off, if that is the word for it?

    I don't think of myself as fighting them off. Conversations, contact with what Auden called the 'ironic points of light' in your life, the ring of vigilance around you which is your circle of friends, the merriment, the sardonic intelligence of people close to you - it's important to be able to trust that, to have internalized that, and to live with that springiness. I think the situation I'm in is eerie in one way: so many interviews, so many reviews, good reviews, but the natural backlash of bad reviews too, and being set up - no, not being set up, being there already, as some sort of phenomenon. Seamus Deane wrote to me after North came out, when I was still living in Wicklow, and he addressed his letter to 'Seamus Heaney', with the inverted commas.
   
And that was what, twenty-five years ago?

    It was.
   
We spoke earlier about the Vendlerising of the Heaney oeuvre, about her aesthete's reading of the poems. Could you bear to complete the circle by returning to the subject? I'd accept that the category of the public work of art - cognizant, let's say, of fact, doctrine and community - can be made to appear archaic or inoperable, and that the opinions which aesthetes have judged extraneous to works of art can be hard to find, and hard to follow, in the poetry of the contemporary world. But they're there all right, and not always the worse for being hard to follow.

I think of the fine poet Anne Carson at this point. No one is less of a protest poet. She is inward, very much a writer for herself. She is sometimes oracular, if not esoteric, if not incomprehensible. And yet her work is alive with philosophical and political interest. Her Autobiography of Red ends with a gnomic interview with an Ancient Greek precursor of the author of this new long poem of hers: 'Identity memory eternity your constant themes,' her Ancient Greek is informed. And Carson's own poem has themes, which these words help to evoke. It also has the incisive portrait of a theorist, a student of 'the erotics of doubt'.

    What Helen Vendler is saying is that there has to be more to a poem than themes, and I think she's right about that.
   
Yes, but you have themes, don't you?

    I know I have.
   
And it's therefore appropriate - though this is something she can appear to deny - for your readers, if they want, to argue about them. The argument would, of course, do well to avoid the suggestion that you come at us in your poems with a tag saying 'Catholic', or 'Farm-boy turned Professor', or 'Nationalist', or 'Imperialist'. It's true that the attribution to poems of subjects and opinions can go wrong. Things aren't always what they theme, as someone once said. But the pursuit and discovery of themes, by writers and readers, look very like activities that have to happen - that will seldom if ever be entirely beside the point.


    Helen Vendler is defending a position that is very much under attack. She has to educate the profession again, though she wouldn't necessarily put it like that. What she has observed, in her maturity, as a reader and critic and teacher, is the disappearance of a capacity for jouissance in the poem itself, and I think a lot of her polemic, a lot of her insistence on the private, aesthetic nature of the experience of literature, is a reaction against the politicization of oral discourse within the humanities.
   
Harold Bloom, another aesthete, has been reaffirming the need for a canon of great works of literature, which you either belong to or you don't, as if by the grace of God. Jeannette Winterson belongs to his canon, he rules, and Angela Carter doesn't. Candidature for the canon has nothing to do, he says, with themes or opinions; it has to do only with aesthetic considerations. Now, while I can understand a hostility towards its politicization, it seems to me that any experience of poetry should endeavour to take in its fullness what the poet has to say. George Herbert has been seen in some debatable way as a Calvinist, a believer in the wickedness of all but a happy few. And he has also been extravagantly described as a Stalinist.

It's all right, in my view, and more than all right, for the reader to be conscious of the opinions which have been attributed to his poems and other writings, and to ask what it meant doctrinally for this parson to be, as he put it, 'on God's side'. As opposed to saying, 'Let's just consider this aesthetically; let's not bother with what he believed.' You can still love the poems while bothering with, and being bothered by, some of his beliefs, so far as we can be sure that he held them.

    If you are a Paisleyite reader of literature, do you come to the poems of someone like Robert Southwell - a Jesuit martyr - and say, 'We don't read them; he was a recusant'? What does it do to your reading of a poem by Herbert, reflecting on the fact that he would have damned people?
   
Damned nearly everybody, on one construction of the matter.

    Yes.
   
Including you, for being a Papist.

    We would have damned him right back: But surely even those readers you call aesthetes possess a vivid historical sense, and know that damning was a given of Herbert's times, just as we know that retaliatory killing was a given of the Beowulf poet's times. Even your aesthete concedes and needs that much context in order to enjoy a text. The sureness of a literary voice may derive from a set of convictions and attitudes which include some that are dismaying.

    2000

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