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Interview with Seamus Heaney

Interview with Seamus Heaney


By Sameer Rahim
(Telegraph)

Seamus Heaney published his earliest poems under the pseudonym “Incertus”, meaning “uncertain”. Perhaps his reticence was understandable. As every schoolchild now knows, Heaney grew up on a farm where what counted was your skill with a spade or a plough – not a pen. He also faced the dilemma of being a Catholic in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland.

Over time, though, as the critical adulation has flowed, the shy soul has transformed into the most lauded poet of our times. Last month, in addition to his dozens of garlands (including the Nobel Prize in 1995), he won the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. Heaney will turn 70 on Monday. So perhaps this qualifies – in the words of his Nobel speech – as a “point of arrival” in his life, though one he hopes will turn into a “stepping stone rather than a destination”.

I meet Heaney at Faber & Faber’s new sunlit offices in Bloomsbury (pleasingly close to T S Eliot’s old premises in Russell Square). “It’s a terrific prize,” he says, looking amiable and spry. “I was on the jury which gave the first award to Naipaul – that was when I was professor of poetry at Oxford.” Awarded every two years, there is no longlist or shortlist; more importantly for Heaney there is no “hullabaloo” or competitors exhibited like “creatures at the banquet”, something which makes him uncomfortable.

One benefit is the money. Along with £40,000 awarded to him personally, Heaney has been given £12,500 to spend on a project that encourages young writers. He is sending the money to Poetry Aloud, an Irish organisation that runs a poetry recital competition for schoolchildren. “North and South,” he is quick to add, “I like that.

“I love it because poetry enters them immediately: it ritualises poetry for them and then it never goes away. I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.” He cites one of his favourite examples: Primo Levi in Auschwitz taking comfort from the Dante he learned at school. So would he like children to memorise his poems? “It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme,” he admits. It was quite different when he was at school, a point he proves by reciting the opening of Keats’s “To Autumn”.

Heaney’s poems may not be learnt in schools but they are extensively studied. Exam boards love the poems of childhood from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), which are deemed perfect for GCSE students. The more complex Bog poems in Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975) are staple fare at A-level. Is he flattered or does he resent the classification of his poems into “easy” and “difficult”? “I don’t feel resentful,” he says. “If I have any doubts,” he ventures carefully, “it’s the trimness with which the poems are taught sometimes. They’re much more related to the sociology of the times than they were – which is a good thing.” But he misses the traditional approach – “The rite words in the rote order,” he quotes approvingly from Joyce.

One classroom favourite is “The Early Purges”, which describes drowning kittens on a farm. “It’s terrific because it sets off a debate,” says Heaney, “but I think the poem is flawed because the voice changes halfway through” – from sympathy with the kittens to an acceptance of their deaths. “‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town/Where they consider death unnatural/But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down,” he quotes. “Very heavy handed but a gift to an English class because you’re left with issues.” Heaney would rather a poem such as “Sunlight” (below) were given more attention. The vision of his Aunt Mary baking bread on Mossbawn farm has no issues to extract; instead, the poet shares his pleasure in physical details – the “sunlit absence” in the yard, the “whitened nails” of Mary’s fingers.

Not all his poems lack strong opinions. On the 50th anniversary of the 1917 Easter Rising he published “Requiem for the Croppies” – a poem that commemorates the Irish rebels of 1798. I was surprised to learn that in the Sixties Heaney read this poem to a Protestant audience (unthinkable during the later years of Republican and Loyalist violence). “To read ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ wasn’t to say ‘up the IRA’ or anything,” he recalls. “It was silence-breaking rather than rabble-rousing.” Nevertheless it is a romanticised portrait of the rebels (“shaking scythes at cannon”). Heaney acknowledges that his audience listened to the poem in frosty silence. “You don’t have to love it,” he says. “You just have to permit it.”

Did he turn down the laureateship 10 years ago for political reasons? “Partly,” he says, quickly adding that, “I’ve nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time… it’s just that the basis of my imagination, the basis of the cultural starting point, is off-centre.” This is a less forthright response than the one he gave in 1982, after being included in an anthology of British poets: “My passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised/to toast the Queen.” (He has lived in the Republic of Ireland since 1972.) His close friend Ted Hughes could write “mythological poems about the Queen Mother” because he was “an English patriot” – something Heaney could never have been.

How does he judge the outgoing laureate, Andrew Motion? Heaney chooses his words carefully. “Andrew gave it the complete 21st-century attention, did the outreach and the poems for the sovereign. He did wonderfully well,” he says, sounding like an indulgent teacher. So who should replace him? In 1977, Heaney gave a lecture which spoke appreciatively of three English poets: Hughes, Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill. Might Hill (the only one still alive) make an interesting choice? “He would make a magnificent poet laureate,” says Heaney. “He has a strong sense of the importance of the maintenance of speech… a deep scholarly sense of the religious and political underpinning of everything in Britain.” However, he continues, his poems show an acute distress at the falling away of standards – cultural and political. “I think because of that he wouldn’t want the job.” Heaney’s work lacks Hill’s religious seriousness.

But there are hints of his Catholic upbringing. Did he ever consider the Church? “The verb ‘consider’ covers such a wide range,” he says. “It was always a possibility. It was an overarching invitation at a Catholic boarding school in the Fifties.” His teachers posed the question to him: “Are you going into the Church or are you going into the World?” When given the choice of studying Greek or French – the Church or the World, as it were – he chose French. Could he have followed the example of Hopkins, a poet and a priest, and chosen both? “Hopkins’s poetry delighted me,” he says. “It brought me alive in all sorts of ways.” But Heaney’s delight was linguistic not religious.

Instead he chose poetry. But even so the world has made a habit of intruding, not least in critical praise and the prizes. There is a tension between the public poet – the laurelled voice of wisdom – and the man trying to write poems in his Dublin attic. “I’ve been working at that separation for a lifetime. That separation is a lifetime achievement also,” he adds. Ever since his first book, he has been aware of “the gap between the textual entity known as ‘SH’ and the inner poet”. How does he protect the poems? “The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful,” he says, “to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.” His words come alive. “The prizes can’t help you at all.”

Recently he reread TS Eliot’s later works. “I think only now am I beginning to understand the utter beauty and strength of something like ‘Ash Wednesday’,” he says. “It is a sort of affirmation and withdrawal: melody and prayer and deep uncertainty.” Eliot won the Nobel Prize after his best work was done. Since Heaney won it 14 years ago, he has published three more collections as well as his translation of Beowulf. Is there more to come? “My ideal would be Saul Bellow – they forgot he got the Nobel Prize.” Longevity helped with him. He chuckles. “There’s hope for that.”

From ‘Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication’ For Mary Heaney

 

Sunlight

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

Última actualización: 28/06/2018