One game you can play while reading the letters of some great dead person — and often you may need a game to keep you going — is to pinpoint the moment when they realise their letters might one day be published. Because except for utter narcissists, few assume their scribbles might be printworthy at the start of their careers. Once they reach a certain level of fame, they have to cut down on the gossip.
In The Letters of Seamus Heaney, that moment comes on page 390, almost halfway through the vast tome. Heaney is writing to his friend Derek Mahon in 1992, congratulating him on winning an award: “Great news about the Irish Times/Aer Lingus bounty. Would have been a disgrace if it had gone any other way but, as they say at Harvard, shit happens. Not that Medbh or Paula are . . . Christ, now that Larkin’s letters are out and Longley’s are in archives, I’m beginning to panic about putting down a line!”
Heaney was right to panic. He had been made Oxford professor of poetry in 1989 (“A case of Irish dog wins English race, all right”) and was six years away from winning the Nobel prize for literature. He couldn’t be seen to denigrate Medbh McGuckian or Paula Meehan. The years of being a little-known rural poet were far behind him. He was a public figure, his life by now a flurry of engagements and responsibilities.
But we don’t open a writer’s letters to read about them being “treated like royalty, flown first class and limousined about” (Japan, November 1997). We want to catch a glimpse of their private selves, what they thought beyond the headlines.
Christopher Reid’s impressive project does give us a glimpse of the private Heaney — one who played pranks on his friends, despaired about his future and complained about responsibilities.
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This is not a complete collection of letters, however. Heaney was born in 1939, but the first entry is dated 1964, when he was lecturing in English and gathering poems for his first collection. Letters to living members of his family are also missing, which is a shame, but perhaps to be expected. “It was made clear to me that their privacy in this regard was to be inviolable,” explains Reid, a fellow poet who was once Heaney’s editor at Faber and also compiled the letters of Heaney’s close friend Ted Hughes.
That in itself is interesting because privacy pops up again and again. When a young Heaney was writing about the fields and bullfrogs of Bellaghy, he had no idea the rural area might one day fall “under siege by sixth formers” studying his work and in search of extra detail for their A-level essays. Sometimes he sees the funny side of this research. “One of my brothers, a busy man, has on occasion found himself with a Japanese professor in Toner’s Moss when he should have been with his cows in the milking parlour,” he writes in 1995. At other times, as in this 1988 letter to a potential biographer, he is defensive: “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.”
That public mask — his booming laugh, friendly eyes, dramatic voice, good humour — was known to all. Heaney put Northern Irish writing on the map in the 1970s, a time when the country was mostly known for sectarian violence. Like all artists in times of war, he felt a great pressure to respond to the conflict in his work. And it wasn’t just from within. The Sinn Fein spokesman and IRA volunteer Danny Morrison confronted Heaney on a train, as the poet recalled in The Flight Path:
So he enters and sits down
Opposite and goes for me
head on.
“When, for fuck’s sake, are
you going to write
Something for us?” “If I do
write something,
Whatever it is, I’ll be writing
for myself.”
And that was that. Or words
to that effect.
Words to that effect crop up in his letters too. Speaking to the Northern Irish writer Brendan Hamill in 1973, Heaney acknowledges: “There should be a voice of freedom issuing from the poets. But the voice can’t be summoned — a poem is a different utterance from a newspaper leader.” And then there is that open letter to Blake Morrison, who had included Heaney in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry: “My passport’s green./ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast The Queen.” (When Queen Elizabeth II visited Northern Ireland 25 years later, Heaney read a poem for the occasion. “Worth doing, but anxiety-inducing,” he told Ted Hughes’s widow, Carol.)
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Those interested in the Belfast Group, the poets’ workshop which ran from 1963 to 1972 and cultivated a great deal of familiar names, will find plenty to savour here, from Heaney’s first letter to a 16-year-old Paul Muldoon (“I think you’re a poet and will go where you decide”) to brutally honest confessions to Michael Longley (“I sit here with a third child, no job, no real idea of where I am going or what I want to do”). They might also be shocked by the level of back-scratching, such as reviewing each other’s poetry collections (all works of genius, of course).
But you forgive him. He’s Seamus Heaney, and even post-Nobel prize, with his ego inflating and his patience dissipating, he never loses his charm. It’s there when he pranks his friend David Hammond, sending to his BBC office a postcard supposedly from a lover: “My life at the massage parlour changed the minute you walked through the door.” And also when he’s feeling out of place at Harvard: “Heaney with a haircut a bit sheepishly taking it all in.”
Most moving is the final “letter”, a text message that Heaney sent to Marie, his wife of almost 50 years, as he was taken into the operating theatre in 2013. “Noli timere,” he told her. Don’t be afraid. It’s the perfect conclusion to a book that will bring you closer to the great man than ever before.
The Letters of Seamus Heaney edited by Christopher Reid (Faber £40 pp820). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
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