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ON
SEAMUS HEANEY
By R.F.Foster
ISBN 978-0-691-17437-2
This little study, just over two hundred pages, is part biography
part criticism and in some degree hagiography. Foster, a professor
in two universities, states early his great admiration for Heaney (
the man and the work it seems) and is determined to defend him from
all comers. Criticism from enthusiasm can be just as good as many
other but Foster perhaps expresses his support a little too
frequently and without reserve: “formidably authoritative range”;
“an ease and accomplishment often lacking in the genre”; “powerfully
realised”; “an ease and assurance with wider horizons”. Much that
Heaney touches elicits superlatives. It’s fine that Foster nails his
colours to the mast, but the effect begins to become a touch
wearisome. It’s possible to reveal a poet’s excellence without
frequently stating it.
Heaney was born in 1939 in rural Northern Ireland. His father was a
farmer and cattle dealer. Heaney was the first of nine. At twelve he
went to St Columb’s College, Derry, as a boarder, having passed the
eleven-plus. John Hume, a fellow pupil, saw the exam as the means by
which the school was opened up; but to a select minority of course.
The college was intended to be a seminary. It opened in 1879 and by
the early decades of the next century was renowned for its academic
successes.
Foster doesn’t have much to say about the influence of St Columb’s,
but it’s perhaps worth considering. Three things might be said to
have formed Heaney’s mind: Catholicism, nationalism and the grammar
school ( it wasn’t till he first read Ted Hughes at Queen’s Belfast
that he fastened on the notion of making himself a poet).
Catholicism instils heteronomy: Catholics aren’t permitted to
make their own agreement with life. God decides, the Pope receives
his wisdom and passes it to the priest and only the priest can
absolve. The Catholic mind is ruled from without, in
contradistinction to the non-conformist, which is forced to
autonomy. The non-conformist learns early that she is alone with her
conscience. The vicar can’t offer penance. Non-conformists have to
be self-regulating. The heteronomy of Catholicism is not nugatory.
The pervasive sense of external rule shapes feeling and thinking
decisively.
Rule from without was also a political reality. Yet, in this case
Catholicism called for resistance. The essential wound of British
rule wasn’t religious but economic and social. His mother’s people
had worked in the linen industry. On the one hand was the rural
inheritance from his father, on the other, the industrial from his
mother. He belonged to the land and the factory, yet only the former
makes a significant appearance in his work. His passport was green,
but his nationalism subtle. His family had good relations with their
protestant neighbours. The Troubles began when Heaney was well into
adulthood and already an established poet. The universal reach of
poetry always meant more to him than the transitory truths of
sectarianism.
The grammar school was a place of privilege. As in the rest of the
UK, the test introduced in 1947 created educational apartheid: the
twenty per cent creamed off for the grammars received a wide
curriculum from well-qualified staff in well-funded schools (though
St Columb’s had to deal with a rapid expansion in numbers once the
scholarship boys began to arrive). The remaining eighty percent
never got a sniff at Latin or Greek, and many not even French,
judged simply too dense. They were the factory and office fodder. At
St Columb’s, Heaney was amongst a small group of boys picked out
because of their academic success( quite different from
intelligence) and groomed for significance.
Thus, his mind was formed in heteronomy, quiet if resolute Irish
nationalism and grammar school privilege and expectation.
Heaney acknowledged Manley Hopkins as his first major influence.
Perhaps that suggests the hold Catholicism had over Heaney’s mind.
Hopkins, of course, experimented with metrical feet, use of lexis,
hyphenation and so on in ways which influenced a few twentieth
century poets. Yet for a poet whose first collection appeared in the
mid-1960s, the choice of an ascetic
Victorian Jesuit whose life seems to have been blighted by
serious depression and who never achieved, apparently, fulfilment in
a love relationship, seems perhaps bizarre. On 6th
November 1865, Hopkins wrote: “On this day by God’s grace I resolved
to give up all beauty until I had his leave for it.” It’s hard to
imagine a clearer expression of a mind ruled from without. Hopkins
was twenty-one. Perhaps this renunciation of autonomy explains the
forced sense of a sublimated joie de vivre in Hopkins. He can
rejoice at the hawk only if God permits it, so the rejoicing isn’t
really his. “What you
encounter in Hopkins…that was the world I was living in when I first
encountered his poems” Heaney remarked. It was the spartan world of
Catholic self-denial and claustrophobia. Late in the book, Foster
quotes Andrew O’Hagan, a friend of Heaney, recounting a snippet of
conversation between him and Karl Miller:
“I stopped practising a long time ago, but some of it holds.
If you have it as a child it gives you a structure of consciousness
– the idea there is something more…”
“a structure of consciousness” is perhaps a somewhat high-falutin’
way of saying you were pretty nearly brain-washed.
Foster speaks of the poet’s “calling”, a suggestion that the poet is
a kind of priest. Heaney seems to have subscribed to this notion, to
some extent at least. Poets are people with the ability to put
language together using rhyme, metre, rhythm, cadence etc. They
aren’t superior people. Not morally superior. They aren’t kinder
than others, more generous, or even more insightful. Larkin was a
racist who called people with dark skins “niggers”. Gross
insensitivity. Auden was a paedophile who wrote enthusiastically to
a friend on his appointment to a post in a private school “it’s a
paradise for buggers”. No better than Jimmy Savile. Poets aren’t any
kind of priesthood, they aren’t shamans. To believe so misleads us.
It tends to make people look through the poetry to some putative
further realm of elevated consciousness. It attributes to poetry the
status of divine text, as if it comes from somewhere other than a
poet’s brain. Poets are just people with a particular skill, like
engineers. No one thinks they derive their equations from some
quasi-mystical realm.
Early on, Foster quotes the famous lines from “Sunlight”, which was
included in North (1975):
And here is love
Four l sounds; consonant clusters in tinsmith’s and scoop; seven s
sounds; two plosives in scoop and past; the phonological chiasmus,
for want of a better technical term, between gleam and meal. It’s
perfect for explaining to students how poets make poems hold
together; but doesn’t it have something of the excessive
wholesomeness of a Hovis advert? Isn’t love always a little mixed
and sullied? In fact, isn’t it at its height when it prevails in
spite of failings and conflicts?
“I am the artful voyeur” Heaney wrote in “Punishment”, which treats
the murder of a girl accused of fraternising with the enemy. Perhaps
this takes us to something fundamental about his work. The
artfulness is beyond doubt, but the question of the uses of
artfulness will never be silenced. Heaney isn’t the voyeur when he
writes about his closest relationships or the rural world in which
he grew. He is inserted in those. His problem as a writer drawing
his main inspiration in his formative years from poets born in the
nineteenth century, steeped in metaphysics and mysticism, was how to
insert himself in a world they were remote from. In 1973, he said
that he wanted to “take the English lyric and make it eat the stuff
it hadn’t eaten before” The stuff was Northern Ireland. Perhaps that
material needed to shatter the English lyric.
In an essay from 1976, “Englands of the Mind” Heaney says English
poets are “being forced to explore not just the matter of England,
but what is the matter with England.” Leaving aside the somewhat
corny formulation, the poets he examines are Larkin, Hill and
Hughes. Perhaps this is because he puts them in the category of the
“great” poets he liked to pay attention to. Maybe he didn’t think of
Adrian Mitchell as “great” (David Craig thinks him perhaps the best
English poet of his generation) but in 1976 surely Mitchell was
prominent among poets writing about what was the matter with
England. Could it be Heaney’s choice was mediated by a formal
conservatism he never managed to shake off?
On 30th April 1990 Heaney gave a lecture as Oxford
Professor of Poetry in which he contrasted the views of death in
Larkin’s Aubade and Yeats’s Man and the Echo. Heaney,
Foster says, admires the “devastating effect” of the Larkin. The
poem is very competently, if somewhat conventionally, structured but
its effect is more pathetic than devastating. Lying awake in the
early hours, the poet sees death “a whole day nearer now”. Can this
be taken seriously? Isn’t it the standard miserable fear of the
narcissist faced with the fact of ageing and disappearance? “Courage
is no good” says Larkin, meaning it won’t keep death at bay; but
courage is precisely what he lacks, the courage to accept, as Kafka
said, the point about life is it ends. Death is the same, says
Larkin, whether “whined at” or “withstood”. Surely not. To accept
the end of your life after a life well lived is part of the art of
living. Doesn’t the poem really express not a fear of death but of
life? Heaney refused Larkin’s “dark contemplation of life and its
ending” and his comparison with Yeats was, apparently, in that vein.
Yet doesn’t the admiration of the Larkin suggest a sympathy for his
practice, which is far less about what was wrong with England and
much more what was wrong with Philip Larkin?
Foster makes much of Heaney’s award of the Nobel. Perhaps it’s worth
reflecting that the prize for literature went to Churchill and Bob
Dylan. Clearly, the judges sometimes have something other than
literature in mind. Of course, the prize made him a lauded public
figure, as prizes will. In his acceptance speech, Heaney spoke of
how his childhood was “proofed against the outside world”. Such was
the inwardness of rural Catholicism, no doubt sustaining but also
limiting. The Nobel changed that. He complained about being “pushed
to the edge” of his own life; “All I do nowadays is ‘turn up’ – I’m
a function of timetables, not an agent of my own being.” The way to
remain an agent of your own being is to be ruled from within, which
might entail not following the kind of path which leads to the
Nobel. Foster is dismissive of those who begrudge Heaney his early
and stunning success. Quite rightly. Nevertheless, his upbringing
schooled him in obedience and acceptable performance. Heaney was a
comfortable poet from the start: writing remote from the industrial
struggle at the core of politics, poems about the land, digging,
earth belonging, nature. Carey Nelson has argued that cultures value
and retain the writing which sustains them. Heaney was an astute
man.
Heaney is often said to be the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. He
appears to have seen him as the standard to match. Yeats was a
member of The Hermetic Order of the Golden dawn, an hermeticist,
composed songs for the Blueshirts (Irish fascists), had no faith in
democracy, a lifelong belief in the occult and wrote “the tragedy of
sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.” Of
course, the poetry exceeds the ideology, but Yeats’s sensibility is
inevitably present in his work. How can a poet coming of age in the
1960s carry the inheritance of an anti-democratic, fascistic
believer in fairies? Poetry, like everything else, has to learn to
cast off its past and it might as well do it cheerfully.
Heaney rejected Brian Friel’s suggestion that he include in his
Nobel speech this from Eliot:
“..whether a culture can survive systematic destruction from without
depends less upon its forces of active revolt , than upon the
stubbornness of the unconscious masses, the tenacity with which they
cling to habits and customs, their instinctive resistance to
change.” Eliot was referring to Poland. Heaney rejected the
quotation because he didn’t want to valorise blank resistance.
Resistance to what? The culture that was destroyed in Ireland fell
before the march of conquest that calls itself progress. A nation
with better weapons raped Ireland. That’s how “progress” works.
Eliot was thinking about reactionary forces in Polish society. Note
the language: the masses are “unconscious” ie unable to think and
make choices; they resist change like purblind animals. This is the
high-Anglican, anti-democratic, anti-Semitic Eliot imposing on the
common folk an abstract definition as dehumanising as that imposed
by communist totalitarianism. Heaney did well to refuse Friel’s
advice.
There’s a section from Heaney’s poem “Flight Path” which appeared in
PN Review in 1992 but which was unfortunately excluded from The
Spirit Level. It’s direct, funny, ironic and somewhat
irreverent. Foster says the poem reveals Heaney’s preoccupations of
the time, expressed in essays and talks. Such things as, what is
poetry for? Perhaps the answer is: why should poetry be for
anything? Heaney was an admirer of Milosz, with good reason. The
Pole believed poets should move nations. Heaney also seems to have
believed, like Yeats, in such miraculous powers. If Dante and
Shakespeare have changed the world beyond literature, it’s in ways
we can’t discern. Asking what literature is for is a bit like asking
what language is for which suggests it was brought into existence to
fulfil a function and is part of a teleology. Fingers are used to
play the piano but to suggest that’s why they evolved is absurd. So
the question what are fingers for is also absurd. The only sensible
answer is: anything they can do. The same is true of poetry.
Heaney suffered a stroke aged 66. Foster points out that some of the
poems that followed were “economical but powerfully substantial”. He
makes no connection between the form of the poems and the cerebral
event. No details about the stroke are presented, but it’s likely it
brought a change to his practice, if only because he probably tired
more easily. Of course, for those who have a more metaphysical view
of poetry such ideas may be somewhat unwelcome, but metaphysics, as
David Hume pointed out, rests on no evidence.
Heaney was an excellent
poet but like all writers had his limits and his failings
(Shakespeare wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost after all). This is a
useful introduction to his life and work but it needs to be
complemented by criticism which addresses Heaney’s shortcomings as
well as strengths and which sites in him in his milieu and examines
more questioningly the influences which formed him.
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