A note about Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller

A 112 page book, containing a 17,000 word interview, in which the poet talks about his life and career – his Mossbawn childhood, his studies in Belfast, his association Philip Hobsbaum's Group, his marriage to Marie Devlin, his work and its reception, his years at Harvard, the Nobel Prize, acclaim for his translation of Beowulf. The book comes with a career sketch, a comprehensive bibliography, and a representative list of quotations from Heaney's critics and reviewers. Also included is the poet's 'Known World'.

A note on Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born on April 13th, 1939, the first child of Patrick and Margaret Kathleen Heaney (née McCann), who then lived on a fifty-acre farm called Mossbawn, in the townland of Tamniarn, County Derry, Northern Ireland.
    Heaney was the eldest of nine children – he had two sisters and six brothers – and as such might have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming a farmer and cattle dealer. When he was still quite young, however, it was recognized that this was unlikely to happen, for after attending the local primary school in Anahorish, he won a scholarship to St Columb’s College in Londonderry, a school which, as he himself put it somewhat later, ‘was very much geared to getting you through the exams, very academically pitched.’
    Heaney did well, and in 1957 he entered Queen’s University, Belfast, where he had been offered another scholarship, this time to study for a degree in English Language and Literature. It was while studying at Queen’s that he started to write, and between 1959 and 1961 – the year he graduated with first-class honours – the university magazines Q and Gorgon published a handful of his poems as well as a short story. They appeared under the pen name of Incertus (i.e. Uncertain).
    The Head of English at Queen’s encouraged Heaney to apply to Oxford to do postgraduate study, but, lacking what he later described as the confidence, the nous and the precedent, and feeling an obligation to start paying his way, he chose instead to go St. Joseph’s College in Belfast, to study for the Postgraduate Certificate in Education.
    Heaney spent only one year working as a school teacher, employed by St Thomas’s Intermediate School in Belfast. What led him to quit after so short a period was the offer of a lectureship back at St Joseph’s.
    At about the time that Heaney joined the staff at St Joseph’s, he met the poet and critic, Philip Hobsbaum. Recently arrived from England, Hobsbaum – who had studied under F.R. Leavis in Cambridge and William Empson in Sheffield – was intent on doing in Belfast what he had earlier done in London, bringing poets together for regular meetings at which their work would be read out and criticized. As in the earlier case, so in this, the circle of poets came to be known as ‘The Group’, and besides Heaney it included Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Stewart Parker and James Simmons.
    In 1964, Hobsbaum sent some of the poems that had been discussed by the Group in Belfast to Edward Lucie-Smith, an old associate of the Group in London. Lucie-Smith forwarded them to the literary editors of various journals, amongst them, Karl Miller at the New Statesman. Miller was very taken with three of the poems by Heaney – ‘Digging’, ‘Scaffolding’ and ‘Storm on the Island’ – and these were published in a single issue of the New Statesman early in December 1964.
    In 1965, Heaney married Marie Devlin, sister of the journalist Polly Devlin, and then working as a teacher. He also saw his first pamphlet published. Eleven Poems was one of a series of such pamphlets issued to coincide with the Belfast Festival, and it received a number of good reviews, including one by John Carey, who described three of its poems as ‘masterly’.
    The following year was to be no less important. In May, just a couple of months before Marie gave birth to the first of their three children, Faber and Faber – who had been alerted to Heaney’s existence by the New Statesman’s three poems – brought out Death of a Naturalist, his first full collection. The book was widely and enthusiastically reviewed. C.B. Cox called it ‘the best first book of poems I’ve read for some time’, Brendan Kennelly thought it ‘a startlingly good collection’, Michael Longley declared its author ‘a true poet of considerable importance’, and Christopher Ricks, after insisting that those ‘who remain unstirred by Seamus Heaney’s poems will simply be announcing that they are unable to give up the habit of disillusionment with recent poetry’, went on to say: ‘The power and precision of his best poems are a delight, and as a first collection Death of a Naturalist is outstanding’. The book won the Cholmondeley Award, the E.C. Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
    Before the year was over, Heaney resigned from his position at St Joseph’s to take up the offer of a lectureship in English back at his old university, Queen’s (the position having fallen vacant when Hobsbaum returned to England).
After two more collections were published – Door into the Dark (1969) and Wintering Out (1972) – Heaney made two very important moves. He had spent the academic year of 1970-71 at the University of California at Berkeley, and not long after his return, first gave up his job at Queen’s, and then left Northern Ireland, to set up home some twenty miles outside Dublin, in Glanmore, Co. Wicklow. He wanted, as he put it later, ‘to put the practice of poetry more deliberately at the centre of my life.’ He also wanted to escape the pressures he felt as a Catholic writer working in the North: ‘In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s the world was changing for the Catholic imagination. I felt I was compromising some part of myself by staying in a situation where socially and, indeed, imaginatively, there were pressures “against” regarding the moment as critical. Going to the South was perhaps emblematic for me and was certainly so for some of the people I knew. To the Unionists it looked like a betrayal of the Northern thing.’
    For the next three years, Heaney made his living as a full-time writer. Then, in 1975 – by which time all three of his children had been born – he was obliged to resume teaching, and went to work at another teacher training establishment, Carysfort College, in Dublin. Heaney moved to the city shortly thereafter, and it has remained his home ever since.
    1975 was also the year of North, his most overtly political volume, and one which, though most reviewers welcomed it – Martin Dodsworth spoke for many when he said that the poems were ‘testimony to the patience, persistence and power of the imagination under duress – did lead some to voice serious misgivings. Ciaran Carson was probably the most outspoken of the book’s detractors, calling Heaney ‘the laureate of violence – a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing’. The book won the W.H. Smith Award, the Duff Cooper memorial Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice.
    Two more books followed – Field Work (1979), and Preoccupations: Selected Prose (1980) – and then, in 1981, by which time he had been Head of English for five years, he resigned the job at Carysfort, having been offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University.
    In 1984, the year he published Station Island, Heaney was elected Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. Five years later, after the appearance of The Haw Lantern (1987) and a second collection of essays, The Government of the Tongue (1988), he was also elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
    Of the many honours to come Heaney’s way – only a small number of which have been listed above – undoubtedly the most prestigious was the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awarded in 1995. Not long afterwards, he gave up the Boylston Chair, but, keen not to sunder his ties with Harvard, accepted appointment as the Emerson Poet in Residence there, a position previously occupied by Robert Frost and Robert Lowell.
    Heaney’s work-rate has shown no signs of slowing down in recent years. Since 1989, the year he turned fifty, he has published The Place of Writing (1989), his Richard Ellmann lectures, Selected Poems 1966-1987 (1990), The Redress of Poetry (1990), the lectures he gave while Professor of Poetry at Oxford, The Cure at Troy (1991), his version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 (1998), and the much-admired translation of Beowulf (1999), for which he was awarded the Whitbread Prize. More recently, he has also published Diary of One Who Vanished (1999), his version of a song cycle by Leos Janacek, which has been staged by the English National Opera in London, Dublin, Paris, Munich, Amsterdam and New York.

A note on Karl Miller

Karl Miller was born near Edinburgh in 1931, and educated at the Royal School of Edinburgh and Downing College, Cambridge. In 1979, he founded the London Review of Books, a journal he edited for many years. Earlier in his career, Miller was literary editor of the Spectator and the New Statesman, as well as editor of The Listener. From 1974 to 1992, he was Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. His books include Cockburn’s Millennium (Duckworth, London, 1975), Doubles (OUP, Oxford, 1985), Authors (OUP, Oxford, 1989), Rebecca’s Vest (Penguin, London, 1994), and Dark Horses (Picador, London, 1998).

An extract from the interview

You said earlier that you haven’t felt the company of professors to be a threat. Could we return to that for a moment?

I remember Ted Hughes saying to me, pretty early on, about the academy, ‘As long as you don’t change your language,’ or ‘As long as it doesn’t change your language.’ There are other poets too who’ve been closely associated with universities, and have survived. Frost is a good example. He had a very resistant language. But being in the company of teachers and professors isn’t necessarily all bad. I owe my initiation into poetry, and my joy in it, to good teachers. I couldn’t say enough about what happened to me between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, especially at secondary school. Not just the English teacher, but the Latin teacher; they taught by revealing that this stuff was part of their personality. And I was well taught at university, on and off. My friend Helen Vendler at Harvard is a great teacher. It refreshes my belief in poetry just to hear her talk about a poem.

Robert Frost may have been closely associated with universities, but there were times when he was nonetheless denied by sections of the American academy, as by the American intelligentsia and avant-garde. He could be seen by these people as inimical, popular, incorrect. There were long spells when you had to search carefully for any mention of him in Partisan Review or the New York Review. This seems to me a philistinism comparable to the ignoring or disgracing of minor writers. It was very difficult for these journals to think of Frost as major. This was in part a city thing, an urban suspicion, with Robert Frost seen by the Modernist Enlightenment as a demagogic right-wing Harvard University Robert Burns. You may think I’m making this up.

No, of course you’re not making it up. The prejudice and the slighting were acknowledged by Lionel Trilling at that famous eighty-fifth birthday party. There was obviously a resentment at Frost’s popularity and a suspicion that he therefore couldn’t be all that good. And maybe a resentment because Frost didn’t disavow his big audience. Too many people quoting ‘Stopping by Woods’ devalued it in some quarters. People quoting it who wouldn’t necessarily be alive to the relish and intricacy of the rhyming, the witchery of the workmanship. Not that the academy ever showed itself particularly alert to the virtuoso side of Frost. Frost’s politics, naturally, were another factor: the anti-New Deal side of him, the aggravator who wrote ‘Two Tramps in Mudtime’, that put him beyond the liberal pale for a while. And yes, there was a patronizing attitude to the rural setting and characters. Patrick Kavanagh suffered from that kind of neglect by the academy too, and for some of the same reasons. Not opaque enough to need explication. Too many potato fields.

I saw Frost in situ when he was this part-time Harvard professor. He talked as he had always talked, you felt; and he must have felt the same. He talked very, very well. But his behaviour on platforms was in some degree cautionary. Subtle and skilful as the performance was, magnificent as the poems were, his readings were a little spoilt by the sense that here was a man running for President, pleasing the crowd. Now you are quite different from Frost in that respect, even though you are yourself a skilful rhetorician. You have never, on platforms, reminded me of Frost.

Frost did indulge in an almost anti-intellectual masquerade. He operated as a kind of academic sniper, his learning secluded, his shots nevertheless accurate. But there was a stand-up performer’s patter that became tedious, even though it may have been developed as a strategy for survival, a way of not caving in to academic jargon. Maybe the exemplary one is not Frost but Ted Hughes. Hughes was always his own voice. He spoke within the terms of his own world, and had a huge central confidence, a genius. But then he never went near the university, as a teacher. What gave him power was what Frost calls somewhere ‘the edge of sacrifice’. He was a free-lance writer from his student days, and he always retained that sense of being at the edge. Not quite ‘agin’, because he was too big to be ‘agin’, but he was out on his own. There was a wholeness about his own speech and his own solitude.

He thought you were at risk, being part of the professoriate?

I think so. This was a good while ago. But ‘As long as you don’t change your language, you’re safe enough.’ In the Eighties, you know, I did feel, in Harvard, that I was changing my language, using a new idiom: ‘discourses’, ‘unmaskings’, ‘privilegings’, and so on. But that’s a trade language, and its terms are useful.

A number of American poets, people who’ve been associated with the universities there, have become pessimistic, I’m told, about the state of higher education in that country. They’ve found it increasingly difficult to work inside these institutions, and, where they’ve retired, they’ve done so with no regrets. You said that you resigned the Boylston Chair because you felt you were repeating yourself, whereas the people I’m thinking of would probably have been content to go on repeating themselves if only they could have supposed that their students were listening. Do you find such reports exaggerated, or do you share in this disaffection? Are you inclined to join Harold Bloom in talking about the barbarians at the gate?

I would have to if I were put to it, yes. I believe in the handing-on of the possessions, from one generation to the next, and I believe in preserving the cultural memory. But I also think that the deconstructive urge, and the suspicion brought about by that movement, is salubrious. To ask yourself, ‘Why do I cherish Shakespeare? Is it just because he’s a cultural and political icon, someone who can be used to hold the group together?’, to ask yourself questions like that can be very good. We were taught Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ at school; it taught us to be good, decent, subservient citizens. To beware riches and value the frugal life. So the deconstructivist’s questions are good to ask, but – and this is the point – they’re only good to ask if you have an informed memory, and already possess the cultural stuff. The problem is that, in the last thirty or so years, the cultural stuff hasn’t been handed down. From the point of view of my generation, what we’re faced with now, inside the universities, is a measure of illiteracy. And this is a big problem. I also think that, to my generation – the generation of the Thirties and Forties – literary values embodied a morality, an ethics. To give up the old style of literary criticism, and to embrace deconstruction – that breaks all sorts of covenants. There’s no religious pulpit for the young any more, there’s no belief in political leaders, there’s no bond. Literature was one of the last elements in such a bond, and if you stop teaching literature, and teach only suspicion of literature, it’s perilous, I think. Soviety, even.

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