Five Letters from Seamus Heaney

Tom Sleigh, Seamus Heaney, and Sven Birkerts. Courtesy of the Estate of Seamus Heaney.

The following five letters were written by the poet Seamus Heaney, all in the spring of 1995. The Paris Review’s interview with Heaney, referenced in his letter to Henri Cole, is available here; two of his poems appeared in the magazine in 1979.

To Ted Hughes

March 14, 1995

Dear Ted,

Matthew’s letter jolted me. And not because of its frank address to money matters and its real interest in moving things along on the Schoolbag front. It made me wince that I had not long ago written to you, to thank you for—among other things—the new Selected and the paperback Pollen. When I saw “Chaucer” in The New Yorker a few weeks ago I reeled for joy. The emerald and the laundry. They were like the streamers of spring, of the Shelleyan spark scattered, new life from huge sorrow. The poem began and ended with immense promise. And in between all was exalted. And then I opened the “uncollected” section of the new book and found myself like canvas in a big wind. Which I could not rebuff. The poem about the vision of your mother and her sister and you mistaken for her brother—well, I suppose that [is] what the poem is about all right, but what it is is sheer poetry. And it is wonderfully placed as a prelude to what follows. I was deeply moved to find “The Earthenware Head” again, a poem which had stayed in me from the moment I read it years ago. But I was quite unprepared for the agon(y) of “Black Coat” and “The God”—like a “Prelude” turned inside out. The total engagement of those poems is exhausting and beautiful because of the total candor and the unleashed, justified anger. Intelligence rampant, as it were. So head-on, and not just with the “you” of the poems; as much, more, with the ring of “them” at bay around the poem-hearth. It is all really quite heartbreaking to contemplate. The positive truth in it all is that your book is as lightning-packed for me in the final pages, in the nineties, as it is/was for the me who read the early poems in the sixties. Those Sylvia poems and “Opus 131” and “Lines about Elias” set the guy-ropes thrumming. Groundswell and emptiness. Your courage and endurance and fecundity and brave solitude count for everything. When I read the poems, I just want to dwell in the daunting feel of them, but even if blurting out impressions is a kind of misrepresentation of the reality of the experience of reading them, I still want to let you know how gratefully shaken I was when I went through them. And there’s all the rest of the book as well. Gaudens gaudeo. (And I was proud of T. Paulin the other night on The Late Show. I’m sure somebody must have told you that he said—rightly but so strangely in the context of that rabid gossip arena—that you were to be revered. As poet and as example of good behavior. The verb was both unexpected and elevating.)

The month of April is more or less clear for me, and much of May, and I could do something purposeful then for the anthology. But I feel we should realign, take squarings again, pow-wow for an hour, sit and look at the same horizon, just to get in tune. Would April Fools’ Day be a possible date for a visit? I am to do the recording for the new Faber cassette series on Friday 31, in London, and I could make another day of it, if it suited you. Or perhaps you might like to come to London, either for dinner on the Friday night or for lunch on the Saturday? See what you feel like, and don’t feel you have to do anything. For God’s sake, don’t change any arrangements you might already have. […]

I’ve been flirting with the anima and have written a very few poems. But there are weeds in the cracks at last. Love to you both.

Seamus

Notes: Matthew Evans at Faber and Faber had reminded Heaney and Hughes of their long-unfulfilled contract to produce an anthology of poems for use in schools.

Hughes’s New Selected Poems 1957–1994, published by Faber, included poems that later formed part of his Birthday Letters (1998) but which, presented in this context, received scant attention from reviewers of the book; Heaney, however, evidently saw them for the bold, intimate revelations that they were. “Chaucer” was another poem destined for Birthday Letters.

Tom Paulin, a frequent guest on the BBC arts program The Late Show, had fiercely and eloquently defended Hughes’s New Selected, and Hughes’s reputation in general, against the disdain and carping of fellow guests.

***

To Henri Cole

March 14, 1995

191 Strand Road, Dublin 4

Dear Henri,

The time, the speed, the distance … All of a sudden it’s almost a year since we did the interview and still no conclusion … Australia, Christmas, some poems, much distraction intervened, but this weekend I got involved again with the big draft and will be sending Roxann a revised version of most of it in a few days. Then, if you don’t mind, I’d like to look at it all again. I’ll have Roxann send you a copy of the preliminary revised text: the revisions I’m making are mostly in the cause of legibility, sense, grammar—trimming the style, making the statements more compact and pointed, and so on. I am not altering the substance of what was said.

What may require some thought is the blocking of it, the shaping or I should say reshaping. Of course, there is much to be said for a certain randomness but I’d like it to be the best randomness we can arrange, so to speak.

Anyhow, I am confident that I shall be putting in another spurt after I get the clean copy out of the computer, and at that point we can talk again. Perhaps after reading period, in May? I know you’ll be going fifty to the dozen between now and then … And am very conscious that I am adding to your woes with the Boylston Prize. I thank you for taking it on and was gratified to learn that we have a rabbi to represent “the pulpit” this year.

Meanwhile, I have been reading The Look of Things. I hope you did not take it amiss that I did not supply a quote for the jacket. Apart from the hurry in my life when the request arrived, there is a whole history of my not having done this kind of thing for many friends and acquaintances—a circumstance which makes it easier to repeat the refusal and harder to contemplate acceptance (what would X and Y say now that he’s doing it for Z?) But enough. Thank you for the gift of the beautifully produced book and buoyantly composed poems. The combination of susceptibility to color and sensuousness and awareness of desolation and pain makes for a kind of sorrowful richness. The black currant liqueur and octopus ink of the opening poem run together in an emblematic kind of way in my mind, bitter knowledge and relished sensation. Of the latter, what beats “The Bird Show at Aubagne”? For the former, what excels “Aix”? And the combination is there, subtly and sadly, in “Supper with Roy,” “Sacrament,” “Harvard Classics,” “The Christological Year” … I could go on. But, of course, I rejoice greatly in “Une Lettre à New York” as well, where the rapturous tendency is given its head and earns its keep entirely. “Tarantula”! “And He Kissed Me …” “Christmas in Carthage.” The book has a real force because the seriousness and pain behind the poems get transformed into their doings as “verbal contraptions” selving, going themselves, transforming. And so too, of course, the pleasure behind them also becomes a pleasuring, of language, through language. The blessing of that cabbage-butterfly is all the more because of its placing! I was glad to hear you say that the Harvard reading gave you a lift, because so it should. There is a trueness that touches, a far thing in the work that brings it close. Close, that is, not dose …

Time I stopped, obviously. My love to all the Kirklanders. Drown the shamrock, if you have not already done so …

Affectionately, Seamus

Notes: The U.S. poet Henri Cole was at this time Brigg-Copeland Lecturer in poetry at Harvard; his Paris Review interview with Heaney eventually appeared in issue no. 144 (Fall 1997), of the magazine. Roxann Brown was an administrative assistant in the English Language and Literature Department at Harvard, assisting Heaney.

Cole’s fourth book of poems, The Look of Things, was published in January 1995.

“selving, going themselves”: see Hopkins’s “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same … Selves—goes itself …” (“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”).

Harvard’s creative writers had offices in a house on Kirkland Street, Cambridge: hence “Kirklanders.”

***

To Tom Sleigh

April 13, 1995

Dear Tom,

It’s not that I have not been thinking about you. I have, quite a bit. And the thoughts have as ever been tinged with second thoughts: for example, I was sorry after you rang that time in the summer that I had not urged you to come over. The usual hunched, wild-eyed panic about how I could do this and that and still have time for the spacious pleasures of sleigh rides in Wicklow intervened too automatically. Somehow, the chance had come and gone in a moment. And then too I’ve been bugged by the idea that I saw a letter from you in a big mail- pile—perhaps when I came back from Australia or Poland last autumn—and that I put it aside to read properly, after the rush-through for crisis-stuff, and then never found it. At any rate, I am haunted by this notion and only hope I am mistaken.

It’s my birthday and it is a day of utterly vernal Easter. Holy Thursday indeed. Fifty-sixth birthday. The fact that I’m actually sitting out in the open air (cf. Mark Twain on the English countryside) will give you some idea of the extraordinary pause and poise of the weather. Loveliest-of-trees time. In fact, the Housman cherry is blooming its snowflakes over my head—and there aren’t no fifty springs left no more “to look on things in bloom.” The Work. The work. Chimes at midnight. La la. Awful but—well, not cheerful either.

Since early December—no, January—I’ve managed to get down here to the cottage every week, sometimes for three nights, more usually for two. I do my “correspondence” with my helper-woman on Monday, and phone calls and fuckabouts, and try to get away 8/9-ish in the evening. Going back then Thursday lunchtime. It has been extremely good for me, and even though I have been back and forward to England and the north at weekends, for various readings and meetings, I have managed to pivot myself on silence and work time. Wrote six or seven poems in late January, early February, had a rush of conviction and threw the shape of a book together. But it is not yet “there,” although my anxiety is somewhat allayed. Meanwhile—hush, hush, I guess—I’ve started on Beowulf. You remember I turned down the commission in the early eighties, and have kept backing away ever since? Well, finally (clearly no rush on Beowulf—this correspondence has been in suspension for 14 years!) the editor wrote and said, OK, we know you’re not going to do it, so just recommend somebody else. I replied by return (on March 21) that I’d do it myself, and have knocked off 400 lines since. Voices singing in the ear that this is all folly. Other insurance-policy voice saying, well, at the end of the year, at least you’ll have something to show for the Sabbatical. Some of it—anywhere that a boat floats—very bewitching. Most of it pretty hall-troop and Weland’s work kind of stuff. The formal speeches especially. Ah well, Fitzgerald gets Homer, Pinsky gets Dante, Walcott gets both, and Seamus gets Beo. Serves him right for doing Anglo-Saxon in the first place. (Made up my own kenning—when the Beowulf boys come off the boat and stand their spears up I call it the “seafarers’ stook”—but is it worth doing three thousand lines to get one touch of originality?)

Had a lovely weekend in Kraków with S. Barańczak before Christmas. His translations of my verses came out and we did readings there and in Warsaw. But the feel of Kraków—great square, marketplace, cafés, baroque churches, closeness of quarters of old town, kitchen-life of the poet-persons (practically Sol Poste in its credibility)—was something unique. It had duration-life, as the Gutenberg elegist might say. I came away from it as if I had been for an indeterminate but salubrious time immersed in Miłosz. (Who called the kitchen where we were after the book-launch and told me I was there “in very good hands”—but with wonderful Slavic slouch and trail to the words, as you can imagine.)

I love being off teaching and as the spring weather opens up and the whins go gold and the sycamore fantails for us, I ask myself how I am going to face Warren House and a lecture course and a workshop. Not much, in a way; but a whole absconding from this open-souled time.

Will The Work be out soon? It stays with me as a pressure and bulwark of a book. A line drawn, a ground stood and a pain constellated. Also a book that makes me want to write myself, because of the way it has found a ground for its sounding, a first stratum which is the string, the strum, that the whole thing is tuned to. I’ve not read it recently, but it has found its place in me as a certain register.

My love to Ellen. The one thing I truly miss this year is the rejuvenation of Stinson courting and Dothan doting and Washington wonking (I said wonking). My love to them all, and to any ambient Ukrainian you may encounter. Four years, and I’ll be visiting schoolchildren—again.

Love, Seamus

Notes: The poet, essayist, and academic Tom Sleigh had been Professor of English at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, since 1986. He and Heaney met in 1984, after a reading at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. When Sleigh sent him his first book of poems, After One, Heaney invited him to lunch in Cambridge and a friendship developed from there.

Mark Twain had called the English countryside “too absolutely beautiful to be left out doors”; allusions to Housman, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Bishop (her poem “The Bight”) follow thick and fast in one of SH’s more than usually packed paragraphs.

“The Work”: a sequence of poems Sleigh was writing after his father’s death, its title altered to The Chain when it was published the following year.

Heaney’s “helper-woman” was Susie Tyrrell.

Sol Poste was a Portuguese restaurant where Heaney, Sleigh, Sven Birkerts, and Askold Melnyczuk, the “ambient Ukrainian” of the final paragraph, were wont to gather. Ellen Driscoll was Sleigh’s wife and they lived at Stinson Court, while Birkerts and his wife lived on Dothan Street, in the Boston suburb of Arlington.

***

To Stanisław Barańczak

28 April 1995

< I wrote this down in Wicklow earlier to-day, on my increasingly beloved laptop … >

… I have been bogged deep in another translation. Although you don’t get bogged in ironworks, come to think of it: Beowulf (for that’s what I’m at) is composed of ingots of Anglo-Saxon, peremptorily dumped clang-lumps of language, brutal bard-ballast that modern English cannot budge or break open. Like trying to assault that castle in Cracow with knitting needles. I see and hear my lines like clotheslines pegged out with little tinkling trinkets and tin bits and keepsakes, while the original is something brutal and Soviet steelman-Stalinesque, more tanklike than trinkety. But after all, as you can see, I do enjoy the impossibility of it, which means that with combine-like tedium, I keep facing it down in Wicklow, a bit entranced, a bit reluctant to leave the labour of it. Anything more different from Treny is hard to imagine. No anima in the poetry, it seems—except when the sea enters. Bóats bring óut the beáuty in the médium. (Christ! An Anglo-Saxon line, unpremeditated, I swear, noticed afterward as I read through this.) …

***

To Bernard and Jane McCabe

May 28, 1995

Dear Bernard and Jane,

Apple PowerBook. Collapse of archaic man. Farewell to the quill, the vellum, the scratch of the pen—of course! that’s where the word came from!—the ink-spurter, as Flann O’Brien called it …

Enclosed are slightly disturbing evidences of new poetic activity. I deeply enjoyed writing the “Dialect Versions” but would not be surprised if you enjoined me to cut it out … there is an element of schoolboy humor, I agree, sixth form snigger. Does one get away with it? I ask because I so much valued, Bernard, your response to the whole manuscript and the beautiful alertness and care with which you picked up on those tics and habits. I should have been more alert and careful and answered promptly—in case you thought I was huff-huffing, than which nothing could have been further from the case. I burbled something into your answering machine too late, I think, since you had already pleasured away to gooseland. Anyhow, I did act on the recommendations, brought ‘The Rain Stick” up to be the first poem in the book, put the MacDiarmid poem in the penult. posit., dropped “Damson” (there goes an “I love”), changed “I love” in “At Banagher” to “And more power to him …” and did a job on one or two of those “alls.” Cadenced closure injunctions to be treated soon … (I’ll be interested, of course, to see if you think I get away with the new Mycenae things.)

Gooseland. Roman remains in museum at Périgueux. Les grottes. I personally am very regretful that I could not be there for a while, because I have this “epiphany” poignancy in remembering a late arrival in the Périgueux museum one afternoon in July 1981, while we were at Domme, near Sarlat, in a gîte, the kids all fourteen years younger … Anyhow, I didn’t have enough time in the place and promised myself to come back. I also remember sitting later on with small sharp wife (Herbert, the dog!) in [a] sunsetty, mellow tile ’n’ bricky place or parc as the boules clocked and borped and we considered where to go for some good old ancienne cuisine. End of flashback. No doubt you had mellow soirées and poignancies and rich munchings, riparian sloths and fluvial reveries. Reverruns. Grassy banks. Meanwhile, s.s.w. has been constantly and anxiously bowed to the books, the fine swimmer’s back and shoulders humbly hunched, the sauce-sniffing, herb-scenting nose to the grindstone, the whole energy concentrated on getting through to noon on Tuesday 30 May when it all stops. She has been greatly focused and truly tense about it all—nobody should be doing exams in their fifties!—and I am glad to have been around, even if it was only to keep out of the way. I believe she will, of course, pass the whole thing with les couleurs flying, but she has not had much joy these past few weeks. Reward in our case is a trip to Spain, to Anne and Ignacio in Asturias for three weeks in July. Hooray.

… Did I tell you I have finally agreed to translate Beowulf for Norton? Anyhow, Grendel’s mum and all that looms. I have just got to line 845, where the mod-werig Grendel goes to the nicor-mere and the melody of mourning becomes irresistible. I suppose one does it for those keens and slow airs that swim up out of the “fenmists” (fenmist criticism, ja?) and for the bewitching interludes—so few, so short—of sea-travel, the floater on the waves, in close under cliffs, the foamy-necked, most like a fowl. No anima, it would seem, elsewhere in the poetry. …

Notes:

The “Dialect Versions” are not readily identified.

“Herbert, the dog!”: Bernard’s brother, the Dominican priest and theologian, Herbert McCabe.

“nose to the grindstone”: Marie Heaney was completing her MPhil in Irish Studies under the aegis of University College Dublin.