BIOGRAPHY:An engaging book of interviews with Seamus Heaney, something between autobiography and biography, tells a kind of wonder-tale, writes TERENCE BROWN.
A PARTICULAR PLEASURE of this richly enjoyable, consistently engaging volume is its inclusion of photographs selected from the Heaney family album (giving us the kind of images of the poet en familleand with friends a biographer would be only too delighted to unearth). One is especially charming, showing as it does a tousle-headed Seamus, at about three years of age, outside a relative's pub in Tullyroan in the North of Ireland. The poet-to-be shares the space in front of the pub (in which advertisements for Youngers No 3 Strong Ale and Old Bushmills Whiskey crowd the window like intimations of a hybrid culture) with the bonnet and windscreen of a motor car. There is a hint in the child's posture, left hand on the car's bonnet, that he both senses and relishes journeys ahead. The pub, with almost mythopoeic aptness, is named Half Way House. For the imaginative journeys Heaney has embarked on in the almost seven decades which have passed since that photo was taken have often involved him in inhabiting halfway houses, in-between zones of feeling and engagement, as he has negotiated with uncommon courtesy and impressive integrity fraught regions of feeling between Unionist and Nationalist, spaces between North and South in this island and between Ireland and Britain, between the claims of the English literary canon and the more fragmented Irish literary inheritance, between eastern and western Europe, between the archaic and the modern. And all this in a time of trouble when the demand for what in one poem Heaney termed "diamond absolutes" was readily, sometimes loudly, voiced.
Stepping Stonesis its own kind of halfway house, entering literature as something between an autobiography and and a biography (it supplies a fairly detailed Chronology in its apparatus). It is the product of a painstaking process in the which the poet Dennis O'Driscoll (who possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of modern poetry) plied Heaney over several years with mostly written questions, to many of which Heaney supplied the written answers here published, along with their prompting queries.
Some of Heaney's contributions are lengthy, others quite brief; they are invariably illuminating. The central matter, as befits two poets, is the poetry - the individual collections taken chronologically, but also Heaney's convictions about poetry's role in our lives, the poetic influences he has absorbed, the technique and craft involved in the writing of verse, his deep interest as a poet in painting (Cézanne is his painter of painters), the dominant themes. However, O'Driscoll is also concerned with poetry's occasions, how it emerges from life situations, from cultural contexts, from intellectual preoccupations and involvement with public issues. His queries on such things elicit some of the lengthier responses from Heaney here and, taken with the sections on individual collections, give us an overall sense of the shape of Heaney's life and and career to date.
It is, of course, a kind of wonder tale, composing a narrative that takes the eldest son of a rural family, born in a forgotten, contested Irish/British province just before the outbreak of a great European war, to meetings with English royalty, to the White House, to enjoyment of the bounty of Sweden and when convalescing, to receiving a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, as an unexpected visitor in a hospital ward. And, as in wonder tales it all happens as if by magic, with the poet's circle of friends, co-workers, supportive editors and critics, the force-field of his impact on a culture, enlarging steadily in two continents until the poet comes to seem a figure in whom an age has found a representative, life-enhancing presence, one in whom good karma is vested, "major man" in Wallace Stevens's commanding designation.
THE BOOK, HOWEVER, does contain some hint of how all this came to pass. The sections in which the poet remembers his childhood home at Mossbawn farm, Co Derry, are not only remarkable examples of recall, in which rooms and spaces, the contents of a house, of a country kitchen, are summoned to mind with miraculous detail, but suggestive of a man whose sense of his place in reality is unusually secure, bound up as it is with an enviable capacity to feel ultimately at home in the world. There is a sense too, in this book, that in adulthood he was able to sustain this gift of childhood, of feeling safely housed in the universe, from the way a country retreat, Glanmore Cottage in Co Wicklow, became a cave of making for him, and by the way a family home in Dublin became a site of permanent sustenance in a busy life ("Well, you've bought the coffin," John McGahern darkly observed, however, of his friend's decision to settle in Sandymount).
All this meant that at some creative level in himself, the three-year-old in the photo would become able for the life that lay ahead for him.That would involve dealing without damaging himself, or others, with the experience of minority status in the unjust state Northern Ireland was in the years in which Heaney came to adult consciousness (about which injustice and its effects Heaney speaks more frankly in this book than he has done before). It would involve him too in protecting his artistic independence when the insistent pressure of terrible events could have unsettled a less doughty spirit in artistically destructive ways (a crucial part of the text deals with Heaney's response to the Hunger Strikes in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s).
Religious faith of an orthodox kind has not for most of his life, this book lets us know, been the basis of that deep feeling of belonging which informs much of Heaney's oeuvre. Indeed a fascinating aspect of the volume is the way it lets us share the poet's own, almost anthropological, reflective awareness of how the young fellow who did the stations at Lough Derg, the altar-boy who served as a stretcher-bearer at Lourdes, and who as late as university days was to all intents and purposes a believing Catholic, in mid years became the secular man, crediting marvels without the ontological support of a credible, authorised metaphysic ( Mud Visionin The Haw Lantern,this books reminds us, is a key text in this regard). Yet the symbology of the Christian vision (particularly as mediated by Dante) remains important to him as old age beckons, to be deployed as enabling mythology along with the classics which are also a major interpretative resource (Czeslaw Milosz, whose relationship to believing Catholicism was closer than Heaney's, serves for him as a kind of lodestar in the poetic universe).
BUT IF HEANEY is no man of faith as conventionally understood, that at-homeness on earth to which much of his poetry testifies, and the sense of which is often evident in this book, has its own charge of tonic spiritual energy. So he writes: "Often when I'm on my own in the car, driving down from Dublin to Wicklow in spring or early summer - or indeed at any time of the year - I get this sudden joy from the sheer fact of the mountains to my right and the sea to my left, the flow of the farmland, the sweep of the road, the lift of the sky. There's a double sensation of here-and-nowness in the familiar place and far-and-awayness in something immense.When I experience things like that, I'm inclined to credit the prelapsarian in me. It seems, at any rate, a greater mistake to deny him than to admit him."
To which the grateful reader replies, yes indeed, or even a hesitant, quiet Amen to that.
• Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney,by Dennis O'Driscoll, Faber and Faber, 524pp, £22.50
• Terence Brown is professor of Anglo-Irish literature in Trinity College Dublin. His selected essays are forthcoming from Cambridge University Press