So there we were, a couple of farm kids (him for real, me simply surrounded by farmlands and a one-time professional hay baler) having a giggle over being the only two males in the Harvard Faculty Club at lunchtime not in blue blazers, watching the parade of what appeared to be an endless line of Episcopalian ministers. He was in a rumpled almost white suit and a check shirt. I had, fortuitously, decided at the last moment on a tan corduroy jacket in preference to my own blue blazer. We were both wondering aloud what on earth had happened that we were in such a place where we clearly didn’t belong. Except that he did. He was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position first held by John Quincy Adams, and future Nobel laureate. I wasn’t. On the other hand, I was his guest. So we amused ourselves by watching the succession of navy blazers above gray slacks—with a single exception of khakis worn, no doubt, by the campus rebel—and comparing notes about growing up in the country. That was the beginning of my day with Seamus Heaney.
I was in Cambridge to interview him for what I hoped would be the fourth book on him, although it turned out to be the fifth. It’s exciting to be in on the first wave of studies of an emerging artist; at that point, almost anything you say will be original, and the earlier works are guaranteed to not cover the newest works by the subject. We concluded lunch, strolled campus for a bit on a beautiful May afternoon in 1987, and retreated to his digs in Adams House, an on-campus residence for new or part-year faculty. I peppered him with a series of obvious and sometimes insipid questions, which he bore patiently and to which he gave back answers so smart as to make them seem almost intelligent. Then, the interview concluded, he announced that he needed a shower before he could face supper, and he handed me a book—his not-yet-released The Haw Lantern, which would hit bookstores, or at least a few of them, the following week. I have no idea how long he was gone. Somewhere between ten minutes and two hours, although I suspect nearer the low end. I can’t say for sure, though, because during that time I vanished into the book, devoured by and consuming something new and astonishing. I had had that experience before with his 1975 volume, North, which is about the Troubles in Northern Ireland (those almost thirty years of violence and mayhem between Unionist and Nationalist forces beginning in 1969), Vikings, Early Iron Age people buried in bogs, Anglo-Saxon half-line verse, and words no one else uses. I know it’s poetry if the top of Emily Dickinson’s head blows off, and this stuff had that effect. But those poems, with all their history and politics and verbal archeology, require some real work on the part of the reader, work bordering on struggle. This new volume came easier, asked less, if only a little, of us. It was more personal, warmer, more approachable. Soon enough, the great man returned, bathed and dressed, and we went on the prowl for steak. For the next six days, I walked around with the delightful fantasy that I was the world’s foremost authority on Seamus Heaney.
The poem that had the most profound effect on me that afternoon, as I suspect it has on every reader, was “Clearances,” an eight-sonnet cycle on the death of his mother. It can blow the top of everyone’s head off. He imagines her sudden arrival at the celestial version of her parents’ house, catching them unawares. He recalls his closeness with her, but also the tensions necessarily present in what he terms “our Sons and Lovers phase.” In another sonnet, he describes folding sheets with her, the paradoxical way that partners in that dance come together by pulling away from one another, “just touch and go, / Coming close by holding back / In moves where I was x and she was o / Inscribed on sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.” I made a comment about how the sense memory of the poem reminded me of his earlier “Churning Day,” from his first volume. Ah, he said (I’m paraphrasing here), but that one is about textures, where this one is about lines of force. In that instant I understood what I lacked that poets have to have. And he writes in the final sonnet of a chestnut tree planted by a maiden aunt who lived with the family to commemorate his birth, a tree cut down by subsequent owners of the farm, and of what absence feels like, of “walking round and round a space / Utterly empty, utterly a source.”
We returned to mundane matters, to food and drink and literary gossip. We drank some highly aged Jameson whisky, stuff one couldn’t buy in this country, that fellow poet Michael Longley had brought him at St. Patrick’s Day. We strolled some more. He couldn’t walk a block without someone hailing him. I bought all the poetry books I thought my suitcase could handle at the Grolier Bookshop on Plympton Street. He recommended a Spanish restaurant just off Harvard Square, chiefly because they served actual potatoes, “real spuds,” he said. If you keep the vowel sound you believe lies within “spuds” and mix it with the one in “books,” you can come close to the way he pronounced it, but let’s face it, neither you nor I can ever match exactly the value of a short “u” for those born in County Derry. As it turned out, while they did indeed have real spuds and excellent beef, their chief item of fare was garlic, which was present in every item, and I’m not sure I’m excepting the wine in the charge. After dinner, he begged me to have a cigar: he had recently given up smoking but longed for the smell of tobacco to round off the meal. I had to decline, which has always troubled me a little, but he got over the craving soon enough. When we parted that evening, I did my best not to become abject in my gratitude, which would have embarrassed him, for he was notably modest in person. I wrote to thank him, but we never met again. I often thought to write at his birthday, just a week before mine; perhaps I could have remembered in time had the two dates been reversed. I did see him at a distance a number of years later in Ann Arbor, but I was part of a crowd in Rackham Auditorium that was giving the Fire Marshall the vapors, and he was being pulled along by his university chaperones. Our eyes met momentarily and he nodded and smiled, as did I. I had the sense that the mental rolodex was spinning, but even I don’t have enough vanity to think he recognized me. More probably, he knew he had seen such a person once, somewhere, if only . . .
What sticks with me most after all this time is that he didn’t need to do all this for me. After all, he was already Famous Seamus, the envy of every other young Irish poet, capable of commanding five-figure speaking fees when the rest were hoping for travel fare, while I was nobody from nowhere. I didn’t even have a permanent academic appointment, although that would change that autumn, when I would join the faculty of the Harvard of Genesee County. But aside from being a great poet, Seamus was famous for his kindness and generosity. He helped scores of younger poets as they made their own way. He ran a regular meeting of young poets in Belfast, taking it over from Philip Hobsbaum, who had begun it when Heaney himself was just starting out. Some of those poets he assisted, people like Frank Ormsby and Michael Foley and Paul Muldoon, went on to become notable in their own right.
Seamus Heaney’s attic office, now silent, Dublin
Photo: Eamonn McCabe, courtesy of The Guardian
Heaney was a great elegist, writing memorial poems about the famous (Robert Lowell, conductor Sean O’Riada) and the unknown (Louis O’Neill, an eel fisherman of his acquaintance who was blown up in an IRA reprisal after Bloody Sunday in 1972). I don’t know if he will find his own elegist, a poet to do for him what W. H. Auden did for William Butler Yeats, or indeed, what he did for Lowell. I hope he does. In any case, I suppose it doesn’t really matter; he lives in his poetry, “The words of the dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living,” as Auden said of Yeats. On Friday, 30 August 2013, again quoting Auden, “he became his admirers.” But then, it was always becoming to admire Seamus Heaney. Just now, I’m performing my own mental shuffle around and around a hole in the world, where someone, like his coeval chestnut tree, whose “heft and hush” have “become a bright nowhere, / A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for.”
-Tom Foster