The letters of the great Irish poet reveal that he was bedeviled by the same problem that overwhelms all of us.
What is the opposite of poetry? What slows the spark and puts sludge in the veins? What deadens the language? What rears up before you with livid and stupefying power—in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day—to make you feel like you’ll never write a good line again?
Stuff.
Not physical stuff, but mental stuff. You know: things you should have taken care of. The unanswered email. The unpaid bill. The unvisited dentist. The undischarged obligation. The unfinished job. The terrible ballast of adulthood.
“In the last two days I have written thirty-two letters … The trouble is, I have about thirty-two more to write: I could ignore them but if I do the sense of worthlessness and hauntedness grows in me, inertia grows and, fuck it, I’m going to get rid of them before I board the plane on Thursday.” This is Seamus Heaney in 1985, writing to his friend Barrie Cooke. Heaney, at this point in his career, in his life, is a poet of established greatness, a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, and his situation vis-à-vis stuff has clearly become acute.
The 700-plus pages of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, beautifully edited by Christopher Reid, contain numerous fascinating themes and subplots. We see the poet, for example, first getting his hands on a copy of P. V. Glob’s The Bog People, the book whose account of exhumed Iron Age bodies in Denmark would trigger “The Tollund Man” and, in time, half of the poems in North. We see him dealing—infuriated, shocked into vulnerability—with a snooping biographer. (“This text which you propose … it actually interferes with the way I possess my own generative ground and memories; is therefore potentially disabling to me in what I could still write.”) And we see him ruing the difficulty of his commission to translate Beowulf, a daily wrangle with “ingots of Anglo-Saxon, peremptorily dumped clang-lumps of language.”
Mostly, however, we see him assaulted by stuff. I might be projecting here—I have my own problems with stuff, as you can possibly tell—but this is a constantly renewed theme in the Letters. What he identifies in an early missive as “the bog of unfulfilled intentions” is always sucking at the Heaney ankles.
“I’ve farted about from broadcast to broadcast to occasional reviews,” he complains in May 1975, “and spent days this year in a torpor of aspiration without action.” January 1978 finds him “unwriting, doomed to lectures that I have not written and broadcasts that I have no stomach for.” To his Polish translator, in 1982, he laments his own “lethargy and inefficiency.” To Ted Hughes, more bardically, he refers to himself as a “torpid swamp-creature.” To Roger Garfitt— slightly less bardically —“a procrastinating fucker.”
When you’re a famous poet, stuff comes in the mail: People send you stuff, in the form of poems and, worse, books to read and comment upon. “The book and my not having written about it to you,” Heaney explains painfully to John Wilson Foster, who had sent him his Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art, “became a neurotic locus in my life … Opening new books begins to build up a resistance factor, especially when they represent all the procrastination and self-sourness that afflicts one.”
Leave Seamus alone! is the reader’s thought at many points in the Letters. Stop poking around, importuning him, making requests he is too nice to ignore, sending him your book about the Irish literary revival, heaping stuff upon him. Heaney himself, a cradle Catholic, had a fatal touch of scrupulosity in this area: He seems to have really felt bad, guilty, if he wasn’t making headway with the stuff pile.
Read: Seamus Heaney’s journey into darkness
The obvious comparison here is with 2007’s Letters of Ted Hughes, also edited by Christopher Reid. Hughes was Heaney’s friend, peer, collaborator (on the anthologies The Rattle Bag and The School Bag), and fellow Faber poet. His correspondence was similarly massive, similarly global, and he had his moments of stuff affliction: “I’m up to my neck in deferred things and pressing things, and always the real thing gets shelved.” But Hughes was not, to use a line of Reid’s about Heaney, “heroically put-upon.” The thousand nibblings of obligation did not seem to do him in to quite the same extent. He was too busy negotiating the crosscurrents of his unconscious, placating or irritating the White Goddess, and keeping an eye on the zodiac. (One letter even finds him sending a privately prepared horoscope to that noted astrologer Philip Larkin.)
No doubt Heaney was engaged in his own version of this battle for poetic resources. And clearly, for all the encroachments and the trespasses upon his time, he was not to be distracted or deterred from his real work: The work itself, my God, testifies powerfully enough to that. Stuff or no stuff, he did what he was here to do.
But just once, along the broad and dutiful road of his letters, I would have liked to find him telling somebody to take their manuscript, invitation, complaint, blurb request, and shove it.
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Seamus Heaney Was Too Nice
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26.11.2023
The letters of the great Irish poet reveal that he was bedeviled by the same problem that overwhelms all of us.
What is the opposite of poetry? What slows the spark and puts sludge in the veins? What deadens the language? What rears up before you with livid and stupefying power—in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day—to make you feel like you’ll never write a good line again?
Stuff.
Not physical stuff, but mental stuff. You know: things you should have taken care of. The unanswered email. The unpaid bill. The unvisited dentist. The undischarged obligation. The unfinished job. The terrible ballast of adulthood.
“In the last two days I have written thirty-two letters … The trouble is, I have about thirty-two more to write: I could ignore them but if I do the sense of worthlessness and hauntedness grows in me, inertia grows and, fuck it, I’m going to get rid of them before I board the plane on Thursday.” This is Seamus Heaney in 1985, writing to his friend Barrie Cooke. Heaney, at this point in his career, in his life, is a poet of established greatness, a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, and his situation vis-à-vis stuff has clearly become acute.
The 700-plus pages of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, beautifully edited by Christopher Reid, contain numerous fascinating themes and subplots.........
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