~ Posted by Maggie
Fergusson, August 30th 2013
Being with Seamus Heaney was
like being with two people at once. On the one hand, he was noble,
statesmanlike, slightly formidable: that monumental head could happily
have taken its place among the classical emperors that ring the
Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. On the other, with his shambling gait,
unruly hair and bred-in-the-bone jocundity, he remained always the
farmer’s son from Co. Derry.
I met him first nearly 20
years ago, when I interviewed him for Harpers & Queen on
the publication of "Seeing Things". He spoke about the duty he felt to
respond to letters from admirers, and of how this maddened his
wife—"Marie always says, 'For God’s sake!', but the relationship
between one’s ethical commands and one’s whole reality is very
complex." He reflected on the need sometimes for a poet to be
political, and stern: "Sometimes it’s immoral not to put the boot in
and cause a bit of bother; sometimes acquiescence is a failure." He
mused on his Catholic upbringing which—though he was no longer a
churchgoer—had left him feeling he had "a right to joy".
Ahead of the interview, I’d
been terrified of getting out of my depth, so as well as buying all
Heaney’s poetry, I'd bought a volume of A-level notes on his work. When
we’d finished speaking, he offered to sign the books and, to my horror,
at the bottom of the tower, he discovered my York Notes. He roared with
laughter. I laughed too. We parted on the merriest terms.
But that evening, when he gave
a reading at the Royal Society of Literature, he was recollected, and
grave. Demonstrating Ted Hughes’s belief that "poetry derives from the
place of ultimate suffering and decision", he recited "Mid-Term Break",
about the tragic death of his younger brother, aged four:
"In the porch I met my father
crying—"
We were brought together again
by another poet, and mutual friend, George Mackay Brown. Embarking on
Brown’s biography, I wrote to Heaney to ask whether he might share his
memories and thoughts. He responded with a fax I will treasure forever:
four pages of precise, perfectly turned reflections that I stitched
through my book like golden thread.
Then, last September, Heaney
gave a reading in Stirling. He allowed me to interview him for "Seven
Wonders", speaking in rich, graceful sentences that made
their way unedited from the recorder to the page. At a dinner in
his honour, he told us how thrilled he’d been by the neighbouring
farmer who dropped in to see him after he returned from receiving the
Nobel Prize. "Ah, Seamus," the farmer said. "Welcome home. And
congratulations on the winnings!"
At the reading itself, he
seemed frail, but radiant. He spoke of his desire "to rise up and make
poetry move—to make art and humanity worth something."
Then there were questions. A Stirling student, as gauche and shy as my
20-something self, asked whether Heaney had anything interesting left
to say, now that he was so old. Unabashed, and twinkling with
amusement, Heaney referred him to his early poem "Digging". "I might
not have too much more digging ahead," he admitted, "but I hope there’s
a good bit of hoeing". If only there had been more.
Picture: Seamus Heaney,
who died August 30th aged 74 (Magnum)
Maggie Fergusson
is literary editor of Intelligent Life and director of the
Royal Society of Literature
