Heaney From the Back Row -The Toast

‘And what was it like,’ I asked him,

‘Meeting Eliot?’

‘When he looked at you’,

He said, ‘it was like standing on a Quay

Watching the prow of the Queen Mary

Come towards you, very slowly.’

(“Stern,” by Seamus Heaney)

Seeing Seamus Heaney is a bit like seeing someone who should be dead, in that it’s only by the grace of God you’re alive at the same time as him. The stroke he had in 2006 nearly killed him, and now his hands flutter gently when he holds a book. I would say he’s less substantial than he was but the tremble gives him a slightly ethereal quality: not fragile, but somehow less earthbound.

I call myself a “supporter” of English PEN, but I am in fact only on their email database because at the lowest point of a job-searching year I biked down to Pentonville Road and unsuccessfully interviewed for a place in their unpaid internship program. Once a week, PEN sends me an email about an event I might be interested in and once a week, I delete that email. I am not terribly proud that I ignored years of foreign writers only to bite the hand off the first event that involved two white, male, middle-class poets but the truth is, if you asked me to imagine my dream ticket, my ultimate poetry event, it would be this one: Simon Armitage and Seamus Heaney, talking about their artistic influences, on stage. I bought two tickets. I knew I’d go alone.

I offered the other ticket to my friend Nancy*. I used to work with Nancy before she gave up bookselling to work on the features desk at [a glossy magazine devoted to the comings and goings of the British Upper Classes which both the editors of The Toast read fanatically], and I adore her in the way you do when you worry terribly about someone. She is a brilliant medieval scholar now spends her professional time asking questions on Facebook like “Can anyone think of someone rich who wears brightly patterned socks?” and “Which celebrities (or posh people) can’t drive?”

Nancy and I have two things in common: we both love poetry and we both have a habit of missing each other–she’ll have to dash off to review a pop-up bar in Kensington at the last minute, or I’ll have to do something less glamorous, and we’ll fail to meet again. I rang her before I got on the Tube, and she was on a train home to see her grandmother. “I’m so sorry!” she cried, and as she did so I realised why I’d asked her. I set off happily for the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn by myself.

Most people know about Seamus Heaney, but in America Simon Armitage is not such a big deal. I get that; he is a very British poet indeed and he rhymes, which is unfashionable. He’s always listing towards humor, always a bit cross, and he looks like my teenage dream sagged into middle age: lanky, with dark hair that swoops sideways over his forehead. Nowadays he’s famous for his translations of old epics like “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and “The Death of King Arthur,” but I love his early work most.

Book of Matches was Armitage’s first collection with Faber and Faber, and the first book of his I ever read. It begins with: “my party piece: / I strike, then from the moment when the matchstick / conjures up its light, to when the brightness moves / beyond its means, and dies, I say the story / of my life.” It is the perfect poet’s opening chord. The ending of the poem is just as apt: “a warning, though, to anyone nursing / an ounce of sadness, anyone alone: / don’t try this on your own; it’s dangerous, / madness.”

From there I read everything he had written–it took me a week. After that, I wrote my first poem. I also wrote Armitage a fan letter. I sent it to his agent (just thinking about this now makes me put my hands over my eyes) and his assistant replied kindly. Later I worked quite extensively with her in a professional capacity and if she remembered the letter she never mentioned it, for which I will forever be in her debt. Thanks, Charlotte.

Armitage and Heaney are the two poets that British people who don’t read much poetry love the most, but apart from that there’s not much holding them together. Their work is wildly different. The only common thread between them is another poet, for Heaney a contemporary and for Armitage a hero: Ted Hughes. Armitage is from the same part of England as Hughes, and has written about him extensively, as well as editing a collection of his poems. Heaney–well, Hughes was his friend. That poem at the beginning of this essay, “Stern,” is Heaney’s recollection of Hughes’s description of meeting T.S. Eliot. Just two friends, talking about their hero.

The Tricycle was packed; it’s a small venue, and most of the seats were reserved. PEN is well-supported by a certain kind of British celebrity, so some of the seats had signs on them that read “Reserved for Redgrave” or “Reserved for McCrory.” I found a place in the back row and settled down to texting my friends things like “Just texting to make myself look busy” because you have to, if you’re not sitting with anyone. I like going to readings by myself. When I moved to Ithaca, where I now live with my grad student husband, it became less possible to do that because the readings I go to are always attended by people I know. In fact, the first time I saw Seamus Heaney was at Cornell, in a large auditorium packed with writers.

That time all the poets I knew–students in the Cornell MFA course–sat by themselves in a block of seats which was covered by sheets of A4 paper with the word “reserved for poet” written on them. I queued by myself and chose a seat at the back of the hall next to a girl I didn’t know and an empty seat. My husband turned up late enough not to disturb the spell of silence my neighbor and I had silently agreed on. Being married to an English Ph.d has its good points, but it’s also like being married to a skilled mechanic if you really like great cars. They can tell you how the machine works–and sometimes you have to call them to say “What is happening to my poem? Why has it broken down on the side of the road?”–but they don’t live with the thrill of experiencing a drive for the first time very often, and they know a LOT about where all the parts come from.

At Cornell, Heaney started with his translation of Beowulf–the passage that takes place in the hall, with the monster outside–and by the time he’d finished that part of it, the air in the place had changed. I think most of us held our breath throughout, but it was more than that. Here we are, the passage said, in this hall, and here is where we’ll tell stories. Outside is where other things are, but we are all in here. As far as art goes it’s the simplest trick in the book, and the most important. After that, even a tiny gesture can make the energy of a place shimmer in one direction or another and though Heaney is a weighty poet, he isn’t averse to a little magic once in a while. During the hour we spent in the hall with him we were, quite literally, spellbound.

I thought of this as I sat in the Tricycle watching him wobble onstage with Armitage, because an audience of actors in Kilburn is a tougher nut to crack than a bunch of poetry students, and the first influence Heaney chose was Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson:

“I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house.”

To begin a story with the explanation that you are beginning a story: there’s not a crowd in the world that wouldn’t work on. He was a jollier presence, this London Heaney, sitting in a chair, exchanging jokes with Armitage and the actors who were reading some of their chosen passages for them. At one point he told a joke about Ireland. It elicited a game titter from the audience and Armitage muttered something to him that made him laugh enough to wipe his eyes. “I know, it’s the way I tell ‘em” he said, and I thought, I love you, madly, from my seat at the back.

Armitage himself started with Ted Hughes, in typical prosaic, sardonic Armitage fashion. “He was my mentor,” he said, “Though he didn’t know it. He was living in Devon, soon to be the last of the lifetime Laureates, and I was in double maths in Yorkshire, soon to be given detention.” Hughes ran through the evening like its blood. Heaney read “Bull Moses” himself towards the end, and made these lines: “Blackness is depth / Beyond Star. But the warm weight of his breathing / The ammoniac reek of his litter, the hotly tongued / Mash of his cud, steamed against me” sound so exact and forceful that my hair nearly stood on end.

As Heaney read it, I remembered that “Bull Moses” is the best poem Hughes ever wrote, and also that poetry, when it is good, is the most important thing in my life. Robert Frost, a great poet who also wrote great things about poetry, once said that “the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.”

But my friend Amy said it better that night in the pub: “Poetry is for when nothing else will do.”

I won’t list all the things they read that night (though I will say that I came away decided, once and for all, to read Dante’s Inferno, a resolution I forgot until just now), but the two things I was most struck by were a passage from Ulysses, and a translation of “Donal Og” by Lady Gregory. The Ulysses passage was extraordinary to hear because I have never read the book, and had decided not to until then, when I realised that I had just been scared off by the academics I know. Joyce is such an industry in academia (“Are you going to Joyce camp this summer?” they will ask each other while I snort quietly into my pint) that I hardly remembered it was a novel at all until I heard part of it read out loud.

“Donal Og” is an eighth-century Irish poem and the translation Heaney chose came from the early twentieth century. The actress who read it for us had been having a hard time with some of the material, particularly Beckett’s, but when she began this poem she suddenly calmed. Perhaps it was the pacing of the poem, or the simplicity of the structure, but it felt to me that she was responding definitively to the ballad’s content. Lady Gregory’s version of “Donal Og” is written in the voice of an abandoned woman, and the language is vividly desolate and accusatory. The actress’s voice understood it instinctively:

“It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;

the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.

It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;

and that you may be without a mate until you find me.”

And then:

“You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me;

you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;

you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;

and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!”

That was the best thing I ever saw, I think: Seamus Heaney listening to someone else read “Donal Og.” He folded his hands over his belly and held his head on one side, a serious smile on his face. He enjoyed it.

I’ll keep that image of him listening with me for the rest of my time, and put it with something I saw him do at Cornell. There, he read his poem “The Skunk,” about missing his wife when he was living in California. It’s a sexy poem. The way the skunk moves across the back yard reminds him of watching his wife bend over in a nightie to get something out of a drawer.

Before he read it he described the way the skunk moved. “Like Mae West,” he said, and lifted his shaky arm up, doing a waving gesture from the elbow to the tips of his fingers, walking it across the air above the lectern, making the audience laugh. Those two things, the listening and the movement, are things I would never have known about poetry unless I’d seen Seamus Heaney twice last year, but now they seem to me to be the two most important lessons to learn.

*Name has been enchanted for protection.

Works Referenced:

Simon Armitage, Book of Matches (Goodreads | Amazon)
Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Indiebound | Amazon)
Seamus Heaney, District and Circle: Poems (Indiebound | Amazon)
Ted Hughes, Lupercal (Goodreads | Amazon)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (Indiebound | Amazon)