This Saturday, March 28th, the rooms at I-12 Adams House will be dedicated as the Heaney Suite. This is where Seamus Heaney lived during his teaching stints at Harvard which continued for more than 25 years. According to Adams House master, Sean Palfrey, Heaney’s Harvard digs will be a place of “reflection, creativity, writing and reading (as internet-free as possible).”
***
Long before I became a resident at Adams House, I called Heaney at his Harvard office.
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He answered the phone like someone who wasn’t expecting it to ring.
“Hello?” he said, in curious way.
He answers his own phone! I thought in horror.
“Is Seamus Heaney there please?” I said, though I knew it was him. I was buying time, trying to figure out what to say next.
My cheeks were burning; my voice was shaky. It was 1991 and the phone was attached to the kitchen wall by a curly plastic cord which I twirled in my fingers.
“To graduate high school, I have to write a really long paper….like 10 pages,” I said quickly. “I am writing about North.” Within a few minutes, I was invited to chat with the great poet in person.
***
Cherry blossoms fell like confetti on the cobblestone pathways of Cambridge. Of course they did, for it was a magical land.
The first time I ventured to Cambridge, I was 14 years old and looking for the home of EE Cummings – a poet whose words I recited as prayers (I thank you God for most this amazing day).
I imagined myself arriving at the poet’s house, knocking on the door, and revealing to whomever opened it: This is the home of EE Cummings! But when I arrived, something deflated me: an oval sign, blue with white writing. Nailed to the gate of 104 Irving Street, the sign said, “This is the home of ee cummings.”
Turns out that the poet I had just discovered, and loved with youthful intensity, already belonged to the world, and not just to me.
Now, two years later, I was back in Cambridge to see another poet that I admired. At that time, Heaney was a poet who belonged, it seemed, just to us and not yet to the world. By “us,” I mean poets – even painfully shy, unpublished ones.
What Heaney said about North that day is blurry: I know that at one point, he turned to me, held his hands in the air and said “bog bodies”. What stayed with me is the feeling I had talking with him – a feeling of being welcome. A feeling that we were all in it together; and by “it” I mean the poetry thing.
I wrote the paper, and called it North: The Poetry of Resistance. I thought it was a work of genius, and so did my high school English teacher. After high school, I went to Harvard and my freshman professor thought the paper on North was pretty good. My sophomore professor was less impressed and by junior year, I retired the paper, reluctantly. It had served me well, probably too well.
Despite my magical associations with Cambridge, Harvard struck me, at times, as inhospitable. If you’ve seen the movie Good Will Hunting, you know how some Boston people perceive Harvard – a place teeming with yuppies, liberals and atheists. So being from an Irish Catholic neighbourhood in Boston, I expected a bit of culture shock. But there was something I didn’t expect: not only did you compete to get into the university, but once there, you had to compete for nearly everything else. There was a competition to be part of the newspaper, the literary magazine, the comedy magazine, the social and athletic clubs. You even had to compete to get into some of the classes. There were so many gates, and overzealous gate keepers. Heaney was not one of them.
Heaney’s presence at Harvard was, well, the word that comes to mind is salubrious. It is a word my father used to describe the sea; meaning something beneficial, beneficent. It wasn’t Heaney’s academic prowess; though the way he spoke about poetry, the very language he used, made everything shimmer as if struck by moonlight. Still, brilliant though they were, I actually fell asleep in Heaney’s lectures. On one page of notes, the phrase “I eat peaches” is inexplicably scrawled just as I nod off. In Heaney’s poetry workshop, I likewise failed to distinguish myself. You might say that I had the experience but missed the meaning.
And yet, despite all that I missed, Heaney taught me one thing: poetry is never about celebrity or exclusivity. It is about relationships forged in solitude that connect us through time and space.
The year I graduated Harvard, 1995, Heaney won the Nobel Prize. There was no denying that he belonged, officially, to the world. And yet with all that recognition, his courtesy and openness never wavered. I would see him over the years at various places, from The Cure at Troy in the Bowery to the Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire. He would always give me the nod, as if he recognized me; and maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. I think what he recognised, and acknowledged, was that poetry binds us together in a kind of kinship.
The last time I saw Heaney was in April of 2013. I was living in Ringsend, and writing my memoir in a converted attic while my kids were at school. I was about to migrate to America for the summer to work in catering. I was stressed out that I would never get the book done, and that it was too late anyway; after all, I was on the wrong side of 40. In short, I felt that life, at least the literary side of life, had passed me by. Then I had a dream: Heaney came to say goodbye and that he would be in America and would see me there. He put his hands on both my arms, between the shoulder and the elbow. It was a farewell and a blessing of some sort. It was a benediction.
***
The memoir is finished, or almost finished, just in time for my 20th Harvard reunion. Which is good as it will give me something to say to people, all of whom will appear to be wildly successful in real jobs. But then, writing is never about success or, for that matter, failure: it is about doing the work. The work is what binds us writers together and to the world; Heaney always reminded me of that.
When I visit my old rooms at Adams House, I will surely pay a visit to the Heaney Suite. It is heartening to think that Adams House I-12 remains one of Harvard’s open doors.
