EXTRACT:In 'Stepping Stones', a new book of interviews with poet Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate sheds new light on his childhood and his work as a poet, particularly the writing of 'Station Island'. The interviews in 'Stepping Stones', extracted here, in which Heaney looks back on his life in a mood of reflection and recollection and also speaks about his responses to the hunger strikes in the North, were conducted by poet and critic Dennis O'Driscoll
WHY DID YOU choose to finish 'Station Island' with Joyce rather than, say, Yeats?
One reason why Joyce is there is to help my unbelief. Yeats couldn't have been a member of the cast because, to put it crudely, the pilgrimage was for papists.
But why assign the advisory role to a prose writer rather than a poet?
Because Joyce qualifies as a poet more than most writers of verse. He enters and explores and exceeds himself by entering and exploring and exceeding the language. My intention always was to have the pilgrim leave the island renewed, with liberating experience behind him and more ahead. The pattern always was the simple one of setting out, encountering tests and getting through to a new degree of independence; on such matters, Joyce is our chief consultant.
All the same, might you not have resisted him as mentor because he would have scorned a "bullockbefriending" family such as yours? Wouldn't he have associated it with "the nets of nationality, language, religion"?
He certainly would. And because I was a member of such a family his work was an essential aid to self-awareness. But the scene in A Portrait of the Artist where Joyce imagines Stephen Dedalus wrestling with the old man of the land ends with Stephen relenting, releasing his grip on the "sinewy throat" and saying, "I mean no harm." And the same attitude comes out in the portrait of Stephen's hurling-playing friend Davin. So there's a limit to the enmity for the rural. Joyce wasn't Brendan Behan. There's also the fact that, by the 1960s - at an imaginative level, if not entirely at the legislative level - Joyce's battles had been pretty much fought and won. He had left, as Lowell says, a loophole for the soul which others had found and followed through.
I've wondered about the advice which, speaking through Joyce, you gave yourself: "it's time to swim / out on your own and fill the element / with signatures on your own frequency". Hadn't you been doing that from the very start?
The advice itself is unexceptional: "Tell the truth. Do not be afraid." A bit like the maxims given out later in the book in that poem called The Master. But, in the fiction of the poem, the advice is given to somebody who has been "in the swim" of Lough Derg, as it were, rather than out on his own. He's being told to flee the nets.
Brian Moore is dedicatee of your poem 'Remembering Malibu'. Did you regard Moore as somebody who had swum out?
Definitely. Much of his fiction is about disengagement from middle-class Catholic Belfast. The Emperor of Ice-Cream is your essential Ulster Bildungsroman.
In remarks made immediately after Moore's death, you stressed how much his "writerly solidarity" meant to you. What had you in mind?
His kindness, for a start. He invited Marie and myself and the kids to visit him and Jean in Malibu during that year we spent in California. It was a boost for somebody with only two slim volumes to his name to be accepted as a member of the guild by somebody as established as Moore. And from that time onwards we would see Jean and himself, regularly if briefly, when they came to Ireland in the summertime. But the solidarity came out in more decided ways when he reviewed Station Island for the Los Angeles Times - and when he objected to some patronising remarks about me by A Alvarez.
You might have been expected to identify with a rural writer like John McGahern, rather than the urban Brian Moore. You once wrote that the real "end" of McGahern's "social realism" is "to get in close to an inner space of feeling" - you could have been describing yourself.
I'd be very happy to be so described. In McGahern's case, the defining statement was one he made at that symposium in Belfast which I mentioned previously: "I'm only interested," he said, "in poetry, which occurs more often in verse than in prose." I felt closer to McGahern not because of the rural background and subject matter but because of his register, his distinctive rhythm. The undertone is important, the melancholy of his music. Cadence was as important to his sentences as content, maybe more important.
Are you wary of work that is too comfortably embedded in the everyday, which settles for social realism alone?
I am, yes. Unless there's some evidence of a sensibility I can't get all that interested. The sine qua non is a binding element between the words, something that gives them psychic and musical weight. If Yeats left out the word "now" in the first line of The Lake Isle of Innisfree, you'd have the same everyday truth about a moment of homesickness but you'd be missing the in saecula saeculorum pivot that the line turns on. It's not that I'm against content or subject matter as such. Far from it. It's just that I like it to be dreamt through, as it were, rather than dumped down. Edward Thomas's As the Team's Head-Brass, for example, or Elizabeth Bishop's At the Fishhouses. Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence.
Wordsworth is one of the poets in whose footsteps you have followed as a literary pilgrim. It strikes me that 'Station Island' was only one of your pilgrimage places, since you must have visited more dead writers' houses than any poet alive - Yeats's Tower, for example, Hardy's birthplace . . .
. . . and Carleton's birthplace, Tennyson's birthplace, Dylan Thomas's Fern Hill, Alphonse Daudet's mill, Hopkins's grave in Dublin, Joyce's grave in Zurich, Wilde's grave in Paris, Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, the Keats House in Hampstead, Akhmatova's "House on the Fontanka" in Petersburg, Brodsky's "room and a half" in the same city, not to mention Stratford and Abbotsford, Coole Park and Spenser's castle, Lissoy and Langholm . . . I'd have thought the urge to go to those places was common enough. A matter of dedicating, as Yeats says in one of his Coole Park poems, "a moment's memory to [a] laurelled head".
You don't go in hope of inspiration?
Not in that spirit, no. The one poem that came from such a visit appears in Station Island: The Birthplace, about the Hardy home in Upper Bockhampton. The trees around the place, the thatched roof, the small rooms, all reminded me of Mossbawn. But that wasn't the only reason I wrote it, there was also the fact that Hardy's novels and poems were so much part of me by the time I got there. In fact, the grave in Stinsford churchyard and the house in Upper Bockhampton are literary "stations" I keep going back to. On 31st December 2000, for example, a hundred years after Hardy wrote and dated The Darkling Thrush, Marie and I went to Dorset and I read the poem in the Stinsford graveyard. And read A Church Romance in the church.
Did you ever - as a young writer, or indeed later - snatch (or sneak) a look at the locale of a living writer in the hope of getting a glimpse of that author?
In the mid-1960s, when I was down from Belfast, I used to drop into the Bailey pub in South Anne Street in Dublin, to take a peep at Kavanagh and company. Once, before we were married, when Marie and I were in the west of Ireland, we went to O'Malley's bar in Cleggan. We knew Richard Murphy's poems about The Cleggan Disaster and The Last Galway Hooker and knew also that he sailed that hooker out from Cleggan to Inishbofin. And next thing Richard Murphy himself arrives in his Aran sweater and seaman's boots. I recognised him from his photographs but didn't speak to him. Too shy, and anyhow, he was with his own party.
Are there places around Dublin to which you habitually bring literary visitors?
There are a couple or three obvious sites: Hopkins's grave in the Jesuit burial plot in Glasnevin Cemetery - and while we're there, Parnell's grave and John O'Leary's, where Yeats says romantic Ireland is also buried. Joyce's Tower in Sandycove, Patrick Kavanagh's memorial seat on the banks of the Grand Canal. St Patrick's Cathedral where Swift was dean and where you can see his epitaph on the wall. There's no shortage of destinations. Charles Wright, by the way, wrote a wonderful poem about his visit to Hopkins's grave. "Father Bird-of-Paradise" he calls him.
The first poem in 'Station Island' is literally set in a station - an underground railway station in London - rather than in a place of literary or spiritual pilgrimage. Is there any reason why 'The Underground' was chosen to be the opening poem?
The last poem in Field Work, Ugolino, was an underground poem of a very different sort, so we're into this next book at a run, heading up and away. I liked it because it seemed to have both truth to life and truth to love. It starts with a memory of running through a tunnel from the South Kensington tube station towards the Albert Hall, late for a BBC Promenade concert. We were on our honeymoon and Marie was wearing her going-away coat. In the course of her sprint, the buttons started popping off. But in the end, the "damned if I look back" line takes us well beyond the honeymoon. In this version of the story, Eurydice and much else gets saved by the sheer cussedness of the poet up ahead just keeping going.
I assume that the 'Wedding Day' poem in 'Wintering Out' recreates your mood on the day you and Marie were married. There's a hallucinatory quality about the images in it - that face, for example, full of 'wild grief'. You make it sound a pretty grievous experience.
On the day, of course, it was a party. Even though it was the first wedding in either family, even though there was necessarily a rare newness about the whole occasion, it was still an unmysterious, ordinary get-together. Everybody in good form and in full cry. The families being themselves, even more themselves than usual, our friends enjoying the fling. My father refused to get into the hired gear; nor would he make a speech, since speech was never his thing anyhow. But, for all that, he and my mother enjoyed themselves. Everybody was, as they say, out for the day.
Yet, in the poem, Marie is singing 'behind the tall cake / Like a deserted bride'.
A wedding always has its moments of strangeness, sudden lancings or fissures in the fun when parent and child have these intense intimations that the first circle is broken. It is in the literal sense unheimlich, an unhoming. I tried to catch some of that in Mother of the Groom also. You have to be pretty immature not to feel the life-change at such a time. That moment in the taxi, for example, when you both drive away and the faces and places vanish, "to be renewed, transfigured, in another pattern". It's hallucinatory all right, and that's why it stays with you.
Your children, as they grew up, presumably continued to reconnect you with aspects of your own childhood. Might poems such as 'The Railway Children' and 'An Ulster Twilight' have resulted from comparing your childhood with theirs?
The Railway Children was written very quickly one afternoon in my room in Carysfort College, before a tutorial. But you could be right about its having some connection with the children, because a few years earlier a photographer called Larry Herman came to Co Derry and took pictures of them and Marie and myself roaming about in some of my old haunts. Several of these eventually appeared in a Penguin anthology called Worlds, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield. There could well be a connection between The Railway Children and a photograph in that book of the four of us - no Catherine Ann on the scene yet - up to our waist in grass on the slopes of the railway cutting in Broagh.
I was definitely remembering my own childhood when I wrote A Kite for Michael and Christopher - an afternoon when my father came out to a field at the back of the house and launched a kite.What was surprising and what I still remember most vividly was the powerful drag in the kite string: partly because the kite itself was a heavy big job, made of lath and pasted newspaper; and partly because the haulage got more and more powerful as the kite lifted. The more string you could pay out, of course, the higher and more spectacular your flight; although often and often, because of that mighty strain, the string would break and you would lose the kite and even if you eventually found it, it would have been wrecked by the fall.
Did you actually make a kite for Michael and Christopher?
I bought one for them made of nylon. We were well and truly into the consumer age by that time. In An Ulster Twilight, for example, the toy battleship that I'm to get for Christmas is being made by the local carpenter, but when it came to Michael and Christopher's turn for toys, it was Action Man out of the shop.
Was Santa Claus an annual visitor?
Definitely. Christmas mornings were as simple and delightful as ever. Marie and I were reliving our own childhoods then too.
Had Santa figured strongly in your childhood fantasy?
Not all that strongly, but I did expect him to deliver and did believe in him for a while - even though, from very early on, there was a provisional edge to my faith. On Christmas Eve my father would tell us, "He's on his way now, coming round Slieve Gallon, and if you listen hard you'll maybe hear the sleigh bells." I remember one time climbing the beech tree at the end of our lane, looking and listening through the frosty air. But of course my father would also warn that, if we didn't behave, there'd be no Santa at all that particular year.
'Changes', apparently addressed to one of your children, ends with an injunction to remember a bird nesting in a pump 'when you have grown away and stand at last / at the very centre of the empty city'. Did it sadden you that, by moving from Wicklow to Dublin, your children would experience an urban upbringing rather than the rural one which had been so enriching for you?
It did sadden me a bit, but there were compensations. And as a matter of fact, that reference to the empty city didn't come from my own sense of what their future was going to be like. It's an image from the I Ching, "the book of changes" - hence the title of the poem; in that context, it could signify the illusory nature of conquest or triumph: you take the citadel or the town only to find there's nothing there.
As well as 'The Sandpit' in 'Station Island', there are poems in other collections - 'Damson' and 'Alphabets' - where there's a fascination with building and bricklaying, trowelling and plastering. Anything to declare about this?
Two things. First, vis-à-vis sand, and sandpits in fields, and sandbeds and gravel beds by the river. During the war, the construction of the aerodrome at Creagh, with its new runways and outbuildings and so on, created a demand for sand, a demand that did not lessen once the housing schemes got started after the war. It meant that some people made a fortune from having sandpits on their land, with the result that sand became a golden resource, and not only because of its colour. But there was also the fact that my uncle Mick, the one who turns up in a poem in District and Circle, was a bricklayer - Mick Joyce, a Corkman who had been in the army and had married my father's sister, Susan. I always remember him arriving at Mossbawn in his khaki outfit, coming up the field from the railway, either when he was on leave or had been demobbed. Mick was tall and exotic to us because of his accent and his tales of having been in England and in the north African desert as a medical orderly. And he had this big canvas bag full of bricklayer's tools - mortar board and trowel and skimmer and plumb line and what have you. All of them heavier than you'd have expected, Achillean gear of sorts, really. You had to be a hero to wield it.
Stepping Stones
These extracts are from Stepping Stones(Faber and Faber, £22.50) which will be published on November 6th. The Abbey Theatre, in association with Faber & Faber, will present An Evening with Seamus Heaneyon Sunday 23rd November at 8pm.
The event will include a reading, public interview and launch.
Tickets are €15 from The Abbey box office (01-8787222) from November 3rd.