THE people-pleasing POET who couldn’t say No

Seamus Heaney was a literary giant with a Nobel prize to prove it. But – as this volume of his letters reveals – he died despondent, exhausted and overwhelmed by the endless obligations that came with fame

The Letters Of Seamus Heaney

Edited by Christopher Reid Faber & Faber €50

Fame may be a ‘spur’ to achievement, but you have only to dig beneath the public face of the great poet Seamus Heaney to realise that it can prove to be a scourge. This absorbing selection of the poet’s letters spans 49 years, taking us from the hard-up, newly engaged young poet desperate for success to the world-famous winner of the Nobel Prize In Literature, at the ultimate peak of literary celebrity.

But the more melancholy journey reveals how Heaney’s natural enthusiasm and energy was sadly transformed over years, into the sick weariness of a creative soul who could never say No to worldly demands. He was just too nice. It’s significant that in the first letter in this handsome volume, he apologises for ‘neglect’ and comments, ‘My accumulating guilt feelings grow into a neurosis’. That was in 1964, when Heaney was 25, to his friend, the poet and critic Seamus Deane.

Heaney was then busy teaching English and contributing poems to literary magazines, so why did he feel such a sense of obligation? Politeness, of course – but it’s also as if the ‘Irish layabout’ (his phrase) from a farm in Co. Derry already had a sense of his own good fortune and, with it, a permanent nag of responsibility to others. Neurosis? Yes, because the degree of self-sacrifice became destructive.

The first pressure on a young writer is money. By 1971 Heaney, married with two sons, is teaching at the University of Berkeley, California, and totting up his earnings for extra work – ‘17 appointments’ that will net him about $1,000.

Then a fortnightly books programme and a small prize are added to reviewing and other bits of freelance work, but he is permanently worried about how to buy a house and writes to his friend, the poet Michael Longley, ‘I sit here with a third child, no job, no real idea of where I am going or what I want to do…’

Poetry is shoved to the back burner in favour of ‘itty bitty broadcasts and articles’ and ‘another bloody festival’. For years ‘the f ****** money fears’ remain ‘cruel’. He writes endless letters (usually apologising for tardiness), advises younger writers, recommends books, pushes the work of poets less successful, teaches and saves money in a dizzy roundabout of work – but by 1975 feels ‘spent and floundering’. So it was to continue, until his death in 2013.

Reading the letters, I find myself feeling guilty for having unwittingly added to his burden. In 1984 I met Heaney in Dublin for a newspaper profile, and we became friendly. Four years later I invited him to take part in my BBC Radio 4 series, Turning Points, and he agreed – by means of a witty postcard that imagined himself hanged by ‘a rope made out of affections and senses of obligation’.

The subject he selected for that programme was choosing to leave Belfast for a rented cottage in Co. Wicklow, moving south to try to concentrate on poetry.

But there was more to it than that. As he made clear in my interview, and in letters published here, he urgently needed to escape the twin pressures of politics and backbiting in the North.

The Republicans wanted to co-opt him to their cause and resented tacit refusal. At the same time, the small community of writers in the North seemed to become – as I’m afraid artistic cabals usually do – inward-looking and envious of their most successful member. The criticisms were unpleasant – no wonder the poet and his long-suffering wife Marie wanted out.

Heaney always felt guilty at winning prizes, when ‘those less gilded with success’ did not. It’s poignant that as late as 1997 he writes a richly generous letter to his old friend, the famously brilliant yet difficult poet Derek Mahon. But on the bottom of a sheaf of praise from a peer, which any poet would be glad to read, Mahon just scrawled, ‘Pompous ass’. Mercifully Heaney didn’t know.

Years pass, fame increases, the round of literary festivals, book tours, interviews and lectures becomes unbearable. All the while he writes letter after letter, often from aeroplanes, always in a rush, yet invariably profligate with words.

I have another delightful, unpublished example. Writing to me in 1999, he riffs: ‘I apologise for the thinness of this quill. Usually I have my inkpen with me, but just now I am in Derry, in my sister’s house, and this hair-cracker is all I have to hand… I don’t feel this nib-nibble is really the thing to unlock a word-hoard.’ And he goes on to respond at length to serious points I had made about his translation of Beowulf.

The point is – and countless letters in this book confirm the point – he didn’t have to. All of us who wanted a piece of him could have been gently fobbed off, but he can’t help being charming even if ‘overwhelmed by mail’ and a prisoner of punishing schedules. What he calls the ‘emotional robbery’ of fame ‘creates an enormous rage in me at times, a feeling I’ve allowed myself to be pushed to the edge of my own life’. He wears a public ‘mask’ – benign and busy – but is increasingly tormented by demands that erode creativity, family time and self-esteem too – because he always feels he falls short of his own high standards.

Why didn’t he just say No? Was there something of imposter-syndrome within the smiling public figure? The triumph of the Nobel Prize in 1995 could only make things worse. His stroke in 2006 was ‘a warning’ yet brought so many goodwill messages from friends, colleagues and strangers that his obligations increased.

It is immensely moving to reach the final part of Christopher Reid’s meticulously edited selection of Heaney’s letters (sadly lacking any from his family) and see how illhealth, exhaustion, despondency and a horror of ageing overwhelmed the great poet.

Three weeks before his death, Heaney was still making public appearances and writing with careful detail to help an Italian translator of his poems. But in 2013, at 74, his stalwart body and soul finally gave out.

On the way to the operating theatre for an emergency procedure, he sent a text to his wife of 48 years: two words in Latin, ‘Noli timere’, which translate as, ‘Don’t be afraid’.

The bard was – too soon – finally at peace.

‘Fame creates a rage in me, a feeling I’ve allowed myself to be pushed to the edge of my own life’