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Sunday, May 31, 2009

In Praise of Chris Ackerley























What a marvellous man Chris Ackerley is and what a thing of wonder his new edition of Watt is. Describing the genesis of Beckett’s novel in his introduction, he draws attention to the ‘Quin’ figure in the drafts as ‘the prototype or common ancestor of both Watt and Knott’, a statement that conjures delicious possibilities of Beckett sects and sectaries (with secretaries, I hope, for the sake of the euphony) devoted to establishing the consubtantiality of Quin and Watt, or Quin and Knott, or Quin and Watt and Knott, much as the Zoggists search for the Real Ian in Roy Fisher’s ‘On the Neglect of Figure Composition’. Zwingliites, Lutherans and Anabaptists of Watt studies will arise. Wars will be fought. But this edition will remain a sacred text to Wattites of all stripes. It is an unimpugnable achievement.

I am aware, in beginning to describe exactly what Chris Ackerley has done, of how little, of how next to non-existent interest many of these questions will be to anyone not as invested in them as out-and-out Wattophiles such as, well, myself.

Beckett wrote Watt during the war, on the run from the Gestapo in the south of France, in six notebooks, two preliminary typescripts, and a series of loose leaves. After the war he made another typescript copy, now lost. No London publisher bit. It first appeared with Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, publishers of Lolita and The Gingerman too, and subject of a French police raid during which the frogs’ chorus from Watt was confiscated under suspicion of being a pornographic cypher (?!). This edition, as anyone who has looked at it will know, is rancid with mistakes. These, and its scruffy typeface, horrified Beckett. Nevertheless, it formed the basis, as a photo-offset, for the Grove edition that followed, with the loss along the way of Arsene’s song about his India rubber duck, though a later reference to this phantom beast, confusingly, survived. By singling it out like this I make it sound as if that were the only confusing thing about the book. As if. In 1963 John Calder’s edition entered the fray, giving Beckett the opportunity to make multiple changes. These were as often changes of intention as corrections, but sadly and simultaneously Calder smuggled in all manner of new errors too.

Error is such a basic category of Beckett’s theme and manner (‘The figures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations are therefore double erroneous.’) that exquisite sensitivity is required in sifting authorial teases from inadvertencies. For instance, when Louit puts the figure ‘Four hundred and eight thousand one hundred and eighty-four’ to Nackybal for the extraction therefrom of a cube root, no answer is forthcoming. ‘Is this because (as later) there is no simple cube root of this number? Probably not, because the working in Notebook 4 indicates that Beckett, in arriving at this figure by cubing seventy-four, made a simple arithmetical error, the correct figure being 405,224. Should this be corrected (...)?’ (Cf. Beckett’s originally defective arithmetic in The Lost Ones too). Ackerley elects that it should not.

And so on and so forth, in ways that most readers of Watt, hardy band though they are, might find all too far below the radar of the critically gripping. But that is not the point. The point is that someone has read this book, comma by comma, dash by dash, and put it all right.

There is one thing though. Our attention is drawn to the second verse of the mixed choir in Part I, whose drafts read ‘Fifty-two point one’, before a change in the galleys to ‘Fifty-one point one’. ‘Fifty-two point one’ intimates the number of days in an ordinary year (as opposed to the leap year of the first verse)’, Ackerley notes in his preface. As he written elsewhere, and as he means here too, this should be weeks, not days. Cf. Beckett’s own confusion, noted by Ackerley and corrected, between the minutes and degrees of Mr Knott’s rotations in his bed.

But my point remains the same. It does not matter that most people will not be sensible of the scale of this editorial achievement or interested in this level of fine detail. But it matters enormously that someone does know and care, and of that man we can say ‘S’incliner simplement, émerveillé.’

(Watt, ed. C.J. Ackerley, Faber and Faber, £8.99)

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Indomitable Oirishry





















Some thoughts on Irish America (scroll down to find).

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Pork Scratchings




















I can’t remember a more lovingly assembled edition of a recently dead writer than Alan Jenkins’ new Collected Ian Hamilton. People didn’t just like Hamilton, they had a Hamilton complex, their love for him growing ever larger the older he got and the smaller (in bulk) his poetic oeuvre remained. Michael Hofmann wrote in the LRB of buying a copy of The Visit every time he saw one in a second-hand shop, for God’s sake. There was always an element of masochism mixed in with the adulation, an element of cowering before his critical majesty. All or what seem like all anecdotes of Hamilton refer to him not eating exactly, but moving his food around on the plate in between puffs on his cigarette (he did have one regret about smoking, Christopher Reid has told me: that he couldn’t do it while he was asleep), but if he was macho and savage about other people’s work, and people loved him for it, was it not on the unspoken understanding that he spent heroic amounts of time refusing to write new poems of his own, ripping them up, trampling on them?

Jenkins’ introduction reminds us of the porcine flensings performed by Edward Pygge in Hamilton’s Review, quoting this example on the now-forgotten Ned O’Gorman:

Toweringly pretentious, intricately boring, and painstakingly derivative, [he] unleashes his clichés with an effrontery that can only be termed: ‘rare’... The poems stand, defying all attempts at interpretation or justification, almost begging, it would seem, to be ignored.

{Ends}

Hamilton, it was said, could kill a book three times over: by proxy in the Review, anonymously in the TLS, and under his own name in the Observer.

All of this drove me upstairs here in the Brynmor Jones Library, where I happily reacquainted myself with its set of Reviews. How on earth did a special issue on the Black Mountain ever get past Hamilton, I wonder. There is surely a tale behind the fact that that issue is represented in the library here by a photocopy: perhaps Hamilton destroyed the original in a fit of pique when he passed through Hull briefly as a visiting professor in the early 70s. That same issue, by the way, suggests that the laughably pretentious ‘Irv’ of the unpublished (but now collected) poem ‘Work in Progress’ was Irving Layton. Or not?

But anyway, a quick trawl through these musty old issues turned up the following pork scratchings:

‘These poems are morally stupid and verbally moronic. Miss Tonks should get some work and stop hanging round the caff all night.’ (Stephen Wall unfortunately foreshadows Rosemary Tonks’ own verdict on her life and writing.)

Edward Pygge meets Basil Bunting, apparently before the latter’s audition for Viz magazine: ‘Pickard, ay, the fluffy bum, the shite hawk. Telt meyis name wus Stoppard. On to a gid thing, I telt mesel. Wait till I seeyim. Kick ees pills, ah will, boorim in the nackers, wipe ees face wiya rasa, suck ees plums...’

‘Where are they now?’ investigates Seamus Heaney: ‘Once I was a trout-tickling Gypsy lad’, murmured 48-year old Seamus Heaney, ruefully, ‘and now I am Ewart Milne, to be sure.’ He tugged sadly at the wasted teats of ‘Lady Gregory’, last of his prizewinning Derry herd: a thin trickle of sour and pungent milk rattled into the pail.

And, drumroll please, an extract from Geoffrey Hill’s ‘The Hallstein Gospel’:

ii The Groaning Board

‘I gave all the scraps to the cat.’ Josef Mrinsky (1874-1910)
‘Mi sono svegliato con aqua in bocca.’ Fra Filippo Lippi (1409-1469)

The, ‘I could do with a bloody drink.’
Lips whetted to diplomatic fury
Attack the main course; mere roughage
For the innocent tripes, mere

Bulk for grand evacuations!

{Ends}

There was also a letter pasted into one issue, signed by Hamilton, apologizing for any aspersions cast on the commercial bona fides of my old friend Bernard Stone’s Turret Books, which had received a Pygging in the previous issue. I photographed it on my mobile phone and will upload it later.

My thoughts on Hamilton’s poems, though, are matter for a whole other post.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Hard Times





















Revisiting Ireland the other week, I was disappointed to see it still languishing in the economic doldrums so familiar to me before I became an immiserated migrant here in East Yorkshire. No change there, then. Perhaps a more imaginative approach to credit for property developers by the major lending institutions and a liberalization of the law on capital gains tax might get things moving, ushering in, who knows, a decade’s worth of economic expansion and prosperity all round? Or so I assume.

A Hoopoe for Sami Hyypiä



































A while back I wrote a longish prose piece about Australia in which I speculated on the fantastical creature that is the night parrot, a bird presumed long extinct, several tantalizing (but dead) examples of which have turned up in recent years. Mystery continues to surround it. It might be extinct, on the point of extinction, or (a much more satisfying possibility) it may instead have perfected the admirable art of stowing itself in Australia’s red centre, in secretive abundance.

I thought of this on reading a poem by Justin Quinn about another such secretive bird, the hoopoe, and which put all the above much more succinctly. The poem is a sonnet and begins with a description of a murky political assassination in the Czech Republic, before ending:

The hitman, he gets rich
and lives beyond the scope
of the curious and the keen

much like the hoopoe which
is native throughout Europe
and nowhere to be seen.

{Ends}

I was also reminded in reading of the hoopoe that Sami Hyypiä is about to leave Anfield after ten years, 460 appearances and 35 goals, which isn’t bad for a defender. I salute this marvellous man. My semi-onomatopoeic, Paulinesque use of ‘yoik’ is a nod to the Finnish, nay, the Sami art of yoiking, a specimen of which I have retrieved from youtube (top of this post). But now my Sami tribute:

Some Nordic hoopoe or
waxwing up to his tricks
again in the box,

Sami Hyypiä,
never happier
than to meet

a corner he turns and yoiks
into the net
as though off the crest of his locks.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

At Burton Constable Hall


















If I stand on the garden chessboard,
what piece am I? Only the king
is more at a loss. The thrusting pawns
jostle and sneer, the queen wants my head.
You turn leisurely cartwheels
in between moves on the orangery lawn.

A gas lamp in the turret again:
His Lordship has advertised for a hermit,
non-applicants only. I start tomorrow,
though I alone know it. Ignored
my non-fame will spread,
dissolve and so conquer all.

The board before games is not
at rest but a sticking-plaster
on slaughter and the memory
of slaughter. Bluff, double bluff.
Pin me now. J’adoube,
I adjust, I capsize.

Another shriek from the stables.
The master’s experiments
with crossbreeding rabbits and hens
are an unexpected success.
The beast crows hourly and lopes
off over the field on its hocks

but there is blood on the turrets and crosiers.
The sheep have grouped at the ha-ha
and low with something like menace.
Alone among his powers my king’s
impotence will remain with him
to the end. Checkmate.

Anything I can
believe now but my own eyes.
The donkey-wheel donkey stops,
goes into reverse, and sucks
the water backwards
out of the fountain.

Genial victor, already
rearranging our carnage
more decoratively,
pick me up by the neck,
turn me over and stub
my head into the ground.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Walk On






















It ain’t over yet, but since I’ve been writing this on and off since the Madrid game in March I thought I’d post this poem now as my keepsake for the season now almost over. This was the year Liverpool lost fewer games than any other premiership team, scored more goals, and easily won most games in the mini-league of the top four sides. And also, yes, couldn’t beat Stoke. There but for Fernando Torres’ hamstring would not have gone the unspeakables (hellfire and pestilence upon them), I naturally but firmly believe. But now for the poem:

Pass and move, said Shankly.
Clatter of seats on the Kop.
Ping of the ball off Torres’
heel: the back-line cowers,
stranded. Belter from Gerrard
knocked wide. Walk on!

Memories of Rome awaken,
Rome 81. Frankly, Mr Shankly,
the position we’ve held looks geared
to trouncing them. Kop
that, Madrid! Cuirasse
of a through-ball driven home by Torres.

Corner: Carragher towers,
holds the line. Will not weaken.
We all dream of a team of Carras.
A kind of socialism, Shankly
wanted: red flags on the Kop,
and Franco’s own left gored

by matador Gerrard,
who scores from the spot. They argue the toss
but winded Madrid can’t cope.
This I want to see week in
week out, Stevie arms wide like the Shankly
statue, one caress

of the ball away from a third. Of course
we’ll stuff United next: on guard,
unspeakables, prepare to sink low
as it gets when you play at ours,
I daydream, as the cattle wagon
of the Madrid defence cap

the evening with a gifted fourth. Their cup
run ith over. Ah victory, crass
and delicious. And so we walk on,
the chant’s last line roared
and rising to a trace
of simply

the spirit of Shankly on the Kop
as it empties to Torres’ and Carra’s
applause and on Gerrard walks: walk on.

Friday, May 08, 2009

Naiad





















First find your wave
and breast it, break it.
Enter the weave
of the sea’s pocket.

Leave the trail
of your heels’ plunge
for the next swell
to rearrange.

Deliquesce
in your element.
Be past caress.
Be all I want.

Thursday, May 07, 2009

L’Art Poétique




















To finish a work means work undone,
the work you failed to fail or disown.

The work you cannot stand to let drop
falls down as even a pick-me-up.

Injure, abuse it, find no better
midwife for it than the shredder.

Let the work be what it discovers
twitching among its shredded tatters.

Monday, May 04, 2009

Nostalgie de la Boue, Slight Return
















An extract from an essay of mine in this new poetry anthology:

For anyone else, the phrase nostalgie de la boue would mean slumming it; for me, it has an almost aspirational air. I exult in, I yearn to fathom the depths, the textures, the tang of these estuarine leavings. Heaney has his bogs, yielding up their hoards of Irish elks and Iron Age human sacrifice victims, and I have my mudbanks, rich in deposits of Asda shopping trolleys and BMXs. Above me hulks the British Extracting Company building, a disused mill. If I were Monet, this colossus on the banks of the Hull would be my Rouen cathedral. I never pass it without contemplating, awe-struck, its huge, redundant majesty. Fossicking around on Google, curious to see what its disused interior might look like, I happened on an account of someone who’d braved the security fence, the wreckage-strewn interior and what sounded like a hair-raising ladder-climb to reach its roof, from which he then photographed the rising sun, suggesting he’d done all of the above in the dark. I salute him for it.

{Ends}

Searching for online evidence again of the innards of the British Extracting Company Building I found this fascinating site, on which enterprising psychogeographers do their bit to reclaim the closed and forbidden landscapes where the concept of place goes to die, in placeless, CCTV-infested, barcoded Britain. Some stunning photographs, I must say.

A Seamus Heaney ABC

















Was in Belfast the other day speaking at a symposium in honour of Seamus Heaney’s seventieth birthday. Belfast remains remarkable as having the only university in Ireland, it seems to me (and to go no further than Ireland) with a community of poets around it, whereas in all too many universities it’s already pushing it to find anyone still teaching the stuff. Here’s what I said on the day.

When this symposium was being planned, it was suggested to me that I might want to base my comments on my contribution to the recent Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney. There is something monumental about a living writer being the subject of a Cambridge Companion, carrying with it a faint whiff of embalmer’s fluid at the ready, so I thought I might make a point of offering something less in that vein today, and possibly with a little off-duty flippancy along the way. Instead I’m proposing an ABC of Heaney, stringing twenty-six possibly random topics together in search of an argument. Where I can at least claim some continuity is that many of them take Stepping Stones, Heaney’s volume of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, as a stepping-off point. I am also aware of using this exercise to raise questions about Heaney to which I might not offer answers. This is either simple laziness on my part, or an attempted reminder that if all the answers were now in, Heaney Studies would of course have come to an end. ‘In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’, Walter Benjamin wrote in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, and of few contemporary writers is it truer than of Heaney. Given his capacity to refresh our perception, and make the old seem worn new, it is a daunting challenge to us, but one we should not shirk, to keep our own perceptions of him equally refreshed and updated.

Which leads to me to my first letter: A is for ABC and ‘Alphabets’. A good reason for mentioning this poem first is the opportunity it represents to see Heaney assembling the world and a worldview. It is a prime piece of Heaney poetic epistemology, if ever there was one. The onomastic readings beloved of Paul Muldoon might latch onto the fact that ‘each potato pit’ in the poem is ‘patted straight and moulded against frost’, name-checking a poet surely part of any Heaney ABC, but the poem dodges self-conscious literariness in favour of its final stanza’s ‘pre-reflective stare’ and a derivation of the earth as letter O from a ‘magnified and buoyant ovum’. The arbitrariness of the signifier, so beloved of Saussure, is not about to trump Heaney’s Cratylean belief in a natural language, or a religiously inflected version thereof (‘IN HOC SIGNO’ indeed). Saussure would have just loved the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and its agon of martyred signifiers, but ‘The Fire i’ The Flint’, Heaney’s early essay on Hopkins, holds steadfastly to a religious reading, leaving any unholy alliance of Freud and Saussure off-limits. The Beaubourg centre in Paris has been described as toutes tripes dehors, having all its guts hanging out, and all through Heaney’s writing life, as poet and critic, and as ‘Alphabets’ reminds us, there has been a consistent aversion to styles that externalize and insist on artifice over naturalism, language read from and returned to the earth with a chthonic licence.

A is also for authority. In my aforementioned contribution to that Cambridge Companion I offered a reading of Heaney’s prose as a graph of his self-image and a form of vicarious life-writing, focused on the question of poetic authority. ‘If you live as an author’, Dennis O’Driscoll reminds Heaney that he said in 1977, ‘you reward is authority. But of course the trouble is how to be sure you are living properly.’ This is a tricky statement to parse. Wherein does that authority lie? In the life or the work? There are poets who self-consciously signal the link between their creative ambition, the life they have led and its poetic rectitude, even – Eavan Boland for one – and others who do the opposite, Derek Mahon, for instance, in the sense that, though a poetic ‘I’ is never just the biographical author, Mahon is at his happiest speaking through exotic and far-removed personae, and shows no interest, in his critical writing, in rehashing his life story or presenting his critical subjects as evolutionary staging posts culminating in his own work. Heaney stands somewhere between these positions. But having amassed as much poetic authority as it is possible for one man to possess, what does Heaney do with it now? Spend it or save it? Who if anyone is in a position any more to advise him about ‘living properly’?

B is for my home town Bray, Co. Wicklow, site of the composition of ‘The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream’, while the poet was waiting for his car to be serviced. I mention this because as the author of a book of essays titled The Place of Writing, Heaney has always rightly or wrongly given all too many critics licence to believe that his place of writing is an uncontaminated Co. Derry home and fons et origo. Place in Heaney, I would like suggest, is a more complex topic than it has been given credit for. Feminist objections, to North for instance, have tended to see his imagination as hopelessly territorial, contesting the occupier’s right to be in his land but not the basic idea that the female land is there to be mastered and occupied. But though Heaney has not written about ‘the importance of elsewhere’ as much as others among his contemporaries, and though his thoughts from abroad frequently turn to home, whether in California, Denmark or Spain, one of the central not-quite-directly expressed dramas of Stepping Stones, I think, is that Northern Ireland became artistically uninhabitable to him in the 1970s. He also downplays the alienness of Co. Wicklow and the south, which leads to a strange and typically Heaneyesque binary: that the place of writing in many Heaney poems since the 70s, I would like to suggest, is both home and exile at once.

C is for Collected Poems. Why is there no Collected Heaney? I can think of no good explanation. Is it because the individual volumes are all still selling too well? I’ve no idea.

D is for Dante, one of Heaney’s great imaginative sponsors, from his version of the Ugolino canto, to the template he provides for Station Island, to the appearance of a Dante-quoting Larkin in ‘The Journey Back’, from Seeing Things. Yet here, as with his relationship to Mandelstam, there is the nagging question of language. Heaney confesses in Stepping Stones to not having known Italian at the time of his Ugolino translation. Is this important? Yeats after all was a monoglot. In his essay on Dante Heaney speaks of T.S. Eliot ‘recreating Dante in his own image’, something Heaney has done to Dante, Eliot and Mandelstam. The word pietas derives from another of Heaney’s avatars, Virgil, but does the habitual imputation of pietas to Heaney too obscure the extent to which there is a Bloomian anxiety of influence at work where his precursors are concerned? His youthful identification with Patrick Kavanagh has always made sense as a handy detour round the monolith of Yeats’s influence, but is qualified more than a little by a phrase from a youthful essay in Hibernia that stands out when repeated in Stepping Stones, ‘There are no major poets at work in Ireland’, written when Kavanagh (and Clarke) were very much alive. Here for once is a flash of the real remorselessness that drove the young Heaney’s self-image, and which many critics still fail to recognise or address. Someone once won a New Statesman for most unlikely book title with My Struggle by Martin Amis, and while My Artistic Will to Power by Seamus Heaney would probably run that a close second, I would like to wonder aloud whether critical squeamishness on this subject is such a good thing. No one gets to be a major poet by accident, and a Bloomian study of Heaney along these lines might make for provocative reading.

E is for eel, the slippery creatures at the centre of the ‘Lough Neagh’ sequence from Door into the Dark:

Where she’s lost once she lays
ten thousand feet down in
her origins. The current
carries slicks of orphaned spawn.

The combination of origins and slipperiness might have been what appealed to Muldoon when he latched onto eels himself in ‘The Suitcase’, a poem that Neil Corcoran has parsed for its intertextual circling of Heaney. Muldoon returned to eels in a bigger way when he devoted an Oxford lecture to Montale’s great poem ‘L’anguilla’, a lecture that also does its share of circling back to Heaney. And still on Muldoon, the Heaney poem dedicated to him, ‘The Widgeon’, again combines an animal with intertextuality, with its sly dig at Muldoon’s genius for poetic mimickry. Perhaps the example of Mad King Sweeney cemented the association of animals and transformation in Heaney’s mind, but let me suggest animals now as the key to the great unwritten work on Heaney’s intertextual dialogue from his contemporaries.

F is for Robert Frost, whose influence on Heaney and other Northern Irish poets has been the subject of a fine study by Rachel Buxton. Sifting Heaney’s lines of poetic descent, Edna Longley has stressed his Virgilian-Frostian inheritance: ‘Heaney’s “earth” is not [Edward] Thomas’s. The speaker does not seek to express “the earth”; he proposes working with “earth” as a metaphor for poetic expression.’ This raises the question of Heaney’s amenability to an ecopoetic reading. Does he ask not what he can do for the earth but what the earth can do for us? Consider how different birds in Heaney are from birds in Longley, for instance. As a city poet Longley has had to make an effort to discover these places and these creatures, whereas for Heaney they are a given, and already there, just as the farmer in Frost’s ‘The Mountain’ is slightly taken aback by the suggestion that he might ever have climbed to the top of the mountain – why would he do that?

G is for guttural, a word I’d like to suggest Heaney has now rendered unusable for all other contemporary poets. Perhaps it could be withdrawn from circulation entirely when he stops writing, in the same way that football teams sometimes retire shirt numbers.

H is for Ted Hughes, Heaney’s debts to whom have also been studied in depth. There is an element of catch-up in Heaney’s more Hughesian early poems, an element of Arnoldian Celtic-Saxon reciprocity in the two men’s collaborations in later life, and an element of custodianship in ‘On His Work in the English Tongue’, the elegy for Hughes that appeared in Electric Light. A note of impatience creeps into Heaney’s answers in Stepping Stones when his interlocutor suggests that Birthday Letters is not among Hughes’s best work, a judgement I would be quick to second. Much criticism of Birthday Letters centred on its unhealthy mythologizing of Hughes’s life with Plath, a gamble on Hughes’s part that took some daring, to give him that much credit, but in Heaney’s elegy (to return to my earlier comments on his artistic will to power) there is a revealing combination of the highest mythic stakes, in its claims for poetry, and deflection of its mage-like claims onto something impersonal and passive. It’s one of the most recognisable of recent Heaney tropes:

Soul has its scruples. Things not to be said.
Things for keeping, that can keep the small-hours gaze
Open and steady. Things for the aye of God
And for poetry. Which is, as Milosz says,
‘A dividend from ourselves’, a tribute paid
By what we have been true to. A thing allowed.

I is for Incertus, an early Heaney pen-name. Heaney describes in Stepping Stones how seeing himself in print led gave him a ‘Borges and I’ experience of self-doubling from the start of his career, which leads me to suggest we’ve misread his pen-name slightly. It is in fact two words, in English, addressed to his early editors: ‘Insert Us’.

J is for just how different literary history would have been if Heaney’s first and middle names had been the other way round and we were now celebrating the seventieth birthday of Justin Seamus Heaney.

K is for Thomas Kinsella, the Irish poet Heaney can always point at with relief whenever the charge of nationalist animus, and the undesirability thereof, comes up in discussions of contemporary Irish poetry. It would be tempting to see Heaney and Kinsella’s divergent responses to Bloody Sunday, and to shouldering the burden of the Gaelic-Irish past as indicators of the deep ideological differences between Northern and Southern Irish poetry. But I don’t believe this for a minute, Kinsella’s sniping about that ‘journalistic entity’ notwithstanding. It is noticeable though, and this comes through more than once in Stepping Stones, how easily Heaney gives the impression of any disagreements involving his work being one-sided affairs, which he himself transcends. As, I would argue, in this case he genuinely does.

L is for Larkin, Heaney’s attitude to whom has received much attention, in particular his charge that Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ ‘reneges on what Yeats called the “spiritual intellect’s great work”’. Without wanting to rehash that debate, I would counterpoint that verdict with Heaney’s frequent invocation of lines from his fellow Larkin-sceptic, someone indeed who devoted a whole poem to his loathing of the man, Czeslaw Milosz: ‘What is poetry which does not save /Nations or people?’ Milosz’s lines help to focus our attitude to Heaney on Larkin, because Milosz at least wrote from a position of unabashed theist loathing of godless defeatism. Whereas Heaney, as we know well, is not a believer. Which leaves, for me, one of the defining questions about Heaney, the redress of poetry, crediting poetry, and all the rest of Heaney’s vocabulary of uplift and redemption: do we prefer it to Larkin’s because it brings comfort, not despair, and to Milosz’s because it comes without dogma and intolerance? Or because, falling short of these two poles, it does not ask us the tougher questions a committed theist or athetist poetics might? What, in other words, is Heaney’s theology of art and has anyone ever answered this question?

M is for most neglected book in the Heaney canon. What is it? I would suggest The Haw Lantern, which marked a break with what had gone before, if not as decisive or as long-lasting a departure as that announced by Seeing Things. Equally, the huge popularity of ‘Clearances’, from The Haw Lantern, could not mask the unease not a few people felt with Heaney’s allegorical style in ‘The Republic of Conscience’, ‘The Mud Vision’ and ‘From the Canton of Expectation’. If there is a plea to be entered on behalf of these poems and their place well above the plimsoll line of better than average Heaney, I hereby enter it.

N is for North, a book that sheer volume of critical response alone tells us is Heaney’s most important. Do we believe that? One of my reasons for beginning with Walter Benjamin’s line on tradition and conformism is the marked reluctance among some Heaney critics to express strong preferences for any of his books over any others. So let me express a preference of my own and suggest that both Field Work and Seeing Things are stronger books.

O is for omphalos, a prophetic ancient Greek word referring to early-twentieth century Irish indigenous styles of rural architecture, specifically down the Toome Road in Co. Derry.

P is for J.H. Prynne, not a name much linked to Heaney’s, but one he mentions in passing in Stepping Stones and that has since triggered some excited debate on Jacket magazine. I’m not proposing to stage a comparison between Heaney and Prynne here (though maybe someone should try), but what the debate illustrates yet again is Heaney’s peerless capacity to deflect poetics at odds with his own, or bounce them harmlessly off the body armour of his self-image. Heaney has never had much or anything to say about avant-garde writing, though his comments are non-committal rather than damning, and when disappointed Prynnites have attempted to respond, in Jacket, they have fallen back on jaded Movement conspiracy theories and engaged not at all with the poetry. There is something more than a little obtuse in the dismissal of Auden repeated by Heaney, however, still in Stepping Stones (and one which, though he doesn’t mention this, contains an undercurrent of homophobic prejudice via Richard Hoggart) as lacking the ‘rooted normality of the major talent’. I think Auden, Prynne or any other shiftless cosmopolitans who happen past might be entitled to some surprise at the restriction of major poet status to the ranks of the rootedly normal.

P is also for the prose poem, the genre of his one jettisoned book, Stations, but one he has returned to, partially, in recent years. I hereby call on him to write more.

Q is for Queen of England, subject of a piece of nationalist joshing by Heaney so minor and unimportant in the larger scheme of things I’m going to assume no Irish Studies academic has ever picked up on or mentioned it. Right?

R is for Russell Square, which Ian Hamilton once suggested Heaney was defiling with his ‘mud-caked fingers’. On the roll-call of critics who have turned up an Anglocentric lip in Heaney’s direction, Hamilton occupies an honourable, which is to say a dishonourable place. A.N. Wilson and Al Alvarez would be two others, I suppose, and so might Peter Porter, if he was English and not Australian. Although much of what these critics have said over the years is simply wrong-headed, it is worth dwelling on for what it reveals about the time-lag between British and Irish poetry, and an underlying sense of ‘Get with the program!’ being barked at Heaney from the post-enlightenment heaven of a world from which farms, muck and men in tweed jackets have been finally eliminated.

S is for Sixties. One striking aspect of Stepping Stones is how strongly the Sixties, or what we think of as the Sixties, seemed to bypass Heaney. Pop music was ‘more like background music or fairground music’, and jazz too fared hardly any better. Exposure to California shortly afterwards emphatically did not prise Heaney’s style apart. The closest he gets to a strong, non-Lowellite American influence, if we choose to read it that way, is the Williamsesque short-line style adopted in Wintering Out and North. Yet when that moment passed the short lines appeared to go back in the closet and have been all too infrequently seen since. It would be the merest philistinism to berate Heaney for not becoming the Adrian Mitchell of Bellaghy, writing poems about fifteen million silage bags, but what does this tell us about the distinctive and even unique moment of Northern Irish poetry in the 1960s?

T is for Translations, a play by Brian Friel in which people who are meant to be speaking Irish speak English, so we can all understand them. In ‘Broagh’ Heaney displays a strikingly contrasting aesthetic, when he insults all non-natives of ‘Broagh’, which is just about the entire population of the world, for their inability to pronounce that townland’s name, and instead of being insulted we his readers almost unanimously thank him for this precious insight into a culture we do not share.

U is for unpublished Heaney. Now that we have a bibliography, the full extent of uncollected Heaney is there for all to not quite see, unless we fancy trudging off to a research library. There is so much bootleg Heaney available online it’s surprising Heaney hasn’t followed Bob Dylan’s lead and started his own official bootleg series. I hereby pitch the idea.

V is for Volkswagen Beetle, the car that turns up with such regularity in the first half of Stepping Stones. Nor only does it drive Heaney to places that inspire him, it features in the poems, and on more than one occasion was their site of composition too. John Goodby has wondered whether, as a ‘People’s Wagon’, the car in Muldoon’s ‘Ireland’ is a ‘vehicle’ for subliminal republican sympathies, but for the last word on cars in Heaney we must refer to surely one of the most distinctive items in the Heaney criticism file, Medbh McGuckian’s ‘Horsepower, Pass By’.

W is for Whoops, I Did It Again, a silly song by Britney Spears I quote to my students every year to make a serious point. When Heaney’s cousin Colum McCartney appears in ‘Station Island’ to reprimand Heaney for his sugaring of his death in a previous elegy, ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’, with a reference to Dante’s Purgatorio, I ask my students to comment on the irony involved and sit back and wait for them to notice he is doing this in a poem whose whole structure is based on Dante’s Purgatorio. It’s usually a long wait, let me add, but my point is this: does the reprimand from the dead man and the associated guilt lessen the poet’s guilt or, since he’s simultaneously repeating the offence, does it not just compound it? One response to this would be a long, furrow-browed Heaney poem of moral introspection, but another is a simple yes or no: off the hook for apologising, or on the hook twice over for moral narcissism? I’d love to know the answer.

X is for X-rated. Conor O’Callaghan has stated that an anthology of Irish sex, as opposed to love poems, would make for a slim volume, and unkind critics have made a habit of picking on Heaney’s alleged squeamishness (I thinking of James Simmons here, and his concern for what Heaney’s ‘mammy’ would think), or stray moments of misjudged phallocracy (‘Rite of Spring’ and its final line, ‘Her entrance was wet, and she came’), but there is a simple riposte to all this. ‘The Skunk’ is surely not just a great poem but an effortlessly sexy poem too.

Y is for W.B. Yeats, once described by Robert Lowell as the best Irish poet before Seamus Heaney.

Z might stand for Zozimus, Zbigniew Herbert or Adam Zagajewski, but in this instance can stand for Zeus, who turns up in one of the ‘Sonnets from Hellas’ in Electric Light. The poet has travelled to the Castalian Spring to drink from its poetic well-spring but is refused entry. He invokes the ‘thunderface’ of the angry Zeus, then sneaks in anyway, feels his anger drain away, and indulges a moment of pure Heaneyesque mixed feelings, of grace, transcendence and defiance all at once:

So up the steps then, into the sandstone grottoes,
The seeps and dreeps, the shallow pools, the mosses,
Come from beyond, and come far, with this useless
Anger draining away, on terraces
Where I bowed and mouthed in sweetness and defiance.

Remarkably among poetic gods, Heaney is someone whose natural element is mildness first and last, a mildness that is a form of power, not weakness, and one whose poetic dividend, to use a Heaney word, continues to overflow bountifully for us mere mortals as well as the god himself.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

100 Years
















Today, 3 May, my father tells me, is the hundredth anniversary of his father’s birth, and here to mark the occasion is a photo of my new uncle Ray (that would be the John Betjeman lookalike). We met him for the first time the other week. Thereby hangs a tale, which I needn’t go into here, but I’m delighted and honoured to know him at last, and my new cousin Bernie too, to his left. I appear to be striking the pose, in the photo, of a nervous young parish priest wondering whether he should drop in on the local Presbyterian minister to discuss any worthwhile inter-faith initiatives. ‘That would be an ecumenical matter’ etc.