Seamus Heaney recalls his poetic pilgrimages to Scotland

Since receiving the Nobel in 1995 he has been bombarded with requests of one kind and another. “No”, it seems, is one of the few words not in his vocabulary. But an intimation of his mortality in 2006, in the form of a stroke, has forced him to cut back on his commitments. Some causes, however, such as the poetry library, are too dear to his heart to abandon. In any case, it gives him the excuse to return to Scotland, to which he has been coming off and on since the early 1970s.

Heaney, as the late Ian Hamilton once remarked, may be “the most over-interviewed of living poets” but, as Dennis O’Driscoll argues in Stepping Stones, his collection of interviews in which he quizzes Heaney at length, it is difficult in publications where space is restricted to see the man in the round. In that regard O’Driscoll’s book is non-pareil. What I had requested of Heaney was that we concentrate specifically on his relationship with Scotland and poets he knew well, such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown and Sorley Maclean.

It turns out to be an opportunity that he relishes, not least because he is eager to “put on the record” memories before they fade. Born at Mossbawn farm, near the village of Castledawson in County Derry, Heaney acknowledges that “anthropologically speaking” he feels closer toScotland than Dublin. His godfather, Eddie Heaney (no relation) had a “Scots tongue”. A neighbour, George Chivers, went to live in Scotland. “I had a pretty strong sense of the Scots and the Scotches, as they called them when they came over in August for the holidays,” he recalls. “The truth of it was that County Antrim was Scots tongue.”

When he went with his father to Ballymena to herd cows he would hear Scots spoken. Words like “yin” and “twa” and “wee” were common currency. At secondary school he was given The Ambleside Book Of Verse, which contained a number of Jacobite ballads and, he says, “kind of unbarred the door” to poetry for him. Burns was one of the poets he was introduced to in his childhood and he remains one of his champions. In an essay on him, Heaney took the chance to extemporise on the word wee -- as in “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie” in To A Mouse -- which tickles him still. “To all, at least, who hailed from north of a line drawn between Berwick and Bundoran, ‘wee’ came on strong,” he wrote. “It was entirely untwee. It neither beckoned nor beguiled. It was just suddenly and solidly there, and there it remains to this day.”

Heaney’s advocacy of the Bard was in contrast to how Burns was perceived at the university in Belfast which he attended from 1957 to 1961. “We should have been reading him,” he says, “but somehow you felt he was part of the hearth culture rather than higher culture. In the 1950s, in a British university like Queen’s or even more so down south, he was regarded, but it was more Wordsworth and Keats and Coleridge and so on and so forth.”

Drams with MacDiarmid

Of late, he says, Burns has become a more accepted part of the canon, which may be partly due to Heaney and others taking him seriously. There again, the disregard of Burns may owe something to what Heaney describes as “the och factor”, “och” being what people say above the invisible line that divides north and south Britain, and below which they say “oh dear” or “dear me”. “There is a whole philosophy of life in that monosyllable,” says Heaney.

Hugh MacDiarmid suffered similarly from academic neglect and derision. It is remarkable, for example, that in compiling The Oxford Book Of Twentieth Century English Verse, Philip Larkin was minded to exclude any poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, whom he didn’t rate. Heaney, it is fair to assume, would have found MacDiarmid’s omission inexcusable. “MacDiarmid,” he says, “was a major European poet who said ‘och’ and smoked a pipe and sounded like your farmer cousins.” He got to know him in the 1960s when Claddagh Records was recording poets reading their own work. When “half-tight”, he recalls, he and fellow Belfast-based poets, including Michael Longley, would chant lines from MacDiarmid’s poem With The Herring Fishers, from which Heaney still quotes accurately: “For this is the way that God sees life,/ The haill jing-bang o’s appearin’/Up owre frae the edge o’ naethingness …/It’s his happy cries I’m hearin’.”

Once, in the 1960s, MacDiarmid visited Ireland and despite being instructed to keep him away from the drink, Heaney, who felt this was no way to treat a poet of such stature, stopped the car in which they were travelling and bought him a bottle of whisky. On another occasion he visited MacDiarmid at Brownsbank, his cottage near Langholm, accompanied among others by Trevor Royle, then literature director of the Scottish Arts Council and now the Sunday Herald’s associate editor.

“We drank a lot of whisky that afternoon,” says Heaney. “I always remember when we were going to get up out of our seats MacDiarmid was sitting quite spry, saying: ‘Can you manage?’” In Dublin in 1967, when MacDiarmid was 75, Heaney recalls him chasing his pregnant wife Marie round a table with who knows what in mind. “I can’t see myself chasing anybody,” Heaney says with mock mordancy.

By then Heaney was a published poet with a burgeoning reputation. He had begun writing poems seriously at Queen’s under the discerning eye of Philip Hobsbaum, who presided over The Group, which included a number of poets who are well known today. Heaney was one of Hobsbaum’s favourites and it was through one of his friends, Edward Lucie-Smith, that Heaney’s poems found their way in 1964 to the desk of Karl Miller,who was then literary editor of the New Statesman. Miller, who was born inEdinburgh, and who went on to edit The Listener and found the London Review of Books, is one of Heaney’s acknowledged heroes, without whom, he insists, his career may not have progressed as sweetly as it did. Miller agreed to publish three of Heaney’s poems, which marked his first appearance in a London-based weekly magazine. One of the poems was Digging, which opens: “Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” Was there ever a better introduction to a new poetic voice?

Miller, says Heaney, is “a wonderful combination of strictness and merriment, intellectually as fit as a fiddle, but with this really intuitive feel for poetry.” He recalls receiving a phone call from him querying something on a proof. “There’s no doubt,” he adds, “that that first publication there by Karl and subsequent loyalty and patronage of my work in the London Review of Books was very important to the reception of it. I’m happy to say, I can say it, I do say it: I love the man.”

As a result of his poems’ publication in the New Statesman, Heaney was contacted by Faber and Faber, who asked if he had a manuscript which might make a collection. He had the makings of one but it wasn’t quite finished. It was the first time, he says, he came across the phrase ‘first refusal’. With Faber’s offer dangling in front of him like a dirty carrot, Heaney set to work. “To tell you the truth, I wrote like hell. The first half of 1965 was very productive.”

‘Wiliness and sensuousness’

Death Of A Naturalist was published a year later. Writing in the New Statesman -- where else? -- Christopher Ricks described it as an “outstanding” debut collection. Among those to have a poem dedicated was Hobsbaum who, in the 1970s in Glasgow, would form another influential group of writers. Blackberry-picking, the poem written for Hobsbaum, is typical of Heaney, rooted as it is in the countryside in which he was raised, unsentimental, sensuous, vividly coloured, pungent and musical. New collections followed at roughly three-year intervals: Door Into The Dark in 1969; Wintering Out in 1972, the year of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry; North in 1975, when his second cousin Colum McCartney was the victim of a random sectarian murder by Loyalist paramilitaries.

It was in 1973 -- “in the month of February” -- that Heaney finally managed to cross the Irish Sea and visit Scotland for the first time. He attended a poetry festival in St Andrews where he met among others Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith and Alastair Reid. Of course, he was aware their poems long before then. As he has recalled, his first encounter with MacCaig’s work was his poem Summer Farm (“Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass/And hang zigzag on hedges”). Such images, he thought, were simply brilliant. “A unique continuum of wiliness and sensuousness. The minimal and the dotty (‘A hen stares at nothing with one eye,/Then picks it up’) transposed into a metaphysical key.”

MacCaig, says Heaney, who died in 1996, and who taught him to pronounce Glenmorangie with the emphasis on the ‘orangie’, could beguile a room “as gleefully and deliberately as he would have worked a salmon pool”, dangling bait in front of those he had targeted. “My ear got the flick of his tongue now and again,” says Heaney. “Poetically, he never expressed it [criticism] to me. My feeling was that if you weren’t okay he wouldn’t have bothered [with you] that much. I liked the way he said ‘boo’. I took it to be a term of approbation, nearly.”

Shortly after the publication of North, in which Heaney considered the violence in Ireland in relation to periods in Irish history when the country was invaded by Scandinavians and the English, he and MacCaig were at a party in Wicklow. “I can’t stand gloomy, ambitious poetry,” said MacCaig, stretching the syllables of each word until they burst, like bubblegum. MacCaig, says Heaney, was warning him in his own roundabout manner to beware the baleful influence of the American, Robert Lowell. Heaney, who can give as good as he gets, as is apparent in his dialogue with Dennis O’Driscoll, responded, “So I suppose Robert Herrick [the 17th century English lyric poet renowned for his rustic lyricism] is the one for you, Norman.” It was cheeky, says Heaney, but merited. “I date our friendship from that moment.” Significantly, his first poem on receiving the Nobel was addressed to MacCaig. Called A Norman Smile, it starts: “To be marvellously yourself, like the river water.” It was as if MacCaig were cautioning him not to get carried away with the hype and flummery. “The muses were instructing me, I thought, to be myself,” he’s said, “not to go with something oceanic and tidal and super-Nobelish, but to stay fresh and true to the old channels.”

Sense of place

Another Scottish writer with whom Heaney was friendly was the Orcadian poet and novelist, George Mackay Brown who, ironically for such a legendary home bird, visited Heaney in Belfast in 1968. Much drink was taken. Mackay Brown, who would have been 47 at the time, sang or, rather, chanted, recalls Heaney. “I found him shy and capable, which he had to be, you know.” Later Heaney repaid the compliment and travelled to Stromness.

He also got to know Sorley Maclean and can add to the lore which has accumulated around the great Gaelic bard, who is renowned as much for his otherworldliness, for example mistaking, while staying in a hotel, a hairdryer for a phone. Once, in Kilkenny, says Heaney, he locked himself in a room. At the request of Joy Hendry, editor of Chapman, he translated Maclean’s epic poem Hallaig. In Stepping Stones he explained that he had enough Irish to get the sense of the Gaelic, “partly because I have the cadences of it in my ear from hearing the poet read it, and partly because I know the kind of places the poem evokes -- a setting of deserted wallsteads, houses with roofs fallen in and gardens and outgoings all overgrown with shrubs and nettles, the kind of thing you used to see everywhere in Ireland, in the south and west especially, although there was just such a ruined dwelling on land very close to our own place in Derry.”

This sense of place runs through Heaney’s poetry like veins in cheese. Though he has long lived in the Republic -- a move seen by some as escape, but actually motivated by a desire to find a settled home for his family and a place in which he could write -- more often than not his point of reference remains the stomping ground of his youth, in those fields rank with cow dung and with a soundtrack of farting frogs sitting poised “like mud grenades.” His best poetry is resonant of his roots. As a child, he wrote in Personal Helicon, “I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells/ Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.” And so he does still.

His most recent book is yet another confirmation of the connection between him and Scotland, a jocose translation from the Scots of Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables. For Heaney it was an act of homage and an opportunity, afforded by his clout as Nobel laureate, to press upon his publisher a book that might otherwise be deemed too recherche. Was he worried about taking on such an onerous task? “The pleasure principle carried me over the anxiety.”

But what drew him to Henryson? It was the sighting in the British Library, he says, of an early illustrated manuscript of Henryson’s fable The Cock and the Jasp. Immediately he was transported back to Derry and those years that formed the poet. Outside the door of Mossbaum farm was a scene common to Henryson and Heaney, a dunghill on which “many’s a time” there was rooster, and in an instant the 500 years and more that separated the two bards were gone.

Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, translated by Seamus Heaney, is published by Faber & Faber, priced £12.99. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O’Driscoll, is published by Faber & Faber, priced £9.99.