Seamus Heaney interview (1996)

he is a great poet in a land that loves writing and poetry he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 Seamus Heaney is from Northern Ireland he is a first Irish Catholic to win the Nobel Prize he has written 11 volumes of poetry three books of criticism he teaches at Oxford did teach at Oxford and still teaches at Harvard he comes this hour for a conversation about his country about his work about his poetry and about his friends in poetry his works explore the conflicting experiences of his Irish heritage and speak to a human complexity that has no borders and no boundaries his latest collection is called the spirit level and it is due out in June and I am very pleased to have him here at this table on this broadcast for this conversation welcome thank you it's nice to have you here the interesting thing about this extraordinary honor is that you were almost the last person to know that is true yes yeah I was in Greece for the first time I was in a little fishing port called pilos on the south west of the Peloponnese I had spent the day before coming from Sparta over the mountains we were resting for a day we had a very intense time were in Athens Mycenae and then Sparta traveling with a Greek sculptor friend a Greek American Dimitri had Z whom I know at Harvard and his wife Cynthia Mary and myself and was I kind of just ardent wonderful time we were hermetically sealed in the in the actual intensity of of the of the sights and both senses as ites and we took this day of quiet and after lunchtime on the Friday I rang home because I knew my son Christopher would be around the house so I'm running about three o'clock four o'clock the afternoon and he said to me dad he said I'm so proud I just want it said that he's not here I said no what daddy said you have won the Nobel present well I mean I don't know what I felt I called my wife I said you better tell your mother because some instinct told me that you don't say I I have just won the Nobel Prize so it's okay to use that sentence as you or he another singer there's some deep law against that so Marie gets on the phone that's right yeah and and yes she do but she says are you sure have we called Stockholm yes well actually this was the next thing that he said you have to talk on start again because I mean they want to know if you will accept oh yes yeah yeah okay everything has its legal side yeah well we want to talk more about that what's your life been like since then because forever now it will be it's almost like your name will not be just seamus heaney but it will also be Seamus Heaney Nobel laureate how does it change you alone and it intensifies things that were there already but I don't think Edward it would I don't think I'm self-deceiving my I don't think I'm deceiving myself to say that it hasn't it hasn't changed in kind my life you know it has made the pressures that were there already more intense in other words mail and requests to read and requests to appear one way or another has that has to be dealt with your before I was like a goalkeeper who had a ball shot at him every four minutes but now there's a rule every 4 seconds ioniq forward serving it so and before also because I've always worked in the university and because I've done a certain amount of if you like educational work of of different sorts community in schools and so on and be invited I had to build I kind of shelter for myself within within that so so so I had prepared both physically and psychologically shelters and they're desperately necessary now in order to get back to Raya yeah you had watched your friend Joseph Brodsky who had handled it very well well I admired that in Joseph enormously first of all admired the the the unremitting humility a21 he knows Joseph it may be surprising to hear here to hear this word used about him but he he had he hadn't much respect for himself as a creature you know as a as a citizen you know there was no question of Here I am Joseph Brodsky bow down before me you know but he had an enormous he arrogated enormous rights to himself as a representative of of intellect and poetry you know so his his impatiens and his overbearing was always a kind of principled you know but he himself what went about without pomp or ceremony and conducted himself after the Nobel Prize with the same kind of smoking and moving along the corner of the street you know here socially and and everyone publicly he remained a Democrat and a free spirit in that energy was always actually that's a yeah of course just had such sheer genius of their high voltage of of energy intellectual know another way come back to this but he and Derek Walcott were friends of yours I don't know at what point maybe at Harvard that you came together or somewhere else well III had read I had read Derek Walcott long before I met him I met Derek much later on in the late 70s he also went through as the whole Caribbean did undoes went to a cultural and political development or crisis that was gone through in Ireland 1890s through to nineteen twenty or thirty you know when you with when you go towards independence from the colonial power then you conduct yourselves do you retain the manners as it were of the Conqueror of colonial or do you in your use your native resources as you see them and there was actually a there's there was and probably still is in the Caribbean that that is acted out in terms of styles you know and in fact in terms of poetry styles Derek Derek retained his as it were debt and loyalty to English language into the forms the traditional forms of English like sonnets and rhyme and and metrical metrical traditions you're about to celebrate what 57th birthday seven on a thousand thirteen was Moscow most bond that's right yes a little for your father was a farmer and also a cattle traitor that's right he they we had a small farm but his rail love was dealing cattle dealing going that we're talking about small communities were he would have traveled in a radius about 13 miles and he liked that I now realized he liked being on the road you know he wasn't he he he owned the farm he worked a bit on the farm but we had somebody who actually did most of you like being on the road because it gave him a chance to get away from I don't know that it wasn't so much of a matter of of avoiding anything as I think he was as they would say empowered when he got that he carried the one of the tools of the Catalina Strait is of course a stick you know a nice plant or a cane which has its uses as a guiding and right beating the cattle into light subsidy but it was also a little scepter you know yeah so so it was good on it there for powering an ennobling yeah yeah didn't go to college no and your mom did not go to no I know you were the first member of your family yes I was able to stun the phone the nine yeah yeah but my my father's sister Sarah she was a schoolteacher she had she had gone to college the 1920s and she had it wasn't that I wouldn't say there was anything I so to speak illiterate about the family there was a respect in the sense of the value of books and so on but there was just no there's no note no experience suit how do you think being Catholic in Northern Ireland shaped you well I think there are two parts to the question being Catholic and being Catholic in Northern Ireland I think being Catholic the longer I live the more I realize if the answer to that question is probably totally yeah well in one way yeah because the world I grew up in was intensely religious I mean first of all my mother was a woman of great faith of the same great religious devotion and they so the rituals of the household you know right through my times teenager would include night prayers you know the rosary and so on the actual social life of the week was based upon church-going was the outing yeah the the whole whole sense of of what what it was about was religious you know and when I went to college of course it was it was like a monastic regime what was it you associated with Protestant kids though you saw them employer I knew them and there was this great thing that little that went what was it Billy what about King Billy from oh yeah whenever they had the depending on who said it yeah but I mean I would make a distinction between if you like the the totally the radiance of inner Catholicism as a child and the sense of eternity and the sense of grace and God filled space that that I think of the sociological aspect in a minute but the older I get the more important I think that that inner expansiveness of justice and the actual supernatural sense of a universe drenched in in radiance you know yes that that's that's absolutely central then there's being a Catholic in Northern Ireland which is nothing to do with what I'm talking is to do with the social rule is to do with being in a minority to do with being in the minority and all that Allu yeah yeah I mean I could talk with this for half an hour but all that they say is true of course both about the sense of difference and of the skin negotiating skills I mean between the groups you know Catholic Protestant at school charting abuse at each other but not being part of the ritual you know I was quite lucky in that I grew up in the country it did if I had to think if I had grown up in in Belfast say on the Falls Road I'd have grown up in a Catholic ghetto with a sense of the other out there on the Shankill Road and it would have been more heard like but I actually grew up face-to-face I mean that my next-door neighbor or the family closest to us were the Evanses across the road he was so to speak a Protestant so he was both both a play playmate and the other you know yeah and I mean I often think that I always remember one Christmas morning and this this to me over the years has become emblematic of the two traditions and so on I went over to him to see what he had got from Santa Claus and he had got a little quite a large it will tase a battleship with little guns on it and everything and it was kind of Royal Navy and it was total as a total loyalist Protestant unionist British masculine Imperial everything I wanted I got I had been given a kaleidoscope and I thought one I look back on say this is the totally Catholic gift you know so in word one bourbon no real possession yeah right this was the battleship represented yeah that was an important extension of birth right of control rollin yeah policing but in that particular countryside and because my father was on the road and a lot of the people he associated with we're Protestants a part of me hates using this language because it enforces kind of sectarian categories which he should be subverted but let me go to the politics of your friend John humans you've known him for a long time yeah are you hopeful now we had the ceasefire in 94 then we had it violated in the last three months are you hopeful that about the politics well I think we have moved from a situation where it was atrocious I mean atrocity was being committed constantly we have moved from a situation of the atrocious to a situation of the messy and that seems to me to be a hopeful the valancy is better than atrocious absolutely and it is surely I mean there is some kind of false hope engendered that politicians will solve the world you know I mean they can't what what they have to do is keep it keep the problem on the move but I think it is conceivable that this ceasefire would be violated again so to speak the occasional bomb but as long as we don't return my idea believe we will return and hopeful to this extent I do not believe that the IRA will mount a campaign again of the sort that was going on because the consequences would be hellish you know you're a powerful poem casualty well that was that was about a man who was caught and blown up thrown up in an explosion in a pub because he was he was in between every all the pressures I mean and I was very very interested in him because once again he was emblematic he was emblematic of divisions and questions I couldn't have written about him except I knew him and he was very very fond of him this man this man only Lewis O'Neill was his name he had he had gone out on a night when there was a curfew on and the curfew what was called by the Provisional IRA said don't go out don't go out tonight we are in mourning for the 13 men the British Army has shortened Derry this was 1972 that wasn't a trust be committed by the british paratroopers they did shoot these people in cold blood in Derry so the whole Catholic community was outraged and in mourning and in solidarity and this man actually did go out for a drink to a Protestant pub nor wasn't wasn't poor backs it was now but it was a public was the puppet pretended to be closed but it was open the back or him so the the bomb came there as it were and so he you know he had been punished for breaking ranks at the same time I mean if you are James Joyce or Henry Gibson you break rank you know this is the path the path towards freedom is a rank breaking path you know so so there are those was there some people who thought you broke ranks when you move to Dublin and 72 I I've heard this but there weren't my ranks if they thought that because you were I don't know who I mean I I I'm not sure who would have who would have felt that I think maybe some Protestants oddly enough rather because there was a some notion that by moving to Dublin you betrayed the Catholics felt betrayed well III haven't I didn't think you'll hear that Noren surely did you feel i'll result a slight guilt of course yeah but but I would have been feeling guilt anyway I mean I'm very good at it the move I made in 1972 from Belfast in the north of Ireland to wicker on the Irish Republic had I notice clearly nothing to do with the political situation it had to do with it had to do with an inner development and inner necessity and myself as a writer as a poet to change my life to go from a place with a job and so on I was going freelance I had made this decision I was going to leave Belfast we were going to go actually we're looking at houses in County Derry and Connie Tyrone that is in Northern Ireland we were going to go from Belfast suddenly we were offered this cottage in Wicklow and it was we went to see it was beautiful place a kind of redemptive thing so we followed that but it was a it was a following of an inner compass which had to do with my own imaginative and psychic needs not political then of course once once I moved what happened was I know I was 33 at the time the Irish Times ran an editorial you know this this was that what I want him to what I'm talking about what's happening to me an inner an inner venture a private domestic move and then then it's written about in the paper in an editorial page so it becomes a public thing and from that moment as it were being in Wicklow took on a different meaning it took on political meaning and but it was it was a movement had to be made I mean I I don't I really don't know the answer to your question about you would have to ask other people about feeling betrayed or not my notion would have been that they would have felt verified you know somebody was leaving leaving the ship saying hell with that Union I don't know it poetry you once said it's about memory yes I mean I certainly in my own case and then as far as I can see in 80 or 90% of cases poems come out of some previous yeah that they the energy for poems is looks like a kind of psychic fossil fuel that's been there and it comes up yeah I think you've said there much is made of a metaphor that you have spoken to at least or people have written about that for you poetry is akin to digging yeah to gathering no how do you see that well that was a like like all blessed poems it was an accident that I connected the pen with the Spade of the earth exactly because when I was a youngster going to school most of the wisdom was handed on to you and for on proverbial form with nothing and one of the things that your elders would say to you especially when the so you're going going to school was the Pens easy carried you know and depends a lot later than the Spade so that's and and I wrote a poem called digging about I was about a sociological shift you know from being a farmer son in the field to being the scholarship boy writing to being the the poet for this first volume published and so on but then I went on to write poems about archaeological finds and so on and I mean I think this is a quite a natural image for for what poetic activity is because you are in negotiation with the unconscious with the dream part of yourself with the under life of the mind with the seller life and it is just a general and fairly common myth of what what does it begin with for you a poem usually would begin with an image a memory or something seem that that that immediately Howser has irradiance and an invitation to it you know know most once again those seed things quite often take on radians take on an uncanny thing because they relate to something previous you know I think everybody has these experiences were for no reason at all some some moment gets isolated what Joyce was called an epiphany you know something like a tractor sitting in a field in Iowa I remember it once drove past a field in Iowa and snow and there was a solitary tractor in the field and I had you know I haven't written about it but it's that kind of thing precisely it was started off but I would have ignited a point yeah it's it's based on accident on County this does it require certain arrogance to be a great poet well I prefer to drop all additives from the poet there is the non is itself a mighty one collet yeah it's a duty as a blogger no it is yes it's one of the few errs that retains a sacred aura it does in in even still it dies and it should be more skier 'some and it actually is we should use it and for it we too frequently say someone is a poet or some or what I see is poetry when it's not and it demeans well I don't know I use poetry I think I think the nineport seriously still still people people intend goodbye it when they said you know it's not used trivially usually it is yes in the sense in the strict sense of arrogance it is an articled act because you are Oh gate to yourself yes a word and to go back to an earlier part of a conversation that is when I left Belfast and went full-time writing I was at that point I are negated to myself the word poet and it happened in a very simple and and dramatic way I brought her two children down to the school in Wicklow which is in the Republic and Irish is the official language of the of the Republic and in some schools they enter the details of the child in Irish and the headmaster sir was writing down my address and so on and then he under the kind of said professional father he wrote done fi le which is the word filler which an Irish means poet and usually I would have demerged you know don't know just put in professor so it wasn't right okay no full-time filler and that and I think there is a difference between writing poetry and conceiving of yourself or allowing others to conceive of you as a port there is as I said a land your great poet in a land that loves great poetry what is it about well I don't place I think our two or three things there there is there is over the last two or three hundred years a language question a change of language a loss of the Irish language our learning of English so so that there is a repossession and a necessity to consolidate something but both a common cultural memory and an inner sense of psychic foundation maybe these are just guests there's that there's a there's a political unfinished Nisour the irish situation in one way Ireland is settled there is a republic independent and there is a British section linked over there but of course all the evidence is that it is unsettled so that when you have and that means that in some deep part of everybody's being there is an unsettled unfinished bit and there is a neediness for in wholeness and integrity and the poet provides that the writer provides that the well the sense of yes there is I think that's what that's what it does provide it is the it's not an illusion of wholeness is actually a glimpsed moment of wholeness or unintuitive wholeness that's what I think that's what artistic form poetic form poetic achievement is it's a feeling that something has been consolidated for that moment you know and so you could have a post-colonial theory of Irish poetry or you could have a kind of linguistic theory of it or you could have a a notion that good writers are great writers like Yeats and Joyce call forth more you know that that it's habit-forming as a way of life there is a greater I suspect a sense of appreciation certainly of the poet that noun then we have here I I think that is true I hesitate once again to exaggerate it but I do think it is true actually that the position that the word the poet has some public function I don't mean that they have the poet has to appear in public but in the arias time say of a poem by Nolan eternal or myself or Derrick man aware appears on a Saturday I mean the Prime Minister will probably read it you know the President may Rosalyn reynad the bishop the Protestant bishop the Catholic bishop of Dublin will read it your your friends will read it so so that is it's part of the language and it's part of the possessions and the name of the poet is part of the cultural possessions of the tribe still you know so so there is there is actually a real truth that and then there is a kind of chic truth journal so that you know etc but I think that that is not true in the States for for a poet you know it's very very difficult for any poet to that's partly because the size of the countries was very different for any port to the to be possessed you know by by the world around around him or her how do you see your or do you see you have a role and more and more as see my role is to write the best probes possible I would have thought that was an evasive answer 10 or 12 years ago yeah would I would think it is too but it's not now while it's not why is it why is it does a new role to be glad because I have actually professed poetry if you like I mean I have I have been a teacher I have done and I believe in these things I believe in standing up and giving lectures on poetry to undergraduates and I believed in doing the Oxford professorship because because partly I had a certain a certain gift for doing it separate from writing poetry and for teaching it for yeah for it's separate from writing explaining it yeah it's separate from writing it but the older I get I say now you've done your duty you have done well by the art you thought you paid your dues you're doing exactly but also paid just to society you've gone into schools you have you've also you know gone to the fundraiser for the good cause and so on stop it you know you also look back I went through my study with a friend who's kept a blog refer man has spent two months two years ago going through papers over the years the number of two or three page things as I had done for openings of exhibitions you know the number of introductions the number of letters written to people all of it part of part of the as I see at the Covenant you have with first of all the covenant with the unpublished that's one thing that ports have I think it's up to points to look after the next generation of poets I do believe that they should be doing the selection you know and and it should be selecting process the next generation yeah it should be listening you know they listening yeah they never tably they do and ratifying in a sense correct absolutely but see I don't let me just go once I because I at least had some impression that something like that happened to you at some point you became ratified you became you you you went into the mystery of the realm yeah and was like that's right yeah first I mean the first thing is rut the sense of excitement in yourself when you're right the second thing I mean that comes if you're lucky enough something will happen and you say I think I've done it you know yeah then you want to know you want some ratification when usually that takes the form of sending it out and having it published which is let us not forget a magical moment from the unpublished to the published condition I mean that is ratification then if you're lucky a book maybe and then you become a textual creature with the same name as yourself then if you're lucky again and I have considered myself to be blessed with luck you meet point you really admire who seem to think you're okay yeah and this happened to me with Ares ports and and the Ted Hughes for example and you're saying that that's the responsibility of people like you well well it's not a written down it's not a written thing but I do feel I do feel go let guys what yes it does but I also think that at the age of 57 you've stopped hearing what's happening to the 17 year olds you know yeah and also you have pitch for two yes so you know what's it about writing the best poetry you can what's that about well that's about redemption redemption yeah but just recalled making your soul I think for for someone who is a writer at the sense of self justification the set the sense of having major soul the sense of having made sense or made something of it is dependent upon the mysterious verification that comes with the sounds and words being put in the right order there is a sense of you have a Vance yourself a bit to arrive at where you were already and it's a very curious experience the writing of poem or indeed the reading of the reading an exciting reading which is give courage of carries you art with a sense of yes yes yes but you arrive at a place somehow that you for you you know and I think it is to do with wholeness and a sense that all that is possible as nearly got done do you think at age 57 approaching 57 do you think about different things now is the subject matter for you changing I don't know that the subject matter is changing I think that the perspective for the but Joseph Brodsky had this phrase which it came from Frost the plane of regard he was very fun playing of regard the fan of regards changes a bit you know but but the actual kick-starting think the things that move you the things that that you are temperamentally animated by or attracted to those won't change that much I mean the can't afford to change that much it's your sense of the world may widen or whatever but as a writer it's it's it's your nervous system your temperament your you know I mean conversation with you I'm reluctant to exaggerate because you'll slap me it is then I think someone said of Winston Churchill that he mobilized the language and saved a nation I think John F Kennedy said that in World War two have have you used your gifts as best they could be used yes I think so I mean I don't I mean I am NOT a political leader and I didn't have to mobilize anybody yeah but just to I had to move truly I've you're the best you can do is to try to be a true to what your inner Sixth Sense your quest doors and sensors or tell you that's the way I think the older you get maybe the less certain you are what what what your requests are sensors are telling you the more you know and the more experience you have the less sure you are sure your sensor that's sure you are yeah the less sure you are about your own but the rightness of your of you're doing because you've seen more yeah do any more and in the beginning you're obsessed with your own sense of what what I mean your instincts and your your entitlement to do this you know I don't know your righteousness but the older you get you realize that the quite often their implications for other people you know take being a parent you know you know you're very rare to me somebody whose children as I don't have 30 28 and 22 who thinks well I did that very well you really be no mistakes there no one says that no yeah it's impossible to do that right in one way yeah so cuz there's no falling others yeah but yeah there's no perfect way yeah me that many things if you had your life to live again you would do them differently of course but but you you you try not to deceive I suppose and you try to be as true as possible what would you do differently I'm not telling you if but but are there were there crossroads and steps and what I don't know much in which you had I was I think I think the crossroads would probably be the same I'll tell you the truth I mean the road not taken' so now no maybe just one one little career choice but that's that's not in the great scheme of things it's not snow here nor there so to speak yeah it's wonderful to have you here I want you to read something if you will this is from you picked at the spirit level and it is myth yeah it's poem called mint tell me about it before if whatever it's a memory of mint glue at the back of the house it's autobiographical in one way but I think mint is belongs to the species as much as to an autobiography the smell of mint is your FINA belongs to us when we were pretty stooped and close to the ground I like this point because it went farther than just my own memories that opened it opened up I think I know it by heart but just okay it's okay I would do the same mint it looked like a clump of small dusty nettles growing wild at the gable of the house beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles unburdened ever almost beneath notice but to be fair it also spelled promise and newness in the backyard of our life as if something callow yet tenacious sauntered in green alleys and grew rife the snip of scissor blades the light of Sunday mornings when the mint was cut and loved my last things will be first things slipping from me yet let all things go free that have survived let the smells of mint go heady and defenseless like inmates liberated in that yard like the disregarded ones we turned against because we'd failed them by our disregard thank you no seamus heaney Nobel Prize for Literature 1995 my thanks to John Scanlan and Pete Hamill who friends of yours who helped me understand and appreciate you and your work I thank you very much makes a little pleasure

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Length: 39min 46sec (2386 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 17 2016