‘Stepping Stones’ (2008) is a book in which Seamus Heaney discusses his work, with Dennis O'Driscoll. John’s review of the book appears below:
‘Stepping Stones’ Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Dennis O'Driscoll, Faber. A Review
When Seamus Heaney came to Melbourne in 1994, he had not yet won the Nobel Prize and could still play an away game. He participated in three memorable events and was responsible for deep enjoyment among those present. As he talked and read from his poetry, its themes opened up and the tone of his voice provided a sense of the weave and heft of his writing.
‘When you write’, Heaney says in ‘Stepping Stones,’ the main thing is to feel you are rising to your own occasion'. Marshalling the strength, memory, belief, shyness, humour and philosophy required to do this, is what ‘Stepping Stones’ is about. A roughly chronological record of Heaney’s life and work, the book takes the form of a series of interviews conducted with fellow poet and friend Dennis O'Driscoll, whose excellent map of the territory gives the book its structure. Most of the questions, responses and exchanges were written rather than spoken and there has been some criticism of this from the Lilliputian cavalry on the basis that Heaney could have been put under more pressure by direct confrontation. Pay no attention. Heaney has long needed to find safe ground for open, relaxed and generous discourse. And incidentally, even when putting the shutters up, Seamus will go very nicely. At a full house session in Melbourne he was asked how he would define religious poetry. He leaned into the microphone as if he were at the House Un-American Activities hearings and explained ‘Religious poetry is that poetry in which the exclamatory particle 'O’ figures considerably'. No trouble.
Seamus Heaney was the eldest of nine children in a nationalist Catholic Ulster farming family. At the age of eleven he won a scholarship, which took him away to boarding school and by twenty-two he had a first-class honours degree. The farm that had given him his bearings was behind him and the pull of home was moving from his life to his poetry. He writes of this realisation in an early poem,
‘But I’ve no spade to follow men like that.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it’.
‘Digging’ (1966)
Heaney’s beautifully remembered South Derry childhood nevertheless provides the historical nucleus of his life and work. In ‘Digging’ we hear the tribal vernacular he has kept in an inside pocket at all times. The circumference of his life has since widened to embrace other languages, work at Berkeley and Harvard, acclaim at home and abroad. But he still holds a poetry book the way a farmer holds an almanac of cattle prices and crop yields. He is practical, friendly and weather-wise and when amused, as he often is, his eyes close with pleasure. The Heaney nucleus also features an instinct for the resolving chord in things; for finding the balance in words and ideas. In another early poem he sees the military disparity of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, in which the French arrived too late to help and were given an ice-cream by the English and sent home, while the Irish rebels were slaughtered. Still in his twenties, Heaney’s impulse was not to rail against injustice; that would be rhetorical. It was to find in the real story, an image which was as sure as the rhythm of the seasons. The Irish soldiers, ill-equipped and hungry, were given a handful of barley to put in the pockets of their greatcoats
‘No kitchens on the run, no striking camp -
We moved quick and sudden in our own country’…
…‘Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.'
'Requiem for the Croppies’, (1969)
Heaney’s first Faber book of poems, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (1966) was an immediate success. He was twenty-seven and working as a teacher. His next books were also successful and he was increasingly sought as a speaker, lecturer and professor. In 1972 Clive James recognised the power in Heaney’s verse and in 1975 Robert Lowell described him as ‘the best Irish poet since W B Yeats’. He was hailed, feted and wreathed in prizes. This led to the usual trouble. It was all happening to him too early, some said. It would fade, they predicted. ‘Famous Seamus’ they joked. He couldn’t keep it up, they agreed. The next book would be a dud, they reasoned. But they were not really talking about Heaney. He did not heap these garlands upon himself. And it wasn’t happening fast; it was just happening. And actually, there was plenty in the tank. His reading was wide and deep and, all through this book, Heaney illustrates with examples, images, metaphors and quotations from other writers. He was also learning to trust his personal experience, to write out of his own places and people and to invest intimacy in the language itself. One thing is very obvious about Heaney; he is patient. He has never forced the pace. The writing that interests him is not a race. It’ll happen or it won’t.
It did happen. The books continued to come; poetry, criticism and translations. In 2000 he published his translation of ‘Beowulf’ from Old English. It was a sensation, enriching the language at its source. In doing this work Heaney used words we use now but only those that come directly from Old English. Old English words are short, strong, stalwart, conveying meaning, not flourish. He gave as an example the section from the Churchill speech, which begins ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ and ends ‘We shall never surrender.’ The only word in it which does not come from old English, is ‘surrender.’
Throughout ‘Stepping Stones’ the reader is surfing in language. Heaney can lilt from a serious point to a softening aside or another thought without losing ‘the whole thing’. His English is assured, exhilarating and colossal, but not complex. He returns often to Robert Lowell’s landfall line ‘Why not say what happened?’ It is never unclear what Heaney is saying and his poetry is able to be read by anyone. When his mother died he wrote a sequence of short poems called ‘Clearances’. Read them when your mother dies. When his father died he wrote a sequence called ‘Crossings.’ When his children were born he wrote about it. When his country was in turmoil he wrote about it. When he and Marie were young marrieds living in a country cottage he wrote the Glanmore Sonnets (1979). When he wanted something new, he journeyed to the bogs of Jutland, digging again but in an older place.
At the heart of this book is an investigation into what Heaney thinks matters and how to say it. In ‘Preoccupations’ (1980) he asked ‘How should a poet properly live and write?’ He found some of his answers in Eastern European writers who were ‘keeping on’, who prevailed through horrors; the Czech Miloslav Holub, the beguiling and deadly Joseph Brodsky and the man Heaney describes as ‘the giant at my shoulder,’ Czeslaw Milosz. Read Heaney on his admiration for Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz. Read him also on his fellow feeling for Ted Hughes or the playwright Brian Friel. Read him on his aunt Mary, on Elizabeth Bishop and on Yeats. When Heaney speaks of the ways in which people have helped him in his poetry, he is not always talking about an insight into where he could tighten a stanza. Often it is a kindness, some support, a wink.
Ulster humour is dark, nutritious stuff. When Heaney showed his friend John McGahern the house he had recently purchased, McGahern pondered upon it. ‘Well’ he announced, ‘You’ve bought the coffin.’ When Heaney had a stroke, from which he has now recovered, Brian Friel visited him in hospital. Friel had had a stroke himself a few years previously and comforted his friend with the insight, ‘Different strokes for different folks.’
If you like poetry or think you might, if you are a writer or might be, if you value place, memory and language, you might enjoy this remarkable book.