On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
My father gave me this beautiful volume in hard-cover. I refer to it all the time, one of the most important books in my library. It is a collection of prose writing from Seamus Heaney from 1971 to 2001. There are memoir-type pieces, as well as lengthy analysis of different poets and authors. Some of his wonderful book reviews are also included (I always kept my eyes peeled when he was alive for his byline. You knew it would be something good.) A lot of the people he writes about I am familiar with, but then there are those gaps in my reading, gaps for no reason other than life is short and I can’t get to everything. But he makes you want to pick up whatever book it is he discusses and experience it for yourself. There is some overlap in content with The Redress of Poetry.
There are personal essays, about his youth, the many aspects of it: the birth of the language issue in his head, at first buried but then more and more clear, the political, the explosion in the North of Ireland and how he experienced it, the trauma of it (all aspects of it) – but also his discovery of literature, his early encounters with the poets and authors who showed him the way.
While Heaney will always be remembered mainly for his poems, the amount of prose he put out there is overwhelming. The scope of his reference points. His ability to see connections, to unearth similarities, to draw from his vast store of knowledge in the process of writing in order to find the perfect analogy, a connection that will crack his topic open. He does it repeatedly. It makes one feel like a dumbass. I treasure that, because it reminds me of how much there still is to learn, how wonderful growth of this kind is.
The book opens with a series of essays about Heaney’s childhood. I love how he talks about the associations he made, as children do – this object/landscape/smell reminded him of time/place/era, and this object/landscape/smell somehow opened up the world for him … so when he sees THIS object/landscape/smell again he always thinks of such-and-such. His essays are full of those sorts of memories, things that we all experience as children but that he is able to make explicit and beautiful. This is the material poets work with. His memories of Belfast in the early 1970s are harrowing (he went into that a lot in his Nobel lecture), and Finders Keepers is a very political book. Things like language is political in Northern Ireland. The accepted literary canon is political. Book publishing is political. Heaney grew up in a British state, but he knew, somewhere, that he was different. Catholics were shut out of job opportunities, economic growth, and, on another level that was very pertinent to him, there was no sense of official Irish-ness in Northern Ireland. Poets who were born there, who identified as Irish, were still looped in with British-ness. He, and his group (called, casually, “The Group”), poets who started publishing the 60s and 70s, were devoted to carving out a little space for themselves, an Irish space, some breathing room. They all went at it in different ways. And then 1968 came. And the horrible 70s. And the position of poets from Northern Ireland became political. Everyone was meant to “weigh in.” You couldn’t write a poem without it being connected to politics. Heaney writes a lot about that too. As we move along, I’ll excerpt some of that.
This is an essay on T.S. Eliot. Eliot was in the canon, beneath only Yeats and Joyce. He was so entrenched in the establishment that his poems were like monuments in an open field, commemorating something mysterious, something school-children had to learn about. So there was THAT barrier to “getting into” Eliot. He was just so massively respected that people treated him with awe and reverence, and that doesn’t leave a lot of room for a school kid having to read “The Waste Land.” Heaney is very honest about all of that. He writes about it in the essay, and he writes about how the way Eliot’s poems were taught were in a strictly historical/social context, i.e. With the cataclysm of WWII, certainties shattered, and Eliot’s poems are about that. Yes. Of course. I learned that in high school about T.S. Eliot, too.
But the surrounding context of Eliot’s world doesn’t help all that much with understanding the poems. Heaney struggled with it. There seemed to be a barrier between him and Eliot. Eliot’s stuff was not accessible to him. Some of it seemed purposefully obscure. He couldn’t crack into the poems. They remained closed, out of reach, glorious accomplishments everyone agreed … but WHY, Heaney wanted to know. He was intimidated by Eliot. He was such a massive figure. What is there to be “learned” from Eliot? And HOW to learn it, when the way he is discussed seems to act automatically as a barrier to any kind of deeper understanding?
Eliot requires patience and submission. That’s true. He can be bafflingly private with his associations. That’s part of it.
I wrote about my brief Eliot phase here.
Heaney had the sense as a young lad, and then older, when he had to teach Eliot in his classes, that he was in the presence of something so genius that it was way way BEYOND him. I’ve had such experiences, as I am sure we all have. There’s a chapter in Ulysses that, honestly, I realize I am not educated enough to understand. Doesn’t mean I didn’t read every word, but there is a definite feeling of inferiority in the attempt. An almost helpless I will never catch up feeling. This type of thing is what annoys those who sneer about “elitism”, and is something I used to experience in the old days on my site when I dared to write about Joyce with enthusiasm and familiarity. “Tom Clancy’s good enough for me,” quipped one douchebag. As though it’s “either/or,” as though me writing about Joyce was somehow an indictment of him. So silly. I was embarrassed for that guy for his comment. Choose limitations! Have at it!
Anyway, my Eliot thing had to do with Cats, as well as his use of adjectives in “Love Song of Alfred J. Profrock,” something I couldn’t quite understand or verbalize, but I knew that the imagery in that poem completely transported me. I had ZERO idea what he was talking about and it didn’t seem to matter.
And that seems to be part of Heaney’s part, in terms of Eliot’s actual language.
I’ll let him have at it now. In the preceding paragraph, Heaney quotes this excerpt from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Heaney also discusses Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’ quite a bit, so if you’d like to follow along …
Excerpt from Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
All this is extremely interesting to remember now, for it persuades me that what is to be learned from Eliot is the double-edged nature of poetic reality: first encountered as a strange fact of culture, poetry is internalized over the years until it becomes, as they say, second nature. Poetry that was originally beyond you, generating the need to understand and overcome its strangeness, becomes in the end a familiar path within you, a grain along which your imagination opens pleasurably backwards towards an origin and a seclusion. Your last state is therefore a thousand times better than your first, for the experience of poetry is one which truly deepens and fortifies itself with reenactment. I now know, for example, that I love the lines quoted above because of the pitch of their music, their nerve-end tremulousness, their treble in the helix of the ear. Even so, I cannot with my voice make the physical sound that would be the equivalent of what I hear on my inner ear; and the ability to acknowledge that very knowledge, the confidence to affirm that there is a reality to poetry which is unspeakable and for that very reason all the more piercing, that ability and that confidence are largely based upon a reading of Eliot.
Of course, the rare music of ‘The Hollow Men’ was never mentioned in school. Disillusion was what we heard about. Loss of faith. The lukewarm spirit. The modern world. Nor do I remember much attention being given to the cadence, or much attempt being made to encourage us to hear rather than abstract a meaning. What we heard, in fact, was what gave us then a kind of herd laughter: the eccentric, emphatic enunciations of our teacher, who came down heavily on certain syllables and gave an undue weight to the HOLlow men, the STUFFED men. And needless to say, in a class of thirty boys, in an atmosphere of socks and sex and sniggers, stuffed men and prickly pears and bangs and whimpers did not elevate the mood or induce the condition of stillness which is the ideally desirable one if we are to be receptive to this poet’s bat-frequency.
I was never caught up by Eliot, never taken over and shown to myself by his work, my ear never pulled outside in by what it heard in him. Numerous readers have testified to this sudden kind of conversion, when the whole being is flushed by a great stroke of poetry, and this did indeed happen to me when I read Gerard Manley Hopkins. From the start something in my make-up was always ready to follow the antique flute of sensuous writing, yet when this kind of writing made its appearance in Eliot – in Ash Wednesday, for instance – its very plenitude was meant to render its beauty questionable. It signaled a distraction from the way of purgation:
At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs’s fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.
The fact that within the finer tone and stricter disciplines of Eliot’s poetry, these lines represented what he would later call ‘the deception of the thrust,’ did not prevent me from being deceived into relishing them. And in that relish two things were combined. First of all, a single unbewildering image was presented. To read the passage was to look across a deep lucidity towards a shaggy solidity, as if in a Renaissance painting of the Annunciation the window of the Virgin’s chamber opened upon a scene of vegetal and carnal riot. Second, the language of the lines called in a direct way, in a way that indeed skirted the parodic, upon the traditional language of poetry. Antique figure. Maytime. Hawthorn. Flute. Blue and green. The pleasures of recollection were all there. The consolations of the familiar. So that combination of composed dramatic scene and consciously deployed poetic diction appealed to the neophyte reader in me. To express the appeal by its negatives, the poetry was not obscure, neither in what it was describing nor in the language that did the describing. It fitted happily my expectations of what poetry might be: what unfitted it was all that other stuff in Ash Wednesday about leopards and bones and violet and violet. That scared me off, made me feel small and embarrassed. I wanted to call on the Mother of Readers to have mercy on me, to come quick, make sense of it, give me the pacifier of a paraphrasable meaning and a recognizable, firmed-up setting:
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live?
My panic in the face of these lovely lines was not just schoolboy panic. It descended again in my late twenties when I had to lecture on Ash Wednesday as part of a course for undergraduates at Queen’s University, Belfast. I had no access to the only reliable source for such teaching, namely, the experience of having felt the poem come home, memorably and irrefutably, so the lecture was one of the most unnerving forty-five minutes of my life.
