Search 'The Letters of Seamus Heaney' for the poet (and myself) – Orange County Register

Normally, it’s only the celebrities who first approach a nonfiction book by flipping through the index, looking for their own name.

Unfamous, yet I found myself doing just that last summer as I strolled through the stacks of Blackwell’s in Oxford, one of the largest and most beautiful bookstores in the world.

I had taken off the shelf the British version of ‘The Letters of Seamus Heaney’, published by Faber & Faber there in the late spring (and now here by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), over 800 pages of correspondence from the great Irish poet.

Before he had become famous – outside Ireland at least; he was ‘Famous Seamus’ there in his thirties – before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his beautiful, groundbreaking, important oeuvre – a dozen of us at UC Berkeley had been lucky enough to be his students at a writing seminar in 1976.

He turned out to be not only a brilliant poet and essayist. He was also a brilliant teacher. We met at his borrowed, book-lined house in the hills of Berkeley, home of the critic and UC professor Mark Schörer. We read our poems. Whiskey was passed around. Those were the kind of afternoons that most young writers can only dream of – and yet they were ours.

“Lawrence,” he had said to me as the term ended. “If you’re ever in Dublin, come and stay with the family for a while.”

I probably never thought I would accept such an offer, I realized later. But after graduation, when I backpacked to Europe for five months, naive as any 21-year-old ever, I dropped a line and was assured that it would be fine to come and stay for a while.

I slept in the attic – later, after a renovation, Seamus’s bright writing room – there on Strand Road for more than a week. We talked, we smoked, we drank; I tried to help Marie in the kitchen, and with some babysitting for Catherine Ann, Michael and Christopher. We traveled to the West Country, where Seamus gave a talk at a small girls’ school. Then we drank Jameson’s in the break room with nuns!

And we stayed in touch for decades and were able to meet up occasionally. I stayed with family in Sandymount on another, shorter visit. One afternoon I took my grandmother O’Brien there. “And what can I give you to drink?” he asked her. “An Irish Coffee, please.” Stunned, he somehow struck one.

So my fear. What if I was a nice figure?

But I wasn’t in the index. Since the letters were arranged chronologically, I went to the fall of ’77, which would have been just after my stay. I had dodged a bullet, it turned out, even though I was part of the problem. In a letter to Berkeley English prof Thomas Flanagan – who had rung the doorbell during my stay in Dublin and I opened it, which somehow felt like the first adult moment of my life – Seamus wrote on October 18: “The Strand Road Hotel still has a few demands. Last week we had Shirley Samuels, a former writing student at Berkeley (F%#! says Mrs. Heaney) … and Marie’s sister and children from England (F%#! says Mr. Heaney). Anyway, it’s been quiet in the house for an hour or two – that’s what I thought. The electrician has just arrived…”

I was part of that cacophony. I felt guilty reading those words. And yet – the 25 books of new and selected poems, the five books of prose, the two plays based on Greek myths – that Seamus (1939-2013) created showed how generous he was with his time with me and so many others, still found the odd moment to scribble.

Including, like the hundreds of letters and emails printed here, from his teenage years to the end – including the beautiful and tragic two-word text he sent to Marie from a Dublin hospital just before he died: “Noli timere” (don’t be afraid) – show, a record of correspondence that wants to be read by anyone with the slightest interest in the best writing of our time – a way with words that so far thrills in the messages between just two people.

Editor Christopher Reid notes that the letters “intended to convey joy to a direct correspondent can now be enjoyed by contemporary listeners.”

From his home in Belfast in 1969 to friend Rosemary Goad, before the Troubles led him to move his family south to the Republic: “We are still short of water after the explosions and I am almost certain that the last flat wheel I got… was the work of Protestant saboteurs. You’re lucky you got rid of it.”

When, in 1977, from the pulpit of St Luke’s Church in London, he had praised his dear friend, the American poet Robert Lowell, who had called Seamus ‘the greatest Irish poet since Yeats’, ‘I was both honored and uncomfortable to be asked to become do it – what with (important poetry critic A.) Alvarez and Ted Hughes and William Empson and other dogs of heaven in the congregation – so that the finished piece tends towards the marmoreal.

What a word! I had to look it up: “made of or compared to marble.”

In 1998, to the American performance artist and musician Laurie Andersonwho had asked permission to use his ‘Lightenings VIII’, one of his most beautiful poemsabout a mysterious airboat that appeared to the monks of Clonmacnoise, in her multimedia show ‘Songs and Stories for Moby Dick’: ‘Please forgive me for being out of touch. I have now been all over the country. My apologies for not being able to pay enough attention to the material you sent, but I am happy to be involved in your project and that the poem stands as a small pennant for the great craft you are launching. Success comes to you. Seamus Heaney. PS Can you add ‘big’ before ‘hull’ – and restore the original lines?”

My only surviving written communication from Seamus was scribbled in a small pamphlet of poems about his children, published by a small Irish press: ‘Lawrence – to remember the family.’ And with his ballpoint pen he corrected a typographical error in one of them, with a slash.

Oh, I remember, Seamus. I do.

Larry Wilson is on the editorial board of the Southern California Newspaper Group.