The Letters of Seamus Heaney

The Letters of Seamus Heaney

Edited by Christopher Reid

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

To the already anachronistic-feeling enterprise of a fat collection of letters, editor Christopher Reid and Farrar, Straus and Giroux have added the baroque detail of the whole 800 pages being the letters of a poet, God save us all. The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, gone from us for a decade now, comes bubbling and chuckling forth in this new Letters of, and thanks to Reid’s superb job of making this volume accessible, the whole thing reads like overhearing the longest and most enchanting conversation imaginable. 

Reid is the perfect concierge of an editor. Heaney carried a library of reading and references around in his head, so even a good deal of his dashed-off (or, though he hated it, dictated) correspondence can be barnacled with allusions, echoes, and call-outs. None of this bricolage is fatal to the uninitiated – this is a writer who was always foremost clear – but Reid has removed even the slightest friction. People are identified, references are explained with a polite whisper of a footnote, dates and associations are smoothed into quick comprehensibility. Throughout his life, Heaney fired off quick letters, postcards, notes, faxes, much of it knick-knacked with poems, all in a happy profusion Reid has tamed and clarified without ever flattening. 

The collection follows Heaney through “the sheer outward-facing busyness” of his life, from school teacher in Belfast  to a steadily-mounting eminence in “long association, in a variety of posts” with Harvard University. It follows him from an unknown young man of letters hunting around for paying work to the odd position of being the world’s most famous living poet, corresponding with Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Czeslaw Miosz, Helen Vendler, Thomas Flanagan, hundreds of other writers, thousands of non-writers. “Fame brought with it incessant calls on Heaney’s time and mind,” Reid writes. “Scholarly acquaintances gave him their books to read, thesis writers assailed him with queries, strangers sent unpublished poems with requests for his advice or endorsement, administrators hoped to co-opt him for civic  projects – and he is both humorously and plaintively eloquent about the wear and tear on him that all this involved.”

“Duty, however,” we’re told, “prevailed …” In fact, Reid sees this as his organizing idea: “If my selection of letters has a principal theme,” he writes, “it is Heaney’s obligation to duty.” 

Readers can naturally see this as a damn shame. Since a letters collection ought not to have a theme, it stands to reason that any that do will suffer for it. Even in a volume as generous and rewarding as this, that mention of duty will make some readers wonder what they’re missing. That worry might be compounded in the book’s first half by the dominance of correspondence with Charles Monteith, Heaney’s editor at Faber and Faber and a literary figure more likely than not to bring duty to mind. Fortunately, other frequent names here, Heaney’s fellow poets Seamus Deane and Michael Longley, tend to provoke more human responses over the decades. Writing to Deane in 1977, for instance, Heaney is blunt about finances in tones that quickly disappear from the book and never return: “The fucking money-fears are so cruel as well as all the rest. I am at the moment in medias of res like that, over £2,000 overdrawn, and the water rising,” Heaney writes. “ … at my back I always hear the Bank of Ireland hurrying near.”

Wonderfully, Heaney was never shy of writing letters after he’d had a skinful, and his recipients were never shy of keeping them, and Reid isn’t shy of including them here, as when the poet pens a note to Bernard McCabe in 1989, messily celebrating the fact that they and their friends have somehow managed to succeed in the Republic of Letters:

Suddenly it’s all like 14 years ago: I remember coming back here around midnight, excited and inebriate, convinced that I should commit myself  to a throwaway (but writing) life, sitting in the sleeping house, elate, then waking hung-over and diminished … Anyhow, that inebriate, animated mood is upon me. And I simply fill this page in salute, in pleasure and celebration of our luck between all four of ourselves; doing a zany semaphore; blathering for pleasure …

But for good or ill, and no doubt for accuracy, Reid’s collection keeps coming back to duty. The later Heaney, Grand Old Man and Noted Writer (a status to be increased enormously in only a couple of years with his internationally-renowned translation of Beowulf), complains even on holiday about being tethered to work, writing in 1997 from Greece to Thomas Flanagan:

I am not altogether made for the grand tour, however; keep thinking of the mail piling up at home and the faxes gulping and slithering into one’s life and the requests for recommendations and introductions lurking … A feeling that sunlight and silence and free time on a Tuesday morning on a Greek island is an affront to the workers of the world.

And so this fat volume flows and rumbles on, irresistibly human and immediately readable in every register. Reid opens his brief Introduction by admitting that one of the foremost blessings of making a book like this was “to hear Seamus Heaney’s voice again, and yes, that’s exactly right. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News