Posted on subsubpoetics.......


Cosmo Landesman meets Seamus Heaney

Poet and superstar: Heaney, unlike Beckett, is comfortable with the fame his
literary prizes have brought



A glittering prize at the end of every line



[This article is subject to a legal complaint]


Last Tuesday, at the Whitbread book award ceremony in
London, Seamus Heaney, that great literary heavyweight of
Ireland, approached the stage to collect his £21,000 winner's
cheque accompanied by flashing lights and music that had all
the tacky triumphalism of a Sylvester Stallone Rocky movie.

Sixty-year-old Heaney had just scored a remarkable victory
over a young English wizard called Harry Potter. And he did
it with a kind of magical alchemy that would impress Potter
himself. Heaney took Beowulf, a piece of 10th-century
Anglo-Saxon poetry, considered by many to be the most
boring book any student of English literature has ever
suffered, and turned it - via the hocus-pocus of a new
translation - into a wonderful read.

Well, that's what everyone is saying. But then everyone says
wonderful things about Heaney every time he puts pen to
paper. P D James has called him "one of the greatest poets of
the 20th century". When Heaney won the Whitbread for the
first time in 1997, the critic Malcolm Bradbury said: "Poets
admire him to adulation. He is the poet of poets." Heaney
couldn't write out a shopping list without winning some kind
of an award.

I was all set to meet the great man at the Savoy hotel when
word came that he wanted to cancel. Heaney was
stressed-out from the attention, and no doubt slightly frazzled
from a punishing, five-hour lunch with his publisher, Matthew
Evans of Faber and Faber, at the Ivy restaurant in London's
West End, just after his exhausting night of mass adulation at
the Whitbread.

The superstar poet turned up wearing a dark suit and the kind
of tie only a poet would wear - a fuzzy, purple thing that
looked as if it had been made from the fur of a cat's tongue.
His hair is the colour of ice, the eyes are young and brown.

He let it be known that he would have to rush off after our
time was up, and that a car was on its way. He had, of
course, to collect another award, this time the Melvyn Bragg
seal of approval on the South Bank Show.

To borrow from the fate of T S Eliot's J Alfred Prufrock,
Heaney has measured out his life in glittering prizes. It began
at the age of 11, when the bright farm boy from Northern
Ireland won a scholarship to a prestigious Catholic boarding
school. Since then he has won the Nobel prize for literature
(in 1995), before that the Somerset Maugham award, and
now the Whitbread twice, as well as almost 30 others. So I
say to him, half-jokingly: "Don't you ever get sick of all this
success - the standing ovations, the slaps on the back, the
critical admiration of other poets, the love of the common
people, the . . ."

"No, I don't get weary," he says in a flat, matter-of-fact
voice.

I wait for the next bit, but sensing that's all I'm getting from
the great one, I say: "Come on, don't you ever crave the
unknown, illicit thrill of failure?" I throw in a wink for good
measure.

"I think failure is always available and it can go along with
prizes. I can say with honesty and pleasure that I have never
sought any award in any way," says Heaney. "I've never
networked, never gone after these things. They've come after
me."

He makes success sound like a mad stalker that won't leave
him in peace.

But isn't he in danger of becoming the Lynsey De Paul of
literary prizes - prepared to turn up to any old event in order
to be seen and celebrated? At least Samuel Beckett couldn't
be bothered to go and collect his Nobel prize, and he turned
down lots of others.

"Beckett was true to himself in the way he conducted himself,
I am true to myself in the way I conduct myself. I have a great
indifference to a lot of this ballyhoo," or so insists the
solemn-sounding Heaney.

I'm tempted to point out that you'd never have caught
Beckett being collected from the Savoy to go to a
programme like The South Bank Show. But I sense that the
great man isn't in the mood for a little bit of healthy criticism.

For when, at the start of our conversation, I suggested that it
was odd that he should have won the Whitbread for
translating another author's book, he didn't want to talk about
it. "It's not up to me to comment on that, you should be
asking the judges about this," he says in no uncertain terms.

"Well, what about those judges? Do you think it was wrong
to have celebrities such as Jerry Hall, Imogen Stubbs and
Sandi Toksvig judging works of literature?"

"Again, I'm not going to comment one way or the other. It's
not my business." And here Heaney goes silent in a way that
says this interview is going badly.

I feed him a question he can have some fun with. "Well, how
did you hit it off with Jerry Hall?"

"Look, as far as I'm concerned this is not the kind of
interview I want to do."

Well, excuse me Mr Poet. What, I wondered, would he like
to discuss - pythiambic verse, pythian meter or the use of
dactylic hexameters in Horace's Epodes, for Christ's sake?
My question isn't as silly as it may seem. The word is that
Hall cast her vote for Beowulf in what has been described by
one judge as a tense and divisive 90-minute meeting, which
ended in a 5-4 split in Hea-ney's favour. So his view of Hall
is certainly relevant and interesting.

Luckily, Heaney takes pity on me and picks up on the topic.

"Look, I met Jerry Hall years ago with Mick Jagger in
Ireland, and I never really spoke to her, I don't know her.
But it seems that she had read all the books, and had a
discreet and firm presence on the panel, and I was impressed
to read that."

And I get the impression that he was less than impressed with
his main opponent, Harry Potter. This is the first year that the
Whitbread has had a category for children's books, and some
critics have claimed that the inclusion of Potter on the main list
is an outrage. So what did Heaney think of the competition?

"I've never read a Harry Potter book," he says. "I've
skimmed over the surface of it. But I wouldn't have been
disappointed if it had won. I think children's books are very
important. I spent many years as a teacher trying to introduce
teenagers to the value of imaginative writing, so,
philosophically, I am entirely in favour of children's literature
as a category."

But not in the main prize? Heaney gives me glum look, and
makes no sound.

It's when we turn to the topic of poetry that he becomes
more personable and passionate, like a professor intoxicated
by the topic he truly loves.

Today, some of us will be sitting slumped in front of the
television or take off for a spot of shopping, an afternoon of
sports or a session in the pub. Could Heaney explain why our
precious Sunday might be better spent in devoting some of
our time to the reading of poetry?

"It's an anthropological necessity. Because, if you didn't have
poetry, everything would slip back into media-speak. Poetry
is religious in its contemplation of experience under the eye of
eternity. It helps us to live our lives in the face of destruction.
It can give us a spiritual strength.

"I hope I'm not sounding pompous," he says, with a little
self-deprecating laugh, "but poetry is also about pleasure,
something that can move and delight us. You don't have to be
a specialist reader to have a place for poetry in your life."

Little is known about the private life of Seamus Heaney. In
1965 he married Marie Devlin, a teacher, and they have three
children. They live in what is said to be a comfortable but
unprepossessing home in Dublin. He does not care to discuss
it.

"Certainly not. It's nobody's business."

I try again. How does his wife like being married to a poet?

"We're fit for each other in all senses," he replies. So, he's not
one of those, mad, bad and dangerous to know type of
poets?

He grins. "You'll have to ask somebody else about that."

How does he feel about being cast in the role of the poet as
the moral conscience of a nation, against the background of
the Troubles in Northern Ireland?

"It would bother me if I'd set myself up in that way. But it's
impossible to be a child of Northern Ireland and not be
deeply implicated in all the entrapments of the place."

Indeed, Heaney has always been at pains to point out that he
is not a British poet, but Irish. But he has been criticised by
some for not having been more committed to the cause of
Irish nationalism.

His friend, the poet James Fenton, says, however, that
Heaney has managed to "be true to a kind of nationalism
which isn't corrupted by the Provos".

It was in the 1970s that Heaney made the decision to move
away from Ulster, one reason being that he had received
death threats. So, in the wake of the peace process, is he
optimistic about the future of Ireland?

"Yes, there's definitely been a turning point in Irish history. I'm
more optimistic than I've ever been in my life. And I think the
21st century will see a better life for people in Northern
Ireland," he says.

And then he adds, with a little mischievous smile: "But it won't
necessarily see better people for a good while."

And, with that, he's off to chat to Melvyn.

from
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/01/30/stirevnws03016.html?999



Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided on Times
Newspapers' standard terms and conditions. To inquire about a licence to
reproduce material from The Sunday Times, visit the Syndication website.

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