A Smiling Public Man

Summary

As Heaney became more famous and influential, he often succumbed to the “friendship rack” and turned out a torrent of recommendations and blurbs. He told the poet Charles Simic that the “jubilant truth-to-impulse, the invention and laconic cluedinness of the work you’ve been doing is really heart-lifting.” The less deserving Anne Stevenson, biographer of Sylvia Plath, was bucked up by what he called her “different buoyancies, velleities, vigours, freshets, risks, frisks”—comments always vague enough to be apparently truthful. As his power began to subside from overuse, he metaphorically told one Guggenheim hopeful, “nowadays some of the starriest kites I’ve been tail to have failed to fly. I begin to wonder if I’m a dead weight.” Since the demands were unending, he had to declare a moratorium on the blurb game. But he was always a striking contrast to Mahon’s “pompous ass”; and to the savage wit of Vidia Naipaul, who awarded a second prize when nobody deserved a first, and crushed one hopeful novice by insisting, “Promise me you’ll never write anything again.” Heaney revealed an important and often unnoticed source of creativity, Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field (1964), which gave him a lift of creative excitement and surge of inspiration. He admired “those long sectioned late Whitmanesque things; plus, of course, the greenhouse poems…that helped to trust a frank celebratory kind of writing, made to feel that illiterate, inchoate memory-place-feeling-stuff was as important as ‘thought.’…He sways and gleams beautifully.” Heaney explained that his translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes was “about the artist and his relation to society. His right to his wound, his solitude, his resentment.” He also considered the important question, “do we trust the writer’s intentions or the reader’s understanding of what has been written,” and seemed to agree with D. H. Lawrence’s famous pronouncement: “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.” The poet enlivened his serious comments w...