Silly Old Twit

Some time ago , 25 years ago that is…..I met the poet Seamus Heaney. I never met Robert Lowell or Elvis but like I say , I did meet Heaney.

I wrote to him , as I said , about 25 years ago. I was having trouble getting some of his books , not his regular editions but privately printed limited editions of his , and so I wrote to him to see if he could help me in some way. I did not really expect to get a reply so I was delighted when he wrote back and suggested that I call down to see him. (I live , perhaps a mile and a half from Sandymount where his home is.)

As I was walking up Sandymount Road with Dublin Bay on my left I happened to meet him in the street. It was about 12:00 noon , sometime in late Summer and there was a pleasant sea breeze as we met and I shook his hand. I remember the first question I asked him. “What’s it like to be famous , to be the Elvis Presley of poetry ” ? Now that may seem a somewhat odd question or even a foolish one so let me explain.

I could of course have asked him some ‘profound’ question about the Greek poets perhaps but the truth of the matter is that I wasn’t really interested in his opinion of the Greeks or any other poets for that matter. Why after all would I be interested in another man’s opinion when I’ve got my own ? But I was interested to know what it was like to be famous. I had never met anyone really famous before and let’s face it , we are bombarded with images of the famous from the moment we become conscious of the wider world. So I asked him , “what’s it like to be famous “. And it turned out to be a good question because while still yet in the street he began to talk about just that.

He talked the of fact that he hadn’t actually made any money from the books he had published ( five at that point in time). That apart from his salary teaching he had not made any money from his fame at all. He told me how much he had paid for his house ( he got in just before the prices started to move upwards) and what it cost to put his kids through school and that sort of thing. We were walking along as he spoke and I think he was talking to himself as much as to me….he spoke of how it could be awkward , even embarrassing to be famous. He explained that he often might be in company with a fellow poet ( a better poet than him as he put it) and people would talk to him , ask his opinion while ignoring the sometimes older and better poet at his side. He spoke of the jealousies and enmities that it brought with it.

When we got to his house he brought me up to his study , a small room overlooking Dublin Bay , and we talked about poetry and poets. It was a pleasant experience apart that is from the smell. The smell , I hasten to say came not from his room but from the beach beyond his window. The sewage from all over Dublin City is deposited in Dublin Bay and in the summer it smells…it really smells. While I was there he was signing the sheets for his limited edition , “Poems and a Memoir”. Just the sheets of paper , the book itself had not been bound at this point. As I say , it was a really nice experience and before I left he gave me some of his own poems , drafts that is , with revisions in his own hand.

I called down to his house two or three times after that ( he invited me). To be honest I cannot remember what we talked about but I suppose it had to do with poetry. But I can remember one conversation….. We were sitting in his kitchen. By ‘we’ I mean there were two other people there , one a fellow who had something to do with Field Day Publishing and the other guy was some artist who’s name I have since forgotten.( I have a long standing interest in Irish art so the fact that I cannot even remember his name will give you an indication as to the nature of the ‘artist’). Well , there we were , the four of us , with a bottle of wine on the table and the sun streaming in the window. The conversation was ( as we Irish say) terrific. Somewhere along the way Heaney told a joke about Robert Lowell. It seems that when he was introduced to Lowell the American just looked at him and said , “My friends call me Robert , but you can call me Bob”. Ok , it’s not that funny but it sounds a lot better after a couple of glasses of wine. I was sitting with my back to the window , my chair slightly back from the table , almost a spectator and it occurred to me that this was the kind of little anecdote that biographers love to record.

Later , as I walked home I couldn’t help but think that yes , yes that little anecdote might well find it’s way into some biography of Seamus Heaney but I would most certainly have been airbrushed out of it. A sobering thought but a true one nonetheless.

And I did in fact later meet one other famous person , a serial killer called Dennis Nilsen……. Oh , and I passed Bono one day on O’Connell Bridge but I didn’t stop to talk to him so I guess that really doesn’t count.

You can find an interview with Heaney on Youtube by following this link.