Made in America

Seamus Heaney never hid his disapproval of the 'centrally heated' day dream of American reality, but the US did offer him a site from which to see the homeplace more clearly, writes Belinda McKeon

WHEN FIRST he spoke to America, Seamus Heaney did not soften the edge of his words. In fact, in his first major interview with an American newspaper, Heaney suggested that it was a certain softness in language that was most troubling him about America. There was, Heaney told the New York Times in 1983, such a "hunger to be comforted" in America, and such a surfeit of the kind of "bogus" language which rushed to offer that comfort, which aimed to say, first and foremost, that everything was all right. Everything was far from all right, Heaney's remarks suggested. And being in America, he said, made him acutely conscious of his "constant battle" as a poet: to choose between giving and wrecking comfort; between making beautiful, soothing things and tearing them down with the stark truths of the poet.

Heaney, at this time, was making huge strides in America. He enjoyed a strong and a rapidly growing readership there, having seriously impressed with his fourth collection, North (1975). He was gaining, too, a firm foothold in the academy; at Harvard, he had been appointed the successor to Elizabeth Bishop as poet-in-residence, and had an arrangement which saw him teach there for a semester each year.

Still, looked at today, the frankness of his diagnosis in the New York Times interview is striking; his wariness and uneasiness with America leap off the page. Soon, in another interview, he would extend that wariness to American poetry, deeming it (and the poetry of John Ashbery in particular) to be disconnected from the hard truths of lived reality, to be insulated within the "centrally heated" American dream. Though he enjoyed much about America, yet he was keeping his distance. Once his public and his academic commitments were through, it was back to Ireland, where the real work of writing was done.

No love lost, or little love lost - at least that's how it looked. Yet America adored Heaney; among critics and general readers alike, his popularity boomed ever larger with each passing year, and his reputation as a literary heavyweight was solidifying with each new collection, each essay, each lecture. Certainly, the impact of the critic Helen Vendler, whom Heaney had met at the Yeats Summer School in the 1970s, and with whom he reconnected while first at Harvard in 1979, was a factor in this success; Vendler became a champion of Heaney's work, and, herself a serious heavyweight, made a real difference with her endorsement. But not all of Heaney's American readers were finding their way to him through Vendler, or through Harvard, or even through the books pages of the New York Times; already in the 1980s, his appeal was far wider than that, and already he was blazing far ahead, there, of his fellow Irish poets. Even some questioning reviews of The Haw Lantern (1987) could not knock him off course. Heaney's rocketing reputation may well have had positive knock-on effects for the reception of Irish poetry, and Northern Irish poetry, more generally in the US, but Heaney was in a league of his own, long before his Nobel Prize win in 1995 sent him into another dimension entirely. His Northern Irish contemporaries, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, were highly esteemed by the poets and critics who knew their work, but those numbers were simply much lower than in the case of Heaney. From early on, his name was that thing so important in the US: a brand. Heaney books would sell in good numbers (and later, of course, in massive numbers). Heaney appearances at festivals or bookstores or on university campuses would draw large crowds (and eventually would cause queues several blocks long).

WHAT WAS IT about Heaney that drew, and held, American readers so? That he spoke often on college and university campuses; that he appeared often at public literary events; that he was, in his own words, "on the go" in this way from the success of Field Work (1979) onwards might have given some fuel to the fire of his popularity, but audiences flock to such appearances only if they already admire or know of the poet; this public profile was not the making of his renown. Neither was it sercured for him by the "ethnic vote", as Heaney described the Irish-American diaspora in that New York Times interview; his appeal went far beyond that section of his readership, Irish-American or otherwise, which might have been hungry either for the comfort of nostalgia or for the starkness of a poetic reckoning with the Northern Irish Troubles.

Nor did Heaney's critical eye on America glaze over with the passing of the decades since he sounded that warning against a language of bogus comfort. US politicians and political commentators up to, and including, the Obama team may have seized on the "hope and history" chorus from The Cure at Troy and quoted it at every opportunity, pivoting on its soaring emotion, treating it like an unofficial inaugural poem, but Heaney maintained the psychological distance which had been so important to him at Harvard, as well as the steel he had shown in that early interview. A poem like From the Land of the Unspoken (The Haw Lantern) castigated the shallow rhetoric of politics and of the mass media in capitalist societies, the reference to writers slumbering "at the very hub of systems" sharply recalling Ashbery's "centrally heated" daydream. And was there such an edge, too, in his Nobel lecture, with its reference to the dangers of "elevating the cultural forms and conservatisms of any one nation into normative and exclusivist systems", or does that only seem the case now, reading those words again at the end of the Bush administration?

Heaney was outspoken on that side of the US, too, talking to Adam Kirsch in 2006 about the "arrogance and stupidity" of the regime - about how those things had made him feel "implicated in American affairs in a new way".

And here, perhaps, is the key to understanding Heaney's abiding appeal and importance for American readers: not what he says about Iraq, or about 9/11 - or, indeed, what he said or did not say about Northern Ireland, when that debate over Heaney's responsibilities as a poet was raging - but the fact and the complexity of his grappling with the notion of such responsibilities, with the meaning of responsibility itself. Heaney writes, always, in ethical terms; he engages, in his poems and essays, with the ethics of art, with its relationship to the world. He questions the artist's own relationship to the social, cultural and political realities in which he finds himself. There is in Heaney's work a constant consideration of poetry and its uses, even as it is written. Heaney's poems work hard for their right to be read, even as that reading is taking place; it is an almost puritan diligence that, with his American readers, has served him well. His writings display and dramatise, also, those dilemmas which, by now, are painfully familiar to many Americans: how much to engage; how closely to intervene; how far distant to remain.

Seen in these terms, the connection forged by Heaney with his American public reveals itself as rooted, ultimately, in the early connection he forged with that American poet who was most important to him: Robert Lowell, whom Heaney first met by inviting him to read at Kilkenny Arts Week in 1975. And perhaps, ultimately, it was Lowell who truly made the difference for Heaney in the US, and not simply because he declared him the most important Irish poet since Yeats. Rather, it was through his reading of Lowell that Heaney could begin to identify and interrogate his own ethical command, could begin to worry the conflict between private and civic identities and responsibilities, between the freedom of the poet and the claim of that which seems to be outside him.

LOWELL'S COMMAND, and its hold upon Heaney, points to a larger command: that of America itself on Heaney's identity as a poet. Because, in truth, Heaney's relationship to America is no one-way street; wary as he may be of the country, he is as hooked on it as it has long been on him. And it is arguable that every one of the deep concerns which has made Heaney's poetry what it is comes, to a very great extent, out of his encounter with that country. America, that is, has mattered far, far more than as a market, a lecture circuit, even than as a source of inspirations or frustrations for Heaney as a poet. The real secret to Heaney's colossal success in America may be this: America made Heaney the poet he is. And it welcomes him partly because it recognises in him so much of what it itself has fostered.

How can this be so, when Heaney kept such a resolute distance, as he told the Times in 1983, from "the American scene" and all its insulated poems? When, as he described to Dennis O'Driscoll some 25 years later, he saw himself, during his time at Harvard each year, as being like a "lighthouse keeper", passing the months until he could go back to his precious shore, back to write and to "relish versing"? Perhaps because the distance that Heaney experienced, and maintained, in the US was what enabled him to write poetry that was the opposite of insulated: poetry, quite literally, of a bared and uncomfortable world. Until he stepped outside the hothouse of Northern Ireland, he could not see that place - his interviews with O'Driscoll in Stepping Stones make this much strikingly apparent. And if the metaphor of America, in the 1969 poem Bogland, had given Heaney a lever with which to free himself from the grip of his homeplace, and a site from which to see it more clearly, then his first extended stay in America, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1970, gave him a "looseness", both personally and in terms of poetic form, which would release him to an even more crucial freedom. At Berkeley, Heaney became aware of "a sense of choice", of the expanse of territories open to him as a poet, and he returned to Ireland with "a different relation to the place", a "devil-may-careness", as he described it to O'Driscoll.

It was this new Heaney who made the crucial (and controversial) decision to move from the North to the Republic in 1972, a decision and a move which marked a turning point for Heaney, which acted for him as proof of his commitment to poetry, and the work of a poet, outside the desires and the demands of politics and place.

Ironically, for all the excesses of its own demands on the poet, it was America which, in large part, freed Heaney to become the poet he is today. From that very straining of which he became conscious there - between comfort and cruelty, between easiness and experiment, between the hubbub of acclaim and the silence and solitude of the art - emerged a poet free to step away from political demands, to step into unfamiliar territories, to step into looser, larger, languages and forms.

It has been a cracked mirror, but a constant one. And released by its glinting expanse, Heaney can be "lost/ Unhappy and at home" anywhere, and anyhow, he should please.