DESMOND FENNELL,
Sir, - My 20,000- word Heaney essay, an exercise in literary criticism, argues that Heaney is a good but not a great poet, and explains how the overblown reputation came about. Mark Patrick Hederman's reply (March 22nd) to my protest about his misrepresentation of my essay is a disgrace. First, he offers no apology for misdirecting readers of his book who might want to look up his quotations of me. Second, he rolls out another travesty of my essay, nearly as bad as the first.
Gone from this new version of "what Fennell says about Heaney" are the more hallucinatory of the rantings which his book attributes to me. For example, "Heaney is a cunning trickster. . . who has had the brashness and bad taste to prostitute his small talent in the gaudy American marketplace... Heaney shouldn't be wasting the Irish taxpayers' money". Or (this is me, allegedly, speaking to Heaney): "If you are trying to hide in there in the monastic sanctuary in the belief - or the pretence - that you are performing some legitimate function, then come out, you whore, or I'll tell them a thing or two about your private life. Do you realise you have to believe in God. . . etc."
There remain in the new version, as things allegedly written by me but in fact not written: "With a keen eye for poetry as a commercial enterprise, Heaney sold his poetry in an American marketplace". "His job as poet is" to do such and such. "He is a man of no proven virtue, perhaps even a bad man. . ., etc."
There remain, too, those quoted passages of mine about "the poet" imagined as a sort of monk, together with Hederman's false statement that they are about Heaney - despite my pointing out in my protest letter (March 18th)that this is clearly, as any reader can see, not the case.
Why this disgraceful persistence in untruths? Leave aside that anyone who has my essay Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No.1, or who can borrow it from a library, can see that they are untruths. (It was published in Dublin in pamphlet form, with a second, augmented edition; in the English magazine Stand, Autumn 1991; in my 1993 book Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland pp 130-137; and in the US, with a postscript, by Milestone Press, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1994.)
The only plausible explanation is that which I gave in my protest letter, namely, that denigration is a customary Irish Catholic way of combating another Irish Catholic who thinks differently, and Hederman conforms.
Even given a second chance, he has failed to quote something I have actually written about Heaney or about poetry, and to contest it with reasons given! - Yours, etc.,
DESMOND FENNELL,
Anguillara,
Rome,
Italy.