My reading time these days consists primarily of two 30 minute stints each week day on the Tube and three or four hours I cobble together most week-ends, so choosing a book is something I do with a reasonable amount of care. (For the same reasons, don’t expect eloquence here–this blog amounts to me rambling on about whatever happens to be on my mind, in whatever time I can scrape together.)
I bought Stepping Stones and moved it to the top of my embarrassingly large TBR pile for two reasons. I’ve long liked Seamus Heaney’s poetry–there’s a capaciousness and generosity about it that I thoroughly enjoy. I also had the opportunity to hear him recently at a reading in London, which had the effect of reinforcing my good opinion of his work and giving me more insight into how he writes poetry than I would have expected. Happily, the book also contains plenty of the latter, helped by the fortunate fact that Heaney’s interlocutor is Dennis O’Driscoll, himself an accomplished poet.
Although billed as “interviews,” O’Driscoll noted at the reading and says in his introduction to the text that the questions were for the most part posed and answered in writing. The book is not then, a free flowing conversation with Heaney, but nor is it very formal. It reads like a conversation that’s a had a bit more spit and polish put on it than if it had been simply made from oral interviews (and Heaney appears to be a spectacular conversationalist). Never fear, however; it still manages to be engaging and personable throughout. The book starts with two short chapters on Heaney’s early life and his transition from youth to poet. It then follows him through the production of each of his books chronologically, weaving in the circumstances that drove the poetry and asking pointed questions about meaning and politics. (Heaney, inevitably, has been seen by some as failing to address the Troubles sufficiently–a criticism I can understand but believe to be mistaken.)
In the first bit of Stepping Stones, Heaney discusses what it was like to grow up in Northern Ireland and the challenges and problems that posed, but we mainly get a wealth of very humanising, personal details on the Heaney family homestead and those in its ambit. The following is a response to a question from O’Driscoll asking Heaney if Padraic Colum’s lines from Old Woman of the Roads aptly described the Heaney family home:
‘I could be quiet there at night, / Beside the fire and by myself, / Sure of a bed and loth to leave / The ticking clock and the shining delph’. Is that how it was in the evenings?
The clean-swept floor, the closed doors that let the heat gather, the shut-in safety of the kitchen, it was all there. But what I remember is more huddled and snug, less highlighted and gleaming than in Colum’s poem. It was an atmosphere created by grown-ups winding down. My father tended to stretch out on the sofa, my mother to be in the armchair, my aunt at the table maybe. A big luxury for my mother was to bathe her feet at night–there was real appeasement in the sound of hot water from the kettle stroop going into the basin of cold stuff. No private bathroom then. No cricket on the hearth either, by the way, since we had a terrific little iron stove called–imagine–’The Modern Mistress’, a coal-burner that gave off a fierce heat when it was stoked up. One of the big thrills was to see the round iron lids redden as it overheated.
We also get wonderful details on Heaney’s father’s position as a cattle dealer and on Heaney’s role in the enterprise (which extended through his holiday periods from Queen’s College).
I helped with the usual jobs. Moving cattle, for example. There was a good bit of droving to be done. Shifting the stock from farm to farm, from Mossbawn to Broagh, or sometimes as far as The Wood, three or four miles away. I had a certain confidence as a herder of cattle on the road, even prided myself on the way I could handle them in the face of oncoming traffic and all that. And when I began driving, I always got a certain pleasure when I encountered a herd of cows being brought in for milking, knowing how to drive through them without anxiety and without causing them anxiety–although the presence of cattle on the road is becoming rarer and rarer.
On the craft of poetry itself, O’Driscoll asks the kind of questions you would hope another poet would: How publication affected his writing, the importance of place, the impact of his relationship with his wife-to-be, having to work for a living, the type of books he read, the usefulness of workgroups, the best time of day for writing. One of my favourite sections describes the spontaneity and inspiration from Squarings. In it, Heaney describes how the inspiration for the form came to him one day in the National Library of Ireland:
. . . I was sitting in the most beautiful reading room with the rain coming down on the glass dome. Suddenly, I wrote a few lines and it became a twelve-line, four three-lines, thing. It felt given, strange and unexpected; I didn’t quite know where it came from, but I knew immediately it was there to stay. It seemed as solid as an iron bar. So I began to use it as a different kind of barre, a stimulus to repeating the exercise, and in a couple of days I’d written the first three poems–in the order in which they eventually appear in the book. The form operated for me as a generator of poetry . . . Then too, as I kept to the twelve-line form, the word ’squarings’ suggested that I might aim for a total of 144, but in the end I settled for 48, a four-square pattern, each square twelve twelve-liners.”
Heaney returns to the importance of form towards the close of the book, where he glosses his association with Keats’s observation, ‘If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it better not come at all’:
Well, it doesn’t mean–and it didn’t mean for Keats–that the actual labour of composition or the working on the poem is an involuntary natural function like sneezing. You have to work. One of the best books I discovered early on, just when I’d begun to write, was Jon Stallworthy’s Between the Lines, about Yeats’s manuscripts. A poem like ‘Coole Park, 1929′, thirty-two lines long–a middle range Yeats poem; a cruising-altitude poem where he’s not breaking any sound barriers–takes thirty-eight pages of drafts and yet he had only a few of the lines to begin with. If you have a stanza form, whatever the stanza form is, whether it’s a sonnet or couplets or quatrains or whatever, you can work at that–and work with it–because the stanza form immediately calls up all other stanzas in the language. To some extent, you’re playing variations or singing in chorus. The quick free-verse poem happens; but, oddly enough, my experience is that the poem comes more quickly if there is a form.
Stepping Stones is a pleasure to read at many levels: Heaney is a genial talker who turns out phrasings so phonetically rich that you find yourself wishing they wouldn’t stop, and those who are studying his work will of course find insight into its meanings, influences, and origins (It may come as a revelation, for example, that Heaney had nothing political in mind when he wrote the now famous line ‘Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.’ He simply liked the way it sounded.) But perhaps the greatest gift is to hear one of our finest poets speak simply and directly about what it takes to become a poet and the process of writing poetry. This isn’t surprising coming from the man who put together “The Rattle Bag” and “The School Bag” with Ted Hughes, but it’s rare enough and accessible enough to make this book feel special.
