THE 18 MEN and women on the Swedish Academy who choose the Nobel Prize for Literature have been known to spring some surprises. Who, in 1983, would have predicted that the prize would go to the American novelist Pearl Buck? Who would have guessed Elias Canetti, a Bulgarian living almost anonymously in London, in 1981? How many of us in the West had ever heard of, let alone read, last year╒s winner from Japan, Kenzaburo Oe? The only surprise of this year╒s award is that it isn╒t a surprise. Though still, at 56, in his prime, Seamus Heaney has been tipped as a Laureate for some time. His friends Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott have both won the award in the past eight years, and as a poet he is at least their equal. He has won most of the honours that it╒s possible for an English-speaking poet to win. He is highly regarded throughout Europe and in the US, where he teaches for one term a year. He is one of the few living poets British schoolchildren have heard of. He has done time (five years) as Oxford Professor of Poetry. He has even been on ╥Desert Island Discs╙. He is Famous Seamus.
The first time I╒d had any appreciation of that fame was in Belfast 15 years ago, when I met Heaney, up from the South for the day, at the railway station. We╒d not walked 200 yards before a car screeched to a halt and a taxi-driver dashed over excitedly shouting ╥Mr Heaney, Mr Heaney╙ and demanding an autograph. It╒s hard to imagine this happening when Ted Hughes comes up to London.
Heaney╒s popularity is in part to do with his genial temperament, an odd mix of flickering wit and sturdy rootsiness. Both Prospero and Caliban, he can put a girdle round the world and perform equally well in Harvard seminar rooms, at London publishing parties, in Dublin, Belfast and further afield. Shy but affable, he is his own best ambassador.
Nice men have won the Nobel Literature Prize before (though not often). What in particular was it that commended Heaney to Stockholm? If the Swedish Academy had to suffer from the same time-lag as we do in the translation and appreciation of foreign writers, it would probably still be coming to terms with his early poetry from the late-1960s, which is loud with the slap of spade and earth. The first poem in his first collection, ╥Digging╙ (╥Between my finger and thumb/The squat pen rests; snug as a gun╙) not only established Heaney as a precocious talent, but pointed to the essential themes he has pursued ever since: blood and soil; imminent violence; a need to dig down, through history and language, to unearth the primal sources of the self. The early reviews of Heaney over-emphasised his rusticity and connections to
Ted Hughes. One critic, A Alvarez, caricatured him as a lumbering peasant out of touch with the predominantly urban condition of late-20th-century life. His domain was always larger, his demeanour more subtle, and his tone more contemporary than that.
In any case, as schoolchildren here know, and as the Swedish Academy will also know, Heaney has come a long way since the richly sensuous poems of his first two books. His next two, Wintering Out and North, turned their attention to the mouth-music of dialect words and place-names, and to the troubled history of Belfast and the North. Under duress to ╥respond╙ to contemporary violence, terrorism and military repression, Heaney proved he could do reportage with the best of them (╥Men die at hand. In blasted street and home/The gelignite╒s a common sound effect╙). But he wasn╒t altogether comfortable with the results, which violated his deeper, instinctual, feminine muse, and at the end he withdrew, ╥a wood-kerne escaped from the massacre╙. Field Work, arguably his finest book, written when he╒d moved south to County Wicklow, is a further withdrawal, but meditates beautifully on ╥responsibility╙, and on the conflicting demands of art and nation. Some of its elegies for dead friends and relations are the finest poems he╒s written.
In recent years, Heaney has turned to quieter, more domestic themes, back to childhood, and also (at the risk, in the allegorical parts of The Haw Lantern, of a kind of poetic Esperanto) to more universal themes. His range as a poet, translator (both from the Irish and from Dante) and as a critic is now so wide that it╒s hard to know which elements of his work the Swedish Academy was drawn to, but in a brief commendation, special mention was made of his ability to ╥exalt everyday miracles╙. This is an allusion to his most recent book, Seeing Things, which as its title hints, moves beyond literal annotation of the natural world into something more visionary, ecstatic and transcendental.
Cynics will say that ╤ like the awards to Sholokov and Pasternak, Milosz and Seifert ╤ here is another ╥political╙ Laureateship, given to Heaney in the year which has seen the peace process on Northern Ireland begin in earnest. Within an hour of yesterday╒s announcement, the wires were buzzing with stories of Heaney╒s alleged keep-everyone-happy chameleon-ism: how, for example, when travelling on the train from Dublin to Belfast he╒ll switch brands of whiskies at the border. But even supposing the incorruptible Swedes were swayed by extra-literary considerations, the argument is doubtful. In the past, it╒s seemed that the Nobel Committee has harboured a prejudice against politically clamorous or didactic writers, yet in its brief statement yesterday it commended Heaney for ╥speaking out as an Irish Catholic about violence in Northern Ireland╙.
This view of Heaney, as a writer who does, when need be, speak out, is much nearer the mark than the popular view of him in this country, which likes to present him as a man who╒s even-handed, sit-on-the-fence, without affiliations. Certainly, as Heaney himself admits and dramatises in the poems, he was reared on the attitude ╥Whatever you say, you say nothing╙, and is all for the quiet life, if he can get it. But take his open letter to the editors of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Andrew Motion and myself) in 1983. Heaney took objection to being categorised as ╥British╙, and, gently biting the hands that had colonised and anthologised him, declared: ╥My passport╒s green.╙ His letter, all 33 stanzas, is a masterly display of tact, embarrassment, apology and sly wit. But in the end, it firmly insists that names, and nationality, do matter. ╥British, no, the name╒s not right./Yours truly, Seamus.╙ Heaney, in public, is often a mediator, but no slippery mediator could have written that poem.
