by Dennis O'Driscoll

from Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He is a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1989 to 1994.

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Did the young poet who completed Death of a Naturalist become a different person (more self-conscious, more confident or more bewildered) in the writing of it from the one who composed the earliest poems in the book?

There was a new self-consciousness, yes, and probably some bewilderment when the book was published. But confidence, too, from the fact of having written the poems. In 1966 Marie and I were living on a housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast, a characterless sort of a place, and I remember getting my six free copies, probably in late April. The actual book looked very good: a lime-green and solid-pink dust jacket, and on the back a list of the Faber poets. Fabulous names: Auden, Eliot, Hughes, Larkin, Lowell, MacNeice, Spender. It was certainly strange.

Three years before, I was somebody who'd had one poem in the Irish Times and one in the Kilkenny Magazine. But it's probably the same for everybody, the moment of publication; it's always a moment of change, the start of the 'Borges and I' condition. The autobiographical creature begins to be implicated in the textual masquerade; you begin to read and hear about this composite who has written the books, and sounds very like yourself, although there's always going to be a certain stand-off between the pair of you.

But at the time there must have been a lot of sheer delight? A man who 'has published a new book' is one of Yeats's images for high excitement ...

I was indeed excited. Mightily. But that afternoon, on my own in the new house, I was also very conscious of the mystery of what had happened—the ordinariness and, well, the election. I suppose I imagined that a poet published by Faber would be somebody in a realm apart, relieved of the usual botherations, acquainted with 'the shit in the shuttered château' and the bohemians in the pub. Not somebody with a job at a teacher-training college, with lectures to prepare and essays and exams to mark, taking his lunch at the staff table in the student dining room, listening to conversations about golf and life assurance.

Marie and I were very much the typical young marrieds of that period, with our teak furniture and our second-hand Volkswagen and, by that stage, Marie pregnant—or expectant, as the term was then. We had our own freedoms and revels, of course, but there was something beyond expectation in having a book out from Faber. That afternoon stands out, me in the house waiting for Marie to come home from school, waiting to give her her copy. Death of a Naturalist was dedicated to her. I can remember feeling elated and, maybe, OK, a bit bewildered. But not to the point of confusion. There was obviously great fortification in what had happened. Something had come to a head, it was 'take a deep breath and start again' time.

How large an element in the writing of the first collection was the fact that you and Marie were—in the terminology of the time—'courting'?

I met her in October 1962 and the next month I published what I consider to be the first poem where I was in earnest. I'm not saying that one thing was a direct consequence of the other. In the beginning, the pump is primed as much by other poetry as by other people; but still, there was definitely a new charge, a quicker flow. I was sited that bit better in my life—and that bit more excited by it. But there was a poetry aspect to our first meeting, which was at a dinner to mark the retirement of the Queen's University chaplain. Marie was there as the guest of another graduate, but since we got on so well and she was in no particular relationship with him, I walked her back to the flat she shared with her sister. The road to her place, however, took us past my flat, so while we were en route I called in and came out with a copy of A. Alvarez's anthology, The New Poetry, which I lent her—and which gave me an excuse to call back a day or two later to collect it. At St Mary's College, Marie had done extended essays on Louis MacNeice and Robert Graves; this meant that, from the start, poetry was one of the elements in the mix. So there was a muse energy in the air all right. 'The wood astir', as Graves says. A call to separateness, to some sort of extravagance, to be more yourself.

Did Marie have any inkling, when you became engaged, that you would offer her a very different kind of life compared with marriage to a non-poet?

Marie has always been a buoyant spirit. There's a terrific readiness about her. She has this great combination of spontaneity and staying power, so no doubt she'd have been a match for things no matter how they turned out. Even so, I think the possibility of an extra dimension helped to hold her interest. Our first brush with each other and with the arts gave our lives a hint of promise. Not long after we met, for example, her elder sister went off to teach in Madrid, and another younger sister upped and left for London at around the same time, and Marie herself certainly entertained notions of a similar move. But for one thing, she enjoyed the school where she was teaching in Crossgar in County Down and liked her colleagues. She was lucky, and different, I think, from many other young teachers starting out, because she was fulfilled by the job—which is to say she was good at it and felt good in herself as a result.

Everything happened quickly and at the same time—the development of our relationship, the entry into poetry, the marriage itself. Inside three years. One excitement quickening the other. And all the while I was what you might call professionally upwardly mobile. In the summer of 1963 I moved from schoolteaching to lecturing in St Joseph's College of Education; at Christmas in 1964 we got engaged—and the New Statesman published three of my poems, which led to Faber asking to see a manuscript; and their acceptance of a book in 1965 certainly helped my appointment as a lecturer in English in Queen's University in 1966. It sounds easy in retrospect and it was by no means an ordeal, but at the time nothing was predictable and there was the usual effort and anxiety.

And how did Marie respond to the poems?

She had a good sense of what rang true. No matter what she'd actually say, I always knew what she felt. It could be awkward enough, she being shown a poem for the first time, me full of the joys of having written it, she perhaps not just as joyful at having read it. Highs and huffs. Ho-hum. The usual see-saw.

You have mentioned A. Alvarez's The New Poetry a couple of times. Clearly, it was an important anthology for you.

Very. For one thing, it's where I got my first sense of R. S. Thomas. I'd encountered Ted Hughes earlier, in the pamphlets the BBC used to issue with their schools broadcasts—a series called Listening and Writing, edited by this marvellous literary producer called Moira Doolin. But The New Poetry was a big stimulus.

Did Alvarez's thesis about the over-genteel nature of contemporary English poetry ring true for you, or indeed influence the direction taken in your own writing?

The manifesto element in the introduction didn't matter all that much to me. On this side of the Irish Sea, and especially among the Northern Catholic minority, we had our own sense of distance and stand-off from English gentility. We didn't need Alvarez to instruct us in Albion's ways of averting the eyes and covering up. The Stormont Parliament was our particular version of 'negative feedback' ... Still, the general sanctioning of a less-polished way with the words and a more head-on encounter with the subject was in tune with my own disposition and the Hopkins-handling in my student poems. And, by then I was under the sway of Lawrence, and there's something Lawrentian about that whole introduction; I think there's even a direct reference to a passage from The Rainbow.

Alvarez has been rather patronizing about your own work, inclined to see it as regressive and safe. That must have been a disappointment to you.

As a matter of fact, he assailed me before he became patronizing. When Door into the Dark came out in 1969, he did a hatchet job on it in the Observer where he was poetry critic. I suppose the good reception of Death of a Naturalist meant that some knives were going to be out for the second book, but Al ex-Alled himself. Yet in fairness it's as well to remember that Alvarez had been part of the action when Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were getting going a few years earlier; since my stuff came in the wake of all that, he probably felt that everybody needed to be reminded of it. Alvarez thinks of himself as a poet, of course, so I found being patronized by him hard to take. The attack was more in order. But it wasn't, as my mother used to say about pregnancy, a killing disease.

Your comment a short while ago about belonging to the Northern Catholic minority brought to mind Auden's remark that Yeats was 'hurt into poetry' by Ireland. Were the hurts you experienced, as an Ulster Catholic, among those which made a poet of you?

When I began to write in 1962, one of my first attempts was a poem about Loyalist emblems cut into the stone pier beside Carrickfergus Castle—including a little three-runged ladder of the sort you see on Orange sashes. And I think there was a carved-out hoof mark commemorating General Schomberg's landing there in 1689. The poem itself was a shaky item, although I believe it was eventually discussed at The Group. But what's interesting to me now is that I'd gone delving straight away into the sectarian seam of Northern life. At that stage I was a graduate with a job, a self-respecting adult of sorts, but I was still subject to the usual old Northern Ireland reminders that I'd better mind my Fenian manners. The B-Special Constabulary were on the roads at night. The anti-Catholic speeches were still being delivered by Unionist leaders on the Twelfth of July. The whole gerrymandered life of the place seemed set to continue.

So it probably doesn't overstate things to call that a hurt, although it wasn't one that set you apart. In fact, it bonded you, and the recognition and the consequences of that very bonding would eventually become something the poetry had to deal with also. But in the beginning, there was a battened-down spirit that wanted to walk taller. In other scholarship boys and girls from the Catholic side, it would find different expression—in politics, obviously, with John Hume and Bernadette Devlin. I'm certainly not saying that the simple fact of belonging to the minority made me a poet; but I am saying that, once a literary aspiration developed, it took account of the hurtful conditions. That would be true also for the generation ahead of me, people like John Montague and Brian Friel, as well as for contemporaries like Seamus Deane.

Were you consciously writing from a Catholic nationalist perspective? How was your work affected by the bonding you speak of?

I wasn't consciously writing from a Catholic perspective, but undoubtedly the work was affected by the bonding. If I were to say that I wrote consciously as a Catholic, it would imply that I saw myself as a representative, with some sort of agenda, yet there was no such thought and no such agenda. On the other hand, after I'd written 'Digging', I remember feeling that there must be hundreds of people of my generation who'd had a similar experience of exchanging spadework for pen work, and that they'd be bound to know what the poem was about. I suppose a majority of those scholarship people would have been Catholics, but by no means exclusively.

Your questions are hard to answer exactly. It would be untrue to say that I was without a Catholic self-awareness. You didn't grow up in Lord Brookeborough's Ulster without developing a them-and-us mindset. Even though there was no sectarian talk or prejudice at home, there was still an indignation at the political status quo. We knew and were given to know that Ulster wasn't meant for us, that the British connection was meant to displace us. No need to go into the list of complaints all over again, the discrimination in housing and in professions such as medicine, the paramilitary nature of the RUC and B-Special Constabulary—the main thing is that you shared what used to be called an 'anti-partitionist' stance. Now, truth to your feelings, acceptable or not, is one of the things that's not only required in poetry, it's often what drives you to poetry. So my early poems are true to my spots—maculate conceptions, if you like.

Did the publication by Faber of Death of a Naturalist make you more alert to the political position you occupied?

Undoubtedly. You know that old joke about the headline in the Irish News— 'Catholic Dog Wins Protestant Race'? Well, subliminally at least, there was some sense of that. The Ulster/Faber axis until then had been what you might call Liberal Unionist, with Robert Harbinson doing his travel books and, earlier, Forrest Reid doing his fiction, and Louis MacNeice in the background all along as some kind of presiding genius. MacNeice had no particular Unionist affiliation or animus; but his social position and religious denomination meant that he was, as he said himself, 'banned forever from the candles of the Irish poor'—which was not a ban I suffered from.

There was another Ulsterman, as he would have called himself, in Faber at the time: Charles Monteith, the chief editor, the man who had previously been T. S. Eliot's assistant, somebody centrally important in the firm and to me. The fact that Charles was a Northern Ireland Protestant with Unionist connections made for a certain understanding from the start, even if it was an understanding of difference. I remember when we first met in London in 1965, a month or two after he had accepted the manuscript, he remarked that I must have been in Belfast for the Twelfth of July and I admitted that I had been. 'Fine old folk festival,' said Charles, a bit disingenuously. 'To some people,' I replied, a bit uneasily.

The manuscript was accepted in 1965, and you recalled earlier that you published what you considered your first achieved poem in 1962. So Death of a Naturalist contains no poems written while you were a student?

No. The earliest ones are 'Turkeys Observed' and 'Docker'; 'An Advancement of Learning' and 'Mid-Term Break': the first two written in late 1962, the others in early 1963.

I'd like to hear about the places where you wrote those poems.

I shared a flat from 1961 until 1963 with two postgraduates in biochemistry. And I wrote 'Mid-Term Break' one evening there after a day's teaching in St Thomas's School, sitting in an armchair waiting for one of those guys to produce the evening meal. We had a rota: week by week, one did the shopping, one did the cooking and one did the dishes. It was my week for the dishes, so I had this free hour from five to six; and I remembered Christopher's accident because it was February, round about the time of his anniversary.

Anyhow, until I got married, I was living in flats—the one I've just mentioned on Wellington Park and another in Fitzroy Avenue near the university, a sitting room and bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, all on the ground floor—very desirable. I shared it for a while with Hugh Bredin, a friend from my time in St Columb's. Hugh was then in Belfast, finishing a master's degree, I think, and getting ready to proceed to Italy, where he did his doctorate on the aesthetics of Croce.

Once you started teaching, did you live in Belfast all the year round?

I stayed in Belfast during term time and would go home to Bellaghy at Christmas and sometimes at weekends and always for the summer holidays. 'Digging' I wrote at home in The Wood in August 1964, upstairs in the bedroom. 'Death of a Naturalist' I wrote in one of the flats on a Sunday afternoon, after lying out in the sun with Marie and her flatmates at the back of a place they had in Tate's Avenue. The dead heat in their little back garden and the reek of litter bins in the alley behind the houses reminded me of the stink of flax in the dam years before. 'Trout' I remember writing on a C&A carrier bag in Marie's flat, when they were all gabbling away together and the record player was going full blast. I couldn't manage that kind of concentration nowadays. I did a section of the famine poem, 'At a Potato Digging', sitting in the driver's seat of my VW Beetle in Botanic Avenue. I may have been waiting for somebody, or have parked on impulse to note the thing down.

Can you tell me about the jobs you were doing during those years?

In 1962, after a year of postgraduate teacher training at St Joseph's College, I worked in St Thomas's Secondary Intermediate School in Ballymurphy and then, in 1963, got appointed as a lecturer in English back in St Joseph's. I stayed there for three years, until 1966, which was the annus mirabilis: our first child, Michael, was born; Death of a Naturalist appeared; and I got a job in the English Department in Queen's.

Still, your life could have been very different had you taken up the studentship that was available when you graduated with a first-class degree. Is it true that you had the option of going to Oxford?

I believe I had, yes, although the whole thing happened so quickly it was over before it got right started. You know what it's like during that first day or two after the degree results are announced. Your status has changed but you're still a student and the professor is still an enormous authority figure. At any rate, when I went to see Professor Butter, he let me know that a studentship would be available; and he indicated that, as an old Balliol man, he could smooth the path to Oxford—and he did indeed help other students in that direction in the years that followed. But I dithered and he didn't push. I suppose if I had anticipated a first and had known that I'd be invited to do a further degree, I might have readied myself and my family for new moves; but as things stood, there was an expectation at home that I'd go out and start earning, and there was my own unpreparedness for the research option. Not that there was any parental gun to my head to start working or contributing—it was just a general expectation, in myself and in them. There wasn't much advice they could give, and Butter was more or less leaving it to me, saying that of course I could always take the Oxford road a little later on, could do an MA part-time, while teaching in Belfast, and all that. Anyhow, I proceeded on the home front.

What sort of place was St Thomas's School?

St Thomas's was what they called in Britain a secondary modern and in Northern Ireland an intermediate school. Set up to provide secondary education for those who didn't make the grade to grammar schools via the eleven-plus exam. Set up for 'non-academic' pupils. No Latin, but woodwork and metalwork—at least for boys; and St Thomas's was all boys, and all Catholic and nearly all from a big desolate housing estate at the top of the Whiterock Road. Most of them from a poor background. The trimly turned-out ones were very noticeable in the classroom.

What happened was not what was supposed to happen. There was supposed to be a swerve away from the exam culture, a development of skills, an inculcation of self-respect by giving the non-academic pupils a prospect of fulfilment in other areas. But what actually happened was that the effort went into helping the top streams, the top fifth or quarter of the intake, say, to catch up in the academic race. In those days, the intermediate schools often turned out to be the place where the ones who failed the eleven-plus could get a second chance to clamber on to the academic conveyor belt by entering, for example, for the junior certificate or the GCE. So instead of a school where equal attention was paid to all abilities, there was this favoured upper stream and then the great non-academic flow-through. My job, for the year I was in the school, was to teach English at first-year and fourth-year levels, to two of the exam-oriented classes. And I had a PE class with a group of really low-ability first years, IG, for God's sake, in a ranking that began with IA.

I don't get the impression that you felt very fulfilled in this post. Did you have problems with discipline, for example?

To some extent, but not overwhelmingly. The problem was that the school was attempting to inculcate a regime of respectability and conformity, a kind of middle-class boarding-school style, but the home culture and street culture of working-class Belfast was very different. For example, the vice-principal made the rounds of the classrooms every day, examining the kids' shoes. They had to be polished. I remember seeing big lads of fifteen being given four slaps with a leather strap because their shoes hadn't been polished ... Crazy. But the thinking behind it was this: if they got into the habit of rigging themselves out cleanly and acceptably, then they'd have more of a chance of bettering themselves, getting a job in the Corporation, things like that.

Was there a fear that you had ended up in the wrong place?

I was certainly unhappy. My main problem was inexperience in the classroom; but also lack of full commitment, a lingering feeling that I was now a bit off course, given that the Oxford option had come up. I don't mean that I was yearning or planning to get back to a university, just that I was quailing under the burden of marking class essays and working in an environment that was definitely non-literary. OK, Michael McLaverty, the headmaster, was a writer, and a congenial presence, and his friendship was a compensation. And there were a couple of other cultivated souls on the staff. But you had to contend as well with the oafs and gobshites. I just didn't enjoy the environment. I had no relish for getting up in the morning, getting on the bus in Shaftesbury Square and heading up to 'the plant'. It looked like an open prison, it had iron railings, steel window frames, tiled corridors—H-Block architecture, really. And all this when I was beginning to get a life, as they say.

Just when I should have been concentrating on preparing my classes and so on in the evenings, I was getting into very different activities—drinking and staying out late at parties and hullabaloos of all sorts. With all the usual penalties the next morning. But even so, I did have a good time with the fourth-year GCE students in particular. We studied Twelfth Night and a poetry anthology called Rhyme and Reason. I took them to Carrickfergus once to see where Louis MacNeice was born, the Norman Castle and the effigies of the Chichesters in church—all mentioned in MacNeice's poem 'Carrickfergus', which was included in the anthology.

Was there anything you did—or could have done—as a teacher to change the perspectives of those students and enlarge their prospects in life? Is art of any benefit in a context where the home life and community life are materially deprived and maybe, in some cases, emotionally arid too?

Put it this way: forty years on, I still remember five or six names and faces out of that fourth-year class—the more intelligent ones, admittedly, the ones with sensibility and personality. Which means that some sort of connection was made. Something was done by the book, as it were. It's a two-way process, after all, whether we're talking about art or education. What's on offer is one thing, what's picked up is another. The temperament and disposition of the ones on the receiving end are decisive, and so are the quality and suitability of the thing being offered. I think, for example, that the Louis MacNeice poem—plus the visit to Carrick—must have meant something to a number of them. They'd have got some kind of confirmation from finding a familiar name and place brought to book like that, some new grip on what they knew, some new freedom within it. So yes, I believe education can offer ampler prospects and a change of perspective or a reason for aspiration. And I'm sure that St Thomas's did that for a few of those boys.

But you're right to see disadvantaged homes and impoverished conditions generally as a barrier to growth and self-realization. The sectarian realities, the unemployment, the eventual presence of the British army, the IRA recruiting machine, the peer pressure—hard to see teenagers who were simply returned from the school to the street corner being able to transcend all that. Hard to have a Stephen Dedalus or a Paul Morel without some emotional and spiritual help in the home and outside it. One pupil, by the way, did triumph—the late Jack Holland, the novelist and writer on Northern Irish affairs, who eventually ended up in New York. Jack was in class 4B and his essays suggested he would make a path for himself. He had an appetite for language—and a sardonic sense of humour. If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

In Finders Keepers, you recall how Michael McLaverty used to cajole the class into reading poetry. But he had an influence on your own reading too?

Michael had his mantras: read Chekhov, read 'The Death of Ivan Ilych', read Friel's 'The Foundry House', read Dubliners, read John Clare, read Edward Thomas. Most of which I was reading anyway. But, for my own work, the most important thing he did was to lend me Patrick Kavanagh's A Soul for Sale, the book that included 'The Great Hunger'. I had encountered some of Kavanagh's Monaghan lyrics in The Oxford Book of Irish Verse and liked them, but 'The Great Hunger' took a deeper hold.

When did you meet Kavanagh himself?

Not until 1967. That summer I taught for a week or two at a summer course in Trinity College and was introduced to him by Richard Ryan, in the Bailey on Duke Street, standing at the bar. I didn't particularly want to meet him. I had some hunch he'd not want anything to do with a young one like me who'd had the luck—the neck—to be published by Faber. His own Collected Poems had come out just then—the book that begins with his saying that he'd never been much regarded by the English critics—and here was I, garlanded with sound bites from Christopher Ricks and C. B. Cox and so on. Could he not take his ease at his inn without this?

In fact, the whole thing went off very stylishly. At first I avoided the contact as unobtrusively as possible, kept my face to the counter when he stopped to speak to Richard, and waited for him to move on—he was coming back past our part of the counter on his way from the Gents. But the pause continued and what had begun as a reticence started to look like an ignorance; so I turned round and said, 'Mr Kavanagh, can I buy you a drink?' 'No', he replies, with the 'O' in the 'No' well lengthened out. So then Richard says something like, 'Paddy, this man's come down here from Belfast, and he's just published a book of poems. His name's Seamus Heaney.' And Kavanagh says to me, 'Are you Heaney?' rhyming me with Rainey, as people did in the country at home. 'Well, I'll have a Scotch.' So I took that as a pass.

Was that all?

Well, no. After that I went over and joined him for a while, among the others in attendance. I remember I either commended Thomas Hardy or asked what he himself thought of Hardy, but he was on to me like a shot—suspected I was making too nifty a link between one 'country' poet and another, and replied ex cathedra, as obliquely and authoritatively as a Yeats, 'Pope's a good poet.' And that was me in my box.

You didn't see him again?

Once. A few days later, I went to a poetry reading by Brendan Kennelly in Hodges Figgis and Kavanagh was there with his wife Katherine, hawking and sighing at the back of the room. At that stage he wasn't in good health; so, at the end of the evening, I gave the pair of them a lift back to Pembroke Road, or wherever they were located at the time. They sat in the back seat of my Beetle and Katherine at one point said something like, 'There you are now, Paddy, you can be a poet and have a car after all.' You would always expect a bit of edge in those days.

Before Faber and Charles Monteith, there was The Group and Philip Hobsbaum. How did you get to know Hobsbaum?

In Hibernia in 1963, I reviewed the Group Anthology he edited with Edward Lucie-Smith, and we met after that. I'd ended the review by suggesting that some sort of poetic group work such as that described in the introduction to the anthology—a workshop, in effect—would be welcome in Belfast. Maybe I'd heard that Philip was thinking of starting something of that nature anyway. I'm not sure who made the link between us—maybe Stewart Parker, who was around the English Department then; maybe Alan Gabbey who was editing Interest. I went to his flat at 5 Fitzwilliam Street, and Marie—even though she wasn't writing poems of her own—came with me, and we met Philip and his wife Hannah. He was very intense, very much a teacher, full of strong opinion. A seminar leader as much as a poet. I suppose he was more or less conducting interviews with people who might be invited to come to the group he was about to start. On the lookout for local talent. Joan Watton, as she was then, before she married and became Joan Newmann, was picked out by Philip in a Workers Educational Association evening class and encouraged into poetry by him. Stewart Parker too he both admired and encouraged. And myself, every bit as much.

Was it through The Group that you met the Longleys?

I think it was at a party in the Hobsbaums' flat, maybe just before the first working meeting. I remember a singing session started and Michael shouted across the room that I was just another stage Irishman. There was a lot of banter and blather, and a definite connection was made. Then one evening Michael and I drove out to a pub on the Lisburn Road. I brought some of my poems—at his request—and he took them home. Edna and he were already doing what they'd continue to do, checking the talent, taking squarings. Edna at that stage was still Edna Broderick and had come to lecture in Queen's around the same time as Hobsbaum. Both she and Michael came to The Group early on and may indeed have been present at the first meeting.

Maybe you would describe a typical meeting of The Group: the room, the rules of engagement, the advice given, the criticism taken.

It began at eight o'clock on a Monday evening. People arrived five or ten minutes before that and sat around in the living room of the Hobsbaum flat, which was on the first floor. Philip would already be in the chairman's seat and other chairs would have been arranged in a big circle. People behaved as they do before a seminar—they looked at the poems on their sheets, spoke to the person next to them, and all the while the chairman didn't say much to relieve the air of formality and expectation. The poems by that week's poet would have been posted out or distributed at the previous meeting and everybody was meant to have read them, so that added to the classroom mood as well. Maybe I'm overemphasizing this aspect of the event; but it was important because it made for a certain seriousness and prepared everybody for the change of gear from chat to main business.

Once the meeting started, the critical loins were girded, Philip concentrated on the poem sheet and hunched forward like a man on a Harley Davidson coming down the road at ninety. For an hour to an hour and a half there'd be a reading of poems by the author, a statement about each by Philip and a general discussion by all present, wound up again by Philip. A pause then, coffee and biscuits served by Hannah, general across-the-room conversation, all of a literary nature, then after ten or fifteen minutes everybody was invited to read a poem and say why they had chosen it—not one of their own, usually, but something they admired, new or old, maybe a translation, maybe something just published. I remember different things that Philip read, a chunk out of Piers Plowman, a Lowell translation of Victor Hugo, poems by people who had attended the London Group, especially Martin Bell and Peter Redgrove.

What did you read?

You know, I cannot recollect. Probably Ted Hughes or Kavanagh. Maybe John Crowe Ransom. I was very devoted to 'Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter' and 'Dead Boy'. But that part of the evening was always an education. You'd hear people reading and talking about what meant most to them. What you were seeing in action was the effect of poetry stored up within an individual's memory and the way it functioned as a shared value. The Group gave the people who attended an audience and a motive for their own writing, but this other, more general toning up of the poetry muscles was equally important, maybe in the long run more important.

But what about the first part of the evening?

A different kind of engagement. Everything on each page was there to be tested or questioned. Now and again there would be a poem where all that needed to be said was 'Well done'—but you'd feel it was a dereliction of duty if that was all you did. You felt you had to workshop, as they say, whatever was put in front of you. That could be embarrassing if the work was useless, but then, fortunately or unfortunately, you can keep up a critical patter just as easily about junk verse as about the real thing—talk about line endings, focus on an image, compare the poem to known poems in the canon. In the end I suppose what the writer gets in these situations is a sense of the poem's madeness, its strangeness to others, and maybe, yes, its improvability. Some revisions were made as a result of those discussions, maybe even some improvements.

Was there rivalry in The Group?

Not exactly in The Group. It was more that the consequences of The Group ratings had to be lived with outside it. After a while, a placement of sorts was established and it persisted in an in-house kind of way. I think Philip's favourite was Stewart Parker, but Stewart went off to Cornell after the first or second meeting. Joan Watton he also held in high esteem, and rightly so. And I suppose I had a top-of-the-class rating as well. Michael Longley, on the other hand, was marked down because of his stylishness. Aesthetically too 'paleface' for Philip. 'Longley's a big man,' Philip used to say. 'Huge voice, huge chest. A rugby back. And he writes these polite little poems.' Longley felt that as a wrong but he had an inner sureness and a kind of detachment. At any rate, we worked out a modus vivendi among ourselves, almost like schoolkids coping with teacher's favouritism. You could even say that one of the big contributions of The Group was the counter-grouping and griping it entailed. Readjustments of the evening's judgements were required afterwards.

Young poets thrive on a mixture of affection and disaffection anyhow, they get involved in a kind of vying that's not quite rivalry, more an aspiration to outdo, pure and simple. But it would be disingenuous to imply that Michael and Edna didn't resent the Hobsbaum rating. On the other hand, they had a status drawn from their own examining board, so to speak, one that consisted of themselves and Derek Mahon and, at that time, Eavan Boland. They played and read the score by Trinity rules as opposed to Group rules.

Would you describe the rivalry as having been at all times healthy?

I don't think the rivalry, if that's the right word, was ever unhealthy in the matter of writing, in the sheer aspiration to best yourself. The desire to have something terrific to pull out of your pocket when you met—that kind of trumping and self-trumping was enjoyed by all. No begrudging, in other words, of achievement per se. The awkwardness or resentment set in when one was promoted over the other by publication or praise or later by the award of a prize. More a matter of ratings than rivalry. But that kind of thing just cannot be helped. What's required all round in those situations is good behaviour—government of the tongue, so to speak, at least when face to face. And I believe we were well enough behaved. We managed to navigate the bad stretches without capsizing.

I always knew my reception and the favour I enjoyed brought out rivalry, not to say resentment, in others: Michael Longley has put on record a flare-up in drink one night at David Hammond's place where what was no doubt private dogma was shouted out as public challenge; the tongue was ungoverned and I was told that Mahon was the better poet. It didn't surprise me to know this was the verdict, but to have it expressed so aggressively was unexpected. For a long time I kept making inner allowances, telling myself to see it from their point of view, but at a certain stage I decided, To hell with it, I'm not going round trying to get one up on anybody, it's live and let live from now on. Michael told Jody Allen Randolph that 'we competed with each other more ferociously than perhaps we now remember', but I don't think I considered myself 'in competition' with anybody. Admittedly I may have been the cause of it in others, which only means, come to think of it, I was raising the standard without even trying.

*    *    *

The reviews of Death of a Naturalist?

Christopher Ricks gave it a good send-off and that was important encouragement, coming in the New Statesman and coming as soon as the book was published. Then too John Hewitt welcomed it in the Belfast Telegraph, Michael Longley saluted me as an Ulster poet in the Irish Times 'Book of the Day', Brendan Kennelly raised his cap and Austin Clarke gave a nod. The fact that the poets included me in was good magic.

But in The Review, Ian Hamilton's magazine, you were included out.

'Mud-caked fingers in Russell Square.' And I also remember getting the brush-off in the Observer from one Peter Marsh, only to discover later that Marsh was one of Hamilton's pseudonyms. The Review was where you expected to get it in the neck anyhow. If they were hammering Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, they were welcome to hammer me as well.

Christopher Ricks's review suggested that your love poems were influenced by Robert Graves. You both show a certain resistance to mainstream modernism, but I can't help thinking of his clipped diction as the polar opposite of your own 'vowels ploughed into other'.

It was typical of Ricks to pick up on that. I listened a good deal to Graves in the early sixties—I'd got my hands on an LP of him reading his poems and was a bit surprised by his officer-class accent and delivery. The actual voice and the clipped writing style were all of a piece. I liked in particular the soldierly address and imagery of 'Spoils': 'When all is over and you march for home, / The spoils of war are easily disposed of .. .' And that clipped way of handling matters got into some of those early love poems, ones like 'Scaffolding' and 'Twice Shy'. Michael Longley was a great Graves fan, and used to quote 'To Juan at the Winter Solstice'. And when I first met Marie, she knew 'Sick Love' by heart—the one that begins, '0 Love, be fed with apples while you may, / And feel the sun and go in royal array, / A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway'. In fact, when we met Graves at a big eightieth birthday party for him, hosted by Garech Browne in Luggala, I asked him to write out that poem in longhand for Marie and he very kindly did so. He was wandering a little by then, but still straight as a rush, still the Roman profile and the old pukka idiom.

He divided the world into the 'all right' and the 'not all right'. He asked Marie, for example, what poets I liked; when she mentioned Theodore Roethke, he asked her to quote something. So she begins 'My Papa's Waltz': 'The whiskey on your breath / Could make a small boy dizzy ... ' and he interrupts to say 'I don't think it's all right to write poems about the smell of other people's breath.' And when Marie replies that Roethke's father was something of an alcoholic, Graves says, 'My father took the pledge.' Case closed.

So Roethke was important to you?

Not early on. But when The Far Field came out in 1964 and then the Collected Poems in 1968, he became one of the invoked spirits. I remember seeing 'Meditation at Oyster River' in the Critical Quarterly, and coming alive to the generosity and supply behind it. I loved his greenhouse poems, too, but something else that interested me about Roethke was the split in his poetic persona. He wrote those big Whitmanesque roller-coaster poems, and then, in a different vein, some very tightly rhymed metrical things, villanelles and so on. I suppose the interest sprang from my own experience of doing poems which were correspondingly open and closed, a trudging sort of poem like 'Digging', say, and then trimmer ones like 'Follower'.

When you reopen Death of a Naturalist now, are you tempted to rewrite or revise or excise—or is it too late to think in those terms?

As a matter of fact, I have done a bit of excising already. After Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Field Work in America, they put out the four earlier books in a single volume, and if you look in the Death of a Naturalist part of that collection—Poems 1965-75—you'll see I dropped seven of the poems. The Naturalist had been out for fourteen years at that stage and I felt free to exercise my judgement. But I would never interfere with the contents of the volume per se—the volume, I mean, reprinted under its own title. That stands and I have no problem about it. It is what it is. And what it was.

Another thing that stands is your acknowledgement of an anthology called Young Commonwealth Poets. I would have thought you'd have been uncomfortable, even at the time, with the very title?

Uncomfortable was about the height of it. As far as I remember, that anthology was organized from Cardiff for some festival or other in 1965 and Philip Hobsbaum—at his good work of promotion, as ever—sent our stuff to the editors. More uneasy for me was an inclusion in Jeremy Robson's The Young British Poets a few years later on. But you know, until Bloody Sunday, that nomenclature business didn't come all that strongly to the fore. Admittedly, it was always a worry in the background; but, as I keep saying, there was no very intense Republican motive operating in me or my family, more your typical nationalist minority stand-off from Unionists. The whole thing was warped by Little Ulsterism. In a contrary sort of a way, as a poet of nationalist background, I might even have enjoyed being included in those books. Croppy wasn't lying down any more ...

Then there's another thing: until I moved to Glanmore in 1972 my passport wasn't actually green, so there were all kinds of anomalies operating. My first passport was got in a hurry in the late 1950s, to go to Lourdes, of all places. Applying to Dublin wasn't even thought about. It was a sufficiently testing bureaucratic achievement for us to get the forms to Belfast. Convenience and unease were there in equal measure with the lion and the crown. And here's something else for the record: when I went to work in London in the summer of 1962, I got a job in the Passport Office in Petty France. I'd actually issued British passports, for God's sake, so I didn't think too much about carrying one. But, as the circumstances became more virulent and politicized in the 1970s, the need to establish new stays against confusion became more urgent.

Does it ever surprise—or indeed annoy—you that there are readers who still regard Death of a Naturalist as their favourite collection?

I can understand that easily. Readers who stay with you from the start are going to have a particular affection for early stuff. There's something self-charging about every good first-reading experience. If you asked me, I'd probably have to say that Lupercal is my own favourite Ted Hughes collection. It's not that I don't admire Ted's work all through. It's just that the original transmissions stay alive in a special way.

About the Author
Dennis O'Driscoll's previous publications include New and Selected Poems and Reality Check. He is the author of a collection of essays and reviews, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams, and the editor of Quote Poet Unquote. He works as a civil servant in Dublin.

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux