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  • Seamus Heaney as Told by Himself
  • Henry Hart (bio)
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 522 pages. Illustrated. $32)

The English writer and editor Ian Hamilton complained that Seamus Heaney was "the most over-interviewed of living poets." Why, then, would anyone publish a book-length interview that runs to 475 pages? In his introduction to Stepping Stones the Irish civil servant and poet Dennis O'Driscoll quotes Hamilton's complaint, but he argues that the many short interviews with Heaney in newspapers and magazines have not done their subject justice. By allowing Heaney more space in which to discuss his career, O'Driscoll has attempted "to present a comprehensive portrait of the man and his times."

The portrait of Heaney that emerges from Stepping Stones is unusual in a number of ways. First, it seems both spontaneous and deliberate—a product of off-the-cuff reminiscences and thoughtful well-crafted responses. O'Driscoll, as it turns out, did not approach Heaney as a typical interviewer with a legal pad full of questions and a tape recorder in hand. In other words, his interviews with Heaney are not recorded conversations; they are Heaney's written answers to O'Driscoll's written questions. Starting in 2001, O'Driscoll sent Heaney sixty-two pages of questions. Over the next seven years he mailed hundreds of additional pages of questions, and Heaney sent back his answers.

This type of interview is risky because it violates the assumptions we have about the genre of interview. If Heaney had written answers that had the polished formality of Henry James's prose, we might think something was amiss. But, as O'Driscoll rightly contends, Heaney often writes as if he were speaking, and often speaks as if he were writing. He is the master of a zesty improvisational style. In answering O'Driscoll's numerous questions, he has avoided the pitfall of sounding like a statue by writing answers that are "spontaneous and shapely, playful and profound, beautiful and true." Although purists might complain that Stepping Stones violates the genre, the book is in fact more substantial and acute because Heaney had adequate time to reflect on his past and reconstruct his memories.

Stepping Stones is a hybrid text—part interview, part autobiography, and part biography. O'Driscoll argues at the start that "the fact that Seamus Heaney has not been the subject of a biography was itself a stimulus to this work." Although the scholar Michael Parker has written a short literary biography, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (1993), O'Driscoll's book includes more biographical information about Heaney's career than any other book so far. While O'Driscoll is a tad unfair in his assessment of biographies, dismissing them as "almost inevitably . . . as predictable as the check-in routines at international airports," he is astute in his biographical insights. He knows that much of Heaney's writing can be traced back to his boyhood [End Page lxxvii] on a farm in Northern Ireland and to his sense of falling into a painful knowledge of oppositions—if not of good and evil, then of Catholics and Protestants. O'Driscoll articulates this central narrative well when he identifies Heaney "as a poet whose childhood—notwithstanding its 'sorrowing' aspects . . . had its Edenic dimensions: certainty and security, calendar customs and feast days, agrarian cycles and ecclesiastical rites. The wound of expulsion from that tried, tested and trusted world hurt him into a poetry of evocation, yearning and elegy."

The title Stepping Stones fits O'Driscoll's vision of Heaney's life as a balancing act between opposed factions that threaten to knock him off his chosen path. Heaney himself has been especially fond of "stepping stones" as a metaphor for his poetic career. In his Nobel Prize speech (1995), he compared his life as a poet to "a journey where each point of arrival . . . turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination." Four years before winning the Nobel Prize, he wrote in Seeing Things (1990):

Crossing water always furthered something.Stepping stones were stations of the soul.

A kesh could mean the track...

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