Stepping Stones: Interviews With Seamus Heaney (review)

The interview with the famous writer has become a staple of literary journals since George Plimpton invented the form in 1953 for the Paris Review, when he thought to go to Cambridge to ask questions of E. M. Forster. Paris Review interviews often focus on the technical aspects of writing—down to what kind of pen, paper, or typewriter has been deployed—and the interviews always include a facsimile page of the author’s manuscript with deletions, additions, the author’s missteps and forays, all occurring on the page before us. The Paris Review interview model is very American in its journalistic slant and its desire for a quick summary of influences and biography. What is sometimes missed in this model is the “why?” of a writer’s career—the real source material, along with the time and space for a full investigation of the writer’s work.

In Stepping Stones, Dennis O’Driscoll, an accomplished Irish poet and critic in his own right, manages—together with Seamus Heaney—to create a new form of the sustained literary interview, and their collaboration takes on the qualities of multiple genres: memoir, biography, literary criticism, history, and table talk. With wit, intelligence, thorough preparation, and in obvious friendship, O’Driscoll and Heaney together have created a book that not only locates Heaney’s poetry in his country and his times, but also illuminates the sources of his work.

Heaney is a poet for whom sound is crucial; as he notes, “I don’t mean sound as decoration or elaboration, as ‘verbal magic’; I mean something to do with what might be called the musculature of your speech, the actual cadencing of the thing as it moves along.” Heaney relishes the way vowels and consonants knock around together. From the first poem, “Digging,” in his first book, Death of a Naturalist, Heaney not only announces his life project in poetry, but he also does so with the sound, rhythm, and accent of his rural childhood: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” The young poet, sitting at his window, is watching his father work a spade in the farmyard below. Notice the deliberate abruptness of the “u” sounds, conveying the confident sense that Heaney’s poetic vocation has been decided. At the same time, he is thinking of his grandfather who “cut more turf in a day / Than any other man on Toner’s bog.” Heaney’s love of sound is evident in this, the earliest and among the most famous of his poems—“The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge / through living roots awaken in my head.”

The opening section of Stepping Stones is titled “Bearings,” and the interviews collected here provide evocative details about the farm, Heaney’s family, the linoleum on the floors, the events of the day, the language he was hearing as a child. How gorgeous the sounds Heaney was able to make from the very beginning: sound at the moment of enactment—sound created on the page and in the mouth of the reader as it is spoken. The sounds capture the poetic moment, honor his family and place, and set an agenda for his work as a poet—“Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”

Heaney’s focus on sound in his poetry is a natural progression from his vowel-rich South Derry dialect and vocabulary. As a child with an attuned ear, Heaney unconsciously absorbed the sounds of common local words—“loaning” (a country lane), “shuler” (wanderer, tramp)—or place names—“Toome,” “Toner’s Bog,” “Mossbawn.” Heaney is invariably eloquent, with his ear pitched to memory, even as he answers O’Driscoll’s question about what sounds a person might hear standing in the Heaney farmyard:

Hens. Cackles and clucks. Coming up to Christmas, turkeys or geese. All year round the occasional roar of a...