“Coincidences, Graces, Gifts”: Seamus Heaney, A Personal Turas

When I was growing up in Northern Ireland, people were thought to come of age at twenty-one. I’m not sure when or why this was revised downward, so that eighteen is now regarded as the point at which we step over the threshold of dependency on parents and become fully fledged adults: independent, sensible, accountable, mature. I don’t know how well I cleared those hurdles. In fact, as I grew older, I came increasingly to suspect that—the raw chronology of aging notwithstanding—there’s a sense in which none of us ever properly grows up. Certainly the violent events in Ulster that cast such shadows on my youth did not suggest much maturity in society at large. Accountability that simply blames the other side is surely childishness at its worst.

One of the more lavish presents I was given when I came of age was a check for £21 from an uncle well enough off to lay down a pound for every year. It was a considerable amount in those far-off days. I used it to buy hard-back copies of Flann O’Brien’s books, at that point my favorite author. My uncle was not best pleased when he discovered how I’d spent his largesse. It wasn’t that he disapproved of books—though he shared a widespread family view that I read too much: it was the nature of the books—or, more pointedly, the religio-political affiliation of their author, that sparked his disapproval. Nothing was ever said of course, as is typically the case in Northern Ireland. Despite the absence of any direct comment about my purchase of O’Brien’s books, a heavy sense of disagreement with my choice, condemnation, angry disappointment at the way I’d let people down, was effortlessly conveyed by terseness, silence, looks—that potent dialect of mood in which everyone was schooled to deadly fluency long before the age of twenty-one.

To me, Flann O’Brien was the writer of such brilliant works as At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman. To my uncle, O’Brien’s literary accomplishments meant nothing. They were rendered irrelevant by the fact that he was a Fenian or a Teague (offensive words for Catholic used more or less interchangeably in the Protestant patois of the day). His books were unsuitable for anyone from “our side.” Buying them indicated a worrying lapse of tribal solidarity on my part. It suggested, at the very least, poor judgment and, at worst, that I harbored turncoat tendencies. It made my uncle look at me askance.

Telling him about my new O’Brien books felt a necessary part of the courtesy of saying thank you for his gift. Perhaps if I’d been a little more mature at twenty-one, I’d have expressed my gratitude more strategically, without disclosing exactly what I’d bought. But at least I had the sense not to share with my uncle the (guilty?) knowledge that on the same shelf as my O’Brien collection there were books by another Teague writer I esteemed, Seamus Heaney. I knew that if my uncle had seen Heaney’s books he’d not have noticed the titles, or the slim, poetry-indicating girth of the spines, but only the name Seamus. Like O’Brien, but even more so, Seamus signaled membership of the opposing tribe. To Ulster Protestant ears, it’s an indelibly Catholic name. Seamus would have acted as a red rag (a green one really) to the bull of my uncle’s prejudices. It would have made me even further suspect in his eyes.

The only time I met Seamus Heaney was in Belfast, on June 30, 1987. That was the day on which uvf gunmen murdered James Keelan, a Catholic living with a Protestant woman in Ballysillan, a predominantly loyalist area of the city. Such killings became common coin in the currency of sectarianism that, for a time, looked set to bankrupt life in Northern Ireland, flooding the ordinary transactions of our little day-to-day decencies with a counterfeit economy...