In his collected letters, published last year, writing to Askold Melnyczuk (17 March 2004), Seamus Heaney appends the following:

p.s. thanks too for your Dalai Lama photo: my sister recently sent me a cutting from the British Independent: a gossip column reported that I was named – along with Dalai L., Germaine Greer and others – by a survey in Erotic Review – as among the top 50 sex gods in the world.

This led me to consider that I wasn’t the first to highlight the physical resemblance between Heaney and the Dalai Lama, a conviction first strengthened when Private Eye published (8 December 2006) thumbnail photos I’d sent them in their Lookalike column. I’d met Heaney earlier in the year, and later regretted having sent in those pictures on learning he’d suffered a stroke that summer and cancelled all public appearances. That uneasiness was reinforced, a couple of years later, when Private Eye ran a tacky parody of his work.

I’d been taught some of Heaney’s work at school; I grew up in a farming community and his was the first poetry I’d ever enjoyed. Alongside that of Louis MacNeice, which I was introduced to soon after, those poems were a factor behind my wish to study literature in Ireland – a country I’d never visited – and may have led, in some degree, to my subsequent work as a poetry editor. In my first week in Dublin, I certainly felt I’d come to the right place when, on hearing I was reading English, a total of three fellow students on separate occasions (surely this would never happen in England) asked, ‘Oh, wonderful: so are you a poet?’ Frequenting and organising readings in the back rooms of pubs over the next years, editing small magazines with friends, poetry became a real concern in our lives back then.

Heaney too – at least to our wistful undergraduate minds – felt like a presence. I lived for a year off Aungier Street where my flatmate, Marie Burke, was from Derry. Her uncle had been – like the future Nobel laureate – a scholarship boy at St Columb’s College. Marie’s father had grown up on a farm in the Sperrin Mountains near what is now marketed as ‘Heaney Country’ (that sanctioned literary geography which the poet himself prophesised, to Karl Miller, would one day be characterised by ‘a few churns and a confessional box’). Together, Marie and I sat in on a remarkable year-long seminar called ‘Three Irish Poets: Yeats, MacNeice, Heaney’, convened by Terence Brown who’d known the latter two subjects of study personally and once read out to us unpublished love letters by MacNeice, asking: ‘Which of you girls wouldn’t like to receive one of these?’ (Brown liked to rile us up. An Ulsterman, he once caused minor outrage among my southern classmates by suggesting he’d have preferred to include, over Heaney, Derek Mahon in our seminar triad; but he felt his hands tied, as that would have entailed ‘teaching work by three Protestants’.) One night, while working as a waitress in the Fitzwilliam Hotel on Stephen’s Green, Marie ran home to tell me she’d actually met and spoken to Heaney during her shift, impressed, most of all, that his tipple had been a glassful of neat vodka garnished with nothing more than a sliver of lemon.

I served him drinks too (Smithwick’s) while working as a volunteer at a literary festival in Dún Laoghaire. The poets had an area cordoned off for them in the back of The Forty Foot; to say the trade in complimentary alcohol was brisk would be to understate things. I was too shy, or too churlish, to mix with the writers, a feeling only exacerbated when the Belfast poet Medbh McGuckian – who remembered me from a reading I’d organised for her in college – called me over, wanting to introduce me ‘to Seamus’. I’d been partaking too, on the sly, to the extent that soon I felt fortified enough to at least hover near the poet’s enclave. Chatting to Medbh’s husband John we, somehow, hit upon common ground in our shared passion for fishing. As John, well into his cups, discoursed on the ‘much overlooked, iridescent beauty’ of roach, and what he termed the ‘piscatorial genocide’ of certain methods of coarse fishing, Heaney leant in and was there with us all of a sudden, contributing an anecdote about Patrick Kavanagh.

With an undergraduate blitheness I informed him I’d been studying his work and, in relation to his poem ‘The Spoonbait’, asked whether he was really a fisherman (suspecting he was not). I aired my admiration, most of all, for Station Island and those ‘bog poems’ which had so captivated me I’d gone on to read the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob’s The Bog People, one of their source inspirations. Far too much into the flow of things at this point, I added, laughing, that later I’d taken a train over to Jutland from Copenhagen on a literary pilgrimage to those famous preserved bodies – only to find the museum shut – while ostentatiously reading ‘The Tollund Man’ (‘Some day I will go to Aarhus / To see his peat-brown head’). Heaney responded – with humour, while firmly putting the finger of chastisement on that pushy young man I was – by pointing out that, for this act to have been ostentatious, ‘someone would have had to have been watching me’.

Seeing the shame rise in my cheeks, Heaney – wanting to lighten the atmosphere again, perhaps – offered up a story about being asked to deliver an address at that museum of prehistoric bodies which was, he noted, ‘more lively a place than most poetry readings’. P.V. Glob had led him out back beforehand where they’d imbibed freely from his hoard of potent homebrew (my diary from the time says ‘beer’, though, writing in the Dublin Review of Books, I see that Bruce Clunies-Ross describes Glob’s alchemic pastime distilling brændevin, or schnapps). Heaney mimed himself swaying at the lectern after, slurring a speech whose delivery was made harder still by Denmark’s attractive queen sitting right in front of him, smoking, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Making a scissoring motion with his fingers, in conspiratorially hushed tones, Heaney asked ‘Did you ever see Basic Instinct?’ I recalled this anecdote later, on reading Stepping Stones, his wonderful book-length conversation with Dennis O’Driscoll (who was to become a friend), specifically Heaney’s oddly neo-Wordsworthian claim that ‘in poetry a recollection is as potent as an erection’. Perhaps this was a meditation on involuntary instinct and poetic truth in the vein of lines from ‘Tenderloin’ by Thom Gunn: ‘And there’s no such thing / as an insincere / erection is there?’

That wasn’t the strangest part to the night, not by a long way. The unlikely Parnassian bower in the back of the Forty Foot, all chrome and glass and fluorescent cocktails, was alive with the tribal resentments and allegiances which define poetry communities the world over. One of Britain’s leading verse publishers, ruddily flushed-up with whiskey and (rather theatrically, we thought) rolling up his sleeves, challenged Ireland’s leading poetry publisher to ‘step outside’ for a fistfight in the carpark. Heaney spilt a whole pint down Medbh McGuckian. Part of my job was to call taxis for the festival guests, all being put up at the same hotel. On asking one poet if she’d like to jump in with the Chinese writer she’d been deep in conversation with all night, I discovered the true meaning of being collared as she grabbed me by the nape, shook me forcibly and, right up in my face, pulled rank with the words ‘How dare you? Don’t you understand that this is how rumours start?’, following up with words to the effect that she was going to report ‘this incident’ to my supervisor.

The next day, in the green room, Heaney must have remembered overhearing my conversation with John, generously suggesting that, as I was into pike fishing, I should make contact with the artist Barrie Cooke (Ted Hughes’s fishing companion), writing out for me his address in Sligo.

There were other occasions when I saw Heaney: reading in the Abbey Theatre and latterly at Westminster Abbey when he gave the address at the dedication of Hughes’s memorial in Poets’ Corner. But the most potent of my recollections remains a visual one: the time when, returning one night to my student digs inside Trinity College – its empty front square dormant under a wintry quiet, mist at ankle-height across the cobblestones – I passed Heaney, spotlit in the yellowy well of light cast by an arc lantern, climbing out of his Mercedes. In a green raincoat and wide-brimmed hat – at once Robert Graves and film noir gumshoe – he looked over, briefly levelling index fingers of both hands at me in that universal gesture known as ‘the guns’.


NOTES

• The title Heaney Astray is aplay on the title of his book Sweeney Astray