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A Smiling Public Man

   Seamus Heaney was born on April 13,1939 (12 days after me) and 3 months after the death of Yeats. The Letters* begin in 1965, his miraculous year. His first book, Death of a Naturalist...

I am housed monastically in an apartment with a red leather sofa, and eat meals in a student refectory.” Five years later, he was still “full of some anxieties about the teaching, the usual pangs about leaving the family and the occasional lift of excitement at the prospect of American energy and bachelor quarters.” But Harvard gave him “economic safety, writerly support and intellectual self-respect.” The university also enabled him to buy and soothe his breast at a country retreat in Co. Wicklow, 25 miles south of Dublin, and to acquire a permanent home at 191 Strand Road in the capital. He told the poet Charles Simic that the “jubilant truth-to-impulse, the invention and laconic cluedinness of the work you’ve been doing is really heart-lifting.” The less deserving Anne Stevenson, biographer of Sylvia Plath, was bucked up by what he called her “different buoyancies, velleities, vigours, freshets, risks, frisks”—comments always vague enough to be apparently truthful. Columb’s gulag.” Las Vegas was “the metropolis of the meaningless.” The local guides to the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, which had inspired Yeats’ “sages standing in God’s holy fire,” “knew every tessera in the town.” The infinitely distant astronauts had “ghostly movements on the moon.” His own frantic travels recalled the names of countries printed on the face of “an old wireless dial.” He’d seen a bullfight in Biarritz and, when decorated with honors, felt “like an old bull being stuck with rosettes” instead of swords.

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