IN THE LATE 1990s, FOR FIVE YEARS, I TAUGHT AT HARVARD AS A lecturer in the Department of English, where Seamus Heaney was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Soon after my arrival, he invited me to dinner at the Dolphin, a little seafood restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, which he liked. He said it was to be a “social evening, not a command performance,” knowing I would be nervous, and on a Tuesday after our classes, we met in the lobby of the Faculty Club to walk the few blocks to the Dolphin. The fact that he did not suggest that we eat at the Club, amid the gloomy portraits of distinguished men, indicated to me it was indeed to be a social occasion.
So, to dinner I wore blue jeans, boots, and an old fisherman’s sweater that had belonged to my dead friend Bill. Seamus was wearing a plaid shirt, with an open collar, and a handsome green suit of Irish wool, which I recognized from my interview many months earlier, at which Lucie Brock-Broido, Philip Fisher, Jill McCorkle, David Perkins, and Helen Vendler, in addition to Seamus, were present. It had been a sunny January afternoon and snow was heaped on the streets. My voice cracked as I answered their questions and I had cotton mouth, but the thirty minutes went by quickly and before I knew it I was shaking everyone’s hands and saying I did not wish them an easy choice, which made them all laugh, and flying home to Oregon. During the interview, Seamus asked if I preferred poets who wrote in syllabics, as I was then doing, and I replied that I liked poetry that was not like mine. His suit was exactly the color of Lucie’s green eyes.
As we walked the few blocks toward the Dolphin that autumn evening, it seemed to me that everyone recognized Seamus, greeting him eagerly, and he shook their hands, listened to what they had to say, and was always polite.
When we got to the restaurant and were seated, Seamus immediately ordered a bottle of Muscadet, a dry white wine that is a fine companion to shellfish and comes from the Loire Valley, where winemakers leave grape juice after fermentation to rest during winter, before putting the wine into bottles to give it a richer flavor. Swallowing his first mouthful, Seamus said that it was his eleventh year at Harvard and he no longer felt terrified returning.
“Terrified about what?” I asked. And he replied that it was painful for him to leave his family for four months every year, and to interrupt his writing, in order to teach American students. His wife, Marie, who appears in many memorable poems, stayed on in Dublin with their young family, making it possible for Seamus to travel annually to Harvard. His friend Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish poet, had recommended he never be apart from Marie for more than six weeks, and this was a formulation that had worked: he returned to Dublin periodically during the term.
He admitted he felt distant from American students and sometimes didn’t understand where they were coming from, unlike his Irish students. But he wanted to continue teaching for six or seven more years before retiring. (In 1995 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which carried a purse of 7,200,000 Swedish kronor, or about 900,000 U.S. dollars today.) As he explained all this, I noticed from the corner of my eye a Cambridge poet and her husband at the next table, also listening intently. When Seamus noticed them, too, he greeted them immediately and then, without missing a beat, resumed our conversation.
To start, Seamus ordered cherrystone clams and I had a half-dozen oysters, which we ate raw, squeezing lemon juice on the creamy beige, slightly salty meat inside. A cherrystone clam is a hard-shell clam, with a thick, tough shell, and these were heart-shaped, with concentric growth lines on them, like those on a tree trunk. Cherrystones have shiny white interiors with a dark purple stain surrounding the muscle scars, and the hinges have three white teeth. They are sweeter and tenderer than larger clams; in size, they’re the next step down from a quahog (pronounced CŌ-hog), a word I first learned from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (“To be in any form, what is that? … If nothing lay more developed, the quahog and its callous shell were enough. / Mine is no callous shell …”).
My plate of oysters made me think of Seamus’s poem called “Oysters,” in which he describes them as “alive and violated,” and lying on “beds of ice,” and “ripped and shucked and scattered.” It is the opening poem in Seamus’s beautiful collection Field Work, which I read when I was a graduate student and was only beginning to appreciate contemporary poetry. But I was changed by it, as a growing fruit is changed by the sun.
How could I be as bold and original and astringent, I wondered?
That night at the Dolphin, when Seamus traded one of his clams for one of my oysters, it made me happy because it seemed like a gesture very much en famille. Later, after we had been colleagues for a couple of years, we traded fountain pens. He was autographing my copy of Crediting Poetry, his Nobel Lecture, with my high school Waterman pen and liked it so much I told him to keep it; in response to this, he reached in his coat pocket and gave me his nice Sheaffer, which I’ve never had the courage to write with, but it lies on my desk, a totem of friendship and creativity.
Seamus ordered boiled haddock for a main course, a fish I thought in keeping with his simple refinement. I, on the other hand, ordered a seafood platter, with scallops, shrimps, and a little piece of delicious cod lying together with parsley and lemon wedges on an oily white plate, an image—I laugh at myself and think—of a poet still experimenting, still becoming himself. As we ate, we talked about his new book, The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, which I’d seen performed in New York City the previous spring. It had been a big success, and this brought Seamus pleasure. It was a classical play with a modern message regarding loyalty, a theme I knew to be relevant to Seamus’s poetry—the loyalty to oneself versus the loyalty to one’s tribe, or, to put it another way, the loyalty to personal moral beliefs versus the loyalty to political or religious callings. Of course, all poets must struggle with loyalty in order to overcome the boundaries of style, religion, race, gender and class, and national and ethnic identity, which inhibit us. Several years later, I learned that Seamus, raised a Catholic, was no longer practicing. He had, of course, long been committing himself instead to truth, or the truth of his own feelings, which is the basis of all art.
Seamus once began a lecture by thanking his colleague Helen Vendler for her introduction and adding that he always appreciated her truthfulness, especially when she was able to praise him. This made everyone in the audience laugh. He then went on to discuss two poems he had loved as a young man: “To a Mouse,” by Robert Burns, a farmer poet, who one day turned up a mouse from its nest with his plow; the poem contemplates the destruction this wrought; and “The Yellow Bittern,” by Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna, an eighteenth-century Ulster poet, who wrote in Gaelic. As on a wintry day he went walking near his home by the shores of Lough MacNean, he came upon a yellow bittern lying frozen on the ice; in his poem, Ghunna (a heavy drinker) speculates that the death was caused by the bird’s not being able to drink from the iced-over water. In both poems, a man confronts a creature in nature and this confrontation yields self-awareness. Also, both poems have two powerful currents of electricity running through them, a current from the English language (caused by the friction and song of words) and another current from the human experience which language relates.
I was especially interested in Seamus’s discussion because L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry was very much in fashion then. It was a poetry preoccupied with fragments and unmeaning, which deranged language and eliminated connotation. Seamus seemed to be arguing that the poem of emotion was as important as the poem of language. This ratified me.
Recalling now the gusto with which Seamus ate his buttered haddock, I smile to myself because it is a durable fish, like him, inhabiting both the American and European coasts of the Atlantic Ocean. It feeds on most slow-moving invertebrates, including small crabs, sea worms, clams, starfish, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and, occasionally, squid. After capture, it must be bled, gutted, and iced immediately, to retain superior flavor. The meat of the haddock is lean and white and flakes beautifully when cooked. The poetry is in the details.
When the bill for our dinner arrived, we were still eating Key lime pie. Despite protests, Seamus paid for everything, and afterward we strolled down Massachusetts Avenue to the Café Pamplona, a tiny underground coffee shop, across the street from Adams House, the college residence where Seamus lived every winter and spring. It was smoky and claustrophobic but rather appealing, too, and later, I occasionally met honors students there for conferences. Seamus was flying to Kentucky the next morning but didn’t seem to want our evening to end, suggesting we even go for a Jack Daniel’s after an espresso. Heading for the bar, we passed still another local poetry figure, walking his dog, and Seamus informed me he was one of the strings that, once plucked, made the whole harp of literary Cambridge tremble. He wanted me to take this under advisement, and I did.
Over the years, I took many things he said under advisement. When I published my fourth collection of poetry, The Visible Man, I was worried it would be narrowly defined by its gay content, but Seamus objected, using the word arena—the arena of human emotion, he called it—which is where all good poems must operate, rather than catering to special interests. The arena of human emotion was where my poems would find a place, he insisted, because the feelings in them were familiar to us all and because the language had a complex geology. I didn’t expect this from the son of an Irish cattle dealer.
On another occasion, seeking advice about teaching, I told Seamus I didn’t want to compete against the poets of my generation for the few desirable positions at American universities.
“It would take an almost unnatural purity to succeed without teaching,” he replied, emphasizing that he’d been lucky to find a half-year arrangement, giving him eight months of writing time each year.
And when he visited my undergraduate poetry writing class, he told a student who complained about being from Salem, Oregon, where’d she’d grown up in a bookless, mediadominated environment, that most fine writers were from disadvantaged backgrounds and this, in and of itself, wasn’t an excuse for not succeeding. This of course did not surprise me, coming as it did from a scholarship boy, the eldest of nine children, who’d grown up on a small farm in a country of posted soldiers.
That night at the Pamplona, we ordered espressos, and the shiny stainless-steel espresso machine whistled in the background. Steam forced through roasted and powdered coffee beans makes a shrieking sound, like truth. Our coffee was served with little glasses of water on the side and a small pyramid of sugar packets. In one of my earliest childhood memories, I am three and sitting at a table in Marseille, France, with my grandmother, eating a warm croissant and dunking it in her bowl of café au lait. It is adulthood I taste then, and that I still taste now whenever I drink an espresso. In fact, I’m writing this on a damp gray morning in Paris and drinking an espresso, while feeling a river of other things Seamus said flood through me.