Preoccupations.
Selected Prose, 1968-1978.
Seamus Heaney.
for Seamus Deane and Thomas Flanagan.
Acknowledgements.
The author and publisher would like to acknowledge the following: BBC Radio, Carcanet Press, Critical Inquiry, Education Times, the Guardian, Hibernia, Honest Ulsterman, the Irish Times, the Listener, Penguin Books, Proceedings of the British Academy, Radio Telefis Eireann, Threshold and The Times Literary Supplement.
Acknowledgements are also due to Andre Deutsch Ltd for permission to quote from Mercian Hymns (1975) by Geoffrey Hill; and to Mrs Katherine B. Kavanagh and Martin Brian & O"Keeffe Ltd for permission to quote from Patrick Kavanagh"s poems.
Foreword.
Except for a couple of reviews and a Listener article of 1971, all of the pieces printed here were written during or since 1972. Yet long before that critical year the sediment out of which many of them spring had been gathering, especially in Belfast in the mid-sixties, when a group of us who had just started to write used to talk poetry day after day with an intensity and a prejudice that cannot but have left a mark on all of us. Then at Easter in 1972 I decided to resign from my entirely agreeable job in the English Department of Queen"s University, and that summer I moved with my family to Glanmore in Co. Wicklow, determined to put the practice of poetry more deliberately at the centre of my life. It was a kind of test.
All that I really knew about the art was derived from whatever poetry I had written, and from those poets who had helped me to write it. I had a half-clarified desire to come to poetic terms with myself by considering the example of others, and to try to bring into focus the little I knew. So when my freelance activities inevitably led to lecturing and reviewing, the focusing began on that occasional basis. But I hope it is clear that the essays selected here are held together by searches for answers to central preoccupying questions: how should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?
The longer pieces were written to be delivered from the podium so now and again that lecturing note creeps in. And if there is sometimes a strait-laced quality about the writing, that too is all part of "the makings of a music", the slightly constricted utterance of somebody who underwent his academic rite of pa.s.sage when practical criticism held great sway in the academy. Nevertheless, I am grateful for that discipline: as Finn McCool said in his time, the best music in the world is the music of what happens.
We go on, of course, to blunder after the music of what might happen, a quest which requires confidants and mentors, and this book is a response to some who came to my a.s.sistance. A number of the essays are obviously a matter of "breaking bread with the dead", an activity which W. H. Auden judged essential to the life of poetry. Others are just as clearly engagements with the achievements of the living; and others still are inspections of myself, although, as Patrick Kavanagh insisted, the self is interesting only as an example.
Many people who are not mentioned in these pages have left their mark upon them: among many excellent teachers, Sean B. O"Kelly at St. Columb"s College and Laurence Lerner at Queen"s, both of whom quickened my love of poetry and, for better or worse, helped to start me writing about it; Michael McLaverty, who lent me Patrick Kavanagh"s A Soul for Sale late in 1962; Edna Longley, whose comprehension of Edward Thomas extended into a reading of the contemporary English poets discussed here along similar lines; Michael Allen, the reader over my shoulder; and Helen Vendler, who encouraged me to trust my critical capacities even after she had read some of these chapters in ma.n.u.script. To the friends named on the dedication page I owe a special debt of grat.i.tude; over the years, their conversation, their writings and their formal lectures have given me food for the thought that nurtured much of what follows. Indeed in one or two places it appears entirely undigested.
Since I have always needed to be goaded into this kind of work, I am in more than the usual debt to the editors who commissioned and patiently awaited the different articles and reviews, and to the sponsors of the lectures. And since n.o.body except my wife Marie has been privy to the turbulence in the house as I kicked against these goads, I have to thank her more than anybody for putting up with and encouraging me during the whole uncertain business.
At the enquiry which preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if Cathleen ni Houlihan was not written to affect opinion. Certainly it was not. I had a dream one night which gave me a story, and I had certain emotions about this country, and I gave those emotions expression for my own pleasure. If I had written to convince others I would have asked myself, not "Is that exactly what I think and feel?" but "How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when they have read it?" And all would be oratorical and insincere. If we understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root. Coventry Patmore has said, "The end of art is peace," and the following of art is little different from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation it demands.
W. B. YEATS, "Samhain: 1905", in Explorations.
I.
Mossbawn.
1. Omphalos.
I would begin with the Greek word, omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door. It is Co. Derry in the early 1940s. The American bombers groan towards the aerodrome at Toomebridge, the American troops manoeuvre in the fields along the road, but all of that great historical action does not disturb the rhythms of the yard. There the pump stands, a slender, iron idol, snouted, helmeted, dressed down with a sweeping handle, painted a dark green and set on a concrete plinth, marking the centre of another world. Five households drew water from it. Women came and went, came rattling between empty enamel buckets, went evenly away, weighed down by silent water. The horses came home to it in those first lengthening evenings of spring, and in a single draught emptied one bucket and then another as the man pumped and pumped, the plunger slugging up and down, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.
I do not know what age I was when I got lost in the pea-drills in a field behind the house, but it is a half-dream to me, and I"ve heard about it so often that I may even be imagining it. Yet, by now, I have imagined it so long and so often that I know what it was like: a green web, a caul of veined light, a tangle of rods and pods, stalks and tendrils, full of a.s.suaging earth and leaf smell, a sunlit lair. I"m sitting as if just wakened from a winter sleep and gradually become aware of voices, coming closer, calling my name, and for no reason at all I have begun to weep.
All children want to crouch in their secret nests. I loved the fork of a beech tree at the head of our lane, the close thicket of a boxwood hedge in the front of the house, the soft, collapsing pile of hay in a back corner of the byre; but especially I spent time in the throat of an old willow tree at the end of the farmyard. It was a hollow tree, with gnarled, spreading roots, a soft, perishing bark and a pithy inside. Its mouth was like the fat and solid opening in a horse"s collar, and, once you squeezed in through it, you were at the heart of a different life, looking out on the familiar yard as if it were suddenly behind a pane of strangeness. Above your head, the living tree flourished and breathed, you shouldered the slightly vibrant bole, and if you put your forehead to the rough pith you felt the whole lithe and whispering crown of willow moving in the sky above you. In that tight cleft, you sensed the embrace of light and branches, you were a little Atlas shouldering it all, a little Cerunnos pivoting a world of antlers.
The world grew. Mossbawn, the first place, widened. There was what we called the Sandy Loaning, a sanded pathway between old hedges leading in off the road, first among fields and then through a small bog, to a remote farmhouse. It was a silky, fragrant world there, and for the first few hundred yards you were safe enough. The sides of the lane were banks of earth topped with broom and ferns, quilted with moss and primroses. Behind the broom, in the rich gra.s.s, cattle munched rea.s.suringly. Rabbits occasionally broke cover and ran ahead of you in a flurry of dry sand. There were wrens and goldfinches. But, gradually, those lush and definite fields gave way to scraggy marshland. Birch trees stood up to their pale shins in swamps. The ferns thickened above you. Scuffles in old leaves made you nervous and you dared yourself always to pa.s.s the badger"s set, a wound of fresh mould in an overgrown ditch where the old brock had gone to earth. Around that badger"s hole, there hung a field of dangerous force. This was the realm of bogeys. We"d heard about a mystery man who haunted the fringes of the bog here, we talked about mankeepers and mosscheepers, creatures uncatalogued by any naturalist, but none the less real for that. What was a mosscheeper, anyway, if not the soft, malicious sound the word itself made, a siren of collapsing sibilants coaxing you out towards bog pools lidded with innocent gra.s.s, quicksands and quagmires? They were all there and spreading out over a low, birch-screened ap.r.o.n of land towards the sh.o.r.es of Lough Beg.
That was the moss, forbidden ground. Two families lived at the heart of it, and a recluse, called Tom Tipping, whom we never saw, but in the morning on the road to school we watched his smoke rising from a clump of trees, and spoke his name between us until it was synonymous with mystery man, with unexpected scuttlings in the hedge, with footsteps slushing through long gra.s.s.
To this day, green, wet corners, flooded wastes, soft rushy bottoms, any place with the invitation of watery ground and tundra vegetation, even glimpsed from a car or a train, possess an immediate and deeply peaceful attraction. It is as if I am betrothed to them, and I believe my betrothal happened one summer evening, thirty years ago, when another boy and myself stripped to the white country skin and bathed in a moss-hole, treading the liver-thick mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened. We dressed again and went home in our wet clothes, smelling of the ground and the standing pool, somehow initiated.
Beyond the moss spread the narrow reaches of Lough Beg, and in the centre of Lough Beg lay Church Island, a spire rising out of its yew trees, a local mecca. St. Patrick, they said, had fasted and prayed there fifteen hundred years before. The old graveyard was shoulder-high with meadowsweet and cow parsley, overhung with thick, unmolested yew trees and, somehow, those yews fetched me away to Agincourt and Crecy, where the English archers" bows, I knew, were made of yew also. All I could ever manage for my bows were tapering shoots of ash or willow from a hedge along the stackyard, but even so, to have cut a bough from that silent compound on Church Island would have been a violation too treacherous to contemplate.
If Lough Beg marked one limit of the imagination"s nesting ground, Slieve Gallon marked another. Slieve Gallon is a small mountain that lies in the opposite direction, taking the eye out over grazing and ploughed ground and the distant woods of Moyola Park, out over Grove Hill and Back Park and Castledawson. This side of the country was the peopled, communal side, the land of hayc.o.c.k and corn-stook, of fence and gate, milk-cans at the end of lanes and auction notices on gate pillars. Dogs barked from farm to farm. Sheds gaped at the roadside, bulging with fodder. Behind and across it went the railway, and the noise that hangs over it constantly is the heavy shunting of an engine at Castledawson station.
I have a sense of air, of lift and light, when this comes back to me. Light dancing off the shallows of the Moyola River, shifting in eddies on the glaucous whirlpool. Light changing on the mountain itself, that stood like a barometer of moods, now blue and hazy, now green and close up. Light above the spire, away at Magherafelt. Light frothing among the bluebells on Grove Hill. And the lift of the air is resonant, too, with vigorous musics. A summer evening carries the fervent and melancholy strain of hymn-singing from a gospel hall among the fields, and the hawthorn blooms and the soft, white patens of the elder-flower hang dolorous in the hedges. Or the rattle of Orange drums from Aughrim Hill sets the heart alert and watchful as a hare.
For if this was the country of community, it was also the realm of division. Like the rabbit pads that loop across grazing, and tunnel the soft growths under ripening corn, the lines of sectarian antagonism and affiliation followed the boundaries of the land. In the names of its fields and townlands, in their mixture of Scots and Irish and English etymologies, this side of the country was redolent of the histories of its owners. Broagh, The Long Rigs, Bell"s Hill; Brian"s Field, the Round Meadow, the Demesne; each name was a kind of love made to each acre. And saying the names like this distances the places, turns them into what Wordsworth once called a prospect of the mind. They lie deep, like some script indelibly written into the nervous system.
I always remember the pleasure I had in digging the black earth in our garden and finding, a foot below the surface, a pale seam of sand. I remember, too, men coming to sink the shaft of the pump and digging through that seam of sand down into the bronze riches of the gravel, that soon began to puddle with the spring water. That pump marked an original descent into earth, sand, gravel, water. It centred and staked the imagination, made its foundation the foundation of the omphalos itself. So I find it altogether appropriate that an old superst.i.tion ratifies this hankering for the underground side of things. It is a superst.i.tion a.s.sociated with the Heaney name. In Gaelic times, the family were involved with ecclesiastical affairs in the diocese of Derry, and had some kind of rights to the stewardship of a monastic site at Banagher in the north of the county. There is a St. Muredach O"Heney a.s.sociated with the old church at Banagher; and there is also a belief that sand lifted from the ground at Banagher has beneficent, even magical, properties, if it is lifted from the site by one of the Heaney family name. Throw sand that a Heaney has lifted after a man going into court, and he will win his case. Throw it after your team as they go out on the pitch, and they will win the game.
BBC Radio 4, 1978.
2. Reading.
When I was learning to read, towards the end of 1945, the most important books in the house were the ration books-the pink clothes coupons and the green "points" for sweets and groceries. There wasn"t much reading done apart from the deaths column of the Irish Weekly and the auctions page of the Northern Const.i.tution. "I am instructed by the representatives of the late John James Halferty, Drumanee..." My father lay on the sofa and rehea.r.s.ed the acres, roods and perches of arable and meadow land in a formal tone and with a certain enlargement of the spirit.
On a shelf, behind a screen and too high to be reached anyhow, there were four or five mouldering volumes that may have belonged to my Aunt Susan from her days in Orange"s Academy, but they remained closed books to me. The first glimpse I have of myself reading on my own is one of those orphaned memories, a moment without context that will always stay with me. It is a book from the school library-a padlocked box that was opened more or less as a favour-involving explorers in cork helmets and "savages", with ill.u.s.trations of war canoes on a jungle river. The oil lamp is lit and a neighbour called Hugh Bates is interrupting me. "Boys but this Seamus fellow is a great scholar. What book are you in now, son?" And my father is likely wringing what he can from the moment with "He"s as bad as Pat McGuckin this minute." Pat McGuckin was a notorious bachelor farmer-a cousin of ours-who was said to burn his scone like King Alfred every time he lifted a book. Years later, when Death of a Naturalist was published, the greatest commendation at home was "Lord knows Pat would fairly have enjoyed this."
Of course, there were always religious magazines like the Far East and the Messenger-Pudsy Ryan in the children"s corner of the former was the grown-ups" idea of a side-splitting turn, but even then I found his mis-spellings a bit heavy-handed. Far better were the technicolour splendours of Korky the Cat and Big Eggo in the Dandy and Beano. The front pages of these comics opened like magic cas.e.m.e.nts on Desperate Dan, Lord Snooty, Hungry Horace, Keyhole Kate, Julius Sneezer and Jimmy and his Magic Patch and probably const.i.tuted my first sense of the invitations of fiction. They were pa.s.sed round at school, usually fairly tattered, but every now and again my mother brought a new one from Castledawson, without a fold in it, its primary colours blazing with excitements to come. Occasionally, also, an American comic-all colour from beginning to end-arrived from the American airbase nearby, with Li"l Abner, Ferdinand and Blondie speaking a language that even Pat McGuckin did not know.
There was a resistance to buying new comics in our house, not out of any educational nicety, but because of a combination of two att.i.tudes: that they were a catch-penny and that somehow they were the thin end of the wedge, that if you let them into the house the next step was the Empire News, Thompson"s Weekly, t.i.t-Bits and the News of the World. Nevertheless, I ended up persuading my mother to place a regular order for the Champion, a higher-cla.s.s comic altogether, featuring a Biggles-rides-again figure called Rockfist Rogan and Ginger Nutt ("the boy who takes the bis-cake", in South Derry parlance) and Colwyn Dane, the sleuth. With the Champion I entered the barter market for the Rover, the Hotspur, the Wizard and any other pulp the presses of old England could deliver. I skimmed through all those "ain"ts" and "cors" and "yoicks" and "blimeys", and skimmed away contented.
So what chance had Kitty the Hare against all that? Our Boys appeared regularly, a cultural antidote with official home backing, healthy as a Christian Brother on a winter morning, the first step towards Ireland"s Own. Cultural debilitations! I preferred the j.a.pes of Ginger Nutt, the wheezes of Smith of the Lower Fourth, the swish of gowns, the mortar-board and the head"s study to the homely toils of Murphy among the birettas. It would take Joyce"s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Kavanagh"s The Great Hunger to get over that surrender.
My first literary frisson, however, came on home ground. There was an Irish history lesson at school which was in reality a reading of myths and legends. A textbook with large type and heavy Celticized ill.u.s.trations dealt with the matter of Ireland from the Tuatha De Danaan to the Norman Invasion. I can still see Brian Boru with his sword held like a cross reviewing the troops at Clontarf. But the real imaginative mark was made with a story of the Dagda, a dream of harp music and light, confronting and defeating Balor of the Evil Eye on the dark fortress of Tory Island. Cuchullain and Ferdia also sank deep, those images of wounds bathed on the green rushes and armour clattering in the ford.
Yet all of that yielded to the melodrama of Blind Pew and Billy Bones, Long John and Ben Gunn. Treasure Island we read at school also and it was a prelude to the first book I remember owning and cherishing: there it was on the table one Christmas morning, Robert Louis Stevenson"s Kidnapped. I was a Jacobite for life after that day. Instinctively I knew that the world of the penal rock and the redcoats-that oleograph to the faith of our fathers-was implicit in the scenery of that story. To this day, my heart lifts to the first sentence of it: "I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father"s house...."
As a boarder at St. Columb"s College I did the Maurice Walsh circuit-Blackc.o.c.k"s Feather remains with me as an atmosphere, a sense of bogs and woods-but again it was a course book that stuck its imagery deepest. When I read in Lorna Doone how John Ridd stripped the muscle off Carver Doone"s arm like a string of pith off an orange I was well on the road to epiphanies. Not that I didn"t stray into the imperial realms of Biggles or the baloney of the William stories. But it is only those books with a touch of poetry in them that I can remember-all coming to a head when, in my last summer holiday from school, I sat up all night to finish Thomas Hardy"s Return of the Native.
I missed Pooh Bear. I can"t remember owning a selection of Grimm or Andersen. I read Alice in Wonderland at the university. But what odds? Didn"t Vinny Hunter keep me in wonderland with his stories of Tarzan: "When he jumps down off a tree Tarzan shakes the world."
So Vinny Hunter would tell me On the road to the school.
I had forgotten for years Words so seismic and plain That would come like rocked waters, Possible again.
Education Times, 1973.
3. Rhymes.
A few months ago I remembered a rhyme that we used to chant on the way to school. I know now that it is about initiation but as I trailed along the Lagan"s Road on my way to Anahorish School it was something that was good for a laugh: "Are your praties dry And are they fit for digging?"
"Put in your spade and try,"
Says Dirty-Faced McGuigan.
I suppose I must have been about eight or nine years old when those lines stuck in my memory. They const.i.tute a kind of poetry, not very respectable perhaps, but very much alive on the lips of that group of schoolboys, or "scholars", as the older people were inclined to call us. McGuigan was probably related to a stern old character called Ned McGuigan who travelled the roads with a menacing blackthorn stick. He came from a district called Ballymacquigan-The Quigan, for short-and he turned up in another rhyme: Neddy McGuigan, He p.i.s.sed in the Quigan; The Quigan was hot So he p.i.s.sed in the pot; The pot was too high So he p.i.s.sed in the sky; h.e.l.l to your soul, Neddy McGuigan, For p.i.s.sing so high.
And there were other chants, scurrilous and sectarian, that we used to fling at one another: Up the long ladder and down the short rope To h.e.l.l with King Billy and G.o.d bless the Pope.
To which the answer was: Up with King William and down with the Pope Splitter splatter holy water Scatter the Paypishes every one If that won"t do We"ll cut them in two And give them a touch of the Red, white and blue.
To which the answer was: Red, white and blue Should be torn up in two And sent to the devil At half-past two.
Green, white and yellow Is a decent fellow.
Another one which was completely nonsensical still pleases me: One fine October"s morning September last July The moon lay thick upon the ground, the mud shone in the sky.
I stepped into a tramcar to take me across the sea, I asked the conductor to punch my ticket and he punched my eye for me.
I fell in love with an Irish girl, she sang me an Irish dance, She lived in Tipperary, just a few miles out of France.
The house it was a round one, the front was at the back, It stood alone between two more and it was whitewashed black.
We weren"t forced to get these lines by heart. They just seemed to spring in our mind and trip off the tongue spontaneously so that our parents would say "If it was your prayers, you wouldn"t learn them as fast."
There were other poems, of course, that we were forced to learn by heart. I am amazed to realize that at the age of eleven I was spouting great pa.s.sages of Byron and Keats by rote until the zinc roof of the Nissen hut that served for our schoolhouse (the previous school had been cleared during the war to make room for an aerodrome) rang to the half-understood magnificence of: There was a sound of revelry by night And Belgium"s capital had gathered then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o"er fair women and brave men.
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when The music rose with its voluptuous swell ...
I also knew the whole of Keats"s ode "To Autumn" but the only line that was luminous then was "To bend with apples the mossed cottage trees", because my uncle had a small orchard where the old apple trees were sleeved in a soft green moss. And I had a vague satisfaction from "the small gnats mourn/Among the river sallows", which would have been complete if it had been "midges" mourning among the "sallies".
The literary language, the civilized utterance from the cla.s.sic canon of English poetry, was a kind of force-feeding. It did not delight us by reflecting our experience; it did not re-echo our own speech in formal and surprising arrangements. Poetry lessons, in fact, were rather like catechism lessons: official inculcations of hallowed formulae that were somehow expected to stand us in good stead in the adult life that stretched out ahead. Both lessons did indeed introduce us to the gorgeousness of the polysyllable, and as far as we were concerned there was little to choose between the music with "its voluptuous swell" and the "solemnization of marriage within forbidden degrees of consanguinity". In each case we were overawed by the dimensions of the sound.
There was a third category of verse which I encountered at this time, halfway between the roadside rhymes and the school poetry (or "poertry"): a form known to us as "the recitation". When relations visited or a children"s party was held at home, I would be called upon to recite. Sometimes it would be an Irish patriotic ballad: At length, brave Michael Dwyer, you and your trusty men Were hunted o"er the mountain and tracked into the glen.
Sleep not, but watch and listen, keep ready blade and ball, For the soldiers know you hide this night in the Glen of Wild Imall.
Sometimes, a western narrative by Robert Service: A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon.
The kid that handles the music-box was. .h.i.tting a ragtime tune.
Back of the bar at a solo game sat Dangerous Dan McGrew And watching his luck was his light o"love, the lady that"s known as Lou.
While this kind of stuff did not possess the lure of forbidden words like "p.i.s.s" and "h.e.l.l to your soul", it was not enc.u.mbered by the solemn incomprehensibility of Byron and Keats. It gave verse, however humble, a place in the life of the home, made it one of the ordinary rituals of life.
Geoffrey Summerfield (ed.), Worlds, Penguin, 1974
Belfast
1. The Group "If a coathanger knocked in a wardrobe/That was a great event"-Derek Mahon"s evocation of the unfulfilled expectancy of an old man living in Belfast could be extended to the young men around Queen"s in the late fifties and early sixties. A lot of people of a generally literary bent were islanded about the place but they in no way const.i.tuted an archipelago. There was Denis Tuohy, Don Carleton, David Farrell, Stewart Parker, Ian Hill, Seamus Deane, John Hamilton, myself and many another, all dabbling. I don"t think many of us had a sense of contemporary poetry-Dylan Thomas"s records were as near as we seemed to get to the living thing. Laurence Lerner was in the English Department and produced a collection called Domestic Interiors but it was somehow remote, none of our business. And as for Philip Larkin, who had just left, I graduated without hearing his name, from student or lecturer. Michael McLaverty was teaching in town, but we never saw him; Roy McFadden had drawn the blinds on Rann, John Hewitt was in Coventry. That older generation were perhaps names to us but not voices. Gorgon and Q, the university literary magazines, were hand-to-mouth affairs, with no real excitement, audience or clique attaching to them. Mary O"Malley, John Boyd, Sam Hanna Bell, Joseph Tomelty and others were at work but again, they were beyond us. We stood or hung or sleepwalked between notions of writing that we had gleaned from English courses and the living reality of writers from our own place whom we did not know, in person or in print.
Those of us who stayed around saw that state of affairs changed by the mid-sixties and one of the strongest agents of change was Philip Hobsbaum. When Hobsbaum arrived in Belfast, he moved disparate elements into a single action. He emanated energy, generosity, belief in the community, trust in the parochial, the inept, the unprinted. He was impatient, dogmatic, relentlessly literary: yet he was patient with those he trusted, unpredictably susceptible to a wide variety of poems and personalities and urgent that the social and political exacerbations of our place should disrupt the decorums of literature. If he drove some people mad with his absolutes and hurt others with his overbearing, he confirmed as many with his enthusiasms. He and his wife Hannah kept open house for poetry and I remember his hospitality and encouragement with the special grat.i.tude we reserve for those who have led us towards confidence in ourselves.
I remember especially the first meeting of the group. Stewart Parker read his poems and was the first-and last-writer to stand up as he did so. That ritual of rising up to enounce, that initial formal ratification of the voice, seems emblematic in retrospect. What happened Monday night after Monday night in the Hobsbaum"s flat in Fitzwilliam Street somehow ratified the activity of writing for all of us who shared it. Perhaps not everybody needed it ratified-Michael Longley and James Simmons, for example, had been in the swim before they landed-but all of us were part of it in the end. What Hobsbaum achieved, whether people like it or not, was to give a generation a sense of themselves, in two ways: it allowed us to get to grips with one another within the group, to move from critical comment to creative friendship at our own pace, and it allowed a small public to think of us as The Group, a single, even singular phenomenon. There was his introduction of a number of us to "The Arts in Ulster", produced by John Boyd. There was an article in the Telegraph. There was Mary Holland scooping it all for the Observer when she arrived to cover the Festival in 1965. It"s easy to be blase about all that now, for now, of course, we"re genuine parochials. Then we were craven provincials. Hobsbaum contributed much to that crucial transformation.
When the Hobsbaums left, we missed the regular coffee and biscuits, the irregular booze, the boisterous literary legislation. One act of the drama had closed down. When the second act opened in my own house, after interludes in the back room of the English Department and the upper room of a pub, some of the old characters had departed, to London, Portrush, Holywood, wherever, and a crowd of gifted boy actors were in the wings to claim the stage. But by then the curtain was about to rise on the larger drama of our politics and the writers were to find themselves in a play within the play.
Honest Ulsterman, 1978 2. Christmas, 1971 People keep asking what it"s like to be living in Belfast and I"ve found myself saying that things aren"t too bad in our part of the town: a throwaway consolation meaning that we don"t expect to be caught in crossfire if we step into the street. It"s a shorthand that evades unravelling the weary twisted emotions that are rolled like a ball of hooks and sinkers in the heart. I am fatigued by a continuous adjudication between agony and injustice, swung at one moment by the long tail of race and resentment, at another by the more acceptable feelings of pity and terror. We live in the sickly light of TV screens, with a pane of selfishness between ourselves and the suffering. We survive explosions and funerals and live on among the families of the victims, those blown apart and those in cells apart.
And we have to live with the Army. This morning I was stopped on the Falls Road and marched to the nearest police barracks, with my three-year-old son, because my car tax was out of date. My protests grew limp when the officer in charge said: "Look, either you go to the police up the road or we take you now to Holywood"-their own ground. It hasn"t been named martial law but that"s what it feels like. Everywhere soldiers with c.o.c.ked guns are watching you-that"s what they"re here for-on the streets, at the corners of streets, from doorways, over the puddles on demolished sites. At night, jeeps and armoured cars groan past without lights; or road-blocks are thrown up, and once again it"s delays measured in hours, searches and signings among the guns and torches. As you drive away, you b.u.mp over ramps that are specially designed to wreck you at speed and maybe get a glimpse of a couple of youths with hands on their heads being frisked on the far side of the road. Just routine. Meanwhile up in the troubled estates street-lights are gone, accommodating all the better the night-sights of sniper and marksman.
If it is not army blocks, it is vigilantes. They are very efficiently organized, with barricades of new wood and watchmen"s huts and tea rotas, protecting the territories. If I go round the corner at ten o"clock to the cigarette machine or the chip shop, there are the gentlemen with flashlights, of mature years and determined mien, who will want to know my business. How far they are in agreement with the sentiments blazoned on the wall at the far end of the street I have not yet enquired. But "Keep Ulster Protestant" and "Keep Blacks and Fenians out of Ulster" are there to remind me that there are att.i.tudes around here other than defensive ones. All those sentry boxes where tea and consultation are taken through the small hours add up to yet another slogan: "Six into Twenty-Six won"t go." I walk back-"Good-night now, sir"-past a bank that was blown up a couple of months ago and a car showroom that went three weeks ago. n.o.body was killed. Most of the windows between the sites are boarded up still. Things aren"t too bad in our part.
There are few enough people on the roads at night. Fear has begun to tingle through the place. Who"s to know the next target on the Provisional list? Who"s to know the reprisals won"t strike where you are? The bars are quieter. If you"re carrying a parcel you make sure it"s close to you in case it"s suspected of being about to detonate. In the Queen"s University staff common-room, recently, a bomb-disposal squad had defused a bundle of books before the owner had quite finished his drink in the room next door. Yet when you think of the corpses in the rubble of McGurk"s Bar such caution is far from risible.
Then there are the perils of the department stores. Last Sat.u.r.day a bomb scare just pipped me before I had my socks and pyjamas paid for in Marks and Spencer, although there were four people on the Shankill Road who got no warning. A security man cornered my wife in Robinson and Cleaver-not surprisingly, when she thought of it afterwards. She had a timing device, even though it was just an old clock from an auction, lying in the bottom of her shopping bag. A few days previously someone else"s timing device had given her a scare when an office block in University Road exploded just as she got out of range.
There are hardly any fairy lights, or Christmas trees, and in many cases there will be no Christmas cards. This latter is the result of a request by the organizers of the civil disobedience campaign, in order that revenue to the Post Office may be cut as much as possible over the joyous season. If people must send cards, then they are asked to get the anti-internment cards which are being produced by the People"s Democracy and the Ardoyne Relief Committee to support, among others, the dependants of the internees in Long Kesh camp. Which must, incidentally, be literally the brightest spot in Ulster. When you pa.s.s it on the motorway after dark, it is squared off in neon, bright as an airport. An inflammation on the black countryside. Another of our military decorations.
The seasonal appeals will be made again to all men of goodwill, but goodwill for its proper exercise depends upon an achieved self-respect. For some people in this community, the exercise of goodwill towards the dominant caste has been hampered by the psychological hoops they have been made to jump and by the actual circ.u.mstances of their lives within the state, British and all as it may have been. A little goodwill in the Establishment here towards the notion of being Irish would take some of the twists out of the minority. Even at this time it is difficult to extend full sympathy to the predicament of that million among us who would ask the other half-million to exalt themselves by being humbled. You see, I have heard a completely unbigoted and humane friend searching for words to cope with his abhorrence of the Provisionals and hitting on the mot juste quite unconsciously: "These ... these ... Irish."