The Writers Stuff

As well as the bitter pill of defeat, the full house that attended Ireland’s game with Sweden was treated to the first real autumn evening of the year. It was cold. For the first time in months, one sought the shelter of a fleece or sweater. There were candles on the table... lit. These are portents of things to come. The year rolls on. The big wheel turns.

But it’s great. The apple tree groans with reddening ballast. Plum trees bend and bow with succulence. Wheat, oats and barley have gone gold and with such low levels of moisture that some say it’s the crop of the century. Hayfields may yet yield a second abundance. Turf has been saved and stored and dried by the heat and lack of wind and rain. Even tomatoes ripen on the vine outdoors. In Ireland! What madness is this? And we have lost Seamus Heaney.
It’s not as though we are short of heroes. They abound and in many walks of life. Most obvious are sports stars and athletes. We hold a special place for musicians and singers of songs. But in Ireland there is a deep, special esteem for writers. Didn’t we elect a poet as President?
By special esteem I mean that people talk knowledgably about writers. Not everyone, obviously. But you meet very ordinary people who can quote lines and phrases, and point to where they came or went, or where Brendan Behan hung them from an upstairs window by their bootlaces...
Some believe that this is an ancient legacy, honed by early Irish monks in monastery scriptoriums (okay pedant, scriptoria), re-exported back to Europe in the Dark Ages and nursed at home in story and song through dark times and bright and especially to express identity and give succour in times of oppression and resistance.
Others see it as a more modern phenomenon, born of acceptance of incorporation into the United Kingdom in the early 19th century and honed by diligent study and application of the details of grammar and syntax and good English, so as to be able to serve in the imperial bureaucracy at the highest level, an ambition to be even better at English than the English themselves. Little wonder, they say, that the Irish and the Indians have been so prominent in modern English writing...
Maybe so.
All the same, the love of story, of the rhythm and meanings of words and language, the subtleties and nuances, the codes and craic, these are especially strong in Ireland. The decline of the pub has withdrawn them somewhat from the foreground, yet they endure.
It’s unsurprising therefore that we produce a lot of writers, almost certainly more than you know. They cover all the genres. Amongst them have been our aces, Swift, Stoker, Joyce, Shaw, Yeats, O’Casey, Beckett, Heaney...
You might sourly acknowledge them as people after whom Irish pubs are named around the world. And that’s true. But these are people who have shaped and reshaped literature. Where we have many who are giants, these are superheroes.
Most of them were outsiders; indeed, most of them were Protestants. This is also true in other fields such as modern visual art and design: for example, Eileen Gray, Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett... True, Joyce was brought up as a Catholic yet he too, an atheist and modernist, was an outsider in the Ireland of his time.
But not Heaney. He was of the country and the rocks and streams and the community and the culture. So too was John McGahern, his epic struggles with the darkness of McQuaid’s Ireland notwithstanding, and so is Brian Friel, so maybe that time has passed.
What is certain is the huge affection felt for Heaney in all sections of society. He was recognised in Ireland as a global big hitter, who could distill and refine millennia of poetry into something sublime and pertinent to the world we live in; someone who might have just stood up from lunch with the Clintons, but who would give you a gentle countryperson’s nod and bid you good day on the street outside; someone who could fuse extraordinary thoughts and concepts, who could find the words to shape the otherwise ineluctable, yet who could also chuckle at life and himself in equal measure.
He took himself and his work very seriously and was not afraid to delve deeply into fraught and fractious themes, yet he also saw the funny side of life and was a most engaging companion.
Above all, his poetry and his presence expressed and embodied something great and generous, thoughtful and inspiring for those of us trailing through these unforgiving times. And he channelled ordinary Irishness into something truly sublime, something that seemed to touch the heavens, something that made us all feel stronger, more whole, more true, more graceful.
We have had sore need of greatness and generosity and thought and inspiration these last few years. Thank you Seamus for giving them to us...