Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell: A Turbulent Friendship

Abstract

Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell: A Turbulent Friendship1 Jeffrey Meyers I In Stepping Stones (2008), Dennis O’Driscoll’s excellent book of interviews, Seamus Heaney recalled that he first met Robert Lowell in 1972 at Sonia Orwell’s party to celebrate Lowell’s wedding to Caroline Blackwood. Heaney was young enough to be Lowell’s son and from a rural Irish background, remote from Lowell’s patrician pedigree. He had not been invited to that grand occasion, but was staying with Karl Miller, editor of The Listener, who was on the guest list and brought him along. He was shy of meeting Lowell ‘because of that nimbus of authority that ringed his writings and his actions’,2 but ‘actually got into a corner with him for about half an hour and did the laundry list, as [Joseph] Brodsky used to say – checking out what was to be said about which poets … It was a genuine enough meeting, and he was immensely charming and even more immensely intelligent’.3 Later, on several manic and memorable occasions, the two developed a close friendship that influenced and inspired Heaney’s poetry. At the party Heaney was not only introduced to distinguished poets, but also gained insight into the politics of poetry: the prestige and power that controlled lucrative teaching jobs and lecture tours, fellowships and honours, of which he would later reap the full harvest. After Lowell’s untimely death in September 1977, Heaney wrote two essays, a memorial address and two poems about him. Lowell had social and political, as well as poetical, influence. Heaney remarked that ‘Lowell was the last American to be a dual citizen of the university and the world beyond it, at home in Harvard, but also at home among the metropolitan set, a figure to be photographed at cocktail parties and on marches to the Pentagon’ (SS, p.273). He used Keats’s description of Wordsworth to describe Lowell’s distinctive genius, and also explained why Lowell’s reputation, though not his poetry, fell after his death when fashions changed and standards declined: ‘Lowell is taking the punishment Studies • volume 109 • number 436 448 that’s always handed out to the big guy eventually; so no, I’m not surprised. Lowell was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, a Eurocentric, egotistical sublime, writing as if he intended to be heard in a high wind. He was on the winning side from the start: Boston Brahmin, friend of Eliot, part of the literary establishment on both sides of the Atlantic’ (SS, p.280). When Heaney’s reputation later soared, he too took his share of low blows. Caroline Blackwood, a witty and talented writer, was also a considerable figure. Her wealthy and aristocratic family came (like Heaney’s) from Northern Ireland, but her father, killed in Burma in the Second World War, was the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. An heir to the Guinness brewery fortune, she was also a great beauty. Her first husband, Lucian Freud, had painted her portrait that was as stunning and sensuous as Botticelli’s Venus. In August 1975 Heaney invited Lowell to a poetry festival in Kilkenny, Ireland. As Lowell feared from past experience, the event became a week of drunken and quarrelsome reelings and writhings. Heaney expected Lowell to arrive for his midweek performance, but he came on the previous Sunday and stayed with him through the next weekend. Heaney’s nine-year-old son Michael, with unusually formal diction, told Lowell that he preferred soccer to sonnets: ‘I know you are a famous poet, but it’s my ambition to meet a famous footballer’ (SS, p.216). During that prolonged visit Lowell, a wayward and distant father to his own daughter and son, envied Heaney’s close family life and sadly remarked, ‘You see a lot of your children’ (SS, p.216) – as if that were a rare event. Heaney said that Lowell ‘had a wonderful way of coming close, personally and critically’ (SS, p. 216) and he valued both aspects of that intimacy. In a letter of 11 September 1975, a month after the Kilkenny chaos, Lowell advised Heaney to follow his own practice of salvaging the best...