Seamus Heaney’s letters confirm that he really was as nice as he seemed

Seamus Heaney wrote letters everywhere – waiting for his car to be repaired at a country garage, sitting over a glass or more of Paddy late at night, and above all in aeroplanes, ‘pacing the pages against the pilot as he takes us in to Heathrow or Shannon’, as he wrote to a friend in 1995. So many eloquent missives were dashed off at high altitude that his editor suggests he might have had notepaper printed with the heading ‘EI 117’, the Aer Lingus flight between Dublin and Washington DC. This airborne activity is significant because it indicates two characteristics illuminated by Christopher Reid’s riveting collection: the pressures of life lived at an exceptional pitch of fame, and Heaney’s powerful need to keep faith with friends and fellow poets.

His old friend Karl Miller once asked him, with characteristic suspiciousness: ‘Seamus, are you really as nice as you seem?’ Heaney answered: ‘I have been cursed by a fairly decent set of impulses.’