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.’ The niceness and the decency are amply demonstrated over 800-plus pages, but also the extent to which they could turn into a kind of tyranny. ‘In the last two days I have written 32 letters,’ he tells his friend the artist Barrie Cooke in 1985, ‘all of them a weight that was lying on my mind even as the accursed envelopes lay week by week on my desk. The trouble is I have 32 more to write…’

Faced with this amplitude, the principles of selection behind this collection prioritise the professional side of the poet’s life. By agreement, there are no letters to his wife Marie, subject of his magical love poems, or to his three adored children. This inevitably sets aside the vital and central rock on which his private life was built. And there is no juvenilia. The letters begin in 1964, with the 25-year-old poet just about to inaugurate his relationship with Faber, which would publish his first book, Death of a Naturalist, two years later.