Conference tallis::celt

404.0. "Probably Fell on DEAF Ears." by BRAT::DROTTER () Tue Jul 05 1988 12:09

        APPLYING THE YEATS CHALLENGE TO THE ANGLO-IRISH AGREEMENT 

			    by Seamus Heaney
              (Reprinted from the Boston Globe, 6/17/88)


In London recently, the poet Seamus Heaney received The Sunday Times Award for
Excellence.  The following are excerpts from his acceptance speech.



When the prospect of this evening's honors was first mooted, I was aware that
T. S. Eliot had praised W. B. Yeats for not allowing himself to become a mere
coathanger upon which the world draped its honors, but could assuage myself by
thinking that Eliot had never witnessed the Merton Professor of English perform
his capework as resourcefully and generously as he has just done.

Yet this spectacle of mutual admiration is not one that should be allowed to 
persist beyond a moment or two of genial acknowledgement.  To fall in love with
oneself may, as Oscar Wilde observed, be the beginning of a lifelong romance,
but to fall in love with the lengthened shadow of one's writerly possibilities
as projected by the mellow light of kindly critical attention -- that is the
beginning of folly.

The act of writing, after all, is an act of detachment and differentiation.  It
compensates you with the feeling of having transcended the given life, where
your possibilities seemed to be no more than the sum of your predicaments.

Robert Frost called it "a momentary stay against confusion" and also "a 
clarification," and it is in this experience of the poem as a personal way of
knowledge as well as a psychosomatic process that every poet's reward must
ultimately reside.

Nevertheless, while it is salutary to recollect the general truth of these
considerations, there remain other considerations which I believe it is proper
to address with the audience, at this particular moment.

For our moment includes not only this evening's courteous and and honorofic 
exchange beteween an Irish writer and a British newspaper, but a far wider, 
less courteous and potentially demeaning exchange between Irish reality in
general and the whole British media machine.  It would perhaps be adept to 
evade facing the issue, but, as the American poet Robert Lowell wrote on 
another occasion, "Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public
celebration without making subtle public commitments."

When I accepted the invitation to join in these celebratory rites, I was not
unmindful of the ongoing operation of the Anglo-Irish agreement, that supple,
subtle, symbolic knot tied by cival servants from Westminster and Dublin in
an attempt to provide a new, more responsive and self-justifying mechanism 
for concession or complaint or suasion on either side.

What was called "the spirit of the agreement" seemed to require and sponsor
a candid coming and going between the domains of Britishness and Irishness.
It seemed to allow everyone to follow the generous inclination, to allow 
somebody like myself to make what Lowell called the subtle public commitment
of appearing in such a citadel of the British consensus as a Sunday Times
banquet without seeming to occupy the token role of the poetic Irishman.

What the agreement implied, among other things, was an eye-level equilibrium
between the British government and the Irish government, an abdication by
both sides of the moral high ground, a recognition by Britain that the haughty
fiction that the internal affairs of Northern Ireland were a matter of domestic
British concern only was indeed a fiction, a recognition that the pretense that 
Ulster was an internal domestic UK matter was simply that -- all this made this
evening's public manisfestation of Hiberno-British amiability appear more than
symbolically worthwhile.

In the meantime, however, it seems to me that the British government and
sections of the British media have reoccupied their old positions on the high
ground.  I noticed in yesterday's newspapers an inclination to view the British
Army presence in Ulster once again as part of the solution rather than part of
the problem, an inclination to view them as hygienic, rubber-gloved, 
impersonally motivated technicians operating in polluted ghettos where 
indigenous hatreds are cultured in self-induced and self-wounding conditions.

I noticed an inclination to think of military funerals as a tribal and 
undesirable form of solidarity when enacted on the Falls Road, but as somehow
immunized against tribal significance when the victims were British soldiers,
the mourners were British soldiers, the mourners were British parents, and 
the martial music was relayed with deeply emotive effect by the news channels
of British television.

The so-called "spirit of the agreement" is not against the solemnization in
public of national sorrows, but it is surely against the gradual obliteration
from public British awareness of a realization that policies which Downing
Street presumably regard as a hard line against terrorism can feel like a
high-handed disregard for the self-respect of the Irish people in general;
and it should be against any downplaying of the fact that local Belfast
paranoia -- generated by a recent graveyard bombing and shooting -- played
some part in the shamefully automatic cruelty and horrow of the two British
soldiers' deaths which followed.

At this outraged moment there is a danger, for the British government and 
for elements in the British media, that they might confuse detachment, which
is a fine, well-earned and constantly renewed condition, with indifference,
which, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, can look like detachment but which resembles
it only as death resembles life.  Detachment is something which Irish writers
have all had to develop not only over the last twenty, but over the last 
hundred years.

It is a habit of mind which inclines to self-accusation and to a cautious
scrutiny both of big gestures and of what Stephen Dedalus called the big words
that make us all unhappy.  Detachment has kept many poets from engaging in
direct political poetry or even from political journalism, since they fear 
that at best they would only be exploiting an internationally chic, politically
sexy platform, and at worst would be giving consolation and corroboration to
terrorist factions, especially if they happened to voice complaints against
conditions upon which those factions peremptorily base their right to act.

Yet the caution rightly induced to detachment has its limits.  Yeats' challenge
to the writer was to hold in a single thought reality and justice, and the
same challenge is in effect in Westminster and Fleet Street.  The danger is 
that in the interests of expediency or quietism, an appeal to pseudo-justice
of the old Lord Widgery sort or the newer Lord Denning sort could lead to an
averted gaze, by government or the generations of public opinion, from the
abiding reality.

My plea, therefore, is for a renewed self-consciousness in the expression of 
just national concerns by the British media, an avoidance of the high ground,
and an ongoing example of the free, self-regulating debate which has typically
distinguished the British democratic process.

My plea to the British political leaders can perhaps be expressed in the words
of an eighth-century Irish king.  We tend to think that Mediterranean culture
is the great source of the golden mean as a rule of behaviour, but on the 
evidence of these eighth-century verses, the middle way ran through Tara and
Armagh as well.  What I am going to end with are lines extracted from a 
translation by Kuno Meyer of a piece of early Irish wisdom literature.

In the piece, the structure is that of question and answer, in which the boyish
Carbery seeks for instruction from the sagacious King Cormac and is told:


	Be not too wise nor too foolish.

	Be not too conceited nor too humble.

	Be not too talkative nor too silent.

	Be not too hard nor too feeble.

	If you be too wise, they will expect too much of you.

	If you be too foolish, you will be deceived.

	If you be too conceited, you will be thought vexatious.

	If you be too humble, you will be without honor.

	If you be too talkative, you will not be heeded.

	If you be too silent, you will not be regarded.

	If you be too hard, you will be broken.

	If you be too feeble, you will be crushed.