To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Seamus Heaney, RTÉ presents a series of essential recordings from the archives.
Professor Heaney is one of two RTÉ Radio 1 programmes made and first broadcast in 2014, in the months following the death of Seamus Heaney. The focus is on Heaney the working man, the teacher and the mentor at two of the world's most prestigious universities: Harvard and Oxford.
In the first programme, RTÉ presenter John Kelly travels with Heaney’s son Mick to show us Heaney’s Harvard, lending the programme a familial take on his father’s time teaching there and of living away from home.
The 1979 spring semester was the first time Heaney taught at Harvard. His family travelled with him. Heaney was by then the celebrated poet, whose ideas and accomplishments drew international notice. Mick Heaney was twelve at the time and remembers the glow of America the family felt: having a television which they didn’t have back in Dublin (adding that his father watched quite a bit of it), living in an apartment and the burger joints.
RTÉ programme maker Séamus Ó Conluain recorded Heaney at this time. Excerpts are included that catch the poet’s imagination in motion, his description of an early ATM machine for example: 'There’s this way of taking money out of the bank. You don’t have to go in and line up in the queues. If you get one of those little banker’s cards and you just put it into the slot outside, and play wee tunes with the buttons, and obey all that the computer tells you and there’s a mouth opens and hands you out nice crisp notes. It’s almost like playing with a little mint…’.
Harvard colleague Helen Vendler, an early reader of Heaney’s work and whose friendship had started when they had first met at The Yeats Summer School in Ireland. She remarks how ‘he was everybody’s big brother. That was his kindness in taking on that role with people, thinking what can I help you with or what would be fun to do together? He was looking out for people always.’
Poet Tom Sleigh, a student of Heaney’s, refers to his professor’s ‘…certain kind of spiritual grace and total down to earthiness and a willingness to suffer fools in the kindest way possible and it took a lot out of him. It could be a deeply frustrating experience to be Seamus Heaney because of the sense that he had that other people were deeply real and he wanted to make connection with them, and so he had the time of day for everyone… I wish we could bottle it into the Facebook age as it seems to me a spiritual gift that is leaking out of the culture.’
There is also Bob Kiely, former English Professor at Harvard and Master of Adam’s House where Heaney stayed, poet KE Duffin and Stephen Birt, now Harvard Professor of English. Both were taught by Heaney; and Christine Davis, curator of Harvard’s Woodberg Poetry Room to which Heaney contributed.
And in a final familial touch presenter John Kelly and Mick Heaney visit the bar formerly called One Potato Two Potato, now called Grafton Street, and according to his son, a regular Heaney haunt. He recalls his mother Marie being affectionately welcomed there as Mrs H. when she’d be over visiting.
Earlier in the programme Mick Heaney had mentioned how the whole Heaney Harvard enterprise could not have happened without her support: looking after the family and home in Dublin made it all possible.
