By After the reading, we strolled down Brownlow Hill
for a Guinness and a chaser at The Vines
next to The Adelphi on Lime Street –
a Walker’s pub in Edwardian baroque.
The westering sun lit the stained glass windows.
We were both young men then. He had been married
the year before. I would be married
later that year. His first book had been published
by Faber and Karl Miller’s prescient review
seemed genuinely to bemuse and amuse him.
We talked of the city’s sectarian split –
the Orange annual march, with drums and fifes,
to Newsham Park, their annual outing
by train to Southport past the Scotland Road flats
festooned with green – curtains, tablecloths.
The University was generous
with expenses and paid for a taxi
to Speke. He had a flight booked to Le Touquet
and a hire car there he would drive through the night
into Italy to join his wife.
He was so unostentatious, so
matter-of-fact, that such travel plans
seemed perfectly ordinary to someone
who had no licence and had only
been abroad on a school trip to San Malo!
As he got in the cab and we shook hands,
I knew I had met a particularly
memorable person – modest, kind
and witty – who happened also to be
especially, exceptionally talented.
When I opened The Door Into The Dark
some three years later and read ‘Night Drive’ –
The smells of ordinariness
Were new on the night drive through France;
Rain and hay and woods on the air
Made warm draughts in the open car.
Signposts whitened relentlessly.
Montrueil, Abbeville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went,
Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.
A combine groaning its way late
Bled seeds across its work-light.
A forest fire smouldered out.
One by one small cafés shut.
I thought of you continuously
A thousand miles south where Italy
Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.
Your ordinariness was renewed there.
– I knew I had been privileged and lucky
that summer evening to shake hands with
a compassionate genius, romantic,
urbane: a maker of exquisite art
out of the everyday.
a combineAbbévillebaroqueBeauvaisBrownlow HillcompassionateEdwardianexquisiteFaberFrancegeniusGuinnessItalyKarl MillerLe TouquetLime StreetLiverpoolloinmakerMontrueilNewsham Park.orangeprescientromanticSan MaloScotland RoadSeamus HeaneysectarianSouthportSpekeThe AdelphiThe Door Into The DarkThe VinesUniversityurbanewalkers‘Night Drive’
Ashen
September 7, 2013What a precious memory, and astute portrait of a friend.
Steve Crewe
September 8, 2013Beautiful, plus it stirred memories of Liverpool, as among other watering holes, I knew the Vines well, plus often ‘strolled down Brownlow Hill’. Moreover, I did at one time lodge in one of the houses bordering Newsham Park.
Tim Ellis
September 8, 2013How lucky you are to have met him! I was lucky, too, to have seen him reading in York only a couple of months ago. I was a student at Liverpool University in the 1980s, and I remember the Vines pub well.
John Hargreaves
September 8, 2013Thank you for this, David. Heaney and I go back a long way – though not as intimately as your meeting. Many years ago, as Head of English at Christ’s Hospital, the Sixth Form English students were taught ‘Seeing Things’. I think this was my high point of a very pleasurable career, a time when students and the department were inspired into creative collaboration. I am minded that many will be struck by his passing.
On my father’s passing, I wrote a poem for his funeral, entitled ‘Seeing Things’, a lame attempt to pay homage to him and Heaney. Such was the influence of both men.
I was struck by something Paul Muldoon said at the funeral when he spoke of Seamus as having ‘beauty, as a bard and in his being’.
John Huddart
October 16, 2013Heaney’s poem conveys promise and anticipation that life’s ordinarinesses are the things to live for. The poem you make around this performs the same function, honours the ordinariness of the man behind the artist and captures with scrupulous care a moment to be seen and remembered. The elegy of the last verse is wholly appropriate, and leaves nothing left to say.