Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark by Seamus Heaney

Source of book: I own Opened Ground, selected poems from 1966 through 1996. 

My wife found this mint condition “used” copy of the book for me. As is my practice, I am reading through it systematically. Since both of Heaney’s first two collections (or at least the excerpts in this book) are fairly short, I decided to read both. Since both were published in the 1960s, I will consider it a decade of reading. 

I admit to being a fan of Seamus Heaney, both for his poetry and the way he read it. My first real introduction was through The Spirit Level, which remains my favorite of his books. “Mint” in particular is one of my all time favorite poems. I also enjoyed his translation of Beowulf, which adds so much to the story because of its keen ear for sound and rhythm. 

The collection kicks off with what is probably Heaney’s best known poem, “Digging.” Here is the classic video of him reading it. 

The title for the first collection comes from a poem about the young poet losing his appetite for collecting frog eggs after fearing the frogs would have their revenge on him. I won’t quote the whole thing, but it is an amusing poem. 

Here are the ones which I liked best:

“Personal Helicon”

As a child, they could not keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

Fructified like any aquarium.

When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call

With a clean new music in it. And one

Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall

Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.  

Yep, I’m a bit like that myself. 

“The Peninsula”

When you have nothing more to say, just drive

For a day all round the peninsula.

The sky is tall as over a runway,

The land without marks, so you will not arrive

But pass through, though always skirting landfall.

At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,

The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable

And you're in the dark again. Now recall

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,

That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

Islands riding themselves out into the fog,

And drive back home, still with nothing to say

Except that now you will uncode all landscapes

By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,

Water and ground in their extremity.

I love exploration, whether on foot or by car, and Heaney makes this one come alive. In these days when a lot of my favorite places are closed to slow Covid-19, I am enjoying poems about places. I look forward to better days ahead. 

This next one is a fascinating, multi-layered poem that gets better with each reading. The title, “Undine,” refers to a water sprite in European mythology. As the inspiration (in part) for The Little Mermaid, undines cannot gain a soul unless they marry a human. However, they will die of the human is unfaithful to them. In this poem, Heaney melds the legend of the undine with a farmer cleaning out his ditch. The language does so many things. It evokes the smell of mud and earth and stagnant water. But it is also shockingly sexual. Bringing together all those elements: the earth, mythology, and sex in a way that unexpectedly works is one of Heaney’s best skills. 

“Undine”

He slashed the briars, shoveled up grey silt

To give me right of way in my own drains

And I ran quick for him, cleaned out my rust.

He halted, saw me finally disrobed,

Running clear, with apparent unconcern.

Then he walked by me. I rippled and I churned

Where ditches intersected near the river

Until he dug a spade deep in my flank

And took me to him. I swallowed his trench

Gratefully, dispersing myself for love

Down in his roots, climbing his brassy grain ---

But once he know my welcome, I alone

Could give him subtle increase and reflection.

He explored me so completely, each limb

Lost its cold freedom. Human, warmed to him.

The second half of the second collection has a lot of poems about the “lough” (Irish version of “loch”) and the surrounding bog. Two of those poems seemed particularly lovely to me. Enjoy.

“Relic of Memory”

The lough waters

Can petrify wood:

Old oars and posts

Over the years

Harden their grain,

Incarcerate ghosts

Of sap and season.

The shallows lap

And give and take:

Constant ablutions,

Such a drowning love

Stun a stake

To stalagmite.

Dead lava,

The cooling star,

Coal and diamond

Or sudden birth

Of burnt meteor

Are too simple,

Without the lure

That relic stored—

A piece of stone

On the shelf at school,

Oatmeal coloured.

“Bogland”

We have no prairies

To slice a big sun at evening--

Everywhere the eye concedes to

Encrouching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye

Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

Is bog that keeps crusting

Between the sights of the sun.

They've taken the skeleton

Of the Great Irish Elk

Out of the peat, set it up

An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under

More than a hundred years

Was recovered salty and white.

The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,

Missing its last definition

By millions of years.

They'll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks

Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Our pioneers keep striking

Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip

Seems camped on before.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

The wet centre is bottomless. 

That line “an astounding crate of air” describing the elk fossil is brilliant and unforgettable. I love the whole poem and its imagery. 

I’m not sure what else to say about Heaney. I love his style, including the peculiar use of enjambment across stanzas. The poems are fairly traditional, yet not exactly regular or rhymed. I am never disappointed to read Seamus Heaney. 

Philip Larkin: Life, Art, and Love by James Booth

Source of book: Borrowed from the library.

When it became obvious that Covid-19 would shut down most non-essential things in my town, I realized I should probably grab a few books to keep me occupied until the library reopens. One of those books was this biography of Philip Larkin, which sat there on the new books shelf tempting me for a few weeks. 

One of Philip Larkin's numerous photographic self portraits.

 While Larkin’s skill as a poet has never really been in doubt, at least during my lifetime, his reputation as a person has been much more dubious. So therefore, one of the key questions any biography is expected to answer is, “How much of a prick was Philip Larkin?” Having read this book, I think one obvious answer is, “Not nearly as much of a prick as Kingsley Amis.” 

But actually, I am not convinced Larkin deserves his bad reputation. There are a few things which contributed to his reputation as a bit of a jerk. First was that toward the end of his life, he “performed” his character in interviews and the like - his role as the crusty old man, librarian and poet. This included acting as if he was a reactionary conservative, which is, ironically, rather the opposite of his actual political views. 

The second problem for Larkin is that he corresponded extensively with various friends and relations, and these letters were mostly preserved. Thus, when he writes to Kingsley Amis, he will often make a tasteless sexist joke (like they would have made at school in the 1930s). He might make a racist statement to a friend in a context that was probably understood to be sarcastic, but which scans poorly by itself. 

The third issue I think has perhaps faded along with changes in society. Larkin never married, although he was in a long term sexual and romantic relationship with Monica Jones, while having quasi-romantic, romantic, or sexual relationships here and there with other women. His refusal to marry (and he most certainly did not wish to - he was clear on that), has been read as being a character flaw, which seems more unfair now that marriage is no longer considered the only reasonable choice for people. 

All of this came to head in Andrew Motion's biography published soon after Larkin's death. Booth's more recent biography seems written in significant part to correct the picture of Larkin as a monster that Motion painted. 

There is plenty of evidence that Larkin was a better man than his reputation as well. Those who worked with him, the women in his life, and his friends had positive things to say about him. One that particularly struck me was his reputation in his day job, Librarian at the University of Hull. In an era when professors routinely ogled and harassed the female staff, Larkin was notable for not doing so, treating his co-workers and underlings with respect and fairness. Far from being the cantankerous old man, he was a great boss with a sense of humor, excellent work ethic, and considerate of his staff. 

James Booth worked with Larkin near the end of his life, and conducted extensive interviews in writing this book. His background in poetry led to the decision to include a decent amount of poetic analysis in the book, as well as the biographical details. The book is well written and rather fascinating to read, although not everyone will find Larkin as interesting, I suppose. I enjoy poetry (as this blog makes pretty clear…), and like reading about complex personalities. 

Larkin is notable for being one of the very few 20th century poets who held a nine-to-five job with no expectation that he would ever write for a living. The other that the book mentions is Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive. This reality was both positive and negative for Larkin. He resented that he felt tied to his job, and became increasingly overworked and frustrated as budget cuts and new technology added to his stress. On the other hand, he was clearly very good at his job: people who knew him primarily as a librarian have insisted that he was underrated in that capacity. There is no question that he greatly expanded the Hull library, collecting countless historically important documents, and organizing the collection. 

There are definitely some fascinating details about Larkin in this book that I did not know. For example, he truly desired to write novels at first, before he capitulated, realizing his talent was in poetry. But he did write a few “lesbian fiction” novels under a pseudonym in his early twenties. I was completely unaware of them - Booth quotes some passages and so on, which was kind of interesting. I’m not sure I will be seeking them out, but it is definitely a side of Larkin that isn’t as well known. 

Larkin was steadfastly as non-political as possible throughout his life. He appears to have, at least in part, intended to avoid making the library appear partisan. But he also disliked politics at a visceral level (something I feel too), and had complications from his love life that incentivized a non-partisan approach. Monica Jones was pretty conservative, while Larkin was to a significant degree liberal. To preserve their relationship, they stayed away from most discussions. 

One exception to this non-political stance was a statement he made in a letter to his mother during his first major gig, a library position in Ireland. Larkin was appalled by the jingoistic parades, particularly the “staggering dullness…& stupefying hypocrisy (‘Civil & religious liberty’...)” As Larkin noted, the politics behind “civil & religious liberty” in Northern Ireland was “denying civil & religious liberty to Catholics & Nationalists, & damn the Pope, etc.” 

This is, indeed, the same twisted version of “civil and religious liberty” that the increasingly dominionist Evangelical-Industrial Complex believes in. Cram their bigoted interpretation of an ancient book down the throats of everyone else using the full force and violence of law and government. 

Larkin was a steadfast atheist throughout his life, and was particularly distrustful of religion as proxy for sectarian politics or as a way to fleece the faithful. Booth quotes a bit from “Faith Healing,” which is such a great poem, I decided to quote it in full here:

Slowly the women file to where he stands   

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,

Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly   

Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,   

Within whose warm spring rain of loving care   

Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,

What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,   

And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer   

Directing God about this eye, that knee.   

Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some   

Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives

Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud   

With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb   

And idiot child within them still survives   

To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice   

At last calls them alone, that hands have come   

To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives

Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd   

Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice—

What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:   

By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps   

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make   

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.   

That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,   

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above   

Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

As an indictment of that particularly American form of religion, it is surprisingly perceptive. I spent time in the charismatic movement during my teens, and, while there was a lot I liked (for example the racial integration and openness to emotion), there was also a troubling culture surrounding the “healing” stuff that appealed to emotionally damaged women in particular, and also attracted creepy-ass guys as the “healers.” Not exclusively, obviously, but to an uncomfortable degree. The last stanza is particularly intriguing, with Larkin’s empathetic yet damning illumination of the all-too-easy switch from living a life of love to seeking a cure for being unloved. 

“Faith Healing” isn’t particularly snarky, but Larkin could be pure acid when he wanted to. One line that particularly caught my eye was from a letter to Anthony Thwaite, declining to review Robert Graves’ latest book. “[I]f he says publicly just once more that he has a large family to support, I shall write to the papers asking whose fault he thinks that is.”

Or how about this one? When he sent a donation to “Friends of Dove Cottage,” he was informed that he had been made a life member. He replied, “In fact I was similarly enrolled a few years ago, when I made a similar generous donation, as you so kindly put it, so I now have the distinction of being a life member twice over. I very much fear, however, that they will have to run concurrently.”

These are just a few of the delightfully witty lines in the book. Larkin was complex, to be sure; more accurately, he was human, with all the virtues and faults that come with humanity. Reading this book very much made me eager to dive more deeply into his poetry. Hardbacks of his Complete Poems are irritatingly expensive, so I will have to either watch for a bargain or make it a rare splurge. 

In any event, I can highly recommend James Booth’s biography for fans of poetry in general and Larkin in particular. 

***

I should note that one of the reasons I got into Larkin in the first place is because of Clive James. 

Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn

Source of book: I own this.

Back in 2018, our book club read some of the Patrick Melrose novels. Technically, I believe we were reading the first three, since they are relatively short, but not everyone finished that much. I read only the first novel, Never Mind, which I reviewed at the time, intending to come back and read the rest in sequence. This is the second novel, Bad News. 

Like the first novel, Bad News is somewhere between a novella and a short story, although at around 160 pages, it is definitely long enough to be a novella. It too focuses on an extremely limited time frame, that of a couple days, and a particular scenario or idea, so to speak. 

Patrick Melrose is now grown up, at least physically. He is twenty-two, and a marginally functional drug addict. The “bad news” that kicks off the story is the death of his abusive father, possibly the most vile person I have encountered in fiction. So, good riddance. Except that he clearly continues to be a demon haunting Patrick. Anyway, David dies in New York City unexpectedly, and as Patrick is the next of kin (his parents split up), he gets to claim the body. Over the course of two days and nights - more or less: it is difficult to follow the exact timeline because Patrick is so drugged out of his mind that sleep and time seem both distorted out of recognition - Patrick sees his dead father, meets with a few friends, visits a few drug dealers, nearly kills himself a couple of times, and works through some of his complex feelings about his father in the most unconstructive way possible. 

As in the previous book, excellent writing combines with a thoroughly distasteful story, unpleasant characters, and drug hallucinations that just won’t end. While not strictly autobiographical, the books are somewhat true to life. St. Aubyn did in fact take obscene quantities of drugs during this time in his life - funded by an inheritance from his grandmother. And it is a miracle he is alive. (As he fully admits.) 

The thing is, despite all the darkness in this book, it does have a sort of humor. It is an ugly, sneering, nasty humor some of the time, kind of like you would expect David Melrose to appreciate. But St. Aubyn also has an eye for a less vicious wit too, and his observations of various broken characters can be empathetic too. It would have been interesting to have seen more of those characters. In the first book, Patrick was less of the focus, so the other people in the story got more of the time. In this one, everything is filtered through Patrick’s head, so much of the time he is way too smashed to even figure out what is going on around him. 

It is kind of interesting to read about drug addiction from someone who writes this way. I have read other books, of course, fiction and non-fiction, in which drugs feature to varying degrees. But there is something peculiarly horrifying about this one. Patrick has what is essentially the great love affair of his life with cocaine and heroin (often at the same time), so St. Aubyn can write a rather authentic love letter to the drugs. But at the same time, reading this book doesn’t paint a pretty picture of drug use and addiction at all. Even as Patrick praises the glorious feelings and the escape from the terror in his own psyche, the horrors of what the drugs do to him and what they make him do are so apparent that I cannot imagine wanting to try one. 

The psychology is fascinating too. I feel as if Patrick takes the drugs in part because he fears he is like his father - and then the drugs enable him to act more like his father. He isn’t an outright abuser, but he can be verbally cruel in the extreme, and he sure does sound like David at times. It is a weird kind of self-awareness, which one wonders if St. Aubyn himself came to possess as part of his therapy. 

There are a few scenes which stood out. Right at the outset, Patrick is accosted on the plane by a guy named Earl, a caricature of the most vulgar of the nouveau riche, and an incentive to never fly with the rich. Yikes. 

Patrick more or less escapes by withdrawing into a mental scene involving his girlfriend Debbie, or, more accurately her father. 

Debbie’s father, an Australian painter called Peter Hickman, was a notorious bore. Patrick once heard him introduce an anecdote with the words, ‘That reminds me of my best bouillabaisse story.” Half an hour later, Patrick could only count himself luck that he was not listening to Peter’s second-best bouillabaisse story.

There is also an interesting line - a remix of Hamlet, in essence - when Patrick is about to eat and drink himself into oblivion in a futile attempt to stay off heroin for the remainder of the day. 

Eating was only a temporary solution. But then all solutions were temporary, even death, and nothing gave him more faith in the existence of an afterlife than the inexorable sarcasm of Fate. No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh. Who could guess what exquisite torments lay ahead in the holiday camps of eternity? It almost made one grateful to be alive. 

I’ll mention the scene in the funeral home where he is accidentally directed to the wrong corpse - complete with a party by the friends and family - and then is tempted to put his foot on his father’s chest as a final gesture of hate. Also the wretched search for drugs in a disreputable part of NYC, because his usual source was sleeping off a binge. Both of these are emotionally devastating, but in different ways. 

Finally, there is a scene where Patrick is talking with friends of his mom’s, and hoping to score with the daughter (he doesn’t), and his father comes up. Eddy (the husband) had his own difficulties with his father. 

“But wouldn’t we now say that he was just wery disturbed?” asked Eddy.

“So what if we did? When the effect somebody has is destructive enough the cause becomes a theoretical curiosity. There are some very nasty people in the world and it is a pity if one of them is your father.”

“I don’t think that people noo so much about how to bring up kids in those days. A lot of parents in your fawther’s generation just didn’t know how to express their love.”

“Cruelty is the opposite of love,” said Patrick, “not just some inarticulate version of it.”

That really is the difference. I know plenty of people who have struggled with their children (and that is me sometimes too), and most of them are just humans who fail. But there are some for whom the issue isn’t “love”: it’s cruelty. David raped Patrick - and that was evil cruelty. His mom looked the other way, which wasn’t love either. So there are ordinary human failings - and we all will fail to a degree. And there is deliberate cruelty, which cannot and should not be dismissed as “they didn’t know how to love.” (Just to be clear, I do not mean to imply anything about my parents here – this is a more general comment stemming from my experience both with divorce law and with toxic church doctrine about abuse.)  

It will be interesting to see where this book series goes from here. It has been pretty dark so far, without much hope. Since the next book is called Some Hope, perhaps there will, at long last, be some. 

My biggest issue with the novels so far is that St. Aubyn, like his protagonist, comes from a place of overwhelming privilege and wealth. Both family background and a multi-million pound inheritance enabled him to chase drugs at ludicrous expense while still living a wealthy lifestyle. His aristocratic family, even if he wasn’t part of that branch, allowed him to drop names and get his degree by the skin of his teeth. He still hobnobs with the A List, so to speak. One of us plebes who did what he did wouldn’t have ended up as a best selling novelist, but broke and imprisoned and eventually dead and looked at with contempt by all. It burns a bit to see that, as it always has, money matters far more than choices if you have enough of it. Although St. Aubyn is a good writer, he also seems to me to be eminently slappable prick and the sort I would loathe to be around in person. (And no, the New Yorker article on him doesn’t help that at all.) Yeah, I feel sorry for him for a horrific childhood, and find his writing fascinating. But, like Patrick, I pretty well dislike him personally, and wish he had had to actually experience poverty for once. Oh well. I feel the same way about Wagner. I shall be entertained, yet also glad I never have to suffer through a dinner party with him. 

***

The Guardian had an interesting article on assumption of wealth and class within the book writing and publishing universe. To a degree, St. Aubyn is a spot-on example of the way things work. I’m not clarivoyant enough to know how to change the system, other than to keep reading books by those outside the “white, upper-middle-class, and privileged” norm. 

***

Here is the list of books that our book club has read. At least the ones I have read too. Most of these were read for the club, but a few were ones I read previously - those posts pre-date the club discussion - and some I read afterward, because I missed the discussion. I have listed them in no particular order. 

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Calypso by David Sedaris

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

There There by Tommy Orange

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Educated by Tara Westover

Stiff by Mary Roach

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Artemis by Andy Weir

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore