'Not Tract, Nor Thesis'

I recovered an email D.G. Myers sent to me almost twelve years ago, urging that I read Seamus Heaney – not the first time a dead friend has offered good advice. When young, I marinaded myself in Yeats and Joyce. Why the block against Heaney? I don’t know. I tend to stop reading or start ignoring any writer awarded the Nobel Prize, but my embargo was in place long before 1995. Silly and pig-headed, I know.

 

I opened my copy of Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) at random and found “Chekhov on Sakhalin,” originally published in Station Island (1984). Maybe there is something to bibliomancy. At this time 130 years ago, Chekhov was writing Sakhalin Island. In 1890, at age thirty, he traveled by train, horse-drawn carriage, river steamer and ocean-going freighter some 4,000 miles from Moscow to the penal colony on Sakhalin, north of Japan.

 

I first read Chekhov’s only work of nonfiction in 2008 in an annotated edition translated by Brian Reeve and published the previous year by Oneworld Classics. It includes photographs, a biography of Chekhov, a bibliography, a selection of his letters pertaining to Sakhalin and the book’s first chapter printed in Russian. It’s one of my favorite books. The great Irish essayist Hubert Butler writes in “Materialism Without Marx: A Study of Chekhov,” published in 1948 and collected in Independent Spirit (1996):

 

“His book Sakhalin Island, the result of this journey, has only recently been translated, because it is in conflict with the accepted Chekhov legend. It is not wistful, resigned and full of subdued melancholy. It is blazing with certainty and indignation, and because of that, in spite of its tragic contents it is perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic of all his writings. He believed that it was worthwhile to be passionately indignant about remediable injustice and that to remedy injustice was not the task of the statistician, the trained welfare officer, the experienced committeeman, it was the task of every man of sensibility and integrity.”

 

Heaney, too, has little use for “the accepted Chekhov legend.” His Chekhov is the grandson of a serf, son of a bankrupt grocer, a tough-minded, compassionate writer without ideology:

 

“. . . the convicts' chains

That haunted him. In the months to come

It rang on like the burden of his freedom

 

“To try for the right tone -- not tract, nor thesis --

And walk away from floggings.”

 

So, unlike much of the rest of the world, I’m finally reading Heaney. There’s another impetus. While reading W.M. Spackman’s essays, On the Decay of Criticism (Fantagraphic Books, 2017), I found his review of Heaney’s North (1975). A caveat: Spackman is a bona fide crackpot, an aesthete of Platonic purity. He even manages to condescend to Tolstoy and Henry James. Extend his arguments to their logical conclusion and you’re left staring at a mirage, though I mostly like him on Nabokov, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henry Green. And he likes Heaney – “concrete, specific, and totally original.” At the end of his 1977 review Spackman widens his critical lens:

 

“The bulk of current American poetry, thanks in part to our beaming national illiteracy, is styleless, vacuous, unaware of traditional craftsmanship, and programmed for the dullest available anguish, Lowell and all—a kind of howling amateur-night pandemonium ‘Where deafening lechers tout their dreams’ or anything else that occurs to them.”

 

And that was written while Anthony Hecht, Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Donald Justice, Turner Cassity, Henri Coulette, Thom Gunn and Herbert Morris, among others, were still alive and writing. Keep in mind what has happened to American poetry in the subsequent forty-three years.