A Smiling Public Man

As Heaney became more famous and influential, he often succumbed to the “friendship rack” and turned out a torrent of recommendations and blurbs. He told the poet Charles Simic that the “jubilant truth-to-impulse, the invention and laconic cluedinness of the work you’ve been doing is really heart-lifting.” The less deserving Anne Stevenson, biographer of Sylvia Plath, was bucked up by what he called her “different buoyancies, velleities, vigours, freshets, risks, frisks”—comments always vague enough to be apparently truthful. As his power began to subside from overuse, he metaphorically told one Guggenheim hopeful, “nowadays some of the starriest kites I’ve been tail to have failed to fly. I begin to wonder if I’m a dead weight.” Since the demands were unending, he had to declare a moratorium on the blurb game. But he was always a striking contrast to Mahon’s “pompous ass”; and to the savage wit of Vidia Naipaul, who awarded a second prize when nobody deserved a first, and crushed one ... Read full article.