Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

Jamie McKendrick’s Second Response
April 2009
Jeffrey, what made me write in with annoyance in the first instance was the whole tenor and direction of your article,
from the title onwards, which wanted to establish a pattern of “dissembling”-essentially dishonesty and bad faith, a
serious charge-in Heaney’s writings. Your copious footnotes and quotations from his prose revealed no such thing.
No doubt all this looks to you like “academic polemic” but it looks to me more like a grievance-in-waiting you’ve
hung onto Heaney’s interview reply. The result is to make the reader question your own honesty, as indeed Swords
[Desmond Swords-another person who responded to Side’s article] did. His approach follows your own example:
he’s making assumptions about your motives just as you did about Heaney’s, the difference being that you were
wearing a scholarly carapace, and he a cap and bells.
But let’s move on to the article:
You take a number of instances from The Redress of Poetry in which Heaney weighs, with considerable care, the rival
claims of life and art on poetry and, in each case, you arbitrarily assert that he only cares about the mimetic function,
the life side of the equation, and has no serious regard for the other side, presumably your side, though it’s hard to
see you as the perfect advocate for the art when Heaney is portrayed as underselling it. (This is a world I don’t think
even Pope could have imagined.)
Let me take some examples. You quote Heaney saying ‘And yet, limber and absolved as linguistic inventiveness may
seem in poetry, it is not disjunct from or ever entirely manumitted by the critical intelligence’. Like it or not, Heaney
has taken pains in the way he’s expressed this tension (‘not disjunct from or ever entirely manumitted by’) only to
have you flatly “translate” his argument into a ‘distrust of linguistic ingenuity’ and to claim ‘he places reason above
artifice and content before form’. This is a travesty of scholarship-it’s like saying, regardless of what the author
actually writes, he means what I want him to mean. Heaney gives due weight to both claims and you say he’s
dismissing one of them. You start from a rigid, aprioristic position and blindly ignore even the evidence you adduce.
Your account of Heaney’s dealings with Clare is similarly garbled, and keeps presuming Heaney is promoting his
own poetry. You accuse him of arguing ‘disingenuously’ when he claims that ‘there is more than mere description in
Clare’s poetry’. Why should this uncontroversial claim be disingenuous? (Everyone who reads Clare can see there’s
a large freight of description, but most of us easily perceive that the description, at least in his best poems, adds up to
something a great deal more.)
In your reply to me you refer to Heaney’s ‘sometimes, dismissive evaluations of other poets’, presumably referring
to his account of Dylan Thomas, about which you say he is ‘again, favouring content over poetic language’. Heaney’s
essay is full of praise for Thomas, but there are occasions in which he sees Thomas carried away by the
‘extravagance of imagery and diction’. Heaney isn’t saying he doesn’t enjoy that extravagance, he clearly does even
in the quotation you give, but it’s just that he prefers it in certain instances where there’s more undertow or
counter-pressure from the material. This seems to me a fair criticism, and one that many other admirers of Thomas,
myself included, would concede. You might have a more original or different case to make about Thomas (though
there’s absolutely no sign of that) but here again Heaney’s argument certainly isn’t “disingenuous” or “dissembling”.
In almost every reference to his essays, you wilfully twist what Heaney writes, and use clumsy prompts like
‘opportunistically’, or the above, that are meant to discredit him. These, especially ‘casuistry’, in the pejorative sense
you intended, describe your own approach far more accurately than Heaney’s.
To turn to the other points that you raise in your reply: the question about whether J. H. Prynne has declined certain
publishing opportunities is something I’m no expert on. I understand, for example, that he chose not to appear in at
least one widely distributed anthology (The Penguin Book from Britain and Ireland from 1945). If I’m right, he may
have all kinds of unimpeachable reasons for doing so. But even if I’m wrong, since I’m not in the least blaming him or
others for such a choice, and you, on the other hand, were blaming the “mainstream”, I’d say the burden of proof for
that claim lies on your shoulders not mine. The idea that certain poets affiliated with Prynne should expect to receive
‘overtures’ and ‘offers of publication’ from the larger presses is comic and naive: in the overwhelming majority of
cases poets submit their manuscripts to publishers. It’s an arduous and sometimes dispiriting business, as I and
hundreds of others can testify. If some poets chose another route-of smaller press publication-without all that
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