Seamus Heaney, Van Morrison – from Bellaghy to Belfast

Blue Boy on Two of the greatest artists to come out of Northern Ireland – different, but with much in common

I was born and brought up in Northern Ireland, growing up in idyllic suburbia in North Down. From our lounge window you could see across Belfast Lough to Carrickfergus Castle on the other side. We lived there until I was thirteen, returning briefly for a few months two years later, before we finally moved away and settled in England.

I was fifteen when we came to England. Happy enough, we settled in well. But I had been taken from where I grew up, and I found that my identification with Northern Ireland was all the stronger in exile than it had been when I lived there. I loved literature and I loved music, and if you were a writer or musician from Ireland – North and South – you had my attention before I had even read or heard any of your work. James Joyce, WB Yeats, Flann O’Brien, Joyce Cary. Horslips, Rory Gallagher, the Chieftains.

And above all – then, and now – Seamus Heaney and Van Morrison.

They were born either side of the Second World War – Heaney in 1939, Morrison in 1945. They grew up in the post-War, pre-Troubles relative tranquillity of the forties and fifties. Their backgrounds were working class; Heaney born into a rural, largely Catholic farming community in County Derry; Morrison in the urban back to backs of largely Protestant industrial East Belfast. They have both written about their fathers; ordinary working men who their sons followed but in fields of work unimaginable and very different. In ‘Digging’, the opening poem in his first book, Heaney writes of his father digging in the fields:

‘By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.’

He himself has ‘no spade to follow them’ – he’ll dig, he writes, with his pen.

In ‘Choppin’ Wood’ Morrison sings about his father, always working for his family, metaphorically chopping wood at Harland and Wolff:

‘You lived a life of quiet desperation on the side
Going to the shipyard in the morning on your bike’.

In songs like ‘Why Must I Always Explain?’ and ‘Songwriter’ Morrison has always insisted that what he does is just his job, like any other. The first time I saw him in concert, at the Manchester Apollo in the late 70s, he was in a characteristically tetchy mood. During his first, and as it transpired, only encore, he was irritated by a particularly vocal audience member whooping and hollering as he performed, and snapped back, urging him to shut up, ‘We’re working up here’.

Heaney and Morrison are both very aware of the hard work of their forbears, and they take it into their own very different professions. There is here an Ulster work ethic – one from the land, one from the shipyard – in each man, inherited from his father.

They emerged as rising stars in Belfast at the same time, around 63 and 64. As Heaney was learning his craft as part of the circle of young poets in the Belfast Group, Morrison was forming Them and starting to perform at the Maritime Club. Morrison came to national attention with two hits in early 1965 with Them, ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ and ‘Here Comes the Night’. Heaney’s first full collection, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ was published in 1966 and won several awards. Morrison had a frustrating few years but found his true voice with ‘Astral Weeks’ in late 1968. A few months later Heaney’s second collection ‘Door Into the Dark’ was published. They were on their way.

They were lauded internationally in the 1970s as major artists in their fields and both men moved away, with spells living in the US and in the South, whilst keeping their connections with their homeland. Their work in the 70s was supremely good and is much of what will sustain their reputations but they continued to produce great work in the 80s and beyond, Heaney’s quality control in particular being outstanding. Both became feted grand old men of Northern Irish letters – Famous Seamus with his Nobel prize, Van the Man with his knighthood. When Heaney died in 2013 there was an outpouring of grief and tributes unimaginable for a poet in England.

I didn’t know if Heaney and Morrison ever met, either as Belfast Young Turks or as established figures but the internet has a picture of them together in 1992 at a poetry reading. I don’t know of any evidence that Heaney listened to Morrison’s music. But he did have his connections with Irish rock and roll royalty – Horslips’ Barry Devlin is Heaney’s brother in law, so who knows? We do know that Morrison has read Heaney. In his live performances of ‘Summertime in England’ Heaney was one of the bards and visionaries that Morrison would invoke, alongside TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, WB Yeats, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake – ‘Mr Heaney, I read your book – ‘Preoccupations’’.

Of course there are differences in their work, their lives, and their characters. Heaney has the precision and care of a poet, weighing every word and syllable to maximum effect. Morrison’s lyrics are more slapdash and impressionistic, but he uses the music and his remarkable voice to invest them with feeling. By all accounts Heaney was a man of great grace and charm, whilst the stories of Morrison’s awkwardness and rudeness are legion. I met Heaney once when he gave a poetry reading at my college. Afterwards a few of us were lucky enough to have him and his wife Marie join us to drink tea and chat for a couple of hours. He couldn’t have been kinder and more generous with his time to a bunch of students. Before he left he signed my copy of ‘Door into the Dark’ and inscribed it with a quotation from Shakespeare:

‘Our poesy is as a gum which oozes
From whence it is nourished…’

I suspect an encounter with Morrison would be very different. He would like the Shakespeare quotation though. Because the great thing these two artists have in common is precisely that their work is nourished by their profound sense of place, and the way they mine, throughout their careers, childhood memories, and recollections of where they grew up. Time and again Heaney evokes the rural landscapes, the farmers, and the way of life around Bellaghy and Lough Neagh in the forties and fifties. Morrison revisits the locations of East Belfast and County Down – the window cleaners, and bakeries, and cafes; the shipyards and terraced streets. It’s the world of Ulster suspended between the War and the Troubles.

Most of the specific locations they cite are – or were – not known to me. I grew up in my own, relatively comfortable and middle class part of Northern Ireland. My experiences were very different. But, still, this is Northern Ireland. It is recognisable to me. It is from and of the place I come from and grew up in, and that’s part of why their work means so much to me.

And there are some references which take me straight back to my childhood. In ‘Coney Island’ Morrison describes an idyllic day driving down the Ards Peninsula and by Strangford Lough. I have my own memories of similar days cycling those very roads with my friends. And, in the relatively recent ‘Going Down to Bangor’, he sings of Bangor, and Donaghadee which were just down the road from where I lived; including reference to the Pickie Pool, whose long-gone concrete-encased freezing sea water lido is memorable to generations of County Down kids.

Heaney’s home village Bellaghy is only a few miles off the road we used to regularly travel when visiting Claudy, in County Derry, where my Dad was from and where many of our relatives still lived. I remember those long trips, four of us squeezed into the back of the car, counting off the towns and villages as we passed them – Randalstown, Toomebridge, Magharafelt, Dungiven, Feeny – places I didn’t know other than as places that, as we passed through, meant we were a little bit closer to our destination. Heaney wrote about Toomebridge and the Toome Road – the latter in a poem from my favourite collection, ‘Field Work’, and one in which he references, if obliquely, the Troubles:

‘Armoured cars
In convoy…
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them?’

Sometime in the 1980s my brother drove over to Northern Ireland and took the road up to Claudy. He stopped to buy a sandwich in Toome. It is a strongly nationalist area, and he had an English car, and English accent, and short hair, that could be that of a soldier. He said that the atmosphere froze, and the shop went very quiet when he went in. He bought his sandwich, got out as quickly as he decently could, and hit the road. Our Dad was livid with him when he heard this story. He knew the dangers, God knows. Back in 1972, Claudy was devastated by three car bombs that went off without warning and killed nine people including the daughter of Dad’s cousin.

Seamus Heaney as criticised by some for not being more explicit, or taking sides more strongly, in the Troubles. In fact, they profoundly permeate much of his work, even if they not the major subject matter of it. I can think of no reference to The Troubles or Irish politics in Van Morrison’s work. The two men come from different sides of the divide, but largely they express what unifies Northern Ireland – indeed, the whole island – going back to those lived pre-Troubles experiences. And in doing so they take all of us – wherever we are from – to the experiences, the memories, the inheritances, that make each of us what we are. Like all great artists, they create the universal from the particular.

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