The Seamus Heaney Archives

Abstract

The Seamus Heaney Archives Rand Brandes (bio) An Origin Story The afterlife of the major Seamus Heaney archives, those used by several scholars in this issue and around the world, did not begin when Emory University’s Rose Library and the National Library of Ireland (NLI) received their boxes of correspondence and manuscripts. These archives emerged without teams of white-gloved specialists going through drawers and closets or sifting through random stacks of disorganized papers. When both libraries received the post-appraisal materials from Heaney’s attic study, the archival process had been ongoing for several years. The poet was able to keep his own writing house in order, but finally things had reached a tipping point and he agreed to let me help with some of the heavy lifting in 1993. I had already been working in the top floor of his Dublin home on Sandymount Strand for a few years. This attic, accessed by a narrow winding staircase (think Yeats’s tower), was his writing space as well as his poetry library with a small window at one end. In the late 1980s Heaney had opened this space to me for occasional lodging and, more importantly, for the research I was doing with Michael Durkan on Seamus Heaney: A Reference Guide.1 After a few visits, I became increasingly more worried than Heaney about the mounds of paper and stacks of notebooks covering every surface, including the floor (figure 1). Following several intense family discussions, which included Heaney’s expressing a sense of being “over-exposed” in public and literary arenas, we agreed on a plan for me to assist him in [End Page 7] “rationalizing” (his word) the attic and his papers. In September 1993, after I received a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Dublin with him, we began the process of preparing the papers in his home for eventual relocation. We first dismantled the attic studio he had been using since 1976. I physically assisted in the demolition and renovation process, bringing in file cabinets and other storage units, and we began the process of organizing, cataloging, and preserving his manuscripts from the 1950s forward. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Seamus Heaney’s Desk, 1993. Photograph by Rand Brandes. When Heaney turned fifty in 1989, he had been publishing for thirty years and had been teaching at Harvard for eleven. By 1993 he had composed fifteen volumes of poetry (including selected poems), three collections of prose works, and one verse play, and he had edited several anthologies, one with Ted Hughes. In addition to the drafts that went into the published works, there were mounds of unpublished manuscripts; correspondence, both personal and administrative; and stacks of unsolicited manuscripts in the corners of his studio. His publications claimed their territories, accompanied by hundreds of reviews clipped out of newspapers and magazines by [End Page 8] professional clipping services—sent “compliments of the publisher” in large canvas mailing bags that fought for even more space. The studio quickly became a reconstruction site with materials coming and going on a regular basis. First, we separated the manuscript items from the correspondence and publications, reorganized the books on the bookshelves, and brought in storage boxes and filing cabinets. To create more space we dismantled Heaney’s homemade desk (described in Geraldine Higgins’ essay in this issue) and launched a large chair out the attic window of his home. We then began filing the loose sheets of paper according to publishing project or chronology and arranged the notebooks in a small bookcase. The next step was to focus more closely on the organizational process itself. Periodicals were separated into “by SH” and “about SH” and then placed in boxes. The organization of correspondence was more difficult than that of the manuscripts and drafts and involved more immediate judgment calls. Even though Heaney had culled most of the nonessential correspondence upon its arrival on his desk, there were still bundles of administrative documents to be vetted. Some of these, such as correspondence pertaining to the Field Day Theatre Company, warranted their own storage space. Then there were the letters that crossed over into the personal from administrative...