Seamus Heaney’s Desks: Stages of Writing

Seamus Heaney’s Desks: Stages of Writing Geraldine Higgins (bio) “I never used to understand why anyone wants to visit a writer’s house: aren’t the books enough? What would you really learn by staring at Martin Amis’s desk or Philip Roth’s kitchen table?”1 recalling his travels with Seamus Heaney in a memorial tribute, Andrew O’Hagan describes a visit to the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Scotland that featured an exhibition called The Tam O’Shanter Experience. Their friend Karl Miller joked that there would one day be a “Seamus Heaney Experience.” Heaney replied, “That’s right. It’ll be a few churns and a confessional box.”2 Now, ten years after his death, fans of the poet can visit two such Irish “Experiences”: Bellaghy’s Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Northern Ireland and Dublin’s Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again in the Republic (figure 1; figure 2). The locations of each bookend the poet’s life, representing the roots and the branches, as it were, of his early years on the farm in rural county Derry and the forty years of his working life in Dublin. Heaney lived or wrote in four significant houses in Ireland— Mossbawn in Bellaghy, Ashley Avenue in Belfast, Glanmore Cottage in Wicklow, and Sandymount in Dublin—none of which were available to be transformed into writer’s house museums open to visitors after his death in 2013. These stepping stones from Bellaghy to Belfast and from Wicklow to Dublin are marked by the poet’s deliberate decision to validate his two rural residences, Mossbawn and Glanmore, rather than either of his city homes as dwellings inspiring [End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Seamus Heaney HomePlace, Bellaghy, Co. Derry, Northern Ireland. Photograph by permission of the Seamus Heaney HomePlace. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Exterior of Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again, National Library of Ireland, at the Bank of Ireland Cultural Centre, Dublin, 2018. Photograph by Geraldine Higgins. [End Page 98] his writing. By positioning these symbolic places of writing in the broader context of writers’ museums and literary tourism, this essay examines how various iterations of Seamus Heaney’s desk are used to authenticate the writer’s presence in different locations. Although Simon Goldhill scoffs at the idea that we might learn anything about writers by viewing their furniture, the writer’s desk suggests otherwise. It is a magical object, a symbol of the creative marriage between writers and their work, touched in sickness and health, in frustration and inspiration. The material surface of the desk brings together the elements of writing—the page, the pen, and the living hand—components that have remained unchanged in staging the scene of writing for centuries despite technological advances. Focusing on the cultural work that the writer’s desk must do, I discuss the display of Heaney’s desk at three different exhibitions: the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy, County Derry; Seamus Heaney: The Music of What Happens in Atlanta, Georgia; and Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again in Dublin. Writers’ Museums Although most “writer’s houses” open to the public are museums of sorts, the process of curating such spaces is largely invisible and operates at the intersection of restoration and replication, recreation and theatrical stage-setting. Much thought goes into the footprint and flow of visitor traffic as well as the selection and reproduction of the artifacts on display. Nicola Watson’s The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums is constructed like a guidebook—from “Introduction: Entrance this way…” to “Exit through the gift shop”—as she deftly surveys the spaces and objects on display in this “quasi-literary genre.”3 Building on her earlier study of nineteenth-century literary tourism, Watson examines the writer’s house museum as a form of biography where the interpretive work of reimagining the absent author is shared between the curator and the visitor. She argues that all such museums construct a specific writer by evoking that author’s [End Page 99] life and writings through objects located in what she calls “pseudo-domestic spaces.”4 Crucially, she adds that the museum only works...