Scruples
James Wood
- The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures by Seamus Heaney
Faber, 213 pp, £15.99, September 1995, ISBN 0 571 17562 7
- The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney
Faber, 71 pp, £14.99, May 1996, ISBN 0 571 17760 3
Seamus Heaney has always doubted poetry – not as a philosopher might doubt reality, but as a rich man might doubt money. He feels not scepticism, but guilt. He thanks poetry for existing but is tormented by the size of its donation. Poetry, he suspects, has no right to its wealth; so he lavishes scruples on his readers. Heaney’s poetry is loaded with anxiety and self-tormented power. At times this is truly powerful, and at other times merely self-tormented. But this is nevertheless the grimace of a major poet.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 14 · 18 July 1996
From Geoffrey Dutton
I wonder whether you could ban from your reviews the use of the word ‘famously’ in the context of literary allusion and quotation? To take an example from your issue of 20 June, James Wood mars an excellent review by writing of Seamus Heaney, ‘The young poet of direct statement felt, famously, in “Digging”, that he could not dig like his farmer father.’ In a recent New York Review of Books, even that usually impeccable stylist Gore Vidal writes that Mark Twain ‘spent his boyhood, famously, in the Mississippi town of Hannibal’. There are countless other examples available in publications all over the English-speaking world, especially here in Australia. There would seem to be two reasons for the use of this obnoxious term. First, one-upmanship: ‘I’ve known this famous literary detail since I was a child, but I don’t expect you’ll have heard of it.’ Second, mock modesty: ‘Of course I know that you’ll know this famous quotation, but we’ll both enjoy it if I use it once again, won’t we?’ The fatuity of the habit is perhaps best exposed by pushing it to extremes, something like: ‘The young Jesus Christ famously thought that his Father was in heaven.’
Geoffrey Dutton
Glasshouse Mountains, Queensland
Vol. 18 No. 15 · 1 August 1996
From Michael Jenkins
Bravo to Geoffrey Dutton (Letters, 18 July) for pointing out the widespread abuse of ‘famous’and ‘famously’. Surely what these words mean is: ‘Here’s a good line or anecdote which I’m going to call “famous” in case you already know it and think I’m a yokel for still finding it interesting.’
Michael Jenkins
London NW3
Vol. 18 No. 18 · 19 September 1996
From Gerald Noonan
To assist Geoffrey Dutton in his campaign against the (mis)use of ‘famously’ (Letters, 18 July), I suggest using Dutton’s examples to see whether ‘famously’ is used as an adverb, to modify the verb. In the Seamus Heaney example, ‘the young poet’ is famous for how he had the ‘Digging’ feeling, not for the expression of it. Similarly, Gore Vidal is, grammatically, saying that Mark Twain is famous for the way he ‘spent his boyhood’ in Hannibal, Mississippi, rather than, as he must have meant, that the Twain connection made the place famous thereafter. It is a clear case of the ‘verbalising’ disease ‘impacting’ adverbs.
I do not believe for a moment, however, that, hopefully, we – all the forces of the post-colonial new world – can rein in this galloping fetish at the seat of Empire. That parallel misuse of the (former) adverb, ‘hopefully’, has gone on far too long. The case against it was much stronger, given that the new fad eliminated the old and useful meaning whereby one could say (à la Dutton), without taint of irreverence: ‘Hopefully, Christ on the cross thought of his Father.’ That positive meaning, the mainstream for a thousand years, is now extinct, hopelessly.
Gerald Noonan
Waterloo, Canada
