Friday
The literature we love tells us a lot about who we are, which is why I’m fascinated by the favorite books of our elected leaders. I’ve written a number of columns about bookworm Barack Obama’s favorites, especially, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, but it’s been harder to discover Joe Biden’s. Seamus Heaney’s poetry is up there, as I have noted (here and here), and he has also mentioned (of all things) James Joyce’s Ulysses. Someone has mentioned his fondness for Joyce’s Dubliners, which makes more sense to me, but I’ll explore the Joyce connection in a later post.
For the moment, I turn my attention to an illuminating Guardian article by Jonathan Jones that seeks to make sense of Biden’s fondness for Heaney. Jones appreciates how Biden draws on the poet to imagine reconciliation in the face of America’s political polarization and observes that Heaney understands hate. At one point Heaney references Dante’s Ugolino episode to capture that murderous passions that tore Northern Ireland apart:
It is for this call for reconciliation that Biden summons Heaney’s wise ghost. And that is a frightening insight into how serious the president-elect thinks the US’s crisis is, despite the celebrations this weekend. For Heaney wrote brilliantly about hate. It was part of his democratic genius to be able to put himself in other poets’ voices, to empathize with other passions, making him a wonderful translator. Some of his greatest lines are in Ugolino, his version of one of the most grisly encounters in Dante’s Inferno. In the frozen lake near the bottom of hell, Dante sees:
two soldered in a frozen hole
On top of other, one’s skull capping the other’s,
Gnawing at him where the neck and head
Are grafted to the sweet fruit of the brain,
Like a famine victim on a loaf of bread.The biter is Ugolino, his prey Archbishop Roger, who walled him up in a dungeon with his young sons to starve to death. Ugolino tells how, as his little boys died, they urged him to feed on their own flesh. Blind from hunger, he succumbed. Now he gets his revenge on Roger for all eternity, but he, too, is in hell. It is a terrible image of the cycle of hatred and revenge that gripped Northern Ireland in 1979, when this poem appeared in Heaney’s book, Field Work.
While Heaney could have been pulled into that cycle, he used poetry to hold on to his humanity. As Jones observes,
It wasn’t easy for Heaney to preach reconciliation. The profundity of his poems about the Troubles lies precisely in his ability to understand that Ugolinesque urge to gnaw on your enemy’s skull.
Jones contrasts Heaney with the antisemitic TS Eliot, the Mussolini-supporting Ezra Pound, and the petty racist Philip Larkin:
Heaney was that truly rare thing: a great imaginative artist who was also a wise and noble human being.
And the greatest thing about him was his voice – so conversational, so slowly seductive, somehow as easy to listen to as a talker at the bar while he takes you to hell and back. It comes across in every line. I heard him read when I was a student, shyly sought his autograph, and the rare richness of that voice has never left me.
Biden too, Jones says, is “patient, reasonable, and full of unmistakable human compassion”:
There is a depth in Biden’s response to Heaney that clearly goes beyond mere political convenience. He has suffered terrible losses in his life and perhaps he finds particular solace in this poet who voyages into the underworld and speaks with the departed. This appreciation of one of the wisest and subtlest of poets marks out Biden as a truly rare politician.
In these dark times, America may have elected just the right person.
