A Succession of Big Heavy Saloons

Medbh McGuckian has done a fine job charting the influence of the car in Seamus Heaney's poetry, or at least in the early to mid-period poems (a second edition is long overdue: Horsepower Pass By! Again!). Here, we take up the interviews with Heaney conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, collected in Stepping Stones. Like the poems, they reveal the reach of the car and driving into many dimensions of the poet's life; a partial catalogue follows:

Heaney's father hitchhiking (before he learned to drive) in order to work as a cattle dealer; the car accident that killed three-and-a-half-year-old brother Christopher while 14-year-old Seamus was away at school (see "Mid-Term Break"); buying his first car (a VW Beetle) to "drive round the country so I could inspect students on teaching practice"; the céilís (country dances), at which you'd have to "ask somebody to shift a car that was blocking somebody else's in the car park"; stopping by the roadside with a dying Robert Lowell to relieve themselves ("Pit Stop Near Castletown"); being driven along Storrow Drive in Boston, "looking at the Harvard houses on the other side of the water"; taking the car on the Holyhead ferry to Wales to drive through "Housman territory."

Kilkenny Motor Club Show 2012 (St. James Park)

Two more extended excerpts follow. The first, a lovely description of the family cars - a familiar theme to anyone with a large family dependent on keeping second-hand cars running. The second, an account of running out of gas, a mundane occurrence but for the momentousness of the day.

We never had a car when we lived at Mossbawn [Heaney's first family house]. All that had to wait until we moved to The Wood farm in the 1950s. At that stage my father learned to drive and we had a succession of big heavy saloons* - big because the family was big, but also because we needed a big boot for ferrying bales of hay and bags of meal and newborn calves. At different times there was an Austin 16 and a Vauxhall Victor and a Humber Hawk, all second-hand. And of course all of them ended up hard to start and needing to be pushed, so that was one way the Heaney family used to come together, shoulder to shoulder, gathering momentum, waiting for the engine to fire. (p. 4)

KMC First Commons Rally (2012)

The Deanes' car running out of petrol on Glenshane Pass the night of the Bloody Sunday funerals in Derry. They were driving back from Derry late: Seamus [Deane] and Marion to their in-laws in Maghera, me to Belfast when I came upon them parked on the mountain road. We left Marion and the kids in the Deane car and Seamus and I drove back to Dungiven to rouse the owner of a petrol pump. In truth, we banged on the door of his pub where there was a crowd of after-hours, post-funeral drinkers on the premises... (p. 187)

The attention to the car and to driving in the poems and interviews is not surprising when one appreciates that, for Heaney, driving is part of composing: "One of the best times for me, for incubating and counting out the beats of a poem, is on long drives. Marie knows because she sees my fingers on the steering wheel beating out the thing. Many, many poems were conceived of and started out in that shut-eyed manner - well not literally shut eyed!" (p. 446)

(*"Saloon" is the UK equivalent of the U.S. "sedan." Photos, none of them SH, courtesy of the Kilkenny Motor Club. I know, I know, but Londonderry doesn't seem to have a club.)