Going for a Pint with Seamus Heaney

Also: Revisiting John Buchan’s “The Thirty-Nine Steps,” Bryan Magee and the meaning of life, Dorothy Whipple’s childhood memoir, and more.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In The American Scholar, the poet Richard Tillinghast reviews Seamus Heaney’s letters and laments the fact that so few of them (over 800 pages) offer “glimpses of the man himself”: “It was a delight to go to the pub with Seamus, to share a meal, to smoke a cigar with him. He was wonderful company. So it’s a shame that so many of the letters reprinted here trace the development of a literary career rather than offering glimpses of the man himself. One turns with pleasure to letters such as the one written to David Hammond, the singer and broadcaster from Belfast: ‘I did nothing all day yesterday but sit about the McCabes’ flat, doze, go out and drink soft pints of bitter, fart, daydream, eat an Indian meal, fart again and sleep for eight hours again last night. Now the birds are singing in the garden, it’s nine in the morning and it’s all clear.’”