Chapter 15 - The Famous Seamus

Summary

That’s one of Seamus Heaney’s jokes. Once he had become famous, he told jokes, with a nice smirk of irony, about famous people being pestered. He began to be famous in 1966, after the publication of his first volume of poems, Death of a Naturalist. I’ve now known the famous Seamus, ‘Seamus Heaney’, longer than I knew him before the fame, when he was just Seamus Heaney or Seamus Justin Heaney, or Heaney, S. J., as his name appeared on examination lists at schools and universities that we attended together for eleven years. If you were named Seamus, you needed another initial, to distinguish you from the throng of Seamuses that emerged in Northern Ireland in the thirties and forties and have continued to emerge ever since. The name Seamus was the Irish version of James and a signal that the Northern Irish Catholic community was loyal to the Gaelic, and not to the British, account of things.