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Lot 266
HEANEY (SEAMUS) Series of nearly thirty autograph and typed (or word-processed) letters signed, cards and other material, to the manuscript collector and dealer Roy Davids, Dublin and elsewhere, 1979-2012
24 June 2015, 11:00 BST
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £6,250 inc. premium
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HEANEY (SEAMUS)
Series of nearly thirty autograph and typed (or word-processed) letters signed, cards and other material, to the manuscript collector and dealer Roy Davids, the earliest letters dating from 1979 when Davids was working in the Book & Manuscript Department, Sotheby's, the last written to hail his 70th birthday in 2012; subjects covered including reminiscences of his hospitality (the earliest letter containing an evocation in the Yeatsian manner, opening "I think of Davids, that persuasive man,/ Among old pictures and old pedigrees,/ Matching the masters' hands with his own hand./ Yet for all that search in mansions behind trees,/ All that skill with the merchant and the clerk,/ He loved poetry and bore the poet's mark..."); Davids's poems ("...grave, tender, 'keeping the accent', accounting to and for yourself, just that bit sad, eheu, and therefore just right..."); his own manuscripts ("...Both of them pages/ stages from the workings of two poems that appeared in Seeing Things. The red Biro gets it right in the third section of 'Markings'; and things have not quite worked out right yet in 'The Ash Plant'. Still...") and their sale ("...the magnificent catalogue... Should teach me not to go boozing and signing and transcribing at the same time... Meanwhile, there may be the jacket art for the next book of poems. To be called The Spirit Level. Due next May..."); reading Giordano Bruno ("...I've read the first hundred pages with happiness and a sense of real discovery, as well as homecoming..."); receiving Davids's poems in hospital in 2006 ("...Young Muldoon says a poem should bring you into a field of force where anything can happen – and what's more should bring you there. You did it. The mark is made..."); and Davids's 70th birthday celebrations (his contribution opening: "Davids, in good company you and I/ And the great Ted, he of the Merlin cast/ And voice as deep as England..."); plus drafts for a note on an Arvon poetry selection (with covering letter by Ted Hughes); a note to Ted and Nick [Hughes]; a card to Michael Holroyd; a letter to Roy's assistant Julie [Armstrong], etc., some 40 pages, folio, 4to and 8vo, Dublin and elsewhere, 1979-2012
Footnotes
'YOU AND I AND THE GREAT TED' – LETTERS BY SEAMUS HEANEY TO ROY DAVIDS, MANY ABOUT THEIR POETRY AND THEIR MUTUAL FRIEND, TED HUGHES. Heaney had been introduced to Davids, Director of the Book & Manuscript Department at Sotheby's, by Ted Hughes, for whom Davids had masterminded the sale of the Sylvia Plath Archive (see lot below). At about this time Heaney was helping Hughes judge submissions for the Arvon Foundation poetry prize, as well as collaborating on their anthology of verse, The Rattlebag. Davids hosted the book's launch at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 1982, having the two poets and their wives to stay in his small cottage nearby (an evening evoked long afterwards in Heaney's 70th birthday tribute).
Of especial note is the long autograph letter written by Heaney to Davids on 28 November 1998, acknowledging receipt of his poem ['Memories, Reflections, Gratitudes'], written in the immediate aftermath of their friend's death: "That torrent was the way to do it. Cry out, run mad, 'appall the very faculties...' It's what I should have done myself. In the days after the news and after the funeral, I was – as you will know better than any – like infant tissue... I had been out of touch, paradoxically, during his year with the illness – somehow I felt he had gone to lie in the forest and didn't want distraction. From Matthew Evans I had heard of the liver cancer, but when he and Carol appeared in Dublin in June I felt (despite registering that meniscus-slight passover of premonition that this was a formal leave taking) the lion was regnant in him still. The hair re-crested. The old crouch and gaze still indomitable at the mouth of the den. Anyhow, I had laid the gossipy 'the-doctors-said-he-could-go-on-for-years' report to my breast like an unction. And then the worst..."; the letter going on to voice Heaney's misgivings about publication of his own tribute to Birthday Letters.