Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain

Part I: Heaney and His Herbert

Gerald O’Collins SJ

Recalling the acclaimed seventeenth-century priest-poet George Herbert, Seamus Heaney, the beloved Irish Nobel Laureate, summed up the achievement of Peter Steele, a priest- and poet-friend, when he wrote to Steele, ‘George Herbet would be proud of you’.¹ A fellow Jesuit, Steele was a lifelong friend of mine. When he passed away, I wrote his obituary for the Sydney Morning Herald² and reprinted it in Portraits: Popes, Family, and Friends.³ The obituary ended with a brief reference to his friendship with Heaney. At the time I had no idea of its rich significance for those two warm, witty, and learned poets.

Born in Perth (Western Australia) in 1939, Steele joined the Jesuits in 1957, spent his life at Newman College, and taught generations of students in the University of Melbourne’s department of English literature. In 1993 he was named to a personal chair. He held visiting chairs at Georgetown University (Washington, DC), the University of Alberta, and Loyola University, Chicago. He also delivered the Martin D’Arcy Lectures at the University of Oxford, which he later published as The Autobiographical Passion: Studies in the Self on Show.⁴

Steele published major works on the Irish satirist and Anglican cleric, Jonathan Swift: first An Air of Truth Apparent: A Study of Gulliver’s Travels and then a longer book Jonathan Swift: Preacher and Jester.⁵ He also wrote studies of contemporary poets, both Australians and others, Expatriates: Reflections on Modern Poetry and Peter Porter, as well as a short study of Samuel Johnson and Dante Alighieri, Flights of the Mind: Johnson and Dante.⁶ And, of course, he also published many volumes of poetry, including two books of poems prompted by works of art, Plenty: Art into Poetry and The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry, as well as White Knight with Bee Box: New and Selected Poems, which was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for poetry in that year.⁷ In 2010 he received the Christopher Brennan Award, given by the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) for ‘lifetime achievement in poetry’.

For some golden years the English department at the University of Melbourne included several notable poets. Apart from Peter Steele, there were Vincent Buckley (1925–88), Evan Jones (1931–2022), and Christopher Wallace-Crabbe (b. 1934). All four were on first-name terms with Seamus Heaney (1939–2013), but Steele enjoyed a particularly close friendship with him. ‘Young Steele’, as Heaney sometimes called him, was born in the same year as Heaney himself but a few months later.

The two poets first met in Chicago, no later than the early 1980s. Over the years that followed, Steele regularly sent Heaney copies of his essays, homilies, and poems, and there were repeated reunions in Dublin, where Heaney lived. Heaney refers to their first encounter in a letter to Professor Margaret Manion after Steele’s death:

I first met him in Loyola University in Chicago and took to him immediately. In fact, from that moment he was like a spiritual director to me – not that he catechised, he simply was his steady, learned, merry, moral self, and his homilies (which would arrive with the poems) were nonpareil: a braiding of faith and intellect. I often said to Marie, only half in joke, that if she needed someone to speak at my obsequies, she was to get Peter Steele.⁸

In a letter of 19 September 2007, Heaney told Peter of the impact of the homilies. This letter reserved its warmest words for the meditations on the Stations of the Cross that Peter had been commissioned to write for the 2008 World Youth Day held in Sydney:

As ever too I was the better for the homilies and the lovely act of thanksgiving in your fiftieth anniversary address [for Peter’s fifty years in the Society of Jesus]. Plus, as they say, the World Youth Stations of the Cross. This latter manages, as you know better than anyone, to do something difficult and do it without seeming effortful – to match scripture not just with meditation and prayer, but with a style, a level of utterance, a pitch and proffer that will be neither a let down nor a strain up. As I read it I grieved with and for the youth in me and the celebrant with his altar boys away back there in the first aisle of the world. George Herbert would be proud of you …⁹

We don’t know whether Steele shared with Heaney the identity of the ecclesiastic who had commissioned the writing of the meditations, which were to be accompanied by movingly choreographed Stations of the Cross. The stations led the youth of the world from the heart of Sydney to the death of Jesus at sunset on the shore of its uniquely beautiful harbor. When he also read the texts that Peter had prepared, George Pell (still then Archbishop of Sydney) phoned to express concern that Peter may have ‘let down’ the divine identity of Jesus Christ.

Heaney was also lavishly positive when commenting on Steele’s poetry. When Steele sent him a collection of eleven poems called ‘A Mass for Anglesea’, in which each poem takes part of the Catholic liturgy as its subject, Heaney praised them as ‘among the richest you have done: abundant linguistically and spiritually, grounded and visionary, “private and planetary”’.¹⁰ ‘They open in so many directions,’ he added, ‘into the personally possessed image, out to the shimmering rim of the known and the strange’. Responding to another set of poems a few years later, Heaney wrote that he found ‘such a beautiful sense of a convergence of that twain, poetry and theology, of the mind’s gambolling for Christ’s sake, of language-relish from beginning to end … ’.¹¹

Steele was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2006 – Heaney called it ‘your own enemy within’. He faced operations, chemotherapy, and blood transfusions with gentle courage, realism, and never a touch of self-pity. On 27 June 2012 he died peacefully at Caritas Christi Hospice in Kew, Melbourne, aged seventy-two. The last letter he received, two days before his death, came from Heaney. Sent by fax, it ended: ‘with heavy heart but with love and rich memories it’s a case of Ave, pater, atque vale. Seamus.’ Heaney himself died one year later, on 30 August 2013, in the Blackrock Clinic, Dublin, aged seventy-four.

Heaney’s letters to Steele breathe the trust and esteem in which he held his Australian priest-poet friend. Shared joy, wit, reflections on their poetic craft, and jokes pervade the eight letters that I have retrieved from the archive of Newman College and present below.

Part II: The Letters

Gerald O’Collins SJ and Manfred Cain (eds)

Two archives in Melbourne contain many letters exchanged between Heaney and Steele: the Australian Jesuit archives and the study centre of Newman College, University of Melbourne, where Steele lived, wrote and taught for most of his life. The Jesuit archives hold over thirty letters from Heaney to Steele and around twenty-five from Steele to Heaney. The eight letters published here, however, are from the Newman College archives. They are the only letters from their correspondence in that repository. By the time they came to light it was too late to make them available for publication in Christopher Reid’s magisterial volume of selected correspondence by Heaney, The Letters of Seamus Heaney,¹² as it was at the proofing stage. These letters have not been published before.

***

28 October 1985

191 Strand Road

Dublin 4

Dear Peter,

Glad to hear from you and forgive me for not replying earlier to the previous letter. Indeed, I am mired in bad when I think of Australia … I owe Vincent [Buckley] a big letter for the big and true and thoroughly written Irish book.¹³ Maybe now that I have got pen to paper I’ll keep it there and begin to loosen the jam. (My metaphor, as Dr Chasuble would say, is drawn from logs, not preserves.)¹⁴

I think the villanelle is dandy – light and singing and debonair in the face of something sullen. I like it and ‘the Demon’ the best of the four, and wonder in the latter case if in the penultimate line a – – – (dactyl?) verb might not be better than ‘make the case for’? ‘The Heart’s Xanthippe’ is terrific, both as warp, sound and wit.¹⁵ And it’s not that I don’t like the geniality and banter of ‘Cue’ [?] and ‘The Less Rare’ [?] – just that the other ones make a more purposeful incision.

Forgive me for not writing when the news of your father’s death came with the words you spoke, so convincing and recognisable to me: ‘his piety was simple and strong, without any kind of flourish or showiness … He was a principled man and principles move towards prayer.’ I love that and know it in many people here. Our belated sympathy. Marie’s mother died a couple of weeks ago; and, in May also, I had a nine-year-old niece killed in a road accident. And yesterday I got news of my seventy-year-old aunt (a nun with the Dominicans in Glasgow), [who] has just had to have a masechtomy [sic]. It is the decade of the deaths, all right, the forties.

So your meditation on the moon came and comes at the right time. I hope you’ll print that in the poetry-essay book: it is quite extraordinarily rich and it amplifies the phenomenological pleasures of a Bachelard and his poetics of space into an act of faith.¹⁶ The sense of the form of intellect-opening in the breeze of affection is very exhilarating. I am honoured to float in across the horizon of its homing and to share the firmament of its reveries with so much else that I love – your linking of Hopkins with the lordless Anglo-Saxon poet is so exact, shooting the needle – the heart’s needle – and stitching the tent in English culture in a single perception. The unstinted and the deliberately pursued and the naturally subjective yet weathered quality of the piece is quite extraordinary, as I say, and lifts the heart.

I’ll have a few poems in the TLS next month – there’s an Irish issue on the cards – which will give you some sense of what I’ve been at. I also enclose a couple of sonnets which are part of a short sequence in memory of my mother.¹⁷ Don’t think of saying anything or writing about them. I just want to raise a little semaphore in greeting to your great pennants of generous work. Give my regrets and promises to Vincent and my best wishes to Chris & Evan & Dinny [O’Hearn, a local literary figure in Melbourne].

And watch as the sky darkens with hats thrown high in honour of your selving, going yourself –

Sláinte!

Seamus

*

6 April 1997 Dear Peter,

My excuses are 1) I’m on an aeroplane and this is the only pen to hand 2) you wrote on St Patrick’s Day.

Marie and I are aimed down to Atlanta; we came to Boston on Thursday, went to Wilmington, Delaware on Friday and spent yesterday in corporate company since (hangdog, spaniel-lugged, he admits). I was named for the well-named Common Wealth Awards, given out by PNC Bank here. Five phallic trophies plus five fairly decent cheques to five ‘achievers’ – including [the American playwright] Edward Albee, edgy and excellent, coming out on the balls of his feet punching daintily; a Dr DeBakey, he who pioneered the open-heart work; Jane Goodall, she of the chimps; and James Clark, he of the Webs and Nets – and private planes and undainty ways [presumably the computer scientist James H. Clark]. Anyhow, all the well-upholstered rhetoric about global messages and saluting excellence gave me a chance to tell them what the chaplain at the Blackrock Clinic said as he walked through the cardiac ward (heard by Barrie Cooke as he awaited his bypass): ‘Blessed are the pace-makers.’¹⁸ It’s in the same class as Phelim Donlon’s remark, which I am sure has been reported to you, about the awful portrait of the dramatist in the Abbey Theatre: ‘Aw Jaysus,’ says Donlon as he passes the thing, ‘the unbearable likeness of Behan’.¹⁹

Anyhow, the PNC crowd paid for Marie and me to come across the ocean, and months ago we arranged to proceed down to Emory University where we have about as many friends as we have in Melbourne. I did the Richard Ellman Memorial lectures there a few years ago, but before that I had known a big Texan called Ron Schuchard (who recently edited T. S. Eliot’s Clark lectures on varieties of Metaphysical Poetry) and his pig-roasting, hooch- whooping hospitality made the link an impressive one. Meanwhile, Emory has been buying the manuscript of every last pen-person who ever published a line and there has been much circling and wondering about what Heaney should do about his ‘archive’. So our trip is partly a response to that interest but mostly a visit to friends. I don’t quite know what to do about the ‘archive’ thing. If I were to sell to Emory, I’d get a fortune which (they say) would equal the bounty of Sweden, and Mrs Heaney is of the opinion that this option would be good for the future of the Heaneylings, not to mention her own wardrobe. And the cattle dealer’s son in me can see the sense of all this. But in order to act upon this wisdom I have to work through my accursed piety, which murmurs that the impoverished National Library in Dublin should be given the bloody stuff; we all know that it’s only wastepaper, apart from the Steele works which are layered into it here and there …

Speaking of which, when I read those new poems I thought of a definition of the activity in general which seemed to apply to these Steele works in particular: ‘Sauter pour mieux reculer’.²⁰ I was both lifted and laid by the melodies and mass of ‘Spadework’ and ‘Driving Home’ and ‘Second Coming’, they felt so gifty and – harking back to one of your sermons – committed, or better say the rewards of commitment. Not that I didn’t rejoice in the spangle and figure-skating and flourish of ‘The Envy [?] of the World’ – which passes what [Derek] Mahon once called the ‘good crack’ test with flying parrot colours; as the parrot-speak and shot-silk of popinjay and Papageno.²¹ You seem to be pedalling on a wonderful taut chain, with real purchase on the hub. Enviable and recognisable.

I, meanwhile, feel a bit convalescent as a verse-worker. I could do with a bit of the Herbertian relish and sun–feeling. Am operating on the translation alibi at the moment, crowbarring dully and brutally into Beowulf: real convict–labour with very little reward. I agreed to do a line-by-line verse translation for Norton (a commission, with eye – on my side – on pension/ text-book royalty, agreed in March 1995, after putting it off several times during the previous fourteen years). So I am stuck with it, and will bludgeon on, but unless there’s a boat crossing water, with the foamy-throat of the woody floater preening on the wave-weft, there’s damned little reward in it. So I have taken to doing the occasional short poem from the Irish as a kind of refresher, and am thinking that I should make a small anthology of those in a few years time. I even have a corny ‘working title’ to keep me going, nothing that would be usable, but something that gives me what Philip Sidney called ‘a fore-conceit of the work’. How about ‘Metres Meet’?

As ever, mon cher prêtre, I was brought to myself by your homilies. Brought to the lessness of said selfness. Less said the better for the truth here. Gratias ago.

Also, a bit of agens called for on the Miłosz front. I loved the way the frame of reference kept passing outwards, the way you Saturn-ringed the poems, gave a Czesławian amplitude and encompassing to the poems themselves. You were able to say wonderful things about the effect of each poem – for example, the way he is hostage to the vision he refuses in the Jeffers poem – and yet follow in the direction in which the poem points – the Dantesque conflation and proclamation at the end is marvellous.

We have entered turbulence and are coming towards Atlanta; if I don’t speak to you by the phone method soon, I look forward to seeing you in Dublin in June. I sympathise with the sad witness & waiting you are in thrall [to,] attending to your mother’s state. My sister Ann (50) has just had a mastechtomy [sic], but it is in the glands. Treatments and attendings in store. Love to you from

[The signoff is missing.]

P.S. I loved the comedy romp of that harp-wielding donkey.

*

2 July 2003

Peter – Sorry for the hold up. This ole dog was on the not-so-hard road in Russia when you faxed, got back a week ago and within three days was off again to a teachers’ conference in the land of the Britons. Please excuse me for not getting back immediately to say a Molly-[Bloom]ish yes to the publisher re-quote. I do have a rule which operates against this activity – until I am prepared to break it. Perhaps the trimmed quotation would be faxed to Dublin, just to have it looked over and returned, if necessary.

January should see us in Dublin, so we look forward to seeing you – and maybe we can assemble also for a plateful and pow-wow when you’re at Fordham. I hope to be at Harvard in October 2004.

Your note gave me the usual pangs – Tony Hecht’s paean should have been greeted by me immediately. Now it’s behind time and irreparably so, but when the hurry stops … And dear C. W. C. [Chris Wallace-Crabbe] and all his troubles. Mortalia tangunt, all right. Love from her in Dublin, too –

Seamus

*

4 June 2006 Dear Peter,

Halfway across the Atlantic, westering un-home – to Princeton for pomps, to Pierpont Morgan Library, for podium work – with Mrs Heaney accompanying

…

The beauteous Whispering Gallery arrived at Strand Road earlier in the week – when I was at Hay-on-Wye, tent city during its literary festival – but all I was able to do was gaze and skim.²² When I get back; in a week’s time, there should be a little more time, although this year I’ve written myself into lit fest after lit fest: before you arrive I’ll have done Dublin Writers and Rotterdam …

Delighted with your salute to D&C²³ – especially in light of the lift I got from ‘Raggedly Love’ – enough to live by in those couple of pages. And a wonderful account of what you have lived by, or nearby, in the Quartering essay. So much in there to be noted and quoted: So much reckoning and rumination (I loved the Jesuit’s caution about coming to pathy [sic] to Hopkins). If writing like that is what you do to mitigate the restlessness, then let there be no settling and slumping, but an ongoing merry-go-round of the mind.

Call us when you get to London – by which time I hope my fax will be back in working order. It wore out while I was in the States last month and I was so worn out and hid away when I got back; it has remained out of order. But next week should see executive powers restored …

Marie sends a lot of the un–ragged commodity, and so do I – Seamus

*

19 September 2007

Dear Peter,

If the opposite of talking, as your sage Lebowitz observes, is waiting, you’ll be thinking that in Heaney’s case it is also the opposite of writing. The plan was to be in touch before you went for the CT scan last month, but there, or rather here we are. Hell is full of good intentions, don’t put off until to- morrow, Où sont les nieges – which we don’t know, barring the successful implementation of Flann O’Brien’s patent for a machine designed to preserve last year’s snow. But now the Lady Ardboe and myself are gladdened by your news that drear chemo has been postponed, that Georgetown beckons or back-ons (Dennis O’Driscoll is a bad influence on me, forever at that kind of thing) and that we’ll be seeing you in Dublin. (Speaking of back-on, I think I may have told you that D. Walcott says there are only two African tribes left in the Caribbean: the Moeteesas, who go around hotel lounges aiming teapots and asking, ‘Mo’ tea, sah?’ and that Backonbacs who stand at the end of entryways crying to the lorry-driver in his cabin, ‘Back on back, back on back … ’ Well, Walcott’s allowed, I suppose. But it’s still technically a scandal to repeat it?)²⁴

The Anglesea poems are among the richest you have done: abundant linguistically and spiritually, grounded and visionary, ‘private and planetary’, the raw meat and the heavenly radiance, earthed altar and ekphrastic celebrant. I rejoice, you have constructed that upon which to rejoice. This is absolutely the right materia for a limited edition, it deserves as much braille as the word can be embossed with … The place and its place in your present, past and future shines through, gives power from below, sanctions the sanctus, instresses the offerings. You yourself must know these ones forced themselves through the green, or better say golden fuse. They open in so many directions, into the personally possessed image, out to the shimmering rim of the known and the strange. I’ve covered the pages with marks and ‘little leaning hoes’, and got more from each time I went through them – which is the sign of the real thing. Also, as a sequence, there’s great virtue in the different angles of approach in different sections – the kyrie and gloria, for example, with their honest to goodness, differentiating, democratic purchase, after the temperate sacerdotal prologue; and then the marvellous rapturous mystery of ‘Word’. I could go on, except I’d have to try to find how to be a ‘master of starcraft’ myself. So let’s just say I joy, and have done and not done.

As ever too I was better for the homilies and the lovely act of thanksgiving in your fiftieth anniversary address.²⁵ Plus, as they say, the World Youth Stations of the Cross. This latter manages, as you know better than anyone, to do something extraordinarily difficult and do it without seeming effortful – to match scripture not just with meditation and prayer, but with a style, a level of utterance, a pitch and proffer that will be neither a let down nor a strain up. As I read it I grieved with and for the youth in me and the celebrant with his altar boys away back there in the first aisle of the world. George Herbert would be proud of you, and not just for quoting the whole of his poem … You can plainly say ‘My God, My King’ and still get away with it. (I greatly enjoyed those asides on atheism in one of the homilies – made me think again of Betjeman’s at-homeness in the Church of England because of its accommodation of/with ‘the real Absence’).

It would be good to be able to boast that I’m a better person for having read the homilies over the years, but I can at least truly report that I’ve been bettered by them as I read, and indeed bested. And this time my special reward was your quote from Augustine, where he avers that to say ‘I love you’ means ‘I wish you to be’. It will help me to speak to my old friend [David] Hammond [1926–2008] next week: for months he has been ailing from deficiencies in the blood and in his wily gifted way deflecting his friends’ attention from the seriousness of the situation, but yesterday he rang to say it is now frankly proclaimed acute leukemia and his doctor told him he’s not likely to see Christmas.

Before Belfast, however, I’m off to the Barbican, where the Nottingham Playhouse Repertory people are putting on their new production of The Burial at Thebes; and I’ll be bringing the enclosed manuscript to the people at Faber. I send it because it requires no response, being a romp that I engaged upon for sheer pleasure. When I do the introduction, hopefully in a Faber series called ‘Poet to Poet’ where a contemporary stave-monger selects and introduces staves by late lamented makers (I have done Yeats and Wordsworth – I shall solemnly invoke the example of Pope and Dryden in order to justify my ‘modernising’ of the Scottish Chaucerean, Robert Henryson. It’s the schoolmaster in him I respond to, also the fact that I feel closer to his fifteenth-century world than the one I’ve ended up in in Dublin.

Anyhow, ‘Seamus and Marie to their trusty and well-beloved Peter, greetings’, agus grá –

Seamus

[PS]

Peter – I’ve also done a ‘translation’ of Henryson’s ‘Testament of Cresseid’ and hope eventually that it and all this stuff will appear as a parallel text. But probably that won’t be until 2009, since the interview book with Dennis O’D should be out at the end of next year, and one offering per annum is more than enough. (Dennis, incidentally, has asked me to keep the text of that book to myself until publication, so for all my murmuring about sending it to you for assaying, I feel honour bound to obey the lad).

I still harbour a hope that the mad marvellous Scots comedian Billy Connolly might do a reading of one or two of the fables – or bits of three or four of them – some time. He’s manic and obscene and bloody magnificent as a stand-up, and yet he did a great, straight job as Queen Victoria’s gamekeeper in that movie Mrs Brown – with Judi Dench the perfect Vicky. Worth a look, if you ever get the chance.

Anyhow, no need to read more than a few pages. My own favourites are the mice near the beginning and the wee mouse at the end. And ‘The Preaching of the Swallow’.

Better crack than Beowulf, all the same. S.

*

4 June 2011

Glanmore Cottage, Ashford, Co. Wicklow

Dear Peter,

A recent review by the zesty Mary Beard – TLS or NYRB – took me back to Latin and Livy and Hannibal and Hannibal’s match, the cunctator Fabius Maximus. It’s a self-aggrandising comparison but there has been far, far too much cunctating in my writing to you – yet I pray that your own enemy within will also have the sense to pull back well beyond the predicted date. (I see this makes you into a Hannibal, but then, alas, we do have an elephant in the room).

By now you have probably rounded the zodiac as your own Star Man, and since Elemental Man is already so intellectually and imaginatively plenary, Sidereal Man will probably rise with ease and repossess that space where the Father brooded over the face of the waters. The four poems and attendant contemplations in the piece you sent (and the quotations – not to mention the Child of Prague gag) the whole thing rinsed and rang more than the ear. There’s such a beautiful sense of a convergence of that twain, poetry and theology, of the mind’s gambolling for Christ’s sake, of language-relish from beginning to end – and what an end, with those two Piero [della Francesca] images.

And when it comes to relish, the juice and joy of ‘Auguri’ is hard to beat, so much more than an abecedarian exercise, a fully realised chant which allows me to quote Miłosz at you, ‘it seems you were born for this, / To glorify things just because they are’²⁶ – although typically enough for old Czesław, the pronouncement came originally in the first person singular.

Everything and nothing to report here. I’ve been on medication which has definitely slowed me down, except for my hands, where it has induced a shake and I have to remind myself not to order soup. After my ‘dip’ last

year, the consultant – a very good fellow who put up early on with my almost mockery of his biochemical account of the brain – prescribed a cocktail – as they say – of stuff and it has upped and steadied the spirits but produced a new found inclination to stay abed in the morning and retire for another while in the afternoon. Inertia, more or less, and a sluggishness in reading and writing. But then Marie keeps saying, ‘You’re seventy-two, so what do you expect?’

[The following page or pages are missing. Or did Heaney simply end abruptly?]

*

25 June 2012

To: Peter Steele SJ, c/o Caritas Christi, Kew [Victoria, Australia]

I would be deeply grateful if you could convey the following message to Father Steele who is now in your care.

Dear Peter

Chris Wallace-Crabbe telephoned a few minutes ago to tell us you had a triumphant book launch [of Braiding the Voices] and that you had moved to Caritas Christi [hospice for the dying]. You should have heard from us long ago but we were ever late responders.

Your stamina, physical and spiritual, has been indomitable and has long since braided itself into many lives and bound them to you in grateful friendship. All our meetings have been significant, from the moment we first met in Chicago and on through our reunions in Dublin. And Marie’s love is as steadfast as my own.

It would be a happiness if we could see you in Australia, but this is not to be. So with heavy heart but with love and rich memories it’s a case of Ave, pater, atque vale.

Seamus

*

13 October 2012

[To Professor Margaret Manion, IBVM, Melbourne]

Dear Margaret,

This is a shamefully late reply to your kind letter of more than a month ago, and your dispatch a little later of Braiding the Voices, generous acts in memory of Peter. The disgraceful delay stems in no small part from a feeling of having failed to keep in touch with Peter in the latter days; I ought to have written more and initiated phone calls, which is why I’ve tended to wince away from things that remind me of that time. In the circumstances, therefore, I appreciate your gentle news of his last journey and the friends who with you were with him to the end.

I first met him in Loyola University in Chicago, and took to him immediately. In fact, from that moment he was like a spiritual director to me – not that he catechised, he simply was his steady, learned, merry, moral self, and his homilies (which would arrive with the poems) were nonpareil: a braiding of faith and intellect. I often said to Marie, only half in joke, that if she needed someone to speak at my obsequies, she was to get Peter Steele. It was always a joy and a fortification of sorts to have Peter in the house.

As you know, he made a habit of calling in Dublin when he was on his way to Georgetown, and having him in your company was like putting your back to some great tree when the sap was rising. And all of that comes through in the essays – pure conviction about the seriousness of the art, extraordinary range of reference, wonderful level-toned expositions and illuminations.

His loss is hurtful to us all. But to you who were so close the absence will be that much more dismaying. A poem by Miłosz may be a little secular in its imagery, and in its last couple of lines not applicable to Peter, but there’s an amplitude that’s right:

‘The Fall’

The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation That had valiant armies, captains and prophets,

And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas, But now it will not relieve any besieged city, It will not enter into any alliance,

Because its cities are empty, its population dispersed,

Its land once bringing harvest now overgrown with thistles, Its mission forgotten, its language lost,

The dialect of a village high upon inaccessible mountains. Ah well, God rest him.

With gratitude and kind regards – Seamus

Emeritus Professor Gerald O’Collins SJ, AC, taught theology at the

Gregorian University in Rome from 1973 to 2006. He published over eighty books. He was living in Parkville, Victoria, Australia, at the time of his death, on 22 August 2024, just as this issue of Studies was going to press. Manfred Cain is engaged with studies in English literature at the University of Melbourne and is a prize-winning poet.

(Notes)

1. Melbourne, Newman College Archives (NCA), Heaney–Steele letter, 19 September 2007.
2. Gerald O’Collins, ‘Obituary’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 July 2012.
3. Gerald O’Collins, Portraits: Popes, Family, and Friends (Brisbane, Australia: Connor Court Publishing, 2019).
4. Peter Steele, The Autobiographical Passion: Studies in the Self on Show (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1989).
5. Peter Steele, An Air of Truth Apparent: A Study of Gulliver’s Travels (1968); Jonathan Swift: Preacher and Jester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
6. Peter Steele, Expatriates: Reflections on Modern Poetry (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1985); Peter Porter (Oxford University Press Australia and New Zealand, 1992); Flights of the Mind: Johnson and Dante (1997).
7. Peter Steele, Plenty: Art into Poetry (Melbourne: Macmillan Art, 2003); The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry (Melbourne: Macmillan Art, 2006); White Knight with Bee Box: New and Selected Poems (Melbourne: John Leonard Press, 2008).
8. NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 13 October 2012.
9. NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 19 September 2007.
10. NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 19 September 2007.
11. NCA, Heaney–Steele letter, 4 June 2011.
12. Christopher Reid (ed), The Letters of Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2023).
13. Heaney refers to V. Buckley, Memory Ireland: Insights into the Contemporary Irish Condition (London: Penguin Books, 1985).
14. Dr Frederick Chasuble is a character in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
15. Xanthippe was the bad-tempered wife of the Greek philosopher Socrates.
16. The reference is to Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), The Poetics of Space (orig., 1958).
17. One of these sonnets (‘When all the others were away at Mass’) recalls the death of his mother in 1984; it has become one the most-loved works in modern English literature.
18. The Irish abstract impressionist painter, Cooke (1931–2014) went fishing for years with Heaney and the poet laureate, Ted Hughes. The fellowship of this trio brought out the best art in each other.
19. Phelim Donlon was an Irish arts manager.
20. ‘Go back in order to make a better leap.’
21. ‘Popinjay’ is the original word in English for ‘parrot’. ‘Papageno’ refers, presumably, to the Papageno Papagena duet in Mozart’s Magic Flute. A fellow Irish author, Mahon wrote for Heaney’s seventieth birthday the controversial poem ‘A Country Kitchen’.
22. Steele, The Whispering Gallery.
23. ‘D’ presumably is Dinny Ahern and ‘C’ Chris Wallace-Crabbe; see letter of 28 October 1985 above.
24. Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950) is an American author; Flann O’Brien (1911–66) was a delightfully comic writer. Since she came from that town in County Tyrone, Heaney names his wife ‘Lady Ardboe’. Heaney and Steele admired the poetry of the Irish writer Dennis O’Driscoll (1954–2012). The Saint Lucian poet and playwright Sir Derek Alton Walcott (1930–2017) received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992.
25. Heaney refers to Steele celebrating fifty years as a Jesuit.
26. ‘Blacksmith shop’ in Provinces (1991), published in Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 503. In this translation, the lines Heaney refers to run as follows: ‘I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: / To glorify things just because they are.’