It’s ordinarily only the famous who first approach a nonfiction book by thumbing through the index, looking for their own name.

Unfamous, I nevertheless found myself doing just that this past summer while meandering through the stacks at Blackwell’s in Oxford, one of the largest and grandest bookstores in the world.

I had pulled from the shelf the U.K. version of “The Letters of Seamus Heaney,” published by Faber & Faber there in the late spring (and now here by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 800-plus pages of the correspondence of the great Irish poet.

Before he had become famous – outside Ireland, at least; he was “Famous Seamus” there when still in his 30s – before he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his gorgeous, seminal, important body of work – a dozen of us at UC Berkeley had been lucky enough to be his students in a writing seminar in 1976.

He wasn’t just a poet and essayist of genius, it turned out. He was a teacher of genius as well. We’d meet in his borrowed, book-lined house in the Berkeley hills, home to the critic and UC professor Mark Schorer. We’d read our poems. Whiskey was passed around. Those were the kinds of afternoons of which most young writers can only dream – and yet they were ours.

“Lawrence,” he’d said to me as the term came to an end. “If you’re ever in Dublin, come and stay with the family awhile.”

Probably never thought I’d take him up on such an offer, I later realized. But after graduation, heading to Europe for five months with a backpack, naive as any 21-year-old ever, I dropped a line, and was assured that it would be fine to come and stay for a spell.

I bunked in the garret – later, after a remodel, Seamus’s light-filled writing room – there on Strand Road for over a week. We talked, we smoked, we drank; I tried to help Marie in the kitchen, and with some babysitting for Catherine Ann, Michael and Christopher. We traveled out to the West Country, where Seamus gave a reading at a small girls’ school. After, we drank Jameson’s in the break room with nuns!

And we stayed in touch, down the decades, and occasionally were able to meet up. I stayed with the family in Sandymount on another, shorter visit. I brought my O’Brien grandmother there one afternoon. “And what could I get you to drink?” he asked her. “An Irish coffee, please.” Bemused, he somehow whipped one up.

Thus, my trepidation. What if I were a figure of fun?

But I wasn’t in the index. As the letters were arranged chronologically, I went to the fall of ‘77, which would have been just after my stay. I’d dodged a bullet, it turned out, though I was part of the problem. In a letter to Berkeley English prof Thomas Flanagan – who during my Dublin stay had rung the doorbell, which I answered, which somehow felt like the first adult moment of my life – dated 18 October, Seamus wrote: “the Strand Road Hotel is still making a few demands. Last week we had Shirley Samuels, erstwhile Berkeley writing student (F%#! says Mrs Heaney) … and Marie’s sister and children from England (F%#! says Mr Heaney). Anyhow, the house is silent for an hour or two – I thought it was. The electrician has just arrived …”

I was part of that cacophony. I felt guilty reading those words. And yet – the 25 books of new and selected poems, the five books of prose, the two plays, based on Greek myths – that Seamus (1939-2013) created showed that he, so generous with his time with me and so many others, still found the odd moment to scribble.

Including, as the hundreds of letters and emails printed here, from his teen years until the very end – including the gorgeous and tragic two-word text he sent to Marie from a Dublin hospital just before he died, “Noli timere” (don’t be afraid) – show, a record of correspondence that will want to be read by anyone with the slightest interest in the best writing of our time – a way with words that thrills in the missives between just two people, until now.

Editor Christopher Reid notes that the letters “meant to communicate delight to an immediate correspondent, can now delight as latter-day listeners-in.”

From his Belfast home in 1969 to friend Rosemary Goad, before the Troubles caused him to move his family south to the Republic: “We’re still short of water after the explosions and I’m almost certain that the last flat wheel I got … was the work of Protestant saboteurs. You’re lucky to be out of it.”

On having eulogized his dear friend, the American poet Robert Lowell, who had called Seamus “the greatest Irish poet since Yeats,” from the pulpit of St. Luke’s Church in London in 1977: “I was both honored and uneasy to be asked to do it – what with (important poetry critic A.) Alvarez and Ted Hughes and William Empson and other hounds of heaven in the congregation – so the finished piece inclined to the marmoreal.”

What a word! I had to look it up: “made of or likened to marble.”

In 1998, to the American performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson, who had asked permission to use his “Lightenings VIII,” one of his finest poems, about a mysterious airborne boat that appeared to the monks of Clonmacnoise, in her multimedia stage show “Songs and Stories for Moby Dick”: “Please forgive me for not being in touch. I have been all over the country in the meantime. I apologize for not having been able to give the material you sent a decent span of attention, but am glad to be associated with your project and to have the poem like a little pennant on the great craft you are launching. Success attend you. Seamus Heaney. PS Can you add ‘big’ before ‘hull’ – and restore original lineation?”

My one, still extant written communication from Seamus, scribbled in a tiny pamphlet of poems about his children published by a small Irish press: “Lawrence – to remember the family by.” And with his biro, he corrected a typo in one of them, with a slash.

Oh, I remember, Seamus. I do.

____

Larry Wilson is on the editorial board of the Southern California Newspaper Group.

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