Louis MacNeice

Frederick Louis MacNeice (September 12, 1907 – September 3, 1963) was a British and Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis; nicknamed MacSpaunday as a group. His body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed, but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly political as some of his contemporaries, his work shows a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his Irish roots. His work is familiar and clever, but intellectually distinguished and informed by a real tragic sense. He casts an ironic eye on the politics of Ireland but his love always understood. His most considerable work is "Autumn Journal", a meditation on Munich and the approach of war; but he is also the author of many notable short poems.

Early Life

MacNeice was born in Belfast, the youngest son of John Frederick and Elizabeth Margaret MacNeice. Both were originally from the west of Ireland. Lily MacNeice died in December 1914 after a series of illnesses including uterine cancer, depression and tuberculosis. His brother William, who had Down's syndrome, had been sent to live in an institution in Scotland during his mother's terminal illness. Shortly after John MacNeice married Georgina Greer in early 1917, Louis's sister Elizabeth was sent to board at a preparatory school in Sherborne, England. Louis joined her in Sherborne preparatory school later in the year.

MacNeice was generally happy at Sherborne, where he received liberal arts education concentrating on the classics and literature. He was an enthusiastic sportsman, something which continued when he moved to Marlborough College in 1921, having won a classical scholarship. His interest in ancient literature and civilization deepened and expanded to include Egyptian and Norse mythology. He was a contemporary of John Betjeman and Anthony Blunt, forming a lifelong friendship with the latter, and writing poetry and essays for the school magazines. By the end of his time at the school, MacNeice was sharing a study with Blunt and also sharing his aesthetic tastes. In November 1925, MacNeice was awarded a "Postmastership" scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, and he left Marlborough in the summer of the following year.

Writing Career

It was during his first year as a student at Oxford that MacNeice first met W. H. Auden, who had gained himself a reputation as the University's foremost poet during the preceding year. Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis were already part of Auden's circle, but MacNeice's closest Oxford friends were John Hilton and Graham Shepard, who had been with him at Marlborough. MacNeice threw himself into the aesthetic culture, publishing poetry in literary magazines The Cherwell and Sir Galahad, organizing candle-lit readings of Shelley and Marlowe, and visiting Paris with Hilton. In 1928 he was introduced to the classics don John Beazley and his stepdaughter Mary Ezra. MacNeice and Ezra became engaged; however their families did not share their happiness. John MacNeice (by now Archdeacon of Connor, and a Bishop a few years later) was horrified to discover his son was engaged to a Jew, and Ezra's family demanded assurances that William's Down's syndrome was not hereditary. Amidst this turmoil, Blind Fireworks was published by Gollancz, dedicated to "Giovanna" (Mary's full name was Giovanna Marie Thérèse Babette). In 1930 the couple were married at Oxford Registry Office, neither set of parents attending the ceremony. He was awarded a first-class degree in literae humaniores, and had already gained an appointment as Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham.

The MacNeices lived in a former coachman's cottage in the grounds of a house in Selly Park. Birmingham was a very different university (and city) to Oxford, MacNeice was not a natural lecturer, and he found it difficult to write poetry. He turned instead to a semi-autobiographical novel, Roundabout Way, which was published in 1932 under the name of Louis Malone; as he feared a novel by an academic would not be favorably reviewed.

The local Classical Association included George Augustus Auden, Professor of Public Health and father of W. H. Auden, and by 1932 MacNeice and Auden's Oxford acquaintance had turned into a close friendship. Auden knew many Marxists, and Blunt had also become a communist by this time, but MacNeice (although sympathetic to the left) was always skeptical of easy answers and "the armchair reformist." The Strings are False written at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact describes his wish for a change in society and even revolution, but also his intellectual opposition to Marxism and especially the glib communism embraced by many of his friends.

MacNeice started to write poetry again, and in January 1933 he and Auden led the first edition of Geoffrey Grigson's magazine New Verse. MacNeice also started sending poems to T. S. Eliot at around this time, and although Eliot did not feel that they merited Faber and Faber publishing a volume of poems, several were published in Eliot's journal The Criterion. In 1934, MacNeice and wife welcomed a son Daniel John. Shortly afterwards Mary MacNeice left her husband and son. MacNeice hired a nurse to care for his son while he worked.

In September of that year, MacNeice traveled to Dublin with Dodds and met William Butler Yeats. Unsuccessful attempts at playwriting and another novel were followed in September 1935 by Poems, the first of his collections for Faber and Faber. In early 1936, Blunt and MacNeice visited Spain shortly after the election of the Popular Front government. Auden and MacNeice traveled to Iceland in the summer of that year, which resulted in Letters from Iceland, a collection of poems, letters (some in verse) and essays. In October MacNeice left Birmingham for a lecturing post in the Department of Greek at Bedford College for Women, part of the University of London.

London

MacNeice moved into Geoffrey Grigson's former flat in Hampstead with Daniel and his nurse. His translation of Aeschylus's Agamemnon was published in late 1936, and produced by the Group Theatre (London). Soon afterwards his divorce from Mary was finalized. MacNeice visited the Hebrides in 1937, which resulted in a book written by MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch.

August 1937 saw the appearance of Letters from Iceland, and towards the end of the year a play called Out of the Picture was published and produced by the Group Theatre. In 1938, Faber and Faber published a second collection of poems, The Earth Compels, the Oxford University Press published Modern Poetry, and Nancy once again contributed illustrations to a book about London Zoo, called simply Zoo.

At the last months of the year he started work on Autumn Journal. The poem was finished by February 1939, and published in May. It is widely viewed as MacNeice's masterpiece, recording his feelings as the Spanish civil war raged and the United Kingdom headed towards war with Germany, as well as his personal concerns and reflections over the past decade.

MacNeice made a brief lecture tour of various American universities, meeting with Mary and Charles Katzmann and giving a reading with W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood in New York City. MacNeice also met the writer Eleanor Clark in New York, and arranged to spend the next academic year on sabbatical so that he could be with her. A lectureship at Cornell University was organized, and in December 1939 MacNeice sailed for America, leaving his son in Ireland. The trip to Cornell proved a success but MacNeice longed to return home; he was back in London by the end of 1940. He worked as a freelance journalist and was awaiting the publication of Plant and Phantom. In early 1941, MacNeice was employed by the BBC.

War and afterwards

MacNeice's work for the BBC initially involved writing and producing radio programms intended to build support for the USA, and later Russia – cultural programs emphasizing links between the countries rather than outright propaganda. A critical work on W. B. Yeats (which he had been working on since the poet's death in 1939) was published early in 1941, as were Plant and Phantom and Poems 1925–1940 (an American anthology). At the end of the year, MacNeice started a relationship with Hedli Anderson, and they were married in July 1942, three months after the death of his father. Brigid Corinna MacNeice (known by her second name like her parents, or as "Bimba") was born a year later. By the end of the war MacNeice had written well over sixty scripts for the BBC and a further collection of poems, Springboard. The radio play Christopher Columbus, produced in 1942 and later published as a book, featured music by William Walton, conducted by Adrian Boult, and starred Laurence Olivier. 1943's He Had a Date (loosely based on the life and death of MacNeice's friend Graham Shepard but also semi-autobiographical) was also published, as was The Dark Tower (1946, again with music by Britten). Dylan Thomas acted in some of MacNeice's plays during this period, and the two poets (both heavy drinkers) also became social companions.

In 1947, the BBC sent MacNeice to report on Indian independence and partition, and he continued to produce plays for the corporation, including a six-part radio adaptation of Goethe's Faust in 1949. 1948's collection of poems, Holes in the Sky, met with a less favorable reception than previous books. In 1950 he was given eighteen months' leave to become Director of the British Institute in Athens, run by the British Council. Patrick Leigh Fermor had previously been Deputy Director of the Institute, and he and his wife became close friends of the MacNeices. Ten Burnt Offerings, poems written in Greece, were broadcast by the BBC in 1951 and published the following year. The MacNeices returned to England in August 1951, and Dan (who had been at an English boarding school) left for America in early 1952 to stay with his mother, to avoid national service. Dan would return to England in 1953, but went to live permanently with his mother after a legal battle with MacNeice.

In 1953 MacNeice wrote Autumn Sequel, a long autobiographical poem in terza rima, which critics compared unfavorably with Autumn Journal. The death of Dylan Thomas came partway through the writing of the poem, and MacNeice involved himself in memorials for the poet and attempts to raise money for his family. 1953 and 1954 brought lecture and performance tours of the USA (husband and wife would present an evening of song, monologue and poetry readings), and meetings with John Berryman (on the returning boat in 1953, and later in London) and Eleanor Clark (by now married to Robert Penn Warren). MacNeice traveled to Egypt in 1955 and Ghana in 1956 on lengthy assignments for the BBC. Another poorly received collection of poems, Visitations, was published in 1957, and the MacNeices bought a holiday home on the Isle of Wight from J. B. Priestley (an acquaintance since MacNeice's arrival in London twenty years earlier). However, the marriage was starting to become strained. MacNeice was drinking increasingly heavily, and having more or less serious affairs with other women.

MacNeice was awarded the CBE in the 1958 New Year's Honours list. A South African trip in 1959 was followed by the start of his final relationship, with the actress Mary Wimbush, who had performed in his plays since the forties. Hedli asked MacNeice to leave the family home in late 1960. In early 1961, Solstices was published, and in the middle of the year MacNeice became a half-time employee at the BBC, leaving him six months a year to work on his own projects. By this time he was "living on alcohol," and eating very little, but still writing (including a commissioned work on astrology, which he viewed as "hack-work"). In August 1963 he went caving in Yorkshire to gather sound effects for his final radio play, Persons from Porlock. Caught in a storm on the moors, he did not change out of his wet clothes until he was home in Hertfordshire. Bronchitis evolved into viral pneumonia, and he was admitted to hospital on the August 27, dying there six days later on September 3, 1963. He was buried in Carrowdore churchyard in County Down, with his mother. His final book of poems, The Burning Perch, was published a few days after his funeral – W. H. Auden, who gave a reading at MacNeice's memorial service, described the poems of his last two years as "among his very best."

Legacy

Louis MacNeice was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis; nicknamed MacSpaunday as a group. His body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed, but socially and emotionally aware style. MacNeice was never as overtly (or simplistically) political as some of his contemporaries. His work reveals a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his Irish roots.

His work is familiar and clever, but intellectually distinguished and informed by a real tragic sense. He casts an ironic eye on the politics of Ireland but his love is always understood. His most considerable work is Autumn Journal, a meditation on Munich and the approach of war, but he is also the author of many notable short poems.

Works

Poetry

• Blind Fireworks (1929, mainly considered by MacNeice to be juvenilia and excluded from the 1949 Collected Poems)
• Poems (1935)
• Letters from Iceland (1937, with W. H. Auden, poetry and prose)
• The Earth Compels (1938)
• Autumn Journal (1939)
• The Last Ditch (1940)
• Plant and Phantom (1941)
• Springboard (1944)
• Holes in the Sky (1948)
• Collected Poems, 1925-1948 (1949)
• Ten Burnt Offerings (1952)
• Autumn Sequel (1954)
• Visitations (1957)
• Solstices (1961)
• The Burning Perch (1963)
• "Star-gazer" (1963)

• Selected Poems (1964, edited by W. H. Auden)
• Collected Poems (1966, edited by E. R. Dodds)
• Selected Poems (1988, edited by Michael Longley)

Plays

• The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936])
• Out of the Picture (1937)
• Christopher Columbus (1944, radio)
• "He Had a Date" (1944, radio, not published separately)
• The Dark Tower and other radio scripts (1947)
• Goethe's Faust (1949, published 1951)
• The Mad Islands [1962] and The Administrator [1961] (1964, radio)
• Persons from Porlock [1963] and other plays for radio (1969)
• One for the Grave: a modern morality play [1958] (1968)
• Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser and Peter McDonald (1993)

MacNeice also wrote several plays which were never produced, and many for the BBC which were never published.

Fiction

• Roundabout Way (1932, as "Louis Malone")
• The Sixpence That Rolled Away (1956, for children)

Non-fiction

• I Crossed the Minch (1938, travel)
• Modern Poetry: a personal essay (1938, criticism)
• Zoo (1938)
• The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941)
• The Strings Are False (1941, published 1965, autobiography)
• Meet the US Army (1943)
• Astrology (1964)
• Varieties of Parable (1965, criticism)
• Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (1990)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• MacNeice, Louis, and Michael Longley. Selected Poems. London: Faber, 1988. ISBN 9780571152704
• MacNeice, Louis. The Strings Are False An Unfinished Autobiography. London: Faber and Faber, 1982. ISBN 9780571118328
• Smith, Elton Edward. Louis MacNeice. Twayne's English authors series, 99. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970. OCLC 9428

External links

All links retrieved November 3, 2022.

• Louis MacNeice BBC

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