The Giving Vein

On November 6, 1959, Louis Mac-Neice wrote to Frances Suzman in South Africa. Among other news, he reported: “I went to a party two days ago given by Guinness’s (the brewing people) to present their annual poetry awards. Lots of champagne—& Guinness—but too many poets, some behaving badly, most behaving boringly.” So much for a party and a meeting I remember with great pleasure.

I had discovered his poetry at eight. Geoffrey Grigson, the editor of New Verse and The Year’s Poetry for 1938, was a family friend, and of all the poems I read my favorite was “Bagpipe Music” for its clickety-clack rhythm and marvelous rhyme-words.

For more than fifty years certain MacNeice lines have been included in “the furniture of my mind”: “Time on horseback under a Roman arch” from “Intimations of Mortality.” (“When I started again to write poems they were all about time,” MacNeice tells us in The Strings Are False.) I have quoted the following from “Turf-stacks” over and over on all sorts of occasions: “For we are obsolete who like the lesser things.” Almost every autumn I take out my copy of the 1940, second impression, Faber and Faber edition of Autumn Journal. It seems fresh and new each time I read it. Among many other things it contains MacNeice’s generous tribute to the wife who had just left him—and their child—to live with one of MacNeice’s friends: “You are one I always shall remember, / Whom cant can never corrupt / Nor argument disinherit.” Several readings of his Collected Poems (1966) have convinced me that “The Sunlight in the Garden” is one of the two finest lyrics of the time:

The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold, When all is told We cannot beg for pardon . . .

The other is Auden’s “Song” from Nones, “Deftly, admiral, cast your fly.”

Perhaps the occasional mean notes (snarls and sneers) were a necessary foil to the generosity shown in the poems, the autobiographical prose, and the letters. Selected Letters of Louis MacNeice, edited, introduced, and noted by Jonathan Allison with great skill, has, nevertheless, for all his care and for all its over seven hundred pages, more than the poems missing. It needs to be read with the 2007 edition of the Collected Poems, the sketches for an autobiography, including The Strings Are False (1941, but published in 1965), Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay, and Jon Stallworthy’s recent biography.

It takes some time in Letters for MacNeice to emerge from his schoolboy letters and from Frederick Louis MacNeice to Louis MacNeice. His working years at the bbc are well represented. MacNeice frequently uses the vivid, often odd, image in his prose that he used to such effect in his early poetry, for example his description of the visit to Barcelona under siege in Autumn Journal. This is especially true of his letters from India. Of how his poems came about there is little. Aside from his correspondence with his editor, T. S. Eliot (chiefly business), there are surprisingly few letters to his peers among poets. So much, then, for Roy Campbell’s composite figure of the 1930s “MacSpaunday”—the left-wing poets MacNeice, Spender, Auden, and Day Lewis, who were thought to be so close to one another they were virtually one.

The emotional center of Letters is certainly the correspondence with his lover Eleanor Clark, and here much new and interesting material is introduced, above all on commitment: Louis MacNeice’s commitment, or noncommitment, to the woman, to the women, he loves; his commitment, or noncommitment, to his country (is he Irish or English, neutral in 1940 or at war?); should he return to England or stay in the United States? In a political age what are his political commitments?

He has no time for Eleanor Clark’s New York Trotskyites. Despite having been a friend from schooldays with Anthony Blunt, who became a Soviet spy, MacNeice seems...