Macneice / Allison Letters of Louis MacNeice

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-26346-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 456 Seiten

Louis MacNeice is increasingly recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his work has been a defining influence upon a generation of Irish poets that includes Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. The Selected Letters is indispensable as a resource for an understanding of the intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century. A Classics don, poet, playwright and globetrotting BBC producer, the medley and blend of MacNeice's cultural influences seems exemplary in its modernity. He kept up a significant correspondence with E. R. Dodds, Anthony Blunt and T. S. Eliot, to name but three prominent figures of the time. During his time at the BBC MacNeice witnessed many key events, including the partition of India in 1947 and the independence of the Gold Coast from Britain in 1957, and these are recorded in two long sequences to his wife, the singer Hedli Anderson. His complex relationship to Ireland and to his Irish heritages speak resonantly to contemporary debates about Irish and Northern Irish cultural identity. Finally, the Letters will do much to broaden our understanding of a vivid and often enigmatic personality whose varied life and individual charisma have often resisted explanation.

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, later a bishop. He was educated in England at Sherborne, Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford. His first book of poems, Blind Fireworks, appeared in 1929, and he subsequently worked as a translator, literary critic, playwright, autobiographer, BBC producer and feature writer. The Burning Perch, his last volume of poems, appeared shortly before his death in 1963.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Macneice, Louis

Allison, Jonathan

Leseproben

Editor’s Introduction

This volume contains an annotated selection of the letters of Louis MacNeice written over a period of nearly fifty years, from the year of his mother’s death in 1914 to shortly before his own death in early September 1963. The first letters are written in the style of a young boy and his final letters were scribbled while lying in bed, before being admitted to St Leonard’s hospital in Shoreditch, days before his death. In between are the letters of a life lived fully, with passion and intellectual candour. The book includes selections from sequences of letters to those who were close to the author, including his father (John Frederick MacNeice) and stepmother (Beatrice MacNeice), his first wife, Mary Beazley, and his second wife, the singer Hedli Anderson. Most of his family letters date from schooldays at Sherborne Prep and Marlborough, and from his time at Oxford. They are mainly addressed to his stepmother (though it was assumed that his father would read them), but he addressed a significant number of letters to his father only. There are several long sequences to his friends Anthony Blunt, John Hilton, E. R. Dodds and Mrs. A. E. (Betty) Dodds, and to the American author Eleanor Clark, with whom he had an affair in 1939–41. With the exception of the Dodds letters, which span a longer period, in each case these sequences are restricted to particular periods of his life: for example letters to Blunt and Hilton were written during school holidays and after they all went to university; the last letter to Blunt reproduced in this volume was written in 1936, just hours before MacNeice’s departure for Iceland. And although there is a letter to Hilton dated 1963, the vast majority of the Hilton letters were written during the late 1920s and early 1930s. I have reprinted almost fifty letters to T. S. Eliot, for so many years MacNeice’s editor at Faber, to whom he first wrote in April 1932.

If these ten sequences form in one sense the core of the volume, there are shorter groups of letters, many of them very important, such as those to his children Dan and Corinna, those to colleagues in the BBC – especially Laurence Gilliam and W. R. Rodgers – and small clusters of letters to his lovers Nancy Coldstream (in the 1930s) and Mary Wimbush (in the 1960s). Among letters to his editors, the Eliot sequence is by far the largest group, although he wrote regularly during the last years of his life to Charles Monteith at Faber. Much earlier, he wrote during the 1930s to Geoffrey Grigson (editor of the important journal ) and to John Lehmann who edited in the thirties and in the fifties. There are letters to editors at Heinemann (Rupert Hart-Davis), Knopf (Philip Vaudrin) and Random House (Bennet Cerf), and at the (John Freeman, Kingsley Martin and Karl Miller) and the (Terry Kilmartin). There is a surprising approach made to Graham Greene, at one time editor of the short-lived . One may assume there are more like these in the files of various journals and newspapers, which have not yet come to light. MacNeice’s letters to editors tend to be businesslike and rather brief, although they reveal some thing about his work at particular moments in his career. They also say something about his sense of the relationship between writing and money. He was very far from being insistent on this issue but he could be quick to ask for an advance as the occasion demanded. Inevitably, there were proposals to editors that never came to fruition, such as his study of Latin humour (), or his plan to write a book about teaching Classics in Britain, or a children’s story about ‘the goats of Croaghan’ on Achill island, and there are proposals that had to be declined, for instance his suggestion in 1961 that Faber publish a book of poems about places. He wrote often about his volume of prose memoirs which he had contracted to finish, at one point tentatively titled a version of which appeared posthumously as , edited by E. R. Dodds.

Apart from visiting the obvious archives in search of letters I have written to many libraries and individuals. Nevertheless, gaps remain. Auden kept very few letters of any kind, so apparently none from that important friendship have survived, although I have taken the liberty of reprinting MacNeice’s public letter to Auden published in and, in an appendix, Auden’s sole extant letter to MacNeice. During the thirties, MacNeice occasionally mentioned Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood but no letters have surfaced. In Belfast, I was unable to find in the obvious places any correspondence with his close friends George and Mercy MacCann, although the Bodleian holds enough MacCann letters to indicate that letters were certainly exchanged. I have found no letters to relations outside the immediate family circle. Nor have I found evidence of correspondence with contacts in India and Ghana, despite the author’s travel to those countries. Other ‘missing persons’ include his close friend at Marlborough and Oxford, Graham Shepard; the German scholar Ernest Stahl, with whom he translated Goethe’s ; his former teacher Clifford Canning; and professional contacts such as Reggie Smith and Jack Dillon in the BBC.

The earliest letters are written from the Rectory at Carrickfergus and addressed to his father, away on business – on one occasion apparently in Scotland (‘are there fish in the Firth of Forth?’). These letters are simple and descriptive of a boy’s daily activities: reading the Bible, playing in the garden, going for walks, doing his schoolwork, strictly supervised by his governess Miss McCready. He was an observant child, and these letters capture the smallness of the boy’s world, circumscribed by the Rectory, the cinderpath, the secret hiding places in the garden and beyond that the Lough with its view of distant sails. From an early age, he was intrigued by riddles and word-play, and in writing simple poems which he would send to his sister. They suggest an early interest in rhyme and a feel for rhythm, with a sense of the comic and absurd (‘A great old Kangaroo / Used to tease poor Bamboo’). In another poem, the emphasis is on wildness and the wilderness: ‘The Cliffs are high / Against the sky / In a wild country.’ He ends with the enquiry ‘Do you like it[?]’ He is something of a performer.

MacNeice went to Sherborne Preparatory School at the age of ten, in November 1917 (his departure had been delayed by illness) and he attended the school until the summer of 1921. He sent a great many letters to his parents from there, written mandatorily on Sunday afternoons and hence sometimes striking a more dutiful than joyful note. They remain, however, an invaluable record of his childhood and youth, his experience of school and of the daily life that shaped him. The early letters from school are mostly addressed to his father, although some are addressed to both father and stepmother (‘Daddie and Madre’); he starts writing exclusively to ‘Madre’ after about May 1918. They convey an impression of the narrowness of the school’s world and of its petty hierarchies. It was clearly a competitive environment academically, and the form ranking was allocated weekly and duly reported home. As in most prep schools at the time, games were extremely important, and it was here that MacNeice developed a lifelong enthusiasm for rugby. At Sherborne Prep nature study and country walks were an important part of the curriculum, owing chiefly to the evidently benign influence of the headmaster Littleton Powys. Nature study encompassed lepidoptery, fossil-collecting and the study of local flora, and there are many excited references to these weekly expeditions and the discoveries they involved. In a letter of 1918 MacNeice includes a list of activities unique to the summer term which include ‘caterpillars, butterflies, cricket’ and ‘collecting flowers’ (19 May). Although limited by the constraints of school life, the Sherborne letters offer an interesting portrait of the artist as a young boy. Chatty, detailed, comically digressive, they obsessively register sports and exam results. There is pride and enthusiasm when the author scores a try, its description enhanced with a diagram and plan of the pitch. He writes about his reading – mainly the novels of Scott and Stevenson, his taste for whom was fed by gifts of bound volumes from his stepmother’s sister, Eva Greer, who lived with the ‘folk poetess’ Gertrude Hind at Glassdrumman, Co. Down. His grandiloquent thank-you letters to Aunt Eva are cast in a high style, which he perhaps thought appropriate for the friend of a poet, even a ‘folk-poet’.

While at Sherborne, MacNeice was very conscious of his Irishness, and of his being one of the few pupils who had to cross the Irish Sea at the beginning and end of every term. The travel arrangements via Kingstown, Holyhead and Euston (a journey sometimes completed with his sister) are rehearsed with great regularity and detail, and the sojourn occasionally sketched or mapped on the margins of the page. He tries to assess the accent of a temporary master from Galway, one Mr Maguire (later skewered in , 1965). All of this he is acutely sensitive to, since his father is after all an Ulster clergyman with a southern accent. One of his teachers is a Mr Lindsay from Portadown, an avid supporter of the Orange Order; a letter written in spring 1918 concludes rather ominously (one might say very skilfully) with an account of Mr...