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To work. To my own office, my own job,
Not matching pictures, but inventing sound,
Precalculating microphone and knob
In homage to the human voice.
MacNeice was awarded the CBE in the 1958 New Year’s Honours
list. He recalled his conversation with The Queen:
“Herself asked me ‘What do you do?’ and I said, ‘Well, I do radio.
I also write.’ She said: ‘Have you been doing it long?’”
From Autumn Sequel (1954)
43
MacNeice’s response was to direct his energies towards his radio
work. His output in the following years varied greatly in range and
scale: in 1955 alone he produced programmes on the Nile,
Yorkshire and Delhi. In 1957 MacNeice received an Honorary
D.Litt from Queen’s University in Belfast, and published a new
collection of poems, Visitations.
“I like to think that my latest short poems are on the whole more
concentrated and better organized than my earlier ones, relying
more on syntax and bony feature than on bloom or frill or the
floating image. I should also like to think that sometimes they
achieve a blend of ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’, marrying the element
of wit to the sensuous-mystical element.”
Visit of Queen Elizabeth II
to the BBC, 1953
MacNeice, on Visitations (1957)
42
In 1958 MacNeice was sent on a BBC television training course.
He adapted two Strindberg plays for the small screen. But he
always preferred radio. The following year he undertook a lecture
tour of South African colleges and universities.
In March 1961, MacNeice’s new collection Solstices was
published.
“To assess one’s own development is difficult. I would say of myself
that I have become progressively more humble in the face of my
material and therefore less ready to slap poster paint all over it.”
MacNeice on Solstices (1961)
Accepts
appointment to
Established
Staff,
1957
36
During this period the BBC Features Department was visited by a
team of management consultants. Their conversation with MacNeice
has become the stuff of legend:
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Consultants: “We see, Mr MacNeice, that during the past six
months you have produced only one programme. Can you tell us
what you were doing the rest of the time?”
MacNeice: “Thinking.”
In the summer of 1961 MacNeice renegotiated his contract with
the BBC, becoming a part-time employee. This was something of a
relief both to MacNeice and to the BBC.
45
“Study of a sensitive and sympathetic man getting blunted and
possibly corrupted by finding himself in the wrong job.”
MacNeice’s proposal for a new broadcast play, The Administrator, March 1960
By this time, MacNeice was drinking
heavily.
44
“A good deal of Features Department’s
time in those days was spent in either
the Stag or, further down the road, the
George. This was the way that Louis
worked, but God, he did get through
a lot of work as well.”
Anthony Thwaite, Archive Hour:
Louis MacNeice (2007)
MacNeice’s Staff Card
Cover for
The Mad Islands & The
Administrator
“How Louis wrote so much, read so much, travelled so much,
drank so much and had so much time for his friends baffled me.
Once we were walking past the old Group Theatre when he
stopped suddenly and addressed me seriously.
‘Are you a drinking man?’
‘No, I wouldn’t call myself one, I drink irregularly but seldom
seriously.’
‘I drink very regularly and very seriously.’”
John Boyd, The Middle of My Journey (1990)
“I believe that this new arrangement will stimulate MacNeice to
creative activity in fields outside radio, and that this, in turn,
will have a beneficial effect on his radio work when he returns
to work for us.”
Laurence Gilliam
1962 and 1963 proved a period of extraordinary creativity, with
MacNeice completing the poems for his collection The Burning
Perch, as well as writing book
46
reviews, a book on astrology,
and delivering the Cambridge
Clark Lectures.
Cover for
The Burning Perch
38
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In July 1963 he recorded an unscripted talk on his childhood years
for John Boyd. Broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme, Childhood
Memories remains the only extant recording of the poet talking
about his own life.
“. . . the McCanns have just lodged their visiting poet
who by noon will cross from the Elbow Room to the studios
in Ormeau Avenue, and deliver his talk, unscripted,
on ‘Childhood Memories’; whose sleep now, if sleep it is,
remains unbroken through the small, insensible hours
between the whiskey nightcap and a breakfast of whiskey.”
Peter McDonald, ‘The Neighbours’
In August 1963 MacNeice visited Yorkshire to gather sound effects
for his radio play Persons from Porlock.
“I was very glad to hear that this had been accepted but am now
somewhat distressed to hear that you want a different title . . . it
would break my heart if either the word ‘person’ or the name
‘Porlock’ disappeared from the title . . . I could easily add a sub-title
– something like ‘A Study in 20th Century Frustration’.”
MacNeice memo to Assistant Head of Features, February 1963
The programme involved recording
underground. MacNeice, anxious that the
sounds captured would be absolutely
accurate, insisted on going down a
Yorkshire pothole with a BBC engineer.
He got wet, caught a chill and developed
viral pneumonia. He was admitted to hospital
on 27 August, and died on 3 September.
47
MacNeice
circa 1963
“MacNeice’s premature death at the age of fifty-five had shocked
us. We felt bereaved of a father-figure whom we had only recently
been getting to know.”
Michael Longley
MacNeice’s funeral was held on Saturday, 7 September 1963,
in St John’s Wood Church in London. His ashes are buried in
Carrowdore churchyard in County Down.
Headstone of MacNeice’s grave,
Carrowdore churchyard
40
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The tributes were laudatory:
“It seems almost grotesque to write about Louis MacNeice in the
past tense. His sudden death (aged fifty-five) from bronchial
pneumonia makes no sense or meaning. He always seemed
destined for a long career, one who would survive, a man
possessed of immense staying-power and a mind like a dynamo;
of natural distinction and dignity, as Apollonian as his friend Dylan
Thomas was Dionysian.”
‘Louis MacNeice: A Tribute’ by Cyril Connolly (1963)
“As a radio writer, he had almost no rivals. Many distinguished
poets and dramatists have contributed to the radio form but none
have used radio as a principal medium of expression so consistently
and over so long a span of time.”
Christopher Holmes writing in the Radio Times (1965)
“Louis MacNeice was a cat who walked by himself. He had a
quality of great stillness, as he watched at Lord’s or Twickenham,
in a Delhi bazaar or a Dublin pub, but there was always a sense of
restrained movement and energy conserved for the decisive spring.”
Obituary, The Times (4 September, 1963)
“I am confident that posterity will sustain my conviction, that Louis
MacNeice’s later poems show an advance upon his earlier, are
more certain in their technique, brilliant though that always was,
and more moving, but even if I thought otherwise, I should still
admire him for risking failure rather than being content to repeat
himself successfully.”
50
From W.H. Auden’s Memorial Address (1963)
49
W.H. Auden, 1964
42
List of personal possessions collected from MacNeice’s BBC office after his death
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The Features Department, which
had encouraged and nurtured the
art of imaginative writing for
radio, was disbanded early in
1965, as the BBC further sought
to respond to the challenges and
opportunities of television.
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51
Louis MacNeice,
1952
The posthumously published poem ‘Thalassa’ is one of
MacNeice’s finest:
The Burning Perch, MacNeice’s final collection of poetry, was
published shortly after his death.
“From the abounding memory source of ‘Soap Suds’ to the
as-it-is-now-and-ever-shall-be mythic take on ‘Charon’, the book
had swiftness and inevitability and left an indelible mark.”
Seamus Heaney
“He seemed like his later work, grim and sardonic, scored by long
experience, though there was a wistful nobility too. If the world he
loved so much had let him down, the long head rose above it –
as his best work now rises above that of his contemporaries.”
Derek Mahon
Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,
Whose record shall be noble yet;
Butting through scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free;
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea.
First published in the London Magazine (1964)
MacNeice’s legacy is not only to the BBC and to the many
poets and writers from Northern Ireland who have been
influenced by him: it is above all to the generations of
readers and listeners who have been inspired by his work.
“His poetry reconciles traditionalism and Modernism. In a curious
way MacNeice did more than other twentieth-century poets to test
poetry against the century. He tested it against the claims of politics
and philosophy, against the pressures of cities and war. And he
did not take the outcome of these tests, or of anything else,
for granted.”
Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (1988)
44
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Short Reflections on MacNeice
52
Bernard MacLaverty
Louis MacNeice was born in Brookhill
Avenue, Belfast, close by the
Waterworks. This was a couple of
minutes’ walk from where I lived in
Atlantic Avenue. As a teenager I would
walk past this house and feel awe that
somebody so brilliant with words had
lived so close. The first poem of his I
came across was 'Prayer before Birth'.
In its lunge at language it reminded me
of Gerard Manley Hopkins with its
powerful rhythmic drive and internal rhymes and alliteration.
'Bagpipe Music' was a comic version of these strengths.
MacNeice's poems force you to remember them. (I like Don
Paterson's definition of a poem as 'a little machine for remembering
itself'.) Later I would come to love the love poems. And Autumn
Journal is still as powerful and fresh as the day it was written –
predicting and condemning 'men who shoot straight in the cause
of crooked thinking'. To end with a book as good as The Burning
Perch (1963) means that MacNeice died while still creating his
best work. Sadly he could not take Yeats's advice 'to go empty to
his grave'. A number of years ago a group of Dublin sixth formers
put together an anthology of greatly loved poems chosen by a
range of people. They asked me and (although it must be said
that your favourite anything changes from day to day) I chose
'The introduction' by Louis MacNeice – a black and bitter piece
of brilliance and wit. His greatness lies in his mastery of 'the hooks
and eyes of words' and his awareness of the ordinary. From 'Snow',
46
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
Bernard MacLaverty
Born in Belfast, Bernard MacLaverty was educated at Queen’s
University Belfast. His first short-story collection Secrets was
published in 1977. His novels Lamb and Cal were memorably
adapted for film in 1983 and 1984 and Grace Notes (1997)
was nominated for the Booker Prize. His television play My Dear
Palestrina was produced by BBCNI in 1980. A long-time resident
of Glasgow, he regularly broadcasts with BBC Radio 3 and
BBC Scotland.
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Derek Mahon
Eclogues between the Truculent
I met him twice if you can call it
meeting, and both times he was in rugby
mode. Calling one afternoon at the flat
in Regent's Park he shared with the
actress Mary Wimbush, we found him
watching rugby on TV and saying little.
Constrained by his rugby-watching
silence, I said little myself. What did I
expect, poetry talk? (A big fan, I'd recently read his latest collection
Solstices, which I thought disappointing; this must have been 1962.)
We watched some rugby and then it was time to go. I got the
impression that, even without the rugby, he would have been
uncommunicative. The curtains were closed and I saw only a grave
grey head and a sombre equine face; though literally long in the
tooth, he had 'presence'. I was virtually ignored but didn't mind,
aware that, while to me he was the great poet, to him I was
nobody in particular.
Grand houses in Regent's Park were not my usual ambience.
I was much struck by this one, by the elegant Mary Wimbush,
and by the voices.
Louis was nasal Oxford, a sonorous growl, Mary pure BBC circa
1960; those there of my own age had already adopted 'Mockney'
and a shared idiom of branché, cool and ciao.
Some months later I was sitting with other students in a well-known
Dublin pub and noticed two older men at a nearby table, one
talkative, one taciturn. The taciturn one was MacNeice. With the
bumptiousness of youth we went over and introduced ourselves;
he didn't remember me of course. He wore some kind of an
anorak, looked unkempt, and acknowledged us with a polite snarl
and a sidelong flash of the horsy teeth. The talkative one, Bill
Webb, books editor of the Manchester Guardian, as it then was,
chuckled at our intrusion. He was a lively man in tweeds, with a
short pepper-and-salt beard, who had put himself in charge of the
truculent Louis.
48
Both were on the whiskey, the effect being to make Webb witty and
MacNeice morose. We spoke to Webb and I tried in vain to get
a response out of MacNeice, preferably some poetry talk. Perhaps,
frustrated by his reluctance, I got a bit truculent too. (What a pain
in the neck I must have been.) They'd been to a rugby international
at Lansdowne Road, and MacNeice's report appeared the next
week in the New Statesman, its circulation higher then than now.
He mentioned Dublin pubs and remarked on their 'aggressive'
(bad mannered) students. We had been put in our place.
He died the following year.
Not exactly Keats and Coleridge, is it? But it's seldom a good idea
to meet your admired authors; you will often be disappointed.
(Not always: Keats wasn't, for one.) Not meaning any harm, they
may take no notice of you; or, meaning a little harm, they may put
you down. Besides, they are generally older, wearier and less
forthcoming than you might wish, and words of wisdom will be few.
Such was my experience of MacNeice. I was just some Belfast
whippersnapper of course. He was in rugby mode; though once
a nifty scrum-half, I'd lost interest in rugby. He didn't want to be
bothered (why should he?) and he was tired of words, of which he
had written a great many. Tired too, perhaps, of life itself: it's there
in the last poems. But you knew that, even if you got on the wrong
side of him, he wouldn't clobber you like some. His eyes were kind,
and it was his eyes that spoke. The mouth might snarl, the gnashers
flash, but that was just his manner: the gaze was a speculative and
not unfriendly one. He seemed like his later work, grim and
sardonic, scored by long experience, though there was a wistful
nobility too. If the world he loved so much had let him down, the
long head rose above it – as his best work now rises above that of
his contemporaries.
Derek Mahon
Born in Belfast, the poet Derek Mahon was educated at Trinity
College, Dublin and the Sorbonne. His poetry collections include
Night-Crossing (1968), The Hudson Letter (1995) and The Yellow
Book (1997). His journalistic posts include those of Features Editor
at Vogue and Literary Editor of the New Statesman. A member of
Aosdána, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize in 2007 in
recognition of a lifetime’s achievement in literature.
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Edna Longley
To quote 'Snow': MacNeice's poetry is
'more of it than we think,/ Incorrigibly
plural'. It reproduces the sensory assault
of existence 'On the tongue on the eyes
on the ears in the palms of one's hands'.
He turns this inside out to imagine
'not-being'. On its socio-political level,
his poetry distinguishes in a uniquely
subtle way between what is owed to the
individual and what to the community,
thus living up to the promise of his
statement in 1935: 'The individualist is
an atom thinking about himself (Thank God I am not as other men);
the communist, too often, is an atom having ecstasies of self-denial
(Thank God I am one in a crowd).' On its metaphysical level, his
poetry faces the whole issue of the self in the world:
Windows between you and the world
Keep out the cold, keep out the fright;
Then why does your reflection seem
So lonely in the moving night?
('Corner Seat')
Gerald Dawe
I think I first came across Louis MacNeice
when I was at Orangefield Boys' School
in Belfast in the Sixties. One of the set
texts for the 'A' Level in English Literature
was the Faber Book of Modern Verse, an
anthology edited by Michael Roberts,
which included a couple of MacNeice
poems. Immediately I was very taken by
the contemporary sound of his poetry, but
also by the enigmatic, 'hidden' quality
too. As if something wasn't being given
away lightly. I bought MacNeice's Selected Poems, edited by W. H.
Auden, and have been reading him ever since – the poetry, mainly,
but also his criticism and the unfinished autobiography, The Strings are
False, all of which are sharp-eyed, questioning, and wear their
learning lightly. I've also taken to a little-noticed book of MacNeice's,
an early work, I Crossed the Minch, as well as his wonderful study,
Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay, which really should be republished.
From Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (1988)
MacNeice's 'career' as a lecturer, critic and broadcaster conceals
how much he lived under the surface – the poems were his life-raft,
his oxygen, his escape route, a way of understanding himself. I often
think how tragic it was that he died so young, relatively speaking.
The Burning Perch, his last book of poems, is certainly among his
best, and had he survived the strains and stresses of a fairly battered
physical and emotional life, he could well, like Yeats, have written out
of a great final surge and produced work into the Seventies and
Eighties. That wasn't to be. But the Collected Poems of Louis
MacNeice, edited with such care and attention by Peter McDonald,
is a timeless testament to one of the great poets from Ireland. I hope
the rest of the world hears about Louis MacNeice, for he deserves
the widest possible audience, now, more than ever.
Edna Longley
Originally from Dublin, Edna Longley moved to Belfast in 1963.
She is an internationally recognised critic on modern Irish and
British poetry, with works including studies of Louis MacNeice and
Edward Thomas. She is now Professor Emerita at Queen’s University
Belfast (where she played a pivotal role in the creation of the
Seamus Heaney Centre), a member of the Royal Irish Academy
and a British Academy Fellow.
Gerald Dawe
Belfast-born poet Gerald Dawe was educated at Orangefield Boys'
School, Belfast, the University of Ulster at Coleraine and the
National University of Ireland, Galway. He has published six
collections of poetry, including The Morning Train (1999) and Lake
Geneva (2003). He has also published The Proper Word: Collected
Criticism (2007) and (forthcoming) My Mother-City: A Memoir.
He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin.
And on its aesthetic level, his poetry reconciles traditionalism and
Modernism. In a curious way MacNeice did more than other
twentieth-century poets to test poetry against the century. He tested
it against the claims of politics and philosophy, against the
pressures of cities and war. And he did not take the outcome
of these tests, or of anything else, for granted.
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55
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Leontia Flynn
When I think of Louis MacNeice's
poetry I tend to think about trains.
'Trains came threading quietly through
my dozing childhood,' he writes in
'Trains in the Distance' and if trains also
thread their way through MacNeice's
oeuvre, this is because, as he observes
slyly in 'Train to Dublin', train-journeying
comprises the greater part of existence:
'. . . the trains carry us about. But not
consistently so, / For during a tiny portion of our lives we are not in
trains . . . '. When it isn't trains it might be cars or taxis. In 'Sunday
Morning', 'Man's heart expands to tinker with his car', and 'a
fringe or two of the windy past' can be clutched from the speeding
motor, while later poems like 'Hold-up' and 'The Taxis' explicitly
figure life as a weird ride in the back of a cab or on a bus.
It is this restless, journeying, perceiving aspect of MacNeice's
poetry that I love. Edna Longley has written that 'On its
metaphysical level, his poetry faces the whole issue of the self
in the world', citing his poem 'Corner Seat' as an example.
Here the speaker's face is reflected in a train window:
Windows between you and the world
Keep out the cold, keep out the fright;
Then why does your reflection seem
So lonely in the moving night?
MacNeice's critics rightly stress his emphasis on flux and diversity.
In 'Train to Dublin' the various kinds of people and experiences
observed or imagined can scarcely be contained by the equally
jumbled, moving self:
Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wisps
Against the basic facts repatterned without pause,
I can no more gather my mind up in my fist
Than the shadow of the smoke of this train upon the grass . . .
Part of MacNeice's legacy, I suppose, has been to show how a
complex intelligence might move within an equally complex history,
responding to it. In terms of his ambivalent Northern Irishness
(which I've never much cared about), I also like that his restlessness
undermines ideas of rootedness and rural permanence: trains
are both part of the landscape and just as passing through.
Finally though, I think it's the fluid patterning and 'repatterning'
of his poetry that matters, and makes 'Train to Dublin' a thrilling
journey in language.
Leontia Flynn
Leontia Flynn was born in County Down in 1974. In 2001 she won
an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, These Days (2004),
won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection of the Year) in 2004,
and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. In the same
year, she was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next
Generation' poets.
If MacNeice's poetry brilliantly projects into language an image of
the self on its trip through life, I also love the contemporary, particular
feel of the world through which he moves. Over the delicate lyricism
of much- anthologised poems like 'The Sunlight in The Garden' and
'Autobiography' – by which I first encountered his work – I came to
prefer the urban busy-ness and crowdedness of 'Birmingham' and
'Belfast'. There's a democracy to the breadth of observations in a
MacNeice poem. The voice recording its impressions seems
historically determined and politically aware, and his world-view
explicitly encompasses both high and low culture. 'Bagpipe Music'
famously finds him at the low end – and the vehicular image recurs
again: 'It's no go the Yogi-man, it's no go Blavatsky, /All we want
is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi'.
52
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Michael Longley
Glimpses of Louis MacNeice
At Inst it was Joe Cowan, a dapper
little Englishman with a pert moustache,
who inspired in me (and, a little later,
in Derek Mahon) a devotion to poetry.
Thanks to the Unionist hegemony there
was little or no Irish literature on the
syllabus in the fifties. Joe Xeroxed
poems by living Irish writers, Kavanagh,
57
MacNeice, Rodgers. He would hand
around the smudgy sheets. "Read that one aloud for us, Longley."
I'd read MacNeice's 'Snow', say, or 'Sunday Morning' in a dim
monotone. "Is the man a poet? Is the man a poet? I should say so!
I should say so!" And he'd chortle and slap his thigh.
In my Sixth Form year my Latin master Maurice Fowler was forced
to go away to hospital in England. His vivacious wife Marjorie took
his place for a year or so. She and I became friends. About this
time she was getting to know Louis MacNeice, and raved about
him. He clearly took to her and bestowed on her a name he thought
suited her better, Maggie. Ever afterwards she insisted that close
friends call her Maggie. She asked Louis to sign for me a copy of
Autumn Sequel (my least favourite MacNeice volume!). She told me
how hurt he had been by the negative reviews his books from this
period had been receiving; that he would like, he claimed, to begin
his life's work all over again.
Marjorie introduced me to her colleague at Victoria College,
Mercy Hunter, and her husband the sculptor George McCann
(Maguire in Autumn Sequel). George and Mercy told me that when
Louis came to Ireland to research programmes for the BBC, his visits
almost invariably coincided with important rugby matches at
Ravenhill or Lansdowne Road. He refused to fly and preferred the
Liverpool to Belfast steamer.
54
"If he was going on to Dublin," Mercy explained, "I would cook
him a full Ulster Fry with two duck eggs and a naggin of Bushmills.
Always the same." When George first brought Louis home, their
new friend kept them up late drinking and talking and singing.
He was having a break, but they both had teaching jobs and an
early start. Eventually Mercy suggested that they move Louis's camp
bed between her bed and George's. "Would that help? I asked
him." He went to bed when they did, and he slept. "When I was
five the black dreams came; / Nothing after was quite the same."
Round about 1961 Derek Mahon gave a paper on MacNeice to
the Trinity College Philosophical Society. The honoured guest was
W. R. Rodgers, and in the audience sat Hedli MacNeice and her
daughter Corinna (Bimba). Louis had recently left Hedli for Mary
Wimbush, and Hedli had decamped from London to Kinsale where
she opened her excellent seafood restaurant The Spinnaker,
a pioneering enterprise in those days. I spoke to Derek's paper.
Although Bertie Rodgers had drunk a good deal, he spoke brightly
about MacNeice the poet and MacNeice the broadcaster. Hedli
seemed pleased with the evening. I remember her walking arm in
arm with Bertie towards Front Gate. Later in my rooms in Botany
Bay Derek and I gave Bertie a mug of milky Nescafe. The next
morning he was up by seven writing a piece for the New
Statesman. A year or so later Derek told me that MacNeice was
drinking up the road in McDaid's. "Let's go and introduce
ourselves." I felt far too shy and uncertain. But Derek went.
The account of their meeting is for him to tell.
A year or so after his death in September 1963 Derek Mahon,
Seamus Heaney and I drove to MacNeice's grave in Carrowdore
churchyard among the drumlins of County Down. We dawdled
between the graves, then signed the visitors' book, each
contemplating an elegy. MacNeice's premature death at the age of
fifty-five had shocked us. We felt bereaved of a father-figure whom we
had only recently been getting to know. (Derek was the only one of us
who had met him personally.) The return of his ashes to Ireland did
feel like some kind of repatriation. When the three of us were next
together Derek took from his pocket 'In Carrowdore Churchyard' and
read it aloud. Seamus started to recite his poem, then crumpled it up.
I wisely decided then and there not to make the attempt. Derek had
produced the definitive elegy: it brilliantly spans the poles of
MacNeice's imagination – colour and darkness, destruction and
rebirth, the underworld and the earth's lovely surfaces:
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This, you implied, is how we ought to live –
The ironical, loving crush of roses against snow,
Each fragile, solving ambiguity. So
From the pneumonia of the ditch, from the ague
Of the blind poet and the bombed-out town you bring
The all-clear to the empty holes of spring;
Rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new.
Michael Longley
Born in Belfast and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, Michael
Longley’s distinguished poetry collections include No Continuing
City (1969), Gorse Fires (1991) and Snow Water (2004). He was
awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2000 and the Queen’s Medal for
Poetry in 2001. He collaborated with Douglas Carson on BBCNI
educational programmes in the 1970s. Corner of the Eye, a BBCNI
profile of his life, was screened in 1988.
58
Patricia Craig
When I was at school in Belfast in the
1950s, the received wisdom was that
everything worthwhile in a cultural
sense had come from elsewhere.
Literature was Milton and Keats,
Wordsworth and W.H. Davies. Yeats in
his Celtic Twilight phase was just about
accepted, because the poems he wrote
at that time were as far in spirit as one
could get from the grim North. I knew
nothing about W.R. Rodgers and his exhilarating refusal of
dourness, the intrepid local allegiances of John Hewitt, or the
thoughtful, illuminating verses of poets like Robert Greacen and Roy
McFadden. And my ignorance extended beyond these and other
poets: even Michael McLaverty, who taught in a school just up the
road from where I lived, was a closed book to me. At some level,
though, I deplored this state of ignorance and was immensely
relieved when it began to be amended – and the first local poet to
affect my literary awareness was indeed Louis MacNeice.
Not that it was right to describe him as a ‘local poet’ – I knew that
much. I knew of him first of all as a component of "MacSpaunday",
the Auden-Spender-Day-Lewis-MacNeice quartet. But when I read
and savoured lines like "I was born in Belfast between the mountain
and the gantries", "the street children play on the wet/pavements,
hopscotch and marbles", "the mill girls, the smell of porter, the
salt-mines . . ." I felt the North had a special claim to him.
No one else, I thought, had tackled the inheritances of Ulster with
a comparable power and pungency – and it pleased me that
MacNeice's "mother city" was Belfast. He couldn't get away from
that fact – and "cursed be he that curses his mother", he wrote –
though much about the place appalled him. (He only relents
towards Belfast in the chapter in Zoo called "A Personal
Digression", in which a tinge of its allure at last becomes apparent
to him.) Whatever distaste he felt for aspects of Ulster, though,
he makes an invigorating business of their appraisal.
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For me, MacNeice was a heady discovery, back in 1960 or
thereabouts, and I understood that it really didn't matter a jot
whether England, Ireland, Anglo-Ireland or Northern Ireland took
possession of him. Try to pin him down under one heading, and
he'll quickly evade categorisation by veering off into another, in the
best way of the individualist or the shape-shifter. Snow and huge
roses, King Billy on a banner, preparations for war on Primrose
Hill, a love affair in London: he takes it all in and imposes an
astonishing beauty and urbanity on all of it. It's just a great piece
of luck for Belfast that his life began here.
Patricia Craig
Born in Belfast, Patricia Craig is an acclaimed anthologist, editor,
biographer and critic. Northern Irish life and literature has been her
focus in works such as The Rattle of the North: An Anthology of
Ulster Prose (1992), The Belfast Anthology (1999) and The Ulster
Anthology (2006). Her Brian Moore: A Biography (2002) is
considered the definitive work on this Irish novelist.
Peter McDonald
The Neighbours
In the single-bedroom flat I used to cry the night through
as my mother walked the floor with me, rocked me and fed me
past the small, insensible hours, not to wake the neighbours;
though often upstairs there might be half the Group Theatre
going till daybreak – a tiny, bohemian airpocket:
Jimmy Ellis (in the Group, before Z Cars), or Mary O'Malley,
and over from next door, next door but one maybe, George
McCann, Mercy Hunter, John Boyd and the BBC,
talking politics or shop, intrigue or gossip the night through:
but perhaps on this occasion there's only the baby
cutting in and out of silence in a high spare room
where the McCann's have just lodged their visiting poet
who by noon will cross from The Elbow Room to the studios
in Ormeau Avenue, and deliver his talk, unscripted,
on 'Childhood Memories'; whose sleep now, if sleep it is,
remains unbroken through the small, insensible hours
between the whiskey nightcap and a breakfast of whiskey.
Peter McDonald
Belfast-born poet and academic, Peter McDonald was educated at
Methodist College in Belfast and University College, Oxford.
His poetry collections include Biting the Wax (1989) and Pastorals
(2004). He has published widely on
Louis MacNeice and on contemporary 59
poets from Northern Ireland in works
including Mistaken Identities: Poetry
and Northern Ireland (1997) and in
2007 edited a new edition of
MacNeice’s Collected Poems. He is
currently a tutor at Christ Church,
Oxford, and a lecturer
for the University.
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Seamus Heaney
Before I encountered MacNeice's
poetry on the page, I'd heard it read by
the poet himself. The event must have
been organized by the English
Department at Queen's University some
time around 1960/61, because I
remember going across to Elmwood
Church with other Honours English
students and hearing MacNeice
introduced by Professor Butter.
But that, I'm afraid, is all I remember: a sense of occasion.
Still, when I graduated in 1961, MacNeice's Collected Poems
1925–48 was among the volumes I bought with my first book token
(others included the works of J.M. Synge and Oscar Wilde), and
reading that book had a definite effect. Inspired by the example of
poems like 'Belfast' and 'Birmingham' I wrote one called
'Newcastle, Co. Down' which I submitted in longhand to the
Sunday Independent and which they luckily returned. Then, during
a postgraduate year at St Joseph's College of Education, 'Sunday
Morning' and 'Conversation' came up in a lecture by Maeve
Conway, and the following year I found myself teaching
'Carrickfergus' as a prescribed poem to a group of GCE students
in St Thomas's Intermediate School in Ballymurphy.
Since then, MacNeice has been an abiding presence, larger and
more luminous as the years go by, his contribution increasingly
recognized and his importance ever more verified by the critical
and creative work of poetic heirs who have flourished during the
last half century 'between the mountains and the gantries'.
We have reached a point where MacNeice's time is not 'away
and somewhere else', but here and now. And here and now the
moment has been marked, appropriately and magnificently,
by Peter McDonald's centenary edition of Collected Poems.
Seamus Heaney
From County Londonderry, Seamus Heaney was educated at
Queen’s University Belfast. He taught at St Thomas’s Intermediate
School, Belfast and later at QUB, Carysfort, Harvard and Oxford.
His poetry collections include Death of a Naturalist (1966), North
(1975) and Electric Light (2001) and his work has featured in many
BBC programmes including the 1970s schools’ series ‘Explorations’.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
Soon after that I was able to organise my own reading of
MacNeice. John Sherlock, a colleague at St Joseph's (where I was
appointed in 1963), had acquired an interest in The Chimney
Corner Inn, out beyond Glengormley, and was eager to initiate a
programme of cultural events. One of the first of these saw Michael
Longley and myself reading and introducing work by the now
deceased poet. By then I had gone on a daytrip with my GCE
students to explore MacNeice landmarks in Carrickfergus, and
would soon join Michael and Derek Mahon for a poets' pilgrimage
to Carrowdore churchyard – whence his ashes 'will not stir'.
It had been The Burning Perch, published a few days after
MacNeice's untimely death in 1963, which made the big,
immediate and lasting impression. From the abounding memorysource of 'Soap Suds' to the as-it-is-now-and-ever-shall-be mythic take
on 'Charon', the book had swiftness and inevitability and left an
indelible mark.
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Terence Brown
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In the late Fifties and early Sixties the
Northern Ireland Senior Certificate English
syllabus was partly based on a volume
entitled The Pageant of English Verse.
A sturdy green hardback (I still keep my
school copy here in my office in Trinity
College, Dublin) it offered substantial
selections by an E.W. Parker of Englishlanguage poetry from the thirteenth to
twentieth centuries.
Terence Brown
Born in China, Terence Brown was educated in County Down, at Magee
University College, Derry and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he is now
Professor of Anglo-Irish literature and a Senior Fellow. A member of the
Royal Irish Academy and of Academia Europaea, he has lectured and
published extensively on Irish literature and cultural history. His
publications include Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (1974) and
Ireland: a Social and Cultural History, 1922–79 (1981).
In its later pages between W.H. Auden's 'O what is that Sound' and
Stephen Spender's 'The Express' appeared a single poem by one Louis
MacNeice. That poem was 'Snow'. I remember how taken I was by its
blend of sensuous immediacy and mystery, its relish for 'the drunkenness
of things being various' and its enigmatic final line (though I doubt I
would have expressed the matter quite like that back then). Oddly
enough, nobody told me that MacNeice was a local man and it was
only at university that I learnt that the poet had grown up in
Carrickfergus, across the Belfast Lough from where I spent my own
Holywood childhood, like him hearing the sound of ships' sirens in the
night and the heavy breathing of steam trains which wended their way
to and from Belfast along the lough shore in Counties Antrim and Down.
As I got to know MacNeice's body of work, and when as a graduate
student I began to prepare a thesis on him, I came to feel that that
poem was one with special claims on the Ulster reader in a province
where the pleasures of the senses were often enough under puritan
suspicion and understood that its zest for a world which is 'Incorrigibly
plural' was an insouciant rebuke to those who would categorize
experience, and sometimes their fellow citizens, all too readily.
I sensed the poem had introduced me with panache and style to the
liberating possibilities of difference and for that I still feel grateful.
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Glenn Patterson
In November 1998 Queen’s University’s
then writer-in-residence, Colin Teevan
decided to mark the diamond jubilee
of Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal by
organising a reading of the poem in its
entirety, with this twist: each of the
twenty-four cantos was to be delivered
by a different reader. He invited poets,
prose writers, playwrights, politicians,
critics, clergymen and actors to
participate. I was fortunate enough to be still hanging around the
university, doing a bit of teaching, having been writer-in-residence
myself until the previous year. (Some would say I am still hanging
around there, although now with the fig leaf of a contract.) I got
wind of Colin’s plans at an early stage and laid claim to Canto IV,
the one which begins, ‘September has come and I awake . . . ’
and which includes some of the greatest writing about love,
and desire, in the English language: ‘all of London littered with
remembered kisses’, and all that.
We had, that autumn of 1998, already had the Good Friday
Agreement, although not yet the first attempt at devolution.
There was still a deal of suspicion. (Proceeds from the MacNeice
event went to the Omagh Memorial Trust, which tells you all you
need to know about where we were then.) Looking back, however,
remembering the easy mix of people in the foyer of the Harty Room
after the reading, people as they say here of all political
persuasions (including that great persuasion known as None),
I can’t help thinking of the event as a pointer to the future, which is
to say to our present and the search for cultural, if not political,
common ground.
I have found myself ever since asking the same question about all
manner of things. It is addictive and, of course, every bit as
subjective as ‘favourite’ and ‘best’. Yet when it comes to Northern
Ireland and Poets We Could Not Have Done Without it is difficult
to imagine how anyone could rival MacNeice for the title. And if
you doubt me, think of three of the other contenders – Heaney,
Longley, Mahon – gathered as young men at his grave in
Carrowdore; think of two of the others – Carson and Muldoon –
with their nods to ‘Snow’. Actually, just think of ‘Snow’: ‘World is
crazier and more of it than we think/Incorrigibly plural’.
Beat that for a revelation, a manifesto, a guide for living, here or
anywhere else.
Glenn Patterson
Born in Belfast, Glenn Patterson studied at the University of East
Anglia, taking a Creative Writing MA under the tutelage of
Malcolm Bradbury. Returning to Northern Ireland in 1988, he took
the post of writer-in-the-community for Lisburn/Craigavon and has
since been writer-in-residence at the Universities of Cork, East
Anglia and Queen's University Belfast. His first novel Burning
Your Own (1988) won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize;
subsequent novels include The International (1999) and the recent
That Which Was (2004). Lapsed Protestant, a collection of his
non-fiction, was published in 2006.
The Belfast playwright Owen McCafferty once told me the
toughest question he had ever been asked: ‘What is the one play in
the last fifty years we could not have done without?’ Not ‘your
favourite’, or even necessarily ‘the best’, ‘the one we could not have
done without’.
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Select Biography
Auden, W.H. (1907–1973)
Widely considered one of the major twentieth century poets,
Wystan Hugh Auden's extensive output covered a vast range
of verse forms. His decision to leave England for America in
1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War caused
controversy. In death his reputation has flourished, some
literary historians describing him as the 'first writer of the
postmodern period'.
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A renowned historian of Victorian Britain, Briggs is also
widely regarded as 'the most important broadcasting
historian in Britain'. His five-volume The History of
Broadcasting in the United Kingdom charts the story of the
BBC from its inception in 1922 (Birth of Broadcasting, 1961)
through to the mid-Seventies and the increased threat to the
BBC from independent television (Competition, 1995).
Britten, Benjamin (1913–1976)
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Prodigiously gifted, Benjamin Britten is
considered one of the finest composers
of the twentieth century. His
penultimate opera Owen Wingrave
(1971) is amongst his most famous
works. Manipulating the mass medium
of television, this BBC broadcast was
seen and heard in at least thirteen
countries by a global audience.
Bell, Sam Hanna (1909–1990)
A Features Producer for the BBC’s
Northern Ireland Home Service
(subsequently BBCNI), Sam Hanna
Bell, through his work with the Outside
Broadcasting Unit, was pivotal in
documenting rural working-class life in
Ulster. He was also an acclaimed
novelist, with December Bride (1951)
his most famous work.
Betjeman, John (1906–1984)
Poet, critic and broadcaster. A prolific writer, by the 1950s
John Betjeman was a well-known figure, publishing regularly in
books and magazines. He was also a popular broadcaster,
making frequent radio and television appearances, often
discussing one, or both, of his twin passions – architecture and
railways. He was knighted in 1969 and in 1972 was
appointed Poet Laureate.
Boyd, John (1912–2002)
From 1947 Boyd was the Talks Producer for the BBC’s
Northern Ireland Home Service. The first producer of regular
arts programmes on BBC Radio in Northern Ireland, his
documentaries profiled Irish writers including Louis MacNeice
and Seamus Heaney. Boyd was also a playwright, memoirist
and, in retirement, advisor to the Lyric Theatre.
66
Briggs, Asa (1921–)
Clark, Eleanor (1913–1996)
American novelist and non-fiction writer. In 1939 she and
MacNeice met and fell in love; however, their relationship
would not last. Clark later married the American writer Robert
Penn Warren. Her book The Oysters of Locmariaquer received
the National Book Award for Arts and Letters in 1965.
65
Cusack, Cyril (1910–1993)
From his debut in Fred O'Donovan's
Knocknagow (1918) to a role in
Danny, the Champion of the World
(1991), Cyril Cusack enjoyed the
longest screen career of any Britishbased performer. However, it was as a
stage actor that he was perhaps most
esteemed, performing to great acclaim
in over sixty productions in the Abbey
Theatre in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Day-Lewis, Cecil (1904–1972)
The poet and novelist Cecil Day-Lewis was born at
Ballintubbert, Queen's County, Ireland. Along with W.H.
Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender he was part
of the Oxford poets' circle of the 1920s. With his translation
of Virgil's Georgics (1940) and his own verse collections
Word Over All (1943) and Poems, 1943–1947 (1948) he
achieved his full stature as a poet. Whilst poetry was his true
vocation, Day-Lewis, under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake,
also wrote detective novels. In 1951, the year in which his
BBC commissioned translation of Virgil's Aeneid was
broadcast as part of the Festival of Britain, he was elected
Oxford professor of poetry. In 1968, he became the first
Irish-born Poet Laureate since Nahum Tate (1652–1715).
Dodds, E.R. (1893–1979)
Born in Banbridge, County Down, Dodds was a classical
scholar. An often controversial figure, he was asked to leave
Oxford in 1916 for supporting the Easter Rising.
However, he returned the following year to take his Greats
examination, obtaining a First. He subsequently taught in
Dublin and Reading before being appointed to a chair of
Greek in the University of Birmingham. He appointed
MacNeice as lecturer in Greek in 1930. In 1936 he became
Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. A lifelong interest in the
paranormal culminated with Dodds becoming President of
the Society for Psychical Research from 1961 to 1963.
66
Gilliam, Laurence (1907–1964)
A critically acclaimed radio producer,
Laurence Duval Gilliam joined the BBC
Drama Department in 1933. In 1936
he was given responsibility for
Features, a pioneering form of
broadcasting which blended sound,
words, and music together to create an
aural picture. His work in Features
during the Second World War earned
him an OBE. Throughout the post-war period – the 'golden
age of radio' – Gilliam did more than anyone else in the
BBC to recruit and encourage poets and writers to contribute
work for the BBC Features Department.
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Gorham, Maurice (1902–1975)
An Irish journalist and broadcasting
executive, Maurice Gorham worked
for eight years as General Editor of
the Radio Times before transferring in
1941 into broadcasting proper and
becoming Director of the BBC's North
American Services. He went on to
enjoy a long and distinguished career
at the BBC, serving variously as
Director of the Light Programme and Television Service.
He left the BBC in 1947 and later served for several years
as Director of Broadcasting at Radio Éireann.
Eliot, T.S. (1888–1965)
First published in 1915, The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock marked the start of
Thomas Stearns Eliot's influential poetry
career. The Waste Land (1922)
secured his reputation as one of the
twentieth century's major poets. In
1925 he became Literary Editor of
Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber),
in which role he would cultivate and
promote younger writers, such as MacNeice, and define the
next forty years of British poetry.
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Larkin, Philip (1922–1985)
English poet, novelist, jazz critic and
librarian. Almost immediately after
graduating from Oxford, Larkin began
his career as a librarian. His
breakthrough as a poet arrived in the
1950s during a period as
Sub-Librarian at Queen's University
Belfast. In 1955 he became Librarian
at Hull University, a position he held
until his death. That same year saw the publication of The
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Less Deceived, the collection that would make his name as
a poet. The Whitsun Weddings (1964) set the seal on
Larkin's reputation. High Windows (1974) was the last book
of poems to be published in Larkin's lifetime.
Motion, Andrew (1952–)
The English poet, novelist and broadcaster Andrew Motion read
English at University College, Oxford. He has held a number of
prestigious posts including that of Editor of Poetry Review and
Poetry Editor and Editorial Director at London publishers Chatto
& Windus. He became Poet Laureate in 1999.
Muldoon, Paul (1951–)
Born in County Armagh and educated
at Queen's University Belfast, Paul
Muldoon worked as a radio and
television producer for BBCNI from
1973 to 1986 and was responsible
for landmark arts broadcasts including
Irish Poetry and Bazaar. Since 1987
he has lived in the USA where he is
currently the Howard G. B. Clark '21
Professor at Princeton University. His
collections of poetry include New
Weather (1973), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987),
Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) and Horse
Latitudes (2006). He has been the recipient of numerous
awards including the Pulitzer Prize (2003) and the 2006
European Prize for Poetry.
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Ogilvie, F.W. (1893–1949)
Oxford-educated, Frederick Wolff
Ogilvie was reading for literae
humaniores when the First World War
broke out. Within two days he was in
the forces. He was seriously wounded
and lost his left arm in 1915, but
remained in the army until the end of
the war. In 1919 he returned to
England and life as an academic
70
and educationalist, first at Oxford, then Edinburgh and, in
1934, Belfast, where he became President and ViceChancellor of Queen's University. He left Belfast in 1938
to succeed Sir John Reith and become the second Director
General of the BBC. His reign at the BBC was described
as 'short, stormy and in some ways calamitous'. Ogilvie
resigned in 1942 and in 1944 became principal of Jesus
College, Oxford.
Olivier, Laurence (1907–1989)
Considered by many to be the finest actor of the twentieth
century, Olivier made his name as a stage actor performing
classical roles. As a screen actor he helped make
Shakespeare available to a mass audience and was twelve
times nominated for an Academy Award. In later years he
played a pivotal role in the establishment of an English
National Theatre.
Robertson, Charles Grant (1869–1948)
An historian and academic administrator, Robertson was
tutor at Exeter College (1895-99) and at Magdalen College
(1905-20). In 1920 he was appointed Principal of
Birmingham University, later serving as its Vice-Chancellor
from 1927 until his retirement in 1938.
Rodgers, William Robert (1909–1969)
The poet-broadcaster W.R. (Bertie) Rodgers was born and
brought up in Ballymacarrett, east Belfast. He was educated
at Queen's University Belfast where he took a second-class
honours degree in English (1927–31). He trained for the
Presbyterian ministry and, in 1935, was ordained and
appointed minister of Cloveneden Church, Loughgall, County
Armagh. Rodgers began writing poetry in 1938; his first
collection Awake! and other Poems was published in 1941.
In 1946 Rodgers resigned his ministry to join the BBC in
London, having been recruited by Louis MacNeice for the
Features Department. A second collection of poetry, Europa
And The Bull, appeared in 1952.
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Spender, Stephen
(1909–1995)
Educated at University College,
Oxford, where he met Louis
MacNeice and W.H. Auden,
Stephen Spender left university
without taking a degree and
went to Berlin in 1930. His
breakthrough collection Poems
was published in 1933. He took
a keen interest in politics,
variously declaring himself to be
a socialist and pacifist. In 1937
he travelled to Spain. His experiences during the Spanish
Civil War inspired some of his finest anti-war poetry. In later
life Spender was Professor of English at University College,
London (1970–77), and later Professor Emeritus.
Stallworthy, Jon (1935–)
Poet, critic, scholar and biographer, Stallworthy is the author
of the definitive MacNeice biography, Louis MacNeice
(Faber & Faber, 1995). A Fellow of the British Academy and
of the Royal Society of Literature, he is Acting President of
Wolfson College, Oxford.
Encounter from 1973 to 1985. He was awarded the OBE
in 1990 for services to poetry.
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Vaughan-Thomas, Wynford
(1908–1987)
Welsh journalist and broadcaster,
Wynford Vaughan-Thomas joined
the BBC in the mid-1930s.
He established his reputation as
a correspondent during World War
Two with notable reports including
those from an RAF Lancaster during
a night raid over Berlin and from
the Anzio beachhead, as well as
the liberations of Rome and the
Belsen concentration camp. The
closing stages of the war found him
in Hamburg, broadcasting from the
studio which William Joyce, Lord
Haw-Haw, had been using only days before. After the war he
reported on Indian Independence (1947) and was a leading
commentator on state occasions, most notably the wedding of
Princess Elizabeth to the Duke of Edinburgh.
Strindberg, Johan August (1849–1912)
Swedish playwright, novelist, painter and short-story writer,
Strindberg's works combined psychology and naturalism.
A literary innovator, his work represented a new kind of
European drama and the evolution towards Expressionist
drama. Along with Ibsen, he is considered one of
Scandinavia's greatest writers.
Thwaite, Anthony (1930–)
An acclaimed writer and poet, Anthony Thwaite worked as a
Producer in the BBC Features Department in the early 1960s.
His later roles including Literary Editor of The Listener,
Assistant Professor of English at the University of Libya,
Henfield Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia,
Literary Editor of the New Statesman, and co-editor of
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Acknowledgements
Editorial Advisory Committee: Edna Longley, Anne Tannahill, Ian Sansom
and Glenn Patterson
Reseach and Production:
Executive Producer:
Francis Jones
Mark Adair
BBCNI wishes to thank all of those who have assisted in the development of
this exhibition, including: Vic Gray at Faber & Faber, Helen Rankin at
Carrickfergus Museum, Alice Williams at David Higham
Associates, Corinna MacNeice, Trish Hayes, Ken Anderson, Hugh OdlingSmee, Gavin Boyd, Douglas Carson, Jonathan Allison, Barnaby Perkins,
David Huddleston and all the staff at The Ulster Folk & Transport
Museum, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, BBC Photo
Unit and BBC Written Archives at Caversham.
Design:
Genesis Advertising Ltd
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13210 L.McN INNER ST22
5/9/07
9:46 am
Page 76
Select Bibliography
Boyd, John, The Middle Of My Journey
(Blackstaff Press, 1991)
Brown, Terence, Louis MacNeice:
Sceptical Vision (Gill & Macmillan, 1975)
Coulton, Barbara, Louis MacNeice in the
B.B.C. (Faber & Faber, 1980)
Longley, Edna, Louis MacNeice: A Study
(Faber & Faber, 1988)
Longley, Michael, ed. Selected Poems
(Faber & Faber, 2005)
MacNeice, Louis, The Strings Are False
(Faber & Faber, 1996)
McDonald, Peter, ed. Collected Poems
(Faber & Faber, 2007)
McDonald, Peter, Louis MacNeice: The Poet
In His Contexts (Clarendon Press, 1991)
McMahon, Sean, Sam Hanna Bell:
A Biography (Blackstaff Press, 1999)
Stallworthy, Jon, Louis MacNeice
(Faber & Faber, 1995)
Wills, Clair, That Neutral Island
(Faber & Faber, 2007)
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